Public Service U

There’s a push going on to create a national “public service academy” modeled after the military academies:

The proposed United States Public Service Academy would offer an all-expenses-paid education to 5,000 undergraduates. Its liberal arts curriculum would emphasize leadership development, analytical thinking and service to others, with requirements for summer service internships and a year of study abroad.

Graduates would be required to work for five years in public service. They could choose from jobs in state, local or federal government, law enforcement, public health, education or nonprofit organizations.

It’s kind of an interesting idea, in the same way as was a proposal to create ROTC-like programs on college campuses to prepare students for careers in intelligence and foreign service that emerged a few months ago. It certainly seems good to have a college which has a clear, overarching mission around which everything in the college is focused and to offer young people a way to serve the country outside of military service. However, the intentions of the individuals behind the idea seem a little suspect:

[Chris Myers] Asch and friend Shawn Raymond, 34, a fellow Teach for America alum and co-founder of the Sunflower County Freedom Project, the mentoring group, came up with the idea for the academy after taking note of the bureaucratic failures in the handling of Hurricane Katrina. That, as well as government errors before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, convinced the men that the country needs an institution that emphasizes civic engagement and inspires a new generation of leaders.

Attempting to fix the problems caused by government bureucracies by creating another governmental bureaucracy doesn’t seem likely to work. And I think it’s pretty well-documented that the errors surrounding 9/11 we not caused by a lack of “civic engagement” — they were caused by, you guessed it, governmental bureaucracy, namely massive and inflexible structures in the intelligence community that prevented the sharing of information. That, and a lack of skilled personnel at the NSA and other sigint organizations; the public services that Asch et al. are mentioning are not so much in need of a “new generation of leaders” as they are people with lots of technical know-how who are paid well enough to work in government as opposed to industry.

This begins to sound a lot like suggestions for helping fix the problems in public schools. You can go a lot further just by paying teachers better and giving them a safe and rewarding work environment than you can by creating a governmental program to fix an existing governmental program; which then needs another program to fix the program which was intended to fix the program, ad infinitum.

[Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs]