When we talk about education, we’re talking about our children, our workforce, our society, and the future of the entire world. There’s a lot riding on our schools! There’s also a lot of money going into them. It makes sense to closely monitor our approach to public education, to be sure that we’re achieving the best possible return on our investment.
Still, we can’t let the high stakes cloud our judgement or tempt us into fear-driven decisions. We need to recognize when fear is unwarranted, so that we can really stand back and evaluate our path before we continue.
Last night, I watched a movie called Waiting for Superman, about the crisis in American public education. It was produced in 2000, just as the charter-school movement (funded by big donors like the Walton Family Foundation) was taking off. Waiting for Superman depends on a bold claim: Public schools in the USA are spending a lot more money per student than they used to, without seeing any improvement in student achievement.
Data like this would scare anybody!
Waiting for Superman(championed by “analog conservatives and digital billionaires” like Bill Gates — who is prominently featured in the film) encourages the American public to believe that our schools are “dropout factories,” chained to the iron ball that is “teacher tenure.”
Note: Teacher tenure doesn’t really exist anywhere in the United States, since the Janus decision effectively made all states “right to work.” Teacher tenure really doesn’t exist in Arkansas, where the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act allows any teacher to be suspended at any time, as long as there is “just cause” (like incompetence.) Once an incompetent teacher has been suspended — even if s/he fights it — it’s only about a 90-day path to termination.
Okay, great! Teacher tenure isn’t the ball and chain that it used to be. But what about the gross overspending? What about poor student achievement? What about high drop-out rates?
Well, it all depends on how you look at it.
Per-Pupil Spending
The scary Superman graph shows per-pupil spending “adjusted for inflation” growing alarmingly quickly. It links per-pupil spending to the Consumer Price Index, which describes the cost of consumer goods. But schools aren’t spending their money on consumer goods — schools are spending their money on salaries and benefits.
What if, instead of using the Consumer Price Index, we adjust the dollar value of per-pupil spending based on the Bush School of Government & Public Service “Comparable Wage Index?” The CWI adjusts for labor costs (salaries and benefits) by accounting for regional differences in the cost of living, instead of tracking the nationwide cost of consumer goods. If we take regional cost of living into account, it turns out we’re not increasing per-pupil spending at all.
That’s right. Depending on how you adjust the value of a dollar over time, school spending (per student) is basically holding steady.
Student Performance
Okay, so what about student achievement?
Compared to the rest of the world, the US is somewhere around the upper-middle on PISA and TIMSS tests.
Unfortunately, we’re significantly higher in child poverty than most of our international educational competitors. Educating poor children costs more money, so we have to balance those higher costs against the results we hope to achieve on the international stage.
Still, as a country, the US is doing fine.
What about Arkansas — where I live? Our legislators keep passing laws that declare we’re in a state of emergency. And we’re at exactly the 23% child-poverty level that matches our national average. How bad are the public schools in Arkansas?
US News and World Report puts Arkansas at #42 in education. Education Commissioner Johnny Key says Arkansas is tied (with 48 other states) for 49th place in education, behind Massachusetts.
However, if we go by ACT-Aspire scores (which Arkansas uses as 96.25% of its grading system for K-8 schools, and 77% of its grading system for high schools) Arkansas is squarely aligned with the national average. When did “average” become an emergency?
The bad news, of course, is that the ACT-Aspire ranks most kids, nationwide, as objectively pretty bad at math, reading, science, and writing — despite being above-average, internationally. Either our children are failing + doing normally + doing quite well at the same time, or we’re just not very good at measuring these things.
Graduation Rates
That brings us to Waiting for Superman’s assertion that we are facing low graduation rates in our public high schools. Are they really drop-out factories?
“Did Sally graduate from high school?”
It is NOT a simple yes/no question, as it might appear.Education departments across the country (and in Arkansas) measure what’s called an “Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate,” which means high schools only get full credit for students who graduate in four years or less. If a school serves students who need extra help (i.e., kids whose racial or socioeconomic status is linked to low academic achievement) it automatically loses points on its “graduation rate” when these students repeat a grade.
In Arkansas, a student who takes five years to graduate high school counts as only half of a graduate. A student with special needs who stays in high school until age 21 (which Arkansas requires high schools to allow) counts as a dropout.
Still, even with all these people who finish high school being counted as “dropouts,” the United States is doing better than it has ever done at getting its kids through high school. We’re at an 84% average graduation rate — up from 80% in 1970 (which is when public education was at its best, according to Waiting for Superman.) Arkansas’ graduation rate is even higher, at 87%. This is WAY UP from the 6% US graduation rate at the turn of the 20th century.
Anecdotes aren’t reliable evidence.
Yes, we can all name a particular teacher, curriculum, or school that isn’t as good as we’d like. However, we have to keep these small-scale problems in their proper perspective when we develop education policy at the state or federal level. As Bruce D. Baker writes in his 2018 book Educational Inequality and School Finance:
We don’t need to be so readily coerced into a panic state that requires immediate policy response. More importantly, we must avoid falling for the claim that “anything is better than the status quo,” because it is always possible to make things worse, especially when acting in haste. Better understanding the status quo, and how we got there, is a first step toward determining the best path forward.
The kids are all right. Don’t buy into a panic narrative.
Panic makes the billionaires richer.
We’re in the middle of an “education reform” movement, marketed as a policy response to the “crisis” of rising education costs, stalled student achievement scores, and low graduation rates. Everybody wants to make schools better, so we’ve bought into every new “management consultant approach” that offers “systems-oriented solutions that can be assessed through bottom-line indicators.”
Unfortunately, none of these approaches has improved public education demonstrably.
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Even the concept of “school choice” has lost its broad appeal. We have collectively begun to realize that charter schools do only about as well as traditional public schools in producing students with high test scores. Charter schools don’t do any better than traditional public schools at indicating future employability or earning success — and in the meantime, they are ripe for fraud and scandal.
Increasingly, the only people who support the concept of charter schools are the people who are profiting off of them financially. These are people whose capital is invested in interest-bearing loans to charter schools, people who run Education Management Organizations, and people who just lie to the State Board of Education about student enrollment/discipline/graduation policies so that they can get “incentive” money and pay themselves inordinately huge administrative salaries.
Who would you rather be? Somebody who supports educator-led improvements within the public school system? Somebody who lets mass-marketed stories of “crisis” scare them into handing over lots of cash and power to unaccountable fraudsters? Or somebody who takes advantage of frightened, well-intentioned, under-informed Americans in order to skim profits off of money intended for education?
I encourage you to get informed. Don’t panic, and don’t buy things you don’t need. Our kids are doing fine, overall. We don’t need drastic policy measures. We need boots on the ground, community participation in local school boards, and parent/teacher collaboration at the local level. And if we want to help disadvantaged children, we need reliable ways to get better funding to the kids who need it most.