Education, the Oil Spill and Subsidiarity
Reading the David Brooks op ed description of the oil clean-up fiasco in the Gulf, I couldn’t help thinking about education.
Apply this quote about the clean up to the growing federal role in education, whether it’s Race to the Top, a national curriculum or No Child Left Behind (though I still think NCLB had its heart in the right place):
If you talk to elected leaders from Louisiana to Florida, they fill your ears with tales of incompetence — of advice that was not heeded, of red tape stifling effective operations, of local knowledge that was cast aside and trampled.
And this:
Leaders in Okaloosa County, Fla., had a state-approved plan to protect their waterways, but then the Coast Guard raised a fuss, and now they’ve got to start over, according to The Northwest Florida Daily News of Fort Walton Beach.
You might feel a sense of solidarity with this:
The county commissioners in Okaloosa County, Fla., got so fed up with outside interference that they unanimously voted to give their emergency management team the power to do whatever it wants. “We made the decision legislatively to break the laws if necessary,” Chairman Wayne Harris told The Northwest Florida Daily News.
The title of Brooks’ op ed is “Trim the ‘Experts,’ Trust the Locals.” The first part of the title–trim the ‘experts’–is at the heart of the dispute about governance in a democracy. As William F. Buckley, Jr. famously said:
I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
And just because he went to Yale doesn’t make it any less true. But that’s a discussion for another day.
The second part of the title, though– trust the locals– is the argument of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity says that decisions should be made at the level of society most affected by the decision. Higher levels– higher in the sense of having more resources, not higher in importance– should help when asked and step aside when they’re no longer needed.
Here’s Brooks again:
Some of this rage is unavoidable when you have a crisis that no one can control. But it’s also clear that we have a federalism problem. All around the region there are local officials who think they know their towns best. They feel insulted by a distant and opaque bureaucracy lurking above.
The balance between federal oversight and local control is off-kilter. We have vested too much authority in national officials who are really smart, but who are really distant. We should be leaving more power with local officials, who may not be as expert, but who have the advantage of being there on the ground.
Interesting that Brooks says the distant officials are smarter than the locals. He might be on safer ground to just say they’re more credentialed.
