The People Hate Standardization

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.

My second kid is just about a month old and I’ve got to say that the sleep situation this time around is much harder. Maybe it’s not the kid but that fact that I’m three years older than last time I did this? Who knows? Regardless, I’m often getting up several times a night to help with diapers and feeding and that means I’m pretty damned tired all day. It makes writing anything coherent a challenge. Add to that the fact that my older kid doesn’t start 3-K until after labor day and you’ve got a recipe for a very busy house without much time to myself for writing. This is all to say, thanks to you dear readers for sticking with me as my writing quality declines and my posts are more scattered and off schedule. I really hope things can get back to normal here at Scholastic Alchemy soon, but I also recognize that “back to normal” is not a concept compatible with scholastic alchemy.

It’s the tests, stupid

Continuing with my intention to rant about things while I’m sleepless and scattered, I thought I would connect some dots that, to me, seem very obvious but that somehow many people don’t seem to notice. I want to make the case that increasing standardization of schooling, via the standards, their effects on curriculum, and through testing, has alienated a large number of parents. The result of this alienation is 1) the perception that even good public schools are bad and 2) an openness to alternative school choice structures, primarily vouchers.

Back in May, I wrote about how education policy seems to be just vibes now and that those vibes are reinforced by bullshit stories we make up in order to accomplish our preferred ideological objectives. The key problem I noticed was that an article in the NYT falsely argued that the opt-out movement (parents objecting to standardized tests in schools) was equally the product of the left and the right. What I pointed out using the NYT’s own reporting on the opt-out movement was that it was concentrated among whiter, wealthier, and more conservative districts. Left-leaning districts like New York City, even with their powerful teachers’ unions, had very low opt-out rates. This reality, though, is no longer fashionable in an era where we feel compelled to blame “both sides” for the problems in our schools and promote some alternative. In this case it was knowledge-based curricula, as if knowledge itself isn’t also hotly contested in our political system right now. I’m sorry, but as much I a think re-centering our curriculum on knowledge is probably a good thing for learning, I have zero faith that it will extricate us from political battles over what counts as knowledge or what knowledge kids should be allowed to encounter in school.

Today I want to return to that post with a bit more I’ve gleaned over the past few months about how attitudes toward testing, standardization, and their impacts on schools have driven people away from public schools. To adapt that old political chestnut, when we see the state of schools today and ask why so many parents are ready to leave public schools behind, we should remember that “it’s the tests, stupid.”

If education is consumption, then consumers’ preferences are clear

Chandler Fritz has a great article in the September edition of Harper’s Magazine about how public education is changing. I highly recommend the whole article, but be warned it is a long one. I noticed you can listen to the audio version without a Harper’s subscription so maybe do that. The idea, not a new one but certainly ascendant, is that parents and their children are consumers of education products. under this model, we no longer receive “an education” so much as purchase components of it on an educational marketplace. Perhaps we want Saxon Math coupled with a Classical Curriculum. Maybe there isn’t one school offering both options but, in a consumer-driven education marketplace, parents can buy their kids access (usually envisioned as using vouchers-as-cash) to their preferred educational products. It’s not just going to tuition at a private school but to “vendors” and an ever-expanding category of educational products sold to parents and paid for using voucher funds. Here’s the overall gist of what’s happening.

I added a bit of emphasis there to point out that better academic outcomes are, at best, an afterthought of the school choice movement. This is the model expanding across red-states and potentially nationwide through the voucher-like tax credit program in the OBBBA. If parents are the only true authority we recognize as responsible for their children’s education, then we will be making them solely responsible for purchasing that education’s various components. To me, this sounds like a nightmare. I know a lot about education and have years of experience in the field and I don’t want to spend all this time and energy researching and evaluating every little aspect of what my kids will learn. It’s a huge burden and one that many parents may not be willing or able to shoulder. Not to mention those who spend the Florida’s tax dollars homeschooling kids at Disney World. This all raises the question, why would parents put up with this? It’s not like people are out there asking for more administrative burdens or wanting to devote hours of their lives to navigating edu-product sales pitches. Why tolerate all the BS? It’s because standardization and testing are unpopular.

Fritz continues with a pair of critical points about the true nature of who “consumes” education under voucher programs and what motivates their flight from public schools.

I think we can see some connections here with what I wrote about back in May. The people who are most poised to take advantage of school choice schemes are upper class parents who, because of how race and class and political affiliation line up in the US, we can safely assume are also mostly conservative and white. In New York, these parents opted their kids out of testing and fight for their local schools to reject standardization. In Arizona these parents empowered politicians who created the most expansive set of permissions for charter schools and have now enacted the most expansive voucher program in the country. In both cases, though, the root of the issue was the unpopularity of standardized tests and the sense that schools were being taken away from local control and placed under a regime of standardized bureaucratic management.

And it’s not just Arizona or New York. A recent NYT piece about Florida echoes many of these same themes. Yes, yes, this is Dana Goldstein again and she is going through great lengths to occupy the same “both-sides” territory as always, but there’s some valuable reporting here nonetheless. The main thrust of the article is looking at how public schools under a choice and voucher system compete for students in an effort to keep their funding intact. That already sounds like a special kind of hell, and you could imagine that, if the best schools are the ones losing kids, it even feels counter-intuitive to many of the teachers and admins at those schools. They’re the best performing and are doing everything right, but parents are still pulling their kids! How maddening that must feel. Oh well, just hire “public school recruiters” to go find you kids that will bring in some of that sweet sweet voucher money. Just like in Arizona, good schools are losing kids.

One parent makes a familiar point:

Parents do not equate standardization and testing with rigor and quality. When public schools become focused on standardization and achieving high test scores, parents see this as bad and become more receptive to alternatives. Anti-school conservatives are there, ready to take your kid to Disney to learn fractions from Snow White on the taxpayer’s dime. And, it appears that parents are willing to take on the burden of being the executor and guarantor of their children’s education if it means they escape systems of testing and standards. The ones who can navigate the paperwork, file for their voucher funds, locate and evaluate the myriad educational products, and get their kids enrolled are going to be increasingly separated from the kids whose parents can’t manage that process. That’s not good! David Brooks, of all people, has a recent op-ed penned against this kind of segregation. Though he thinks the entire nation should go the way of Mississippi and Louisiana where, as far as I can tell, the outsized results are simply the result of cutting the bottom 10% of students out of the testing rolls each year. This is also a practice in Florida where officials often tout its 4th grade scores on the NAEP while ignoring the fact that its 8th graders, who do not have a retention policy like the 4th graders, have among the lowest scores in the nation. And of course there remain many questions about the administration of the NAEP under a scaled back DoE and reduced funding. It seems the right-wing hatred of testing runs from the local to the federal.

Meanwhile in Texas, where national attention has been on redistricting efforts, the legislature is looking to eliminate their state’s set of standardized tests, the STAAR over the objections of Democratic lawmakers (again, note who is anti-standardized test here, it’s not the democrats!). The replacement for the tests that inspired NCLB would be a smaller set of three exams taken less frequently. The Texas legislature currently has no plans to require schools receiving voucher funds to take these new tests either. No wonder 59% of parents said they would likely send their kids to private school if voucher funds were made available.

Ed Week gives us a helpful chart noting that parents really want to feel like they “have a say” in their kids education. Note the gap between independents, republicans, and democrats.

I’ve said repeatedly that local control of schools is popular and that parents who feel like they have lost local control will resent that loss. What I think is so interesting, and hard to understand is that losing local control means parents will pursue options where they have even less control. One result from the same poll told us that 100% of private school parents feel like they “have a say” in their kids education. That seems insane to me. The only recourse you have if your kid is receiving an inadequate education at a private school is to remove your kid from the school. In the mean time, she has not learned what she was supposed to learn and is, perhaps, behind her peers. But there’s an even bigger problem. How would you know if your child was receiving an inadequate education? What indicator would you have? There are no tests required so you’re reliant on the school taking your money to convince you that they are indeed educating your child. Maybe they are but maybe the school has been engaging in financial shenanigans with your (taxpayer subsidized) tuition. It’s not illegal and it’s not even something they have to report! Who knows? In the end, it’s buyer beware and all the information asymmetry problems that come with it. And yet, somehow parents prefer this to standardized tests.

Implications

To wrap this up, it’s clear to me that standardization has set many parents against schools and that this trend is strongest among parents who lean conservative. What we’re seeing in red states is a rejection of standardization of education but, unlike what we saw in states like New York and New Jersey, conservatives there have opted to build and fund a parallel constellation of education products and services where parents are positioned as consumers and as the only ones ultimately responsible for whether or not their kids are learning anything. This system gives parents the feeling that they are in control and is, apparently, more popular than traditional schools when traditional schools are positioned as test-driven. Parental satisfaction, however, seems like it has been decoupled from questions of school quality and learning. Indeed, proponents of choice no longer talk about school quality and simply position parent choice as a valid end in and of itself. As these programs have rolled out, the schools seeing the biggest declines in enrollment appear to be the best schools. To me, this will lead to a self-fulfilling prophesy where private schools, micro-schools, and home schools poach kids from the top, lowering averages on state tests and perpetuating the “public schools bad” mythology.

And ain’t that some peak scholastic alchemy shit? Originally school choice was all about improving academic outcomes, including at public schools, because competition would allow the best schools to succeed and to gather the most children and the most money. Instead, we’ve actually built a system where there is no accountability for outcomes anywhere except for traditional public schools where, because of those accountability measures, they spend all their time prepping kids to perform well on the measures — tests. Indeed, part of the appeal of this new choice system is that parents get to pick programs like Classical Education, where kids are no longer subject to standardized curricula.

So, while we lament that nobody can read whole books anymore, let’s remember that this was all part of Republicans’ hallmark education reforms, No Child Left Behind and Common Core. It all came from us wanting to emulate the Texas Miracle and the Florida Miracle (both under Jeb and George W Bush and both debunked, mind you). Where I depart from the author of the above segment is that I do not see this as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism posits a hierarchy of merit and one which would use standards and testing in schools to separate out a hierarchy of talent and ability. Rather, as I have written about a few times this past spring, I think we’re seeing a vision of education in which the public and the government it elects no longer think it’s important for every child to receive an adequate education. Instead, we seem to have a consensus that only some kids deserve a good education and the way those lines are falling seems to reflect some pretty old social hierarchies.

Take is away Peter Greene:

Thanks for reading!