Education Reads to Start Your Week, March 9th

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each and Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

Author’s Note: I’m reorganizing the links into Monday morning posts. I’ve been struggling to devote time to reading the kinds of things I’d like to share in the weekly links since the organization of my day-to-day life has changed somewhat. As such, I thought I would pen slightly longer discussions of fewer links and share them at he start of the week instead of the end. Let’s see how it goes.

Against College Majors

Chad Orzel had an interesting post on Friday musing about whether colleges should reduce the number of majors by de-specializing them to some extent. His formulation was “fewer broader majors.” I’ve been thinking about it over the weekend and to me college majors are, today, part of a system we’ve set up to solve knowledge problems for employers.

Imagine for a moment that you’re looking to hire someone entry level to work in your company. You might consider experienced candidates who’ve worked in the field already, but the pay for this position is probably a bit too low and the actual work they’d be doing are somewhat basic compared with what you’d have senior staff doing. Hence, entry level. How, if you can’t rely on applicable experience in the field, do you know if you have a candidate who will do a good enough job? Employers have solved this problem in a number of ways over the years.

In a family business, you hire relatives and it gives you two advantages. First, you know your family members personally and that knowledge helps you know which ones would be good at which jobs. Second, because you’re all family, you have some intrinsic desire to perform your job well. Beyond direct family business, we still often see people who use family connections to begin their careers. Personal knowledge of someone’s skills and disposition is one way to fill a position. Nepotism is very common despite its negative connotation. Of course, this kind of hiring has downsides, such as people being hired or promoted for their personal connections rather than for their performance or potential.

Apprenticeships used to be very common in the United States and still are in some skilled trades, although more so in Europe than in the US. Indeed, today’s system of apprenticeship dates back to medieval guilds that emerged to organize specialized manual labor in the wake of the Black Death. You take someone new and basically you put them through the necessary job experience under the guidance of someone who is already a skilled practitioner in the field. Indeed, there seems to be something of a resurgence in apprenticeships in the US, but there aren’t enough skilled tradespeople to take on new apprentices. The challenge here is complex and apprenticeships are hard to scale. First off, you need a skilled tradesperson who wants to take on apprentices, often costing them time and money since they’re not actively doing the work themselves. Second, apprenticeships are typically paid for by the company who is doing the hiring. Your local plumber or HVAC repair outfit is not likely hiring more than one apprentice at a time. While an apprentice is training, an employer is effectively paying two salaries for the work of a single laborer. It’s not financially optimal unless you expect that apprentice to stick around and earn that investment back. Sometimes, they don’t even complete the training and you’re back to square one. Apprenticeships don’t solve that initial knowledge problem as well as family or nepotism hiring.

Another medieval innovation that continues on to today is the professions. Classically, there are only three “learned” professions: law, medicine, and divinity. In general, professions are autonomous and self-governing, often through bodies we’ve all heard of the like state bar association or the state medical board. Various governing bodies, such as the American Colleges of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) established and maintain standards for the education and training of members (doctors, in this case) and will often stipulate further training that looks a bit like apprenticeship. The professions, by formalizing the process of admission, education and training, and evaluation have largely solved the informational problems new employers face. Like family or nepotism, members of the professions will have a high degree of knowledge about the skills and aptitudes of applicant. Like and apprentice, new professionals will have ample practical experience in the line of work they are entering. Moreover, professions often require members to uphold standards of behavior and ethics and to continue their learning in demonstrable ways. While the information and experience problems are solved, the setting of high barriers to entry and long training requirements often means there simply aren’t many professionals. That scarcity also drives up the cost of hiring professionals. While there are now many professions, and not all are high paid (teaching, social work), the pathways are long and narrow enough that there seems to always be a shortage of them.

Indeed, most working people, even those who are college educated, are not working in the professions. I should note that government statistics include far more in the professional employment category but really we’re talking about the big three plus accountants, architecture, engineering, pharmacists, veterinarians, teachers, social workers, nursing, and optometry. Maybe a handful of others formally count or don’t but regardless of where you draw the line, most people are not employed in a profession. Nor are they working as apprentices. So, what do these employers do? Some give tests! The tech industry became infamous for tricky “Google Interview Questions” that were said to force people to put their abstract reasoning on display by asking them questions like “how many streetlights are in Manhattan?”. Google later audited the outcomes of these interviews and decided that they weren’t a good indicator of a quality hire. People interviewing for coding jobs may be tested by being asked to write some code. Outside of tech, industries such as finance use internships. Human resources departments set up all kinds of practices and procedures that they think will determine who is a good potential employee. Some work, some don’t.

One important credential that white-collar employers look for is a college degree. Earning a degree communicates some important information to an employer about what someone is able to do. Moreover, there are many kinds of degree and majors so employers are able to expect different things from someone who studied history vs biology. Orzel says that one problem with this system is that majors are becoming more specialized, in part because employers seem to be demanding that specialization.

His idea for reorganizing majors would be to put them together based on, more or less, methodology.

Orzel goes on to note that something similar is possible in the humanities and social sciences and that may even be a way to defend the various kinds of identity studies from further degradation.

I don’t have a big point to make here about whether I agree or disagree with Orzel but it’s a new way of thinking about how to organize higher ed than what we usually see out there. I tend to be something of a generalist by disposition. I am not an economist or political scientist but tend to read a lot in those fields, despite methodologies that are different from my own training which was mostly derived from sociology and psychology. But that was doctoral training. That was specialized. If I think about teaching, Orzel’s view makes a lot more sense. I was never a math teacher but I know a lot more about the day to day work of teaching math because all teachers share some common basis of professional knowledge. We learn about learning, teaching methods, and human growth and development, in addition to out learning about our specific subjects. While I may not be able to adequately teach advanced math courses to high school students, I am confident that you could hand me a middle school math curriculum and tell me to go teach sixth graders for a year and I would pull it off. It would be hard and require a lot more work for me than asking me to teach sixth grade English, but I could make it work.

To me, though, that’s the information problem at the heart of what Orzel is writing about. How do we communicate to an employer that someone has the requisite knowledge and skills as well as the attitude that would make them successful in a role. Perhaps he is correct that reorienting college majors around the shared methods they use to arrive at knowledge and do the work of the field is better. Food for thought.

School Choice Contradictions

Should Islamic schools receive taxpayer dollars as part of school voucher programs? I’ve written a lot about how the politics of school choice have changed in the last few years. In general, choice usually meant something like charter schools or, in rare cases, a whole district would allow people to apply to any and every school — I mentioned New York City’s system last week. What used to be a coalition between liberals and conservatives has fallen apart in recent years. While many liberals seem content to try and re-create the conditions of education reform in the 2000s, conservatives have moved on to an entirely different way of looking at education. If I had to summarize their views, I’d say they believe that parents are the ultimate arbiters of a child’s education and that education must conform to each parents’ values. It is simply not a strong interest of the state to ensure a child has a proper education now. Beyond that, it’s clear that, for conservatives, not everyone is meant to receive a quality education and schools should not be welcoming places for various minority groups. Finally, because even charter schools are too “woke” now, taxpayers must subsidize the wealthy in attending private schools so that kids can have an education that aligns with their parents’ values.

You may have sensed a contradiction in those statements. If an education is going to align with a parents’ values, then a woke charter school should be okay. After all, parents choose the charter school. In a system of choice, a woke school is one of many choices but they allow those choices because they believe in the principle behind it. Saying you support school choice and then strictly limiting the choices based on various ideological positions isn’t giving choice. Over the summer I wrote about educational pluralism and the idea that there is a new compromise to be made between liberals and conservatives. Educational pluralists believe that there should be schools that align with many different kinds of social and cultural values and that those should be options, even if private or religious or whatever. If we allow for there to be pluralistic schooling, which would mean school choice and vouchers and all that, then we have to allow for many choices while also holding schools accountable for using taxpayer dollars effectively. I remain skeptical. Not only do voucher proponents abhor any accountability for how taxpayer dollars are spent, but they also don’t seem to feel the need to compromise on values. In the end, I said that I thought proponents of educational pluralism were hopelessly naive.

It turns out, no, they do not feel the need to compromise. In fact, conservatives are perfectly willing to build a system of school choice and vouchers and then turn around and curtail choices they dislike for religious and cultural reasons.

Texas is not alone in trying to prevent Islamic schools from receiving voucher funds. I noted back in November that conservatives in Florida are trying to block Islamic schools from that state’s voucher program. Anyone paying attention knows that school choice was never an honest movement from the get-go. Whether it’s the movement’s roots in segregationist resistance to civil rights or its long-term support from religious organizations seeking access to public tax dollars, the school choice movement has always been about anything but choice. It’s not looking any better at the federal level with the new education tax credit scheme.

Vouchers Are Unpopular Because They’re Technocratic

Let’s close with a quick note from Jennifer Berkshire that, in fact, vouchers are unpopular. One way we know this is that even fairly red states like Mississippi reject vouchers and invest in public schools. Often some of the loudest opponents of voucher programs are representatives of rural districts who rightly grasp that they’ll only lose funds and that no fancy private school will open for kids in those districts. What I didn’t expect, though, is another new angle: vouchers are government overreach. Even the paucity of rules and regulations in a system like Texas’ can still rub people the wrong way.

That’s exactly what happened in that special election back in January, by the way, when Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a loud critic of vouchers, won an upset election, defeating a Republican opponent who’d been opposed to vouchers before changing her tune once it came time to campaign, and more importantly, solicit campaign funds.

Berkshire goes on to detail opposition to vouchers in North Carolina and Arizona.

She notes that Talarico’s notable Democratic win in Texas also embraced anti-voucher rhetoric which is similar to what conservative activists are saying.

The point to make here is the one I’ve been harping on as my new framework this year. Americans like locally controlled, locally elected, locally accountable schools. It’s a long tradition and among our most democratic institutions. Public schools in the US are traditionally a majoritarian institution (for better and worse, I don’t want to gloss segregation, for example). When schools cease being local, being democratic, being legible to the people who send their children to those schools, they lose that majoritarian character. One way people come to feel this way is through excessive standardization. Technocrats, anxious to improve various outcomes, take control of curriculum and assessment away from local districts and pass it to experts and consortia and unelected bureaucrats. Another way is through school choice. Schools judged to be “good” are locked away behind applications and lotteries and gifted programs and magent programs where seats are always limited. Efforts to improve schools become efforts to resort and redistribute who gets access to the “good” schools. Seen in this light, voucher programs like those in Texas are actually pretty similar in nature to school choice systems in places like New York City. Instead of the “good” schools being a few well-performing public schools, the “good” schools are private schools. In both cases seats are scarce. In both cases, wealthy parents get most of the benefit. In both cases, the local and majoritarian aspects of schools is replaced by a technocratic system redistributing kids and funding based on various ideological assumptions. This leads to a populist backlash and we are seeing that play out in real time.

I’d say Berkshire’s piece is another win for the Gatton/Edenhofer framework.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!