Books, Arts & Manners: The Right Books

The premise of Excellence in Education: The States Take Charge (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1150 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; $4.95), by Denis P. Doyle and Terry W. Hartle, is an interesting one: namely, that the domestic policy initiative, having dwelt for more than a half-century in the national capital, is gradually reverting to the fifty states. The Federal Government—so the argument goes— having promised more and more, actually delivers less and less, and does it, moreover, with increasing clumsiness and ineptitude; hence, individuals and the local governments that represent them are looking increasingly to the states to accomplish the things they hope to see done (just as, in the authors’ words, “when the failure is in the public sector . . . the private sector appears”). During the New Deal and Great Society years it was widely assumed that the state governments lacked the organizational capacity (as well as, their detractors suspected, the moral will) to accomplish the reforms mandated by Washington; but, with many of these governments having become mini-versions of the capital itself (certainly not an unmixed blessing), that argument is gradually subsiding.

Partly, therefore, because the federal budget level is diminishing Washington’s potential to do everything, and partly because of the natural tendency for the more sophisticated state capitals to assert their demand for greater control, the New Federalism (as William J. Baroody Jr. insists in his foreword) “is a reality today in all but name”—in the field of education, at least. Doyle & Hartle concur: “In a very real sense . . . the first four years of the Reagan Administration have been a triumph of educational policy, although hardly one that was planned. Through federal budget policy the states have been starved, not into submission, but into self-reliance.”

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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The premise of Excellence in Education: The States Take Charge (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1150 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; $4.95), by Denis P. Doyle and Terry W. Hartle, is an interesting one: namely, that the domestic policy initiative, having dwelt for more than a half-century in the national capital, is gradually reverting to the fifty states. The Federal Government—so the argument goes— having promised more and more, actually delivers less and less, and does it, moreover, with increasing clumsiness and ineptitude; hence, individuals and the local governments that represent them are looking increasingly to the states to accomplish the things they hope to see done (just as, in the authors’ words, “when the failure is in the public sector . . . the private sector appears”). During the New Deal and Great Society years it was widely assumed that the state governments lacked the organizational capacity (as well as, their detractors suspected, the moral will) to accomplish the reforms mandated by Washington; but, with many of these governments having become mini-versions of the capital itself (certainly not an unmixed blessing), that argument is gradually subsiding.

Partly, therefore, because the federal budget level is diminishing Washington’s potential to do everything, and partly because of the natural tendency for the more sophisticated state capitals to assert their demand for greater control, the New Federalism (as William J. Baroody Jr. insists in his foreword) “is a reality today in all but name”—in the field of education, at least. Doyle & Hartle concur: “In a very real sense . . . the first four years of the Reagan Administration have been a triumph of educational policy, although hardly one that was planned. Through federal budget policy the states have been starved, not into submission, but into self-reliance.”