Every educational reform we have tried in the United States over the past half century has failed. And every educational reform we will try over the next half century will fail too.
Fifty Years of Failure
If that sounds harsh, consider the record. After the Supreme Court ordered ‘busing’, racial mix-and-match was supposed to bring parity in educational achievement; nothing of the sort happened. People continued to achieve at different rates. If anything, new ‘gaps’ became obvious—such as the superior achievement of the children from East Asian and Jewish backgrounds. In an unintended but amusing rebuke to the whole business, children of Indian immigrants started to dominate the spelling bee.
After the initial expensive failure, even more expensive failures followed. Head Start, for example, gave the children a ‘head start’, that completely dissolves after a few years. May as well let the tykes enjoy play for a few more years. Reducing classroom classes—it has a small positive effect, but at an outrageous cost. Integrating classroom technology—a wash, but I suppose it employs some good-for-nothing tech people. Other reforms have been plain harmful, such as the educational tent revivals such as ‘whole words’ and ‘common core math’. It turns out that phonics and drill are the best ways to teach reading and background mathematics.
And the failures are not just a matter of blaming our beloved friend on the left; conservative reforms have failed too. Teacher accountability never had a chance to work—and who could device a scoring system that accurately captures the skill of a teacher? No one has managed to do so, and the task is daunting; the skill of every teacher is affected by a bunch of variables out of her control, starting with her students. Teachers are right to complain about that. More recently we have found out that voucher programs have a small effect on educational achievement. Overall a small positive for users of the programs, but nothing to write home about.
Obstacles to Reform
At least two serious obstacles make it difficult for any kind of mass educational reform to succeed. The first one is, well, ‘the culture’. We, as a nation, simply do not care enough about educational achievement. Nothing wrong with that in itself—very few people do care for education for the sake of education anywhere. The biggest problem is that we don’t care for the habits that lead to achievement either. Hard work, discipline, a long-term horizon—those things are not for us. Let us text each other emojis instead. Even television programs are suffering because they require too much focus to enjoy. Unless our attitude towards those habits change, we start middle school with bored unmotivated teenagers, and teachers that would rather be somewhere else.
The second problem is not problem from my point of view—but it presents an obstacle to reform. This is self-sorting, the tendency of those groups and individuals who do care about education to seek like-minded people. Crudely put, the best place to achieve a good education is just about anywhere except a regular public-school classroom. People know this, and act accordingly. That’s how you get parents paying outrageous tuition to elite private schools, or else paying outrageous real estate prices to live in a good school district. That’s how you get networks of home-schooled children—and in fact homeschoolers outachieve both public and private school pupils. Parents implicitly know that the most important driver of education is the quality of their children’s peers. Whatever educational reform we will try next will crash about the will and wiles of motivated parents seeking the best for their children. I predict it will fail too.
