Sorry, Secretary Cardona, but Rule by Experts Is Not Democracy in Education

W e respect Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who was a pretty good school superintendent back in the day. Unfortunately, the secretary’s missteps and misstatements show that he needs to retake American Government 101. Take his recent post on X: “I’ve said it once and I will say it again, parents don’t want politicians dictating what their children can learn, think and believe. That’s not how public education is supposed to work in a free country.”

As school-choice supporters, we agree with Secretary Cardona to an extent. In a free society, parents should be able to choose their child’s school, and most parents do want that. But that is not what the secretary is advocating. He, and many other overzealous defenders of the public-education establishment, have lamented the increasing pushback from the political center and right, labeling efforts to shape curriculum as “book bans” and decrying efforts to limit divisive, zero-sum racial ideologies such as critical race theory. This is the context in which we understand his post. (But Secretary Cardona should feel free to write back to set us straight.)

Despite the secretary’s protestations, elected politicians influencing what children learn, think, and believe is exactly how democratically controlled education systems work. Indeed, democratic control is a hallmark of American public education, and of America.

In representative democracies, voters elect politicians to keep public bureaucrats accountable, whether those bureaucrats are Army generals, police captains, or public-school superintendents. The alternative to rule by elected politicians is rule by unelected, unaccountable, nontransparent bureaucratic “experts.” From Russia to Cuba, we can see how well that works.

As any U.S. government textbook says, the American model goes like this: Voters have preferences; they elect politicians who support their preferences; those politicians pass laws and reorganize bureaucracies in ways voters want. If it works well enough, voters reelect those politicians; if not, voters lather, rise, and repeat (to use the old shampoo slogan), washing out the old politicians. In recent years, political scientists have called this “principal–agent theory”: Voters are the principals selecting politicians as agents to carry out their goals; in turn, politicians are the principals who persuade or force bureaucrats to implement their goals.

Oftentimes it works. The famous 1970s congressional hearings led by Senator Frank Church (D., Idaho), an elected politician, exposed decades of questionable practices by the CIA’s expert bureaucrats, leading to new rules about when and how the CIA can use force to protect U.S. national interests. This was an example of politicians telling experts how to do their jobs. In short, it was democracy.

It was also democracy when the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee, led by Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), grilled leading college presidents about their protecting blatant antisemitism while eviscerating nonprogressive free speech.

As one of us (and Patrick Wolf) detailed in “Cops, Teachers, and the Art of the Impossible: Explaining the Lack of Diffusion of Innovations That Make Impossible Jobs Possible,” voters in New York City elected mayors from both parties — Rudy Giuliani (R.), Michael Bloomberg (R., I.), and now Eric Adams (D.) — to reform the New York Police Department. Each of these mayors appointed capable police commissioners, who terminated incompetent officers and promoted effective police personnel and practices. As a result of that meddling by elected politicians, New York City became one of the safest cities in the country, with the sixth-lowest homicide rate among 50 major cities and the fewest per capita police killings of civilians. In contrast, in cities such as Minneapolis and Baltimore, which, notwithstanding reform rhetoric, ended up empowering “expert” police bureaucrats and their unions over democratic governance, police kill far more civilians per capita, and homicide rates are far higher.

One of us got elected to his local school board, despite receiving no endorsements and being opposed by the experts running the district, on a platform of improving teaching by making job offers to new teachers earlier in hiring season to pick the best, paying teachers better, listening to them more, and terminating those who were ineffective. To some degree those things happened after his upset election. That was democracy. It was also democracy when, five years later, despite getting most of the official endorsements, he was defeated for reelection by a candidate representing interests (conservative Christian parents) who had gone unrepresented in policy-making.

And it was democracy when many elected state legislatures passed laws forcing public schools to implement the science of reading stressing phonics rather than the whole-language approaches to teaching reading favored by “experts” in schools of education, who went with their feelings and their lucrative book contracts rather than the science.

Supporters of the traditional public-education system like to tout democratic control as one of the virtues of the system, especially when they are railing against school-choice programs. Yet when voters peacefully enact policies they oppose, Secretary Cardona and others denounce democratic control of education, instead favoring government by experts. We’re sorry, Mr. Secretary, but that is not what democracy in education looks like. Under democracy, experts face political accountability.

Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. James V. Shuls is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. These views may not reflect those of their organizations.