Education / Youth – Page 2

Public School Successes

I frequently post critiques of privatization–with special emphasis on school privatization, aka educational vouchers. Some twenty or so years ago, privatization enthusiasts had a standard answer for every perceived government malfunction: let the private sector do it! This approach had multiple, significant drawbacks, and as those drawbacks became too obvious and costly to ignore, the early enthusiasm faded–except in education, where the “market can solve all problems” ideologues were joined by rightwing activists pursuing a vendetta against teachers’ unions, and by religious folks who chafed at separation of church and state and wanted a First Amendment “work-around.”

“How do you improve the performance of the nation’s public schools?” was–and remains– a fair question. Urban school districts, in particular, face multiple challenges, and when the question of how to meet those challenges became an everyday topic following publication of A Nation at Risk, political figures offered two wildly competing suggestions: “the market can solve everything” ideologues insisted that competition from private schools would incentivize public school improvement; supporters of public education lobbied for additional resources, to be deployed in line with reforms suggested by new academic research.

As we know, vouchers won the political debate. It was a disarmingly simple fix, championed by people who not-so-coincidentally stood to gain from it. Unfortunately, however, despite the promises, vouchers have failed to improve test scores or educational outcomes. (They have been a financial boon for well-to-do families, however, a fact that will make it much more difficult to end these boondoggles.)

Surprisingly, the news is much better from those much-maligned public school systems. Take, for example, Chicago’s public schools, once one of the worst performing systems in the country. As the American Prospect recently reported, “a system that used to be ridiculed has become a model for schools in other cities.”

In 1987, a visit from Bill Bennett–then Secretary of Education–prompted labeling Chicago’s schools the worst in the country. Half of the district’s high schools ranked in the bottom 1 percent nationwide, nearly half of the students dropped out before graduating, and some schools were physical danger zones. Since then, however, Chicago’s public schools have become markedly better.

Black and Latino third graders from low-income families have been, at least according to 2017 data, outperforming their counterparts elsewhere in the state. Graduation rates rose to 84 percent in 2023, within hailing distance of the national average. In 2022, three-fifths of high school graduates enrolled in college immediately upon graduating high school, an increase from previous years, countering the national trend of declining college attendance during COVID; more of them are earning degrees than in the past. This track record is among the best urban school systems in the nation.

A new book, “How a City Learned to Improve its Schools” explains that structural changes, and the policies and practices that they generated, have emerged from a continuous improvement, ‘tortoise beats hare’ approach. As the book readily admits, Chicago’s improvement hasn’t been a straightforward march-to-success narrative. Struggles and setbacks have included teacher strikes, fights over school closures, administrative churn, and high-profile CEO misconduct.

But through it all, the system has continued to improve.

Graduation rates and other measures of accomplishment have continued their steady rise. Nor has the system lost its penchant for evidence-driven changes. The most significant example is the ongoing expansion of early education, with its demonstrated promise of shifting the arc of children’s lives, auguring well for their success. A commitment to experimentation has prompted the system to partner with the University of Chicago Education Lab in testing promising innovations, such as intensive math tutoring for ninth and tenth graders who were mired amid long division and fractions; and a summer internship program that has given students the soft skills they would need in the world of work.

Chicago isn’t alone. Another book, “Disrupting Disruption: The Steady Work of Transforming Schools” highlights three other successful systems: Union City, New Jersey; Roanoke, Virginia; and Union, Oklahoma–systems with a majority of students who are low-income and disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities. In each of these districts, the graduation rate has steadily increased and the opportunity gap has essentially become a thing of the past.

What lesson should we take from all this?

The American journalist H. L. Mencken said it best: “Every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, plausible — and wrong.” Fixing thorny problems is almost always an incremental task requiring consistent, evidence-based analysis and constant adjustment. Americans have an unfortunate penchant for simple, “plausible” remedies that don’t require hard work.

Far too often, as with our current costly, divisive and failed voucher programs, those “simple” ideologically-motivated solutions don’t improve anything–they just add new problems to the old ones.

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The Evidence Continues To Mount

Inequality.org recently took an in-depth look at the Right-wing’s increasingly successful effort to destroy public education. In an article titled “Private Fortunes Vs. Public Education,” the article began

The United States essentially invented public education. Back in the 1780s, notes the Center on Education Policy, federal legislation “granted federal lands to new states and set aside a portion of those lands to be used to fund public schools.” By the 18th century’s close, most Americans had embraced the notion of “using public funds to support public schooling for the common good.”

In the mid-20th century, amid growing levels of economic equality, that public financial support for public schools would expand mightily. The results would be impressive. By 1970, graduation rates from American high schools — institutions, notes historian Claudia Goldin, themselves “rooted in egalitarianism” — had quadrupled over 1920 levels.

But that era of growing equality and expanding public education would start fading in the 1970s. Over recent years, a new U.S. Senate report makes clear, that fade has only intensified.

The article went on to report that, during the last decade, funding for the nation’s public schools has “barely increased,” while “state spending on tax breaks and subsidies for private schools has skyrocketed by 408 percent.”

A report from the Brookings Institution found that universal voucher programs “are unwinding two centuries of tradition in U.S. public education” and that the programs “violate basic traditions of church-state separation, anti-discrimination, and public accountability.” As the researcher concluded, even if the courts -ignoring over fifty years of precedents–rule that these voucher programs are constitutionally permissible, “we should assess them against our principles as a nation.”

Indiana is a prime example. For severa years, the Hoosier state has had the nation’s largest voucher program. It was originally justified as a way to allow poor children to escape “failing public schools,” there were income limits for families taking advantage of the program, and vouchers use was limited to children who had first attended a public school. Those restrictions were steadily eased, and a few days ago, the Indianapolis Star confirmed what I have repeatedly pointed out on this blog: costs have exploded and Indiana’s voucher program has become a subsidy for parochial schools and the well-to-do.

The Star article began with the story of a father who had been paying his daughter’s tuition at a private religious school in Mishawaka, Indiana. The school informed him that Hoosier taxpayers stood ready to assume most of the nearly $10,000 annual cost.

Garcia applied and his daughter joined more than 600 other students ― or about 90% of Marian’s enrollment ― utilizing the state grants to pay for their schooling 2023-24. The tax-funded payments generated $4.3 million for the private school…

A three-month investigation by University of Notre Dame students in the Gallivan Program for Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy found that a majority of the families in the Indiana voucher program today were previously paying for private school on their own, just like Garcia. Yet the state stepped in to offer a financial subsidy to parents who didn’t need it ― a costly decision critics say is hurting public schools, which educate more than 90% of the approximately one million K-12 students in Indiana.

Started in 2011 under former Gov. Mitch Daniels as an avenue to help low-income students escape failing public schools, the voucher program has changed dramatically in the last decade. While it has helped thousands of families choose their preferred school, the cost is projected to grow 263 percent in just five years. This expansion is predicted to force public school districts to either make severe cuts or ask taxpayers for more money through public referendums.

The Indiana legislature has turned the program into “a subsidy for predominantly wealthy, white suburban families”. The Star found that–far from helping poor minority children– the program’s “average recipient is a white female who has never attended public school, from a family earning more than $99,000 a year.”

That cushy subsidy for the well-to-do has cost Indiana’s public schools an estimated $600 million this year.

In 2011, in order for a family of four to qualify for a voucher, the family could make up to $40,000 a year. Today, the same family can qualify while making $222,000 a year. A program that initially cost Indiana taxpayers $15.5 million per year cost more than $300 million last year, and is projected to top $600 million this year.

Meanwhile, a mountain of research confirms that educational outcomes have not improved–and in some places and some subjects, have declined.

Researchers have also identified the “dark money” behind the attack on public education, and Project 2025 acknowledges that the goal is to replace public schools with private and parochial ones.

In Indiana, where gerrymandering has given the GOP carte blanche to do their worst, they’re already working on it.

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Family Values

What are “family values?”

To hear Republicans describe them, family values are a traditional, a backward-facing insistence on sexual “purity” (for women) and heterosexuality: mom in the home watching the children (no pre-school or day care), gays in the closet, no access to abortion. Occasionally, there will be a nod to the importance of dad’s fidelity, but that gets awkward these days, given GOP allegiance to a male sexual predator.

Democratic policies illustrate a very different approach to valuing families.

For one thing, Democrats emphasize job creation, so that families can adequately care for the children they may–or may not–choose to have. (On that score, the GOP’s performance has been dismal: during the DNC, Bill Clinton noted that, since 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. Fifty million were created during Democratic administrations, one million under Republicans. This jaw-dropping statistic turned out to be true, albeit slightly misleading.)

Even if you discount the importance of a robust economy to the health of the American family, a glance at the policies pursued by the parties confirms that Democrats are far more family-friendly. Nicholas Kristof recently made that case. Calling Republican efforts to paint themselves as the “pro-family” party “chutzpah,” Kristof wrote

Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).

One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again.

Can anything be more anti-child?

Well, maybe our firearms policy is. Guns are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, largely because of Republican intransigence and refusal to pass meaningful gun safety laws.

It’s because of the G.O.P. that the United States is one of only a few countries in the world without guaranteed paid maternity leave. Republicans fought universal health care and resisted the expansion of Medicaid; that’s one reason a child in the United States is three times as likely to die by the age of 5 as a child in, say, Slovenia or Estonia.

Kristof also noted several of the anti-child policies advanced in Project 2025, including ending Head Start–which has been a lifeline for low-income children– and dismantling the Department of Education.

Banning abortion and requiring women to give birth whether or not they can afford to feed and clothe a child is hardly “pro family”– even ignoring the fact that when women with dangerous pregnancies cannot access adequate care, they often die, leaving existing children motherless. And Republican extremism on abortion and birth control has led to obstacles to in vitro fertilization–for some families, the only avenue to producing those children Republicans want women to keep turning out.

Kristof also recognized the importance of the economy in supporting families. If marriage rates are important–and he agrees that they are–the evidence of economic influence is compelling.

Union membership among men raises their marriage rates, for example, apparently because they then earn more money and become more stable and appealing as partners. But Republicans have worked for decades to undermine unions.

And while marriage is important, so is access to divorce. Before easy access to divorce, large numbers of women were trapped in violent marriages that terrorized them and their children. (JD Vance is on record counseling women to remain in such marriages.) As Kristof notes,

One careful study by the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that the introduction of no-fault divorce in America was associated with about a 20 percent reduction in female suicides, at least a 25 percent reduction in wife-beating and an apparent decline in husbands murdering wives.

Which raises the question: can an anti-women party be pro family values?

In this policy arena–as in so many others–the fundamental difference between today’s GOP and the Democratic Party really does get back to dramatic differences in values. That’s why calls to “bridge our differences” and “achieve compromise” ring so hollow. If the debate is about the best way to achieve result X–say, feeding hungry children–then we can absolutely come to some sort of mutual agreement. But when one party wants to feed children and the other party doesn’t, compromise isn’t likely.

Americans aren’t divided over policy; we are divided over values–and not just family values.

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Why Red States Are In the Red

A recent column by Michael Hicks in the Capitol Chronicle focused on a data-point that is far too often overlooked. It seems that calling Republican-led states “Red” is entirely appropriate, because most of them are in the red.

(Before going into the details of the column, I want to note that the Chronicle is part of an encouraging trend here in my city–a trend that is also showing up elsewhere. As I have repeatedly noted, the dearth of local reporting has had a very negative effect on democracy and the sense of community. In city after city, local newspapers have either disappeared or–as in Indianapolis–turned into “ghost papers” that no longer cover the sorts of things citizens need to know about their local institutions. Recently, however, we’ve seen several new media entrants that propose to fill the gap–including Axios Indianapolis, The Mirror, State Affairs, and the Chronicle.)

But back to Hicks. He begins this particular column by noting that from the end of World War II up until about 1980, economic differences among the states bore little relationship to the partisanship of those states.

In fact, if you picked just one variable that best measured prosperity — per capita income — the was no correlation with political party. There were rich states led by Republican and Democratic governors and poor states led by both as well.

Over the past 40 years, that changed. Today, 19 of the 20 richest states are solidly Democratic, while 19 of the 20 poorest states are solidly Republican. It is clear that the GOP has become the party of poor states, while the Democrats have become the party of prosperous states.

The question, as usual, is “why?”

One big culprit is that political parties changed, erasing regional differences. Up until the late 90’s, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. That is no longer the case, so as states began to align with national politics platforms.

This trend more extreme today. Even races for local government tend to be highly nationalized. State and local issues are often ignored in primary or general elections. This homogeneity of national politics naturally tends to cause parties to have success in places that are more similar – polarizing states between parties.

A second trend is the sorting by politics increasingly effects household location choice. Though much sorting happens at the local level, the nationalization of politics means that state borders now effect household location choice.

The nationalization of politics means that each party has been staking out positions that appeal to majorities in key states. In this way, politicians are choosing their voters. The sorting of households reflects voters choosing political landscapes they prefer, on economic, fiscal and cultural issues. This trend appears to be accelerating.

That last paragraph reminded me of the demographic observations in Bill Bishop’s 2009 book The Big Sort.

Hicks acknowledges that there is never one simple reason for economic performance, but he also hones in on what appears to be the largest cause of the disparity between Red and Blue states: public education.

The cause of the economic divergence is because human capital — education, innovation and invention — replaced manufacturing and movement of goods as the primary source of prosperity. This means that places that grow will necessarily need to develop and attract more human capital. But the educational policies pursued by both parties are vastly different, with very different outcomes.

The GOP has largely tried to adopt broad school choice, and cut funding to both K-12 and higher education. The Democrats have largely eschewed school choice, but amply funded both K-12 and higher education. Seventeen of the 20 best funded states are Democratically controlled and 17 out of the 20 lowest funded states are GOP strongholds. Educational outcomes between these states are stark.

Educational attainment differences alone explain about three quarters of the difference in per capita income between states….

Voucher programs haven’t just failed to generate superior test scores. They’ve impoverished our critically important public school systems –and kept Red states like Indiana poor. As Hicks concludes,

Economists have been saying this for three decades, without any effect in poor states. The prognosis is simply that poor states — like Indiana — are going to get poorer for decades to come. While rich states will grow richer.

Not that Indiana’s terrible legislature will take note….

I recently discussed the abysmal effects of voucher programs on the podcast co-hosted by Morton Marcus and John Guy: Who Gets What?

If you have some time, tune in.

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Project 2025, Public Education And The Public Good

Today’s post is a bit longer than usual, so consider yourself forewarned.

As we’ve learned more about the various elements of “Plan 2025,” it looks increasingly like an all-out attack on the America most of us believe in. There’s the assault on women (the effort to take us back to what those nice White “Christian” men consider our proper role as breeders and housemaids); the fight to remove any and all elements of a social safety net (who needs health insurance or Social Security?); the multiple provisions favoring the wealthy over the middle-class; and a full-scale attack on public education.

Time Magazine, among others, has reported on the education portion of the White Nationalists’ plan.

Project 2025, the policy agenda for Former President Trump’s potential first year back in the White House published by the far right conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, has been making waves recently. Some of the many destructive proposals within the agenda include the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education—along with federal education funding and any civil rights protections—and the diversion of public money to private school voucher programs instead.

Make no mistake: The goal is to end public education.

As the article goes on to detail, the measures in Project 2025 are a continuation of the same efforts we’ve seen the past several decades– efforts to turn education into a consumer good available to those who can afford such luxuries.

We are on the brink of a new wave of public school closures, another step in the decades-long project to divest and dismantle the institution of public school. Disguised as “school choice,” federal, state, local, and private actors have prioritized paying for private and charter schools, hoarding educational resources for the haves and depleting resources for the have-nots.

The policies that Project 2025 plans to prioritize—government payments to families sending their children to private school and creation of new charter schools that are run like businesses—have expanded in the last few years, starving public school districts that serve all students of already insufficient resources. In the 2023-24 school year, at least 70 school districts, including in San Antonio, Texas, Jackson, Mississippi, and Wichita, Kansas, announced permanent closures of public schools, impacting millions of students. These districts are resorting to the harmful, discriminatory, and ineffective so-called ‘solution’ of closing schools in Black and Latine communities, stripping those communities of their local public schools.

The schools already being closed are (not so coincidentally) those in the poorer areas of cities–the schools that serve low-income and minority students, and that have historically been underfunded– depriving the communities around them of “community resources like adult education, polling locations, a place to hold community meetings, and access to democratic community control through school board elections.”

Despite the original rhetoric about opening access to “better” schools for underprivileged kids, voucher programs now primarily benefit upper-middle class parents, many of whom were previously paying to send their children to private and parochial schools.

What is ironic about this effort to deny educational opportunities to those with the fewest resources is how costly it is.

Pro Publica reports that the voucher program in Arizona has “blown a hole” in that state’s budget.

Arizona, the model for voucher programs across the country, has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.

Two years ago, Arizona passed the largest school voucher program in the history of education. The program was generous: “any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.”

In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.

Indiana was one of those states.

Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million.

As a result, Arizona has cut $333 million out of water infrastructure projects (as the article pointed out, this in a state where water scarcity is a huge issue). It cut tens of millions of dollars for highway repairs, and $54 million from Arizona’s community colleges, among other cuts.

In Indiana, voucher program costs have ballooned to $439 million, some 40 percent higher than in 2022–2023.

Despite the enormous costs– vouchers haven’t improved educational outcomes.

In the Public Interest recently noted that the assault on public education is part of a larger attack on the very notion of a “public good.”

We define public goods as the things we all need to survive and thrive–the big things: public health, mobility, knowledge, democracy, shelter, clean air and water, the ability to communicate with each other (including, lately, broadband access). Public goods include things we need everyone to have. Those are things that we can only do if we do them together. It is part of our responsibility to each other, and it forms the basis of our society. And for a very long time in the United States, there was a consensus that we need every child, not just one’s own children, to get a high-quality education.

It seems beyond the imagination of many conservatives that people might—or should—care about and feel any responsibility regarding the plight of someone who is not within their own personal sphere or realm of identity. (It also seems of a piece with the way former Ohio Senator Rob Portman became receptive to gay rights only after his own son came out to him.)

Margaret Thatcher once said of society “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”

Such a narrow and individual approach to public policy is at the root of the notion of “school choice,” a catchy name for programs like vouchers that essentially move public money from public schools to private schools. It holds that K-12 education is best offered as a function of the marketplace, something with which only school age children and their parents should be concerned. It doesn’t view education as the necessary component of a functioning democracy, nor does it value the social cohesion that universal public education can foster…

The reality of “school choice individualism” is that schools that receive public money that comes from all of us via vouchers want to be able to exclude some of us. They don’t have to follow the rules of public schools—they can pick and choose students, and they can–and do–discriminate against anyone they choose: those with disabilities, families who are part of the LGBTQ community, and religious affiliations they deem unacceptable.

The article concluded with a dig at JD Vance’s oft-expressed disdain for public goods and “childless cat ladies.”

While many conservatives don’t seem to regard public education as a public good but rather as an expression of a shopping preference for families, the vast majority of Americans do see education as a public good. And that includes those who have school-age children, those with children who are now adults, those who have never had children, and even, we’re sure, quite a few cat ladies.

Meow…

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