>"Disturbingly, if you care about a robust democracy with checks and balances established through ideological competition, these organizations are overwhelming drawn from the same political backgrounds: they tend to be billionaire-funded, espouse the use of economic and business principles in schooling, and have a corporate mentality that prefers loose regulation and centralized control."
I think this is a good point, but I'm not convinced democratically accountable groups would be better. Robust democracy with checks and balances established through ideological competition probably leads to a lot of parts of the country having lesson plans about creationism, no?
I could be completely wrong here, but my prior is that education boards are more ideologically extreme in places like NYC and SF than the median voter but less extreme in places like the deep south than the median voter.
If people who are disproportionately highly educated and left-leaning join school boards, then this makes sense.
Not familiar with Rochester in particular but in many of these struggling local systems you have a) big enough districts for real resources to be available, which means real incentive for corruption but b) not big enough to have the kind of local media that can really investigate said corruption and c) lots of overlapping jurisdiction between state and city, particularly given that in many states the state government can assert control over struggling districts, which further contributes to both too many hands at the wheel but simultaneously too little accountability.
Despite our completely different political stances (I’m a small-l libertarian), I agree with your perspective on many issues and am grateful for your education (and other) work. But how is it that the word “union” does not appear anywhere within this post about the balance of power in K-12 education?
In our most recent home, Seattle, the superintendent, parents and the school board were powerless in the face of the teachers union to reopen schools. It was only an ultimatum from the governor that opened schools (2.5 hours, 4 days a week) in mid April. Even now, unions in other nearby cities are hedging about next year. I have never been a fan of public sector unions but now that I see their power and how they wield it, I loathe them.
We are looking for a new home and high on the list of criteria is a place with a toothless or nonexistent teachers union. We will not allow our children’s education to exist at their whim.
I'm honestly confused about this, having read many people making your same point. I am extremely skeptical about the value of public schools in general, but I thought there was general agreement among most other people that they were a critical component of a civil society. We pulled ours out this year and homeschooled rather than sit them in front of screens 6 hours a day.
So you wanted the teachers unions to agree to put themselves and their students at risk? Why, when after a few more months, they'd mostly be vaxxed and safe? Right-wingers always say "because kids don't get bad coronavirus." Ok cool, but teachers can, and so can adults, and kids can spread it, so why so angry over a few extra months? Because it became a fun right-wing talking point, I guess.
Yours is an extreme reaction, and not reflective of teachers in general. I'm from a family of teachers, my wife is a teacher, lots of our friends our teachers. Their unions are powerful here in NY. The contingent arguing to keep schools closed out of fear of Covid is vanishingly small and has little influence outside of NYC (and not much there, either). This isn't a "right-wing talking point". People, including teachers, want to get the schools back open and children educated. Remote teaching has not worked. A few extra months is a lot to ask, and most teachers unions are not asking it and don't particularly want it.
I could have made a more temperate post so as not to get distracted by this same-old argument (I'm just still furious about it, mostly on behalf of other people's children--mine are fine). My main question remains: "Where are the teachers unions in a story about the balance of power in K-12?"
I will point out that many non-union charters NEVER re-opened--not in mid-April, not for some form of hybrid, nothing. So despite what the media would have you believe, it simply is not the case that it was only intransigent anti-science unions keeping students out of classrooms.
To me, the heart of the matter is that regardless of whether classrooms were open or not, most families simply did not feel safe sending their children back. I teach in a unionized charter and we DID attempt to reopen but there just wasn't enough demand from families to justify the enormous logistical challenges involved with safely reopening.
I also think many in the elite media and in public health took for granted that school administrators could be trusted when they agreed to the many new policies and infrastructure required to make school as safe as possible. But there is no way teachers would ever be that naive.
I mean, most of the schools I've worked in didn't have soap or hot water in the bathroom. I've had to provide paper and pens so students have something to work with. That I would simply race back to the classroom because of lofty promises about HEPA filters and shit? Without it all being verified? Lol, no.
"I also think many in the elite media and in public health took for granted that school administrators could be trusted when they agreed to the many new policies and infrastructure required to make school as safe as possible. But there is no way teachers would ever be that naive."
I worked (in an extracurricular cram school for talented-but-underserved kids via a Gear Up grant) in a metropolitan school system famous for its "crazy union" and now know several people in that union. The union's shenanigans become less crazy when teachers explain the limits the administrators put on the union, while the administrators themselves feel free exert arbitrary, unresponsive control. I'm generally suspicious of public-sector unions, but I can't blame teachers for responding in the only ways the administrators permit their union to respond.
One incident I saw a teacher go through, a miniature disaster too small to provoke a union response but crushing nonetheless to those going through it, made me realize I don't have the fortitude to be a public school teacher. When the union does get involved, the charades the administrators expect the teachers' union to perform for them — "We want this but we're not allowed to ask for this, so we have to ask for that, when we don't want that, in hopes we can turn that into this" — boggle my mind.
I agree. It varies by locality, of course, but in many cities, teacher's unions have a huge amount of influence. Elected school boards just increase their influence, since unions have money and ground troops to devote to these tiny, low-turnout elections that no one else cares about.
I'm more sympathetic to teacher's unions on some issues, including the pandemic. But I admit that my view has also soured over time. I used to join picket lines to support the local teacher's union, back when I had nothing at stake -- I just supported them as a lefty fan of organized labor.
Then I worked in public education for a couple of years. Now, my views are a lot more mixed. I still support the unions on many issues, but they fight for their workers like any other union, sometimes at the expense of students. Management wasn't any better, don't get me wrong. I left feeling like nobody had students' interests at heart.
"A more radical proposal might include assigning school board seats to people who opt-in to a lottery which chooses the board. Provisions could be made to ensure that the composition of the lottery is reasonably representative of the appropriate municipality. These board members could be strictly term limited to a single term of two or four years. It might seem dramatic to assign seats of such importance randomly, but then again this is precisely what we do for juries, which is rightly seen as a sacred and important duty."
I've had family (misguidedly, IMO) run against the local caucus in school board elections. Predictably, they got nowhere — worse than nowhere, in a sense, since the caucus ran a moderately-successful rumor campaign damaging their and their loved ones' reputations. You've mentioned charter-school lotteries leave room for shenanigans. How would school-board lotteries avoid shenanigans in lotteries? My family's experience may not be common (or perhaps it is) but does make it hard to trust that lotteries wouldn't be rigged in favor of local insiders.
I mean, there would probably also be issues, but I don't want to be completely nihilistic. The problem with many charter lotteries are that the schools themselves often run part of, or all of, the lotteries - they are literally held in-house by the very organizations that succeed or fail based on the outcomes of those lotteries! I can see a system run by the municipal government that is more secure. Is anything really safe? No, I suppose not.
Fair. My formative experiences do leave me pretty nihilistic.
And it's only fair for me to admit I'm not inherently bothered by school lotteries being rigged in favor of those more likely to succeed if admitted. Talent may be impossible to manufacture, but it sure is easy to crush, and favoring talented kids with families able to be just supportive enough to keep that talent from being crushed makes sense to me. The evil lies in lying about it, pretending the lotteries aren't weighted in favor of aptitude (including the parents' aptitude) when they are, and telling those who don't make it that it's their fault for failing in a system where "everyone can succeed".
Yikes! The lack of transparency of the lottery process does nothing but raise suspicions and I don't see a good reason for it. But there are some factors that can make a school's population not mirror the broader community. For example, my daughter's school (not a charter, but a public "choice" school, whatever that means) holds itself out as academically rigorous, with a traditional teaching style. Parent reviews and feedback, both from parents who gush about the school and those who hate it, confirm the academic rigor and demand at this school. That reputation narrows the applicant pool to those who want to sign up for this kind of torture for their 6 year olds. But it's true that we have no idea how this so-called lottery spits winners out of the applicant pool, and the cheat-incentives Freddie describes are undeniable.
On a happy note, that article taught me a new word that I'm instantly in love with: jamoke.
Right, reputation narrows applicant pool. A rather cultlike after-school program, Russian School of Mathematics, has opened up here, starting in preschool. It's obviously as much about training the parents as the kid, and insists kids behave kindly and respectfully to stay in. We found applying intimidating, especially for a preschooler with far-from-perfect behavior, but the behavioral benefits if our kid doesn't get kicked out could be huge. Math? The math is nice, likely to interest our kid given who we are, but secondary to moral development — learning not to get discouraged by tough problems and, frankly, learning not to be a jerk.
Very excited for this education series. I'm a new teacher recently out of a year-long certification program, and even at my highly-rated teaching school, the amount of time we spent on nuts & bolts/dollars & cents analysis of how schools literally work from school boards to the Department of Ed was woefully small, almost all of it devoted to telling young progressive twentysomethings canned histories about standardized testing and the racial achievement gap that they already knew.
My folks were school admins so I've seen some of how the funding sausage gets made, but I know an awful lot of young teachers who still seem to think that local property taxes are the first and final way that large urban districts get money, while the Dept of Ed and all its billions winked out of existence as soon as Betsy DeVos wasn't around to yell about.
I think it's very premature to call Common Core a failure -- it seems like it's still very young and lots of teachers and students and parents are still getting used to it. My kids were in middle school and high school when it was introduced so they didn't get many of the benefits, but it seemed to me to be a deeper way of teaching than what I learned in K-12. It was very much trying to get kids to understand the concepts of why things work the way they do in math, and pushed more critical thinking and perspective shifting in reading comprehension. It was destined to be a rocky roll out, but I hope we don't abandon the curriculum.
Really interesting and informative, as usual. Freddie- let’s say a billionaire came to you and said he wanted to spend heavily on education, with a focus on the most disadvantaged students, what would you recommend that he do?
Basic physical infrastructure. A really disturbing number of schools have inconsistent HVAC, electrical and power delivery, ventilation, lighting.... And because of the quirks of supplemental funding, there are a lot of public schools out there with state-of-the-art computer classrooms but which are filled with asbestos and black mold etc. You've got to start at the beginning and assure the students are in safe and healthy environments.
So these are the start of the posts that have finally got me to subscribe Freddie. Sorry for taking so long to get around to it. That and I really appreciate the weekly digest posts you put at the end of the week and linking to interview and podcasts that you have participated in. Substacks and podcasts are pretty much 90% of my go-to for information nowadays.
To give some background I was a budget analyst for the State of Maryland during the 2010s and had Education under my purview at some point. Maryland during differing years led the nation in things like graduation rates and students taking A.P. classes. What was interesting about Maryland, is that it has a city like Baltimore under its purview, where poverty is abound in certain districts which included classrooms that didn't have enough textbooks for students or even heating that worked properly during winter. It is also the state with Bethesda, whose students were among the wealthiest in the nation and whose parents worked mostly for the US Government, foreign embassies and students whose parents were researchers and doctors at NIH. Their schools had enough textbooks and heat in winter.
In Baltimore, I remember local administration could get pretty bad with corruption. Look at how many Baltimore mayors and city leaders are currently in jail, went to jail or are under investigation in the past decades. That is not a positive view for local administration of education funds or outcomes to help students. In my mind at the time, I was definitely for a national standards and more control of education from DOE partly because of this... and also the Flying Spaghetti Monster mania happening in the mid 2000s because some local board Kansas was trying to teach creationism in schools. So I applauded having standards like Common Core at the time. After reading Freddie and other education like-minded folks, I have changed my mind on this.
I remember Common Core being debated at this time in Maryland. So Common Core from what I remember during the monthly State Board meetings and legislative hearings...didn't really get a robust push back in any real sort of way. Most of the grumbling from citizens during public discussion came from "Crank Tea-party types" that were easily dismissed by the technocratic elites heading the State Board. There was also some grumbling from teachers that all they were doing was wasting lots of time teaching students to teach the test.
Which turned out to be true, lots of school administration folks pushed heavily for teachers to spend weeks teaching students how to succeed on the state tests. Why this was? Well, school funding was tied to how well schools did on these tests, graduation rates and if students went on to college. Whether students were ready to get on to college or even graduate high school kinda gets pushed to the side of the perverse incentive for school administration folks to get Mo Money.
Also, federal funding from DOE was threatened to not give money to states who didn't adopt these standards. Sort of like how states changed their drinking age to 21 because of pressures of trying to get federal highway funding.
Even with all these pressures from above, I can't really remember a single time someone tried to say that there is no correlation between quality standards and higher student achievement. I can rant about this for a while but, just like Baseball, Education has become quantitatively sexy to those in charge. I fucking hate it and what it has done, but technocrats like their numbers so I do not foresee this changing anytime soon. And these same elites in charge will do everything they can to fudge numbers, lower standards, and push students out of the way for the money. Anyway I'll write later in the week about where I think money for schools does lots of good. School construction funding (GREAT!)
Innovation or any Ed-tech grants (GARBAGE!)
One last thing, I don't know if you have written about this Freddie but Maryland just applauded this year that "The administration is thrilled we can finally state that, as of today, every public high school in Maryland has either an assigned school resource officer or coverage coordinated with local law enforcement. " I'd be happy to see you write about whether having police officers in every school is a good thing.
School Boards deserve a lot of scrutiny. All members aren't there for the kids. Many see school board as a stepping stone to bigger political opportunity.
The variation of recompense is incredible. Many members receive no pay.
The Florida legislature will have a ballot issue about this in 2022.
I'd love to hear an analysis of vouchers. I can see how they would be disruptive to the current system, but it seems in the long term they would fix a lot of the corruption and other problems with control.
It all gets back to my basic point about education writ large: people think private schools teach well because private schools systematically exclude the students who are hardest to educate. If you let those students in, then the advantage disappears. You're making an argument based on the ancillary benefits of schooling, which seems to me to be more supportable than arguments based on improvements to quantitative metrics. But ultimately it's the same old point that educational outcomes are the product of how school populations are assembled.
I'm interested in this topic as well. How do you reconcile this post with your other post about spending money to improve school infrastructure? Private schools seem to do better overall on the infrastructure and amenities sides. Wouldn't students benefit from a shot at a better or different school environment? Even if vouchers fail to raise the bottom end of the achievement scale, what about the potential impact on the middle or high achievers who are less likely to be excluded from private schools?
"Private schools seem to do better overall on the infrastructure and amenities sides"
Private schools spend less per pupil overall, but this is misleading - the vast majority of private schools have no special education, no need for serious disciplinary programs, and no remediation programs. Because, again, what matters is the student body that you've selectively assembled; it's vastly cheaper to educate affluent white kids than the American student body writ large. If we were to adjust for those factors we would surely find that private schools spend more per-pupil on infrastructure than public, so it's no surprise that they have better air conditioning and less mold.
Wherever your kid goes to school, they are still your kid - gifted or bottom of the class or anything in-between. If an individual parent has the resources to send their kid to a different school because they like the optics or the kid will be happier there, fine. But school choice was always premised on the notion of superior quantitative outcomes, and that premise is flatly false. Absent that rationale I can't support moving public money into private hands, because public services are not an ATM https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/public-services-are-not-an-atm
Though I can afford to send my daughters to private school, I have enrolled her in public school. She got into a choice public school via lottery, the only way to enroll there, as there is no constituency that's entitled to send their kids there. Had she not won this lottery, I'd have done everything in my power to get her into another good school in the district, and short of that, into private school.
The public school assigned to my address is one of the lowest performing in the district, with shoddy facilities, in a not safe location, and a revolving door system of teachers and administrators. Going there was not an option we were going to live with.
We got lucky with the lottery into a top tier public school. Had we not, we had other options. I can and will navigate a maze of red tape, layers of website links and conflicting and confusing instructions and deadlines on how to apply to maximize her chances of getting into a school I hand-selected, and if all else failed, to pay private school tuition. It bothers me that lower income and less savvy families, who desperately want these options for their kids, are out of luck. I don't even necessarily think vouchers are the answer, and would never extend them to higher income families. But even just making the cluster that's the school selection and application process less of a cluster would help. If I, with 2 advanced degrees and a profession built on advocacy, reading, drafting and interpreting contracts, instructions, and policies, have a whale of time navigating the public school research and enrollment process, I can't imagine what it's like for immigrant parents holding down two full time jobs while trying to learn English. [ok, I'm an immigrant too, but you get my point.] It bothers me that for a large portion of the population there is simply no option but to attend the school they're told to attend.
The public goal is educated children, therefore vouchers are not taking money out of the public system, they're just changing who makes the choice on where/how that money is spent (parents aren't profiting, or only in that their children may be benefiting from a better education). As a taxpayer without a child in the system anymore I am just looking for the best bang for my buck. For other functions like policing and roads there is no analogous entity who I'd trust to make these decisions so of course it has to be done in our traditional democratic way. And large infrastructure spending doesn't seem like a good comparison to educating individual children. I think in this fortunate case of public service delivery there is an obvious entity that would do a great job of resource allocation, the parent. I do agree that there would be a large disruption due to problems like economies of scale, but I bet these would settle out. And probably faster than you'd think.
"therefore vouchers are not taking money out of the public system"
The consensus among public school educators and administrators is that, in practice, this is not true. Of course, some would say that they are not trustworthy on this question.
I think it's worth saying this: most people in the private school world are in fact pretty ambivalent about voucher programs. They would bring in more money, but they would also bring in harder-to-educate students, of precisely the type that many parents are trying to keep away from their own kids. And given that private school teachers on average make less than public, a big influx of a new population of low-income students with worse academic and behavioral metrics doesn't seem like a great idea to them.
Sorry, my writing wasn't clear. I was thinking more about the abstract public goal of education but called it a public "system." Of course the current system as it is constructed would lose money, but the public goal of educating children would be better served, was the argument. I would also suspect that innovation would get a boost and possibly we could come up with better solutions on how to handle the harder to educate and other marginal cases. And vouchers could (should) be means tested.
Do proposals for voucher systems include a mandate that the chosen school *has* to admit the voucher bearing student? If not, I don't see how private schools in a voucher systems would have a harder time teaching students. They can continue to deny enrollment to and expel harder-to-educate/discipline students, just as they do now. What private school parents may not be eager to articulate is their preference to simply keep their kids' school affluent and exclusive.
Even school choice is ultimately just allowing self-selected segregation--by race and by class, and of course, there is tons of overlap. Parents with the means and the will to insist on their top choice simply get it. In our district, one of the zones (each student is assigned to a zone; you rank which schools you want within your zone) contains both the highest performing school in the wealthiest neighborhood with the fanciest facilities and the lowest-performing school with the worst facilities in a high-crime neighborhood. The rich school is 78% white. The poorest school is 83% Black. This is demographic data from 2015-16.
I will be closely following your pieces on education. I am out of my depth on this topic, something I've been shameless about, until I had my daughter. This year she will be entering kindergarten, and I'm terrified because I know so little about education in general, and the public education system in America in particular. I didn't understand anything about even my own education, though my schooling was pretty unfraught, and the k-12 portion wasn't in the US. The whole education machine is a mystery to me. I don't know how any of it operates, from the macro to the micro level. I don't know what works, what doesn't, and who is doing it which way and why, and what topics are perpetually galvanizing. I don't know what forces exert most influence on the system, who operates in good faith, and who's got a narrow axe to grind, and who's downright corrupt. It a classic case of not knowing what I don't know, and imagining that's an endless, overwhelming universe I will never master.
School Boards--some members get paid, many do not. Members of the Los Angeles Board of Education—the second-largest school district in the nation—receive the highest annual salary. Beginning in September 2017, board members with no outside employment were eligible to receive $125,000 per year, and members with outside employment were eligible to receive an annual salary of $50,000....
Was there supposed to be a link for "the profound bipartisan failure of NCLB"? I know very little about this stuff and only read these posts because of the "If Freddie writes something, read it" maxim. But that struck me as interesting. I remember it being a big deal when it was implemented and I know I haven't heard about it in a long time but I don't know anything else about what happened. And that sounds like a really interesting thing if a big, bipartisan initiative belly flopped. I'd love to read more about it.
Big subject but look at it this way: at the height of the war between Obama and congressional Republicans, when nothing was getting passed, GOP leaders and the White House came together to undo NCLB. The chorus against it had grown incredibly loud and was bipartisan. Key to the failures:
1. It called for schools to meet performance standards that were simply never going to be realistic no matter how much time they gave them; as a result of the mass failure to meet this standards, the Obama Dept of Ed had to hand out waivers in mass, to the point where the whole thing was rendered a farce.
2. The law called for permanent year-over-year improvement in some contexts - that is, the 2022-2023 kids had to outperform the 2021-2022 kids, who had to outperform the 2020-2021 kids, etc, in perpetuity. Simply not sustainable.
3. The enforcement mechanism was to cut funding from schools that didn't meet these standards, but people sensibly asked how schools caught in a failure spiral could ever get out if they were being consistently defunded.
4. Parents of means absolutely hated the testing requirements NCLB imposed and the subsequent teach-to-the-test pedagogy that came with them. They were able to make a lot of noise in the national stage and turned the tide against the law among Democrats.
There's more. But in time liberals objected because of the accountability mechanisms and conservatives objected because of the loss of state and local control and there were no positive learning gains to help stem that political tide. So the law was unceremoniously dumped.
In terms of international competitiveness the mediocre performance of US schools is probably at least partially offset by immigration from abroad. The number of native born US students majoring in engineering has been declining for decades. From what I understand the shortfall has been made up by international students. And of course in fields like tech immigrants make up a substantial portion of the work force.
Hey Freddie, a couple small but important corrections: the National guard are an organization controlled by state governors, and are therefore not really the Federal government interfering in local education. That interference initially came from the Supreme Court itself, which is a big part of their whole self-appointed role. Additionally, the Arkansas National Guard kept the Little Rock 9 OUT of the white schools at the order of Governor Orval Faubus. The response which you're misremembering is when Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne AKA the Screaming Eagles in to force the issue, and it was those guys who guarded the black students in their newly desegregated school. You're not totally wrong here because Eisenhower did federalize the National Guard in that instance but it was to take it out of Governor Faubus' hands as a tool to retain segregation. If you want to learn more about it I recommend Carlotta Walls' extremely boring autobiography. She manages to make Democrats blowing up her house with Dynamite seem dull but she's a very clear reporter of the facts.
None of this touches your main point in that paragraph but in a post about local vs federal power distributions it's important to be accurate about who had the power and how it was used.
>"Disturbingly, if you care about a robust democracy with checks and balances established through ideological competition, these organizations are overwhelming drawn from the same political backgrounds: they tend to be billionaire-funded, espouse the use of economic and business principles in schooling, and have a corporate mentality that prefers loose regulation and centralized control."
I think this is a good point, but I'm not convinced democratically accountable groups would be better. Robust democracy with checks and balances established through ideological competition probably leads to a lot of parts of the country having lesson plans about creationism, no?
It's a fair point....
I could be completely wrong here, but my prior is that education boards are more ideologically extreme in places like NYC and SF than the median voter but less extreme in places like the deep south than the median voter.
If people who are disproportionately highly educated and left-leaning join school boards, then this makes sense.
Would love to see you get into what the heck is wrong with places like Rochester, NY. That's my hometown and the RCSD is completely messed up.
Not familiar with Rochester in particular but in many of these struggling local systems you have a) big enough districts for real resources to be available, which means real incentive for corruption but b) not big enough to have the kind of local media that can really investigate said corruption and c) lots of overlapping jurisdiction between state and city, particularly given that in many states the state government can assert control over struggling districts, which further contributes to both too many hands at the wheel but simultaneously too little accountability.
seems to be an A and C combo. Thanks!
Despite our completely different political stances (I’m a small-l libertarian), I agree with your perspective on many issues and am grateful for your education (and other) work. But how is it that the word “union” does not appear anywhere within this post about the balance of power in K-12 education?
In our most recent home, Seattle, the superintendent, parents and the school board were powerless in the face of the teachers union to reopen schools. It was only an ultimatum from the governor that opened schools (2.5 hours, 4 days a week) in mid April. Even now, unions in other nearby cities are hedging about next year. I have never been a fan of public sector unions but now that I see their power and how they wield it, I loathe them.
We are looking for a new home and high on the list of criteria is a place with a toothless or nonexistent teachers union. We will not allow our children’s education to exist at their whim.
I'm honestly confused about this, having read many people making your same point. I am extremely skeptical about the value of public schools in general, but I thought there was general agreement among most other people that they were a critical component of a civil society. We pulled ours out this year and homeschooled rather than sit them in front of screens 6 hours a day.
I honestly feel like a political party that supports paying teachers more while also kneecapping teachers unions would be an electoral juggernaut.
So you wanted the teachers unions to agree to put themselves and their students at risk? Why, when after a few more months, they'd mostly be vaxxed and safe? Right-wingers always say "because kids don't get bad coronavirus." Ok cool, but teachers can, and so can adults, and kids can spread it, so why so angry over a few extra months? Because it became a fun right-wing talking point, I guess.
Yours is an extreme reaction, and not reflective of teachers in general. I'm from a family of teachers, my wife is a teacher, lots of our friends our teachers. Their unions are powerful here in NY. The contingent arguing to keep schools closed out of fear of Covid is vanishingly small and has little influence outside of NYC (and not much there, either). This isn't a "right-wing talking point". People, including teachers, want to get the schools back open and children educated. Remote teaching has not worked. A few extra months is a lot to ask, and most teachers unions are not asking it and don't particularly want it.
I could have made a more temperate post so as not to get distracted by this same-old argument (I'm just still furious about it, mostly on behalf of other people's children--mine are fine). My main question remains: "Where are the teachers unions in a story about the balance of power in K-12?"
"Aren't," but I got your point.
I will point out that many non-union charters NEVER re-opened--not in mid-April, not for some form of hybrid, nothing. So despite what the media would have you believe, it simply is not the case that it was only intransigent anti-science unions keeping students out of classrooms.
To me, the heart of the matter is that regardless of whether classrooms were open or not, most families simply did not feel safe sending their children back. I teach in a unionized charter and we DID attempt to reopen but there just wasn't enough demand from families to justify the enormous logistical challenges involved with safely reopening.
I also think many in the elite media and in public health took for granted that school administrators could be trusted when they agreed to the many new policies and infrastructure required to make school as safe as possible. But there is no way teachers would ever be that naive.
I mean, most of the schools I've worked in didn't have soap or hot water in the bathroom. I've had to provide paper and pens so students have something to work with. That I would simply race back to the classroom because of lofty promises about HEPA filters and shit? Without it all being verified? Lol, no.
"I also think many in the elite media and in public health took for granted that school administrators could be trusted when they agreed to the many new policies and infrastructure required to make school as safe as possible. But there is no way teachers would ever be that naive."
I worked (in an extracurricular cram school for talented-but-underserved kids via a Gear Up grant) in a metropolitan school system famous for its "crazy union" and now know several people in that union. The union's shenanigans become less crazy when teachers explain the limits the administrators put on the union, while the administrators themselves feel free exert arbitrary, unresponsive control. I'm generally suspicious of public-sector unions, but I can't blame teachers for responding in the only ways the administrators permit their union to respond.
One incident I saw a teacher go through, a miniature disaster too small to provoke a union response but crushing nonetheless to those going through it, made me realize I don't have the fortitude to be a public school teacher. When the union does get involved, the charades the administrators expect the teachers' union to perform for them — "We want this but we're not allowed to ask for this, so we have to ask for that, when we don't want that, in hopes we can turn that into this" — boggle my mind.
I agree. It varies by locality, of course, but in many cities, teacher's unions have a huge amount of influence. Elected school boards just increase their influence, since unions have money and ground troops to devote to these tiny, low-turnout elections that no one else cares about.
I'm more sympathetic to teacher's unions on some issues, including the pandemic. But I admit that my view has also soured over time. I used to join picket lines to support the local teacher's union, back when I had nothing at stake -- I just supported them as a lefty fan of organized labor.
Then I worked in public education for a couple of years. Now, my views are a lot more mixed. I still support the unions on many issues, but they fight for their workers like any other union, sometimes at the expense of students. Management wasn't any better, don't get me wrong. I left feeling like nobody had students' interests at heart.
"A more radical proposal might include assigning school board seats to people who opt-in to a lottery which chooses the board. Provisions could be made to ensure that the composition of the lottery is reasonably representative of the appropriate municipality. These board members could be strictly term limited to a single term of two or four years. It might seem dramatic to assign seats of such importance randomly, but then again this is precisely what we do for juries, which is rightly seen as a sacred and important duty."
I've had family (misguidedly, IMO) run against the local caucus in school board elections. Predictably, they got nowhere — worse than nowhere, in a sense, since the caucus ran a moderately-successful rumor campaign damaging their and their loved ones' reputations. You've mentioned charter-school lotteries leave room for shenanigans. How would school-board lotteries avoid shenanigans in lotteries? My family's experience may not be common (or perhaps it is) but does make it hard to trust that lotteries wouldn't be rigged in favor of local insiders.
I mean, there would probably also be issues, but I don't want to be completely nihilistic. The problem with many charter lotteries are that the schools themselves often run part of, or all of, the lotteries - they are literally held in-house by the very organizations that succeed or fail based on the outcomes of those lotteries! I can see a system run by the municipal government that is more secure. Is anything really safe? No, I suppose not.
Fair. My formative experiences do leave me pretty nihilistic.
And it's only fair for me to admit I'm not inherently bothered by school lotteries being rigged in favor of those more likely to succeed if admitted. Talent may be impossible to manufacture, but it sure is easy to crush, and favoring talented kids with families able to be just supportive enough to keep that talent from being crushed makes sense to me. The evil lies in lying about it, pretending the lotteries aren't weighted in favor of aptitude (including the parents' aptitude) when they are, and telling those who don't make it that it's their fault for failing in a system where "everyone can succeed".
Lotteries are rigged?
Apparently!
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/charter-school-lotteries-are-a-black
Yikes! The lack of transparency of the lottery process does nothing but raise suspicions and I don't see a good reason for it. But there are some factors that can make a school's population not mirror the broader community. For example, my daughter's school (not a charter, but a public "choice" school, whatever that means) holds itself out as academically rigorous, with a traditional teaching style. Parent reviews and feedback, both from parents who gush about the school and those who hate it, confirm the academic rigor and demand at this school. That reputation narrows the applicant pool to those who want to sign up for this kind of torture for their 6 year olds. But it's true that we have no idea how this so-called lottery spits winners out of the applicant pool, and the cheat-incentives Freddie describes are undeniable.
On a happy note, that article taught me a new word that I'm instantly in love with: jamoke.
Right, reputation narrows applicant pool. A rather cultlike after-school program, Russian School of Mathematics, has opened up here, starting in preschool. It's obviously as much about training the parents as the kid, and insists kids behave kindly and respectfully to stay in. We found applying intimidating, especially for a preschooler with far-from-perfect behavior, but the behavioral benefits if our kid doesn't get kicked out could be huge. Math? The math is nice, likely to interest our kid given who we are, but secondary to moral development — learning not to get discouraged by tough problems and, frankly, learning not to be a jerk.
Very excited for this education series. I'm a new teacher recently out of a year-long certification program, and even at my highly-rated teaching school, the amount of time we spent on nuts & bolts/dollars & cents analysis of how schools literally work from school boards to the Department of Ed was woefully small, almost all of it devoted to telling young progressive twentysomethings canned histories about standardized testing and the racial achievement gap that they already knew.
My folks were school admins so I've seen some of how the funding sausage gets made, but I know an awful lot of young teachers who still seem to think that local property taxes are the first and final way that large urban districts get money, while the Dept of Ed and all its billions winked out of existence as soon as Betsy DeVos wasn't around to yell about.
I think it's very premature to call Common Core a failure -- it seems like it's still very young and lots of teachers and students and parents are still getting used to it. My kids were in middle school and high school when it was introduced so they didn't get many of the benefits, but it seemed to me to be a deeper way of teaching than what I learned in K-12. It was very much trying to get kids to understand the concepts of why things work the way they do in math, and pushed more critical thinking and perspective shifting in reading comprehension. It was destined to be a rocky roll out, but I hope we don't abandon the curriculum.
Really interesting and informative, as usual. Freddie- let’s say a billionaire came to you and said he wanted to spend heavily on education, with a focus on the most disadvantaged students, what would you recommend that he do?
Basic physical infrastructure. A really disturbing number of schools have inconsistent HVAC, electrical and power delivery, ventilation, lighting.... And because of the quirks of supplemental funding, there are a lot of public schools out there with state-of-the-art computer classrooms but which are filled with asbestos and black mold etc. You've got to start at the beginning and assure the students are in safe and healthy environments.
So these are the start of the posts that have finally got me to subscribe Freddie. Sorry for taking so long to get around to it. That and I really appreciate the weekly digest posts you put at the end of the week and linking to interview and podcasts that you have participated in. Substacks and podcasts are pretty much 90% of my go-to for information nowadays.
To give some background I was a budget analyst for the State of Maryland during the 2010s and had Education under my purview at some point. Maryland during differing years led the nation in things like graduation rates and students taking A.P. classes. What was interesting about Maryland, is that it has a city like Baltimore under its purview, where poverty is abound in certain districts which included classrooms that didn't have enough textbooks for students or even heating that worked properly during winter. It is also the state with Bethesda, whose students were among the wealthiest in the nation and whose parents worked mostly for the US Government, foreign embassies and students whose parents were researchers and doctors at NIH. Their schools had enough textbooks and heat in winter.
In Baltimore, I remember local administration could get pretty bad with corruption. Look at how many Baltimore mayors and city leaders are currently in jail, went to jail or are under investigation in the past decades. That is not a positive view for local administration of education funds or outcomes to help students. In my mind at the time, I was definitely for a national standards and more control of education from DOE partly because of this... and also the Flying Spaghetti Monster mania happening in the mid 2000s because some local board Kansas was trying to teach creationism in schools. So I applauded having standards like Common Core at the time. After reading Freddie and other education like-minded folks, I have changed my mind on this.
I remember Common Core being debated at this time in Maryland. So Common Core from what I remember during the monthly State Board meetings and legislative hearings...didn't really get a robust push back in any real sort of way. Most of the grumbling from citizens during public discussion came from "Crank Tea-party types" that were easily dismissed by the technocratic elites heading the State Board. There was also some grumbling from teachers that all they were doing was wasting lots of time teaching students to teach the test.
Which turned out to be true, lots of school administration folks pushed heavily for teachers to spend weeks teaching students how to succeed on the state tests. Why this was? Well, school funding was tied to how well schools did on these tests, graduation rates and if students went on to college. Whether students were ready to get on to college or even graduate high school kinda gets pushed to the side of the perverse incentive for school administration folks to get Mo Money.
Also, federal funding from DOE was threatened to not give money to states who didn't adopt these standards. Sort of like how states changed their drinking age to 21 because of pressures of trying to get federal highway funding.
Even with all these pressures from above, I can't really remember a single time someone tried to say that there is no correlation between quality standards and higher student achievement. I can rant about this for a while but, just like Baseball, Education has become quantitatively sexy to those in charge. I fucking hate it and what it has done, but technocrats like their numbers so I do not foresee this changing anytime soon. And these same elites in charge will do everything they can to fudge numbers, lower standards, and push students out of the way for the money. Anyway I'll write later in the week about where I think money for schools does lots of good. School construction funding (GREAT!)
Innovation or any Ed-tech grants (GARBAGE!)
One last thing, I don't know if you have written about this Freddie but Maryland just applauded this year that "The administration is thrilled we can finally state that, as of today, every public high school in Maryland has either an assigned school resource officer or coverage coordinated with local law enforcement. " I'd be happy to see you write about whether having police officers in every school is a good thing.
Have a good Monday!
School Boards deserve a lot of scrutiny. All members aren't there for the kids. Many see school board as a stepping stone to bigger political opportunity.
The variation of recompense is incredible. Many members receive no pay.
The Florida legislature will have a ballot issue about this in 2022.
https://www.wlrn.org/news/2021-03-12/florida-house-panel-targets-school-board-pay
I'd love to hear an analysis of vouchers. I can see how they would be disruptive to the current system, but it seems in the long term they would fix a lot of the corruption and other problems with control.
I can write that up, at some point. The extant research is not encouraging: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20174022/pdf/20174022.pdf
It all gets back to my basic point about education writ large: people think private schools teach well because private schools systematically exclude the students who are hardest to educate. If you let those students in, then the advantage disappears. You're making an argument based on the ancillary benefits of schooling, which seems to me to be more supportable than arguments based on improvements to quantitative metrics. But ultimately it's the same old point that educational outcomes are the product of how school populations are assembled.
I'm interested in this topic as well. How do you reconcile this post with your other post about spending money to improve school infrastructure? Private schools seem to do better overall on the infrastructure and amenities sides. Wouldn't students benefit from a shot at a better or different school environment? Even if vouchers fail to raise the bottom end of the achievement scale, what about the potential impact on the middle or high achievers who are less likely to be excluded from private schools?
"Private schools seem to do better overall on the infrastructure and amenities sides"
Private schools spend less per pupil overall, but this is misleading - the vast majority of private schools have no special education, no need for serious disciplinary programs, and no remediation programs. Because, again, what matters is the student body that you've selectively assembled; it's vastly cheaper to educate affluent white kids than the American student body writ large. If we were to adjust for those factors we would surely find that private schools spend more per-pupil on infrastructure than public, so it's no surprise that they have better air conditioning and less mold.
Wherever your kid goes to school, they are still your kid - gifted or bottom of the class or anything in-between. If an individual parent has the resources to send their kid to a different school because they like the optics or the kid will be happier there, fine. But school choice was always premised on the notion of superior quantitative outcomes, and that premise is flatly false. Absent that rationale I can't support moving public money into private hands, because public services are not an ATM https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/public-services-are-not-an-atm
Though I can afford to send my daughters to private school, I have enrolled her in public school. She got into a choice public school via lottery, the only way to enroll there, as there is no constituency that's entitled to send their kids there. Had she not won this lottery, I'd have done everything in my power to get her into another good school in the district, and short of that, into private school.
The public school assigned to my address is one of the lowest performing in the district, with shoddy facilities, in a not safe location, and a revolving door system of teachers and administrators. Going there was not an option we were going to live with.
We got lucky with the lottery into a top tier public school. Had we not, we had other options. I can and will navigate a maze of red tape, layers of website links and conflicting and confusing instructions and deadlines on how to apply to maximize her chances of getting into a school I hand-selected, and if all else failed, to pay private school tuition. It bothers me that lower income and less savvy families, who desperately want these options for their kids, are out of luck. I don't even necessarily think vouchers are the answer, and would never extend them to higher income families. But even just making the cluster that's the school selection and application process less of a cluster would help. If I, with 2 advanced degrees and a profession built on advocacy, reading, drafting and interpreting contracts, instructions, and policies, have a whale of time navigating the public school research and enrollment process, I can't imagine what it's like for immigrant parents holding down two full time jobs while trying to learn English. [ok, I'm an immigrant too, but you get my point.] It bothers me that for a large portion of the population there is simply no option but to attend the school they're told to attend.
The public goal is educated children, therefore vouchers are not taking money out of the public system, they're just changing who makes the choice on where/how that money is spent (parents aren't profiting, or only in that their children may be benefiting from a better education). As a taxpayer without a child in the system anymore I am just looking for the best bang for my buck. For other functions like policing and roads there is no analogous entity who I'd trust to make these decisions so of course it has to be done in our traditional democratic way. And large infrastructure spending doesn't seem like a good comparison to educating individual children. I think in this fortunate case of public service delivery there is an obvious entity that would do a great job of resource allocation, the parent. I do agree that there would be a large disruption due to problems like economies of scale, but I bet these would settle out. And probably faster than you'd think.
"therefore vouchers are not taking money out of the public system"
The consensus among public school educators and administrators is that, in practice, this is not true. Of course, some would say that they are not trustworthy on this question.
I think it's worth saying this: most people in the private school world are in fact pretty ambivalent about voucher programs. They would bring in more money, but they would also bring in harder-to-educate students, of precisely the type that many parents are trying to keep away from their own kids. And given that private school teachers on average make less than public, a big influx of a new population of low-income students with worse academic and behavioral metrics doesn't seem like a great idea to them.
Sorry, my writing wasn't clear. I was thinking more about the abstract public goal of education but called it a public "system." Of course the current system as it is constructed would lose money, but the public goal of educating children would be better served, was the argument. I would also suspect that innovation would get a boost and possibly we could come up with better solutions on how to handle the harder to educate and other marginal cases. And vouchers could (should) be means tested.
Do proposals for voucher systems include a mandate that the chosen school *has* to admit the voucher bearing student? If not, I don't see how private schools in a voucher systems would have a harder time teaching students. They can continue to deny enrollment to and expel harder-to-educate/discipline students, just as they do now. What private school parents may not be eager to articulate is their preference to simply keep their kids' school affluent and exclusive.
Even school choice is ultimately just allowing self-selected segregation--by race and by class, and of course, there is tons of overlap. Parents with the means and the will to insist on their top choice simply get it. In our district, one of the zones (each student is assigned to a zone; you rank which schools you want within your zone) contains both the highest performing school in the wealthiest neighborhood with the fanciest facilities and the lowest-performing school with the worst facilities in a high-crime neighborhood. The rich school is 78% white. The poorest school is 83% Black. This is demographic data from 2015-16.
I will be closely following your pieces on education. I am out of my depth on this topic, something I've been shameless about, until I had my daughter. This year she will be entering kindergarten, and I'm terrified because I know so little about education in general, and the public education system in America in particular. I didn't understand anything about even my own education, though my schooling was pretty unfraught, and the k-12 portion wasn't in the US. The whole education machine is a mystery to me. I don't know how any of it operates, from the macro to the micro level. I don't know what works, what doesn't, and who is doing it which way and why, and what topics are perpetually galvanizing. I don't know what forces exert most influence on the system, who operates in good faith, and who's got a narrow axe to grind, and who's downright corrupt. It a classic case of not knowing what I don't know, and imagining that's an endless, overwhelming universe I will never master.
School Boards--some members get paid, many do not. Members of the Los Angeles Board of Education—the second-largest school district in the nation—receive the highest annual salary. Beginning in September 2017, board members with no outside employment were eligible to receive $125,000 per year, and members with outside employment were eligible to receive an annual salary of $50,000....
Some are appointed; some are elected.
https://ballotpedia.org/School_board_salaries_in_America%27s_largest_school_districts
Was there supposed to be a link for "the profound bipartisan failure of NCLB"? I know very little about this stuff and only read these posts because of the "If Freddie writes something, read it" maxim. But that struck me as interesting. I remember it being a big deal when it was implemented and I know I haven't heard about it in a long time but I don't know anything else about what happened. And that sounds like a really interesting thing if a big, bipartisan initiative belly flopped. I'd love to read more about it.
Big subject but look at it this way: at the height of the war between Obama and congressional Republicans, when nothing was getting passed, GOP leaders and the White House came together to undo NCLB. The chorus against it had grown incredibly loud and was bipartisan. Key to the failures:
1. It called for schools to meet performance standards that were simply never going to be realistic no matter how much time they gave them; as a result of the mass failure to meet this standards, the Obama Dept of Ed had to hand out waivers in mass, to the point where the whole thing was rendered a farce.
2. The law called for permanent year-over-year improvement in some contexts - that is, the 2022-2023 kids had to outperform the 2021-2022 kids, who had to outperform the 2020-2021 kids, etc, in perpetuity. Simply not sustainable.
3. The enforcement mechanism was to cut funding from schools that didn't meet these standards, but people sensibly asked how schools caught in a failure spiral could ever get out if they were being consistently defunded.
4. Parents of means absolutely hated the testing requirements NCLB imposed and the subsequent teach-to-the-test pedagogy that came with them. They were able to make a lot of noise in the national stage and turned the tide against the law among Democrats.
There's more. But in time liberals objected because of the accountability mechanisms and conservatives objected because of the loss of state and local control and there were no positive learning gains to help stem that political tide. So the law was unceremoniously dumped.
Thank you Freddie! This was very helpful and actually made this all sound more interesting.
In terms of international competitiveness the mediocre performance of US schools is probably at least partially offset by immigration from abroad. The number of native born US students majoring in engineering has been declining for decades. From what I understand the shortfall has been made up by international students. And of course in fields like tech immigrants make up a substantial portion of the work force.
Hey Freddie, a couple small but important corrections: the National guard are an organization controlled by state governors, and are therefore not really the Federal government interfering in local education. That interference initially came from the Supreme Court itself, which is a big part of their whole self-appointed role. Additionally, the Arkansas National Guard kept the Little Rock 9 OUT of the white schools at the order of Governor Orval Faubus. The response which you're misremembering is when Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne AKA the Screaming Eagles in to force the issue, and it was those guys who guarded the black students in their newly desegregated school. You're not totally wrong here because Eisenhower did federalize the National Guard in that instance but it was to take it out of Governor Faubus' hands as a tool to retain segregation. If you want to learn more about it I recommend Carlotta Walls' extremely boring autobiography. She manages to make Democrats blowing up her house with Dynamite seem dull but she's a very clear reporter of the facts.
None of this touches your main point in that paragraph but in a post about local vs federal power distributions it's important to be accurate about who had the power and how it was used.