Six weeks into my fourth-grade year, the schools closed for a Friday, and on Monday each was precisely 20 percent black and 80 percent white. There was no violence and minimal white flight. The slogan is an ingenious example of technocratic propaganda, interesting even today for that reason. Pretty much everyone is, after all, in favor of education. All that's left to do is work out the details.
Education policy is thus the perfect technocratic test case.
Here, if anywhere, governance by disinterested experts should work. We can simply ask experts on curriculum, on teacher training, on school design, and so on, to run things in the one best way. Since at least the 1920s, that has been the promise of public school management. We form state boards and commissions to regulate curricular requirements and establish standards. It doesn't take much of a reality check to see that educational technocracy hasn't lived up to expectations.