Public education is in the early stages of transitioning from its second to third paradigm.
In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn described an organization’s paradigm as the lens through which the organization’s members perceive, understand, implement, and evaluate their work. A paradigm includes a set of assumptions and associated methodologies that guide a community’s determination of what is right and wrong and true and false.
A paradigm shift occurs when anomalies begin to occur, and some community members begin to question the veracity and effectiveness of their paradigm. Eventually, a few community members begin proposing new ways of understanding and implementing their work, and a prolonged contest emerges between the existing paradigm and proposed new paradigms. If a majority of the community ultimately decides a new paradigm enables them to be more successful, a paradigm shift occurs, and this new paradigm is adopted. In scientific communities, Kuhn calls these paradigm shifts scientific revolutions.
Paradigm shifts are disruptive because they require community members to reinterpret all previous work and adopt new ways of conducting and evaluating future work. Senior community members most strongly resist changing paradigms because their status comes from their application of the existing paradigm over many years. Consequently, paradigm changes are rare and require several decades to complete.
While Kuhn’s work focused on the role of paradigms in scientific communities, his description of how paradigms function and change is relevant for most organizations and communities, including public education.
Public education’s first paradigm shift occurred in the 1800s. The United States was a sparsely populated rural agrarian society in the 1700s and early 1800s, and public education was highly decentralized. Most children were homeschooled, and literacy focused primarily on reading the Bible. Religious organizations provided most of the structured instruction outside the home.
Public education’s paradigm during this period emphasized decentralization, family control, flexibility, basic literacy, and religious instruction.
This paradigm began failing as innovations in transportation and communications in the early 1800s started to connect the country and promote more industrialization and urbanization. About 90% of Americans lived on farms in 1800; 65% in 1850, and 38% in 1900. This transition from rural to urban created child care needs, and increased industrialization necessitated more people becoming more literate.
The influx of European immigrants in the early 1800s, most of whom were Catholic, caused Protestant-controlled state and local governments to see public schools as the best way to ensure newly arriving Catholic children would be properly assimilated and turned into good Protestants. However, this first paradigm was ill-equipped to address this concern.
By the early-to-mid 1800s, a consensus was forming that a new way of conceptualizing, organizing, and implementing public education (i.e., a new paradigm) was needed. First, a desire for greater centralized management and standardized instruction and curriculum led states to begin creating school districts to own and manage local public schools.
Next was the passing of mandatory school attendance laws. Massachusetts passed the nation’s first modern mandatory school attendance law in 1852 to help assimilate a growing influx of immigrants from Ireland and other predominantly Catholic countries. By 1900, 31 states had followed suit. Eventually, every state joined them, with Mississippi being the last to do so in 1918.
Mandatory attendance laws significantly increased school attendance, which created management challenges for school districts, especially in growing, urban communities. To address this surge in student attendance, school districts began adopting industrial mass production methods such as batch processing that enabled the nation’s manufacturers to produce large numbers of products with consistent quality at a lower cost.
In addition to centralizing school district management and standardizing instruction and curriculum, this new industrial model of public education replaced multi-age grouped students with age-specific grade levels which functioned like assembly line workstations that moved students annually from one grade level to the next en masse. This was the new lens through which government, educators, families, and the public were now seeing and judging public education. This was U.S. public education’s second paradigm.
Just as public education’s transition from its first to second paradigm was driven by changes in transportation, communications, and manufacturing innovations in the 1800s, the rise of digital networks, mobile computing, and artificial intelligence in the 21st century is generating changes that are causing discontent with public education’s second paradigm.
Decentralization and customization are becoming core societal values that are transforming all aspects of people’s lives, including how we work, communicate, and consume media and entertainment. Consequently, decentralization and customization will be at the core of public education’s third paradigm.
Since public education is a government responsibility, this shift from the second to the third paradigm will impact government’s role in public education. Currently, government has a monopoly in the public education market, which undermines the market’s effectiveness and efficiency primarily because it underutilizes the market’s human capital.
In this emerging third paradigm, government will regulate the public education market but will no longer be a monopoly provider. This is like the role the government now plays in the food, housing, health care, and transportation markets. Most of the responsibility for how children are educated will shift from the government to families as families assume control over how most of their children’s public education dollars are spent.
This shift in government’s role from monopolist to regulator will require many operational changes. For example, as a public education monopoly, government holds its schools accountable for achieving performance goals. Without a government monopoly in the public education market, customers (i.e., families) will hold schools accountable for performance and change schools when they are dissatisfied.
Taxpayers also are customers in the public education market, and the government is responsible for meeting their needs through how it regulates this market. While families bear the responsibility for ensuring their children’s needs are met, government continues to be responsible for ensuring the public’s needs are met.
Kuhn’s research suggests that paradigm shifts are always long and contentious. This is particularly true for public education, given how much certain groups benefit financially and politically from the status quo. Lower-income students are the ones being most underserved by public education today and will benefit the most from public education becoming an effective and efficient market. But these students’ families have the least amount of political power.
In 1791,Thomas Paine proposed an ESA-type program for lower-income children in The Rights of Man. “Public schools do not answer the general purpose of the poor. They are chiefly in corporation towns, from which the country towns and villages are excluded; or if admitted, the distance occasions a great loss of time. Education, to be useful to the poor, should be on the spot; and the best method, I believe, to accomplish this, is to enable the parents to pay the expenses themselves.”
Paine’s recommended funding method was, “To allow for each of those children ten shillings a year for the expense of schooling, for six years each, which will give them six months schooling each year, and half a crown a year for paper and spelling books.”
More than 150 years after Paine’s proposal, Milton Friedman proposed a similar but more comprehensive plan in 1955 for making the public education market more effective and efficient. Now, almost 70 years later, we are starting to see some states adopt education choice programs similar to what Paine and Friedman suggested.
Apparently, U.S. public education is more fiercely resistant to change than the scientific communities Kuhn studied, but I am hopeful public education’s current paradigm shift will be completed within the next 30 to 40 years.
Milton Friedman first proposed giving families control of their children’s public education dollars in his 1955 essay "The Role of Government in Education." Friedman argued that the best way to improve student learning was to make the public education market more effective and efficient, and this could happen only if families were empowered to choose their children’s schools. Friedman believed the quality and efficiency of schools would improve if they had to compete for customers (i.e., families) rather than the government assigning families to schools. He further believed that a market-driven public education system would be more equitable and especially benefit lower-income students.
Wisconsin state Sen. Polly Williams was a Black Democrat from Milwaukee who in the late 1980s wanted to help lower-income and minority students attending what Williams described as “failing schools.” Like Friedman, Williams’ solution was school choice, but her approach differed. While Friedman’s market solution was designed to improve the entire public education system, Williams’ focus was not systemic improvement. Her intent was to help lower-income and minority students trapped in failing district schools by giving them public funds to attend private schools.
Williams’ vision became reality in 1990 with the passage of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), which became the nation’s first publicly funded school choice program. Willams’ approach, which became known as the social justice model of school choice, emerged as the prototype that most school choice advocates and state legislatures embraced for the next 20 years. A small and persistent group of school choice advocates continued to promote Friedman’s market solutions, but social justice remained the dominant school choice rationale.
The first steps toward the merging of the Friedman and Williams models of school choice began in 2011 when Arizona passed the nation’s first education savings account (ESA) program, and in 2014 when Florida began creating the country’s largest ESA programs.
ESAs are flexible spending accounts that families may use to pay for a variety of education products and services in addition to private school tuition and fees.
Jack Coons and Steve Sugarman were among the first to advocate for a voucher with ESA-type functionality when they called for "divisible vouchers" in their 1978 book, Education by Choice. Friedman also called for flexible spending vouchers in a 2003 interview with Education Next.
By enabling families to spend their public education funds on education products and services beyond schools, ESAs allow the supply side of the public education market to expand, which in turn encourages more families to use ESAs, which in turn causes further expansion of the market’s supply-side, which then causes even more families to use ESAs. This ongoing interaction between supply and demand and the information that is shared through this continuous exchange is key to how Friedman envisioned the public education market better serving all students. Particularly those students Polly Williams was most concerned about.
In 2021 West Virginia created an ESA program with no eligibility restrictions other than age and residency. Eight more states have followed West Virginia’s lead, and today Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah also have passed various types of ESA programs with universal eligibility. While these states are not all funding every eligible student who wants a scholarship, their ESA programs are growing the demand side of their public education markets. Florida funded over 405,000 ESAs in the 2023-24 school year.
Moving forward, the merger of Williams’ social justice vision with Friedman’s market-based approach for achieving this vision will accelerate as more states give all their students access to ESAs.
The nine states currently working to implement ESA programs with universal eligibility have work to do before their public education markets successfully address Friedman's and Williams’ social justice aspirations.
Determining the proper barriers to market entry for supply and demand is an ongoing challenge. For example, should ESA-funded tutoring be limited to state certified teachers, or is that too restrictive? Should ESA-funded tutors only be required to pass a background check, or is that not restrictive enough? Should homeschool parents who are teaching their children be able to pay themselves with their children’s ESA funds? If not, are we blocking lower-income families from participating in homeschooling?
ESA financial transactions present another challenge. In some states, they are cumbersome and costly. Requiring detailed documents for reimbursements and reviewing every reimbursement request regardless of the amount is expensive, time consuming, and delays payments to families, which puts undue financial pressure on lower-income families. States need to decide if the benefits of reviewing every ESA purchase, regardless of the amount, are worth the costs.
Information is the lifeblood of every market. Without access to the appropriate information, families cannot make good purchasing decisions and good purchasing decisions is how families teach educators (i.e., the supply-side of the market) what they need and want. States need to determine what information families require to help ensure they are purchasing the most appropriate educational services and products for each child. States should also ensure busy families can easily access this information.
These regulatory issues are challenging because of the magnitude of the transformation the public education market is undergoing in ESA states with universal access, and the contentious political environment in which these market improvements are occurring. But these challenges must be successfully addressed if the Friedman/Williams model for achieving greater equality of opportunity through a more effective and efficient public education market is to succeed.
Editor's note: After posting Howard Fuller's concerns about universal vouchers last week, we asked Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, to offer his perspective.
It’s not hard to see why Howard Fuller might be skeptical of universal government education programs. Public schooling is one such program and it has done an atrocious job of serving the poor. But is its universality the cause of its failure? Fuller believes that the poor are forgotten and given short shrift under universal programs and that the wealthy are favored by them. If that were the case in public schooling, we would expect schools serving the poor to receive less funding than those serving the wealthy. In responding to Fuller, Matthew Ladner contends that this is indeed the case: that public schooling “systematically distributes more money per pupil” to wealthier kids.
Actually, though, that doesn’t appear to be true. According to the federal Department of Education’s Condition of Education 2010, Indicator 36-1, districts with the poorest students are the highest spending. Public schools serving these students are not atrocious because they are underfunded, they are atrocious despite the fact that they are the best funded districts in the nation.
Having voted to raise public school spending relentlessly for generations, and having chosen to direct the highest level of per-pupil spending to the poorest children, it is hard to believe that Americans are indifferent to the education of the poor.
A more plausible explanation of the facts is that Americans would love to see their poorest countrymen thrive educationally but don’t know how to make that happen. For generations they have been told by the media, academics, and political leaders that the solution is higher spending. They have gone along with that recommendation and it has failed utterly. A few are finally beginning to realize that, but they still don’t know how to improve matters.
But the school choice movement believes it does know the cause of the problem: the lack of alternatives. Middle and upper income families find it easier to pay for private schooling or to relocate away from the worst public schools. They have alternatives that the poor do not. As a result, they get better service. The movement’s solution is thus to ensure that everyone has alternatives.
And this brings us back to Fuller’s claim: that the poor will be better served by a school choice program targeted exclusively at them. Is he right? In answering that question, it helps to consider a few facts and distinctions that are usually overlooked:
• First, there is a difference between universal access to the education marketplace and universal participation in a government program;
• Second, tiny markets are dramatically inferior to vast ones;
• And third, it actually matters who is footing the bill for a child’s education.
Saying that everyone should have educational choice is not the same thing as saying that everyone should participate in a particular government program. (more…)
