A Choice Not an Echo: Thinking Institutionally about Education Reform
Early in my teaching career, I sat in a meeting at my public school district; projected up front was a colorful graphic with the word “equity” placed at the very center. It was the conceptual cornerstone and guide star of this governmental entity—justifying and affecting every one of its policies, practices, curricular decisions, even down to the organization of classroom desks (rows were said to create a hegemonic power structure wherein the teacher is oppressor and the student is oppressed).
In the past decades, American education has undergone a fundamental shift in its telos, replacing achievement, equality, and merit as foundational ideals with this notion of equity, and, until very recently, few have stopped to question the goodness or rightness of this transformation. At that meeting, I naïvely whispered to my colleague, “what if we disagree with the idea of equity?” He scoffed. Such a question was not worth discussing.
Of course, this single anecdote illustrates a larger shift and politicization of American education. Schools have removed classics from shelves and reading lists, and replaced them with young adult fiction parroting the latest progressive obsession. Prospective teachers imbibe Marxist-influenced “critical pedagogy” from academic publications and at university schools of education. In social studies, students research and advocate for the latest cause célèbre, instead of learning traditional history or reading our country’s founding documents. If they engage in the latter pursuits, they do so only to critique, deconstruct, and topple our national ideals like antiquated statues.
Taken together, such stories illuminate what revered professor E. D. Hirsch has called the educational “thought world,” the dominant beliefs within the sector that manifest in slogans, platitudes, passing remarks, and ultimately the instruction, curriculum, and policy of our schools—the ideas that are almost in the air, reinforced in every education-focused publication and teacher meeting.
What does this thought world implicitly communicate to students? That their personal passions, however irrational, warrant indulgence. That the here and now is all that matters, and only topics that interest them are worth study. That the highest good in their life is political involvement and activism. That no work of art or institution is better than another, deserving our acclaim or humble respect.
Many in the media decry and lament the supposed culture wars in our schools. In reality, our recent brawls over which books to read, how to frame America’s history, or the rights of parents are very much a return to the ancien régime. In the preceding decades, technocratic debates over testing metrics, charter schools, and pay scales dominated discourse. But historically, the defining fights centered on prayer, the pledge of allegiance, which translation of scripture to use, who was allowed access to our buildings, which language would be taught, and other issues that touched on ethnic and religious lines.
Our recent technocratic debates over testing metrics and academic outcomes are worthwhile but they represent minor adjustments to the dials and knobs of our ship of state. Cultural debates about what sort of citizenry our public institutions ought to create direct the very course of it.
For decades, conservatives largely ceded the cultural ground in our schools. Thus, the recent flares of classroom culture wars represent movement conservatism’s return to fighting for education. And the Right is winning victories; polls even show more public trust in the Republican Party than Democrats on the issue of education. While unfortunately coded as “conservative,” values such as merit, the liberal arts tradition, or curricula that prioritize classic novels maintain appeal to a broad swath of the American public. Even so, progressives control so much of the public education infrastructure, and have captured so many organizations that inhabit and influence it, that conservatives—and their centrist and liberal allies—will ultimately lose this battle unless they look beyond passing a handful of libertarian-influenced policies and begin to focus on rebuilding and reforming the institutions within and around public education.
Public Education’s Dual Purpose
At their founding, our public schools had a dual purpose: both academic and civic. Schools form the individual child and the broader society. Neither duty is superior to the other. Choosing which is right and proper for a school is akin to choosing which of our legs is more important. They’re twin pillars.
In a series of annual reports, Horace Mann, the intellectual and politician credited with creating American public education as we know it, set forth these interrelated objectives of common schools. Most simply, common schools provide necessary intellectual capacities and practical skills. Often derided as coldly utilitarian, Mann frames this justification in a far more robust, emboldening way. Schools form children into “skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.” They create self-reliant, self-sufficient individuals. They populate a society with a competent citizenry upon which our industries, culture, and affluence depend. What’s more, a universal, rudimentary education allows a democratic society to function at a very practical level. Citizens can read newspapers and press briefings, arbitrate competing claims from advocates and politicians, and come to reasonable conclusions.
Much education debate has focused on this first purpose: raising reading and math scores, inculcating basic factual knowledge, and fostering workforce skills. These are necessary, fundamental duties of schools, but they are only half of what schools do. A second, arguably even more important purpose of public education, is its ability to create and sustain shared civic principles. Mann believed that education should be moralistic, a “protection of society against the giant vices which now invade and torment it.” Schools not only sustain culture but shape it. The common school existed to unify the country, providing a shared experience, a shared cultural knowledge, and shared civic values. “The training of the schoolroom expands into the institutions and fortunes of the State,” he wrote.
Mann predicted what would happen if schools began to advance a partisan political view, if each classroom became “a miniature political club-room” that was filled with “political addresses prepared by beardless boys, in scarcely legible hand-writing, and in worse grammar.” He saw that parents would come to resent “that their children are indoctrinated” into “political heresies” and so “withdraw them from the school.” He predicted even that “one set of school books should be expelled, and another introduced, as they might be supposed, however remotely, to favor one party or the other.”
He was, in effect, saying that schools should impart shared principles but not a dogmatic ideology. America needs common precepts about the rights of man, the nature of government, and the purpose of society. These common beliefs form “the only common ground, whence the arguments of the disputants can be drawn” without resort to violence or secession. Moreover, a shared common culture creates a community directed toward an agreed upon common good. C. S. Lewis once quipped that all friendship begins with the question, “what, you too?”—implying a point of common interest. When all citizens can discuss common points of history or spark up a conversation with a stranger about their love or hate of The Great Gatsby, it binds us together.
Such cultural formation and society-shaping power are fine ideals. But how can we redirect our schools away from solipsistic obsessions over identity or activism and back toward classically liberal, American first principles?
To counter the ideological capture of American public education, conservatives have advanced two policies: school choice and various prohibitions against overtly political instruction. While certainly improvements upon the status quo, they are woefully insufficient.
A Choice or an Echo?
Consider, first, school choice. The argument runs thus: when facing market pressures, namely parents exiting the system, schools will either reform themselves or face crippling budget shortfalls. Competition incentivizes improvement. At the very least—whether they’re unhappy with mediocre education or outright political indoctrination—dissatisfied parents can take their taxpayer-subsidized education funding elsewhere.
School choice might provide an escape hatch for some families, but will it bring about large-scale reforms of public education? Unlikely.
Roughly 80 percent of American children still attend traditional, district-operated public schools, even with the recent exodus of students and families. If current trends persist, this overwhelming majority will continue to attend such schools for the foreseeable future. Inertia is a powerful force. Any alternative institutions, however important, will educate a minority share of the population. Moreover, as schools face steep, post-pandemic declines in enrollment, many states are implementing “hold harmless” policies, which limit revenue declines and thereby dampen pressure from competition, a primary mechanism through which school choice is believed to improve education.
More significantly, however, so long as the institutions surrounding any system of choice are themselves acolytes of progressivism, any charter, private, or other schools will repeat the same shibboleths. That same thought world envelopes these alternative schools. As a member of the founding board of a classical school, I’m facing many of these hurdles right now.
Where do we get our teachers or administrators? Our colleges of education are petri dishes where some of America’s most noxious ideologies incubate. One of the most popular—and arguably the most influential—book for prospective teachers is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, an explicitly Marxist tract that overlays the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy onto the teacher-student relationship, even citing the Russian and Maoist Cultural Revolutions as ideal educational endeavors. In colleges of education, applicants breathe in radical pedagogies in which schools function not as disseminators of truth and a cultural heritage, or formal academic training centers, but rather as the loci of societal change. When these institutions train the vast majority of our country’s teaching force, who will staff charter or private schools?
Accrediting bodies and policies also force this ideological bent on teachers. Illinois’s “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” require that teachers “support and create opportunities for student advocacy,” that they include activities for “raising consciousness,” and that they adopt a “broader modality of student assessments” that includes “social justice work” and “action research projects,” wherein students investigate and advocate for various political issues. At the national level, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) is the largest accrediting body of teacher prep programs in the country. Its standards list the importance of interrogating biases, safe spaces, and DEI, but nary a mention of anything actually foundational to instruction like the science of learning, curricular construction, or classroom management.
Or consider the accrediting and approval process for new schools. When national accrediting associations require, or at the very least recommend, that schools hire DEI officers, adopt anti-racist curricula, and implement comprehensive plans for DEI, even conservative classical school founders must either acquiesce or quit.
Under the institutions currently shaping our education sector—from teacher credentialing and school accrediting to curriculum companies and consulting agencies—implementing school choice would provide few real choices to parents. If a restaurant owner only has pasta, marinara sauce, and an Italian chef, it doesn’t mean much to tell diners they have free choice to develop any menu they want. When all ingredients, supplies, and ideas are uniform, choice remains a mirage. To paraphrase Henry Ford, parents can choose any school they want, so long as it’s woke.
The decline of two notable charter school systems exemplifies these problems. America’s largest and arguably most successful charter school system, Knowledge is Power Prep (KIPP) serves more than a hundred thousand students at 272 schools. But after the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots, it retired the revered slogan “Work Hard; Be Nice”—a motto that is concise, actionable, and comprehensible—because it supposedly carried vestiges of white supremacy and prized submissiveness, only to replace it with “Together, A Future Without Limits”—soupy, vague, and passive. KIPP’s blog, once a resource for practical teaching and administration advice, now elaborates progressive neuroses about “white accountability” and promotes books on transgenderism for every grade level.
Another system, Uncommon Schools, fell from grace that same summer. Its decline was less precipitous but still notable. In an open letter, school officials promised to loosen their once exacting behavioral standards, including the requirement for silence in the halls, to relax dress codes, and to reduce reliance on punitive discipline such as detentions.
Such self-styled “No Excuses” schools were once bright spots on the education landscape. They were deemed “gap busting schools” by the research center credo at Stanford, and offered models that thousands of schools across the country watched and many mimicked. Unfortunately, many of these institutions now fare no better—or even worse—than their traditional public school counterparts. These schools faced progressive pressure, and without other institutions to provide the wherewithal and rhetorical cover to bolster their positions, they caved. Today, many of these institutions, which accomplished the once progressive goal of closing achievement gaps, are crumbling.
Finally, there is an assemblage of local laws and regulations that handicap the growth of charter schools: state-level caps on the number of charter schools, onerous licensure laws that prohibit principals from hiring staff, state budgets that allot drastically lower per-pupil funding to charters, authorizing rules that force classical or No Excuse charters to compromise their vision, limitations on the sale of public school buildings to charter or private schools, and even the lower borrowing costs that public schools can take advantage of for major capital investments in new facilities. As these laws and regulations vary from state to state and even city to city, a full accounting of them is beyond this essay, but their collective effect is the same: they limit the supply of alternative schools such that, even as demand grows, genuine school choice will remain elusive.
The second popular conservative education strategy is to ban things. Idaho banned the teaching of critical race theory. An executive order from Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders banned “indoctrination” or any education tied to critical race theory. Dozens of such policies have proliferated across the country at the federal, state, and local levels, both legislative and executive. But this approach, too, is inadequate.
How does one ban a zeitgeist? Forbidding critical pedagogy or other progressive ideas in schools through executive action or a few pieces of legislation cannot hold back the deeper ideological currents.
Former philosophers of education such as John Dewey have had profound impacts on school policies and practices, even if students never read his magnum opus “Democracy and Education.” Anywhere students choose their own curriculum, engage in projects instead of traditional instruction, or create their own behavioral rules, Dewey’s influence shows. So, too, students can absorb the precepts of Kimberlé Crenshaw or the thought of Richard Delgado without ever cracking the foundational texts of critical race theory.
Would reading Romeo and Juliet through a feminist lens, as recommended by the National Council of Teachers of English, run afoul of these bans? How could a ban limit critical race theory’s influence on ever-weakening school consequences and discipline structures? How do bans surveil the lion’s share of instructional resources which teachers craft on the fly or pull from their own internet searching?
What’s more, progressive terminology famously evolves. Today, critical race theory or diversity, equity, and inclusion run afoul of bans, but tomorrow it may be “belonging,” “compassion,” or “community.” The ideas can persist under new nomenclature. A politician who banned critical race theory will once again have to explain to the public how these euphonious-sounding words mean something quite different in the mouths of activists. Politicians will spend their limited political capital banning an ever-mutating hydra of word play.
School choice and bans are necessary steps but insufficient. Moreover, once conservatives pass these bills, there’s a significant risk that voters’ righteous anger will be sated, complacency will return, and the same ideas will pass along to the next generation. The reform of American education requires a far more comprehensive vision. More than a handful of preventative policies, reformers need to rebuild, reorient, and repurpose the hundreds of mediating institutions upon which any thriving education sector relies.
Alternative Approaches
In many ways, the band of conservatives and centrist liberals fighting for education reform resembles the Greeks at Thermopylae contending with the overwhelming Persian army. There are seemingly endless ranks of authors, bureaucrats, institutions, accrediting services, academics, teachers, and administrators all advancing a progressive vision in our schools.
Nevertheless, consider what just three reformed institutions could do to shift the “thought world” in education. As already alluded to, an essential task—arguably the most important—is the training of a corps of teachers. Like any profession, there are skills required for successful execution—classroom management techniques, assessment and grading strategies, pacing considerations, question asking, even down to how to run simple routines like handing out papers or classroom transitions. In the United States, there are over three million teachers, and most receive their training at teacher prep programs housed within colleges of education, where they spend more time swimming in critical theory than learning about the nuts and bolts of running a classroom or the content of the subjects that they will be attempting to impart to their students.
The dominant theory of education has shifted once before, and schools of education bear most of the responsibility for this change. Prior to the twentieth century, classical education was predominant. But in the early twentieth century, progressive theorist John Dewey and his protégé William Kilpatrick together trained tens of thousands of prospective teachers at Teachers College of Columbia University, then one of the first university schools of education. Its association with academia gave the progressive dogmas of Dewey and Kilpatrick the allure of expertise, and so their progressivism supplanted classical education in universities and, thereby, the K–12 institutions beneath them. Their program churned out a teaching workforce that filled schools, bureaucracies, administrations, curriculum companies, unions, and every other educational institution.
Already, nascent efforts exist for alternative training institutions. Most notably, Hillsdale College now offers a master’s program in classical education, training a corps of teachers for the budding classical school movement and hopefully for public schools as well. Liberal arts colleges or enterprising professors and administrators at major public universities could form similar—apolitical, albeit classically-influenced—programs to train up a new generation of education professionals.
In Governor Ron DeSantis’s bill to defund DEI and other related policies on public campuses in Florida, he also included a provision to establish the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education. The center will offer students majors in philosophy, politics, economics, and law, all rooted in the Western tradition. A positive development, but governors can and should use their governing authority over public institutions to establish similar centers at flagship universities across the country with an emphasis on training teachers in this tradition as well.
It would only take a few programs to have an effect. If, say, Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Michigan formed a handful of such institutions, they’d immediately create a robust network. The classical education movements in their states would have personnel, scholarship, and resources at hand to flourish, and enterprising school founders, or even individual teachers looking for an alternative, would not need to build from zero.
Already, the Barney Charter School Initiative of Hillsdale and the influential Great Hearts Academies in the South are model classical systems. Paired with institutes of classical education and teacher prep programs, they could expand and replicate their model more easily in other friendly states. Moreover, such a network would make it easier for similar institutions to form and persist even in blue cities and states. San Francisco may not lead the way for a classical revival, but frustrated parents looking for an alternative can use these resources in their homeschool co-ops and a few independent schools could form and endure.
State-level politicians could also pass legislation to fund and ease the creation of alternative licensing programs, such as Teach for America, but with an emphasis on traditional liberal arts. Many classical school principals tell me of the difficulty in hiring teachers, because they want to bring former accountants or engineers on staff. Even if they could train them in-house on the practicalities of running a classroom, licensure laws often prohibit them from doing so.
A sizeable body of research finds that traditional training at schools of education has middling effects: it improves a teacher’s efficacy in the first year, but unlicensed, untrained teachers catch up within a year. Only experience and subject matter knowledge substantially improve a teacher’s academic impact. What’s more, alternative licensing programs have a greater value-add on student achievement. Loosening licensure laws—requiring only a subject-matter content degree (and not an education degree), for example—would not necessarily advance classical education, but it would break the pipeline connecting universities and their fringe politics to schools. Such measures, along with establishing teacher apprenticeships as Tennessee and a few other states have done, would allow charter schools more leeway to choose and train their own staff. Eventually, as these institutions train personnel and their success persuades even the skeptical, there could be a critical mass of school staff to upend much of the worst ideas in the education thought world.
To influence yet more educators, conservative policymakers could leverage licensing and accrediting policies to pressure public teacher prep programs to offer teachers at least a handful of classical or traditional readings on education, as well as necessary, ideologically-neutral topics such as the science of learning or classroom management.
Such institutions would also assist with a further essential task: new publications. Countless magazines and websites with a leftward tilt exist in American education. Online blogs tout the latest curriculum, provide teachers advice for instruction, and review the latest research. Multiple trade papers cover the latest news, run op-eds, and feature arguments of the day—almost invariably through a progressive lens. All successful political movements have had central publications to hash out their disputes and advance their arguments, from National Review for the Reaganite Republican Party to Leninist Pravda. Where can educators go to learn more about classical education? Where should a sympathetic politician turn to review arguments regarding classical education policies?
Hillsdale could found a scholarly journal of classical education to disseminate research and debate philosophical first principles. Great Hearts could begin a teacher magazine covering the latest news in the sector and offering teachers practical advice. Soon, more seminars and teacher conferences crop up with these leaders, authors, teachers, and professors reinforcing, improving, and sustaining the movement.
The final critical task is a better standardized testing regime. It’s a truism in education that what’s tested is taught. The SAT and ACT are insipid, offering students lifeless readings pulled from third-tier social science books or contemporary op-eds from Democratic politicians. Conversely, the Classic Learning Test offers students passages from a treasury of classic authors and works of literature. Hundreds of individual liberal arts colleges now accept the CLT as an entrance exam, and the state of Florida has made it an acceptable admissions exam for all of its public universities, while Tennessee looks to follow suit. More states ought to follow Florida’s lead.
Countless other mediating institutions need to be built. Where can state- and district-level executives find the policymakers to fill their administrations and cabinets? Reforms of governors such as Ron DeSantis or Sarah Huckabee Sanders will face challenges so long as state departments of education are staffed with ideologues opposed to their agenda. Who will write the curriculum? Who will train charter school leaders? Who will assist and advise new charter and private schools through the authorization process? What consulting firm will a district hire when seeking improvements? Who will a teacher turn to for legal counsel, if not their local union? What professional organizations could they join?
The Left has an expansive network of such organizations. Any time new teachers, even politically conservative ones, begin their career, they can only receive professional development training from education academics. The risks of legal challenge incentivize them to cozy up to their local union. The only curriculum available to them advances a progressive worldview, and the tests for which they train their students encourage a bland, utilitarian conception of learning.
As a young teacher, I felt this pull. My university training had me read academic essays on critical race theory and transgender literacy. The National Council for Teachers of English, the foremost professional organization for my specialty, recently declared the need to end classic texts and academic essays as the focus of literature classes. Instead, the organization now emphasizes the need for reading through various “critical” lenses, and even the inclusion of graphic novels such as Gender Queer in the curriculum. All publications or professional development materials hawked to teachers offer a student-centered, progressive approach to pedagogy and discipline.
While official policy can be helpful, education requires comprehensive institutional reform—not just a few pieces of legislation and a handful of executive orders—a reversal and counter-imitation of the slow march through the institutions that began in the 1960s and remade the American K–12 and university landscapes. Any enterprising reformer would accomplish as much from founding or working with a nascent organization, such as the CLT, than advocating for another policy change. Funders might win far more lasting improvements by bankrolling a teacher training program in classical education, or a Christian private school, than cutting another check for some advocacy organization.
That Great Institution
An institutional analysis of American education raises the question: what ought we to do with our public schools? And I’ll likely ruffle some conservative feathers when I suggest that it’s quite reasonable to consider our system of public education a great American institution. Like Congress or our universities, they may be corrupted, but are they not worth saving? The inheritor of a once-grand estate fallen into disrepair could raze it to the ground, dispose of its art, and trench the garden—or revitalize its greatness. Are we stewards or demolitionists?
Prior to the common school movement of the 1800s, education in much of the country was either a privilege of the aristocratic few or a haphazard affair, cobbled together under the auspices of various churches. Today, while test scores and graduation rates leave much to be desired, our population has universal access to schooling, all but eradicating true illiteracy. Our nation has led the world in scientific advancement for the better part of a century, boasting some of the greatest universities and thinkers in the world. On the time scale of human history, mass education is a recent phenomenon, and any criticism of public education must consider this reality.
In their original conception, public schools were community affairs, not bureaucratic organizations. Each new town had to establish a plot of land for its local, community school. And vestiges of this ideal survive: children walking through their neighborhood street to a redbrick building to learn under the tutelage of Mrs. Pennyworth, a beloved teacher, who is always available to her students with a hug, Band-Aid, or picture book for sharing. In many towns, the public school remains the center of the community—the weekend football game or musical providing the best entertainment on any Friday evening. Adults and children with disparate political, socioeconomic, and racial backgrounds come together for the common good. Should we ourselves set fire to Rome simply because the barbarians are within the gates?
Edmund Burke warns that “It is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down any edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society.” Conservatives must be wary of their calls to dismantle public education, lest they find that they themselves have become the Jacobins. Even as conservatives advance libertarian policies such as school choice, the health of public education and the ideal of the community school must remain ever present in their minds.
That being said, charter schooling may be a superior policy focus at present. As individual institutions, they far outperform traditional public schools. Even more fundamentally, the charter sector represents a return to form for American schools. Prior the 1940s and ’50s, the one-room schoolhouse was the norm. But efforts aimed at saving money saw the centralization of education into mega districts that necessitated onerous bureaucracies. No longer did local families entrust their children to a handful of teachers, but shopping-mall-like high schools brought together thousands of students under the auspices of distant, state-level officials. Charter schools localize education again. Subsidiarity, not free market competition, is the motivating principle.
Even while enabling more charters, conservatives should fight for policies that maintain the health of local public schools. This could mean running for school board to gain direct control of discipline policies and curricular decisions, or reforming state-level policies and standards to ensure that civics, classics, and traditional academic content—not politicized theories—make their way into classrooms.
For example, Wisconsin recently approved eleven science-of-reading-related curricula. Schools that use an approved curriculum receive reimbursement from the state for its purchase; Hillsdale’s phonics-centric curriculum didn’t make the list, and so classical charter schools in the state have to eat that cost, and local public schools in conservative jurisdictions will avoid its use despite its quality. Considering the share of America’s children who still attend public schools, it would be an unforgivable mistake to neglect them—leaving 80 percent of our students badly educated.
And discipline policies are another pressure point for reform. Many states—California, Illinois, and plenty of others—have restricted local districts from appropriate discipline in the classroom, requiring onerous “restorative justice” plans before schools can impose suspension or detention. Some state policies even outright prohibit punitive discipline for insubordination or anything else short of violence. Reversing these policies at the state and school board level would improve the education of the majority of American students.
Speaking broadly, institutional education reform would see a center-right coalition continuing to create alternatives to poorly performing, ideologically captured public schools while also enacting effective policy reforms at the local, state, and federal levels. But both sides of that equation require winning elections and having sound policy ideas, not just bans and prohibitions.
Perhaps more than any other policy area, education will determine America’s future—toward revitalization or a limp toward expiration. Reforming it will require a comprehensive, positive vision, and multiple generations of compounding wins.