On Breaking Things as a Policy
TL;DR — It's a bad idea, and Democrats should have none of it.
Tonight, the Department of Education’s Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) will vote on whether or not to approve a contract for Pearson, the testing company, to administer next year’s Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), which would determine the group of freshman that will enter the city’s eight specialized high schools (not including La Guardia) in the fall of 2026. The failure to approve the contract, already delayed by two months, would guarantee uncertainty and chaos for tens of thousands of families who pursue admission to the specialized high schools, and would leave unanswered the question of just how thousands of seats across eight high schools would be filled.
What is happening here is that opponents of the current specialized high school admissions process, having failed to win the day in the venue where this debate belongs (the State Legislature, which would need to repeal or amend the State’s Hecht-Calandra Act), have brought the fight to a venue where it certainly does not: a panel with functionally ministerial contract approval authority.1
There are a number of legitimate policy arguments implicated here, including whether to change a specialized high school admissions process that results in vanishingly few black and brown students at some of the most sought-after schools in the city,2 and just how much power should be given to a group of 24 obscure political appointees.
But treating the approval of a necessary contract as a proxy for those debates is grossly irresponsible and incoherent as a political strategy. What does success look like here for opponents of the SHSAT? No freshman class at Stuyvesant in 2026? Some cockamamie interim admissions process that the City dreams up to fill the seats, which would be in violation of State law and almost certainly enjoined? Is there any possible way this would lead to support for, rather than anger at, those whose efforts led to this outcome?
An op-ed in today’s Daily News reveals the game, and its limitations. The piece is, in effect, a bill of indictment against Pearson. Fair enough. (As it happens, I was Chief of Staff in the Attorney General’s Office when we took action against Pearson, resulting in a fine of $7.7 million, as referenced in the piece. I was fairly involved in that matter, and certainly carry no brief for the company.) But what is missing, entirely, is any suggestion of what happens if the dog catches the car and the PEP kills the contract. Either that’s because the author has no such plan, or because it’s a doozie.
This is policy by breakage. It’s deeply irresponsible, and the kind of thing we mostly see from Republicans who want to kill Obamacare or any efforts to tackle climate change. For right-wingers who don’t want a strong or trusted public sector, the collateral chaos isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
And so it is unusual to see policy by breakage from the left, but we do from time to time in New York, when there is a political consensus that falls short of a maximalist objective. I discussed this briefly in my post-election piece with regard to criminal justice policy. Advocates made a major mistake, both substantively and politically, when they set out not just to reform laws but to fundamentally break — including through budgetary deprivation — our system’s capacity to apprehend, prosecute, and appropriately sentence, or divert, people who commit crimes. Doing so has made us less safe and alienated no small number of New Yorkers who were sympathetic to the need for criminal justice reform.
An effective and broad public sector is a core tenet of FDR’s Democratic Party, and mine. It is a big part of what keeps us from the dystopian future of distrust and anger the Republican Party under Trump wants to bring about. It is also a big part of what makes New York, New York — a place where a spectacular range of people are able to live and thrive.
If we are to maintain support for the public sector — and the taxing and spending it requires — we must have the confidence of the people it serves. Robust debate, where everyone is heard, builds that confidence. Breaking things as a policy erodes it, and that’s not something that New York Democrats should have any patience for.
To put a finer point on this, here are the first sentences of the section of the State Education Law outlining the powers of the Panel for Educational Policy:
§ 2590-g. Powers and duties of the city board. The city board shall advise the chancellor on matters of policy affecting the welfare of the city school district and its pupils. The board shall exercise no executive power and perform no executive or administrative functions.
I should note here that I am both a specialized high school alumnus and parent.