gat

The rootless people who accumulated on this once productive farmland offered little resistance to
further centralization of school governance, although the farmers they replaced surely would have.
As commuters, what interested them most was that schools become places of feeding, recreation,
socialization, health care, and life counseling for their children. It was the Prussian formula reborn
in late twentieth century America, a formula which allowed displacement of social management
into the right hands. Thus is institutional schooling always more than it seems.
Who Controls American Education?
James Koerner was a well-known national figure in the 1960s when he headed a presidential
commission looking into the causes of civil unrest after Detroit’s black riots. A former president
of the Council for Basic Education, he had more than enough information and experience to write
a public guide for laymen in which the players, policies, and processes of the system are laid bare.
His book Who Controls American Education? was published in 1968. The area even Koerner,
with his gilt-edged résumé and contacts, hesitated to tread hard in was that region of philosophy,
history, principles, and goals which might uncover the belief system that really drives mass
schooling. While noting accurately the "missionary zeal" of those who sell ideas in the educational
marketplace and deploring what he termed the "hideous coinages" of political palaver like "key
influentials," "change agents," and "demand articulators," and while even noting that experts at
the Educational Testing Service "tell us that schools should seek to build a new social order and
that they, the experts, know what the new order should be," Koerner carefully avoided that
sensitive zone of ultimate motives—except to caution laymen to "regard with great skepticism the
solutions to educational problems that may be offered with great certitude by experts."
"It is not at all clear," continued the cautious Mr. Koerner, "that fundamental decisions are better
made by people with postgraduate degrees than by those with undergraduate degrees, or with no
degrees at all." Toward the end of his book, Koerner defined the upper echelons of school policy
as "progressive, modern, life-adjustment" folk, but ducked away from explaining how people with
these attitudes gained the driver’s seat in a democracy from a body politic which largely rejects
those perspectives.
Nor did he explain what keeps them there in the face of withering criticism. Koerner was
impressed, however, with what he called "the staying power of the ancien regime" and challenged
his readers to resign themselves to a long wait before they might expect the modern school
establishment "to give all students a sound basic education":
Anyone who thinks there [will be] a new establishment in charge of the vast
industry of training and licensing teachers and administrators in this country
has his head in the sand.
What we miss in Koerner’s otherwise excellent manual on school politics is any speculation about
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