I just finished Jal Mehta’s . Over the coming weeks, I’ll be blogging about the book.

The Allure of Order is an excellent book and should be a contender for education book of the year. Jal does an admirable job of deep historical analysis, policy criticism, and solution seeking. I imagine people on all sides of reform debates will find much to their liking. Do read it.

Here is how Jal frames why he wrote the book:

Jal’s basic premise is that American education reform has suffered, in part, due to the combination of:

1. America’s weak welfare state and an associated belief that schools can solve more problems than they probably can.
2. The failure of the teaching profession (practitioners and researchers alike) to professionalize their field through rigorous research, standards of practice, and field advancements.
3. The fact that our decentralized operational nature of education contributes to wide variations in quality.
4. The ability of a diverse coalition of elites to exert moral power to demand increasingly centralized levels of standards and accountability over our decentralized school systems.

While it’s impossible to fully explain a hundred years of education history with a few broad strokes, these four conditions do seem to have a lot of explanatory power.

Of course, this analysis raises an important question: is a hundred years of standards and accountability reform the result of morally legitimate desire to inculcate high expectations, or is it the equivalent of saying the beatings will continue until morale improves?

Ultimately, it’s probably both, which helps explain why education is so decisive. In many ways, it pits a morally just vision (children, poor and minority included, can achieve!) against an exasperated field (how can we educators achieve this vision with poor training, little research, a weak welfare state, and dysfunctionally governed school systems)?

How to fix this?

The political knot seems to be this: elites seem unable to deliver what educators need (better training, practice focused research, real autonomy, and non-educational supports for children), and educators seem unable to let go of the institutions and values that protect but ultimately limit them (thousand page collective bargaining agreements and district bureaucracies).

In other words: while too many elites suffer from the Allure of Order, too many educators suffer from the Allure of Safety.

Together, the Allure of Order and the Allure of Safety seem to be at the heart of our educational problems.