BOOK REVIEW

Why no political economy? Why no pedagogy? Essayreview of Tough choices or tough times

David Hogan

Published online: 5 January 2008� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

In 1981 a leading British researcher, Brian Simon, published a much discussed essay on

‘‘Why no pedagogy in England?’’ (Simon 1981). In a trenchant critique of English ped-

agogical discourses, Simon argued that pedagogical debate in England was neither

coherent nor systematic and that English educators and policy makers, enthralled with

various normative visions of good pedagogy or policy imperatives, had developed nothing

like the ‘‘science of pedagogy’’ that continental Europe had managed to create over the

course of the 20th century. Instead, they combined pragmatism and ideology in equal

measure to devise programs of pedagogical innovation that had little lasting effect on

pedagogical practices in schools or on student achievement and left schools continuously

open to a constant barrage of new reform proposals that were, true to form, as much a

mixture of ideology and pragmatism as earlier ones. While some critics suggested that

Simon had overstated his case and that he ignored evidence that many teachers did in fact

exercise principled, evidence-based reflective judgments in their teaching, they agreed with

the broad thrust of his argument. Simon published a second essay in 1994 that simply

restated and updated his 1981 essay and the debate continued on its merry way, culmi-

nating in a brilliant essay by Robin Alexander (2004) that reignited the issue again in a

blistering critique on the continuing ideological orientation and confusion of official

pedagogical discourse in England, especially its preoccupation with ‘‘competence, excel-

lence and failure,’’ combined with a call for an informed analytical account of pedagogy.

Alexander insisted that the theory of pedagogy must focus systematically on issues of

learning, curriculum and assessment in context, and on issues of substance and not just

judgment.

I was reminded of the essays by Simon and Alexander as I read Tough Choices orTough Times: A Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforceproduced by the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington, DC. And I

was reminded of them because I gradually realized that there was something missing but

also something incorrigibly American about the Report. Since the release of a Nation at

D. Hogan (&)Office of Education Research, National Institute of Education,Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singaporee-mail: david.hogan@nie.edu.sg

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J Educ Change (2008) 9:91–99DOI 10.1007/s10833-007-9059-1

Risk in 1983, Americans have witnessed a continuous stream of alarmist jeremiahs about

the state and future of American education from numerous business, government and

professional groups proclaiming that the end is nigh––but that redemption is possible, if

only Americans would heed the words of the wise ministers to the nation. The publication

of Tough Choices or Tough Times falls well within this discursive tradition. I suppose one

ought not be surprised: in a political culture so profoundly shaped by religious tropes as the

United States, it is probably to be expected that policy documents of this kind would take

on the schematic structure of eschatological declarations. Nor should we be surprised, then,

that a related January 2007 report from Educational Testing Service (ETS) at Princeton––

America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future (Kirsch et al.

2007)––even begins with three (whimsical) lines from the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer.

Indeed, David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) have explored aspects of this discursive

tradition in their wonderfully clear eyed Tinkering Towards Utopia. More recently, Harvey

and Housman (2004) have written of the prevalence of a ‘‘discourse of crisis’’ in US policy

talk. They describe this discourse as ‘‘policy oriented and managerial; tends toward finger

pointing, top down solutions; and claims that economic catastrophe lies just around the

corner’’ (p. 1). Furthermore, ‘‘to support its case, this discourse encompasses worries about

standards and assessment and reliance on analyses of economic need, potential skill

shortages, and inefficiencies in the system. Many analysts and policy makers favor this

argument, because it readily captures public attention’’ (p. 1). Sound familiar?

Why does this matter? This matters because I think the American eschatological dis-

cursive tradition gets in the way of balanced analysis and prognosis––and this takes us

back to the papers by Simon and Alexander. Tough Choices or Tough Times is a terribly

uneven report. It certainly highlights issues that need to be highlighted. Many Americans

will find Tough Choices or Tough Times (hereafter TC/TT) disturbing. Many––I suspect

fewer––will also find key recommendations appropriate and desirable, as I do. But while it

points to significant weaknesses and challenges, and recommends some long overdue and

sensible reforms, the diagnosis of the state of American education is partial and incom-

plete, and many of its recommendations wildly fanciful and utopian, yet oddly incomplete

as well.

Given the wide publicity that TC/TT has had, I do not intend to list or summarize its key

diagnostic findings or its recommendations for change. Rather, I want to focus on just two

key elusions in TC/TT. In particular, I want to focus on the failure of the authors of TC/TTto frame an adequate political economy of the current educational system and its failure to

understand the nature and logic of American pedagogy and to frame pedagogical recom-

mendations accordingly. Both of these evasions seriously compromise the analytical

strength and message of TC/TT. This is a great pity, because there is much in TC/TT––in

both its diagnosis of the ills of the American system of education and some of its rec-

ommendations––to which I am deeply sympathetic.

Political economy sans politics

There is little doubt that globalization generally, and the dramatic rise of the Indian and

Chinese economies in particular, pose immense challenges to the American economy and

its system of education. There is little doubt that, as TC/TT suggests, ‘‘innovation’’ and

‘‘creativity’’ will be at a premium in an increasingly knowledge based, globalized and

competitive economic context. There is little doubt that the terms of trade in skill for-

mation are likely to continue to go against the US for the foreseeable future, although I am

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not convinced that the situation is as dire as the authors of TC/TT make out. (For a far less

eschatological analysis of the situation in the UK, see Leitch 2006). But certainly a strong

case can be made that in an increasingly globalized world, the American workforce is

underskilled and overpaid. Indeed, Brown et al. (2006) have recently suggested that ‘‘the

age of human capital’’ promised by Gary Becker (2006) and others might well be over for

the West: ‘‘The dominant view today is of a global knowledge economy, driven by the

application of new technologies, accelerating the shift to high-skilled, high-waged Western

economies…. This view is reflected in the expansion of higher education and the key role of

education in national economic policy. Not only is education believed to hold the key to

international competitiveness but to the foundations of social justice and social cohesion’’

(p. 2). Their recent research on China, Germany, India, Korea, Singapore, United States and

the United Kingdom challenges these assumptions, leading them to ‘‘predict the rise of high

skilled, low waged economies in the United States and Britain and that the human capital

assumptions on which the current education consensus rests are historically contingent and

increasingly redundant in the early decades of the twenty first century’’ (p. 2). Indeed, they

go on to conclude that ‘‘further investment in education and skills will not deliver high

skilled, high waged jobs to a majority of workers in the developed economies’’ (p. 3).

Not everyone is convinced that the kind of prognostications advanced by TC/TT, let alone

by Brown, Lauder and Ashton are warranted. Mishel and Rothstein (2007), for example,

dispute TC/TT’s central claim ‘‘that revolutionary improvements in education and skills are

the antidote to globalization and to a corresponding deterioration in US living standards’’

(p. 737). Rather, they point to the fact that despite continued growth in productivity after

2000 (11.5% between 2002 and 2006), wages (and therefore income returns to skill as

measured by educational attainment) have been stagnant for both high school graduates and

college graduates. They go on to argue while ‘‘work-force skills can spur productivity

growth, which, in turn, increases national wealth is… skills cannot determine how that

wealth is distributed. This is a function of policies over which schools have no influence: tax,

regulatory, trade, monetary, technology, anti-discrimination, and labor market policies

organize the demand for skilled workers and help determine how much they are paid.

Continued upgrading of skills is essential for continued growth and especially for closing

historic racial and ethnic income gaps but is no guarantee of economic success—without

policies to ensure that productivity gains are passed on to employees’’ (p. 737). Indeed, they

conclude, work force skills are not being rewarded commensurate with increases in pro-

ductivity because, in part, ‘‘the fruits of productivity growth have been redistributed from

wages to profits’’ (p. 738). At the same time, ‘‘some college graduates—managers, execu-

tives, white-collar sales workers—have commandeered disproportionate shares of the gains,

with little left over for scientists, engineers, teachers, and others with high levels of skill. No

amount of school reform can undo regulator and labor market policies that redirect wealth

generated by skilled workers to profits and executive bonuses’’ (p. 738).

So, we have two quite different accounts of the education–skills–productivity–income

nexus in the US with quite different implications for US politics and policy. If the argu-

ments of TC/TT and Brown and Lauder are valid––indeed, even if they are only half true––

it spells considerable trouble for the US, for it suggests that the principle mechanism of

social mobility on which the American people have depended since the second half of the

19th century––investments in human capital formation through ever increasing levels of

educational attainment––will trap growing numbers of middle class Americans in what

Marx (1976) once trenchantly labeled as the ‘‘silent compulsions of economic relations’’.

The social and political implications of this are all too obvious: growing inequality, lower

standards of living for many Americans and a deepening of class politics. On the other

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hand, if Mishel and Rothstein are right, the US has more options in terms of its ability to

manage the education-skills-productivity-income nexus, but only if it is prepared to bite

the bullet on income distribution policies more generally and not simply focus on human

capital/skill formation policies. Its ability to do so in the near to medium future will depend

very greatly on the outcome of the 2008 elections. This is not to say that the American

school system, properly supported, could do a lot more to lift the quality of education that

takes place in it and better position America in the world of knowledge economies in the

future. But it is to suggest that the forces of global capitalism––ironically enough in

considerable measure a US invention––are rapidly changing the rules of the international

human capital game in ways that will make it increasingly difficult for the US to thrive and

prosper as it did in the 20th century unless and until it improves the quality of its education

and is better able to deal effectively and equitably with the domestic politics of social

mobility and inequality generated by the changed international economic order. Who was

it that once said that capitalism has a nasty habit of eating its own?

I want to make two further observations in this context. The first is that while TC/TTmaps out in some detail many of the persisting (and increasingly deeper) inequalities of the

American system of education, it fails to offer or explore the sociology of social stratifi-

cation in the US. It simply reports statistics of racial, ethnic and social class inequalities.

But this only gets us so far. It certainly reminds us of the persistent (and I suspect

increasingly intractable) failure of the US political system to deal with persistent and

growing levels of social inequality, but it tells us nothing about the dynamics of social

inequality in the US, or the relationships and interactions between the various dimensions

of social stratification in the US. This is especially important in the case of education, since

educational inequalities are deeply embedded in broader structures and institutionalized

processes of social stratification involved in the production and reproduction of social

inequality. Indeed, the American high school itself is the precious offspring of the 19th

century market revolution and democratic localism and has remained to this day at the

heart of the US vision of meritocratic social mobility and a principal preoccupation of the

domestic economy of most American families struggling to run faster in what the con-

temporary economist Robert Frank terms the ‘‘positional treadmill’’ of the credentials

market that rendered education, in Lester Thurow’s words, ‘‘a defensive expenditure

necessary to protect one’s ‘market share’’ (Frank 1988; Thurow 1972, p. 333; see Hogan

1996 for a fuller discussion).

We can imagine how some of these processes that will surely put a severe break on any

and all efforts to level the playing field in the area of school finance, for example, is

competitive credentialing. Most parents send their children to school to get a good edu-

cation; most want them to get as good an education as they can. But many responsible,

well-meaning and credentialing savvy parents also want their children to get a better

education than the students down the street, in the next suburb, or in the next town or city.

They can do this in a variety of ways: by sending their children to an expensive private

school, by moving to a suburb or town with a reputation for ‘‘good’’ (or ‘‘better’’) schools,

or by supporting property tax regimes that can generate levels of school funding out of

reach of poorer school districts elsewhere. In this way, parents are able to buy privilege,

access to other people’s human and social capital and a competitive advantage in the

credentials market. It is hard to see Americans––particularly responsible, well-meaning

and credentialing savvy parents––giving these advantages up out of a broader, abstract and

remote concern for the economic future of future generations or America’s competitive

position in the global marketplace. And, it is certainly difficult to see them giving up direct

local political control over their schools, as recommended by TC/TT, at the same time as

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their declining standard of living diminishes their ability to gain competitive advantage in

the credentialing market by buying privilege at private schools and declining opportunities

for social mobility compromises their ability to offer their children a better future. It is

simply inconceivable that US citizens will tolerate sacrificing (or even significantly com-

promising) the principle of democratic localism at the same time as the social mobility

opportunities of their children are diminishing. Indeed, the fiscal components (and conse-

quences) of democratic localism have been a key strategy to secure a competitive advantage

in the credentialing market by enabled middle class communities to buy a ‘‘better’’ edu-

cation for their children from their tax dollars. Fiscal expressions of democratic localism are

just too central to class based strategies of social mobility for the American middle class to

abandon in favor of a vague, whimsical egalitarian fantasy about ‘‘contract’’ schools. And

this of course will make it extremely difficult politically for states to equalize school funding

across schools, a proposal I believe is fundamental to achieving greater equity in American

schooling, because better off communities will resist bitterly the loss of their ability to

purchase privilege and a comparative advantage. Much the same could also be said of

TC/TT’s call to reconstitute the American high school and social mobility pathways through

it, as I suspect that American parents will view this proposal not in terms of the broader and

far more abstract and removed institutional and international pressures on the US economy,

but in terms of the social mobility prospects of their children or grandchildren.

In short, I simply cannot see the politics working in a way necessary to support key

recommendations of TC/TT. I, therefore, conclude that TC/TT’s political economy is

internally self contradictory. The politics simply do not support the economy of TC/TT.

Indeed, in a very real sense, TC/TT simply has no politics.

The second observation I want to make is that the absence of realistic politics also applies

to TC/TT’s recommendations regarding teacher recruitment, salaries and pensions. While I

am sure American teachers would warmly welcome increased salary levels, I can hardly

imagine them trading off their current pension levels for better starting salaries. Nor can I

imagine that increasing the salary levels that TC/TT proposes will even come close to

attracting students form the ‘‘top third’’ of college students into teaching. I suspect that won’t

happen until the lifetime opportunity costs of choosing teaching over business, law or

medicine are very substantially reduced, and the daily transaction costs of teaching are

significantly reduced by very substantial improvements in resources, support, professional

development, class size and professional pathways that enhance the daily lives of teachers

and the intrinsic rewards of teaching. Moreover, I’m not sure that too many American

parents would be entirely comfortable with the idea that their children’s teachers are only in

it for the money. Rather, they would like to believe that their children’s teachers care about

their children, care about teaching, and gain deep existential (or at least non-instrumental)

satisfaction out of it. In my view, TC/TT’s recommendations do not come close to what needs

to be achieved in this area. Consequently, I suspect that its proposals to improve the quality

of the teaching force will go nowhere. This is a pity as American schools could well do with

an infusion of funds. But perhaps this might not matter as much as we think, since I am not

convinced that improving the ‘‘quality’’ of teachers is nearly as important as improving the

quality of teaching. Unfortunately, TC/TT has almost nothing to say of value here.

No pedagogy

TC/TT contains any number of pedagogical recommendations. But it contains nothing like

a coherent view or theory of pedagogy, either normative or empirical. In much the same

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manner that TC/TT fails to draw out the likely political implications of the new American

political economy and the reorganization of structures and patterns of social mobility in the

US, it is breathtakingly uninformed about assessment and has almost nothing to say of

value about how America might improve the quality of teaching as opposed to the

‘‘quality’’ of the teaching force. Improving the quality of teaching involves improving the

technical core of schooling––the process of instruction in US classrooms. This elusion is

deeply puzzling, analytically mistaken and politically shortsighted.

What then is pedagogy? For Alexander, ‘‘pedagogy is the discourse which informs and

justifies the act of teaching and the learning to which that teaching is directed’’ (Alexander

2004, p. 11). The important point is that Alexander drew a clear distinction between

analytical and normative models of pedagogy, while recognizing their interrelationships

(‘‘informs and justifies the act of teaching…’’ (p. 4)). But rather than discuss normative

pedagogical theory here, I want to focus on more analytical empirical models of pedagogy

that the authors of TC/TT might have considered. One very useful place to start is the

recent effort of Cohen, Raudenbush and Ball (2000) to develop a powerful analytical

model of pedagogy that focuses not so much on teacher characteristics, what resources

teachers have, or even what instructional strategies they employ, but on how effectively

and expertly teachers allocate and use instructional resources, broadly defined, in inter-

actions with students within the classroom:

…what we casually call teaching is not what teachers do and say and think, which is

what many researchers have studied and many innovators have tried to change.

Teaching is what teachers do, say, and think with learners, concerning content, in aparticular organization of instruction, in environments, over time. What we often

mistakenly refer to as the practice of teaching is a collection of practices, including

pedagogy, learning, instructional design, and managing instructional organization.

There are more instructional practitioners than teachers, and more practices than

pedagogy. Moreover, the environments in which teaching and learning are situated

are not simply outside the classroom, but often are implicated in teachers’ and

students’ interactions (Cohen et al. 2000, p. 12).

Cohen, Raudenbush and Ball go on to identify the different kinds of instructional resources

that teachers might deploy in the classroom. This paper, and others that Cohen and Ball

have produced over the last 6 or 7 years, have been widely circulated and discussed in the

research community. Other researchers have also produced much of considerable theo-

retical value over the same period. Sadly, TC/TT shows no evidence of having given any

thought whatsoever to the nature and logic of pedagogical practices––or variations in

them––in the American context. TC/TT makes much of jettisoning America’s 19th model

of schooling in favor of a 21st model, but the authors have given no attention to the

technical core of schooling itself. Instead, they simply rush to pedagogical judgment,

proclaiming, without a shred of hard evidence, that the key to improving the quality of

teaching in American schools, apart from improving the ‘‘quality’’ of teachers, is to create

a ‘‘performance based’’ system of education centered on a state-based exit examination at

the end of 10th grade (NCEE 2006, pp. 51–58). TC/TT principally makes this argument on

the assumption that a national system of state wide exit examinations will lift standards,

increase rigor and enhance the quality of teaching and learning in US high schools. Now

these assumptions might be vindicated in a developing system that wanted to improve

standards fast from a very low base. Certainly policy makers and researchers believe this to

have been the case in Singapore, where I now work. But I am not convinced that these

assumptions apply in the case of the US. There is now substantial international evidence,

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including evidence based on US experience (currently some 25 US states whose student

populations account for two-thirds of all students and three-quarters of all minority stu-

dents) that high stakes assessments do not improve standards or increase rigor. The authors

of TC/TT do so because, true to the American eschatological discourse of educational

redemption, they have committed themselves to the view that the key to improving

classroom pedagogy is to seek salvation in high stakes summative assessments. This faith

in high stakes summative assessment, whether through standardized assessments of the

kind associated with NCLB or exit examinations proposed by the authors of TC/TT, is

every bit as much a part of what Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson (2004) have termed

the American Educational Gospel––the notion, in the words of the California Superin-

tendent of Public Instruction, Jack O'Connell, that ‘‘we all have the responsibility to help

prepare our young people to succeed in an increasingly competitive global economy’’

(O'Connell 2007, p. 20). However, in a recent article, Grubb and Jeannie Oakes (2007)

have pointed to a range of research findings that suggest that the current focus on high

stakes assessment as a means of improving standards has, ironically, dumbed down the

curriculum, reduced the quality of classroom instruction, and failed to improve student

outcomes. Indeed, they conclude that high stakes summative assessments in the US …

… reinforce conventional academic curriculum; they do little to enhance standards

and may even undermine them; they distort curriculum and instruction; they lead

to higher and more inequitable dropout rates; and, they impose substantial costs—

especially on districts and schools that can least afford it—without considering

alternatives. As a way of reforming the high school—even if reform is defined

exclusively in terms of enhancing standards without consideration for alternative

goals like those discussed in the final section—exit exams seem an approach that

has so far failed on its own terms. One might argue, of course, that it’s too soon to

judge the standards movement in practice, and that states will slowly learn how to

develop more appropriate exit exams and more effective ways to improve student

performance. But this argument places enormous faith in the states’ abilities to

recognize and provide necessary improvements in capacity, and there’s little

evidence so far to suggest that they are up to the challenge (Grubb and Oakes

2007, p. 23).

Similarly, Linda Darling Hammond, in her testimony September 10, 2007, before the

House Education and Labor Committee on the re-authorization of the NCLB legislation

(Darling-Hammond 2007), challenged the pedagogical efficacy of the kind of standardized

assessments spawned by NCLB. Like Grubb and Oakes, Darling Hammond identifies a

range of initiatives, grounded in empirical research on pedagogical practice, that promise

to enhance the quality of American teaching. None of these initiatives are particularly

original or even controversial––they are simply evidence based, institutionally smart, and

politically doable. In particular, she draws attention to the fact that ‘‘Many states developed

[assessment] systems that include state and locally-administered performance assessments

as part of their efforts to develop standards under Goals 2000 in the 1990s’’ and that ‘‘not

coincidentally, these include most of the highest-achieving states in the US on the National

Assessment of Educational Progress’’ (pp. 19–20). She also draws attention to the fact that

‘‘the National Science Foundation provided millions of dollars for states to develop such

hands-on science and math assessments as part of its Systemic Science Initiative in the

1990s, and prototypes exist all over the country’’ and that researchers have demonstrated

‘‘that such assessments can be managed productively and reliably scored with appropriate

training and professional development for teachers, along with moderation and auditing

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systems, and that teaching and student achievement improve when such assessments are

used’’ (Darling Hammond 2007, p. 8).

Similar evidence and recommendations are reported for the US by Grubb and Oakes

(2007) and by Randy Bennett from ETS (2007) and for Britain by the British Assessment

Reform group (Gardner 2006). It is worth mentioning as well that research conducted by

the Centre for Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP) in Singapore indicates that while the national

high stakes assessment system has served a number of positive objectives historically, it

now constrains the opportunity (and motivation) of teachers to engage in the kind of

pedagogical innovation that the Ministry of Education regards as critical to adequately

prepare young Singaporeans for the complex institutional demands of the 21st century.

And being the good pragmatists that they are, Singaporean policy makers have begun to

signal their intention to introduce school based performance assessments in schools in the

near future. I suspect that these will not supplant the existing summative assessment

system, but instead form a component of the overall assessment regime to complement

(and assure alignment to) the system of school based curriculum development that has been

introduced over the past 2 or 3 years.

In short, the evidence does not support the heart of the TC/TT pedagogical recom-

mendations. Nor is it grounded in a rich empirically based account of the logic and

character of American pedagogy. What TC/TT offers is little short of pedagogical

quackery, a simple-minded nostrum that will do little to improve instructional processes in

American classrooms. Its rather though a car manufacturer had decided to build a new car

with a brand new gee whiz 21st century body but decided to leave a model T engine inside

it. This is inexcusable, given the extraordinary rich work that has been undertaken on

American education by educational researchers. It’s also inexcusable in light of the fact

that we are now at a point that we probably know enough about how to improve the

instructional system in substantial and sustainable ways (see Fullan et al. 2006; Fullan

2007).

In conclusion: Tough Choices, Tough Times is long on utopian fantasy, short on hard

analysis, theoretical understanding and political nous. Caveat emptor.

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