We Should Lower the Stakes of 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.

Recap

In recent weeks I’ve been trying to noodle though some steps I think public schools and people who care about them could take to improve public opinion towards public schools. I started off by noting that schools used to be essential components of America’s civic culture. When someone sought to depict Americana, they would often use schools as one of the main symbols. It wasn’t just representation, though. Schools were part of youth’s identity formation and seen as spaces that provided valuable social and cultural lessons alongside the academic ones. When schools moved more toward college and career preparation, they lost sight of many of those other functions and lost their place at the heart of America’s civic self-image.

I think one reason public schools became a bit lost in the last thirty years or so was the slow demolition of comprehensive high schools. We often hear about how kids today don’t take shop class or even have the opportunity to learn any hands-on skills. Politicians of all stripes lament the loss of technical education and preparation for the trades, the existence of arts programming in schools often relies entirely on grants and parent funding, and school athletics have taken a back seat to both academics and to expensive private travel leagues. Schools have also become more specialized. Whereas a great technology and engineering program would have been part of a comprehensive high school in the past but today might be a magnet school or charter school where every kid and every course focuses on technology and engineering. The slow death of comprehensive high schools means kids don’t rub shoulders with kids who are different from them. It’s important to note here that I am not just talking about racial or wealth differences, although that is also the case, but also kids with different interests and different skill sets.

A corollary development has been the emergence of strict academic pathways for kids in advanced courses. Often times kids will lose access to high level math classes in high school because of their performance in elementary school. Perhaps they don’t get a teacher referral into that school’s gifted and talented program so they can’t even choose to take algebra in middle school, even if they want to, because that’s a course limited to kids in the gifted program. (Let me also flag my objection to the tendency of gifted programs to turn into advanced academic tracks, which is not what they’re supposed to be.) We know, for example, that there are a lot of kids who could succeed in 8th grade algebra but never receive a referral into the tracks that would let them take algebra. This kind of gatekeeping is exceedingly common, and to my larger point, limits access to advanced coursework. Schools, ideally comprehensive ones, should offer advanced academics to as many kids as possible and we should make pathways to these classes flexible. Kelsey Piper labeled this “open-tracking” and I think that’s a nice term to adopt. Moreover, there’s good reason to believe that parents want schools that give their children lots of options — comprehensive schools, folks — while the general public wants schools that offer advanced academic options. Both strongly dislike the elimination of advanced courses in order to move all students at the same pace. Both can be made happy with a comprehensive model of schooling and open-tracking for advanced classes.

The Red Wheelbarrow

My final recommendation in this four-part series is for us to lower the stakes of education and student achievement. I spent some time last January writing about the old logic that’s dominated education policy for decades: human capital theory. I was not necessarily criticizing the theory itself but all the distorted things it’s become in connection with our K-12 and higher education systems. So much depends, we’re told, on students succeeding in K-12 and then going on to college so they can get a good enough job and earn enough money to live a middle-class life, free of economic precarity. That’s THE pathway for every single kid and it fits nicely into the stories that the right and left want to tell about how people succeed. On the right, it’s a story of personal responsibility. If you don’t succeed in school, it’s because you made poor choices or, for some, because you were simply not culturally or genetically able to succeed. Either way, it’s all on you and fits a right-oriented moral framework that establishes the worth of a person. On the left, it’s a structuralist story. Schools are mechanisms for lifting classes of people out of poverty or are places where racial inequality can be addressed. Here, a kid failing to succeed is the product of a system that isn’t providing the right kind of support or opportunities. This is the left’s moral and structural story in which students are adrift on the tides of power.

The trouble here is that the stakes are just so damned high for each kid and for schools that anyone who’s not succeeding figures out early on that there is no more point in trying. If it turns out that you’re not taking algebra until 9th grade, sorry, you’re not going to a selective university. You’re likely locked out of the top professions and maybe don’t even graduate from your non-selective college or community college. Others may be successful but care little for what they are learning because it’s all devalued in the present — what matters is that final prize, the college degree and the high-paying job that supposedly comes with it — so they’re happy to turn over their thinking to AI and coast through. Still others are successful but stressed out. They are so worried about failure that they work themselves up, egged on to depression and anxiety by every grade and every test score, because they are told their entire lives depend on it. And the thing is, their entire life does, to some extent, depend on it. When any academic misadventure is so punishing that it stands a good chance of knocking you out of a high tax bracket, you’re not wrong to be stressed!

I’m not sure we should accept this because I’m not sure it’s 100% true. While I am a big fan of schools and want kids to learn and succeed in school, I suspect that a large portion of those life outcomes are not wholly dependent on success in school. There’s been a “techcession” for the last few years where last generation’s winners, the ones who learned to code, have seen higher rates of firings and unemployment than the average worker. That’s snowballed into the AI era where it’s also possible that many workers see even worse career prospects as entry level jobs are replaced by AI. That link profiles someone who, under the old way of thinking about schooling, is an absolute winner. After succeeding in school he went to a selective university, studied business, finance, and technology, and learned to code. Mr. King ended up making a lot of money in his twenties making AI agents for a major consultancy and accounting firm.

But wait! King did everything right. He was successful both academically and in his career. Yet somehow King and probably many many more just like him, aren’t going to get what they “deserve” under the classic way of thinking about education, labor, and productivity. Yet, right now, we are being told that schools need to do more to prepare kids for this AI-rich labor environment. The stakes remain high and our only lever for improving people’s outcomes in life is, apparently, K-12 schooling. We should take some pressure off the education system by admitting that schools are downstream from large economic and technological shifts, not the cause of them. When I think about this issue, I’m reminded of something Brad Delong wrote in Slouching Toward Utopia that should be imprinted on the wall of every education policymaker’s office.

We as a society decided so much depends on schooling that any failures a person experiences in their career are downstream of bad decisions they made in school. The stakes to education are way too high when the reality is that economics and government policies in response to economics are far more impactful and meaningful. We should acknowledge that schooling alone is not going to guarantee any particular outcome and that, instead, schooling is about gaining knowledge and skills so that kids can later specialize as they choose but also feel good that they learned things and gained skills at all. It’s to help them become broadly literate and numerate so that they can elect leaders who look out for their interests and make policies that grow and support the country. After all, they told us to learn to code and look what happened to them. Do we now blame them for choosing a STEM pathway in high school? Do we now blame them for spending less time reading novels than writing code? We might as well blame the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep.