In 1942, there were 108,579 public school districts in the United States. By the 2020-21 school year, there were only 13,187.

That massive consolidation of school districts was propelled by the belief that economies of scale created by larger school districts would lower costs and serve students better. Those presumed efficiencies have not, however, been demonstrated in practice. As Stephen Coffin summarized,  “Large urban school districts generally have not been accountable for improving school and student performance…they have been constrained by their overly large scale…The typical large urban school district needs to be right-sized or disaggregated.”

Why has school district consolidation failed to perform as advertised? Because centralized administration creates more adverse incentives that overwhelm any advantages they might have.

One important reason is that teaching is an idiosyncratic art, practiced differently by people with different capabilities and approaches. One such difference is that younger teachers are closer in age to their students, but know fewer relevant illustrations than older teachers, who have often accumulated larger stores of knowledge over time, which faces them with a different issue: determining what works best for a particular class. Further, some seem to be far better storytellers than others.

As with other differences, these imply that there is no single set of teaching guidelines that can be imposed from above by a centralized decision-making authority, and attempting to do so will serve students poorly.

Centralized bureaucratic systems also tend to undermine teachers’ accountability to those for whom it is most important. They make teachers accountable to administrators rather than to students and their parents.

Noting the incentives created by large, centralized school districts, not to mention the many controversies that have arisen in public education helps us understand the increasing support for breaking up some of the largest school districts, which would reduce the “monopoly power” of their school boards. At issue? What is taught and how. Merely breaking larger monopolies into smaller monopolies, however, does not necessarily mean parents and students will end up with any more power over policies.

That inherent difficulty helps explain the growing support for charter schools, which are not subject to the same rules as traditional public schools. But as Thomas Sowell documents in Charter Schools and Their Enemies, even the far superior performance of charter schools in apples-to-apples comparisons may not be enough to withstand the increasing political dangers threatening charter schools under the flag of “reform,” which threatens to undermine “the urgent task of educating young people in the skills that will determine what kind of future they will have available as adults.”

Sowell illustrates both the “remarkable success” of charter schools and the hostility they face at the hands of public school teachers and administrators, their unions, schools of education, and politicians seeking union backing. For all of this, there is one simple explanation: “It is successful charter schools that are the real threat to the traditional unionized public schools.”

With charter schools so heavily opposed by the public school establishment, producing far too few spaces for those who wish to enroll in them, voucher programs may serve parents better. The portability of those resources could powerfully invigorate accountability by letting money move along with students when they leave poor teachers and schools for better ones. When resources don’t accompany students, financial punishment is visited upon more effective schools that must teach more people without more funds to do so. When resources do accompany those students, parents have far greater incentive to be involved, as their ability to redirect resources allows them to benefit from superior academic performance on behalf of their children.

Very large school districts have failed to serve parents and students, but have increased the rewards given to those responsible for that failure. Efforts to break them up have faced resistance, and even when break-ups are achieved, top-down policymaking often undermines the potential payoffs. Efforts to improve things with charter schools have shown some great results, and vouchers are attractive as a means to make educators more responsible to parents than to administrators. But we are still in the early stages of a very long struggle, and there are no quick, easy fixes.

With the powerful opposition every effort at effective educational reform faces, what we need are ways to decisively sever control of schools from the hands of special interests. And that effort faces the wild card of a sharply declining population of school-age students, which can provide yet another excuse to further consolidate educational provision that is already too centralized.  It is a daunting task, but our children’s future justifies facing it head-on.

Dr. Gary Galles is a Professor of Economics at Pepperdine.

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This article was published by AIER, American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Pixabay

A review of The Canceling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, 2023, Simon & Schuster, New York, 443 pages.

The Canceling of the American Mind appears to have been written in a hurry and could’ve used some editing and wordsmithing.  But it’s worth reading for its many examples of how colleges and other institutions have been captured by people who are not only illiberal but completely bonkers.

Warning:  You might have to be slightly bonkers yourself, or at least masochistic, to endure reading example after example of America’s version of China’s Cultural Revolution.  It’s difficult to read the examples without becoming infuriated and pessimistic.

Anyone who claims that the danger of wokeness and cancel culture is right-wing hyperbole will be disabused of the notion after reading the book, assuming that the person’s mind has not been sealed shut or shrunk to the size and density of a golf ball from spending too much time on shallow news media or even shallower social media—or from getting a degree from a college of illiberal learning.

The authors of The Canceling of the American Mind are not right-wingers, conservatives, or Trumpers, or white supremacists, or racists, or fascists, or election deniers, or climate deniers, or vaccine deniers, or deplorables, or jingoists, or any of the other pejoratives used by the cultural revolutionaries to silence opposing views—the same revolutionaries who claim to deplore racial, ethnic, cultural, and gender stereotypes.

Author Greg Lukianoff is a self-identified classical liberal and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan organization devoted to free speech that, among other endeavors, rates colleges on their commitment to free expression and their aversion to ideological orthodoxy.  Coauthor Rikki Schlott, a member of Generation Z and a research fellow at FIRE, is a classical liberal with libertarian leanings. 

Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt authored the 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which was based on their 2015 article by the same title in the Atlantic, which is certainly not a conservative publication.

In the interest of fairness, Lukianoff and Schlott lambaste illiberal conservatives who try to ban speech they disagree with or try to cancel speakers.  For sure, Trumpers won’t like what they say about the former president.  But most of the book focuses on the illiberalism on the left, because that is where the most egregious violations of free speech can be found, especially on college campuses, where Democrat faculty far outnumber Republican faculty.

To that point, the book cites studies that give the ratios of Democrat to Republican professors in academe.  The overall ratio is eight to one, but in most disciplines, it is much more unbalanced.  For instance, no Republicans could be found in anthropology. Engineering and chemistry are the only disciplines where Republicans outnumber Democrats. 

At the same time, one in four professors identifies as socialist.  It’s doubtful, however, that they will be giving up their tenure, short hours, and cushy working conditions to show solidarity with the proletariat.

Again, the book abounds with examples of how unhinged mobs have stopped speech that was counter to their worldview, kept those with different views from speaking, viciously attacked ideological heretics with verbal abuse and threats of physical violence, and destroyed the heretics’ careers in the process.

The revolutionaries come across as morally superior, thin-skinned, self-absorbed, and self-righteous.  They have a childish take on complex issues, have temper tantrums like spoiled brats, and claim that their safety and very identity are threatened by views that differ from their ideological uniformity.  Having made it to Volume II of a twelve-volume set of knowledge and wisdom, they believe that they are fully educated, have nothing new to learn, and are far smarter than those who have made it to only Volume I.

Even the ones who are students at prestigious and obscenely expensive colleges parrot in unison all of the voguish clichés, banalities, and sophistries about undefined minorities continuing to suffer from White privilege, patriarchy, racism, oppression, and colonization.  They ignorantly believe that Whites are homogeneous, come in one skin shade, don’t have wide variations in ethnicity and socioeconomic status, and have not suffered from injustices.

Projecting their own sheltered childhood experiences onto all Whites, the wealthiest and most preppy among the revolutionaries are the most neurotic about White guilt and the most eager to embrace discriminatory and exclusive forms of diversity and inclusion.  

It’s impossible to have rational conversations and constructive debates with the revolutionaries, as illustrated by an example from the book, an incident you may have heard about when it happened in 2015 at Yale.

The hullaballoo was triggered by Halloween costumes, of all things.  It began when administrators at the university issued guidelines on appropriate and inappropriate costumes.  Erika Christakis, the associate master of Yale’s Stillman College, took exception to the guidelines in a community-wide email, saying that while she deplored insensitive costumes, she didn’t think that a bureaucratic, paternalistic decree was the proper way to handle the matter.  Her preference was to trust that students were mature enough to self-police to address any insensitive fellow students and handle any conflicts in a way that would be a learning experience for everyone.

She had overestimated the maturity of Yale students.  They became outraged over her email.   She was excoriated in a letter signed by 700 students, faculty, and alumni.  The letter said: “To ask marginalized students to throw away their enjoyment of a holiday, in order to expend emotional, mental, and physical energy to explain why something is offensive, is–offensive.”  The letter concluded with the bizarre statement that the signers simply wanted their “existences not to be invalidated on campus.”

Marginalized students?  Yale is one of the world’s most expensive, selective, and prestigious universities, a university where graduates go on to become captains of industry, investment bankers, senators, presidents, Supreme Court justices, and so on. 

Invalidated existences?  If an email disagreeing with a policy on Halloween costumes can invalidate a student’s existence, the individual needs counseling or needs to go to parts of the world where people worry about having enough to eat to continue their existence or worry about their existence being ended by extremists killing them in their sleep.

The persecution of Erika Christakis continued after the letter.  Students engaged in a three-hour confrontation with a Yale College dean while making outrageous demands.  Some students demanded that they be warned before Christakis entered the dining hall.  Others demanded the firing of not only Erika but also her husband, Nicholas Christakis, who also was a Yale professor.

An angry mob of about a hundred students would go on to surround Nicholas in a courtyard, demanding his apology and cursing at him. Graduating students would later refuse to accept their diplomas from him.  Erika would eventually leave Yale, and Nicholas resigned from Stillman College but stayed at Yale as a professor.

In 2022, FIRE ranked Yale near the bottom in free speech, a lowly 198th out of 203 colleges.  Yet the university has more applicants than ever, and parents are more desperate than ever to do whatever it takes to get their children into Yale and other Ivy League schools, as was seen in the tuition bribery case of a couple of years ago.  Once admitted, students run little risk of not getting good grades and not graduating.  And after graduation, they are almost certain to have a life of privilege, power, and wealth.

This Halloween incident is just one of many examples in the book of the tactics of the cultural revolutionaries, not only the revolutionaries in academia but also the ones in media and industry.

The authors advise on how to fight the cancel culture constructively and how to deal with ad hominem attacks without resorting to the same tactics in self-defense.

I agree with the advice and have followed a similar strategy for years.  But I’m not optimistic that it will change anything, given that two generations of Americans have been steeped in the precepts of the cultural revolution, and that the thinking permeates just about every American institution.

The revolution will have to run its course until the revolutionaries get devoured by the political monster they’ve created.

Look on the bright side:  It took only ten years for China’s Cultural Revolution to end. On the other hand, it took 70 years for the Soviet Union to collapse and end the Bolshevik Revolution.

Editors Note: We think this is a good start, but it does not go far enough. We would hope in Arizona the Board of Regents and the legislature would call for the elimination of all DEI programs. Students should be admitted and teaching positions should be filled on the basis of merit, regardless of the race or ethnicity of the person involved. The way to stop racial discrimination is to quit using racial discrimination as a policy. Where taxpayer money is involved, DEI should be eliminated.

The Iowa Board of Regents called for the state’s three public universities to review the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, also known as DEI, and eliminate functions unnecessary for compliance or accreditation.

The vote came after Regent David Barker presented a report to the board from a three-member task force formed in March that included feedback from students, faculty, DEI administrators, and others.

David Barker said the University of Iowa, Iowa State, and the University of Northern Iowa are examples of diversity.

“The combined percentage of students that are members of minority racial groups is more than double that of the population of Iowa and our minority graduation rates, including for African American students, are higher than average,” Barker said.

The Iowa Legislature passed Senate File 560 earlier this year that directed the Board of Regents to review DEI policies in the universities.

The recommendations adopted by the board also require universities to take reasonable steps to ensure “no employee, student, applicant, or campus visitor is compelled to disclose their pronouns.”

The universities must also “explore a proposal, including cost, to establish a widespread initiative that includes opportunities for education and research on free speech and civic education.”

The policy could be a model for other states. Rep. Alex Dallman said in a social media post he thinks the Wisconsin Board of Regents should enact the policy.

“The DEI study group looked at programs and efforts by the universities in Iowa surrounding DEI,” Dallman said. “Included in their recommendations is eliminating unnecessary DEI related positions and responsibilities as well as eliminating DEI specific operations and services at their state-funded universities.”

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This article was published by Center Square and is reproduced with permission.