Something I wanted to blog this weekend during the downtime: Chris Myers Asch's pitch for a public service academy to turn out well-prepared government employees. Asch doesn't have Barack Obama's support yet, but Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, and Joe Biden are onboard, according to the NYT.
A former elementary school teacher with black belts in two martial arts, Mr. Asch, 35, has labored with such ascetic focus and cheerful earnestness that even his plan's detractors call him a "sweet" and "admirable" guy.He argues that American culture derides government work and dissuades bright young people from pursuing it. Campuses glorify material gain, he said, and even students who choose public service often enter the nonprofit world. The result, he argues, is weakened bureaucracies behind disasters as different as the Sept. 11 attacks and the response to Hurricane Katrina.
"When government institutions fail, people die," he said.
Like its military counterparts, the United States Public Service Academy would offer a free four-year education in exchange for five years of government service. Supporters see both substantive and symbolic benefits: 1,200 skilled graduates a year, spread across federal, state and local agencies, and a flagship institution that would give new prestige to government work. (source)
There are several important questions hanging over this idealistic plan. First, do we need 1,200 people trained to be bureaucrats each year? We already have various government and public policy programs throughout the nation's schools. I'm not quite sure how churning out additional grads will create more respect for public service - any more than the huge glut of life science PhDs has improved the prestige of postdocs!
Second, is "training to be a bureaucrat" the best way to prepare students for government service? Shouldn't our government be comprised of people from diverse academic backgrounds (including, ahem, science) - not to mention people with experience in private industry? And shouldn't they bring along diverse networks and experience from different undergraduate institutions and regions of the country? Barack Obama has taken some heat for appointing a lot of his Harvard compatriots to temporary political positions. Imagine if the bulk of government careerists were from one school! Yikes.
Finding a career position in government is challenging. There's an esoteric application system. The hiring process weights things (like seniority and veterans status) which don't have much to do with the needs of the position itself. The pay is good, but often better in private industry. And it's true - there's not a lot of respect or prestige associated with being a government drone (does "good enough for government work" ring a bell?) I'm not saying Mr. Asch's plan is a bad one; I just don't see how it would solve those problems, or improve the way Americans perceive their government.
Anyway, I hope the issue gets some more press this year, because it's a public discussion worth having. What do you think?
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It might be better to set up some sort of certification program with required coursework in law, design of regulations, public records management, etc. as well as some specialty (science, civil rights, public finance...) that could then be taught in the many existing public administration programs nationwide.
Otherwise, the way you get public prestige for a Public Service Academy is for it to have sports teams that can beat Army, Navy, and Air Force. ;-)
Training to be a bureaucrat? That sounds like the bureaucratic equivalent of an MBA. Being a government bureaucrat requires more than that; bureaucrats need to know something (actually, a lot) about what they're managing. In fact, I can't see how such a school could produce better results than what we get now, without one. What needs to be done is to make sure qualified people become those bureaucrats.
Thanks for raising some great questions, Jessica. I would encourage you and your readers to look through our Draft Blueprint to get a sense of what we envision at the Public Service Academy:
http://uspublicserviceacademy.org/about/draft-blueprint/
As you'll read in the Blueprint, the Academy will not offer "training to be a bureaucrat." Instead, it will offer an intensive, year-round academic program with a broad core curriculum that emphasizes civics, international education, and leadership development. Students could be any number of liberal arts majors (including biology, chemistry, and the rest of the sciences, of course!), but they also would choose a public service field of concentration such as health care, education, emergency management, etc. Students will emerge from the Academy far more well-rounded and experienced than graduates of traditional schools.
Graduating 1200 students a year will not transform our public institutions overnight, but we think it will help raise the prestige and raise the level of expectation when it comes to public service. We do not claim that it alone is enough to reform the public sector, but it is an important piece.
Chris
PS -- Did you know that "good enough for government work" used to be considered praise?
I would certainly rather see bureaucrats trained in a non-partisan environment of expertise like what sounds like is being proposed than in deranged sick-fuck right-wing theocratic fake-ass "colleges" like the ones so many of the Bush regime's apparatchiks were indoctrinated by.
The French already have one: http://www.ena.fr/en/accueil.php