Volume 26, Number 6
November/December 2010

Inverting the Pyramid of School Reform

Practice should drive research and policy, not the reverse

by Jal Mehta

 

When I was eight years old, I was sure that I knew how Santa Claus worked. I knew that the story my parents were telling me could not be true, because mathematically it just did not make sense. There were more than 5 billion people in the world, of which at least a billion were kids. There were only 86,400 seconds in a day. There was no way Santa could get to all of those chimneys. So how did my presents arrive at 402 Winston Avenue in North Baltimore?

Well, I figured that I told my parents what I wanted; they called the Baltimore City Santa Claus Department and passed on the word; and on Christmas Eve, after I went to bed, someone from the city showed up with the presents.

Right from the start, I had an outsized faith in the power of benevolent social planning.

In one sense, my professional life has been a kind of tug-of-war between my eight-year-old idealist self, who believed in the power of the state to achieve equitable and good outcomes, and my older self, who slowly came to realize that it was more complicated than I initially imagined. For example, having a regionally departmentalized Santa system might be better than leaving distribution to the private market (where some kids don’t get presents at all), but it would likely have problems of its own, especially if it worked as well as most Baltimore city services! Much of my academic work has focused on understanding the possibilities and challenges of these kinds of large-scale social delivery systems. I still retain my eight-year-old faith in what we can accomplish collectively, but now I believe that to do so will require rethinking how we put the pieces together.