Do we care if everyone gets an education?

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Elite action has its limits

Something I’ve touched on again and again is my worry that the average American no longer cares that every child gets an education. There seems to be a new elite consensus that the preferred function of education is to enforce hierarchy. The goal of the American system of schooling should be to identify the top 10% or so of students and flood them with resources and support. The idea is that only the top 10% of people contribute meaningfully to the nation’s economic potential, perhaps by starting companies or designing new technologies. This is, we are told, an attempt to embrace a strict meritocracy. Schools, therefore, don’t have to be inclusive or worry about doing much for the students they find to be less exceptional.

Of course, we have to run all of these efforts through some commonsense filters. At the federal level, there is only weak control over state and local curricula. I was right that the DoE was not closed and instead exists as an ideological enforcement branch but even that has its limits, as does all federal action on education. For example, that same spate of executive orders sought to create alternative accreditors for colleges and universities because the current consortia of regional accreditation are, I’d imagine, considered too woke. This is, in fact, not a strong move but a weak one. The federal government has no direct control over accreditors and can’t dictate what kinds of requirements programs must meet to satisfy those accreditors. Trump’s only option is to create a parallel system of accreditation so that more ideologically friendly universities and degree programs can emerge. Similar things are happening throughout K-12 and higher ed as various new rules, funding freezes, and firings are held up or invalidated by courts. The easier path is not fighting but simply making a separate academic space where right-wing ideas will be protected from academic scrutiny.

The kids who can’t

My bigger worry, it turns out, is actually something I encounter at a more interpersonal and social level. When people think about schools, they primarily think about it as something for the, let’s say, top half of academic performers. Here’s something from an exchange I had online recently. A commenter was replying to a comment of mine about how 66 of 83 students who started at a charter school dropped out before graduation. I asked whether those 66 kids received an adequate education. I’ve excerpted three of this commenter’s replies because they exemplify both what I think should happen but also what I worry about with regard to educating all kids.

Obviously, I’m not going to share the commenter’s username or call them out publicly and, in fact, that’s not my point because I think we probably agree more than we disagree. He (presuming he, I know) makes the overall point that different kids need different pathways through education. One reason we have social promotion is because we’ve made a single or a few strict pathways through our school system and toward graduation BUT then we tied accountability and quality to the number of kids who graduate. There’s an incentive to move kids through even if they are not adequately prepared for what comes next. His solution is to offer other pathways to graduation that have different requirements. We were discussing algebra, so he makes the case that the college-bound style of algebra is probably inappropriate for many students, and they’d benefit from some other kind of math instruction. Maybe we could call this functional math; the math intended for helping people navigate everyday life, jobs, etc — not to be confused with mathematical functions, though. They should know enough to, using his example, not fall victim to payday loan usury.

I want to stress that this commenter is communicating a deeply compassionate perspective. He sees, quite rightly, that many kids are tortured by their mathematics courses and end up learning very little, certainly not enough to pass the regents exams (we were talking about New York, and those are their system of high stakes testing). What is the point, he might say, of running every kid through an algebra course only to fail and throw off graduation or pass them through without having developed the required skills and knowledge. It is both cruel and a disservice to the students. I am deeply sympathetic to this perspective! In fact, back in February I made a point of asking a similar question. What do we do with the “kids who can’t?”

Enter the worry

It seems somewhat reasonable, progressive even, to want schools to better tailor learning to the needs of students so they are better equipped to be a part of society. When I was in high school in Georgia in the pre-NCLB days, we had a college preparatory track and the career preparatory track. If you were on the latter, you pretty much got what the commenter was asking for. You needed fewer math credits, took career prep specific math, science, history, and English classes, and had options for vocational electives such as woodshop, auto-repair, and health vocations. To some extent, NCLB is what killed this pathway because it required every kid to be college ready. The career and technical programs that exist today are often themselves college preparatory, at least officially. This includes moving those students into general education math classes. So, I get it.

My worry stems from the problem of deciding who gets which kind of education. Here are a few vignettes from my own education.

• Non-college pathways are used to segregate classes. 100% of Black students at my high school were placed into career prep. In fact, it was a point of contention when one Black kid got onto the college prep path and some kids changed classes because they (well, their parents) believed this indicated a poorer quality course. This is not an exception, it turns out. Black and Latino students are more often placed into career preparatory programs. This may mean they are locked out from advanced coursework, especially later in high school when prerequisites are important for taking advanced classes.

• Non-college pathways are used to “warehouse” special needs students. When I was teaching in Georgia, the school where I worked used their career and technical program as a dumping ground for special education students, especially the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. Now, the Army was never going to take these kids, and it drove the course’s teachers nuts because the Army was paying for this program because the while point was recruitment. The belief among the school’s administration was that those students needed discipline. Even within that school’s CTE program there was a two tier system with health occupations and criminal justice being highly regarded and attended by the most academically successful students while ROTC and “computer class” was for the special needs students.

• It’s hard to get on and off pathways. Schools use credit structures to determine who graduates. If you miss a credit because you fail a course, you enter some kind of credit recovery process, usually an online class or summer school. It’s a big blow. If you’re moving from a non-college prep pathway onto a college prep pathway, there’s a good chance that some of your courses won’t count. It puts you behind even if you passed all your classes. Once you’re on a path, it’s hard to get off.

But, probably my biggest worry is that I don’t trust the systems we will use to decide who goes on what pathway. Let’s return to the commenter. His suggested filter is IQ:

Now, I am going to set aside some of the obvious things people say whenever someone brings up IQ. I’m not interested in that kind of an argument today. You can go read the discussion and commentary I’ve linked to get a sense of what the back and forth look like. Instead, let’s take the commenter’s proposal as a serious suggestion and see where it takes us. Most intelligence tests (Wechsler scales and their variants) would situate 80 as being “low average”. However, with children, an IQ score of 80 is roughly average as students enter high school (the average range depending on test and age is 70-90). Even being low average is not indicative of a student with an intellectual or learning disability. This cutoff is, I think, too high (again, we are setting aside other potential problems with IQ testing as the deciding factor in students’ placement). This would imply that half of all students are incapable of learning algebra, not that they don’t succeed in algebra class or struggle with the test. The commenter is saying that approximately half of students are, by their biologically endowed intellect, unable to learn algebra — a class some kids can pass in 7th grade. These students, half of any school’s student body, should instead get some kind of functional math curriculum that is not designed to prepare them for college or for a career pathway such as being an electrician. Going back to that original point about the charter school where 80% of the kids drop out, maybe that is the expectation?

And that brings us back to the titular question of today’s post. Are we prepared for a situation in which we’re taking 50% or 80% of the students and shoving them onto a pathway that excludes them from the possibility of attending college? And, again, I get that we’re already kind of doing this. ~30% of students graduate from high school prepared for traditional college with about 60% attending college in some form following high school. That leaves us 40% who have a high school diploma looking for work right away. And from that 60% who go to college, only half earn a degree so they mostly end up on the labor market with a high school diploma anyway. I’m not writing a defense of the system here.

Instead, I am asking if we want a system that codifies up front, when a student is 12-13 years old, whether or not that student will be prepared by schools to attend college? Do we want a system where that decision is made and 50% or even 80% of the students are told in middle school that they are not college material? Are we ready to have an education system that tells a kid who’s maybe not even a teenager yet that she is not allowed to take advanced classes and, instead, has to take dumbed-down courses because a test or a teacher’s recommendation says that’s all she’s capable of? And what do we do when this system ends up re-creating all the same old inequalities where it’s the poor and the black and the female students who are placed onto these pathways in disproportionate numbers?

You may remember that California recently tried exactly what the commenter is saying. They created a pathway around data science that would allow students who were not on advanced mathematics pathways to learn math that was thought to be more useful in day-to-day life while keeping some path to college open for those who wanted it. All of the advanced classes were still there; it’s just an additional option that was thought to be more accessible for most students. I haven’t followed up recently, but I seem to recall the architect of this plan getting some rather harsh attention.

Do we want this?

If you’d asked me a few years ago, I’d have said no. I think people largely want schools to offer broad opportunities to kids, even if not all the kids can take advantage of every opportunity offered. If a kid is motivated to reach for an advanced engineering course, she shouldn’t be shoehorned into a less rigorous audio engineering class. Today, I am not so sure the average person would agree with me. They might argue that schools should do more to filter students out of these courses, that college isn’t for everyone (just their kids, of course), and that scarce resources should be devoted to kids who will go on to contribute most to society, whatever that means. What’s crazy is, I’m not even opposed to using content and skill tests to better place students. I understand the challenges that come with setting students up to fail if they’re not adequately prepared for more challenging coursework. But I worry that we’re not going to let kids grow and learn and prove themselves capable. Instead, we’re going to make the pathways more rigid and harder to move on or off so that supposedly scarce resources (driven, no doubt, by a combination of austerity budgets and voucher programs) will be hoarded, Matthew effect style, at the top. What the commenter was saying is not, anymore, a fringe opinion. It’s now okay to suggest that schools should give some kids less and other kids more. That the less and more fall along lines of race, disability, and poverty will, I’m sure, be explained as simply a natural phenomenon justifying further reductions in resources.