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Pubic Schools Are Giving Up Their Monopoly Control Over The Minds Of Our Children.

December 25, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

It is all too easy to fall into the clutches of despair when contemplating prospects for the rollback of coercive, controlling, and intrusive government. But once in a while, there’s a promising development. One may be occurring now as a result of the teachers’ unions’ collective refusal to open schools. Parents are beginning to examine alternative education options for their children and finding many, from homeschooling to private schools.

Insisting that “the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny,” the Chicago Teachers Union is fighting plans to return children to the city’s public school classrooms. Not only is the union seeking an injunction to keep kids at home, but it says “all options are going to be on the table“—an implied threat of a strike in an already chaotic year—if it’s not happy with the school board’s decision.

Amidst a multitude of such battles across the country, it’s no wonder that families weary of being held hostage to other people’s decisions are abandoning government schools to enroll their kids in private institutions or to teach them at home. That shift is likely to permanently transform education in the United States in a way that lets children experience diverse approaches and viewpoints.

School and union officials in Chicago differ over their reading of public opinion tea leaves. The board points to the 37 percent of students whose families have opted for in-person teaching, while the union flips that around to emphasize that a majority of families want to delay reopening. But both sets of data indicate the same thing: people have different risk tolerances and come to varying conclusions about the right way to educate their children. Uniform, top-down approaches inevitably leave large numbers of them dissatisfied and looking for something that better suits their needs.

With similar battles playing out around the country, many families are heading for the exits. The evidence shows that more children than before the pandemic are learning their lessons from options chosen by their parents and free of the whims of school boards and unions. Public school enrollment is down in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, Minneapolis, Mississippi, and elsewhere.

“Comprehensive national data aren’t available yet, but reporting by NPR and our member stations, along with media reports from around the country, shows enrollment declines in dozens of school districts across 20 states,” NPR reports.

“The reason is no mystery,” according to The New York Times. “With public schools mostly shifting to remote or hybrid learning, parents are pulling their children out entirely, opting to keep them at home or looking for options that offer more in-person instruction.”

Where are those kids going? Perhaps some are getting lost in the year’s chaos, but it’s obvious that many families have embraced education options both traditional and new.

“More families are choosing to home-school or send their children to private schools,” notes the Lewiston Sun Journal in Maine.

Homeschooling, in particular, is booming. Once regarded as a fringe choice for hippies and religious families, various approaches to DIY education pushed into the mainstream in recent decades and reached critical mass this year. An estimated 3.3 percent of children were homeschooled in 2016, up from 1.7 percent in 1999, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That share roughly tripled this year to nine percent, in an Education Week survey. Gallup agrees, finding that 10 percent of children are now being homeschooled.

“Home schooling will become more mainstream and socially acceptable, now that so many people are getting experience with schooling their own children from home—whether it’s through traditional home schooling or overseeing their children’s remote schooling,” Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy at Indiana University, told Education Week. He predicts that some families will return to public schools after the pandemic passes, but the ranks of homeschoolers will permanently increase.

Many private schools, too, are seeing growth in enrollment. That comes after years of declines because of the Great Recession and the proliferation of charter schools which offer options without charging tuition.

“As the pandemic drags on through the fall, more families are seeking out schools that are fully in-person rather than remote — and, for many, that means switching to an independent institution, despite the cost,” CNBC reported last month.

“In a survey of 160 independent schools over 15 states and the District of Columbia, almost half of schools (78) surveyed report they have experienced higher enrollment in the current school year, relative to the prior year,” according to Damian Kavanagh, president of the Mid-South Independent School Business Officers association and Ben Scafidi, the director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University. “Forty-eight schools experienced a decrease in enrollment, while the remaining 34 schools had enrollments ‘stay about the same.’ Of schools where enrollment essentially was unchanged, the reason that enrollment did not increase at 14 of them was because they were at capacity.”

That means that, even as the economy is slammed by pandemic lockdowns and people idled from work in a way that usually decimates private school enrollment, more Americans are digging into their pockets to pay for their kids’ education.

Kavanaugh and Scafidi emphasize that independent schools offer “diversity of educational, religious and social offerings in K-12 education.” The same can certainly be said of families that tailor their homeschooling approaches according to their own values and their children’s needs rather than school board policies.

Perhaps nowhere is this more important than in the range of ideas with which students are presented, and the interpretations that teachers offer to students.

“American history textbooks can differ across the country, in ways that are shaded by partisan politics,” Dana Goldstein of The New York Times marveled last January, in a stark summary of the country’s curriculum wars. She contrasted different editions of the same textbooks prepared for public schools in California and Texas and found that “classroom materials are not only shaded by politics, but are also helping to shape a generation of future voters.”

Deliberately or incidentally, families are leaving those politicized lessons behind as they abandon unsatisfactory institutions that have been paralyzed by pandemic-era battles between school boards and unions. The world they’re creating is bound to be more diverse in terms of its ideas and approaches even as it’s better suited to the needs of parents and children.

School shutdowns may demonstrate to parents the low quality of public school learning

The Schools Shutdown May Dent The Power Of The Government’s Public School System.

May 16, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

Twenty twenty is likely to be a watershed year in the history of public schooling. And things aren’t looking good for the public schools.

For decades, we’ve been fed a near-daily diet of claims that public schooling is one of the most important—if not the most important—institutions in America. We’re also told that there’s not nearly enough of it, and this leads to demands for longer school hours, longer school years, and ever larger amounts of money spent on more facilities and more tech.

And then, all of sudden, with the panic over COVID-19, it was gone.

It turns out that public schooling wasn’t actually all that important after all, and that extending the lives of the over-seventy demographic takes precedence.

Yes, the schools have tried to keep up the ruse that students are all diligently doing their school work at home, but by late April it was already apparent that the old model of “doing public school” via internet isn’t working. In some places, class participation has collapsed by 60 percent, as students simply aren’t showing up for the virtual lessons.

The political repercussions of all this will be sizable.

Changing Attitudes among the Middle Classes

Ironically, public schools have essentially ditched lower-income families almost completely even though school district bureaucrats have long based the political legitimacy of public schools on the idea that they are an essential resource for low-income students. So as long as the physical schools remain closed, this claim will become increasingly unconvincing. After all, “virtual” public schooling simply doesn’t work for these families, since lower-income households are more likely to depend on both parents’ incomes and parents may have less flexible job schedules. This means less time for parents to make sure little Sally logs on to her virtual classes. Many lower-income households don’t even have internet access or computing equipment beyond their smartphones. Only 56 percent of households with incomes under $30,000 have access to broadband internet.

Nonetheless, working-class and lower-income parents are likely to return their children to the schools when they open again. Many believe they have no other choice.

Attitudes among the middle classes will be a little different, however, and may be more politically damaging to the future of the public schools.

Like their lower-income counterparts, middle class parents have long been happy to take advantage of the schools as a child-care service. But the non-educational amenities didn’t stop there. Middle-class parents especially have long embraced the idea that billions of dollars spent on school music programs, school sports, and other extracurriculars were all absolutely essential to student success. Sports provided an important social function for both the students and the larger community.

But as the list of amenities we once associated with schooling gets shorter and shorter, households at all income levels will start to wonder what exactly they’re paying for.

Stripped of the non-academic side of things, public schools now must sell themselves only as providers of academic skills. Many parents are likely to be left unimpressed, and this will be all the more true for middle class families where the parents are able to readily adopt homeschooling as a real substitute. The households that do have the infrastructure to do this are now far more likely to conclude that they simply don’t need the public schools much of the time. There are now so many resources provided for free outside the schools—such as Khan Academy, to just name one—that those who are already savvy with online informational resources will quickly understand that the schools aren’t essential.

In addition to this, many parents who were on autopilot in terms of assuming they were getting their money’s worth may suddenly be realizing that public schools—even when they were physically open—weren’t that much of a bargain after all. As Gary North recently observed,

For the first time, parents can see exactly what is being taught to their children. They can see the quality of the teachers. They can learn about the content of the educational materials.

Many parents may not like what they see, and as many increasingly take on the job of providing in-person instruction, school teachers won’t look quite like like the highly trained heroes they have long claimed to be.

Budget Cuts

With the image of schools as indispensable social institutions quickly fading, the political advantage they have long enjoyed will rapidly disappear as well. It wasn’t long ago that schools could go back to the taxpayers again and again with with demands for more money, more resources, and higher salaries. Teacher unions endlessly lectured the taxpayers about how getting your child into a classroom with one of their teachers was of the utmost importance. Voters, regardless of political ideology or party, were often amendable to the idea.

That narrative is already greatly in danger, and the longer the COVID-19 panic ensures that schools remain closed, the more distant the memory of the old narrative will become. As school budgets contract, school districts from Las Vegas to Denver and across the nation are bracing for furloughs and layoffs.

With smaller staff, fewer teachers, and smaller budgets, expect virtual public learning to become even more bare bones, and less rewarding and engaging for students.

What Will Things Look like This Fall?

Even if schools open this fall, the reforms currently being pushed will ensure that schools continue to lack many of the amenities many have come to expect. If these reforms are adopted, students can forget about social events. They can expect shorter school days, and an ongoing role for online schooling. Team sports will be gone. Old notions of universal mandatory attendance and long days will seem increasingly quaint and old fashioned—or possibly even dangerous.

For many parents, this will just reinforce their growing suspicions that public schools just aren’t worth it anymore. Maybe they never were.

Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute.

Our School System Was Designed To Produce Obedient Servants Of The State. It Should Be Abolished.

June 10, 2019/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

While it’s almost universally understood that the American school system is underperforming, “reform,” too, is almost universally prescribed as the solution. Yet in other walks of life, bad ideas are not reformed—they are eliminated and replaced with better ones. Our school system is rarely identified as a bad idea.

The system is reflexively left alone while the methods are the bad ideas that get cycled in and out: open concept schools, multiple intelligences, project-based learning, universal design for learning, merit-based pay, vouchers, charters, and most recently, educational neuroscience. Every decade or so we are told by the pedagogic experts that they have found an answer to our school’s problems. The trouble is, they’re looking right past the problem.

Schooling Monopoly

The problem is the monopoly that schooling has gained over education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, approximately 97 percent of kids go through traditional schooling (as opposed to homeschooling or unschooling), and just over 90 percent of those attend government schools. That is to say, there is basically one accepted way to educate kids today: school them.

Given the relatively poor performance of American students on international achievement tests, you would think schooling might receive a second look. Quite the opposite, actually. It is instead made mandatory, and taxpayers are forced to subsidize it. This begs the question: Why would the government continue to propagate a system that produces such questionable results? The answer lies in their motives, and their motives are best understood by reviewing a brief history of compulsory schooling.

Roots in Germany

The earliest ancestor to our system of government-mandated schooling comes from 16th-century Germany. Martin Luther was a fierce advocate for state-mandated public schooling, not because he wanted kids to become educated, but because he wanted them to become educated in the ways of Lutheranism. Luther was resourceful and understood the power of the state in his quest to reform Jews, Catholics, and other non-believers. No less significant was fellow reformist John Calvin, who also advocated heavily for forced schooling. Calvin was particularly influential among the later Puritans of New England (Rothbard, 1979).

Considering compulsory schooling has such deep roots in Germany, it should be no surprise that the precursor to our American government school system came directly from the German state of Prussia. In 1807, fresh off a humiliating defeat by the French during the War of the Fourth Coalition, the Germans instituted a series of vast, sweeping societal reforms. Key within this movement was education reform, and one of the most influential educational reformers in Germany at the time was a man named Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Like Luther before him, Fichte saw compulsory schooling as a tool to indoctrinate kids, not educate them. Fichte describes his aim for Germany’s “new education” this way:

Then, in order to define more clearly the new education which I propose, I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility.

But actual education is an organic process and requires free will; this was not an attempt at education. Schools were to be factories that would churn out the type of obedient, compliant workers the state preferred. Here’s Fichte again explaining the desired interaction between teachers and students:

[Y]ou must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.

Fichte understood full well that a statist vision could most easily be realized if governments were given kids’ minds early on:

Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished … When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.

If such a totalitarian vision were quietly isolated in Germany, or even Europe, it might be of very little consequence. But it would be this Prussian model of control-by-schooling that 19th-century American politicians would bring to our nation—and the one that is still with us today.

Horace Mann’s Evaluation

Referred to as the first great American advocate of public education, Horace Mann embarked on a journey to Europe in 1843 to evaluate national school systems. He toured several western European states, but Prussia left the most impressionable impact on him (see his 7th Annual Report of the Board of Education, 1843). Once back in the United States, Mann began to lobby heavily for a taxpayer-funded government school system that largely mirrored that of Prussia’s.

Mann was no ordinary, grassroots American activist; he was an extremely influential public figure. He had been a part of the Massachusetts State Legislature, he was the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and he later became a United States congressman. He had enormous reach. In short, Mann’s influence worked. His “common school movement,” as it would be known, began to spread across the Northeast, with government schooling taking root in Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

By the end of the decade, all states had public schools. Unsatisfied with forcing taxpayers to fund a government school system, Massachusetts also wanted to force everyone to go. What good would an organized system of indoctrination be if people could simply ignore it? They instituted the first compulsory attendance laws in the 1850s, and neighboring states began to follow suit; by the end of the 19th century, 34 states had compulsory school laws.

By 1918, they all did. Over the decades, the number of years kids were forced to go to school slowly increased, as did the number of required school days per year. Fines and penalties would be imposed nationwide for school truancy. Within decades, the federal government passed the ESEA, which thrust the national government into education and shortly thereafter established a federal Department of Education. Mann’s vision for a truly national school system would be realized just a little over a century after his initial visits to Prussia.

Pure Intentions?

It is impossible to discuss, or even understand, the failures of our school system without understanding its origins. The motivations were not pure; they were never to educate. That need not be speculation—it is directly from the mouths of the reformers themselves. The objective was to nationalize the youth in a particular mold.

From Luther to Fichte, the idea to use the coercive power of the state to force kids into schools and indoctrinate them was clear. Horace Mann became instrumental in importing this system and helping it spread throughout the United States. Attempts to reform this system amount to an incredible waste of time and resources; discussions of reform are a waste of breath. The system is rotten at its foundation and must be abolished completely.