Paul E. Peterson, School Politics, Chicago Style. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976, 297 pages, $15.00.
IT'S AT LEAST a bit ironic that a major university press would release a book like this in times like these. In recent months, the massive sales of Edwin Newman's Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue would suggest that readers are becoming sensitive to the dangers of jargon and social scientific obfuscation. Yet against that publishing backdrop, the University of Chicago Press has forged a head and published this sampler of all that's wrong with the language of the social sciences.
The book as a whole gives you a keen awareness of the meaning of that old saying about an elephant struggling to give birth to a mouse. Once you wade through 256 pages of actual text (not to mention the 34 pages of footnotes), you have this distinct sense that a good editor could have pared it down to maybe a 20-page article for publication in some appropriately obscure journal of the social sciences. And all this is doubly maddening since the notes on the dust jacket go out of their way to announce that. like every other book ever printed on education, it will appeal both to specialists and to laymen: "This study will be welcomed by educators, political scientists, urbanologists, and concerned citizens for its lucid presentation of the politics of a big-city school system."
It might be best to take a look at a couple of examples of this lucidity. My favorite occurs on page 129, where the author is, I think, trying to say something about how hard it is for social scientists (or maybe board members, it isn't entirely clear)' to either act rationally, or, possibly, to determine whether one can determine whether others have acted rationally. If that sounds boggy, listen now to the author:
"The apparent impossibility of objectively rational action has induced defenders of rationality models to offer an alternative, more subjective, definition of rationality, which avoids the Scyllan rock that destroys any actor's claim to rationality only to be sucked into the Charybdian whirlpool that reassures every actor that he is acting rationally, thereby reducing rationality models to meaningless tautologies."
Which is not to mention the Slough of Despond into which the hapless reader slides after 128 pages of that sort of thing.
In addition to that kind of pretentious illiteracy, Peterson also uses another time- honored academic device — the blatant redundancy, apparently for the sole purpose of adding to the word-count and making a flimsy article into a book. How else can you explain this portion of the first paragraph of his last chapter?
"School politics in Chicago had in its essentials a style characteristic of big-city school systems. Chicago's school board, like those in most big cities, was in the late sixties plagued by civil rights cries for integration, teacher organization demands for improved salaries and working conditions, and neighborhood group insistence on greater involvement in local school policy. Or, to state the issues in their fundamental terms, big- city schools were beset by racial migration, worker dissatisfaction, falling pupil performance levels, and bureaucratic isolation,"
Really! Here I thought Chicago was unique and totally untouched by racial tensions, unionization. and demands for decentralization.
None of which is to say that the book doesn't have a point or that the author has no thesis. Peterson announces quite clearly that he intends an examination of two patterns or models of bargaining which may or may not apply to the deliberations of the Chicago School Board. These are "pluralist" bargaining, which occurs "when participants are primarily concerned about preserving or enhancing their immediate electoral or organizational interest," and "ideological" bargaining. which" occurs when participants are motivated by broader, more diffuse interests, such as those of a racial or class faction or of a political regime, which are regarded as of such an enduring significance that the participant becomes deeply, ideologically, committed to them." In short, it's an examination of whether the members of the Chicago school board tend to act from a sense of expedience or from dedication to principles of various sorts.
But finally, it's damned hard to know which is dominant, as even the author admits. Peterson analyzes school board votes on the major issues of desegregation, collective bargaining, and decentralization, and does, in fact, provide a good deal of interesting background information on these issues, smothered though it is in layers of jargon and linguistic imprecision. But finally, in introducing the case studies, he tells the reader that his/ her guess on the dominance of one model is as good as the author's:
"Although in the conclusions to-each of the case studies that follow, the merits of each approach will be considered, in the end the reader's own values will inevitably govern any conclusion he may wish to draw."
Which can only lead the reader to conclude that 15 dollars spent on this bloated piece of speculation is 15 dollars wasted.
Finally, however, School Politics, Chicago Style has the same punch and interest as would a book which discusses the management of the Chicago Cubs without describing what happens on the field. All the horror, all the grotesqueness, yes, and all the life would be missing from such a book on the Cubs. And all the horror, all the grotesqueness, and whatever life there is in the Chicago public school system is missing, too, from this dismal and illiterate academic exercise. ž
Losing money over segregation
COMMENTING at an Illinois Education
Association Convention February 19 on a
move by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) to cut $80 million
in .funds for Chicago schools because of
segregated faculty policies, state Supt. of
Education Joseph Cronin stated, "My only
quarrel with HEW is they are only looking
at faculty segregation. Both students and
faculty have to be integrated." He added that
the number of racially desegregated schools'
in the state now approaches 70 of the 82
districts with Rockford in court, Springfield
with a court order and Peoria desegregating
next year. ž
April 1977/Illinois Issues/7