Reihan Salam is a very popular guy with other professional political writers, so I am risking opprobrium in criticizing a piece he wrote about education. But it needs to be said: this is an awful piece that marries broad ignorance about its subject matter to the condescending Slate house style.
Salam:
Say you were given $26,000 to educate a young kid for a year. Do you think you could put that money to good use? I do.
In most of the country, there are quite good private schools that would charge you substantially less for a year’s tuition, leaving you with plenty of extra money for field trips, academic enrichment programs, summer camp. Tuition at the average Catholic elementary school, for example, is $3,673, and it is $9,622 for a freshman in high school. To be sure, tuition tends to be higher at nonsectarian schools, but the average is nowhere near $26,000. There are rarefied schools in America’s big cities and boarding schools where tuition is substantially higher than $26,000, but that largely reflects the fact that those schools long to be highly exclusive status symbols.
Let’s leave aside this crazy notion that you’d just spend your $26,000 on private school tuition and a few extras for the kid in question. That’s too easy.
Now it happens that there is no such thing as private school pedagogy that’s distinct from public school pedagogy. Private school teachers often attend the same college programs as public school teachers, teach from the same collection of textbooks, give the same sort of tests. They are often exempt from the manic standardized testing that public school teachers have to participate in, freeing up class time, so there’s that, I guess. But it’s not like there’s some secret lesson plans that get passed around only between private schools. And here’s another dirty secret: there frequently isn’t a big difference in the day-to-day administrations of private schools, either. Oh, you can fire a teacher easier in your average private school. But there’s absolutely no reputable evidence to suggest that this is why private schools seem to have better educational outcomes than public schools. There is, on the other hand, an argument that has been supported by decades of responsible studies from thousands of responsible researchers: student demographics are more powerful determinants of educational outcomes than teachers or schools. And private schools systematically exclude the hardest-to-educate students, through high tuitions, entrance exams, and opaque selection processes. For these schools, the fact that the hardest-to-educate kids can’t attend is a feature, not a bug.
Public school teachers make more money than private school teachers and enjoy better benefits. Why, then, do so many people of similar skill sets and education to public school teachers choose to teach in private schools, even while many public school systems struggle to find teachers? Because the job is much, much easier. And given that many or most private schools don’t take special education students and exclude or kick out the disciplinary cases that are the most expensive to teach, the job of teaching this population is much, much cheaper. This is not complicated.
Indeed: special education costs may account for 40% of new education expenditures. Does this subject come up in Salam’s piece on education expenditures? Nope!
Source: National Center for Education Statistics
Salam:
Over the course of six years, New Orleans cut the gap in educational performance between its students and students across the state of Louisiana by 70 percent. The share of students attending failing schools fell from 78 percent to 40 percent. All of this happened without a big funding boost. Rather, it was the result of the steady replacement of traditional public schools with innovative public charter schools, which found new ways to do more with less.
Actually, New Orleans cut the gap by becoming richer, whiter, and more highly educated, and in so doing getting on the better side of the three most powerful variables in predicting educational outcomes.
If you really care about public education, calling for more spending is exactly the wrong thing to do. Pouring more money into dysfunctional schools gives incompetent administrators the excuse they need to avoid trimming bureaucratic fat and shedding underutilized facilities and underperforming personnel. It spares them the need to focus on the essentials, or to rethink familiar models. The promise of constant spending increases is what keeps lousy schools lousy. When private businesses keep failing their customers year after year, they eventually go out of business. When public schools do the same, they dupe taxpayers, and the occasional tech billionaire, into forking over more money. If you really, really care about The Children, call for a system in which the most cost-effective schools expand while the least cost-effective schools shrink, and school leaders are given the freedom to figure out what works best for their teachers and their students.
So what do we think, here– is Salam really ignorant of the last several decades of education “reform” efforts, or does he assume his readership is ignorant of that history? Because there may have been a time when you could have married this vague, empty, buzzwordy endorsement of Competitive Values of Private Enterprise as a solution to our education problems, but that time was long, long ago. If there is absolutely any lesson from the education reform movement, it’s that espousing free enterprise pablum doesn’t actually result in better outcomes for students. People have been saying this stuff for thirty years. They have been experimenting with vouchers and charter schools and merit pay and all of the other privatization fever dreams of conservatives for thirty years. Our outcomes have been stagnant. What do you think is more likely? That nobody really got around to try to figure out what works best for teachers and students? (I can see school administrators now– “oh! we should try to figure out what works best for teachers and students! Thanks, Reihan!”) Or that there are structural factors of American society which create very predictable inequalities in educational outcomes around demographic lines?
(Is Slate even pretending to be something other than a conservative site now? What percentage of their work arrives at straightforwardly conservative conclusions? 75%? 80%?)
Minus his last bit of nonsense, this is actually a very round about way of getting to the idea that the money should be spent directly on families in order to try and assuage achievement discrepancies, rather than simply pushing it through schools and waiting for the magic to happen.
There’s something to that. If you just gave the parents the money in the form of a bigger universal income and told them they had to have their kid enrolled in some school (any school on, say, a list of approved primary or secondary schools), maybe that would be better.
I’m not sure it would survive, of course. I think the psychology of political support for public education is different when it’s for schools anyone can theoretically attend in their neighborhood, versus just giving people voucher money. I remember the big reason my conservative Republican relatives here in Utah voted against a voucher referendum a couple years back was because they didn’t like the idea of paying for someone else’s private school.
I do think there is something to the idea that closing and re-opening schools can have a positive effect. Schools aren’t just building where people do stuff – they pick up their own history, their own dysfunctional norms and rules and haunts, and so forth.
Closing and reopening a school is pointless if you still have the same population of students. The problem is that administrators and bureaucrats have all the power and the teachers, who interact with the students on a daily basis, are largely denied agency. If Reihan really wants teachers to be free to do what’s best for students, he should advocate reducing the amount and power of administrators, and reducing the scope of the regulations that require excessive, time-wasting testing and absurd expenditures on special education students, many of whom have wealthy parents who get them classified so they can get extra time on the SAT. It’s way easier to just spout the Free Market Gospel than consider structural factors, though.
Thanks for this. Well-expressed, righteous, research-supported anger is a rarity online.
Great post. Here in California the API is known as the Affluent Parent Index.
Back when schools in the state were first ranked by student performance, the L.A. Times did an article on the highest-ranking and lowest-ranking elementary schools. The highest-ranking one was a school in wealthy Palo Alto, whose students were the children of Stanford professors. The lowest-ranking school was in a poverty-stricken corner of the Imperial Valley, where students were the children of migrant farm workers. The principal of the lowest-ranking school said that when she got the news, she put her head on her desk and wept. A faculty member at the Palo Alto school had the grace to say that if the schools swapped teachers, student scores would remain the same. In reality, I believe the scores at the Imperial Valley school would have gone down.