Overcorrecting Public Schools and More
Can We Reform Schools and Other Government Programs Without Tearing Everything Down?
As a parent, education policy matters more to me than any other governmental issue. Immigration, DEI, and the price of eggs are nice, but Ian’s IEP meetings kept me up at night. Steve and I would hash out school issues every night after the kids went to sleep: Did Jonah’s bio teacher just get fired? Should we send him to a Catholic high school because he’s getting lost in the crowd? Should we hire a tutor for English?
We sold our house and moved to another town to give our kids access to better schools. We took out a home equity loan to pay for college. We spent our evenings driving our kids to enrichment activities. In a parking lot an hour from home, we sat in the car to keep warm during Jonah’s soccer matches in November.
Why did we do all this work? Because schools alone aren’t enough to raise children in the modern world.
An Imperfect System
Our factory-style schools were set up in the early 1900s to assimilate and homogenize new immigrant children. They put twenty students in a room, organized by age, and blasted them with the same message. It was an efficient model that could get thousands of dirty children off the street, and in just a few short years, provide them with enough knowledge to function as street pavers or auto workers and assimilate them into American culture.
With those goals in mind, schools were designed to reach a maximum number of students. They were never intended to educate *all* children. Kids with disabilities were kept at home or sent to schools for “idiots” or the “feeble-minded.” Rich families sent their children to private schools with a classical curriculum and individual attention and prepared them for life in the professional class.
Public schools were also never intended to educate even the average student *well.* My Great-grandfather was a foreman for a company that paved the streets of Chicago. With a fifth-grade education, he didn’t need to know Shakespeare, but he had enough schooling to mentally calculate the correct number of paver stones for Michigan Avenue.
Conflicts come from a mismatch between the original mission of public education and modern priorities. Today, we want schools to educate all kids and give them the tools to achieve any outcome. We want every student to have the option to become a doctor, an astronaut, or a plumber. However, we haven’t made the necessary changes to make that happen.
The COVID Backlash
Those conflicts came to a head during the school shutdowns during COVID. With substandard remote education the norm, parents and children became cynical about education.
Some parents decided that education wasn’t worth the bother and stopped forcing their kids to attend school. In 2023, around 60% of school districts in New Jersey had a chronic absenteeism rate, compared to only 32% of schools in 2018-19.
In reaction to school closures, other parents sent their children to private schools or homeschooled them. When schools opened again, those parents never returned to public education. As a result, states are passing laws that support public school defectors.
In Iowa, a new house bill would enable parents to charge tuition to educate other children. Critics say that this is the first step in the creation of unregulated private schools that may be eligible for school vouchers.
The North Dakota House passed a bill giving substantial tax credits to homeschooling families.
The Texas legislature is discussing a new voucher plan.
The Supreme Court will hear a case soon about a Catholic Charter school in Oklahoma.
Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater
Traditional public education isn’t perfect. Too many students aren’t gaining the skills needed to thrive in a modern, technical workforce.
However, the new state laws won’t improve public schools where most kids are still educated. They won’t help the dispirited children in low-income cities, who have stopped attending schools. Charter schools and homeschooling don’t benefit kids who learn differently or need specialized help. These policies don’t restructure calcified school bureaucracies or ramp up evidence-based curricula.
Rather than improving current governmental systems, like schools, we’re moving into a new era that trashes the whole thing and starts over again. Americans voted for Trump as a rejection of the Biden-era policies for schools, immigration, DEI, and more. But will the corrections go too far?
Yes, we need some control over immigration, but nobody wants their landscapers rounded up in the supermarket and put on a plane back to Columbia.
Sure, there is a lot of waste in government programs. But do people want to end all federal grants, as was proposed today? Medicaid, which currently serves 79 million low-income and disabled Americans, was just paused.
People may have voted for Trump because they thought that Biden was too old and his administration was too extreme. But I can’t imagine that they’ll be too happy when adults with Down syndrome are kicked out of group homes when the Medicaid payments end.
Who will cheer when poor kids can’t get their only meal of the day at the school cafeteria? Well, Rep. Rich McCormack (R-GA) thinks that it will be good for kids to lose their free lunches, but he’s a rather large asshole.
Can we make changes without trashing everything?
Personal
I was planning on finishing off a 1,000-word draft about immigration this morning. Instead, I wrote this piece about schools. Education issues loomed large in my home this week, so it was hard to talk about other things.
Last weekend, we took my son, the one with autism, up to college in Vermont. He’s nearly 23, and this is his first semester in a dorm away from home. It took tons of work to get him ready for this milestone. I’m numb with relief.
I wrote about it here:
Excellent article on schools.