American Schools Are All the Same

Despite our federalist education system, most schools look alike

A bunch of schools that all look the same (a weird AI-generated photo using that prompt)

The weirdest thing about the American education system is how decentralized it is. Schools are funded largely by state and local governments, with only minimal additions kicked in by the national Department of Education. This is partly why the educational outcomes of different states are so divergent: California and Massachusetts do things differently than Mississippi and Tennessee do. This is also perhaps the biggest frustration of well-meaning education reformers who want to reshape American schooling based on what the evidence tells us we should do. The diversity of schooling also makes it difficult to compare outcomes in the U.S. with those in other countries, since other countries’ systems are much more cohesive than ours is.

Despite the fact that there are thousands of school districts governed by dozens of states, most schools look pretty similar to one another. Most schools are split up into classrooms with desks arranged in rows and facing a whiteboard. Most classrooms have between 15 and 30 students and one teacher in them. Most schools have a principal and a vice principal, and most are probably increasing the number of assistant principals and deans of students at a steady pace each year. Schools, in turn, are governed by local school boards, and local school boards are governed by state governments that, despite the diverse makeups of each state, look roughly the same (all have three branches of governments, most (if not all) have legislatures that are split into two branches, etc.).

In short, despite the decentralized nature of American schools, they all look pretty similar in the grand scheme of things.

I find this to be fascinating. After all, if our federalist system is supposed to be a laboratory of democracy, then you’d expect there to be large differences in how one state practices education compared with another. For instance, it’s surprising that we don’t see more states experiment with class size. In states with a surplus of teachers, you could imagine classrooms with as few as 10 students in them. In states with teacher shortages or budget constraints, you could imagine some classes with upward of 100 students in them (along with a few teacher assistants to keep the hordes under control). 

You could also imagine states like California or New York allowing local districts to adopt a Montessori-type model for elementary schools. Under the Montessori design, students aren’t really given a curriculum and are instead allowed to explore their intellectual and/or creative passions (you can see why I chose California and New York as my examples for this). On the other end of the education journey, you could see some states granting permission for schools to allow students to pursue music, theater, or creative writing rather than the traditional curriculum of math, English, and science. 

With some exceptions, it would be hard to find this type of true diversity in the schooling experience in U.S. public schools. Indeed, this was part of the push for charter schools, which operate beyond the traditional strictures of public schools and can thus experiment with different curricula, behavioral models, and personnel allocations. But most public schools are stuck in amber and thus chug away without any real sense of what could be different for students, parents, teachers, and administrators.

Why is this the case? One reason is probably the teacher labor market. In many states, teachers are unionized. Because unions are good at negotiating higher salaries and better working conditions for teachers, most teachers want to work in states with strong unions. As a result, teachers in states without unions are incentivized to move to other states that have unionized teacher forces. This may be an oversimplification, but it’s at least directionally true: Teachers respond to incentives like every other human being, so it’s not surprising that they are more likely to work in states where they are paid more. Because unions are typically pretty strong, it’s hard to make big changes in states that have teacher unions. Any change that is likely to negatively affect teachers is going to be fought fiercely by local union representatives, and only school boards whose interests are not intertwined with those of the union will have a chance at pushing through the change regardless of the union’s position on it. This, for instance, is why we’re unlikely to encounter very large classrooms: Unions won’t like it because it would make teachers’ lives harder, and therefore classrooms have to be capped at a certain number of students, per the negotiated contract. And since there’s free movement of the teacher labor force across states, one state’s change is likely to reverberate, whether positively or negatively, to neighboring states.

Another reason is probably the desire of taxpayers to hold schools to account for public spending. This makes it less likely that a state would adopt a Montessori model for its elementary schools. There is a huge diversity of political opinion in the U.S., but even the most free-loving hippies in Portland want their kids—or at least other people’s kids—to go to an elementary school that looks like the one they went to as children. Most people probably think they turned out okay, and since they went to a normal, traditional elementary school, they think that traditional elementary schools are fine for most kids. And since public money is spent on schools, the public has a reasonable expectation of positive outcomes from those schools. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, most people think their local schools are doing a fine job preparing students for the world, so they stick to the status quo and don’t allow weird models to emerge.

There’s also probably a lack of imagination on the level of state governments—driven in part by the amateur nature of politics, and state-level politics in particular. Most members of state legislatures probably see their tenure in the state house as a stepping stone to more ambitious political careers. As a result, they spend a lot of time learning how to be a good politician and not as much digging into specific policy areas, like education, that may deserve particular attention. By the time they might be halfway decent at tinkering with education—and getting enough buy-in from both their party and at least the moderate wing of the opposition party to have any chance at passing a bill that allows for more flexibility in the sector—they’ve probably left state government entirely. At the local level, the problem is less a surplus of ambition and more a shortage of competence. School boards are often made up of people for whom that job is a side hustle, so they don’t spend much time analyzing the issue. When it comes time to make important decisions about their district, they defer to the experts or stick with their faction. 

Another force that keeps schools from innovating is the desire to be competitive with other states and districts. This encourages school districts to do what other school districts are doing, because doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing isn’t likely to win you or your graduates any major distinction. Plus, high-school accreditation schemes like the Carnegie Unit enforce rigidity because colleges view as legitimate only high schools that are accredited by Carnegie. You don’t want to be the high school whose students are never accepted into even moderately prestigious colleges simply because you don’t conform to the standard that every other high school conforms to. And so most schools go along with the crowd to avoid being a letdown to their students.

There’s an understandable desire among education reformers to denounce the decentralized nature of American schooling. After all, if you have an idea to put into place a teaching reform that you think will enormously benefit all students, then you’d want to put that reform in all schools. That’s why the two major education-reform initiatives of the past 25 years—No Child Left Behind and the Common Core—were nationalizing schemes that sought to bring more conformity to how schools taught and assessed their students. Indeed, I often feel the same impulse. I think that cognitive science-based early literacy instruction could greatly improve the reading abilities of students across the country, and I often shake my head at the inability of American education to adopt this reform across the board.

But it’s also important to recognize that even with the vastly decentralized nature of American education, a lot of it looks pretty much the same. In light of that, then, we should stop pining for conformity and instead take a step back to ponder what we could do truly make schools better. I offer no set-in-stone solutions for doing this, but I think it’s crucial to think in broader terms than we normally do. We should use the diversity of our systems to our advantage rather than constantly demanding its abolition.