No Adults Left Behind

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.