The People Want School Options

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.

A continuing series

At the start of the month, I began what I thought would be a continuous series laying out what I think public schools need in order to rebuild their reputation among average Americans, parents, and policy makers. In Wolverines, I said that schools used to hold an important position in our culture such that when we sought to depict the very idea of America, our media apparatus often turned to schools. Going to school served as an important orienting force in people’s lives and helped shape them in meaningful non-academic ways. Beyond all that, schools also anchored local communities and helped people feel a sense of civic connection that is lacking today. If we want the American public to love public schools once more, then we should try and restore some of that social and cultural role. Let’s embrace kitschy school spirit, athletics, and camaraderie. Let’s stop treating school as simply a steppingstone to a job or college and let it be meaningful in and of itself.

Initially I had planned to write follow-up posts in subsequent weeks but felt compelled to comment on giftedness and the Mississippi Miracle and the Southern Surge and phonics and all that. And, fine, it all needed to be said. Today, though, I’d like to get back to what I’d wanted to spend October writing about. So, the second thing I think public schools, especially high schools, need to do in order to win back the public is bring back lots and lots of options. This means everything from advanced academics to career-focused classes like auto-shop, work study, multiple levels of athletics, and broad electives and specials for every interest. Our public schools should offer just about everything youth need because, as I’ll argue, I think that is the public’s expectation.

Comprehensive High Schools

If you’re of a certain age and grew up in wealthy suburbia, you probably looked at what I just wrote and wondered what I’m talking about. You probably remember going to a comprehensive high school that offered all of those things to some degree. You probably were at a school that let you take advanced academic courses while also pursuing a multi-year series of health occupations classes that ended with EMT certification. Maybe you played baseball competitively and also took a woodshop class on your way to your state’s big university. Perhaps you were a student with disabilities and your CTE courses helped you develop useful skills to maintain an hourly job that otherwise might have been out of your reach. In many wealthy suburbs, the idea of the comprehensive high school remains alive and well, even today.

What may be less clear is that this is increasingly the exception rather than the rule. Comprehensive high schools, the grand experiment in providing a broad and high-quality education to all children that began in the 1940 and accelerated due to sputnik and school integration, has been on a slow downward trajectory since the 1980s. The opponents of the comprehensive high school come in two primary flavors. First, you had conservative opponents who objected, on religious (but also racial) grounds, to large scale secular schooling that did not reflect their religious values. Second, you had what I will call technocratic specializers who argued that comprehensive schools led to mediocrity and low standards. This second group sought smaller more focused schools that specialized in one or a few key academic areas. If these two groups seem familiar to my readers, it’s probably because they are also the political force behind the “charter school treaty” that I’ve written about in the past.

I think it’s also important to point out that the comprehensive high school served important non-academic functions, functions much like those I outlined in Wolverines. Importantly, comprehensive high schools served a unifying function in bringing together a broad swathe of children who hailed form different racial, ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds. James Conant, former president of Harvard and someone who damned near singlehandedly reshaped education policy in the middle of last century outlined this feature in his 1977 autobiography.

Conant’s sense that education risked becoming a dual system, one for the children of elites and one for everyone else, was well founded. Work began shortly after his death to end comprehensive high schools, undo desegregation efforts, and today we are building out a dual system based on vouchers for the wealthy and austerity-based public schooling for everyone else. Being a product of the early twentieth century as well as someone who had access to the nation’s waspy elites of that era, Conant understood better than anyone alive today, that America was unique in its efforts to try and make lots of different kinds of people get along. This understanding is backed up by research though within-school segregation continues to be a dogged problem for academic access and academic outcomes. Still, what Conant pointed to most often was not academic outcomes but social ones. Comprehensive high schools were meant to build a tolerant, cooperative, and liberal society as opposed to the totalitarian alternatives that emerged so catastrophically in early twentieth century Germany and the Soviet Union. It’s worth remembering that we built our education system not just to beat the Soviet Union but to avoid becoming them.

Options, Not Choice

I’d argue that people today still have an expectation that schools are comprehensive. They want to see their kids enter into a school where there are lots of options for courses, activities, and social development. I’m starting to notice, for example, that parents who flee public schools are not doing so because those schools do not offer rigorous academics. If we want the public to like public schools, maybe we could listen to these parents more? Or how about parents who sent their kids to Alpha School?

How often am I going to have to link actual parents sharing their motivations for choosing something other than public schools before people start to believe me when I talk about standardization driving people out? Public schools are able to offer all of these things if we let them. A comprehensive schooling experience would be (used to be!) flexible, safe, offer a variety of academic tracks and paces, and a variety of spaces. If we want parents to love public schools, why not have public schools meet their non-academic needs, too? Why laser focus on test scores just to drive away families and send them into unaccountable voucher programs where they won’t be tested anyway? Most of all, parents want to feel like they have a say in their children’s education. The answer right now is to give them a say by doing school choice schemes but what if what they really wanted was lots of options at their neighborhood school?

Thanks for Reading!