"Adventures in Wonderland: A Scholar in Washington" by Diane Ravitch, in The American Scholar (Autumn 1995), Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009.

In July 1991, during the Bush administration, Ravitch, the noted education historian author, was sworn into office as an assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. She was put in charge of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) and given a grand office with a full view of the Capitol. During the next 18 months, she writes, she found herself "constantly amazed or angered by the ways things worked." 

 OERI, her $450 million domain, had some 500 employees, including 130 who worked for the respected National Center for Education Statistics. (Like every other bureaucracy, hers was rife with acronyms. OERI was a POC--"principal operating component"--and Ravitch herself, as she "discovered to my alarm," was a "POC-head.") OERI also was in charge of, among other things, dozens of miscellaneous small programs, many of dubious worth but, as she soon learned, virtually all sacrosanct.

Ravitch and her deputy managed to get the ordinarily sluggish bureaucracy to pro- duce "a steady stream of publications," but it took "constant pressure and nagging." Many career employees "worked very hard and very effectively," Ravitch says, but others, some of them making as much as $110,000 a year, "did nothing at all, ever, and it was impossible either to remove them or to get them to do any work."

Ravitch's worst problems, however, were on Capitol Hill, where Democrats then controlled both houses of Congress. While the senators and their staffs "were always cordial and straightforward," House Democrats and their staffs, after 40 years in the majority, "exhibited the arrogance of uncontested power." Their attitude was that they alone "decided every educational issue and the department did their bid- ding." Anything the department did that was not to their liking was "politicization," she notes, "but nothing that they themselves did--like directing federal funds to their favorite causes or harassing administration officials--ever amounted to 'politicization."'

With the advent of the Clinton administration in 1993, Ravitch left public service. Among the lessons she took away with her: The federal government is run by Congress, especially by the House of Representatives, which controls the budget and decides how much money will be spent, who will receive it, and what they may or may not spend it on." Another lesson: turnover in public office is a good thing.