Chaos is bad. Humans are made to look for patterns, and to seek out order in everything. Nature tends toward (relatively perfect) order. Chaos is unnatural. Order fits the human condition.
Schooling the past few years does not seem like it’s trending toward order. A recent release of EdChoice’s ongoing polling showed a fairly high number of parents either sending their children to microschools, or interested in them:
Other measures show homeschooling on the rise over the past few years, but some nonzero amount of that increase is all of the kids in the variety of schools people are mentioning to EdChoice. Maybe a lot more than zero. Lots of kids aren’t leaving schools to do fulltime homeschooling, though they might show up in large-scale Census and similar datasets that way. They’re going to hybrid schools and microschools, and registering with their states as homeschoolers. See Question 2 here.
These students are incredibly hard to track accurately. The landscape may look like chaos. But it’s not chaos. It’s spontaneous order working itself out. Rather than trying to “reform education,” people are just solving their problems themselves. Ask yourself how well this statement from Adam Ferguson describes the current hybrid school/microschool/learning pod landscape (hint: really, really well):
“Men, in general, are sufficiently disposed to occupy themselves in forming projects and schemes: But he who would scheme and project for others, will find an opponent in every person who is disposed to scheme for himself. Like the winds that come we know not whence, and blow whithersoever they list, the forms of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin; they arise, long before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not from the speculations of men. The crowd of mankind, are directed in their establishments and measures, by the circumstances in which they are placed; and seldom are turned from their way, to follow the plan of any single projector. Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”
Individual schools are most definitely the result of direct human action and design, but the whole sector these days isn’t being directed by anyone. At best, friendly state legislators are trying not to break things.
Now, there is some reasonable skepticism about what this could all look like if we keep down this path. Those state legislators are passing universal education savings accounts in loads of new states. Parents will have many more options, and not just of schools, but in directing the multiple ways the education funding slated for their children is spent. So this piece by Checker Finn deserves some response. Finn is a school choice supporter and his work in education reform is important. The overall argument in this piece is that we should be placing yet more speed bumps in the road as we design and enact “universal education savings accounts,” or even skeptical that such systems can really lead to better outcomes. Some points/counterpoints:
-On parent decisionmaking and school closures:
“…even good parents often make dubious education choices, choices that ill-serve their kids in the long run. Instead of seeking out schools that maximize children’s future prospects by equipping them with solid skills, knowledge, and (one can hope!) values and behavior patterns, some parents settle for convenient locations or are beguiled by the claims and advertisements of shoddy schools in search of pupils. The very same parents may not enroll their kids in summer school despite Covid learning losses, failure to pass third grade reading guarantees, or lots of absences during the year and much to make up.”
Currently, instead of having parents make “bad” decisions, we hand the reins over to school officials who make “bad” decisions, and we the public and parents can only make very inefficient, very long-term complaints. This is not a better system. Are kids in conventional schools on average being sent to the best fits for their future prospects, and walking away with “solid skills, knowledge, values, and behavior patterns” now? Not even close. And without even more choice, parents are already settling for the convenient locations – because that’s where they’re told they can go. Many students are suffering COVID learning losses literally because of decisions their schools made to stay closed, while nearby hybrid and microschools and others remained open. Lots of hybrid and microschools literally came into existence in order to fix the problems Finn fears they might cause.
-On the need for audits:
“…when lots of money is floating around, some folks will grab for it by starting shoddy (but lucrative) schools, filling board and staff with friends and relatives, leasing a facility at exorbitant rates from themselves or their cousins, and deploying nothing that resembles a coherent curriculum.”
I agree with this, and will state that I will take second place to almost literally no one on the importance of audits in education. I’ve done more than most – measured by work, insults, and threats – dealing with them. Finn is right about this issue. But it’s not like conventional schools are covering themselves in glory with their honesty. We have had this discussion about less-regulated education entrepreneurs globally already. All of this is a reason to be prudent and to audit ESAs, not to overregulate or to strangle or to “guide” innovations.
-On rich parents and bad spending:
“…the “windfall” effect when tax dollars are used to pay for private school tuitions that well-off parents (which does not include many private-school families) were already paying for on their own; the possibility that entrepreneurs will set up shop in wealthy areas where parents can “top up” the ESA dollars while ignoring communities with greater need for good education options; and the use of ESA dollars by parents to purchase things with, at best, a hazy relationship to K–12 education—tickets to amusement parks, trampolines, and such. It doesn’t take many such extravagances to put a cloud over the whole policy.”
Finn also mentions that these faults with wide-open ESAs will all be picked up by the media, leading to overcorrection/overregulation and a compromise of the mission in the future.
All real problems! And I’ll add more! It’s not just poor choosers and greedy providers. A drum I bang a lot is that even well-meaning people can be susceptible to Founders Disease, and this can especially be the case in small-by-design startup organizations. Another that concerns me is: where are we supposed to find all of these teachers? But these are solvable problems.
And this is where we have a fundamental shift; an actual, real change in education policy happening in this moment. In a piece on what parents actually want in terms of schooling for their children, my colleague Ben Scafidi includes a great discussion of the difference between “rules of just conduct” and “rules of organization.” He writes,
In Hayek’s view, rules of just conduct:
consist of basic laws,
are generated over time,
help solve recurring problem situations,
provide individuals and groups with “ground rules,”
help create a “spontaneous order,”
facilitate people using knowledge to pursue their interests, and
maximize opportunities for all people.
Hayek distinguished rules of just conduct from rules of organization, which:
consist of detailed rules and regulations,
are generated as desired by those in control of government,
are designed to achieve particular results,
limit opportunities for individuals and groups to use knowledge to pursue their interests, and
are implemented by government bureaucracies.
That paper was written in 2013, but it’s a great depiction of what is happening now. Humans don’t actually want chaos anywhere, and parents certainly don’t want chaos in their market for schools. But they are increasingly fed up with a “rules of organization”-style approach.
Technology, social developments, and now policy are moving us toward greater acceptance of “rules of just conduct” in school choice. But it is a transition in thinking, in policy, and in practice, and it’s bumpy. That transition is the tension between Finn’s concerns and these universal ESA bills that are quickly becoming laws around the country. It can feel chaotic right now. So sure, “embrace the chaos,” but it’s not going to remain chaos. The picture at the top of this post is from the show Moon Knight. It’s the *villain* telling Moon Knight to “embrace the chaos.” Moon Knight doesn’t exactly do that; he doesn’t let his life remain in chaos; he accepts the strangeness of his situation and re-orders it. Our hybrid and microschool landscape won’t always feel chaotic because it has to find a stable state that people can build on. And anyway, “chaos is dull.”
Maybe it’s not even really chaos. We’re going to get a handle on this new landscape and channel the “chaos” we currently feel in lots of different, productive directions that aren’t available to us under our old “rules of organization.” We’re moving toward what will be a landscape with different rules, and a much wider variety of schools, and which will be “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”
Moon Knight is one of my favorite 'dark' Marvel phase pieces. So gritty and bending. Such a breath of fresh air. But what I appreciate most is the story's ability to touch on difficult subjects that are also heartfelt. Thanks for this reminder, Eric.