The Paradox of Pandemic School Reform

Parents are mad about curriculum and pandemic mandates but love their schools. And while they are exhausted by reform, they’ve learned they want more choices.

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Debates about schooling are currently consumed by what appear to be twin puzzles.

Even as angst about critical race theory (CRT) and school masking mandates run rampant, parents tell pollsters that they continue to love their kids’ schools and teachers. Meanwhile, Americans report exhaustion with school reform of pretty much every stripe, even as parents say they’re hungry for novel options (including private school choice, homeschooling, and “learning pods”). 

What’s going on? How can parents be simultaneously angst-ridden and satisfied? Exhausted by reform and hungry for options? 

For starters, we need to appreciate that schools serve at least three key functions for students and families: the custodial, the social, and the academic. 

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  1. Peter

    "Meanwhile, parents were suddenly offered an unprecedented window into what actually happens at school. Remote learning let parents see what kids were (or weren’t) learning. Parents suddenly had access to every assignment and reading, including those that seemed idiotic, ideological, or otherwise problematic. Asynchronous learning days, when students watched videos or did online assignments on their own, showed that a “full day” in many schools seemed to require less than an hour of learning—raising questions about just what students normally do all day."

    I am a public school teacher who loves The Dispatch, but suggesting that remote learning during the height of the pandemic was an indicator of what kids "weren't learning" in a "full day" is such an unfair assessment. Would a snapshot of what a working adult was doing during a "remote work day" during the pandemic be an accurate representation of their normal working life?

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    Ben Connelly

    “ Meanwhile, parents were suddenly offered an unprecedented window into what actually happens at school. Remote learning let parents see what kids were (or weren’t) learning. Parents suddenly had access to every assignment and reading, including those that seemed idiotic, ideological, or otherwise problematic. Asynchronous learning days, when students watched videos or did online assignments on their own, showed that a “full day” in many schools seemed to require less than an hour of learning—raising questions about just what students normally do all day.”

    Emphasis on the “or weren’t learning” and the “questions about just what students normally do at school all day.” I was in public high school about a decade ago and the amount of time we spent on busy work or watching movies because the teachers had to fill class time… and I had a good education. It’s even worse for a lot of students who didn’t have the kinds of opportunities I had. It wasn’t always the fault of teachers either - many had to operate within certain constraints.

    Scott had an installment of Capitolism recently about the lack of basic numeracy in the American people due to poor math education. David commented on a recent Dispatch pod about the incredibly poor understanding of civics that the average American has. Seems to me a lot of our problems today stem from educational failures. I’m more concerned about students not learning anything constructive than about indoctrination.

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    Justin Stapley

    There's is so much misunderstanding and vitriol surrounding the curriculum debate. In one of my recent college classes, we were confronted with ideas presented by our professor based on "racial contract theory" and "sexual contract theory" that have many similar ideas to CRT but are not CRT. We keep focusing on CRT and many on the Left roll their eyes and say "it's a legal theory, it's not in the schools" all while kids in elementary school are being sent home for wearing Halloween costumes "outside of their culture." The reality is, there are many, many theories out there pushing views of politics, culture, government, and society based on purely racial constructions and these ideas are trickling down into curriculum at all levels and, yes, they are impacting and affecting children of all ages. Parents are waking up to this reality and are starting to speak out. This isn't moral panic (though there definitely is some of it), it's parents reengaging with their children and taken interest, something that's actually a very good development.

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    Kmregan7

    "They want schools to reflect their values and their faith....." Schools DO respect faith. Teachers and school admin go out of their way to respect that - if a child needs to miss school for a religious holiday that isn't on the calendar, they will not be penalized. If a child wants to pray (something I overheard a child asking in the school I work at), they are allowed - so long as the teacher/adult isn't leading the prayer, or making others feel bad for NOT praying. What they do NOT do is force kids to follow the religion of some people over others. And thank goodness and especially the law for that. If they want kids to feel safe, valued, and welcomed forcing religious viewpoints regarding things like prayer, or sex ed is not the way to do it.

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    BrandonAlleman

    I read this article this morning but can't stop thinking about what my high school English teacher would have said about this sentence if I'd written it in paper,

    "After all, their party is a constellation of the diversity consultants, progressive activists, education bureaucrats, and teachers unions that staff the schools, fought for school closures, champion CRT, embrace mask mandates, and are dead-set on defending the public school establishment."

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    Frank Lee

    CRT is just Democrat racism repackaged as version 2.0. Republicans defeated slavery and then passed civil rights legislation. It seems that Democrats are always going to be involved in some new attempt to gain and retain power by marginalizing other groups and refusing to accept that app people are created equal under our creator and the law. Democrats as a species seem to see the world through a group lenses, and then they play rock-paper-scissors with them. The Women group gets a rock, but the Blacks group comes up as paper... unless it is a black (no matter the gender) in the Republican party because the Red group is always at the bottom and canceled from playing the game. The Muslin Afghani group would be scissors today, as would the Haiti illegal immigrant group. But things can change. Jews are generally also not allowed to play unless they fit well into the Blue group. Supporters of Palestine and Iran wiping Israel off the map... they are a fourth item (TNT) that destroys all rocks, paper and scissors.

    CRT is just the game instructions. It is also a program to pull in school children to think in the same divisive new racism 2.0 way.

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  7. cb76

    "What they do want are good options, and plenty of them."

    Sure. So have the federal government make every school, public, private, or quasi public, available to any and every parent, for free.

    School choice, right?

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    George.Skinner

    Education always has some capacity for indoctrination, and I think that's what triggers a lot of the backlash against schools. Teachers have a particularly influential and powerful position in a child's world. The trick is how to decide how to use that appropriately, recognizing that there's always going to be differences of opinion in how subjects should be presented.

    The CRT debate generally parallels the political debate on antiracism theories promulgated by Ibram X. Kendi and others. The concepts are anathema to many people, but almost an article of faith for some progressives. I think a good teacher would teach the debate, but that's incredibly hard to do well. I can think of a few teachers in my experience who could've done it, but also a lot of others who'd get mired in their own personal views or hopelessly muddle it and lose critical nuance. I also don't expect there'd be much help from the educational bureaucracy, which isn't exactly a bastion of pedagogical talent. CRT is hardly the first controversial topic in education. Evolutionary theory, the history of the Civil War and the civil rights movement, and environmentalism have been and continue to be contentious.

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      Bill Nelson

      “Education always has some capacity for indoctrination.”
      “ Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.” - Vladimir Lenin

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        George.Skinner

        Nothing like giving your kids a copy of Animal Farm to fix that…

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          Kmregan7

          Which is (or was) taught in schools. Now, let's see how parents would feel if the Bible were taught as literature and not absolute truth ..... I know many who wouldn't mind at all if schools indoctrinated their children (and everyone else's) in faith (if it agreed with theirs) but would raise holy he** about some other controversy.

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      Bill Nelson

      I know of no real school, outside of a very small number of church schools, that do not teach evolutionary theory. The civil war is lightly touched as is most history, but the light touch will teach slavery as the cause. Environmentalism is a cause, not a science.

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        George.Skinner

        Which is not to say that there isn't still people who are displeased with what's currently taught in school. There's always been controversial topics, and there always will be. The trigger has always been when a kid comes home from school repeating something their teacher has taught in school that conflicts with a parent's views or beliefs.

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          Bill Nelson

          It depends on what the conflict is. I doubt there would disagreement over differential equations, but I can see it over other topics, such as history (I had a big argument with my father over Sen. Joe McCarthy). Schools, or rather, teachers, can impart instruction on areas of social studies which can be a problem. But the parent does have a say in what is taught to their children, and schools must find a way to accommodate that.

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            George.Skinner

            Differential equations? I've known a few mathematicians who get kind of snotty when you start applying Laplace transforms for solutions, but that's another story. I've found the best way to counter some of the framing on issues in schools is to make certain my kids are presented with more information. One danger is that you'll sometimes find teachers who don't react well to being challenged and can react vindictively. I don't want my kids at the mercy of those people, so sometimes I bite my tongue and don't get too far into the controversy.

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    Pat Riot

    "For starters, we need to appreciate that schools serve at least three key functions for students and families: the custodial, the social, and the academic. "

    The author left out the fourth major function of schools: a political football.

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      Bill Nelson

      Only in the SEC.

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  10. Midge

    "In fact, as a general matter, school choice has not been concerned with empowering suburban parents. For three decades, school choice programs have been designed and marketed as a tool for serving low-income children in the urban core, while most of middle America has been told that school reform wasn’t about their kids."

    In fairness, so many suburban homevoters ("homevoter" is the economist William Fischel's term) seem so invested in tying housing values to "good schools" that I'm not surprised school choice hasn't much caught on with them. Zoning to "keep the riffraff out" is very popular among suburban homevoters, and our current school setup is one reason why.

    Effective classrooms need some way to screen out kids who aren't there to learn. There are many ways to do this. Private programs can simply kick kids out. Tracking and special-needs programs can offer multiple levels so kids can find some level they're ready to learn at. But by far one of the most popular ways to screen out kids not ready to learn in the US is to screen out parents unable to afford expensive housing. This strikes me as slightly nuts. I think it's both anti-egalitarian *and* anti-free-market. But it appears to be very popular.

    And for all the failures of school reformists (I recently read "The Prize" by Dale Russakoff), reformists aren't to blame for Americans' habituation to zoning as educational policy. There's arguably plenty of "government" to blame for that, but you'd have to start with homeownership policy.

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    1. cb76

      ^^^^This. One hundred percent, and a thousand times over. The last thing affluent suburban parents want is "school choice." Because their kids are attending the schools everyone would be choosing.

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      1. Phil Rexroth

        That’s a misunderstanding of cause and effect as it pertains to why those schools are “the good schools”. The ability to purchase a home in a good school district correlates pretty strongly with other factors that are more likely to be associated with educational success, and the students in those schools reflect that correlation. If there was a functioning market for elementary and secondary education, you would see three types of schools develop in short order: 1. Religiously affiliated schools or those informed by a religious tradition; 2. Schools that place a heavy emphasis on academic rigor where parental involvement is an expectation; and 3. Everyone else. To think that the geographic location of those schools would be integral to their success or failure is to posit that the dirt they are built on contains some magic quality as opposed to merely reflecting where certain people tend to gather.

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        1. Midge

          I don't see any misunderstanding from cb76 or myself as to why these schools are "the good schools". As far as I can tell, cb76 and I both believe "The ability to purchase a home in a good school district correlates pretty strongly with other factors that are more likely to be associated with educational success" but we also believe that this "pretty strong[]" correlation is inefficient, in the same way that inferring a child's height from his age is less efficient than simply asking the child's age.

          Moreover, cb76 describes a fear that homeowners in the better school districts really do have, of families "freeloading" on the district by gaining residency without purchasing "enough" house. I'd add this isn't just a fear of families with "substandard" children "freeloading", but even — perhaps especially — fear of families with high-achieving children "freeloading".

          High-achieving Asian kids whose families had no house, just an apartment, in the district? "Freeloaders." Really, anyone without "enough house" in-district could be thought of a "freeloader", but, at least where I grew up, the suspicion was especially likely to be directed toward minorities living in small dwellings, either for bringing the tone of the neighborhood down (if they were perceived as low-achieving) or for unfairly exploiting the system with their excellence (if they were perceived as high-achieving). It's a bit weird to hear, as a student, "Why can't you be more like those Asian kids? — but also, their families are pushy freeloaders" and they should presumably be ashamed. Well, which is it? Are we supposed to admire these supposed "freeloaders" for their discipline and gumption, or resent them for "stealing our class rank"?

          Me? I figured admiration won out. But I was just a student at the time, not a property tax payer. Had I been paying property taxes out the wazoo, perhaps I would have felt differently.

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          1. Phil Rexroth

            Very much agree with you that our current system is inefficient and has a number of nasty externalities, which is why I would love to see school funding attach to students so there can be at least a quasi-free market in elementary and secondary education. To your other point, I suppose my experience differs from yours as to perceptions of “freeloaders”. The parents in the public schools my kids have attended have always been amenable to kids from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds as long as those kids were committed to the same academic and behavioral standards. To the extent that some people use socioeconomic status as a proxy for other attributes, I see your point, but I dispute your categorical use of it.

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