I recently started reading Fredrik deBoer’s The Cult of Smart, which asserts that the reason our schools are broken and failing is because they’re the wrong tool for the social problems we seek to address through them. 

The issues with schools and what we seek to accomplish through them, as he lays them out, are two-fold.

First, some children, by dint of their genetics (parental, not racial — he goes to great pains to repeatedly stress this distinction throughout the book) and environment, may have no natural talent at schoolwork at all. That’s why, despite decades of reforms, we’ve never figured out how to reliably turn poor students into high-achieving students.

Just as schools can’t turn every child into a professional athlete, they also can’t turn every child into an academic prodigy, nor should they be expected to. Consequently, attempting to reward or punish educational institutions for their quality of education is a mistake because, once a school achieves a basic level of competence and safety, it has little direct control over any particular student’s academic outcomes. 

Compounding the mistake further, attempting to compare educational institutions as if they have statistically identical children, each equally likely to be studious prodigies, leads to perverse outcomes and impossible working conditions for teachers. As he explains:

“My essential stance is this: a child’s brain is not a widget. The basic analogy of treating schools like any other competitive enterprise in a market system is flawed. Teachers and administrators simply do not control student outcomes in the way that a factory manager controls the widgets that come out of his factory. Imagine saying to someone, ‘How well your widget performs will determine whether you will be allowed to keep your job and how much you will be paid. By the way, you will not get to choose the raw materials for your widget; your widget’s basic construction and early design will be controlled entirely by someone else; you will only have control over your widget for six hours out of the day, after which someone else may treat it roughly; and the conditions that you do not control will be vastly different from one widget to the next.’ How could anyone work under those conditions, or see such a situation as a healthy environment in which to work?”

Second, even if schools were somehow capable of reliably turning children into prodigies — or even consistently studious B students — doing so would merely entrench an undesirable social and financial hierarchy ostensibly based on academic merit. Encouraging parents to pursue “equality of opportunity” for their children through the choice of one venue of education over another, then, encourages society to accept unacceptably unequal outcomes. If someone is poor because they dropped out of school, it’s not their just deserts for their failure to apply themselves — it’s a social failing that should be ameliorated by those with the means and skills to do so.

This position, it should be noted, is consistent with his identification as a self-described Marxist.

Unsurprisingly, given how deBoer believes there’s little meaningful difference between schools — and given his ideological opposition to allowing material prosperity to be based on which school someone attended and their academic performance while they attended — he is not a fan of charter schools (he calls for their abolishment) nor school choice more generally. From his point of view, all schools should be funded and resourced sufficiently to meet the immediate needs of the children attending them. 

If a specific school is failing at that task — say, because its ceilings are covered with bat excrement or the water is giving students cancer — then the solution isn’t to require parents to have enough executive function to enroll their children into a different school while the remaining students enrolled in the failing school suffer through privation. 

The solution is to adequately fund the failing school.

There are, it should be noted, a few issues with both the premises and conclusions deBoer draws, as Scott Alexander’s thorough review of The Cult of Smart neatly illustrates. 

For starters, not every educational problem can be solved by throwing money at it — which, to be clear, is not the same thing as claiming no educational problems can be solved by throwing money at them. Roofs, clean water and the like are all obvious needs and are easily addressable given sufficient funds, which is why I recommended last week that AB519, which funds capital improvements for rural schools, should become law.

The connection between school funding and the sort of safety issues that caused the Wall Street Journal, of all publications, to devote investigative attention toward my local neighborhood middle school, on the other hand, is considerably less obvious. Would increasing teacher pay make the school safer? What about hiring more armed school resource officers? Would more in-school counseling services help?

Maybe — but it’s also entirely possible there are problems that need to be addressed outside of the school and, given finite government budgets, it would be wiser to fund solutions to those problems instead.

On a more fundamental level, as noted management consultant Peter Drucker once observed, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” More succinctly, we shouldn’t try to get better at doing something we shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Devoting additional resources to particularly badly designed and badly run schools — and legally compelling parents to enroll their children into those schools — could make a bad situation worse.

Quoting Alexander: “School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood — a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder — sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole.”

Yes, additional funding could lead, at a minimum, to the installation of air conditioning in classrooms that currently don't have that feature installed. Whether additional resources would otherwise lead to more pleasant classrooms, however, is not a yes or no question. Using additional funds to increase both real world and online surveillance of students, for example, is precisely the prescription you would expect from someone who treats schools and prisons as conceptually adjacent entities.

Do you want your children to be compelled to go to prison for 180 days each year? Me neither.

Alexander’s proposed solution is to let parents find better, less inherently carceral educational delivery models for their children. Perhaps that’s through private education, perhaps that’s through charter schools, perhaps homeschooling can help. If public education can be changed to provide a better experience for students, great — but, in the meantime, it’s grossly unethical for students to be forced to attend an institution that is demonstrably bad for their mental health. 

Quoting Alexander again: “ I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences — is doing things super, super backwards!”

There is, however, one significant blind spot in Alexander’s analysis. As deBoer points out in The Cult of Smart:

“Reform types love to argue that market forces compel schools to promote student learning, but this is incorrect on its face. Market forces compel charter schools to please parents, which is not at all the same thing.”

This, of course, would be true whether “market forces” existed or not for one very specific reason — parents, not their children, are legally responsible for deciding if and where their children go to school — but it does raise an uncomfortable truth: Different parents have different objectives for their children’s education and many of those objectives actively conflict with each other. Some parents want their children to receive an education that prepares them for college. Other parents want their children to receive an education that prepares them for a skilled trade. Some parents want their children to be surrounded by the children of highly successful parents so that their children can network with the next generation of elites. Other parents want their children to be surrounded by less materially comfortable peers so they maintain a broader perspective of society. Some parents just want some free day care. Other parents just want their children to be happy. 

Oh, and yes, a few parents would prefer their children to be educated solely in a manner consistent with their religious and social beliefs.

The question, then, which of these objectives, if any, should be subsidized by the government and its taxpayers? If the government chooses to subsidize some or all of these objectives, how should those objectives be delivered? For that matter, how many parents want any of these objectives to be met?

***

Washoe County School District recently announced a new policy for parents seeking variances for their students. Instead of requesting variances from individual schools, with each variance either approved or denied by an administrator in the school, parents can instead fill out a new variance form. If the desired school’s enrollment is below 90 percent capacity, the student will automatically be accepted to the school. Ostensibly, this new policy will make it easier for Washoe County parents to enroll their students at a different school than the one they’re zoned for.

Will the policy achieve what policymakers claim it will achieve? Meaning, will it actually make it easier for parents to enroll their children in different schools than the ones they’re currently zoned for? 

The answer to that question is a firm maybe, or perhaps an unequivocal it might. 

Clark County passed a similar policy two years ago and one common complaint with the new policy is that enrollments at several Clark County schools are already at or exceed their stated capacity — consequently, getting a variance to attend many of Clark County’s schools is now next to impossible.

Washoe County’s schools, by contrast, are not quite as habitually overcrowded, though there are some notable exceptions. According to the district’s Facilities Plan 2020-2039, which lists school capacities, and the district’s We Are WCSD data portal, which lists current school attendance figures, most of the enrollments at Washoe County’s schools are under the 90 percent threshold announced in the new policy, especially for schools in older parts of town (if anyone wants to send their child to school in Sparks or Incline Village, just ask — there’s room).

Capacity, however, is quite constrained at several schools located at the edge of town, where new developments have increased student count beyond initial projections. North Valleys High School — where Assemblywomen Natha Anderson (D-Sparks) and Selena La Rue Hatch (D-Reno) teach — has 150 more students enrolled than it has listed capacity for. Even the new Hug High School, which was built to accommodate at least 300 more students than the original Hug High School, is also already over capacity.

With 1,639 students, meanwhile, McQueen High School is over 95 percent of its 1,717 student capacity — over the 90 percent threshold established by the district’s new policy. Similarly, Reed High School, which has a listed capacity of 2,330 students, currently has 2,142 students enrolled — nearly 92 percent of its capacity.

Additionally, there is one more wrinkle that somehow didn’t make it into the district’s announcement of the new policy. School capacity is only one of the criteria used to consider whether a variance may be granted — the other is whether teaching positions at the selected school are fully staffed. Though teacher vacancy rates in Washoe County aren’t quite as dire as they are in Clark County, there are still nearly 200 certified positions — roles that require a license to work in, including teachers — currently listed on the district’s job board. If the district refuses to approve variances unless all teaching positions in a preferred school are fully staffed, as its application suggests, some schools may never permit variances.

That said, the new variance process only needs to be approved once. Unlike the previous variance process, which required annual renewals, once a student is approved for a variance for a particular school, they’ll be automatically approved for as long as they continue to attend that school.

The next question to ask is whether allowing variances does any good — and whether increasing the number of them is a worthwhile policy goal.

Right now, more than 6,600 of the district’s roughly 64,000 students receive a variance to attend a school other than their zoned school — that’s a bit more than 10 percent of the total student population. Since students enrolled with a variance don’t receive transportation from the district to school and are subject to restricted athletic eligibility, we must assume parents aren’t enrolling their children into variances lightly.

Unfortunately, the district doesn’t collect information about why parents might seek a variance for their students. That said, according to district personnel, common reasons likely include the availability of specific programs, proximity to a parent’s workplace, connections with a particular teacher or administrator, or just a desire to maintain continuity after a child moves from one school zone to another.

These all sound reasonable enough.

There is, however, one final question to ask: If there’s truly little meaningful difference between one school and another, as deBoer and those who agree with his line of thinking believe, why are more than 10 percent of Washoe County’s students enrolled in a different school than the one they’re zoned for? 

Asking that question doesn’t require us to examine why idiosyncratic or ideologically driven parents select charter or private schools that more closely align with their personal beliefs over the traditional public school system. There the differences are obvious, even if deBoer might argue the end result for the student, educationally speaking, is likely to be statistically the same at either school. Instead, the parents of more than 10 percent of the students in Washoe County are choosing different schools from within the same school system. Theoretically, the similarities between one school and another in the same system should be even more pronounced — the curriculum and standardized testing regimes should be largely identical.

Yet, even despite their similarities, a sizable minority of parents, when given a choice, make a different choice than the district offers them by default. Why?

The answer is obvious. Sure, most schools might produce more or less statistically identical outcomes for students, in aggregate, but that doesn’t mean a specific school is the right fit for a specific student or their family. As deBoer himself points out, a child’s brain is not a widget — nor, for that matter, is a teacher’s brain, nor the brains of a child's fellow classmates. Sometimes a change in scenery, and absolutely nothing else, can make all the difference in a student’s life.

Though Opportunity Scholarships, Education Savings Accounts, and charter schools may get all of the attention from those who advocate for school choice — and sometimes raise questions about whether their proponents seek to remove our state constitution’s prohibition against using public money for sectarian purposes — they’re not the only choice for parents who want or need a choice. It’s encouraging to see Nevada’s two largest school districts realize this and are conducting themselves accordingly.

David Colborne ran for office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Twitter @DavidColborne, or email him at [email protected].