Has compulsory education turned out to be a mistake? That essential question remains oddly unaddressed. This is most peculiar, given the serious school problems that unmotivated, disruptive, sometimes openly hostile, kids create when compelled to attend. They learn little, waste prodigious amounts of taxpayer's money and disrupt the entire process.
To learn, ya gotta wanna. And those who must be compelled to even attend, generally don't wanna. They are the kids "graduating" from high school who can barely read. Moreover, instead of being in school they are often truant enough to make educating them impossible. In fact truancy rates in inner city schools are often comically high. And even when they aren't tardy, they often show up hours late.
Wouldn't it be far better if these "students" weren't there? Better for whom? Better for those who want to learn, certainly. And better for their teachers as well. But there seems to be little concern about the fate of the motivated kids, or their teachers,; both of whom pay an unacceptably high price for the disruptive presence of these others. The focus is typically on the disrupters. Those whose behavior causes serious problems, sometimes physical danger for everyone around them, receive the most attention and use up the most resources.
We waste prodigious amounts of tax payer's money continuing this process. The latest 2022-2023 data shows the total average cost of "educating" a youngster in a U.S. public school is some $163,000.00. Now, imagine giving a child a present worth that kind of money and have them not only to refuse to open it, but possibly destroy it. Not just their own gift, mind you., but other's gifts as well. How? By making it impossible for them to learn. This is what we've been doing, year after year, decade after decade, for well-over a century.
When "students" are compelled to attend, educators must try to force-feed them. Sure, some initially unwilling kids can be coaxed to learn. But this coaxing is so time consuming and costly that it is often impractical. After all, our public schools, for cost control purposes, must be run like factories. And factories run very poorly when the raw material is uncooperative, even oppositional. Painstaking efforts to seduce uncooperative learners disrupts the production process and consumes vast quantities of scarce resources that is far better used educating the willing. Nevertheless, we pretend that compulsory education is working — or at least would be working if educators could only figure out how. So we go on forcing kids to attend, then pretend they are learning.
Meanwhile legislators and judges, safe in their offices far to the rear, have stripped teachers of any ability to impose meaningful sanctions for misbehavior or lack of effort. So these educators can't even coerce a semblance of civilized behavior from the disruptive. Worse, a similarly emasculated school administration offers besieged teachers little help. Some administrators even play defense by siding with the malefactors. So it goes, with pretense, turmoil and wastage rolling on and on.
Folks worry that if we abandon compulsory education, disruptive kids will roam the streets threatening the peace. That has some validity. Except that, because of truancy, a lot of disruptive, potentially dangerous kids aren't in school to begin with — especially in nice weather. But, and here's a key point, it is NOT the school's proper businesses to conduct part-time incarceration. The school's distinctive function is to educate, not incarcerate. And it is way past time to face up to the fact that when educators try to do both, they often can't do neither?
Of course day care is another unacknowledged function of public schooling. Teachers spend an average of 7 hours a day providing that service. Given a class of, say, 25, that means an elementary school teacher is providing day care 175 hours a day or 875 hours per week. That's 31,500 total hours of day care per school year. If the teacher were paid $15 an hour per child, he or she would have earned $472,500.00! Is this what keeping compulsory education in place is really all about? Well if it is, it shouldn't be. This, too, is NOT a distinctive function of schooling. And, just like temporary incarceration, it gets in the way of actual education.
In Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District (2017) ruled that schools must provide educational services that are reasonably designed to enable students to make progress appropriate in light of their circumstances. But what counts as "reasonably designed?" Suppose, for instance, a student is failing to make educational progress because his mother is a crack whore who is abusively neglectful and the absent father's identity is a multiple choice question? There are tens of thousands of kids facing similar situations in what passes for their home. And, of course, they are often among the kids who reject and disrupt the educational process. Is there any "reasonable design" possible for them, given available resources and a factory style setting?
Should we decide to get serious, not just solemn, about public education we must take a fresh look at compulsory education and ask why we continue to spend billions upon billions of dollars yearly vainly trying to force-feed knowledge to kids who not only resist and resent it, but also prevent their classmates from learning. Isn't it time to consider public education a privilege rather than a right? After all, the public is providing these youngsters and their parent(s) with free, very expensive services.
Ignoring the difficulties created by compelling attendance, school districts adopt truancy prevention programs. They are, in effect, encouraging the attendance of potential troublemakers. A major justification of these programs is that truancy breeds broader social problems. It's asserted, for instance, that 95% of juvenile offenders started as truants. We're told that truants are more likely to:
- join a gang running the risk of disease, injury or death;
- use marijuana, alcohol and hard drugs;
- become pregnant and drop out of school;
- have low self-esteem, low aspirations, and educational failure;
- be illiterate or have serious trouble reading;
- engage in violent and criminal activities.
But every one of these assertions suffers from the same fatal flaw. Just because these things correlate, does NOT mean one causes the other. All juvenile offenders start out as babies, for instance. But does starting life as a baby cause a youngster to become a juvenile offender? Of course not. Correlation is NOT causation. Why assume, for instance, that gang membership begins with truancy? Isn't it more likely that gang membership encourages truancy? The same applies to marijuana, alcohol and hard drug use. Sure, truants are more likely to engage in these behaviors. But why assume that it is truancy that causes them to do so? Are truants more likely to become pregnant and drop out of school? Sure they are; but is truancy the cause?
As for low self-esteem, low aspirations, and educational failure, isn't it more likely that these things provoke truancy, rather than cause it? The same applies to serious reading difficulties. And as for kids that engage in violence and criminal activities, don't blame truancy, blame lousy parenting, dysfunctional families, broken homes, poverty, violent neighborhoods, the illicit economic opportunities created by making certain intoxicants illegal, ad infinitum.
Truancy prevention stops being a problem if we quit compelling school attendance to begin with. We've grown used to kids rejecting, even actively destroying, the extremely expensive educational opportunities taxpayers provide. In fact, this sort of behavior is so commonplace in some schools that the educational process is largely a pretense. Teachers pretend to teach and administrators pretend to be running a school. Meanwhile standardized testing consistentlyproves that the whole compulsory education thing is a farce.
Isn't it time to face up to the fact that this very expensive endeavor has failed; and, instead, concentrate on effectively teaching those youngsters who are willing to at least try to learn? But what is to be done with kids who reject, even destroy, this gift? That remains unsolved. But what is abundantly clear is that maintaining the pretense that compulsory education is working is wasteful, counterproductive and foolish.
