Large schools—public or private—cannot replicate the flexibility offered by ESAs [educational savings accounts, which can be used to pay a variety of providers to meet the needs of a given student], pods, or hybrid homeschools. They cannot personally tailor their programs to the same degree while at the same time maintaining the small community coherence that many families desire. In the U.S., hybrid homeschools have generally been open and operating (relatively) normally this school year. Most parents are ready for schools to re-open. But they are not looking for the return of business as usual. They are likely to pull their kids out much more quickly than they were in the past if things are not working well. They are seeking, somewhat paradoxically, more individualization and more community, and are often finding both by attending—or starting—hybrid homeschools.
He is talking his book, Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons.
Many major American institutions have degraded over the past 70 years, but I think that there is a case to be made that public schools have degraded the most.
Between 1950 and 1980 the number of school districts fell from 83,642 to 15,987. Today, it stands at 16,800.
That means that in 1950, there were about 1,820 Americans per school district. Today, there are roughly 19,700 Americans per school district. School boards are remote from their constituents. The influence of parents on public schools has waned. The influence of teachers’ unions has waxed.
If the larger districts have produced economies of scale, this is not evident. Spending on schools has soared, without any evident improvement in performance.
One argument for public schools is that they will take any child. But it seems that students with special needs are served better by smaller institutions. The affluent parents I know who have children with special needs send them to private schools. The parents are progressives who support public schools but “not for my child,” who they think could not possibly thrive in public school. Less-affluent parents deserve the same opportunity.
Another argument for public schools is that they provide common socialization. But the woke religion that today’s teachers are being taught and are passing along to children is not my idea of helpful socialization.
If we are going to continue to keep the public school concept, we need significant reforms.
1. Smaller school districts.
2. Much diminished power for teachers’ unions.
3. A totally different approach for training teachers, based on evidence rather than ideology.
The prospects for this being what they are, I have more hope for a voucher system.
Ah, but will such a juicy political prize be surrendered by, not the majority, but the occupying power that now controls the compulsory education. I would not go so far as Mises, as I favor a voucher system, but he’s correct:
“There is only one argument that has any bearing at all on this question, viz., that continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace. “…
“If one leaves to the parents the choice of the school to which they wish to send their children, then one exposes them to every conceivable form of political coercion. In all areas of mixed nationality, the school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character as long as it remains a public and compulsory institution. There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.”…
“But even if we eliminate the spiritual coercion exercised by compulsory education, we should still be far from having done everything that is necessary in order to remove all the sources of friction between the nationalities living in polyglot territories. The school is one means of oppressing nationalities— perhaps the most dangerous, in our opinion— but it certainly is not the only means. Every interference on the part of the government in economic life can become a means of persecuting the members of nationalities speaking a language different from that of the ruling group. For this reason, in the interest of preserving peace, the activity of the government must be limited to the sphere in which it is, in the strictest sense of the word, indispensable.”
–Mises, Ludwig von (1927). Liberalism
After the centuries of the “melting pot” we seem to be entering into the “mixed nationalities” of which Mises speaks, if we substitute the group politics being pushed these days. The very ‘diversity’ heralded by the “educators” expose the violence being done by compulsory education.
On a side note: Mises wrote
“For more than seventy years the German professors of political science, history, law, geography and philosophy eagerly imbued their disciples with a hysterical hatred of capitalism, and preached the war of “liberation” against the capitalistic West. The German “socialists of the chair,” much admired in all foreign countries, were the pacemakers of the two World Wars. At the turn of the century the immense majority of the Germans were already radical supporters of socialism and aggressive nationalism. They were then already firmly committed to the principles of Nazism. What was lacking and was added later was only a new term to signify their doctrine.
“When the Soviet policies of mass extermination of all dissenters and of ruthless violence removed the inhibitions against wholesale murder, which still troubled some of the Germans, nothing could any longer stop the advance of Nazism.”
–von Mises, Ludwig (1947). Planned Chaos
Here we are just over 70 years from the defeat of Nazism, during which the American professors have “imbued their disciples with a hysterical hatred of capitalism, and preached the war of “liberation” against the capitalistic West”. And again, the violence against the classical liberal ideas in the West is on the march.
Really kind of boggling how wrong all this is.
In no particular order:
“If the larger districts have produced economies of scale, this is not evident. Spending on schools has soared, without any evident improvement in performance…..The affluent parents I know who have children with special needs send them to private schools. ”
If they have special needs, then those affluent parents are probably forcing the public school to pay for the private schools. The exploding costs “unmitigated by centralization” are instead caused by a bunch of federal laws. The combination of IDEA and ADA turned almost every disability into an expensive mandate for public schools to handle per kid. And that’s the single biggest reason for exploding costs. Every special ed kid on average costs twice as much as a nonsped. Another one is Plyler vs Doe coupled with Lau v Nichols, which first forces states to educate all immigrants including illegal ones, and also educate them in their own language. So all those kids coming over the border are being dumped in classrooms. A small district might only have a few kids, but they’ll have to dedicate one full-time teacher to handle those kids, and handle them the minute they show up.
Your absurd idea of making districts smaller will simply create more teachers and more administrators and more pensions, without doing anything to address the federal mandates that you are apparently ignorant of, since you clearly don’t understand the costs they force on schools.
“The influence of parents on public schools has waned. The influence of teachers’ unions has waxed.”
This is nonsense, but it’s standard regurgitated nonsense. I don’t like unions, but they are a megaphone, not a powerbase. Unions don’t get anything unless some other player with power agrees. The single thing that most conservatives don’t understand is that the power player the unions most often agree with are parents. They don’t agree with unions, and it’s apparently beyond their understanding that a majority of parents in their district do. Unions were not able to influence NCLB, Common Core, or merit pay demands. All of these were overturned because parents despised them. Until parents figured that out, unions had zero control and all of these were forced on schools over their objections.
The people damaging schools are the politicians and lawsuits.
But hey. Conservatives on education are definitely “soldiers”, not “scouts”. (It’s ok. Progressives are soldiers, too.)
“Less-affluent parents deserve the same opportunity.”
hahaha. the idea that in a private education market, less-affluent parents would have any opportunity at all is so absurd I can’t believe you wrote it.
Small districts = more teachers needed. We’re already at a teacher shortage. But sure, in these small districts, the richer districts wouldn’t grab up all the teachers–or the richer private schools–leaving less affluent parents with dregs.
“Many major American institutions have degraded over the past 70 years, but I think that there is a case to be made that public schools have degraded the most.”
We have to educate far more kids than before, have been imposed with mandates by people who don’t understand low IQs, in a world with far fewer jobs for low skilled kids to take on, in an environment where neither left nor right imposes ludicrous demands because of their ignorance.
Education is doing pretty well. It could do better, but everything in that wish list would destroy it. Good news is, we’re years away from pols trying to mess with education again.
Oh, and for pushing critical race theory? You really want to argue that private schools are going to do better on that front? Have you been *reading* anything lately that oh, might challenge your notions? Be a scout, dude.
I’m not worried about critical race theory being imposed on public schools where the parents don’t want it. And if you understood schools better, you wouldn’t either.
It is almost impossible in most states to get a public school district to pay for the cost of a private special education school. My daughter has attended three such schools, an my wife has been on the board of one for about 10 years. Of the 100+ families I have met, only one successfully sued to have the public district pay, and they gave up after a couple of years because the district re-litigated every year.
Special education is not the driver of increased costs in public schools. More is spent on school sports than special education at the middle and high school levels (just count the number of coaches vs number of special education teachers and the number of stadiums and gymnasiums vs the number of dedicated special needs facilities). In any event, if you believe that education must be financed publicly for the benefit of the public, why would you exclude my child and those like her.
“It is almost impossible in most states to get a public school district to pay for the cost of a private special education school. ”
It isn’t. There’s case law, and if you have a good lawyer you’ve got a good shot of winning. Arnold was talking about affluent parents.
“Special education is not the driver of increased costs in public schools. More is spent on school sports than special education at the middle and high school levels ”
First sentence is flatly wrong, second sentence is ludicrous. On average, special ed students cost twice as much, as I said. That’s a well established fact. In some states it’s much more.
” In any event, if you believe that education must be financed publicly for the benefit of the public, why would you exclude my child and those like her.”
I would kill IDEA and start over. Severely impaired children should be outside the public school system. States and feds should argue over who pays, but they should not be a cost of public schools. Moderately impaired and disabled children (blind, deaf, wheelchair bound, functional but low IQ) are appropriately covered at the district level.
The “learning disabilities” scam should be ended. They should not qualify for additional funding. So I don’t know where your daughter is in that list.
Having grown up in an area where school boards were town based and moved to one where they are County based, it’s a huge degradation. In the town based model the people on the school board are the people in your town that go to the schools. They have skin in the game and you usually have similar background and culture.
Down here people living an hour drive from you that you never meet that you have nothing in common with that don’t attend your school decide everything about your school.
As far as I can tell this has to do with my growing up in the northeast (which was densely populated enough for each town to have its own schools) versus living in a formerly rural but now quickly developing area (where it used to be that a county might only need one or two high schools, but that has rapidly changed by a factor of 10x or more within a generation. This seems to be a common problem in the fast growing Sun Belt.
Shout it from the roof tops.
And a great follow up to your excellent earlier suggestion to just leave the public schools closed.
Just to expand upon the theme, advocates for the pre-covid status quo have lately been attacking the new online education options and alternatives in a desperate bid to restore the monopoly and force children and the money that comes with them back into the mass production mode of the factory schools where every child is fungible.
Joanne Jacobs, for example, recently linked to a small Dutch study for the proposition that online education is inferior: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/17/e2022376118
The study looked at data covering 15% of Dutch primary schools throughout the years 2017 to 2020 (n ≈ 350,000). The data include biannual test scores in core subjects for students aged 8 to 11 years. It found that the covid school shutdowns resulted in a 3 percent learning loss. Inexplicably, however, the study authors reason that this represents a best case scenario. The opposite is much more likely the case.
Let’s compare the Dutch and USA school systems to see why the Dutch 3 percent learning loss might be a worst case situation. First the Dutch system outperforms the USA system by a wide margin (1556 average combined PISA compared to USA’s 1485 – despite 20% of the population being non-Dutch compared to the USA with its 15 percent of which a much higher percent consists of higher IQ Asian immigrants of whom the Netherlands has relatively few – o.3/percent Chinese.). Second, the Netherlands has benefited from its long tradition of religious freedom and tolerance expressed in pillarization, permitting smaller groups to organize publicly funded religious schools unlike the USA and its insistance on uniformity, regimentation and a fascistic Black good, white bad social order. The Netherlands is perhaps the world’s exemplar of pluralism and couldn’t be more different than the USA’s top down authoritarian socialist workers national teachers union approach. To graduate from a teaching program in the Netherlands is difficult and requires above average intelligence: about a third of students can’t pass the high bar that is set for the profession. In contrast, well let’s just say the less said about the USA the better. But in other words, the Dutch had much farther to fall, and closure of a much higher quality system should have produced larger declines, not smaller. Closing a low quality system probably has even less impact and may even be ameliorative consistent with numerous past studies that have found student achievement improved during public school teachers strikes. When one considers the unanticipated and sudden nature of the shut down and the necessity of adaptation to the new system, a temporary short term drop in outcome measures is not unexpected, however, nor would substantial improvement as families become acclimated and figure out how to maximize the return from the new opportunities for higher quality education.
So, yes. Smaller is better. And so is pluralism.
Smaller is almost always better, when it comes to government.
Big organizations become awkward and self-reverential, but in free markets get run out of business if too much so.
Big government organizations are eternal, from the Pentagon to the City of Los Angeles to the USDA to the VA.