This graphic accompanies “Hunger for Stability Quells Appetite for Change: Results of the 2021 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion,” by Michael B. Henderson, David Houston, Paul E. Peterson, and Martin R. West.
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This graphic accompanies “Hunger for Stability Quells Appetite for Change: Results of the 2021 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion,” by Michael B. Henderson, David Houston, Paul E. Peterson, and Martin R. West.
The post Education Next Annual Poll: Trends Through 2021 appeared first on Education Next.
By: Education Next
Title: Education Next Annual Poll: Trends Through 2021
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/ednext-poll-interactive-trends-through-2021-public-opinion/?utm_source=Education%2BNext%2BAnnual%2BPoll%253A%2BTrends%2BThrough%2B2021&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS%2BReader
Published Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2021 04:02:20 +0000
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jackie Kerstetter, jackie@alessicommunication.com
2021 Education Next Survey Reveals Parental Support for School Covid-Safety Measures Despite Vaccination Hesitancy
Plus, support for policy reforms wanes as public craves return to normalcy
August 31, 2021 (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.)—While a large percentage of parents support Covid-safety measures for students, many are reluctant to vaccinate their children, the 15th annual Education Next survey of American public opinion on education policy finds.
Support for policy reforms, such as school choice or free college, is falling among both Republicans and Democrats, suggesting a sweeping desire for a return to normalcy. Despite an apparent decline in district enrollment last fall, the size of each of the four school sectors—district, private, charter, and homeschooled—has largely returned to spring 2020 levels.
Read the 2021 Education Next survey articles and explore the interactive graphics.
Among the key findings:
Methodology. The total sample for the survey (3,156 respondents) includes two overlapping samples: a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults (1,410 respondents); a nationally representative sample of American parents, stepparents, or foster parents of at least one child living in the respondent’s household who is in a grade from kindergarten through 12th grade (2,155 respondents). The parent sample includes oversamples of parents with at least one child in a charter school, parents with at least one child in a private school, Black parents, and Hispanic parents. The survey was conducted in May and June 2021.
About the Authors: Michael B. Henderson is assistant professor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication and director of its Public Policy Research Lab. David M. Houston is assistant professor at the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University, Director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and Senior Editor of Education Next. Martin R. West is academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Editor-in-chief of Education Next.
About Education Next: Education Next is a scholarly journal committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform, published by the Education Next Institute and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. For more information, please visit educationnext.org.
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Immunocompromised individuals in Boulder County can get their third vaccine dose in all clinics offering Pfizer and/or Moderna in the county. People who have a moderately to severely compromised immune system may benefit from an additional dose of vaccine to ensure they are protected against COVID-19.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends people whose immune systems are moderately to severely compromised receive an additional dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine at least four weeks (28 days) after their second dose.
It is not recommended that people receive more than three mRNA COVID-19 vaccine doses.
On Aug. 12, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) amended the Emergency Use Authorizations for both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines to allow an additional dose after the first two doses in certain immunocompromised people. The additional dose should be the same vaccine product as the first two doses.
At this time an additional dose of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine has not been authorized for immunocompromised people.
“The additional dose of the vaccine for immunocompromised people will help increase their protection and prevent severe illness, hospitalization and death,” said Indira Gujral, Boulder County Public Health Manager of Communicable Disease & Emergency Management. “This is a great step toward protecting vulnerable people in our community. If you are immunocompromised, go get your third dose today!”
People who are recommended to receive an additional dose include those who have:
Additional doses are free, and no ID, insurance or proof of medical history is required to receive one. Individuals may self-report their immunocompromising conditions to vaccine providers.
Boosters for the general population have not been approved by the CDC or FDA.
The CDC has stated booster shots might begin the week of Sept. 20 for all Americans who have had a second dose at least eight months prior. CDC also anticipates booster shots for the J&J (Janssen) vaccine will become available.
To find a COVID-19 vaccine provider in Boulder County, visit www.boco.org/covidvaccines.
For information about additional doses for immunocompromised individuals, call the Boulder County Call Center at 720-776-0822, Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
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With California voters already casting ballots by mail in the September 14 election to recall Governor Gavin Newsom, a replacement candidate, Larry Elder, is pushing school choice in a last-minute appeal to Democratic voters.
Polls show Elder, a Republican radio host, is the leading replacement candidate. Most, though not all recent polls show “keep” Governor Newsom beating “remove,” but the margins are close, and the actual election day is two weeks off.
Two recent Elder commercials highlight the school choice issue. One features Gloria Romero, a Democrat who was the majority leader in the California State Senate. “I believe in charter schools and school choice. So does Larry Elder. But not Gavin Newsom—he shut our public schools while he sent his kids to private school,” Romero says in the ad.
Another shows Elder making the case against Newsom. “I favor school choice, he doesn’t. I favor giving parents an option out. He doesn’t.”
“In-School Learning” is one of eight “topics” on the Elder campaign website. “We had a governor who is shamelessly beholden to the teacher’s unions. A governor who sent home millions of public school children while his own children received elite in-person instruction at a private school,” the Elder website charges.
“As governor, I would be a big proponent of school choice. It is simple, the money follows the child, not the other way around. Studies have shown that school choice improves education in the suburbs and in the inner cities alike. Positive competition improves the product,” the Elder website says. “Education is a 21st-century civil rights issue. It’s not right to force parents to send their children to an under-performing school.”
Newsom, for his part, has portrayed the recall effort as “A partisan, Republican coalition of national Republicans, anti-vaxxers, Q-Anon conspiracy theorists and anti-immigrant Trump supporters.”
“I’m incredibly proud of California’s economic recovery” Newsom said, issuing tax rebate “stimulus” checks timed to arrive in mailboxes shortly after the recall mail-in ballots.
Ira Stoll is managing editor of Education Next.
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An education researcher and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Tom Loveless, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss a new book by Loveless, “Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of the Common Core.”
Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or here on Education Next.
— Education Next
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The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, $28; 288 pages
The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
By Adrian Wooldridge
Simon & Schuster, 2021, $24.99; 504 pages
As reviewed by Jay P. Greene
Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit and Adrian Wooldridge’s The Aristocracy of Talent both address the widespread support for meritocracy that characterizes modern America. Wooldridge acknowledges the challenges raised by meritocracy but sees the concept as a central force in improving human well-being. Sandel, as his book title suggests, has a much less favorable view of meritocracy.
Their disagreement does not appear to be based on a different understanding of the facts or even a dramatically different application of values to those facts. Instead, the main difference between the perspectives of these two authors lies in the standards they use to compare policy prescriptions to possible alternatives. Wooldridge argues that meritocracy, despite its flaws, is better than any alternative arrangements people have tried, while Sandel prefers to compare meritocracy to an ideal system rather than to actual historical alternatives.
Wooldridge defines meritocracy as the belief “that an individual’s position in society should depend on his or her combination of ability and effort.” Wooldridge notes that meritocracy was an alien concept for the bulk of recorded human history. Instead, men and women were largely born into their station and were expected to abide by its restrictions and responsibilities without complaint. There was a natural and fixed hierarchy, often believed to be divinely ordained. Deviation from it was considered unnatural and blasphemous. Positions of power were allocated largely by birth. The rationing of positions within one’s station was largely determined by nepotism, patronage, or bribery rather than by accomplishment or ability.
There were pockets of meritocracy in the past, according to Wooldridge, in both imagination and actuality. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates imagines a meritocracy ruled by philosopher kings. China’s mandarin elite were selected by the merit of their performance on examinations to run the empire’s bureaucracy. Also, in Wooldridge’s account, Jews historically established their own meritocracy of intellectual accomplishment in societies where they were denied access to status by birth. And the European Church and Italian city-states created enclaves of merit-based advancement. But these deviations from restrictive hierarchies were limited in time or place.
The lack of meritocracy produced suffering, according to Wooldridge’s history. Effort and ability often went unrewarded, resulting in less of both. Society was characterized by corruption, waste, and oppression. People were generally unable to develop their individual dreams and could rarely hope to realize those ambitions through their own skill or hard work. This left people poorer and less fulfilled. Life may not have always been nasty, brutish, and short, but it was pretty close.
The shift toward meritocracy began with the Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe, Wooldridge notes, writing that “removing group-specific legal rights and replacing them with individual rights was at the heart of the Enlightenment project.” According to him, this change in perspective spawned “the four great revolutions that created the modern world. The French Revolution was dedicated to the principle of a ‘career open to talents.’ The American Revolution advanced the idea that people should be allowed to pursue life, liberty, and happiness without being held back by feudal restrictions. The Industrial Revolution unleashed animal spirits. The liberal revolution . . . introduced open competition into the heart of government administrations and educational systems.” These revolutions transformed how people thought about themselves and society worldwide, producing unprecedented prosperity and freedom.
So, what’s not to like? Sandel, for his part, devotes virtually no attention to world history before the ascendancy of meritocracy, so he does not make comparisons between meritocracy and what preceded it. Instead, he focuses on describing two main shortcomings of meritocracy today. The first is that much of what people think of as merit is actually luck. As Sandel puts it, “my having this or that talent is not my doing but a matter of good luck, and I do not merit or deserve the benefits (or burdens) that derive from luck.” As an example, he acknowledges that Lebron James is very talented and has to devote significant effort to developing and maintaining his skills—but notes that it is largely luck that James was born in a particular time and place that recognized and rewarded those skills. Similarly, someone with an aptitude for computer programming or playing violin should recognize the good fortune of being born in a time and place where those skills and the effort required to develop them would be recognized and rewarded.
Sandel is further concerned that people born with wealth and advantage are in a better position to identify and cultivate skills sought by the market, converting the luck of their birth into what people might describe as merit. He notes the higher probability of their gaining access to elite educational institutions, and the limited ability of other people to move from poverty to prosperity, as evidence of this calcified hierarchy masquerading as meritocracy.
Rather than seeing this flaw in meritocracy as a problem that should be remedied by expanding opportunities for the disadvantaged, Sandel offers his second argument—one that rejects the ideal of meritocracy altogether. The problem, according to Sandel, is not that we have imperfectly sorted people by merit, but that accurately sorting people by merit would be even worse: “Even if a meritocracy were fair, it would not be a good society,” Sandel writes. “It would generate hubris and anxiety among the winners and humiliation and resentment among the losers—attitudes at odds with human flourishing and corrosive of the common good.”
The real danger of meritocracy, according to Sandel, is not that we are failing to achieve it, but that its successful implementation would affirm the notion that those with greater merit are superior to those with less, harming both. Sandel says we would be better off in an aristocracy: “If you were born into the upper reaches of an aristocracy, you would be aware that your privilege was your good fortune, not your own doing. Whereas if you ascended, through effort and talent, to the apex of a meritocracy, you could take pride in the fact that your success was earned rather than inherited.”
This is where Sandel’s argument goes off the rails. It is shockingly ahistorical to assert that those born in aristocracies would recognize the good fortune of their birth and be any less arrogant than those who succeed in meritocracies. Wooldridge confirms this point when he quotes Markgraf Karl Friedrich von Baden as observing, “If there are races among animals, there are races among men. For that reason, the most superior must put themselves ahead of others, marry among themselves, and produce a pure race: that is the nobility.” Wooldridge also quotes Walter Raleigh: “For that infinite wisdom of God, which hath distinguished his angels by degrees, which hath given greater and less light and beauty to heavenly bodies . . . hath also ordained kings, dukes, or leaders of the people, magistrates, judges, and other degrees among men.” It seems that the hubris of the successful does not require meritocracy to give it license.
Sandel is not actually pining for a return to aristocracy. He is simply arguing that meritocracy is even worse. So what alternatives does he suggest? Sandel does offer some policy prescriptions in the final chapters of his book, but they are underwhelming, given the ferocity of his critique. He suggests, for instance, that elite universities should establish minimum qualifications for admission and then randomly accept students above that threshold. That way, students would at least be reminded of how luck played a role in their success.
If Sandel really believes that much of what we consider merit is luck and that even a true meritocracy would be undesirable because it would lead to hubris and humiliation, then randomly accepting candidates from the top 5 percent to form the elite 1 percent would hardly address that problem. Those at the helm of academia draw fine distinctions about merit in many areas other than admissions. They award grades to students. They hire and grant tenure to faculty. They determine which research should be published in leading journals. Wooldridge, who is an editor at The Economist, is clearly poking fun at Sandel, who is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard, for offering such a limited solution to grand concerns when Wooldridge suggests that “perhaps we should also distribute named chairs and tenured professorships on the basis of a lottery of the qualified.”
Sandel’s other policy prescription is to renew “the dignity of work” by replacing “some or all of the payroll tax with a financial transactions tax—a ‘sin tax,’ in effect, on casino-like speculation that does not help the real economy.” Changing tax rates or tinkering with trade policy seems like weak tea in the face of claims that almost all success is the result of luck and, to the extent that it is not, differences in success demean the winners and losers.
Wooldridge acknowledges the concerns Sandel raises, as do all of the other foils that Sandel discusses in his book, including academics like libertarian economists Friedrich Hayek and Frank Knight, and political philosopher John Rawls, as well as elected officials like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. While Sandel attributes much more to luck than these individuals do, everyone he discusses recognizes that success is produced by some mixture of talent, effort, and luck. And almost everyone recognizes the dangers of hubris and humiliation that inequality can foster.
Traditional value systems and religion remind us of the extent of luck in our lives and prompt us to maintain gratitude and humility through such sayings as “there but for the grace of God go I.” But Sandel sees religion as having the opposite role. “The allure of the meritocratic world [is] that the world is arranged in a way that aligns what we receive with what we are due,” he writes. “This is the hope that has fueled providentialist thinking from the Old Testament to present-day talk of being ‘on the right side of history.’” Sandel also interprets the Book of Job as teaching that Job “must have committed some egregious sin. . . . This is an early example of the tyranny of merit.” Suffice it to say that this is a highly unconventional interpretation of the Book of Job, which is normally thought to teach that people do not get what they deserve in this world and that God’s divine justice is beyond our ability to comprehend.
No one’s solutions to the challenges of meritocracy, from those in the Bible to those of Hayek and Rawls, are fully satisfying. But, as Wooldridge notes, “meritocracy succeeds because it does a better job than the alternatives.” He offers that conclusion after presenting an exhaustive history of how meritocracy transformed the world for the better. Sandel suggests that our existence is governed by luck but wants to maintain dignity and mutual respect in the face of randomness by holding lotteries for admission to Harvard and taxing hedge-fund managers. He discusses no time or place in the world in which that dignity and mutual respect were achieved in the absence of meritocracy.
This debate about the merits of meritocracy has significant implications for the education-reform movement, which is generally based on the unexamined belief that expanding access to educational opportunities to remedy defects in our meritocracy should be a primary goal. Sandel provides a warning that there could be a dark side to more efficiently sorting those with high potential from those with less in an effort to offer more opportunities to the disadvantaged. If we were persuaded by his argument, we would be more open to proposals to eliminate accelerated courses and AP, abandon test-based admissions for elite public schools such as Stuyvesant or Thomas Jefferson, and diminish or eliminate the use of college-entrance exams.
Before taking such leaps, we might want to look at Wooldridge’s account of what happens in the absence of meritocracy. He notes that the City University of New York was once an engine of opportunity for immigrant children to move into the halls of wealth and power, until it opted for an open-admission policy. The collapse in the quality and success of CUNY’s graduates after the university eliminated meritocratic admissions might give us pause. Wooldridge’s telling of how positions of wealth and power were allocated before the advent of meritocracy should make us more concerned. The pre-meritocracy sorting system—with its nepotism, corruption, and bribery—did not produce greater equality. It merely strengthened the ability of the advantaged to maintain their privileges. Access to elite high schools, colleges, and jobs were much more determined by one’s birth than is the case in our currently imperfect meritocracy. And those who expanded their wealth and power in this way were plagued by at least as much hubris, and the disadvantaged by at least as much humiliation, as the winners and losers of today.
Meritocracy may mistake luck for skill and effort and may facilitate a form of hubris, but we can hold these defects in check to some extent by reinforcing norms of gratitude and humility. If there is a tyranny of meritocracy, it appears less tyrannical than the alternatives.
Jay P. Greene is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
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As American schools reopen for the fall—or attempt to, amid a new surge of coronavirus cases related to the Delta variant—what, if anything, can be learned from the experience of Europe?
Governments in Europe have wrangled over when to close and reopen schools, weighing the risk of children spreading the virus at school against the economic and education-related disruptions of keeping them at home. During the first months of the pandemic, when most schools were shut, research supported reopening schools for younger age groups, given the evidence of low infection in and from young children. Governments attempted to follow this science and have, from almost the beginning of the pandemic, tried to keep schools open as much as possible to avoid children losing out on education. Teachers unions, on the other hand, have tried to keep the schools closed.
Teachers unions have persistently argued that schools were too unsafe for teachers, who could risk contracting the virus and spreading it to their communities and vulnerable people. The unions put enormous pressure on governments to close down schools, even when governments deemed it safe enough to open or partially open them. When the unions were unsatisfied with government action, they sought to block their members from returning to work, filed lawsuits, issued strike threats, and held strikes and mass protests to compel governments to delay school reopenings. When scientific advice indicated it would be safe for more children to return to school in England at the beginning of June 2020, Mary Bousted, the leader of the National Education Union, told members not to engage with any government planning based on a wider reopening of schools and hit schools with 22 pages of demands, including a ban on grading. The union also launched the Escalation App, a smartphone app devised to help teachers challenge attempting to keep classrooms open during lockdown and initiate local strike actions. Across the channel, the French teachers unions— the most strike-prone unions in Europe—launched three major strikes during the pandemic, criticizing the government’s handling of the crisis and calling for more teachers, higher salary, and an increase to the 2021 education budget.
Teachers-union activism has routinely goaded governments into accepting union demands and allowing politics rather than science and medical advice, to drive decisions. Parents, who are in favor of some in-person learning for children, have been largely marginalized in the political battles of school closures and reopenings. They have found it frustrating when governments negotiate with unions rather than parents, who prefer to trust public-health professionals. Consequently, more resourceful parents have sought to find alternative ways of schooling, while low-income families, who often do not have access to such opportunities, have had no other choice but to live with union-enforced decisions.
There’s not yet been a careful accounting of how many European schools were closed due to union pressure rather than medical advice. The European teachers unions, well-organized and resourceful, have sought to be at the forefront of influencing political decisions about whether or when to send children back to schools. How the unions’ demands on health and safety measures come into play and how much power they have varies from country to country, however.
The following offers a brief tour on how teachers unions pursued their “teachers first” agenda at the beginning of the pandemic in five European countries.
England
On March 23, 2020, Britain went into its first lockdown, which meant schools were closed except for the children of key workers. The two largest teachers’ unions, who had pressured for the lockdown to take place earlier, supported the government’s decision. But when the government attempted to open primary schools to some children on June 1, 2020, when case numbers were down, the teachers unions collided with the government. The unions insisted that schools should not even consider reopening until the number of new Covid-19 cases and deaths had fallen even further and an effective program of mass testing and contact tracing was in place.
The union campaign succeeded in derailing government plans for the wider school openings. The government announced that it was abandoning plans for all primary-school age groups to return to school for four weeks before the summer term ended. A government survey had reported that, on June 18, 2020, only around one third of Year Six pupils in primary schools (10- and 11-year-olds) were receiving in-person learning. Instead, most primary-school children returned to classes in early September, almost six months after schools closed. A more detailed survey by the National Education Union, with responses from about 11,000 of England’s 16,769 primary schools, found that 44 percent of schools did not open at all on June 1, while another 21 percent did open more widely but on a smaller scale than the government requested. Only 35 percent of schools acted on the government’s instructions.
Most of the primary schools that remained closed were controlled by local authorities. A number of local authorities, mostly led by the Labour party, had advised schools against wider reopening, though a few Conservative-led authorities had also expressed concerns. In sharp contrast, the academy primary schools run by trusts, which are similar to American charter schools and make up about 35 percent of primary schools, have been more eager to reopen their doors. A similar divide can be observed for school reopening at the secondary level. The local authority secondary schools have tended to be closed for longer than the academy secondary schools, which make up about 77 percent of secondary schools and have sought ways of keeping schools open for as for long as possible, in line with medical and scientific advice.
A trust-wide approach was arranged to manage risk assessment and shape local response to national Covid-19 guidelines, as well as to develop remote learning and quickly source equipment for pupils to use at home. Likewise, the private schools, with their greater resources, raced ahead, offering 74 percent of their students online lessons, compared with 6 percent in the state sector. Private schools also graded students’ work, provided pastoral support, and held parent meetings. Some private schools even formed partnerships with state schools that ignored the union pressures.
The pattern that has emerged, and appears to have persisted throughout the pandemic, is that the local-authority-run school sector, in which teachers unions are rooted, has kept schools closed for longer periods and has been more reluctant to return to in-person learning, whereas the trust-run academies have tended to be open longer and arrange online learning activities and other forms of alternative education more extensively during lockdowns. Since 2010, the rollout of the academy program, which is still ongoing, has resulted in an eroded power base for the teachers unions, though the unions have continued to cause disruptions in what is left of the authority-run school sector.
France
Schools in France were among the first to close on March 17, 2020, during Europe’s first lockdown, but when President Macron announced plans to get schools out of lockdown on May 11, 2020, the largest teachers unions planned to block the effort. The unions claimed that the 56-page raft of safeguarding rules issued by the government, which mandated small classes, timed arrivals at schools, and compulsory masks for all teachers and students from the age of 11, was insufficient. Unions then countered with their own demands. Macron sought to take the spike out of the mounting conflict by saying that it was parents, not unions, who should decide whether to send their children back to school. As a result, most schools began to open. Some 40,000 primary and middle schools reopened, which meant that around 1 in 5 primary-school students returned to class.
During the second lockdown beginning on October 28, 2020, the French government vowed to keep schools open, and the teachers unions retaliated with strikes. The unions claimed that the health of teachers was at risk due to insufficient protocols against the virus. Macron tried to allay concerns by allowing secondary schools to offer more online teaching, under the condition that students take at least 50 percent of their classes at school. The unions refused to accept this compromise and demanded the government hire more teachers to enable smaller class sizes. Protests continued despite several parent organizations demanding schools open to continue in-person learning.
On January 25, 2021, the teachers unions yet again staged a national strike to oppose the government response to the pandemic and repeated their demand for better working conditions and higher salaries. Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer had announced a roughly $460 million package to bump up teachers’ salaries back in April 2020, which took effect in January 2021, but the unions claimed this was not enough. A march through the center of Paris and other protests throughout the country caused serious disruptions to many schools. A third strike was organized in March 2021.
Germany
The German government and the main teachers unions did not clash seriously over school reopenings, as Covid-19 was handled relatively well in the early months of the pandemic. From March 13 to April 23, 2020, all of Germany’s 16 states closed schools. During that time, public adherence to government restrictions got daily cases of the virus into the single digits, resulting in many children returning to school long before the summer holidays. Schools opened fully in August 2020 and were, for the most part, working normally until another lockdown started in 2021. Ample testing and thorough contact tracing have kept disruption to a minimum, impacting just a few students or a single class for a few days or weeks.
Under Germany’s federalized system, school closures and openings fall under the jurisdiction of the 16 states. The teachers unions, who for decades have advocated for stronger national control of education, complained that the guidelines produced by the Conference of Ministers of Education—a body that coordinates education polices—were “unhelpful and unpractical” and left too much leeway for the individual states to make their own plans. The unions demanded fully standardized safeguarding rules that every state should follow “step-by-step.” Some centralized coordination and standardization measures resulted, but the states, who lobby for stronger autonomy, believes imposing a standard solution for all schools would be restrictive. The states’ crisis management teams adopted the Conference of Ministers of Education procedures for reopening. Regional union representatives were part of the crisis management teams in only some of the states; in others, they were not consulted.
The relations between the government and teachers unions became increasingly tense during the wave of new infections that swept Germany in January 2021. On March 12, 2021, Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek said that nationwide school closures were not on the agenda and that efforts were being made to maintain normal operations for as long as possible. Another lockdown and school closures followed. Elementary schools in more than half of the Germany’s states reopened in late February 2021 after two months of closure. This move came as case numbers were flattening in those states, even though case numbers were rising in others. Karliczek defended the decision to reopen schools, saying younger children in particular benefit from learning together in groups. She expressed confidence that state education officials, who were in charge, would consider infection numbers when deciding to reopen. Union leader Marlis Tepe lamented that states might reopen schools, regardless of the spread, and were taking “a high risk for the health of teachers, students, and their parents.”
Finland
In Finland, the government announced a state of emergency on the March 16, 2020, and closed all schools with almost immediate effect. The teachers union in Finland endorsed the decision and had participated in discussions with the government in the run up to the decision to close schools. The Finnish teachers union is a force to be reckoned with. It is the only trade union for teachers in the country, 97 percent of teachers are members, and it is deeply integrated into the governmental subsystem of boards and commissions, as well as the education ministry. Throughout the pandemic, the union has influenced many government decisions on safety measures in schools, distance learning, equipment, programs, teacher education, additional support grants, and much more. At the same time, the union sought to block local authorities from allowing teachers to deliver their distance teaching from school premises, as it has been active in trying to convince employers to allow teachers work from home.
When research came out showing it was low risk to open schools and the government endorsed the findings, the union hit back. On April 18, 2020, Asko Järvinen, chief physician of infectious diseases at the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa, said that international studies indicated school closures were “perhaps the least effective way” to slow down the pandemic. The following day, Prime Minister Sanna Marin announced plans to reopen the schools. A union representative complained: “As a teacher, I don’t understand why it is worth risking the health of teachers, children, and their loved ones.” Given the success in containing the spread of Covid-19, the government maintained that children’s rights to education outweighed the risk of going back to school and pressed ahead. Education Minister Li Andersen said that the government was “unmoved” by the union’s “negative opinion about the reopening of schools before the summer break.”
Sweden
Sweden is an outlier. Sweden never closed schools, judging the benefits of leaving schools open to outweigh the risks. Unlike most children across Europe, Swedish students nationwide have not missed a single day of school due to the coronavirus. The country’s public-health authorities made the decision to keep schools open at the start of the outbreak and stuck with it, even when death rates were ten times higher than in the other Nordic countries. Classes have been compulsory for all pupils up to the age of 16. Local authorities decide how to handle possible outbreaks and have the option to close individual schools. The country’s two teachers unions criticized this decision and have called for national guidelines on whether schools should be closed. Since the unions were unable to overturn the government decision, they have focused their efforts on emphasizing the safety of their members. They also raised concerns over dividing classrooms into smaller groups, as this increased teachers’ work hours and created staffing shortages. Keeping schools open in Spring 2020 did not lead to infection rates among students that were higher than those in neighboring Finland, where schools were temporarily closed.
Bringing It Back to the U.S.
Governments in Europe are now facing a mammoth task in narrowing the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers from higher-income families. Quality school-catchup time is paramount. Schools face an enormous task. Governments will consider measures such as extending learning time into what are usually vacation weeks, adding additional hours to the school day, and offering school-based homework and personal tutoring for students, all of which will increase demands on teachers. Unions strongly oppose such measures. The hostility between European governments and teachers unions will likely continue or perhaps even intensify. In the face of union power, governments have typically scaled back their efforts to make even incremental changes.
The union influence is also strong in international institutions. Governments, which increasingly rely on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in improving their education systems, are likely to receive policy advice that has been influenced by the unions. As the importance of the OECD in developing global education policies has increased over the years, so has the influence of the teachers unions. After years of effective lobbying, they are now at the heart of the OECD decision-making processes. Education ministers from OECD member states (only twenty high performers) cannot attend the most important meeting in the International Summit of the Teaching Profession at the Education Directorate OECD without being accompanied by representatives from the teachers union and Education International, a union umbrella group, and they must be given the same amount of speaking time as the ministers. As co-chairs, they decide, together with the OECD, the agenda for every meeting and the format of these, and they have a say on the narrative of the reports published, especially the Teaching and Learning International Survey. In these reports, teachers’ well-being is ranked higher than student outcomes and learning achievements.
That teachers unions in Europe entered the pandemic crisis with teacher-centric demands, almost succeeding in silencing the “parent voice,” may seem like a familiar story to Americans. A recent study of 10,000 of roughly 13,000 school districts in the United States shows that the most important factors in determining reopening plans for the 2020–21 school year were local politics and the teachers unions. After controlling for urbanicity, partisanship, and the Covid-19 case rates in a district, the study observed that in larger districts, where unions are more likely to be powerful in politics and have collective bargaining, schools were far less likely to hold in-person classes for children.
In Europe as in the U.S., without a strategy to deal with unions, governments seeking to reopen school for in-person education and to help students recover learning lost in the pandemic will find success elusive.
Susanne Wiborg is co-author of Comparative Politics of Education: Teachers Unions around the World and reader at UCL Institute of Education, London.
The post The Politics of Closing Schools appeared first on Education Next.
By: Susanne Wiborg
Title: The Politics of Closing Schools
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Published Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2021 09:00:49 +0000
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Marinus van IJzendoorn, one of the world’s leading experts in child psychology, is telling me about dandelions. This is unexpected, since I reached him via Zoom at his home in the Netherlands to talk about a breakthrough he has made that has far-reaching implications for school intervention. But his analogy is leading somewhere.
He’s 60 and speaks in the flawless, softly accented English that is universal in Holland. When I first saw him, his resting face seemed severe, but as soon as he spoke, he smiled. It’s easy to imagine him telling a mother in gentle but assured tones that her troubled child is in fact rather bright.
Dandelions are remarkable organisms. They somehow survive in almost any ecological niche, not by being incredibly hardy but by altering their biochemistry on the fly. Their defining characteristic is adaptivity.
Orchids, not so much. They do badly in most environments, but, in certain conditions, they bloom spectacularly.
Most children are like dandelions, explains van IJzendoorn (the ‘J’ is silent: ee-zen-dorn). They grow to function surprisingly well regardless of their environment. But other children have a harder time. They are prone to tantrums and oppositional behavior, say, or they are constantly distracted. Van IJzendoorn likens them to orchids. They do badly in most environments. But with the right structure, the right support, they do well. In fact, in those circumstances, they do better than the dandelions.
That’s a recent view, and one still seen as radical by many in psychology. More typically, oppositional behavior, ADHD, and other cognitive traits such as dyslexia are seen only as deficits, to be identified, accommodated, and treated. Proponents of the orchid theory—which experts refer to by the rather less memorable name of differential susceptibility, meaning that people differ in their susceptibility to a particular environment—argue that these traits wouldn’t have survived evolution if they only had downsides. That suggests there must be circumstances in which people with these traits, like orchids, have an advantage over dandelions. The metaphor appears to have originated with W. Thomas Boyce, a pediatrician and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who wrote the 2019 book The Orchid and the Dandelion (Knopf). Van IJzendoorn notes it may be imprecise shorthand but has caught on.
In the early 2000s, van IJzendoorn and his colleagues began to wonder if this idea might explain the yawning gaps in children’s response to schooling. Perhaps students who do poorly in school are orchids in the wrong environment.
* * *
The question of what to do to help students who are falling behind their peers gnaws away at teachers. “By middle school, a single class could include students whose abilities spread across six grade levels,” says David Geary, a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri. Teaching to such a wide span is a challenge. But in elementary school, and especially in reading, where mini-assessments are frequent, catching students as they fall has become a science.
The idea is to gauge students’ ability levels and organize them into tiers with increasing degrees of support. For most students, tier one, the regular classroom, is sufficient. For those who need additional support, teachers provide a second tier of more intensive, higher dosage instruction. And for a few students, a third tier of instruction might be needed, adding daily small-group work or one-on-one tutoring. Implementing this three-tier model seamlessly requires coordination and extra staff. But there is evidence that it works for many students.
And that’s the funny thing. Whatever intervention is used at the higher tiers, it works—just not much. Reading leveled books works a little, as does learning individual letter sounds or using a reading app on a tablet. The same is true for interventions in mathematics and at any grade level. In the language of the effectiveness literature, 0.1 standard deviations is considered a small impact, 0.3 is okay, and 0.8 is strong. What Works Clearinghouse, a federal database, lists 155 interventions for mathematics with an average effect of 0.1. Academic labs and education vendors create new interventions each year and excitedly commission studies of their effectiveness only to discover that if a new program works at all, it does not work much.
The Dutch researchers studying orchid children thought they knew why. A colleague of van IJzendoorn, Adriana Bus, who earlier in her career authored some of the most influential papers in early literacy, dug into the data. She looked at interventions that gave a student-by-student breakdown. Almost universally, those interventions didn’t show what you might expect. Instead of every student improving a bit, they showed some students improving a lot and others not at all. Some even experienced a negative effect—they would have been better off not getting the patterns intervention. When you average across all those students, you wind up with a small positive effect masking a much bigger one for a subset of students. The interesting question isn’t “does the intervention work” but “for whom does it work?”
Bus reasoned if you could figure out ahead of time which students would respond well to an intervention and only put those students into it, then you would have transformed a weak effect into a stronger one.
But how can you figure out who is going to respond to an intervention before delivering it? This is a bit like the old joke that it is prohibitively expensive to put seatbelts on every train in the country, so let’s just put them on the trains that are going to crash. Van IJzendoorn and his colleagues at the University of Leiden thought they could identify which trains would crash: which students would respond best to a specific intervention.
The conventional wisdom was that the wide differences in individual student outcomes in an intervention were essentially random noise. Students (and teachers) have good days and bad days. If you re-ran the intervention, the same students might get different outcomes.
Van IJzendoorn and Bus challenged that. They thought, instead, that genetics could help predict which children would respond strongly to a reading intervention, to find the orchids among the dandelions.
* * *
On Chromosome 11, beyond the supercluster of genes for smell, gliding over a great variety of genes linked to autism and depression, past the famous insulin gene (one of the first discovered), and just before reaching the telomere, or the end of the chromosome, lies one of the most interesting of all genes, named, in the inimitable style of biochemistry, DRD4. It’s an unassuming name for an unassuming thing: just a string of DNA letters and then a repeating pattern. These are the instructions to make a receptor, a piece of biomechanical machinery designed for a particular molecule to lock into. DRD4 makes receptors for dopamine, the pleasure molecule.
Not everyone has the same repeating DRD4 pattern. For most people, the pattern repeats four times. For some, it only repeats twice. Still others have three, four, or six repeats, all the way up to 11, though that is vanishingly rare. One in five Americans, and far fewer Asians, has a DRD4 gene with seven repeats, according to a study published in Human Genetics in 1996 based on a worldwide sample of 1,300 people. That difference, tiny though it is from the standard four repeats, can make for a very different arc of life. Ellen Greenberger, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Social Ecology, and her team combined genetic data with evidence of ancient migrations. A clear pattern emerged: “The populations that remained near their origins showed a lower proportion of long [seven-repeat] alleles of DRD4 than those that migrated farther away,” says Greenberger.
One conclusion is that seven-repeat people are better explorers. Researchers have shown an association between seven repeats and traits including novelty-seeking, risk-taking, and hyperactivity. Perhaps people with seven repeats were more likely to embark on a long, harsh migration. Given the choice between a new experience and a familiar one, seven repeaters tend to prefer novelty. They have learned that, occasionally, they will discover a new experience that beats the old. It may be that the ancient willingness to be more active and to take risks, which were advantages on a 6,000-mile journey 20,000 years ago, expresses itself in modern people as higher activity and a tendency to have your attention diverted—perhaps even ADHD.
Why would a few extra repeats at the far end of Chromosome 11 make you more easily distracted? No one knows for sure, but it could be that the seven-repeat recipe makes receptors that are less good at binding to dopamine than the four-repeat recipe. Dopamine feels like a reward. So seven-repeat people have to work harder to get the same amount of dopamine rewards as four-repeaters. They need more stimulation to get the same good feeling.
The orchid theory put forward by van IJzendoorn and his colleague Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg had already suggested that owning a genome with seven repeats in DRD4 should not be viewed solely as a problem. The first study to show this appeared in Development Psychobiology in 2006. Van IJzendoorn and a colleague videoed 47 10-month-old infants at home with their mothers. While the infants played, the experimenters gave the mother a distracting task to see how the child—and the mother—handled the situation. Then they sequenced DNA from each child. They found that, for seven-repeat children, behavior is much worse than average—they are disruptive and defiant—when they are treated insensitively. But they behave better than average when they are treated sensitively, for instance when parents were trained to give feedback in the form of praise for wanted behaviors rather than frequently calling out unwanted behaviors. For four-repeaters, the form of feedback still makes a difference, but not much. The seven-repeaters are orchids; the four-repeaters are dandelions.
Perhaps, thought Van IJzendoorn, orchid children learn differently, too. In the wrong environment, perhaps they learn at a much slower rate than their dandelion peers. That gets noticed in school and is considered a deficit. In the right environment, they learn as well as their peers, but better. If that were true, these children are falling behind because school was designed by the dandelions for the dandelions. It’s like letting a plot of land grow wild. Dandelions will do well;, orchids will struggle. Should we conclude that orchids are simply less successful plants than dandelions, destined always to shrivel? No; we would find a better environment in which to grow them. School is one big, wild field made for dandelions.
Van IJzendoorn recruited Bus to help prove this theory correct.
* * *
The experiment Bus and her colleagues designed was straightforward. She took a mixed group of dandelion-children and orchid-children (four-repeaters and seven-repeaters) and gave them an early reading intervention designed to deliver a dopamine rush: computer-based lessons with instant feedback. In a typical kindergarten classroom, when a child reads a word, there is likely no -one close enough to give feedback, except when a teacher calls on them specifically. In the Leiden experiment, every single word a child read generated feedback. The hypothesis was that this might give orchid-children as much dopamine as dandelion-children get every day. Presumably, the dandelions would get even more,; but there’s a limit to how much dopamine has an effect at any one time. Bus’s prediction was that orchids would do worst in the classroom but best, better even than the dandelions, in the high-dopamine computer-based program.
The life of a researcher is to spend many months planning and running an experiment, followed by weeks of carefully sorting data, until the day you plot the result as a few bars on a computer screen. Most of the time, the bars are roughly the same height, but occasionally they are not. It’s like coming across a brightly colored flower in a junkyard. The Leiden team’s bar for orchid-children was much taller than that for dandelion-children.
Being careful researchers, they began immediately to plan a repeat experiment, to make sure this wasn’t a fluke. The second study, this time using animated digital books, replicated the result of the first, as have several subsequent studies. The size of the effect was surprising. Orchids did 0.4 standard deviations better when learning with the high-feedback method. Dandelion-kids actually fared slightly worse than if they had received typical classroom instruction. Bus and van IJzendoorn had found a powerful way to teach the very children for whom traditional class works worst.
Once you see a classroom of students through the orchid and dandelion lens, it is impossible to miss how wrongheaded the current multitiered system of intervention is. It has the dimension wrong; it’s vertical instead of horizontal. Students who fall behind are moved up to a higher tier, where they get the same instruction that failed them once, but in a more intensive way, more frequently, and in a smaller group. That is rather like a doctor who gives all his patients aspirin and, when some don’t respond, recommends quadrupling the dosage. Instead of moving orchid children up, they should be moved across, to a learning environment designed for the way their brains functions.
How would that work in practice? Schools would look different than the model in which students learn in groups of 30 with a single adult. Instead, intervention teams would become specialists in matching students to learning environments.
Bus and van IJzendoorn focused on DRD4 and high-feedback environments, but researchers have found other areas of differential susceptibility—other kinds of orchids. One is how we deal with stress. Stress-orchids do poorly in environments such as taking a high-stakes test but are superior in low-stress situations such as project work. Another is introversion, which might lead to lower participation in large groups, like a classroom, but an enhanced ability to self-manage in a pandemic lockdown, say, or independent study time. Some of these may be strongly influenced by single-gene variants like DRD4. Some will be much more complex variations of multiple genes. Others will be gene-plus-environment interactions.
And we are only scratching the surface. There may be different types of orchids for learning socially rather than from books, for competing to learn rather than cooperating, or for learning from projects that give students a chance to apply new concepts before being confronted with abstract theory, or for learning from spiraling curricula, or for performing when the stakes are high. Perhaps some of these types sound like you, or someone you know.
“It would be wonderful to know which of these is true,” says van IJzendoorn. It would, in fact, be a revolution. What if schools were designed to uncover each learner’s inner orchid and match them with the optimal environment? The school team would think of themselves as running a portfolio of instructional approaches—computer-based, small group, project-based, whole class—and matching students with the approach that truly accelerated their learning.
Such a redesign would not be easy. It is hard to change the fundamental structure of a system as large and socially ingrown as schooling. Like any good idea in education, there are some prototypes out there—such as Kundskapskolan, a Swedish school network in which advisors help students craft and follow an academic path, a model similar to what they will do in college, and Teach to One, a way of optimizing middle-school math instruction to a portfolio of options guided by an algorithm—but they have not caught on.
A simpler starting point would be to take the existing multi-tiered system of support (“MTSS,” in educator jargon) described above and turn it on its side: instead of tiers, paths, or MPSS. Path one would be traditional whole-class instruction; Path two might be computer-based, optimized for DRD4 seven-repeat orchids. Assuming there may be objections to widespread DNA testing, all Path one students could be exposed to Path two for, say, four weeks, in order to detect who advances more rapidly.
A significant bonus of this approach is that it is student-centered, something being done for and with students rather than to students, as the multitiered system sometimes appears. Students will discover whether they are orchids and, if so, which type, and how best to cultivate that strength.
The multitiered system of support, or something like it, is widely used in schools, especially for reading in earlier grades, so reorienting it should be a great deal easier to adopt than redesigning schools wholesale. Over time, one might lead to the other. But the orchid approach need not be restricted to early literacy. The Dutch researchers have already shown that the effect is at least as strong in more conceptually rich material such as vocabulary and comprehension. That suggests it will also apply in mathematics, though demonstrating that awaits further research. And, while early childhood is a time when the difference between orchids and dandelions is stark, so is adolescence.
* * *
Pharmaceutical companies and medical researchers are working on “precision medicine” in the hope that some cancer treatments or other drugs, though they failed in broad-based clinical trials, will prove beneficial to smaller, genetically targeted populations. We have an analogous situation in education: most interventions perform poorly in broad trials. But if we can identify each student’s inner orchid, and we know what environment to build for each, we can accurately target interventions. Think of it as “precision education.”
Many orchid kids—those who struggle to pay attention to dull lessons, who act out, who make slower progress in academics—are today seen as problems. They are identified and accommodated, pitied, sometimes even mocked and bullied. They are considered a distraction, making the job of teachers harder, a cost to society and the rest of us.
This is a tragedy; a scandal. Orchid children are simply the victims of the one-size-fits-all approach that has pervaded school design for the last century. The dandelions created learning environments to suit themselves. Parents of orchid children sometimes talk of their being “twice exceptional,” once with a behavioral disorder, say, and once as gifted. That may be comforting, but it is wrongheaded. The disorder is the gift. Whether it’s a negative or a positive is not about how we look at it; it’s about what we do to ensure a setting and an upbringing that turns the negative into a positive. The real cost is the opportunity lost to orchids and to society: they could achieve so much more in the right environment. More even than us dandelions.
Laurence Holt has spent the last two decades leading innovation teams in for-profit and non-profit K–12 organizations.
The post The Orchid and the Dandelion appeared first on Education Next.
By: Laurence Holt
Title: The Orchid and the Dandelion
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Published Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2021 09:00:06 +0000
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