Public education in the United States is transitioning from its second to third paradigm.
Paradigm shifts in public education occur when larger societal changes force public education to change to meet these new conditions. Current technological advances and the accompanying social changes are pushing public education into a new paradigm and a third era.
To best meet society’s current and future needs, this third paradigm aspires to provide every child with an effective and efficient customized education through an effective and efficient public education market.
A paradigm: The lens through which communities do their work
In his 1962 book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Thomas Kuhn described a paradigm as the lens through which a community’s members perceive, understand, implement, and evaluate their work. A paradigm includes a set of assumptions and associated methodologies that guide how communities construct meaning and determine what is true and false and right and wrong.
A paradigm shift occurs when inconsistencies, which Kuhn called anomalies, begin to occur, and some community members begin to question their paradigm’s veracity and effectiveness. As these anomalies accumulate, 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 resolve the anomalies and better understand their discipline, this new paradigm is adopted. In scientific communities, Kuhn calls these paradigm shifts scientific revolutions.
Paradigm shifts are disruptive and revolutionary because they require community members to reinterpret all their previous work and adopt new ways of conducting and evaluating their future work. Senior community members are particularly resistant to changing paradigms because their status comes from applying the existing paradigm over many years. Consequently, paradigm changes are rare and require several decades to complete.
Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (GTR) was a new physics paradigm that challenged Newtonian mechanics and Newton’s law of universal gravitation (i.e., the dominant physics paradigm at the time). It took over 40 years before GTR gained wide acceptance among physicists. Einstein never won a Nobel Prize for GTR because the Swedish physicists on the Nobel committee refused to accept his new paradigm.
Although Kuhn’s work focused on the role of paradigms in scientific communities, his description of how paradigms function and change is relevant for all communities, including public education. The struggle in U.S. colonial times to transition from a monarchy to a democracy was a paradigm shift. It was a revolutionary change in how government works, was fiercely resisted by those in power, and took decades to complete.
Public education’s first paradigm
Public education’s first paradigm began before the United States was a country, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted the “Old Deluder Satan Act” to ensure the colony’s young people learned scripture. As the name of that early legislation implies, this first era prioritized basic literacy and religious instruction. Most children were homeschooled, and formal instruction tended to be ad hoc, improvised, and organized around the agricultural calendar.
Religious organizations provided most of the structured instruction outside the home in the 1700s and early 1800s. Children and adults attended Sunday schools, and communities organized what today we would call homeschool co-ops, which allowed rural children to receive instruction when their chores permitted.
The federal government supported public education through the U.S. Postal Service by subsidizing the distribution of magazines, pamphlets, books, almanacs, and newspapers, and establishing post offices in rural communities. By 1822, the U.S. had more newspaper readers than any other country.
Public education’s first paradigm started failing in the early 1800s as innovations in transportation and communications began connecting the country and promoting 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 childcare needs. Increased industrialization necessitated a more highly skilled workforce. And concerns about social cohesion grew as the growing country welcomed immigrants from Ireland and later from Southern and Eastern Europe. These were demands the informal, decentralized, and family-driven first public education paradigm was ill-equipped to meet.
Public education’s second paradigm
In 1852, Massachusetts passed the nation’s first mandatory school attendance law. This accelerated public education’s shift from its first to second paradigm.
The massive influx of European immigrants beginning in the 1830s was a primary reason Massachusetts decided to make school attendance mandatory. The U.S. experienced a 600% increase in immigration from 1840 to 1860 compared to the prior 20 years. Most of these immigrants were illiterate, low-income, and Catholic. Massachusetts’ mandatory school attendance law was intended to help turn these new immigrants into “good” Americans, meaning they needed to be literate, financially self-sufficient, and well-versed in Protestant theology.
Protestant hostility toward Catholic education in the U.S. continued deep into the following century and included the infamous Blaine Amendments that many states adopted in the late 1800s to forbid public funding of Catholic schools, and the 1922 constitutional amendment in Oregon that required all students to attend Protestant-controlled government schools.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Oregon amendment unconstitutional in its 1925 decision Pierce v. Society of Sisters, ensuring every American family had the right to choose public or private schools for their children. This ruling would later help make public education’s transition to its third paradigm possible.
By 1900, 31 states had passed mandatory school attendance laws. While these laws were not initially well enforced, they did significantly increase school attendance, which created management challenges.
As David Tyack chronicles in “The One Best System,” a history of how this first paradigm shift unfolded in America's cities, a new class of professional administrators, known as schoolmen, set out to modernize public education practice and infrastructure. One-room schoolhouses serving students were no longer adequate, so public education began adopting the mass production processes that enabled industrial manufacturers to create large numbers of products at lower costs. The most famous example was the assembly line that Henry Ford created to mass produce affordable Model Ts.
This new industrial model of public education replaced multi-age grouped students with age-specific grade levels that functioned like assembly line workstations. Just as Ford’s assembly line workers were taught the skills necessary for their workstations, public school teachers were trained to teach the skills associated with their assigned grade level, and children were moved annually from one grade level to the next en masse.
Mississippi became the last state to pass a mandatory school attendance law in 1918. By then the bulk of multi-aged one-room schools were being replaced with larger schools that reflected the best practices of 19th century industrial management. This was the paradigm through which government, educators, families, and the public were now seeing and understanding public education. This change marked U.S. public education’s second paradigm.
Ford famously told customers they could have any color of Model T they wanted provided it was black. Public education adopted this one-size-fits-all approach to increase efficiency. Car consumers began demanding more diverse options over the next several decades, and so did public education consumers. The auto industry diversified its offerings much quicker than public education because it faced competitive pressures the public education monopoly did not. But in 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which required all school districts to begin adapting instruction to serve special needs students. This was the first instance of government requiring public education to provide a large group of students with customized instruction.
Public education’s third paradigm
This expansion of instructional diversity accelerated in the late 1970s and early 80s as school districts started creating magnet schools to encourage voluntary school desegregation. The school district in Alum Rock, California even experimented with a short-lived voucher program that fostered an ecosystem of small, specialized learning environments that today would be called microschools.
Most of the beneficiaries of early magnet schools were white middle-class and upper middle-class families who were attracted by the additional resources and high-quality specialized instruction. But magnet schools created for desegregation could serve only a limited number of students. In response to political pressure from influential constituents, school districts began creating magnet schools unrelated to desegregation, which expanded and normalized specialization and parental choice within school districts and accelerated the transition to public education’s third era.
Florida added significant momentum to this transition with the passage of its 1996 charter school law, the founding of the Florida Virtual School in 1997, and the 2001 creation of the nation’s largest tax credit scholarship program.
Two decades later, the COVID-19 pandemic further hastened public education’s current paradigm shift. Magnet schools, virtual schools, charter schools, homeschooling, open enrollment, homeschool co-ops, and tax credit scholarship programs were already expanding nationally when COVID arrived in March 2020. The pandemic turbo charged the growth of these options and newer options such as microschools, hybrid schools, and education savings accounts (ESAs).
Just as 19th century innovations in communications, transportation and manufacturing led to public education’s first paradigm shift, the rise of digital networks, mobile computing, and artificial intelligence are transforming all aspects of our lives, including where and how we work, communicate, consume media, and educate our children. These technical and societal changes are driving a decline of trust in institutions that no longer enjoy a monopoly on public information. They are also driving increased demand for flexibility to determine when, where, and with whom teaching and learning happen. Public education has begun to adopt a paradigm more aligned to 21st century demands, which include parents gaining more power to decide how their children learn.
Government’s changing role
Government’s role in public education will be impacted by a new public education paradigm that reflects these ongoing technical and cultural changes. Under the second paradigm, government had a near-monopoly in the public education market. This quasi-monopoly undermined public education’s effectiveness and efficiency because it failed to take full advantage of the knowledge, skills and creativity of students, families and educators.
In public education’s third era, government will regulate health and safety and help facilitate support services for families and educators but will no longer be the dominant provider of publicly-funded instruction. This regulatory and support function is like the role government currently plays in the food, housing, health care, and transportation markets. Most of the responsibility for how children are educated will shift from government to families and the instructional providers families hire with their children’s public education dollars.
Shifting government’s primary role from instructional monopoly to market regulator and supporter will require operational changes. Families will be able to choose from a plethora of instructional options and will need access to information that allows them to make informed decisions, as well as education advisers who can help them evaluate their child’s needs and develop and implement customized education plans to meet these needs. Government will need to ensure data accuracy and truth in labeling – much as it currently ensures food labels accurately describe what’s in the package.
Third paradigm issues
Providing each child with a high-quality customized education through a more effective and efficient public education market will require public education’s stakeholders to rethink all aspects of how it operates. Here are some issues we will need to address.
Public education’s third paradigm has old roots
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 [sic] expence themselves.”
Paine’s recommended funding method was, “To allow for each of those children ten shillings a year for the expence 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.”
Over 150 years after Paine’s proposal, Milton Friedman proposed a similar but more comprehensive plan in 1955. Many of the third paradigm’s core ideas existed in the 1700s prior to the industrial revolution. But they were not technically or politically feasible.
Thanks to modern technology and a growing acceptance of families’ rights to direct their children’s education, these ideas are viable today. We can now provide every student with an effective and efficient customized public education. While all students will benefit from customized instruction in a more effective and efficient public education market, lower-income students will benefit the most because they have historically been the most underserved by the current government monopoly. Underserved groups always benefit greatly when the markets they rely on for essential goods and services are more effective and efficient.
Public education’s transition to its third paradigm is happening faster in Florida than in other states. Over 500,000 students using ESAs is rapidly improving Florida’s public education market. Floridians are seeing in real time the creation of a virtuous cycle between supply and demand. More families using ESAs is encouraging educators to create more innovative learning options, which in turn is causing even more families to use ESAs, which in turn is causing even more educators to create more learning options. These rapidly expanding options increase the probability that all students, but especially lower-income students, can find and access learning environments that best meet their needs.
Public education’s first paradigm shift took about 100 years to complete (1830-1930). This second transition began around 1975 and will likely also take about 100 years to complete nationally. Like all paradigm changes, this one is proving to be a long slog. But larger societal changes will help ensure this transition’s success.
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.
Horace Mann (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
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