Who Are Schools For?

Students.

Great! Article over! Everyone agrees that schools are for students, right?

Wrong.

At this point, it is hard to figure out whether students are truly at the forefront of any discussion of schools.

Amidst the pandemic, when students were forced home for virtual learning in the name of public health, the discussion seemed to be less about the effect on students than the effect on parents. “We need to return to in-person schools,” economists and politicians thought, “so that parents can return to in-person work.”

Parents have too much power in education, and students essentially have none. You might ask how children could have control of their own education. Wouldn’t they just ask for less homework? This argument seems to fall apart as kids get older. Though they still would probably want less homework, it seems stupid to say “students can’t have a say in governance” when some of them (albeit a small portion) can vote.

It’s funny to call something literally about parenting paternalistic, but it seems somewhat imperialistic for policymakers about a public service (i.e. school board members) to be elected into office by everyone except the people who use that public service.

You see this around public health policy in the return to schooling too. Many students, unable to vote, show up to school board meetings to ask for vaccine or mask mandates, only to be shouted at by parents for naively believing the media. It’s just a sign that parents expect to have the power when it comes to school decisions, not children.

But it’s not just parents who incorrectly think school is for them instead of students. Teachers are at fault here, too. Teachers unions are, at times, quite willing to protect teachers at the cost of students. To an extent, it’s understandable, because that’s the job of a union. But school is not for teachers. It’s for students.

You saw it during COVID, when teachers unions were, in my view, too insistent last year on staying home for virtual school at the cost of the educational and social success of students. You see it in hiring policies and teacher tenure, which unions fight for but arguably prevent schools from having the best teachers.

Think about the all-powerful Parent-Teacher Associations. PTAs seem to leave out an important stakeholder, don’t they?

But wait, there’s more. Businesses, colleges, and other intuitions act as if pre-collegiate public school is for them. These groups have always had a bigger impact on curriculum than the students. They make arguments that “students need to be prepared for the rigor of college life” or “students need to be prepared to perform well in the workforce,” but the specifics of what skills are taught to prepare them are set by the incumbent leaders in business and higher education, with no chance for students to have a say in what jobs the economy of the future should value.

Schools should be for students. But they aren’t.