MEDIOCRITY

In 2019, the National Education Association’s “Representative Assembly” considered the resolution that “NEA will make student learning the priority of the Association”—and then voted it down (!).

New Book Mediocrity Distills the Concerns About Public Schooling

By Frederick M. Hess
AEIdeas
20 April 2023

For a very long time, the impulse to denounce “failing government schools” has done for conservative school reformers what “defund the police” did for left-wing criminal justice reformers. It’s a slogan that energizes adherents but alienates the lion’s share of Americans. That’s because most Americans like their local public schools. Even when they’re down on the nation’s schools as a whole, Americans have consistently said (for a half-century) that they like their kids’ schools. It’s a lot like how the public feels about Congress: Voters inevitably hate Congress but love their own representative.

School choice advocates have long had trouble accepting this, or the courses of action it recommends: One, offer the public options without attacking their schools; two, convince them that there are problems in their local schools which they haven’t fully appreciated. Well, the recent explosion of school choice legislation has shown how the pandemic and the proliferation of extreme racial and gender ideologies have fueled a hunger for more options, without necessarily requiring school choice advocates to spend as much time making the case against public schools.

Indeed, on the second count, the last several years have made it all too easy to critique public education on the merits, without having to rely on over-the-top sloganeering. After all, we’ve seen massive infusions of cash coupled with prolonged school closures, devastating declines in test scores, school reopenings delayed by unions working back channels at the CDC, a push by the National School Boards Association to have frustrated parents investigated by the federal government as “domestic terrorists”—well, you get the idea.

For readers seeking a useful survey of these issues, Libertas Institute president Connor Boyack and American Federation for Children senior fellow Corey DeAngelis have published a useful new resource. In Mediocrity, they use the 40th anniversary of the seminal A Nation at Risk report to make a wide-ranging case that public schools are too often falling short. Its 40 short, easy-to-read chapters offer a mix of anecdotes, compelling media snippets, and data points on school closures, spending, school safety, curricula, unionization, and much more.

Some of what Boyack and DeAngelis share is particularly telling. In their chapter on “Schools: A Jobs Program for Adults,” they note that public school spending increased by 21 percent from 2002 to 2019, after adjusting for inflation, but that more than 64 percent of those funds were consumed by employee benefits. In the chapter “Politics > Education,” they recount that, in 2019, the National Education Association’s “Representative Assembly” considered the resolution that “NEA will make student learning the priority of the Association”—and then voted it down (!).

Mediocrity will be a timely resource for those seeking an accessible distillation as to where the nation’s public schools are coming up short.