Ontario Education
A recent Atlantic article extols the success of public education in Ontario, Canada (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/what-america-can-learn-from-ontarios-education-success/256654/). As many of the commentators on this article noted, this should mean that the U.S. could do the same with its own state-level programs. Canada has no federal education program; all public education is funded and run by the individual provinces. But there are significant differences between provinces and states.
The first is that far fewer residents of the provinces move to other provinces than we do in the states. The figures are that about 15% of the residents of a province were born in another province, while about 40% of the residents of an American state were born in another state. That is almost three times as many.
The provinces simply have a stronger "identity" than our states do. This is partly because there are far fewer or them, but also because they have a definite culture of their own. Of course Quebec is different, but so is Manitoba. They even have their own political parties that are different from the national parties, and their own somewhat odd forms of government. Are there any state governors who are not Democrat or Republican?
This identity and stability mean that an educational system run by a province has a much greater chance of actually benefiting the public who are paying for it than one run by a state. In the state, 40% of your graduates are going to move away, but only 15% in a province. This makes a difference in how much you want to spend on education, or simply how concerned you are about this problem.
In the article it was noted that the whole reform process started when the voters elected a government that was committed to long-term educational success. Has this ever happened in a state? Some governors have worked hard on education for a few years, and made some progress, but never over a long term. Do any state politicians ever run on an education platform?
The reality, I think, is that we don't in fact want to spend much effort on improving our particular state's education program, or anything else about the state. We know we may not live there all that long and have no real commitment to it. We are committed to American education, not New Jersey's.
In the comments after the article it was lamented that Canadians take education more seriously than Americans. Perhaps this is true, but what can we do about this? Not much. What we can do something about is our state system of education. It cannot work, ever, unless we all go back to spending our lives in one state, and that is not going to happen. The only serious solution is a national education system.
P. Dodington
Problems with Merit Pay for Teachers
In my years of teaching I have seen proposals for merit pay come and go. It is always tempting to suppose that the intensity and vigor of the business world can somehow be transferred to public education. And it seems quite logical to try to base merit pay rewards on what is, after all, the point of the whole process: the achievement of the students. What could be more reasonable than to judge the effectiveness of teachers by looking at the test scores of their students?
Yet there are very good reasons why such proposals are rarely, if ever, adopted. One is that the “product” in this case is not some new item for our shelves, or a better way of making something, but a child. Children are not things, or ideas, or a form of wealth; they are humans, like us, who can be harmed as well as helped by our actions. Once you take the possibility of harming the child into account, you have to let go of the idea of merit pay in education.
Why is it, after all, that private schools, with all their freedom to pay their teachers anything they wish, with no interference from unions or state regulators, won’t touch merit pay? Isn’t it because parents aren’t paying a small fortune so that their children can be, in essence, used by the teachers for their own personal gain? Who is going to get these merit pay rewards? Not the fun-loving math teacher who puts on plays using math symbols. Won’t it be the most cynical, self-centered teacher who, like some character out of “Glengarry/Glen Ross”, knows just how to manipulate the process for his own gain? Is this who we want for our child’s teacher? What, in the most general sense, is he teaching them?
The reality is that we don’t just want our children to get good grades. We want something much more complicated for them. We want them to grow up, and learn how to love, and work, and find themselves. Would we ever hire a Little League coach and pay him according to the success of the team? Or even a high school coach? (Yes, we pay coaches of professional teams according to their wins, but that’s because they are working with adults, not children.) We want something much less definable from these people; something that has to do with their overall relationship to our children. To pay them for anything else would be dangerous to the child. Would you pay a babysitter by how quickly she got the kids to sleep? Not a good idea. The risk that merit pay might actually harm the children makes it a non-starter for schools.
Another reason merit pay doesn’t make sense is that public schools are not businesses; they are public programs. As such they are supported by the general public, not an individual who is in need of a product or service. If you go to the cleaner and he does a bad job, fine, you don’t pay him. He is in this business to make money, so when he fails at it, it is reasonable to withhold that money. But public programs are not set up to make money. They are trying to provide a public service, such as safety, garbage pick-up, transportation, or education, that can be best accomplished through collective action. The whole point of the public sector is that it works at things that are not easily bought by individuals, such as safe streets, or an educated work force. It doesn’t make sense, then, to treat it like a private business.
The proponents of merit pay are always talking about how the schools need to be more like a company, where productivity and initiative are rewarded. A more apt comparison, though, would be with the other public programs already in place, such as the police, firemen, public health nurses, etc. Do any of these use merit pay? Should we pay a police officer according to the number of tickets he writes, or criminals he catches? Or a fireman by the number of fires he puts out? And if we did, what would be the result? I can hear an old police sergeant telling his colleagues, “You know, the wrong guys always get that thing.”
They are the wrong guys because they are not working for the goals that the program was set up to accomplish: the community betterment that is at the core of any public program. We pay firemen and policemen a flat rate because we don’t want them worrying about their own pay and their own benefit. That’s not the job. The job is to solve some complex community problems that, by definition, cannot be solved through the private sector. The last thing we want is to encourage them to act like private businessmen, focused on their own gain, not the community’s.
The real question, then, is why do these merit pay proposals keep coming up in public education but not in other public programs. The answer is because public education is a broken system in this country, and so draws to itself all sorts of outlandish solutions simply because nothing else seems to work. What makes it broken is, in my view, the decentralized, state-centered nature of it, but that is a discussion for another time. For now we just have to agree that merit pay will work neither in education in general, nor in public programs in general, and so has no place in the public schools.
Peter Dodington
The Robins Build a School
I heard this story from a homeless man I often see wandering in the woods of Inwood Hill Park, in northern Manhattan.
Once upon a time the robins were complaining that their young were not learning the skills needed to succeed at adult robin life. Hardly any of them knew, for example, how to intimidate a hawk, or the broken wing trick.
“What we need to do,” said Robin Redbreast, “is build a school. And let’s make it open to all, regardless of their wealth or background, so our whole flock will benefit when all the young become better and more productive robins.”
“But no outsiders,” said Cock Robin, who had been tweeting his friends and just joined the conversation. “The school should be only for the children of our own local community, those who share our values and ideals. We don’t need any outside interference.”
“Of course,” replied Robin Redbreast, “It will be a public school, but only for the young of our flock. All the funding will be raised from our own local taxes, so we can have total local control. “
And so it was. The school was a success from the start. The young robins learned the knowledge and skills needed for adult life and, most importantly, the attitudes and ideals of the flock. They became productive and civic-minded robins, adding to the wealth and happiness of the whole flock. Everyone was willing to support and improve the school because it was clear that each graduate brought them a significant benefit.
In time, though, the school’s success created its own set of problems. As they became more educated, the young robins realized that they could succeed anywhere in the forest, not just in their own flock. The opportunities and the pleasures of the world outside drew them away more and more. Eventually most of the young were choosing to live elsewhere as adults.
“And why, then, are we paying to make this school any better,” Cock Robin wanted to know, “when most of the graduates go off to benefit other flocks in other parts of the forest? The better our school gets, the more we lose when they migrate off to other flocks. It’s true that we get graduates back from these other areas, but by definition they are only of average ability, since they come randomly from a variety of places. It only makes sense, then, to just support the school up to that average level. We’re wasting our money if we try to make it really good, better than the others."
“But the school does help our children,” said Round Robin, the parent of two small robins. “I want to do everything I can to make it the best possible place of learning. We all need to pull together to help our children.”
“That’s fine,” continued Cock Robin, “but you get the direct benefit of your children’s education no matter where they go in the forest, so it makes sense for you to make the school better and better. What benefit do I, or any other non-parent taxpayer, get, other than the vague sense of helping my neighbor? I’m willing to put in some money, but I can’t see the point in making the school much better than it already is.”
“Well,” pondered Robin Redbreast, “we could ask the state to help us. Many of our graduates settle in the state and so benefit all the state residents. If we shared our school costs with them, paying state taxes and getting back state aid to education, we could come closer to equalizing the costs and benefits of the schools for all the residents of the state. Then it might make more sense for everyone to support the schools fully and try to make them better.”
And so it was. Soon the amount of school funds received from the state equaled or even surpassed those raised locally. But support for the schools still remained stagnant.
The problem was that the state had its own mobility issues. Fully 39% of its graduates, by the latest robin census, had moved out of the state to somewhere else in the forest. That was enough to make the state taxpayers think twice about fully supporting calls for improvements to the schools.
And perhaps more importantly, the state had no real ideals or goals of its own that would energize the robins to support their state programs. No one believed in the state. The Robins cared about their local communities, and they cared about the whole forest, their nation, but were generally indifferent to the success of their state. In a sense they didn’t actually want their state to become a lot better than other states; they wanted them all to be similar. What was the point, then, of building up the state-run school system, when its final goal, the improvement of the state, was not what they wanted?
So the schools languished; not failing, but not getting any better either. The parents continued their efforts, but these were always undercut by the resistance of the general non-parent population to any increase in expenditures. The partial benefit that the average tax-paying robin received, due to the mobility of the graduates, led to a partial support of the schools and, consequently, a locked-in mediocrity.
Everyone kept grumbling about the sorry state of the schools, but no one seemed to be able to make them better. Finally, Robin Hood, a gym teacher at the local school, called a meeting to address the problem.
“What bothers me most,” he began, “is the waste of effort. We keep coming up with plans and procedures on how to improve the schools themselves, and many of these are excellent. But our problems cannot be solved at the school level. We could make the best school in the forest and still not change the fundamental reasons why our schools end up being mediocre. The problem is in the structure of our school system, not the schools themselves.”
“The only solution is to adopt the school-system structure that every other animal uses, a forest-wide system. Then we will share in all the benefit from the success of our graduates, since few ever leave the forest permanently, and our costs will be likewise shared across the forest. When these costs and benefits are again equalized, it will once again make sense for each of us to fully support the schools, and they will improve.”
“Furthermore, we believe in what the forest stands for: the ideals set down by our Founding Robins. We want to make the forest as strong and good as we can, unlike our feelings about the state. The forest is actually our community in a way that the state can ever be. Structuring the schools around the forest gives us a truly workable rationale for improving the schools.”
“No, no; you can’t do that,” called out Round Robin. “The forest council is too big and too strong. They will force us to educate our children only their own way. What will become of our freedom of choice to teach our young as we see fit? Perhaps the schools are not as good as they could be, but at least they are our own. I’m not going to be told what to do about my own kids. I’ll take my freedom, no matter what the cost.”
“But we wouldn’t be changing our level of freedom at all,” said Robin Hood. “We would still have the local school systems, and could make them as strong as we want, stronger than they are now. It is only the state part that needs to be replaced. Once we put in a system that actually works we will have the flexibility to adapt it to our needs. We could make it as centralized or decentralized as we want.”
The flock was silent. Many respected Robin Hood, and could see that there was a good deal of merit to what he said, but the change seemed so enormous. It would threaten, they thought, the very foundations of their flock. Hadn’t their ancestors come to this forest precisely to avoid this kind of government intervention? His plan might work, but perhaps too well.
But Robin Hood wouldn’t give up. He kept arguing that a forest-wide system was the only way to have a working public school system in a mobile society, and no one could prove him wrong. Eventually the states decided that being in charge of a system that could never work was not what they really wanted, and agreed to give up control of the schools to the forest.
Then the schools finally did improve. The forest council standardized the things that needed to be standardized, like the tests for graduation and the distribution of resources to each school, and also emphasized the humanitarian and community-building ideals of the Founders. They left the actual running of the schools, though, to the local flocks. If anything, there was less big-government interference in the local schools, since everything ran so smoothly.
The parents were pleased and the general public was too. They could now see how their support benefitted them, since the forest could easily tally the success of all the graduates no matter where they settled. The public schools were finally back to where they had started, when everyone could see how they benefitted from school improvements and so it made sense to fully support them. The schools improved, the young robins learned more, and in time the whole flock became more civilized, productive, and happy.
After all this the robins were tired but content. They had fixed a problem no one thought was solvable. They decided that their next meeting would be on medical care.
Peter Dodington
Aug. 30, 2011
Better College Admissions Tests
In most of the world, the way you get into college is to pass a test on what you have learned in high school. Those who do well go on to the best colleges and often the best careers, and those who don't go on to something else. This means that success in high school plays a clear role in the future success of the students.
Such a system helps the schools a great deal, since it gives the students a clear incentive to do well in school. If the colleges are paying attention to how well you understand factoring and the subjunctive, you will, too. If whether you do your French homework directly affects whether you will go to your favorite “name” school, you may well do it. And if your teachers are not just people sent by your parents to annoy you, and make you “do your work,” but are actually the key people who can help you learn the material on this test, since they are the ones who actually know it, then you might listen to them quite carefully, and ask some good questions. Having college admission tests based on the curricula of the schools makes the schools work much better than not having such tests.
In America, though, we have no such tests. Instead we use the SAT test for college admissions which is purposely not a test of any school’s curricula. The SAT, which was originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, measures students’ ability to solve problems: their aptitude for scholarly work, not what they have learned in school. The colleges were looking for another way, besides grades, to indicate which students could do well in college. The SAT in effect tallies the students who have not done well in school, but still have the ability to do college work. It is not so much a test of how well the students have done in school as a test of how well they may do in college.
Over the years many have complained that the SAT is harmful to schools and should be replaced by a test on curricula, but no changes have ever been made. The reason for this is that the states have no way of bringing this about. Some states have their own tests on their curricula, such as the New York State Regents, but there is no way to use this for college admission. Obviously the colleges are not going to consult 50 different state tests.
Nor are the states able to formulate a test common to all, since there is no common curriculum among them, nor is there any organization that could coordinate such a move. Each state is an autonomous entity fully in charge of its own schools and students. There is no way to organize such joint action. If one state were to try to start the process of changing to a different test by itself, the colleges, all of which take students from many different states, could easily ignore them, to the detriment of that state's students.
The obvious answer is a national system of education. Then we would have a way to coordinate the various curricula of the states, and make a general test that reflected the work of the schools. Once we changed to a national system, it would be perfectly natural to have a national admissions test, and to base this on school work, not aptitude. This would bring improvements to the level of learning throughout the schools in this country.
The state-run system we have harms the schools. It takes away from them a major incentive for their students to learn. It is as if we set up a game for children and then told them that the “winner” would be the ones with the best colored shirts. They wouldn’t play the game very well, then, would they?
All this is not the fault of the states, or the colleges, or even the SAT test itself, which is actually run quite well. It is the fault of the system we use to organize public education in this country, a system that forces the schools to hand over control of college acceptance completely to the colleges, since no state or local district has the ability to organize it themselves. There is no way to fix the problem except through a national school system.
Peter Dodington
Do We Want a Successful State-run Program?
Suppose that we had a successful state-run school system in this country. One where the states were increasing their educational success and the public was generally satisfied with their progress. What would that look like? Would it be something that we would want?
If we wanted the state system to work, we would have to lessen the amount of mobility out of the states. Currently only about 62% of the U.S. population is living in the state they were born in. This means that, roughly, more than a third of the people educated in any one state move to another. What is the point, then, in working hard to make your state’s educational program excellent? More than a third of the benefit from that excellence is going to move off somewhere else. The only logical way to treat such a situation is to aim for a middle ground in your educational efforts, so that you don’t produce graduates who are better than average. High mobility has to lead to mediocre state programs.
In Canada, where it can be argued that provincial-run education does work well, the percent of the population that is living in the province where they were born is about 85%. Only about 15% leave the province they were educated in, or less than half the U.S. rate. If we want to succeed at a state-run program here, we would have to get our out-of-state migration rates down to about that level.
Then it would make sense for the state residents to invest in their own state’s educational programs. If you all stay in the state, then it makes sense to hire good 7th grade math teachers because the better students they produce will be the ones you work with, or live next to, later in life when both you and they are still in your state. Then you all will have better jobs and better communities, and your kids will too.
But only if you, and your kids, stay in the state. You cannot move to another state for a better job, or more opportunity, or a better climate. And, you cannot take advantage of the power of this country, either. You have to rely on the power of your state. Google may be doing well, but that is not going to affect you unless you happen to be in a state where they operate. To benefit fully from your state’s educational program, you have to regard it as your one and only source of power and success.
This means, too, giving up on any attempt to improve the overall educational strength of the U.S. A state program has no control over the country as a whole. To make a state program work you have to focus on that program, not the country. Of course, success in the state may help the country succeed, but this is only by chance. The state cannot set out to improve the country. State success may have little effect on the overall improvement of the country if other states do poorly and cancel out its contribution. A state program cannot change the success of the country as a whole any more than it could change the educational success of a foreign country.
In the end, then, making the state-run school system work would mean shifting our allegiance to the states rather than the nation. It would mean that we would actually have to care more about the success of our state than the success of our country. The state would have to become our true home, not America.
So we could make our current state-run system work. The question is, do we want to? Do we ever want to put our efforts more towards our states than our country, and do we want to limit ourselves to residing only in the one state where we were educated? If the answer to these questions is no, then there is no way we can ever have a successful state-run educational program.
Peter Dodington
8/16/11
The Founding Fathers on National Education
In the first years of our country, several of our most prominent leaders argued that our new government should adopt a national system of education. From the start, our country seriously considered the value of a uniform system for all citizens. These plans were not adopted, partly because our national government was so weak at the time, but national public education was always thought to be a viable option in this country.
Foremost among these leaders was George Washington. In his first State of the Union address, delivered on January 8, 1790, at Federal Hall in New York City, he laid out his recommendation for a national university.
…Nor am I less persuaded that you will agree with me in opinion that there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
To the security of a free constitution it contributes in various ways:…by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; [and] to discern and provide against invasion of them….
Whether this desirable object will be best promoted by … the institution of a national university, or by any other expedients, will be well worthy of the deliberations of the legislature.
The need for a national university was one of Washington’s favorite themes. He brought it up again in this farewell address, calling for the “promotion of institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge”, and in his will left money for the establishment of a national university.
While not specifically calling for a national system of public schools, Washington's plan would have strongly promoted such a system. A national university would have influenced high school curricula throughout the country, since its entrance requirements would have been adopted as graduation requirements for most of the high schools. It would have at least created a de facto national curriculum. Whether this would have led to eventual federal control of public education cannot be known, but it is surely not impossible.
Another group of founding fathers interested in national public education were the leaders of the American Philosophical Society. They held a contest in 1796 for the best system of national public education in America. This society was organized in Philadelphia in 1769, with Benjamin Franklin as its first president, Thomas Jefferson its third, and many of the founding fathers as members. It offered a prize of $100 for “the best system of liberal Education and literary instruction, adapted to the genius of the Government of the United States; comprehending also a plan for instituting and conduction public schools in this country, on principles of the most extensive utility” (Quoted in Allen O. Hanson, Liberalism and American Education in the Eighteenth Century, New York, 1965, p.110). The two winning proposals were by Samuel Knox and Samuel Harrison Smith.
Samuel Knox was a physician, educator and minister from Maryland. His entry was published in Essay on Education (Baltimore, 1799). He sets out to describe “an entire, general, uniform national plan” for education (Essay, p. 26). In his remarks, he notes that he is amazed that national education, which seems to him to be as natural as sunlight, has not gained more prominence.
To have dwelt upon the natural advantages of national education, in the present enlightened age of the world, would appear like an eulogium on the benefits of the light of the sun to the solar system….It would appear, in some degree, unaccountable that little hath been done in promoting some general plan of education equally suitable and salutary to the various citizens (Essay, p. 66).
He argues that using the combined resources of the entire nation to educate our children would be a much more effective, and efficient, method than the current scattered and incomplete attempts by individual localities.
Great…surely, must be the difference between the effects of education when abandoned to the precarious uncertainty of casual, partial, or local encouragement, and of that which has been established uniformly and generally by the united wisdom and exertions of a whole nation (Essay, p. 70).
Knox argues that the wide extent of our country, with all manner of different customs and conditions, makes it particularly suitable for a national system.
In…the United States of America, a considerable local diversity… must be the consequence of such a wide extent of territory, inhabited by citizens blending together almost all the various manners and customs of every country in Europe. Nothing, then, surely, might be supposed to have a better effect towards harmonizing the whole…than an universal system of national education (Essay, p. 71).
Knox shared the Philosophical Society’s prize with Samuel Harrison Smith, an editor of several literary magazines in Philadelphia. He proposed a complete system from elementary to the university level, all superintended by a national board of education. He urges that the national government vigorously take charge of the education of our children.
…it is the duty of a nation to superintend and even to coerce the education of children (Quoted in Essays on Education in the Early Republic, Frederick Rudolph, ed., p. 211).
He spells out the entire system of education for children from 5 to 18, all run and organized by a national board.
It shall be the duty of this board to form a system of national education to be observed in the university, the colleges and the primary schools,…and to superintend the general interests of the institution (Rudolph, p. 213).
Instead of adopting any of these proposals, though, the national and state legislatures left public education in the hands of the local school districts. The feeling evidently was that our settlers wanted to control their own education in their own communities, without interference from either the state or the national governments. As we have noted, this has led directly to the current stagnation of our school system.
From the start, then, the concept of a national school system was supported by some of the best minds, and the best leaders, of the country. It seemed the logical choice. To adopt such a system today would not be to go against the ideals of our founding fathers. They thought that such a national system was certainly possible, and to many, preferable.
It cannot be that Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, who worked so hard for public education, envisioned for our schools the un-workable stagnant situation we have today. If they were here, they would want a workable system; that is, national public education.
Peter Dodington
July 30, 2011
Small Town Ideals
In my first teaching job, on the high plains of eastern Montana, I taught English in a large, three-story brick building that towered above the low wooden houses and gravel streets of the small town of Brockton, Montana. As in many rural communities built in the 19th and early20th century, the public school was the largest and most ornate building in town, easily dwarfing the stores, churches and entertainment establishments. The original settlers had spent a considerable amount of money and effort on this imposing and elegant school building.
I often wondered about the exceptional quality of that building, and others like it in similar towns across the country. Why did the founders of these towns build such grand public schools? What was it about public education that made it so valuable to them, and what might they teach us about our own problems with schools today?
Those early schools must have provided something more than simply a service to the parents in those towns. If they only had that kind of functional, day-to-day role, they would have been built like the other practical stores and places of business in the town; low structures of wood and fiberboard. The school I worked in must have stood for something more, some ideal.
That ideal was probably the future growth and success of the community. The founders of that town made it bigger, better, and more elegant than the other buildings because it represented their hopes for a bigger and better town. They wanted the town to become as impressive and successful as that school building.
The school would bring this about by providing smarter, more skilled and more civic-minded adults. Its graduates would grow up to become the town’s leaders and successful citizens, and these adults would share their success with all the residents of the town, making it grow and prosper. The young man who had done well in algebra would use that knowledge to help everyone calculate things like the risks and rewards of early planting, and the woman who had studied Macbeth would help people understand the dangers of ambition and power. Through the work of its adult graduates, the school would provide the means to improve and strengthen the entire town.
For these early settlers, then, the public school was much more than simply a place to educate their children; it provided a public benefit for everyone. And since that benefit extended to all the residents, it made sense to charge them all equally for the school. Everyone would succeed more if the quality of their residents was improved by education, so everyone supported the school.
This was the way public education was supposed to work in this country. We set up small autonomous districts to run the schools, since local control was what the early settlers wanted. When the graduates from the schools stayed in, or returned to, the community where they were educated, they provided a benefit to the same people who had funded their education. As long as the children being educated would become the adults who would improve the community, it made sense to support and improve the schools. Each dollar spent on the schools would come back as a future benefit to the taxpayer who had spent that dollar.
Notice, also, that the school itself did not have to do anything to promote this public benefit. In these small towns there was no need for data on the success of the school’s graduates; it was obvious to all. The public could see how they benefited from the school by just looking out the window at what the graduates were doing. All the school needed to do was to keep track of what went on within its own walls: attendance, grades, tests scores, etc. The school had a good relationship with its tax-paying public, but it was an informal, undocumented one.
Mobility and Mediocrity
If the graduates, however, did not come back to their community, the public would no longer be getting this public benefit from their school support. They might feel that they benefited somewhat from the graduates who moved away, since they might encounter them in some other context, but they no longer got the full benefit of their investment. Of course, other graduates from other towns moved in, but this did not necessarily mean that they were getting the full benefit they paid for. It could well be that they were exporting a higher level of graduates than they were getting back.
This partial benefit led to the public pulling back on their support for the schools. In fact, sharing graduates with other towns meant that, at best, they only had an incentive to support their schools to a middle level of excellence. By trading graduates with other schools they were getting a benefit that was the average of all the schools whose graduates came to them. It only made sense, then, to contribute only an average amount. If the costs of something are born individually but the profits shared, one has to keep those costs to a middle range, comparable to the middle level of profits that the sharing enforces. If you aim for the best graduates from your school, you will always be losing money. The better your school gets, the more you lose. The mobility of the graduates brought about a situation where the public was aiming for mediocre schools.
The obvious solution to this mobility problem was to enlarge the community that was funding, and benefitting from, the education. If the state became the center of public education finances, then everyone would get a fair return on their educational investment as long as the graduates stayed in the state.
But the states had their own mobility problems. There was, and is, a wide variety between the states, but, on average, about a third of state residents no longer live in the state where they were educated. This was enough to make residents think twice about fully supporting improvements. State taxpayers also had to aim for a middle ground in their support for the schools.
This loss in the return on educational investment, though, only applied to the general public, not the parents. The parents continued to get a benefit from the education of their children regardless of whether these graduates returned to the community or not. The children of parents always “return” to those who supported their education, since they keep in touch with their parents throughout their adult lives and so bring back to them the fruit of their educational labors. For parents it always makes sense to fully support the schools while their children are in them, since they know they will get back a full measure of the benefit due them. Since they do not have to share the benefits of their support with others, they have the full incentive to maximize that support.
Parents, though, make up only about a third of the general population. They cannot support the schools all by themselves. Try as they may to improve the schools, their programs are always eventually undercut by the non-parent majority, who have less interest in making the schools better than average. And since parents, by definition, are only parents of current school children for a limited time, they often abandon these battles even if they are making progress. Why fight for better 7th grade math if your kids are now in high school? The system of costs and benefits of public education still works for the parents, but that only means that the general push towards mediocrity is occasionally retarded. The majority of taxpayers are still forced to want only moderate success for the public schools.
Modern Consequences
No wonder, then, it is so hard to improve the public schools today. Graduates still do not stay in the same towns or states where they were educated, so the public still has no incentive to fully support the schools, and reforms are not funded. The schools themselves, never having been in the business of paying attention to the public benefit, continue to ignore the problem and focus only on the needs of the parents. The result is that there is a general feeling that there is no solution to the problem of the general public’s support for improvements, so we may as well pull back to simply pleasing the parents and leave it at that.
Indeed, all the reforms in the last 30 years have been about making the public schools more focused on the needs of the parents, and less on those of the general public. Vouchers, charter schools, smaller schools – all these try to make the schools more responsive to parents. The issue of support from the general public is not even brought up, much less worked on.
These reforms would work fine if the schools were private, and funded only by those parents. That would work. But as long as we keep to a public system of funding, charging everyone equally, ignoring two-thirds of the supporters has to lead to stagnation. The ignored majority will always pull the system back to the status quo. When only one-third of your supporters has any reason to fully support the schools it doesn’t matter how well you serve that one third; you still will get a mediocre result.
We cannot solve the problems of our public school system with private school remedies. If we actually want to try to fix the public system, we have to fix it with public remedies. This means dealing with the problems of the general public, not just the parents.
The stagnation is actually a more serious problem that simply low performance. It calls into question the validity of the entire public system. A program that cannot change is a program that doesn’t work. It would be one thing to have a low-performing school system that needed a lot of work to make it better, and we had some evidence that we could do that. It’s quite another to have a system that seems impervious to any efforts to change it. The first may eventually be fixed to meet our needs, but the second can only be allowed to slowly decay until we eventually throw it out entirely.
The Solution
In other countries the problem of the benefit for the general public is solved by having a national school system. At the national level the mobility of the graduates (to another country) is low enough to give the population confidence that they can realize the social benefit from the schools. Each taxpayer puts in his contribution to the national system and gets back exactly that amount of benefit, since the adult graduates remain in that system. No graduate moves out of the school system you support and takes his benefits to another system. There is only one system.
Under a national system, if you want to improve the education of people who tend to commit crimes, for example, you can do that with your tax dollars and know that there will be now be less chance of someone coming to steal your car, no matter where in the country that criminal went to school. You can know that your own contribution to the schools helped stop the robbery of your own car. Since your tax dollars are affecting all the people who might help or harm you in the future, you have a strong incentive to improve their education.
None of this happens under the state system, because you are only paying for the education of people from one state, yet can be robbed, or helped, by people from all 50. There is no way for you to know whether your contribution to education will ever help you or your community, since all the graduates of all the schools throughout the country mix together in their adult lives. You know that education does lessen crime, but you don’t know whether your own contribution to education is lessening your own exposure to crime.
If the entire country attends the same school system, it is easy to see data on the benefits from it, since one can just look at general national indicators, such as growth in productivity or the prison population, to get an indication of the effect of the schools on the public good. One doesn’t have to rely on the schools to keep track of the public benefit; it will show up in the general national statistics. If everyone in the country is taking the same math courses, a glance at the country’s production of technically sophisticated products shows whether the public is getting a benefit from those math courses or not. The general social and economic indicators for the entire country can be used to show the public how they benefit from the school system.
Such a national system of public education only works, of course, if the tax money actually goes to the federal government. Just having Washington keep track of the public benefit, while keeping the state-run system, would not work. It would just produce a better way of demonstrating to the public how much they are losing through that state system. The problem is not the data, it’s the money. When you combine the mobility of graduates with small (i.e. state-sized) school systems, each taxpayer’s contribution leaks out of each small system to such a degree that it makes full support illogical. No amount of federal oversight or data collection by itself can change that.
We would not have to change the funding system for the local districts, however. We could let the local districts focus on the needs of children and parents with as much autonomy as possible. Local control does work for the parents and children. It is the state part of the system that would have to be replaced by a national one so that the other two-thirds of the system also worked.
When this country was founded, many suggested that we create a national school system. Washington wanted a national university, and plans for national secondary schools were put forth by Benjamin Rush and several others. None of these plans were put into place, though, since our new immigrants wanted to set up their own communities and run their schools themselves. This worked for them and produced many excellent schools.
In time, though, we seem to have changed our minds about those small local communities. We still think they are a good place in which to raise our children, but no longer want to spend our working lives there. There is nothing wrong with this, but the change in attitude has undermined the public school system. Education needs communities that are stable over a long period, so the schools can return their long-term benefits to those who paid for them. Our stable community has become, in effect, our country, not our towns or states. It is the one place where we both grow up and live as adults. As such, it has to be the basis for our public schools.
The problem is that, although we have changed our minds about the value of living all our lives in the same small town, we have kept the school system that was built around that pattern. It no longer fits our needs, and so can only produce some fraction of the benefit we expect from it. We have changed, so the school system needs to change.
If we changed to a national system we would in effect be going back to the original goals of the public schools in those frontier towns like the one I taught in long ago. We would again have a school system that allowed us to see, with our own eyes, the benefits that the graduates of the school we support brought back to our community. Everyone, then, not just the parents, would have an incentive to support the schools, since all would be benefitting equally. With that kind of full support it would be possible to implement long-term improvements. It the way the public schools are supposed to work.
Peter Dodington
Hidden in Plain Sight
When I first started teaching in New York City, in the early 90’s, I worked at what used to be Andrew Jackson High School in Jamaica, Queens. The school had been converted to a collection of magnet schools that summer, but there were still remnants of the old arrangement around, including the bulletin boards put up by the last of the Jackson students. (Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been a Jackson graduate—her name was still engraved on the permanent honor role in the front hall.)
One of these bulletin boards was about a letter-writing project in which the students had proposed that we adopt a national education system. I forget the details, but I think they had written to various senators and congressmen to argue the case for converting to a fully national school system. They simply pointed out that a federal system would work better than the current state one.
In the years that followed I have often thought of those students and their project. In a way, what I am doing now on this blog is a continuation of their work. I just want to point out, perhaps naively, that a national school system would work well, and leave it at that. Like those kids, I want to focus on the simple question of how to make the schools better. If that is the only question under discussion, one has to eventually get to the topic of national public education.
A fully national school system, with the educational tax money that we currently send to the states going instead to the federal government, (but the local school district staying the same) is not a topic that many take seriously. I suppose everyone thinks that it would be too difficult to make such a fundamental change, and too scary. That fact alone, however, does not make it any less logical. No one can deny that trying to improve all the schools in this country with 50 different, autonomous, groups in charge is not the best arrangement. Just on the face of it, without going into all the complex arguments for state or national control, one can see that having 50 leaders of school reform will tend to bring about the kind of permanent mediocrity that we have come to know so well. It is not that our state system cannot work; it is that it can never work well.
I realize that there are many people out there who are at best lukewarm on the topic of improving public education. These are not my audience. But there are also many who truly believe that public education is the best way to educate our children, and are seriously searching for ways to improve it. To these I want to suggest that one answer has been there all along, hidden in plain sight: a national school system. It is time that we started talking about it.
Current Views on National Public Education
When I first started thinking about national public education, about 20 years ago, very few people wanted to discuss it at all. You only heard it mentioned when some politician vowed that he would never “run our schools from Washington.” Now, though, little by little, the topic is being brought up. No one seems quite ready to call for a fully national system, but many commentators see the need for some form of incremental change in that direction.
Writing in 1991, Dwight W. Allen proposes a national system of public schools, run in conjunction with the existing local and state system, which would be used to test current theories and practices. He envisions “a national experimental schools network: a nationwide system of schools with a balance of national, state, and local control” (Schools for a New Century (Praeger, New York, 1991, p. 1-2). He is particularly interested in testing new uses of technology for the schools in this way.
Allen argues that we have only “the illusion of local control.” Just about every one of the 16,000 districts uses roughly the same curriculum, written by the same textbook publishers. Each state is technically autonomous and could choose to teach whatever it pleased, but in practice they all teach about the same thing. There is, in reality, a de facto national curriculum, set by the colleges and the textbook makers. Similarly, there are de facto national college admissions tests, the SAT and ACT, run, again, by private organizations, not the states or the districts (p.44).
A national structure for our public schools, Allen argues, would paradoxically increase the power of the local districts. It would free them up to concentrate on more important matters than schedules and pay scales. They could then turn their attention to the actual curriculum and practices of their schools, since the more bureaucratic issues would be taken care of at the national level (p. 47).
In all of this Allen is right on target. He sees the problems with our current system and knows how a national system would solve them. My only comment is that he doesn’t go far enough. Leaving the state and local systems in place and just adding a national level is clearly not going to make the school system run better. To do that you would have to simplify the overall structure, which means replacing the current hodgepodge with a fully national system. It is true that a system of experiment schools would allow us to test practices and materials before they are mass produced, but this is not a great enough gain to convince the public of the necessity of such a fundamental change.
In the forward to Allen’s book, Terrell H. Bell also comments on the problems of our current system. He says:
Very true; we actually have no mechanism to deal with the problems of U.S. education. It’s not just that we don’t have any solutions; we don’t even have the tools or structures to implement those solutions if we ever do find them. Each state can affect only a small fraction of the problem, and the states are supposed to be in charge.
Morton J. Marcus, in his book Tightrope to Tomorrow (Bloomington, IN, 1997), argues that most funding for public education ought to come through the federal government. He proposes that one logical source for these funds would be the social security program, since educating our young is one of the best ways to provide a prosperous future for our elderly. He envisions a “Federal Education Commission,” which would manage the school system in the same way that the Federal Reserve, he says, manages the banks. He does not go into how this would affect current state and local education programs, if at all.
Marcus’s arguments for federal funding are quite good. He says:
As I, too, have suggested elsewhere, the real customers for our public schools are the general public, who outnumber the parents two to one. We therefore need to provide an educational system that benefits, “and is seen to benefit,” that general public. Marcus realizes that the important issue is not benefit per se, but perceived benefit, and that this is where our current system fails us. The schools do benefit the general public; the problem is that this benefit cannot be seen. Federal funding would solve this crucial problem. He continues:
If the “community” of the local public school is truly the entire nation, because its graduates, and the benefit they bring, scatter throughout the country, then it only makes sense for the entire nation to share in the funding. A national system is the only way to equalize the costs and benefits to each taxpayer.
Marcus also counters the argument that privatizing the school system would be another way to equalize costs and benefits for the schools. He notes that any privatization would mean that the poor would get less education than the rich. But, as he says, “education for the poorest child is an important as, or perhaps more important than, the education of the wealthiest” (p. 108).
Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, has called for a three-fold increase in the percent of federal government support for public education, from about 9% to 25-30%. In his book The Tyranny of Dead Ideas (New York, 2009), he points out the flaws in the current view that schools should be strictly a local matter.
All this is well and good, though of course I would add to his “problems of local control” the issue of graduate mobility and consequent lack of perceived public benefit.
On the role of the federal government, Miller notes that it was Richard Nixon’s Commission on School Finance which first suggested that the federal government should help the states equalize funding disparities. At that time the commissioner of education said publically that the federal government should pay 25 to 30 percent of the cost of public education. There was even a rumor, reported in the New York Times, that Nixon was thinking of a national value-added tax to help pay for such educational expenditures (The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, p. 210).
Miller does not go into the exact details of how he would like to increase the federal presence in public education, but in general wants to lift teacher salaries, especially for those deemed high-performing, and use federal dollars to help innovative new programs that seem to be succeeding, as well as develop universal preschool, more research on education, and a better curriculum in global studies (pp. 212-213). He argues that all this is bound to happen in time no matter what we decide today. Just as it was once anathema to consider a federal role in retirement security or medical care, it will eventually be seen as quite natural to have the federal government support a large part of education in this country (p. 215).
A more direct call for a national school system is offered by Susan Jacoby in an article in the New York Times entitled “One Classroom, From Sea to Shining Sea,” (March 19, 2010, p. A25). She says,
She notes that our current efforts to add incrementally more federal control of the schools, as in the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top,” will only result in “the worst of both worlds: broad federally mandated goals, and state manipulation of testing and curriculum.” You cannot leave the control of the schools in the hands of entities such as the Texas Board of Education, she says, which recently cut Thomas Jefferson out of its curriculum (for his non-religious views), and still have a system that can compete with the rest of the world. She continues,
Ms Jacoby has her doubts about whether we can ever solve this problem, but offers three “baby steps” to combat the problem: a voluntary national curriculum; invest federal funds in more educational research and development, especially in the area of teacher training; and pull back from the movement for more charter schools. She characterizes the push for charter schools as “a further balkanizing of a public education system already hampered by a legacy of extreme decentralization.”
She ends with a quote from Daniel Webster at a memorial service for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who both died on July 4, 1826. She says:
She concludes:
Another comment on the value of a national education system in America was recently made by Andreas Schleicher, a senior education official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, an organization which helps coordinate policies for 30 or the world’s richest countries. Mr. Schleicher notes that America’s system of standards and curriculum, controlled by states and local districts with a heavy overlay of federal rules, is a “quite unique” mix of decentralization and central control. More successful nations, he has said, maintain central [national] control over standards and curriculum, but give local schools more freedom from regulation (Reported by Sam Dillon in The New York Times, 3/10/10, p. A21). Mr. Schleicher argues, as did Mr. Allen above, that more central control from Washington would result is less bureaucratic meddling at the local level.
What has happened to us is that, since we have left power in the hands of the states, who have not succeeded due to the mobility of the graduates, etc., we’ve had to bring in the federal government to try to fix the problems, but the feds can only “meddle” in the problem since they have no real control. Thus we end up with the worst of both worlds: too little and too much federal involvement. What we need is for the states and federal government to switch roles, so that overall funding and control would reside with the federal government, and as much flexibility as desired would be given to the local districts and states.
There are other promising signs of a movement toward federal control of education, such as the development of a “common curriculum,” and efforts by the Federal Department of Education to expand its role, but I will wait to see how these turn out before commenting on them. In general, many see the problems, but few are ready to solve them.
Peter Dodington
August 5, 2011