Reform Expertise

There has been a pretty healthy debate over the Ed Wonks regarding this post (which I talked about in the Daily Top Five of Feb. 21.)

On a macro level, the issue is whether or not a person should have to have experience in a given field before offering advice for reforming that field or system. The Ed Wonks think that too many education reformers have never spent any time teaching. I think that you don't have to be a practitioner of a given profession to offer suggestions for improvement.

The idea spills over into many different fields that I discuss. Campaign finance and politics have their reformers, however misguided I might feel them to be. There is legal reform, ethics reform, medical reform and reform of all sorts going on around the world. Do we really think that such reformer have proper expertise? Is expertise requireed or would have a fairly good grasp as a lay person be enought to offer suggestions? What if you are simply a stakeholder in the dispute, in other words, do you have to have a dog in the fight to be worthy of making suggestions for changes?