Vladimir Kogan No Adults Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education and Hurts Kids Cambridge University Press 328 pages, 6 x 9 inches, ISBN 978-1009606318
In a nutshell
There is a conundrum built into how we as a society have decided to organize public education. Schools exist to educate children. But public schools are governed through elections in which adults—mostly older adults without school-aged children, it turns out (see Chapter 2!)—are the key decision-makers.
No Adult Left Behind argues that the interests of students and these politically pivotal adults are often misaligned. Across nine chapters, it documents the various mechanisms through which such misalignment has introduced perverse incentives, causes dysfunction in our K–12 education system, and ultimately harms student learning.
Because our governance system is designed to respond to and prioritize the interests of adults, the issues most salient and visible education policy debates focus on—identity politics, partisanship, employment and contracting, property values—have little to do with how well schools are actually educating students.
The wide angle
I’ve been interested in education, and attending school board meetings, for more than half of my life. I began in high school when, as editor of my high school newspaper, I decided it was important to see what the local school board was doing. This was right after the federal No Child Left Behind Act was passed and I still remember a board meeting where everyone panicked about how they were going to achieve 100% proficiency in math and reading by 2014, as the law required. (Needless to say, that goal was never reached.)
After college, I wrote for the Voice of San Diego, the first online-only, nonprofit journalism organization that focused on local issues. My beat was the San Diego Unified School District.
And over the past 10 years, I have worked with colleagues to collect the most comprehensive data on local school elections available, thanks to generous support from the Spencer Foundation.
Although I didn’t set out to write a book on education, eventually I saw too many important themes that no one was talking about. No one fully explained why the dysfunction and complaints that have been made about public education are essentially hardwired into how schools are governed. No one has pointed out that our system is effectively “gerrymandered” to serve mobilized and self-interested adults, even at the expense of students and their learning.
Education scholarship, I’m sad to say, is one of the biggest offenders. Many scholars seem to start with the premise that the current system is optimal and their job is to defend it. They use “democracy” as a trump card to criticize reforms that truly move the needle on academic achievement and attainment and transform kids’ lives for the better. Other academics focus on fringe theories—writing hundreds of pages of impenetrable prose about “neoliberalism” and other “isms”—that have almost nothing to do with the real world.
No Adult Left Behind, I hope, is an antidote to these pathologies. It brings together what we’ve learned in our research and provides a clear and compelling overview of what’s gone wrong and offers some modest ideas for how we can do better.
A close-up
If someone was just browsing, I would encourage them to start with the first sentence of the first chapter: “June 7, 2023, was the day a group of homophobic Armenians from Glendale, California, almost got me canceled.”
If that doesn’t whet your appetite, I don’t know what will! And I don’t know of any other academic book that starts this way.
The opening section tells the story of a huge controversy in Glendale about the local school district’s decision to fly the gay pride flag during Pride Month, and why I think the controversy illustrates everything that is wrong with how we adults approach public education.
The first chapter ends with another cancellation—of a local Columbus school board member named James Ragland. He was accused (unfairly, in my view) of making a misogynist post on Facebook. In reality, the local teachers’ union long had knives out for him and took advantage of this post to destroy his reputation and his political future. They convinced the local Democratic Party to not endorse him when he ran for re-election, and he ended up losing in a landslide.
Here is how the first chapter ends: “This book is not about what happened to James Ragland, but rather what his defeat symbolizes. It is about the roles of teachers’ unions, political parties, identity commitments, and the media all play in influencing what schools do. It is about how local democracy actually works in practice—not in some idealized Nirvana—and how politics shapes our education system and its ability to effectively serve our kids.”
Lastly
It doesn’t matter to me whether people agree with me or not. I just want them to read the book, take my arguments seriously, and truly think about them.
One of the people who blurbed my book is a retired professor at Columbia University. Here is what he said: “Some of the books I’ve most valued are those that rankled and perturbed me because they challenged my presumptions and led me to sharpen my thinking and arguments. While there’s much here with which I disagree, No Adult Left Behind is stimulating, forceful and too important to ignore.”
He said he was a little worried I would be offended, but I was absolutely over the moon! I couldn’t think of a response that better demonstrates exactly what I want the book to accomplish.