Transcript
Speaker: Hey there, Nick here at Human Restoration Project. Today's episode starts out with a little visualization. Close your eyes and picture a good school.
Speaker: Maybe you teach at one or send your kids there. Now make a mental list of what makes that school good. What are their criteria? Is it close by, within walking distance?
Speaker: Is the building new and well-resourced? Perhaps you went there or people in your neighborhood send their kids there. Maybe they offer programs, clubs, and extracurriculars you know your kid would fall in love with.
Speaker: Now, using those criteria, think of the top 20% of schools that do those things best. Most of the time, and for most kids, they're safe and accessible, well-maintained, and help students reach the next stage of their lives.
Speaker: Now think of the bottom 20%. They struggle to provide the minimum of what the top 20% seems to produce by default. How does a public education system decide which kids go to the top 20% or to the bottom?
Speaker: Someone has to make a choice. Either the system decides through geographic placement, a lottery, or some other mechanism, or families make the choice for themselves.
Speaker: Regardless of why you would or wouldn't pick a school for your own child, somebody's kids have to go there. And we don't often think about education in terms of rationing scarce resources, but that's exactly what it is.
Speaker: And when there aren't enough seats at good schools, rationing itself becomes the focus of education policy. Reformers rightfully target inequitable and unjust rationing when it's done by state agencies or by neighborhood.
Speaker: And they offer school choice as a way out, where every family gets to pick the schools they want, and that will be the best fit for their children. But as my guest argues in her book, school choice changes how rationing works, not whether it exists.
Speaker: School choice also focuses policy discussions away from the biggest question of all. Why are good schools so scarce that access must be rationed at all, my guest argues.
Speaker: Scarcity is treated as a fact of life in public education, not a crisis. Once scarcity is accepted as permanent, much else begins to feel inevitable. The strategizing, the self-sorting, the exhaustion, and the reproduction of inequality even when reforms are sincere.
Speaker: That incredible book is The Scarcity Loop, How School Choice Reshapes the Rationing of Public Education, and the author and my guest today is Dr. Jennifer Jennings. Jen Jennings is the Class of 1988 Professor in Domestic Policy and Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton, where she directs the Education Research section and studies racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in educational and health outcomes.
Speaker: Her other recent work includes an experiment testing whether better school information helps New York City families choose high schools, studies of lead in school drinking water, and research on how families living in shelters navigate school choice.
Speaker: Oh my goodness. Thank you so much, Jen, for joining me today. and like It's so great to finally meet you and to be here to have this conversation. Thanks so much for having me. God, that's right. We haven't ever. haven't met. we've been going back and forth. We are online. Yes, we' we're terminally online. So being face to face is wonderful.
Speaker: At one point in the book, you describe choice as a process of navigating a city enshrouded in fog. What a visual. And at the macro level, that's kind of how I feel about trying to understand how school choice actually works. There's so many different moving parts and so many of them are obscured at different points. But reading the scarcity loop is really like shining a spotlight into all of those nooks and crannies. And it's one of the most insightful books I've read on the topic of school choice.
Speaker: It's been out for a month now. What's the reception been so far? Yeah, so um so it's been it's it's been about, i guess, less than a month, or just just about over a month, I guess. And so, um you know, so I'm just starting to conversations with people about it, really. I think it's been...
Speaker: um helpful it'd be out on the road talking to both, um you know, students in classrooms who are reading it. So college kids, as well as colleagues. um And I think people have had really, I think, good questions and and good questions about how to push it forward. I think one of the um things I asked in the class at Cornell on Monday day was, if there was going to be a sequel, like, what did I get wrong?
Speaker: like What could I do better next time? And it's a fun question engage with students on. And no pressure. You're like, I just published this book and you're already asking about the next one. Come on, guys. Sure. Well, it's a way of getting them to be willing to tell you a critique, right? Because I think otherwise students are often like they see us as somehow not just like them, right? But the professors, in fact, are a lot just like them.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, what is their response to their reaction? this This is a book that I wish had been written and I had read 10 years ago. I think it would have informed just so much. I think um they for students, and i I taught a draft of it to my own students last year too, so I had a couple of ah goes swings at it. I think um students are often really focused on the, so what do we do kind of piece as opposed to, you know, fundamentally the book is a diagnosis. It's not a a guide manual for how to fix school choice and 10 easy steps because the point is that you can't
Speaker: You can't choose your way out of a shortage. right So I um you know often talk to students about there are technocratic fixes. There are ways to make it better. There are ways to make it um less of an in insane process for for families to be sure. right And like the experiments that you mentioned um that you know ah Sean Corcoran, Carolyn Satin-Bajaj, and Sarah Cahodis and I did together are really an effort to try to do that, right to you know put something in front of kids that can make their lives easier.
Speaker: um But the the fundamental issue of, you know, there not being enough seats that folks um either see is like what I call kind of at like adequacy scarcity, kind of above some basic bar. um So, you know, there is some good news there. Like 10 years ago when... um I looked at those numbers. They're, I think, about 28% of seats that had 80% of graduation rates and 80% safety. I was just taking a look at those the other day, and that's up to 66%. So, again, those are...
Speaker: shamefully low targets, I should say, to begin with. No one wants their kids to go to a school where one in five kids don't graduate and one in five kids don't feel safe. But, um you know, we have made some progress in pulling up the bottom. And I think in education reform, we often um you know, don't talk enough about that. That's, I should say, it's happened across the country. It's not a New York City specific phenomenon, right? but um But, you know, we we certainly with kind of the consistent, um you know, pushing on political will can do a lot to to pull up that bottom. But the reality remains there's still
Speaker: two-thirds of applications going to one in five um schools in New York City, which says something about the extent to which families feel like um there's enough out there for everyone.
Speaker: And before we get into the nitty-gritty of what the scarcity loop is and how it works, I do just want to follow up. What was the audience that you had in mind when you were writing this book? Is it for policymakers? Is it for future reformers? Is it for your public policy students? Yeah.
Speaker: i think I think I wasn't um particularly like focused in on just one audience. right I think I they wanted it to be a book that could work in an undergraduate classroom to teach some kind of key pillars of education policy. I wanted it be a book that helped move the conversation forward in the scholarly academic realm. And I wanted it to be a book that made...
Speaker: um parents and kids alike feel like less alone and less alike. I was really struck by what a number of my students um at Princeton I knew well, so they told me these things, you know, i had gone through the New York City process, said like, i I wish I had understood this broader context in eighth grade, right? that This was not just about whether or not I was able to climb this mountain, but rather, you know, about a historically grounded, complex set of dynamics that are so much bigger than me. So I think that interestingly became like a core, core audience. Of course, I hope policymakers read it too. um but ah But those were the ones that I was most thinking about.
Speaker: That really is so cool that you were helping students really get an insight as to how to the processes that shaped their education journey that maybe they weren't privy to. What an what an interesting position to i don't find yourself in as as the person teaching it and in the students in your room learning about it. you know Yeah, no, and they absolutely, I mean, I think we're um whether they came from the New york City system, or not like made really incisive, um thoughtful suggestions to you know improve the book along those lines. So it was very much a two-way.
Speaker: a lot of a lot of pieces of the book changed after they read it, and they really you know pushed them to be like, you're not helping me out if – you tell me like jazzy hands, you know, like Professor Jennings like needs you to do her a solid here. So, um, so, you know, they really, they really did, um, come through.
Speaker: What parts of the book did they help influence? Like what, oh god as a, as, as we read through it, what, where's their voice in that? Yeah. So it's everywhere. I mean, it's, it's all over the place. So I think it's in kind of the, couldn't you just be a little bit more succinct about this? Um, fundamentally, you know, could you just try to help us? i think that the scarcity loop kind of historical process in in general is confusing. And I, um you know, can think it definitely got less confusing over many drafts, but I think that they really helped push to be like, write it down on the board, you know, with a set of diagrams, which ended up in the, in the book itself. I think um being sure you know,
Speaker: It was extraordinarily clear that the families who, especially immigrant families, were not, like, they love their kids so much. They chased opportunity across the globe, right, to to give their kids a better life. And so helping make sure that that part is told alongside of wanting their kids close, I think it was always there, but I really tried to put a point on that just because I think it's often the case people...
Speaker: kind of get get that wrong, um you know, with respect to just looking at applications and saying these families just prefer to stay close um when when the the broader ecosystem is a lot more complicated.
Speaker: I think that's a perfect entry into discussing those mechanisms because it's not as easy as just choosing a school as you've uncovered here. There's a lot of things that shape both the family's choice of fit and where they might want to um send their kids if the parents are involved in that process. And schools have a lot of say in that choice too. So what is the scarcity loop as you begin to uncover it?
Speaker: Yeah, so this is certainly, I mean, this was'ter this came at the end of the process of writing the book of like really hammering, and banging my head against the wall of the history for a long time. um you know, so i I came to like really want to understand how we got here at the end of, you know, a couple decade and a half of studying this. And um what was really just striking, I think perhaps one of the most striking episodes, came right on the heels of Brown v. Ward. So Kenneth Clark, who was a key testifier of the Dull studies, people may be familiar with, and Brown was also a New Yorker. And he
Speaker: you know, on the eve of Brown coming, being handed down, came back to New York City and was like, look, we have segregated schools here in New York. This isn't a Southern problem. And really set off kind of a firestorm because New Yorkers saw themselves and and still see themselves as somehow above and different, right? And like that stuff they do down there in the South. And um you know A number of things happened, but fast forward to 1960, the way that the Board of Education at the time, there was ah not a mayoral control, we now call it the Department of Education, decided to deal with this was to say, like we're going to give kids the opportunity to enroll somewhere else. If you're in a highly segregated school, we're going to designate sending and receiving schools. and um you know This is the way that we're going to deal with the problem of segregation. So um in in what echoes through history, what you end up seeing is they don't provide transportation, they don't provide lunch. And at that time, kids, by and large, went home for lunch. They give folks four days to get these forms back. And then when only 3% of folks stepped forward and said, I want to move my kid, um both the media and the board said, we've given you, you want the chance to go somewhere and you're not taking it So this is, you know,
Speaker: This is on you, essentially. um And you know historically, over time, like Black parents stepped into the fray. They tried to organize parents to be able to take up this opportunity. By the time this program gets discontinued in 1967, only 6% of folks, I think, have taken it up. But um it provided the shield for the city um to be able to say, like we're giving you the choice. If you're not taking a choice, um we've done our bit. and you need to do yours. and I think that that
Speaker: continues to happen over time. So you have some kind of the scarcity loop, just in in real brief, the idea is that you have some pressure to create more good seats, um that those seats get created, but very quickly, kind of in the same way that the commons get enclosed and privatized, get enclosed by some kind of new rule that doesn't always look like a barrier. So one of the best examples of that, I think, is for the new small schools that were started in the early 2000s, you had to go to an information session. And For so many people, they're like, what's the big deal? You go to an information session and you get priority to go to the school. They're not selecting on your academics. They're selecting on whether you show up. If you if you can't show up, that's on you. and But the um open houses weren't listed anywhere. you um they often had one to two of them. So if you missed them, you weren't necessarily going to get priority. And again, like what didn't look to everyone like a barrier at the beginning really did become a barrier for, you know, being able to get into those seats. So essentially this enclosure, um you know, then kind of quiets public um pressure for a little bit, but there's still not enough. And so you kind of go back and and do this all again. And this we've done multiple cycles of that in New York City.
Speaker: One of the things that you do a great job of elaborating on in the book is uncovering how when that decision is made by the state actors or agencies or a Department of Education, that at least puts the decision in a person's role or a policy that we have democratic leverage over, right There's a policy somewhere that we can enact to change it, right? But the privatization of those school choice decisions then lays the fault for inequalities or
Speaker: the poor choices, quote unquote, that parents may make, right, at the feet of families and kids. um What were those roles, and I don't know, call them like the rationing logics that students, parents, you look at counselors, principals, schools, they all have their little role in this intersection. um How do they serve and deploy the issue of school choice?
Speaker: Yeah. So i mean I think what's really fascinating is um you know we interviewed both kids whose parents had college degrees who I'm calling advantage just for shorthand in the book and kids whose parents don't have college degrees which I'm calling disadvantage. um And I think there there's a lot of evidence that like that access is a main dividing and stratifying access is in our society right now um as opposed to simply income. But the advantage families were the ones who were the most critical of the system despite having what some might see as much better outcomes. But I think the story we've told about um school choice
Speaker: always having advantage families as the winners is not it misses the boat. So before you could buy a thing and you could get your school and that was that. um Now you've got a go through a bunch of hoops, right? So those are the folks whose lives have in some respects changed and ah not kind of allocating sympathy or disdain or anything here just descriptively changed the most. um And so you know, they essentially tried to use kind of navigational patterns to be able to um still be able to succeed within the system, right? So these are folks who have flexible jobs, are able to take time off work, even as, I mean, asking parents to take 70 hours off of work to manage a process is um strikes me as a real mom tax on average, you know, from the state.
Speaker: um And then, you know, on the other side, and I'll get to the rationing bit, for disadvantaged families, like the spatial dimension is just central, um that it just is a lot more costly when you don't have resources to be further to home for a number of different reasons. One is that your ability to move through space safely is quite different. The ah second is you can't just buy your way out of it. So whereas Families in some parts of the city will like charter a private bus so their kids can get from Park Slope, which is an affluent part of Brooklyn, to Bronx Science. That's not an option for, you know, for other families. um
Speaker: These families are more likely to have like young siblings as well, as opposed to like two very careful, like, Closely spaced, not carefully spaced, but closely spaced um kids. So there are there are a lot more you know younger kids to care for. And there are also you know the kinds of things that come with poverty, which are health issues, both in parents and in other members of the family. um uncertainty, you know, we have a remarkable um ah population of kids who are in temporary housing in New York City. So just not knowing, are they going to move me next year? Am I going to still be here? How you know how am I going to make this choice without any certainty about next year's address? And so the spatial dimensions are In addition to these other parts, right, the navigational dimensions um were a big part of it. I think for everyone, um the kind of fog that you mentioned, like what do you even see on the map as options? Even if everyone's getting, at that time it was paper, it's now online, but there's, you know, big fat directory.
Speaker: What part of that is even visible to you? um in in kind of not just ruling it out before you even had a look. And, you know, different folks did that in different ways, depending on like their their family's histories, um their migration histories, um their own understanding of the kind of um social structure of the city. But it it wasn't that everyone opened that book and said, these are all actually auctions for me.
Speaker: As you elaborate, some people viewed some places as ah where they wanted to escape from. Like they viewed their home neighborhood as like a liability. Like I got to get out of here to make something of myself. Well, other people viewed that their same place as, well, yeah, I want to stay close to home because this is where my family, my neighborhood, my community, my right. Like those ties and one gets viewed a,
Speaker: good and one gets perceived as bad and we blame the families who make the choice to stay closer to home rather than send their kids across town. Yeah, i mean, think everyone, irrespective of social background, or would prefer to have proximity. um Like, just because, like, we are physical beings, we can't just teleport ourselves places. And, um you know, to the extent that that's not possible because of the spatial distribution of quality, people...
Speaker: who, you know, kind of make different choices than that. But I don't think there's anyone who prefers to commute an hour each way um because that's a, you know, that's the middle of the the winter when you go to school in the dark and you come home in the dark. um That's a real uphill climb.
Speaker: Yeah, and parents who don't feel comfortable putting their kid for an hour on the subway. Yeah, or putting their kid on the subway at all, right? so Yeah, yeah. if you moved here from a place that didn't have, I mean, like a lot of the the but largest immigrant group in new York City are Dominicans. And um from the middle of the Dominican Republic where um like there is no subway um you know per se, this just seems like a risk that – I moved here you for opportunity. I didn't move here to put my kid at risk.
Speaker: um And so, you know, families really, um about one in five of recent immigrants didn't feel comfortable putting their kids on the subway and also, you know, just had questions about the bus system in general.
Speaker: it was really eye opening and humanizing, frankly, to just hear in their own words and to sort of lay out and contrast those things on the page side by side. um And I think, you know, we've been talking about the navigational, the perceptual, the spatial resources that families may or may not have um in this mix. Let's flip the script and look then at um the schools themselves and the role that the actors within the schools play as sort of sorting and rationing. Another huge, fascinating um bit of that, how principals
Speaker: Some of them put the reputation of the school first in the way that they present them. um Counselors sometimes, you know, sort kids ah really actively and others take a more laissez-faire approach. But all of these little micro decisions end up adding up to ways that schools, frankly, end up picking their kids too. So let's let's talk about some of those for a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing that fascinated me about this the school side of it was that I first saw it in an ethnographic context. So in 2004 or 2006, when there were new schools that were founded, I um was started a study of the founding of new small schools. This wasn't initially something that was on my radar because I saw it naively as kind of rule-bound, that these were the rules, people were going to follow the rules, and that wasn't an area
Speaker: of interest, quite frankly, um in the beginning. But then I was very surprised to see um among like three truly excellent educators in multiple ways. right like I think it's hard to follow these folks around for for a year and a half. and um not And see the amount of sacrifice that they're going through to serve their kids. And then, you know, I think on the page, some of the actions people take people's breath away, right? um ah A native Spanish speaker who screens out Spanish-speaking families because she's afraid that... that's going to put her behind the eight ball, right? But it's from the community that she's serving and has spent her career sweating for these kids, right? It's it's it's not just kind of a villains, um you know, and heroes kind of story. It's it's really complicated um on the ground. But what's fascinating is i saw that. But when I went back in history, what was really interesting to me is in the mid-60s,
Speaker: The high school principals were very much like, we do not want to have more selective schools. This is going to lead to a brain drain from our own neighborhoods. you know, like, let's just make an agreement about this. um But as the city starts emptying out in the 1970s, both the specialized school principals um are really a big part of this effort to put into state law that there has to be a particular test used for these three schools.
Speaker: um And then as new career magnets are started, those principals are some of the most vocal in saying we have the right and the need to select our students however we see fed.
Speaker: um And principals in other parts of the city responded in kind by saying, okay, if they're going to do it and there's not any oversight framework, I'm going to start my little program in my school. um And this kind of by the mid-80s becomes a crisis where essentially people are um saying like this system makes no sense as a whole. The kinds of complaints that are made now are very much of the same um type that were made then. But um at each point, principals really were um playing a central role in shaping the nature of this admission system.
Speaker: um I think that there's a perception now that that that has been dialed back to some extent. There's a little bit more oversight, but even so, I'd say, um in so far as you present your school in particular ways um as um are your desks in rows? Do you have strict uniform policy? Do you have – do people call teachers by their first names or by their last names? You know, things that seem very non-related to –
Speaker: student admissions end up being ways that sort. um and And I think there's a lot of class sorting that happens that way. Like particular types of more authoritarian discipline is seen by more advantaged parents is not for their kids and and vice versa, right? and Like where That kind of loosey-goosey, what looks loosey-goosey to some folks is not what they want for their kids. And so there's there's them a lot of dynamics on the ground and that I think are are very, very subtle, but that we don't do enough thinking about.
Speaker: Yeah, the school choice is really a trying to reframe that selection process as merit while kind of neglecting the role that the schools and the process itself has in constructing merit and constructing the meritocracy and who gets to go where, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. Even through things that aren't formally characteristics of selection, right? I think there's ah a really high profile um recent instance of this that we can bring up. um And for listeners who may not have followed this, um Nicole Hannah-Jones, um ah shout out native Iowan, um wrote a New York Times essay about her daughter that came out, I think around the same time that your book was released. yeah yeah titled, In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did i Betray My Own? And she writes, a decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter's education that I hoped would challenge New York City's separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice. And obviously, it's been in the discourse for a lot of reasons. um And it feels like the scarcity loop in microcosm, right? This could be a case study of one of the parents and families in your book. How
Speaker: how did you approach that story and how does that scarcity loop help us understand it? Yeah, i was it was a it was kind of um ah amazing timing in terms of just a few days after the focus first app is coming out and i um i teach the out. I will now teach the second article, but i teach the first article in my class, um the 2016 article. and And so what I found these dynamics to be so interesting, I guess in two ways, like if you read the comments,
Speaker: They're all about, did this parent make the right choice as opposed to why is this the set of choices that she has? Right. And I mean, few people understand structure as well as Nicole Hannah-Jones. And I think that's what runs throughout her career.
Speaker: piece is both a deep understanding of that and then there's this amazing part at the end where she says something along the lines of like, I hadn't chosen her, meaning her daughter. And so even for someone who um so, so deeply understands the structural nature of her choices, this um process, is it does make it very intimate because you feel like, and you in fact are choosing, right? Thing A versus thing B. um So I think it it kind of laid bare um the extent to which people relocate the conversation into what should this person do versus why, how did we get a system that looks like this in the first place and why do we um tolerate it?
Speaker: How did that newest piece land with your students? Yeah. So I've talked, I mean, I'm on sabbatical this year, so I haven't, I'm not teaching, and but I have taught, I had multiple students like text or reach out, like, you know, folks who've now graduated being like, oh my gosh, did you see this? Like, this is blowing my mind. And so, um you know, I think when I teach the original article, there's, it's always very polarizing um where some folks, it's kind of like a,
Speaker: whoa, I never, like the whole world has been turned um in a way. And for others, the world has been turned in a way that that's asking kind of a fundamental question that philosophers say, which is it, is it ethical to give priority to your own child? child And I think um Essentially, that's i think philosophers kind of land on, yes, it is, right? Like that's that's your role and in this system. um Although, of course, everything's debated. But um I think folks really, it's a great piece to teach because folks really grapple with both the structural and individual dimensions of of moving through a system like this.
Speaker: You had mentioned there's so many class dynamics at play when parents go to make fits and schools navigate those choices too. But I think that pairing in Nicole Hannah-Jones' own experience really raises the valence of race too and how school – Oh, absolutely. how schools manage reputation and perception and how families perceive this notion of fit, which you write about a lot too, like how that word just hides a lot of information.
Speaker: What did you find out about fit? I'm really glad that you brought that up because I think that people treat that as a neutral world-like word and it is nothing of the type. um the The racial sorting dominates this New York City system and many others. I think what's unique about New York is it actually does have a multiracial, multiethnic population. um But um essentially, in my student, now ah assistant professor at UT Austin, Chantal Haley's work, where she did experiments that carefully controlled the characteristics of schools and simply just changed the composition of school, she found that, you know, every single group of folks um essentially avoided Black school. So there's um often in this assumption that Latino and and Black families are a coalition of sorts. and They often do face similar conditions, but that absolutely isn't the case, at least in New York City.
Speaker: um So I think that, yeah, the I mean, the The huge issue in terms of kind of readdressing, like, or undoing segregation in any way is that until you have a more uniform distribution of kids across schools, all these other features of schools are not what folks are choosing on. They're choosing peers. um And, you know, and and have been doing so, right, for the last, you know, 50 or 60 years. our Our schools at the high school level are actually more black-white segregated than they were in 1970.
Speaker: um The um segregation by um what New York City calls Hispanic white or Asian white has reduced somewhat because folks initially when they came after 1965 lived in ethnic enclaves um and people have spread out a bit. but um But certainly the black white numbers have only increased as we've moved from having 86 schools in 1970 to just look the other day, there's like 600 and something ninth grade serving schools. That includes charters as well.
Speaker: um But that hasn't, that's created more opportunities to sort as opposed to, um you know, kind of distributing folks equally across the system. And I love how you kind of tackle to the sort of homo economicus type thinking of the reformers who would enact school choice, right? Thinking that, well, families are gonna act in their own rational self-interest to select from the top and do all of this.
Speaker: While school choice certainly doesn't prevent families from just saying, I don't want to go where there are a lot of black kids. Right. And some families make a choice or sort some of their top choices based on racial criteria. So the system reflects that. Right.
Speaker: Absolutely. I mean, absolutely. i think it's the dominant, um you know, factor at the end of the day. And, um, and that's, that's something that, you know, essentially if you had a, ah uniform, think like, for example, in some parts of LA that, that do have a more, um,
Speaker: racially or ethnically uniform population, like ah this is some of an economist, Chris Cambos' work. This has worked a bit better because people aren't necessarily dominantly choosing um on features of peers to the same extent. but um But nonetheless, you know, I think it's something that that people really, think researchers by and large don't, ah a lot of researchers don't love to talk about this. um it's It's part of this country's history and it continues to be in large measure.
Speaker: So I guess like the question in all of this then, and maybe it's a loaded question, right? Like in in your estimation, in your work, does school choice work?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think you have to define one of the the big things that I... try to emphasize in my class is like we need to put a referent when we say work. um And so I think that it works for holding a school system with a heterogeneous population together without from like a political economy perspective. I think that it I don't mean works in a positive normative sense. I mean, it functions. Right.
Speaker: um I think that for um the set of lower income or disadvantaged, high achieving kids, it offers a partial crack, it kind of cracks the door open, but so much is needed to turn that into a change in where kids go to school, that it's it's a very conditional promise. But I want to be sure to acknowledge, right, that there are kids who, um you know, experience themselves as as benefiting from this and, in fact, go to a different school environment than they would if they were sorted by neighborhood.
Speaker: um For the modal kid, like we do a little simulation where we – Again, it's flawed because people would live in a different place if they were not going to be having school choice, right? there's They actually live in slightly more integrated neighborhoods. National, a study by Peter Rich has found, won their school choice systems, which is interesting. It's a tiny, tiny difference. It's like a 0.03 difference in the dissimilarity index.
Speaker: But um so so be that as it may, when we do this this exercise, there's no effect of, despite the fact that kids are traveling 32 minutes um at the median, no effect on racial or socioeconomic um integration from this choice system at the high school level. What it does do is sort um quite dramatically at the achievement level. So you have Kids who are at the top and bottom the achievement distribution being much less likely to be in the same school, then neighborhoods are much more ability integrated than our schools. um So...
Speaker: So I think, you know, once you once you see that, um it raises questions about what goals are being met at the system level besides the kind of political economy. we're not It's not desegregating. It's not having these other kinds of impacts.
Speaker: For... um The modal family, I think people do want some form of choice, right? um But that can happen, you know, in a lot of different ways. I never thought about it this way, but um when I taught at Trenton High School, we had like what were at that point called small learning communities, and we had six or seven of them, and It gave some kind of choice within maintaining, you know, geography, right? So it served the function of people wanted um a little bit of specialization or were subject focused, you know, poop which really, i mean, they did the same things in all parts of the building. It's just electives were slightly different.
Speaker: um But so much of high school is homogenized by what's on the other end of it, which is college, right? That the ability to really make high schools look radically different in terms of um the content of what's happening is is relatively limited. So I'm not sure it's serving working from that perspective.
Speaker: um But I think what holds the system in place is that, you know, parents who are facing a system like this, they keep asking for better instructions. They're not, like, raging against the system. Like, it kind of keeps everyone on this treadmill of, can I just make it through and, you know, move on, you know, with my life? So it's um it's not the case that it's quite clearly, like,
Speaker: I don't think neighborhood schools are some justice panacea. you know like I think that um they're they're ah an incredibly like brutally legible form of exclusion. um So I am not arguing that that's um what we should do, but rather just saying this is actually just another way of doing the same thing, um but kind of hiding the the process.
Speaker: Shifting gears a little bit, Obviously, we've been talking in the New York City public schools context, you know looking at their schools, families, and their particular school choice system. And vouchers, I think, get ah one mention like in the context of history in the book. But I wonder how well the mechanisms and the conclusions of this book in particular are actually transferable to other states like my own, like Iowa, that now we have school choice programs that involve
Speaker: tuition vouchers for private schools. um Have you looked at that at all? Or how well do you think those same mechanisms apply? Yeah, I mean, I i see them as as kind of transfer transferring quite directly, um but pulling more so on the role of the school, right? So this is the role of the school is strengthened in a way that is even in systems that have a lot of school discretion um is nothing like you can say that you need a
Speaker: You need to have a sign the biblical lifestyle compact saying that you will not neither live by nor condone anyone else's not living with a biblical lifestyle. You will um agree that you will only interact with school staff um in you know the spirit of resolving you know essentially they're kind of clauses that are like resolving things peacefully. I'm not going to kind of fight about school policy. um And then, you know, all the other kind of disability, um gender, sexuality, family structure, religious belief, um you know, kinds of restrictions. So um I think
Speaker: What I saw through our history is these different rationing mechanisms kind of have this ability to like you push one in here, something pops out over there. and I think with vouchers, um you're kind of to some extent, ah you know, dealing with the m i Actually, the school kind of comes to a ah larger role um in terms like the symbol, not just symbolic, but also formal, like the ability to um just fundamentally sort on whatever you want um is is fully in the school's discretion and legal. So
Speaker: um I think those come to the fore, butt all but other bits like navigating the system, um you know, and I've done a lot of work on Iowa. um And so, you know, schools increasingly don't post their prices. And um So even being able, there's there's no ability to have a functioning market if you can't even compare schools on what their prices are. And they've also increased prices by, you know, by year three, something on the order of 40%. So,
Speaker: um You know, I think that there's the additional thing that's brought in by vouchers is the financial bit, right? That's something that's we're bringing the what used to be housing price back in um with that kind of tuition costs. Countries that do have vouchers, but that um and do kind of ah have religious schools that are involved um don't let you charge more for the school. Like you have to accept the voucher as the full amount, period, full stop.
Speaker: um And so I think that that kind of reinscribing of the financial mechanism, um which operates in residential zoning as well, is something that's different than what I wrote about.
Speaker: That's so interesting. So we can kind of take the the lessons and the mechanisms here and apply them to these different contexts as well. And you're saying, yeah, in these other kinds of systems, a lot of the same mechanics are at work from school perspectives and from families. They may even be amplified. I wonder, have you seen, is anybody, i guess, trying to take that lens and apply it to these these voucher arrangements? Yeah, I mean, you certainly could. um it's worth like, ah worth my opinion for some of that for the other work that I'm doing on vouchers. But yeah, I think that it still provides a useful like frame because also on, you know, i think the racial composition of private schools is, you know, further diverging from the racial composition of um of traditional public schools as well. So this kind of perceptual piece of who belongs where, um but it happening in a two-sided way, I think is going to be increasingly important.
Speaker: Zooming out to the question that we had sort of started the conversation with and that you repeatedly mention is at the center of this issue of rationing, of course, is scarcity.
Speaker: You know, you said that this book is not necessarily making prescriptions or solutions focused, but what do you think it would take to eliminate scarcity? the scarcity of good schools in the U S is it a money question, capacity will, or how we define what good schools are. What do you think are the biggest hurdles in that direction? Yeah. I think when you, when you bring it out to the U S S space, it becomes a different set of issues, right? I mean, I think for a large part of the country, money is a really central, um you know, and and fundamental piece, right? um
Speaker: New York City, know, certainly what it costs to educate kids who are living in like poverty outside of school is much higher but we were very blessed to have a school finance successful lawsuit that that means that that the funds are there i think that um ah so i'll speak specifically about about the new york context but like i'm happy to extrapolate out um I think to the extent that we manufacture scarcity um in the form of selective schools, like I think without pulling some of that back, and I'm not suggesting, im not of the mind that I'm
Speaker: i'm I'm very comfortable with having tracking ability grouping, whatever, within a school. But what we've done is move this to the school level. um And in so doing, you've just kind of stratified the system from the get-go. there's There's no ability to kind of access the same academic program across all schools. And there's you know good work showing that some of these smaller schools are you know, are not able to offer even like the basic requirements for graduation. There's kids who are taking night school at some of these schools because the courses aren't able to be offered. That's rare, but what's more common is you've got one AP course and some other school is 28 courses. So I think that
Speaker: There would have to be like a consolidation to make schools larger than they are right now. I think that um they'd have to be academically heterogeneous and more, you know, kind of...
Speaker: um there would have to be some degree of desegregation, right? So that people aren't just choosing on those facts, um the facts of who's in the building. And then I think there probably, as I said, have to be some compromise to keep families in the system that we're going to have some degree of um sorting within schools in terms of offering a range of courses. And i I'm not um like a tracking advocate, but am aware that absent offering some differentiation that people will exit the system and um
Speaker: I guess I'd be willing to make the trade-off for for having a more integrated school that can still like allow for court some courses to be um academically and racially and economically integrated. And you know to continue to try to break down some of the most pernicious you know things that I don't want to... not This is not a commercial we're tracking, but but rather just a kind of reality that we are currently tracking at the level of the school.
Speaker: Yeah, no, no. I mean, it's it's pragmatic, right? To think like there are ah trade-offs to every sort of change there and to achieve the goal of why we need to do X. And, you know, ah yeah, i'm I'm totally with you all on that. I think we just need to be thinking a lot more expansively, um both about the options on the table and like the side effects of those choices too, right? Like,
Speaker: There's trade-offs for everything. Like some are good, bad, and different. We just need to embrace that reality, you know? So Jen, what I guess is your hope for the book going forward? Gosh, I hope that folks read it. um i hope that it helps folks make sense of the experiences that they've had in various contexts.
Speaker: I um have been around the block enough times to understand that um no piece of academic work is going to fundamentally bend the arc of public policy, right? So um if if I were 25 years younger, i might have a different answer.
Speaker: on that. But I think, you know, i I do hope it helps reframe what I think is a broken conversation around school choice, which is to assume that school choice means that actually you're the one doing the choosing. And so I think kind of I'd be really really thrilled if like what comes out of this is that we have a different frame for thinking about like this is another form of rationing.
Speaker: um It's not the family empowered, um but rather you know a family that has the chance to apply as opposed to the chance to enroll. um Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker: I'll stand on my soapbox here real briefly at the end, but I think when so much discourse about education and education policy and instructional practices, all the things wants to flatten complexity and try to wave it away towards easy solutions, i appreciate you embracing it and giving us a peek behind the curtain at sort of, again, the trade-offs, how the sausage gets made um behind the scenes, what their true culture cost of rationing and the scarcity loop actually is. So thank you so much for writing the book.
Speaker: Thank you so much. That means a lot.
Speaker: Thanks again for listening. If you want to learn more about how schools are using Polaris to put student voice front and center, visit polariseducation.ai and sign up for the newsletter to stay up to date.
