The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies

Fourth Quarter 1999

The title of this article is that of a new book, soon to be released by Princeton University Press. The author, Charles Glenn, is a professor in the School of Education at Boston University, a former state education official in Massachusetts, and an adviser to the Center for Public Justice. An expert on education policies in Eastern and Western Europe as well as the United States, Dr. Glenn writes widely on education and welfare issues. The following excerpts are taken from the book's introduction.—Ed.

Working as a state education official responsible for civil rights and urban education, and then teaching educational policy, I have puzzled over the relationship between schools and families, between the wider world in which children must learn to live and the deeper world in which they will always to some extent be rooted. But if this is the continuing theme, I have come upon it (or it has come at me) in three different forms.

Mediating Structures

The first can be identified with some precision: a little book by Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus called To Empower People [1977]. Berger and Neuhaus called the attention of policymakers to the importance of "mediating structures," the "value-generating agencies" that mediate between individuals and the state. They urged that public policy make greater use of these organizations associated with community, church, family, and voluntary associations.

Berger and Neuhaus were of course by no means the first to stress the significance of what is commonly called "civil society," but they wrote at a time when American social policy was ripe for a change of course. Disillusionment over the failure of Great Society programs to deliver on their promises was growing on the Left, while to the Right it seemed obvious that the unanticipated consequences of these programs had made matters worse. Many across the political spectrum were ready for a new approach that put services and decisions about services closer to those being served...even in their own hands.

It seems fair to say that the first part of the Berger-Neuhaus argument—that government policies designed to meet human needs should make more use of the ways in which people organize their own lives—was heard more readily than was the warning with which they followed it: "We should learn," they wrote, "to ask about the effects of public policies on mediating structures," since "there is a real danger that such structures might be 'co-opted' by the government in a too eager embrace that would destroy the very distinctiveness of their function."

The most unfashionable aspect of their case, in the context of the seventies, was the high value they placed upon religious institutions as significant participants in the health of American society. They were in effect echoing Tocqueville's famous observation, "Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should...be considered as the first of their political institutions, for although it does not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use thereof."

I came across To Empower People several years after it was published, when I was well into my twenty-one-year career as the state official responsible for urban education and civil rights in Massachusetts. While it did not cause me to abandon my convictions about the desirability of racial integration, or my belief that the state has an important role to play in education, it made me wonder whether we were going about our work in a way that destroyed much else of value. ...They insisted upon "perhaps the most fundamental human right—the right to make a world for one's children," and I could not help wondering whether they were correct that, by taking decisions out of the control of the family, "schools teach contempt for the parents and, ultimately, self-contempt." Could a system of vouchers, which I had never considered seriously until then, "enhance the diversity of American life by fostering particularist communities of value—whether of life style, ideology, religion, or ethnicity?"

School Choice

The second starting point for this study was the growing movement in support of public policies to allow and encourage parents to choose the schools their children attend. This idea is often considered libertarian, but in fact was first implemented on a large scale under government auspices as part of the racial integration effort. In 1974, the Massachusetts Legislature took away the State Board of Education's authority to order student reassignment plans for racial balance, and in its place provided millions of dollars to encourage parent choices that would serve to integrate schools. Over the next seventeen years I was able to grant about half a billion dollars for magnet schools and other choice initiatives. Meanwhile, I served as official monitor for choice-based school assignments in Chicago, and advised Mobile and Albuquerque, San Diego and Tel Aviv, on putting school choice in place. Working with hundreds of magnet schools turned me into a strong advocate of the merits of school diversity and parent choice for their own sake.

Unlike the many supporters and opponents of school choice as a theory, we were forced to work out specific policies and procedures to ensure that it functioned within a framework balancing the general good with individual choices. Eventually, I came to believe that school choice could not realize its full potential unless the supply of schools among which to choose was opened up more radically, by charter schools and even by vouchers. The bureaucratic constraints imposed by government- operated school systems are inconsistent with good education.

Norm-Maintaining Institutions

The third starting point of this study is the growing concern that I share with many others about the weakening of those institutions in the society that generate a sense of moral obligation. The triumph of the market as the metaphor for relationships, even the most intimate, and the ever-expanding activity of the welfare state have between them undermined individual moral and civic responsibility.

This is why the revival of civil society in the post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe has been so profoundly important for their freedom as well as their prosperity. In Educational Freedom in Eastern Europe (1995), I showed how the totalitarian devastation of civil society is being reversed in part through initiatives taken by teachers and parents in hundreds, if not thousands, of communities—from Estonia to Bulgaria and from Prague to the Urals and beyond—to educate children with integrity and effectiveness in nongovernment schools that they have created.

Schools have been among the most common "new structures" emerging during the last years of Communist rule and in a flood since its collapse. Groups of parents and teachers began at once to recreate education through school-level initiatives, many involving new autonomous schools. Post-Communist education policy debates focused, even more than in the United States, on whether such initiatives should be merely tolerated as an expression of freedom or welcomed and supported in the interest of society as a whole.

Putting Them Together

Three themes, then, which can be put together in several ways that make evident their intimate relationship. Mediating structures should be used to deliver education and social services because they are better than government at generating the sense of moral obligation that is essential to both. Parent choice of schools can help to nourish new and existing mediating structures. Despite ferocious resistance by well-organized public employees, there is a growing willingness among elected officials to adopt policies that encourage the use of mediating structures. There is even a new willingness to contemplate partnerships between government and faith-based organizations.

Perhaps the most promising manifestation of this new spirit in American policy developments is the language introduced, by Senator Ashcroft of Missouri, into the [1996] federal law reforming the public assistance program. The so-called Charitable Choice provision requires that, if states choose to contract for social services with federal welfare funds, they must allow faith-based organizations to compete on equal terms and may not impose conditions that affect their religious practices.

Another indication of a new willingness to enter into partnership with faith-based organizations is the adoption, by Wisconsin, Ohio, and Puerto Rico, of educational voucher programs that are intended to include religious schools chosen by parents. The decision by the Supreme Court, in November 1998, not to consider a constitutional challenge to the Wisconsin programs creates new forms of possibility.

The most immediate question for my own work in educational policy has to do with whether vouchers or other mechanisms for extending public support to faith-based schools would lead to new injustices or would inevitably corrupt the schools. This danger has been raised both by Evangelical supporters of church-sponsored schools and by libertarian opponents of government intervention in the civil society. Some, indeed, consider that public funding is likely to be a fatal embrace.