America Needs True K-12 Education Reform

Education reform in the United States has followed similar trends over the last twenty years or so. Back in 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act, advocated for by the George W. Bush administration, was passed through both chambers of the legislature and signed by the President. Based on the claim he'd overseen a "Texas Miracle" as the namesake state's governor, Bush upheld if every student between the 3rd and 8th grades were annually tested, with high-performing schools rewarded and low-performing schools penalized, the nation would see test scores increase, teacher performance rebound and graduation rates soar. Under this new education regime, America would supposedly undergo a massive investment into underprivileged children by giving teachers and school districts the motivation they needed to perform.

In 2009, President Barack Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative doubled down on the concepts implemented during the Bush years with a new round of $5 billion in funding. Offering states millions of dollars to implement regular standardized testing for students, evaluations for teachers, Common Core State Standards and forced closing or shaking up of leadership at low-performing schools, all of this was done while regulations were loosened and funding provided for charter schools to explode in popularity across America. This began in earnest the modern school-choice movement, based on the idea that if parents can choose where their kids go to school, children will naturally perform better.

Then, during the recent Trump presidency, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos touted and campaigned for school-choice, charter schools, student vouchers and public funding of private religious schools like no one in her position has in American history. Over $440 million was spent by the federal government to sure up private and charter schooling at the expense of traditional public schools. The COVID-19 pandemic only made the disparity between high-and-low-performing school systems more dramatic and obvious.

Now, at first glance, this sort of performance-focused education system might seem logical, common-sense even. The only problem is: the standardized-testing, school-voucher-pushing regime has failed on every level in the United States, if your goal is to provide quality education to the American public at-large. While American student's overall test scores have stagnated over the last twenty years, there is a growing performance divide between students from wealthy households and those from economically depressed areas. In other words, rich kids have been achieving higher scores across the board while those from poor neighborhoods are steadily sinking even lower.

This gap in performance and achievement impacts everything from the likelihood a given child will go on to graduate high school, attend and finish college, stay out of prison, become and stay married, own a home, obtain and keep family-sustaining work, and have children themselves which are subjected to the same pressures. We are codifying a system in which the wealthy get richer and the poor remain stuck. Even while charter schools at-large do not demonstrate test scores notably different from public schools, many are increasingly working to choose their students, investing more into the easier-and-cheaper-to-teach cohorts of American society which give their organizations the best proverbial 'bang for their buck'. Meanwhile, lower-performing inner city and rural schools have been shuttered or seen management turnover with increasing frequency.

Even more structurally and historically problematic is how America funds its K-12 school system. While nearly every other advanced economy, and several developing ones, fund their education systems through a centralized federal system or a partitioned state system, America breaks much of its funding down to individual school districts. This has led to around 44% of each school district's budget coming from the property taxes collected within the school district. Wealthier areas tend to have higher tax percentages due in property taxes, as well as higher-value homes from which this percentage is taken. This has led to huge disparities in funding between affluent and struggling school district budgets.

Additionally, the K-12 funding scheme in the US is and has been a major driver of the "White Flight" phenomenon, wherein middle-class, mostly Caucasian families move to wealthier suburbs ever farther from a given city's urban core, draining funding for schools away from those which need it most and towards ever newer districts where the spending per-student is notably higher. This in turn directly contributes to life-long academic and personal achievement, enforcing either a positive or negative feedback loop generation after generation. The only real question becomes, which sort of family and school district are you born into?

In combination with a flawed criminal justice system and lackluster social benefits, America has inadvertently (or not) created an education regime which results in colonies of landlocked poor folks surrounded by comparative middle and upper class success and achievement. Children growing up in lower-performing school districts are less likely to vote, settle down and have a family, keep long-term employment or even stay out of jail or prison for crimes such as drug use (which is statistically committed in nearly equal measure within wealthier communities). Alternatively, lower life expectancy, worse health outcomes, greater gang involvement, more single mothers on government assistance and children stuck in generational poverty are all far more likely outcomes for this same cohort of Americans.

Within the charter-school-loving middle and upper class American communities, however, the exact opposite trends have been realized. Greater K-12 achievement, high school graduation rates, college degree attainment, professional success, long-term marriages and low incarceration rates are all part of the reality experienced in these far wealthier hubs of life in the US. We've created a system within which it is increasingly difficult to exit poverty if one is born into it, while securing financial and personal success for those with enough money to buy the advantage. Our educational outcomes are increasingly reflecting our political partisanship and stratified economic classes, rather than personal ability and effort.

Thus I ask, what can we do about this problem? While the full answer is certainly complex, much of it boils down to our funding of public education. Every state in the US should set standardized property tax rates, collect all property tax revenue and distribute it evenly based on the number of students attending class in each school district. Then, the funds which the state currently kicks in on top of property taxes should be prioritized for the schools and students which need it most. Instead of schools in poorer areas receiving less or even the same amount of money as others, they should receive more per student out of the state's coffers. The federal government should also kick in more than its current 8% average into school district's budgets, prioritizing schools which are struggling. Universal pre-K should be offered across the nation, while higher education and trade schools should become more integrated with high schools to ease transitions from one to another.

Instead of seeing poorly-performing schools and districts as needing to be punished, we need to begin understanding that they require more help. We need to go beyond equality in school funding, which we're already not achieving, and focus on equity in student's needs. Standardized testing and Common Core should be nearly eliminated, with large-scale testing being confined to end-of-year competence evaluations for the sole purpose of comparing American students against previous years and others around the world. Curriculum should largely be taken out of individual district's hands and handled by the states based on empirical data and education research. The federal government should also set some hard requirements and soft guidelines as to what will or will not be taught based on the best available research on what makes for the most capable and flexible graduates and adults. That said, how material is taught, such as individual daily lessons, yearly teaching plans, and how to meet individual student's needs should be left entirely up to the teachers and schools themselves.

Another incredibly obvious needed change: teachers across the country should be paid notably more than they are now, like the required and valued professionals each of them are. Teachers should also be evaluated based solely on their own performance and teaching techniques, not the test results of students. Education budgets at a federal, state and local level should be set to a guaranteed percentage of taxes collected (or GDP per-capita at a federal level) which cannot be lessened without a change in the law, alongside automatic annual adjustments for inflation. Every student should have a learning and resources plan similar to an IEP for special needs students, which allows teachers to quickly access likely best-practice techniques or methods for each student they work with. Finally, we need to end the notion that privatizing schools or giving out student vouchers is somehow going to magically fix the growing disparity in education outcomes when the past two to three decades under the same line of thinking has only produced the opposite result.

Every single one of the highest performing K-12 (or equivalent) education systems around the world, from Canada to Hong Kong to Denmark, implement some or all of the reform recommendations I've listed above. At the end of the day, there is no substitute for investment into the American people, and meeting each student where they're at on their educational journey. We as a nation have thoroughly experimented with pseudo-libertarian market-focused ideals in education to rather disastrous results. It's time we stop seeing our public education system as a locally-focused affair, and started investing in all of our students like the future leaders and citizens they have the potential to be. Successive generations will truly thank you for the foresight.

References:

1) https://ssir.org/articles/entry/how_20_years_of_education_reform_has_created_greater_inequality

2) https://time.com/5775795/education-reform-failed-america/

3) https://www.letsgolearn.com/resources/education-reform/

4) https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/best-countries-education/

5) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/

6) https://ncee.org/top-performing-countries/

7) https://www.kevmrc.com/schooling-in-denmark-education-facts

8) https://upjourney.com/which-education-system-is-the-best-in-the-world

9) https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/an-overview-of-the-funding-of-public-schools