American conservatism at times forgets her first principles, the most oft-forgotten of which is hierarchy. Nowhere is this more visible than in education.
If we want to fix the issues with education, then not every student will excel. By failing to respect the healthy necessity of failing those who are not fit to progress, all we do is degrade the credentials and educational experience of those who genuinely are fit.
The origin of today’s educational woes is the fact that both the Right and Left approach education from the perspective of rabid egalitarianism, treating student failure as institutional failure. This is reflected famously in Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” and its Obama-era successor, “Every Student Succeeds.” Across the country, we punish schools and universities for giving out Fs and reward high graduation rates. But despite rising graduation rates, graduate quality is declining.
In everything, including education, the qualified are distinguished by the existence of the unqualified. Many states today, though, refuse to acknowledge this essential principle and instead pass along students who fail to meet grade-level standards. This is due to the fact that there is great concern about how holding back students affects their development. Yet the goal of the education system is not merely any individual student’s welfare, but the nation’s. The damage done to the education system by pushing along students is cataclysmic when taken in aggregate. Furthermore, even at the individual level, the story is complicated.
Many studies indicate retention only consistently harms high school students and has either a neutral or positive impact on elementary students. The much-vaunted Mississippi Miracle’s success, wherein the state’s students, who were previously performing well below the national average, rapidly rose to above the national average, came from a combination of extensive investments in early childhood literacy with mandatory retention.
Yet once again, the welfare of individual students must not be our only concern, lest we lose the forest for the trees. Without standard enforcement, it invites the current situation whereby 20% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. The Pareto principle time and time again proves true: The key to our national future is enabling our best and minimizing damage from our worst. Measures like academic “tracking” on the moderate side and suspension at the extreme are argued to harm the worst performers, but we also know that the best students do better when separated from the worst.
It is often said that “kindness to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent,” and yet we balk at applying this principle to our schools, even as they suffer under rising disorder caused by lax discipline. Roughly five to ten percent of the population is persistently antisocial, and these students not only disrupt their own education, but their entire cohort’s.
The estimated value of harm is approximately an $80,000 reduction in lifetime income to affected pupils. To tolerate the worst students is to rob the majority that simply seek to learn; the enforcement of disciplinary standards is just as critical for the healthy function of our schools as academic standards are, and like academic standards, their decline is substantially harming the quality of education received by the majority of students.
Low-performers take up a large quantity of cash. Take, for instance, English Language Learners (ELLs). States at the median increase funding by 25% relative to the average student. 24% of these students are foreigners, and while the remaining are U.S.-born, many have foreign parents. There is no data on the number of ELLs without legal status, but given at least 5.5 million students have at least one illegal parent, logic indicates a strong overlap. It is not an exaggeration to say we are paying a premium to educate the children of illegal foreigners.
Another example is the exceptional amount spent per pupil for special education. Congress mandates special resources for these students, but in the majority of districts, the fiscal burden largely falls on locally-sourced revenues. Local tax bases are strained to provide an education for those who likely never contribute to them, let alone become net taxpayers. This especially affects rural communities which have higher rates of autism and smaller tax bases relative to cities.
Special education and ELL programs do yield positive outcomes for the students involved; their funding is a good thing for society. What is problematic, though, is how much they are funded relative to what is spent on advanced students, who will make up most of the nation’s future tax base. The average district only receives $3.38 per pupil for gifted education. AP courses rarely cost districts more than $5,000 ($200 per student for a class of 25), and much of that cost is for one-time purchases rather than routine expenses.
Essentially, we spend little on our most gifted students and extraordinary amounts on our least; it is the opposite of what the Pareto Principle would guide us to do.
However, before we can contemplate spending more on our best students, we must identify them, which means restoring value to grades. Grade inflation is rampant in both K-12 and higher education. Universities gave 45% of students an A in 2008 as compared to 15% in 1940. In the same period, the share of the population possessing a college degree has increased by a factor of 5. Thus, there are 15 times more people walking around in the general public who can claim to have aced university than 80 years ago. This would be laudatory if not for the fact that college graduates are no longer intellectually distinct from the general public.
Unfortunately, universities – like high schools – have an incentive to graduate as many students as possible in order to secure state funding and retain tuition-paying students. But cohort enlargement is not institutionally costless, as it leads to reduced cohort quality. The discipline most singularly guilty of this is education, where nearly 70% of students receive an A. Pay is often attributed as a major factor behind the decline in teacher aptitude, but evidently their training lacks rigor too, no doubt a consequence of education itself being a hub of radical egalitarianism. Thus, we are in a vicious cycle whereby higher education devalues degrees by lowering standards, leading to teachers who do the same in K-12, causing more of the same in higher education. If we want this to stop, the solution is abundantly clear: More students at every level must fail if degrees are to again actually mean something.
The simple truth is that society has a carrying capacity for the educated; not everyone can be or should be extensively educated. We must recognize that failure is a crucial part of any credentialing system. Effective exclusion of those who don’t perform at the required level is what gives degrees their value.
Whatever the course for education reform, it must be rooted in the principle that standards must be upheld and that graduation rates must not be allowed to increase at the expense of educational quality.
