It’s the first week of January so here’s the In and Out list (2023 here and 2022 here). It’s unscientific, it’s impressionistic, and it’s informed by your emails so keep sending them.
Happy New Year.
Out
In
Dress Codes
Gender stereotypes
Networks
Hubs
Philanthropic dollars in education
Philanthropic commitment to education
Race-based affirmative action
Essays and supplemental questions
Covid dollars
Fiscal cliffs
Governance
Donors
Ed tech will transform how we learn
AI will transform how we learn
Middlemen
Brandon Johnson
Substantive teacher strikes
Performative teacher strikes
Antiracism
Antisemitism
Standardized tests
Aristocracy
Phones
Drones
Nina Rees
Nina Rees
Safetyism
Calls for violence
Democrats as ed reformers
Democrats
Localism
SCOTUS
DEI Jacobins
Chris Rufo as Robespierre
Privacy
Private schools
Evidence
Vibes
Counseling
Coaching
Intersectionality
Melting pot
One-time spending
Hysterics about budget cuts
DeSantis with outsized coattails in school board races
In my view, Nina did a masterful job navigating a complicated set of cross-pressures for her organization and the charter sector. On any given day she was catching flack for being too hard-edged or for not being collaborative enough. Nina is an institutionalist not a tribalist. She got grief for inviting Randi Weingarten to a national charter school conference but also for inviting Betsy DeVos while she was Secretary of Education. We need more institutional thinking and leadership like that – especially right now.
It’s almost that time…Did you put off your holiday shopping? Need a gift or three? Just like to read? Here’s the Eduwonk Holiday Book gift guide. (And here’s last year’s, I am seeing a few of those books on 2023 lists, too).
If we had to live a book the past few months I would have at least hoped for a Hemingway story with some fishing in it (I have one for you below). Or even better maybe a nice poem. Instead, we’re living the argument of two new books: Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trapand Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Cancelling of the American Mind.
Mounk shows why identity-based politics are a dead end. Implications for how the education sector thinks about politics and progress and implications much more generally for our civic life. Hard to miss how much more effective idea-based education politics were than the soup reformers are trying to sell now is. Lukianoff and Schlott argue how and why “cancel culture” stifles expression and creates the style of argument we’ve seen these past few months, not to mention last decade.
The choice of college or career training after high school is often set up as a binary. In The Career Artseducation analyst Ben Wildavsky makes clear why college matters, but also offers advice for thinking about different paths, social capital, and how to get the most of your experience and set yourself up for success.
But, higher education needs reform and changing the institutions is tough. Former college president Brian Rosenberg lays that out in the provocative and witty “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.”
In Dream Town Laura Meckler revisits Shaker Heights. Come for the lively discussion of John Ogbu and Ron Ferguson’s research, which should be discussed more, stay for a timely story for 2023.
In How Elites At The Social Justice Movement Freddie deBoer takes a look at why social justice movements often fall short and in particular why did the energy of 2020 amount to so little? DeBoer is unsparing, not because he doesn’t care but rather because he does.
Salty!
Not a book, but a spicy entry from Oakland education leader Hae-Sin Thomas and her husband Parker. The pair has launched a business offering cooking salt. Jo Su offers a terrific array of options for different palettes as well as gift packages. Strongly recommend!
In The ExceptionsNew York Times reporter Kate Zernike gives a book length treatment to the story she broke about how MIT discriminated against female scientists. Unlike how these things usually come to light, class action suit or a whistleblower, these women documented their case themselves. Zernike, who does great work when she turns her attention to education, tells the story.
You might assume I’m including a book about space on an education as a STEM angle or something along those lines. But I’m including Ashlee Vance’s When the Heavens Went On Sale because it’s a hell of a story with an ending we don’t know yet. If the first era of space was government working with the private sector the second phase is increasingly the inverse.
Community colleges are an amazing part of the education ecosystem and an often inspiring place to see the American ethos of an education system that offers many second chance opportunities. In America’s Hidden Economic Engines, a slim edited volume, Bob Schwartz and Rachel Lipson compile some examples and offer some ideas for policymakers.
Elliot Washor is a longtime voice for ideas about a different, more hands on, way to do schooling. Learning To Leave, which (I assume) is a play on the classic British sociological work Learning to Labor follows their previous Leaving to Learn, Elliot Washor and Scott Boldt profile schools offering students a radically different learning experience. These ideas only work in a system of choice, which is the irony of the education conversation today. The anti-testing people are also generally the anti-choice people all the while claiming to be against “one size fits all.” It’s why voices like Washor are so important.
On a new WonkyFolk Jed and I talk with David Griffith from Fordham about their new report on education competition in the nation’s largest school districts. And David shows off his fancy home for us. It’s an interesting report with some counterintuitive findings and also questions for policymakers and advocates. One issue we get into is just how much penetration you should expect from competition anyway? Important with the sky is falling rhetoric.
This interview with tennis icon Martina Navratilova by Kara Swisher is worth your time if you want a textured and measured discussion about transgender athletes and sports. One issue that comes up is this criticism that a lot of people suddenly energized on this issue are nowhere to be seen on all the various gender equity issues affecting women’s sports. I think that’s true – in different degrees – of both sides. Women’s sports are still not equitable with men’s sports and there is a lot of work to do there. Yet it’s also irrelevant to the core questions of inclusion, fairness, and safety that must be balanced on this particular question with regard to different sports and levels of competition. This is one of these issues where if someone has a really simplistic take, either way, they probably haven’t thought very hard about it.
Anti-Equity
I was stunned when I learned of this Republican plan to literally transfer millions of public dollars from schools serving Black students to schools serving white ones. It’s absolutely brazen. 81 percent of white students will benefit but only 56 percent of black students and 66 percent of Hispanic students from this plan -that carries a total cost as high as $1.9 billion. Just wow. They’re really doing this stuff.
Actually, this is the plan New York Democratic leaders and the teachers union cooked up to lower-class size in New York City. According to this Urban Institute analysis 81 percent of white students will see their class size reduced but only 56 percent of Black students. At a cost of nearly $2 billion. Yeah, equity! Local leaders are concerned about the costs and implications for basic fairness in that city. The policy is basically what you’d come up with if you asked AI to develop a class size policy at odds with the research on effective class size policies. For instance, the money is not focused on the early grades or poor kids but instead spread like peanut butter across the city. It’s sort of astounding it’s not getting more attention given what a reverse equity play it is.
Across the board class size reduction is a great policy – if you live in a vacuum. In practice, it creates issues like this and raises serious questions about ROI for this kind of money. Democrats, who remain tethered to producer interests in education, still struggle with the basic jobs versus education quality dynamic in public education. Layer on the class politics of New York and then you get an unfolding disaster like this.
My point here is not that the Republicans are great on education, they’re not. It’s merely that if you’re looking at education policy through a red or blue lens these days you’re missing the action because neither party is distinguishing itself and at the same time both have interesting leaders trying to do interesting things. This, however, is not one of those things.
Proles cost too much!*
This new study from Brookings is kind of wild. It argues that class-based affirmative action won’t work because there isn’t enough aid to support low-income students. It’s a wierd argument if you’re concerned about social mobility because it seems to sort of give the game away that as previously constructed affirmative action was benefiting more affluent and often already advantaged kids, which it was. But before the SCOTUS case saying that got you branded as anti-diversity. Now it makes you what, some sort of clear-eyed realist? An advocate for diversity even? Yes, a lot of these schools are down to their last billion or two, times are tough, but it seems like we can do better here? And to their credit some schools are.
This Washington Post article about students choosing colleges is intended to spin you up about the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. Me? It spins me up about the (lack) of navigation and guidance support we provide to students and how we even talk about schools in the first place. The basic architecture of the piece tracks two high school seniors, a white guy and a Black guy, as they navigate college applications this year. They both think the affirmative action decision will affect them – in different ways. Yet there is a good chance both are wrong, and too few people seem to be telling them that.
Colleges are still seeking to create diverse classes and the Supreme Court explicitly allows students to talk about their race in essays and how it affected them. Meanwhile, at highly selective schools admissions are something of a lottery anyway, and so for any individual the effect of the court’s decision will be less impactful than what it turns out to mean in aggregate. It’s entirely possible the court’s decision is going to turn out to be symbolically important but substantively marginal. The best advice for students remains do what you want to do, regardless of the case, and there are hundreds of amazing colleges in this country so you need not fixate on just the Ivies. The differences in what these two students experience in terms of guidance and support – well, that’s a story I wish more reporters would pay attention to because it matters a lot more to the student experience than anything the court did.
Also, in case you needed a reminder, most students are not deciding which, if any, Ivy to apply to. Most Americans go to schools that will be unaffected by the Supreme Court decision because they take everyone. This is elite signaling journalism.
Fish
It’s Friday…so Friday fish porn! I’ve been out with Covid caught during a lot of travel (which it turns out I was coming down with when we did the podcast) so intended to send this earlier in the week but here we are. Since it’s a Friday now, I bring you fish. Here’s Bellwether’s Tom Gold, with a nice striper.
I had to wonder: What might have transpired had Gee emphasized the moral urgency of creating grand options for working- and middle-class students? What if he had taken the case for building a top university directly to West Virginians? Instead, the inescapable impression he leaves is of a college president—a man with experience, energy, and willpower—who settled for a utilitarian vision and straitened choices.
Yes please. Great states and nation states have great universities. This idea that every boat on its own bottom or economic ROI is a good approach to universities is antithetical to thriving culture, arts, and knowledge.
Unfortunately, too many universities are themselves becoming antithetical to thriving culture, arts, and knowledge. Everyone has a take on that disastrous hearing this week. Here’s mine: If you make Congresswoman Stefanik look like a stateswoman you should rethink all the choices in your life that brought you to that point.
The problem for the schools, of course, is the hypocrisy. It’s not so much free speech per se but rather that these universities can’t live up to their own avowed commitments around speech or conduct and consequently discredit the whole enterprise. If you can’t discern use – mention distinctions on controversial words or put students in anti-bias trainings because of political views or cancel speakers for holding views that a majority of Americans do and then suddenly get mealy mouthed about anti-semitism or genocide then that’s a problem. And the reason they can’t live up to their commitments is because they, via the administrative operations they oversee, have fallen in love with the currently ideological fashionable idea that the world is best understood through a reductionist lens of oppressed or oppressor. It’s a method that gets you in trouble as soon as it runs into an actual use case – as we saw at Tuesday’s hearing. But like the politicians who were grilling them, the university presidents are also scared of “the base,” just different bases. So now we’re getting damage control, clean up statements, and videos that have a ‘blink three times if you’re being held against your will’ quality. What we need instead is a more fundamental conversation about speech, but also consistent expectations for conduct, and most importantly viewpoint diversity which is wanting at too many schools.
This binary oppressor / oppressed idea and seeing people as extensions of groups rather than individuals, has, by the way, also firmly taken hold in K-12 and captured the attention of too many education leaders who have never encountered a stupid fad they didn’t embrace. It’s a natural and predicable extension of a focus on DEI that’s morphed from an essential emphasis on diversity, commitment to difference, equitable participation and inclusion into a bubble fueled and hard-edged political agenda – an agenda that one must note ample polling shows enjoys more support among elite white progressives than among the people it’s ostensibly aimed at empowering who, on average, are like yeah, no thanks. Because, despite professional division industries all around us, most people recognize we’re all more alike than not, life is complicated, and kind of like this place while also wanting it to be better.
So my message to education leaders is simply this: What happened Tuesday will one way or another happen to you at some point as well, especially if you keep saying one thing privately and another publicly because you’re scared, or an opportunist, or just don’t want to risk a good dinner party invite. And the perverse irony is that in the process you will discredit important ideas and the backlash, as we’re starting to see, will create its own set of problems. Many of the people seizing this moment don’t share any real commitment to difference or a genuine belief in inclusion or building a more inclusive or economically mobile America. Yet you, your funders, your allies, are doing their work for them.
Profiles in porridge.
After the disappointing PISA results came out Miguel Cardona, the American Secretary of Education, give a stirring speech where he said this is a generational challenge, kids who were already farthest from opportunity pre-pandemic are most at risk and given his deep commitment to equity he calls us all to truly focus on them, and that everyone should lay down the ideology and come together to rise to this challenge. He called on school systems and states to be more transparent about student performance and responsive to parents.
Actually, other than the results none of that happened. In fact, the secretary said in a statement we don’t spend enough and absent the Biden Administration’s spray and pray approach to education finance things would be much worse. He did marginally better in a full speech but it was still mostly talking points on book “banning” and other greatest hits bookended by pleas for money. He says we can’t tolerate the status quo but then proposes the status quo plus extra bucks. The line from others was that we’re better than Yemen or something. Just mush, all the way down.
Everyone will have their quibbles. My take remains the same. Zora Neale seems underplayed David? And the reparations debate section is underpowered and a missed opportunity to showcase diverse thought. On the other hand, the course briefly mentions the role of Native Americans in slavery and by extension the Civil War, something that is too infrequently taught because it complicates the easy good guy / bad guy narratives (see above). But, something I learned this week is just how fractious a discipline African-American history is even within the field. It turns out the most used text, The Souls of Black Folk, is used in fewer than one in four college African-American history classes. And “consensus” drops off pretty quickly from there. That’s a probletunity, as one of my colleagues, used to say and seems like essential context to understanding the debate about this course – that both “sides” seem to look past.
Recognizing that this is a college course it would still be useful to crosswalk it with state standards in all 50 states, would be illustrative.
Earlier this week Secretary of Education Cardona gaffed. Apparently unaware that President Reagan was not much of a fan of large government Cardona deployed Reagan’s famous 1986 press conference quip, “I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” The problem? Cardona dropped the terrifying part and merely said he wanted to help, like Reagan had said. Oops.
Look, two things are true at once here. One is if part of your job is saying a lot of words you’re going to screw some of them up. It’s inevitable. Especially if you’re tired, stressed, or whatever. (I’m assuming here this wasn’t in prepared remarks or talking points but was a botched audible). I still cringe when I think about mistakes I’ve made. I once mixed up a Kennedy and Einstein quote, that in that case could have been given by either man though the Einstein one is iconic, because I was at the Kennedy School and nervous giving a talk. That I can pretty vividly recall the moment years later tells you how painful these things are if you’re the kind of person who cares. Cardona’s job requires saying a lot of words. It happens. Yet of course it was catnip for conservatives given that this mistake lies at the center of a Venn diagram of things they care about. That’s fair, Cardona is a political figure and turnabout is fair play. Democrats did the same thing with DeVos.
The other thing that’s true, however, is this is part and parcel of what happens as we move away from a focus on rigor, knowledge, and facts in school and society. You don’t have to be the kind of person who can recall page numbers in Lou Cannon’s books to know that Reagan was a conservative, he was the vanguard of the conservative movement, and the 1980 and 1984 elections were consequential. Whether you’re a conservative or not that’s relevant cultural knowledge and cultural capital in the same way that you should understand some high level things about FDR and Johnson whether or not you’re a Democrat or a progressive. The secretary should have known this orientation given his role – and especially given Reagan’s history with the Department of Education.
Why would he though? Listening to Cardona these past few years he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who spends a lot of time with people who disagree with or challenge him. The media sure doesn’t. And our current environment leaves little room for acknowledging the other side has a point.
The thing to remember about DeVos, though, is that two things were also true. She sure made some missteps, and she was never going to get a fair shake regardless. An early tell was when then-Senator Al Franken talked over her and mansplained about an accountability question neither of them understood. As I noted at the time if a Republican man had done that to a Democratic woman all hell would have – rightly – broken loose. So Rick’s also right there are just a lot of double standards.
That, not whether Secretary Cardona doesn’t know Reagan 101 or misspoke in the moment, is the real problem here.
Through the education rhetoric looking glass.
Dana Goldstein has a piece in The New York Times about history/civics standards in three different states, Florida, South Dakota, and Virginia. Mike Petrilli immediately objected to some bias in the article. He’s not wrong (and I don’t always say that on media stuff), this sort of selective exercise is almost always bias confirming and bubble revealing. If you really wanted to compare the three states side-by-side it would be a useful and illuminating and probably not narrative confirming exercise. Even better, look at the process by which they were developed in each state. Regional emphasis, various changes, big debates. That’s where the action is. Lumping these states together obscures more than it reveals. We ought to be having a more sophisticated conversation about different approaches to content and skills and teaching challenging material than this culture war approach to covering these issues allows. Don’t hold your breath.
Oh, and by the way, communism was bad for hundreds of millions in the 20th century….
On the politics, Republican governors are happy to have TheNew York Times write articles like this all day every day. It’s part of the brain numbing back and forth of narrative driven politics and journalism. These stories aren’t hit pieces, they’re gifts. Getting attacked in the New York Times for being too conservative on history standards is about the best press a Republican governor can get.
That’s politics though. Why it matters is twofold. First, it leaves readers with a skewed sense of these issues. That’s not helpful to the exhausted middle. But also, because, as Traub points out, Virginia got to a place of unity and quality on its history and civic standards. They passed a politically diverse board unanimously. No small thing in this climate. Now comes the hard part, implementation. And there are conflict entrepreneurs on both sides who would love to see that go sideways or keep up the fight, especially right now activists on the left for whom getting Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin is more important than getting things done. Articles like this makes their work easier, the work of implementation harder, and it’s consequently bad for Virginia students.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
By the way, if he went to high school in Virginia now Secretary Cardona would know heads from tails about Ronald Reagan:
Credit Where It’s Due:
This Portland teachers strike was a mess. Don’t take my word for it, the union’s chair of its negotiating committee quit over it saying the learning loss wasn’t worth the gains and the gains were meager because union leadership didn’t do their homework. But while the national press couldn’t be bothered with a strike that had kids out of school from Halloween until this past Monday the local press, in particular the Oregonian’s Julia Silverman, did a fantastic job and set a standard on how how to cover these things. They covered both sides, were not in the bag for any faction, checked facts and math, and hustled and reported. Well done. More please.
It’s Friday. I have fish porn:
This is Parker Baxter with a fat largemouth bass from Florida. He bills it has a modest size fish for down there, but c’mon, that’s a beast. You can find Parker at his day job at CU Denver’s School of Public Affairs.
They say most of the time you’ll spend with your kids is before they’re 10, and certainly before they’re 18. Portland parents, then, are getting some bonus time. They should be grateful to the teachers union not frustrated that schools have been closed this month! What ingrates! Portland parents, and education experts, Christine Pitts and Andy Jacob (of Bellwether) discussed the strike with me on LinkedIn earlier this week.
Today, @andyjacob, @arotherham, and I discussed the pitfalls and silver linings within the Portland teacher strike and how other large urban communities can plan for similar fiscal situations. https://t.co/LgtGlhr80H
As I try to say often, thank you. Grateful for your readership. Even at a time education reform is less front and center, Eduwonk continues to do more than 2 million page views each year. So thanks for your time and attention or just your interest in fish.
This is a long one. Buckle up. But there is fish at the end.
Coming attractions: Look for a LinkedIn live on Monday with Andy Jacobs, Christine Pitts, and me discussing the strike in Portland. Like other strikes lately remarkably little attention in the media. Andy and Christine are both education experts, and also Portland Public School parents. And Jed is back from Europe so look for a new Wonkyfolk soon.
If it seems like increasingly vibes or narratives are driving perceptions about education and education policy, well that’s because it’s happening. There has always been some of this, but it seems more acute right now. I’ll use a few Virginia examples to make the point and then get into why it matters more generally.
The recent election results are in Virginia are being portrayed as some sort of landslide and a referendum on a range of issues. This makes people feel good, but it’s not accurate. The election was close, it’s really about one issue, and that issue was not education.
None of this is to say the election is not consequential, it is substantively and politically. The Dems had a good night and it was a rebuke of Republicans and the governor. But it’s overhyped. Democrats will control the state Senate 21-19 and the House of Delegates 51-49. There were 70 Republicans and 70 Democrats in the legislature before the election now it’s a 72-68 Democratic advantage. Control matters in some important ways, but that’s close. (Most of our elections have been close lately. One reason a lot of people are so antsy about 2024 is that in 2020 a shift of less than 50,000 votes would have us in the middle of a second Trump administration right now. Trump won by 80,000 or so votes across key states in 2016. Not a lot of wiggle room.)
The two closest House races (HD – 21 & 97) were decided by 1,826 votes.
A switch of 914 votes and the Republicans would have a majority in the House.
In the Senate, the two closest races (SD 30 & 31) were decided by 6,494 votes.
A switch of 3,248 votes and Republicans win Senate too.
Again, better to be the Dems than the Rs, but that’s tight.
Second, there was one issue driving this election: Abortion rights. You see this in what the ads were about, you see this in the results, and you see it in what people in the state are saying. You see it everywhere except for people trying to make a point about this or that issue they really care about and so want the election to be about.
If there was a secondary issue after abortion it’s probably redistricting that makes districts increasingly insurmountable for one party or the other. The rural / urban/ suburban divide continues to deepen, which will impact school finance reform – something Virginia desperately needs.
Overall, the Republicans didn’t really have a message, but I’m not sure it would have mattered if they did. The bottom line is voters simply don’t trust Republicans with the keys to the car if first trimester abortion rights are in play. Ann Coulter said abortion is the Republican version of “defund the police.” She’s wrong, it’s worse in terms of political damage. A Democratic candidate who was literally caught performing sex acts for money on the internet – after she had announced for public office – nonetheless performed pretty well on election day and lost a close election. That should tell you all you need to know. If not, it’s also why a governor with approval ratings in the mid-50s couldn’t drag candidates over the finish line in close races. Dobbs is an absolute political millstone for Republicans. People will do gymnastics about how this was about education but outside of school board races that obscures the core dynamic: If Dems can run marginally compelling candidates in competitive races they will win until the Rs figure out how to slip this abortion noose – of their own creation it should be noted. Generally I don’t think these off-year elections are as predictive or revealing as some people think, but the reproductive rights signal seems pretty clear.
But that sucks to write again and again if you’re an education reporter or opinion writer. It doesn’t really help you much if you’re an education activist. It matters greatly to governmental politics but means electoral politics are being fought out elsewhere. So, for instance, even though transgender issues were a low-priority for Virginia voters this cycle, we’ll hear a lot about how that was a big driver.* It wasn’t.
Optimistically, Virginia voters seemed to have a refreshing no-drama bent. School board elections in some key locations – Gloucester and Spotsylvania – tossed out divisive and bombastic types. But it wasn’t just conservatives getting the boot. Loudoun voters tossed out the progressive prosecutor who oversaw the circus surrounding sexual assaults in schools there – including taking the unusual step of personally handling the prosecution of the father of one of the victims for a disorderly charge (he was subsequently pardoned). Voters there also wiped the board slate clean (also several close races) after multiple reports showed the sexual assaults were mishandled – and that whole episode was narrative driven. The message across these diverse geographies seems less partisan than just: Be more normal.
Not enough discussion on the complete collapse of Loudoun countywide Dem candidates this year. @ButaBiberaj got the most votes and still lost, as did everyone else but Phyllis Randall who survived because of a third party candidate pulling votes.
It doesn’t seem like Moms for Liberty had a good night, but I don’t trust any advocate’s numbers on school board races. What matters is what happened in highly contested races, not all the endorsements. What size geography are we talking about – eg some yo yo somewhere gets headlines but impacts relatively few students or a big district? What happened where control was at stake? And this conflates school board candidates and other races, which turn on different issues. Both Moms for Liberty and the AFT use slippery criteria.
And then there is this:
Even assuming a world where Republicans had won by comfortable margins school choice was still going to be a dogfight in Virginia. The state has basically a fake charter school law and even university-sponsored lab schools remain controversial. There are both obvious and subtle reasons for that, but it’s not just Democrats in the way, though that’s a convenient narrative. You see that dynamic in some other states as well. So sure, choice supporters may “hope” or feel that way. Doesn’t mean they are right. School choice in Virginia is about more than any one election.
And look, on restricting race in classrooms, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a vibe, sure, but read the standards about that. If you really want to make a case that schools should be doing stuff that violates the Civil Rights Act I’m all ears, but I don’t see it.
Most recently James Traub, hardly a conservative, actually read them and was like, pretty good, for Politico.Washington Posted board and others grudgingly say the same thing. Here are three examples, if this is restricting teaching about race then kids in most states would be lucky to be so restricted.
If you can’t live with this you need to send your kids to private school. Example of a high school standard – most of this content was not in prior standards.
The law in question is actually this one – and it’s causing confusion. Even the law’s patron (who lost in a close race that turned on, you guessed it, abortion) says it’s being used in unintended ways. You can read about the rolling chaos in Spotsylvania, they were doing a lot of stuff, but they were not implementing some coherent agenda the way this implies.**
I don’t raise all this to argue Youngkin hasn’t made missteps or the Dems didn’t have a good night, Moms for Liberty fell short and seem a little high on their own supply….etc…and I’m personally glad to see new leadership in Spotsylvania for the kids there.
Rather, the point is it’s all illustrative of a broader problem plaguing us right now: Narrative or vibes driven reporting and analysis fueling vibes driven discourse. Details matter. They matter to understanding and they matter to effective strategy.
Again, look I get it, if 2024 is about Dobbs, the economy, and democracy, as it seems like it might be, then it will be a pretty boring cycle to be an ed writer, at least at the national level. Still, resist temptation to fan culture war flames where they don’t exist.
Some of this rigid narrative driven / confirmation bias confirming reporting owes to the echo chamber, some to social media and some to intense polarization and the idea that nuance is giving care and comfort to the “enemy.” When The New York Times committed an act of journalism by daring to report on an evolving and complicated set of medical questions about transgender youth all hell broke loose. People notice that.
(Also, of course, no one can even agree on what a book ban is, or what CRT is, and so forth. Some of the views cited in the media as outliers are actually majority-held viewpoints – there was an amusing headline recently about how majorities of voters support extreme conservative education positions. It’s a muddled and confused debate only made more muddled by rampant polarization and narrative driven reporting).
Here’s the ‘to be sure’ graf: Doing general interest writing on deadline is harder than it looks. We all make mistakes. These issues are complicated and really disparate in a country with 13,000 school districts and 50 states doing different things. Still, there sure does seem to be room to do better in terms of not just flattening everything out?
We all know good information is instrumental to good decision-making. We talk about that a lot around here because it matters. A lot. Narrative driven coverage distorts things and contributes to our more general misinformation problem. That’s not pro-or anti-reform, rather it’s pro-good decision-making.
Yes. the labor of keeping informed has increased. And the decline in nuance in the coverage has helped fuel a rise in the need for high-quality proprietary analysis. People in strategy, sales, and key decision-making roles need to know what’s going on at an accurate and granular level and open source is not reliable. But that obviously creates an inequity – good information for people who can afford to hire someone (like me) to do an analysis, narratives, vibes, and acrimony for the proles. It’s not just a problem on education and it’s not good for us.
“We’re raising native brook trout to release in the Mormons River. Now we’ve learned fly-fishing technique, techniques connected with brook trout and their habitat,” science teacher Chris Stanek said. “When we connect the curriculum to something that’s more real, learn a new skill, and get outdoors, I think are all benefits.”
And here’s Melody Schopp’s granddaughter with the biggest fish she’s caught…yet. Later that day she killed her first deer, so that’s a pretty big day.
*This is another example of the narrative problem. There is a big gap between what the public thinks on this issue and schools and what reporters think and that shows up in the coverage. Glenn Youngkin’s position basically aligns with a majority of Virginians, which is why it wasn’t a big issue except among the columnist set. That’s neither here nor there about whatever your view of the correct policy happens to be, you shouldn’t base your views on public opinion polls, but it’s essential context to understanding the dynamics of this and any issue.
If you have not read Cara Fitzpatrick’s new book “The Death of Public School” I recommend it. Ignore the title, whether you love school choice, hate it, or are in the messy middle Cara’s book is a discussion of the complicated history of school choice along two key dimensions – the expansion of choice and the change in Supreme Court jurisprudence.
There is a tendentious debate on social media and elsewhere about the origins of school choice. And yes it was a tool of segregationists during massive resistance. Cara gets into that (and goes deep on Virginia history) but also gets into the support on the left for vouchers as an equity strategy. That’s especially salient today given the attention to how many public school boundary policies don’t have a rosy history either. It’s all more complicated than whatever some outrage-addled tweet jockey told you.
Jed Wallace is off on an incredible walk so Morgan Polikoff joined me at Wonkyfolk for a wide-ranging conversation. Perhaps the most salient point is how hard it is to stay out of the ideological ruts that are shaping the debate today, but it covered a lot more ground.
