Déjà Vu
Social Policy. May/June 1970.
International Arts & Science Press. 68 pp. $1.50. $8.00 a year for six issues.
Social Policy is a new journal devoted generally to social change, but specifically to a critical examination of the various agencies of social policy—in education, health, welfare, housing, manpower training, and the like. The editor is Frank Riessman, author of The Culturally Deprived Child, but better known for his book, with Arthur Pearl, New Careers for the Poor, and for his subsequent efforts, following up on this book, to encourage the use of non-professional workers in public agencies dealing with the poor. The editorial board is a distinguished one which includes such figures as Noam Chomsky, Kenneth Keniston, Charles Hamilton, Alvin Gouldner, Paul Jacobs, Rhody McCoy, Peter Edelman, Roy Innis, and Marilyn Gittell.
Social Policy is clearly not intended to be a journal reflecting the point of view of the typical administrator or the typical professional agency (even though many contributors to the first issue have been or are administrators and professionals). Rather, it will form part of that massive revaluation which has been affecting every area of American life and thought. Just as all intellectual and scientific values and all the major academic disciplines are having their assumptions and preconceptions explored and their fruits assayed; and just as American democracy itself is under attack as inadequate, limited, or positively destructive of human life and human values, so, too, social workers, teachers, policemen, doctors, principals, hospital administrators, government officials, have been coming under strong and sometimes virulent attack.
All this, of course, has been going on for a long time—indeed since the late 1950’s—and the general lines of the attack are by now familiar. So far as the established social agencies, public and private, are concerned, the charge is that they have become professionalized, more preoccupied with their own internal standards than with the concrete human beings they are supposed to help. The result is that instead of helping, they hurt: the teachers miseducate, the social workers make their clients dependent, the doctors ignore the real sources of ill health, the police exercise violence, etc. Another line of attack points to the bureaucratic division of the client into various parts, each subject to the ministrations of a different agency. And still another line of attack points to the cultural ignorance of middle-class professionals dealing with lower-class clients or of white professionals dealing with black or Puerto Rican or Mexican clients.
Throughout the 60’s programs and approaches were developed aimed at overcoming these deficiencies of the social agencies: to allow the poor a role in planning, delivering, and evaluating the services that were purportedly designed for them (“maximum feasible participation”); to decentralize the bureaucracies so that the clients would be able to acquire a greater say in the running of them (“community control”); to supplement and even replace the professionals with people lacking professional qualifications but closer to and more representative of the clients (“para-professionals,” starting on “new career ladders”); to get the professionals to serve the interests of the clients and not those of the government agencies (“advocate planners” and other “advocates”); and to put blacks and other minorities at the center of all these new developments.
Virtually every article in the first issue of Social Policy embodies these relatively new but already aging approaches and ideas, as one can see from the titles alone: “The Dialectics of Community Control,” “Community Control and Radical Social Reform,” “The Changing Face of Professionalism,” “Whom Does the Advocate Planner Serve?,” “Social Policy and White Racism,” “Year One at I. S. 201.” Some of these articles are better and some worse, but so alike are they in content and tone that it is hard to keep them apart in one’s mind, and there is little that is new in any of them. After being exposed to a long series of arguments, mostly arguing for the same thing, one thirsts for the concrete, for—let me say it—the non-ideological. One wants to know whether these policies have been tried, and if not, why not, and if so, how they have worked and why. There is almost none of this in the first issue of Social Policy.
Thus, “Year One at I. S. 201” describes the first of the schools in New York City under community control, schools which according to the writer went through the terrible year of 1968-69 undisturbed. The author, Charles E. Wilson, the former unit administrator of I. S. 201, gives us intriguing hints as to what went on but not much more than that. For example, “Some of the experienced teachers who chose to remain needed and may still require help in updating their skills and acquainting themselves with new techniques and new resources. Some required and still require a kind of politicizing and reorientation.” That sounds interesting, but just what does he mean? Or: “Not all of 201’s innovative attempts were successful. But even the failures were instructive. . . .” Which ones, and in what ways? Mr. Wilson doesn’t say. Instead, we get the typical administrative prose, which is impenetrable to the layman: “In the future, teacher-centered programs will not be as easily accepted by the unit administrator and governing board as in the past, unless the programs demonstrate flexibility of design and flexible directors.”
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Abstract and ideologically familiar though it is, the Wilson article, like most of the other contributions to this first issue, does meet certain tests—if only minimal ones—of logic and coherence. From “Social Policy and White Racism” by Preston Wilcox, however, it would appear that any article attacking “white racism” is to be exempt by the editors of Social Policy from even those extremely modest standards. “Urban renewal became ‘Negro removal’; Model Cities is more accurately understood as Model Colonies; Public Assistance turned out to be planned starvation . . . it is fairly obvious to keen observers that this nation is organized residentially to overprotect the vaginas of white women from Black men.” That is the flavor of the piece. “Any serious, sociological studies of Blacks will note the white supremacist attitudes which underly them.” Mr. Wilcox then refers to only two studies, both of which in his mind challenge “white supremacist attitudes.” They are by Charles Tilly and Karl E. Taueber, who are white. Aware that something is wrong with his argument, he says, “These two studies were exceptions to the norm.” No one who knows anything of the field could agree with him.
But there is something, if not exactly new, then not quite old, in Social Policy. It is an argument between the proponents of the various reforms in social policy I have referred to (community control, paraprofessionals, advocate professionals, and the like), and those who are convinced that even these reforms will not do the job. The latter group believes that our society is hopelessly rigged against the poor, that social services will always benefit the professionals rather than the clients, and that something larger and more massive than these reforms—however great the struggle that has already been waged to institute them—is therefore needed.
Matthew Dumont, for example, discussing as a hopeful development the rise of a new anti-professional professionalism, contributes the engaging term, “the swinging professional”—one guesses he is the social worker or teacher with beard, beads, and the corresponding attitudes. In response, Robert Reiff gloomily comments that “a less naive view would recognize that professionalism cannot be changed without changing the whole social fabric.” Similarly, Frances Fox Piven, on the “big change” side of the debate, argues that the advocate planner, a planner who works with and plans for the poor, “deflects conflict by preoccupying newcomers to city politics with procedures that pose little threat to vested interests. It is a strategy which thus promotes political stability in the city. But if the force of the poor depends on the threat of instability, planning advocacy does little to promote equity.” Sumner Rosen retorts in defense of advocacy: “An alternative plan may, in the short run, move leaders off the streets, as Piven says (does she want them always there?).” Another “big-change” polemicist, Stanley Aronowitz (a columnist for the radical weekly, the Guardian), attacks community control under the grand title, “The Dialectics of Community Control” and in the kind of jargon that is common on the Left: “A radical analysis of power in America reveals the interlocking character of control over all institutions in a pyramid fashion, with the pinnacle of power in most local institutions held by the same groups of corporations and their professional servants in government or human service bureaucracies.” And so on to the conclusion: “It requires that the movement for popular control search out societal alternatives beyond the confines of the corporate capitalist framework.”
Even Frank Riessman seems to have developed doubts about the efficacy of change within social institutions themselves in the absence of larger change at the top—this despite the fact that Riessman has been one of the most energetic of those who have been involved in thinking up and launching precisely such reforms. Community control, he says in a piece written in collaboration with Alan Gartner, must fail unless it “is escalated and becomes programmatic, demanding specific educational policy changes . . . at a national level.” S. M. Miller, a frequent collaborator of Frank Riessman, also gets into this argument in an article with Pamela Roby entitled “Social Mobility, Equality, and Education.” They make the point—which they have previously made elsewhere—that the current unequal distribution of income seems particularly resistant to changes by way of more democratic education, or greater social mobility, and they suggest that it may be changed only by direct measures of redistribution. This point of view, skeptical as it is that reforms within social-welfare institutions can make for movement toward equality, would put Miller and Roby on the “big-change” side of the debate, rather than on the “reform of welfare institutions” side.
The debate, though not at all neat, is a real one, and at least in this first issue of Social Policy there are still two sides—what we may call the less-Left and the more-Left. The big-change group may be further divided between those who think it is possible to work within the system and those who do not. A number of contributors are straddling this issue. Potentially the most interesting thing about Social Policy is the course of this debate.
There is no debate, however, where actual social policies are concerned. Except for Jules Cohn (“Business and the Hard-Core Unemployed”), hardly any of the writers here seems interested in the specific problems and promises of going programs or proposed programs in the areas of health, education, welfare, housing, and the like. Thus we get no discussion in Social Policy of the proposed Nixon-Moynihan welfare reform, perhaps the chief potential development in social policy in recent years. There is no discussion of the crisis in health care, which now rivals education in claiming a substantial share of the gross national product (both are already not far behind defense, and growing faster). There is no discussion of any issues in education except for community control, though achieving community control would still leave us with the same questions about education that plague us now. There is no discussion of the processes of public-opinion formation, organizational influence, and governmental decision-making which affect what we do in all areas of social policy. The missing ingredient in Social Policy, in short, is social policy.
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This perhaps helps explain why the lead article in the first number is an attack on another journal, the Public Interest (edited by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol). The thesis of the article, written by Maurice R. Berube and Marilyn Gittell, is that “the promotion of professionalism” is the major interest of the Public Interest. As a regular contributor to the Public Interest, and as a member of its board of editors, I was surprised by this charge. After all, Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, if they are professional anything, are professional intellectuals, writers, and editors. They are scarcely professionals in the sense of being social workers, principals, government administrators, etc., and yet the authors of this article think that Kristol and Bell’s main concern is to protect the interests of these professionals. In support of this charge, Berube and Gittell argue that the Public Interest dismisses “Community Action Programs, the Black Power movement, community control, student protests, and on and on.” And yet I recall early and important articles in the Public Interest by Daniel Moynihan and Earl Raab on community control, and I recall a whole issue devoted to student protest. It is true that the Public Interest does have other interests—the distribution and redistribution of income; problems of taxation; the state of social security and of welfare, housing, health, and manpower pro grams. But the magazine has scarcely spoken for the professionals—the professionals, that is, engaged in the thankless task of developing and running programs in these areas—in the sense in which Berube and Gittell use the term. It has, however, been more sympathetic to the plight of professionals in these areas than the writers in Social Policy seem to be—simply because it takes issues of social policy more seriously and inevitably gives them closer and more detailed scrutiny.
But I think that the Public Interest is more attached to professionalism than Social Policy in quite another sense, a sense foreign to the critique of Berube and Gittell. It is more committed to rigor of analysis, to cogency of presentation, and to factual detail than Social Policy, at least on the evidence of this first issue, seems to be.
There should be two, three, many journals dealing with social policy. They should be different. The concerns of the people associated with Social Policy are serious and important. But these concerns have been given a rather weak and tired presentation in this first issue, as if everyone had been asked to fish something out of the bottom drawer which he hadn’t quite thought worth publishing until then. The field of social policy is worth more than that, and if it is to make an impact, Social Policy will have to do better in the future.
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