Restarting School
On School Choice, Institution Building, and Innovation in Education
“…we are fortunate in escaping the deadening influence of uniformity in the educational process…if a nation desires intellectual vitality and originality, it will encourage this variety….”
This would be a great assessment of how we need to move forward in American education post-COVID. Russell Kirk wrote it in the late 1950s. We see new threats concerning the “deadening influence of uniformity” in American schooling today, and this is why school choice, building new educational institutions, and innovating in education are probably more important issues today than they were for Kirk.
School Choice
Two kinds of families typically engage in modern school choice: wealthy ones who can write tuition checks or move into the most desired school districts, and poorer ones, at whom most choice programs are targeted, or those who live in areas with the worst-performing schools. That leaves out a large segment of the population, and current strife in schools shows what happens when families feel stuck and without options. In large, sprawling countries, or even large sprawling states and cities, the choice is always going to be between increasing choice, and constant fighting. We know many schools don’t serve poor students well. We have also known for a long time that many aren’t serving wealthier students well either. Improved technology, increasing work-from-home abilities, and greater societal acceptance among parents and policymakers, are coming together to enable more school choice. Which is great. Russell Kirk was of course right that this variety of schools will help increase “intellectual vitality and originality” among schools. How could it not?
On the other side of the equation, authoritarian COVID rules and culture war issues are pushing more families to look for more solutions. Which is also great for school choice, though those fights are less great for society in general. Parents have sought a huge variety of options over the past three years in order to give their kids better experiences.
Institution Building
But school choice is not simply about enabling easy pop-up answers to students’ needs. The best examples of school choice and its best outcomes are when new institutions are set up, and able to last and to adapt over time. New – but smaller – institutions are created, with new and smaller communities founding and tending to them. The people involved in these new educational institutions and communities feel ties to them and a responsibility to nurture them over time.
Some readers will be aware of how many 20-something charter school founders the country churned through over the past few decades trying to remake US education. Lots of them were/are still heroic, but that just isn’t sustainable. What is more sustainable are smaller, more local operations, with little groups willing and able to coach up their benches and then hand the institution off to a newer, younger group.
In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin writes about how smaller-scale institution-building could actually help improve the climate of American society, even as we re-localize. Noting the Catholic principle of subsidiarity – that “nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization,” Levin writes:
A modernized ethic of subsidiarity would therefore not yield a radical revolution in American life but an incremental revival. And it would not involve a checklist of public programs and policy steps. It would begin, instead, with an instinct for decentralization in our public affairs, a tendency toward experimentation and bottom-up problem solving, a greater patience for variety in our approaches to social and economic problems and priorities, more room for ingenuity and tolerance for trial and error, and more freedom for communities to live out their moral ideals, and so to each define freedom a little differently. It would involve greater attentiveness to the near at hand, and so a lesser emphasis on national battles—lowering the stakes, and therefore the temperature, of our national politics.
There may not be a better candidate for this kind of shift to decentralization than American K12 education.
Innovation in Education
And of course innovation is important – is necessary – to get these new institutions. As political scientist Hugh Heclo – who will likely make recurring appearances in this newsletter – writes in On Thinking Institutionally, “I believe it is possible to imagine being both thoroughly modern and more deeply committed to institutional values. By thoroughly modern I mean that we will probably continue to be distrustful of institutions and on guard against their power over us. And rightfully so, given the harm they can do us…Along with a prudent regard for institutional failings, a turning of thought and action toward institutional values could also prevent much harm and do us great good.”
I will get a lot more into “institutional values” over time. Heclo adds that institutions need to change sometimes: “…there certainly is an inert stability if institutions weather time as rocks do. But always to do the same thing as surrounding circumstances change is also, in a sense, not really to be doing the same thing. If my behavior stays the same as it was in college, while my friends go on to start families and develop their careers, what once looked like boyish charm will probably look more like childishness. So, too, when an institutionalized arrangement remains fixed in place while the relevant environment around it changes, this boulderlike fixedness can amount to a transformative drift in the institution.” This is certainly not to say that every institutional value is relative and constantly negotiable. Stability + slow, or at least well-informed innovation is often the way to go.
Russell Kirk left us with other relevant wisdom which I’ll use to wrap up this introductory post. In a 1977 piece, he writes that we need a change in American schooling. “…we begin to look to the little platoon,” Kirk says, “The big battalions are failing us.” Any topic around school choice, institution building, and innovation in education is fair game, but this newsletter will focus a lot of a group of schools that I think is doing a great job of offering school choice by building innovative new institutions – hybrid schools. I also have a preference for old things, as I will talk about a lot. But as Heclo says, sometimes things stop working, and it’s important to know when that happens; to know what time it is. It’s time to change American education in big ways, by going small.