Zero-sum Education and Technocracy

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. 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!

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Scarcity and Zero-Sum Schooling

I wrote last week that many education reformers display zero-sum thinking when it comes to schools. Some report that reformers would prefer to remain quiet in the face of ICE raid induced attendance problems because they’re promoting charter schools or private voucher programs anyway. If public schools and their students lose, then these reformers’ preferred schooling arrangements presumably win. This is zero-sum thinking. Others, like Alpha School, see learning as a zero-sum enterprise. Alpha argues that students in traditional schools spend too much time on academics and instead shift their focus to enrichment and entrepreneurship. Instead of broad academic knowledge, Alpha almost exclusively teaches to the test. In this case, the test is the MAP, an assessment that has been drawing some critical scrutiny recently for its flattening of everything into “skills”. But, if you live with zero-sum thinking, then learning is all about these kinds of tradeoffs. Why waste time on civics? When we hear that Alpha is revolutionizing education, let’s all remember what that revolution looks like!

I closed out by noting that some reformers are clearly positive-sum even when that may not be how they personally interact with public schooling but others, despite penning essays about educational abundance, are clearly operating with a zero-sum framework. This is most apparent when zero-sum thinkers promote limiting access via lotteries, applications, voucher systems, or other barriers to entry. At their root, zero-sum thinkers do not believe that traditional public schools can be good (or at least good enough) so experts and policymakers must act to equitably distribute the limited “good” schooling. Good schools are seen as scarce. There is only so much good school to go around — it’s zero-sum. What I thought of last week, but decided to save for today, was that these are technocratic measures brought about to establish some kind of fairness or justice on behalf of some kind of minority.

Technocracy, the solution to and cause of all life’s problems

Readers may recall that I’ve adopted a new framework for thinking about schools this year. The basic gist of the Gratton and Edenhofer framework is that modern liberal democracies will empower technocrats to design and manage important institutions in order to support minority participation in politics, protect their rights, and as temporal insurance against a future in which current leadership are in the minority. This empowerment creates tension, though, because it is anti-majoritarian. Gratton and Edenhofer demonstrate that populists can leverage this tension to gain majoritarian support and take power, often then using that power to not just undo technocratic rules but smash institutions entirely. If this becomes cyclical, then countries may find themselves undergoing democratic backsliding.

School choice has traditionally been exactly this kind of technocratic policy, maximizing a non-majoritarian social welfare function. Crucially, the reason it’s seen as welfare maximizing is because schooling is viewed as zero-sum. I think that’s an important connective piece between Gratton-Edenhofer’s theories and what I argue about all the time here in Scholastic Alchemy. Some reformers believe that schools cannot, as a whole, be made good so the only fair way — non-majoritarian welfare maximizing way — to send kids to schools is basically by random lottery so that everyone has an equal chance of getting into a good school. Short of true randomness, which would be intolerable for kids, parents, and schools as institutions, you develop other choice schemes to make sure that as many kinds of kids as possible have access to that rare resource, school. In some ways, though, this can be anti-majoritarian. In the United States, localism has been very strong in our school systems. Creating a technocratic institution that says, no, you don’t go to your local school where you elect the school board and the other students are your neighbors. Instead, you go to the school across town because that’s where the lottery matched you and hundreds of other random kids from around the broader metro area.

Case Study: New York City Schools

We can see a good example of this kind of technocratic solution to assumed zero-sum problems in New York City. Under mayor Bloomberg, the city overhauled its school enrollment system and became entirely a system of choice. Every single child in the nation’s largest school system applies for a lottery wherein they rank their top 12 choices for 3-K, Pre-K, Elementary, Middle, or High School and are then matched to a school. Bloomberg’s School Chancellor, Joel Klein explained the thinking to the New York Times back in 2003 when they started the new admissions for high school students.

I think this fits my point nicely! We have the assumption of scarcity “a chronic shortage of good schools” and a statement of technocratic welfare maximizing principle “trying to maximize what’s good for 80,000 kids.” It’s kind of crazy looking back and seeing the leadership of the nation’s largest public school district throw up their hands and say that some schools will just always be bad. It also reminds us once again that there’s a huge revisionist narrative around school reform that says we’ve given up on improving schools when, in fact, it was the reformers who gave up. They gave up in large part because they believed that making schools better was impossible. For them, schooling was zero-sum. All that was possible was to technocratically redistribute the kids to more equitably sort kids into the few good schools. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Apparently, they also didn’t tell parents or even some schools how the admissions system would work.

This is textbook technocratic programming: public buy-in is totally unnecessary, just sit back and let the algorithm work. Later that month, the Times followed up with an article detailing parents’ consternation. Klein, like any true technocrat, couldn’t understand why families were stressed out by the new system he and Bloomberg sprang on the city, nor did they grasp that this admissions system placed a large burden on parents.

Under the control of the mayor, his appointed chancellor, and their technocratic welfare maximizing matching algorithm, parent frustrations were of little import. This program later expanded to middle, elementary, and early childhood. Today, kids at every level of education are assigned to their schools through a lottery, to say nothing of kids apply to magnet schools, gifted and talented programs, charter schools, or the city’s eight specialized high schools. In true Gratton-Edenhofer fashion, the city has elected a populist mayor who campaigned on ending mayoral control of schools and returning to locally elected school boards, though he has walked that back since taking office.

Remember, we’re doing this because we’ve decided that some schools will just be “bad” forever. Good schools are scarce and as a scarce resource, access to them is zero-sum. Was the total-choice overhaul at least an effective change? It’s a mixed bag. While overall system quality has improved, it’s hard to say that school choice was a causal factor when so many other things changed at the same time: NCLB, Common Core, ESSA, Covid. Perhaps there will be big gains now that another of Klein’s policies, mandating Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study, has been replaced. Parents certainly have more options than they did before the overhaul, but more options also means they’re required to evaluate more information about the schools. The level of stress and anxiety parents feel because of this system is high. Various forms of segregation remain among the highest in the country, so it’s also questionable as to whether the reforms accomplished any of the desired welfare maximization.

Positive-Sum and Majoritarian

The efficacy of NYC’s changes are not the main point here. What I hope I’ve made clear is that there is a link between recent technocratic reforms and zero-sum thinking. Zero-sum reformers will always pursue technocratic solutions to redistribute access to what they see as a scarce education. This can take many shapes: school choice, charter schools, magnet programs, vouchers. We don’t tend to hear about anything “close to the metal.” That is, we don’t hear much from them about curriculum and instruction, school organization, grading policies, or other nitty-gritty. There might be the odd call for more standards or more accountability, but as technocrats they usually just tell us to follow evidence-based practices, listen to the experts, and “trust the science”. Of course, that leaves schools vulnerable to all kinds of fad chasing as what is considered “the science” is often anything but. If we follow the example of the Kleins and the Aldemans of the world, we also tacitly hold low expectations for schools. A zero-sum view means our policy has effectively become “some schools are just bad.” With apologies to Kelsey Piper, “some schools are just bad” is not good education policy.

What if our model of change was positive-sum? What if we believed that the things that made schools bad could be improved upon? What if we saw that schools existed to serve local communities and invited them as participants in education? What if turning around neighborhoods was part of turning around schools? Or if we had actual comprehensive high schools again? Or if advanced academics were open to more kids? Or if we understood the counterproductive nature of excessive standardization?

One reason I’ve been pushing this line of thinking so often is that our public schools (like the rest of our democracy) are in danger. While various reformers disagree about the past and fight over what direction schools should take, there’s been a radical break from conservatives’ traditional political positioning around schooling. I devoted a lot of time last year trying to explain that conservatives have largely given up on public education and that populists are exploiting their frustration with technocratic management of schools in order to end public schooling as we know it. They haven’t been dealt a mortal blow just yet but are certainly wounded. If all we do is turn around and re-implement a bunch of technocratic management that alienates parents and communities, we may not be so lucky next time. I really hope that we can quit the zero-sum mindset and begin rebuilding the public’s trust in public schools. As I wrote back in November,

Indeed, conservatives seem to be focusing on school as a way to make babies, so it’s clear that they’re operating in a whole different paradigm. Reformers should catch up.

Thanks for reading!