Value Competition

Management and Law Comparative Paper--Outline

What follows is an outline of a paper that would review and revisit the themes of Barley and Kunda (1992) and Eastman and Bailey (1998); the idea would be to submit it for the AoM conference this summer in Montreal and then revise it for journal publication:

a) Intro--paper theme--a new look at the historical, cyclical, materialist classification of management scholarship by B & K and the different historical classification of management and legal scholarship by E & B, which is non-cyclical and idealist;

b) Predicting the recent past--does B & K's approach or E & B's work better to explain trends in management scholarship and education since the 1990s when B & K and E & B wrote?  How about trends in legal education?

c)  The basic dichotomy between utilitarianism and deontology; the prevalence of the former in management and of the latter in law;

d) Utilitarian-Benthamite and deontological-Kantian approaches to mediating the fact-value antinomy;

e) How management with its predominantly utilitarian mediation surfaces methodological "rationality of means" value competition and represses substantive "rationality of ends" value competition; how law with its predominantly deontological mediation surfaces substantive value competition and represses methodological value competition;

f) The greater salience of business ethics as a field relative to legal ethics; why the utilitarian mediation of management leads to the rise of business ethics and why the deontological mediation of law leaves legal ethics as a backwater;

g) The growth of a methodological split in the legal academy with the rise of law and economics; management in that respect as pointing the way for law;

h) Relevance of the analysis for management education;

i) Conclusion.

Administrative Tenure

This blog is about the analysis of values, including left and right values, and is not intended to be a forum for the expression of my own or other people's left and right values.  Accordingly, I'm a bit reluctant to include the following post, which consists of my testimony in Trenton last Thursday against tenure for principals, assistant superintendents, and other public school administrators.  The post does hook into the one I did a little while ago on how both parties have supporters (unions for the the Democrats, religious exclusivists for the Republicans) who are useful for the party and arguably the polity in enhancing voice for lower status people, but are also detrimental in policy terms.  Also, this post and my general interest in the administrative tenure issue could be regarded as an outgrowth or application of the value competition program--of course, the causality might actually run the other way, with my experiences with the school board, the Community Coalition on Race, etc. driving the program.

Since I find the left-of-center case for job security for bosses much more elusive than the left-of-center case for security for lower-ranking, lower-status workers, I think the administrative tenure issue is one on which liberals and Democrats as well as conservatives and Republicans may see a need for reform.  I'll be working with other South Orange-Maplewood school board members to push this issue forward--it'll be interesting to see what if any success we have. 

Why New Jersey Should End Administrative Tenure

[remarks prepared for General Assembly Education Committee hearing 12-3-09]

Wayne Eastman

South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education

430 Meeker Street

South Orange, NJ 07079    

weastman@business.rutgers.edu 

(973) 353-1001     

Good afternoon.  I’m Wayne Eastman, a member of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education, elected in 2006 and re-elected in 2009.  My background, briefly: I’m a professor in the Supply Chain Management and Marketing Sciences Department at Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick who was formerly a practicing lawyer in New York and New Jersey and who teaches business law and business ethics.  As acting director in 2007 of the Prudential Business Ethics Center at Rutgers, I organized a Rutgers Ethics Initiative on ethics in New Jersey government that led to a report covering pay-to-play, dual office-holding, and other matters.   Today I am speaking on behalf of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education in one respect, in that we have agreed as a body that administrative tenure as it now exists in New Jersey public schools should not be continued, and have established a Lobbying Committee to advance that position and other positions we hold collectively.  On the specifics of what I’m saying, though, I note that the words and arguments I’m using are my own rather than a collective position of the Board.

I want to begin by expressing my appreciation to Assemblyman Cryan.  I and three other members of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education—our President, Mark Gleason, the chair of our Lobbying Committee, Rowland Bennett, and another member of that committee, Beth Daugherty, along with our lawyer, Jessica deKoninck--had an excellent meeting back in mid-October in which the four of us on the Board expressed our opposition to administrative tenure.  The Asemblyman expressed strong interest in the topic and told us he would hold a hearing in the form of a round-table discussion in the lame-duck session.   A few weeks later, though, the Governor’s race turned out rather differently from what Assemblyman Cryan said he expected.  I would not have blamed the Assemblyman or anyone else if he had regarded his October statement to us as having an implicit contingency clause that his favored candidate for Governor win, given the understandable depth of his commitment to that candidate.  But Assemblyman Cryan went ahead with this hearing, and for that I strongly thank him.  I also want to express optimism about what I think this hearing can lead to.  Much as some issues--such as teacher tenure—are difficult or impossible to get a consensus on across partisan and ideological lines as of December 2009, I believe that the issue of ending administrative tenure while at the same time providing reasonable protection for current and new educational administrators is one that a Democratic legislature and a Republican governor can come together on right now.  The people of New Jersey need to see that their newly-elected leaders can work together to advance accountability and effectiveness in public education.  There is no better issue for that than administrative tenure, and I regard Assemblyman Cryan’s decision to proceed with this hearing as a highly hopeful sign that we can move forward together on this issue in New Jersey soon. 

Now, on to the substance of my remarks.  I have three main points to make.  First, based on my on-the-ground experience as a school board member for four years, I believe that administrative tenure is not a minor or abstract issue.  Rather, I believe it is a very serious obstacle to accountability and effectiveness in public education.  Second, administrative tenure is fundamentally contrary to the logic of having administrators be accountable to a school district’s top manager, the school superintendent. Finally, the tide of reform in the states and nationally is running against administrative tenure.  In the remainder of my written statement I will expand on these three points.  In the last part, I will then respond to three concerns about the abolition of administrative tenure and explain how abolition can be done in a way that is fair to current and new administrators.  At the end, I include a few links that may be helpful. 

I.  Administrative Tenure Is a Big Problem

Based on my experience on the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education, administrative tenure is a central obstacle to a superintendent running a school district sensibly, not a minor or peripheral issue.  What I’m going to say in this section is somewhat cryptic, given that both our able board attorney and my own background as a lawyer counsel me to avoid unnecessary references to pending or potential litigation or to individuals.   In making these remarks, I also want to stress that I regard my district’s administrators, past and present, as a highly skilled and dedicated group.

Now, the blunt part of what I have to say.  Many hours of board discussion and many thousands of dollars have been wasted in our district because of administrative tenure and litigation it spawned.  Without administrative tenure, it is possible that litigation would have occurred anyway, given that government employees have—and in my view should have—due process rights.  But without administrative tenure, any such litigation would have merely been a nuisance suit, rather than the significant drain on time and money that we have actually experienced.

In my experience, the requirement that a superintendent and a board make a decision within a limited number of years—frequently less than three because of shorter clocks for administrators with certain kinds of previous experience--on whether someone should have what amounts to a lifetime job as a high-level manager like a principal or assistant superintendent is a terrible one.  Even when nothing goes dramatically wrong, tenure plays a central, deforming role in high-level personnel decisions. I have found myself supporting tenure for principals where I thought that there was very limited evidence on progress in student achievement and building a strong school culture.  Even in cases where I thought there was good evidence of progress, I have never felt confident in what amounts to tying the hands of future superintendents.  The problem goes beyond the length of the tenure clock.  What the superintendent and the board know about a candidate is necessarily time-bound.  To ask a superintendent and a board to proscribe the judgment of all future superintendents and boards by granting tenure to an administrator is to ask them to engage in a fool’s mission.

On the other side of the ledger, I have also found myself troubled by my support for denying administrative tenure.  Absent tenure for administrators, superintendents and boards would be more willing to renew third year candidates who should not be given tenure, but who might prove to be very good if renewed for a year or another contractual period of time.  I’m not claiming that the main reason to end administrative tenure is to avoid firing administrators—but I do believe that some firings of third year administrators that now occur can and should be avoided by ending administrative tenure.

II.  Imagine if Christie (or Corzine) Couldn’t Change His Cabinet…

    As a result of an earlier reform, superintendents in New Jersey no longer gain tenure.  But all other administrators do, including the principals responsible for buildings and the central administrators who work closely with the superintendent.  Let me speak bluntly again.  For important administrators like assistant superintendents and principals not to be accountable to the superintendent they report to is absurd, judging not only by the standards of the business world but also by the standards that apply at the top of our state and federal government.  Anyone who proposed that the top staff who implement the vision of a CEO or the cabinet of a Governor or a President should have iron-clad job security would be considered completely out of bounds—but that is in fact the system we have in New Jersey public education. 

    At this point, I want to address the comparison between K-12 education in New Jersey and higher education, the sector in which I work at Rutgers.  There are major parallels between the two sectors.  As one who has tenure myself as a professor and whose wife is a tenured English teacher in a New Jersey high school, I feel those parallels keenly, all the more so because I am also an educational administrator myself as vice chair of my department.  Unlike my faculty position, my administrative position has no job security.  I have a one-year contract and otherwise serve at the pleasure of my chair and my Dean, as do other faculty and non-faculty administrators at Rutgers, who likewise are covered by contracts of differing lengths.  In other words, higher education in New Jersey already has the situation that should apply as well to K-12 education.

I see significant arguments for as well as against the faculty tenure that I and my wife have.  But I see no good reason for administrators whose job is to be accountable to a chair or a Dean or a superintendent to have tenure that makes it next to impossible for that chair or Dean or superintendent to remove them.  Whatever the ultimate merits of teacher or professor tenure, there is a serious case for it that there simply is not for educational administrators, who need to be accountable to the superintendent or dean who hires and evaluates them.

III.  The Trend is Against Administrative Tenure

Administrative tenure as it exists in New Jersey has been a minority position for a long time.  A 1983 survey by the National Association of Secondary School Principals found that only seventeen states had full-scale principal tenure, with the remainder having lesser protection or no principal tenure at all.  Since then, there has been a definite trend toward eliminating administrative tenure.  The best information I have been able to locate on the current situation comes from a document from the National Conference of State Legislatures, the relevant parts of which I have included in the sources section at the end of this statement, and which suggests that New Jersey is one of a small number of states with full-scale administrative tenure.  We may even have the dubious distinction of being the state with the most iron-clad system of administrative tenure, given that New York, which the NCSL document highlights as being similar to New Jersey, has a more limited mandate than we do, in that it does not include assistant superintendents and has been limited further in New York City. 

We should eliminate administrative tenure because it is the right thing to do, not just because we’re worried that Arne Duncan’s next speech or the latest federal regulations for Race to the Top eligibility will include administrative tenure here along with laws in California and New York prohibiting the use of student performance data in teacher tenure decisions as examples of reactionary, unjustifiable state laws.  But that concern about being out of step is another good reason for us to move away from administrative tenure in New Jersey.

IV.  But What About…?

    There are a number of concerns that can be raised about the elimination of administrative tenure.  In this section, I give responses to what I believe are the three biggest legitimate concerns and suggest ways in which the elimination of tenure can be accomplished in a way that is fair to current and new administrators.

Q. Isn’t it unfair to take away tenure from administrators who have already gained it?

A. Given the equity issue raised by the question, it makes sense for the elimination of tenure to be prospective rather than retroactive, which is to my knowledge the path followed in states that have eliminated tenure for administrators.  (Also, I would recommend that a provision be added to the legislation to make it clear that is is lawful for districts to offer a package in which a current administrator can voluntarily agree to forgo his or her tenure rights.  Further, it would be reasonable to include a provision stating that nothing in the legislation shall be construed to deny the right of an administrator under state public employment law and the state and federal constitutions as interpreted by the courts to due process in connection with a termination of employment.)

Q.    Isn’t it unduly harsh to fire an administrator who is not up to par as an administrator but was a perfectly good teacher before becoming an administrator?

A. Opinions on this may differ, since one can reasonably say that a teacher who chooses to become an administrator should simply accept the additional risk, just as a teacher does in giving up tenure when moving from one district to another.  In the interest of reaching agreement on legislation and given my own Rutgers experience, I personally believe it would be fine to have an teacher turned administrator retain tenure that he or she possesses in a given district as a teacher.

Q.    Aren’t the problems with corruption and politicization in some New Jersey school districts a good reason to retain administrative tenure?

A.   The overall answer to the question is no.  The reality that some school districts in New Jersey have past and present difficulties with corruption, poor personnel management, and failure to focus on student learning is not a good reason to hold back progress in the large majority of districts that are run professionally.  Instead, a better approach would be to recognize that problems exist in certain districts and to deal with that specific issue.  One reasonable way to do that would be a provision that requires school districts below a certain administratively determined level of performance on the state’s QSAC accountability monitoring to have their terminations of administrators with more than three years experience reviewed by the State Department of Education. 

V.  Conclusion

    The fact that the elected school board of South Orange and Maplewood, two of the deepest blue suburbs in New Jersey, supports the elimination of administrative tenure as we do is significant.  On some issues, my towns aren’t a bellwether.  But on the issue of administrative tenure, we are a very important indicator.  If we are against it, what part of New Jersey is for it?  Republican suburbs or rural areas in Morris County, Sussex County, Monmouth County, and Ocean County?  I think not.  I believe school boards and voters in those solidly Republican areas are with us in rock-ribbed Democratic South Orange-Maplewood in supporting change.  To the extent there are special issues in certain school districts, especially in our cities, they can be dealt with through enhanced state monitoring for these districts, as I’ve suggested.  Across party lines, let’s move forward in New Jersey to join the strong national majority of states and the strong national trend by eliminating administrative tenure and enhancing accountability in our schools.

VI.  Some sources:

1.   The National Association of Secondary School Principals (2000) and (1983): Although their material has some tilt toward the pro-tenure position (for instance, it repeats the frequently made but misleading claim that tenure simply guarantees a hearing and due process, which ignores the reality, clear in my experience as a board member, that it is in fact extremely difficult to remove a subpar tenured public school employee in New Jersey), it also includes an acknowledgement that many principals favor ending principal tenure, and has useful information on trends and the law:

http://www.principals.org/s_nassp/bin.asp?CID=680&DID=50140&DOC=FILE.PDF (2000)

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED238149&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED238149 (1983)

2.  Education Week: The title of this 1998 article--“Tenured Principals: An Endangered Species”--indicates its theme:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1998/03/04/25tenure.h17.html

3.  KPMG Peat Marwick report for North Carolina General Assembly: This 1992 report to the legislature advocates elimination of administrative tenure in North Carolina and notes various ways in which administrators without tenure can be protected from unfair discharge:

http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/GPAC/issue/e/GPACEDU071.pdf

4.  National Conference of State Legislatures document: This undated document, which appears to be a draft, contains information on state tenure laws, which is reproduced below:

 

 

 

7700 East First Place, Denver, Colorado, 80230, 303-364-7700

 

 

PRINCIPAL TENURE

 

 

States that grant tenure to principals:

New Jersey

NJSA 18A: 28-5

http://lis.njleg.state.nj.us/cgi-bin/om_isapi.dll?clientID=478476&Depth=2&depth=2&expandheadings=on&headingswithhits=on&hitsperheading=on&infobase=statutes.nfo&record={7D76}&softpage=Doc_Frame_PG42

 

New York

Education Law § 3012 (1) (b) Tenure: certain school districts.

http://public.leginfo.state.ny.us/menugetf.cgi?COMMONQUERY=LAWS

 

Utah

Utah Code Title 53A, Chapter 8, Utah Orderly School Termination Procedures Act

http://le.utah.gov/~code/TITLE53A/53A08.htm

Tenure for school employees is provided by school district policies or an agreement with an employee association. The Utah Orderly School Termination Act specifies procedures for the termination of tenured employees who have worked a minimum of three years for their employer. Termination Act procedures apply to licensed principals. In Utah, a principal can be hired without having an administrative license, but the person is an at-will employee.

 

States with some protection for principals:

Hawaii - Principals are union employees and enjoy all of the civil service privileges due to their bargaining unit. 

 

Nebraska - Principals are under the same continuing contracts as teachers. Under the group of statutes that are labeled "Tenure" in the codified statutes, teachers and administrators (other than superintendents) are protected from termination after their first 3 years in a district by continuing contracts and may generally only be removed for just cause as defined in the statutes or as part of a reduction in force.

 

Nevada - The Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) do not use the term "tenure" with regard to teacher and administrator employment.  Instead the terms "probationary" and "postprobationary" are used.  These are defined in NRS 391.311.  The following sections provide for employment of teachers and administrators. 

• NRS 391.3197 provides that a probationary employee is someone in his or her first 2 years of employment with the school district.  Receiving notice of employment for the third year entitles the individual to be a postprobationary employee. 
• NRS 391.3196 provides that postprobationary employees have an expectation of reemployment. 
• NRS 391.3197 provides that an administrator who has completed his or her probationary period and is promoted to the position of principal must serve an additional probationary year as a principal.  After that, he or she is a postprobationary employee in the position of principal.
• NRS 391.110 provides for the employment of superintendents.  An initial contract term may not exceed four years.  The term of any subsequent employment may be for any length of time. 
• NRS 391.312  lists grounds for suspension, demotion, dismissal and refusal to reemploy teachers and administrators.

http://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-391.html#NRS391Sec311

 

North Dakota - Principals are under continuing contracts, which includes due process.

http://www.legis.nd.gov/cencode/t151c15.pdf

 

West Virginia - Does not refer to it as "tenure", principals are awarded a  "continuing contract" under West Virginia Code §18A-2-2 after their  first three years of employment.  If you look at that code section,  although this statute refers to "teachers", §18A-1-1 says that   "professional educator" is synonymous with "teacher" and includes  "principals".  The statutes are not clear on the rights of probationary verses continuing contract employees. However, a legislative staff member, after looking at several grievance decisions and supreme  court cases, says that it appears that continuing contract employees are given more rights in terms of the reasons for which they can be dismissed, use  of seniority when a reduction in force occurs, and being placed on a  preferred recall list.  A probationary employee simply can be let go by not renewing his or her contract. 

 

Competing Values in Law

On the face of it, law is a domain of surfaced value competition in a way that management is not.  Managers may employ individualist or communitarian--or for that matter left or right--ideas, but a direct competition of the sides with advocates for both defies the norms of the management field.  On the other hand, surfaced competition with advocates for both sides is entirely mainstream within law.  Further, quite often the positions the two sides are advancing are individualist, communitarian, left, or right positions.  

The key qualification to make about law and values is that what the competing sides advocate and what judges decide, if they are "speaking law" properly, is not Rawls or Nozick or MacIntyre or Burke but a version of ideology or ethics that is tailored to the distinctive legal task of blending and alternating between rules and standards.  John Hart Ely's wisecrack some decades ago about the Supreme Court voting 6-3 for Rawls over Nozick hits home as a criticism of the limits of politicized legal judgments not so much because law is apolitical or a ethical--it  most emphatically has very substantial political and ethical content--but because judges must speak properly in legal terms.  A brilliant libertarian or communitarian idea must remain tacit, or be translated into an appropriate rule, standard, or rule-standard. 

By comparison to judges, managers can draw from column A and column B without the constraint of having to justify their answer as the right answer over other possible answers.  Compared to law, a "right answer" discipline, management is a "move the ball forward" discipline.  A manager can draw on Bentham, Kant, Rawls, MacIntyre, Burke, and other ethicists and/or ideologues more freely in some respects than a judge can do.  Judges face greater consistency constraints than managers do; for a manager, honoring the grab-bag, local rationality over global rationality quality of management as a discipline constrains the manager from consistent commitment to one ethical or political perspective as the right answer but supports eclectic commitment to different perspectives that may in different circumstances help move the ball forward.

The Implicit Ethical Structures of Management and Legal Education

Why is business ethics more intellectually ambitious and more successful as a field than legal ethics?  A plausible materialist answer is that the professionalization of law has led to legal ethics becoming synonymous with a code of professional responsibility and to a concomitant diminution in intellectual ambition and disciplinary power.  But there is also a potential idealist explanation: The virtues and the flaws of management as an academic discipline map better onto major ethical schools than the virtues and flaws of legal education do.

Management education with its mix of calculative (finance, OM, etc.), cultural (OB, etc.), and mixed disciplines can be justified in eclectic utilitarian terms: To enhance their effectiveness as well as that of their firms and their society, managers should be able to draw on both utilitarian and non-utilitarian approaches.  From the eclectic utilitarian perspective, epitomized by Mill, effectiveness is often enhanced when utilitarianism is not directly relied upon; given that perspective, the central role of the calculation-culture dichotomy in management theory makes sense. 

Management education also can be usefully criticized in philosophical terms.  From a Kantian deontological perspective, there is a serious concern as to whether management forsakes moral seriousness and universality for an endless succession of morally relaxed utilitarian compromises.  From an Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective, there is a serious concern over whether the dominant split between calculation and culture in management loses sight of the manager as a whole person with a character in favor of viewing the manager as a device to achieve effective results.  From a communitarian utilitarian perspective a la Peter Singer, management education reinforces the failure to take into account remote but ethically pressing harms and benefits.  From an individualist perspective, management education oversocializes, cultivating organization men and women rather than free spirits.  Because critical stances as well as a justificatory stance on management education can be readily related to major ethical schools, business ethics courses have a reasonably straightforward logic.

By comparison, legal education with its emphasis on inculcating skills in blending and alternating between clear rules that avoid moral language and ambiguous standards that embrace moral language does not readily map onto Bentham, Kant, Aristotle, or other major ethicists.  First, because the utilitarian reason cultivated by law and economics is a subordinate kind of reason that dare not speak its name, there is no bright-line clash between utilitarianism and deontology in law the way that there is in management.  Next, because the legal curriculum is not as fragmented and dichotomizing as the management curriculum, virtue ethics has less critical bite in law than it does in management.  Finally, because legal education lacks the preoccupation management education has with the individual, firm, and social levels, individualist and communitarian critiques map less well onto law than to management.  For all that the structure of legal as well as management education has significant ethical content for the people who go through it, the structure does not accord as closely with major ethical theories in law as  it does in management.

The Analogy between Religion and Education

Is the economic analysis of religion creepy?   One can emulate Jeremy Bentham or Al Roth (the HBS professor who posts on repugnant markets http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~aroth/alroth.html ) and stand up for consequentialism in its creepy as well as its mainstream manifestations.  Personally, though, I prefer trying to use analogies to reduce the sense of creepiness that extending economic analysis to new domains can engender.  

For an analysis of how unregulated religious markets can lead to market failures in the form of religions that fail to socialize their members effectively, I think the right analogy is to education.  In that sphere, as in the religious one, there's a generally accepted (and I believe correct) case that there are positive externalities of the activity that make certain public subsidies warranted.   In education, though, not even the most fervent supporter of vouchers argues for giving out the money without substantial quality control by the government.  Allowing that people feel differently about the direct provision of government dollars to education compared to the indirect provision of dollars to religion through property tax and income tax subsidies, there is a logical case for extending at least a measure of the quality control that people rightly expect in government-supported education to governmentt-supported religion.   Whether this argument gets people to change their minds on moving away from the highly hands-off stance the US now takes toward tax-supported religion or not, I believe it helps advance the case for doing so in a way that has less of a "creep-out" factor than a pure economic argument does. 

Egoism, Altruism, and Political Ideology in Suburban New Jersey

A basic value competition proposition is that useful political ideology cuts across the believer's other interests or preferences rather than consistently reinforcing them or consistently countering them.  What follows is an application of that proposition as applied to certain aspects of my individual situation, which I'll relate to a center-right pro-market ideology and a center-left "correct for market failure" ideology:

1.  Tenure--As a tenured professor at Rutgers, a pro-market position pushes me in an altruistic direction all else equal, while a market-correcting position (reflected in New Jersey law, under which fourth year K-12 teachers automatically receive tenure) reinforces my job security interests; 

2.  Land-use regulation--As a homeowner in a quite plush New Jersey suburb, I'm a beneficiary of an elaborate web of regulation (no commuter parking on my street, which is right next to a train station; single-family zoning, minimum lot sizes) that makes it more costly for outsiders to join me in becoming homeowners but that allows me to be something of an inner suburban squire.   A pro-market position on land-use regulation like that taken by Ed Glaeser pushes me in an altruistic direction, while a market-correcting one reinforces my interest in upholding my current way of life;

3.  Exclusive support for public education--As a faculty member at New Jersey's major state university, as a school board member, and as a parent whose children go to public schools now and may well go to Rutgers in the future, a pro-market voucherization position on education like that taken by Milton Friedman is contrary to my interests, while a market-correcting position in favor of government-provided education reinforces them;

4.  Where to live--As a New Jersey resident for most of my life, I've faced a series of choices about which city or suburb to live in.  Particularly for whites such as myself, a market-correcting position that criticizes laissez-faire in housing markets for leading to segregation and the decline of majority-minority communities pushes me in an altruistic direction in regard to choice of community of residence, while a pro-market position supports my interest in maximizing the value of my housing investment.  On the other hand, once I've chosen to live in an integrated inner suburb, it is the market-correcting position that supports my interests;

5.  Tax rates--This category is trickier than some others.  The fact that both my wife and I work for public educational institutions gives us an interest in high state and local taxation, while the fact that our family income is high gives us an interest in federal tax cuts for high earners;

6.  Social welfare spending on health care, etc. for low-income people--Here, unlike in the case of education, the market-correcting position pushes me in an altruistic direction, while the pro-market one reinforces my interests.

The overall count of egoistic rather than altruistic interests for me winds up at  4.5-1.5 in favor of the market-correcting position, treating taxes as a wash and further treating market-correcting interventions in favor of inner suburbs as in my interest given my residence in such a suburb.  The obvious point is that given that tilt, it would be reasonable to guess that my sympathies will lie on the liberal side of the political spectrum more than the conservative one, absent feelings on culture or foreign policy that would tilt me the other way.  Three points of broader interest : a) The exercise helps show some of the difficulties in assessing altruistic and egoistic tendencies within ideologies (for example, support for tenure could be described, contrary to the way I've done it, as a pro-market position to the extent it is freely negotiated for by employees and employers rather than fostered by the state), but overall supports the possibility of making such assessments; b) people who believe in a side that heavily reinforces their interests are a "dangerous class" to the degree they lack the level of internal checks and balances present in those who are more cross-pressured, but are valuable to the degree that their egoistic values can lead them to a high level of effort in coming up with value-enhancing ideas and actions; and c) whether the ideas generated by members of the "dangerous class" are value-enhancing depends on whether they are aligned with victory-oriented politics in which victory depends not on either side's dangerous class but on swing voters who are cross-pressured.

The Public Policy Curriculum

Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor Dani Rodrik wonders about the paucity of KSG grads in Obama's top ranks compared to the large number of lawyers from Harvard and Yale:

http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/11/where-are-the-hks-graduates.html

A value competition take: The law curriculum with its relentless emphasis on the case method produces grads who are proficient in making both rule-oriented and policy-oriented arguments.   By comparison, KSG's public policy curriculum seems to offer only a modest amount of material that inculcates skills in balancing between consequentialist and rule-based modes of policy-making: 

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/degrees/masters/mpp/curriculum 

Law, economics, and business programs train their graduates to excel in negotiating certain major value dichotomies: rules-policy for law, market success-market failure for economics, and calculation-culture for business.  By comparison, the public policy curriculum is at a disadvantage if it tries to cover all these value dichotomies rather than focusing on one dichotomy, preferably one not already taken by law, econ, or business.

The Carver Model

If you're on a board for a nonprofit organization with a large budget, you may well have encountered John Carver's policy governance model, which stresses the importance of boards taking responsibility for policy-making relating to the basic goals of the organization, while leaving to the CEO and staff the responsibility for managing to achieve those goals:

http://www.carvergovernance.com/model.html

As a school board member chairing our policy committee, I'm in the middle of a number of issues associated with how to implement policy governance.  Given the academic rather than personal nature of this blog, I'll forbear from dwelling on the specifics of my experience in favor of some thoughts about the economic logic and the value competition logic of the Carver model.

As a matter of rational choice logic, Carver's basic point that nonprofit organizations have more ambiguous goals than for-profit organizations is on target, and in the case of an elected school board his case for the board being the appropriate body to make basic judgments about the organization's ends also seems right.

As a matter of value competition logic, policy governance is likely to work well to the extent it infuses both board members and the CEO/admin with values that are partially egoistic, impelling action where otherwise there would be inertia, and partially altruistic, impelling acquiescence to, or active support for, the other side. Carver's division between matters of policy appropriate for the board and matters of management appropriate for the CEO works well in that regard.  A Carverized board and CEO will be impelled to push harder for their own interests in certain respects and be more accommodating to the other in other respects, which is exactly right. 

Now, several reservations/qualifications: 1) There is a difficulty in getting board members to drink as deeply from the cup of management theory and values as CEOs and administrators; 2) the "board policy/CEO management" dichotomy is less suited than certain other dichotomies, such as "scientific management/human relations," to being internalized within board members and administrators in a way that usefully fosters both modes of thinking/feeling within a given individual; 3) if boards propose "policy" solutions to issue X and admin proposes "managerial" solutions to X, there is a likely improvement over the situation in which both sides advance both kinds of solutions or do nothing, but there remains a danger that the policy-management dichotomy will accentuate the polarization that policy governance should alleviate; and 4) under value competition, the Carver model needs to be complemented/opposed by another useful framework that board members and administrators can also draw on.

As a board member, my informal working model to employ alongside the process-oriented Carver model is a substantive "where can I make the greatest difference for good" utilitarian approach.  I suspect that the next step forward for nonprofit governance is for a management consultant to make a substantive model of governance a persuasive alternative to Carver's proceduralism

Managerial Values Come Home for Thanksgiving

The Dining section of the 11/26 NYT has a semi-humorous piece, "The CEO of Thanksgiving Dinner," complete with quotes from HBS professor Amy Edmondson http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=bio&facEmId=aedmondson on how the host should choose between a tightly controlled, "organize to execute" management style and a looser, "organize to innovate" style:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/dining/26dele.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Well...perhaps this is an arena in which the host(ess)'s competing managerial values should be active but latent, rather than having one side selected with the clarity Professor Edmondson advocates...

More seriously: The ability of contemporary middle-class adults like those being satirized and lauded in the article to deploy ambivalent managerial values in their home lives and to inculcate these values in their children strikes me as a highly valuable feature of cultural modernity.  It also strikes me as a concern, though, if working-class adults and their children do not have a like ability to swing back and forth flexibly in their lives between the "organize to execute" and "organize to innovate" poles. 

Big-Time College Sports and Left-of-Center Faculties

If China, India, and other rising nations are to equal or surpass the U.S. in university quality, they should consider following the American pattern of having many schools with big-time sports programs and predominantly left-of-center faculties.

A sketch of an informal model for why big-time football and other sports combined with left-of-center faculties may be a feature rather than a bug: With their highly paid, perform-or-else coaches and quasi-military discipline, big-time sports programs model and foster conservative values in regard to markets and culture.  Meanwhile, tenured faculties with a tilt toward equality and security on economics and libertarianism on culture do the same for liberal values.  The result is universities in which people's preferences are usefully modified by competing values, but internal conflicts are minimized by the division of labor between ascendant liberalism in academics and ascendant conservatism in sports.

A stylized fact/possible empirical finding that could be explained by the model: UMass and other state schools with weaker big-time sports programs than one would expect controlling for other factors are also weaker academically than state schools like UMich with stronger-than-expected big-time sports programs.