July-August 2007

by Margaret A. Miller

As I took off for U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’ March summit meeting on the recommendations of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, a colleague called out to me, gaily, “Take a couple of showers when you get back.” Although I’m sure that he disagrees with many of the particulars of the commission’s report (or perhaps just has a distaste for the current administration), I suspect that his squeamishness extends to policymaking in general. When I walked into a room as a representative of the state higher-education coordinating board in Virginia, that attitude almost always hung thick and heavy in the air. I was “Richmond,” the enemy.

I understand and have a certain sympathy for those feelings. Policymakers sometimes do meddle in things they shouldn’t, kick up dust and blithely walk on, and apply heavy-handed solutions to relatively isolated or small problems (what I think of as shooting mosquitoes with an elephant gun). And policymaking, like university administration, is generally more a political than a rational process.

On the other hand, one of the peak moments of my life was meeting Clark Kerr at a board meeting of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and having the opportunity to thank him for my life. I was the third child in a lower middle-class family in Los Angeles, and although I didn’t know it at the time, the California Master Plan (which he spearheaded) was what enabled my parents to send their three girls to UCLA. For me, that eventually meant graduate school and everything that followed from it. Without the master plan, I’m not sure what my life would have looked like today.

That life was what Gov. James B. Hunt of North Carolina was talking about when he commented, in Measuring Up 2000, that “despite the accomplishments of American higher education, its benefits are unevenly and often unfairly distributed”—by class, race, and geography—“and do not reflect the distribution of talent in American society.”  Depending on the public policies of a particular state, children like me, not to mention those of color or poorer than we were, do or do not flow through the educational pipeline. I was lucky in being born in the right place at the right time, where good educational policy was in the ascendant.

I needed that policy even though I had a lot of advantages going for me: by education my family was middle-class, and I’m white and able bodied (at UCLA my college roommate went to one of the two universities in the country that at that time was equipped for students in wheelchairs), with a family that spoke English in the home. I had a mother and even a grandmother who had gone to college, so there was no question about educating girls (unlike in the families of many of the students I later taught in Massachusetts). And I grew up in a relatively affluent, segregated suburb to which good teachers were attracted, so I had pretty good schooling that made me “meritorious” when it came time for college admission. But as I said, I was unaware of all this at the time: I took my advantages for granted, including the higher education policy that made such a critical difference for me. 

On days when I feel that policy work is just another Sisyphean rock that we push uphill, only to see it tumble back down again, I remind myself of my own story. Human beings, like other creatures, need feedback, a sense that what they’re doing makes a positive difference. With work whose results take a long time to come to fruition (sometimes generations) and can never quite be tracked back to their source, that feedback is generally missing. And the challenges we deal with today—how to educate to a higher level than ever before more young people from groups we’ve been markedly unsuccessful with —seem so daunting that it’s hard to imagine making a dent in them.

On those days I also look to the great education policy leaders—such as Clark Kerr, former Governor Hunt, former Governors Baliles and Warner of Virginia, and the many colleagues with whom I work today—and think that with the kind of dogged persistence they have shown, things can change for the better. We aren’t making enough progress in our schools, and way too many of our young people drop out, but preparation is slowly improving in this country after a couple of decades of concentrated policy attention. I’ve watched states like Kentucky gradually improving their chances of prosperity under the leadership of a governor and a couple of enlightened system presidents. I see people like those on the Spellings Commission beginning to talk about our challenges in the terms that Measuring Up introduced: preparing our children for college, making sure that they have access to it, making it affordable for them, getting them through at a high enough level of learning, and ensuring that there are jobs for them when they graduate.

Policymakers get a bad rap in this country—maybe everywhere. They’re the monster everyone loves to hate. And it is true that the best-intentioned policies can have perverse consequences undreamt of by their perpetrators. It’s like the game of “telephone,” where one person whispers to another who whispers to another and so on down the line. By the time a policy reaches the faculty, it’s often been garbled so badly as to be unrecognizable. Policies can also be gamed, and in the process their purposes are often badly distorted.

But someone needs to keep their eyes on the big challenges—the ones that transcend any one institution and affect our collective lives. And while college and university leaders are protecting their institutions, someone needs to stand up for students—for example, the Hispanic high-school dropout or the African-American pupil whose high school doesn’t offer enough AP courses to make her eligible for those much-ballyhooed full rides now being offered poor students by highly selective institutions.
I’m very glad I had a Clark Kerr in my life. North Carolina was fortunate (and smart) to have had Governor Hunt at its helm for 16 years. And from time to time, Virginia voters show the same kind of wisdom when they elect their governors.