Lack of Consensus on Education: What Are Its Dimensions?

This article offers an analysis of the dimensions of consensus on education using Diane Ravitch's statement: "The single biggest problem in American education is that no one agrees on why they educate." The interesting problem is to determine which consensus on educational issues varies, whose consensus it is, and how and why it varies. The author analyzes consensus on an issue in three dimensions: its breadth, its depth, and its span. The breadth of the group's consensus is the agreement captured by the ambiguity or vagueness of either the definition of the group or the statement of the issue. The number of specifications needed to adjust the original formulation to the level of some kind of implementation is the measure of its depth. The "span" of consensus is obtained by comparing the agreements across issues for a given group. The author summarizes that consensus on an issue can fail to reach fruition in many ways. The consensus may be an illusion of breadth, resting merely on ambiguity or vagueness. The consensus may disappear as the costs of implementation, its depth, are revealed. The consensus on one issue, in the context of restricted resources and competing concerns, may not carry the implementation forward despite persisting through an exploration of its depth. (Contains 6 notes.)