Support for federalism and subsidiarity often seems to run very thin among many ideological groups, but it's a particular problem for individualist libertarians who don't believe any level of government can have proper authority to regulate certain rights, and so are comfortable (or have become so since WWII) with levels higher up the governmental hierarchy squashing attempts lower down to use such powers.
The trend has been toward a de facto political arrangement in which, practically, and for anything of real importance, there is only the individual and the national (or affiliation with a national, ideologically-narrow political party, which amounts to the same thing), which is a big reason why few people even know the names of even their democratically-elected local officials anymore. They don't have to know the names, they only have to vote for their side's machine.
Plenty of today's 'YIMBY' / "Build Baby Build" libertarians seem happy to support central governments rolling over the preferences of the current residents of local communities by outlawing the capacity of those communities to decide collectively on the rules for their own urban arrangements and developments. Really, it's YIYBY, "Yes in -YOUR- Back Yards". But as I've said before, many people aren't really NIMBY in terms of some inflexible political position or perspective, but as a kind of second-best cope to the fact that it's the only way to exercise any kind of local control in a system that has tended towards its erasure.
What you say sounds reasonable enough but I'm skeptical there's much truth in it.
We talk a lot about how national decisions affect ours lives yet most of those decisions have very little impact on most of us while state, and especially local, decisions get far less attention and surely impact us far more than almost anyone recognizes.
As for NIMBY, I think you are wrong in that most people don't want more people, especially low income, nor businesses that bring more traffic, noise and other negatives into their immediate neighborhood, or even their commute route. They might be flexible if they see far more benefit than negatives but they are far more leery of the negatives than open to any benefits.
Absolutely: it is attitudinal all the way down, it is situational, hypocritical, illogical, you name it. And it is very much in service of a bland-ification one associates with the most hegemonic one-size-fits-all rule, ironically, all must bounce their balls in time together. It would be a dull world if we were all the same - so let’s do that!!
I can adduce two examples of this allergy to the hyper local, and further to the idea that every place need not be homogenized.
One, my former city’s heritage tree ordinance (by no means enforced in a draconian way, there being too few inspectors - it relied on good faith, and on there being still neighborhoods with people who valued trees enough to remain alert to the sound of chainsaws). This ordinance only becomes more salient in an arid area, by the way.
The state government - led by people hundreds of miles away, with no stake in this at all - devoted most of one legislative session to destroying this. Nevermind such things were on the books elsewhere without controversy, probably in some of their own localities. Never mind it had been in place for decades. They had an animus against the city for other reasons, and then - idiocracy-like - went after one of its sanest rules, intended to make it more liveable more “itself” as a place where trees … didn’t exactly grow on trees, but the older ones, that had planted themselves, gave the city its pleasant spots, and the shade you crave when it’s 110 and asphalt all around.
Meanwhile these same libertarian-infected GOPers were perfectly fine with state government growing by leaps and bounds in every dimension, not to mention sucking at the fed. government teat for all kinds of things, like road projects, education, welfare.
Then: because a river runs through the city, and it was noticed that it was clogged with plastic trash bags, making islands for the turtles, the city passed a bag ban. There was grumbling in some quarters and then, because it was so trivial an aspect of life, people got used to it.
So of course the Lege had nothing better to do (it was not, note, at that point the least bit interested in such issues as the border) it devoted all the session’s airtime to outlawing plastic bag bans by municipalities.
Note that this affected vanishingly few places, but one of them was a bastion of radicalism lol, tiny Fort Stockton, TX, which banned the bags for the simple reason that locals got tired of seeing the wind festoon all the barbed wire with them.
Even these utterly minor things - trash mitigation efforts, which hopefully would have led to others, in those places that cared about ten cents about their home - were too much local control.
There is no consistency - there is really nothing there at all, with this kind of thinking.
But it will well suit a world where nobody cares about anything. Whether such a world could be described as the least bit “conservative” I leave as an exercise to the reader, as Newton said about action at a distance.
The problem of coherent scaling in human organization can be solved with power distributed in two distinct ways, centrally bureaucratic or hierarchically delegated. In the centralized model, it's the individual and the state with nothing in between and all the Kafkaesque helplessness and alienation that follows. In the hierarchical (i.e., quasi-feudal) model, there is, theoretically, always someone within Dunbar numbers who has a relationship and knows you at least slightly better than a number or some mere random stranger to whom one can talk, appeal, petition, etc. and who either has some genuine authority or else capacity to "take it up the chain" if necessary and warranted. That's was a traditional social model in much of the pre- modern world (which still had big empires), and also the old military model, and the one once used by trade unions. Indeed, the word 'soviet' means "workers council" which in practice, at least until around the turn of the 20th century, often meant small enough socialist-democratic 'locals' such that workers really could have some kind of knowledge to the person who could 'represent' them, to whom they could express grievance, seek protection, etc. Of course the ideal of a whole society built from the ground up by a hierarchy of soviets with any actual meaningful local authority quickly became a fiction. But in the US much of the analogous letter and spirit of federalism has also become a dead letter. To be 'protected' from above from the potentially abusive exercise of local power of personal scale and scope is inevitably to be dispossessed of the very possibility of the exercise of that power and thus the possibility that one could have any say in or influence over it.
I think schools underwent a similar process. While public schools in the US are under the management of an elected local school board (sometimes a mayor) and under the legal frameworks established by each state, various nationwide initiatives have stripped local elected officials of much of their power. I was just reading a 2014 interview Marco Rubio did where he pointed out that Common Core was a backdoor to federal control of school. While we may or may not remember that Common Core was technically passed by each state, adoption of its testing regime (and by extension the standards) was incentivized at the federal level. Beyond standards and testing, federal oversight and court cases related to civil rights and disability shifted power up the chain to the DOE, diluting the level of representation.
One of my personal theories of the rise of populism in the US says that frustration with schools, especially the loss of local control, drove many “normie” centrist types into the populist camp when it came time to vote. They, at least, wanted to empower local schools boards once again.
An interesting outcome, though, is that in some instances that local power has been short-circuited by states or by choice and voucher programs. In the former case, some states have taken a very active role in managing schools, overriding local boards or enforcing their preferred ideological conventions on curriculum and materials. In other cases, while parents can use vouchers to “vote with their wallets”, they’ve ceded democratic accountability at the school/district level for the state level (since the states determine how vouchers may be used and which schools qualify). It’s kind of a tossing up of hands, I think. They’re saying, “well, if we can’t oversee our own schools, we might as well be able to do something else.”
I moved to Florida in large part for school vouchers. I think the idea that will lead to government takeover of schools is hyperbole.
A problem outside the northeast is that everything, especially schools, is done at the county level. This made some sense when less populous parts of the country had like one high school for the entire county. But in the mid Atlantic and sunbelt today it means districts that are a hour drive and hundreds of thousands of children spread across dozens of schools. My right wing town had its schools run by left wingers an hour drive away.
Illinois has 102 counties and 853 school districts. You are nuts if you think that doesn't give local school districts immense control, regardless of what comes down from higher up.
I worked in K-12 for a long time and James is right that the state ed department (and the state legislature) have lots and lots of requirements. Length of day, length of year, what must be taught, who can be hired to teach, how teachers must be hired and fired, how students can be suspended or expelled (quick answer to the latter: with great difficulty; schools must attempt to educate almost everyone 5-18 in the district).
There really isn't much a local school committee can do to make its schools different. It gets to decide things like where to build schools and what grades to put in them but not much about how or what students are taught in them.
Almost all requirements are about procedures rather than results, inputs rather than outputs. There are few "high stakes test" requirements for graduation any more and the ones that remain are not very rigorous.
Your comment makes me doubt you have had any experience in a school.
There are infinite loopholes. An admin assistant where I worked left to teach at a rural elementary school with no training. The pay was awful and they simply couldn't get enough licensed teachers. My son graduated with an engineering degree and decided not to engineer. He taught at a charter school for troubled kids in Indiana for two years before grad school in something else. This qualified him for a teaching license. It would have been transferrable to Illinois. Probably other states. It's been years since my kids were in elementary school but they were in combined grades. My niece teaches elementary in Virgina. Up until last year she taught combined grades. Now she teaches k-5 art and has complete curricular discretion.
Who decides whether and what to offer for art, music, recess, foreign language, PE (yes, some states have a minimum reqt), vocational training, home econ, drivers ed, AP, after school, volunteer aides, class size, etc.? Who decides length of class periods? State sets minimum hours and days but do they set a maximum? What if they don't finish the required material? What if they finish and have time for other things? Who decides whether to group kids by ability and the criteria for doing so? (Yes, anti-discrimination policies put limits of this but it still happens)
There are probably a million other things I'm not thinking of or don't even know about and yes state and federal rules and policies place limits but clearly local schools have way more control than you suggest.
I taught for many years in eastern Massachusetts, where there has never been any problem getting enough teachers. So I suppose things are tighter here.
Yes, state ed departments will waive or not enforce requirements when the alternative is no teachers or no school but at least a decade ago, that seemed pretty rare.
Massachusetts requires a minimum of 180 days of instruction and 990 hours of instructional time. You can divide periods any way you wish but they can't add up to less. Combine that with subject matter requirements and textbooks which are pretty uniform state to state and there isn't much realistic discretion. Sure, the school can decide to have 6 equal length periods or 5 smaller and one larger but that minimum has to be made. At my school, it was made exactly. Though not without some of the usual education bs. The state ed department said study hall was "instructional time" if there was a teacher in the front of the room. It basically means that not counting lunch, kids have to be in school six and a half hours a day. Very, very few systems require more.
You can access the MA Current Frameworks at https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/current.html As you can see, it includes a "2023 Comprehensive Health and Physical Education Framework", a "2021 World Languages Framework", and a "2019 Arts Framework". Massachusetts may be more prescriptive than many states.
The state does not send inspectors into every classroom or require reports on what is actually covered. They just assume you're following the standards. Schools themselves point their teachers to the standards. The standards are almost always a subset of what the textbooks cover. And the textbooks are remarkably similar.
There is a saying in education, "When the classroom door closes, it's just you and the students." A teacher whose students like him will probably not get into trouble for adding things or not covering things. Largely because no one in authority will know. But that's a matter of teacher freedom, not school committee/school board freedom.
"Who decides whether to group kids by ability and the criteria for doing so?" The local schools here, though there seems to be strong pressure not to have more than two levels (and any more than two turns into a scheduling nightmare).
You are right. School systems have discretion not to offer various classes.
Yes and no. While I don’t know Illinois specifically, many states these days will lay out specific curricula that schools must choose from, set standards all students in the state must meet, and establish a system to testing to ensure those standards are being met. While that may feel broad, in practice it’s led to a lot of standardization across schools that would otherwise be very different.
Without denying most of what you wrote, the idea that local school boards, most of whose members are backed by teachers unions, much of whose funds come from mandatory dues, as being paragons of the interests of the locals is… highly suspect to say the least
I don’t necessarily disagree. I do think teachers unions have been on a multi-decade trajectory of decline, in part because local control is weaker and they haven’t been able to effectively resist accountability reforms like state standards and testing for some time. It will be interesting to see if the newfound love for localism at the federal level will lead to unions clawing back some of that power.
I notice in the comments a lack of distinction between the question of who wields a power and whether a power should be wielded in the first place. I am all for devolving powers down to the lowest possible level, and have written on the scaling problems of our institutions, and totally agree with Arnold there. However, I think the state capacity view point often makes the mistake of starting from "the state can and should do whatever it wants because that is the will of the people" without fully realizing it, and without fully realizing that the will of the people is nonsense.
There is one place in your essay which I can point to as a blind spot - you say you would like to "distribute" power to the localities. Instead, let's imagine you can withhold power from the central government... or in fact, from any kind of government body. Because it's also too easy to think of the smaller governments as subsidiary to the central one, rather than drawing together voluntarily to be represented in a limited but necessary deliberative forum through representation.
The emotion surrounding 'organic' bottom-up processes is simply incomprehensible from a top-down, attention-to-the-center perspective. Your County planners should be powerless to mess about in your neighborhood unless all the neighborhoods assemble to grant them this particular authority over roads of a certain character, for example, or trees at the neighborhood borders, etc. At least, that's the logic that built America.
I'll add another aspect of Chartertopia to address this issue: bylaws are a bottom up hierarchy. When a jurisdiction passes a law, its districts can individually opt out. If those districts have subdistricts, they can opt out of the district and opt in to the jurisdiction.
It's not nullification, at least on the jurisdiction level. If all districts opt out, it could be called nullification, but if it's that unpopular, it would be easier to just repeal the thing.
I feel like the fact that Switzerland is still recognizably, unmistakably Switzerland has more to do with shared values than governance - though the style of the latter may also be an expression of them.
This puts America at least as presently constituted right out of consideration.
It was probably Freakonomics that reported a look at tax compliance in Switzerland and Italy. What was found was that northern Italians behaved more like Swiss than other Italians. If so, this would be almost entirely culture, not governance.
I was reading an interview with Italian tennis player Jannik Sinner. They asked what he likes to splash out on. Cars, he said he loves cars and his favorite thing to do was to go for drives all alone. Then as if he might have given the wrong impression about his love of cars, he added that he only owns 2 cars. Which strikes me as about as Swiss a thing as an Italian might say.
Please excuse my amusement at Olde People™ in a couple neighborhoods being upset that the vast metroplex of which their neighborhoods are a part...is trying to plan for the future. Folks not familiar with NOW might not know that stuff like housing and transportation is a burgeoning critical issue, and that the desires of Olde People™ wanting everything to stay the same as it was decades ago...is the problem.
This "problem" is as old as America. The frontier closed a long while back. Imagining our own self inflicted problems can be solved by adopting the administrative structures of Switzerland...I mean, WTF...Switzerland...(?)....approaches delusional.
Having deep libertarian sympathies and tendencies, it's easy to understand the frustrations, but...tough shit. I've been there. It sucks. So what?
Well, if one wants to get into the stupidities that masquerade as planning...I can write a dissertation. That doesn't relieve the Olde People™ from having to understand that change is necessary.
If someone wants to say change is necessary because the previous "planners" were incompetent morons, OK. If one has any experience in municipal metroplex planning, that's a given. That doesn't give the Olde People™ a get out of jail free card.
I do suspect the current "planning commissions" are made up of credentialed experts and politicians. Of course they are. Our overly credentialed society demands it. Could gifted amateurs do a better job? I've sat on construction sites with undocumented Mexicans that described all the problems with appropriate solutions while munching on tortillas warmed up in a 2nd hand store microwave. So, I believe amateurs can do a better job than those currently employed in the task, if anyone would listen to them, which they won't.
Also, I've heard that lots of folks want to live in that specific metroplex because of...you know...jobs and everything else that are the underpinnings of civilization, and there's not enough housing and folks want different transportation options. So, there's that.
Granted my math skills are slight, but how can a County of 1.0 million work as this: "County Council of 11 members. Population per legislator is about 900,000." I wonder if perhaps a zero is not astray somewhere. Or I am a moron.
I'm intrigued, but I need to hear more about how the citizens to legislator ratio matters. If there were 10x as many legislators, wouldn't they each have 1/10 as much power, putting you in basically the same situation?
I can see how the absolute size of the population matters of course.
I've bested Arnold on his widely unread book by having my own IMAGINARY book. No one has read it; it lives, unexpurgated, in my head.
My book is an explanation/exposé of America's urban "planning", where "planning" is defined as adopting initiatives wherein everyone is working overtime to live at the expense of everyone else...apologies to Bastiat.
50 years ago, a bunch of us (then) hippies were going into the trades and postulating entirely new and beautiful ideas about how communities should be planned and built. We foresaw the explosion of housing cost, the absence of land adjacent to jobs, the problems of building in flood plains, wetlands, and coastal areas, how development did not follow or respond to obvious and immutable economic constraints, and how changing lifestyles would blow up then current thinking on the topics.
Of course, no one wanted to listen, let alone consider how we might do all this smarter...and, it's really hard to read an imaginary book. So, here we are.
Christopher Caldwell is the only writer I know of who locates the essential conservatism at the heart of this aspect (and a few others) of what is recalled as “hippie”-dom, though of course there is a bit of sloppiness there. These “hippie” ideals that for reasons were prompted by postwar life, didn’t really involve the stereotypical “hippie” that later entered the popular imagination.
My Phillips Exeter-educated father-in-law was absolutely such a one 60 years ago, and his hair was never much beyond his ears, nor has he ever been out of an Oxford shirt with a pocket protector.
Yeah, that was me...certainly not Phillips Exeter but with short hair and decidedly conservative attitudes. Then, pop culture turned it into stoners and Haight Asbury type characterizations.
Oh, would that today’s left had anything like the values you describe.
Not exactly the same point you seem to be making above, but at least similar is to me the punchline of Collin Wright’s brilliant Elon Must Tweeted My Cartoon WSJ piece:
“The right may be inconsistent in its support of free speech, individual rights and women’s rights, but the left is consistent in its opposition to all three.”
"Countries like Switzerland, Singapore, and Norway show that you can have adequate state capacity at a scale of less than 20 million people."
You seem more rational than someone like Trump but sometimes you perplex me just as much. You say you are a conservative yet you propose blowing up our governance structure after already proposing blowing up our university system. How is either the slightest bit conservative?
Second, you've cherry picked the countries to make your point. What about all the countries not doing as well as the US, both governance and economically?
Besides good governance, why are any of those three countries doing as well as they are? How much are they dependent on the inventions, innovation, growth, and markets of the US? Where would they and the rest of the world be without this supposedly less successful country?
AK doesn’t say he is a conservative. I think he says he *leans* conservative, but that is not the same thing.
To the extent you are equating “conservative” with “classical liberal”, however, the answer is pretty simple: our total government power has so far exceeded what it was at our founding that cutting it way back is indeed the right thing to do.
That said, you’d probably be best off going to Dr Hammer’s comment re: “distinction between the question of who wields a power and whether a power should be wielded in the first place.” On that front, I do think I agree with you that this is far from AK’s best - or clearest- piece.
I've yet to learn how to search substack posts for something from the past but I'm near certain AK has said he is a conservative. I believe this because I remember how surprising I found it given that much of what he says sounds more libertarian than conservative to me.
As to Hammer's comment, I don't disagree with it but I also don't think it conflicts with anything AK said or invalidates the points he made.
One of my Chartertopia goals was to prevent government from defining itself. One method I came up with is that government has -zero- control over districts (it has nested districts, not states, counties, cities, etc).
Assume all district borders align with parcel borders. If it aligns with one of your parcel borders, you can move it to the other side -- in effect, move your parcel from one district to a neighboring district.
It does indeed mean border parcels can change city, county, or state.
Why should governments have any say over where their boundaries are? Every time I hear of some city annexing neighboring land, I wonder who gave them that authority?
(I know it's never going to happen. I didn't invent Chartertopia to make it happen, but to give me some baseline to understand why governments are so incompetent.)
Support for federalism and subsidiarity often seems to run very thin among many ideological groups, but it's a particular problem for individualist libertarians who don't believe any level of government can have proper authority to regulate certain rights, and so are comfortable (or have become so since WWII) with levels higher up the governmental hierarchy squashing attempts lower down to use such powers.
The trend has been toward a de facto political arrangement in which, practically, and for anything of real importance, there is only the individual and the national (or affiliation with a national, ideologically-narrow political party, which amounts to the same thing), which is a big reason why few people even know the names of even their democratically-elected local officials anymore. They don't have to know the names, they only have to vote for their side's machine.
Plenty of today's 'YIMBY' / "Build Baby Build" libertarians seem happy to support central governments rolling over the preferences of the current residents of local communities by outlawing the capacity of those communities to decide collectively on the rules for their own urban arrangements and developments. Really, it's YIYBY, "Yes in -YOUR- Back Yards". But as I've said before, many people aren't really NIMBY in terms of some inflexible political position or perspective, but as a kind of second-best cope to the fact that it's the only way to exercise any kind of local control in a system that has tended towards its erasure.
What you say sounds reasonable enough but I'm skeptical there's much truth in it.
We talk a lot about how national decisions affect ours lives yet most of those decisions have very little impact on most of us while state, and especially local, decisions get far less attention and surely impact us far more than almost anyone recognizes.
As for NIMBY, I think you are wrong in that most people don't want more people, especially low income, nor businesses that bring more traffic, noise and other negatives into their immediate neighborhood, or even their commute route. They might be flexible if they see far more benefit than negatives but they are far more leery of the negatives than open to any benefits.
Absolutely: it is attitudinal all the way down, it is situational, hypocritical, illogical, you name it. And it is very much in service of a bland-ification one associates with the most hegemonic one-size-fits-all rule, ironically, all must bounce their balls in time together. It would be a dull world if we were all the same - so let’s do that!!
I can adduce two examples of this allergy to the hyper local, and further to the idea that every place need not be homogenized.
One, my former city’s heritage tree ordinance (by no means enforced in a draconian way, there being too few inspectors - it relied on good faith, and on there being still neighborhoods with people who valued trees enough to remain alert to the sound of chainsaws). This ordinance only becomes more salient in an arid area, by the way.
The state government - led by people hundreds of miles away, with no stake in this at all - devoted most of one legislative session to destroying this. Nevermind such things were on the books elsewhere without controversy, probably in some of their own localities. Never mind it had been in place for decades. They had an animus against the city for other reasons, and then - idiocracy-like - went after one of its sanest rules, intended to make it more liveable more “itself” as a place where trees … didn’t exactly grow on trees, but the older ones, that had planted themselves, gave the city its pleasant spots, and the shade you crave when it’s 110 and asphalt all around.
Meanwhile these same libertarian-infected GOPers were perfectly fine with state government growing by leaps and bounds in every dimension, not to mention sucking at the fed. government teat for all kinds of things, like road projects, education, welfare.
Then: because a river runs through the city, and it was noticed that it was clogged with plastic trash bags, making islands for the turtles, the city passed a bag ban. There was grumbling in some quarters and then, because it was so trivial an aspect of life, people got used to it.
So of course the Lege had nothing better to do (it was not, note, at that point the least bit interested in such issues as the border) it devoted all the session’s airtime to outlawing plastic bag bans by municipalities.
Note that this affected vanishingly few places, but one of them was a bastion of radicalism lol, tiny Fort Stockton, TX, which banned the bags for the simple reason that locals got tired of seeing the wind festoon all the barbed wire with them.
Even these utterly minor things - trash mitigation efforts, which hopefully would have led to others, in those places that cared about ten cents about their home - were too much local control.
There is no consistency - there is really nothing there at all, with this kind of thinking.
But it will well suit a world where nobody cares about anything. Whether such a world could be described as the least bit “conservative” I leave as an exercise to the reader, as Newton said about action at a distance.
I kinda like the rant. I just object to the description of most of the GOPers involved in doing as you suggest being all that “libertarian-infected”…
Let us say that they very much think that they are. I’ll concede that they’ve never thought about it to any great degree.
Subsidiarity...a favorite topic of mine.
The problem of coherent scaling in human organization can be solved with power distributed in two distinct ways, centrally bureaucratic or hierarchically delegated. In the centralized model, it's the individual and the state with nothing in between and all the Kafkaesque helplessness and alienation that follows. In the hierarchical (i.e., quasi-feudal) model, there is, theoretically, always someone within Dunbar numbers who has a relationship and knows you at least slightly better than a number or some mere random stranger to whom one can talk, appeal, petition, etc. and who either has some genuine authority or else capacity to "take it up the chain" if necessary and warranted. That's was a traditional social model in much of the pre- modern world (which still had big empires), and also the old military model, and the one once used by trade unions. Indeed, the word 'soviet' means "workers council" which in practice, at least until around the turn of the 20th century, often meant small enough socialist-democratic 'locals' such that workers really could have some kind of knowledge to the person who could 'represent' them, to whom they could express grievance, seek protection, etc. Of course the ideal of a whole society built from the ground up by a hierarchy of soviets with any actual meaningful local authority quickly became a fiction. But in the US much of the analogous letter and spirit of federalism has also become a dead letter. To be 'protected' from above from the potentially abusive exercise of local power of personal scale and scope is inevitably to be dispossessed of the very possibility of the exercise of that power and thus the possibility that one could have any say in or influence over it.
Nicely said.
I think schools underwent a similar process. While public schools in the US are under the management of an elected local school board (sometimes a mayor) and under the legal frameworks established by each state, various nationwide initiatives have stripped local elected officials of much of their power. I was just reading a 2014 interview Marco Rubio did where he pointed out that Common Core was a backdoor to federal control of school. While we may or may not remember that Common Core was technically passed by each state, adoption of its testing regime (and by extension the standards) was incentivized at the federal level. Beyond standards and testing, federal oversight and court cases related to civil rights and disability shifted power up the chain to the DOE, diluting the level of representation.
One of my personal theories of the rise of populism in the US says that frustration with schools, especially the loss of local control, drove many “normie” centrist types into the populist camp when it came time to vote. They, at least, wanted to empower local schools boards once again.
An interesting outcome, though, is that in some instances that local power has been short-circuited by states or by choice and voucher programs. In the former case, some states have taken a very active role in managing schools, overriding local boards or enforcing their preferred ideological conventions on curriculum and materials. In other cases, while parents can use vouchers to “vote with their wallets”, they’ve ceded democratic accountability at the school/district level for the state level (since the states determine how vouchers may be used and which schools qualify). It’s kind of a tossing up of hands, I think. They’re saying, “well, if we can’t oversee our own schools, we might as well be able to do something else.”
I moved to Florida in large part for school vouchers. I think the idea that will lead to government takeover of schools is hyperbole.
A problem outside the northeast is that everything, especially schools, is done at the county level. This made some sense when less populous parts of the country had like one high school for the entire county. But in the mid Atlantic and sunbelt today it means districts that are a hour drive and hundreds of thousands of children spread across dozens of schools. My right wing town had its schools run by left wingers an hour drive away.
Illinois has 102 counties and 853 school districts. You are nuts if you think that doesn't give local school districts immense control, regardless of what comes down from higher up.
I worked in K-12 for a long time and James is right that the state ed department (and the state legislature) have lots and lots of requirements. Length of day, length of year, what must be taught, who can be hired to teach, how teachers must be hired and fired, how students can be suspended or expelled (quick answer to the latter: with great difficulty; schools must attempt to educate almost everyone 5-18 in the district).
There really isn't much a local school committee can do to make its schools different. It gets to decide things like where to build schools and what grades to put in them but not much about how or what students are taught in them.
Almost all requirements are about procedures rather than results, inputs rather than outputs. There are few "high stakes test" requirements for graduation any more and the ones that remain are not very rigorous.
Your comment makes me doubt you have had any experience in a school.
There are infinite loopholes. An admin assistant where I worked left to teach at a rural elementary school with no training. The pay was awful and they simply couldn't get enough licensed teachers. My son graduated with an engineering degree and decided not to engineer. He taught at a charter school for troubled kids in Indiana for two years before grad school in something else. This qualified him for a teaching license. It would have been transferrable to Illinois. Probably other states. It's been years since my kids were in elementary school but they were in combined grades. My niece teaches elementary in Virgina. Up until last year she taught combined grades. Now she teaches k-5 art and has complete curricular discretion.
Who decides whether and what to offer for art, music, recess, foreign language, PE (yes, some states have a minimum reqt), vocational training, home econ, drivers ed, AP, after school, volunteer aides, class size, etc.? Who decides length of class periods? State sets minimum hours and days but do they set a maximum? What if they don't finish the required material? What if they finish and have time for other things? Who decides whether to group kids by ability and the criteria for doing so? (Yes, anti-discrimination policies put limits of this but it still happens)
There are probably a million other things I'm not thinking of or don't even know about and yes state and federal rules and policies place limits but clearly local schools have way more control than you suggest.
I taught for many years in eastern Massachusetts, where there has never been any problem getting enough teachers. So I suppose things are tighter here.
Yes, state ed departments will waive or not enforce requirements when the alternative is no teachers or no school but at least a decade ago, that seemed pretty rare.
Massachusetts requires a minimum of 180 days of instruction and 990 hours of instructional time. You can divide periods any way you wish but they can't add up to less. Combine that with subject matter requirements and textbooks which are pretty uniform state to state and there isn't much realistic discretion. Sure, the school can decide to have 6 equal length periods or 5 smaller and one larger but that minimum has to be made. At my school, it was made exactly. Though not without some of the usual education bs. The state ed department said study hall was "instructional time" if there was a teacher in the front of the room. It basically means that not counting lunch, kids have to be in school six and a half hours a day. Very, very few systems require more.
You can access the MA Current Frameworks at https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/current.html As you can see, it includes a "2023 Comprehensive Health and Physical Education Framework", a "2021 World Languages Framework", and a "2019 Arts Framework". Massachusetts may be more prescriptive than many states.
The state does not send inspectors into every classroom or require reports on what is actually covered. They just assume you're following the standards. Schools themselves point their teachers to the standards. The standards are almost always a subset of what the textbooks cover. And the textbooks are remarkably similar.
There is a saying in education, "When the classroom door closes, it's just you and the students." A teacher whose students like him will probably not get into trouble for adding things or not covering things. Largely because no one in authority will know. But that's a matter of teacher freedom, not school committee/school board freedom.
"Who decides whether to group kids by ability and the criteria for doing so?" The local schools here, though there seems to be strong pressure not to have more than two levels (and any more than two turns into a scheduling nightmare).
You are right. School systems have discretion not to offer various classes.
Yes and no. While I don’t know Illinois specifically, many states these days will lay out specific curricula that schools must choose from, set standards all students in the state must meet, and establish a system to testing to ensure those standards are being met. While that may feel broad, in practice it’s led to a lot of standardization across schools that would otherwise be very different.
And do Chicago schools meet those standards? I'm pretty sure they aren't even close. So how can any other school district in Illinois be held to them?
I think this comment makes my point nicely.
I’ve never lived IL.
I lived the northeast which has a school district for each town. In the mid Atlantic and south everything is at the county level.
The problem is people want Local Control... with non-locals paying for it.
Without denying most of what you wrote, the idea that local school boards, most of whose members are backed by teachers unions, much of whose funds come from mandatory dues, as being paragons of the interests of the locals is… highly suspect to say the least
I don’t necessarily disagree. I do think teachers unions have been on a multi-decade trajectory of decline, in part because local control is weaker and they haven’t been able to effectively resist accountability reforms like state standards and testing for some time. It will be interesting to see if the newfound love for localism at the federal level will lead to unions clawing back some of that power.
I notice in the comments a lack of distinction between the question of who wields a power and whether a power should be wielded in the first place. I am all for devolving powers down to the lowest possible level, and have written on the scaling problems of our institutions, and totally agree with Arnold there. However, I think the state capacity view point often makes the mistake of starting from "the state can and should do whatever it wants because that is the will of the people" without fully realizing it, and without fully realizing that the will of the people is nonsense.
By far the best point in this discussion - across AK’s post itself and all the comments.
Thank you sir :)
Arnold;
There is one place in your essay which I can point to as a blind spot - you say you would like to "distribute" power to the localities. Instead, let's imagine you can withhold power from the central government... or in fact, from any kind of government body. Because it's also too easy to think of the smaller governments as subsidiary to the central one, rather than drawing together voluntarily to be represented in a limited but necessary deliberative forum through representation.
The emotion surrounding 'organic' bottom-up processes is simply incomprehensible from a top-down, attention-to-the-center perspective. Your County planners should be powerless to mess about in your neighborhood unless all the neighborhoods assemble to grant them this particular authority over roads of a certain character, for example, or trees at the neighborhood borders, etc. At least, that's the logic that built America.
I'll add another aspect of Chartertopia to address this issue: bylaws are a bottom up hierarchy. When a jurisdiction passes a law, its districts can individually opt out. If those districts have subdistricts, they can opt out of the district and opt in to the jurisdiction.
It's not nullification, at least on the jurisdiction level. If all districts opt out, it could be called nullification, but if it's that unpopular, it would be easier to just repeal the thing.
I feel like the fact that Switzerland is still recognizably, unmistakably Switzerland has more to do with shared values than governance - though the style of the latter may also be an expression of them.
This puts America at least as presently constituted right out of consideration.
It was probably Freakonomics that reported a look at tax compliance in Switzerland and Italy. What was found was that northern Italians behaved more like Swiss than other Italians. If so, this would be almost entirely culture, not governance.
I was reading an interview with Italian tennis player Jannik Sinner. They asked what he likes to splash out on. Cars, he said he loves cars and his favorite thing to do was to go for drives all alone. Then as if he might have given the wrong impression about his love of cars, he added that he only owns 2 cars. Which strikes me as about as Swiss a thing as an Italian might say.
90,000 per council member, not 900,000.
Please excuse my amusement at Olde People™ in a couple neighborhoods being upset that the vast metroplex of which their neighborhoods are a part...is trying to plan for the future. Folks not familiar with NOW might not know that stuff like housing and transportation is a burgeoning critical issue, and that the desires of Olde People™ wanting everything to stay the same as it was decades ago...is the problem.
This "problem" is as old as America. The frontier closed a long while back. Imagining our own self inflicted problems can be solved by adopting the administrative structures of Switzerland...I mean, WTF...Switzerland...(?)....approaches delusional.
Having deep libertarian sympathies and tendencies, it's easy to understand the frustrations, but...tough shit. I've been there. It sucks. So what?
Maybe my opinion is colored by mostly or entirely agreeing with the point but I just love the way it is written.
Thnx. It felt good.
It's wonderful to know that the metroplex "is trying to plan for the future". I thought it was a bunch of credentialed experts and politicians.
Well, if one wants to get into the stupidities that masquerade as planning...I can write a dissertation. That doesn't relieve the Olde People™ from having to understand that change is necessary.
If someone wants to say change is necessary because the previous "planners" were incompetent morons, OK. If one has any experience in municipal metroplex planning, that's a given. That doesn't give the Olde People™ a get out of jail free card.
I do suspect the current "planning commissions" are made up of credentialed experts and politicians. Of course they are. Our overly credentialed society demands it. Could gifted amateurs do a better job? I've sat on construction sites with undocumented Mexicans that described all the problems with appropriate solutions while munching on tortillas warmed up in a 2nd hand store microwave. So, I believe amateurs can do a better job than those currently employed in the task, if anyone would listen to them, which they won't.
Also, I've heard that lots of folks want to live in that specific metroplex because of...you know...jobs and everything else that are the underpinnings of civilization, and there's not enough housing and folks want different transportation options. So, there's that.
Nothing doesn't change. Repeat it over and over.
Granted my math skills are slight, but how can a County of 1.0 million work as this: "County Council of 11 members. Population per legislator is about 900,000." I wonder if perhaps a zero is not astray somewhere. Or I am a moron.
I'm intrigued, but I need to hear more about how the citizens to legislator ratio matters. If there were 10x as many legislators, wouldn't they each have 1/10 as much power, putting you in basically the same situation?
I can see how the absolute size of the population matters of course.
These councilmembers would be the ones making all of the decisions should a government -led
“Abundance” agenda ever become reality. The ideal city as imagined by Ezra Klein
I've bested Arnold on his widely unread book by having my own IMAGINARY book. No one has read it; it lives, unexpurgated, in my head.
My book is an explanation/exposé of America's urban "planning", where "planning" is defined as adopting initiatives wherein everyone is working overtime to live at the expense of everyone else...apologies to Bastiat.
50 years ago, a bunch of us (then) hippies were going into the trades and postulating entirely new and beautiful ideas about how communities should be planned and built. We foresaw the explosion of housing cost, the absence of land adjacent to jobs, the problems of building in flood plains, wetlands, and coastal areas, how development did not follow or respond to obvious and immutable economic constraints, and how changing lifestyles would blow up then current thinking on the topics.
Of course, no one wanted to listen, let alone consider how we might do all this smarter...and, it's really hard to read an imaginary book. So, here we are.
Christopher Caldwell is the only writer I know of who locates the essential conservatism at the heart of this aspect (and a few others) of what is recalled as “hippie”-dom, though of course there is a bit of sloppiness there. These “hippie” ideals that for reasons were prompted by postwar life, didn’t really involve the stereotypical “hippie” that later entered the popular imagination.
My Phillips Exeter-educated father-in-law was absolutely such a one 60 years ago, and his hair was never much beyond his ears, nor has he ever been out of an Oxford shirt with a pocket protector.
Yeah, that was me...certainly not Phillips Exeter but with short hair and decidedly conservative attitudes. Then, pop culture turned it into stoners and Haight Asbury type characterizations.
Oh, would that today’s left had anything like the values you describe.
Not exactly the same point you seem to be making above, but at least similar is to me the punchline of Collin Wright’s brilliant Elon Must Tweeted My Cartoon WSJ piece:
“The right may be inconsistent in its support of free speech, individual rights and women’s rights, but the left is consistent in its opposition to all three.”
"Divide the counties into wards!" ~ Thomas Jefferson
You can't have both State capacity and veto power by small neighborhoods.
Imagine someone at high control level decided the County needs 10% more houses.
He looked, and proposed reasonable changes to add them - with all the required infrastructure, costs, etc.
This would inevitably run over some local interest. Someone wouldn't like the extra houses, the extra roads, the extra schools.
I feel this here in my city of Vancouver, Canada. ( west van specifically)
"Countries like Switzerland, Singapore, and Norway show that you can have adequate state capacity at a scale of less than 20 million people."
You seem more rational than someone like Trump but sometimes you perplex me just as much. You say you are a conservative yet you propose blowing up our governance structure after already proposing blowing up our university system. How is either the slightest bit conservative?
Second, you've cherry picked the countries to make your point. What about all the countries not doing as well as the US, both governance and economically?
Besides good governance, why are any of those three countries doing as well as they are? How much are they dependent on the inventions, innovation, growth, and markets of the US? Where would they and the rest of the world be without this supposedly less successful country?
AK doesn’t say he is a conservative. I think he says he *leans* conservative, but that is not the same thing.
To the extent you are equating “conservative” with “classical liberal”, however, the answer is pretty simple: our total government power has so far exceeded what it was at our founding that cutting it way back is indeed the right thing to do.
That said, you’d probably be best off going to Dr Hammer’s comment re: “distinction between the question of who wields a power and whether a power should be wielded in the first place.” On that front, I do think I agree with you that this is far from AK’s best - or clearest- piece.
I've yet to learn how to search substack posts for something from the past but I'm near certain AK has said he is a conservative. I believe this because I remember how surprising I found it given that much of what he says sounds more libertarian than conservative to me.
As to Hammer's comment, I don't disagree with it but I also don't think it conflicts with anything AK said or invalidates the points he made.
Pretty mich every country with a good governance is a small country: Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia( in addition to the list above,).
Not every small country has a good governance, but practically all countries with good governance are small
One of my Chartertopia goals was to prevent government from defining itself. One method I came up with is that government has -zero- control over districts (it has nested districts, not states, counties, cities, etc).
Assume all district borders align with parcel borders. If it aligns with one of your parcel borders, you can move it to the other side -- in effect, move your parcel from one district to a neighboring district.
It does indeed mean border parcels can change city, county, or state.
Why should governments have any say over where their boundaries are? Every time I hear of some city annexing neighboring land, I wonder who gave them that authority?
(I know it's never going to happen. I didn't invent Chartertopia to make it happen, but to give me some baseline to understand why governments are so incompetent.)