Two questions

 Two questions should sit at the heart of every conversation about public schools:

1. What is the job of a public school?
2. 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 job of a school through the eyes of students and the adults in their lives? The answer is not especially mysterious. Consider just a few common expectations:

• Keep my child safe.
• Help my child build friendships and feel like they belong.
• Make school engaging and meaningful.
• Ensure learning is deep and lasting.
• Prepare my child for the next stage of life.
• Teach collaboration and communication.
• Develop writing and storytelling skills.
• Don’t reduce everything to test scores.

Most parents generate lists far longer than this, and none of the items would be surprising. These are commonsense expectations — the reasons families entrust children to schools and what they hope to receive in return.

The legislature’s job, then, should be straightforward: increase the capacity of schools to deliver those benefits.

But in Texas where I live and in a great many other states, that is increasingly not how political leaders seem to understand their role. Instead, they approach schooling through a command-and-control mindset, a narrow fixation on standardized test scores, burdensome regulation, chronic underfunding of public schools, and policies that direct resources towards alternatives that, by design, cannot reliably deliver the full range of benefits families expect.

The logic behind these choices is impossible to defend. Somehow, we are asked to believe that underfunding institutions designed to deliver broad educational benefits in the eyes of parents, while subsidizing alternatives that cannot, will produce better outcomes for more students.

That is patently absurd.

The recent report from Network for Public Education, which gave Texas and a range of states that treat public schooling similarly a solid F, reinforces what many have been saying for years: legislatures all over the country are failing to do their job.

I challenge any legislator who votes for vouchers or educational savings accounts, that thinks starving schools of the basic resources they need, or treats test scores as the only lens for judging schools, to look honestly at the full job of a school and explain how any of these increase the capacity of a school to do its job for the people that voted for them.

In nearly every case they reduce or degrade that capacity, making it harder for a school to deliver on its expectations.

All of which makes something painfully clear: too many of the people shaping education policy in Texas and elsewhere appear far more interested in damaging our public education system than helping it, but then feel the need to blame those in schools when their policies have the very effect they intended.

The failing mark for those legislatures are both shameful and well deserved.