Pull These Two Levers To Fix K-12 Education

By Ashley Berner

We fight a lot about education in the United States. On its face, that is neither new nor, necessarily, problematic—sometimes conflicting ideas produce innovative solutions. What is problematic is this: Our current education policy debates pit entire school sectors against one another. School districts decry charters, school choice advocates demean districts and politicians stoke curriculum wars to win votes.

This type of animus is unique to the United States. Why? Because unlike us, most democracies have long funded a wide array of school types equally, while holding them equally accountable for academic results.

Policymakers in, for instance, Australia, England, the Netherlands, Poland and many other nations don’t spend time arguing about whether Catholic, Montessori or district schools are inherently superior; they’re too focused on helping each individual school thrive.

This arrangement is called educational pluralism, and it has three main elements: state funding, state oversight and diverse delivery. Educational pluralism, in one form or another, is the global norm. In fact, a full 83% of the 200 countries tracked by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization include public, private and volunteer organizations in their school systems.

We in the U.S. aren’t there yet. My hope, as I argue in my just-released book, “Educational Pluralism and Democracy: How to Handle Indoctrination, Promote Exposure, and Rebuild America’s Schools,” is that stepping back from our inherited notions about education—that public-private binary we’ve known since the late 19th century—will bring much-needed air into the room and allow a more generous space for policy decisions.

In the meantime, the good news is that high-performing, pluralistic school systems routinely pull two “levers” that are both available to any school, at any time. These levers are a robust academic curriculum and distinctive school cultures. Each can exercise an independent, positive effect on academic and civic outcomes.

A Robust Academic Curriculum

American education systematically under-challenges students. The low level of rigor has a long history, and many factors contribute to it, as I discuss in my book. But the upshot is that adults and students alike are woefully unprepared to exercise democratic citizenship. In terms of demonstrable civic knowledge and skills, the most recent National Assessments of Educational Progress (also known as “The Nation’s Report Card”) found that only 31% of eighth graders are proficient in reading, 25% in geography and a mere 13% in U.S. history. And it doesn’t get better as students grow older. The percentage of 12th graders who are proficient in U.S. history? Only 12%. Adults fare no better, with surveys from the past 15 years showing that a full 25% of adults are not able to name any of the three branches of U.S. government, and only 6% earn a “B” or better on a test of international politics.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. When Chicago Public Schools put the academically rigorous International Baccalaureate Diploma Program in 13 of its extremely low-performing high schools in 1997, students who went through all four years of the program were 40% more likely to attend college than their peers. The focus and rigor of some urban charter networks accelerate learning and erase gaps between different racial groups. When Duval County Public Schools (Jacksonville, Fla.) implemented knowledge-rich curricula in its K-8 schools, students’ academic growth was so pronounced that six other districts in the state followed suit.

The difference between business-as-usual classrooms and those that nurture young people’s emotional engagement and intellectual success can be summed up in a single concept: access to knowledge. This is a key reason that students from wealthy families are more likely than students from lower-income families to succeed in school: Well-resourced families often provide copious amounts of knowledge about the world—from geography and current events to good literature and science museums—as a routine matter. First-generation families, often working multiple jobs to make ends meet, rarely have time or access to knowledge-building experiences. Therefore, if schools don’t ensure classrooms brimming with knowledge about the world, the achievement gaps between wealthy and low-income students persist.

Natalie Wexler’s “The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—and How to Fix It” is a must-read summary of recent research and practice on the benefits of a sequenced, spiraled curriculum in which students encounter important topics repeatedly, in greater depth, across their K-12 journeys. The repetition and expansion reinforce key concepts and allows students to build on what they already know. My institute at Johns Hopkins developed a trademarked process to analyze social studies and English language arts curricula through this lens; the resulting Knowledge Maps depict areas of knowledge that are supported and those that are not, unit by unit and grade by grade. And the Knowledge Matters campaign provides compelling reports from school systems that have adopted knowledge-building curricula—and given teachers the tools to deliver them—to good effect. Good things are happening in the curriculum field, but it will take time and effort to scale.

A Strong School Culture

“School culture” does not mean just a friendly school, a school where people like each other or a school with minimal bullying. It refers, rather, to the underlying values, norms and rules (both written and unwritten) that shape what we see when we walk in the door.

As two scholars of school culture put it:

The term culture provides ... an intuitively appealing way to help school leaders understand their school’s unwritten rules and traditions, customs, and expectations. The unofficial patterns seem to permeate everything: the way people act, how they dress, what they talk about or consider taboo, whether they seek out colleagues or isolate themselves, whether they work together, and how teachers feel about their work and their students.

School culture therefore acts as a foundation on which the school community rests. And mission clarity helps create a “thick,” organic community that makes moral formation more cohesive and academic achievement more likely. This outcome is observable in many types of schools, both religious and secular, public and private. For instance, both James Coleman and Anthony Bryk et al. found this factor at work in American Catholic schools, whose “communal culture” revolved around the belief that human beings have inherent value, having been “made in the image and likeness of God.” Education professor and former teacher Scott Seider observed the benefits of strong normative culture in three very distinctive charter schools in Boston. Education writer Karin Chenoweth attributed students’ success in the large district schools she studied to an intentional alignment of leaders and staff around the mission of academic rigor and post-secondary attainment. Summing up the empirical findings, international scholar and civil rights activist Charles Glenn notes, “Schools with a distinctive identity ... offer educational advantages deriving from their clarity of focus.”

As with curriculum, so with culture: Good things are happening in the field. Many school systems emphasize and pressure-test their mission alignment through annual surveys, and several large district school systems (most notably Miami-Dade, San Antonio and Indianapolis) have mechanisms in place that encourage schools to differentiate from one another.

Yes, heightened polarization about the structure and the content of American education is exhausting and generally unhelpful for kids. But all of us, whether parents, teachers or policymakers, can leverage what we know about academic rigor and school culture to make things better right here and right now, one school at a time.

Ashley Berner is director and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and a fellow with the Mercatus Center’s Pluralism and Civil Exchange program.