Can the politics of schools be fixed?

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America’s schools exist to educate students — right?

Not exactly, says Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at the Ohio State University. In his recently published book, "No Adult Left Behind," Kogan lays out a provocative thesis: public education is not set out to maximize student learning. Instead, it prioritizes the various demands of adults.

Employee groups protect their members’ jobs, voters without children reject additional funding for schools, and activists derail a focus on academics by complaining about school mascots or the types of books in the library, he says.

“Kids can’t vote,” writes Kogan. “Most people who can (and do) aren’t particularly concerned about their learning.”

Kogan is taking aim at a once-cherished American institution, the local school board, which finds itself under siege these days. Politicians are increasingly funding charter schools and private schools, which are not run by elected boards. In some places, state leaders are taking power from local boards.

Kogan’s argument is not exactly new — “adults” has long been a veritable slur in education policy — but his particular findings and recommendations are worth considering. He shows that when school boards focus more on hot-button culture war topics, student learning suffers. He also has found that voters in school board elections are often not representative of the children and families in public schools. And he notes that school board members rarely lose elections because of bad student learning outcomes.

To address these concerns Kogan wants to move school board elections to a time when more people vote (i.e. in November in even years); to promote the use of growth measures to help voters make better decisions; and to embrace school choice policies targeted at disadvantaged students. He also wants people to accept that “local democracy” is not an unalloyed good. 

I wanted to speak to Kogan because I think these ideas are worth taking seriously — and also because I wanted to hear his response to pushback to them.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write that there is an “inherent tension” between local democratic control and improving student achievement. Why?

Democratic control has a lot of virtues, but one of the downsides is that academic concerns mostly take a back seat. They are not the primary or even secondary factor that's driving voter decisions in who they support in these elections. 

One of the alternatives when a school board is deemed ineffective is a state takeover. My reading of the literature is that those takeovers are not very effective on average.

My read of the evidence is similar to yours, although there are some exceptions. I don't know that state-level officials who are appointing the people taking over the school districts necessarily have stronger incentives to care about academic outcomes.

So is local democratic control the best of all the bad options?

I'm open to that possibility. The last chapter of my book doesn't say get rid of school boards. It just says, make local democracy better. And I offer three mechanisms. 

One is election timing. The typical voter in an off-cycle election is somebody in their 60s and 50s. When we move from off cycle to November the dimension that changes the most is age and the share of voters who have kids. It dramatically increases the political power of parents who have the most skin in the game.

We can also improve the quality of the information that's available to voters. When most people think about school quality, they think about proficiency rates, how much the students know at the end of this year. That is not a measure of school quality at all. It's a measure mostly of the demographic composition of the students. We need to do a much better job helping voters, helping parents, helping policymakers use better measures of quality. Instead of looking to see how much students know at a point in time, look at growth from year to year. That really helps isolate the things that are happening in the classroom. 

We can also think about school choice. Creating alternative channels of accountability, allowing families to vote with their feet, does create some pressures for school districts to do a better job serving the students. 

Should we just have as much school choice as possible?

No, for two reasons. I like targeted school choice programs because I want public schools to compete to retain and serve disadvantaged students.

Also, parents generally do try to do what's best for kids, but wanting to do good things versus doing good things are not the same. There's a big informational problem there. At the core of so many problems in education is that schools that look good are not the same schools that are good. 

You're saying that parents won't make the right decision for their kids. You're an “adult” — why should we trust your adult interest over parents’ interest?

Certainly a lot of school choice advocates disagree with me. Some would argue that if parents are choosing schools that have negative effects on test scores, it's probably because they know something that we don't, and maybe it is the right choice for the kids. Maybe they care about bullying and safety, maybe they care about values. I think it's possible. Again, if parents are making choices that they have with good information, that's fine. I just don't think they have good information right now. 

Why do you define culture-war topics, like school mascots or policies related to transgender students, as adult issues?

The adults that are fighting those battles argue, oftentimes not unreasonably, that they care about students. I think they care much more about getting their particular viewpoint inculcated into policy. That leads to potentially big disruptions to how districts and schools operate. If the superintendent gets fired because people are really upset about some cultural-war-related issues, that has all sorts of downstream consequences for the district.

I find some evidence that when there is a high-profile culture war type controversy we do see some modest decreases in student achievement. People who have really good intentions — even though they might win on the policy, there might be a cost to getting that win.

You're trying to distinguish these as adult issues. Lots of students are invested in these topics too. 

That's very fair. I don't think they’re just adult issues. But how students feel about them, and even how students’ families feel about them, is really not what determines the kinds of policies that you get at the school district level.

In the long run, until recently, we have seen large educational gains in this country. How is that possible if our political system for running schools is so dysfunctional?

I don't have very satisfying answers. It is interesting that the gains we saw, particularly in the 1990s to the 2010s, took some external accountability reforms. The conversation around “A Nation at Risk” did make people care more about student learning than they seem to care now.

Reach me at [email protected].