American students are falling behind while local school boards are preoccupied with culture war controversies. Is local democratic control of schools a detriment to improving student outcomes? Vlad Kogan finds that school boards regularly prioritize the needs of teachers and administrators over students. Elections are unrepresentative and sometimes partisan and drive schools to distraction. He draws surprisingly positive lessons from post-Katrina New Orleans and Chicago school closures and argues for on-cycle elections that grade schools on student achievement.
Guest: Vlad Kogan, Ohio State University
Study: No Adult Left Behind
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Is democracy failing education? This week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann.
American students are falling behind while local school boards are preoccupied with culture war controversies. Is local democratic control of schools a detriment to improving student outcomes? Could we improve schools by single-mindedly focusing on student achievement over the needs of adults?
This week I talked to Vlad Kogan of Ohio State University about his new Cambridge book, No Adult Left Behind. He finds that school boards regularly prioritize the needs of teachers and administrators over students. Elections are unrepresentative and sometimes partisan, and drive schools to distraction.
He draws surprisingly positive lessons from post-Katrina New Orleans and Chicago school closures, and argues for on-cycle elections that grade schools on student achievement. I think you’ll find our conversation insightful.
So tell us about the major findings and takeaways from the new book, No Adult Left Behind.
Vlad Kogan: Yeah, so the big argument is really about the connection between student outcomes, and lack thereof, and the governance system. That we’ve set up a public education system that is really designed to maximize the representation of adults and not necessarily designed to maximize learning opportunities for children. And I think that’s the key argument, the key insight, that sometimes what’s good for adults may not be what’s good for children. And we’ve kind of stacked the deck in favor of the adult interests.
Matt Grossmann: So one simple way of making the point is just that school boards represent the interests of adults, teachers, parents, and people who have no direct stake in the political system. But part of your argument seems to be that something that’s happened more recently with these cultural war controversies and kind of national polarization, has sort of moved things further off kilter. So how much is new and how much is kind of long-standing in this system?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah, I think it’s a little bit of both. And I would go a little bit further. So although much of the book focuses really on local school districts, I would argue it’s not really unique to local government, not unique local school districts. I think it’s more generally about democracy, that democracy is all about representing the interests of the people who vote. And by definition in most places, kids can’t vote. So that’s one important side.
So I definitely think some of this is systemic, and has always been the case. And we’ve been arguing about education reform, really, for over a century. But I do think things have gotten a little bit worse, I would say in the last 20 years in particular. And I think there’s really three things that have changed in ways that are kind of complementary.
And just to put this in context, so about 40 years ago, there was a really interesting article written by a historian named David Tyack, who’s one of the premier historians of education, and he was talking about education in the United States and comparing it to the rest of the world.
And he said one thing that the United States got right, one thing that is successful, is that in the United States, the major political parties really have not differed much on educational policy in the way that you have seen in places like England and Germany. And I think when you look at today, that quote really is no longer accurate at all, right? That today education policy is definitely polarized along partisan lines.
So I think that’s one big change that is relatively new that has not been the case historically. And I think that’s related to the change in the media environment. Although again, I mentioned argument is not just about local school boards, those are the key actors, those are the key elections. And historically, I think most people when they thought about local politics, generally got information from local news sources. And one thing we have seen in the 21st century is really the decimation of local newspapers, and really increasing nationalization of politics, driven by where people get their information.
And so as you learn less and less about what’s going on in your community, and as you rely more and more either on social media or I think cable news, by definition, the kinds of narratives, the kinds of issues that become salient are national issues. And so I think that nationalization has been driven apart by the media environment.
And the last thing I’ll mention, this is I think a more subtle point, there has been a big change in who’s educated in American schools. So about a decade ago, we entered a new period where the majority of students in American public schools are non-white, whereas the majority of voters, particularly voters who vote in off-cycle low-turnout [inaudible 00:04:36] elections remain mostly white. So there’s a growing disconnect between who schools serve, the kids that attend them, and who votes. And I think that exacerbates many of the issues that I write about.
Matt Grossmann: So you make a pretty strong argument that schools are designed to improve student outcomes, that should be the North Star, and really the only thing that they’re about. Usually that brings to mind standardized test scores. So I wanted to ask about the extent to which we have a good metric for judging schools. And if it’s sort of about long-term outcomes, are we able to judge that easily? We’re always entering new economies, new societies, all kinds of new social circumstances that today’s students may face in the future. So how much do we know about the relationship between how we judge schools and the end outcomes for students? And is that a metric that we’re ever going to be satisfied with? Are we just asking for continual improvement in what students learn over time?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah, great questions. I’ll start with the last, which is I think really important, and really subtle. To say that we should care about standardized test scores, I think there’s a big difference between test scores at a point in time and test score growth over time. And I’m definitely arguing for the latter. I think there’s a lot of important benefits at looking at growth rather than achievement levels.
So with that caveat in mind, I think that’s really important. Because when we look at particularly within students over time, we’re really taking out a lot of other things that impact achievement. Things like poverty, things like parental involvement. And when we look at growth, I think we have pretty good evidence that in general, achievement and achievement growth predicts later life outcomes. And schools and teachers that improve those outcomes also improve things like the probability that you’re employed as an adult, the probability that you’re not having kids out of wedlock, the probability that you’re not getting arrested.
Now again, there’s some nuances there, but I think in general it is the case that test scores and test score growth measure a lot and give us a lot of important insights, in the way that I think when we go to the doctor, we start by measuring the vital signs. And it’s not to say that the only measures of health is your heart rate and your blood pressure, but those are pretty damn important. If those are pointing in the wrong direction, that should be cause for alarm. And I think we should think about test score growth in the same way.
Matt Grossmann: So I said that you have kind of constrained the purpose of schools to be about students, but obviously schools do serve other social roles, including socialization, babysitting, allowing parents to work for other hours, maybe broadening people’s interests or even civic education. So why should we constrain the focus to just this one set of outcomes, and why should we take your view over the collective democratic view? If the collective democratic view turns out to be schools should serve these other roles, why should we not go with that direction?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah, a ton of facts. So let me start with a few points and see what you think. And then I’ll get to, I think the most difficult question, which is the collective democratic view that I think we’re pretty skeptical about.
So first, if we think we want schools just to be babysitting machines, that’s fine. I don’t think we need to spend a trillion dollars a year to do that, right? If that’s what we want schools to do, we can go back 100 years and we had class sizes of a hundred, and I think that worked pretty well for babysitting and that would free up a lot of resources to do other things we as society want to do.
So I think, again, if all we wanted was babysitting, we don’t need to do all the stuff and spend all the money we spend now on that function. More seriously, I think the other, what people might call non-cognitive skills, broadening interests, civics, I’m all on board for that. And I think the evidence does generally suggest that, particularly when we measure test scores the right way, when we look at long-term growth, those two tend to go hand in hand. And I don’t think it’s the case that schools that really, really suck at teaching kids something basic as reading, are really good at teaching students socialization and democratic civics.
It’s just hard to think of a story whereby you can’t figure out something pretty simple. Like teaching kids to read is not that hard of a task, I would argue than compare it to socialization and everything else. So if there’s something going wrong that’s preventing us from teaching kids to read, it’s almost certainly the case that that is undermining all of these other functions. So I think getting the reading and the math right, is an indicator that we just set up a system that works well for achieving those other goals.
And the last thing I’ll mention, I think it’s a little bit of a cautionary tale. Because the argument that schools are broader, that technology is always changing, that we need to go beyond economic skills, that’s an argument people have made for at least 100 years. And we’ve actually tried that before, and I think it kind of turned into a disaster.
So in 1940s, there was a group of folks who said, “Technology is changing. Maybe learning Latin and Greek in high school is not that important. We got to prepare kids for the real world.” And so there was a movement called the Life Adjustment Education Movement, which is, “We’re going to prepare kids for life. We’re going to teach them basic life skills, and maybe some of that is sewing and cooking and all of that kind of stuff, so that when they leave school, they’re prepared for the real world.”
And I think in retrospect, people realized that was a colossal mistake. It was just an excuse to water down academic standards. The kinds of skills that we prepared kids for did not age well. As technology changed, most of those skills became not at all useful. And really, it was the Sputnik moment, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, that made people realize, “Oh my God, our education system is far behind the Soviet Union. And one reason is that we focused all this effort on life education at the expense of academics.” And there was kind of a back-to-basics movement that recognized that in focusing on this other stuff, we really let something core fall to the wayside.
So let me get to the hard question which is, “What if voters got together and said, ‘You know what? We just don’t care about academics, we care about other stuff’?” I think that’d be the wrong way to think about it, because voters are one constituency. But again, my core argument is that there’s a fundamental disconnect between what’s good for voters that voters want, and what’s good for kids. Because most voters don’t have school-aged kids.
And I don’t think the argument really works in other domains. And maybe the most simple one is thinking about abortion policy. We know abortion policy has a lot of core value questions, and yet every time that there’s legislation passed by a group of men regulating abortion, one of the arguments is, “It’s a little bit odd that we have a bunch of men telling women what’s happening with reproductive health.” And I think that makes people uncomfortable. Even though these are elected legislatures that are making policies through the democratic process, we realize that there’s certain boundaries between what the state can make people do, particularly when it’s making other people do things. [inaudible 00:11:53] men imposing policies on women.
I think the same thing applies in education. When we have a lot of adults without school-aged kids making decisions about education that is going to mostly impact kids themselves and households of kids, there’s something I think fundamentally uncomfortable with that. That’s not to say it’s completely illegitimate, but I think there needs to be some boundaries there, that just because it’s democratic, just because voters decided it, doesn’t mean that’s the only criteria by which we judge whether schools are doing the right thing.
Matt Grossmann: So we’re going to go through some of the evidence that you do present, but I wanted to first ask about what’s not in there. Because it seems like you have a strong view that school board governance is not great for education policy. But I didn’t see a lot of comparison to alternatives. Is it the case that some places give administrators more of a role than elected officials? We obviously have a state like Hawaii that has statewide systems. We have lots of potentially comparative evidence from other places that do things different. So why don’t we have evidence that there is a better governance system than the one we have?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah. And I don’t know necessarily that there is a better system. Maybe this is the worst system except for all the rest. And I would say, again, my argument is a little bit broader. It’s not that local school boards are not a great way to run schools. I would say it’s just democracy in general, not specific to local school boards.
So you’re right, we do have a lot of variation across the globe, across the world, even within the United States. But I think it’s really hard to compare across systems, because there’s a lot of other things changing, right? The composition of students is changing. So my read is really, we don’t have much compelling evidence, let’s say statewide elected boards versus local elected boards or appointed officials. I think in general, the evidence is pretty weak. And I think there’s good evidence in particular to be skeptical about expertise.
Maybe when we talk about the science of reading, I think that’s a great example of maybe how little the experts actually seem to know. So I don’t necessarily think those are the margins on which we should be thinking about governance.
Really, for me, I think the key distinction is between people with a lot of skin in the game, which is parents of kids who are experiencing school and people with less skin in the game, which is voters that don’t have school-aged kids and might be distracted by some other non-academic things.
And so as we’re thinking in big, big terms about what kind of governance system is likely to be effective, I think it’s a governance system that shifts some of the power from people without kids in schools, to more the power of people with kids in schools. And some of that could be about how we run elections. But some of that could be completely different. It could be about charter schools. It could be about private school choice. It could be about school choice in general. It could be about other kinds of interventions that are really not getting at some of the dimensions that maybe you were thinking of in your question.
Matt Grossmann: Let me push a little bit though and just say, you’re asking us to change our governance system, and in part in response to, we’re maybe educating people worse than other places in the world, or than-
… other places in the world or than some places in the United States achieve, or that we achieved in some past periods. But don’t we need evidence before changing the governance system that there’s a governance system that works that we should emulate?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah, and to be clear, I’m not necessarily asking that we change the governance system. I think I’m making a more modest claim that every time somebody comes forward and proposes a reform, we can’t just say that’s undemocratic and use democracy as a cudgel, as a trump card, which I think is often, particularly in education research how that argument is used. That sometimes it may make sense to sacrifice a little democracy and maybe one parallel is in monetary policy.
I think in general, most people now accept the idea that having an independent central bank is actually pretty good. President Trump a few weeks ago decided or suggest he might fire the Federal Reserve chair. People said, “Oh, that’s crazy.” But in monetary policy, we realized that democracy sometimes creates really perverse incentives. And tying the hands of elected officials by having independent central bank seems like in general works pretty well. And I think we should be open-minded to the same kinds of ideas ind education.
So I’m not arguing necessarily for any particular model, I’m just saying that we can’t say it’s not democratic, therefore it’s illegitimate. I think we have to be open minded to reforms. But I’m not necessarily making the case for any kind of particular kind reforms. I will say I think there’s three modest changes that I do come out in favor of, and they would keep local school boards completely intact, they would just make a few changes in the margin. And I’m happy to talk about that if you want.
Matt Grossmann: So before we get to the solutions, let’s outline the problem a little bit more. So you do have a lot of evidence on school board elections first that it’s not parents with children in the schools that are determining the outcome. Second, that school board members are not judged based on school performance even when that information is available. And third, that school board members actually do rotate through. You don’t have these long-term incumbents as much as you do with other elections.
So what do we conclude from those findings? And I guess how important are they? Would we really see very different outcomes if the elections were held at different populations?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah. So I think those findings are really important because in some ways they provide an empirical baseline against which to judge alternatives to your previous question. And I think what you just described, the point that most voters don’t have switch kids, the fact that academic performance doesn’t seem to matter much to the [inaudible 00:17:41] elections, and the fact that most of the turnover in school board elections is driven by incumbents retiring, not voters voting out incumbents.
That is, I think, fundamentally at odds with how people that write about education for a living, people that defend school boards. Think about democracy. I think in most people’s minds there’s this very, very naive view about how democracy works. And those three things are completely inconsistent with that view. And so I think that’s really important. It provides some realistic corrective to, I think, this romanticized view that I think dominates a lot of the dialogue.
And especially again, when we get into some of the modern debates about charter schools and about vouchers. People say, “Well, charter schools are terrible. They’re not democratic, they’re not elected.” Well, have you looked at local school boards and how well those elections work? I think when we compare, say, charter schools to the reality of school board elections, it’s not obvious that the democracy works really particularly well. And again, that we should just use the absence of elections as a drop-the-mic trump card to end all debate about alternative governance arrangements.
Matt Grossmann: So you evaluate but don’t completely endorse this idea that what’s gone wrong is a top-down partisanship from partisan leaders. You have a few examples from California initiatives where partisan leaders were able to polarize or depolarize voting patterns. So what can we conclude from that? And I guess how much is it the case that school board elections are just caught up in the overall partisan polarization and that that’s a big problem?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah. So I think partisanship is one dimension. And I think my argument about partisanship is a little bit different. I think often when we look at public opinion and we compare what people want, the policies they get, and we say if they get what they want that’s democracy working. And my point is we have to step back and ask why is it that different people have different policy preferences? And my argument is a lot of it is just blind, follow the leader top-down influence, that it’s not like people sit around and say, “What is the optimal way to run schools?” They just react to what partisan leads say.
And I think one recent example of that that I talked about in the book is what happened during COVID with school reopening. That it’s not obvious that the decision to reopen schools is a DRR issue, but it became totally a DNR issue. And my point on that chapter is to say this is not new. That this is not just a symptom of modern partisanship. We go back in the 1980s and those are the referenda I look at when partisanship was much lower, we still had many of the same dynamics. There was a lot of top-down opinion leadership and a lot of the way in which voters formulated preferences and voted on election issues, which really driven by how much they liked prominent political elites. So I think that’s one point.
But partisanship is definitely I think only one element. I think it’s a toxic element because, again, it’s not obvious that that’s the best way to formulate opinions. But I think there’s a lot of other things baked in into education. So there’s a lot of employee interests that for many people when they challenge the idea that schools are about educating kids, that they’re about test scores, they say, “No, schools are about employing adults. They’re really adult agencies.” And I think unfortunately a lot of that is based into the governance as well. When we look at if it’s not achievement and achievement growth that’s predicting school board elections, what is it? Well, it turns out teacher union endorsements are one huge predictor of who wins and loses. And as you might imagine, teacher unions are mostly interested in protecting employment opportunities for teachers.
But I think there’s other interests as well as there’s property owners care about maximizing their property interests. So I think those are all different kinds of interests that I think are really well represented in education. And the problem is a lot of those interests are either completely orthogonal to what’s good for kids, or maybe sometimes even zero-sum. They’re at the expense of kids. And so I would put partisanship as just one of those buckets of adult interests that I think has some problematic and negative impacts on how schools run.
Matt Grossmann: It seems like there is the potential that partisanship could serve the interest that you want it to serve. I’ll just give two examples. One, we do have this research from the early 20th century, from Thad Kousser and others that actually having competitive, partisan elections in a state is what led states to start spending big money on education and make the schools better in the first place. And we also had a long period before the current one in which the parties seemed to be incentivized to moderate and take on new solutions at the national level on schools in order to make electoral gains.
One could argue that we have several consecutive presidents, Bush One, Clinton, Bush Two certainly, and Obama, who all took on education policy in ways to try to improve student learning outcomes, whether or not they succeeded. But at least that’s what they were trying to do. And it really isn’t until the recent Biden and Trump presidencies that we got off that train of presidents really trying to use education achievement as a key issue to appeal to voters. So why can’t we have electoral incentives to move us back there?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah. Well, let’s start with That’s work and Gerald Gamm. So I’m not, I think, fully sold on their findings. I mean, it is the case that when there’s more competition, they find, although I think not in the present era, which I think is interesting, but they find higher spending. I would not equate higher spending with better outcomes. Particularly if you look at over the last 50 years, spending on education has gone up pretty dramatically, outcomes have moved in the opposite direction. So it may be a great way to incentivize spending more, it may not be, I think, a great way to incentivize better outcomes.
I don’t think that model applies at the local level. There’s very few places in America that are politically competitive. So if you have partisan dynamics driving voting behavior, you’re going to have really deep red districts where only Republicans win, you’re going to have really deep blue districts where only Democrats win, and you’re going to have very, very few purple areas of the kind that they find at the state level. So I don’t think that model works well in our modern context where partisanship is really geographically polarized.
But I think to go back to your other examples, I would not necessarily look at President Bush and President Obama and what people call the bipartisan consensus as evidence that those are great times, and so let me give you two examples. We’ve had recently the Science of Reading movement where we had big reforms in education. And I think what’s interesting is we haven’t learned anything new about how to teach reading since the 1990s. So everything that the current policy debate and policy consensus reflects was known in 1990s when Congress put together a commission to look at that.
And the reason why it took decades to take those findings from the 1990s and to get what is today bipartisan consensus, I think is the parts of politics. President Bush, the first President Bush, was a big supporter of phonics-based education. And him pushing that policy had the exact opposite effect. It completely took half of America, and particularly to teachers who are mostly democratic and said, “That’s the Bush way of teaching reading. It’s got to be bad because I don’t like Bush.”
And I think we had something very similar with President Obama when he came into office he continued many of the education policy reforms of the Bush administration. One of the things that his administration adopted was called Common Core, which was an effort to get really higher standards, that during the previous 10 years, again, for a variety of reasons we had a race to the bottom where there was a lot of incentives for states to lower the bar on what they expect the students to learn. And race to the top was meant to undo some of those [inaudible 00:25:43] incentives. It was a bipartisan policy. It was formulated by Republican governors. It was formulated by the National Governors Association. And yet when President Obama came out in favor of Common Core, it became branded as Obama Core, became super polarized, and in many ways had the opposite of the fact. It actually made it harder for that policy to get adopted in mostly red states.
And so even during that period that you mentioned, I think having elected officials, having partisan officials take lead in education policy hasn’t worked out well. I think it usually backfired and it turned half of the country against their ideas even when they’re pretty damn good ideas. And so I think we have to be careful about that, and I think that’s one of the dangers of making these issues partisan, is it’s going to completely turn off half the country regardless of the merits of the underlying policy ideas.
Matt Grossmann: So certainly part of the story in the Science of Reading and the other examples you mentioned are that people just instinctively went against any policies supported by the partisan opposition. But you also cover the more recent period in which in our most polarized times state legislatures throughout the country are passing Science of Reading reforms on a bipartisan basis. So sometime we get to this evidence-based policymaking that doesn’t polarize. So what distinguishes that period? And is this an example of failure because it took so long? Or might it be seen as an example of success where even in our times we can still get closer to the right answer with enough evidence and mobilization?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it’s actually a case study of the two mechanisms I really have in mind, which is media and parents. And just to provide some context. To me this is always crazy. So in the 1990s, Nicholas Lehman, who at the time was a reporter for the Atlantic, went to California because California was amidst a big legislative debate about reading and reading instruction. And he talked to a bunch of officials there, including legislators, and they said, “You wouldn’t believe how polarizing teaching reading is.” And there’s still a quote that blows my mind. It said, “Reading is worse than abortion. It’s more partisan than abortion.” Which is I think in the modern context, it’s crazy to think about that.
So what changed? What took reading from being more polarizing abortion in 1995 to being essentially totally bipartisan and not controversial at all? I think two big elements. One is really a podcast. So there was a public radio reporter named Emily Hanford who started a series of audio documentaries and then ultimately a series of podcasts. And the one that became the most famous is called Sold a Story that really told the backstory behind how the alternative methods of teaching reading became dominant, and how what people call the scientific consensus became marginalized.
And she was not a partisan firebrand. She was a Minnesota public radio personality. And so many of the people that distrusted President Bush, who actually had many of the same policy prescriptions, I think she had just much more buy-in. She was not seen as a partisan hack and her podcast had tremendous impact. And we know because she actually talked to legislators who said, “The reason why we’re pushing this bill is because of your podcast.” So I think that’s one part of the story, and it’s a case where media has the opposite effect.
One of the things I said is we are in a period of nationalized media that tends to push towards partisan conflict. But I think this is a case study where media had the opposite impact. So it really highlights the importance of media for, I think, constructing these coalitions and also dividing these coalitions.
And I think the other is the importance of parents. So there are kids with neurological conditions that are dyslexic and they’re a pretty small number, but their parents are really mobilized. And these parents of dyslexic kids who are really, I think, a powerful political force who went to legislators and said, “The way we teach reading is failing our kids, and you need to do something about it.” And they were incredibly vocal and they were incredibly well mobilized. And they were incredibly effective in part because of, again, I think the media environment. And that’s the story again of parents with skin in the game really advocating for kids and pushing back on policies that probably were suboptimal. And I think the …
… and pushing back on policies that probably were suboptimal. I think the challenges in most other aspects of education, we either don’t have that parent advocacy or we have many other interests on the opposite side that have their own agendas who are much more powerful and much more influential. I think the science of reading is maybe the exception of who’s the rule of what can happen when you have the right media environment and when you have truly empowered parents that I think is generally absent in education more generally.
Matt Grossmann: So another big finding in the book is that districts that have these controversies, most of them are kind of cultural war controversies, did actually subsequently have a student math achievement declined, although it doesn’t look like there was effects on reading. And it looks like the math effects are important, but not big enough to explain big math differences across districts. So, does that show that this is really what’s detracting us from student achievement, is these other kinds of controversies, and if so, what is it about them? Is it just a distraction or is there some way in which they’re actually causing these score declines?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah. I think my argument is a little bit more narrow, which is I think that it illustrates the zero-sum nature of policymaking, and that anytime you spend arguing about school mascots or you spend time arguing about should we teach evolution or spend time arguing about which books on the library, there is a cost to that. And the cost is that is time, both policymaker’s time and staff time that is not being spent on improving achievement. And so you’re right, the effect sizes are not massive, they’re pretty small. But I think it’s proof of concept that we should think about, even again, I think a lot of people advocating on these issues really are truly well-meaning. They think they’re going to make the world a better place.
And the analogy I have in the book is kind of in policing. We have in policing this idea of a Ferguson effect that when we have well-meaning advocacy to try to improve policing, it often backfires because of unattended consequences and it makes crime go up. And I think that’s my analogy. We have a Ferguson effect in policing. We probably have something like the Ferguson effect in education that’s driven by, again, these, what I would generally call culture war type issues. Again, I think by people who are entirely well-meaning and truly believe in their heart that they’re doing what’s best for kids, but they’re not thinking through the impact downstream on how schools are run.
Now to your question about what is going on, and I think it’s much harder to get at the mechanisms, but I would say I think we have enough anecdotal case study evidence that really having a district seized by these incredibly divisive debates where there is no middle ground is incredibly toxic and toxic for the community and it affects governance in a fundamental way. And I’ll give you an example that I mentioned in the book. There is a district in Pennsylvania, a small rural district that a few years ago really got heavily involved in on one hand debate about trans athletes in sports and on the other debates about what books should be in the school libraries. And this is a really small Italian in the community. And these two issues really tore it apart. It created a lot of animosity amongst school board members. And it had a lot of impact on their ability of just to hire good staff.
And so when they try to hire superintendent, they can’t get anybody to apply because the word got out that this is a toxic district and you have no idea how long you’d be superintendent because the next election maybe the board majority flips and they’ll boot you out. So they couldn’t find a superintendent. The only who applied were coming from districts with their own issues. The superintendent they finally got decided to rent a hotel and live out of a hotel because he didn’t want to sign a lease because he couldn’t be sure that six months from now he’d still be superintendent. So I think those are the kinds of mechanisms that we should be thinking about, of the downstream disruption of really making school boards and making schools like the battleground for the most divisive and most contentious issues today. It’s those things that happen downstream of that.
Matt Grossmann: So certainly the political debates can have negative consequences, but at least more broadly, it seems like you want to separate these other kinds of outcomes of schools that everybody wants to put back in. And LGBT issues are kind of a good example where I would say actually both the left and the right on this issue agree that schools have been an important contributor to social change, the increasing acceptance of LGBT people at younger ages that have had pretty profound social outcomes associated with them, whether you believe they have been good or bad. So why isn’t that something that people should consider if this is a role that schools are having, whether it’s their primary import or not?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah. I mean, I think I would push back on the premise. I don’t think we have much evidence that schools really had a huge role to play in that shift of public opinion. I think certainly popular culture shows like Will and Grace in the 1990s I think played a much more important role. And there was a concerted effort by gay rights activists to come out to their families to change their perception of what it meant to be gay. I think that was much more important than schools. So I think the empirical evidence for many of these claims that schools are going to be a magic mechanism to fix all these social ills, I think it’s just not there.
But I think the more fundamental answer, even if I’m wrong, if you think schools are part of that story, maybe that’s one area of success depending on your perspective. But I would say probably greater acceptance and tolerance is a good thing. But I think you can find many other examples of adults that have, again, well-meaning ideas, trying to use the schools to push that. And I think those have turned out less well. So 100 years ago, a lot of people that thought alcohol was the demon’s realm said the way to get alcohol to society is take over the schools and teach kids about the evil of alcohol. And there was legislation passed in nearly every state 100 years ago to require teaching about the uses of alcohol. And again, I argue in the book that maybe that is one reason why voters who were exposed to that as children when they became adults voted for prohibition and it’s not obvious that prohibition was a great policy.
I think the debate about evolution and the teaching of evolution is, again, I think one example. It’s much more complicated. I think today’s narratives give it credit for. But I think that was another case where people with really good intentions, and it wasn’t just religion, it was concern about eugenics. It was concern about World War II and World War I, an idea that, gosh, we got to get the evolution out of the schools because it’s creating pro-eugenics, pro-war society. So I think when you look over the long run, I think more likely than not trying to use schools to push for social change either completely backfired because it brought about worse policy, or again, I think it distracted schools and created conflict, unnecessary conflict that really took away from the fundamental educational mission of these schools.
Again, it’s zero-sum. So the more time you spend debating about evolution, debating about the evils of alcohol, the less time you spend thinking about how do we help children learn to read and do basic math.
Matt Grossmann: One more on this because obviously the biggest social change that was accomplished through the schools was desegregation. And this is an area that you do cover. And so obviously today’s Vlad says that this was a policy that actually did improve student learning and that it was in some ways blocked by parochial interests of teachers and of employment. But it seems like Vlad of the 1960s or 1970s would have been saying, why are you wanting to have these social issue controversies in the schools? We should be focused on student improvement. And even if it didn’t improve student outcomes, a lot of people would say, well, we had this because it was important for these other social ends that we did help to achieve three desegregating the schools.
Vlad Kogan: Yeah. So I think as you mentioned, I think school desegregation is a huge success story, but I think it’s really important to, I think, understand where those arguments came from. It was fundamentally concern about the quality of education. I think the reason why segregated schools were attacked, and rightly so, was not just because they were segregated. It was because they were really, really bad. In the south [inaudible 00:38:52] schools, the amount that was spent on Black schools was much lower. The quality of facilities was much lower, and so much of the impetus for desegregating schools was actually bringing about equity and quality. And so that’s an entire consistent with my thesis, it was really about ensuring that kids had access to a high quality education.
I think what’s interesting is many of the proponents of school integration who later became disenchanted, people like Derrick Bell, who became a founder of Critical Race Theory, who was originally an attorney for the NAACP and later kind of came to regret his role in school integration. He said, our goal was about improving opportunities for kids and we lost sight of that goal. And by the 1970s, it seemed like integration was really about numerical benchmarks. It was about ensuring that every school had the right mix of Black and white kids. We thought that was the proxy for the quality of education. But we lost sight of the goal about the quality of education, and we became fundamentally about hitting these racial targets.
And so again, I’m not necessarily agreeing with Derrick Bell, but I think that’s an important part of the story, that the reason why segregation worked well is because it actually did improve, particularly in the South, the quality of schools that dramatically increased spending per students for Black children who were previously incredibly underfunded schools. And so I think you can’t separate that context and that goal from, I think, how we think about segregation today, which is less about the quality of education and more about the social milieu and the social impacts that I think for the most part, it’s still very much main debated.
I think there’s some evidence that going to integrate schools has some positive impacts, particularly for white children. But I think those impacts, I think are much more modest than the direct impact on the quality of education that I think was motivating many opponents of segregation in 1960s.
Matt Grossmann: So we don’t have a lot of grand experiments like this today, but you do tackle some of the most important ones that have happened recently. So let’s talk about a couple of them. First is post-Katrina New Orleans where we did have lots of students switch districts and we also enabled very large governance reforms in the district that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible. So what’s the kind of conventional lessons that people take from that, and what do you take from it?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah, I think Hurricane Katrina and what happened in New Orleans is a great case study of things that happen off the [inaudible 00:41:23] path that we would not otherwise expect to happen. And so as most people know, in 2006, there was a big hurricane devastated New Orleans, and this was an opportunity by some educational reformers, both Democrats and Republicans, to, I mean, really do something that is unthinkable. They came into New Orleans, they fired all New Orleans teachers. They closed all the New Orleans schools. They got pretty much rid of the elected New Orleans School Board. And they essentially went to a charter school model where instead of having elected school boards, run schools, they would have high-quality operators. Think about KIPP, think about The Success Academy, those kind of high-quality charter schools come in, take over existing buildings, hire whatever staff they wanted, but on a condition that there’d be a strict contract based about performance. That if you weren’t getting the results that you promised, we would shut you down, we would take the school away from you and give it to another charter operator.
And that was a radical reform on that scale. We’ve had, I think, more modest examples of that in places like New York and Boston, but never on 100% charter school city. And what we’ve seen, and this is based on really careful evaluations that Doug Harris at Tulane University has done, is it worked incredibly well. So before Hurricane Katrina, academic achievement in New Orleans was abysmal. New Orleans was incredibly corrupt to the point that the FBI literally set up shock inside the district headquarters because there’s so many cases to prosecute. And over a period of less than a decade, academic outcomes improved dramatically. And New Orleans went from being far below the statewide average to being actually at or somewhat near the average. And that I think, shows the power of governance and changing governance.
And I think what’s interesting is parents saw improvements. If you look at public opinion data, most parents said schools are much better if you ask parents, do you prefer the elected school board or do you prefer charter schools? Parents said, man, the charter schools are way better. We prefer that. And then when you look at local activists, when you look at, frankly, academics that ride back New Orleans, they say, well, forget about the test scores. What about the loss of democracy? And certainly by that metric, New Orleans doesn’t look great. But that’s, I think, the wrong metric because it really illustrates that sometimes democracy and academics are in conflict.
And I think there’s another, actually more recent example. So this has happened after my book was finished, but about two years ago, Houston and Texas got taken over by the state, and Houston had some really low-performing schools that could not get to the right performance goal that exempted them from the state takeover law. And two years ago, they brought in a guy named Mike Miles, who was a previous charter school operator, previous superintendent of Dallas. He came in and he was appointed by the Texas Education Commissioner. They sidelined the elected board in Houston. They appointed Mike Miles, and there was huge tumult in the community. People said, this is a hack being brought in by this right-wing governor. He’s taking power away from this majority minority community.
And then something incredible happened. Over the last two years, Houston has seen a dramatic improvement in academic achievement despite a complete lack of democracy. And again, I think it illustrates this tension that democracy is one dimension, but that may be at odds with the ultimate goal of providing a high-quality of education to kids. I think there’s many other examples we could talk about, but I think to me, those are the most powerful showing. Sometimes when you take away democracy, you get better outcomes for kids. And if you agree with me that that’s the ultimate goal of education, then we should take that seriously and, again, be willing to entertain some trade-offs a little bit less-
And again, if you’re willing to entertain some trade-offs, a little bit less democracy for a little bit better performance.
Matt Grossmann: So another controversy that you take on is school closures. These have been particularly dramatic and people have been taking lessons from them in Chicago where there is this debate about how much should the concerns of local communities matter and what should be prime? Should it be the opinions of those nearby who have ties to these schools or the overall performance of the district. So what do people usually draw from that evidence or those controversies, and how do they differ from how you see it?
Vlad Kogan: And let me just provide some context. I think this is a really important question because public schools around the country are facing an enrollment cliff. So the kinds of things that Chicago was arguing about 10 years ago about what do we do in the face of declining enrollment? Do we close schools? I think that is going to be a conversation that’s going to be happening everywhere because enrollment is falling everywhere. All right. So I think what’s the connection with wisdom? And again, I think scholars education are I think some of the worst people and perpetuating these narratives that are just frankly incorrect.
So I think one story is, well, this is just evidence of underfunding. Why did Chicago schools declines? Because we weren’t spending enough on them. Now, if you look at the data, some of the lowest enrolling schools in Chicago spend something like $70,000 per kid per year. So the claim that that is evidence of underfunding is I think a stretch. The fact that the small schools tend to actually spend some of the most per student, I think it’s pretty clear evidence that narrative doesn’t hold water.
I think the other story is this is structural racism. And the reason why I think people’s inclination to draw a conclusion is basically based on where closures take place. And in Chicago in particular, again, this is a somewhat unique story because Chicago had for a long time pretty notoriously bad public housing that was only African American, and there was an effort to close a lot of those high-rise public housing complexes. And one unintended consequence of those demolitions was those also happen to be the students. So once you demolish the public housing, you also displaced most of those students and enrollment in those schools went down.
And so, this housing story that it was mostly African American neighborhoods that have schools closed because that’s where the public housing historically had been located. But if you look nationally, I think there’s really two important implications. One is the story that this is racism that we intentionally disproportionately close high minority schools is not the case. It is the case in a purely descriptive bivariate way, that it is the case that neighborhoods that are more heavily minority have schools closed. But it’s not because they’re more heavy minority, it’s because those are the neighborhoods that have lost enrollment. In fact, it’s enrollment losses and enrollment considerations that seem to drive school closure decisions.
I think the other big narrative out of Chicago, and it’s been replicated in other cities is this is really bad for kids that when you close schools and you displace students, their achievement goes down. That was actually never true in Chicago. It is the case that achievement went down, it was actually before the schools closed, and it had much more to do with these adult politics and mobilizing disruptions than it did with the closures. But if you look nationally, there’s just not much evidence that closing schools has a huge negative impact on achievement. It doesn’t have a huge positive impact, which is what we would hope. But it’s not the case that closing schools has a devastating impact on learning because of the disruption it creates.
Matt Grossmann: So you also cover the role of property owners and property taxes in local school governance. I’d say the conventional story here is just that this is part of the problem with residential segregation in the United States. Property taxes fund schools, and that means that where the rich people are, they have better schools. But you have a somewhat more nuanced view of what is the property owner interests and when does it matter and when does it differ from student achievement. So where do you stand on that conventional story that this is a big part of the problem and what do you add?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah, so on the first part, I think that would be a compelling argument. If you went back to 1960 when we in fact did fund public schools local property taxes, that is no longer how we fund schools. So if you look today, less than half of the money for public education comes from local property taxes. Most of the rest comes from state revenues and a little bit from the federal level. And the state and federal funding is highly compensatory. It’s designed to offset the inequalities created to property taxes. So the story that we have unequal schools because we have unequal funding, that’s just no longer true today. That today, we tend, again, there is exceptions in individual states, but nationally, we actually spend more on low-income students and schools and low-income students and minority students than non-low-income and non-minority students because of these funding reforms that were happening in 1960s and ’70s and ’80s.
So I think that part of the story is just completely outdated. That again, it’s not the case that we have big shortfalls in funding. Now, some people might say, “Well, we’re still not spending enough to compensate for all the disadvantages that students face.” That’s a very different argument than saying we’re spending less on them than we are and everybody else, which was true again 60 years ago, not true today. So I think it’s part one.
I think part two is despite the fact that property revenues are no longer the main funder, property owners are still a huge and powerful interest because of who votes in local elections. We know that, and we have really good social science evidence that once people buy their house, they become much more engaged in local politics because now they have, again, a lot of skin in the game, that their home equity is their main store of wealth, it’s their retirement account, it’s their savings account, and they guard it and protect it jealously.
So that has some positive impacts. It creates more oversight. It creates more accountability, creates people who care and pay attention. But there is a big problem because of how that works. So I’ll give you an example. I think we’ve come to realize that in housing policy, incumbent homeowners in general have a pretty bad impact, that they’re kind of nimbies, they care only about themselves, and that creates exclusion, and it hurts the downtrodden and the low income. I think the same thing happens in education that homeowners, because of the things that are good for their property values often push for policies that actually end up screwing the most disadvantaged kids. And part of that, again, it’s a little bit of a complicated argument, but part of that is driven by what economists call capitalization.
One reason why property owners care is because school quality affects home values. And I think the challenge is when we look empirically, only certain dimensions of school quality matter, and unfortunately, it’s not the dimensions that actually capture what I would call true school quality. It’s mostly dimensions that capture selections, mostly capture the kinds of kids you attract and retain, and the kinds of kids you push out rather than the quality of the education you provide them. So because only that part of school quality is captured in home values, it creates a powerful constituency that mobilizes just like in housing around exclusion, around keeping the undesirables out. And just in the same way that it hurts low-income folks in housing, I think it hurts low-income children in K-12 education.
Matt Grossmann: So we come to the end of this book that shows all kinds of problems in our goals and how we are implementing them in fundamentally failing children in terms of student learning. And then, we get a pretty modest group of potential reforms here. We should move to on-cycle elections, I know that would be a big deal, but it has happened in some places. We should have visible grades for schools and then we should try something in the area of school choice. So why is that enough to reverse all of these kinds of problems you’ve been thinking about? And I guess why pick out school choice as one among many policies with pretty modest evidence of its effectiveness as the one to go on here?
Vlad Kogan: Yeah. Well, so two answers. I mean, earlier when we began, you accused me of wanting to blow things up and say, “You’re proposing all these radical things. Don’t we need evidence to show that they work?” And now you’re saying, “Well, all your reforms are so small bore.” And so, I definitely agree that these are modest reforms, but they actually have some evidence in favor of them, to get to your previous comment. So I think we have some evidence that on-cycle elections increase accountability for performance. We have, I think, very strong evidence that on-cycle elections increase the voting power of parents relative to non-parents. We have, I think, a lot of evidence on the role of information. We know that we would provide parents and salient information about school performance. They use that information. And so, it’s not just about grades, but I think it’s the right grades, really focusing on growth rather than achievement levels. I think that is incredibly promising.
But I think it’s also, it’s very libertarian. This is kind of a nudge reform where if you don’t care about achievements, just giving you the information doesn’t make you use that information. And lastly, I think my read of the school choice literature I think is a little bit more bullish than yours, and I think we want to separate it out into two groups. One is what’s the impact of school choice? And mostly thinking about private school vouchers, but we can think about charter schools as well on the participants, on the families that take advantage. And I think that evidence is pretty mixed. So I’m with you that it’s not particularly promising, although again, it’s complicated.
But for me, I think the most important aspect of school choice is not wealthy small number of families who take advantage of it, but it’s about how it changes the internal dynamics of districts and how it creates the threat of exit. One of the things that we mentioned before, one of the reasons why poor families are stuck in bad schools is because unlike everybody else, they can’t afford to move to other places. So they’re stuck going to the neighborhood school because those are the only neighborhoods where they can afford to live, and districts know that. And so, there has no incentive to improve the quality of education because what are you going to do about it?
And I think that is the main promise of school choice. It creates a threat that now if you’re too poor to move to a better neighborhood, you can still take advantage of these alternatives. And I think we have pretty good evidence that it’s the mere threat, the mere existence of alternatives that fundamentally changes what districts do. It fundamentally changes how they run, and it really causes them to take more seriously the interests of the children and the interests of the parents in ways that they did not have to before.
And maybe the best evidence of this comes from Florida. So David Figlio, an economist, has done some really interesting work on Florida, which was one of the early states to create private school vouchers. And it really shows dramatically that as the voucher program became widespread, you saw improvements not amongst the kids that used the vouchers, but amongst the kids who were in public schools who now had alternatives. Even though they didn’t use the alternatives, simply having that voucher available. Districts knew if we don’t step up our game, these kids could leave. And so, it created, I think, really powerful incentives internally. It changed some of the dysfunction that’s baked into, I think, the governance system. And so, for me, that is why school choice is so important. It’s not because choice itself works, but because it creates this threat of exit that I think has a powerful positive impact on changing the internal dynamics within school districts.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next. They’re all linked on our website. Higher Education: An Engine of Social Mobility or a Driver of Inequality, the Politics of School From Home, How Rich White Residents and Interest Groups Rule Local Politics, Do Democrats and Republicans Get Different Results, and How Public Policy Intentionally Segregated American Homeowners. Thanks to Vlad Kogan for joining me. Please check out No Adult Left Behind, and then listen in next time.