An Educational Contrarian

I am on occasion accused of being an apologist for schools, someone willing to criticize policy, policy makers, and critics of the public education system, as if somehow their criticisms are entirely unwarranted. Those accusations mostly just mean that they ran across one thing I wrote or said and took it out of context.  The objective reality is that our public school system in 2026 is a good ways from what it needs to be. I know of no educator who thinks otherwise. But at its core it is a system designed to educate young people for a world that hasn't existed for decades. Any attempt to fight that system is met by the forces of gravity pulling towards an undesirable state. And not every school is a good school, just as not every hospital, police department, or public institution can be said to always be performing as it should. Understanding and accepting that is how we get better. What I criticize are those with the power to make things better. You cannot underfund an institutio...

 Two questions should sit at the heart of every conversation about public schools: What is the job of a public school? How can the legislature best support schools in doing that job? To understand the job of any organization we must start with a simple reality: the people inside the organization do not ultimately define its purpose. That role belongs to the organization’s primary stakeholders — the people who stand to benefit directly from its work. For a hospital, that means patients. For an architecture firm, it means clients who need buildings designed. For schools, it means students — and, by extension, the adults responsible for them. People outside an organization define its purpose through their own experience and expectations, and they decide how to engage with that organization through that lens. Organizations can describe their mission however they choose, but it is the perception of those they serve that most shapes how they are understood in the world. So, what is the ...