I know there's not a great deal of overlap between Robert Pondiscio's audience and mine, but this one is worth reading for a non-raving example of how the issues look from the other side.
Pondiscio's "The Last Days of Public School" appeared in The American Enterprise, the glossier, more magaziney outlet for the American Enterprise Institute, and you may not find it encouraging, but it is a fairly sober look at where we are.
The hook he hangs the piece on is the idea of "peak public school," the zenith of the public education, arguing that "A school choice revolution is rapidly reshaping how public education is organized, funded, and delivered in America." Pondiscio doesn't spend time analyzing the good or bad of that transformation, just the general shape and possible dangers of it.
Some of his observations, such as the fact this revolution "has spurred surprisingly little public discussion" are observations I very much agree with. I might argue that the lack of discussion has been caused in no small part by choicers who very much wanted to stay low and avoid such discussion, but it has always frustrated the hell out of me that we are changing some fundamental assumptions about what the nation's education system is supposed to be and do without really talking about it but instead acting as if we're just getting a new design on slipcovers instead of replacing the couch with a bar stool.
Pondiscio is not soft-pedaling the "revolution"
For generations, America’s K–12 public schools have been largely immune from the disruptive forces that have roiled retail, travel, entertainment, health care, and many other sectors of the economy and culture, but the reckoning has finally come. Public education is on the verge of an unprecedented crack-up. In fact, it’s already underway.
We may argue the scope and size of this crack-up, and I don't love the word "reckoning" here, as if public schools are at last paying for their sins. But it gets us to this:
The reckoning has arrived. What comes next, and the social and cultural cost of “peak public school,” is a question that demands serious consideration.
Pondiscio provides a short, pointed history of school choice in fewer sentences than I would need to summarize it. He identifies the final straw as Covid and culture wars, and here I will disagree with him. These aren't just crises that happened, but crises that were deliberately harnessed and amplified by choicers who routinely repeated the "parents saw school on Zoom and were alarmed" narrative, but stayed silent when polls showed that parents were largely satisfied with how their local schools handled Covid.
The list of other crises is debatable as well: "historic declines in student achievement, chronic absenteeism, discipline crises, and plummeting teacher morale." Sort of, in some places, yes, and yes. Of course, we may never know how the NAEP story ends, now that Trusk has fired all the data people.
Pondiscio's culture war account provides an interesting point of view. In his telling, the uneasy alliance of left and right started to crumble when "education reform’s dominant progressive wing began adopting the arguments and slogans of the social justice left to explain away the movement’s failure to close achievement gaps between black and white students." This, he suggests, is when the culture was came for the reform movement,
I would quibble with bits of that; from out here in the cheap seats, none of the "progressive" wing of reform ever looked particularly progressive (e.g. Democrats for Education Reform, specifically designed to "look" leftish). And I've never liked the term "culture war" with its suggestion that both sides are on the attack, when I see attacking mostly coming from one side only (spoiler alert: it's the side that employs Chris Rufo specifically to find ways to attack opponents). Was the pursuit of "equity" some sort of attack? That said, I've heard before of conservative reformsters stung by accusations from their supposed allies.
But the next graph sure hits the nail-
Freed from having to make nice with their progressive colleagues, education reform conservatives went all-in on school choice and on the attack against “woke” public schools. A 2021 AEI Conservative Education Reform Network report by Jay Greene and James Paul noted that a significant number of all school choice bills passed in statehouses did so without any Democratic support. A follow-up Heritage Foundation report functionally served the education reform left with divorce papers. The pair argued that private school choice would be attractive to conservative parents concerned about teacher activism and public schools’ embrace of a social justice agenda. They concluded, “It is time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war.”
And as Pondiscio points out, that has worked out well for them. He does fail to note one important point--that public support isn't all that deep, and that every single one of the choice movements victories has been achieved by legislators acting without, or even in spite of, public input.
From there Pondiscio moves on to rewards and risks. We disagree on the rewards, but I appreciater his clear-eyed view of the risks.
If, as seems inevitable, more Americans adopt a “choose your own adventure” style of educating their children, it could exacerbate the gaps between educational haves and have-nots and lead to an even further degradation of social cohesion.
Absolutely. No "could" about it. Because we aren't talking about a school choice movement, but a taxpayer-funded, free market school choice system, a distinction that has gone unquestioned even though neither taxpayer funding nor the free market are needed to implement school choice. But basing school choice on an educational marketplace, we are absolutely guaranteed gaps between tiers based on financial resources (see also: every market good in the country, from cars to groceries).
Pondiscio is correct in pointing out, "While public schools have largely failed to be the 'great equalizer of the conditions of men' Mann envisioned, they have at least aspired to provide a shared foundation of civic knowledge and literacy." And also this-- "Schools transmit not just knowledge but shared values, norms, and narratives." Cato Institute in particular has argued the presence of different and conflicting values in public school families is a reason to promote school choice, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how raising students in separate ideological bubbles will bear civic benefit-- especially when some bubbles are the Mercedes Benz of bubbles and others are the used Kia.
As Pondiscio notes, we are sliding into a system in which schools have "few common guardrail." I think it's more accurate to say that some schools (public) have guardrails and others (private and charters) have none. Pondiscio has hopes that choice will allow some students to escape the low-achieving schools, though he acknowledges that leaves even more kneecapped schools and students behind. And the choice system we're growing isn't even particularly well-suited for such "rescues" because 1) quality private school costs are prohibitive and 2) choice laws have been written to privilege the private schools' ability to exclude anyone for any reason.
Also, school choice does not guarantee better schools—only different ones. The same market forces that produce elite private schools could also create a “long tail” of low-quality options.
Exactly. We're already seeing it.
Pondiscio gives an on-point look in the rear-view mirror.
In retrospect, the pandemic could not have come at a worse time for traditional public schools. Decades of expensive and intensive efforts to improve public education outcomes at scale have been disappointing and dispiriting. The education reform movement of the past several decades, which began with the youthful, can-do optimism of Teach For America and high-flying urban charter schools, morphed into a technocratic regime of standards, testing, and accountability that proved not just ineffective but deeply unpopular with parents and teachers alike. Even before pandemic-driven “learning loss,” long-term trends in student achievement didn’t match the effort or expenditure devoted to improving student outcomes and closing the achievement gap.
I don't think he'd say it this way, but I will-- the education reformster movement was an expensive bust that wasted money and time, degraded the teaching profession (Teach for America was not so much optimistic and hubristically disconnected from reality), and promoted a fanatical focus on hitting the wrong target-- test scores. And in the process, reformsters (some inadvertently and some absolutely on purpose) eroded public trust and faith in the institution of public schools.
Pondiscio allows that traditional zip-code public default mode education "is unlikely to disappear entirely," but his argument is that "its influence and dominance can only wane."
Have we seen the peak? We do tend to forget that there was a long slow growth, that people who try to call back some golden age of US education are fantasizing. Any trip into the even-barely-long-ago past takes us to a day when fewer Americans finished school, those that did learned less, and the promise of a good education for everyone was only barely acknowledged. We have done great things with our public system, and we have always had room to improve.
The pandemic pause gave us a chance to recalibrate the system and build back better, and we pretty much let that slip through our fingers. Now we've got a system that has been kicked around a bit by reformsters, by choicers, and by opportunistic culture panic grifters.
Our huge gaps remain in education, mostly between the haves and the have-nots, as well as that great undiscussed divide between rural and urban. Rural communities have always been on the short end of the choice shtick because places like my county, with only a couple thousand students K-12, don't present much of a market opportunity-- and as the baby bust moves through the next decade or so, that will only get worse. Because choice in this country has been tied to free market forces, it will only ever be significant in high-population areas. I'll also go ahead and predict that at some point, taxpayers who have become convinced by the rhetoric that paints school not as a public good, but as a commodity sold to parents-- those folks will lead the charge to cut voucher support and leave even less money in a system that already favors the wealthy. This to me is one of the ironies of school choice US style-- it is perfectly constructed to reinforce and even magnify every wealth-related ill that the public system already suffers from, but without any systemic push to do better.
So things will look different, somehow. Perhaps it will look like a multi-tier system with fancy campuses filled with rich resources for children of the elite, and bare-minimum training boxes for future meat widgets. It almost certainly will look different depending on which state you live in; clearly we already have some states determined to dismantle the public system (hey there, Florida) and some that aim to preserve and support it. Or maybe we'll reach a point where pressure builds to put guardrails on choice schools, leading them to look more and more like the public schools they meant to replace.
But I'll repeat that there is no going back to some golden age; there never was. If I had a magic wand, there are some developments of the last few decades that I'd erase, but there isn't, and I can't, and if there's one thing I've learned in life, you can only move forward from where you are, not from where you wish you were.
What I hope the very most, the brink that we are teetering on that I hope we can step back from is this--
Let's not agree to a society in which education is a private commodity, and procuring a good one for the child is the responsibility of the parent and the parent alone. Let's not agree to a society in which we have no collective obligation, investment, or responsibility for making sure that every child has a chance to learn as much and become as much as they can. Let's not wash our hands of them and say, collectively, "This child's future is not our problem, parents. This is on you." If that day comes, public school as we understand it will be gone.
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