An Urgent Priority for the United States
Having an excellent K-12 education system available to everyone can have a very positive impact on many of our country’s diverse challenges such as social justice and winning the technology competition. If this is true, and I believe it is, then having an excellent K-12 in the United States should be a highest priority. Considering the condition of our K-12 education, especially in urban areas, suggests it is not a priority, and has not been for some time. This is so important we need to take a close look at why that is the case and work toward a solution. Before we can improve we need to know where we are now and how we got there, In that first sentence are two words (excellent and available to everyone) that should make most of us conclude we do not have a competitive program, which means minds are being wasted and we are falling behind in a very competitive world. We do have some excellent schools but overall our rating is much below excellent and those outstanding schools are generally not available to urban areas. We need to improve.
In trying to develop a comparison of K-12 programs in other countries we fine that there is no definitive list of countries that offer the best and worst education. However, organizations, think tanks, and publications have used data such as literacy or graduation rates to determine which nations have the best education systems. This type of criteria can be misleading.
One such list was created by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or OECD. This organization looked at the number of people between the ages of 25 and 64 who have completed a vocational program or had to receive a two- or four-year degree. This data was used to determine which countries were the most educated, This can be confusing since this type of comparison would indicate that the United States was second globally in education systems. Ironically, despite the United States being considered as having the second-best education system globally, it consistently scores lower than many other countries in benchmarks such as math and science. According to the Business Insider report in 2018, its education ranking was 38th in math scores and 24th in science. In the latest ranking (2020) we were rated 26th in the basic subjects of reading, math, and science. Proficiency in those subjects seems like a better criteria for rating the quality of K-12 education. The top five in that latest grouping were China, Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore, and Japan, almost all which were Asian countries.
Apparently funding of K-12 is not a problem for the United States. Expenditures per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level varied across OECD countries in 2016, ranging from $3,200 in Colombia to $20,400 in Luxembourg. The United States spent $13,600 per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level, which was 39 percent higher than the average of OECD countries reporting data ($9,800). Hence we presently have the unenviable position of spending more but getting less in positive results in K-12 education. Not sure exactly when the decline in public school education happened but when I graduated in the mid-50s the public school I attended had shop for the boys and home economic courses for the girls and business courses for both the boys and girls (I was always grateful I had taken the typing course).But we also had physics, chemistry, and algebra and trigonometry courses. Our graduates appeared well prepared to go directly into the work force or directly on to college. But as Thomas Sowell pointed out something else happened in the mid-50s, in 1954 the Supreme Court declared that racially separated schools were inherently unequal. Sowell also liked to point out that at the time of the court decision about one mile from the Supreme Court was the all-black Dunbar High School which sent more students to college than any white public schools in the city. This suggests that perhaps it was the courses offered and being taught by competent teachers that was the true criteria for excellence and not racial makeup of the student body. But that did not seem to matter, the Supreme Court had spoken and racial segregation became the primary reason for poor black students performance.
Thus began a nation-wide experiment of busing to achieve a more even distribution of students by race. Black students had to be bussed (often very far from their homes) to predominantly white schools. And white students had to be bussed to predominantly black schools. In addition the teachers had to be relocated to insure racial equity. The parents of both black and white students were unhappy and the public school system had to expand to develop new skills to handle the logistics of bussing and to expand to add administrators who could assess and handle the clash of cultures created by this breakup of the existing system. The result was a lot more emphasis on expanding administration and in some cases developing new courses on getting along in diverse groups and with less emphasis on reading, writing, and arithmetic. To protect themselves, the teachers unions grew stronger and the academics in the system grew weaker. The system clearly declined and parents who could afford it opted out of the public school system and enrolled in private and Catholic parochial schools as an alternative. Clearly the experiment had failed, in particular in regards to the educational level of black students.
Busing eventually faded but black parents clearly wanted the same options when the local public school was inadequate, that is a choice to leave the system like those who could afford it had done. They pushed for vouchers to pay for tuitions, scholarships, tuition tax credits and homeschooling and magnet schools within the public school system. The genie was out of the bottle, low income parents wanted some type of school choice. One of the most successful kinds of schools that resulted from this failed experiment was the charter school.
Charter schools was a special public school freed from some of the rigidities of the regular public schools and was allowed to receive government financial support so long as the students educational outcomes met established educational goals. While not all charter schools are successful most were highly successful. Many formed networks to manage several charter schools and those networks that were located in low-income were not only able to achieve results above most traditional public schools but often achieved results better than most schools locate in affluent white neighborhoods.
So it looked like a real solution was available to parents in school choice. However this success was not welcomed by everyone. One thing I forgot to mention was that Charter schools get their name because they develop charters to set the goals and principles by which the school will meet the established government educational goal. Originally all Charters stated that teachers could not join unions! Hence Charter schools were attacked by teacher unions, politicians (often supported by donations from teacher unions), the civil rights establishment and others. Those attacks and debates about the superiority of Charter Schools continue to this day.
These debates have been very emotional and sometimes confusing because there are so many variations of Charter School and traditional Public Schools it was often comparing apples to oranges. Fortunately, Thomas Sowell, the noted and respected economic scholar from the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, volunteered to create a comparison that would be accurate and fair. He published the results in 2020 in his book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies.
To make it a fair comparison he established the following rules:
- There is a similar ethnic composition of students in a particular charter school serving the same local population.
- The students of both schools are taught in the very same building, thus reducing whatever effect differences in particular buildings, or in the neighborhoods around those buildings, might me. This also reduces the likely range of dispersion in the locations of the homes from which students come, as well as the likely dispersion of their socioeconomic backgrounds.
- The charter school and the traditional public school have one or more classes at the same grade level in the same building, so that students in those particular classes in their results when taking the same tests.
New York City turned out to be able to meet all of these requirements. There turned out to be five charter networks in New York City that met the three specified requirements in school year 2017-2018 and had classes in five or more buildings with traditional public schools having classes at the same grade levels. These networks were the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools, and the charter schools in the Success Academy, Explore Schools, Uncommon Schools and Achievement First networks.
Each year the New York State Education Department administers two tests to both public charter schools and public traditional schools. The two tests are the English Language Arts test and the Mathematics test. These were the two tests used and the State’s four proficient levels were used for scoring.
In every case the charter schools outperformed the traditional schools. This was not surprising since parents who have been participants in both public charter and public traditional schools have always claimed this. However this test, done under fair and equal conditions, added a great deal of weight in favor of charter schools. I was particularly interested in the comparison because the infrastructure of the City of New Orleans, my home town, was largely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. This included extreme damage to the school system. The result was that all of the school were converted to public charter schools when they started up a year after the storm. As mentioned before charter schools can vary greatly in their primary emphasis. For example they can range from international emphasis with strong foreign language courses to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) with courses heavily weighted in those subjects. So as mentioned before comparing public charter schools to public traditional schools is often like the well-worn statement it is like comparing apples to oranges. Hence, Sowell’s student comparison was extremely important in clearly establishing the superiority of charter schools to traditional schools. Further proof of this is that in New York City there are still 50,000 students on waiting lists to get into the charter schools.
One area in which both charter and traditional public schools do poorly is education for special needs children. This requires other school choice options than just charter schools. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) passed in 1975 was supposed to insure that all students would have access to a good education. The IDEA is not a requirement for charter schools. So parents must look for other school choice options. The most common school choice programs for students with disabilities are vouchers, Educational Savings Accounts (ESA), Tax-credits, or Scholarships. For teacher unions vouchers seem to be in the same category as charter schools and the unions fight against them. ESAs seem to have the most promise for students with disabilities. In the book, School Choice Myths: Setting the Record Straight on Education Freedom, it addresses 12 common stumbling blocks for parents who favor school choice, including options for children with disabilities. That study shows that at least 14 States offer one or more of the school choices listed above for students with disabilities. Some of the programs are excellent. It is a very good book edited by DeAngelis and McCluskey. I recommend it along with Thomas Sowell’s book, Charter Schools and Their enemies.
We have pointed out that your present K-12 education system does not provide the best results, particularly in the important subjects of reading, mathematics, and science. We also pointed out that we have some good options for improving but not everyone agrees on the best solution. In particular, the powerful teacher unions, like many large organizations, are interested in protecting its members over the parents and students. For some that is understandable but this problem of providing the best K-12 education to our citizens is too important to our kids and our country to not do our honest best. Even though the incoming Democrats generally support the teachers unions many States have already passed laws that allow for school choice. In addition, this conflict has produced recent lawsuits. Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire have filed their own lawsuits after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a Montana case that states cannot cut religious schools out of programs that send public money to private education. School choice is important to many parents.
To get to the best solution, it is best that we keep this debate out of the courts. In our divided country that may not be possible but we have to try. We need the educators and the communities they serve realize how important the K-12 education question is – we need to give it a high priority. Otherwise we may have to all sign up for Chinese language courses.
We can do this! Let’s work together on it with urgency.
Will Lannes