No Adults Left Behind

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.