Education's Regulatory Pandemic
COVID isn’t our only pandemic, millions of state, local and federal regulations are also causing misery. For colleges and universities, the Department of Education has approximately 2,000 pages of regulations and issues more than one guidance document per day. They also have had “aggressive efforts... to shape the (public school) agenda” and “trampled on the authority of state and district leaders to make their own decisions about school reform.” It’s not just the federal government, teachers also complain about the states adopting the Common Core standards which make them “teach to the test” taking individuality out of their craft.
Despite spending massive amounts of money, in 2017 the U.S. was 38th in math among 71 countries and 24th in science. We’re behind Slovakia in math, and Vietnam in science. Two recent articles however should give us hope. The first is from Karin Chenoweth who reports in the Washington Post that Chicago public school students have steadily improved in reading and math since the early 2,000s. In the early 1980s, Chicago was described as the “worst district in the country and in an ‘educational meltdown.’ A big reason for the improvement was a “recognition that principals are the drivers of improvement.
Another interesting development reported in the Wall Street Journal is an improvement in student outcomes due to the crowd-funding source, DonorsChoose. Four out of five public school teachers have requested these privately supplied funds to buy books or even air filters for a third-grade class. The founder, Charles Best, argues that teachers are well placed to know which resources will make the biggest difference for their students… unleashing “microsolutions that are better targeted, more innovative and more effective than what someone might come up with on high.”
It’s the principals and the teachers who, if left to their own devices, are the ones that can improve student outcomes. They are able to do so because they are closest to the problems in their own schools and, if necessary, can provide creative solutions.
Meanwhile, the Department of Education has recently proposed one of their priorities as providing “a Learning Environment that is Racially, Ethnically, Culturally, Disability and Linguistically Responsive and Inclusive, Supportive and Identify-Safe.” Will the regulations and guidance implementing this priority ensure that all students are able to improve their reading and math skills, or will it hinder teachers and principals trying to accomplish that?
In a recently published superb book, Try Common Sense, Replacing the Failed Ideologies of the Right and Left Phillip K. Howard argues that, “The detail of American regulation is overwhelming, serving no public purpose other than the quest for complete uniformity, even in small choices.”
Howard argues that we need to go back to broad principles and empower individuals, like school teachers, who can use the “personal resources of personality, experience and willpower to make students excited about learning” but also to hold them accountable for results.” He notes Stanford’s professor Eric Hannushek’s argument that replacing the bottom 8 percent of teachers “would bring the U.S. up to the level of [world-leading] Finland,” even though we spend nearly $5,000 more per student every year than Finland.
Instead of empowering teachers and principals, we have a democracy that, as Tocqueville argued, causes society to suffer under “a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.”
Howard doesn’t stop there. He argues that “Bureaucracy is not just inefficient. Bureaucracy is evil.” Note, bureaucracy is evil, not bureaucrats. It doesn’t have to be this way. When we empower people to solve problems, innovation follows. But innovation stops in its tracks because of the millions of local, state, and federal rules that expand like a pandemic. We don’t blame the microbes for the misery they cause, but we should blame ourselves for consciously or unconsciously choosing regulatory pandemics.