Last month I argued that the education-choice movement, now more than seventy years old, still treats the existing public-school program as a fixture rather than a failure. “School choice,” as practiced, frees a slice of children from a system politicians already know is not working, then cheers for leaving the rest of the machinery in place. My position was simpler: ditch the system.
Let’s free parents to participate in the education programs that work best for their kids at the cost they’re willing and able to pay. Let families, vocations, businesses, churches, and charities participate in what that looks like. Let the market operate. Prioritize the essential elements of human flourishing. Politicians need do nothing except get out of the way.
I also said I was leaving three hard questions on the table: how the poor would pay, how to deal with bad schooling, and how standards would be set. This essay takes the first of those, which is the most important. The others come next.
A coin flip is not a plan
We know, as a statistical regularity, that large shares of American public-school students never reach proficiency in reading, writing, math, and science. On the Nation’s Report Card, only about a third of fourth- and eighth-graders score proficient in reading. Among twelfth-graders, roughly a third score below basic in reading, and only about one in five is proficient in math. History and geography fare no better; anyone who talks to recent graduates already knows that.
It is a hard thing to consign poor children to a system with those results. Poor children already have enough to overcome. Why give them the illusion that school, as presently arranged, is anything more than a coin flip between liberation and another generation of the same?
Some readers of the last piece said affluent districts simply do better. There is a correlation. Money is not the mechanism. Jericho, on Long Island, is one of the wealthiest districts in the country and posts some of the strongest results in the country. Blaine County, Idaho — Sun Valley’s district in my home state — spends among the most per pupil, with teacher pay at the top of Idaho’s scale, and still sits in the middle of the pack on tests. If spending were the engine, the exceptions would be rare. They are not.
If poor districts usually underperform, that is not an argument for leaving the design alone. It is evidence that the design does not meet the students who need the most help, and has not for decades. We can do nothing, and leave those children in the same experience with the same likely outcome. Or we can build something suited to them. That requires getting our hands dirty.
It has been done without a department
A critic will ask: Wayne, is that even possible, or are you dreaming?
It is possible. It is documented. And if we care about poor children, it is necessary.
Massachusetts passed the nation’s first compulsory attendance law in 1852. The story we tell ourselves is that government then rescued people from illiteracy. That is not what happened. Literacy among the free population in Massachusetts was already in the high nineties. It got there through family teaching, church schools, subscription schoolhouses, and neighbors who took turns boarding a schoolmaster. Nobody issued a central design. People wanted their children to read, so they taught them.
I could also go back further in time for examples. In the 1780s, a newspaper publisher in Gloucester, England, named Robert Raikes noticed that the children of factory workers ran wild on their one day off — Sundays — and couldn’t read a word.
One might expect that to solve this problem he petitioned the local politicians and demanded their attention. But he didn’t. Instead, he hired a few teachers, opened a Sunday school, and printed stories about it in his paper. (Side note: Efforts like Raikes predated his, but Raikes gets a lot of credit for interesting reasons worthy of your own exploration).
Within fifty years, more than a million British children were learning to read this way, taught largely by volunteers, funded entirely by people who gave because they cared. The movement educated a generation of the working poor without a single appropriation, committee meeting, parliamentary vote, or campaign promise to address the situation.
Let’s look at a more recent example: The Children’s Scholarship Fund — private money, freely given — has sent more than 220,000 low-income children to schools their parents chose since 1998, more than a billion dollars in scholarships.
Over the last 20 years, homeschool co-ops and microschools have spread across the country, often at a fraction of what the government system spends per pupil, tailored to the children in the community.
The job was never the state’s to monopolize
We do not need another century of arguing about how to retune a nineteenth-century invention. If we care about poor people — and I do, and most of my readers do — we owe them more than the story that the current system is serving them. We owe them an honest look at what works and what does not. We can imagine poor students getting the best available education because we stopped being satisfied with a system that overpromises and underdelivers.
The people who built the subscription schoolhouses and the Sunday schools were not better than we are. They were never told it wasn’t their job. It is our job. It always was. We accepted the story that we are too small to change course. This is the chance to prove otherwise: big enough, stubborn enough, and determined enough to offer children — especially poor children — something better than a coin flip.
Indeed, it should be easier today than it was in the 1700s and 1800s. Because now we have a lot of technology at our fingertips that the school innovators of yesteryear could never have imagined. And as a gut check, we know that we can do better than we are.
This still leaves two big questions left for me to tackle: How to deal with bad schools, and what about education standards. Those are the next essays. Stay tuned!