Dumber Kids or Better Education?

What’s going on in our nation that has spent the last century plus at technology’s leading edge. With a massive single market and lots of high-tech buyers and sellers, some of the finest engineering and scientific universities on Earth, and capital markets designed to fund and foster innovation, we rose and sustained our highest economic and global power. Yet we seem constantly able to shoot ourselves in the foot. We are fracturing and polarizing to decimate that single marketplace… noting that Europe’s divisiveness has been the single driving force that has prevented that Continent from achieving competitiveness comparable to ours. The EU has never got its act together, and now we seem to be imitating that fractious model.

We pride ourselves on low taxes, but we have financed so much of what we do by living on our past achievements and borrowing to maintain our present lifestyle (at least for the well-heeled). We keep telling ourselves that “rich people with big tax cuts” are the “job creators,” even though isn’t any evidence to support that inane theory. Rich folks did not get that way by randomly hiring when they get a tax cut! What we do know is that education, especially quality education, actually is both the genuine “job creator,” and before income inequality devasted the lower and middle classes, the path to upward mobility. Upward mobility seems to have left our building.

But those incredible universities with amazing faculties require undergraduate candidates who are prepared to learn at the necessary level. And since the Supreme Court effectively eliminated DEI from college admissions consideration and enabled state funds for religious charter schools, the quality of public primary and secondary education has never been more important. Today’s blog focuses on that level of education, and to compare apples to apples, I first looked at the US level of education, prepandemic. My bases for comparison are the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) standardized test results focused on 15-year-olds. A late 2018 comparison showed the U.S. ranked 36th in math and 13th in reading out of the 79 countries and regions that participate in the test.

But oddly, as bad as those results are, an analysis from the December 2019 Hechinger Report (authored by Jill Barshay) adds this twist: “Amid the long-term stagnation, there is an important change to note. Inequality is growing. Peggy Carr, associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) points out that both exams are showing a widening achievement gap between high- and low-performing students. One in five American 15-year-olds, 19 percent, scored so low on the PISA test that they had difficulty with basic aspects of reading, such as identifying the main ideas in a text of moderate length.

“But the inequality story is a nuanced one. Part of the inequality is between schools with students at wealthier schools posting much higher test scores than students at schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students. But the vast majority of educational inequality in America is inside each school, according to the PISA test score report. Statisticians mathematically teased out inequality between schools versus within each school and found that, in the U.S., only 20 percent of the variation in student performance is between schools. The remaining 80 percent is inside each school.” Unfortunately, the impact of the tax cuts for the rich has seriously reduced public education budgets.

But the polarization of America has taken an even more disastrous toll on the quality of American primary and secondary public schools. Our culture war has prioritized anti-“woke” interpretation of history and civics, religious doctrine and theory over empirical science and generally denigrated highly trained educators as “out of touch elitists.” Alternative educational paths have opened up, looking good on partisan paper but failing miserably to prepare students for a STEM-driven global economy, further distancing American teenagers from being prepared for quality college courses and life careers that can sustain their futures.

Writing for The Morning news feed from the New York Times (June 17th), Dana Goldstein examines the problem: “An overwhelming majority of American students attend public schools. But that number is falling. In part, that’s because in more than half of states, parents can now use public money to educate their kids — at home, online, in private schools. This year, a million students used some kind of private education voucher, more than double the figure from four years earlier, according to new research from EdChoice, a group that supports private-school choice and tracks the sector.

“The result is a growing movement of choose-your-own-adventure education. Parents are permitted to find any program that they think fits their beliefs and their kids’ needs. Yet it’s unclear how, or whether, accountability or standards will be enforced outside traditional schools.

“What’s driving this change? The pandemic prompted many families to reconsider how their children learn. Republican lawmakers embraced private-school choice as part of a broader push for parental rights. (They also see the issue as a way to appeal to young parents — often Black and Latino — who are critical of how public schools serve their children.) And teachers are reporting intense burnout, with some leaving public schools to open small businesses that can accept these vouchers.”

There’s a lot more home-schooling, but Goldstein observed: “A few were Christian conservatives who want the Bible taught as history. One mother complained about L.G.B.T.Q. public school educators and lamented what she said was an emphasis on gender and race… But more common were parents who had nothing against public school except that their children failed to thrive there. Nicole Timmons said her daughter, Sienna, 15, was not moving forward academically. Sienna now attends C.H.O.I.C.E. Preparatory Academy, a microschool in Gwinnett County [Georgia]. It serves an almost all-Black student body.

“The boom in nontraditional education comes with a new political vocabulary. Conservatives who think the government should give parents money for these programs no longer talk much about vouchers. Now they praise money sent directly to families in education savings accounts and buzz about ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘permissionless education’ — no teachers’ unions or curriculum mandates, and far less standardized testing… Private-school choice programs are popular with parents of disabled children. Public school administrators sometimes suggest vouchers to parents when their children are having difficulty, especially with behavior. But accepting a voucher often means enrolling in a program that is not required to follow federal disability law. Private educators often don’t provide on-site therapies.

“Advocates for private-school choice embrace the lack of regulation. They say the market will correct itself as parents withdraw their children from mediocre programs. “We’re in the midst of a change on what we mean by accountability,” said Robert Enlow, chief executive of EdChoice, a right-leaning group.” Unfortunately, the consequences of this flow can be dire. For the most part the quality of STEM courses has fallen, and the public schools with the resulting lower enrollment suffer significant budgets cuts and facilities closing.

I’m Peter Dekom, and at some point those red states prioritizing conservative teachings over the hard and fast fact-based learning required for success in life, you might think, would get the blues, at least when it comes to good teachers teaching factual accuracy.