Some years ago, in the post-Internet but pre-smartphone era, I joined a group of acquaintances for dinner at a Washington, D.C. restaurant. At the end of the meal, the friend who had organized the gathering began collecting cash to cover the bill. In the midst of this then-familiar ritual, he remarked, “Doesn’t this give you present shock? Don’t you wonder why we are still doing it this way?”

Today, of course, these exchanges typically take place electronically. My friend anticipated this. He foresaw that we’d figure out a better way to settle up, but he didn’t (and couldn’t) know that, within a few years, instead of cash, we would all be carrying mini-supercomputers in our pockets that enabled the seamless exchange of money between friends. How could he? The term “app” was not part of our lexicon, let alone now-ubiquitous phrases like “just Venmo me.” The arc of these developments was perhaps inevitable, but the mechanisms enabling them were unknowable.

Frederick Hess’s The Great School Rethink contains a healthy dose of “present shock.” During the pandemic, we inadvisably shuttered our schools, in many cases for over a year, with devastatingly predictable effects on our kids, especially those who were most likely to have already fallen behind academically. The response from the public-school edutocracy also has been predictable. “Just give us more money, and we promise to spend the money wisely to catch the kids up.” Right. The kids were teetering on the edge of an achievement precipice before the pandemic. Presumably, if more of the same worked, we would have caught them up a long time ago.

If the pandemic has a silver lining, it is that one can now say this in polite company. We now have a unique opportunity to rethink the American education system—to systematically ask, “Why are we still doing it this way?” This is the “rethinking” project that Hess, a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, undertakes. 

 Our K-12 education system is complex and decentralized, making top-down reform virtually impossible (which may, in the end, be a good thing). Although the federal government wields some influence through regulatory conditions on funding, most education policies are set by states. The states, in turn, delegate the task of educating the overwhelming majority of children to over 13,000 school districts (which vary dramatically in terms of size, wealth, and demographics). These districts operate nearly 100,000 schools and employ over seven million people (about half of whom are teachers). Ninety percent of K-12 students attend public schools, although seven percent of them attend charter schools, which are designated as “public schools” but are privately operated independently from school districts. About ten percent of students attend a private school, and three to five percent of school-aged children are homeschooled. (The latter are not counted as “students” if you are wondering about the math.)

Nobody in their right mind would make this Rube Goldberg contraption up from scratch. It is the result of numerous ad hoc decisions and cultural idiosyncrasies: The haphazard consolidation of school districts, a shameful history of anti-Catholicism which long precluded, legally and politically, the public funding of non-governmental schools, the emergence of charter schools as an alternative to vouchers. Hess is clear that his goal is not to propose any grand solutions to the myriad challenges facing the many actors in this system, but rather to—as the graduate student might muse—“complexify” them through a series of pointed questions.

Hess’s “rethinking” efforts are divided into roughly two parts—reflections on the old (K-12 public schools as we know them) and on the new (the recent dramatic expansion of parental choice). With respect to the former, he raises a host of “present shock” questions: Why do we limit our teaching force to those with a credential that excludes mathematicians from teaching math and stick to school calendars developed to address the needs of the early-twentieth-century economy? Might public schools have something to learn about staffing from other industries (e.g., the division of labor now common in pediatrician’s offices, with nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants assuming responsibilities previously entrusted to doctors)? What can be done to improve teacher-parent communication? To ensure that technology is employed more effectively? 

I don’t know the answer to these questions, and Hess refreshingly acknowledges that he does not either. (Admittedly, I did not warm to Hess’s questions about whether schools might benefit from a greater degree of specialization and more division of labor between faculty and professional staff. Having lived through both over the past 25 years in higher education, I have serious doubts about whether either would improve student learning.) These reservations aside, I found most of Hess’s questions about K-12 public education provocative but dispiriting. Provocative because it really is jarring to ask “Why are we still doing it this way?” about so many aspects of our public education system. Dispiriting because the answer to that question is that the system itself—with authority distributed across so many different institutions and actors, many with both tenure and a strong interest in maintaining the status quo—dooms most reforms, however sensible, from their start. Perhaps a district here and there will learn to better deploy smart boards or reading specialists, but there is little reason to hope that these successes will be broadly replicated. Not surprisingly, the history of American education is littered with grandiose reforms that failed epically. In my view (as well as Hess’s), one of the best books ever written about public education reform is Charles Payne’s So Much Reform, So Little Change. 

There are, to be sure, benefits of decentralizing educational authority, including, importantly, the fact that a decentralized system allows for experimentation and empowers parents to exercise what Albert O. Hirschman famously described as “exit, voice, and loyalty.” Charles Tiebout, it turns out, was right: Local governments, including school districts, compete for “consumer voters,” and this competition results in improved student performance. Unfortunately, the benefits of this system have historically redounded primarily to families with the financial means to move to high-performing suburban school districts, leaving low-income kids trapped in academically struggling schools that systematically fail them.

The second half of Hess’s book, which focuses on the recent dramatic expansion of parental choice in the U.S., left me far more upbeat. In the last two years, nine states—Arizona, West Virginia, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio and North Carolina—have enacted universal private-school choice programs that extend eligibility to all students, and several others have adopted or expanded programs that come close to universal eligibility. And, earlier this week, the Texas legislature reconvened for a special session to consider Governor Greg Abbott’s universal parental choice proposal. Abbott has made clear that the proposal is a top priority, going so far as to threaten to continue to reconvene the legislature until they adopt it. What’s more, a majority of these states have embraced a choice mechanism—the education savings account (ESA)—that gives parents the option of using the public resources allocated for their children’s education on a range of approved expenses, including but not limited to private school tuition. It’s difficult to overstate the scope, scale, and import of these reforms. I have been a parental-choice proponent for my entire professional career (that is, since the mid-1990s), and I tear up whenever another state joins the universal parental-choice roster.

For many years, the school choice movement focused on giving disadvantaged (and, to a lesser degree, special-needs) children alternatives to public schools that do not serve them well. In doing so, advocates eschewed both Milton Friedman’s foundational arguments about the efficiency-enhancing effects of subjecting monopolistic public schools to competition and broad parental-rights focused arguments for universal choice. As Howard Fuller once described, the battle for parental choice became “more of a rescue mission than a fight for broad societal change.” 

Hess chides advocates for this incrementalism and for focusing narrowly on advancing school choice—that is, on helping kids switch schools—rather than on parental choice more broadly. Long a proponent of the “unbundling” of K-12 education, he raises provocative questions about the implications of embracing universal parental choice through ESAs. These include questions about the ways that parents may choose to customize their kids’ education, the possibility of schools (public, private, charter) creating modular education products and courses, the emergence of innovative new schooling models—learning pods, micro-schools, online education, etc.

Until recently, I assumed that parental-choice incrementalism was a pragmatic necessity (and I continue to embrace the rescue mission goal as a moral imperative). I’ve elsewhere raised concerns about real-world challenges of successfully implementing ESAs, although I am buoyed by the extent to which the education reform community is taking steps to attend to them. My assumption is that—at least in the short run—most ESAs will be for private school tuition. I can’t help but wonder whether Hess and others are overly bullish about parents’ appetite for embracing the challenge of customizing their kids’ education. But I’ve been delighted to be proven wrong about the political appeal of universal parental choice, and I will be equally delighted if, in the months and years to come, parents creatively embrace the opportunities provided by ESAs. Demand for ESAs has exceeded expectations in states with new or expanded programs, and nonprofits have emerged to help parents navigate their options, including non-traditional ones. The kinds of innovations Hess envisions do appear to be emerging (although, not surprisingly, public school interests are crying foul and opponents are unsurprisingly demanding that regulators limit or roll back the choices available to families).

While Hess’s book packages questions about the future of public education with questions about the future of parental choice, he stops short of making predictions about the interactions between the two. But there is no question that they will interact, and it would be foolish to disregard the potentially generative (and disruptive) systemic effects of these interactions. As Hess recently observed, “We’ve exited one era of school improvement defined by the attempt to bolster the “one best system” and entered one notable for attempts to dismantle it.” In other words, the current battle for parental choice is no longer a rescue mission, but rather “a fight for broad societal change” grounded in the belief that parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.

Ultimately, Hess’s book prompted me to ponder a question that he doesn’t ask—the one that many parental choice proponents stopped asking long ago: Could it be that Milton Friedman was right all along and parental choice can provide the exogenous shock needed to reform and reshape our entire K-12 education system, including our public schools? Thus far, it’s fair to say that more incremental versions of choice have not had this effect, although the introduction of choice typically does improve public school performance, at least marginally. But what happens with incrementalism gives way to universalism? As Friedman predicted in 2005, “Sooner or later there will be a breakthrough; we shall get a universal voucher plan in one or more states. When we do, a competitive private educational market serving parents … will demonstrate how it can revolutionize schooling.”

What might that look like? Here, I’ll borrow a page from Hess and say I don’t know. But I hope that a decade from now, we will look back at this as the moment when all educational providers, public and private, were exposed to a healthy competition that led them both to innovate and emulate successful innovation—and as the moment when all families, rich and poor, became empowered to exercise “exit, voice, and loyalty” in their educational choices. Perhaps I am being uncharacteristically optimistic, but I live in a state (Indiana) that recently expanded its voucher program to near-universal eligibility, a development that—at least anecdotally—has coincided with an increase in the prevalence of billboards advertising district public schools. Maybe this is American education’s iPhone moment. Let’s hope so.