Teacher unions are the principal mechanisms that turn normie suburban centists into right wingers. This has been true for a long time, going all the way back to when I was growing up in the 80s and the unions tried to eliminate gifted programs in favor of having the gifted kids do unpaid tutoring to the not-gifted kids as a "humbling learning experience"
I spent my entire 20s and early 30s as a Republican partly because of the nonsense I witnessed in public schools.
If you think teacher unions are good allies of science and reality - note that most of them opposed vaccine requirements, in the same manner that the cop unions did, until they got a ton of pressure upstream from mayors/governors in blue states. They are literally the left wing version of cop unions, who will justify, in bad faith, nearly anything that their worst performing member does.
Shamelessly copy-pasting a comment I left back in August on Matt's teacher compensation article:
1. The employer-employee relationship isn't always adversarial, but unions are created to be adversarial. So a unionized industry will almost inevitably have adversarial relations, especially a large unionized industry. It's baked into unions' principal-agent relationship. They are duty-bound to maximize the best interests of their members, just as corporate CEOs are duty-bound to increase shareholder value and lawyers are duty-bound to zealously represent their clients. It's very difficult for them to moderate their advocacy for their principals' interests for the sake of the greater good. It's not impossible, but it isn't how the system is designed to work. Their default setting is to represent their principals' interests to the exclusion of anyone else's.
2. This doesn't mean unions are bad. We have lawyers and business corporations for a reason, and we have unions for a reason too. Sometimes we as a society have to mediate between two competing legitimate points of view, and we decide the best way to ensure a just result is to "arm both sides." It's like checks and balances in government. If both sides fight vigorously, hopefully the outcome will land on the best/most truthful spot in the middle.
3. Because the process is adversarial, it is always in unions' interests to refuse to do whatever management wants their members to do. It is by refusing to do whatever management wants that the union can demand that management pay the union's members to do that thing.
4. That's generally fine in the private sector, but in the public sector there are two complications. First, in the public sector it is management's (i.e. the government's) job to seek the good of society, not to increase shareholder value. That doesn't mean it always does that, of course - not by a long shot. But it is supposed to, and so it often does. Therefore, because it is in unions' interests to refuse to do whatever management prioritizes, it is generally in public employee unions' interests to refuse to make any changes that would benefit society. Second, management also has a principal-agent dynamic, and while its agents (i.e. politicians) do have an incentive to seek the good of society, its principals (i.e. voters) don't always place the *highest* priority on that. So when push comes to shove, you'll often find that management would rather not pay unions extra to agree to stronger accountability for bad apples, but instead would rather lower taxes. In other words, if you "arm both sides" in the public sector hoping they'll eventually land on the most societally beneficial settlement, you may be disappointed.
5. This does not mean that public employee unions are bad. If they didn't exist at all, their members could be exploited. It does mean, however, that you shouldn't be surprised when they oppose changes that would require their members to do good things. That is, in fact, what you should always expect them to do.
That is an excellent summary, but I’m going to disagree with point 5. Public unions are bad. As a lifelong Chicagoan, public sector unions of every kind, transit, teachers, police, fire run counter to the interests of taxpayers / reformers every single time.
As a Democrat, I was viscerally against Scott Walker’s anti-union push back in the 2000s. In retrospect, it’s unfortunate he didn’t also include the GOP’s police union, because otherwise that would have been Wisconsin’s greatest achievement.
It is not the job of Teacher's(or other) Unions to benefit taxpayers. That is the job of the school district who negotiates their contract. The job of the union is to serve its members.
That may seem witty to you. In my city, parents have dealt with two lengthy strikes and an extended school shutdown, very much driven by the CTU, even after data on transmission rates in school with preventative measures showed very low risks (not to mention low risks to children, period.)
So I am very much angry at the cheese grater for only wanting to grate cheese under its very specific set of conditions.
yes at times there is corruption on the other side as well. I'm very willing to admit that crony capitalism is a problem.
But giving money and helping to elect politicians who then turn around and give you tax payer money so you can give the politicians their cut is IMHO corrupt.
There should be no public unions (I'm totally fine with private ones)
I don't understand how you think this an argument that would convince anyone. First off, the idea that you think sworn public servants aren't designed to benefit citizens is utterly surreal. Some of them, LEO & firefighters, literally take an oath to do so. If teachers wanted to maximize their earnings or job security they could've become investment bankers or something. They deliberately became public servants to help children & families, so it makes sense that we would hold them to some kind of social benefit standard.
If they're not benefitting society but simply themselves, no problem- we can cancel their union contract, mass fire all of them, and hire new teachers who will.
Try to visualize it this way- I'm a member of the 'taxpayer's union'. It is not the job of the taxpayer's union to benefit teachers. The job of the taxpayer's union is to serve its members. Does that kind of make sense?
In order for this to be realized, the government/public has to view any gains by the union as negatives that should be fought against because anything that the union gets for free will mean their costs are otherwise higher.
I have argued this before. I think that union negotiations are adversarial by their very nature. The problem is that boards of education are trying save money by offering vast amounts of power to the unions. I think this is dumb. I would even be in favor of legislating that they may not negotiate away their own responsibility.
I think there is a difference between a private company employees having an adversarial relationship with a companies' management and public sector employees having an adversarial relationship with the public's representation.
What you're missing is what the services are like in places that don't have public employee unions. Like there are several states where teachers unions either don't exist or are completely neutered, and I doubt you'd be any happier with the performance of schools (or transit or whatever) in states like that.
People who think that red states are much better at the whole 'running schools' thing should check out how great the school system is in Oklahoma, it's a real treat.
Agreed for most of this, but you missed an important point. The unions are helping to elect the politicians that then give the union members raises, who then donate to the politicians and on and on.
No I don't believe we should have public unions, or if we do. There role should be REALLY limited. Probably just pay and benefits. They shouldn't be serving in a role to protect bad cops, or bad teachers. If we did that it would only be the tax payers getting screwed.
Something I think that you imply but don't straight up say:
Because unions exist to zealously advocate for their members per se (and that's fine), it's bad for people and political movements to uncritically embrace and boost the positions of unions.
It's easy to blame unions, but note that public unions really only have the power to 1) force employees to join the union and charge dues, and 2) strike. And in many states, they are legally forbidden to strike. All of the things we complain about are in their contracts, which are agreed to by elected representatives whom we elect. Of course unions advocate for less oversight and higher pay, but they have next to no power to actually impose those things -- the people have that power. They should write better contracts!
They also have the power to get school board members, state superintendents of education and state legislators elected, through their donations and campaign canvassing troops. Those elected officials, in turn, make decisions that benefit them.
It’s ironic, that all the replies to this initial reply by me sort of illustrate why swing voters like me would vote Republican because of progressive democratic viewpoints.
I understand all the debate below. But stepping back, is it unreasonable for parents to just want their kids to be taught well. If you are a suburban parent, and your kid is spending a decent amount of time helping other kids instead of learning, no amount of justification is going to make that OK with them.
Their natural instinct is… Put my kid into a different class with students of the same ability so that they can learn at a faster pace.
It is perceived that Democrats are against that, therefore if they feel the governor is going to advocate for something they want… They’re going to switch parties.
Rory, can you elaborate on what you see as the "progressive" viewpoints in this thread that would make someone (not already decided) choose to vote Republican? Granted, I lean progressive but this feels like you had prejudged.
My view would be that Republican's efforts to "starve the beast" have left schools short staffed and unable to provide both for the average student and for the gifted.
Parents in general want their kids to succeed. They want what's best for their kids. They don't care about education gaps. They care how their kid is doing. Whether their kids is learning to his or her potential.
Most parents (middle class types) feel that education should be about the base R's. They are willing to accept a certain amount of non basics curriculum, but only if it doesn't hurt their own kid.
In general parents believe gaps are bad (which they are), but they have a suspicion that the progressive unspoken view is that progressives would like to reduce education gaps by holding back high achievers.
Evidence: Everyone in this thread feeling I am unreasonable that I would prefer my high achiever to learn more or faster instead of tutoring other kids.
- The move to eliminate tracking in math classes in California (I think its California).
- The move to eliminate magnet schools and or gifted programs.
- The move to get rid of test scores for those schools in NYC.
- The way not having schools in session was justified by the left.
Now yes. Democrats are generally better with school funding. But As Matt pointed out... Republicans are the party of Parents. Us parents see a lot of waste and mismanagement in schools. The typical middle class parent (remember we are talking swing voters here) goes into their kids school and its pretty nice. Funding isn't as big an issue.
Yes, you right that Republicans in some areas have tried to starve the beast... but that's only because they sort of feel that schools strayed from what they believe the core purpose should be (3 R's).
But in places like Virginia... the parents are generally progressive or at least moderate. However given all the other issues that Matt and I have mentioned... they are willing to vote for a moderate Republicans who hits on the key things they care about.
I am not sure it answers my question. It does satisfy me. Is it your impression that Republican's were the party of parents prior to this year? That was not my impression but I may well be wrong.
I absolutely _do_ agree that the Democrats seem lost and are bleeding voters right now. That union decisions on covid are black eye as is the handling of CRT. I guess agree that progressive handling of parents concerns may be problematic in general.
Addressing your list from my own perspective rather than plumbing the thread below:
1)I would be shocked if any member of this community didn't think that a kid who was sharp enough to be done with 75% of the time left, oughtn't be moved into a more challenging environment. My thoughts were that the teacher lacks the power to do that and that existing her to assist seemed not unreasonable. If there were advanced classes available and she opposed them, she should be sued and then fired. I am glad you found a suitable environment for her. I hope she excels.
2)I have no idea about tracking in math classes. My dad is a super left wing union organizing S.F. bay HS teacher and he never ceases to be amazed by the idiocy that occurs in some school boards.
3)The move to eliminate magnet schools. This is tough. Obviously with a fixed fiscal pie you have to make difficult choices. The optics are atrocious without them being spun by the opposition. And they are even worse when spun by the opposition.
4)NYC - No idea.
5) Justification of school stoppages - I am guessing we're talking covid. My thinking is that unions back teachers and that there are always a few dumb(or excessively risk averse) teachers (just like every other occupation). If I was running a union I would probably support my teachers and support stoppages just to keep the members from tearing each other to shreds. As a Democrat it seems disastrous and I strongly oppose it. As a parent I would be in school board meetings asking for consequences to be imposed.
Also... I spoke to my daughter... told her about this argument. She actually said that when she was in Middle School, the teacher would actually have her grade other kids tests, and that helping other kids was at least better than that.
I think this is fine if the school *asks* them to do this, and not fine if the schools *makes* them do it (and eliminates other programming so that they no alternative).
There is a power imbalance. Do you think my daughter at 15 has the choice to say no to a teacher who makes it clear... "go help blah, blah, blah with their homework"
I think you could have it as a "tutoring club" or something where it's not being assigned to you by your actual teacher.
In my high school there was a program where you could go around to the elementary schools and tutor some kids after school. You didn't get a grade for it and no one felt pressured to do it. I think I only ever went once but nobody cared. You did it to get honor society points or to put it on your college applications.
This is happening in the middle of class. Multiple classes.
You get time to work on something... random worksheet in whatever subject.
My daughter finishes quickly... hands the paper to teacher, teacher says to go help other kids.
She isn't learning anything more... she already knows whatever it is... she literally just did the assignment.
Basically she is just expected to explain what she already know to other kids.
The way it actually works though, is she is de facto just giving the other kids the answers.
If she wasn't doing this, she would go back to her desk, and read, or do homework in another class, or maybe do future assignments.
This last year she transferred to the South Carolina Governors School for Science and Math... highly selective public boarding school. (Basically a magnet school)
She no longer has to be an unpaid teacher... but this is exactly the sort of advanced gifted program that people are trying to get rid of.
Hmm. I don't think this is actually a bad thing, IF there is also some venue for enrichment on top of it. It is well-demonstrated that teaching a particular concept gives people a deeper and more intuitive understanding of that concept. Having a gifted student teach other students is not only for the benefit of the other students, and peer teaching is an effective learning tool.
The entirety of school is based on students doing work for free, including many things they do not want to do, so I'm not sure either of those arguments really make sense here.
The only relevant question is whether teaching the concepts to other students is or is not beneficial to both students. My understanding is the data is favorable on this question, or at least, the official position of education schools is that it is. If it isn't actually beneficial, of course, that would be a good reason to stop doing it, but the fact that your daughter finds it boring does not, in itself, mean that it is a bad idea.
More sides to this than Rory lets on. Free labor is bad, we all agree $15/hour. Learning stuff is good. Should we be paid for it or do it because we like learning. Getting on with other humans is also a useful skill, and we should we only do it if we're paid for it. Quickly gets complicated. I hope his daughter loves schools, learns enough to be the next Einstein and doesn't kick down her dumber classmates.
She does love school. And skipped 10th grade to be accepted to a public math and science boarding school in which she is loving. She still helps fellow students, and they occasionally help her. That is because they are all on the same relative level.
And my daughter would never ever talk bad about a student who was less academic then her. She is your typical young bright inclusive liberal with a diverse friend group.
Is your claim that students can never do anything that is beneficial to other students without being compensated? Should smart kids not be allowed to participate in group projects without being compensated?
If the teaching is beneficial to the student who is doing the teaching, then it is a learning strategy, i.e., it is appropriate for school.
After having read this entire sub-thread, I have a comment. I think that this type of thing can benefit her and if it isn't then the failure is in the teacher's ability to properly motivate or instruct her as to how she teaches.
One of my strongest skills is in communicating complex topics to lay audiences. As a young teen I used to try to explain Godel's Incompleteness Theory to random people on the public bus on my way to middle school. I believe that to a significant extent, this skill was honed by growing up with a (high functioning) Down syndrome brother (2 years junior).
Teaching, teaching is valuable. If the teacher is doing it poorly then that is poor teaching on their part. It does not seem to me that it is any kind of injustice perpetrated by the school system. (Assuming that the person being asked to do so is asked after finishing their studies but still on class time)
Not every kid wants to become a mathematician. We still teach them that. I am not a teacher. I am an engineering manager. Being better able to explain things benefits everyone.
I would even argue that being better able to explain things forces one to more thoroughly understand them.
I’m a “stats manager” let’s call it, and sure, yeah explaining is a valuable skill. It’s a question of proportion and time allocation. If this is something that happens for an hour or two a week or in a thoughtful way in a specific context, then, yeah, it’s good.
When kids learn for themselves for the first 10-15 minutes of each class then spend the remaining 45 minutes teaching others or sitting around, then that’s a serious problem and a failure of the education system.
Hey... I actually spoke to my daughter an hour ago... told her about this whole debate.
Apparently in Middle School, the teachers would have her grade other kids tests... she said helping the kids was at least better than that.
I also think everyone misses, that I am talking about where she was 12 and 13 years old. She was 14 during Covid. 15 Now and she is in a math and science magnet school.
I guess my issue is is that the time she is spending helping the other kids is inefficient.
The teacher is using her to make her job easier. All the talk about it be good for her is basically bullshit.
I know this because during Covid she was able to do self paced classes, and basically did two years in one.
She loved it. She learned Way more than she would of in typical classrooms.
If the school catered to kids like her, the education gas would be even larger than they are now. So they don’t do that. We’re only do it in a limited amount.
Of course they end up with the issues of what to do with these kids. They can just have them sitting around… So they used to make their job easier. They justify it by saying that she is actually learning something. Explaining concepts… Etc.
But I’ll say it again… Whatever benefits she gets from explaining stuff to other kids, pales compared to the marginal cost of not learning new stuff at a pace she is capable of.
When you put it that way, I feel slightly more mixed--society would probably be better overall if more people behaved this way! When I get done shoveling my sidewalk, if my neighbor is running behind (especially if they're old or infirm), of course I'll go help out.
But I can't ask you to commit your kid's well-being in this way. Tragedy of the commons, etc.
If it were my daughter, I would discuss with the teacher or maybe the principal first. But, before doing that, I would do my homework. Google "Is it best instructional practice for early finishers to be required to help other students?" I didn't see anything that said it was a good practice. Bring that with you to the principal or teacher.
I suspect the teacher is in need of some professional development on her instructional practices.
I mean, sure, kids should help other kids. But not as the stated policy, and certainly not as a replacement for a gifted program in order to presumably equalize outcomes.
A conundrum. What's better for the smart kid, learning more stuff or helping other dumber kids. What's better for society? The smart kids gave us nukes, but also much more productive agriculture. They also taught us how to pump hydrocarbons from earth to make life so much more pleasant, except yikes we're toast because life became so much more pleasant we're micro-waved.
Former teacher here. A good teacher provides what's called differentiated instruction, where not all students are doing the exact same thing. It's much more labor-intensive (and that's why good teachers should be paid more), requiring more lesson planning, more variation in instructional techniques, and lots of assessment which informs the lesson planning, and on and on.
In such a teacher's classroom, the only time the smart kid finishes before the dumber kids, as you put it, is during testing. Early finishers take out their free choice reading.
This last year she applied to the South Carolinas Governors School for Science and Math. It's a public boarding school for 11 and 12 graders. Highly selective. Top school in the state.
She applied as a Freshman because she was basically fed up being held back in normal classes.
Not only was she accepted (skipped a grade)... she is kicking ass and loving it.
No more helping other kids as a requirement. Now its a bunch of advanced kids helping each other actually learn.
Happening right now, and there is no sense that it’s a problem.
Quite to the contrary, this is what I was told on many school tours when I asked what they do do kids who finish faster or master the material more quickly - they can check their work and if they’re satisfied they can help others, because teaching other kids is a great way to learn. Also my entire public school career.
Throughout the Trump Administration, there was a constant refrain that he was gaslighting us. I think that it was sometimes true, but a lot of times it was clear that he was just bullshitting and didn't care if anyone believed him. This is a bad thing for the President to do, but at the same time, isn't really what the term "gaslighting" means. I always interpreted gaslighting as referring to a circumstance where you try to convince someone that you are more reliable than their own eyes.
Applying this definition, I have rarely felt as gaslit as I have in the context of the "CRT" debate. As pointed out in this article (and in the regular emails I receive from my kid's schools DEI advisor), it is clear that something is going on in the schools. However, the party line seems to basically be "nothing to see here, definitely no CRT, that's just taught in law schools, if you believe that, you must be racist" followed by DeBlasio banning advanced math, and Nicole Hannah Jones tweeting that if you don't feel shame for all of the awful things the US did decades or centuries before you were born, you're an immature asshole.
Ultimately, I think that systemic racism continue to be a problem in the US and schools in particular and its worth looking into ways to fight this problem. I also think that it is important to teach the bad things the US has done, along with the good. However, when people pretend the idea that CRT (or rather some sort of DEI/anti-racism program which most of the country now associates with CRT) is in schools, rather than defend the particular programs on the merits, I find it frustrating and politically suicidal (see e.g. VA).
I always balked at claims of a "liberal media." I think for most of my life these claims really were just GOP objections to reporting on facts which objectively supported liberal positions. However, over the past few years, and the past year or so in particular, between this, denials that "cancel culture" is a thing, and a few other issues, it increasingly seems like more and more media outlets have switched from Julia Galef's scout mindset to her soldier mindset on a lot of issues, and I've really lost faith in a lot of outlets I used to read. I know that I am now way more skeptical of anything I read in Slate, or Vox or hear on NPR than I ever was before. I really hope that this current bubble pops soon.
I did read a number of real, early-ish, CRT papers during an abortive attempt to major in sociology a couple decades ago. It was a confusing and demoralizing experience - they were simultaneously vague, densely referential, and over-elaborated in a way that made it frustratingly impossible to extract any underlying explanatory idea or concrete implication. Lots of "lenses" and "constructs." Later, more worldly and cynical, I recognized the writing style as "theory paper grist for the tenure mill," in which the trick is to appear erudite and topical without saying anything clear enough to be provably wrong. So yeah, that stuff obviously isn't taught in high schools. (And shouldn't be taught anywhere!)
But come on, Democrats and media members! You know perfectly well the types of school activities parents are complaining about when they complain about CRT. If you think those activities are defensible (many are!), then defend them. Performatively failing to understand the complaint, on the grounds that people picked an imperfect term to use when complaining, is totally unconvincing. And it looks elitist and rude - just seizing an opportunity to suggest that you know what CRT means and the complainers don't.
"You know perfectly well the types of school activities parents are complaining about when they complain about CRT. "
What are they? I hear parents complain about CRT, but then when we walk the list of things that are happening in the school they don't have issue with any one of them. But still have issue with CRT in the school.
See "Questionable DEI initiatives" subheading in the article we're all commenting on. "Questionable DEI initiatives" is a much better bucket term than "CRT" - broad enough to encompass both curricular and administrative interventions - but that's why Matt makes the big bucks as a writer I suppose.
The problem is that what Matt writes about is NOT what most parents are complaining about. Or maybe more accurately, that's what they say they are complaining about, but none of it is actually happening at their school. I'm sure there are schools where it is happening. Just like I'm sure there are still schools that say states rights had nothing to do with slavery. But they are lightning rods, not anything near the common case.
If the issue is "Courageous Conversation" training -- then I think we can get most people onboard with dismantling that. If the issue is reading Beloved or about Ruby Bridges or the impact of the FHA on POC in urban housing then I think we have an issue.
That said, I agree -- questionable DEI initiatives is a way better term and something I think myself and other progressives could get behind.
"You mean except for things like the 1619 project who's primary narrative is that the purpose of America is racism?"
This is a great example, one of the most outspoken critics of it, Wilentz, said this, "Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it.” Are there factual mistakes in it, almost certainly, but even amongst historians that take issue with it, they tend to agree with the general direction. I take much less seriously those people that try to take down the 1619 project as a whole.
I think there is a fair case to be made that "CRT" is not exactly the right terminology, and is in fact being used by right-wingers to conflate a bunch of things so that normie parents and far-right racists feel OK about joining forces since they think they're fighting a common enemy.
However, it would be a more intellectually honest *and* politically effective response to disaggregate the various trends that "CRT" might refer to, concede that some of them are bad, and throw those overboard. Instead, progressives are trying to skate by with their own conflation because they want to keep the bad stuff in place without having to defend it on its merits. So they limit their response to "that stuff isn't CRT" (technically defensible, but misleading and ultimately counterproductive).
I agree that what most people mean when they say "CRT" isn't what was originally meant by CRT, and that the Right (and Ruffo in particular) intentionally conflated a bunch of things. However, I'm not sure that is really a fight worth having.
Essentially all of the efforts to explain this have come across as a disingenuous attempt to score rhetorical points while avoiding defending the merits of the attack. It's like when Conservatives object to "assault weapons" bans on the grounds that an AR-15 isn't technically an assault weapon. I'm not sure that either argument is convincing anyone other than a judge at a debate competition, and probably does more to undercut than advance the persuasive portions of your argument.
You aren't being gaslit, but you are being played -- but it is by the right. And very cleverly. You are right, there is something going on in some schools. But the vast majority of it is fairly innocuous -- although as Matt points out, its not clear how helpful it is. But what the right is doing is trying to conflate a bunch of things to DEI. And you have to fight back about that. Once you cede ground on the terms of the debate, you've largely already lost. If you let me define your party as the party of Hitler, everything else is uphill for you.
Curious, what is the DEI advisor sending home that is deeply objectionable? Almost everything I've received for my child makes a lot of sense and shows the values that I'd expect -- be respectful, be open minded, we value diversity/outreach, everyone is important, etc... I certainly haven't seen the types of thing on Fox News where they say that White people are the problem. Haven't seen that, have you?
"be respectful, be open minded, we value diversity/outreach, everyone is important, etc"
This message wouldn't happen without a DEI advisor? The principle and the teachers can't be trusted to deliver on those counts? Can children only pick up these kinds of values from school? What metrics is your school using to measure whether the advisor is successful?
"This message wouldn't happen without a DEI advisor? The principle and the teachers can't be trusted to deliver on those counts?"
No, they wouldn't. Teachers and principles are already asked to do a lot. And frankly struggle to deliver on other parts of their core job, much less pick this up as well.
"Can children only pick up these kinds of values from school?"
I'd hope not. But from the feedback I hear from the kids, for many these are very new concepts.
"What metrics is your school using to measure whether the advisor is successful?"
I'd say there is a lack of good metrics, and this is something they're working on. But I've heard ideas discussed -- nothing that's rocket science, but things like diversity in afterschool activities, student surveys on various aspects of schooling, %age of students in different groups that do re-tests (these are optional tests you can take to redo tests you performed below your desired result), etc...
An employee with a good salary who's job will be to... make sure after-school activities are diverse?
Improve test results by ethnicity or merely report on the results by ethnicity? The former seems a very hard lift for a single staff member. The latter seems like something existing staff could easily handle.
Regarding innocuous DEI content. During my PhD, the university spent a fair amount of money on administrators for (among other things) DEI stuff, but nothing for raises for PhD students, even though rents considerably increased in the meantime. I strongly believe that PhD salaries aren't that great and that it's hard to finish a PhD without parental financial assistance (particularly in hot real estate markets), so seeing the university allocate its resources like that has made me hate (among other things) the DEI initials regardless of actual content.
To the best of my knowledge, American universities are more willing to make us anxious about making the ends meet and then hire an administrator to mentally counsel us, than actually help us make ends meet. My experience in Europe on this issue is considerably different, but there's no DEI there.
My school district is going to raise taxes the maximum amount allowed, under state law, for each of the next 5 years to cover a structural budget gap. Meanwhile our newly elected school board is planning on hiring a DEI advisor and staff.
Much of it is innocuous or good, but that's not true across the board and Yglasias and others have pointed out examples of that.
In particular, I think that the move away from advanced classes (as was happening in NYC and other places) and standardized testing in the name of equity are bad ideas. I think that the push away from the SATs is the sort of thing that is dressed up as anti-racism but will actually hurt poor and minority kids as admissions become based upon squishier standards that are easier for more affluent (usually white) parents to game.
Additionally, while I think it is good to teach about the ways the the US has been and continues to be flawed (although I remember already being taught this sort of thing when I was in school 20 years ago), I don't like the idea of trying to make kids feel guilt or shame for things that they are not responsible for. Whether or the extent to which this is happening is harder to nail down that the advanced placement/standardized test issue I discussed above. A lot of it depends on how particular lessons are taught, which almost certainly differs on a school-to-school or even teacher-to-teacher basis. But, while a lot of people deny that this is going on, a lot of those same people will then argue how it would be a good thing if it was going on (See, e.g. Nicole Hannah Jones' tweets over the weekend).
As for my local school, I haven't seen anything particularly objectionable, but I bring it up as an example of how things are clearly changing. The DEI advisor is a new position, hired last year.
Ultimately, I don't think that this push is necessarily a bad thing, but when you see an increase in anti-racist/DEI/"CRT" initiatives in schools, and one side says they are bad while the other side denies that anything is happening, I tend to get suspicious of the side telling me to ignore what I'm seeing with my own eyes. In particular, when they say "don't worry, the programs we deny are going on definitely aren't teaching your kid to feel bad because they are white," I'm disinclined to take them at their word.
The SAT thing is more interesting. Matt has made good points that automation (taking humans out of the equation) will often reduce bias. I'm not sure though that the SAT test as constructed is the right way to do it. I'm OK if we want to take a step back and be more thoughtful about it. I'm also OK to see if having test-optional impacts results, negatively or positively.
And do you see people denying DEI initiatives? Here in Seattle it's very well known. It's on the schools website. But we aren't doing CRT. We aren't teaching kids to feel bad, white or black. I find it hard to believe that your school is denying DEI initiatives either, as they hired someone to focus on it.
Again, I think conservatives have done a great job at conflating DEI with anti-whiteness. And again, I find it almost Orwellian that they've managed to create the narrative that society is anti-white, and if you try to say there are anti-black aspects to society that you are pushing an anti-white narrative.
The DEI movement seem to be largely in epistemic closure and suffering the same failures of other movements in this situation. Once you start to regularly dismiss people, or even data, that disagree with you as invalid, it's game over. You lose the ability to learn from and adapt to reality. You also become prey for exploitation by grifters and reputation launderers.
It doesn't mean it can't accumulate power, but in terms of delivering positive outcomes, its prospects seem bleak.
I think this is entirely correct, except that it almost certainly does mean "it can't accumulate power."
The GOP will happily pre-empt local governments that might still be dominated by Wokeists from doing anything they want, and they can't win at the state level, let alone Federal.
Of course, those preemptions will also cover things like "let's liberalize zoning laws", "let's procure EVs for government fleets", "let's end natural gas hook-ups in new construction".
I'm not sure you're correct about the state level. I'm pretty sure there are some states where people of that ideological persuasion (whatever one wishes to call them) can obtain sufficient power to impose their agendas on public education systems, at least for awhile.
Perhaps. I'm struggling to identify any other than Massachusetts, Washington, New York, and California, though.
As we're seeing, even NJ isn't really blue enough, such that the mere association of that camp with Murphy helped to almost cost him the election. In VA, the Democrats' deflections on the topic did cost them the election.
If New Jersey isn't blue enough to hand control to the wokeists, then that rules out basically everything right of New York.
And even in the few big states that are that blue, the local big tent Democratic parties are likely to primary or recall such a governor with great success after they get started down that path.
Which, I suppose, is where your last sentence comes in.
Over here in Oregon, the Portland metro area is so far to the left of the rest of the state that they've almost reach Hawaii. The synopsis of the Multnomah County website begins: "Multnomah County is committed to building equity and justice in our community by transforming systems, affecting policies, meeting the needs of overlooked..."
Combined with a couple of other liberal counties like Lane and, increasingly, Deschutes, they outnumber the rest of the state to the point that the GOP only really exists at the local level. And, as a result, they have become completely unmoored from reality, basically one big backlash to the even scarier, leftier caricature of the Dems that they are reacting to.
Voters are increasingly asked to chose between woke left-wing lunatics and dangerous right-wing lunatics. So the wokes get a lot of the normie liberal votes from around the state who are really just voting against the doomsday prepper with a face tattoo that says State of Jefferson. The Dems seem to take from that the lesson that they're winning by turning out the progressive base and they rightly see how crazy the GOP is here, so they march ever lefter and I wind up voting for a vegan yogi with who hands out copies of How to be an Anti-Racist door to door. That is why we still have an f-ing *outdoor* mask mandate statewide despite the fact that I need binoculars to make out my neighbors' Trump flags.
I don't know about New Jersey, but I lived in Massachusetts for a few years and, while it is very "blue" politically, your median Bostonian would run away screaming from the Oregon Country Fair. Plus the Massachusetts GOP isn't insane, so you are actually presented with a viable alternative if you don't like when the Dems are offering.
The West Coast state GOP organizations seem to have reacted to their rapid degradation from "natural party of government" to "borderline lunatic fringe" by embracing the "lunatic fringe" and doing its best to get rid of the "borderline".
AZ and NV seem to be headed the same way as CA, OR, WA, and CO.
It would be entertaining to watch them do the same in the East, but it seems unlikely. Especially after VA, when the state GOP rigged a convention to push through someone other than a rabid Trumpist, and won because of it.
The GOP in Virginia did something completely sane out of self-interest, which is something that I think the Oregon Dems are still perfectly capable of. They had to bypass their own primary voters to nominate a rational candidate, but that wouldn't work here because the GOP brand is so damaged the nominee would still lose to anyone with a D by their name.
Oregon has always been full of political weirdos, but the GOP base was blue-collar workers, mainly in the timber industry. When that went away the base of the party wound up in hollowed-out backwaters (like the one Nicholas Kristof—who is trying to run for governor—always writes about). Once the Bay Area transplants moved on from Seattle to Portland, it was a short walk to the state GOP becoming a party of protest candidates.
I know little of Virginia politics, but I think a prerequisite of the dynamics at play in Oregon is to have a solid base of lefties in the first place. And something tells me that the concentration of smelly hippies is much lower in Richmond than Portland. But it does become self-reinforcing; once one party moves past dissembling and pandering and just loses its grip on reality, the other one can pursue whatever boutique politics the primary electorate is in to.
The funny thing about Arizona is that the GOP there seems to be radicalizing all by itself—but historically I think they are more similar to Virginia in that it was a red state not that long ago. So maybe they'll have to start disintermediating their primary voters to win statewide too.
I'd think Hawaii, Oregon, and Connecticut might also fall into that category, but even limiting it to Massachusetts, Washington, New York, and California is still something around 70 million people. My last sentence is referring to the likelihood that it would take a couple electoral cycles for moderation/backlash (depending on how you want to frame it) to get going.
Well, if R C is to be believed, Oregon is basically there already, but it took the state GOP going insane to open the door to it. Which narrows this down to CA, OR, and maybe WA. CO in a decade or two.
It's not happening in MA, RI, or CT, probably not in NY either.
Great post. What is particularly worrying is the absolute refusal among progressive elites to even consider the possibility that they need to think about these issues - both about their substantive merits, and about their impact on election outcomes.
An illustration of this mindset was the line: "CRT is a graduate school framework that is not taught in Virginia K-12 schools."
Really? What parent who is upset about the issues that Matt lists will be persuaded by that?
As the putative "smart party," the Democrats responding, "You're an idiot; we don't teach actual CRT because that's a law school program" is one of the dumbest things out there. A smart party would think, when people are outraged by "CRT in schools" what is their anger really about and how do we try to address it?
It's dumb, though in a different way, like saying that "defund the police" isn't *really* about closing down police departments, but blah blah blah. Or saying, "Republicans will call any Democrat a socialist, so why not just nominate a socialist?"
Public messaging is hard enough when you don't shoot yourself in both feet.
To quote Kendi on being willing to reassess the efficacy of messaging: "What if we measure the radicalism of speech by how radically it transforms open-minded people.... What if we measure the conservativism of speech by how intensely it keeps people the same.... At a time when I thought I was the most radical, I was the most conservative" [because he turned his audience off by the way he spoke to them].
One of the frustrating things about reading Kendi is how often he sets out principles that seem right and necessary, even obvious, to ending racism -- treating people as individuals, not conflating the individual with the group, etc.-- but then when it comes time to make a policy recommendation he doesn't follow his own principles to their logical conclusion. Instead he reverts to a kind of crude racial essentialism that takes racial classifications as prior to everything else about society.
He's admirable open about thinking out loud and changing his mind as he works through things, so I'll be interested to see where his thinking lands in another ten years or so. But for now, Democratic politicians should stay away from him with a ten foot pole.
I agree with this and also have a very “Ah great!” “What? Dude really?!” Relationship with Kendi.
On this particular point I wonder if he is actually on the cusp of putting forth a new way that we value our society away from the smartest and most skilled entirely.
There’s an aspect of me that wonders if we’ve actually maxed out what we can do with available education. And that it might be time to entertain radically different ideas about what we should do to achieve more humans feeling worth and dignity.
I couldn’t agree more, I think Kendi makes some truly thought-provoking observations about society then mixes in some weird, hypocritical race essentialism and comes to some bizarre conclusions. For example, his “what if there are other forms of intelligence beyond what can be measured on a IQ test?” is undeniably true! But to extend that to say “standardized tests are racist” is to buy in to the idea that the standardized tests were ever a measure of human worth and dignity.
It often seems like Kendi is shying away from the implications of his own analysis because of a strong sentimental attachment to the black ethnic identity of the community he grew up in - the neighborhoods, foods, lingo, HBCUs, all of it - which he (correctly) sees as threatened by assimilation and acceptance of black Americans into the mainstream. So he falls back into race essentialism rather than pursue his own analysis to its end. I'm sympathetic to that but ultimately come down on the side of "join the club". That's the fate of every ethnic subgroup that has mourned the watering down of its distinctiveness as its members became more integrated to mainstream American society. You can be a discrete and insular minority, like Mennonites or Amish, or you can be part of mainstream society, but you can't be both. The good news is assimilation isn't a one-way street; American society and culture changes too.
One more note… Kendi gets called “CRT,” but no one notes that he explicitly challenges two tenants of pop-CRT: that black people have no power, and that black people can’t be racist about white people. (Note that pop-CRT is itself a bastardization of academic CRT, which has its own issues but is not something Kendi claims to speak for or about.)
Virtually everyone is afforded the essential dignity of work, that's reasonably compensated and afforded some basic respect regardless of exactly what the job is. The rewards for clambering to the top of the pyramid are a bit more muted to pay for it all, but still there. And no one is desperately concerned about falling down once or twice in life, because they won't be damned to poverty as a result.
The idea that teachers should be highly paid professionals on par with lawyers and physicians is anathema to both sides of our political system. Moreover schools of education are entirely unwilling to raise the standards for admission to something resembling what they do in Japan or Finland. Finally, parents are not keen on turning over most of the teaching and curriculum-making authority to classroom teachers. They would prefer those decisions are made by state legislatures or at the very least elected school boards. So, while I agree that Japan, Finland, and many other nations offer examples of good things we could do, I don't think there's going to be much support for it here. Heck, you only have to read the comments here to learn how much disdain the average liberal has for teachers. (And to be fair, I am quite critical of schools overall and am deeply upset by unions fights against vaccine mandates, but I do generally have a positive opinion of teachers, having worked with them my whole adult life.)
Obviously “meritocracy is a failure” is an incredibly bold and loaded statement.
But to unpack it I would consider two angles that I think of in which meritocracy may have “failed.”
1) The points mentioned. It really makes people who can’t climb atop the pyramid feel just bad in life and constantly worried that they’re a slip away from losing it all.
2) This is a more subtle and perhaps darker one. Is meritocracy actually failing to deliver its intended gems even for those at the top? When we see our smartest people working in taxi cabs, nicotine, and food delivery branded as technology. When we see companies like Zillow’s data scientists run the company to the point that 1/4 of its workforce had to be let go. When we still don’t have our self driving cars. When the pandemic rages on… is pumping the best and the brightest to lead. Working?
Another though that goes along with this: do we really even have a meritocracy? It seems like we often sell aspects of our society as meritocratic and then it turns out they probably aren't (i.e. Ivy League schools).
These were two of the three big reasons floating around my mind; it's miserable for the folks who aren't deemed to "have value in a modern economy", and "meritocracy + financialization = wild misallocation of productive talent."
The third was that it doesn't make the people who reach the top of the pyramid any happier, either, because they *still* feel like they're a slip away from losing it all.
Japan and Finland are very narrowly defined ethnostates. Japanese and Finns are all family to each other if you want to put it that way. It is much easier to take care of people perceived to be family in this way. Their experience is not remotely applicable to the continental-scale, multi-ethnic, immigration-friendly nation that is the United States. Americans are not family to each other, we are many families who are all together in a project heading into the future.
You'll find me on the record saying that I do not wish to become Sweden or Finland.
But you'll also find me on the record saying that the degree to which we've allowed "meritocracy" to govern everything about our system, and the extent to which it's been used as an excuse for outright corruption and rent-seeking under the guise of "the best and brightest win out" is rotting us from the inside out.
I'm merely saying that we can, indeed must, file the roughest edges off the system for everyone, such that pretty much everyone gets a living wage, healthcare is the responsibility of the state, housing gets built in quantities adequate to prevent it from becoming a speculative vehicle (he said, as he bought a third investment property last week), and tertiary education is more than an expensive plaything for the idle rich.
I agree with you completely on all of this. I guess what I'm saying is that we have to find a different model and a different path to this goal. It may be that we can't have what Sweden or Finland (or Japan) has, but we can have something better than what we have now, that works for our unique circumstances.
People who engage with his ideas critically vs people who didn’t even read his book and built their understanding of his ideas from memes and tv interviews (on the left and right).
I've read and heard enough Kendi (and DiAngelo) to conclude that life is too short and he doesn't deserve my time to read his entire oeurvre. If people like Kendi and DiAngelo remain in the middle of these debates, that's our fault as liberals and Democrats. We should retire them to the obscurity they so richly deserve.
I very much hope there will be a post about what is happening in higher education. There, the DEI push really is very aggressive: strong opposition to the use of standardized tests, demands that admissions/hiring make identity a primary consideration, and dramatic expansion of the DEI administrative apparatus. And on top of that, of course an endless list of signaling issues like renaming buildings, new rules about pronouns, etc.
All this has less of an immediate impact on election outcomes that K-12 education, but the long term effects are highly damaging. These efforts fundamentally seek to undermine the meritocratic system that has made US science and higher education the envy of the world. In terms of politics and culture, they make it absolutely clear to half the population that academics are in a very real way their adversaries. Of course they are going to not trust the pronouncements of the academic elites on climate change, public health, etc. Not to mention the impact on funding for research and higher education.
Good points Gunnar. DEI bureaucracies have become part of the ever-growing administration of universities, even in the face of COVID hiring freezes and the increasing adjunctification of the professoriate. The answer to every issue is always hire more administrators!
This is rhetorical inflation though isn't it. A person can agree or disagree with the idea, but it is very hard to see how 'renaming buildings' and 'new rules about pronouns' can have 'highly damaging long term effects'. Even on stronger ground like 'making identity a primary consideration in hiring' you would need to persuade me about 'highly damaging long term effects', though I can see the argument against doing this.
The "cultural" issues are interesting. Some of them are laudable - working on being more inclusive is generally good, removing confederate generals seems reasonable, etc. But pushing *super* aggressively on issues that were outside of the Overton window in the very recent past, and rub even the middle of the country the wrong way is just a bad idea. It alienates people who would normally be your allies, it is enormously energizing to the R base, and it definitely erodes trust with the public that the universities they fund are worth investing in.
Sorry, but I'm confused. I thought by 'highly damaging long term effects' you meant on children's education. Are you instead talking about a] the Democrat party, b] the causes of racial justice etc etc, and/or c] universities' future funding?
I mean that these efforts are a frontal attack on what I consider to be the crown jewels of Western civilization - the scientific process, evidence based inquiry, free speech, liberalism and tolerance (in the classical sense), meritocracy, individualism, etc. The short term threat I focused on here was the impact on higher education and scientific research, but my concern is broader.
Okay, I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree. I don't for a moment think that renaming buildings, using people's preferred pronouns or affirmative action in hiring pose the risk of highly damaging long term effects to the foundations of western civilisation, and I go back to the original point that this is an awful lot of rhetorical inflation.
I have yet to be disappointed by cranking my bullshit meter up to 11 at the first invocation of "equity".
Also,
' And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. '
"Black people/black cultures are just intrinsically worse at writing" sounds... kinda racist!
Everything Kendi says sounds, if you strip away the bullshit, kinda racist.
It's like he set out, from day one, to completely and utterly validate the phrase "racism of low expectations," twenty-odd years after the Republicans invented it as a strawman.
Also note that the first thing that comes up when you google "soft bigotry of low expectations" is a thing from the "Racial Equity Institute" screeching about how using that very phrase maintains white supremacy.
As a parent of an 8 year old in a mixed-income neighborhood in the pacific northwest, this column encapsulates my experience so exactly it’s startling. The school closures were terrible (and in retrospect a clear mistake that went on too long); they hurt the literacy progress of my son’s lower SES peers more this his higher SES ones; the district has a variety of equity & DEI initiatives that seem not harmful but just wasteful; and the most politically progressive parents & educators I know are increasingly hostile to banal measurement tests for the kids.
It’s not a catastrophic situation- the school is still good, reasonable people can disagree about the closures & mitigation policies, etc. But the 3 things Matty describes here are a package of trends headed in the wrong direction. Backlash from some swing parents isn’t surprising to me.
I think this is missing one piece that is especially enraging to parents. The attack on gifted education and tracking, and the rationale that underlies it - that there’s no such thing as intellectual giftedness or some kids who are smarter than others or better at math or reading - is going to be basically a non-starter for white collar parents who are meritocracy high achievers. Especially if they 1. Suffered through a public school experience that ignored their needs as children or 2. Immigrated to this country on the basis of their intellectual achievements.
Do normal people care about gifted education or is this more specific to the type of person who pays $80 a year to subscribe to a political economy blog?
Normal parents, almost any way you want to define it, definitely do care about gifted programs. I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood in the rustbelt, and the 10% of students who were in the gifted program had parents who were (off the top of my head) bus drivers, car salesmen, building maintenance worker, a truck driver, a mechanic and one software engineer (me / my dad). They definitely cared and they wanted their kids to do better than they had, which in almost every case I'm aware of, they did.
I just checked to see what the vibe of the reactions were. Not so bad overall but my favorite "yelled at by woke white dudes" response was:
"Standardized testing is a ridiculous way to judge performance. It's pop science, at best. Get rid of such nonsense and teach children reality and how to live in multicultural America. Pretending it's 1950 isn't going to help them compete in the 21st century."
I was just googling around to do a quick fact check of the claim I ended up making in another comment here that anti-testing arguments often say standardized tests can't measure "what really matters", and what I learned from that plus the response you mention here is: people seem prone to confusing "one particular standardized test that comes readily to mind" with "all standardized testing ever".
I would say the first part of that tweet is the least ridiculous. And we should "teach children reality" is the most ridiculous.
But standardized testing reminds me of what Churchill said about democracy. It's the worst way to measure performance except for all the others that have been tried. Measuring performance is just generally really hard in most contexts. But singling out standardized tests, which have pros as well as cons, feels grossly misguided.
This article is pretty spot on. I’m going to add several additional points.
1. While kids were at home parents got to see the curriculum a lot closer up then they did while their kids went to school. There are a whole lot of cultural lessons that are integrated with everything from math to science. There is a whole Lotta bullshit work it doesn’t really have any added value to whatever subject is being taught.
2. The gaps in education might even be worse, because the highest performing kids, Were actually able to learn more than they would have in school when their hamper down by learning at a pace of slower kids. I 15-year-old did two years of math in one year because it was self-paced during Covid. She would’ve never been able to do that if she was stuck in a normal math class where everyone had to go at the same pace.
3. The back-and-forth of kids between virtual school and in class school whenever someone is expose store has close contact is very frustrating for parents. One of my daughters got Covid, and we were actually relieved… Because now for a few months she doesn’t have to isolate if one of her friends expose her.
1. For many families, schools are hugely important both to educate their kids and as day care centers for two full-time working parents. When I was a kid, two working parents weren't the norm, and when my dad was sent to Malaysia for a year, my mom, who went with him with kids in tow, went to our school, borrowed the school books for her three kids (7th, 5th and 3rd graders) and we were home schooled for a year to no disadvantage. It took about an hour a day. My sister in Fayetteville, Arkansas, home-schooled her daughters because the public schools were so awful. No one in my grandfather's generation had access to public schools.
2. While union membership has declined in America, public sector unions in my lifetime have increased significantly, with especially dramatic effects on schooling and policing. It seems increasingly clear not all these effects are being embraced by voters.
3. Private sector unions, which are vestiges of what they once were, have come to be seen, and probably are, patronage machines where membership is inherited like in medieval guilds.
4. They enormously drive up construction costs in New York and make Matt's dream of cheap housing for a billion Americans a chimera. Sad.
I will content myself with saying that I believe, strongly, that a patriotic history curriculum is useful and important. I am not saying we should not teach the full history of the United States but, as Ross Douthat writes:
"If historical education doesn’t begin with what’s inspiring, a sense of real affection may never take root — risking not just patriotism but a basic interest in the past."
Or, in my view, you can also get an unhealthy attitude where in every case you see all of your country's ills without being able to see your country's successes (the current Progressive sin in my mind).
Progressives may disagree, but I think Americans should want their children to love their country. Progressives seem to want to make people hate their country (in an effort, I think, to raise them to be good Progressive voters who despite the Republican Party) except for a handful of scenarios.
Progressives are not patriotic. Period. I do not agree with this at all. Beinart wrote:
"'I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.' Will make this country great? It wasn't great in the past? It's not great as it is?
The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law."
Progressives do not see America as a set of ideals: they see America as a flawed, white supremacist, racist, country which is, at best, in need of reform, at worst must be torn out root and stem and rebuilt. They reject the ideals the United States was built on and, instead, want to replace them with their own.
Which makes this less a debate about patriotism, and more whether or not the United States should have ever existed in the first place.
I think progressives want people to love ideas. And then measure their country against these ideas and learn how to make changes to move their country closer to these views. Loving your country first will invariably put you in a mindstate where you justify the bad, because you love your country. In many ways this is a major distinction between right and left. The right wants to justify all the ills of the country (and make the country more like it was when they learned to love it). The left wants to focus on ideas they value and move the country toward it, even if it means saying that the country they were raised in did it completely wrong.
That isn't accurate at all. It is actually based on an misperception of what love even is. Loving your family members does not invariably put you a mindstate where you justify the bad that they do. Parents who love their kids aren't any less able to call their kids out when they do something wrong: if anything, it's the opposite.
You're around different parents than I. Having spent time in schools the number of times I've seen parents claim their child "could never" when everyone at the school was like "yeah, they probably did" is countless. Just about the only time I ever seen parents harder on their kids is when they coach their kids, and even then it is situational (they'll yell at their kid more, but they won't bench them).
Is it your view that the reason why those parents do those things is that they love their kids too much, and that they'd do a better job if they loved their kids less?
It depends on what you view the role of the parent to be. In some sense the main job is to make sure your child accumulates as much as they can. This is loving the material child, and not the character of the child.
But if your focus is on the character of the child. The idea of what the child can be then you want the child to have growth experiences. You don't want to defend the child against growth, but rather want the child to learn -- even if it means fewer material accumulations in the short-term.
Both are about love. There's love of the institution (the body/material) and love of ideas (character). They'll lead to different behaviors.
Agree about this - the stories we tell each other about the past are about the present. The "true" facts about some long dead Founding Father are no more relevant today than the "true" facts about Zeus and Hera or Adam and Eve. They are for all intents and purposes today mythical characters that exist only in our imagination; if we stopped talking about them, they would cease to exist. So we as well have a good inspiring story rather than a bad one.
Sure, the Founding Fathers once existed and walked the Earth as flesh and blood mortals, but they long ago died and returned to dust. They only exist today in our imaginations and only matter to the extent we the living choose to make them matter, same as with mythical gods and other creatures.
It certainly is the case that history is so large that we can only focus on some parts, and which parts we focus on at a given time is largely dictated by the concerns of the present, but creating a myth and trying to understand what historical figures did are different projects.
Another thing I love about this Navigating EdEquityVA chart is that it presents five keys to ensuring that equity chiefs succeed, but it presents no metrics by which we could evaluate the work product of those equity chiefs, even qualitatively.
The slacker in me would love a high-level job with no performance metrics!
These debates always seem to be presented as "Democratic Teachers vs Republican Parents". I really wish we had more perspectives from non-white parents on how they understand these issues, and what they think should be prioritized.
The impression I get is that these parents are far less invested in "exposing and dismantling systems of oppression", and far more interested in having their children succeed under the systems as they exist today, and the Discourse papers over this fault line.
Yeah there are plenty of situations where the activists and such are wildly unrepresentative of the back/latin groups they claim to be fighting for, and I this is clearly one of them
My impression is that a lot of progressive opposition to standardized testing is a misapplication of the (I think correct) progressive response to psychometric testing via-a-vis "The Bell Curve'. A lot of progressives know that test composition for things like IQ tests can have distorted results for cultural reasons and combine that with the knowledge that teacher's unions are against standardized tests and conclude that they suffer from the same problems, to the same degree. There is a major difference however, in that a standardized test is there to measure knowledge and skills that that the students are specifically trained for and, as such, rely on less culturally acquired knowledge to perform.
I know it's as huge meme that Conservatives are always saying that the 'real racists' are the activists who want to use policy to preferentially handle people of different races. However absurd that is in general in the case of standardized testing, where you have activists saying that the achievement gap is not a resources problem but is someone inherent to being black in America, and yeah... that sounds exactly what someone running a Jim Crow state would say...
Wasn't the big fight actually about having bilingual classrooms or offering those services to kids who didn't speak English as their first language? Isn't that just bog-standard now? So much of the progressive agenda in 2021 feels like they've won on all their good ideas, and now they're scraping the bottle of the barrel to keep getting those donations/institutional dollars. And the quality of the arguments, scholarship and moral clarity goes down down down.
The irony is that dual language immersion schools are WILDLY popular now. Waitlists hundreds of kids long, parents begging to get their kids into a school where they don't speak english in the classroom. I think sometimes we take for granted when we win just how thoroughly once seemingly inconceivable ideas become rote standard and people refuse to acknowledge the victories and progress made.
I remember this fight. Hell in *California* it was illegal to teach English as Second Language students in their native language. At all. The only permissible way for a school to teach a kid English was total immersion. Arizona only repealed their version of this law in 2014! It's not that long ago that the "consensus" was that dual language instruction was bad (unless it was for kids whose first language was already English.) imo this is a great victory for anyone who wanted education to be culturally responsive and sensitive to the needs of non-dominant communities. But that win just gets forgotten in the face of the next big fight, whatever it may be.
The original California ban was because there was a panic about poor immigrant kids not learning English at all in Spanish immersion programs that just helped natives. It was left-coded more than right-coded, back when Democrats liked test scores more.
I'm not enough to remember this fight but I've read a little about it. Language exposure seems great. But from what I understand of the Right's concerns, way back when, they were worried that Spanish (or whatever other language) instruction would slow down or halt assimilation. That seems like a legitimate concern. Also from what I read, the majority of immigrant parents agreed, which is why the right actually won on this issue at the time.
Teacher unions are the principal mechanisms that turn normie suburban centists into right wingers. This has been true for a long time, going all the way back to when I was growing up in the 80s and the unions tried to eliminate gifted programs in favor of having the gifted kids do unpaid tutoring to the not-gifted kids as a "humbling learning experience"
I spent my entire 20s and early 30s as a Republican partly because of the nonsense I witnessed in public schools.
If you think teacher unions are good allies of science and reality - note that most of them opposed vaccine requirements, in the same manner that the cop unions did, until they got a ton of pressure upstream from mayors/governors in blue states. They are literally the left wing version of cop unions, who will justify, in bad faith, nearly anything that their worst performing member does.
Shamelessly copy-pasting a comment I left back in August on Matt's teacher compensation article:
1. The employer-employee relationship isn't always adversarial, but unions are created to be adversarial. So a unionized industry will almost inevitably have adversarial relations, especially a large unionized industry. It's baked into unions' principal-agent relationship. They are duty-bound to maximize the best interests of their members, just as corporate CEOs are duty-bound to increase shareholder value and lawyers are duty-bound to zealously represent their clients. It's very difficult for them to moderate their advocacy for their principals' interests for the sake of the greater good. It's not impossible, but it isn't how the system is designed to work. Their default setting is to represent their principals' interests to the exclusion of anyone else's.
2. This doesn't mean unions are bad. We have lawyers and business corporations for a reason, and we have unions for a reason too. Sometimes we as a society have to mediate between two competing legitimate points of view, and we decide the best way to ensure a just result is to "arm both sides." It's like checks and balances in government. If both sides fight vigorously, hopefully the outcome will land on the best/most truthful spot in the middle.
3. Because the process is adversarial, it is always in unions' interests to refuse to do whatever management wants their members to do. It is by refusing to do whatever management wants that the union can demand that management pay the union's members to do that thing.
4. That's generally fine in the private sector, but in the public sector there are two complications. First, in the public sector it is management's (i.e. the government's) job to seek the good of society, not to increase shareholder value. That doesn't mean it always does that, of course - not by a long shot. But it is supposed to, and so it often does. Therefore, because it is in unions' interests to refuse to do whatever management prioritizes, it is generally in public employee unions' interests to refuse to make any changes that would benefit society. Second, management also has a principal-agent dynamic, and while its agents (i.e. politicians) do have an incentive to seek the good of society, its principals (i.e. voters) don't always place the *highest* priority on that. So when push comes to shove, you'll often find that management would rather not pay unions extra to agree to stronger accountability for bad apples, but instead would rather lower taxes. In other words, if you "arm both sides" in the public sector hoping they'll eventually land on the most societally beneficial settlement, you may be disappointed.
5. This does not mean that public employee unions are bad. If they didn't exist at all, their members could be exploited. It does mean, however, that you shouldn't be surprised when they oppose changes that would require their members to do good things. That is, in fact, what you should always expect them to do.
That is an excellent summary, but I’m going to disagree with point 5. Public unions are bad. As a lifelong Chicagoan, public sector unions of every kind, transit, teachers, police, fire run counter to the interests of taxpayers / reformers every single time.
As a Democrat, I was viscerally against Scott Walker’s anti-union push back in the 2000s. In retrospect, it’s unfortunate he didn’t also include the GOP’s police union, because otherwise that would have been Wisconsin’s greatest achievement.
It is not the job of Teacher's(or other) Unions to benefit taxpayers. That is the job of the school district who negotiates their contract. The job of the union is to serve its members.
That is correct. And that is exactly the issue. It’s members interests often are out of alignment with the public good.
It's a great excuse to get mad at Teacher's Unions. Just like it's a great excuse to get mad at your cheese grater for being shitty at opening cans.
I would indeed get mad at my cheese grater if it regularly lobbied to make it illegal to own a canopener
That may seem witty to you. In my city, parents have dealt with two lengthy strikes and an extended school shutdown, very much driven by the CTU, even after data on transmission rates in school with preventative measures showed very low risks (not to mention low risks to children, period.)
So I am very much angry at the cheese grater for only wanting to grate cheese under its very specific set of conditions.
The problem is the unions are helping to elect the politicians that then approve the rate increases.
IE this is corruption at it's finest
Electing politicians that support your priorities is not in and of itself corruption. Is Republicans electing politicians who cut taxes corruption?
yes at times there is corruption on the other side as well. I'm very willing to admit that crony capitalism is a problem.
But giving money and helping to elect politicians who then turn around and give you tax payer money so you can give the politicians their cut is IMHO corrupt.
There should be no public unions (I'm totally fine with private ones)
I don't understand how you think this an argument that would convince anyone. First off, the idea that you think sworn public servants aren't designed to benefit citizens is utterly surreal. Some of them, LEO & firefighters, literally take an oath to do so. If teachers wanted to maximize their earnings or job security they could've become investment bankers or something. They deliberately became public servants to help children & families, so it makes sense that we would hold them to some kind of social benefit standard.
If they're not benefitting society but simply themselves, no problem- we can cancel their union contract, mass fire all of them, and hire new teachers who will.
Try to visualize it this way- I'm a member of the 'taxpayer's union'. It is not the job of the taxpayer's union to benefit teachers. The job of the taxpayer's union is to serve its members. Does that kind of make sense?
In order for this to be realized, the government/public has to view any gains by the union as negatives that should be fought against because anything that the union gets for free will mean their costs are otherwise higher.
Do we really want this adversarial approach?
I have argued this before. I think that union negotiations are adversarial by their very nature. The problem is that boards of education are trying save money by offering vast amounts of power to the unions. I think this is dumb. I would even be in favor of legislating that they may not negotiate away their own responsibility.
I think there is a difference between a private company employees having an adversarial relationship with a companies' management and public sector employees having an adversarial relationship with the public's representation.
What you're missing is what the services are like in places that don't have public employee unions. Like there are several states where teachers unions either don't exist or are completely neutered, and I doubt you'd be any happier with the performance of schools (or transit or whatever) in states like that.
People who think that red states are much better at the whole 'running schools' thing should check out how great the school system is in Oklahoma, it's a real treat.
I mean wealthy areas having good schooling outcomes is basically a given, no matter where you are located.
I disagree. UPS is unionized and that is good. But if all of a sudden UPS was absorbed by the USPS, I would like the union to survive
Agreed for most of this, but you missed an important point. The unions are helping to elect the politicians that then give the union members raises, who then donate to the politicians and on and on.
No I don't believe we should have public unions, or if we do. There role should be REALLY limited. Probably just pay and benefits. They shouldn't be serving in a role to protect bad cops, or bad teachers. If we did that it would only be the tax payers getting screwed.
Something I think that you imply but don't straight up say:
Because unions exist to zealously advocate for their members per se (and that's fine), it's bad for people and political movements to uncritically embrace and boost the positions of unions.
Sounds fair.
This is excellent!
Thanks!
It's easy to blame unions, but note that public unions really only have the power to 1) force employees to join the union and charge dues, and 2) strike. And in many states, they are legally forbidden to strike. All of the things we complain about are in their contracts, which are agreed to by elected representatives whom we elect. Of course unions advocate for less oversight and higher pay, but they have next to no power to actually impose those things -- the people have that power. They should write better contracts!
They also have the power to get school board members, state superintendents of education and state legislators elected, through their donations and campaign canvassing troops. Those elected officials, in turn, make decisions that benefit them.
That sounds like a nice pat answer, but principal-agent problems rule everything around us.
I think this is going a little too far. Cop unions will justify murdering unarmed civilians. I haven't seen a teacher union do that yet
What about the damage bad teachers, protected by their union, do to a whole generation of children?
Yes. Recent moves in SF to do this here reminded me of it.
Literally, the maximalist position of some of these union leaders is to turn the job into a ghost payroll patronage op.
So... what governments across the developing world are trying to put a stop to?
Good, I feel much better about saying "public sector unions bad" with no caveats or asterisks now.
Looking at how Philadelphia's City Council and San Francisco's School Board run, I'm not sure there's a good answer there.
Yes. This is absolutely what happens. My 15 year-old is pretty bright. When she finishes her work early, she is expected to help the other kids.
It’s ironic, that all the replies to this initial reply by me sort of illustrate why swing voters like me would vote Republican because of progressive democratic viewpoints.
I understand all the debate below. But stepping back, is it unreasonable for parents to just want their kids to be taught well. If you are a suburban parent, and your kid is spending a decent amount of time helping other kids instead of learning, no amount of justification is going to make that OK with them.
Their natural instinct is… Put my kid into a different class with students of the same ability so that they can learn at a faster pace.
It is perceived that Democrats are against that, therefore if they feel the governor is going to advocate for something they want… They’re going to switch parties.
Rory, can you elaborate on what you see as the "progressive" viewpoints in this thread that would make someone (not already decided) choose to vote Republican? Granted, I lean progressive but this feels like you had prejudged.
My view would be that Republican's efforts to "starve the beast" have left schools short staffed and unable to provide both for the average student and for the gifted.
I am not sure if progressive is the right word.
Parents in general want their kids to succeed. They want what's best for their kids. They don't care about education gaps. They care how their kid is doing. Whether their kids is learning to his or her potential.
Most parents (middle class types) feel that education should be about the base R's. They are willing to accept a certain amount of non basics curriculum, but only if it doesn't hurt their own kid.
In general parents believe gaps are bad (which they are), but they have a suspicion that the progressive unspoken view is that progressives would like to reduce education gaps by holding back high achievers.
Evidence: Everyone in this thread feeling I am unreasonable that I would prefer my high achiever to learn more or faster instead of tutoring other kids.
- The move to eliminate tracking in math classes in California (I think its California).
- The move to eliminate magnet schools and or gifted programs.
- The move to get rid of test scores for those schools in NYC.
- The way not having schools in session was justified by the left.
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Now yes. Democrats are generally better with school funding. But As Matt pointed out... Republicans are the party of Parents. Us parents see a lot of waste and mismanagement in schools. The typical middle class parent (remember we are talking swing voters here) goes into their kids school and its pretty nice. Funding isn't as big an issue.
Yes, you right that Republicans in some areas have tried to starve the beast... but that's only because they sort of feel that schools strayed from what they believe the core purpose should be (3 R's).
But in places like Virginia... the parents are generally progressive or at least moderate. However given all the other issues that Matt and I have mentioned... they are willing to vote for a moderate Republicans who hits on the key things they care about.
Did this answer your question?
I am not sure it answers my question. It does satisfy me. Is it your impression that Republican's were the party of parents prior to this year? That was not my impression but I may well be wrong.
I absolutely _do_ agree that the Democrats seem lost and are bleeding voters right now. That union decisions on covid are black eye as is the handling of CRT. I guess agree that progressive handling of parents concerns may be problematic in general.
Addressing your list from my own perspective rather than plumbing the thread below:
1)I would be shocked if any member of this community didn't think that a kid who was sharp enough to be done with 75% of the time left, oughtn't be moved into a more challenging environment. My thoughts were that the teacher lacks the power to do that and that existing her to assist seemed not unreasonable. If there were advanced classes available and she opposed them, she should be sued and then fired. I am glad you found a suitable environment for her. I hope she excels.
2)I have no idea about tracking in math classes. My dad is a super left wing union organizing S.F. bay HS teacher and he never ceases to be amazed by the idiocy that occurs in some school boards.
3)The move to eliminate magnet schools. This is tough. Obviously with a fixed fiscal pie you have to make difficult choices. The optics are atrocious without them being spun by the opposition. And they are even worse when spun by the opposition.
4)NYC - No idea.
5) Justification of school stoppages - I am guessing we're talking covid. My thinking is that unions back teachers and that there are always a few dumb(or excessively risk averse) teachers (just like every other occupation). If I was running a union I would probably support my teachers and support stoppages just to keep the members from tearing each other to shreds. As a Democrat it seems disastrous and I strongly oppose it. As a parent I would be in school board meetings asking for consequences to be imposed.
Also... I spoke to my daughter... told her about this argument. She actually said that when she was in Middle School, the teacher would actually have her grade other kids tests, and that helping other kids was at least better than that.
I think this is fine if the school *asks* them to do this, and not fine if the schools *makes* them do it (and eliminates other programming so that they no alternative).
There is a power imbalance. Do you think my daughter at 15 has the choice to say no to a teacher who makes it clear... "go help blah, blah, blah with their homework"
I think you could have it as a "tutoring club" or something where it's not being assigned to you by your actual teacher.
In my high school there was a program where you could go around to the elementary schools and tutor some kids after school. You didn't get a grade for it and no one felt pressured to do it. I think I only ever went once but nobody cared. You did it to get honor society points or to put it on your college applications.
This is happening in the middle of class. Multiple classes.
You get time to work on something... random worksheet in whatever subject.
My daughter finishes quickly... hands the paper to teacher, teacher says to go help other kids.
She isn't learning anything more... she already knows whatever it is... she literally just did the assignment.
Basically she is just expected to explain what she already know to other kids.
The way it actually works though, is she is de facto just giving the other kids the answers.
If she wasn't doing this, she would go back to her desk, and read, or do homework in another class, or maybe do future assignments.
This last year she transferred to the South Carolina Governors School for Science and Math... highly selective public boarding school. (Basically a magnet school)
She no longer has to be an unpaid teacher... but this is exactly the sort of advanced gifted program that people are trying to get rid of.
Hmm. I don't think this is actually a bad thing, IF there is also some venue for enrichment on top of it. It is well-demonstrated that teaching a particular concept gives people a deeper and more intuitive understanding of that concept. Having a gifted student teach other students is not only for the benefit of the other students, and peer teaching is an effective learning tool.
Expecting free labor is bad.
My daughter would rather spend that time learning more things instead of dumbing down things she already knows.
She does not enjoy it... she does it because she doesn't want the teacher to be be mad at her.
The entirety of school is based on students doing work for free, including many things they do not want to do, so I'm not sure either of those arguments really make sense here.
The only relevant question is whether teaching the concepts to other students is or is not beneficial to both students. My understanding is the data is favorable on this question, or at least, the official position of education schools is that it is. If it isn't actually beneficial, of course, that would be a good reason to stop doing it, but the fact that your daughter finds it boring does not, in itself, mean that it is a bad idea.
No. She does not learn from helping other kids do Algebra... she is (or was) already getting A's in Algebra. She is not learning anything new.
She is basically just giving the answers to the other kids. But in a step by step way.
This last year she got accepted to a public boarding school that is highly selective for math and science.
She no longer has to help the other kids, because everyone is advanced.
She loves it way more. Is learning way quicker.
This is exactly the sort of school / program that some districts are trying to eliminate.
Is this pedagogy beneficial for the brightest students or for median students, is the useful question?
If the latter, which I have some reason to believe, albeit only anecdotally, then this justification falls apart.
If even the brightest still benefit from teaching the material, then fine.
How many hours a day should kids be asked to do that?
As one strategy among many, it’s probably fine. But if half or more of each class period is devoted to that, don’t you think that’s a little unfair?
More sides to this than Rory lets on. Free labor is bad, we all agree $15/hour. Learning stuff is good. Should we be paid for it or do it because we like learning. Getting on with other humans is also a useful skill, and we should we only do it if we're paid for it. Quickly gets complicated. I hope his daughter loves schools, learns enough to be the next Einstein and doesn't kick down her dumber classmates.
She does love school. And skipped 10th grade to be accepted to a public math and science boarding school in which she is loving. She still helps fellow students, and they occasionally help her. That is because they are all on the same relative level.
And my daughter would never ever talk bad about a student who was less academic then her. She is your typical young bright inclusive liberal with a diverse friend group.
Can we unionize the kids then, since in this context, they are now workers?
Is your claim that students can never do anything that is beneficial to other students without being compensated? Should smart kids not be allowed to participate in group projects without being compensated?
If the teaching is beneficial to the student who is doing the teaching, then it is a learning strategy, i.e., it is appropriate for school.
These aren't group projects. She is simply helping the teacher do their job with no added benefit to herself.
She gladly does group projects (where she normally does an outsized share of the work.. .but we have no issue with that).
lol, putting that quote in my file of "wpps, said the quiet part out loud".
After having read this entire sub-thread, I have a comment. I think that this type of thing can benefit her and if it isn't then the failure is in the teacher's ability to properly motivate or instruct her as to how she teaches.
One of my strongest skills is in communicating complex topics to lay audiences. As a young teen I used to try to explain Godel's Incompleteness Theory to random people on the public bus on my way to middle school. I believe that to a significant extent, this skill was honed by growing up with a (high functioning) Down syndrome brother (2 years junior).
Teaching, teaching is valuable. If the teacher is doing it poorly then that is poor teaching on their part. It does not seem to me that it is any kind of injustice perpetrated by the school system. (Assuming that the person being asked to do so is asked after finishing their studies but still on class time)
Totally disagree. Not every kid wants to become a teacher. It’s fine for those who enjoy it, but not in place of having kids learn themselves.
Not every kid wants to become a mathematician. We still teach them that. I am not a teacher. I am an engineering manager. Being better able to explain things benefits everyone.
I would even argue that being better able to explain things forces one to more thoroughly understand them.
I’m a “stats manager” let’s call it, and sure, yeah explaining is a valuable skill. It’s a question of proportion and time allocation. If this is something that happens for an hour or two a week or in a thoughtful way in a specific context, then, yeah, it’s good.
When kids learn for themselves for the first 10-15 minutes of each class then spend the remaining 45 minutes teaching others or sitting around, then that’s a serious problem and a failure of the education system.
Hey... I actually spoke to my daughter an hour ago... told her about this whole debate.
Apparently in Middle School, the teachers would have her grade other kids tests... she said helping the kids was at least better than that.
I also think everyone misses, that I am talking about where she was 12 and 13 years old. She was 14 during Covid. 15 Now and she is in a math and science magnet school.
I guess my issue is is that the time she is spending helping the other kids is inefficient.
The teacher is using her to make her job easier. All the talk about it be good for her is basically bullshit.
I know this because during Covid she was able to do self paced classes, and basically did two years in one.
She loved it. She learned Way more than she would of in typical classrooms.
If the school catered to kids like her, the education gas would be even larger than they are now. So they don’t do that. We’re only do it in a limited amount.
Of course they end up with the issues of what to do with these kids. They can just have them sitting around… So they used to make their job easier. They justify it by saying that she is actually learning something. Explaining concepts… Etc.
But I’ll say it again… Whatever benefits she gets from explaining stuff to other kids, pales compared to the marginal cost of not learning new stuff at a pace she is capable of.
I would absolutely be annoyed(or possibly pissed) if I thought a teacher was using my child to try to make her job easier.
Yes, the teacher is using her to make her job easier. (I'm a former teacher.) It's part of her job to have something for "early finishers" to do.
Agree. It's poor teaching.
Was this written by a teacher? Really eye opening if it was.
Engineer/Engineering manager but son of 2 teachers (one was treasurer of a large school union)
When you put it that way, I feel slightly more mixed--society would probably be better overall if more people behaved this way! When I get done shoveling my sidewalk, if my neighbor is running behind (especially if they're old or infirm), of course I'll go help out.
But I can't ask you to commit your kid's well-being in this way. Tragedy of the commons, etc.
You choose to help your neighbor. My daughter doesn't choose it at all. She is expected too.
If she didn't have to, she would spend her time doing homework in other classes or reading and learning more.
If it were my daughter, I would discuss with the teacher or maybe the principal first. But, before doing that, I would do my homework. Google "Is it best instructional practice for early finishers to be required to help other students?" I didn't see anything that said it was a good practice. Bring that with you to the principal or teacher.
I suspect the teacher is in need of some professional development on her instructional practices.
I mean, sure, kids should help other kids. But not as the stated policy, and certainly not as a replacement for a gifted program in order to presumably equalize outcomes.
Absolutely, on balance it is horrible, horrible policy. Didn't want to imply otherwise.
A conundrum. What's better for the smart kid, learning more stuff or helping other dumber kids. What's better for society? The smart kids gave us nukes, but also much more productive agriculture. They also taught us how to pump hydrocarbons from earth to make life so much more pleasant, except yikes we're toast because life became so much more pleasant we're micro-waved.
Former teacher here. A good teacher provides what's called differentiated instruction, where not all students are doing the exact same thing. It's much more labor-intensive (and that's why good teachers should be paid more), requiring more lesson planning, more variation in instructional techniques, and lots of assessment which informs the lesson planning, and on and on.
In such a teacher's classroom, the only time the smart kid finishes before the dumber kids, as you put it, is during testing. Early finishers take out their free choice reading.
This last year she applied to the South Carolinas Governors School for Science and Math. It's a public boarding school for 11 and 12 graders. Highly selective. Top school in the state.
She applied as a Freshman because she was basically fed up being held back in normal classes.
Not only was she accepted (skipped a grade)... she is kicking ass and loving it.
No more helping other kids as a requirement. Now its a bunch of advanced kids helping each other actually learn.
At least presumably as a TA you get a stipend!
I read it as a TA asked a student(FrigidWind) to do it, not that a teacher asked a TA(FrigidWind) to do it.
Happening right now, and there is no sense that it’s a problem.
Quite to the contrary, this is what I was told on many school tours when I asked what they do do kids who finish faster or master the material more quickly - they can check their work and if they’re satisfied they can help others, because teaching other kids is a great way to learn. Also my entire public school career.
Throughout the Trump Administration, there was a constant refrain that he was gaslighting us. I think that it was sometimes true, but a lot of times it was clear that he was just bullshitting and didn't care if anyone believed him. This is a bad thing for the President to do, but at the same time, isn't really what the term "gaslighting" means. I always interpreted gaslighting as referring to a circumstance where you try to convince someone that you are more reliable than their own eyes.
Applying this definition, I have rarely felt as gaslit as I have in the context of the "CRT" debate. As pointed out in this article (and in the regular emails I receive from my kid's schools DEI advisor), it is clear that something is going on in the schools. However, the party line seems to basically be "nothing to see here, definitely no CRT, that's just taught in law schools, if you believe that, you must be racist" followed by DeBlasio banning advanced math, and Nicole Hannah Jones tweeting that if you don't feel shame for all of the awful things the US did decades or centuries before you were born, you're an immature asshole.
Ultimately, I think that systemic racism continue to be a problem in the US and schools in particular and its worth looking into ways to fight this problem. I also think that it is important to teach the bad things the US has done, along with the good. However, when people pretend the idea that CRT (or rather some sort of DEI/anti-racism program which most of the country now associates with CRT) is in schools, rather than defend the particular programs on the merits, I find it frustrating and politically suicidal (see e.g. VA).
I always balked at claims of a "liberal media." I think for most of my life these claims really were just GOP objections to reporting on facts which objectively supported liberal positions. However, over the past few years, and the past year or so in particular, between this, denials that "cancel culture" is a thing, and a few other issues, it increasingly seems like more and more media outlets have switched from Julia Galef's scout mindset to her soldier mindset on a lot of issues, and I've really lost faith in a lot of outlets I used to read. I know that I am now way more skeptical of anything I read in Slate, or Vox or hear on NPR than I ever was before. I really hope that this current bubble pops soon.
I did read a number of real, early-ish, CRT papers during an abortive attempt to major in sociology a couple decades ago. It was a confusing and demoralizing experience - they were simultaneously vague, densely referential, and over-elaborated in a way that made it frustratingly impossible to extract any underlying explanatory idea or concrete implication. Lots of "lenses" and "constructs." Later, more worldly and cynical, I recognized the writing style as "theory paper grist for the tenure mill," in which the trick is to appear erudite and topical without saying anything clear enough to be provably wrong. So yeah, that stuff obviously isn't taught in high schools. (And shouldn't be taught anywhere!)
But come on, Democrats and media members! You know perfectly well the types of school activities parents are complaining about when they complain about CRT. If you think those activities are defensible (many are!), then defend them. Performatively failing to understand the complaint, on the grounds that people picked an imperfect term to use when complaining, is totally unconvincing. And it looks elitist and rude - just seizing an opportunity to suggest that you know what CRT means and the complainers don't.
"You know perfectly well the types of school activities parents are complaining about when they complain about CRT. "
What are they? I hear parents complain about CRT, but then when we walk the list of things that are happening in the school they don't have issue with any one of them. But still have issue with CRT in the school.
See "Questionable DEI initiatives" subheading in the article we're all commenting on. "Questionable DEI initiatives" is a much better bucket term than "CRT" - broad enough to encompass both curricular and administrative interventions - but that's why Matt makes the big bucks as a writer I suppose.
The problem is that what Matt writes about is NOT what most parents are complaining about. Or maybe more accurately, that's what they say they are complaining about, but none of it is actually happening at their school. I'm sure there are schools where it is happening. Just like I'm sure there are still schools that say states rights had nothing to do with slavery. But they are lightning rods, not anything near the common case.
If the issue is "Courageous Conversation" training -- then I think we can get most people onboard with dismantling that. If the issue is reading Beloved or about Ruby Bridges or the impact of the FHA on POC in urban housing then I think we have an issue.
That said, I agree -- questionable DEI initiatives is a way better term and something I think myself and other progressives could get behind.
"but none of it is actually happening at their school"
You mean except for things like the 1619 project who's primary narrative is that the purpose of America is racism?
https://dc.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2020/07/21/the-1619-project-curriculum-taught-in-over-4500-schools-frederick-county-public-schools-has-the-option/#sthash.9lpfavcR.dpbs
Or anti Asian attempts to transform the gifted schools in New York or Virginia?
Or all the schools that suddenly have departments of equity and inclusion???
"You mean except for things like the 1619 project who's primary narrative is that the purpose of America is racism?"
This is a great example, one of the most outspoken critics of it, Wilentz, said this, "Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it.” Are there factual mistakes in it, almost certainly, but even amongst historians that take issue with it, they tend to agree with the general direction. I take much less seriously those people that try to take down the 1619 project as a whole.
Here's an article from the National Review about how the perception of what happened in Virginia is wrong: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-virginia-did-not-eliminate-accelerated-math-courses-because-equity/
Again, I note that this is from the National Review, not some crazy left wing journal like the NY Times. ;-)
And even in the case of NYC, I'd grant those parents the right to complain -- again, for most parents no such thing is happening.
Lastly, what is the problem with having DEI programs at schools? Is it so bad to have DEI at our schools now?
I missed the part in your link that said racism was the purpose of America.
I think there is a fair case to be made that "CRT" is not exactly the right terminology, and is in fact being used by right-wingers to conflate a bunch of things so that normie parents and far-right racists feel OK about joining forces since they think they're fighting a common enemy.
However, it would be a more intellectually honest *and* politically effective response to disaggregate the various trends that "CRT" might refer to, concede that some of them are bad, and throw those overboard. Instead, progressives are trying to skate by with their own conflation because they want to keep the bad stuff in place without having to defend it on its merits. So they limit their response to "that stuff isn't CRT" (technically defensible, but misleading and ultimately counterproductive).
I agree that what most people mean when they say "CRT" isn't what was originally meant by CRT, and that the Right (and Ruffo in particular) intentionally conflated a bunch of things. However, I'm not sure that is really a fight worth having.
Essentially all of the efforts to explain this have come across as a disingenuous attempt to score rhetorical points while avoiding defending the merits of the attack. It's like when Conservatives object to "assault weapons" bans on the grounds that an AR-15 isn't technically an assault weapon. I'm not sure that either argument is convincing anyone other than a judge at a debate competition, and probably does more to undercut than advance the persuasive portions of your argument.
Whenever I hear political arguments like that, they remind me of this random Kumail Nanjiani joke at 3:00-4:30 of this NPR show which somehow stuck in my head all these years even though it's just OK: https://maximumfun.org/episodes/bullseye-with-jesse-thorn/kumail-nanjiani-kent-haines-sound-young-america/
You aren't being gaslit, but you are being played -- but it is by the right. And very cleverly. You are right, there is something going on in some schools. But the vast majority of it is fairly innocuous -- although as Matt points out, its not clear how helpful it is. But what the right is doing is trying to conflate a bunch of things to DEI. And you have to fight back about that. Once you cede ground on the terms of the debate, you've largely already lost. If you let me define your party as the party of Hitler, everything else is uphill for you.
Curious, what is the DEI advisor sending home that is deeply objectionable? Almost everything I've received for my child makes a lot of sense and shows the values that I'd expect -- be respectful, be open minded, we value diversity/outreach, everyone is important, etc... I certainly haven't seen the types of thing on Fox News where they say that White people are the problem. Haven't seen that, have you?
"be respectful, be open minded, we value diversity/outreach, everyone is important, etc"
This message wouldn't happen without a DEI advisor? The principle and the teachers can't be trusted to deliver on those counts? Can children only pick up these kinds of values from school? What metrics is your school using to measure whether the advisor is successful?
"This message wouldn't happen without a DEI advisor? The principle and the teachers can't be trusted to deliver on those counts?"
No, they wouldn't. Teachers and principles are already asked to do a lot. And frankly struggle to deliver on other parts of their core job, much less pick this up as well.
"Can children only pick up these kinds of values from school?"
I'd hope not. But from the feedback I hear from the kids, for many these are very new concepts.
"What metrics is your school using to measure whether the advisor is successful?"
I'd say there is a lack of good metrics, and this is something they're working on. But I've heard ideas discussed -- nothing that's rocket science, but things like diversity in afterschool activities, student surveys on various aspects of schooling, %age of students in different groups that do re-tests (these are optional tests you can take to redo tests you performed below your desired result), etc...
An employee with a good salary who's job will be to... make sure after-school activities are diverse?
Improve test results by ethnicity or merely report on the results by ethnicity? The former seems a very hard lift for a single staff member. The latter seems like something existing staff could easily handle.
I think you read that wrong. It's an employee's job to figure out how to measure and improve DEI. I gave some examples on metrics.
The DEI officer / advisor's job will be to figure out how to measure DEI and then make plans for how to improve DEI?
Regarding innocuous DEI content. During my PhD, the university spent a fair amount of money on administrators for (among other things) DEI stuff, but nothing for raises for PhD students, even though rents considerably increased in the meantime. I strongly believe that PhD salaries aren't that great and that it's hard to finish a PhD without parental financial assistance (particularly in hot real estate markets), so seeing the university allocate its resources like that has made me hate (among other things) the DEI initials regardless of actual content.
To the best of my knowledge, American universities are more willing to make us anxious about making the ends meet and then hire an administrator to mentally counsel us, than actually help us make ends meet. My experience in Europe on this issue is considerably different, but there's no DEI there.
My school district is going to raise taxes the maximum amount allowed, under state law, for each of the next 5 years to cover a structural budget gap. Meanwhile our newly elected school board is planning on hiring a DEI advisor and staff.
You should ask the board to show the proof of eficacy for this DEI program.
Much of it is innocuous or good, but that's not true across the board and Yglasias and others have pointed out examples of that.
In particular, I think that the move away from advanced classes (as was happening in NYC and other places) and standardized testing in the name of equity are bad ideas. I think that the push away from the SATs is the sort of thing that is dressed up as anti-racism but will actually hurt poor and minority kids as admissions become based upon squishier standards that are easier for more affluent (usually white) parents to game.
Additionally, while I think it is good to teach about the ways the the US has been and continues to be flawed (although I remember already being taught this sort of thing when I was in school 20 years ago), I don't like the idea of trying to make kids feel guilt or shame for things that they are not responsible for. Whether or the extent to which this is happening is harder to nail down that the advanced placement/standardized test issue I discussed above. A lot of it depends on how particular lessons are taught, which almost certainly differs on a school-to-school or even teacher-to-teacher basis. But, while a lot of people deny that this is going on, a lot of those same people will then argue how it would be a good thing if it was going on (See, e.g. Nicole Hannah Jones' tweets over the weekend).
As for my local school, I haven't seen anything particularly objectionable, but I bring it up as an example of how things are clearly changing. The DEI advisor is a new position, hired last year.
Ultimately, I don't think that this push is necessarily a bad thing, but when you see an increase in anti-racist/DEI/"CRT" initiatives in schools, and one side says they are bad while the other side denies that anything is happening, I tend to get suspicious of the side telling me to ignore what I'm seeing with my own eyes. In particular, when they say "don't worry, the programs we deny are going on definitely aren't teaching your kid to feel bad because they are white," I'm disinclined to take them at their word.
The push away from advanced classes in NYC is a bad thing. Although even the National Review had a story that some of these stories may be overblown, e.g., https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-virginia-did-not-eliminate-accelerated-math-courses-because-equity/
The SAT thing is more interesting. Matt has made good points that automation (taking humans out of the equation) will often reduce bias. I'm not sure though that the SAT test as constructed is the right way to do it. I'm OK if we want to take a step back and be more thoughtful about it. I'm also OK to see if having test-optional impacts results, negatively or positively.
And do you see people denying DEI initiatives? Here in Seattle it's very well known. It's on the schools website. But we aren't doing CRT. We aren't teaching kids to feel bad, white or black. I find it hard to believe that your school is denying DEI initiatives either, as they hired someone to focus on it.
Again, I think conservatives have done a great job at conflating DEI with anti-whiteness. And again, I find it almost Orwellian that they've managed to create the narrative that society is anti-white, and if you try to say there are anti-black aspects to society that you are pushing an anti-white narrative.
Since the history of public schools in the United States at least. I can't speak for other countries.
The DEI movement seem to be largely in epistemic closure and suffering the same failures of other movements in this situation. Once you start to regularly dismiss people, or even data, that disagree with you as invalid, it's game over. You lose the ability to learn from and adapt to reality. You also become prey for exploitation by grifters and reputation launderers.
It doesn't mean it can't accumulate power, but in terms of delivering positive outcomes, its prospects seem bleak.
I think this is entirely correct, except that it almost certainly does mean "it can't accumulate power."
The GOP will happily pre-empt local governments that might still be dominated by Wokeists from doing anything they want, and they can't win at the state level, let alone Federal.
Of course, those preemptions will also cover things like "let's liberalize zoning laws", "let's procure EVs for government fleets", "let's end natural gas hook-ups in new construction".
I'm not sure you're correct about the state level. I'm pretty sure there are some states where people of that ideological persuasion (whatever one wishes to call them) can obtain sufficient power to impose their agendas on public education systems, at least for awhile.
Perhaps. I'm struggling to identify any other than Massachusetts, Washington, New York, and California, though.
As we're seeing, even NJ isn't really blue enough, such that the mere association of that camp with Murphy helped to almost cost him the election. In VA, the Democrats' deflections on the topic did cost them the election.
If New Jersey isn't blue enough to hand control to the wokeists, then that rules out basically everything right of New York.
And even in the few big states that are that blue, the local big tent Democratic parties are likely to primary or recall such a governor with great success after they get started down that path.
Which, I suppose, is where your last sentence comes in.
Over here in Oregon, the Portland metro area is so far to the left of the rest of the state that they've almost reach Hawaii. The synopsis of the Multnomah County website begins: "Multnomah County is committed to building equity and justice in our community by transforming systems, affecting policies, meeting the needs of overlooked..."
Combined with a couple of other liberal counties like Lane and, increasingly, Deschutes, they outnumber the rest of the state to the point that the GOP only really exists at the local level. And, as a result, they have become completely unmoored from reality, basically one big backlash to the even scarier, leftier caricature of the Dems that they are reacting to.
Voters are increasingly asked to chose between woke left-wing lunatics and dangerous right-wing lunatics. So the wokes get a lot of the normie liberal votes from around the state who are really just voting against the doomsday prepper with a face tattoo that says State of Jefferson. The Dems seem to take from that the lesson that they're winning by turning out the progressive base and they rightly see how crazy the GOP is here, so they march ever lefter and I wind up voting for a vegan yogi with who hands out copies of How to be an Anti-Racist door to door. That is why we still have an f-ing *outdoor* mask mandate statewide despite the fact that I need binoculars to make out my neighbors' Trump flags.
I don't know about New Jersey, but I lived in Massachusetts for a few years and, while it is very "blue" politically, your median Bostonian would run away screaming from the Oregon Country Fair. Plus the Massachusetts GOP isn't insane, so you are actually presented with a viable alternative if you don't like when the Dems are offering.
David R.just now
The West Coast state GOP organizations seem to have reacted to their rapid degradation from "natural party of government" to "borderline lunatic fringe" by embracing the "lunatic fringe" and doing its best to get rid of the "borderline".
AZ and NV seem to be headed the same way as CA, OR, WA, and CO.
It would be entertaining to watch them do the same in the East, but it seems unlikely. Especially after VA, when the state GOP rigged a convention to push through someone other than a rabid Trumpist, and won because of it.
The GOP in Virginia did something completely sane out of self-interest, which is something that I think the Oregon Dems are still perfectly capable of. They had to bypass their own primary voters to nominate a rational candidate, but that wouldn't work here because the GOP brand is so damaged the nominee would still lose to anyone with a D by their name.
Oregon has always been full of political weirdos, but the GOP base was blue-collar workers, mainly in the timber industry. When that went away the base of the party wound up in hollowed-out backwaters (like the one Nicholas Kristof—who is trying to run for governor—always writes about). Once the Bay Area transplants moved on from Seattle to Portland, it was a short walk to the state GOP becoming a party of protest candidates.
I know little of Virginia politics, but I think a prerequisite of the dynamics at play in Oregon is to have a solid base of lefties in the first place. And something tells me that the concentration of smelly hippies is much lower in Richmond than Portland. But it does become self-reinforcing; once one party moves past dissembling and pandering and just loses its grip on reality, the other one can pursue whatever boutique politics the primary electorate is in to.
The funny thing about Arizona is that the GOP there seems to be radicalizing all by itself—but historically I think they are more similar to Virginia in that it was a red state not that long ago. So maybe they'll have to start disintermediating their primary voters to win statewide too.
I'd think Hawaii, Oregon, and Connecticut might also fall into that category, but even limiting it to Massachusetts, Washington, New York, and California is still something around 70 million people. My last sentence is referring to the likelihood that it would take a couple electoral cycles for moderation/backlash (depending on how you want to frame it) to get going.
Well, if R C is to be believed, Oregon is basically there already, but it took the state GOP going insane to open the door to it. Which narrows this down to CA, OR, and maybe WA. CO in a decade or two.
It's not happening in MA, RI, or CT, probably not in NY either.
Great post. What is particularly worrying is the absolute refusal among progressive elites to even consider the possibility that they need to think about these issues - both about their substantive merits, and about their impact on election outcomes.
An illustration of this mindset was the line: "CRT is a graduate school framework that is not taught in Virginia K-12 schools."
Really? What parent who is upset about the issues that Matt lists will be persuaded by that?
As the putative "smart party," the Democrats responding, "You're an idiot; we don't teach actual CRT because that's a law school program" is one of the dumbest things out there. A smart party would think, when people are outraged by "CRT in schools" what is their anger really about and how do we try to address it?
It's dumb, though in a different way, like saying that "defund the police" isn't *really* about closing down police departments, but blah blah blah. Or saying, "Republicans will call any Democrat a socialist, so why not just nominate a socialist?"
Public messaging is hard enough when you don't shoot yourself in both feet.
Especially when they're shooting themselves in the foot after putting their foot in their mouth.
To quote Kendi on being willing to reassess the efficacy of messaging: "What if we measure the radicalism of speech by how radically it transforms open-minded people.... What if we measure the conservativism of speech by how intensely it keeps people the same.... At a time when I thought I was the most radical, I was the most conservative" [because he turned his audience off by the way he spoke to them].
One of the frustrating things about reading Kendi is how often he sets out principles that seem right and necessary, even obvious, to ending racism -- treating people as individuals, not conflating the individual with the group, etc.-- but then when it comes time to make a policy recommendation he doesn't follow his own principles to their logical conclusion. Instead he reverts to a kind of crude racial essentialism that takes racial classifications as prior to everything else about society.
He's admirable open about thinking out loud and changing his mind as he works through things, so I'll be interested to see where his thinking lands in another ten years or so. But for now, Democratic politicians should stay away from him with a ten foot pole.
I agree with this and also have a very “Ah great!” “What? Dude really?!” Relationship with Kendi.
On this particular point I wonder if he is actually on the cusp of putting forth a new way that we value our society away from the smartest and most skilled entirely.
There’s an aspect of me that wonders if we’ve actually maxed out what we can do with available education. And that it might be time to entertain radically different ideas about what we should do to achieve more humans feeling worth and dignity.
I couldn’t agree more, I think Kendi makes some truly thought-provoking observations about society then mixes in some weird, hypocritical race essentialism and comes to some bizarre conclusions. For example, his “what if there are other forms of intelligence beyond what can be measured on a IQ test?” is undeniably true! But to extend that to say “standardized tests are racist” is to buy in to the idea that the standardized tests were ever a measure of human worth and dignity.
It often seems like Kendi is shying away from the implications of his own analysis because of a strong sentimental attachment to the black ethnic identity of the community he grew up in - the neighborhoods, foods, lingo, HBCUs, all of it - which he (correctly) sees as threatened by assimilation and acceptance of black Americans into the mainstream. So he falls back into race essentialism rather than pursue his own analysis to its end. I'm sympathetic to that but ultimately come down on the side of "join the club". That's the fate of every ethnic subgroup that has mourned the watering down of its distinctiveness as its members became more integrated to mainstream American society. You can be a discrete and insular minority, like Mennonites or Amish, or you can be part of mainstream society, but you can't be both. The good news is assimilation isn't a one-way street; American society and culture changes too.
One more note… Kendi gets called “CRT,” but no one notes that he explicitly challenges two tenants of pop-CRT: that black people have no power, and that black people can’t be racist about white people. (Note that pop-CRT is itself a bastardization of academic CRT, which has its own issues but is not something Kendi claims to speak for or about.)
Japan and Finland.
Virtually everyone is afforded the essential dignity of work, that's reasonably compensated and afforded some basic respect regardless of exactly what the job is. The rewards for clambering to the top of the pyramid are a bit more muted to pay for it all, but still there. And no one is desperately concerned about falling down once or twice in life, because they won't be damned to poverty as a result.
Meritocracy is a failure.
The idea that teachers should be highly paid professionals on par with lawyers and physicians is anathema to both sides of our political system. Moreover schools of education are entirely unwilling to raise the standards for admission to something resembling what they do in Japan or Finland. Finally, parents are not keen on turning over most of the teaching and curriculum-making authority to classroom teachers. They would prefer those decisions are made by state legislatures or at the very least elected school boards. So, while I agree that Japan, Finland, and many other nations offer examples of good things we could do, I don't think there's going to be much support for it here. Heck, you only have to read the comments here to learn how much disdain the average liberal has for teachers. (And to be fair, I am quite critical of schools overall and am deeply upset by unions fights against vaccine mandates, but I do generally have a positive opinion of teachers, having worked with them my whole adult life.)
Obviously “meritocracy is a failure” is an incredibly bold and loaded statement.
But to unpack it I would consider two angles that I think of in which meritocracy may have “failed.”
1) The points mentioned. It really makes people who can’t climb atop the pyramid feel just bad in life and constantly worried that they’re a slip away from losing it all.
2) This is a more subtle and perhaps darker one. Is meritocracy actually failing to deliver its intended gems even for those at the top? When we see our smartest people working in taxi cabs, nicotine, and food delivery branded as technology. When we see companies like Zillow’s data scientists run the company to the point that 1/4 of its workforce had to be let go. When we still don’t have our self driving cars. When the pandemic rages on… is pumping the best and the brightest to lead. Working?
Another though that goes along with this: do we really even have a meritocracy? It seems like we often sell aspects of our society as meritocratic and then it turns out they probably aren't (i.e. Ivy League schools).
Another thought...
need edit buttons
This is also a point.
"Meritocracy" is one of the more common covers for "rampant rent-seeking" in the US.
So add that to the list of major flaws that are eating us alive.
These were two of the three big reasons floating around my mind; it's miserable for the folks who aren't deemed to "have value in a modern economy", and "meritocracy + financialization = wild misallocation of productive talent."
The third was that it doesn't make the people who reach the top of the pyramid any happier, either, because they *still* feel like they're a slip away from losing it all.
Japan and Finland are very narrowly defined ethnostates. Japanese and Finns are all family to each other if you want to put it that way. It is much easier to take care of people perceived to be family in this way. Their experience is not remotely applicable to the continental-scale, multi-ethnic, immigration-friendly nation that is the United States. Americans are not family to each other, we are many families who are all together in a project heading into the future.
You'll find me on the record saying that I do not wish to become Sweden or Finland.
But you'll also find me on the record saying that the degree to which we've allowed "meritocracy" to govern everything about our system, and the extent to which it's been used as an excuse for outright corruption and rent-seeking under the guise of "the best and brightest win out" is rotting us from the inside out.
I'm merely saying that we can, indeed must, file the roughest edges off the system for everyone, such that pretty much everyone gets a living wage, healthcare is the responsibility of the state, housing gets built in quantities adequate to prevent it from becoming a speculative vehicle (he said, as he bought a third investment property last week), and tertiary education is more than an expensive plaything for the idle rich.
I agree with you completely on all of this. I guess what I'm saying is that we have to find a different model and a different path to this goal. It may be that we can't have what Sweden or Finland (or Japan) has, but we can have something better than what we have now, that works for our unique circumstances.
Kendism vs Kendi?
People who engage with his ideas critically vs people who didn’t even read his book and built their understanding of his ideas from memes and tv interviews (on the left and right).
I've read and heard enough Kendi (and DiAngelo) to conclude that life is too short and he doesn't deserve my time to read his entire oeurvre. If people like Kendi and DiAngelo remain in the middle of these debates, that's our fault as liberals and Democrats. We should retire them to the obscurity they so richly deserve.
I think that’s a fair stance to take and he’s definitely overrated. DiAngelo is a borderline psychopath.
I very much hope there will be a post about what is happening in higher education. There, the DEI push really is very aggressive: strong opposition to the use of standardized tests, demands that admissions/hiring make identity a primary consideration, and dramatic expansion of the DEI administrative apparatus. And on top of that, of course an endless list of signaling issues like renaming buildings, new rules about pronouns, etc.
All this has less of an immediate impact on election outcomes that K-12 education, but the long term effects are highly damaging. These efforts fundamentally seek to undermine the meritocratic system that has made US science and higher education the envy of the world. In terms of politics and culture, they make it absolutely clear to half the population that academics are in a very real way their adversaries. Of course they are going to not trust the pronouncements of the academic elites on climate change, public health, etc. Not to mention the impact on funding for research and higher education.
Good points Gunnar. DEI bureaucracies have become part of the ever-growing administration of universities, even in the face of COVID hiring freezes and the increasing adjunctification of the professoriate. The answer to every issue is always hire more administrators!
This is rhetorical inflation though isn't it. A person can agree or disagree with the idea, but it is very hard to see how 'renaming buildings' and 'new rules about pronouns' can have 'highly damaging long term effects'. Even on stronger ground like 'making identity a primary consideration in hiring' you would need to persuade me about 'highly damaging long term effects', though I can see the argument against doing this.
The "cultural" issues are interesting. Some of them are laudable - working on being more inclusive is generally good, removing confederate generals seems reasonable, etc. But pushing *super* aggressively on issues that were outside of the Overton window in the very recent past, and rub even the middle of the country the wrong way is just a bad idea. It alienates people who would normally be your allies, it is enormously energizing to the R base, and it definitely erodes trust with the public that the universities they fund are worth investing in.
Sorry, but I'm confused. I thought by 'highly damaging long term effects' you meant on children's education. Are you instead talking about a] the Democrat party, b] the causes of racial justice etc etc, and/or c] universities' future funding?
I mean that these efforts are a frontal attack on what I consider to be the crown jewels of Western civilization - the scientific process, evidence based inquiry, free speech, liberalism and tolerance (in the classical sense), meritocracy, individualism, etc. The short term threat I focused on here was the impact on higher education and scientific research, but my concern is broader.
Okay, I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree. I don't for a moment think that renaming buildings, using people's preferred pronouns or affirmative action in hiring pose the risk of highly damaging long term effects to the foundations of western civilisation, and I go back to the original point that this is an awful lot of rhetorical inflation.
Western civilisation will be just fine.
Preach it.
I have yet to be disappointed by cranking my bullshit meter up to 11 at the first invocation of "equity".
Also,
' And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. '
"Black people/black cultures are just intrinsically worse at writing" sounds... kinda racist!
Everything Kendi says sounds, if you strip away the bullshit, kinda racist.
It's like he set out, from day one, to completely and utterly validate the phrase "racism of low expectations," twenty-odd years after the Republicans invented it as a strawman.
Also note that the first thing that comes up when you google "soft bigotry of low expectations" is a thing from the "Racial Equity Institute" screeching about how using that very phrase maintains white supremacy.
We live in hell.
As a parent of an 8 year old in a mixed-income neighborhood in the pacific northwest, this column encapsulates my experience so exactly it’s startling. The school closures were terrible (and in retrospect a clear mistake that went on too long); they hurt the literacy progress of my son’s lower SES peers more this his higher SES ones; the district has a variety of equity & DEI initiatives that seem not harmful but just wasteful; and the most politically progressive parents & educators I know are increasingly hostile to banal measurement tests for the kids.
It’s not a catastrophic situation- the school is still good, reasonable people can disagree about the closures & mitigation policies, etc. But the 3 things Matty describes here are a package of trends headed in the wrong direction. Backlash from some swing parents isn’t surprising to me.
I think this is missing one piece that is especially enraging to parents. The attack on gifted education and tracking, and the rationale that underlies it - that there’s no such thing as intellectual giftedness or some kids who are smarter than others or better at math or reading - is going to be basically a non-starter for white collar parents who are meritocracy high achievers. Especially if they 1. Suffered through a public school experience that ignored their needs as children or 2. Immigrated to this country on the basis of their intellectual achievements.
Do normal people care about gifted education or is this more specific to the type of person who pays $80 a year to subscribe to a political economy blog?
Normal parents, almost any way you want to define it, definitely do care about gifted programs. I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood in the rustbelt, and the 10% of students who were in the gifted program had parents who were (off the top of my head) bus drivers, car salesmen, building maintenance worker, a truck driver, a mechanic and one software engineer (me / my dad). They definitely cared and they wanted their kids to do better than they had, which in almost every case I'm aware of, they did.
Teacher unions have latched on to DEI initiatives as yet another way to avoid accountability.
The biggest people pushing DEI are Gates Foundation, Zuck/Chan foundation, and other well funded education reform orgs.
Can’t wait for Matty to get yelled at by woke white dudes on Twitter
I just checked to see what the vibe of the reactions were. Not so bad overall but my favorite "yelled at by woke white dudes" response was:
"Standardized testing is a ridiculous way to judge performance. It's pop science, at best. Get rid of such nonsense and teach children reality and how to live in multicultural America. Pretending it's 1950 isn't going to help them compete in the 21st century."
It's impressive how that comment was entirely devoid of content despite having so very many words.
I was just googling around to do a quick fact check of the claim I ended up making in another comment here that anti-testing arguments often say standardized tests can't measure "what really matters", and what I learned from that plus the response you mention here is: people seem prone to confusing "one particular standardized test that comes readily to mind" with "all standardized testing ever".
I would say the first part of that tweet is the least ridiculous. And we should "teach children reality" is the most ridiculous.
But standardized testing reminds me of what Churchill said about democracy. It's the worst way to measure performance except for all the others that have been tried. Measuring performance is just generally really hard in most contexts. But singling out standardized tests, which have pros as well as cons, feels grossly misguided.
This article is pretty spot on. I’m going to add several additional points.
1. While kids were at home parents got to see the curriculum a lot closer up then they did while their kids went to school. There are a whole lot of cultural lessons that are integrated with everything from math to science. There is a whole Lotta bullshit work it doesn’t really have any added value to whatever subject is being taught.
2. The gaps in education might even be worse, because the highest performing kids, Were actually able to learn more than they would have in school when their hamper down by learning at a pace of slower kids. I 15-year-old did two years of math in one year because it was self-paced during Covid. She would’ve never been able to do that if she was stuck in a normal math class where everyone had to go at the same pace.
3. The back-and-forth of kids between virtual school and in class school whenever someone is expose store has close contact is very frustrating for parents. One of my daughters got Covid, and we were actually relieved… Because now for a few months she doesn’t have to isolate if one of her friends expose her.
A few random observations.
1. For many families, schools are hugely important both to educate their kids and as day care centers for two full-time working parents. When I was a kid, two working parents weren't the norm, and when my dad was sent to Malaysia for a year, my mom, who went with him with kids in tow, went to our school, borrowed the school books for her three kids (7th, 5th and 3rd graders) and we were home schooled for a year to no disadvantage. It took about an hour a day. My sister in Fayetteville, Arkansas, home-schooled her daughters because the public schools were so awful. No one in my grandfather's generation had access to public schools.
2. While union membership has declined in America, public sector unions in my lifetime have increased significantly, with especially dramatic effects on schooling and policing. It seems increasingly clear not all these effects are being embraced by voters.
3. Private sector unions, which are vestiges of what they once were, have come to be seen, and probably are, patronage machines where membership is inherited like in medieval guilds.
4. They enormously drive up construction costs in New York and make Matt's dream of cheap housing for a billion Americans a chimera. Sad.
I will content myself with saying that I believe, strongly, that a patriotic history curriculum is useful and important. I am not saying we should not teach the full history of the United States but, as Ross Douthat writes:
"If historical education doesn’t begin with what’s inspiring, a sense of real affection may never take root — risking not just patriotism but a basic interest in the past."
Or, in my view, you can also get an unhealthy attitude where in every case you see all of your country's ills without being able to see your country's successes (the current Progressive sin in my mind).
Progressives may disagree, but I think Americans should want their children to love their country. Progressives seem to want to make people hate their country (in an effort, I think, to raise them to be good Progressive voters who despite the Republican Party) except for a handful of scenarios.
I think a large chunk of the debate about how to teach American history is rooted in different views of patriotism, and Peter Beinart sketched out the two basic views a while back: http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1818195,00.html
Progressives are not patriotic. Period. I do not agree with this at all. Beinart wrote:
"'I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.' Will make this country great? It wasn't great in the past? It's not great as it is?
The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law."
Progressives do not see America as a set of ideals: they see America as a flawed, white supremacist, racist, country which is, at best, in need of reform, at worst must be torn out root and stem and rebuilt. They reject the ideals the United States was built on and, instead, want to replace them with their own.
Which makes this less a debate about patriotism, and more whether or not the United States should have ever existed in the first place.
I think progressives want people to love ideas. And then measure their country against these ideas and learn how to make changes to move their country closer to these views. Loving your country first will invariably put you in a mindstate where you justify the bad, because you love your country. In many ways this is a major distinction between right and left. The right wants to justify all the ills of the country (and make the country more like it was when they learned to love it). The left wants to focus on ideas they value and move the country toward it, even if it means saying that the country they were raised in did it completely wrong.
That isn't accurate at all. It is actually based on an misperception of what love even is. Loving your family members does not invariably put you a mindstate where you justify the bad that they do. Parents who love their kids aren't any less able to call their kids out when they do something wrong: if anything, it's the opposite.
You're around different parents than I. Having spent time in schools the number of times I've seen parents claim their child "could never" when everyone at the school was like "yeah, they probably did" is countless. Just about the only time I ever seen parents harder on their kids is when they coach their kids, and even then it is situational (they'll yell at their kid more, but they won't bench them).
Is it your view that the reason why those parents do those things is that they love their kids too much, and that they'd do a better job if they loved their kids less?
It depends on what you view the role of the parent to be. In some sense the main job is to make sure your child accumulates as much as they can. This is loving the material child, and not the character of the child.
But if your focus is on the character of the child. The idea of what the child can be then you want the child to have growth experiences. You don't want to defend the child against growth, but rather want the child to learn -- even if it means fewer material accumulations in the short-term.
Both are about love. There's love of the institution (the body/material) and love of ideas (character). They'll lead to different behaviors.
I don't know what Progressives want, but I do know that fights over history are inevitably about the present not the past.
Agree about this - the stories we tell each other about the past are about the present. The "true" facts about some long dead Founding Father are no more relevant today than the "true" facts about Zeus and Hera or Adam and Eve. They are for all intents and purposes today mythical characters that exist only in our imagination; if we stopped talking about them, they would cease to exist. So we as well have a good inspiring story rather than a bad one.
Are you seriously comparing the Founding Fathers to mythical gods, who we can't prove exist?
Sure, the Founding Fathers once existed and walked the Earth as flesh and blood mortals, but they long ago died and returned to dust. They only exist today in our imaginations and only matter to the extent we the living choose to make them matter, same as with mythical gods and other creatures.
It certainly is the case that history is so large that we can only focus on some parts, and which parts we focus on at a given time is largely dictated by the concerns of the present, but creating a myth and trying to understand what historical figures did are different projects.
This is an absurd comparison and comment which quite frankly makes it impossible for me to engage.
Another thing I love about this Navigating EdEquityVA chart is that it presents five keys to ensuring that equity chiefs succeed, but it presents no metrics by which we could evaluate the work product of those equity chiefs, even qualitatively.
The slacker in me would love a high-level job with no performance metrics!
Metrics are white supremacy. /sarcasm
"high-level job with no performance metrics"
So... a grift?
These debates always seem to be presented as "Democratic Teachers vs Republican Parents". I really wish we had more perspectives from non-white parents on how they understand these issues, and what they think should be prioritized.
The impression I get is that these parents are far less invested in "exposing and dismantling systems of oppression", and far more interested in having their children succeed under the systems as they exist today, and the Discourse papers over this fault line.
Yeah there are plenty of situations where the activists and such are wildly unrepresentative of the back/latin groups they claim to be fighting for, and I this is clearly one of them
My impression is that a lot of progressive opposition to standardized testing is a misapplication of the (I think correct) progressive response to psychometric testing via-a-vis "The Bell Curve'. A lot of progressives know that test composition for things like IQ tests can have distorted results for cultural reasons and combine that with the knowledge that teacher's unions are against standardized tests and conclude that they suffer from the same problems, to the same degree. There is a major difference however, in that a standardized test is there to measure knowledge and skills that that the students are specifically trained for and, as such, rely on less culturally acquired knowledge to perform.
I know it's as huge meme that Conservatives are always saying that the 'real racists' are the activists who want to use policy to preferentially handle people of different races. However absurd that is in general in the case of standardized testing, where you have activists saying that the achievement gap is not a resources problem but is someone inherent to being black in America, and yeah... that sounds exactly what someone running a Jim Crow state would say...
Wasn't the big fight actually about having bilingual classrooms or offering those services to kids who didn't speak English as their first language? Isn't that just bog-standard now? So much of the progressive agenda in 2021 feels like they've won on all their good ideas, and now they're scraping the bottle of the barrel to keep getting those donations/institutional dollars. And the quality of the arguments, scholarship and moral clarity goes down down down.
The irony is that dual language immersion schools are WILDLY popular now. Waitlists hundreds of kids long, parents begging to get their kids into a school where they don't speak english in the classroom. I think sometimes we take for granted when we win just how thoroughly once seemingly inconceivable ideas become rote standard and people refuse to acknowledge the victories and progress made.
I remember this fight. Hell in *California* it was illegal to teach English as Second Language students in their native language. At all. The only permissible way for a school to teach a kid English was total immersion. Arizona only repealed their version of this law in 2014! It's not that long ago that the "consensus" was that dual language instruction was bad (unless it was for kids whose first language was already English.) imo this is a great victory for anyone who wanted education to be culturally responsive and sensitive to the needs of non-dominant communities. But that win just gets forgotten in the face of the next big fight, whatever it may be.
The original California ban was because there was a panic about poor immigrant kids not learning English at all in Spanish immersion programs that just helped natives. It was left-coded more than right-coded, back when Democrats liked test scores more.
(Help natives-> helped native English speakers learn Spanish)
I'm not enough to remember this fight but I've read a little about it. Language exposure seems great. But from what I understand of the Right's concerns, way back when, they were worried that Spanish (or whatever other language) instruction would slow down or halt assimilation. That seems like a legitimate concern. Also from what I read, the majority of immigrant parents agreed, which is why the right actually won on this issue at the time.