Nix it or fix it?

Winds of change, wills of stone.

A civil war is coming. I don’t mean that literally, (although some might argue the literal version is inevitable - yikes!). But there is a growing divide in this country between those who think our public school system is mostly working and simply needs time, resources and “tweaking”, and those who think the system is completely broken. (The second group is also split on whether a “gut-and-rehab” will do the trick, or whether it needs to be burnt to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.)

To say the public school system is too big to fail is perhaps a little silly, because by most objective metrics, it IS failing. Here are just some of the numbers:

• Since 2011-12, the average test scores for 13-year-old students dropped 7 points in reading and 14 points in math.

• In the Program for International Student Assessment (2018 - BEFORE the pandemic), out of 80 participating countries, the US placed 13th in literacy, 37th in math and 18th in science.

• The same assessment found that 19% of 15-year-old students in the US did not achieve level 2* on the proficiency scale in literacy, and 27% didn’t reach level 2 in math. 19% fell below level 2 in science proficiency, and — here’s a great stat for a capitalist nation — 16% were below level 2 in financial literacy. (*at level 2, students can solve problems with direct instructions and familiar contexts, and demonstrate basic competencies necessary to participate in society; considered the minimum level students need to function effectively in modern life.) Latvia has better readers and mathematicians than us. Kids from North Macedonia have more proficient readers than we do. Let that sink in.

• ACT scores are at their lowest in 30 years.

• Our students are not making progress at post-COVID recovery.

• Chronic absenteeism in K-12 schools has become a nationwide crisis.

In addition to the dismal portrait painted by numbers, the dissatisfaction of American parents with curriculum, culture, discipline and overarching policies across the nation is well-documented. It has shown up in surveys, at school board meetings, in blogs and social media, and perhaps most significantly, the largest enrollment decline in public school history.

And yet public school officials and school board members are resistant to change and reticent to engage parents in the process.

So maybe rather than “too big to fail”, the real question is more like, “Is it too big to fix?” or “Is it too big to replace?”

1. A brief history of the US public school system.

The concept of a “common school” that would be free of charge, universally available to every child, and funded by the government was first entertained in the state of Massachusetts in the 1830s, to instruct children in reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and geography, along with lessons in civic and personal virtues.

Public schools began appearing throughout various communities, but compulsory school attendance was not the law in all fifty states until 1918 (Massachusetts was first in 1852, and Mississippi was last in 1918! You can check when education became mandatory in your state here.) By the 50’s, 98% of American children participated in the public school system.

But in the ‘60s, some families began to oppose social and cultural changes entering the public schools; they were perceived as a turn away from Christian principles. (The perception was intensified by legislative and legal actions, such as the Supreme Court rulings in 1962 and 1963, which outlawed organized school prayer and school-sponsored Bible reading.)

(Contrary to what many may think, there were also young parents immersed in the countercultural left who rejected American institutionalism, including public education, and chose instead to raise their families and educate their children in small-scale rural communities dubbed “communes”.)

The compulsory attendance laws of each statemade homeschooling de facto illegal, forcing homeschooling families underground until 1972 when a Supreme Court case opened the door, but homeschooling did not become legal in all fifty states until 1992! (That date blows my mind every time I see it.)

By 1992 there were 750,000 homeschool students in America. That number grew modestly over the next 27 years to reach 1.5 million in 2019. But MOST students remained in the “common school”; by the same year, public school enrollment reached an all-time high of 50.8 million students.

2. But then, COVID.

What began as a series of temporary school shutdowns driven by widespread fear as the body count rose from the COVID-19 virus became a prolonged national crisis. Ohio was the first state to mandate that all schools close in March of 2020, under the leadership of Governor Mike DeWine. In less than a week, every state in the nation followed suit; all schools remained shut down for in-person instruction for the remainder of the 2019-2020 school year.

But astonishingly, many school remained closed into and through the 2020-21 school year as well, long after there began to be serious questions as to what health and safety goals were being achieved by keeping kids out of school, and whether those goals were worth the emotional and mental health effects or the learning loss that was occuring. During the first spring of the shutdowns, as many as 25-30% of students had not participated in remote education, and were de facto truant and often unaccounted for. In some districts, the truancy rate ran as high as 40%.

We were deeply divided as a nation. Accusations arose that our children were being used as pawns in local, state and federal politics as lawmakers, school boards and public health officials fought bitterly over the return to classrooms. The divisions ran along ideological lines, with the political left supporting the continuation of remote learning out of cautiousness and the political right asserting that students needed to return to the classroom. For example, fewer than 1/5 of the districts won by Trump in 2020 remained closed in fall, and fewer than 1/5 of the districts won by Biden reopened before March of 2021. Similarly, when the CDC recommended 100% masking among staff and students for in-person learning, almost 80% of Biden districts complied with the recommendation, while less than 40% of Trump districts followed it.

As someone who was teaching in an elementary classroom, my own experience was that the public health and CDC guidelines were incredibly difficult to implement and impossible to manage. The masks were on and off little faces, licked by little tongues, passed between little hands, and draping every surface throughout the day. Keeping young children from touching one another let alone community surfaces was a herculean (and epically failing) effort. And the masks had unintended consequences of making it difficult to get children to respond verbally in class, to be able to understand when they did, and to ensure proper pronunciation and vocabulary during engagement.

And one thing everyone seems to agree on is the lasting and traumatic effect COVID-19 and the subsequent shutdowns had on our children’s learning and education. The longer the shutdowns, the worse the impact. Four and a half years later, schools are still trying to recover from the chaos and setbacks caused by the pandemic. In fact, students are still, on average, 3-6 months behind in core subject knowledge, and the teacher shortage continues to be a huge problem across the nation.

3. Culture wars in our classrooms

The problems plaguing our schools neither started nor ended with the pandemic. In the past ten years, cultural and social issues have become embedded (entrenched?) in public school classrooms, from the content and “voice” in the curriculum to the insertion of personal opinions of teachers in daily instruction. School governance and parental rights have been at the center of spectacular polarized debates played out in school board meetings, on social media, and in the news. We are facing deep societal divisions, and the intensity and vitriol of the debates have grown markedly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which both exposed and accelerated tensions within public discourse surrounding schools.

The debate over how race, gender, and American history are taught in schools, especially, has fueled discord among parents and school staff. The addition of “critical race theory” (CRT) and LGBTQ+ topics in school curricula has led to parental outcry, school board confrontations and legal challenges. Disputes have emerged over books with LGBTQ+ themes in school libraries, the use of preferred pronouns, and sex education standards. And as national debates about identity, race, gender, and political beliefs have intensified, students have increasingly found themselves targets of harassment based on their perceived affiliations or personal characteristics. LGBTQ+ youth have reported elevated levels of bullying, both in school hallways and online. At the same time, students expressing conservative or religious viewpoints have also reported being ostracized or silenced in some settings. The advent of social media and digital communication has made it easier for bullying behavior to extend beyond the classroom and into students’ homes, often with little adult supervision or accountability.

The culture wars in education reflect a broader struggle over national identity, civic values, and the rights and responsibilities of educators, parents, and students. Combined with failing test scores, is there enough movement to effect a revolution of our nation’s education system?

4. Your turn: So do we nix it or fix it?

Well, dear readers, the bottom line is that in the years following the pandemic, public school enrollment has shown a deep decline, with a loss of more than 1.5 million students — unprecedented since the beginning of the common school. At the same time, with parental choice programs growing, private schools have seen modest growth, and homeschooling is surging.

There are now more than 4.5 million homeschooling families (in 2019 there were 1.5 million.)

Parents are increasingly “opting out”, wreaking havoc on planning, budgeting and staffing school districts throughout the US. Those parents are saying, “Nix it.”

But is there a way to fix it? Is there a NEED to fix it, to have “common school”? What would that look like moving forward?

What do you think?