Institutions and Influence
The little school in the next neighborhood over from mine is known as the best public elementary school in town. It has some of the highest scores in our rural district and is located in one of the few upper-middle-class areas within the town limits. Walking by the school each day with our dog, I often wish my husband and I could send our children there.
But when my eldest child was approaching kindergarten age, a number of factors turned us away from this school. Our pediatrician, when asked, cautioned against sending our daughter to any of the local public schools: “She’ll either become a mean kid, or be tormented by mean kids,” he counseled. Then, I looked up the school’s test scores. Although, as an education researcher, I knew not to put too much stock in these, they were lower than I had hoped. And then there were the low graduation rates from the town’s two high schools, and our concerns about what the school taught about sexuality, and the fact that the school relied so heavily, already in 2015, on screens. And so our family decided in favor of homeschooling.
A few years later, we had an even stronger reason not to send our younger children to this school: reports surfaced that a teacher there had been habitually striking, yanking, and otherwise abusing the three- and four-year-olds in her care; and when this was finally reported, the school hid this news from parents for several days, breaking any remaining trust between the school and the community. Parents were livid, but the teacher eventually got off with probation through a plea bargain, despite outcry even in the courtroom.
Parents could do nothing to influence the situation. Except, perhaps (and only if they had the means), remove their children from these public schools.
This story is but one example of how American parents are losing trust in American institutions. There are as many examples as there are institutions. From the public school whose pandemic Zoom lessons shocked parents into homeschooling, to the library where children encounter performative drag queen story hours, American institutions are becoming less effective at serving the basic, shared needs of American families. The waning trust between Americans and their institutions is not just about safety and morality and (not) learning the 3 Rs, however. It is also about influence.
Usually when we discuss influence today, we discuss it in the negative: a certain person is “a bad influence” on our kids, or we complain that the famous or wealthy “use their influence” to gain undeserved favors. We rarely talk about good influences. Rather, influence is something that we blame for negative outcomes for ordinary people. We recognize that influence is something that is open to abuse; the examples from history (Jim Crow and school segregation come to mind) are too numerous to count.
But influence has also long been an essential factor in the running of civil society; and in reality, influence is negative or positive only according to its particulars. Influence is an important part of what knits together relationships and helps local institutions, in particular, to respond to families’ needs. The question is whose influence counts most in any given situation—or who has the ability to influence situations at all.
Much like the parents at my local school, many Americans have become frustrated with their lack of influence on public (and in some cases private) institutions. This problem goes far beyond my little town. Indeed, in my research for a forthcoming book on the history of homeschooling, Skipping School, I discovered that American schools have become less and less responsive to parental influence in the past seventy-five years, and especially in the past fifteen. This has been a major factor in the growth of homeschooling in recent decades, with parent after parent in my research citing the refusal or inability of schools to address severe bullying, respond to children’s academic needs, or handle social problems interpersonally. Indeed, concern about “safety, drugs, and negative peer pressure” in schools is a much more common reason given for homeschooling today than, for example, the desire to give religious instruction. Many such parents have lost trust in institutions like public schools, because they have found that when something goes wrong in those institutions, they do not have enough influence to change it—even with respect to the treatment of their own children.
While growing less responsive to parents, however, public schools have become more responsive to business and administrative influence. Administrative bloat funnels school funds toward red tape; pen and paper are replaced with Chromebooks despite its being bad for seven-year-olds to read and write primarily on screens; and the outsized influence of politically correct fads in sex education outweigh the wishes of local parents. School shootings have also led to the literal locking down of school campuses in some regions, including in the California city in which I grew up, so that parents and other community members in some places cannot enter school campuses without special permission.
In this context, schools are increasingly divided from families, and a conversation with a teacher is no longer enough to address a parent’s concern. Many teachers have little power in the classroom itself; not only are their hands largely tied at the state or district level in terms of curricula and classroom discipline, but they need higher-up approval even for minute classroom decisions. One teacher in my town even told me that she could not post my flyer about a local writing contest for kids on her classroom corkboard unless I received approval for the flyer from the district superintendent.
There’s influence there, but it’s not from local parents.
Similar problems are occurring in other institutions in the United States. Disagreements over public library events and collections, for example, can rarely be resolved in the twenty-first century with discussions, town halls, or local votes. Instead, they turn into major political controversies, replete with protests, political posturing, and outside advocacy groups joining the fray in all directions. What might have been resolved in public libraries through local discourse in the past is now outside of personal influence; it has to be done through some sort of higher-level, more dramatic confrontation. This is, of course, a means of influence, but it’s one that damages trust instead of building it. Normal means of influence such as discussion and voting are not enough.
The argument could easily be extended to other institutions: the hospital where the parent and physician both despair over the need for a surgery that a far-off insurance adjuster deems unnecessary; the parks and rec departments where changing room policies put the preferences of trans-identifying adults before parents’ concerns about little girls changing in view of grown men; and again, the classroom where the person making decisions is not a teacher who knows your child, but some official who decides that the Common Core need not include very many whole books, because having your child read excerpts on a screen suits him (and Apple) much better. When influence over institutions is held primarily by those who sit at a remove in positions of power, ordinary families don’t stand a chance.
But families do need schools and public pools and childcare and libraries and hospitals. What, then, are some possible solutions?
Homeschooling is one; microschools and other small private schools are another. Subscription-based medical offices or cost-sharing alternatives to insurance are helping many. And some parents turn to nanny shares instead of institutional daycare, or they seek flex time so that they can care for their children in settings in which they have increased control. But these solutions come with significant costs, both financial and personal, and many families cannot access them. Even when costs are not a concern, such solutions will not work for everyone.
Hence the need, in justice, to do something to support families’ ability to access and influence institutional resources. Legislatively, there has been some success lately at extending school vouchers and similar programs, so that families have actual choices among schools (and sometimes homeschooling). Such solutions divert institutional funds to encourage local or family solutions while also transforming those families into a market force that may have increased influence on institutional practices. Ombudsmen with loud public voices, cost-sharing programs in the medical field, pro bono attorneys, and sustained grassroots political efforts can also help increase families’ influence while supporting their immediate needs for services. Families can also continue to try to build relationships with their local school principals, teachers, school boards, medical office managers, doctors, librarians, sports coaches, and others. Even though these people themselves also have limited influence, in individual situations, relationships may still count for something. When we know each other better, then even when we disagree, we can share a sense of belonging that can lead to better solutions.
These solutions are admittedly imperfect. School vouchers, in particular, are not a panacea, and there is legitimate concern that they may lead to increased government control over private schools and homeschooling arrangements. And although increased school funding does not guarantee better student performance, it is a serious thing to remove funding from public schools. These schools are the backbone of our childcare economy and are the only source (however poor) of academic instruction for most American children. It is possible that a better form of scholarship or community support for educational alternatives could be envisioned in the short term.
Waiting for a perfect long-term solution instead of trying out reasonable options right now, however, probably means waiting for something that will never come. Families and legislators should be deliberately exploring a range of solutions to increase family support outside of institutions and to increase the ability of individuals to influence how institutions treat them. But we also need to implement some of these solutions right now. We need to try. To refuse to try, because the options before us might weaken the entrenched power of ineffective institutions, is to ignore the fact that families’ influence should matter. If we can’t trust our own institutions, even locally, to respond to individual and shared needs, at least some of those institutions may require rethinking.
Image licensed via Adobe Stock.