The Education Gadfly Weekly

So many of our debates about paying for higher education hinge on conflicting views of what’s the taxpayer’s responsibility and what’s the recipient’s (or their families.) That’s true of President Biden’s much-contested loan-forgiveness plan, as well as any number of proposals to make community college free. That’s true of student-aid debates going back to Lyndon Johnson’s time (and arguably before). These days, it’s also true of preschooling, and arises in different form when we fight over vouchers, tax credits, ESA’s, and such. Is it society’s responsibility to pay for private schooling or is it the family’s?

Education, according to every economist I’ve known or read, is both a public good and a private good. Which is to say, getting people educated is good for society, makes it more prosperous, cultured, secure, creative, perhaps even more humane. Keeping kids in school is good for society, too, as it keeps them out of trouble, advances the general welfare, and boosts the GDP by freeing more adults to get out of the house, earn money, pay taxes, and keep the wheels of industry and commerce turning.

But it’s a private good, too. Getting educated boosts one’s own life prospects, skills, job options, future earnings, and capacity to function as an informed citizen. For the most part, the more of it one gets, the more of those things it does, which is why high school graduates earn more than dropouts and college graduates (for the most part) earn more than those who didn’t. Get enough education and you may become a neurosurgeon or software engineer. But it’s not just a quantity thing. Graduating from a prestigious school or college, or winning an external accolade like a National Merit scholarship or Rhodes Scholarship, is apt to do you even more private good.

If education is both a public good and a private good, how much of it should the public—i.e., the taxpayer, whether local, state, or national—pay for and how much should be financed via investments by individuals who will benefit from it or their doting parents? And does equity in this realm mean treating everyone the same or working out sliding scales and income-contingent schemes that come closer to equalizing opportunity? Such questions carry huge moral and political implications, as well as budgetary.

Even before the mid-nineteenth Century invention of what we know as “public education,” many towns and local communities pitched in to cover the costs of educating at least some of the children who lived in them (most often white boys). But as the industrial revolution spread, states began to make some schooling universal and committed themselves to pay for it (up to a point). They also added clauses to their constitutions that obligated them to educate their residents—also up to a point. The point varied from state to state, as did the Constitutional phrasing, but generally resembled clauses such as Ohio’s, which committed itself to providing a “thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the State.”

Alongside these self-imposed obligations to educate the public, states started to enact “compulsory attendance” laws, requiring children to attend those schools, again up to a point. Such mandates also varied by state, but all had such laws on their books by the end of World War I, generally demanding attendance through the elementary grades.

By and large, society’s changing human-capital needs have driven the expansion of taxpayer-supported education. When most work was manual—pushing a plow, driving a harvester, screwing nuts onto bolts on an assembly line, taking dictation—there wasn’t much need for secondary schooling—which was then largely the province of prosperous elites headed for university. The wealthy have always been able to buy more—and higher-status—education for themselves and their children. That’s part of how they stay wealthy! As the economy modernized, however, more people needed more skills, and the tax-financed parts of education grew apace. In 1910, just 9 percent of Americans had a high school diploma; by 1940, the number had increased to 50 percent.

Yet as it became open to all and free to the consumer, high schooling was usually optional—and even today there’s no requirement that kids complete it. Compulsory attendance laws are written in terms of students’ age, not the amount of education they get under their belts. Those ages varied by state—and still do. Here’s where things stood in 2009 according to the Education Commission of the States:

Minimum compulsory age:

• Age 5: 8 states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands
• Age 6: 24 states and American Samoa
• Age 7: 16 states
• Age 8: 2 states

Maximum compulsory age:

• Age 16: 23 states and the Virgin Islands
• Age 17: 8 states
• Age 18: 19 states and the District of Columbia, American Samoa, and Puerto Rico

At the lower end, observe that a third of the states don’t even require six-year-olds to attend school, let alone five-year-olds, and most don’t require attendance through the conventional age of high school graduation.

Insofar as education is optional, however, how much of it is society’s responsibility to pay for? Compulsory attendance definitely implies access to free public schooling, though such laws can also be satisfied by attending private schools or home schooling.[1] Yet arguments rage over how much additional education the taxpayer should pay for, whether universal or not, mandatory or not.

Taxpayer-funded pre-K is contentious, in part because some families don’t want it for their kids and many have made private arrangements for the version of it that they want (and can afford). Why create a windfall for those who don’t need or desire it? Nowhere is preschool compulsory.

Post-secondary education is where most of the fuss arises today. Though college has grown ever more expensive for decades, the “returns” on most forms of it remain substantial, and lots of politicians are urging that it be more heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

The United States has long had a mixed system when it comes to paying for higher education. Some of it is almost entirely private, but most takes place in “public” institutions. There, however, attendance is entirely voluntary and seldom actually free, save for a relative handful of states that cover tuition at their community colleges and (rarely) in four-year colleges for at least some residents of those states.

The general pattern is that “public” colleges and universities are partially subsidized by their states (and sometimes local communities), but their students share in the cost of attendance. And even where tuition is fully subsidized, there are fees to be paid, as well as room and board, parking, books, and more.

Superimposed on all this are myriad “student financial aid” programs—grants, jobs, and increasingly loans—designed, as the phrase implies, to assist tuition-payers with the cost of obtaining higher education. Almost all such aid is calibrated to a student’s (or family’s) ability to pay. This “Robin Hood” form of higher-ed financing has been around a long time, but today it’s battered by several forces.

Demographic and economic changes have created big vacancies in lots of colleges, sharpening their appetite for more students. Contemporary equity concerns argue for redoubled efforts to open opportunity and remove obstacles for poor and minority students, yet states have been stingy with appropriations for higher education. Meanwhile, the “college for all” push has caused many more young people to embark on post-secondary schooling than in earlier eras, often borrowing substantially to do that, and the rising cost of higher education has led to more and more student debt, including on the part of millions of people who didn’t finish college and therefore didn’t reap the income boost that it usually provides. Hence the pleas for debt forgiveness and the politicians’ incentive to respond to it.

The issues in K–12 school are parallel but different. In quantitative terms, every young American now has a “right” to free public schooling—there’s no tradition of cost-sharing with the consumer—but in most cases, they don’t have a tax-subsidized right to the version of it that they want or that may serve them best. So we argue, often bitterly, over just what is society’s responsibility and where to draw the line, across which families should be obliged to satisfy their “private” requirements and preferences with out-of-pocket investments of their own, whether that means moving their residence to a different place, getting up early to enter a school-assignment lottery, digging into their pockets for tuition, or educating their kids at home. Pushing to keep that line as tight as possible are not only budget considerations plus the organized interests of traditional public schooling, but also the ideology of “common” schooling, something we don’t much contend with at the postsecondary level. (Look back at that phrase in the Ohio constitution.)

At the end of this meditation, you may well expect me to advance a grand synthesis, sweeping conclusion, or great compromise. The fact is that, while Americans “believe” in education and the right to obtain as much of it as one wants, we don’t really agree on who should pay for how much of it, particularly at the “optional” stages, nor do we agree on whether society’s obligation is to furnish a single uniform version or to foster options, choices, and personal preferences. These disputes are destined to continue.

Last week, two more states—Iowa and Utah—joined Arizona and West Virginia in adopting universal education savings accounts. Several more states, including Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, might soon follow suit. The disruptive power of putting parents in control of the lion’s share of state education dollars brought to mind the work of Ashley Berner, who is the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. Her eye-opening 2016 book, Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School, debunked several arguments frequently made by traditional, district-school-only advocates: that only state-run schools can create good citizens or offer equal opportunities to all children, and that exceptions to the American model of government-funded and government-run schools are constitutionally suspect.

“Our imaginations and our public debates remain captive to the existing paradigm in which only district schools are considered truly public,” she has observed. But while universal ESA legislation expands the number of service providers paid for with public dollars, Berner warns that it doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to the plural education systems that are common to most other democracies, or their more capacious ideas about what is—and what is not—“public education.”

Here are highlights of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written that, in more plural systems, “many types of schools are considered to be part of the public education system.” How likely is it that Americans can adopt that vision of public education?

The honest answer is, I don’t know. Changing cultural expectations—the taken-for-granted backdrop of a given society—takes time and concerted effort. Social movements, to succeed, require a clear idea that’s adopted and shared by people with different types of capital—financial capital, political capital, moral capital—who can articulate the new idea and translate it into new institutions. For instance, when William Wilberforce argued in Parliament that slavery was an abomination to the British Empire, he had zero support. Slavery was embedded in the British mercantile system, in their wealth system. But Wilberforce didn’t act alone. He held prestige as a member of Parliament; he recruited merchants to his cause; he worked alongside a network of religious abolitionists. It took decades, but by the time he died, the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire. It became unthinkable to own another human being. Our country took much longer, sadly, to get there.

I’m embarrassed to admit how little I knew about the education systems of other countries. Until I read No One Way to School, I assumed other countries were just like the U.S., with public schools funded and run by the government.

Me too! I didn’t know this until I lived in England with children and realized that they could attend very different school types that were funded as part of the government’s commitment to the next generation. I had had no idea. I started researching other democracies and realized, my gosh, the U.S. has been stuck in this very narrow, very belligerent paradigm of public versus private, where only one type of school is considered legitimately public education. I’m not saying that every kind of school is considered a “public school” in plural systems. I am saying that “public education” is, for them, a broad term for the government’s funded commitment to educate the next generation. That commitment holds, no matter how education is actually delivered. As but one example, the Netherlands funds thirty-six different kinds of schools on equal footing—Montessori, Catholic, Islamic, secular, among others. And yet 30 percent of students still attend what we would consider “district schools.” It’s all part of the public education system.

But even if we are the outlier, I’m not sure Americans are persuaded by international examples.

That’s an astute comment, and I’m sure you’re right in general. However, highlighting the international experience may prove persuasive to progressives who perhaps agree with Democrats for Education Reform but are uncomfortable with the libertarianism of the school choice movement. If they knew that traditionally left-of-center countries like the Netherlands and Sweden and Denmark take educational pluralism for granted, they might find it more persuasive. The broader school choice movement, with which I largely affiliate, tends to be less interested in international examples, except insofar as they bolster the case for school choice.

Is the argument for ESAs the same as the argument for pluralism?

Not necessarily. It depends on which assurances of quality are written into the laws. Educational pluralism doesn’t just support diverse school types—it also requires all of them to reach a specific academic quality. As such, tax credits and vouchers that are tied to, for instance, nationally normed assessments or site visits by school inspectors fit more readily into pluralistic models. If ESAs jettison all public assurance of quality, I would be pessimistic about their long-term success. I think the best path is a posture of school-sector agnosticism that asks, “How can we help all schools or programs improve?” That’s what public policymakers in pluralistic countries tend to ask. They don’t compare entire sectors and pit them against each other. Legitimacy should not reside in one model; we should care about all the models. The best thing that people in public policy can do is put our weapons down and quit demeaning entire sectors.

Bottom line: Do ESA’s move us closer to educational pluralism?

Again, it depends on how they are designed. Educational pluralism rests on civil society, which is distinct from the individual family and from the state. These systems strike a balance between the wishes of parents and the civic imperatives of the state. Putting all the eggs in either basket can be democratically justified, don’t get me wrong. But I find pluralism arresting because it generates this middle path between the individual and the state. It doesn’t valorize parents, and it doesn’t valorize the state. It creates space for both. I’m interested in creative ways to get us there in a system like ours that’s not used to those concepts.

Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.

Just before the winter holidays, the National Center for Education Statistics released new data on school staffing in the 2021–22 academic year. The data are provisional, but they represent the best look yet at how school staffing levels have changed over the course of the pandemic.

As I forecast in September, the new data show that schools have been adding teachers, even as they serve fewer students.

The first graph below tells the national story. Student enrollments (in red) fell in the first full year of the pandemic and have not recovered. In total, student enrollments in public schools are down 2.6 percent (1.2 million) from the 2018–19 academic year. Meanwhile, those same schools employed 32,000 more teachers (a gain of 1.1 percent, in green).

There was a very small dip in the number of teachers from 2019–20 to 2020–21 (a decline of .03 percent nationwide), but that has since reversed, and the U.S. is now safely above pre-pandemic levels.

There’s wide variation across the country, but public schools in many states have been adding teachers while serving fewer students. The next graph compares the change in student enrollment versus the change in the number of teachers by state from the 2018–19 to the 2021–22 school years. Complete data were available for forty-seen states and Washington, D.C.; of those, forty had a lower pupil/teacher ratio last year than they did in the last year before the pandemic. Data for all years aren’t available yet for three states—Illinois, Nevada and Utah—but they also appear to be lowering their student/teacher ratios.

The new NCES figures are from last school year, but they help answer some questions that other federal datasets can’t address. For example, according to the latest payroll figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in public K–12 schools is still down somewhat from February 2020.

The bureau’s data are the timeliest available, but they can be somewhat misleading in that they count each individual employee regardless of how many hours they work or in what role they serve. So a school with fifty full-time and twenty half-time employees would count as having a total of seventy.

The NCES data more accurately reflect a school’s total available staff time because they are calculated in terms of full-time equivalent employees (FTEs), which takes into account the number of hours an employee works. Two half-time employees equal one full-time worker, so in the example above, NCES would count that school as having sixty FTEs (fifty full-time plus twenty half-time employees). According to the NCES data, public schools nationwide employed 65,000 fewer FTEs last year, or about 1 percent less than their pre-pandemic total.

But the NCES data also allow researchers to unpack employment changes by role. In addition to more teachers, schools now employ more student support staff, a category that includes attendance officers and providers of health, speech pathology, audiology, or social services. The number of school administrative support staff, guidance counselors, district administrators, and school psychologists are also all above pre-pandemic levels.

So which types of employees did schools lose? In numeric terms, the categories with the biggest declines are paraprofessionals (down 34,000 FTEs) and a group of workers NCES classifies as “all other support staff.” This is the second-biggest category of workers in schools, after teachers, and it includes plant and equipment maintenance, bus drivers, security, and food service workers. Schools had 41,000 fewer FTEs in this “other” category of workers, thanks in part to a massive hiring slowdown in spring and summer 2020 and continued school closures well into the following academic year.

These gaps can force the remaining employees to take on additional responsibilities. That may be a big reason why teachers are reporting higher workloads and anxiety, and why they’ve been asked to fill in on other non-teaching tasks.

However, to help schools to improve their services and be responsive to student needs, it’s important to be precise about the exact staffing challenges schools are facing. Contrary to warnings of a mass teacher exodus or a nationwide teacher shortage, policymakers should remain focused on local context, specific shortages, and potential solutions to address schools’ actual needs.

The pandemic changed what the American public wants from K–12 education.

Rather than preparing young people for college, Americans want K–12 to help young people learn more practical, tangible skills and outcomes. This view includes ensuring young people have more choices or pathways to opportunity rather than only the college pathway. That’s the heart of a recent Purpose of Education Index report by Populace, a Massachusetts nonprofit.

Populace used interviews and focus groups to identify fifty-seven attributes describing the purposes of K–12 education. It then interviewed nationally representative groups of a general population and parent sample using the attributes.

Three themes dominate the Index and imply the need for what I call a new K–12 opportunity program.

First, K–12 schools need a priority reset. The Index reports that “getting kids ready for college” dropped from a pre-pandemic tenth highest priority to forty-seven out of fifty-seven. Priority one is students “developing practical skills”—only one in four (26 percent) think they do—followed by “problem solve and make decisions,” “demonstrate character,” and “demonstrate basic reading, writing, and arithmetic.” This leads seven in ten (71 percent) to say more things should change in K–12 education than stay the same, with two in ten (21 percent) saying everything should change.

Two, Americans want a personalized approach to K–12 education with more options and pathways. The Index reports that Americans place a high priority on giving students the unique support they need (number five) rather than giving each student the same level of support (number thirty-four) or having them study the same advance thing (number fifty-four). Americans are strong believers in mastery learning, where students move on to the next subject after having demonstrated that they have mastered a subject (number seven). These views suggest the need for more K–12 options and pathways for young people, what the report calls “individualized and tailored approaches that recognize students’ unique needs.”

Third, Americans have collective illusions about K–12 education. There’s a gap between what Americans personally want in K–12 education and what they perceive other Americans want, what the report calls collective illusions. For example, as the first theme shows, most do not think K–12 should prepare students to enroll in college, ranking it forty-seven out of fifty-seven. But many think most Americans do, giving college preparation a perceived societal ranking of three out of fifty-seven, a forty-four-rank difference. The report shows these collective illusions “are the rule, not the exception” which creates false barriers to changing the K–12 system.

The Index’s findings on what Americans want most and least in the K–12 education system imply a new opportunity program for K–12 education that is based on opportunity pluralism.

This approach offers individuals multiple credentialing pathways to work and career. It makes the nation’s opportunity infrastructure more pluralistic so individuals pursue opportunity through many avenues linked to labor-market demands.

These paths include apprenticeships and internships; career and technical education; dual enrollment in high school and postsecondary and other training institutions; job placement for on-the-job training; career academies; boot camps for acquiring discrete knowledge and skills; and staffing and placement services.

In short, opportunity pluralism aims to ensure that every American—regardless of background or current condition—has multiple pathways to acquiring the knowledge, skills, character, and networks needed for jobs, careers, and human flourishing.

Elected state leaders are expanding educational options to make this opportunity agenda a reality. This includes open enrollment across school district boundaries, vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts (ESAs).

ESAs are especially popular because they allow families to tap state education funding for many different costs, including private school tuition, tutoring, after-school programs, and community college.

Currently, nine states have some version of an ESA, with more than half a dozen governors proposing new programs. All this is producing a more pluralistic K–12 system with more educational options for families and students.

The benefits of such an opportunity program reach far beyond economic preparedness. It includes the importance of developing character and the relational aspects of success, in addition to the technical or material dimensions.

This program also helps young people develop an occupational identity and vocational self. Choosing an occupation and developing a broader vocational sense of one’s values, abilities, and personality is important for adult success.

Finally, this opportunity program puts young people on a trajectory to economic and social well-being, informed citizenship, and civic responsibility, laying a foundation for adult success, a lifetime of opportunity, and human flourishing.

Editor’s note: This was first published by The Center Square.

Many states fund students who utilize school choice—public charter schools, private school voucher programs, interdistrict open enrollment, and the like—via “passthrough” mechanisms whereby per-pupil funding goes into a student’s home district coffers first before being transferred to the schools that students actually attend. Not only can such a funding model engender unnecessary animosity between education providers, but it can also muddy the water in vital analysis and discussion of revenue and spending. A new paper from Matthew Gardner Kelly of Penn State University and Danielle Farrie of the Education Law Center in New Jersey spells out the ways in which school funding data are complicated by passthroughs and calls for increased accuracy in funding data.

Using enrollment and fiscal stats from National Center for Education Statistics’s (NCES) Common Core of Data’s Local Education Agency Finance Survey, Kelly and Farrie find that traditional public school districts in forty-six states reported some form of passthrough payments in the 2018–19 school year. Amounts, means, and purposes varied greatly. These funds are included in the districts’ revenue and expenditure totals, but the students funded by them are excluded from enrollment totals. They term this per-pupil funding gap “artificial inflation” because the numbers make it look like districts are spending more money per pupil than they really are.

Kelly and Farrie illustrate the artificial inflation problem using their home states as examples. In Pennsylvania in 2018–19, federal data included $2.1 billion in funding designated for charter schools in district funding totals, even though the 143,259 charter students funded by those dollars were excluded from district enrollments. The “artificial inflation” average for the state was almost $1,900 per pupil, but that number masks a wide variation—from more than $25,500 per pupil in the Duquesne City School District to just $450 per pupil in Northern Tioga School District. These variations are driven by differences in the number of students attending charters, plus differences in the per-pupil amount of state dollars provided to districts via the funding formula.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, interdistrict open enrollment was the largest passthrough category in 2018–19, totaling $1.3 billion. While there is less variation from district to district in this context, the most extreme example provided was a district that received nearly double the amount of state funding its 554 enrolled students were allotted, thereby inflating revenues and expenditures by nearly $14,000 per pupil. Again, state averages mask considerable diversity of data, and indeed, the analysts don’t tackle the issue that open enrollment typically includes both sent and received students, with money and students flowing both directions. Their bottom line, however, is well received: The more variables to be accounted for, the more accuracy can potentially be compromised.

Largely, this is “a researcher problem.” It’s not that districts are actually getting more—or less—money than they are eligible for. Considering it’s been more than thirty years since the first charter school opened its doors, this should be widely known among the research community. But Kelly and Farrie claim that the issue needs reiteration and explain how their colleagues can “avoid this inconsistency” when using federal data by subtracting passthrough dollars from total revenue, total state and local revenue, and total expenditure variables before calculating per-pupil data. They also encourage NCES to very specifically “provide more detailed enrollment data so that researchers can distinguish between membership counts that include or exclude students” associated with all of the various passthrough funding processes that exist in the vast majority of states. It is interesting to note that passthrough funding is excluded for certain school funding data (see page 42 of this Census Bureau document for details on Ohio). But until it is uniformly the case, Kelly and Farrie’s advice should be heeded by number crunchers everywhere.

SOURCE: Matthew Gardner Kelly and Danielle Farrie, “Misrepresented Funding Gaps in Data for Some States,” Educational Researcher (January 2023).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute tells Mike Petrilli and David Griffith why we should be happy that an increasing number of states are eliminating college degree requirements for many jobs. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber tells us about the effect of mandatory pass/fail grading on college student performance.

Recommended content:

• “Penn.’s New Governor Strikes a Blow Against the College-Industrial Complex” —Forbes
• “Busting the College-Industrial Complex” —National Affairs
• “Utah governor wants to eliminate the ‘paper ceiling’ of degree requirements” —The Center Square
• The study that Amber reviewed on the Research Minute: Kristin Butcher, Patrick McEwan, and Akila Weerapana, “Making the (Letter) Grade: The Incentive Effects of Mandatory Pass/Fail Courses,” National Bureau of Economic Research (December 2022)

Feedback Welcome:

Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to our producer Nathaniel Grossman at [email protected].

Cheers

• Contrary to popular belief, gifted and talented programs have a negligible effect on racial segregation in schools. —Education Next

Jeers

• A highly influential Stanford professor wants us to stop worrying about learning loss and focus on “more holistic” measures of student growth. —Jo Boaler
• U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona argues that standardized test should no longer be a “hammer.” But how can they be a “hammer” when leaders have already stripped them of all consequences? —Education Week

• Most of the socio-economic gap in college enrollment, and all of the gender and racial gaps, can be explained by differences in academic preparation during K–12 schooling. —Brookings Institution
• Education Savings Accounts represent a shift from boosting student outcomes to empowering all parents. —Nicole Stelle Garnett and Richard W. Garnett
• “How to grade schools post-pandemic? States must decide.” —Chalkbeat
• Only eight states still require students to pass an exit exam in order to receive a high school diploma. —Education Week
• Connecticut reduced student chronic absenteeism by as much as 16 percent by using federal Covid-relief funds to send school employees on home visits. —Education Week
• Research shows that teachers should connect content knowledge to literacy instruction throughout the school day. —Education Week