The Great Education Debate
With America’s kids heading back to school, overly politicized debates miss the undercurrent of the education issue.
In the Stroudsburg (Penn.) Area School District, in the early 1990s, math went like this: A student took Pre-Algebra in either seventh or eighth grade, then moved on to Algebra I in either eighth or ninth grade, then Algebra II. (A year of Geometry was sandwiched in between the two years of Algebra up until my class year.) Not to brag, but back then I was in with the group that took Pre-Algebra in seventh grade, which gave us a chance to take Calculus as seniors (such a prize!).
As a class, we did well in our little seventh-grade Pre-Algebra group— so well that our teacher ran a little experiment. One day, he gave us a blackboard full of Algebra I problems to work through, and only after we had knocked them out did he tell us we had been doing math that was a few months ahead of where we were “supposed” to be. He thought we could jump up and get a head start on Algebra I in seventh grade, and so our class started the eighth-grade math curriculum a few months before we were “supposed” to.
Not to get all “back in my day…” on you, but based on some of the recent discussions around education policy, such an action might be considered revolutionary now.
Forget about seventh grade: California has instituted a new statewide framework to guide local school districts that dissuades Algebra I until ninth grade. Those behind the policy consider advanced math a luxury for more well-off school districts and students, so they recommend keeping everyone on the same page of the math book until high school. This follows similar initiatives instituted by local school districts in San Francisco and Cambridge, Mass. In all cases, proponents note the need to promote equity to eventually get more kids from minority and/or low-income communities into advanced math later in high school. The problem? It doesn’t work the way they intended.
The concept of “equity,” while noble and important, can paralyze progress. Three years ago, when Fairfax County Public Schools closed down in-person learning during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the district stumbled for weeks trying to figure out how to continue education. Sitting just outside of Washington, D.C., Fairfax encompasses a range of neighborhoods that present different challenges for educators. Understandably (and properly), district-wide decisions have to consider everyone. This reality was the reason given when, just after schools shut down, there were absolutely no initial moves to technology-based solutions (like Zoom classrooms or even downloadable resources). School officials apparently feared that moving to this type of model would leave lower-income students out. Weeks after the shutdown began, students received snail-mailed packets of photocopied worksheets (riddled with typos, incidentally) to do on their own.
Like their Californian counterparts, FCPS leadership’s heart seemed to be in the right place, but their lack of action laid bare a value system that favored equity over education, rather than holding both as equal values. Emergencies require an element of triage; FCPS might have delivered education more effectively by recognizing and exploiting the advantages in some of its middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Eventually, such a strategy might have helped them conserve and better direct their limited resources (including human resources) to the school communities where help was more desperately needed. Instead, FCPS refused to allow any schooling that didn’t include everyone.
The blur of March-April 2020 was a weird time for us all, so grant FCPS some degree of forgiveness for their early-pandemic bungling. Further, it’s easy to criticize those decisions now, as a Monday morning quarterback. Even with a touch of forgiveness, though, FCPS’s halting pandemic response echoes efforts to tap the breaks on advanced math in California and Massachusetts. And you can hear it in Pennsylvania, too, where Gov. Josh Shapiro promised to kowtow to teachers’ unions by vetoing a school voucher program (in the process, reneging on an earlier campaign promise).
In each case, the message is clear: School systems are telling us they won’t deliver educational resources at all unless everyone has the exact same educational resources, regardless of need. Under this paradigm, no education at all is better than education which is one iota different from another student’s.
There are two giant problems with this line of thinking. First, it abandons the notion of education. Second, it ignores the reality that each child is different.
Each has a different family situation; each has a different set of aptitudes and interests; each has a different set of study habits. Each has a different potential for success. Public education cannot help each student maximize his or her potential without accounting for such differences. Taken one step further, schools and teachers have to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses. If a student needs to be in a different classroom or is better served at a different school, neither rigorous placement guidelines nor pride should impede those decisions.
Student performance — particularly in reading and math — provides a stark indictment of the status quo. (For those concerned with equity, communities of color are faring even worse on those measures.) Student behavior after the year-plus layoff from COVID shutdowns has been atrocious. Peering through the fog of curriculum battles and library shelf real estate debates, we see a public education system that isn’t currently doing the job of educating the public.
Looking through a lens of left-right spectrum politics makes it tempting (and even easy) to characterize broader public education discussions in simple terms. Conservative politicians point to parent unrest as a reaction to left-wing ideologies woven into the curriculum; left-wing politicians accuse conservatives of favoring parental controls over the expertise of teachers and administrators and funneling money to private schools. This framing works great if your goal is generating rage views and hate clicks, or if you are trying to rile up base supporters. It does little to explain the real problems at hand. Ironically, by trying to oversimplify the issue, media and politicians alike overlook the most simple concern of all: basic competency.
Are kids learning? Are their minds being expanded and challenged? Those two questions are at root the root of today’s education debate. Parents need to be confident that the answer to both of those questions is an unqualified “yes.”
