Sam Abrams is the director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the author of Education and the Commercial Mindset (Harvard University Press, 2016; paperback, 2018). Before joining Teachers College as a researcher in 2008, he was a high school teacher of history and economics for 18 years. 

DB: How did you get interested in education, society, and economics initially? What brought you to your research interests?

SA: My interest in education goes back to my sophomore year at Holyoke High School in Holyoke, Massachusetts. My English teacher, Ms. Dorothy Bach, ran the peer tutoring program and asked me to serve as a peer tutor in math and English. Ms. Bach ran the program in the school library during two of the school's three lunch periods. I was honored to be asked by Ms. Bach and immediately found myself at home as a peer tutor. I got a lot of satisfaction from seeing struggling students understand material, develop a sense of independence, and feel better about themselves. At the same time, as a student in Ms. Bach's class, I became quite aware of the impact of an excellent teacher. Ms. Bach was a stellar teacher--empathic, brilliant, and dedicated. She made everyone feel welcome, she radiated a love of literature, and she personified organization and hard work. The message was clear that democracy itself depended on the likes of Ms. Bach in the classroom.

Beyond that foundational experience, I was taken aback during my first years as a teacher myself in the early 1990s to see the confidence on Wall Street in for-profit management of public schools. The companies in this new sector were called educational management organizations (EMOs). The concept of EMOs struck me as incongruous. Education lacks the transparency necessary for proper contract enforcement. The result is contract failure. The parent, taxpayer, and legislator are all at a necessary distance. The immediate consumer is a child and thus in little, if any, position to judge the quality of service rendered. In sum, this confidence on Wall Street struck me as a classic case of paradigm encroachment. I followed the story of EMOs closely and a decade later got the opportunity to write a book about it. I think the epigraph for the prologue captures my puzzlement. It's from the economist Arthur Okun: "The market needs a place, and the market needs to be kept in place." 

DB: If you were to advise democratic socialists on our education policies, what would you suggest?

SA: With Ms. Bach as a point of departure, I would say democratic socialists should focus on empowering teachers. In concrete terms, that should mean organizing to end standardized testing as we know it, to boost teacher salaries, and to keep class size at manageable levels. Ms. Bach taught from 1955 to 1984 (I was a student of hers in 1979-1980). This was before the concentration on standardized test results. I think Ms. Bach would have found today's focus on testing utterly stifling. I know that's the consensus today among many thoughtful teachers--and I know quite a few who have left teaching in public schools for private schools (or left teaching altogether)--because of this focus on testing. As I wrote in the epilogue of my book, we need little more than the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which tests a small but significant sample of students every two years in every state in grades 4, 8, and 12 in reading, writing, math, and science. The Finns, as I wrote in the twelfth chapter of my book, set the standard for intelligent sampling by testing only 10 percent of students in grade 9 in two subjects a year over a 10-year period and thereby cover the entire curriculum once a decade; in addition, the Finns test 10 percent of students in grade 3 in math and test them again for longitudinal purposes in grades 6, 9, and 12. 

Regarding salary, Ms. Bach became a teacher when the doors of academia, medicine, law, and business were in large part closed to women. Schools benefited from this discrimination. And the low salaries of teachers as a whole appear to reflect a longstanding bias against women in particular. This is untenable. To return to Finland, a high school teacher there earns about 110 percent as much as his or her college classmate. In the United States, he or she earns about 65 percent as much.

Finally, class size matters, a lot. The Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) study in Tennessee, run from 1985-1989, provides indisputable evidence of this: students in kindergarten through grade 3 with 14 classmates compared to those with 24, which was the statewide norm, outperformed their counterparts in those four years of school and for many years later on account of the additional attention. Implicit in this finding is, one, the effectiveness of teachers themselves on account of smaller class sizes; and, two, their satisfaction as professionals.

There are more fronts to fight on: we need paid maternity leave, high-quality preschool, and better school lunches. But in alliance with teachers, social democrats would be well advised to start with organizing to end standard testing as we know it, to boost teacher salaries, and to make classes smaller.

DB: What do you think about the recent wave of teachers' strikes in the US and across the world?

SA: The teacher strikes speak precisely to these issues. Teachers walked out last year in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona for long-overdue raises. Salaries in those states and many others make teaching a form of civic servitude when teaching should be an honorable profession that allows its practitioners an honorable living. Equally telling, teachers in Los Angeles walked out in January of this year not because of inadequate pay--the union and the district had already agreed on a 6 percent raise before the teachers walked out--but because of growing class sizes and insufficient support in the form of guidance counselors, nurses, and librarians. The teachers in Los Angeles also called for a cap on charter schools, on the grounds that charter schools divert funding from conventional public schools and thus indirectly drive up class sizes and shrink the money available for guidance counselors, nurses, and librarians. After six days, the teachers in Los Angeles won. And their cause constitutes a telling complement to the cause of their colleagues in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona. 

DB: In your book, Education and the Commercial Mindset, you conclude with an anecdote from your own classroom. You mention a student in an economics class who was kneeling beneath a table, tinkering with the leg so the table didn't wobble. After trying and trying, he reports (I'm paraphrasing) "I think it's the floor that's the problem, not the table." You use this as an allegory for educational reform. To address problems with schools we need to fix the floor, or the larger social structure, rather than tinker with more superficial issues. In that analogy what does the floor represent exactly?

SA: I'm glad that anecdote resonated with you. I used my student's observation as the epigraph for the epilogue, in fact: "It's not the tables, it's the floor." The floor represents the exogenous factors that we're not addressing in debates about education policy. Childhood poverty, as I noted in my book, is at 23 percent in the United States, placing us at the top of 30 OECD countries ranked by UNICEF for "relative child poverty." That is a disgrace. Income inequality in general in this country is a disgrace. We need to begin there and then implement paid maternity leave, high-quality preschool, smaller classes, and better teacher pay.

In fact, the strongest correlate of scores on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the triennial exam administered to a sample of 15-year-olds in each OECD member nation since 2000, is the percentage of children born at low weight. And birthweight is indeed an excellent proxy for standard of living. Nations with low percentages of children born at low weight, on average, post significantly better PISA results. 

For example, in a multiple linear regression analysis I did concerning the PISA results in reading for 2012, every one-unit increase in low birthweight (measured as a percentage point of a nation’s infants at low birthweight) was associated with a decline in PISA reading scores of 5.25 points (this association was significant at the 0.05 level). Finland, for example, reports a low-birthweight rate of 4.3 percent, according to a 2013 UNICEF study, and high PISA scores. The United States, by contrast, reports a low-birthweight rate of 8.2 percent, according to the same study, and subpar PISA scores.  

In focusing on accountability with high-stakes standardized testing, policymakers have been looking at the tables, not the floor. With the best of intentions, these policymakers wanted to expose and thereby close the difference in levels of achievement in reading and math between children from low- and middle-income homes through regular testing. But what they have accomplished with all this testing in reading and math is merely the repeated exposure of the difference in such levels of achievement. They have not closed the gap. Moreover, in the process, as former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a chief advocate of high-stakes accountability, put it, such testing in reading and math has been "sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools."  This testing has meant not only mind-numbing test prep in reading and math. It has also crowded out time for art, music, crafts, phys ed, and even history and science in the name of such test prep. Yet not until we address the underlying problem of poverty will our schools function as they should. 

DB: Now that the fervor for testing and charterization appears to have ebbed somewhat, what should communities fighting for education justice focus on? What do you see on the educational horizon?

SA: Beyond the objectives I've already mentioned--from boosting teacher pay and lowering class sizes to funding high-quality preschool and better school lunches--I think we have to carry on the fight for more equal spending. This cause famously went to the Supreme Court in 1973 in San Antonio v. Rodriguez but lost, with Justice Lewis Powell writing for the 5-4 majority that the plaintiffs' contention for equal per-pupil spending rested on too loose a reading of the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. On account of that decision, the pursuit of equal spending was deputized to the states. About 20 states have since succeeded in leveling the amount of funding but only to a degree. Even in these states with equalization formulas, wealthy districts can, for example, do work-arounds by issuing bonds for capital improvements. As  Jonathan Kozol has put it, the way we fund schools in the United States has led to "savage inequalities." No other western democracy operates its schools in this manner. Had Hillary Clinton won the election, advocates of equal funding like Michael Rebell would have tried to relitigate San Antonio v. Rodriguez. And Rebell and his allies still might try. But with Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh taking seats on the Supreme Court, the battle might be futile. It still must nevertheless be fought at the state level. 

DB: What's one idea democratic socialists should understand about education in the United States today?. 

SA: "It's not the tables, it's the floor."