Category Archives: education policy

School and Society in the Age of Trump

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John Rogers and the research team of Michael Ishimoto, Alexander Kwako, Anthony Berryman, and Claudia Diera have produced a landmark study entitled “School and Society in the Age of Trump,” based on their survey of 505 high school principals and follow-up interviews of 40 principals.

The principals offered evidence about five challenges that confront schools at this moment: 1. “Political division and hostility,” 2. “Disputes over truth, facts, and the reliability of sources,” 3. “The crises posed by opioid addiction,” 4. “Vulnerabilities associated with threats of immigration enforcement” and 5. “The perils and frequency of gun violence.”

The report explores the frequency of these issues in various types of school: those with predominantly students of color, racially-mixed schools, and schools with mostly white students; schools in Trump, anti-Trump, and politically mixed communities; and schools in different regions of the country. Principals were also also asked how their schools respond. For instance, do they communicate the importance of respecting new immigrants? Do they discipline students for uncivil or demeaning behavior?

All the results make sense, but they are not always immediately intuitive. For instance, derogatory remarks about other racial/ethnic groups are more common than derogatory remarks about immigrants, and both are most common in predominantly white schools, but far from absent in the other schools. (See below.)

Principals are also most likely to report disciplining students for insensitive remarks in mostly-white schools, but they are much less likely to talk with their students about the importance of respecting immigrants in the mostly-white schools.

Many principals report proactive responses, such as meeting with student groups to ask for their help in promoting civility and respect or meeting with parents for similar purposes. But those responses vary greatly. Sixty-two percent of principals serving mostly youth of color met with parents for this reason, versus 37% of principals in mostly white schools.

It’s common today for parents to challenge the information or news sources that teachers assign or for students to reject assigned sources. The frequency of those events doesn’t differ dramatically depending on the schools’ demographics (although I imagine that the sources that are distrusted differ).

According to the report, “A little more than a quarter of principals report they have restricted topics or information sources in order to diminish the flow of unreliable or contentious information.”

A different kind of stress comes from the opioid crisis. It is worst in predominantly white schools but definitely present in racially-mixed schools and those that serve mostly youth of color.

Rogers and colleague write that “Sixty-eight percent of the principals we surveyed report that federal immigration enforcement policies and the political rhetoric around the issue have harmed student well-being and learning, and undermined the work of their schools in general.”

Students across the board are fearful of gun violence, but more so to the degree that their students are people of color.

These challenges vary by demographics and region, but I’ll show a final graph about politics. The opioid crisis is most widely reported in Trump country. Political division is also more often reported there than elsewhere, but by small margins. In Trump country, far fewer principals report immigration enforcement as a challenge for their students. (That is either because of where most immigrants live or because of problems of under-reporting in Trump districts, as Rogers notes.) Untrustworthy information is seen as a challenge everywhere, to about the same degree, but I am sure that what counts as untrustworthy varies.

These are just some snapshots from a rich and compelling report.

the first “civic ed” bill: 1642

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The Massachusetts legislature is considering S. 2306, a bill to enhance civic education. I’m for this legislation. Questions about whether the Commonwealth should require civics–or, indeed, any subject–led me to wonder when civics was first mandated in Massachusetts. I think the answer is 1642:

Forasmuch as the good education of children is of singular behoof and benefit to any Common-wealth; and whereas many parents & masters are too indulgent and negligent of their duty in that kind. It is therfore ordered that the Select men of every town, in the severall precincts and quarters where they dwell, shall have a vigilant eye over their brethren & neighbours, to see, first that none of them shall suffer so much barbarism in any of their families as not to indeavour to teach by themselves or others, their children & apprentices so much learning as may enable them perfectly to read the English tongue, & knowledge of the Capital Lawes: upon penaltie of twentie shillings for each neglect therin.

There was a high-stakes test. All “children or apprentices” had to learn “some short orthodox catechism without book, that they may be able to answer unto the questions that shall be propounded to them out of such catechism by their parents or masters or any of the Select men when they shall call them to a tryall of what they have learned of this kind.”

And there were accountability mechanisms. In addition to the “twentie shilling” fine for local leaders who failed to ensure successful educational outcomes for all their communities’ youth, there was also a plan to be followed when “children and servants bec[a]me rude, stubborn & unruly.” First, the responsible selectmen would be admonished. Next, “the said Select men with the help of two Magistrates, or the next County court for that Shire, shall take such children or apprentices from them & place them with some masters for years (boyes till they come to twenty one, and girls eighteen years of age compleat) which will more strictly look unto, and force them to submit unto government according to the rules of this order, if by fair means and former instructions they will not be drawn into it.”

The 1642 act required religious as well as civil instruction, which we wouldn’t endorse under the US Constitution. It included a large dose of what we might call character education, career preparation, and/or social-emotional development, under the heading of preparation for “some honest lawful calling, labour or employment, either in husbandry, or some other trade profitable for themselves.”

I’m not saying that the Massachusetts School Law of 1642 is what we need today. It’s wise to innovate. But there is certainly precedent for requiring civics: 375 years of precedent, in fact.

what if there were no public or no private schools?

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The Atlantic’s Julie Halpert asks us to imagine two scenarios. In one, “every child would have to attend private school, and in the other, every child would have to attend public school. Which scenario would be more likely to improve or worsen kids’ educational outcomes—and, by extension, the health of American society?”

She quotes me a few times with doubts about an all-private system:

Levine’s prediction for an all-private-school world? “You’ll have this very intensely competitive market in which every child would be assessed,” he said, “and if your child has behavioral issues, they won’t get as good a deal in the market.” … An all-private-school world, then, would foster a system that thrives on selectivity. As Levine emphasized, private schools can’t just scale up like companies can because small size is often a selling point in K-12 education; the best schools are those that don’t accept large numbers of students.

I am not a doctrinaire opponent of choice or market mechanisms in education. Denmark is rightly admired as a model social welfare system, yet 15.6% of Danish kids attend private schools fully funded by vouchers. In many European cities, all the schools are what we would call “charters”: basically self-governing entities, regulated by the state, that get public money in proportion to their enrollments. (Rural areas tend to offer less choice, simply because the low population density favors local mandatory-enrollment schools).

By the way, the Danish Union of Teachers represents 97% of primary and secondary teachers. A competitive market with high union density may offer a good combination of choice plus job security.

Meanwhile, it’s not so clear that offering only public schools really gets rid of market competition. The American “common school” model–one school system for all the children in each political jurisdiction–reflects a fierce market for housing. Americans of means choose their residence in order to determine their kids’ schools. It would arguably be better to separate the market for schools from the market for houses, rather than combining them and kidding ourselves that we have ever had a “public” school system.

But I was asked whether I’d like to see a system without public schools at all–Milton Friedman’s model of vouchers for an all-private system. I offered several ways in which education differs from other markets.

One difference is that education is meant to produce public goods, such as a unified body of informed citizens, not just private goods, such as each graduate’s value in the labor market. I agree with this normative position, but the empirical evidence is complicated. There is evidence that Catholic high schools in the United States–which are private–have done a better job than public schools of generating public goods.

Another difference is that educators typically do not want to increase the size of their own enterprise. For teachers, it’s better to have 18 rather than 8o students. For principals, it may be preferable to have 20 rather than 200 teachers. Families may also prefer smaller and more selective schools. The usual incentives to “scale up” don’t apply.

A third difference is that kids, not just schools, have unequal market value. Coca-Cola doesn’t care who you are if you have enough money for a bottle of Coke. Detroit Country Day School (the institution that Halpert uses as an example) definitely does care who you are if you want to enroll. The other kids contribute profoundly to each student’s experience and trajectory.

In fact, I have sometimes wondered whether a university that had sufficient status–thanks to its history and branding–could offer no education at all, and its students would still fare well thanks to their cultural capital, the network ties they form among their peers, and the market signal conveyed by enrolling them. The admissions office and the dormitories could do the whole job of conveying social advantage. It would not be irrational to prefer (and to pay tuition for) such an institution rather than an open-access university that added more value in the classroom.

In the long run, it might be a mistake to blatantly offer no pedagogy or curriculum whatsoever. That might erode an institution’s brand. However, I’m confident that many highly selective schools and colleges do a subtly worse job of instruction than many low-status institutions that enroll less advantaged kids. The former still win in the market for students because they have already attracted other privileged students.

Charging higher tuition can even make a school more desirable by ensuring that most of its students have high social positions. (A school may then get even more value by admitting a few non-privileged kids for “diversity,” charging them less than the sticker price).

These are not reasons to reject choice and market mechanisms altogether, but they do suggest that facile analogies between ordinary consumer markets and education are likely to mislead.

conflict v mistake as a framework for politics

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Scott Alexander has an interesting blog post that distinguishes two ways of thinking about politics:

  1. “Politics as mistake.” I’d put this one a little differently. The core idea is that institutions have flaws that result from their designs and the incentives that they create for participants. Sometimes institutions work well enough, but we use the word “politics” for efforts to fix them. Political action is driven by a belief that the structure and incentives of existing institutions demands change.
  2. “Politics as conflict”: Here the idea is that different people have different interests and ideals, so it matters who’s in charge. Politics is mostly about putting one’s own side in control of institutions.

Alexander’s post is long and I could argue that it’s a bit tilted in favor of #1, partly because the examples he cites of #2 are unnecessarily tendentious, e.g., a Baffler article on James Buchanan. Very serious people from a range of perspectives agree with #2. Still, even with a possible tilt, I find Alexander’s framework useful.

The poster child for #1 would be China. The Communist Party took control in 1949, representing a demographic group (workers and peasants) and an ideology (state communism). A fairly continuous group of leaders still runs that Party and that country. For instance, the current premier, Xi Jinping, is the son of the Party’s former propaganda chief, vice-premier, and National People’s Congress vice chair (1952-62). But the regime has shifted from radically egalitarian to rapaciously capitalist, and many grandchildren of Red revolutionaries are billionaires. I make sense of this story by discounting politics as conflict. It doesn’t matter who runs the government or what they stand for. Structures and incentives ultimately prevail. If single-party government gives the ruling cadre a chance to rack up billions, they will sooner or later rack up billions.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger has unimpeachable leftist credentials, but he faults the 20th century left for ignoring institutional structures and the incentives they create. “With few exceptions (such as the Yugoslav innovations),” he writes, “the radical left … has produced only one innovative institutional conception, the idea of the soviet or conciliar type of organization: that is to say, direct territorial and enterprise democracy.” But soviets were never seriously developed to address “practical problems of administrative and economic management,” and they have “quickly given way to forms of despotic government” (False Necessity, pp. 24-5).

On the other hand, politics as conflict (#2) makes better sense of “realignment” elections in functional democracies. When FDR won the presidency in 1932, or when the British Labour Party won in 1945, new people with new interests and new ideas took over those countries. The result was a raft of new policies and institutions. When Thatcher and Reagan won elections decades later, they reversed some of those policies and began to dismantle some of those institutions. It matters who wins the support of the majority of voters and what program they propose.

The same debate also arises in specific domains of policy. For example, people who believe in politics as conflict think that the key questions for education are what is taught and how. There are lively debates between whole language and phonics, patriotic and critical versions of American history, STEM and the humanities. To influence the outcome of these debates, we can try to persuade teachers and schools to adopt our vision of education. We can also enact favorable policies, such as legislative mandates to teach or assess in certain ways.

Meanwhile, some people believe that the important questions in education concern structures and incentives. Maybe we must pay teachers more and protect their autonomy, or assess student outcomes and hold teachers accountable, or give parents choice and let dollars flow to the schools that they choose. These are politically and ideological contrasting theses, but all presume that the way to improve education is to get the incentives right.

It’s too easy to say, but I believe it: politics is both institutional design and conflict over ideas and interests, and each aspect requires attention. Unger recommends that reformers “develop elaborate institutional incentives, a strategy for putting them into effect, and a view of social transformation to inform both their programmatic and their strategic ideas. They must also redefine their guiding ideals and their conceptions of the relation of these ideals to the aims of their political opponents. For if the real meaning of an ideal depends upon its tacit institutional background, a shift in the latter is sure to disturb the former” (pp. 20-21).

It’s a mistake to ignore incentives and assume that institutions will do what they officially promise, unless that somehow pays off for the people in charge. To assume that public schools will serve every child is like assuming a can-opener on a desert island. (Or assuming that a dictatorial party will pursue equality just because it calls itself “communist.”) But it’s also a mistake to discount ideas and ideals or to presume that the only payoffs that people care about are monetary. For the purpose of explaining social change, both incentives and ideals have power.

Further, if you want to know whether you are changing the world for the better, you must rely on a range of evidence. It’s useful to observe people’s behavior under constraints. For example, price signals tell you what people value, given what they have. That kind of analysis falls under Alexander’s “politics as mistake” heading (although the word “mistake” is a bit misleading; it’s really politics as engineering). However, evidence from behavior is always insufficient, because you must also decide what means and ends are good. Unless you arrogantly assume that you can answer that question by yourself, you must listen to other perspectives. And that necessitates “politics as conflict.”

See also how to tell if you’re doing good; the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger; school choice is a question of values not data.

sorting out human welfare, equity and mobility

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Here are three distinct goals that you might pursue if you see education as a means to improve a society. All three are plausible, but they can conflict, and I think we should sort out where we stand on them.

  1. Improving lives. What constitutes a better life is contested, as is the question of how a population’s welfare should be aggregated to produce a score for a whole society. The Human Development Index includes such components as mean life expectancy at birth and “mean of years of schooling for adults.” You might think that what counts is not these averages but the minima: how much life, education, safety, health (etc.) does the worst-off stratum get? Their circumstances can improve with balanced and humane economic development. Arguably, the worst-off 20 percent of Americans are better off than Queen Elizabeth I was in 1600, because you’d rather have clean running water in your house than any number of smelly and disease-carrying servants. But our minimum is still not very good, since some Americans sleep on grates or are warehoused in pretrial detention facilities because they can’t afford bail.
  2. Equity. By this I just mean the difference between the top and the bottom, e.g., the GINI coefficient, although one might consider more factors besides income. Algeria and Sweden have almost identical levels of equity (GINI coefficients of 27.2 and 27.6, respectively), but Sweden is much wealthier, with 3.3 times as much GNP per capita as Algeria has.
  3. Mobility. This means the chance that someone born at a relatively low level in the socioeconomic distribution will rise to a relatively high level. By definition, that means that someone else must fall. (Or one person could fall halfway as far, and a second person could fall the other half way, to make room for the person who rises all the way up.) By definition, mobility is zero-sum, being measured as the odds of moving up or down percentile ranks. If everyone moves up, that’s #1 (an increase in aggregate welfare), not a sign of mobility.

These three goals can come apart. For example, equity coincides with very poor human development when everyone is starving together. Sweden has high human development and high equity but not much mobility: Swedish families who had noble surnames in the 17th century still predominate among the top income percentiles. It’s just that it doesn’t matter as much that you’re at the bottom in Sweden, because the least off do OK there.

To be sure, the best-off countries in the world tend to be more equitable and prosperous, and there’s a long list of very poor countries that are also highly unequal and (I guess) have little mobility. That pattern could suggest that the path to higher development requires equity. But that’s a contingent, empirical hypothesis, unlikely to be true across the board, and the goals are not the same.

For proponents and analysts of education, the difference matters. Presume that you are concerned with improving human lives. One way to do that is to expand the availability of education. More people reach higher levels of education today than did in 1930–and more people lead safer, longer, lives. This strategy won’t produce equity, however. As educational attainment has risen in the United States, the most educated people have increased the wage gap.

Another way to enhance human welfare is to yield outputs that benefit everyone: skillful doctors and engineers who have great new technologies, medicines, training, etc. To get the best results, it might be smart to concentrate resources at very high-status institutions. The universities that produce the most scientific advances tend to be highly competitive institutions in inequitable systems like the US.

Presume that you want to promote mobility. Then you must reduce the correlation between parents’ and children’s educational attainment. That means admitting and advancing more students whose parents were disadvantaged. It also means, by definition, admitting fewer students from advantaged homes. Increasing the number of total slots is an inefficient way to enhance mobility. Mobility requires competitiveness: when people can compete better, newcomers can more easily knock off incumbents. When individuals are protected against failure, mobility is hampered.

Mobility also operates at the level of communities. In a system of Schumpeterian “creative destruction,” Detroit can fall while Phoenix rises. European countries intervene much more effectively than we do to protect their deindustrializing cities. That is better for human flourishing, but it may also hamper mobility.

Finally, presume that you really want to improve equity. One way to do that would be to improve the education of the least advantaged while holding the top constant. Another way would be to lower the quality and value of the education received by the top tier. Very few people would support doing that, even if it improved equity. That’s because most people think that welfare and mobility are at least as important as equity. (I leave aside liberty, although that is also a valid and important principle.)

Hybrid goals are possible. Perhaps what we want is to maximize the welfare of the least advantaged while not allowing inequality to get out of hand or mobility to vanish. That’s arguably the outcome in Denmark and Sweden. The US may under-perform regardless of how you weigh the three goals. We have vast inequality, limited mobility, and not much safety or health for a large swath of our people. But even if we can make progress on all three fronts at once, they are still different directions.

See also: to what extent can colleges promote upward mobility?, when social advantage persists for millennia, and the Nordic model