Is Education Reform Evolving?

Has the education reformster movement evolved over the past forty-ish years? In a recent piece for Education Next, Rick Hess argues that there has been a major shift in the "school improvement" world. I'm not convinced. But Hess is someone I think of as worth taking seriously, so I'm going to go ahead and take a closer look at what he sees, and why I see something else.

Hess's idea is pretty simple: Back in 1983, the focus of education reform was on tweaking the traditional system. A Nation At Risk, says Hess, "was married to an intense faith in the conventional schoolhouse." Nowadays, the focus is on burning down and replacing the public education system via vouchers etc. 

The upshot is that, 40 years on, we’ve exited one era of school improvement defined by the attempt to bolster the “one best system” and entered one notable for attempts to dismantle it.

I don't think so. While the history of modern reformsterism is admittedly complicated, featuring alliances that involve both reformsters using others and others using reformsters, I think there's a pretty clear through line that has always been there.

We can go back to the days before A Nation At Risk and talk about the granddaddy of burn-it-all-down reform, Milton Friedman, who was pretty clear--for a really long time--about A) liking vouchers and B) why he did:

He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

In 1955, Friedman's idea was perfectly positioned for segregationists looking for a way to circumvent Brown v. Board (for a good look at this, read Steve Suitts slim but thorough Overturning Brown). I don't want to argue whether Friedman was a segregationist or not; it's enough that he never explained who the nation could end both public education and segregation. 

But beyond the world of people who didn't like public ed because it spent their tax dollars on or set their children next to Those People's Children, folks mostly liked their public schools. So for people who wanted to take back public schools for God, people who wanted to break open an untapped multi-billion dollar market, and people who shared Friedman's dream of an end to public education and the taxation that supported it, there was one major obstacle-- the public belief that public schools are not only good, but a necessary good for society. 

A Nation At Risk was the first major shot at removing that obstacle. As Anya Kamanetz, who did some digging into the report, reported on the 35th anniversary:

But what I learned in talking to two of the original authors of “A Nation At Risk” was that they never set out to undertake an objective inquiry into the state of the nation’s schools.

Cherry-picked data. Repeatedly debunked conclusions. Produced under a President who had already called for the end of the Department of Education. And a prediction of imminent doom that has never actually come true in forty years. And nothing concrete that would actually point to actionable steps for improvement. While the public was waggling its eyebrows at striking pull quotes like the whole "if another country did this to us it would be an act of war" or the mellifluous "rising tide of mediocrity," actual educators in actual schools were looking at all this and asking, "And you would like us to do.... what, exactly?"

But ANAR launched a modern reformster movement. Kamenetz quotes Mike Petrilli of the very reformy Fordham Institute calling ANAR a "touchstone" and pointing out that it's in the Fordham mission statement. 

The question here, looking at Hess's thesis, is this: was that movement aimed at improving public schools?

I accept that, at every turn in those years (I started teaching in the fall of 1980), there were people who meant well. I believe that there are free market true fans who believe with all their hearts that free market forces and competition would truly improve public education. I believe that there are standards and data cultists who believe that measuring and testing and data crunching would lead us to better schools. I think they are absolutely wrong, but let's skip that for a minute.

But I also have no doubt that, for a huge chunk of the reformster crew, ANAR marks the beginning of a long, patient attempt to move the Overton Window on education, that window through which one views which policies are politically viable. In the 90s, CATO was still singing the Friedman song-- abolish the whole thing. But the window wasn't there yet.

Every wave of ed reform has been used to turn the baseless assertion that "American public education is failing" into conventional wisdom, a thing that people repeat and accept without any critical consideration. And every tap of that "failing American schools" hammer has moved the Overton Window closer to the point where the dissolution of public schools, once an unthinkable "solution," has become more and more thinkable.

No Child Left Behind was premised on the notion that schools were failing and had to be fixed. The standards movement was premised on the notion that schools were failing and had to be fixed. Race to the Top and the Common Core--both based on the notion that schools were failing and had to be fixed. Hess's phrase-- "school improvement"-- was never how the reform movement identified itself.

My colleagues and I watched, first incredulously, then with mounting frustration, realizing that policies like No Child Left Behind's mandate that all students must be scoring above average on the Big Standardized by 2014 were not designed to fix anything, but simply gather more data "proving" that we were failing. There was no help for us in the classroom anywhere in these policies--just threats. Get those scores up, or else. The early part of the millennium saw the activation of so many teachers as they realized that the game had been rigged for them to fail and for public education to pay the price. Meanwhile, all the "or elses" were simply normalizing the idea of public school alternatives. Tap, tap, tap on the Overton Window.

Reformsters made alliance for a while with people interested in social justice, a politically advantageous move in the Obama years, but then an unnecessary one in the Trump era. School choice, tried out in a variety of forms, never really made a convincing case for social justice or equity or better education or more efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and while, again, I'll agree that some people sincerely believed that school choice would serve those goals, they also provided cover for the folks who just wanted to keep tapping away at that window.

When COVID hit and school buildings were shut, folks on the far right sensed an opportunity to smack that window with a sledgehammer. Tap, tap, BAM! Now ed reform barely pretends to be interested in choice as anything other than a way to dismantle public education, top privatize not only the business of providing of education, but the responsibility for it, while using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private, mostly Christian schools. 

I'll say it again--all along this path, there have undoubtedly been reformsters who sincerely believed that their particular brilliant idea would fix public schools. At the same time, many were working on the same old voucher idea by tweaking the branding (since vouchers still weren't politically viable). Maybe call them scholarships, or savings accounts? Maybe we don't need vouchers to get rid of public ed--just  sell other alternatives, like computerized algorithm-driven programs. 

Standing here in 2023, it's pretty easy to see a straight line running from Milton Friedman through A Nation at Risk right up to the current Burn It All Down Moment. When Chris Rufo said "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust," he was simply describing the long march toward Friedman's dream. 

There have always been seams in the various reformy alliances. In the Obama years, social justice types chafed at working with "racists" as free marketeers tired of the touchy feely stuff. Charters brought together people who really believed in charters and people who considered them a half-measure until vouchers could be implemented. Right now, I have a read-between-the-lines tension between the experienced grownups of ed reform and the new burn-it-all-down dudebros taking center stage.

The reform movement has never been a homogenous whole, but instead has married together a variety of interests. The balance between those partnerships is sometimes hard to read-- are Christian nationalists using the choice movement, or is the choice movement using Christian nationalists? Only a few of those interests have ever been in the promise of quality education for all students. And the part of the movement that Hess depicts as a new evolution, a new idea about reform, a new emphasis on replacing public education--that has always always been there. It's not a new idea at all; for many folks it has always been the only idea that matters.