Is the U.S. Education System Adequately Polycentric?

• Author: Strong, Michael D.
• Position: Symposium on Polycentric Systems in a Free Society - Report

A key advantage of polycentric systems is that they allow institutions to evolve according to different values and objectives and thus allow for the emergence of new institutions that attract those whose needs are more fully met by the newer institutions. Despite considerable polycentricity in U.S. education with respect to district-level governance, a combination of other factors--ranging from federal legislation to collective-bargaining contracts to network effects locking in existing institutional technologies--prevent the current system from enabling the evolution of newer, more-effective institutions. Lock-in to obsolete institutional technologies is preventing the emergence of newer institutional technologies that may provide better outcomes with respect to social mobility, adolescent well-being, and adult well-being.

Polycentricity as a Framework for Evolutionary Competition

Insofar as the very concept of polycentric governance was first brought to mainstream academic attention as a study of metropolitan areas (see Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961), it might seem as if public schooling in the United States provided a paradigmatic case of polycentricity. That text explained that "polycentric connotes many centers of decision-making which are formally independent of each other" (831). Certainly, the nearly fourteen thousand school districts across the United States constitute centers of decision making that are formally independent of each other.

However, monocentricity and polycentricity exist on a continuum. Paul Aligica and Vlad Tarko refine the concept of polycentricity in light of the lifetime corpus of Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom: "Polycentricity emerges as a nonhierarchical, institutional, and cultural framework that makes possible the coexistence of multiple centers of decision making with different objectives and values, and that sets up the stage for an evolutionary competition between the complementary ideas and methods of those different decision centers" (2012, 251).

Unfortunately, the evidence shows that the U.S. K-12 system in its present form does not set up the stage for an evolutionary competition among different ideas and methods based on "multiple centers of decision making with different objectives and values."

Secular Academic Schooling as a Monocentric System

Compulsory government schooling around the world consists of the following structural elements:

1. Sequenced, grade-level advancement (e.g., first grade, second grade, etc.)

2. A mandatory core academic curriculum (e.g., math, science, social studies, language arts)

3. Seat-time-based progression as the norm (i.e., one year to complete first grade, etc.)

4. Grade-level standards for obtaining "credit" for the year (e.g., in theory a student must "pass" or make "satisfactory progress" before moving on from grade to grade, though this is rarely a reality in much of the world)

5. The expectation that government-licensed teaching professionals teach the specified curriculum to students, which is then assessed using examinations

   Note that an approach as simple and obvious as a self-paced, competency-based education or a completely personalized approach for a particular student is not compatible with these basic structural assumptions (though some educators and students manage to break the rules enough to get there in part).

   Graded, sequenced, age-segregated schooling is the dominant form of "education" around the world today. If we regard "schooling" as a global standard, and if we believe that there may be forms of learning that are nonschool, nonsecular, and nonacademic, then education appears to be remarkably monocentric. To return to the U.S. case, all state departments of education and all public-school districts assume "schooling." They specify a sequenced grade-level set of standards combined with assessments for those standards. They require attendance reporting that is based on a specific number of days in a school year, with truancy arrests and prosecutions possible for those parents who do not send their child to school for the required number of days.

   Students who do not progress adequately through the system may be regarded as falling behind. Students who do not attain appropriate grade-point averages and who do not graduate from high school are often regarded as having limited their opportunities in life. Because parents typically are concerned for their child's well-being, they are reluctant to take risks that could result in a loss of opportunities for their child. As a consequence, unless they have a high degree of certainty that a pathway outside of the traditional schooling model will provide significandy greater rewards and opportunities, most parents are reluctant to pursue nonschooling approaches to their child's education.

   Homeschooling is a growing exception, especially in the United States (for an excellent overview of homeschooling, see Kunzman and Geither 2013). Since 1993, homeschooling has been legal in all fifty states, but with significant variation in the degree of freedom. Many states allow significant autonomy, but some northeastern states require that specific material aligned with state standards be taught and that the homeschooling education be supervised by a licensed teaching professional. Homeschooling has gradually grown to about 3.3 percent of K-12 students in the country (National Center for Education Statistics 2017).

   Education outside the Dominant K-12 Schooling Model

   Prior to the creation of the compulsory schooling system, there were many different ways in which young people learned the skills needed to become successful adults:

1. In indigenous cultures, young children learned through playing, imitating adults, and ultimately taking on increasingly mature and responsible roles in the tribal community. There was no "school." (See Gray 2008.)

2. With the rise of literate religions and philosophical traditions (the GrecoRoman world), a subset of society chose to learn to read in order to access the texts and the disputations about those texts. Literacy and the associated study of texts was a voluntary, self-selected activity. (See Jaeger [1939] 1986.)

3. As specialized skills and trades developed, informal and then formal apprenticeships became increasingly common.

   This is a nonexclusive list, but as a starting point it is worth noting that for thousands of years in cultures around the world human beings thrived and civilizations advanced without the formal, compulsory, graded K-12 schooling that is ubiquitous today.

   The standard narrative is that modern civilization demands such a system of schooling. But insofar as governments around the world have imposed schooling systems on their populations, the notion that schooling is necessary for modern civilization may be an ex post facto rationalization that has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

   For a counterexample, consider the education of Laura Deming. Deming was working in a lab at the University of Califomia-San Francisco at the age of twelve, was admitted to MIT at the age of fourteen, won a Thiel Fellowship to work on anti-aging research (and dropped out of MIT) at seventeen, and by twenty was a leading anti-aging venture capitalist.

   Her father "unschooled" her, which meant that she followed her own interests at home with little supervision or instruction. At no point did she take a regular course; at no point was she taught by licensed, accredited teachers; at no point was she schooled at all. To get into MIT, she had the recommendation of her lab supervisor, a world-renowned researcher, she had done well on the SAT, and she had audited several college math and science courses.

   For another counterexample, consider Cliff Spradlin, who dropped out of high school and dropped out of a brief attempt to take college courses at the University of TexasAustin. He had almost no formal secondary schooling but became a self-taught coder online who developed a reputation for his coding, obtained a job designing video games online, then went on to work for SpaceX, Tesla, and Waymo as a senior software engineer designing some of die most sophisticated software systems for cutting-edge technologies.

   Of course, there are millions of successful adults working at all levels of the twentyfirst-century economy without traditional schooling (consider homeschoolers plus alternative schoolers alone). In Kuhnian terms, as counterexamples accumulate, they ultimately result in a crisis for a scientific paradigm. Given both that compulsory government schooling was unnecessary for success prior to die twentieth century and that it remains unnecessary for success on into the...