Cody Englander
Staff writer
Thursday’s morning lecture began with a simple statement.
“School principals make more decisions every day, second only to emergency room doctors,” said Rebecca Winthrop.
Ian Rowe and Winthrop discussed challenges in public education, school choice and the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom during the 10:45 a.m. Thursday lecture in the Amphitheater. This lecture was an extension of Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week Four theme “The Future of the American Experiment — A Week in Partnership with American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution.”
Rowe is a senior fellow at AEI and cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a network of virtue-based International Baccalaureate high schools. He is currently the chairman of the board for Spence-Chaplin, a nonprofit adoption services organization, and cofounder of the National Summer School Initiative.
Winthrop works as a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings. Her research focuses on global education with special attention toward developing youth skills. She leads the Brookings Family Engagement in Education Network and co-leads the Community Schools Forward Task Force.
Their conversation began with the topic of student engagement and how to involve children in schools.
“Students are unmotivated and disengaged,” said Winthrop. “Student motivation and engagement has been low for a long time. About a third of kids are deeply engaged, and there’s rigorous evidence here that the more engaged kids are, the more they come to school, the more they graduate, the more they go on to higher education.”
She proposed that, since COVID-19, student engagement and participation has been consistently dropping. According to Winthrop, a quarter of students in school are “chronically absent.”
“We have a big achievement problem in this country,” she said. “… There’s something called NAPE, the nation’s report cards. About a third, on average, of kids are reading and doing math at basically proficient level, which is not an extremely high bar.”
Many of the third of students who are proficient on math and reading levels are the same portion of students fully engaging in school.
Rowe views education as, in some ways, a display of two Americas, split between local public schools and private schools.
“Depending on the family, the health of the family that you’re born into, depending on the zip code that you’re born into, you have two dramatically different pathways or access to a high quality education,” Rowe said.
He’s been working with public charter schools in low-income communities in the Bronx, having recently launched a high school in the Sound View neighborhood of District 12 in the Bronx. In that district, only 7% of kids graduate from high school ready for college.
“Of the 2,000 or so students in District 12, when they start ninth grade, four years later, they will have either dropped out, or if they did earn their high school diploma, still cannot do math or reading without remediation if they were to go to college,” said Rowe. “Which is worse? That you actually do this thing that you’re supposed to do, but when you graduate, you cannot compete on equal footing?”
Rowe wants to even the playing field for schooling. He wants to ensure that students leave school with a sense of purpose and fulfillment they wouldn’t otherwise have.
“As much as we focus on academics and proficiency rates, something else we need to think critically about is what is the moral formation that our schools are focused on,” Rowe said.
He’s a proponent of school choice, an alternative to the traditional public schooling.
Winthrop doesn’t view school choice as a positive, as it negatively affects local public schooling.
“The truth is there are private schools, charter schools and public schools that are failing our kids, that are not helping them love school, are not giving them a civic grounding, are not giving them academic rigor and not helping them develop to be agents of their own life,” she said. “… To me, it’s less of a ‘What type of a financing mechanism and governance mechanism is a school under?,’ and more ‘What are we doing with the kids when they’re there?’ ”
Rowe values the ability for a single mother to have a choice where her child can go to school.
“There is a greater demand, particularly amongst low-income folks, for better options,” he said. “All parents are asking for is an equal shot for their kid. That’s what school choice is. It’s an equal shot for my kid.”
Winthrop disagreed.
“It does no good, actually, for the mother you talked about if the charter school that opens up or the home school, the microschool is poor, poor quality,” she said.
Rowe cited the current low standards of accountability for public schools has allowed for school choice to become more of a competitor.
“Not every charter school is good,” Rowe said. “But at least there’s a mechanism for evaluating effectiveness.”
He noted a provision in President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that would allow for a parent to send their child to a different school if needed.
“That mom, if she is in a system that she’s trapped to send her kid to the school with such a terrible track record, she can use that money and get a credit to go to a religious school, which is a very, very big change,” Rowe said, “and, I think, a healthy one.”
However, the lack of a core curriculum for private and charter schools worries Winthrop. The idea of an uncentralized control over private education raises a red flag for her.
Private schools don’t currently have a condensed and singular curriculum outside of their school district. Rowe wants states to decide curriculums for these schools, and said that public schools have begun to lower their standards for education.
“New Jersey changed what’s called the CUT score that you have to achieve to demonstrate proficiency,” said Rowe. “Before, about 37% of New Jersey kids were demonstrating proficiency. After the change in the score, suddenly 80% of kids were passing.”
While Winthrop agrees that lowering standards is an issue, she believes upholding a good public education system is a civic right America offers. Having worked overseas, Winthrop has seen children find better lives because of their public education systems. She wants to continue this American tradition.
While Winthrop looked toward a long-term goal, Rowe focused on the short-term solution.
“The question becomes what do we do in the interim while we wait for all these folks to suddenly start caring?” he said.
Rowe sees the current standard of public education as solving societal issues while education at times takes a backseat.
“Poverty, mental health issues,” he said. “There are many other things that creep into the day-to-day tasks of most teachers that becomes overwhelming.”
While Winthrop sympathized and understands these issues, she believes not discussing these issues breaks down communities.
“It’s this idea that we are losing our community institutions in most of our communities,” she said. “… All of this is going down, but schools are there, and they could be — as the ideas of a community school movement — a hub for children’s learning and development.”
Winthrop recommended bringing community into the schools through food banks, dentists and doctors to solve exterior issues. While working with schools all across the globe, she’s seen this system be effective.
Rowe believes that simply running a school is difficult enough, and this is just an added stressor for public schools to go through.
While researching reasons for “chronic absenteeism,” he found many low-income families had asthma from growing up with mold. Every time parents would have an incident involving asthma, their child would end up missing school.
“So what should we do in that situation? Should we create an asthma center in our school? No,” Rowe said. “We partner with an asthma organization that provided legal counsel for the parents to fight their landlord and (get) medical treatment.”
The panel shifted conversation toward the topic of AI in the classroom.
Winthrop sees schools as needing to be run differently with the introduction of AI, citing how some programs are able to pass AP tests, SATs, GREs and MCATs.
While Rowe wants to restrict access to students’ use of technology, he finds an upside to AI in the classroom when it is used as a tool, rather than a distraction.
“Imagine if you had an AI tutor who had been trained solely on the writings of Aristotle, or solely on the writings of Plato,” he said. “So our students would have a pocket philosopher. So when they face any kind of situation, like, what would Aristotle do?”
While both have different suggestions, the panelists agreed that AI needs more guardrails before classroom implementation.
Rowe concluded the lecture by referencing the honor code from his school, where students recite the cardinal virtues of the school through a series of “I” statements. It brings the school together in unity before the day begins.
“It’s a commitment for how we are going to operate together,” he said. “It’s the best defense against the excesses of artificial intelligence or any technology. Because that’s what the human component is all about.”
