Unless you were sedated during May you probably heard the furor about Kansas City Chief place kicker Harrison Butker’s commencement address at Benedictine College, a small conservative Catholic private school in Kansas.
Butker said a number of controversial things in his speech, a lot of stuff I don’t agree with. And then came the predictable overwrought reaction. I don’t mean the criticism, that’s healthy just as it’s healthy Butker can express his views. But Butker discourse really took off – and again a lot of people seemed shocked to learn that a lot of professional athletes are conservative and an NFL sideline is not the hotbed of DEI many seem to think it might be.
Source: Benedictine College
At some level, who cares? This is a particular kind of school and an NFL place kicker’s views on the world have little impact on how you like your coffee in the morning. (Yes, I know he’s done a few other things in life but you would not have heard of him if he couldn’t effectively kick a football under pressure.) But in 2024 there is still no meeting for the people who didn’t like the speech and also didn’t like the hysterical reaction. Or who just didn’t care, which contra the “silence is violence” crowd is fine, too. You can’t get spun up about everything.
Marcus Aurelius reminds us that we always own the option of having no opinion. “There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control. These things are not asking to be judged by you” he wrote.
Yet one line buried in the address, that did not get as much attention as the bit about marriage roles, stood out to me and made me think that Harrison Butker is probably kind of an asshole. It was this,
I am certain the reporters at the AP could not have imagined that their attempt to rebuke and embarrass places and people like those here at Benedictine wouldn’t be met with anger, but instead met with excitement and pride. Not the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it, but the true God-centered pride that is cooperating with the Holy Ghost to glorify him.
I don’t care that he believes this. It’s disappointing, sure, I’d suggest it’s not all that Christian, and he should come check out the 21st Century in America where people can live their lives as they wish. It’s great, fun, and he might even like it. That’s just a gratuitous, ungracious, and unnecessary thing to say at a commencement ceremony where 485 people are getting their diplomas. Even accounting for the specific nature of this school you have to assume, just based on average statistics, there are gay people in that class, and among the family and friends that came to see them get their diplomas and celebrate them.
Here, too, one might channel Aurelius and say nothing. At a commencement. It seems almost certain that on one of the most special days in their life Butker made someone feel small, bad, or excluded when there was just no reason to do so and he could have made his broader points absent that.* I’m not arguing for safetyism, thought and word policing, or any of the other absurdities infecting public discourse. I’m just pleading for manners and decency. For time and place.
To lower the temperature in this country, and our debates about schools, we have to accept that people can believe what they want and allow them to do that insofar as it doesn’t trample the rights of others. You don’t have to bake that cake and we should not compel belief and expression – an issue that is showing up in school law lately. Harrison Butker should argue for what he believes as should those who disagree with him. You just don’t have to be an asshole about it.
*You see a version of this at some high school graduations, too. It’s great to celebrate the students who performed really well, and we should. You can do that, however, without making those who didn’t do as well feel lousy – especially on graduation day. I saw a graduation recently where the superintendent had graduates stand up in groups based on GPA – not a lot of fun for those with lower GPAs! And this at a school that proudly ditched class rank and recognitions of that sort. Pretty much exactly backwards.
But before we get to all that we disagree about the charter school musical chairs issue, agree about a concerning trend in state superintendent races (Truitt and Baesler in the dock, really, wtf?), talk cross-partisanship, and get a tutorial on Pennsylvania politics.
I moderated a session at the RISE conference with Indiana’s chief state school officer Katie Jenner, Ralph Smith, Tiffany Justice of Mom’s for Liberty, and Kerri Rodrigues of National Parent Union. You can watch here.
Yes, this headshot makes me look like a serial killer.
I was a participant in an Aspen Institute webinar on “cross partisanship” and new ideas about how to get things done in an environment of intense polarization and negative polarization. You can watch here.
No one knows how ESAs are going to play out. Most people are arguing from whatever their prior views on school choice are.
ESAs will have all the predictable quality issues of early-stage choice programs. Here, again, people’s priors matter. If you think choice programs can improve over time you’ll have one frame on ESAs, if you see it all as pretty constant then you’ll see it differently. Not all voucher programs have become academically stronger as they’ve expanded. Charters are improving, on average. There is something for everyone to seize on. Direct payment plans are not uncommon in public policy, they’re still relatively new in education. Expect bumps.
ESAs are proving to be wildly popular *and* expensive as a result. Those are related. A key metric to look at is people participating in ESAs who were not previously participants in public education. Here again people will look at that footprint differently based on their broader orientation toward public education. But it’s an opportunity for public education, and an upcoming collision.
There is not a singular ESA policy. These programs vary in their characteristics. That will be worth watching. Also, as a result, evaluating them and accountability around them is similarly a mixed bag given how some ESA’s are designed.
You cannot unring this bell. The era of direct payments in education is here. Something like what Louisiana just did would have occasioned an epic freak out 20 years ago, now it’s just another week in May.
Along with books like Patricia Hersch’s Tribe Apart,Fast Times is, in my view, essential to understanding 1980s suburban culture. But where Hersch, and others, documented what was happening or had happened, Cameron Crowe’s 1981 book really anticipated the direction things were going. The movie, directed by Amy Heckerling, while not a favorite of critics, was important as a cultural marker and stands up for capturing a moment in real time. More on that in a second.
Today, my kids and kids in California follow the same trends on TikTok and the same fashions and trends in the real world. Gather round kids and I’ll tell you about a time before social media, when trends largely moved west to east. When youth culture was transmitted by magazines, what you saw in the real world, and word of mouth. A time when you didn’t have a lot of knowledge about what was happening far away. A kid at your school would come back from California with new clothes, a year later most everyone would have them.
I also posted a picture from Fast Times, with Spicoli (Sean Penn) and Jefferson’s brother (Stanley Davis Jr.). It had little to do with the analysis but the post needed art. A certain kind of person hears, “Fast Times” and immediately jumps to ‘that movie is problematic.’ Sometimes they reach out to tell me that. Thanks. I had no idea…Actually, I have some troubling news for you: The ‘80s were problematic.
What picture did you think I was going to use? This is a family friendly publication.
The movie captured things that were going on. Cameron Crowe’s job wasn’t to make us better, it was to document and Heckerling’s to entertain. They masterfully did both and the project behind Fast Times is something that should be better known in the education world. Embedding as a student today would likely get you arrested, when Crowe pulled it off things were different.
A decade ago I was writing a daily “on this day” kind of thing for an education newsletter for RealClear Education with the fantastic Emmeline Zhao. On Judge Reinhold’s birthday, which it turns out is this week, I wrote about Fast Times and why it matters and why high school is still pretty screwed up. Being an adolescent is, too, as our report shows.
May 21, 2014 It’s Judge Reinhold’s birthday today. The actor was born on this date in 1957 in Delaware. He spent some of his childhood in Virginia and was a student at Mary Washington College for a while. Reinhold’s known for leading roles in Beverly Hills Cop and an acclaimed role as the “close talker” on Seinfeld. But for Americans of a certain age he’ll always be best recalled as high school senior Brad Hamilton in Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
That film had a who’s who of future movie talent in addition to Reinhold: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forrest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, Nicholas Cage (who appeared under his true name, Nicholas Coppola), and, of course, Phoebe Cates. Ray Watson, who perhaps is best known as a Broadway song and dance performer, is unforgettable as Mr. Hand. “What are you, people? On dope?” The film was based on Cameron Crowe’s book, which he wrote while posing undercover as a student at a California high school in 1979.
Fast Times works because it’s at once ridiculous and also a dead-on encapsulation of high school angst. It veers between the absurd, Sean Penn’s over-the-top Jeff Spicoli who lives only for “tasty waves” and “a cool buzz” to the serious, sexual pressure and teenage pregnancy. Hanging over it all is the palpable sense that despite the pressure and immediacy, real responsibility and stakes lie in wait just around the corner. Crowe stirred that mix just right and the film is as much sociology as it is entertainment. That’s why young people responded to the film even if critics didn’t.
The American high school experience is many things to different people. For some it truly is glory days, for others an important formative period, and for some a period of alienation and difficulty. It’s why we would do well to remember that the stereotypical experience at the comprehensive high school is foreign to many kids. The isolation can be particularly acute in rural communities where a single high school is the focus of so much. With some notable exceptions, overall school systems in all communities generally do a lousy job for the students who need or want something else besides the mainstream. High schools are a part of the American education experience long overdue for more customization.
Technology provides some avenues. Badging and competency-based education can make the high school experience more flexible. But fundamentally, policymakers and educators have to adopt a mindset that there is nothing sacred about the four-year traditional high school experience and students can succeed and thrive with different models.
We’re supposed to reinvent ourselves anyway. As Jeff Spicoli said in Fast Times,
What Jefferson was saying was, Hey! You know, we left this England place ’cause it was bogus; so if we don’t get some cool rules ourselves – pronto – we’ll just be bogus too! Get it?
For millennia and across different societies there have been formal and informal rites of passage for young people based on different and shifting conceptions about when and how the transition from child to adult happens.
This image has relatively little to do with the Edge of Seventeen analysis, but it’s a good opportunity to highlight a Fast Times picture.
Today, in the United States, we have formal laws and regulations and informal secular and religious rituals. For some, a quinceañera, bar mitzvah, hunting trip, or debutante ball mark the entry into adulthood or young adulthood. The age at which one is allowed to formally work, drive a car, or make certain health decisions on their own is also important, and is based upon government sanctioned markers.
In the past, young people often rushed toward these markers of adulthood, often out of necessity (e.g., needing to work and provide for their family, get married, or engage in community defense). Today some evidence suggests a leeriness toward “adulting” and a growing resistance to taking on some responsibilities of adulthood, for instance financial independence or even driving.
Rites of passage were often a matter of necessity, and in some cases still are today. I once visited what’s left of a ranch in the Utah desert that even in the 21st Century is a long day trip by jeep track or only accessible by river, as we came. Someone I was with had notes on the family that once lived there in the early-20th Century: a boy, his sister, and their father. When the father went to “town” he would leave the boy to care for his sister and run the ranch. The boy was about six, his sister three or four. He was, necessarily given ranch life, armed with a rifle.
Many of these issues, gender, firearms, social media, or health care occasion intense debate. Less debated are broader questions surrounding them, where are the lines between childhood and adulthood and how should a liberal society recognize and codify them in law?
Today, that would earn you a visit from child protective services. But what would fly, and why? It depends on who you ask because we don’t agree. For example, the age of sexual consent in Montana is 16, in Virginia it’s 18. Are young people in Virginia really two years less mature in their decision-making than young people in Montana? Maybe. Or maybe Montana’s law is irresponsible? Or is the gap simply an artifact of different lawmaking processes and norms? Whatever you think, it’s hard to make a case that the distinction makes any logical sense or is grounded in a body of evidence. These inconsistencies are global, too. Montana and other U.S. states with an age of 16 are not outliers. In England, for example, the age of consent is 16 as well. Yet plenty of reasonable adults think 18 is far more appropriate.
Despite being a more connected and communicative society than ever before, Edge of Seventeen shows we lack a clear or consistent conception of what it means to be a young person in the United States and consequently what law and policy should be. Where and how are we denying kids agency they should have prior to age 18? Where and how are we letting them make consequential decision too soon? When do laws fail to protect young people and where do we overprotect?
Of course, beyond the formal laws there are also informal distinctions as well. For instance, although the drinking age is 21 across the country, many parents allow their children at least some access to alcohol at younger ages. In other cases, young people find ways to drink alcohol on their own. We can ban minors from accessing porn, it doesn’t mean they’re not.
The current debate about transgender youth, perhaps our highest profile age debate right now, turns in part on age and at what age young people can make certain health care decisions. On the political right there is strong pushback on the idea of medical treatment for people under 18 who identify as transgender. On the political left there is an emphasis on ensuring unfettered access to medical treatment for minors. Yet in red states other kinds of consequential health care access such as mental health, abortion, or STI treatment can be available to minors even without parental consent. And in blue states one finds many restrictions when it comes to other body issues as trivial as piercings or tattoos.
When Mississippi banned medical procedures for transgender youth part of the reasoning was to protect children from irreversible decisions. Mississippi still allows people under 16 to get married with parental consent and a judge signing off. Hard to argue there is a consistent standard at work.
Some states are restricting a young person’s ability to control how they are addressed – the name or pronouns they are called in school for example – even as those same young people can make consequential health care and mental health decisions on their own. These examples also illustrate a lack of any sort of logical through line. It’s worth asking questions like why a young person can drive a car at 16 and handle a firearm to hunt or target shoot, but not decide how adults, who in the case of schools are agents of the government, address them in public settings?
Other than the title this, too, has little to do with the analysis. But I needed art for the post and she’s fantastic.
In Alabama you can have a gun at any age, but you can’t smoke until you’re 21. Wyoming, too, lets you have guns at all ages but restricts access to mental health care without parental consent until you’re 18. Rhode Island restricts mental health to 18 as well but the age of sexual consent is 16. Delaware lets you work at 12 but no gambling until you’re 21. You get the idea. There are inconsistencies across states, and within states.
In our analysis we look at coherence and incoherence as a way to frame the issue and illustrate the status quo. But it’s not self-evident that coherence is better. Perhaps these issues are so varied that incoherence is unavoidable, necessary, or even desirable.
Many of these issues, gender, firearms, social media, or health care occasion intense debate. Less debated are broader questions surrounding them, where are the lines between childhood and adulthood and how should a liberal society recognize and codify them in law? If you, left, right, or center, are really spun up about any particular issue have you considered the question more generally?
Schools, especially public schools, are squarely in the crosshairs of many these debates and policy questions because they are where young people spend a lot of time, and represent a place where activists on the right and left have staked out positions on contested political issues. School leaders and teachers have at times injected themselves into these debates as well. Schools also enforce some state laws and policies and school employees are generally mandated reporters on laws involving minors. In different ways, laws affecting everything from driving and employment, access to controlled substances, medical decision-making, social media, and gender and sexuality land at the schoolhouse door.
Our project is designed to call attention to the inconsistencies of our current age-related laws. Though I and the other authors certainly have our own views, and disagree with one another on some things, our goal is not to suggest how you should think about any particular question. We want to spur discussion not police wrong think or suggest a correct answer to specific questions – because on many reasonable people can and will disagree.
That’s because these issues are complicated and individuals will arrive at a position based on a blend of what they know about young people from a scientific standpoint, what they believe from a values or community standards point of view, their own experience, and increasingly, if we’re being honest, from negative polarization on the hot button issues.
That’s hard to falsify. So perhaps instead to have a better conversation about these issues – especially the contentious ones – we should broaden the aperture and think more broadly about what does it mean to be an adolescent in America in 2024? To be, with apologies to Stevie Nicks, on the edge of seventeen?
A few memories stay with me from the very early days of the pandemic. Mostly about what I got wrong or right, or just got lucky.
My wife and I throw themed dinner parties and on Feb. 29th of 2020 we threw a small one with a leap theme, about great leaps. We served grasshoppers among other jumpy food. The attendees included a managing editor at a media outlet, a former secretary of education, an artist friend, non-profit leaders, a FAANG type, that sort of thing. People who were generally connected to information. By that point everyone knew it was bad news, the worst was coming, and part of the conversation tended to, ‘probably the last dinner party for a while, enjoy it.’ People offered predictions about what was about to happen. I remember one guest saying that a lot of people were about to die, we just didn’t know who yet or all the characteristics they might share. It was odd to be talking about that over wine and leap themed dishes as the world sort of ticked on.
That was a Saturday. Early the next week I remember being at the supermarket with my kids. We filled three carts. They thought this was beyond embarrassing. “Everyone is staring at us,” one said with dismay because that really is hell on earth for an 8th-grader. They always think everyone is staring at them, in this instance they were right. We were buying a lot of groceries. A week or so later? Well, they they were glad for it.
Here’s the thing. We were late to all this and I slept on Covid in its early days, assuming it would be disruptive but more or less like a bad flu year. I chocked some of the more severe reports up to click-hungry media. In February 2020, some schools in Virginia were actually closed because of flu, so episodic not widespread closures wasn’t a radical idea. Epidemiologists, though, knew this was not the case. The rest of us not yet. Professionally, I underestimated it in the early going, still wondering if we could pull off a meeting in California in early March or some school visits and spring training in Florida before things had to really close down.
We’re not “preppers.” I don’t have a bunker in my back yard, closest full of ARs, or a year’s worth of food. I stockpile bourbon and DVDs of 80s films. Nor am I any more prescient than the next person. But I am connected to pretty good information flow. I have friends in various fields, government, aviation, sports, medicine and, although later than some, once I started paying attention I was able to piece together what was going on and likely to happen. (I was also moonlighting as an EMT doing 911 at the time so though we were basically treated like mushrooms we got some trickle down by early March). By March people I knew were making big financial or logistical moves. A friend who was getting regular non-public briefings told me that first week of March that all the decisions about work, life, travel, that seemed debatable would soon be obvious. It became alarming.
Most of the country was still not yet alarmed.
It seems like the same thing is happening with AI now, albeit in slower motion. To be clear, I don’t think AI is simply something to be alarmed about. It’s not like Covid. With AI there will be upsides and downsides, as with any novel technology. But, those downsides will be as acute in some cases as the upsides are profound. Adverse consequences are talked about quietly, generally in my experience by elites or those connected to the information flow. ‘A lot of people…we just don’t know who yet.’ (My own hunch is the next recession will create the permission structure for layoffs that are actually AI-related and those jobs will not come back.)
Some people are in the know, some are waking up, some have no idea. In that way it feels a lot like the early days of Covid.
Via DALL·E 2
In my experience, most conferences or meetings about AI have a very ‘in the know’ vibe to them. At one level that’s normal. If you went to a charter school meeting in the 1990s, for instance, you were talking about a new disruptive innovation that few people were yet aware of. I raise a lot of money for cancer research and try to stay connected but I’m sure there are all manner of emerging treatments I am unaware of but are common knowledge among insiders. Hang out with professionals in almost any field if you want to understand how little you know about some things. But AI is different in that the effects will be broad across the economy and society, they will affect all of us.
Some people are preparing for those effects more than others. They’re counseling their kids. They’re thinking about their careers. They’re thinking about efficiency and upside as well as risk. Others are unaware and will be buffeted. In our little corner of the world, people talk in hushed tones about what this might mean for education’s labor market and various roles wary of causing alarm or setting off political tripwires. In the media world you hear conversations about the serious impacts of AI on how people find and consume news. In elite government circles there is attention being paid.
If you trust tech, trust our tech leaders, think they have everyone’s best interests at heart, then rest easy and carry on. If you don’t, then something is coming that a small group of people understand – like Covid not fully, but in its broad dimensions – and most people don’t. This doesn’t mean you should go bury a shipping container in your yard. Or buy guns and antibiotics. (Though I will say those old John Cusack films stand up and you’ll want them on hand regardless.) But it does mean leaders should probably do more to ask questions, democratize the flow of information, and help people prepare for opportunity and disruption. Help people understand what’s happening and what it might mean – knowing we can’t be sure. And be more candid about the potential upsides and downsides. We should do that less in cloistered groups and as much as possible in a more open way around the sector and particularly among its organizing entities – various organizations and associations.
In 2020 we didn’t have a leader with the skills and manner to do this for Covid. With AI, in 2024, it’s on all of us.
Next week I’m participating in this webinar with Aspen about de-polarization and bipartisan policy work. Karen Nussle is a participant too. More on her below.
Speaking of Karen Nussle, who is a great person in the sector, here she is with some fish. A largemouth bass and a pike both from the same lake in Wisconsin.
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools made an inspired choice in Starlee Coleman as its next President and CEO. That was announced this week. She brings political acumen, public affairs experience, and has run a state charter school association – as a former board member of one I can tell you that’s harder than it looks! (I also should note I was a founding board member of the Alliance). Nina Rees did a great job at the Alliance, and will be a tough act to follow so this is a solid choice.
One reason it’s a good choice is that the charter sector has some particular challenges ahead. (It’s important to note it’s a freewheeling sector and the Alliance doesn’t call the shots.) The challenges are somewhat ironic, of course, because overall charter performance continues to get better and is in some cases simply outstanding. The reasons why some charters outperform haven’t been some great mystery for a while. They’re common sense. But in a sector where, ‘it’s all about what’s good for the kids’ is the benediction at any meeting, charters somehow remain controversial in a lot of circles despite turning in results we don’t see a lot.
The other day I posted on Twitter that while I get paid to do elaborate analyses of various questions, the challenge facing charters is pretty simple so it’s a freebie:
I was screwing around but it’s a real point. This is part of the political problem charters have, we’ll talk about the other part in a second and they are to some extent related. A few things are happening. One, big statewide universal voucher plans, ESA’s, are passing now on the regular. 13 states have ESA’s of some kind, more will this year. It used to be a big deal when you had a pilot voucher program in places like D.C., Cleveland, and Milwaukee. Now another state passes universal choice and it’s like, yawn. And whether you love them, hate them, or are a wait and see how they play out type, these programs are wildly popular right now. Speaks volumes about where the energy is.
Second, the Republicans are, on average, a lot more interested in ESA’s than other choice options. They like the universal features, less regulations, less publicness, all of it. Democrats, meanwhile, mostly see those things as flaws. For a while there was stasis in this debate, charters were something of a compromise. Charters offered less regulations, could be universal, but they had key elements of publicness. They were an outpost for Democrats and a way station for Republicans. The ground has shifted and post-pandemic the energy is with rapidly expanding choice.
This perhaps would not be such a big problem for charters if they enjoyed a strong base of support in the Democratic party and were genuinely bipartisan in 2024. But they don’t. They’re not. Sure, there are still some pro-charter Dem governors, but Joe Biden cut the public charter school program at the Department of Education in his budget. Tells you what you need to know. Charters enjoy support among base Democratic voters, but not among elites and powerbrokers. And as the Democratic party becomes more a party of the highly educated and affluent suburbs this further pressures and threatens charter support.
For their part, many charter leaders read the political problem with Democrats as a challenge of convincing Democrats that charters are, in fact, the good guys. That they themselves are the good guys. This often showed up as a “we’re for social justice, too!” agenda.
The problem is, the Democratic opposition to charters is not about the politics of the schools, which were always to some extent left wing ideas about opportunity, equity, economic mobility, and empowerment funded with right wing money that wanted choice by any means. It’s not about the politics of the personal either. Rather, the opposition is about the intraparty politics of the Democratic coalition. Democrats are cross-pressured between education producers and education consumers and the producers – in particular the teachers unions – are incredibly powerful in American politics and especially in the Democratic coalition. You can dress it up however you like but that’s the dynamic. Full stop. It’s why, despite the evidence, you don’t have more Dem charter supporters.
The parents may want more charters, the polling and preferences on the ground clearly show that, but the parents are not yet organized. The teachers unions are. In politics concentrated beats diffuse most of the time. And the parents are less interested in the wide-ranging social justice agenda than you probably heard at the last education conference you attended. They just want good safe schools and are less interested in discipline reform, DEI, culture wars, and so forth than your median education non-profit employee and certainly less than the activists. People are pragmatic, if not conservative, about their own kids.
So what’s happened in practice is many charters have tried to play up to the party that structurally really can’t embrace them while antagonizing, or on a good day giving the cold shoulder, to the one that could. And in the process they’ve started to dilute and blur the crispness of their brand and differentiation, too.
The Republicans are no picnic in general these days. Here, although they’re allergic to accountability in some of these ESA programs, they are pretty good on school choice. That’s the awkward reality Democratic education reformers have to accept. What charters need to do is engage, maintain, and build on that Republican support while also organizing parents to actually pressure Democratic leaders to moderate their posture here and again make charters a default consensus position. That can’t be about partisan politics, it has to be about charter politics.
Otherwise, we have to ask, when the music stops and ESAs are even more established and the Dems have moved further from an embrace of any kind of school choice, will there be a chair for public charter schools?
Greg Schneiders
The political world, and the education world, lost a good friend and wonderful person earlier this week when Greg Schneiders passed unexpectedly. Greg was a pollster and strategist, loyal Democrat and veteran of many Democratic campaigns. I interviewed him about all that a few years ago just prior to the pandemic. More recently he was working to try to ensure that Donald Trump doesn’t return to The White House.
Far more important than all that he was just a terrific person to be around. Politics has great people and ones who are more of an acquired taste. Ones who think they’re God’s gift to the rest of us and humble ones. Greg was humble and great. A lot fun with a contagious joie de vivre and appreciation of the charmed life. Whip smart. Wise counsel. I worked with him on some projects but really connected when we realized we had some friends in common in the education and media scenes. So what I really treasure are boozy lunches and dinners, usually at The Palm (the “cafeteria” to Greg), discussing, sometimes arguing, politics and current affairs and learning from his stories and experiences. After he moved from Washington I looked forward to his visits back to the city and a long lunch or dinner with a small crew. Like so many, I will miss him.
Jed and I have a new WonkyFolk out. Most of you listen on various podcasts apps but if you watch on YouTube you’ll see that although we don’t preplan Jed and I are aligned and on point on fashion. We talk about AI, ASU-GSV, charter school history, charter school present, politics, and why Jed wants charter folk to get crisp. I own up to my biggest parenting mistake and being a lousy boyfriend.
The Advanced Education Research and Development Fund is hiring a Program Executive Director to lead its next initiative focused on advancing scientific discovery and inventions in PreK-12 US education. It’s a $25 million opportunity to change the direction of education. Candidates are invited to start their applications by April 30. Learn more and apply at: https://aerdf.org/prove-the-impossible/
Oh Dems…
In February on a WonkyFolk I said I thought Joe Biden’s electoral chances were better than it appeared. I still think that although there are obvious caveats. First, this mess on campus is a liability. Second, the convention in Chicago, which could mar things right as most people start paying attention to politics. And then third, of course, health and gaffes. That’s fine with me as far as a status quo, Donald Trump is unfit in my view and so I want to see Biden prevail. But it’s worth asking, given Trump’s record, lack of support from his cabinet when he was president, and that most charitably you could say he was unconcerned with illegal acts to thwart the the transfer of power, why the hell is the election even this close?
There are a lot of reasons why, and education is not foremost amongst them. But education does matter as a frame and in a close election, everything matters. It turns out that Black and Hispanic parents are a demographic quite likely to be switching from Biden to Trump. (In a close election switchers matter a lot, too, because they take a vote and get a vote).
None of this is all that surprising, President Biden has an education policy pretty skewed towards white progressives. People care. What is surprising? He already has those votes in the bag. His immediate political problem is a bleed he can ill-afford among Black and Hispanic voters. Here, education might help, or at a minimum the White House might practice a little more do no harm in its politics. Cutting the public charter school budget is a signal there is just no reason to send. It tickles the teachers’ union, sure, but you already had their endorsement.
It’s not hard to discern why. The data are clear that the median Black or Hispanic voter is to the political right of the median white progressive. Yet white progressives graft their own political preferences onto “people of color,” who are in fact a diverse group as far as viewpoint is concerned, and more generally. They are mostly, like the rest of us, normies. It’s why, politically, although consultants keep reinventing the wheel you can do a lot worse than a good schools, safe neighborhoods, economic opportunity agenda.
This idea that everyone is super-progressive is reinforced by the bubbles people operate in. If you work in an education non-profit, or perhaps at NPR (though I used to do paid commentary for them I have never worked there) you’re not going to run into a lot of Black conservatives, for instance. What’s more, the big divides are in fact by education level and geography – as Berliner noted about NPR’s listenership. You do see that same issue show up in elite education circles.
The sooner education leaders key in on this the better it will be for the political health of the public schools. The sooner Joe Biden’s political team does the better it will be for the country.
When my daughters were pre-teens they came home from school one day alarmed. During a lesson on climate change the teacher or some part of the lesson, it was never quite clear, had basically stated that absent radical attention to warming there would be little hope for survivability on earth after 2030. This was during peak Thunberg-mania.
I remember having a few thoughts. First, I’m someone deeply concerned about climate change but this isn’t what the evidence shows and is a bananas lesson. But also, even assuming this is what the evidence convincingly shows, these are really young kids, what would be the point of telling them anyway?
This episode occurred to me recently in the context of the constant, and weirdly fashionable, bellyaching by reformers about how education reform has accomplished so little if anything at all. Oddly this is one place reformers and anti-reformers seem to agree these days, even as the evidence indicates it’s not true. What’s more, even assuming it was in fact the case, if you’re an advocate why the hell would you run around braying?
Has everything gone swimmingly, of course not. But in the context of U.S. social policy, until a few years ago we were making what would be considered good progress. (It’s worth noting how long social policy change takes in a country like this – perhaps the recent quite rapid progress in issues like gay and transgender rights has skewed perceptions.)
Until ESSA and the Obama Administration’s decision to throw in the towel on accountability student achievement was on a steady, if modest, growth path. Students furthest from opportunity were making gains. Not enough, but gains. The pandemic, of course, scrambled everything but we should not lose sight of those earlier trajectories – that are averages across an entire student population. People will argue about counterfactuals and the pace of change, but “barely budged,” which you often hear, this is not.
Here’s a deeper dive on all this from Tom Kane and several colleagues. Tom, who while being perhaps the most passionate voice on the urgency of pandemic learning loss, also suggests we may have the longer-term story of achievement wrong. Here’s Rick Hanushek and several colleagues on gaps, “We find a steady, albeit modest, reduction in the SES-achievement relationship over the past four decades.” Other data indicate the same thing about low-achievers, notable progress during the standards-era toward what we used to call equity.
Time to throw a party? Nope. The data are all as sobering as encouraging. But it does mean the Dante-like abandon all hope approach to talking about educational progress is not only politically stupid whether you’re a reformer, staunch public school supporter, or both, it’s also empirically questionable.
There are also plenty of other examples.
I can remember being lectured by the smart set in education that KIPP would never have more than 15 schools and was consequently more or less a distraction I was naive to even be interested in. (The same people said Teach For America would be perhaps a boutique program of 500 teachers a year if they were really lucky.) By extension most people thought Bill Clinton’s goal of 3,000 charter schools was just throwaway political hyperbole. Today there are more than 7,000 charter schools (and about 275 of them are KIPP schools). Are charters all fantastic, no. But many are and the data shows on average they’re getting better and are a good bet as a policy. And there are inferences you can draw on why that is. If you had told people 25 or even 20 years ago that there would be so many you would have been greeted with a lot of skepticism.
More people are going to college, too. Again, not an unvarnished blessing given the mixed quality and ROI of higher education, but also on average for the good. Especially for low-income students in quality higher education programs.
Standards are also improving. There is plenty to critique about President Obama’s education record but it seems inarguable that in aggregate state standards were better in 2016 than they were in 2008 and he and Arne Duncan played a role in nudging that along. Standards are also more specific and actionable for teachers, and more often aligned with curriculum. We’re also seeing a boom in high quality curriculum hitting the market and the focus on curriculum is a welcome and noteworthy change. In addition to being good for students, curricular support makes the job of teaching more sustainable.
That’s in part because of another good news story, we’re finally getting serious about reading and knowledge rich instruction and curricula. The politically fashionable but largely ineffective approaches are being sidelined, an evidence-based approach to reading is taking hold. Is this arguably a half-century overdue? Yes. But you can bemoan that or appreciate that late is better than never. It’s still progress.
On all these issues you saw a combination of government activity, philanthropy, and social entrepreneurs of different sorts. The private sector also played an important role in some key aspects including innovation. And that activity for a time engaged journalists and policy leaders. It was exciting.
If we’re being honest the biggest barrier to a lot of changes has been and continues to be the constantly changing fads and politics in education. On reading, curriculum, or assessment too many people figure out what is politically fashionable and proceed from there. I’ve had people tell me that phonics is just a Republican way of teaching reading. That’s idiotic. That sort of ethos is why the gap between evidence and practice is often so substantial and preference falsification is rampant.
This is also the same problem we see now with everyone having the mopes about education improvement and reform. Like those tan shoes with white soles it seems like every dude was suddenly wearing, it’s just the fashionable thing.
It’s remarkable how often you hear at an education meeting that little or nothing has improved in schools, or even that things are basically the same as they were during Jim Crow. It’s complete nonsense, of course, most people are smart, well-read enough, and aware of the larger world to know this (at least I sure hope that’s the case). Yet it’s the fashion right now to be in that mode, you get socially and professionally rewarded for it even as it’s creating a culture at odds with high-expectations and optimism for young people.
We’ve also created a culture where saying there has been progress or things aren’t so bad is likened to being blind to the problems. Progress and continuing challenges are not mutually exclusive. This country, and this sector, has made enormous progress *and* there is still a lot of work to do.
But, obviously, to do that work you need people to believe it’s possible. That’s why saying there is no progress, woe is us, and all that is insane as an advocacy strategy. As we’ve discussed, Joe Biden is not going to lead a parade, but he’ll get in front of one. So will most pols. But who wants to lead or be anywhere near the parade of Eeyores? Right now the message to politicians, philanthropy, and media is a dour if not repellent one.
Sure, if you genuinely believe education is not a lever for change or empowerment then you should go work in a different sector or on different issues. Reasonable people can disagree about the best way to effect change. Otherwise, let’s stop admiring the problems and get back at it with a lot more energy, new ideas, and some fresh arguments and debates.
Here’s the bottom line: Until the one-two punch of ESSA and the pandemic achievement trends were going in the right direction – especially for students on the wrong end of the achievement gap. And the supports for students, whether new school options or curriculum are improving. There is pent up demand and increasingly supply around innovation.
That’s not a bad time to work in education, it should be an exciting time. Reform has hardly been flawless and hasn’t achieved its loftier goals and at the same time evidence of progress is all around. This sort of fits and starts progress is how social policy change generally happens. In fact, given how stubbornly resistant to change the education system is, how political, and how fad driven, the narrative that nothing has worked is pretty much backwards.
We should say so.
Eclipse Reax:
Monday I wrote about the eclipse. They’re amazing to experience – especially totality. Yet in some cases schools were not embracing that. I got emails with stories of ‘don’t worry we’re closing the blinds’ and ‘out of an abundance of caution we’re keeping everyone inside.’ I heard from someone in Boston saying indoor activities were being canceled so kids could be home safe with their parents. One parent from a school making sure kids would not see the eclipse wrote, “Such a missed opportunity to get kids excited about the universe and its wonders.” Exactly, this is something to be awed by not fearful of. Why are we teaching kids anything different?
But the good news is we have two decades to prepare for the next one here in the U.S. So order those eclipse glasses now.
Going vintage today with the Friday fish porn. Here’s Ben Sayeski of ESC, a former principal who moved into data visualization with a nice Alaska salmon. Not his first time here.
Greetings from Ohio. I’m out here with family in the path of totality because eclipses are an amazing thing to experience and I’ll go out of my way to experience one. Totality and standing inside of Stonehenge one evening at sunset are the two experiences I’ve had where time does feel like it’s moving differently. I hope you are somewhere you can experience it. (I also visited Neil Armstrong’s childhood home, which was cool to see. I’m a nerd).
Alas, not everyone feels that way and some schools are doing the hide the kids thing again. I wrote about this back in 2017 for U.S. News & World Report. It’s understandable why schools in the path of totality are going to make some changes given the time of day, there are traffic and other logistical concerns. But it’s not understandable for some schools to just keep kids inside out of “an abundance of caution.”
There is no world where we’re not better off exposing young people to science and natural phenomena. It’s how we get them engaged for the future. This still holds:
It’s understandable that the ancients were terrified of eclipses. Professional educators in 2017? There is no excuse.
Lieberman
Joe Lieberman fell, and then passed away at the end of March. He was a controversial politician but you could see the respect many of his peers had for him in their tributes.
I had the privilege of working with him some, when I was in government and in the think tank world. He was decent, not a hater, and did what he thought was right (even if you didn’t agree, and at times I certainly didn’t). He was also funny. And he wasn’t a partisan, which as it turns out presaged much of our polarization and negative polarization now.
You can’t ask for more than that, and we need more people in government, whether you agree or disagree with them, who do what they think is right rather than just running in the worn grooves of a broken politics.
A study by the American Psychological Association found that while in the late 1970s, 60 percent of twelfth-graders reported reading a book or a magazine every day, the figure had plummeted to 16 percent by 2016. It’s almost certainly fallen further since then.
Instead of reckoning with the ugly fact that a threat to our democracy is emerging from right-wing extremists in suburban and urban areas, the authors of White Rural Rage contorted studies and called unambiguously metro areas “rural” so that they could tell an all-too-familiar story about scary hillbillies. Perhaps this was easier than confronting the truth: that the call is coming from inside the house.
If A Form Fails In the Forest And No One Hears About It…
Imagine for a moment that hackers attacked Harvard’s computer systems, or someone dragged a huge magnet through Cambridge, and suddenly we had no record of who had attended and graduated for the past 40 years. Would it get a lot of media attention? I suspect so. Especially from The Times and other outfits that are essentially Harvard’s outposts across the realm. We’d hear non-stop about the disruption and downstream consequences for now unverifiable Harvard graduates, even as most people never darken the door of Harvard. We’d hear about fake Harvard grads. We’d get think pieces on, ‘what really is a Harvard degree anyway?’
Yet the ongoing FAFSA disaster? The one that affects millions of poor kids because it involves the federal financial aid form that is determinative for their aid? Not so much. And it’s not just The Times.
So here’s another counterfactual: Imagine if the Trump Administration stumbled on 70,000 emails from students. In an inbox! All hell would break loose and Twitter/X would be nothing but a river of stupid GIFs. And rightly so. It would be a mess and unacceptable.
Or, imagine if the Trump Administration and Betsy DeVos just bumbled the rollout of a revised FAFSA, something that was in the works for years (and was a rare glimmer of bipartisanship.) You’d never hear the end of that either. Rachel Maddow would be in high dudgeon. Every night. All right thinking people would be appalled at the incompetence. Education Zoom calls would open with ritualistic head shaking (and probably a little finger snapping) at the badness of it all. And that would all be correct. It wouldn’t be acceptable because this stuff matters.
Yet the actual FAFSA disaster we’re living through? The real one you don’t have to imagine because it’s happening right now? A lot of crickets.
It’s hard to miss that the people who write and think about FAFSA for a living are far less impacted by this trainwreck than the people FAFSA is aimed at.
And obviously, no one wants to criticize Joe Biden because he’s running for a second term against Donald Trump and the election is somehow far closer than it should be.
Still, at some point…c’mon. Democrats are supposed to be about a couple of things. One is opportunity for the less fortunate. That’s kinda the point of FAFSA. Democrats are also supposed to be about improving people’s material conditions and showing that government can be a force for good by making government credible. How? By making government work.
The FAFSA disaster manages to fail on all counts. At once.
Look, I don’t want Donald Trump back in The White House either. But two things are true at once here. Donald Trump shouldn’t be anywhere near the levers of governmental power in this country. And this is a big and consequential screw up. Negative polarization and how that’s impacted media coverage is certainly a factor here. But if this problem affected a more politically potent demographic or a demographic more present in elite media we’d probably hear a whole lot more about it than the low rumble of background noise we get now.
Despite the imbalance in school resources, Cournoyer notes that students on the reservation benefit from cultural and language support — something they could miss if they attended schools in Custer, even with its “nicer facilities and more advanced technology.” The city and its school district were named for George Armstrong Custer, a U.S. commander who fought and killed Indigenous people on the Great Plains before his defeat at Little Bighorn.
This is all true.
You know what else you could write?
The city and its school district were named for George Armstrong Custer, a U.S. commander who fought and killed Indigenous people in the East during the U.S. Civil War and later on the Great Plains before his defeat at Little Bighorn.
I don’t carry any brief for Custer. He played a role in keeping Charlottesville and UVA from being destroyed during the Civil War, sure, but he was generally pretty reckless. It did him in.
He does illustrate a larger point. The general assumption is that the whitewashing of history only runs one way. In fact, it runs in all directions. The problem is not that we don’t do a good job teaching about the history of X, whatever X matters most to you. Rather, we don’t do a good job teaching about history. In no small part because of the politics of the present. The Smithsonian National Museum of The American Indian does a noteworthy job discussing the complicated history of Native Americans during the Civil War. Custer, Sheridan, and others brought a history with them to the west.
Like so many historical figures, Custer is an example of how the good guy/bad guy frame fails us. Was he a good guy or a bad guy? Liberator or oppressor? Depends on the conflict? We don’t do messiness well.
Living History
If you’re going to be in San Diego for ASU-GSV it would be great to connect. One way is this discussion Bellwether is hosting on AI and schools Tuesdaylate afternoon the 16th. It’s at a local bar, so food and drink as well as great conversation about a complicated set of questions around AI and K-12 education.
Fish Porn
One of the discussants at the Bellwether event is Ben Riley, who is doing work to help link learning science to the AI conversation.
Here he is last year in Michigan. Nick Adams country.
