The past week brought quite a bit of news with regard to educational reform. Teachers’ unions are not happy with the proposals coming from the Obama administration and the Department of Education under Secretary Arne Duncan. “Standardized testing, school accountability, performance pay, charter schools — all are integral to President Obama’s $4.35 billion ‘Race to the Top’ grant competition to spur innovation. None is a typical Democratic crowd-pleaser,” the Washington Post reports. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported the results of a study that purports to confirm the superior performance of charter schools. “Critics of charter schools have long argued that any higher test scores were not necessarily attributable to anything the schools were doing, but to the students themselves, on the premise that only the most motivated students and families elected charters. [Prof. Caroline] Hoxby’s study sought to address that argument by comparing students who attend charters directly with similarly motivated students — those who sought to attend charters but were denied a seat through a random lottery. She concluded the charters did have a positive effect.” It’s worth noting that Prof. Hoxby is associated with the right-of-center Hoover Institution; her research findings frequently have been cited by supporters of charter schools.
The intent here is not to make a case for or against “Race to the Top” or charter schools. There might be something to be said for all such measures, but my view would be that no single one of them is a panacea. Instead, I would simply make the observation that we continue to lack consensus about what to do with schools. This week’s news provides as good a pretext as any for some general observations on the matter.
Progressives and representatives of unions that represent public-school teachers will not be happy with my views. Before going any further, it ought to be acknowledged that public school teachers, to say the least, feel harried and underappreciated. They would hold that they are being asked to carry out a difficult task with limited funds and less-than-optimal working conditions.
There is no reason not to concede as much. However, my view would be that public-school teachers, or at least those who would speak for them, have put themselves too far out on a limb. There is too great of a gap between their preferences on the one hand, and those of the parents of school-age children and the public in general on the other. As long as this situation continues, we can expect the electorate to balk at providing school funding at the level that public-school teachers and their representatives would like, and that programs that teachers find onerous, such as “Race to the Top” and No Child Left Behind, will win public acquiescence.
It’s worth noting that, when governments began providing what we have come to call “public education,” the proximate cause was that parents were beginning to go to work outside the home, in factories, rather than engaging in economic production within the household. From what I understand, government provision of education began in France, at the time that the Industrial Revolution was taking hold in that country. (For the time being I’m not going to provide an academic-style apparatus of footnotes and bibliography for these assertions.) Before that, people who received any education at all, got it in the form of something like what we would now call “homeschooling.” It’s also noteworthy that, in this earliest form of public education, the government attempted to accommodate the religious preferences of the parents — an area which, of course, remains a sore spot in the 21st-century United States.
Elementary and secondary educators would like enhanced recognition in the form of higher stature as a profession. Like everyone else, they would also like higher salaries. For better or worse, nevertheless, education — or at least public education — also has its detractors, some of whom sometimes belittle schooling as glorified babysitting. I wouldn’t say such a thing, but there is at least a grain of truth in the belittlement, in that elementary and secondary education is not quite like other professions; it represents something of a “farming out” of child-rearing. We have tried to professionalize something that would have been done more or less exclusively by parents, until relatively recently in human history. Since we don’t require professional accreditation for someone to become a parent, this means that elementary and secondary education differ in a crucial aspect from professions like law or medicine — and this difference may continue to be a hindrance to efforts to enhance the professional status of elementary and secondary educators.
The school system thus represents a sort of sharing of responsibility for child-rearing between teachers and parents. A major problem is that this is being carried out under conditions with which many parents are not happy. Some parents might go so far as to say that the schools are being run over their dead bodies, as it were.
A major component of parental unhappiness is, of course, the race issue. In some cases, school systems largely have been abandoned by relatively affluent suburban parents — who generally, although certainly not always, are white parents. A good deal of cynicism is directed at liberal politicians like Barack Obama, who enroll their children in institutions like Sidwell Friends School — although it should be noted in fairness that he is hardly the first such politician to have done such a thing. Affluent suburban parents will always flee what they perceive to be the trappings of a ghetto environment, unless you absolutely prohibit them from so fleeing. Experience has shown that they can accept a limited degree of integration, but will flee once a “tipping point” is reached. Is this an overreaction? I don’t know whether I could tell people such thing with a straight face in each and every case. Concerns range from physical safety to the difficulties parents perceive with delivering what we would call a “college preparatory” education in an integrated environment.
All of this is not to say that we should not understand and sympathize with what integrationists were trying to accomplish. If schools are permitted to vary in racial and socioeconomic composition, the schools in the more affluent neighborhoods will be viewed as more desirable working environments. They will garner more experienced teachers, and political considerations may dictate that they will be more lavishly funded. Outside these neighborhoods, students may be shortchanged. If each school is required to have the same racial and socioeconomic composition, all students can be put on the same footing.
Therefore, we should not belittle what integration and busing plans were intended to accomplish. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of decades of “white flight,” the question has to be raised whether the integration policies were pushed to a point at which they became untenable. It has to be admitted that the matter is somewhat akin to insulating the house; seal the windows, and the draft will come in under the door sill. Similarly, some students may be shortchanged under a system of “neighborhood schools” — but extensive integration plans may only provoke “white flight.”
Just as conservative parents balk at sending their children into what they perceive to be a hostile and dangerous sociocultural environment, so do religiously devout parents desire to give their children their religious education along with their general education. To decline to permit this, and to mandate that education be secular, creates a situation in which government comes down on the side of treating religion as not especially important — or so this is perceived by religiously devout parents. I am afraid that this is going to be a ’sore spot” as long as the educational status quo persists. Religiously devout parents perceived pressure to make them secular — whereas government ought not to be trying to make people secular, any more than it ought to be trying to make them religious. One solution would be to permit the establishment of autonomously operated schools, representing various religious and secular traditions, and then to let parents choose from among them.
That would be tantamount to a “voucher plan” — but public-school teachers and their spokespersons traditionally have been hostile to such a thing. They think it would be tantamount to the destruction of the public schools — although it might be more accurate to say that it would break down the distinction between public and private schools. After all, a “voucher” simply means a stipend to be used for school tuition — and the cash value of the voucher would be supplied from public funds.
A few years ago, the Supreme Court issued a decision that allowed experimental voucher plans to continue to operate, albeit under extensive limitations and restrictions. Contrary to some expectations, however, voucher plans have not proven wildly popular and have not been adopted widely. Taxpayers appear apprehensive; many of them may have been scared off by apprehensions about what sort of schools extreme religious conservatives might operate if they were allowed to participate in such a plan. Religious conservatives themselves have been apprehensive because of their fears about what strings might be attached in the form of regulations and restrictions that would come with participation in a government-sponsored and financed voucher plan. They do not want any sort of ground rules — and for such a thing to be a serious proposition, ground rules there would have to be. One such ground rule would be that participating schools could not be exclusive with regard to the students they would admit. I would also stipulate that any religious instruction would have to be optional. Furthermore, schools that do not desire to participate should not be required to; they should be allowed to continue to operate on the same footing on which private schools operate now.
A couple of decades ago, I might have tried to rattle off for you a five-point plan of some kind to put all schools on a voucher-plan footing. Such a thing would frighten public-school teachers and others, but if it does frighten you, don’t worry — because I do not anticipate that such a thing could possibly come to fruition until well after our lifetimes. There is too much of a gap between secularists and the religiously devout, and that gap will have to be closed considerably before such a change can become a realistic possibility. For instance, regarding instruction in the sciences, a wise approach would be to look at how evolutionary theory could be understood as compatible with religious teachings. Of course, there are many who do not want to do this — they insist that it be taught that the world is no more than a few thousand years old. Taxpayers cannot be expected to subsidize such a thing. It amounts to a sort of secession from the wider world. Of course, the devout do not desire to become “worldly” — but their judgment about where and how to draw the line may fairly be questioned in many cases.
I still think that there would be benefits to be realized from such an arrangement, if it could ever come about. It could provide for more of a living-and-let-live arrangement between citizens of different worldviews, and could create an environment more supportive of governmental support for education; if you think education needs to be better funded, just increase the value of the voucher. However, both the religiously devout and those of a more secular bent would have to accept that education is an area in which different people want to do things differently. Not every school would conform to the preferences of either a “religious-right” activist or a progressive teachers ‘-union representative.