What Are Public Schools For? Parents have a different answer than activists and policymakers do

This is an article from City Journal.

The gap in perspective between professional educators and the communities they serve about what public education is for has grown unsustainably large.

The gap is most evident, and costly, on the question of what outcome a good education should lead toward. For the current generation of reformers, the answer is simple: a college degree. Embracing this college-for-all mentality, secondary schools have become college-prep academies held accountable to rigorous testing regimes and college-going rates, while policymakers have plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into subsidizing higher education. Leading proposals for “free college” and student-loan forgiveness reinforce those commitments.

American parents disagree.

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A third blind spot, though, may be causing the most damage in practice. Professional educators cling to an ideal of equity that bears little relationship to what parents know about their children and want for them. Educators have long despised the idea of “tracking” students. Over a century ago, Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University, said, “I refuse to believe that the American public intends to have its children sorted before their teens into clerks, watchmakers, lithographers . . . and treated differently in their schools according to their prophecies of their appropriate life careers. Who are we to make these prophecies?” In the 1980s, the New York Times reported that “traditional ability grouping is under attack from education experts as racist, elitist or simply a bad way to teach.” In recent years, The Atlantic has taken to calling tracking “The Other Segregation” or “Modern-Day Segregation.”

This year, reflecting the latest fads in education ideology, California proposed mathematics guidelines that reject the idea of naturally gifted children altogether, while New York City announced plans to discontinue its gifted and talented program. The dogma of college-for-all is an inevitable corollary of this orthodoxy: if all students have the same potential, all should be on the same track; if all are presumed to have the aspirations of the college-educated professional class, then of course public education should be built to send them all to college.

Parents consider this hogwash. By 61 percent to 39 percent, they say that “some students have the academic ability to succeed in college, and others do not” rather than “with the proper support, nearly every student can succeed in college.” Most strikingly, they support tracking by overwhelming margins. Given the choice between a model for high schools in which students are kept in the same courses with the goal of preparing all for college versus one in which families can choose different tracks that place their children in different courses headed toward different endpoints, parents choose tracking by more than six-to-one. That preference holds across political parties and across classes, including a 94–6 split among middle-class parents.

In political circles, conventional wisdom holds that while tracking might make sense in theory, you can’t say “tracking” because of purportedly negative connotations. This is simply wrong. Our survey split its sample, using the term “tracking” with half of parents and the more fashionable “diverse pathways” with the other half. Parents couldn’t care less.

Submitted December 15, 2021 at 09:01AM by Beliavsky https://ift.tt/31Tmwor