The Education Gadfly Weekly

If my Dad were alive today—and fifty years younger—I suspect he'd be a Trump voter.

My father got a high school education, enlisted in the Army, and fought in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war, he was hired by American Airlines, the only company whose paychecks he would ever cash. In forty-plus years on the job, he went from working as a mechanic to flying transcontinental routes as a flight engineer (a job made obsolete long ago by microprocessors). 

He earned enough to move his family from Yonkers to Long Island, with its affordable houses and good schools. His own father had been an immigrant pick-and-shovel man. My Dad did him one better by following the playbook common to men of his moment and mindset: learn a trade, work hard, play by the rules, and things will work out. On the day he dropped me off at college (I was the first in my family to attend), he was still badgering me to learn TV repair, plumbing, or heating and air conditioning. College was fine, but its benefits seemed nebulous to Depression-era guys like Dad. It wouldn't hurt, he insisted, to have "a skill to fall back on."

Within a generation, however, his kind of life and the playbook he followed have largely ceased to exist. This disappearance is not sitting well with millions of our fellow citizens who may fairly be forgiven for wondering what the hell happened to the country they believed they lived in. "The angriest and most pessimistic people in America are the people we used to call Middle Americans," David Frum writes in the current issue of the Atlantic. "Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English and who wonder how white male became an accusation rather than a description."

Frum's observation illustrates the cloud settling over the pundit class, and elites more generally, as they come to terms with the resilience of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Recall that the Huffington Post initially relegated Trump coverage to its entertainment section. Next came sputtering outrage over Trump's calls to build a wall to block illegal aliens, register Muslims or ban them from the country altogether. Each of these and worse, supposed the elites, would surely shake Trump supporters from their fever dream. 

Yet none did. Now, at last, there's an emerging, rueful understanding that possibly Trump's support is not a function of racism, bigotry, and xenophobia. "It is tempting for the rest of us to turn away in dismay," observed William Galston in the Wall Street Journal. "We should resist that temptation, because underlying the harsh words are real problems that extend well beyond our shores."

The ground has not merely shifted beneath the feet of blue collar white Americans with no college degree; it has liquefied. "You can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age," Frum notes. "They are pissed off. And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the pollsters, 'That's my guy.'" If he were my age today, my Dad would almost certainly be struggling among them. The country that allowed him to become upwardly mobile through sweat, toil, and time—not credentials and connections—is gone.

As this new sobriety over the issues animating Trump supporters, if not Trump himself, settles in, I'm hoping for a parallel rethinking among education reformers. What, if anything, can be done to bring this huge contingent of pissed-off Americans, or at least their children, in for a softer landing before they give up entirely?

Frankly, we missed it. With our focus on closing the achievement gap between blacks and whites, framing reform as the "civil rights issue of our time," and the attention and praise we have heaped on inner-city charter schools—one of reform's few bona fide success stories—we have tacitly made education reform a race-based endeavor. In doing so, we largely overlooked a crisis that's been hiding in plain sight for years. There are about twice as many non-Hispanic whites as blacks living below 150 percent of the poverty line in the U.S. It's a fair bet that their kids aren't doing very well in school—and that they see Donald Trump as "my guy."

This should not come as a complete surprise. In his book Coming Apart, the social scientist Charles Murray warned us that we are becoming a nation divided less by race than class. Births out of wedlock, crime and joblessness are not uniquely inner city problems. They are almost as prevalent in Murray's composite working-class community, “Fishtown.” As work disappears, physical disability claims skyrocket by millions, creating a new economic underclass helpfully absent from sunny unemployment figures. A sobering segment on This American Life a few years ago documented the plight of Americans living in depressed towns—themselves plunked down in poor states—and struggling to fend for themselves in an economy that is systematically shedding every kind of job they know how to do. "Being poorly educated in a rotten place in and of itself has become a disability,” reporter Chana Joffe-Walt observed. This is soul-deadening stuff.

Many of us—I'm certainly guilty of this—have been so turned off by Trump the candidate/person that we've missed the larger story under our noses: Trump voters, their alienation, and their rapidly dwindling options—not just for upward mobility, but for any kind of productive life and self-sufficiency. "They simply do not have the skills needed to compete in today's labor market," observed Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy. "Their numbers are quickly rising. And they are angry. Angry in part because they cannot get work and support their families, but enraged because having a job and supporting their family is the single most important key to self-respect in our society."

Perhaps the understandable resentment of Trump voters toward elites—including "our" educational institutions and reform initiatives—is so deeply rooted that we've forfeited our ability to be taken seriously. We may be seen as part of the problem, not sources of the solution. It is certainly true, as Tucker noted, that Trump supporters "were produced in the first instance by the failure of the larger society to give them the skills they need to compete in the greatly changed global economy." That's one's on us.

Donald Trump is not going to be president. And even if he won, he would be no more successful bringing back my Dad’s world than King Canute was in ordering the tides to recede. Yet the forces that are keeping Trump's candidacy alive and well are not going away and can no longer be ignored. For those of us in education and reform, perhaps it's time to make white and blue collar the new black. If education reform truly is the civil rights struggle of our time, it's time once again to widen the definition of rights at risk to include working class white people too.

Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in a slightly different form in U.S. News & World Report.

It’s said that failure is an orphan, but success has a thousand fathers. If that’s true, what conspiracy of malefactors do we have to thank for the oafish presidential candidacy of Donald Trump? Even as he continuously fails the tests of maturity, credibility, and good taste, the second-generation merchant landlord has proceeded from strength to strength in Republican primary polls (as he’ll be the first to tell you).

Some will attribute his rise to the anger of disaffected working-class whites or his near-monopoly of election press coverage, but these strike me as only offering proximate explanations. My own theory is a little more ethereal: Trump’s gravity-defying candidacy represents the predictable outburst of an electorate whose civic awareness has been all but hollowed out. Just think of the 2016 primary follies as the bill come due for our decades of failure in teaching American students the foundational concepts of their history and political system.

This failure has been abundantly publicized in recent months. April saw the release of the “Nation’s Report Card” for civics and American history (among other subjects). The results, as any number of panic-stricken reports made clear at the time, were abysmal: A pathetic 23 percent of eighth graders scored at or above “proficient” in civics, and only 18 percent did so in American history.

A pervasive ignorance about politics and government haunts our high school graduates as well. Whenever the Pew Research Center administers its regular survey of the public’s “news IQ,” they uncover baffling gaps in our awareness of the issues of the day. Recent versions of the quiz revealed that dishearteningly few respondents could identify the current partisan makeup of the Senate or the portion of the budget that the federal government spends on items like Social Security. As one might expect, this trend is even more pronounced in members of the millennial generation, who were only about half as likely as their Baby Boomer parents to pay close attention to politics and national affairs.

My point isn’t to shame uninformed citizens the way Jay Leno used to mock unfortunate bystanders on the sidewalks of Los Angeles. Believe me, I get it—life is long, Lincoln Chaffee’s presidential campaign was short, and we’ve got to get our kids to soccer practice. But we now have incontrovertible proof that our education system cannot impart knowledge of history and civics, as well as the routine demonstration of Americans’ obliviousness to world affairs. How can it be any surprise, therefore, that so many of us have been left vulnerable to the fantastical pronouncements of Donald Trump, many of which recall some of the ugliest episodes of our past?

To put it very simply: If you read in school about the grotesque internment of Japanese citizens during World War II (for which the federal government under President Reagan offered an official apology and billions of dollars in restitution), you’d be appalled by Trump’s equivocations on the practice. If you learned about America’s flatly anti-Semitic immigration quotas before that war, which helped trap thousands of future Holocaust victims in Hitler’s Europe, you would shudder at a leading presidential candidate demagoguing the humanitarian resettlement of Muslims fleeing violence today. And if you were taught to revere the First Amendment and its bedrock guarantee of religious liberty, you would condemn the cavalier suggestion that we close a few irksome houses of worship. The ideals at the heart of our political framework—freedom of conscience, limited government, equal protection—are repulsed by loose talk of shuttering mosques and rounding up undesirables.

It’s worth noting that our struggle to teach these ideals, as well as the historical figures and events that proved pivotal in their establishment, is nothing new. As early as seventy-five years ago, media commentators were lamenting teenagers’ inability to list the accomplishments of Andrew Jackson. (Which, in comparison with some of the NAEP U.S. history questions for our own high school seniors, actually seems like a fairly high bar to set.) But self-inflicted policy wounds have turned a perennial annoyance into something approaching a crisis.

With the advent of No Child Left Behind’s assessment and accountability measures, it was perhaps unavoidable that greater instructional time in the nation’s classrooms would be devoted to math and reading (the two areas that schools were required to test). Few anticipated, however, that this well-intentioned focus on “core subjects” would birth the Amazing Shrinking Curriculum. From an alarmed statement put out by the National Council for the Social Studies: “By requiring states to measure student achievement in language arts and mathematics and tying school performance reports and financial incentives to testing results, NCLB resulted in the diversion of both funding and class time away from social studies and other non-tested subjects.”

That redirection of precious academic resources came with a quantifiable cost. In a Center on Education Policy (CEP) study of 491 school districts around the country, it was found that 36 percent had cut teaching time that had previously been dedicated to social studies. The average decrease in time was seventy-six minutes per week, greater than the diminishment for any other subject. And almost fifteen years after the law’s passage, just nine states require the satisfactory completion of a civics exam as a condition for high school graduation.

That’s a mistake. The rudiments of responsible citizenship anywhere lie in a basic awareness of national customs, politics, and government. Deprived of this general background, voters are way more likely to fall for the policy-free ramblings of a man who promises to replace Obamacare with “something terrific.” With an impoverished understanding of executive powers and America’s posture toward its neighbors, they might similarly buy into the notion that a President Trump could simply mandate that Mexico helpfully pay for a partition along our southern border. To see through delusions like these, it takes sustained exposure to the ideas underlying our constitutional order.

If Americans aren’t getting that in schools, during the foundational years, when are they going to get it?

Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in a slightly different form in the Daily News.

• The feds must have been in a festive mood in the days leading up to Christmas, when they finally closed a four-year-old investigation into Wisconsin’s school voucher program. The probe was triggered by a 2011 complaint, jointly filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and local group Disability Rights Wisconsin, alleging that private schools were discriminating against students with disabilities. This was always a spurious charge on a few grounds. For one thing, private institutions aren’t bound by the same mandates as public ones under the Americans with Disabilities Act, making the case a tough sell from the start. For another, the few accommodations they are required to make for the disabled are difficult to achieve, since private schools receive much less federal funding than public ones. In an effort to negate the problem, state legislators have already inserted additional outlays for disability vouchers into future budgets. With any luck, the investigation’s death will help restore the reputation of a useful tool for expanded school choice.
• Not all anti-reform agitation starts with Uncle Sam, though. In Tennessee, the Achievement School District is again weathering attacks from local lawmakers and activists—and while the criticism is still emanating mostly from partisan sources, some observers wonder how long the embattled turnaround entity can continue taking shots. Members of the Black Caucus of State Legislators have announced their intention to introduce bills this session that will either eliminate the ASD or trim its sails significantly. It’s hard to foresee whether their efforts will bear fruit: State government is dominated by Republicans like Governor Phil Bryant, who remains bullish about the initiative’s potential for rescuing underperforming schools, and past efforts to rein in the ASD have sputtered. But the history of state-led turnarounds in Tennessee is long and undistinguished, and this situation bears watching.
• New York Times reporter Kyle Spencer painted a singularly unattractive portrait of parents near Princeton, New Jersey a few weeks back. Pointing to scores of student hospitalizations over academic stress, as well as the local superintendent’s urgent attempts to tamp down pressures on elementary schoolers, Spencer observed a “fissure” between families “that broke down largely on racial lines”: Between white parents who wanted relaxed school requirements and Asian Americans who sought to drive their little scholars as strenuously as possible. It’s a bracing read and well worth your time, but so is Patrick Riccards’s trenchant counterpoint. Riccards, the writer and Princeton-area parent behind the Eduflack blog, argues that the paper’s race- and class-based lens was reductive. Beneath the headline-friendly framing, there’s an important debate here on how to keep kids happy, healthy, and successful in schools. 

The miseducation of Donald Trump voters, a brave and bold take on sex education, student pressure in a New Jersey district, and the effectiveness of school vouchers in Louisiana. Mike Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio host, and Amber Northern delivers the Research Minute.

Amber's Research Minute

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, Christopher R. Walters, "School Vouchers and Student Achievement: First-Year Evidence From the Louisiana Scholarship Program," NBER (December 2015). 

Civics is at or very close to the top of my education priority list. I’ve often lamented how far we’ve strayed from the founding ideals of public education, which had more to do with preparing young people for effective self-government than college and career readiness. NAEP results reinforce just how badly starved for oxygen civics and history are in our schools. If reading and math proficiency are at crisis levels, civics and history have reached a state of advanced decay. Fewer than one in four eighth graders score “proficient” in civics; in history, it’s even worse—just 18 percent at or above proficient. We don’t even bother to test in twelfth grade anymore. Perhaps we just don’t want to know.

From the Education Commission of the States comes a new brief, “Youth Voting: State and city approaches to early civic engagement.” The report notes that opportunities for youth participation in city and state elections “are becoming part of the policymakers’ toolkit to create engaged citizens and lifelong voters.” Specific initiatives—preregistration to vote of individuals as young as sixteen in twelve states and the District of Columbia; allowing seventeen-year-olds to vote in primaries, municipal races, and school board elections in twenty-five others—are highlighted.

I have to confess that even though civic education matters a great deal to me, efforts to extend to vote to sixteen- and seventeen-year olds don’t quicken my pulse. “Hey, kids! You can vote in primary, municipal, and school board elections! Isn’t that awesome?!” Well, is it awesome to you, adult voter? Voter apathy may be a sign of civic disengagement, but narrowly defining civic engagement as voting strikes me as unlikely to be the antidote our civic malaise. If merely driving more young people to the polls is the goal, just hand out orange slices and participation medals at the polls and be done with it. 

Let me offer an alternative: A K–12 education steeped in history, civics, and current events. Consider a move away from the curriculum of narcissism—fetishizing “culturally relevant” novels; writing endless personal essays and memoirs—that was always predicated on the condescending assumption that kids can only be engaged by their own interests and experiences. A good education should challenge students to think, speak and write about important issues in their communities. The world outside the classroom is rich and relevant; children should be encouraged see themselves as players, not spectators, in America’s democracy. If you extend suffrage to high school juniors and seniors, you may get more lifelong voters, but I imagine they will view it the way they do brushing their teeth, eating well, and exercising—an obligation; a civic duty. If they are invested in the outcome of the vote—the residue of restoring civics, history, and citizenship to a first purpose of schooling—we would not need to “encourage” them to vote. They will march to the polls like they do to the DMV on the day they are eligible for a driver’s license. Driving a car is a meaningful act that gives kids a sense of agency and control. Voting should feel the same.

Youth voting? Sure, go ahead. There’s no harm in saying, “Here’s where the levers are, kids, and here’s how to pull ‘em.” But let’s also make sure that kids have the opportunity to learn why voting matters, what’s at stake, and the price that’s been paid to ensure their right to do so. Do that well and they may surprise us by becoming “engaged citizens and lifelong voters” without any further effort on our part.

SOURCE: Stephanie Aragon, “Youth Voting: State and city approaches to early civic engagement,” Education Commission of the States (December 2015).

A fascinating new study in Education Finance and Policy examines discretionary layoff policies in Charlotte Mecklenburg. In general, there are two non-discretionary, mechanical approaches to reducing the number of school employees. One is seniority-based layoffs: last in, first out (LIFO). There is also an approach known as “inverse student performance”: those with the worst value-added scores are the first to be fired. Neither of these is particularly desirable. In LIFO’s case, the reasons are obvious and legion. And using only value added might result in teachers focusing solely on test scores or in the loss of instructors who fill organizational needs (e.g., teaching specific grade levels or subjects) or otherwise contribute to a school’s educational priorities.

In contrast, Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools use a discretionary policy. Candidates for layoffs are identified using a variety of factors, including the lack of formal job qualifications, length of service, and performance as determined by principal evaluations, plus the particular needs and goals of the school. Student test scores are not part of the process. Between 2008 and 2010, the district laid off over a thousand teachers because of the recession. The study’s author, Brown University’s Matthew Kraft, asked two questions: Which teachers actually got laid off? And how did this affect student achievement?

Laid-off teachers fell into two categories. In one were the obvious candidates: probationary teachers with year-to-year contracts, returning retired teachers, teachers hired after the start of the school year, and teachers with a temporary license or no license. In the other category were the lowest-performing teachers across all levels of seniority. And indeed, lower-performing tenured teachers were more likely to be laid off than higher performing non-tenured teachers—so there was clear evidence that discretion was actually used.

The effect on student achievement was, according to Kraft, “suggestive but inconsistent.” Laying off a more effective teacher, as measured by either principals or value added, was shown to lower student achievement. And the achievement of students who lost an effective math teacher went down compared to students who lost an ineffective one. (There was no similar finding for reading.) Interestingly, the achievement of students who lost a senior teacher as opposed to an early-career teacher was not statistically significant, which is in line with previous research.

Taken together, the results confirm that measures of effectiveness, not seniority, best predict how layoffs will affect achievement. The findings also reveal that discretionary layoff policies (if applied thoughtfully!) can surpass strict schemes like LIFO when it comes to influence on student achievement. And under Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools’ discretionary policy, effectiveness actually did determine layoff order. Using value-added scores might have helped identify effective teachers, but principal evaluations did a good job of informing layoffs on their own. The outcomes showed the importance of including non-rigid measures, rather than trading one inflexible policy for another.

SOURCE: Matthew A. Kraft, "Teacher Layoffs, Teacher Quality, and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Discretionary Layoff Policy," Education Finance and Policy (November 2015).

This study compares “diverse” and “non-diverse” charter schools in Washington, D.C., focusing on three areas: academic proficiency, academic growth, and suspensions. It focuses particularly on the eighty-seven D.C. charter schools (out of 112 total) where more than twenty-five students took the DC CAS test between 2011 and 2014, of which twenty-seven are “diverse”—defined as having a student population that is less than 80 percent African American. (No other race accounts for more than 80 percent of the student body at any school in the study, though a few schools that were excluded for technical reasons are more than 80 percent Hispanic.)

Overall, the study finds no statistically significant differences between diverse and non-diverse schools when it comes to proficiency and growth. When the results are broken down by subgroup, however, some interesting differences emerge. For example, African American and at-risk students have higher proficiency rates and lower suspension rates at diverse schools, but they exhibit no differences in growth; on the other hand, there are no significant differences for Hispanic students in any of these areas. (Unfortunately, there are too few white students at non-diverse schools to make any comparisons.)

A secondary analysis that restricts the sample to diverse schools also yields some interesting results. For example, a whiter student body is associated with significantly less academic growth for at-risk students and less growth in reading (but not math) for African American students, whereas proficiency and suspension rates for these groups are unrelated to a school’s whiteness. In contrast, Hispanic students exhibit greater academic proficiency at whiter schools, but similar academic growth.

These results, in particular, cry out for an explanation of some kind, but the data offer few clues as to what that might be. Although African American and at-risk students are suspended at lower rates in diverse schools, the lack of correlation between whiteness and suspension makes it unclear whether the former has an impact on discipline policy. Perhaps white kids (or parents) in D.C. simply monopolize the attention of teachers. Or perhaps it matters if a school’s racial diversity is intentional or fortuitous. There are many possibilities.

Regardless of the true explanation, it’s important to understand that the study does not represent a rejection of diverse schools in general—though it seems to favor those with greater concentrations of minority students, for reasons that aren’t clear. Prior studies have also found that poor students benefit from attending school with richer students, a finding that is difficult to square with the results of this analysis.

Additionally, it’s essential to remember that this study “did not attempt to assess many of the less-measurable benefits that are posited for diverse schools, such as greater tolerance and a better ability for students to live, study, and work with others from different backgrounds.” Nor, I might add, does it consider other long-term outcomes, such as college enrollment and employment, which could plausibly be impacted by the number of white kids with whom one goes to school.

In short, the study raises at least as many questions as it answers. It should be repeated in as many cities as possible.

SOURCE: “Diversity in DC Public Charter School,” DC Public Charter School Board (November 2015).