The War On Schools

State takeovers. Mass layoffs. Teacher shortages. School closures. As America debates the future of public K-12 education, Professor Daniel Moak provides the historical context to answer the question: How did we get here?

By Amy Martin

hen Daniel Moak was a teenager, the teachers at his public high school in Billings, Montana, went on strike.

“At first, I was sort of elated—no school!” he remembers.

“But then it lasted several weeks. So I started talking to the teachers on the picket line. They were upset with declining wages and cuts to pensions, but also this sense of loss of autonomy they associated with some of the federal policies that were coming from Washington. It was the first time I realized how political the issue of education actually was.”

It was 2002—one year after Congress had passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a bipartisan bill based on the premise that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals could improve outcomes in K-12 public education. The bill required all schools receiving federal funding to administer standardized tests to students in certain grades, and provided punitive measures states could enact if schools failed to meet certain targets.

NCLB received widespread support from both Republicans and Democrats, and the measure passed 381-41 in the House of Representatives and 87-10 in the Senate. The legislators’ intentions were good: improve education to close achievement gaps and ensure all students would have the skills they needed to contribute to the workforce.

But as Moak, an assistant professor of government at Connecticut College, explains in his new book, From the New Deal to the War on Schools: Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State, there was already ample evidence NCLB was destined to fail.

More than two decades later, the future of public education, once a crown jewel of American society, is in peril. Faced with massive teacher shortages, some states are cutting school weeks to four days, eliminating professional requirements and increasing class sizes. Districts failing to meet progress goals are being taken over by state governments, often with detrimental effects. Public funding is being diverted to private entities through charter schools and universal vouchers.

And still, the achievement gap widens.

If a student is living in poverty and doesn’t have help at home because his parents are working multiple jobs to make ends meet ... it’s unlikely a teacher is going to be able to substantially increase his test score by teaching alone.

— Daniel Moak, assistant professor of government

THE GREAT EQUALIZER

Moak’s research traces the origins of what he calls today’s “punitive education state” back much further than the passing of NCLB, to a significant shift in political ideology in the post-New Deal era.

“In the 1930s, poverty, racial inequality and unemployment were interpreted as problems with the structure of the economy. So if people were poor, it was because the economy was not providing high enough wages or enough well-paying jobs, and the policies of the time reflected that thinking,” Moak explains.

“But by the time we get to the 1960s, the effects of automation and de-industrialization begin hitting communities and we see some real economic turmoil. And the orthodoxy begins to shift to, ‘It’s not really about the labor market, it’s about the skills that individuals bring to the labor market.’ Now, if you’re impoverished, it’s your fault because you don’t have the right skills. And this is the moment education becomes really important because the interpretation is that K-12 education can provide the skills that are going to improve people’s economic standing and reduce racial inequality.”

It was with that backdrop that Congress passed the first major federal legislation directed toward public education—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—in 1965. Part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” the act was seen as a progressive measure, providing significant federal funding for professional development, educational resources and instruction materials to public schools, and in particular supporting schools attended by children from lower-income families.

“This is the first time the government is able to give a lot of money—billions of dollars—to K-12 schools, and that’s a really good thing,” Moak says.

“On the flip side, it brought the expectation that schools would be able to solve issues of poverty and racial inequality. And fundamentally, I argue this is not something schools can solve by themselves,” he adds.

“But you have the federal government pouring all this money into education, and very soon after the passing of this legislation, lawmakers begin to demand evidence that it’s going to work.”

ENTER: THE STANDARDIZED TEST

As lawmakers sharpened their focus on the impact of the ESEA, a consensus began to emerge that the best way to measure educational success was to look at student performance on standardized tests.

“This frustration with a perceived lack of progress was the big impetus for expanding standardized tests,” Moak says. “And then when there wasn’t this dramatic closing of racial gaps or huge improvements on test scores, you begin to see policymakers from both parties calling for accountability from schools and then also from teachers.”

Yet Moak found that even the evidence at the time suggested there was only a limited effect teachers could have on standardized test scores.

“If a student is living in poverty and doesn’t have help at home because his parents are working multiple jobs to make ends meet, and then he comes to school hungry because his family can’t afford to feed him, it’s unlikely a teacher is going to be able to substantially increase his test score by teaching alone,” Moak says.

“We knew even then that these tests largely reflected the structural inequalities not necessarily in schools but outside of them. And to ignore that and pretend we can solve all of society’s issues just by changing school policy—it was never going to work.”

Moak’s research also delves into the origins of the standardized tests, which were developed in part to force schools to run more like private businesses. They were purposely designed to reduce teacher discretion to measurable outcomes, so there wouldn’t be wide discrepancies in what students were learning, which in practice stripped teachers of their autonomy in the classroom and even fundamentally shifted the purpose of education.

“Historically, classroom education was about teaching children to learn to live together, learn to communicate with fellow citizens, and learn how to pursue their interests. These tests helped shift the focus of education to things that are of interest to future employers.”

The tests are also designed to measure year-over-year progress in a single grade rather than to track the progress of individual students, Moak says. So a school might perform well with a particular class of third graders one year, for example, only to have a different group of third graders score lower the next.

“These are different children with different abilities and different life stories taking the test each year. So you end up with these absurd situations where someone wins ‘teacher of the year’ one year because of students’ test scores, and then the very next year is judged ‘inadequate’ because the next group doesn’t perform as well.”

Despite existing evidence that the tests were an imperfect measurement, political pressure on schools and teachers only intensified.

“We see the emergence of demands for things like merit-based teacher pay, alternatives to public schools, even the breakup of the ‘public school monopoly,’ because the interpretation is we still have the problem of unemployment, poverty and racial inequality—we’ve given all this money to the schools to do something about it, and they haven’t solved it,” Moak explains.

“And this really gets set in motion by the late 1960s and ’70s, much earlier than most people realize.”

You end up with these absurd situations where someone wins ‘teacher of the year’ one year because of students’ test scores, and then the very next year is judged ‘inadequate’ because the next group doesn’t perform as well.

—Daniel Moak, assistant professor of government

THE SNOWBALL EFFECT

By the 1980s, a continued “shredding of the social safety net” further exacerbates the problem, Moak says.

“You see attacks on welfare and the scaling back of social benefits that people experience, which leads to greater inequality, which then makes it even more difficult for teachers to do their jobs. And it’s in this broader context that we see the passing of No Child Left Behind.”

A reauthorization of the earlier ESEA, NCLB codified standardized testing requirements and expanded states’ legal authority to punish underperforming schools and teachers, essentially doubling down on the initial bet on schools and upping the stakes.

Yet many of those punitive measures have only further hindered the academic success of students.

Studies show that when standardized tests are the main metric by which schools and teachers are judged, educators will focus heavily on “bubble students”—those who have the capacity to improve their test scores—at the expense of all of the other students, including the lowest and highest achievers.

When schools fail to meet testing goals, they risk losing funding, state government takeovers, mass layoffs, and even closure. Decreased funding leads to larger class sizes, less individualized instruction and less paraprofessional support, and underperforming schools then find it harder to recruit experienced teachers, who are concerned about job security.

Stagnant pay for teachers, along with the erosion of benefits and a loss of professional respect and autonomy, has led to a nationwide teacher shortage as qualified individuals seek employment elsewhere. To address staffing shortages, some states, like Oklahoma, are cutting back instruction time and limiting the number of days children attend school each week. Other states, like Florida, are eliminating professional requirements and staffing classrooms with military veterans with no teaching experience or training.

“There have been repeated attacks on teachers’ unions as placing their own interests above students’ interests, but one thing I remember very distinctly from the strike at my high school was a sign that read, ‘Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions,’ and I think that remains very true today,” Moak says.

More than 100 public school districts deemed “failing” have been taken over by state governments or entities since the late 1980s, yet multiple studies show that these takeovers tend to further destabilize districts with greater teacher and staff turnover and less parent and community engagement, and rarely lead to increased academic achievement. Other states have broadened charter school programs or instituted school voucher systems, diverting public funds into private, for-profit entities that can pick and choose who they serve.

“You now have people going after public education as a concept in general. And there are real reasons to be concerned about privatizing the public education system,” Moak says.

And while the issue is highly political, Moak points out that the pressure on schools to solve broader social issues has continually come from both sides of the aisle.

“For almost 60 years, this has been the dominant ideological orientation. The rhetoric from both Republicans and Democrats has been, ‘Nothing is more important than schools—this is the path to prosperity both individually and as a nation,’ to the detriment of other social programs,” he says. “It’s going to be difficult to break out of that overnight.”

There are reasons to remain hopeful. Americans still largely support the concept of a free, public education for all students, and teachers have had some recent successes pushing back against punitive measures.

But more comprehensive solutions are needed, Moak says.

“Just as the problem is not educational alone, the solution can’t only be education. It’s got to be part of a broader political movement to tackle some of those structural issues that are really at the root cause of poverty, unemployment and racial inequality,” he says.

“Education is extremely important, but we need to be realistic about what we can expect education to
accomplish.”