The Trouble With Common Sense

I’ve had a problem with Philip K. Howard since 1995, when he published his much-acclaimed best-seller The Death of Common Sense. Howard’s diatribe against regulation and lawsuits featured plenty of hair-raising anecdotes about idiotic government bureaucrats stifling the creative impulses of good Americans, but failed to suggest a better way to achieve a fair balance among competing interests--which after all is the central challenge in governing a complex society like ours.

The most frequently cited story in The Death of Common Sense involved Mother Teresa abandoning plans to build a multi-story homeless shelter in New York City because she couldn’t afford to install an elevator, as mandated by excessive, intrusive regulations. The book implied that the typical New York real estate developer who runs afoul of city ordinances is pretty much a Mother Teresa-type, humbly intent on serving humankind. (It implied this rather than saying it because the idea immediately disintegrates as soon as it’s put into words.)

Now Howard is back with an op-ed piece in today’s Times in which he rails against excessive bureaucracy in the public schools. I don’t doubt that ham-fisted administrators, legislators, and principals often make teaching needlessly difficult. But it’s typical of Howard that his article is prompted by a recent court ruling that New York City schools have been short-changed by the state (in favor of upstate and suburban school districts) to the tune of over $14 billion.

The prospect of the state having to make good on the inequity outrages Howard. Why? Because “experience shows that failing social institutions are rarely resuscitated by money alone.” To prove this point, he cites a single example (Kansas City) of a school system that invested in building facilities and hired teachers but then showed “little improvement” (at least according to Howard). The real route to school reform, of course, is eliminating legalistic rules, as Howard spends the next fourteen paragraphs asserting.

Notice the sleight-of-hand here. Neither the state court panel that ordered the change in school funding nor anyone else that I know of has spoken in favor of needless bureaucracy or intrusive rules. There’s no logical reason why we can’t do both--provide city schools with badly needed money and reduce red tape. But the structure of Howard’s argument suggests that it’s an either/or choice. Which means, in his universe, that the city schools mustn’t get the money.

(As an aside, it’s interesting how conservatives decry the folly of “throwing money at problems” when it applies to public school funding, welfare, or health care, but never in regard to defense spending, building prisons, or corporate subsidies. And I have yet to meet a Republican mom who objected to having a shiny new library, science lab, or swimming pool in her suburban school on the grounds that “education isn’t about spending money.” That logic applies only to other people’s kids. But I digress.)

There’s a clear pattern underlying Howard’s writings. In the abstract, no one can argue with his call to eliminate needless bureaucracy. But somehow Howard’s “common sense” consistently promotes outcomes that benefit affluent, white communities and harm poor, urban, largely minority communities.

Just a coincidence? I think not.