Only just read this article and have a couple of comments. I do agree very much with your closing comments and found the article informative and insightful. Am wondering about your comment:
"America’s education schools have a very poor reputation among normal social scientists, and as far as I can tell, that’s for good reason. They churn out a lot of work that’s not just very political, but largely devoid of sound empirical research."
Having obtained an Hons. B.A. and gone on to graduate school in Philosophy, I enjoyed the opportunity to mingle (at a somewhat later age than most) with people in various disciplines. For what it is worth, my view is that there was no group on campus more "political" than social scientists, normal or abnormal. The antagonism between Marxists and Liberals in Social Science programmes was often very hard to stomach in the grad school pub. There was such real hatred there, one could split the air.
Otherwise, my personal view is the the problem still is one of class or, if has begun come up, the difference between the "haves" and the "have-nots". Maybe life is easy for some people but for many of us it can be dreadfully difficult and requires a near-constant struggle. From an intersectionality point of view, most people do have various factors that intersect to create a manifold problem for those who just want to be human and care for other humans.
Something I think about a lot... As fewer and fewer households have school age children at any given time (combo of smaller households, aging population, and later average first birth), how much does this stuff matter? In the 70's, most (70%+) had a school aged child at any given time, meaning most Americans would comen into contact with whatever was being taught in schools. Today... Not so much. What is out there at a policy level that bag reach a majority of households anymore to effect cultural change?
I don’t know what to think with the persistent framing of “whiteness” as a problem. What does that mean? To my ear I hear what the King in Braveheart said about Scotland “the problem with Scotland is it’s filled with Scots”.
Yes, America is majority white and most white people act white and therefore whiteness is pervasive in American society. What is the solution to “dethroning whiteness” (Michael Eric Dyson used that phrase)? Should I act less white?
I would like to have a long conversation with Dyson about his meaning and the applied approach to doing that? I would like to be able to hear Dyson at 3/4 speed and without all the background music he likes to add, just the actual lyrics.
Critiquing whiteness appears to have become a way of saying bad things about white people without doing it directly. A kind of proxy. In my mind, I always change the word whiteness to white people. Maybe I’m wrong to do that? If so, why?
"They keep coming back to it as a topic while repeatedly taking potshots at the validity of SAT and LSAT tests without ever mounting a sustained argument in its favor. I kept wanting to scream at the book “DID YOU GUYS NOT READ THE PART ABOUT MATERIAL INTERESTS?”"
Matt can you explain what you meant here? I didn't understand this paragraph.
The quote in the next paragraph explains: "A persistent internal critique accuses the movement of straying from its materialist roots and dwelling overly on matters of concern to middle-class minorities — microaggressions, racial insults, unconscious discrimination, and affirmative action in higher education."
I think that paragraph is vague if you don't follow this closely, but I read it as him repeating the argument that standardized testing is getting attacked as racist right now precisely because delegitimizing the *least* inegalitarian method of admissions aligns with material goals of well-off people who want their kids admitted to Harvard/etc with letters of rec and extracurriculars.
I guess the retort here is the consciousness raising of anti-racism will create the popular political will to actually do the things we empirically know result in equity. I’m not saying I believe anti-racist training will do that (I don’t) but you can argue convincingly that these policy levers are avoided because people don’t adequately appreciate the enduring legacy of racism.
I do some adjunct on-line teaching for the university that I retired from. Today I was grading some responses in a Family Studies class. The students were asked to make any comments they might have on the chapter on Parenting. Anyway, one student asked me, "Why do women generally do most of the childcare [presumably in the U.S.] Do you think it's because during slavery the slave women took care of the children for the white women, and it was only after slavery that women had to care for children?" So no, my annoying woke self did not respond, "Girl, the patriarchy preceded the U.S. slave trade." I patiently explained some of the historical and biological reasons why women in most societies do the bulk of childcare. But I suppose her question is a semi-logical conclusion of a (very) simplistic understanding of CRT.
If critical race theory truly rejects, “the very foundations of the liberal order, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” then isn’t CRT sufficiently unhinged from secular enlightenment values to be considered, under the law, as a religion?
It violates the establishment clause for government to mandate “intelligent design” in schools, because such a mandate amounts to government advancement of a religion. Why is CRT different than intelligent design, if CRT, like intelligent design, rejects enlightenment rationalism?
Does CRT need to call itself a “religion” to be treated as one? Legally this is not so. And surely democrats would not want the “QAnon History of the US” mandated in schools by Republican state legislators. Surely Qanon is a cult analogous to a religion and so advancing QAnon history in schools should violate the separation of church and state. Why is CRT different if it self expresses itself as an ideology unmoored from secular principles and objectivity?
We need to have a serious discussion about what the “separation of church and state means” in the 21st century, especially as America abandons traditional religion and incubates cult-like ideologies on social media.
If an avowedly subjective ideology cannibalizes our “objective institutions”, then this will break pluralistic democracy.
I haven't read the book Yglesias is talking about nor am I particularly familiar with CRT, but the rationalism actually advocated for by the great Enlightenment thinkers ("Enlightenment Rationalism) was frequently sexist, racist, and ablist, not to mention have lots of other opinions that we today might have issue with e.g., lots of passages in Kant, Hume, etc. (Kant famously defends dueling as a legitimate means to resolve disputes!).
Whatever idea of Enlightenment Rationalism you are working with is a cartoon or a popularized idea.
“Neutral principles of constitutional law” are not a cartoon and they govern your life wether you want them to or not.
If an ideology rejects the very neutral principles of law and objectivity meant to hold our government to account (we call this “the rule of law”), then the government should not be allowed to mandate such unprincipled subjectivity. This is the essence of the “separation of church and state.”
These reality television narratives programmed by news producers are getting more and more heinous. Scaring Asian-American’s is bad enough but then pushing them in front of television cameras to be your political pawns is truly disgusting. Shame on you media!
So what group are you going to psychologically terrorize next? If your political agenda includes scaring children you really should re-think it.
But it’s not just kids, I saw a 6’1” and 210 pounds NFL strong safety talk about the fear he had of being shot by the police. That isn’t rooted in the data. That’s rooted in media propaganda. It really is bad. These journalists needs to think about what it means to be a good human after spending 4 years of blasting Trump (justifiably so) for being a bad one.
Having lived in Los Angeles for forty years, for a long time I bemoaned the arid state of political engagement by the residents. Political campaigns barely exist here. It's rare to even see a yard sign (though more Biden/Harris signs this time around). It seemed that people couldn't be that interested. Perhaps that's why most state leaders tend to come from the Bay area rather than the far more populous southern California.
But now I see the upside of people just going around living their lives. They get much less embroiled in endless, and often pointless, political catfights. Our school board would probably never think of renaming schools a la San Francisco. Ideology is just not a thing here.
*Some* politics is, of course, a necessity for a strong democracy. A rousable citizenry must be able to rise up against the worst excesses of governments, officeholders and politicians.
But this CRT stuff -- on *both* sides -- strikes me as too much politics.
I'll be frank and say that I share the opinion that these bills are pretty much amounting to censorship. After all, many of these states that are introducing these bills are also the same states that have introduced bills that promote the installation of some form of 'Patriotic Education', and criminalizing protest on campuses.
Should any of the anti-racism, or Critical Race Theory, curriculum be improved and scrap the meaningless parts that neither help nor improve a student's understanding? Absolutely, but I feel like the tweet by Connor, and many of those parents complaining about Critical Race Theory are basically just faux-progressives or what was the original definition of SJW: People promoting social justice for social clout and brownie points but really don't believe in it themselves.
Here is the short answer - trying to teach deeply nuanced ideas about race to children in a society where we have big issues with race is about as likely to succeed as my plans to sprout wings and fly. Does anyone ever ask the question of "what is the failure mode of this when it's taught poorly?". If anything, don't ever underestimate the ability of a public school system ran by local school boards (cries in SFUSD school board) to take a good nugget of an idea and turn it into palpable nonsense.
I get that people would be worried about people being taught out-there stuff in elementary school, but I think it's a big disingenuous to separate these sorts of efforts from the idea that it is in fact white people who are the real oppressed ones that seems to be floating around on the right. As Matt points out in the article, burying the fact that you can't teach people that white people have benefitted from racism in the middle of an otherwise OK section on how stereotyping is bad really hamstrings the extent to which you can actually talk about how racism manifests itself. It seems to me the intent is to avoid uncomfortable discussions of race in the first place, to go back to the sorts of triumphalist narratives on the Civil Rights movement etc. that I was taught at that age.
There are plenty who oppose programs of this sort (the odious ones showing up in K-12 settings, not actual critical theory study in universities) who are not on the right.
I think that racism is not institutional or systemic but organic. It is unfortunately human nature to fear anyone who is “different”. Commercial and political institutions may have often found it expeditious to accommodate that grass roots racism but they are not the sources of it.
Why did a restaurant owner in Alabama in 1955 turn away black customers? Why turn away business and profits? Either the owner was willing to indulge his own prejudice at his own expense, or, I think more likely, he calculated that if he served black customers he would lose his white customers. Yeah, he should have stood up for principle, but not everyone selling hamburgers is cut out to be a social pioneer.
This post sort of weirdly dances around the object level issue, and I kind of don't understand why. It's true that real CRT has a lot of genuine insight to offer. It's also true that conservatives straw-man CRT as "that woke stuff that's happening in our kids schools and on twitter".
However, that doesn't change the fact that there is a thing happening in schools and on Twitter that is extremely toxic and dangerous, even if that thing is only loosely related to genuine academic CRT. While I think any article on this subject should call out the fact that conservatives are getting it wrong, and lots of aspects of CRT are valuable and revelatory, it seems weird to focus on those aspects at the expense of the very harmful ideologies that are permeating elementary schools.
I'd love to see a world where we can all sip lattes and discuss the real ideas of merit underlying intersectionality theory, or the nuances of more consequentialist speech regulation. However, it seems like priority number one pretty clearly ought to be removing the people promoting this bastardized version of CRT from positions of power, especially over the developmental process of young children, as quickly as humanly possible.
I had a fascinating discussion with some friends who work in public education in a ritzy-ish blue state suburb (both nonwhite, a principal and a SPED teacher). We were talking about the school board's decision to hire an executive-level administrator whose job was to improve education for black and brown students. Their general attitude was that
1) They wouldn't hire a POC for the position for unspecified reasons
2) Even if they did, the position was a pointless fig leaf that wouldn't do anything to address racism
I responded that I got where they were coming from, and they might be right about the POC thing. But I generally thought that when you hire a high ranking person whose only job is to make sure that something important happens, that is at minimum, a strong material signal of intent that would create at least a nonzero chance that the relevant thing would in fact happen. After all, wouldn't the board be monitoring this person's progress and evaluating their work?
Shockingly, they basically looked kind of puzzled and then said "Yeah, that's a good idea they should totally think of a way to do that".
Coming from the private sector, the idea that you would hire an executive officer in charge of a major policy change and then not actually measure their effect on the outcomes of that policy completely blew my mind.
You don't understand how central offices in schools tend to work. They focus on the paperwork etc and very rarely add value to actual educational practice in the classrooms. Key issue with measuring the effect of anything in education is that it's so hard to do so. See all the controversy with linking teacher pay to performance. If you can't quantify the impact of one teacher, how are you going to quantity a teacher coach or diversity officer?
The conventional wisdom in education seems to be you can’t measure the effect of anything in education. But why? I mean, is that really true?
If you wanted to improve education for students of color, couldn’t you measure improvement with annual standardized testing? Or graduation rates? Mental health or other health metrics? It just doesn’t seem impossible. Just choose what you consider improvement.
Most jobs can be evaluated in terms of whether you are meeting sone criteria of performance.
Or really, if all of those other measures fail you can just articulate some other measure that you believe would be better and then measure it, like they do in literally every other part of human existence.
I'm not saying it's easy- there are lots of cases where measurement of one thing can get in the way of something else that is important. But when something else becomes important you still need to say what it is, and measure that.
I don't think it's true that you can't measure anything. But it's awfully hard to demonstrate much quantitatively. Standardized testing success shows you evidence that a school can teach to a test well, which is different from learning how to learn. Unions certainly play a factor.
I think a lot of decent teachers at great schools think they are amazing. But the problem then comes in, people born on third think they hit a triple. It's hard to do bad teaching with an excellent student body, and decent teaching looks great.
Performance criteria in education thus tends to be what is mentioned in the article - can you tick all the boxes on a state department of education lesson planning form.
I think this is exactly right, and in my mind illustrates well why ideas that center on framing social problems primarily through race and racism is a complete logical and political dead end for liberals.
Regardless of whether you agree that race and racism is the best way to think about social problem X that you want to fix, thinking about any actual problem from a racialized perspective necessarily centers everything on an internalized world that is inherently about hidden motives and drivers that nobody can see or quantify. So it's impossible to build consensus around what actions can make any kind of progress, or what progress even looks like.
In education this can arguably make sense because reasonable people disagree about what a well-educated person looks like. But even as the CRT prism contains a lot of good ideas about understanding society, it's completely unworkable for doing anything practical because it traps everyone in this world where we all agree that racism is intolerable and everywhere, but nobody can agree on what racism actually is or what we need to do about it.
That isn't to say that an effective school administrator couldn't make progress around racial disparity- but it means that they need to mostly focus on the disparity part and be rigorous about that.
Only just read this article and have a couple of comments. I do agree very much with your closing comments and found the article informative and insightful. Am wondering about your comment:
"America’s education schools have a very poor reputation among normal social scientists, and as far as I can tell, that’s for good reason. They churn out a lot of work that’s not just very political, but largely devoid of sound empirical research."
Having obtained an Hons. B.A. and gone on to graduate school in Philosophy, I enjoyed the opportunity to mingle (at a somewhat later age than most) with people in various disciplines. For what it is worth, my view is that there was no group on campus more "political" than social scientists, normal or abnormal. The antagonism between Marxists and Liberals in Social Science programmes was often very hard to stomach in the grad school pub. There was such real hatred there, one could split the air.
Otherwise, my personal view is the the problem still is one of class or, if has begun come up, the difference between the "haves" and the "have-nots". Maybe life is easy for some people but for many of us it can be dreadfully difficult and requires a near-constant struggle. From an intersectionality point of view, most people do have various factors that intersect to create a manifold problem for those who just want to be human and care for other humans.
Something I think about a lot... As fewer and fewer households have school age children at any given time (combo of smaller households, aging population, and later average first birth), how much does this stuff matter? In the 70's, most (70%+) had a school aged child at any given time, meaning most Americans would comen into contact with whatever was being taught in schools. Today... Not so much. What is out there at a policy level that bag reach a majority of households anymore to effect cultural change?
I don’t know what to think with the persistent framing of “whiteness” as a problem. What does that mean? To my ear I hear what the King in Braveheart said about Scotland “the problem with Scotland is it’s filled with Scots”.
Yes, America is majority white and most white people act white and therefore whiteness is pervasive in American society. What is the solution to “dethroning whiteness” (Michael Eric Dyson used that phrase)? Should I act less white?
I would like to have a long conversation with Dyson about his meaning and the applied approach to doing that? I would like to be able to hear Dyson at 3/4 speed and without all the background music he likes to add, just the actual lyrics.
Critiquing whiteness appears to have become a way of saying bad things about white people without doing it directly. A kind of proxy. In my mind, I always change the word whiteness to white people. Maybe I’m wrong to do that? If so, why?
"They keep coming back to it as a topic while repeatedly taking potshots at the validity of SAT and LSAT tests without ever mounting a sustained argument in its favor. I kept wanting to scream at the book “DID YOU GUYS NOT READ THE PART ABOUT MATERIAL INTERESTS?”"
Matt can you explain what you meant here? I didn't understand this paragraph.
The quote in the next paragraph explains: "A persistent internal critique accuses the movement of straying from its materialist roots and dwelling overly on matters of concern to middle-class minorities — microaggressions, racial insults, unconscious discrimination, and affirmative action in higher education."
I think that paragraph is vague if you don't follow this closely, but I read it as him repeating the argument that standardized testing is getting attacked as racist right now precisely because delegitimizing the *least* inegalitarian method of admissions aligns with material goals of well-off people who want their kids admitted to Harvard/etc with letters of rec and extracurriculars.
I guess the retort here is the consciousness raising of anti-racism will create the popular political will to actually do the things we empirically know result in equity. I’m not saying I believe anti-racist training will do that (I don’t) but you can argue convincingly that these policy levers are avoided because people don’t adequately appreciate the enduring legacy of racism.
I do some adjunct on-line teaching for the university that I retired from. Today I was grading some responses in a Family Studies class. The students were asked to make any comments they might have on the chapter on Parenting. Anyway, one student asked me, "Why do women generally do most of the childcare [presumably in the U.S.] Do you think it's because during slavery the slave women took care of the children for the white women, and it was only after slavery that women had to care for children?" So no, my annoying woke self did not respond, "Girl, the patriarchy preceded the U.S. slave trade." I patiently explained some of the historical and biological reasons why women in most societies do the bulk of childcare. But I suppose her question is a semi-logical conclusion of a (very) simplistic understanding of CRT.
If critical race theory truly rejects, “the very foundations of the liberal order, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” then isn’t CRT sufficiently unhinged from secular enlightenment values to be considered, under the law, as a religion?
It violates the establishment clause for government to mandate “intelligent design” in schools, because such a mandate amounts to government advancement of a religion. Why is CRT different than intelligent design, if CRT, like intelligent design, rejects enlightenment rationalism?
Does CRT need to call itself a “religion” to be treated as one? Legally this is not so. And surely democrats would not want the “QAnon History of the US” mandated in schools by Republican state legislators. Surely Qanon is a cult analogous to a religion and so advancing QAnon history in schools should violate the separation of church and state. Why is CRT different if it self expresses itself as an ideology unmoored from secular principles and objectivity?
We need to have a serious discussion about what the “separation of church and state means” in the 21st century, especially as America abandons traditional religion and incubates cult-like ideologies on social media.
If an avowedly subjective ideology cannibalizes our “objective institutions”, then this will break pluralistic democracy.
I haven't read the book Yglesias is talking about nor am I particularly familiar with CRT, but the rationalism actually advocated for by the great Enlightenment thinkers ("Enlightenment Rationalism) was frequently sexist, racist, and ablist, not to mention have lots of other opinions that we today might have issue with e.g., lots of passages in Kant, Hume, etc. (Kant famously defends dueling as a legitimate means to resolve disputes!).
Whatever idea of Enlightenment Rationalism you are working with is a cartoon or a popularized idea.
“Neutral principles of constitutional law” are not a cartoon and they govern your life wether you want them to or not.
If an ideology rejects the very neutral principles of law and objectivity meant to hold our government to account (we call this “the rule of law”), then the government should not be allowed to mandate such unprincipled subjectivity. This is the essence of the “separation of church and state.”
These reality television narratives programmed by news producers are getting more and more heinous. Scaring Asian-American’s is bad enough but then pushing them in front of television cameras to be your political pawns is truly disgusting. Shame on you media!
So what group are you going to psychologically terrorize next? If your political agenda includes scaring children you really should re-think it.
But it’s not just kids, I saw a 6’1” and 210 pounds NFL strong safety talk about the fear he had of being shot by the police. That isn’t rooted in the data. That’s rooted in media propaganda. It really is bad. These journalists needs to think about what it means to be a good human after spending 4 years of blasting Trump (justifiably so) for being a bad one.
Having lived in Los Angeles for forty years, for a long time I bemoaned the arid state of political engagement by the residents. Political campaigns barely exist here. It's rare to even see a yard sign (though more Biden/Harris signs this time around). It seemed that people couldn't be that interested. Perhaps that's why most state leaders tend to come from the Bay area rather than the far more populous southern California.
But now I see the upside of people just going around living their lives. They get much less embroiled in endless, and often pointless, political catfights. Our school board would probably never think of renaming schools a la San Francisco. Ideology is just not a thing here.
*Some* politics is, of course, a necessity for a strong democracy. A rousable citizenry must be able to rise up against the worst excesses of governments, officeholders and politicians.
But this CRT stuff -- on *both* sides -- strikes me as too much politics.
I'll be frank and say that I share the opinion that these bills are pretty much amounting to censorship. After all, many of these states that are introducing these bills are also the same states that have introduced bills that promote the installation of some form of 'Patriotic Education', and criminalizing protest on campuses.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2021/02/26/gop-targets-cancel-culture-in-school-lessons-political-speech
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17644180/political-correctness-free-speech-liberal-data-georgetown
Should any of the anti-racism, or Critical Race Theory, curriculum be improved and scrap the meaningless parts that neither help nor improve a student's understanding? Absolutely, but I feel like the tweet by Connor, and many of those parents complaining about Critical Race Theory are basically just faux-progressives or what was the original definition of SJW: People promoting social justice for social clout and brownie points but really don't believe in it themselves.
Here is the short answer - trying to teach deeply nuanced ideas about race to children in a society where we have big issues with race is about as likely to succeed as my plans to sprout wings and fly. Does anyone ever ask the question of "what is the failure mode of this when it's taught poorly?". If anything, don't ever underestimate the ability of a public school system ran by local school boards (cries in SFUSD school board) to take a good nugget of an idea and turn it into palpable nonsense.
I get that people would be worried about people being taught out-there stuff in elementary school, but I think it's a big disingenuous to separate these sorts of efforts from the idea that it is in fact white people who are the real oppressed ones that seems to be floating around on the right. As Matt points out in the article, burying the fact that you can't teach people that white people have benefitted from racism in the middle of an otherwise OK section on how stereotyping is bad really hamstrings the extent to which you can actually talk about how racism manifests itself. It seems to me the intent is to avoid uncomfortable discussions of race in the first place, to go back to the sorts of triumphalist narratives on the Civil Rights movement etc. that I was taught at that age.
There are plenty who oppose programs of this sort (the odious ones showing up in K-12 settings, not actual critical theory study in universities) who are not on the right.
I think that racism is not institutional or systemic but organic. It is unfortunately human nature to fear anyone who is “different”. Commercial and political institutions may have often found it expeditious to accommodate that grass roots racism but they are not the sources of it.
Why did a restaurant owner in Alabama in 1955 turn away black customers? Why turn away business and profits? Either the owner was willing to indulge his own prejudice at his own expense, or, I think more likely, he calculated that if he served black customers he would lose his white customers. Yeah, he should have stood up for principle, but not everyone selling hamburgers is cut out to be a social pioneer.
I wonder how much it would cost to put a functional conditioner in every classroom in America. Also, school districts should start later in September.
Here is a place to start:
https://quillette.com/2019/03/06/how-ed-schools-became-a-menace-to-higher-education/
https://quillette.com/2019/04/05/what-they-dont-teach-you-at-the-university-of-washingtons-ed-school/
https://quillette.com/2020/08/12/look-whos-talking-about-educational-equity/
This post sort of weirdly dances around the object level issue, and I kind of don't understand why. It's true that real CRT has a lot of genuine insight to offer. It's also true that conservatives straw-man CRT as "that woke stuff that's happening in our kids schools and on twitter".
However, that doesn't change the fact that there is a thing happening in schools and on Twitter that is extremely toxic and dangerous, even if that thing is only loosely related to genuine academic CRT. While I think any article on this subject should call out the fact that conservatives are getting it wrong, and lots of aspects of CRT are valuable and revelatory, it seems weird to focus on those aspects at the expense of the very harmful ideologies that are permeating elementary schools.
I'd love to see a world where we can all sip lattes and discuss the real ideas of merit underlying intersectionality theory, or the nuances of more consequentialist speech regulation. However, it seems like priority number one pretty clearly ought to be removing the people promoting this bastardized version of CRT from positions of power, especially over the developmental process of young children, as quickly as humanly possible.
I had a fascinating discussion with some friends who work in public education in a ritzy-ish blue state suburb (both nonwhite, a principal and a SPED teacher). We were talking about the school board's decision to hire an executive-level administrator whose job was to improve education for black and brown students. Their general attitude was that
1) They wouldn't hire a POC for the position for unspecified reasons
2) Even if they did, the position was a pointless fig leaf that wouldn't do anything to address racism
I responded that I got where they were coming from, and they might be right about the POC thing. But I generally thought that when you hire a high ranking person whose only job is to make sure that something important happens, that is at minimum, a strong material signal of intent that would create at least a nonzero chance that the relevant thing would in fact happen. After all, wouldn't the board be monitoring this person's progress and evaluating their work?
Shockingly, they basically looked kind of puzzled and then said "Yeah, that's a good idea they should totally think of a way to do that".
Coming from the private sector, the idea that you would hire an executive officer in charge of a major policy change and then not actually measure their effect on the outcomes of that policy completely blew my mind.
You don't understand how central offices in schools tend to work. They focus on the paperwork etc and very rarely add value to actual educational practice in the classrooms. Key issue with measuring the effect of anything in education is that it's so hard to do so. See all the controversy with linking teacher pay to performance. If you can't quantify the impact of one teacher, how are you going to quantity a teacher coach or diversity officer?
The conventional wisdom in education seems to be you can’t measure the effect of anything in education. But why? I mean, is that really true?
If you wanted to improve education for students of color, couldn’t you measure improvement with annual standardized testing? Or graduation rates? Mental health or other health metrics? It just doesn’t seem impossible. Just choose what you consider improvement.
Most jobs can be evaluated in terms of whether you are meeting sone criteria of performance.
Or really, if all of those other measures fail you can just articulate some other measure that you believe would be better and then measure it, like they do in literally every other part of human existence.
I'm not saying it's easy- there are lots of cases where measurement of one thing can get in the way of something else that is important. But when something else becomes important you still need to say what it is, and measure that.
I don't think it's true that you can't measure anything. But it's awfully hard to demonstrate much quantitatively. Standardized testing success shows you evidence that a school can teach to a test well, which is different from learning how to learn. Unions certainly play a factor.
I think a lot of decent teachers at great schools think they are amazing. But the problem then comes in, people born on third think they hit a triple. It's hard to do bad teaching with an excellent student body, and decent teaching looks great.
Performance criteria in education thus tends to be what is mentioned in the article - can you tick all the boxes on a state department of education lesson planning form.
I think this is exactly right, and in my mind illustrates well why ideas that center on framing social problems primarily through race and racism is a complete logical and political dead end for liberals.
Regardless of whether you agree that race and racism is the best way to think about social problem X that you want to fix, thinking about any actual problem from a racialized perspective necessarily centers everything on an internalized world that is inherently about hidden motives and drivers that nobody can see or quantify. So it's impossible to build consensus around what actions can make any kind of progress, or what progress even looks like.
In education this can arguably make sense because reasonable people disagree about what a well-educated person looks like. But even as the CRT prism contains a lot of good ideas about understanding society, it's completely unworkable for doing anything practical because it traps everyone in this world where we all agree that racism is intolerable and everywhere, but nobody can agree on what racism actually is or what we need to do about it.
That isn't to say that an effective school administrator couldn't make progress around racial disparity- but it means that they need to mostly focus on the disparity part and be rigorous about that.