Education and Bureaucracy

K-12 education is a human enterprise that is built on relationships.  In the end, the teacher is very much in loco parentis.  It is, in actuality, a different relationship than the parent-child relationship, but it is similar.  Much more similar than the currently in vogue conceptualizations of the teacher-student relationship or the old concept which they claim to contest.

The (obviously failed) educational paradigm of the past is the bureaucracy.  The modern state (as in nation-state)  is organized by bureaucracy.  Despite it's bad name, bureaucracy does do some things exceedingly well (see: the military).  Unfortunately, education is not one of them.  I would bet that if you did a comparison of the size of a educational system's bureaucracy and compared it with the quality of education that students receive, that there is a negative relationship.  The larger the bureaucracy, the worse the education provided.

Public education in the United States began in Boston as a means by which the community (of maybe a thousand at the time) took care of itself (specifically, training their religious leaders).  This was not a bureaucratic, but rather an organic undertaking.  It was communal.

The problem with today's educational reform movement is that it claims to challenge the bureaucratic norm, but all too often it seeks to replace the bureaucracy with a corporate norm.  Schools should be run as businesses: more competition is good for education.  Students, and parents, are seen as customers.  But this is also a fallacy.  Students and parents are not customers.  Sometimes schools must do things that specifically hurt the short-term interests of students (by not passing them), which violates the axiom that the customer is always right.

The big question, fearless reader, is can public schools be successful in the modern world?  Or does the answer lie in charter schools?