The Liberal Education Reckoning

When good intentions lead to back outcomes, we need to have the courage to admit our mistakes.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

I am the proud product of excellent K-12 public education. I am a liberal who wants to pay teachers more, who supporters teachers’ unions, who will always vote to raise my own taxes to give more money to public schools, who opposes efforts to redirect public funds to private religious academies, who thinks education has to be broader than just multiplication tables and spelling tests.

And I’m stunned at just how badly people who share my politics have screwed up public education for American kids — and how urgent it is to reckon with the bad outcomes of our good intentions, and quickly change course.

In New York magazine, Andrew Rice has a must-read piece looking at his own town of Montclair, NJ, which has one of the best-funded public school systems in the nation and yet has seen steep downturns in student outcomes, especially for Black students. In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch writes about the stunning decline in math abilities among college students, many of whom — even at competitive colleges — cannot complete problems suited for eighth graders. In The New York Times, psychology professor Jean Twenge writes about plummeting standardized test scores and identifies the ubiquitous in-class laptop as a culprit. On Twitter, organizational psychologist Adam Grant shared a new study finding that, per Grant’s summary, “students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It’s not just because they’re less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.”

There is no single cause of the educational backsliding we’ve seen over the past decade. And Covid school closures certainly accelerated existing negative trends. But Covid also contributed to polarization in even agreeing that there’s a problem to be solved. It is clear, in hindsight, that closing schools was disastrous for students; but it was not clear, in the moment, that the potential learning losses for students were more of a risk than the potential loss of life and health for the masses, including sick and elderly family members living with young children. The Covid divides, though, have poisoned the education conversation. At this point, there is nothing we can do about the fact that many schools closed and many students suffered from it — and some people’s lives were also probably saved. It would be far more useful to look at the whole picture of what went wrong — what was going wrong before Covid, and which terrible ideas Covid made widespread — so that we can learn from our mistakes and improve the situation for American kids.

Liberals really have been America’s strongest advocates for public education, and America’s public education system really is an incredible achievement. But if we want to keep it strong — if we want to make it stronger — then we need to see where we’ve gone wrong, and work quickly to right it.

Step one: Get screens, including laptops, out of the classroom.

This doesn’t mean “no computers ever.” But as Grant points out, when students take notes on laptops instead of with pen and paper, they don’t retain nearly as much information. It’s also the case that we don’t retain nearly as much information when we read it on a screen versus on paper (sorry to all of you, I wish I could mail you a printed version of this newsletter). If we want young people to retain what they’re being taught, one of the best things we can do is get them back on paper for most of their day.

Getting students off of screens is also necessary if we want them to even hear what’s being taught. I am currently sitting in a cafe writing this newsletter, which is both my job and something I enjoy and have chosen to do, and I have clicked away to scroll through Twitter, check my email, WhatsApp a friend, read the front page of various websites, and otherwise distract myself approximately 5,693 times. And I am an adult with a fully-developed frontal cortex. Ask yourself: When was the last time you sat with a computer in front of you and only focused on your single task at hand? Is that your normal way of working? If adults can’t do this, how in the world do we expect kids to do it — and why are we plunking distraction machines in front of them all day long? With a laptop in front of their faces in the classroom, students scroll through social media and watch YouTube; in one study, a quarter of teens said they’d used their class laptops to watch porn. College students may be more mature, but they aren’t much better: Twenge cites a study finding that they spend roughly 40% of their in-class time screwing around on the internet instead of focusing on the material at hand. The obvious ensues: “The more time college students spent doing something else on their laptops during class, the lower their exam scores, even after accounting for academic ability,” Twenge writes.

This is a Covid holdover. The pandemic pushed students to learn at home, online, and through screens. That was disastrous. And yet for some reason, while we’ve grasped that we have to get kids back in the classroom, we’ve kept the screens in front of their faces.

Laptops are also now substituting for school-issued textbooks, which means that kids are bringing these distraction devices home and can, under the guise of doing homework, enjoy virtually unlimited screen time. Papers written on them are increasingly penned by ChatGPT.

The school-issued Chromebook may have seemed like a good idea, a way to equalize internet and computer access for public school kids, including those whose parents don’t have the resources to buy them a computer. But a funny thing has happened: Educated, affluent parents are increasingly forcing their kids off of screens, delaying screen access as long as possible, enrolling young kids in screen-free schools, organizing to delay giving kids their first smartphones, and limiting screen time for older children. Poorer families are more screen-dependent. Poorer kids spend more time on screens.

This is not to say that children should never see a computer. There are reasonable ways to teach crucial modern-world skills — typing, online research — without moving the whole of education online. Giving students time to type out papers, for example, on school computers disconnected from the internet supports learning and skill-building rather than diminishing it. Screens are a part of life. But in school, they should be a part of it — not dominating it.

Who wins here? Not kids or parents or teachers, but the tech companies who supply not only the laptops, but the millions upon millions of dollars of software that public schools now depend on. Laptops in the classroom have not increased “equity.” They’ve contributed to widening racial achievement gaps.

Step two: Raise expectations.

I am a woman of childbearing age, and so I see tons of social media content about raising children. As far as I can tell, American parents are very concerned about raising kids who are (1) resilient and (2) not entitled. But our educational system has increasingly treated kids with, well, kid gloves, and demanded that educators cater to their desires. It’s good that schools are considering students’ feelings and wellbeing. But in trying to keep kids from being discouraged in school and in trying to decrease racial and socioeconomic inequalities among students, we may have instead sent the message that we don’t expect students to work hard — that we don’t trust that they can do well. We don’t teach them to experience setbacks and persevere through them.

We also see education as a consumer product, and parents are among the worst offenders there, routinely complaining to deans if their adult children — college students — don’t get the As to which their parents believe they are entitled. And that of course starts well before university, with parents “advocating” for their kids to get higher grades as early as elementary school. Teachers, of course, don’t want to feel like they’re depriving students of future opportunities. They also aren’t paid enough to fend off invective from angry and entitled parents.

As a result, students are learning less but getting pushed forward anyway. As actual student abilities have gone down, graduation rates have gone up. So have grades. Some 60 percent of grades awarded at Harvard are now As, according to a grade inflation report from the university; twenty years ago, it was 25 percent.

“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers, and because I know it’s so harshly graded,” one Harvard student told the student newspaper. “If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”

One key to managing anxiety is not avoiding it; it’s learning, through practice and failure and eventual success, that you actually can do hard things and that disappointment is a normal part of life. The answer to pervasive mental health issues among young people is not to confirm their fears that they can’t do what’s being asked of them or that perfection is the only acceptable outcome; it’s to show them that they can face their fears head-on, and that they’re resourceful enough to succeed — if they put in the effort and have the necessary support systems. Learning, frankly, is not always enjoyable. It shouldn’t be miserable either, but wiring your brain in new and better ways can be painful and difficult. That’s part of what makes it so good.

Raising expectations also means offering more-academically-inclined students opportunities to be challenged in the classroom. I know this makes me a big outlier among progressives, but gifted and talented programs are actually good, as are AP and other advanced classes. It is really hard for teachers to effectively teach to students who are several grade levels apart in skill, and the obvious outcome is that the lowest-performing students are left behind while the highest-performing ones are bored. We should probably re-name them (“gifted and talented” is… a lot). We should absolutely take steps to change the status quo in which a child from an affluent family is twice as likely to be funneled into a gifted and talented program as an identically-performing child from a poorer one. But if in pursuing “equity” we’re actually simply imposing universal mediocrity, that’s bad.

Step three: Evaluate well and fill in resources where most needed.

A lot of the current politically moderate critics of America’s educational demise point to the end of No Child Left Behind and its testing requirements as the moment things started to turn bad. I think it’s definitely more complicated than that, and No Child Left Behind had more than its fair share of problems. But we do need a more comprehensive way to assess student learning, and a thoughtful system to dedicate additional resources where they are most needed. That doesn’t need to look like over-testing, teaching to the tests, and punishing schools that do badly. It does mean giving ourselves the tools to identify problems, and the resources to help solve them.

It also means resisting the urge to forgo data collection because you might not like what you find. In the heady period in 2020 when so many Americans and American institutions were grappling yet again with our country’s racism and pervasive inequality, several elite colleges and universities decided to drop SAT scores from their application requirements. The idea was that SAT scores are pretty unequal, with affluent white students typically doing the best, and they don’t necessarily measure any individual student’s potential (they do, in fact, tend to be pretty good at predicting how well a student will do in college and if they’ll graduate). But with pervasive grade inflation, it’s awfully hard for colleges to really compare apples to apples when looking at SAT-free student applications. And the SAT can perhaps perversely be a real benefit for students from challenging backgrounds. They may not be able to afford the fancy test prep that richer kids get, but buying an SAT practice book is a lot more accessible. By contrast, the ability of a17-year-old to write an essay that intrigues and persuades a panel of university administrators that you deserve admission is a more sophisticated endeavor, one that cannot be studied for — it often involves pretty sophisticated parents, school counselors who are practiced at getting students into elite institutions, often private essay tutors and editors. A policy meant to help even the playing field seems to have only skewed it further.

We shouldn’t make a similar mistake with kids in the public K-12 education by sidestepping testing. Nor should we assume testing is the end-all be-all to education. It should be one diagnostic, not the whole plan.

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To be clear, the conservative assault on public education is also a big part of this story. They have undermined public trust in the education system and undermined public education itself by fighting to push Christianity in schools and opposing teaching students things like widely agreed-upon scientific consensus. They have successfully taken public funds for secular education and channeled them into religious schools which have to meet virtually no standards at all. They have created a homeschooling scheme that broadly enables child abuse and neglect. As I write this, the Heritage Foundation’s Russell Vogt is and other extremists in the Trump administration are dismantling the Department of Education. American conservatives today are, in many ways, an anti-Enlightenment bunch. They have been the driving factor in America’s education problems.

But conservatives generally aren’t the ones reading this newsletter; liberals are. So if you’ve gotten this far, I want to hear from you. What here sounds right? What have I missed? What do American schools need, and what can turn things around for our kids?

xx Jill