The Future of Education Policy

Federal educational policy is always problematic, because education is primarily, and perhaps even exclusively, the business of cities, counties, and states. The national government has no clear role in education, given the text of the ninth and tenth amendments to the Constitution.

Yet, at least since the 1979 creation of the Department of Education, and perhaps even earlier, the federal government has dealt in educational policy.

What will such policy be in the near-term future? Policy statements are often vague, and citizens must often wait for the subsequent actual implementation to understand what the policies are.

In early November 2016, President Trump’s administration offered this statement:

The American Dream remains an illusion for too many families and taxpayers. We fail too often to provide our schoolchildren with a high-quality education to prepare them to be successful adults in a knowledge economy that rewards creativity and a smart work ethic, which in turns fails to provide our workforce with relevant intellectual and career competencies necessary for advancement in the U.S. or international business community. Each time our nation forgoes the academic preparedness of one child or adult we miss a window of opportunity to invent a roadmap for greatness our founding generation envisioned 229 years ago.

While an interesting assessment of education in the United States, the paragraph above sets no clear policy direction. The following paragraph begins to hint what the Trump administration might do:

For approximately 70 million school-age students, 20 million post-secondary students, and 150 million working adults, the Trump Administration will advance policies to support learning-and-earning opportunities at the state and local levels – where the heart and soul of American education takes place. We will accomplish this goal through high-quality early childhood, magnet, STEAM or theme-based programs; expansion of choice through charters, vouchers, and teacher-driven learning models; and relief from U.S. Department of Education regulations that inhibit innovation. A Trump Administration also will make post-secondary options more affordable and accessible through technology enriched delivery models.

This statement indicates that more control might be given to local educators as the quantity of regulations from the federal government decreases, that college and university tuitions might be nudged downward, and that parents and students might experience increased levels of choice in selecting a school.

It will take several years, however, to see precisely which concrete forms these policies take. Only then can the citizens observe and measure the net impact of the Trump administration’s education policy.

Emotions in School?

Much of what passes for pedagogy, as future teachers are instructed in "schools of education" at contemporary American universities, contains a hobbling internal contradiction.

On the one hand, the importance, even the supremacy, of the "affective domain" is preached to those who would become teachers. The professors, isolated in their ivory towers, far from the daily reality of an actual school filled with actual children, stress that it is important that the pupils "feel good" about being in school.

But on the other hand, the ideal archetype of a teacher is presented as someone who either never has strong emotions, or who keeps them perfectly concealed.

Inconsistently, emotions are presented as being simultaneously the centerpiece of the school and something undesirable in a school.

Current notions of "classroom management" routinely instruct the teacher never to be angry and never to project anger. The teacher is to remain calm and simply implement consequences, disagreeable or pleasant, for behavior good or bad.

To be sure, there is something appropriate in this guidance. One does not want a perpetually angry teacher with a "hair trigger" - one who's ready to begin yelling at students for minor infractions.

Professionalism dictates that a teacher deal calmly with students, explain what they've done wrong, and show them that the consequences that they receive for these actions are both natural and logical.

If we are preparing these students for higher education, for citizenship, or for the work world, we should, however, help them to understand that there are limits to this dynamic. Which employee will long survive the habit of deliberately angering his boss?

There is, at the margins, a place for a teacher to express a healthy anger. Indeed, the failure to appropriately manifest emotion is a mark of the type of dysfunction which the modern or postmodern pedagogue claims to want to avoid in the school.

The measured and professional expression of anger is a mature response to egregious behavior. Yet it is precisely this response which teachers are instructed never to make.

An adult employee in a reasonable workplace knows that it is unwise to deliberately insult or anger his colleagues or his boss. A rational employee has some unease around his employer's anger.

A student who delights in consistently provoking his fellow pupils lacks a healthy respect for the anger of others. This lack will handicap the student in current and future endeavors.

The failure to set an emotionally healthy tone, including a measured and appropriate expression of anger, limits what can be achieved in schools. By prohibiting teachers from a mature and professional expression of anger, we keep students artificially infantile in their emotional development, and allow for a student to inflict negative behavior on other students.

The results in both academic and social progress are visible.

Managing the End of the School Year

The last few weeks of the academic year in a high school present challenges to maintaining the desired school climate.

Unlike university students, who understand that the semester’s work gets more intense at the end, high school students often feel that they can begin to relax toward the end of the semester.

To be sure, there is a form of ‘senioritis’ at the college-level, but it is most severe at the high school level - and not merely among seniors, but among all students.

A high school can take several different approaches to the final quarter of the year. Whichever tactic it takes, however, must be taken by a unified faculty and staff.

One strategy is to celebrate the final weeks of the year with pizzas, field trips, classroom parties, and movies.

A different strategy is to emphasize the intensifying academic work, avoid all those fun and social events, and instead assign ever more written work, reading, and lectures.

Both of these approaches have advantages and disadvantages, but the key to both of them is that they must be embraced uniformly by the teaching faculty.

If different faculty members are using different strategies, then a consistent school culture at the end of the year is not possible.

The administrators should present both of the above options, along with other tactics if they exist, and work to build faculty consensus around one or the other of them.

Different Sorts of Achievement Gaps

The phrase ‘achievement gap’ is often used to describe statistical differences between African-American students and other students. But gaps exist between many various demographic segments.

At Huron High School, an administration of the M-STEP standardized test during the 2014/2015 academic year yielded results which manifest several gaps. The test was given to 11th-grade students.

For the moment, we’ll table the question of exactly what the M-STEP test allegedly measures, and the question of how well it measures it.

In each subject area, the M-STEP categorizes students as advanced, proficient, partially proficient, or not proficient. Students in the top two categories are aggregated as ‘advanced or proficient,’ and the total fraction of the student body which places into that category is supposed to be the measure of the school’s, and the individual’s, success.

One obvious and consistent gap displays itself across every portion of the test. In Science, of the 359 juniors tested, 69.7% of the Asian students measured as “advanced or proficient.” No other demographic group performed as well. Of the entire group, including Asians and all other demographic groups, 51.5% were “advanced or proficient.”

Similar numbers appear in other content areas: 81.8% of Asians were ‘advanced or proficient’ in Mathematics, compared to 54.9% for the entire group.

In English Language Arts, 80.3% of Asians were ‘advanced or proficient’, a significant number light of the fact that for many of them, English is not a native language. The average for the all students in the sample was 66.3%.

In Social Studies, 84.9% of the Asians were ‘advanced or proficient,’ while only 66.9% of the total population was ranked at that level.

But the ‘Asian gap’ is not the only statistical chasm.

In Mathematics, 55.6% of all females were ‘advanced or proficient,’ while only 54.0% of males were so. This cuts across all racial or ethnic groups, and constitutes therefore a ‘gender gap.’

The ‘gender gap’ is even clearer in English Language Arts, where 73.0% of all females were ‘advanced or proficient,’ while only 59.2% of males scored that high.

These numbers, by themselves, constitute too small a sample, and are derived from too unreliably a measuring instrument, to justify a general conclusion.

But these numbers merely reflect a larger pattern, seen in standardized tests from ACT to SAT to AP. The ‘Asian gap’ and the ‘gender gap’ are real, measurable, observable, and quantifiable.

Getting into College: How Many Clubs Did You Join?

In January 2016, Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times, describing a report about college admissions. Students who graduate from high school and seek admission to a university face a multidimensional and multifactorial system.

Various metrics are used to evaluate applicants. Some metrics are more relative than others; some are more susceptible to manipulation than others.

Letters of recommendation are subjective. The meaning of GPAs vary wildly from one high school to another: at one high school it’s relatively easy to earn a 3.5, while that same number represents a Herculean effort at another high school.

Standardized testing represents more reliable and more objective measurement, but such tests - e.g., SAT and ACT - do not fully capture a student’s ability to carefully examine and analyze text, or to synthesize ideas from two different philosophers.

The report also addresses the frantic effort on the part of high school students to compile a long list of extracurricular clubs and involvements. Bruni writes:

The report also suggests that colleges discourage manic résumé padding by accepting information on a sharply limited number of extracurricular activities; that they better use essays and references to figure out which students’ community-service projects are heartfelt and which are merely window dressing.

Many questions emerge. One is that the admissions process needs to reflect the purpose of higher education. Because that purpose is not monolithic - some attend college to master an academic discipline, others to gain employability - the process retains a somewhat split personality.

A second questions surrounds the manipulation by students of their ostensible academic profile. Standardized tests, while leaving much to be desired, are not nearly as malleable as letters of recommendation and high school GPAs. The methods by which students can scam a GPA, or cajole a teacher into writing a letter, are numerous.

The report which Bruni describes is nonbinding in its recommendations, but nonetheless offers a chance to reconsider the process.