A majority of Americans think public schools are going in the wrong direction. Donald Trump’s administration believes the problem is inefficient government bureaucracy and is pushing for school choice. But there must also be a deeper problem, too, since we see similar challenges even in top private schools that already compete for students — such as the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, or Lab, the elite K-12 school run by the university since being founded in 1896 by John Dewey as an education research and development hub.
What exactly these deeper problems are is unclear, but parents increasingly have a hypothesis: mission drift.
The No. 1 concern parents have with America’s public schools is a loss of focus on academics. Ditto for Lab. I was talking to a fellow middle school parent at Lab who said about his daughter, “We only recently realized she hadn’t really been learning math for the past four years.” Many public school parents can sympathize, given that the large share of elementary school teachers in the U.S. say they’re not great at math and don’t love teaching it.
Or consider what Lab did when faced with a short-term cash crunch: It ended one of our best academic programs, German. Where does the money go instead? By my count, the number of administrators at Lab has tripled since 2007. (The student population has not nearly tripled.) The data shows the same trend toward administrative bloat for public schools, too. There’s an old saying: “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”
The second-biggest concern parents have with public schools is they’ve become political. Ditto for Lab. For example, in 2019, Lab adopted a strategic plan that endorsed the principles of the Progressive Education Network. In a country where people are allowed to hold different political views, is anyone surprised that a lot of parents aren’t happy that their school is now taking stands on immigration policy, school choice and other so-called “corporate reforms”?
Similarly, I’ve heard many parents express strong views — pro and con — about Lab’s big investments in diversity, equity and inclusion. Some parents look out the window at the inequality we have here in Chicago and are glad Lab is giving attention to this.
Other parents see DEI principles such as “How do we name and affirm our own and others’ racial identities every day” as antithetical to Dewey’s pluralistic vision: “Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life.” But usually these comments are conveyed privately, particularly by parents with views counter to the majority here in Hyde Park.
DEI, in other words, is a third rail even at the University of Chicago, which prides itself as being the place for free speech and inquiry. One can only imagine how much self-censorship on both sides of the political aisle is going on at school board meetings around the country given how politically segregated our communities have become — the “big sort.” What parent with some counter-majority view — say, a red state mom or dad who opposes book bans — wants to get pilloried at a public meeting?
A third reason for parent dissatisfaction is a sense that a lot of this is happening in schools without our knowledge. For example, it was ridiculously hard for me to figure out what had happened to the ratio of administrators to students over time at Lab. My Lab parent friend who discovered only too late that his daughter was struggling in math is far from alone: Surveys show most public school parents in America don’t realize how behind academically their children are.
The infusion of politics into schools is even harder to track since so much of what the schools tell us is in vague bureaucratese. For example, even Texas families that support the promotion of family values are surprised to learn the most banned book in the state is Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” which in one puzzled parent’s recounting seems more substantive and no more offensive than most TV shows.
At Lab, the science department used land acknowledgements for years before the University of Chicago’s leadership finally realized and asked officials to stop as a violation of institutional neutrality. Even today, the university’s official policy is “Diversity & Inclusion,” yet Lab itself (despite being part of the university) has gone its own way with administrators and programs officially in diversity, equity and inclusion. The larger point is that if the University of Chicago administrators who sit above Lab in the chain of command sometimes can’t figure out what’s happening, how can parents?
My own hypothesis is that it is this third problem — lack of parent understanding of what schools are doing — that leads to the other two, mission drift on academics and schools becoming political. School choice can’t work if parents are kept in the dark. (For that matter, neither can democratic accountability for the public schools.)
While the national debate is likely to focus on school choice, looking at what parents across the political spectrum are worried about suggests the value of focusing on something even more basic: a clear conversation about what schools should be for.
Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, the Pritzker co-director of the University of Chicago Education Lab and a Lab School parent. He can be reached at jludwig@uchicago.edu.
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