Wakanda Now, Wakanda Forever
In President Donald Trump’s inaugural State of the Union Address he announced that “Education is the Civil Rights issue of our time.” In another 2017 speech Trump announced, “Young people are destroyed before they even start.”
But on the campaign trail, one of the biggest applause lines, second only to “Build a Wall”, was when Trump would say he would scrap common core and “make schools local again”. Common core is not a federal statute but is an initiative undertaken by many states to standardize their curriculum. Although common core is outside the jurisdiction of Trump’s authority, it is a good proxy for a well-known law, No Child Left Behind.
For urban parents with young children this issue resonates particularly as spring approaches, and these parents perform the annual ritual of waiting to hear from quality magnet schools before frantically flipping their houses to upgrade to school districts with more Whites and Asians. Whatever their voting record or issues they parrot, (which is just marketing anyway), when the rubber hits the road parents will move heaven and earth to protect their children and do what is best for them. But, is it necessary that government ask parents to make that much of a sacrifice?
Allow me to share some real-world anecdotes:
-The doctor who lives in a decent neighborhood with a $½ million home in a 30% Hispanic school district selling and moving to a $1 million home in a school that has 30% Asian population.
-The pilot and housewife that home school their daughters explicitly to avoid getting harassed at school. The mother with a hangdog look, face sagging, explaining that minority boys were bullying her daughter and the mother had to pull her daughter out to home school her. Next year they will sell their house and move 40 miles away to the suburbs.
These are the fortunate families, the ones with the resources and flexibility to move. Wealthier families send their children to private school to the tune of $6–15k/child annually. In small towns, with fewer high paying jobs, there is even less flexibility for parents to protect their children. The root of the problem goes back to 1965, when President Johnson passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act which provided federal funding to “distressed schools” to offer opportunities to students eligible for services based on socioeconomic status and academic achievement.
The public was reticent to allow federal involvement into schooling but at first Johnson and congress provided considerable leeway to states and districts and provided funding for accessories. But as with any federal program it created an incentive for dependency which grew in time. Education and welfare spending thus became a synergistic two-headed leviathan.
About 15 billion dollars is allocated by the federal government for Title I funding, which is received by more than 50% of all public schools. It is a pretty cheap price tag for puppet strings to nearly every school district in the US. The myth of No Child Left Behind (re-authorized under President Obama as “Every Student Succeeds Act”) was that if government held teachers accountable with “Adequate Yearly Progress” reports they could improve test scores of the students. This rests a lot of responsibility on teachers. But the dance of the urban achiever does not rest on the quality of the teachers but almost solely on the demographics of the school zone.
In response, school boards also game the system by redrawing school districts annually to send worse performers out to rural schools with fewer, and mostly white students. The rural school now has enough bad performers to meet requirements for Title I and town center schools can meet adequate yearly progress to avoid getting dinged by too many poor test scores. Thus, each school district maximizes the number of schools receiving Title I funding. The result, whether intentional or not, is an integration of the worse possible kind, minority children from rough family backgrounds and behavioral problems are the ones shipped out to rural, or bottom half of the socioeconomic scale districts with white children. These children now spend most of their time in fight or flight mode rather than learning. It was a sneaky, backdoor way to achieve integration in a way forced busing could not. Further, it also punishes the individual minority children for being worse academic performers by separating them from their peers and shipping them 10 miles away.
In this sense when Trump promises to make schools local again he is signaling what is likely a universal desire of all citizens to have autonomy over where their children go to school. There are some simple, common sense reforms that would benefit all Americans, but would go a long way to ease the burden of parents of children with learning problems and particularly rural schools with small class sizes.
1. Allocate federal education funding equally to every public-school student.
We have attempted the experiment of federal manipulation to improve school outcomes of impoverished and minority populations for three generations, there is little evidence that any improvements were made. To the contrary, government investment in alleviating poverty has naturally incentivized it. No Child Left Behind compounded this by punishing Blacks and Hispanics for having poor academic performance. Conservatives like to talk about being color blind, and having equal allocation of federal funding by student, not handicapped by poverty or minority status or progress on annual yearly progress, would go a long way to paying off that rhetoric. It would also save billions and billions in the real estate market. Minorities in town centers can go to school with their peers and school boards can save money on all the cross-county busing.
2. Charter schools. The charter school movement has provided an alternative to parents in many cities, and the result is that the primary factor that minorities and whites overwhelmingly choose is that they be around people they are familiar with. In fact, 1 in 6 charter schools are 99% minority according to a study by the Brookings Institute. These schools are so popular because students perform better on test scores than in traditional public schools, and require winning a lottery to get in. Racial groups apply en masse to specific schools and thus self-segregate. Pearl clutchers at the ACLU, NAACP, and the Brookings Institute condemn segregation even when it is driven by minorities wishing for a “for us by us” model with black teachers and staff improving the prospects of students. When the overarching goal of integration is preached upon us as so overwhelmingly positive that no amount of facts and data to the contrary can persuade, one wonders whether improving the lives of minorities is actually the goal of integration. If blacks want their school to be Wakanda, who are we to deny them that?
3. Freedom to microschool. Lower the barriers to create home school-like environments and allow the formation of loosely regulated schools that adopt a broad definition of curriculum. The return of the one-room schoolhouse. The trend in recent decades has been for schools to get bigger and require more bureaucracy, bus drivers, and staff and atomize the identity of children. This drifting away from the neighborhood one-room school contributes to the alienation of children from their parents due to long commutes, exposure to drugs, and school shootings. Private companies that run charter schools are not likely to pop up in rural outposts. Perhaps low cost rural hubs as part of the infrastructure bill would provide rural Americans without the means to afford private school a greater degree of autonomy in school choice.
The overarching goal of education is to provide basic literacy, mathematics, and science skills and to prepare young Americans to become good citizens. The experiment of Soviet-style mega-schools with maximum amount of integration has made everyone miserable. The American education needs to get out of the social engineering game, and give all citizens a voice on how to educate their own children.