Political Leadership—Principles or Positions on Issues?

We have politicians promising all kinds of government solutions, programs, and controls of almost everything imaginable: our health, our income, our education, our travel, our security, our energy usage, our consumption of all kinds of things. The presidential candidates’ Christmas message is to portray themselves as Santa Claus, the source of gifts to citizens—health care, etc. And yet some still lament the lack of creative leadership, lack of fresh new proposals, lack of new ideas from our presidential candidates as if all the things government is already trying to do and in addition those now promised by politicians were still not enough to attract their vote. But this is not leadership.

Promising all kinds of solution and programs is not leadership but about promising the many almost anything as if government is the source of the common good, the solution to any problem, and the origin of benefits to ordinary citizens. Leadership is not about offering a supermarket of promises and programs to voters. Leadership is not about having definite views on everything, having a ready solution to anything, having certitude and taking charge of every situation. So many convictions overwhelm each other; they suggest the politician is a mile wide and an inch deep in the politicians understanding of leadership. Leadership is about something deeper than “the issues;” it is about principles.

Paul Johnson, the eminent historian, points out that great leaders anchor their actions in a few, perhaps 3 or 4, fundamental and clear principles. Principles are not issues; they are basic organizers for human activity such as upholding the rule of law at home and abroad, keeping government activities and taxes to a minimum, and encouraging individuals to do as much and achieve as much as they can. We do not all agree on these particular principles but to be a great leader means to understand and anchor actions in something much deeper than issues.

In contrast to true leadership, consider the main message of most current presidential candidates; it is the reverse of empowering and encouraging citizens in their activities. They, in effect, advocate a great proliferation of government programs and controls to do things for and to citizens. They are removing citizen’s role. They are not leading people; they are removing citizen activity by subordinating citizens to government. Government programs necessarily depend on obedience, not intelligence from citizens.

Great leaders have a kind of will power that gives them a defining role and centered purpose. Will power subordinates the immediate demands and political expediencies to a long range sense of direction. It is not a stubbornness but is an organization into a coherent vision of the future which guides action often in spite of the immediate and changing opinion of the day. Will power gives leaders the ability to persevere in the face of adversity, as George Washington spectacularly did, that comes with a deeper, more integrated understanding of the human condition.

Leaders can also, of course, communicate such as to inspire and create commitment from others. They are also somehow magnanimous in ignoring the mean sprited such that they seem to have a virtuous quality not born of political expediency. Politicans promise programs to solve problems but even presidents cannot deliver on their campaign promises. Presidents don’t pass legislation or control the national budget or manage the economy but by promising such things they lead voters to think voting is about voting for such things. So voters are given to voting for politicians based on their stand on the issues or even on a single issue. But great leaders are not selling programs and cures; they are leading by helping us to participate in a vision, to sense how we might achieve the great.

Political leadership is not the salesmanship so currently on display from most of the presidential candidates. If we take the lessons of great leaders we might learn from history, we might seek candidates who have far less to say about issues and much more to say about a deeper understanding of the source of societal good, its sources in human activity, and the relationship of government to that human activity that is constructing the good of society.

Do Free Exchanges in Health Care Lower the Costs?

Michael Rotheschild in his book, Bionomics, reported that researchers had yet to find a single private industry in which costs and prices did not drop over time. The increase in efficiency occurs because, as Michael Rotheschild pointed out, economies, businesses, industries are living systems of exchange and as such learn and adapt in their behaviors over time. This institutional learning produces greater efficiencies, better products, and more diversification.

However, the same is not true for areas dominated by government agencies, government controls, and government funding such as the post office and public education. In those industries costs either rise over time or remain about constant. They never decline. The idea that having a single provider produces increases rather than decreases in costs over time seems counter intuitive.

Having a single provider would seem to be more efficient than allowing multiple providers to offer the same products. But the difference is that learning organizations "feed" off their increases in efficiency, product quality, and consumer satisfaction whereas government agencies "feed" off a guaranteed revenue stream of public funding regardless of consumer satisfaction. Consumers don't control the purse strings of government agencies with their choices, and so government agencies have no incentive to respond to their needs. They can, and almost must, take their customer gor granted.

Furthermore, since government agencies have no market in which consumer choices discipline their products and cost, even if government agencies had the incentive to do so, they cannot be given free use of funds. They must by law be directed in how to spend the funds; they simply cannot conduct R&D processes even if they waned to.

Economists found the principle of the learning organization produced a 20% increase in efficiency of production for each doubling of production. Some industries are higher, others lower, but for all industries, whatever their rate, the rate remains constant per doubling of production.

We should assume this economic principle would hold true for health care services as well. To test the idea, we would have to look at some sector of health care that is not currently controlled by government regulations or funding.

There are some sectors that still remain relatively free from domination by government. What economists find in comparisons among free and unfree sectors is that the private, relatively free sectors do indeed decrease their costs over time whereas the regulated sectors with third party funding always produce increasing costs over time. One such sector is cosmetic surgery which is almost never included in employee insurance or government funding.

Health economist Devon Herrick testified before Congress regarding these trends in the cost of health care services for cosmetic surgery. Since these are generally not paid for by government controlled payment plans, they provide a comparison between the free market and government controlled systems.

clipped from www.theobjectivestandard.com [D]espite a marked increase in demand between 1992 and the present, cosmetic surgeons’ fees remained relatively stable. The average increase in prices for medical services from 1992 through 2005 was 77 percent. The increase in the price of all goods, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), was 39 percent. Cosmetic surgery prices only went up about 22 percent. Thus, while the price of medical services generally rose almost twice as fast as the CPI, the price of cosmetic surgery went up slightly more than half as much. Put another way, while the real price of health care paid for by third parties rose, the real price of self-pay medicine fell.

This Testimony for Submission to the House Education and Labor Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, March 15, 2007 by Devon Herrick makes other comparisons to answer the question, “Why Are Health Costs Rising?” In another example he reports on costs over time in the area of corrective eye surgery:

In 1999, only a few years after LASIK was approved, the price was about $2,100 per eye, according to the ophthalmic market research firm MarketScope. Within a short time, competition drove the price down to slightly more than $1,600. The cost per eye of the standard LASIK is now about 20 percent lower than six years earlier. Competition held prices in check until a new innovation arrived for which patients were willing to pay more. By 2003 surgeons began to perform a newer, more-advanced custom wavefront-guided LASIK procedure.

For some reason, ideas for having the government directly provide or pay for health care seem to hold considerable appeal to citizens and politicians. But for economists, these ideas aren't valid. They understand that systems of third party funding cannot and do not work either in theory or in fact. It is possible that if the public understood how to recognize in a policy proposal a design based on third party funding so they could compare it to free systems, they might be able to recognize its long run dangers.

If we want to help certain classes of people, the principle should be to entitle them directly so they are empowered as consumers. Entitling the needy directly is far more cost effective than blanketing everyone with a system of third party funding for health care. Entitling the needy preserves the incentives and drive for increasing efficiency, expanding consumer choices, and increasing quality. Systems of third party funding do just the opposite. Costs cannot be controlled over the long run without some form of rationing, quality cannot be maintained, and consumers' choices must be restricted. As a result, they harm the good of society and are immoral even though they may be promoted on the best of intentions.

How to Escape the Third Party Problem of Government in Health Care…and Public Education

Health Care Proposals

I found an nicely abbreviated summary of the public policy options written by Arnold Kling. He looks at three key outcomes that health care designs must produce and ranks the various proposals.

The first outcome we all want is access to health care by low income and under insured citizens, not just the rich and employed. He ranks the various designs from "Good" to "Bad" to "Ugly".

He does the same ranking for a second outcome, the quality of health care services or more accurately how quality is supposedly maintained by the design.

The third outcome is cost, the biggest problem in our current health care mess since it involves entitlements that will produce rapidly escalating costs and huge unfunded mandates in the future.

I don't think this table will find much acceptance among people who don't understand the third party problem. None-the-less, it might trigger some further investigation by us as we try to undertand why the various proposals would produce widely different outcomes in access, quality, and cost.

clipped from www.tcsdaily.com Access Quality Cost Good --clinics --vouchers --high-risk pools data analysis data analysis Bad --mandates --Medicaid --Medicare P4P cost containment Ugly national health services malpractice suits licensing regulations The table above summarizes our experience in terms of three goals of health care policy: improving access to care; improving the quality of care; and lowering the cost of our health care system.

If we understand how 3rd party funding works, or rather fails, to maintain access, quality, and cost efficiency, we can generalize this evaluation of health care proposals to other institutions. Public schooling needs this kind of evaluation.

Public Schooling

Public schooling relies on a single government provider, the school district, that is equivalent in design to a single national health service provider in health care,i.e., socialized medicine since the government owns the mean of delivery. The government agency controls and delivers all public education services just as a national health service agency would for socialized medicine.

In public education, the only exception to a forced choice from a single provider is the small number of charter schools some states have allowed, and the rich. Public education is means tested. If you are of poor means, you get what your local public school has to offer, and if you are poor you probably live in a poor neighborhood with the strong likleyhood of a poor school. If you are rich, you can afford a private school. In both systems, citizens suffer from shortage of services.


Public schooling relies on performance standards that are not even pay for performance standards. No lawsuits are allowed since their is no consumer and no consumer protection laws in public education. Public education essentially lacks any means by which to maintain quality since there is no consequence for the failure of student learning. By legislative policy, public schools are designed to produce schools and teaching, not learning. There is simply no consequence to the adults running the system if kids don't learn.

As to cost, public schools depend on a guaranteed revenue stream from the state and local property taxes. If the adults don't get the pay and benefit increases they want, they can strike. Public opinion usually supports the teachers and seldom supports school boards since it is the kids who suffer the consequences of a strike. Boards simply can't take a strike and they have no choices to the union who holds a monopoly control (legally mandated by the legislature) over the labor force.

Public schooling is at the bottom of the table, in the ugly category. If by public policy we institute a single payer or single provider system, we will by design build in the basic problems of third party systems. Public schools produce a 25% drop out rate. Of 3/4 who survive through to graduation, about 1/3 make it to a satisfactory level of academic achievement.

How's your fractions? What is the success rate of public schooling?
It is 1/3 of 3/4 which is 1/4 or 25%. Using a design similar to public schooling for health care would produce the same problems of access, quality, and efficiency that we have in public schooling.

The Cost of Government

Here's what Don Boudreaux has to say about the platitude of taxes as the cost of a civilized society:

clipped from marketcorrection.powerblogs.com At least two errors of logic mar Thad Williamson's argument that taxes are the price we pay for prosperity ("No Taxes Would Mean No Prosperity," April 30). First, just because government performs some task - say, running schools - does not mean that such tasks would not be performed better by the private sector. Second, even if government performs some vital tasks that cannot be done by the private sector, Mr. Williamson is wrong to conclude that we, therefore, have no moral right to our pre-tax incomes. Tasks necessary to sustain life and society are performed also by clothes makers and home builders, yet no one argues that those of us who wear clothes and live indoors lose moral claims to our incomes as a result. Taxes Are Among the Costs of Ignorance

Religion and American Democracy—Explaining Political Theology

A CATO discussion of the relationship between theology and American Democracy, i.e., political theology, provides an interesting example for an analysis by a developmental epistemology. Is American Democracy founded and/or guided by religious principles or is it secular in its foundations thus effectively separating Church and State?

To start the discussion, Mark Lilla laid out his thesis of secular foundations:

But once you understand that, the radicalness and newness of the American secular idea is what looms large. I think this is what Mark is emphasizing: not that America is a secular country or that Americans are secular people — but rather that their religious life and nature are framed and made possible by a deeply secular constitution. American politics is very religious; American foundational politics is very secular. This combination is what makes this country different; and its blessed exception to most historical rules can blind us to the fragility of the achievement and the strength of its ideological and political enemies.

In the discussion that followed Andrew Sullivan summarized Lilla:

I think this is what Mark is emphasizing: not that America is a secular country or that Americans are secular people — but rather that their religious life and nature are framed and made possible by a deeply secular constitution. American politics is very religious; American foundational politics is very secular. This combination is what makes this country different; and its blessed exception to most historical rules can blind us to the fragility of the achievement and the strength of its ideological and political enemies.

To debate the emergence of American Democracy to either secular or religious foundation seems to be an argument between two reductionist. A developmental framework might find that the American form of government brought together a number of ideas, themselves having their own individual developments, into a completely new framework that replaced the previous forms of governance. A parallel development might be cited in the replacement of Aristotelian physics with Newtonian physics.

It was not the discovery of new facts or even the formulation of new concepts that caused the scientific revolution. Even though Aristotleian physics had been shown repeatedly to be inconsistent, illogical, and counter to factual evidence, it was not until the complete reconstruction and formulation of a new and different scientific framework occurred that the old Aristotelian science could be replaced. Even though Aristotelian physics had been long outmoded it was not until Newtonian principles provided an acceptable, new framework for reasoning, posing experitmental problems, gathering evidence, demonstrating correspondance with reality, and all the rest that made widespread acceptance suddenly possible.

Now consider how religion and governance have been linked throughout history until American Democracy reformulated concept and principles to coordinate them into an integrated framework. This framework of property rights, individual liberies, trial by peer juries, civilian control of the military, divided government and limitation of powers, etc, had roots in fragmentary forms earlier in history. The invention and genius was to organize them into a coherent, workable whole. Not only did this whole have a coherence that made its logic inescapably obvious to the writers, the inidividual concepts such as property rights also achieved a new found logical necessity when organized into an overall framework.

Thus, the revolution in governance came about not because of some separation of Church and State (although that was one of its results) nor did it have its roots in any divine religious principles. It came about, or more accurately, it developed out of a natural process of abstraction, differentiation, and integration of governance and concepts of human activity just as those processes are integral to scientific progress. The seat of these processes clearly were the Founding Fathers but their discussions and reflection using the previous experiences of human governance developed out of the problems they posed to themselves. It was the ability to pose the problems of human governance more than anything that drove their processes of thought such that collectively and individually the American form of Democracy developed and then was formalized in written documents. The importance of getting the problem right was perhaps the underlying reason for why the Declaration of Independence took on such importance.

So to say the American form of Democracy “evolved” is to recognize that the vector to history lies in the constant constructions out of previous idea, constructions, and frameworks and that American Democracy required certain of these previous political constructions and attempts at governance—property rights, voting, monarchies, etc.—before these ideas could become reflected and reconstructed into a more coherent form of governance. The previous history and ideas of governance captured by earlier writers, provided intellectual aliment but it was the work of abstracting and reformulation that combined many previous notions into a new, more valid form of governance that marked the radical leap forward by the Founding Fathers.

By the new coherence and inescapable political logic it introduced, American Democracy also necessarily enriched many individual concepts that now became elements of the system. For example, the Greek idea of voting and democracy by the polis is relatively unimportant in American Democracy because the system gave it more specificity as when it could be used, who used it, how it was to be used and so on. In essence American Democracy fundamentally redefined democracy and voting by radically delimiting it. Democratic voting as a means of governance is unwieldy and unworkable. It often doesn’t know its limits or capabilities. The Founding Fathers understood these problems and that they had to protect the governance process from the stupidity of ignorant citizens and the radicalism of mob rule that can result from unfettered democracy. Thus, their American design limited and defined when and how democracy, in the sense of citizen voting, was to be appropriately used; they did this by making it subservient to a republican system.

All this to say that it was the epistemic process by which a new method of thinking about how to constitute a government was developed that was the source of American Democracy, not theology nor even the history of conflict and separation of religion from the state. These are certainly events and even important or necessary phenomena but they are only the fodder for the epistemic processes of history. They are not the cause any more than previous experimental evidence caused Galileo and Newton to reformulate and reconstruct the whole of physics. Only when the problems were posed properly, itself a mark of an advance in thought, and a proper seat be established for the processes of abstraction and reflection could their be a fundamental reconstruction and advancement be made in physics, in governance, and indeed, in any are of human affairs.

The two features of the emergence of American form of Democracy—the clarity by which the problems of governance were posed by the Founding Fathers’ careful abstraction and articulation, and the reconstruction and formalization of the new, integrated framework in a written constitution out of many historic preliminaries, and in addition because these same processes find their parallel all scientific advances—these facts compel us to avoid reductionism in the study political theology by placing it in the perspective of a developmental epistemology. Human progress cannot be reduced to mere history or religious sources. It is due to the epistemic processes whereby order arises out of its sources in human activity and particularly in the activity of human thought.

What Is Your Candidate's Theory of Government

It seems possible to sort politicians' thinking into levels of analysis according to how deeply they undertand an issue. The easiest and first form of thought is a focus on a simple outcome. The second level of analysis is more advanced since it sets the outcomes and other features into a conceptual description involving the relationships among the descriptions. The third level of analysis subordinates the issue with other issues into am explanation of what system organizes and produces the outcomes, that is, the general ideas surrounding the means of production which in politics is usually government versus the free market.

Issues become tools for analyzing politicians' theories of government. The issue of student diet in public schools gives a clear example of the difference between a level1/2 analysis and a level 3 analysis.

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, has twice introduced bills to deal with foods other than the standard school lunch, which is regulated by Department of Agriculture. Several lawmakers and advocates for changes in school food believe that an amendment to the $286 billion farm bill is the best chance to get control of the mountain of high-calorie snacks and sodas available to schoolchildren. For this issue, the desirable outcome is a better diet for kids. An outcome is a "what". Now look at the "how".

Looking at how the outcome is produced requires an analysis comparing government controls versus protecting the free choices of students. If no thought is given to how and why we create a system of government to fulfill certain functions, then the outcome, the good intentions of making sure kids eat good diets is all there is to the politicians thinking. But regardless of whether the goal is desirable, a deeper analysis also considers how we want our government to work. We need a theory of government since it organizes our analysis of this school lunch diet issue and all others.

So we can take this diet issue and ask how well politicians produce the deeper third level analysis that serves as their theory of governmnt. How does Senator Harken explain why and how federal government should be used to take over control of what kids eat in school. Harken doesn't explain. Another politician does touch on a third level analysis. Fred Thompson says he wants the government to keep its hands off your dinner plate.

”I’m telling you, I don’t think that it’s the primary responsibility of the federal government to tell you what to eat,” Thompson said to applause when asked if his health care plan included any details on preventative care, a priority for Democratic candidates. “The fact of the matter is we got an awful lot of knowledge,” said the former Tennesse senator. “Sometimes we don’t have a whole lot of will power, and I don’t know of any government program that’s going to instill that.”

So, looking at candidates level 3 analysis in which they explain their theories of government, Thompson at least explains enough to let us know he is a fan of small government by saying that healthy living should be the responsibilities of families first. It's not a complete theory of government but gives us some clues. By contrast, Senator Harken describes the school lunch diets as an "issue" and therefore implies that it is a problem that federal government must solve. But that is all he says so we don't have an explanation from him as to why or how this is should be a function of the federal government.

Reason for Choosing Among Candidates—Their Theory of Government

Here’s a common sentiment:

This country needs to be inspired--and my dad is very impressed by Obama. He believes that Obama has the grasp of the history of this country that is absolutely necessary in order to lead us out of the MANY messes we're in. It really doesn't matter to me how right a plan is for health care, ending the war in Iraq, whatever. If our Pres is divisive and threatening to almost half of this nation and much of the rest of the world, we will not even begin to solve the problems facing us. I am looking for a unifier.

I have five observations:

1. Democracy Is Necessarily Divisive

Since it is about limiting choices of people, democracy always excludes the choices of the minorities by imposing the majority's opinion on everyone. If government is involved, the democratic choice that results is imposed by force on everyone. To be honest, the idea of democratic decision making is to vote on an issue so that we can force everyone accept one choice. We protect free and open debate so that supposedly we can allow the best solution to emerge. So political debate always exposes irreconcilable differences among people. The more issues there are that are important, the more "divisiveness" there will be. To blame a leader for being divisive is really to expose the problem of too much democracy and government power.

2. Principles Unite

Our unifiers are not people but those deeper principles that we almost all agree upon—freedom and justice—equal rights under the law; freedom of religion; freedom of speech; republican, constitutional government with separation of powers; and at one time, agreement to keep government out of our affairs by limiting it to only those powers expressly given it, namely the powers (police, courts, armed forces, etc.) necessary to protect citizens. Principles unite us but political issues divide us because they are about limiting our choices. Political issues are proposed government actions and therefore make the climate divisive because they involve government. Leaving things up to the free choices of citizens without government involvement keeps things from becoming divisive. So, for example, public education is divisive at every level since it is controlled by democratic processes that impose single choices on everyone—but in religion we have relative harmony since people can chose freely among many choices. When we try to restrict people's choices by using democracy, we create divisiveness in deciding whose choice is to prevail.

3. If Democracy Is To Work, It Must Be Constitutionally Limited

No candidate today could probably be elected on such principles of government because people mistakenly believe we need "strong leadership" and "creative" government solutions for "our problems." But strong government and leadership—the thinking that turns things into problems and then public issues for government and leaders to solve—is what leads us into difficulties both foreign and domestic. Previous government actions, e.g. in health care, are what create problems which political leaders use to justify more government solutions. Since we have unlimited government, the political process promotes politicians who pander to voters and misconceptions about government and economics. The solution is to limit government action, not to promote more government solutions.

4. Limiting Government in Foreign Affairs

Our government should be just as limited in foreign affairs as it is in domestic. It should be limited to protecting our country, not trying to create democracies. Some, not all, see a moral logic that generates a response to evil. Iraq should trigger thought about what to do about evil in the world, and secondarily, how constitutional limitations should work in controlling government actions.

5. A Solution for Citizen Voting

We might find a long term solution if we think more deeply about how choose among candidates based on their theory of government. If Democracy is to work successfully in the long run, it must be limited to electing people who understand what functions are proper for government and how government restricts or promotes the constructive solutions of free activity. Turning something into a political "issue" so that it becomes a "problem" government must solve may well appeal to many voters and get policiticans elected but it is also what creates divisive politics and more problems which then need to be "solved" by "strong leadership."

If we are to be responsible citizens, we must not choose politicans on how well they try to sell their leadership, their personal qualitiesor their government programs.
We must choose politicians on the basis of their understanding of government in particular, the American form of republican government, and how and why it limits government power.
The fundamental principle is that it is the constructive power of free human activity that builds a society, not government engineering.

No Change in Test Scores—Why?

I'm not much interested in performance indicators of public schooling. They vary a little but don't change much over time. So we get mixed results. This report from the National Center for Education Statistics in the Institute of Education Sciences summarizes the performance of U.S. fourth-grade students on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006 assessment, comparing their scores with their peers internationally:

PIRLS is led by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and has been administered twice, in 2001 and 2006. The United States participated in both years. In 2006, 45 education systems participated, including 38 countries, 5 Canadian provinces, and the separate English- and French-speaking education systems in Belgium.

The average score for U.S. students was:

* higher than the average score in 22 education systems

* lower than 10 education systems and

* not significantly different from 12 education systems.

In 2001, the U.S. scored higher than 23 education systems, lower than 3 education systems, and not significantly different from 8 education systems.

Testing is a 2nd order descriptive analysis of schooling output. Even doing it much better won’t change the fact that it remains a descriptive fact about the system, not causal explanation of change. Judging from the constant movement toward testing, I'd guess that value added testing is the coming thing.

This Houston effort spurred by the Gates Foundation will surely generate a lot of talk but so what?

Teachers, students, and parents in the Houston Independent School District will soon benefit from a new data system that will monitor individual student progress, inform classroom instruction, and help teachers to provide more targeted support. HISD will receive $4.5 million over three years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the ASPIRE—Accelerating Student Progress, Increasing Results & Expectations—data system.
By tracking student results, teachers will be better able to identify individual strengths and weaknesses and target their support where it is needed most, helping all students to meet the high academic standards set by HISD and the state. The ASPIRE Initiative reflects HISD's continuing commitment to improve teaching and learning so that all young people can get the high-quality education they deserve.
Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra welcomed the support for Houston's groundbreaking project. "For the first time we are charting the individual academic growth of every child, and we're going to use that value-added data to design specific ways to help every child continue to improve," Dr. Saavedra said.

Testing doesn't cause anything anymore than sticking a thermometer into someone does. How exactly is knowing more about a student's test results and now how those results change over time to have any effect on teaching methods? Meanwhile, the overall test scores of the U.S. tend to remain flat over time. The system is in a general equilibrium condition regarding its output, and more money simply provides it with more economic energy to do more of the same.
Like the Post Office (you can't even buy stamps after 5 p.m. at the Sandy PO), consumer needs or values have little relevance in how the system operates since it relies on government design for its operations, and government people simply don’t have the omniscience required to design the thing. They don’t even allow more than one design. In particular those who are elected and impose the rules of the public school game lack any deep understanding of the kinds of human growth schools should try to promote. Instead, they impose demands for trivial activities and trivial results.