The culture war matters, it’s popular, and it’s inevitable, argues Buck. In fact, it matters a lot—as much if not more than the technocratic squabbles over testing metrics, data analysis, teacher accountability, charter policies, or pay scales. These policies adjust the dials and doohickies on the ship of state. The culture war is the rudder that determines its direction.
You may have heard that there’s a culture war in education. Listen to leaders of the National Education Association and they’ll tell you that this culture war amounts to little more than a “manufactured outrage” designed to foment a minority of disgruntled voters into political action. It creates a “divisive and polarizing climate.” It’s a distraction from more pressing issues and practical solutions.
Allow me to offer a counter narrative: The culture war matters, it’s popular, and it’s inevitable.
In fact, it matters a lot—as much as, if not more than, the technocratic squabbles over testing metrics, data analysis, teacher accountability, charter policies, or pay scales. These policies adjust the dials and doohickies on the ship of state. The culture war is the rudder that determines its direction.
Behind the anger over “banning books” or school board protests are fundamental questions: What books should schools include and thereby endorse on their curricula? What’s the nature of masculinity and femininity? What’s the role of parents in determining school policy and curricula? How should we frame American history? To wave away these debates and the news stories in which they manifest isn’t high-minded idealism. It’s a refusal to engage in the issues that shape not just what kind of citizens students will be, but what kind of culture and country we will have.
The largely technocratic debates of the last four decades are actually something of a historical anomaly. For most of American history, education debates focused on questions of values, such as the place of Christianity in schools, rather than the minutiae of policy. The common school movement, the era that established our public system, justified itself as a means to assimilate Irish-Catholic immigrants for goodness’ sake. Only after the influential report “Nation at Risk” did the left and right set aside their cultural fights to form an education reform coalition.
While it lasted, the post–“Nation at Risk” coalition won important victories: Charter schools bloomed like azaleas, the National Assessment of Education Progress provided reformers a metric with which to compare school achievement, unions lost their vice-grip on our schools, and accountability measures applied pressure to failing schools.
Even so, many teachers grew disgruntled with the way in which classrooms had to contort themselves to fit a new testing regime, while many rural and suburban families felt irrelevant to the movement. What’s more, as Checker Finn and Rick Hess astutely summarize in National Affairs: “Achievement increased only modestly in the 2000s, then plateaued in the 2010s. Little or no progress, overall or on closing racial gaps, had been made since George W. Bush turned the Oval Office over to Obama.” The focus on bipartisanship and fine-tuned policy solutions proved disappointing.
That’s not to say that arguing over the minutiae of policy or pedagogical approaches is unimportant. The current push for phonics is perhaps the most significant movement in education at the moment. But we cannot pretend that the esoteric debates of stuffy think tank wonks or mainstream journalists are somehow more important than the value-laden, cultural concerns of parents or even many teachers.
Which brings me to my second point: Contrary to popular belief, the culture wars are popular. After the 2022 midterms, many decried conservative wins in local school boards. At the New Yorker, Jessica Winter lamented that activists capitalized on a “manufactured culture war” to win seats. Elsewhere, the NEA suggests that “a tiny but extremely vocal minority of voices is determined to turn our classrooms into battlegrounds for their vicious culture wars.” Parental activists are only “small clusters of hate” opposing broader school unity.
What are the data on this? A New York Times and Siena College Research Institute poll found, for example, that Americans think that elementary schoolers should not learn about gender identity or sexual orientation—arguably the most heated controversy in education at the moment. Similarly, a majority of Floridians, including a majority of Democrats, supported Governor Ron Desantis’s parental rights’ act. It turns out that testing isn’t really unifying. Cultural battles that champion our country and contest politics in the classroom are. Where the press suggests that these policies are controversial, they are in fact big-tent policies with broad appeal.
Indeed, Republican politicians have been savvy about finding the reasonable middle ground on many of these culture wars. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, whose stunning 2021 victory brought so much attention to “parental rights” as a winning issue, famously called for teaching American history, warts and all—a very popular position. He just didn’t want it to be nothing but warts, as some on the left seemed to have been calling for. Likewise for Governor Ron DeSantis’s take on the A.P. African American Studies draft curriculum, which originally included divisive, far-left material that was far out of the mainstream.
Voters care about the culture. They care about what worldview the books in classrooms push or if their children are receiving a positive or negative view of their country. So when politicians or journalists suggest that the culture war is red herring, what they’re really communicating is that they don’t care about what their voters care about—or even worse, that those who do care about these issues are somehow malicious in their intention.
Finally, the culture wars are inevitable. Our public schools are just that: public institutions. They bring together families of every race, creed, religion, and class and ask them to educate their children together. In Federalist #10, James Madison argued that factions are “sown into the nature of man.” With incompatible worldviews and interests, conflict in politics is inevitable. Why should we expect our public schools, institutions controlled by elections and politics, to be any different?
James Madison continues on to argue that the only way to prevent faction and conflict is to either bring together only those with perfectly aligned worldview and interests, an impossibility in a system of neighborhood schools, or to stifle any opinions and factions outside the majority, an injustice. In other words, if we’re not fighting the culture war—actively arguing over what to include in curricula, how to frame our history, the appropriate control for parents or teachers to have—then in practice, that simply means one political faction directs the schools and the other simply bends a knee.
If we’re looking to turn down the heat, then subsidiarity and federalism, not the refusal to engage in certain debates, is the path out of controversy. A local public school making local decisions among local teachers and parents may find more agreement and civility than federalized battles in which affluent Californians, rural Floridians, urban Chicagoans, and suburban Wisconsinites all need to find common ground. Keeping decisions in school boards where they belong and out of governors’ mansions or the halls of Congress would do much to turn down the heat.
Ultimately, I find the concept of the “culture war” to be something of a misnomer. Rarely do those who use it define it, but instead apply it as a label to controversies and issues that they deem unimportant. In the West, we have been arguing about what our children ought to learn since Socrates laid out his perfect society in Plato’s Republic. Cheapening the importance of this culture war, especially in education, isn’t high-minded. It’s ignorant.
Note: On April 13, AEI’s Robert Pondiscio spoke at Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance’s Colloquium Series, responding to Dr. Danielle S. Allen’s presentation on the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, a framework for teaching civics and history to K–12 students, which includes themes, guiding questions, and other teaching resources. Dr. Allen suggested that “aspirational federalism” would drive adoption of the Roadmap. The following is an edited version of Pondiscio’s response that was first published by AEI.
Broadly speaking, I support the Roadmap and its goals. I want it to succeed. Many people that I admire both personally and professionally, not the least of whom is Dr. Allen, contributed to it. But I have concerns, not about the Roadmap itself, but with the theory of change and, frankly, the conditions in American schools and American education at this present moment, which make this an extraordinarily heavy lift.
We can’t forget the hostility that greeted the Common Core State Standards, which hints at the suspicion and skepticism with which efforts to “harmonize standards and assessments” are likely to be received. But my first major concern is that we have a long way to go to convince American education to take up the challenge of preparing America’s children for active and engaged citizenship in the first place.
From time to time, I have looked at the mission, vision, and core values statements of our largest public school districts. These statements demonstrate shockingly little concern for their public role of citizen-making. To be sure, no teacher consults their district’s mission statement when deciding what to teach, but they’re still instructive. They tell us what the men and women who oversee our school districts are thinking about when they challenge themselves to ask, “What’s our role? What do we do here?” Where citizenship is mentioned, it tends to occur as often as not in the context of “global citizenship.” The word “patriotism” appears in none of them, not even once. More shockingly, neither does the word “America” or “American.” This is a stunning departure from the historical role and founding ideals of public education.
A second, even more significant factor is that the relationship between Americans and their public schools has never been more at play than at the present moment. I will leave it to you to decide whether that represents a threat or an opportunity for those of us who see education as an indispensable mechanism for building students’ knowledge and capacities to sustain American democracy. But my AEI colleague Nat Malkus has documented that, coming out of the Covid pandemic, public school districts have lost 1.2 million students out of the 60 million Dr. Allen cited as the target of this initiative.
Measures of trust in public education and teachers, while still comparatively strong, are softening. About a dozen states now offer educational savings accounts; six of them have “universal” ESAs—Arizona, West Virginia, Iowa, Arkansas, Utah, and Florida. This enables parents to opt out of the public education system entirely and take with them the lion’s share of state dollars to purchase education services independently, from simply paying private school tuition to more bespoke options. No one likes to hear this, but Jay Greene and Jason Bedrick of the Heritage Foundation have argued quite persuasively that what’s driving a lot of the desire to exit is so-called culture war imperatives—the sense that public education is pursuing its own agenda, not that of parents, not that of the common good, and certainly not citizen-making. The universal ESA movement began with small states, then Florida doubled the number of eligible students in one fell swoop. If Texas adopts a universal ESA, it will double again. It would mean that roughly one in four American families would have the power simply to exit the system altogether. Dr. Allen referred to a ten-year implementation plan for the Roadmap, but things may look very different ten years from now. They already look different today.
I don’t think I’m overstating the case to say that a significant number of Americans, whether they would consciously frame it this way or not, are beginning to question the very legitimacy of public education, and are pushing back hard against its permission structures. All of this colors my view of the “aspirational federalism” Dr. Allen described as the delivery mechanism for the Roadmap. As much as I want to be optimistic about this work, the forces that I’ve described—a public education system that doesn’t embrace its role in citizen making, parents and politicians who are disenchanted with public education, the declining trust and enrollment in public schools—makes me more pessimistic than I would like to be.
Over the last few weeks, debates about early literacy have dominated headlines in Ohio. Much of the conversation has revolved around the state budget, as Governor DeWine included in his recommendations a bold plan to improve reading achievement in Ohio by requiring schools to use high-quality curricula and instructional materials aligned with the science of reading.
Despite the renewed focus on early literacy, some lawmakers have proposed dismantling the decades-old retention requirement of Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee, which requires schools to hold back students who, based on state assessments or state-approved alternative exams, aren’t meeting reading standards by the end of third grade. Schools must provide these students with intensive interventions such as summer reading programs or tutoring. But House Bill 117 aims to abandon the requirement, and House lawmakers proposed a similar provision in their recently released version of the budget.
This is the wrong move, akin to your optometrist refusing to provide the glasses prescription she knows you need and expecting you to make do with blurry vision instead. For starters, there’s a considerable amount of evidence showing that, when combined with intensive supports, retention has a positive impact on students’ short-term and long-term success. In several other states—like Mississippi, which has been hailed as a learning miracle—retention has been a crucial part of its widespread reading improvement.
But for many critics, these positive academic impacts take a backseat to the harm that they believe retention can have on a student’s social and emotional wellbeing. These aren’t concerns to take lightly. The mental health of students matters, especially in the wake of a pandemic that not only upended the stability that kids often count on from school, but also robbed them of vitally important experiences both inside and outside the classroom. Now, more than ever, it’s important for teachers, parents, advocates, and policymakers to be mindful of how policy and practice impacts the mental health and wellbeing of students.
The problem, though, is that by identifying retention as the only potential source of social and emotional harm, critics completely overlook the significant impact that poor reading skills and illiteracy can have on students who are socially promoted. In fact, nearly every social and emotional impact cited by opponents as a reason to eliminate retention could also be applied to students who fail to achieve reading proficiency by the end of third grade.
Students who are socially promoted but continue to struggle with reading can get made fun of by other children—especially in the older grades, when reading becomes fundamental and a lack of fluency and comprehension becomes glaringly obvious. Struggling readers often experience frustration or boredom in class because they can’t keep up with their peers, which could lead to an increase in disruptive behavior and school discipline incidents. They can also suffer from low self-esteem because they struggle academically, and may feel ashamed that they need remediation. Without a caring adult to notice what’s going on and offer support and encouragement, they may even internalize their academic difficulty as an inflexible marker of their worth rather than a temporary obstacle that can be overcome with the right help.
I know all this from personal experience because, as a high school English teacher, I saw the negative impacts of social promotion every day. Many of my most persistently disruptive students acted out not because they were bad kids—they definitely weren’t—but because they struggled to read and write and keep up with their peers, and were embarrassed and frustrated as a result. On the flip side, some of my best-behaved students were nearly half a dozen grade levels behind where they should have been. They worked hard and participated and followed every rule to the letter, but because they’d been passed on by so many teachers before me, their poor reading skills made it extremely difficult for them to master the content of a high school English course.
On more than one occasion, I stepped in to stop one student from bullying another over their limited reading skills. There were dozens of students who, because they couldn’t read proficiently, were struggling in all their classes. These students needed intensive reading intervention, but my high school—like most high schools—wasn’t equipped or prepared to teach such basic fundamentals. The further away my students got from elementary school, the less likely they were to get the reading intervention and support they needed from teachers and staff who specialized in early literacy.
One instance, specifically, sticks out in my mind. I remember standing in the hallway outside of my ninth-grade classroom during my first year teaching. The mother of one of my students—we’ll call him Sam—had stopped by with her son to ask how he was doing in my class. We’d just finished diagnostic testing, so I told her the truth: Despite being in ninth grade, Sam had the reading skills of a fifth grader. He was certainly capable of catching up, and I was going to do everything in my power to make sure he did, but it was going to be an uphill climb. I’ll never forget the look on her face or how she cried when she told me that no one had ever told her that her son struggled to read proficiently. I’ll never forget that she asked me how it was possible for her son to be in ninth grade if he couldn’t read at a ninth grade level. I had no answer.
Sam was a great kid. He paid attention and worked hard, his mother was involved, and I worked my butt off that year to give him the education he deserved. But by the time he walked through the door of my classroom for his first day of ninth grade, Sam was already six years beyond the third grade make-or-break reading benchmark. He refused to read aloud in my class (and I never forced him to) because he knew other students would make fun of the way he stumbled over his words. His reading struggles had a huge impact on his academic outcomes, both in my English class and in his other courses. But they would impact his life outside school, too. The written knowledge test he would have to pass to earn a driver’s license, the ballot measures and candidate information he would need to read to exercise his right to vote, the daily news he needed to grasp to understand the world—these were basic tasks that were severely hindered by his lack of reading proficiency.
Sam knew all of this. He knew he couldn’t read very well, and he knew it made him different than some of his classmates. He knew how much more difficult his life would be—because it already was. For Sam—and for millions of other kids—the social and emotional impacts of illiteracy are massive and far-reaching, even when those students are “protected” from retention.
Pretending that moving struggling students onto the next grade saves them from social and emotional harm isn’t just wrong, it’s irresponsible. We owe it to students to give them the intervention and support they need to become proficient readers before they go on to middle and high school. Advocates and policymakers need to recognize that because illiteracy has such enormous social and emotional impacts, we should be intervening as early as possible. Retention, coupled with rigorous intervention, gives students a chance to catch up with their peers and avoid a lifetime of struggle. Social promotion doesn’t offer that—and claiming that it does is educational malpractice.
How to select students for advanced or elite academic programs has long been controversial. Critics of “holistic” admissions policies argue they often turn to mush—or inject bias into the process. At the other extreme, a few programs use nothing more than a single assessment to determine placement. Most notably, gaining entrance to New York City’s prestigious specialized public high schools requires the prospective student excel on a single opt-in standardized test, called the SHSAT exam.
A new working paper examining high school admissions policies in Mexico City sheds light on the limitations of one-shot tests like the SHSAT and suggests that more information about an applicant will help schools and students to be better matched.
In the new study, researchers from Tulane University and VIA Education, a Mexican non-profit, use achievement and demographic data from middle schoolers in Mexico City to explore assignment to the city’s public high school. The paper aims to answer two critical questions: Do students admitted to elite schools perform better? And does it make sense to admit students based on a single test?
In Mexico City, students applying to high school put their top choices on a list, and then they are assigned to schools based on both the preferences they listed and their scores on an admissions test. Since the elite schools are oversubscribed (i.e., more students apply than they can accept), the researchers are able to calculate the effect of getting admitted to one of these elite schools for students near the threshold.
Using a regression discontinuity framework, the researchers compare students who gained admission to elite schools to students who just missed the test score cutoff. Overall, there was no effect on high school graduation rates for students near the threshold of elite school admission. Yet they also found that the effect of attending an elite high school—for those students at the margin—depended on whether the students had good grades in middle school. Students with strong middle school grades saw a 7-percentage-point increase in graduation rates when admitted to elite schools. In contrast, those with worse middle school grades experienced an 8-percentage-point decline in graduation rates when placed in elite institutions.
This suggests that using grades in conjunction with the score on the test provides better predictions of future student performance. An admissions system that considers only a single metric may be ignoring valuable information that could be used to create better matches between students and schools. In addition, the students who perform well on tests may not accurately represent the overall population of high achievers, at least when achievement is defined more broadly.
The study went on to conduct simulations of Mexico City’s elite school composition if middle school grades were weighted alongside exam scores. The results showed that, under this broader approach, the selected students would be less affluent and more likely to be girls compared to the current test-only approach. This finding suggests that incorporating multiple indicators of student performance not only leads to better predictions of student success, but that it could also lead to more equitable and diverse educational opportunities in Mexico City’s high schools—or under any admissions system that is based on narrow criteria.
SOURCE: Marco Pariguana and Maria Elena Ortega-Hesles, “School Choice, Mismatch, and Graduation,” University of Western Ontario Working Paper (November 2022).
Countless studies on education incorporate measures of socioeconomic status (SES). But this metric is, perhaps surprisingly, rather ill-defined and has incorporated many varying components since its inception in the early twentieth century. Because the choice of SES measures can directly affect results in education research, formulating a clear understanding of what defines this important measure is imperative for understanding the needs of students.
A recent 2023 study published in Educational Researcher examines decades of research on SES to see how its components have changed over time—and ultimately, to help and encourage education researchers to better define and standardize SES measures. The authors sought to answer many questions to help advocate for a better SES metric for use in education research, including: What are the most popular components? And how have they changed in popularity over time?
The authors defined SES as the measurement of the economic, social, and cultural resources that a person possesses. They identified three theoretical frameworks of SES, which acted as lenses for their analysis of components. The authors then systematically screened hundreds of academic articles to find those that both explicitly created or examined SES measures and were within the field of education. This process yielded ninety-two publications released between 1916 and 2020. They grouped components, measured their frequency, and examined changes over time.
The study found 150 SES measures and 392 components within those measures. The authors deemed forty-five of these components to be popular, which were defined as those that had been referenced in four or more articles. Across time, the three most popular components among the articles studied were parental education, parental occupation, and income. They also found that measures of income, education, occupation, and material possessions were common in every decade studied.
However, measures of possessions have changed over time, from asking if individuals have items such as furnaces in earlier studies to digital devices in recent ones. The authors found a shift from measures of social capital (like the clubs a mother is a member of) to financial (including items like the use of public assistance) and cultural capital (such as private and public school attendance). They describe this shift as concerning, citing research arguing that all forms of capital are important for educational success, as well as other research claiming that social capital is more influential in success than financial capital. Likewise, many modern measures contain subjective components, which the authors believe provide valuable insights but are used too inconsistently. They also discussed their belief that the prominently used free and reduced-priced lunch (FRPL) variable is a flawed measure of student need due to its broadness, reliance on familial enrollment, and the community enrollment that sometimes see students receiving it based on the school they attend.
Due to the abundance of variable components within these measures, which the authors describe as having compounded in the last century, they argue that education researchers should create a standardized and streamlined SES measure. They also argue that because components of these metrics are historically products of their time, they will eventually need to be adapted to fit contemporary contexts.
The authors conclude by recommending the adoption of a multi-item measure of SES that is designed for use with the specific populations researchers want to analyze and is careful not to include too many items. They also recommend that education researchers use large preexisting data sets, like PISA, that contain multiple measures of SES, rather than relying on the flawed FRPL metric.
Ultimately, a standardized but adaptable measure of SES that is relevant to the population studied can provide a better understanding of student needs and ensure proper representation of disadvantaged students in vital education research.
SOURCE: Kody Long and Rachel Renbarger, “Persistence of Poverty: How Measures of Socioeconomic Status Have Changed Over Time,” Educational Researcher (2023).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Robert Pondiscio joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss a new study that shows that a curriculum rich in content knowledge can boost reading comprehension, especially for students from low-income backgrounds. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber looks at the impact of charter schools on private tutoring prevalence.
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