With increasing pressure on schools to find teaching and learning products that work, there’s a growing discussion in the education space about how the sector can evolve to better protect purchasers and users.
In other sectors, consumer protections such as mandatory disclosures and standards of care set a clear bar for quality for companies — and define consequences for those whose products or services hurt consumers by falling below that bar.
The K-12 education space has traditionally taken a different approach, said Ashley Jochim, a principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University. The K-12 accountability system heavily weighs how students score on standardized tests to gauge the performance of a district, school, or individual teacher.
But as the industry supporting public schools has grown and the number of products has proliferated, bolstered until recently by federal pandemic relief, there has been an increased interest in how education can create a stronger baseline of expectations for products.
About This Insider
Ashley Jochim is a principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, focused on identifying opportunities and obstacles to addressing systemic challenges in K-12 schools. A political scientist by training, her research has focused on the work of state education agencies, K-12 accountability, personalized learning, school choice, and district reform efforts. Previously, she was a graduate fellow at the Center for American Politics and Public Policy at the University of Washington, and a research analyst at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights.
This represents a shift from assuming that schools where students test well are doing things right to more clearly defining what is outdated or harmfully ineffective, Jochim said.
Claims about consumer protection in school products are currently being tested in a closely watched court case in Massachusetts, in which a group of parents is suing reading curriculum providers that they say failed their children by not embracing new methods for teaching reading, even as research increasingly suggested the old methods weren’t best practice.
Rather than suing the school district on the grounds that their children have a right to an education — a more traditional route in school-focused lawsuits — the case takes a consumer protection angle, saying the companies failed to warn customers of their products’ “defects” and falsely marketed their products as research-backed.
EdWeek Market Brief recently spoke with Jochim about how she believes consumer protections should be applied to the K-12 education space, and how those standards could offer helpful guidance for education companies.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What got you interested in researching and thinking about consumer protections in the K-12 sector?
I’m a political scientist by way of background — I didn’t grow up in the education policy sector, per se, I was trained broadly on American politics and public policy. That exposure meant that I spent my graduate training thinking a lot about many sectors of the economy and public policy, and their evolution over time.
That context is important because I think in education we often like to think we’re on an island by ourselves, but in reality, there’s a lot of cross-fertilization that I think can be beneficial when we look at how other sectors of the economy manage particular problems.
Which areas of education were of the most interest to you?
I started thinking about the issue of consumer protection in the context of new private education choice programs.
There’s been a widespread loss of credibility or belief in traditional mechanisms for improving the quality of public education, at least among the people who are the strongest supporters of new private education choice programs.
Through a series of discussions I had with different folks on Twitter and other platforms, I started using this notion of consumer protection as a way to almost escape the traditional debate around K-12 accountability, [which typically concludes that the current accountability system] doesn’t work, so that means we shouldn’t do anything at all.
The reason why I really like it as a framework is because consumer protection has very different aims from traditional K-12 accountability.
How is a consumer protection mindset different than traditional accountability?
K-12 accountability, at least in its original articulation, was really about driving performance across the continuum of performance outcomes. It was very much viewed as a continuous improvement system: By having these standards and assessing our progress over time, everything is going to get better.
Which is a much more ambitious aim than when you look at the history of consumer protection.
Consumer protection does not try to solve a quality problem, per se. Its ambitions are far narrower, which is really to prevent the worst harms. So instead of trying to make sure you get something really good, it’s just trying to make sure that you, as a consumer navigating a market, can avoid things that present extraordinary risk.
How much of a shift would moving from accountability to a consumer-protection mindset be for how we evaluate schools and products?
A challenge that’s been raised around accountability systems is people saying, “Well, education is complicated, so we can’t have accountability standards, because those are unreliable tools for helping us select which schools or providers are good or bad.”
That’s a frequent reframe you’ll see in the education sector — on both the left and the right [side of politics] — that we’re not very good at identifying what quality is, or even what “negligence” might be.
[That] is a big logical leap, to go from “this didn’t work as expected” to “now we should just give up any effort to assess quality or protect the end users of public education from fraud, abuse, negligence.”
Consumer protection gives us a way of thinking about some of the issues we’ve historically struggled to [address] in the context of schooling.
Take us through how consumer-protection standards might be applied in schools.
One is thinking about the standards around a standard of care, and how that connects to the ways we think about negligence.
In the context of health care, or consumer products, we establish negligence by defining: What do we know? What is the body of knowledge…that we know to be true.
Based on those standards, this is how we can tell if someone has been grossly negligent. And that degree of negligence is shaped by the distance between whatever the person or company is producing and what the actual standard of care is.
What are the potential challenges with bringing this standard to education?
Some [research or market consensus is] more uncertain than others, and negligence in a context of high uncertainty is much harder to establish.
You see this in healthcare litigation all the time. You can have a doctor say, “How would I have known that this would have been the better course of action?” That’s what a lot of healthcare litigation hinges on.
[There’s longstanding thinking that] we can’t define a standard of care and education. And I think that’s very false. I think that we have a lot of evidence around how children learn, what practices support them, and how schools can put in place those practices.
So I would say that our failure to establish a standard of care is more politically driven than it is driven by the evidence.
One potential counter to that argument is that education research is always evolving and doesn’t offer clear direction to policymakers and educators. How do you respond to that?
In teaching, like when we define a standard of care in medicine, we can’t remote control it or engineer it. It’s not like we’re baking and we have a recipe for good results. Actually, there’s an art and a science to medicine that is really important.
The evidence that we do have [in] healthcare research is always evolving, just like in education…. Over time, our knowledge grows.
Tobacco is an example of where we’ve had a lot of consumer protection and litigation over the course of a century. I don’t think many people would have been successful in arguing a cases about the dangers of tobacco 100 years before we had the evidence that tobacco causes lung cancer.
But as we know more, then there’s a question of: Is it negligent to ignore all of this evidence and continue to provide consumers with products that we know are faulty, potentially dangerous, and harmful?
That’s what consumer protection law is really all about. It’s about saying: No, actually, you can’t continue.
Are there other forms of consumer protection as well?
The reason why consumer production law exists at all is because of information asymmetries. When the [potential harms] of products are not very visible to the people who are purchasing it, that’s called an information asymmetry.
It’s not just about litigation. You also have mandatory disclosures. That’s a really common consumer protection tool to counteract this problem of information asymmetries.
For example, if you buy a house, the seller is required to give you — and this is government-mandated — a form that asks about 100 questions about potential things that could be wrong with your house. That’s an example of an information disclosure. Nutrition facts [on food items] are another example of information disclosures.
And then, of course, there’s regulatory standards where there is a set of process standards that the government has determined is essential to protect consumers.
Drop-side cribs, for example, used to be really popular 20 years ago, and when there was evidence that dozens of kids were getting trapped in drop-side cribs, [regulators] said: No more drop-side cribs. We’re not going to do that. That was a mandate.
Those are the ways that you can do this.
How could regulatory standards apply to curriculum and teaching?
There are a few things we can talk about when we think about regulatory or information disclosures in the context of schooling.
One is on the issue of curriculum and products in general. There are a lot of products in the K-12 space. Someone needs to be bringing together evidence around curriculum in a way that is [broader] than what the What Works Clearinghouse does.
The What Works Clearinghouse tries to do this by prioritizing [randomized control trials], which is not a bad approach, but we don’t have [randomized control trials] on all the questions we actually need answered.
This is where you need to use professional expertise about what we know about teaching and learning, and use that to evaluate whether particular products meet the standard of care.
EdReports is an example of a non-governmental effort to do this. But the [limitation] with EdReports is they’re grounded around standards alignment, so … they will actually rate some curricula that are known to be very high quality in terms of using evidence-based practices for teaching low because there’s some misalignment with the standards.
In some other sectors, product providers are required to make mandatory disclosures. Could these be applied to education?
If we think about disclosures as a tool in the context of schooling: What if states actually collected data on the ELA and math curriculum that every school district is using?
That seems like that would be a no-brainer. And you could have that information available to families, policy makers — people with a stake in this system — so they can understand, is this school using an approach that our best expertise suggests is going to be effective.
Why are you advocating for this discussion to happen now?
We have this sort of magical thinking that simply establishing [desired] outcomes is all that is required. But that assumes there are multiple ways in which people can get to those outcomes, in which case you want to leave them unspecified because people can use a variety of tools or strategies and get the same results.
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I would say a lot of people in education believe that, even though I don’t think it’s supported by the evidence.
How does the new presidential administration play into any of this?
One thing that makes me optimistic about this moment is that some of the obstacles to doing what we’ve been talking about … is that doing that is going to make a lot of people mad. It is controversial.
One of the things that is really noteworthy about this administration is they’re not afraid to break stuff. They’re not afraid to offend the sensibilities of some of the people who have been activists or gatekeepers in this space for a long time
There could be an opportunity for a reconceived version of IES and thinking about some of this stuff, and provide a springboard for states to do the same.