Why on Earth is Education Still So Bad?
The field is gigantic, diverse, and complex. It’s a wonder there’s any improvement at all
I spend a lot of time thinking about education policy. As a teacher, my experiences were the direct result of decisions made by policymakers, which in turn were influenced by researchers, advocates, and activists. I’ve written before about how Massachusetts lawmakers made it harder to suspend students, which contributed to chaos in my classroom and in the hallway just outside. I’ve also explained how students’ literacy has been set back because a policy and curriculum movement reshaped early reading instruction in its unscientific image. I’ve expressed frustration with our culture of low expectations, which has influenced policymakers to set the bar for student performance far lower than it should and celebrated incremental gains in test scores as overwhelming wins for schooling.
But as regular readers know, I stopped teaching just over a year ago to pursue a career in Washington, D.C., in education policy. When I was in the classroom, I had an on-the-ground perspective that is too often missing in policy discussions among far-flung wonks in Washington. Now, I have a birds-eye view as one of those policy wonks in Washington that allows me to understand some of the institutional and political obstacles that education reformers face. I’ll try to blend these points of view in an attempt to explain why education outcomes for American kids are still so poor—despite more than a century of efforts by reformers to improve them.
As a policy wonk, I recently floated two ideas: mastery-based learning and classical education. Mastery learning describes an approach to education in which students must first master a concept before moving onto the next one. I said that this was a no-brainer and that if we treated education like we do sports, we would recognize the folly of having students move onto the next concept before mastering the previous one. Classical learning is a philosophy of education that holds that the Medieval revival of ancient Latin and Greek languages and thinkers should be a model for how to educate young Americans today. I find both of these ideas to be compelling and, possibly, revolutionary.
But as I wrote at the time, mastery-based learning is much simpler and appealing in theory than it is in practice. In theory, mastery learning requires students to be held back from advancing in their education until they have properly learned the material they are working on. In practice, it’s increasingly difficult to hold students back. Of all the students I taught, perhaps three of them had ever been held back—and that was only in the early grades like Kindergarten, where the practice is far more common because it’s obvious when students aren’t yet mature or proficient enough to move on. Plus, it’s hard to stand up to parents who insist that their child is competent enough to move on to the next set of material, even when that’s demonstrably not the case. Indeed, parents may be the most formidable obstacle in advancing mastery-based learning. Another key difficulty is that mastery learning requires a different way of assessing and reporting student progress. Instead of an A-F grading scale, mastery learning is best realized with a dashboard containing labels such as “needs improvement” and “proficient” to describe a student’s progress. This sounds great in theory, but when parents are not familiar with the new terms—since they themselves were graded on a traditional letter scale—they are likely to push back and complain that the new scales are illegible and that they disadvantage their children. As in many cases, inertia dictates that it’s harder to get an idea off the ground than it is to keep it running, since the existing stakeholders are likely to rebel against anything with which they’re unfamiliar.
In the case of classical learning, the issue isn’t with parents but with teachers. In theory, it’s great to expose kids to the foremost thinkers of the ancient and modern worlds, from Plato through Kierkegaard. But this requires teachers to understand those philosophers, which is a tall order. Moreover, classical learning dictates that teachers hold Socratic-style seminars in order to lead their students through robust discussions of complex ideas. This, too, is easier said than done. To properly run a Socratic seminar, you need not only to know when to push a particular student to expand on his or her thinking but also to have deep knowledge about the subject so you can answer questions and draw comparisons with other fields to illuminate the subject. When I taught, several of my colleagues struggled to pass the basic exams required for a Massachusetts teaching license. If my experience is any indication of the readiness of the teacher workforce to actually implement classical learning (research suggests that it is), then all I can say to classical education entrepreneurs is: good luck.
I mentioned teachers, so I have to bring up the elephant in the room: teachers unions. I have complex feelings about unions, as I shared in a previous newsletter. Unions can be a source of great cohesion among teachers. Teachers often feel lonely because their main duties are carried out behind closed doors and away from colleagues. Unions attempt to break down those barriers and build camaraderie between educators. But unions are the source of much of the inertia in education reform that I mentioned above. For instance, one obvious solution to many of our problems in education is simply to hire better teachers, pay better teachers more than worse ones, and fire the lowest-performing ones. (Even that is easier said than done, since there’s often disagreement as to what makes a “good” teacher.) But imagine trying to force through any of those policies while the teachers unions are in place. A unions’ job is to protect its dues-paying members. As a result, any teacher whom administrators want to fire receives union representation and, if needed, legal counsel to fight their termination. This makes it prohibitively challenging to fire a teacher—especially mid-year. And unions were responsible for establishing the current step-and-lane pay scale for teachers. They helped set up a salary schedule that increases based on the number of years they have been employed (that’s the “step” part) and the level of education they have received (the “lane” part). Abandoning that in favor of differential pay based on performance would be a nonstarter for most union officials, who want to ensure their members have job security and stable salaries. That’s certainly a noble goal. But it makes it harder for any reform to be pushed through the unions.
Education is particularly complex in the U.S. because of how diffuse it is. Instead of a national, standardized system, we have a sprawling web of local and state control over education policy. As a result, it’s impossible to coordinate any change at the national level and ensure that it percolates down through the states. Former President Obama learned this the hard way. When implementing his infamous Common Core system, which used Department of Education grants to incentivize states to adopt a national system of learning standards, he ran into roadblocks. Spurred on by conservative backlash, many states that had previously signed onto the Common Core abandoned the standards in subsequent years. Political polarization has only increased since Obama left office in January 2017, so it’s hard to imagine any successful reform efforts driven from on high.
This diffuse nature of education can be a thorn in the side of reformers, but it can also lead to innovation and growth. One example is the proliferation in recent years of education savings account (ESA) laws, which allow education funds to follow individual students and families rather than to flow to the public schools that they would otherwise attend. Each state law is different, but in general ESA funds can be spent on a host of education-related expenses from private school tuition to tutoring. Yet again, though, the diverse nature of the education system in the U.S. means that ESAs are unlikely to be a solution for many families across the country. Most ESA laws were passed in Republican states. School choice used to be a more bipartisan idea, but as political polarization increases, it’s becoming ever more one-sided. Good luck to any Democrats who seek to set up some version of an ESA law in their blue state.
If this is anywhere near as depressing to read as it was to write, then you’ll by now be much more cynical about education reform in the U.S. In some ways, that’s healthy. It means that you’re unlikely to consider any policy idea as a silver bullet and that you’ll be more realistic about the chances of its passage and successful implementation. This outlook is anti-utopian, which is nearly always a good thing. When Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia, the original dystopian novel, he invented the word “utopia” to mean “no place.” In other words, a utopia by definition cannot exist. Therefore, it’s better for people to look askance at reformers who proclaim that their idea will magically alter the education landscape for the better.
But in other ways, this more cynical outlook is just depressing. It means that we can’t expect much change in the field of education—a field that, as demonstrated by recent scores on the National Assessment for Education Progress, is sorely in need of change. This jadedness can also dampen enthusiasm for education entrepreneurs who see an untapped market in, say, mastery-based learning, which could further impede progress on such a promising idea. For instance, there are probably people out there who are adept at designing intuitive mastery learning dashboards and in communicating their importance to skeptical parents. But, assuming they read this newsletter (a lofty assumption on my part, to be sure), they may come away convinced that their idea will never work. That is surely enough to make them abandon their idea and to go into a more lucrative sector to make more money.
I certainly don’t want to deter any would-be entrepreneurs from doing their best to improve the American education system, so I’ll try to end on a high note—or at least a more practical one. Policymakers and entrepreneurs should focus less on systems-level transformation like shifting the pay scale for teachers or establishing mastery-based learning. While those ideas are promising in theory, I’ve just laid out (some of) the reasons that they would be hard to implement. Instead, those with the power to change education should focus on what can be done by the educators currently working in schools and with the systems currently in place. One untapped market is curriculum reform. Lots of English curricula, for instance, just don’t work very well. They are devoid of substance and do not interest students. (I speak from experience.) Instead, we should focus efforts on making curricula both more engaging and less labor-intensive on the part of teachers. Teachers spend hours every day collecting and printing out worksheets that they find on places like Pinterest and TeachersPayTeachers. There’s no reason why curriculum designers can’t put together a robust and engaging curriculum that is scientifically proven to help students learn and that is easier for teachers to assess student work. Another promising avenue is to revamp teacher preparation and professional development (PD). Most PD is slapdash and unhelpful to teachers, who often view PD sessions as a waste of time. But developing better PD sessions that do things like educate teachers more deeply in the content matter that they’re teaching can make them better teachers. Some may rebel against having to take classes in subjects they learned in high school or college, but at least their PD sessions would be productive and enlightening rather than mundane and useless.
Of course, those two ideas are fraught with difficulties, too. But those obstacles are much more easily overcome than those that stand in the way of more fundamental change. We should always strive to make systematic change when that is needed, and I certainly don’t want people to stop coming up with ideas about how to better the lives of American students and teachers. But we must recognize that most reforms are going to fail. Once we have that perspective, we can then focus our energies on what we can do that will actually move the needle on education rather than result in millions of wasted dollars and minutes of our lives.
Governments are really bad at doing things. Maybe education is the thing they are the worst at. One time Judy and I attended a local Board of Education meeting in our neighborhood about safety. There were about 12 people up on the stage. All of them administrators, most of them PhD’s. None of them teachers. It was then we knew it was busted. Government is way too big and has lost its way. Money for nothing.