Matt writes: "I was disappointed by the trajectory of education policy in both of those cycles, but I did understand what everyone was thinking. The New Jersey gubernatorial primary, by contrast, seems like a situation where there is an objective incentive for someone to take some positions fearlessly, without regard for union politics."
Some Republican friends of mine are befuddled that the GOP is taking positions against trade, against international coalitions, and for government intrusion into private organizations. They can't quite come to grips that their GOP -- the GOP of the Bushes, Romney, McCain, Reagan -- does not exist any more.
I think the same is true for you and the Democratic Party of Clinton (Bill), Obama, Carville, et al. That Party doesn't exist anymore. I hope today's essay, like the Common Sense Democrat Manifesto series, will start to resurrect it.
I think there is some false equivalence here. MAGA is totally rampant in the GOP. Their base clearly supports MAGA. DSA, which I guess is the closest equivalent in the Democratic Party, has 3 Representatives and 1 Senator (Bernie, unofficially I think). Even if you go wider and look at the Congressional Progressive Caucus, they have 1 Senator and 97 Reps. So even that's a clear minority.
It's been extensively discussed how they wield power through a mix of activism, staffing, lobbying and threatening to abandon the coalition if they don't get their way. They have not persuaded the bulk of Democrats to their point of view.
Democrats have moved to the left. Republicans have moved to the lunacy. Single payer healthcare and slavery reparations may not be everybody's cup of tea (they're sure not mine), but they're a far cry from elections denialism, vaccine quackery, and invading Greenland.
There is a version of election denialism in the Democratic Party that I wish got any attention: the propensity of Democrats to falsely attribute Republican legislative majorities to gerrymandering even when the Republican majority is proportional to the GOP's share of the legislative popular vote.
I've seen that from random people on social media, but also Hakeem Jeffries and writers for the NYTimes.
I've seen a belief among Democrats that a "fair map" would produce a Democratic majority, even on a minority of the popular vote.
Again, it's not just randos who say this. This assertion about a "fair map" being a Democratic one in part comes from assessing gerrymanders by the "Efficiency Gap, " ignoring how the Efficiency Gap has a large structural bias in favor of the Democratic Party. This bias, which I haven't seen explored by anyone yet, exists because the Democrats tend to win low-turnout districts and the Republicans tend to win high-turnout districts and that tendency produces more "wasted" votes for the Democratic Party. Hence, Democrats can construe proportionality or slight Republican disproportionality as Republican "gerrymanders."
I might well be missing the swell of these Democratic election denialists who focus on gerrymandering, but when I hear Democrats complain about gerrymandering broadly, the advantage isn't that killing gerrymandering will = massive democratic wins, but that it will = less partisan candidates. E.g., in a gerrymandered district, partisans can get away with pushing an extremist because all you need is people to default to partyline voting to win. In a competitive district, candidates have to appeal much more broadly and win votes across the aisle. Which, theoretically, will produce a congress that cares more about getting things done than impressing the base with posturing.
tl:dr—I think getting rid of it would be a huge win but not because there will be a massive Democratic sweep.
I think you're correct that having less partisan candidates is a motivation by anti-gerrymandering Democrats and that they are sincere in that, but I think that belief about gerrymandering exacerbating partisanship is erroneous.
Just to focus on Republicans who are considered extreme, several of the most notable, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, come from places that would be Republican under any plausible House map. Northwest Georgia and the Florida panhandle are simply very conservative.
Several other extreme Republicans, like Lauren Boebert, represent districts that are centrist. They simply are very conservative people who don't care if they lose reelection (Boebert changed districts because she was vulnerable in her original district). I forget her name, but there was another Arizona Republican extremist who came from a competitive district.
The current chair of the Freedom Caucus, Andy Harris, is from Maryland and is the result of a _Democratic_ gerrymander.
If we were going to combat that kind of extremism, the more viable electoral change would be to change the primary process, ie to have a top-two primary, or, even better, top-four RCV (or top-four STAR).
It is true that 95% of US House districts have become non-competitive, but that is the result of the "Big Sort" and each party making itself unacceptable to moderates who a generation or two ago would have been swing voters. If you analyze results by _county_, you'll see that most American counties have become single-party dominant, despite county boundaries never changing.
Finally, there is a huge problem in drawing House districts to be competitive, in that these swing districts tend to swing to the same party together, so more competitive districts = bigger disproportionalities. IMO, if we have to use single-member districts, the least-bad way to do it is to draw for proportionality.
Or we could just build more housing and do proper Congressional apportionment? I don't think many people in America feel appropriately represented, Gerrymandering aside, we need to expand the House.
The fact is, of the states that are purplish on the legislative level, a majority of the worst gerrymanders are Democratic, including Nevada, which is the absolute worst, where the Democrats turn 45% of the vote into 65% of the seats.
This also includes New Jersey and Colorado, where immense Democratic disproportionalities exist despite the use of non-partisan commissions.
The absence of any commentary on Democratic gerrymanders is partly media bias and partly the bias of academia, but also partly because the Republican Party is so passive on Democratic gerrymanders that the GOP itself doesn't give the media much to cover.
(At least in California you could argue that the Democratic disproportionality is the natural result of a very large popular vote majority electing a body through single-winner districts.)
I happily admit there's a Nevada gerrymander and would also happily agree to a national law that would severely limit state and congressional gerrymanders, but I'm not going to argue the Democrat's should shoot themselves in the head to play fair.
Thanks for great data. I suspect that republicans could spend 24/7/365 pointing out the reality without effect. Reality doesn’t fit the narrative of the true believers.
And those are good reasons to vote Democrat rather than Republican right now.
But plenty of people didn't think those were good enough reasons, so maybe just saying(even accurately) "but the other side is way worse" isn't good enough?
> Defund the police, open borders, mutilation of children under the misguided notion that you can change a person's sex.
Which mainstream democrats are saying this? The progressive wing of the party (The Squad) basically lost the majority of their members the last cycle. And I see people saying people can change their gender identity, not sex. I also don't seriously see any Democrats supporting defunding of the police, open borders or child mutilation (sex changes I assume?). I see people saying kids should get gender confirming care but sex changes don't even poll well for kids under 16 amongst Dems.
Don't let the loudest social justice leftists on Twitter lump us all together.
The changes in the GOP are larger and the alienation of the Reagan / GHWB conservatives are more profound, but I don't think it rises to "false equivalence" to point out how far the party has moved from the time of Bill Clinton and first term Obama.
I agree the Dems haven’t moved that far left, but the pathological degree to which they’ve been captured by the Groups (teachers unions as in this case, envuronmental groups on energy policy, and trans activists on gender issues) has a lot of explanatory power in terms of their inability to govern or win important elections.
On the Dem side I think that's not quite right. This is like the tenth year of the 2016 primary. Biden's synthesis attempt ultimately failed, so we're probably back to the two factions but with a new generation.
I think the Abundance stuff being embraced by actual politicians is a genuinely good sign. Education reform policy is behind in development. Partially it's because of deference to unions, but also because the old reform agenda is old and was only marginally successful.
But, I suspect there's an appetite by both the voters and Abundance friendly pols for a new reform agenda. Luckily, in the Obama Foreign Policy theme, there's a lot of low hanging fruit in the "Stop Doing Stupid Stuff" vein.
Maybe this is naive but I find myself wishing for an in-person Common Sense Democratic club to brainstorm concrete ways to persuade/expand the tent over beers/coffee/whatever.
I find the idea of this much more compelling than standing on a street corner in a blue city/town holding up anti-trump signs exhorting drivers to honk in support, which seems to be the only option right now in the 2 places where I spend time (DC and Ann Arbor MI). Perhaps I’ve read too many accounts of the historical importance of coffeehouses…
I was thinking this morning about how I miss Pope Francis and then thought about Benedict and then John McCain. Leaders make an organization and its culture. When they are gone these organizations can turn alien.
"...John McCain. Leaders make an organization...."
In hindsight, McCain was not the worst that Republicans had to offer. But McCain was also never a leader of the party -- his brand was always "maverick." And he sure as hell was not the pope of the Republican Party. I think he had very little effect on the culture of the party, throughout his political career -- the Reagan cadre and the Bush family were far more central during his era.
You could make the argument that McCain was the John the Baptist of Trumpism. But I thought Dan was presenting him as the Pope of the older, saner Republican Party. It's the latter judgment I was disagreeing with.
Presidential nominees typically don't give much thought to their VP choices, except how it might give a tactical political advantage. Lincoln picking Johnson; FDR and his choices, etc.
Probably because to take the choice more seriously must begin with the premise, "I need to make a good choice because I might fall down and d--" and that's when thinking immediately stops.
In the post '72 primary reform era current/former VPs have won 50-60% of presidential nominations they've run for. It's easily the single best way to get a future pres nomination, see how much it turned Biden and Harris from primary flops to future nominees. They've got to start giving way more weight to "Do I want this person to be my party's next nominee and potential next president?" questions, rather than "Will this person give me a 0.4% boost among *demographic*?"
McCain wanted to see the 2008 financial crisis go thermonuclear by opposing "Bank Bailouts" as the Republican presidential candidate. He also championed that psycho VP populist and he spoke to the right wing populists who became the Tea Party. Hence the exodus of the educated and affluent to the Democrats and our branding as "PMC" "neoliberal", or whatever.
McCain is the chief villain in my personal narrative about how Republicans became the party of the stupid, poor losers. Moreover I believe his anti-technocratic brand created the environment for not only Trump but also Bernie.
Yes, I agree there is some positive in McCain's legacy and in general people are complex. Nonetheless, Americans have always loved our "outside the system" candidates, including not just Trump and Bernie, but also Obama, Bill Clinton, Reagan, etc. Just was no point in McCain centering his brand on being a "maverick" as he gained institutional power.
To a lesser extent, Obama also struggled with evolving his brand as he gained institutional power. At least Obama and his team leaned in to the challenge and was increasingly thoughtful about messaging and actions. But it sure would've been easier if he and Democratic leadership didn't have to fight grass root Republican populism during the 2008 presidential election to manage a complex financial crisis.
Would've been much better if Romney was running in 2008 such that Republicans could better own the bank bailouts and both parties would share in credit and blame. Instead, Obama himself became a major target of Occupy Wall Street and other lazy left wing populist movements.
John McCain was a corrupt (google Keating Five) less openly religious reactionary hawk who ran against a more religious conservative in a primary, got rightly upset over terrible attacks by people associated with said religious conservative and thus stumbled into voting the right way on some bad tax cuts, got religion over campaign finance (in part likely due to those PAC attack ads), and then was pretty straightfowardly terrible for the next 20 years including during his Presidential run, then got rightly upset at another personal attack by Trump and thus voted the right away on ACA repeal.
Then he died before he could ruin his reputation again, like the Senator from South Carolina.
"got religion over campaign finance (in part likely due to those PAC attack ads)"
The campaign finance reforms backed by McCain and Democrats have been absolutely terrible for America as it has removed almost all real power from parties while empowering outside forces.
I also think they were bad, but I also think they, along with Citizen's United have become kind of overrated by the kind of person who want the parties to have more power.
As long a small donor donations and the Internet exists and our parties were never parties the same way the UK Labour or German CDU is, something like this is inevitable.
Maybe things aren't quite as bad, but the days of LBJ being able to end a career by threatening to turn off the party spigot was already over.
Jamaal Bowman lost his primary. Not the general election, but his primary. Because Israel/Palestine was so much in the news at the time, there was a lot of theories that his loss was attributable to his positions regarding the conflict. Given the demographics of his district, that probably played some role. But its also probably important to keep in mind that Bowman was very possibly the most prominent Democrat espousing the super left positions on education that Matt (rightfully) pushes back on. He was especially prominent regarding scaling back and even eliminating standardized testing. https://pelhamexaminer.com/56336/announcing/rep-bowman-introduces-bill-to-end-over-testing-in-schools-that-would-eliminate-federally-mandated-exams/ * And in an election (by definition) made up of only Democratic voters, he lost.
Which is I think Matt's point to a degree. You're correct to note that the Democratic party has moved left generally since the time of Clinton and even Obama. Matt has written a number of posts about this. A lot of the commentators below have pushed back with some critiques of your post that I think have some merit, but overall you're correct. And and a lot of issues I'm very glad for it (I suspect most of the commentators on here are pretty happy the Democratic party has moved left on the topic of gay marriage since Clinton's time for example).
But on education? Yeah, it's not at all clear that the progressive education reformers who had a lot of influence on Democratic education policy since 2020 represent the median Democratic voter let alone the electorate at large. Which is why I'm pretty sure Matt is pleading with some of these Democratic candidates to take a more moderate position on education given a) you have no chance of getting the Teacher's union endorsement anyway and b) there's a decent chance it will actually win you support from Democratic voters. What's the downside risk here basically.
There is a lot of talk last 10 years that as Democratic party increasingly becomes the party of the upper middle class this will push Democrats rightward on taxes. And for the most part this hasn't happened. What's been underrated is that the changing make up of the Democratic party likely makes super progressive positions on education less popular among its voters, not more.
I had a 5 hour flight Monday and didn't really feel like working so I went back and watched a bunch of Obama's '08 campaign speeches and (1) wow ... he's brilliant but (2) I just don't see any throughline from Clinton (Bill) to Obama. He literally ran against *a* Clinton in the primary from the Progressive left (e.g., anti-war, anti-NAFTA, anti-corporation). His Ohio and Wisc. speeches pulled directly from Perot in '92 (e.g., NAFTA = a giant sucking sound of lost factories to Mexico).
New Jersey education policy is 95% about how much money is going where, largely because the NJ Supreme Court prescribes that as the main metric for ensuring that the state provides the constitutionally guaranteed fair access to education, via the Abbott cases. To wit, courts don’t primarily look to test results or graduation rates, they look at whether the poor districts are getting enough money.
There are a considerable number of charter schools in Newark that do pretty well, on average, and whether to raise the cap on the number of charter schools has historically been the other main education issue NJ governors face during their terms.
I was disappointed Matt didn't mention the Abbott cases in this piece, because NJ actually in many ways is a success story of official liberal policy (very high and equitably distributed funding, towards the top of the country in demographic adjusted NAEP scores for 8th grade reading, the exam that is hardest to achieve success on). The entire framing of the debate in Jersey needs to be around how that investment, while meaningful, has produced diminishing returns against low spending states while crushing suburban taxpayers.
And I’m not sure if things have changed in recent years, but (when I was more well read on this issue a few years ago) NJ was specifically a leader in education performance in high poverty high diversity districts. at least suggesting that Abbott was effective, albeit not necessarily cost-effective
How could Matt write an article chiding politicians for not supporting what he wants (ie. union busting) if he admits New Jersey and the evil teacher unions seem to be doing a pretty good job on education?
The interesting take, which Matt won’t touch, is whether investing educational resources in high poverty areas is cost effective. Creaming would certainly be cost effective, but that requires measuring that might illuminate awkward racial gaps in achievement .
The other thing is, like, people in New Jersey like their schools and the schools are generally pretty good to REALLY good? As an issue I get that people are talking about it but my sense from my Jersey based in laws is that they are annoyed taxes are so high but believe the schools are good enough to justify it.
This from the outside seems to be the political dynamic in every state once you get past the borders of Pennsylvania - people complain and whine about taxes and the government but the vast majority of people would still prefer it over say, the Texan or Florida government.
Before anybody responds, yes, a lot of people move out every year - that's still 90% housing prices and that it sucks to be cold 6-8 months out of the year. One of the few things I'll continue to irrationally believe without evidence is that you could completely flip the political values of the Northwast/Great Lakes states and Southern states since 1975 and the population changes would be about the same because people hate being cold and enough housing hasn't been built, not taxes, unions, or even really social views (Florida since 2020 might be an exception).
Growing up in New England in the 90s, my classmates thought it was weird that my grandparents didn't live in Florida since that was the default for so many of them.
Yup, at this point, I could argue the current political valence of the South is hurting their population growth. While I'd still have issues, if you had a bunch of Jeb's running things as opposed to the weirdos who have taken over, you wouldn't be able to stop people moving to North Carolina or Georgia.
As a dirty leftie, I'd be opposed to some of the policies they'd pass, but even I know my more politically involved but still pretty normie friends wouldn't be totally against ever moving to a red state.
Eh, I dunno. There are frustrations. Because of union dominance, there are a higher than usual number of half days, which are inconvenient for parents. And that’s leaving aside the political objections to trans/DEI elements of curricula. But as a general matter, yes, people are satisfied in the same way that most Americans are satisfied with their health insurance.
While Education is a Democrat issue, I don't think boosting it's salience helps Dems because many left wing activists believe really weird and mad things about education and are willing to shout them in public. Activists expressing concepts like maths tests are racist, the idea violent kids shouldn't be expelled and bad teachers should never be fired etc are really good for the GOP.
The point here is that Steven Fulop should come out and say math tests are great, violent kids should be expelled, and most especially that bad teachers should be fired. Also that good teachers who have been in the job for only a few years should get paid more than mediocre ones who’ve been there a long time, and that there should be a lot of standardized testing to figure out which teachers are doing well enough to get the big raises and which are doing poorly enough to be put on PIPs and eventually fired. And that all of this is safe for Fulop to say politically because he is literally running against the avatar of education lunacy, the head of the teachers' union.
TLDR; you are correct, that is why it’s a great way for a moderate Dem to do it.
I think the antipathy toward teacher's unions among actual Democratic voters is highly overrated by a certain kind of highly educated center-left person in urban areas.
Not to say they all think they're perfect but again, a lot of the supposed moderate minority voters that we were told to listen to over out of touch activists backed the teacher's on not wanting to open schools.
Like, there's a reason like the best thing to be in a Democratic primary is probably a former school teacher just like the best thing to be in a Republican primary is a veteran (well I guess in 2025, the best thing to be is a weird right-wing social media infliuencer).
If Karen Lewis the president of Chicago's teacher union ran for governor, would her affiliation with the union help or hurt her?
I agree that Dem primary voters like teachers (this is through intuition rather than data) but I'm skeptical that a representative of an unpopular teacher's union would be a good candidate.
Also, I find it interesting when folks like you and Matt decide that Democrat's need to listen to the people and stop telling them what to think and when elitist outsiders are supposed to takeover and impose decisions from above.
As I pointed out in another thread, it was disproportionately minority parents and teacher unions in a coalition that stopped school openings in much of the US, while more well-educated people were mad at them.
I mean, yes, the one actually out there very unpopular teacher's union (though I think there's still probably 1/3 of Chicago's population that's support her over a moderate candidate) is a bad example.
I think the President of the Minneapolis teacher's union or here in Seattle, the president of the Seattle teacher's union would do fine in a mayoral election.
Hell, we just saw recently in Wisconsin, while they did worse than the judge, the union-backed candidate for statewide education office won despite various moderate Democrat's backing her opponent.
I think the median Democrat thinks there are some teacher's that have some silly ideas and are bad, but they still trust teacher's when it comes to what or how to teach or who or who shouldn't be fired over say, non-teachers who want to impose their will on those teacher's because of studies.
Especially when seemingly everytime the reformers get their way, there are stories of beloved teachers getting fired because they get the right scores on whatever system a MBA from Chicago U made up.
Cool, can you tell me how to determine a "bad teachers" in a way a majority of teachers will agree with, as opposed to a method a majority of people whose main job in life is to break teacher's unions?
Look, I'm not designing the policy, just clarifying what it is, substantively, the piece is recommending that the moderate Democrats not named Sean Spiller should do. I'm not commenting on whether or not this is correct.
Kind of surprised the author here doesn’t take the opportunity to examine why education policy- or at least the perception that things at schools went really bad- put Youngkin in the governors office in Virginia.
" Activists expressing concepts like maths tests are racist, the idea violent kids shouldn't be expelled and bad teachers should never be fired etc are really good for the GOP."
Isn't that your opportunity to punch left and stand out as a moderate?
I mean, the first is really a problem in like 10-15 school districts in the country which makes it difficult to make a point on and makes you seem like a weirdo obsessed with conservative politics outside of those districts, everybody loves zero tolerance policies on violence until it's their kid getting suspended and part of the reason why you had changes in policies was parents being upset over how their kids were being treated, and whom reformers think is a bad teacher and who teachers, parents, and student is a bad teacher doesn't always overlap very well.
Like, sure, if you're in San Francisco run on how math tests aren't racist. In suburban New Jersey and likely even in Trenton or Camden, probably far less of an issue.
Solving this is (politically, not substantively) in tension with the desire to have advanced classes be more fair, automatically enrolled, etc.
In the south we mostly have integrated schools, unlike the north where they kept segregation. Partly this is because of a greater number of mixed-income neighborhoods but it's mostly because schools draw from both poor and rich neighborhoods. The suburban parent solution is to replace actual school segregation with the creation of de-facto segregated advanced classes. In my experience this works a lot better, because rather than being a hard barrier like school zoning, it's a soft barrier that sufficiently motivated parents can overcome with relative ease, and it works sufficiently well to stop upper-middle-class parents from opting out of the public school system by default. I went to a high school that was only 30% white and was mostly poor students and my AP classes were maybe 60% white and an even greater percentage of wealthy students, but there were still more minority and low-income students then you'd get in a school that used the housing market to ensure almost all students were from wealthy families.
I think if you try to break this system, you will create even greater political backlash over the idea of ending school segregation, and you might end up recreating the education dynamics of the old south (i.e. private academies whose entire value proposition is segregated student bodies).
Middle-class parents may have replaced race with class but ultimately they still want their kids to be around other kids *like them*, and the state has limited tools to overcome that when said middle-class parents are the core political constituency.
"The suburban parent solution is to replace actual school segregation with the creation of de-facto segregated advanced classes."
When you put it that way, it looks as though the academic stratification is a means to racial segregation: "I don't care much whether Johnnie does calculus or not, but if it will keep him away from the blahs, then I'll make him do his homework!"
Is that really the way that the parents you are referring to think about it?
Because I would have thought that the motivation to get your kid into a more challenging class is...so that they'll learn more, or get a jump on college, or hang out with the bright kids (of any color) or lots of other motivations. But not, "what I'd really like is actual school segregation, but I guess I'll make do with advanced classes leading to de facto segregation."
Notice that is not the motivation that Matt attributes to many "suburban Americans." They might just be thinking, "I want Johnnie in a challenging school; I believe urban schools are less challenging; so I'm going to move to the 'burbs." The driver in this case would be the desire for an academically superior school, and the racial segregation would merely be a byproduct of that.
I think it's a bit of both! There are absolutely parents who are sincerely racist (this is the south, after all) and want their kids in advanced classes for this reason alone. A somewhat unexpected turn of events when I was a teacher is that the only people who are *open* about this motivation are non-black minority parents (i.e., Hispanic parents, Asian parents, etc.) but I am sure there are plenty of white ones too who just don't say it out loud.
But there are also lots of parents who are just concerned about the 'peer group', and want to avoid low-performing whites and low-performing minorities equally, and don't mind minority students in their kids' classes as long as they are high-performing.
The main thing, though, is that very few parents (or people in general) are actually egalitarians. They have some sorting mechanism in their head (race, class, academic success, etc.) for high-quality and low-quality people, and believe that it is important for their child's future that they spend time around the high-quality people. To your point, they do want their kid to learn calculus -- and they believe the presence of low-quality people will inhibit that objective.
"They have some sorting mechanism in their head (race, class, academic success, etc.) for high-quality and low-quality people...."
Absolutely. I've met fairly few people who had no racist prejudices of any kind, but even fewer who were not committed to some kind of elitism or another.
I think it’s impossible to disentangle people committing statistical discrimination from people using statistical discrimination as a pretext for taste based discrimination, but the product of both is de facto segregation because parents don’t want their kids around “bad kids” and the demographics being what they are in a lot of the south, those bad kids look a certain way.
Interesting data point. My son’s rather affluent southern elementary school is about 5% black and does not have gifted classes. There is “enrichment” for the gifted kids a few hours a week, but they are in standard classes. This means my son is in a math dessert.
Next year, in 6th grade, his school will draw from a bigger district that includes apartments and where 10% of the students get subsidized lunches. Tracking begins in sixth grade.
I attended one of those supposedly magical bussed schools. I lived in the wealthy north part of my school district and my high school was about a 10 minute walk from my house. My school district bussed in students from the poorer south part of the district. But my advanced classes were almost entirely filled with students from the north part of the district where I lived. The average skin color of the students in the advanced classes was also a lot whiter than the student body as a whole.
This is interesting and not my experience here in a very large diverse district in Texas. The school is about 50% white. I am regularly in AP classes of all subjects, and I can tell you that white kids make up about 20% of the class. The other 80% are all of Asian descent. It appears to be a cultural thing where the children of recent immigrants are the ones pushed to take the hardest classes and get the best grades. These students make up most of the top strata of the graduating class.
My more politically unlikely than actual socialist revolution policy for this is school district consolidation...like a ton of it. As in, no more than one school district per county and within that county, all the public schools should be lottery based, with some advantages built-in for people within the neighborhood as everything I've seen shows that sending poor kids to good schools helps them a lot while sending rich kids to less well-off schools doesn't really hurt them.
I know this is more politically toxic than wanting refugees given new luxury apartments in the middle of San Francisco.
The closest analog I can think of is what happened in California (I forget the proposition number that standardized funding and District size) and the unintended consequence is that housing construction ground to an absolute halt.
I seem to recall it was a court case, and the result was Prop 13, which kept taxes to a minimum, since they could no longer be used in an exclusive way. (And Prop 13 then has knock on effects on housing.)
Fascinating to hear this described as a southern thing. I grew up in the Baltimore suburbs—in most ways culturally northern but with a southern legacy, especially around segregation—and this perfectly describes my high school.
Kind of a side topic but I’m kinda surprised the resistance to charter schools hasn’t been accompanied by arguments that taking money from affluent public school districts would likely hurt home values?
Not quite sure if this is what’s going on in New Jersey teachers union but what I observed through my wife, who’s a public school teacher is there’s basically three factions in the union
1. Status Quo keeper: by far the largest, leaders are from this faction and tend to stay in power for long time
2. Sensible reformers: second largest
3. DSA types
What I observe is basically group 1 is basically catering to group 3 to prevent challenges from group 2 - like group 2 wants more tangible actions while group 3 wants… performative stuffs, so it’s much easier for group 1 to cater to group 3.
Other interesting dynamics is elementary school teachers are the largest in number but the most vocal ones tend to be high school teachers. And elementary school teachers constitutes of group 1.
My personal wish is group 2 wields more influence to bring a reasonable change to the teachers union…
Thank you for sharing this. Intra-union dynamics are not something I've really seen discussed in the education reform sphere. (Probably my lack of wide reading, TBH.) The point about HS teachers vs. elementary ones is intriguing to me. The skills required for one job are pretty different from those required for a different job, yet the tendency is to lump "school teachers" together as a group. It wouldn't surprise me if education reform policies both effected and made sense differently for teachers specializing in different age groups.
Is there a reason education policy, unions, etc. tend to lump all grades together? E.g., different union contracts or differently-incentivized pay structures for Elementary vs. HS teachers?
Good point and I am not an education policy specialist so not quite sure…
It’s def interesting tho as there are separate unions for principals etc so there could separate unions.
My guess is, bc the primary role of unions is to negotiate the salary with the city (or county), there exists an incentive for union to have more members for negotiation power
Does this make sense, politically? It assumes (a) the head of the teacher's union has a reasonable shot to win the primary, on which I'm guessing the three leading candidate have plenty of internal polling data, and (b) the median New Jersey Democratic voter is unhappy with the state of their public schools. If you think about the richer Democratic voters they're mostly trying to appeal to (after all, this is a primary electorate and the voting demographic skews richer), you'd figure that most people not sending their kids to private school probably already pay high taxes and live in a high performing district. So would they want "reform" that might upset that balance? It seems like an unnecessary risk.
I've heard a theory that Spiller is running so that the NJEA has cover to not endorse one of the other major candidates. The theory makes sense to me as a way to preserve its power and influence. Perhaps the other candidates know this and are playing ball.
On the other hand, I've seen polling that has Spiller in second...
I don't live in New Jersey, but I do live in a relatively high tax, high performing Northeastern school district. If a candidate proposed radical school reform, as a voter I'd be wary. I also wouldn't vote for the head of the teacher's union to be my governor! So I'm struggling to understand the "why" particularly since Matt frequently endorses popularism as a political strategy.
Matt isn't suggesting that all moderate candidates do this, only that at least one of them should take the risk of proposing reform.
For a "Common Sense" Dem agenda, the best case scenario is that education reform is back at the table, and the most likely worst case scenario is that the pro-education reform moderate loses to another moderate dem.
Torres is endorsing Gottheimer? That's disappointing. Gottheimer is the sort of moderate who manages to pick the wrong side of every issue. For example here. He wants to go all DOGE on New Jersey but won't piss off any public sector unions? Sure buddy. Where do you think the waste is?
Anyways...
Issues of crime, housing, and education are all interrelated. As Matt points out, if the schools aren't well run, parents will be incentivized to become more NIMBY so their kids' schools aren't full of badly behaved kids. Progressives would rather ignore this, but it's obviously true if you've either worked in schools, or talked to parents. For that reason, school discipline is important the same way crime prevention is important.
I was talking to a new family in town at my son's T-ball practice yesterday. Hispanic family from LA, moved here a few years ago, I mention I'm from Long Beach originally, we talk about the Dodgers, the weather, blah blah blah. Then they ask me how the schools are here in the burbs compared to Portland. "How are the schools" can mean a lot of different things, but I basically said "it's not really any different than LA, if there are shoes on the telephone lines, the schools are like that too, but if the neighborhood is decent, the schools are too. The difference is that in Vancouver, you can actually afford to live in the neighborhoods with good schools." Come to find out that's basically exactly what they were asking about. He works for Portland PD and has dealt with the tweakers and all that. And they weren't sure about Vancouver public schools, so they're sending their son to a private Catholic school. I'm much more sympathetic to religious schooling than many here, and I don't have a problem with people doing that, but if you want to have good quality schools, you want parents with, I'll go ahead and call it "bourgeois values," to be willing to send their kids there. If they don't trust the school system, you'll have a vicious cycle, where the most involved parents pull their kids out first.
It's interesting, living in a school district with huge problems but also a lot of potential. Philly has been "two steps forward, 1-3/4 steps back" on this for a long time.
We have some good catchment schools at the elementary and middle school level, and many have been getting better, but we've also killed one or two by suddenly changing their catchments to encompass a bunch areas where families aren't engaged and kids bring discipline problems and even violence. Once that happens that elementary school is done for a generation.
We've fallen about as far as most blue-area public schools on the need for discipline and early interventions, and we're badly resourced to try to get the school system to act as a replacement for parenting, but there've been some programs and some schools that have done well.
Our charters range from top-notch ones (often run by non-profits with community ties, as the one my older goes to), through the range of "do better than public schools partly due to selection effects and partly due to accountability" to "just as bad or worse than the worst public schools." But on the whole they've probably improved educational outcomes and offered better discipline and safety policies than the district schools they've replaced or pulled students from.
And then we've got, somehow, no less than half a dozen (maybe as many as ten, I would have to look) excellent select-admit/magnet high schools that crank out grads who can go toe-to-toe with kids from the best districts in the burbs. These play roles ranging from "aspiring poor black families ride their kids like hell to get them into these schools because they set them up for good colleges" to "white professionals leave the city if their teens don't get into these schools, so their excellence shores up the tax base permanently as they stay after their kids leave and the pressure is off." Naturally, the "equity" nuts have desperately tried to kill basically all of them at every damned turn.
When Biden imploded in the debate, zero major Democrats made a bold bid for power. Pete Buttigieg tarnished his own brand by doing almost nothing to lower construction costs as Secretary of Transportation. Maybe it’s safetyism, maybe it’s malaise. Maybe with six candidates everyone is worried about covering their downside if they lose. Whatever it is, Democrats need better elites. Soon. I sincerely hope our next Presidential nominee is someone whose name I barely know.
I was highly intrigued by Pete in 2020 and I think he has a lot going for him coming into 2028. 3 elections in a row democrats have nominated a terrible communicator with no independent vision of where they want to take the country and no ability to spread that message convincingly. In the shadow field so far Pete seems best suited to do that. And as a Pete fan, FAR AND AWAY to me his biggest blinking red light risk is that he will be attacked for knowing of Biden's diminishing capacity and won't have a sufficient explanation to ppl for that. The idea that the secretary of transportation is responsible for inflation and YIMBYism seems...... dubious.
Nah, far and away his biggest political liability is being married to a man. And I say this is as someone who agrees with you that he is head and shoulders above the rest of the Democratic field in communication style and general projection of strong thinking and competence (although I’d be pretty cool with Booker too.)
When he was in the primary last time, lots of people had no idea he was gay. If he advances further along, it will become more well-known. I would like to think that we are now at a place where that won't matter so much, but I honestly have no idea what voters will do with that information.
Is he a great communicator, though? He sounds great sparring on Fox News. Does he give rousing speeches? Can he get a crowd to roar and surf on top of its enthusiasm like Obama and Clinton could?
Maybe he'd be great at something like FDR's fireside chats, but you only get to do those kinds of things after you win.
I strongly expect he could if given the opportunity, although I admit that my "listening to rousing speeches" time budget is approximately zero minutes per year these days.
If a smart technocrat cannot address construction costs having been given more power over transportation than any other single American, what are smart technocrats good for?
Do you really think this was the limiting principle here? Pete had a giant “Lower costs now” button on his desk that he didn’t push for four years? amidst all the tentacles of local regulatory barriers Matt talks about here constantly? Of every democratic politician in America I am exceedingly confident Pete is in the 99th Percentile of Abundance Pilled
In the short-term, actual politicians talking about the abundance stuff mostly has me worried that they're going to start creating offices of abundance management, abundance coordinators, abundance community outreach liaisons, institutes of abundance studies, etc, and nothing is going to improve other than the student loan balances of well-credentialed bureaucrats, academics, and staffers.
Smart technocrats are good at building teams that can work to gradually bend systems in directions that eventually lead to good outcomes. You might call it the slow boring of hard boards.
More importantly, they don’t just come in and smash everything in the name of efficiency while forgetting whether they are talking about billions or trillions or millions.
Pete struggles with working class people. Obama seemed to alleviate working class concerns with his elite demeanor and he came across as accessible. Pete does not have that in his toolbox. But in fairness, most Democrats don’t. 2020 Biden did. In close elections in the Midwest this matters.
Imo, it's also partly the result of the erosion of elite power (candidates who were endorsed by the county party had favorite position on the primary ballot, but courts struck that down last year). If the party line system still existed, there would almost certainly be fewer than six candidates in the race
That elite power was removed in part because it was insanely corrupt. Like, basically half of Jersey's Democratic party was controlled by one corrupt guy, as opposed to the evil Group's.
I don't have strong opinions about what New Jersey should do with it's education policy, but I'm sure they can figure it out. In general, and especially compared to the neighboring states of PA and NY, New Jersey is a state that works as a state. A relatively cohesive political community with a strong state identity. And as a result, not nearly as much push-pull gridlock between regions that simply have irreconcilable preferences and desired ways of doing things.
Interesting, my experience in SE PA is the exact opposite and I am infinitely more grateful for the mere concept of “opposition parties*”, just for having looked at NJ or MD governance. Or Chicago…
*Even if ours is insane, it restrains our own morons.
The synthesis is that NJ's administrative state and judiciary are adequately funded, have good SOPs, and have strong esprit de corps, and so can deliver services efficiently. But the lack of political opposition means a lot of political decisions are stupid, counterproductive, or corrupt. In PA the administrative state is strangled by a lack of resources, bad SOPs, and demoralization, (to say nothing of the state’s overpoliticized and lazy judiciary) but healthy political competition keeps the actual policies from being too wild in either direction.
All things considered, given the relative lack of frequency with which many people interact with the judicial system in particular, I prefer our circumstances. I can only imagine what Philadelphia would have done to itself over the last several decades with a blank check from Harrisburg.
About the only (possible) upside would be a better funded and better functioning SEPTA, and whether more money would have actually translated to more service in that instance is questionable at best.
I don't disagree in the least, but I have, based on the examples of Baltimore, NJ, and Chicago among others, absolutely zero faith that we would have used such funding well if we'd had it.
Most of the city institutions that function well now are downstream of the interplay between Philly, the Collar Counties, and Harrisburg between 1980 and 2010 or so. Our budgeting process, our improving pension and debt service costs, the school district's overperformance relative to funding levels compared to most of our peers, SEPTA's operational efficiency by North American standards, our relatively clean governance, a somewhat responsive civil service...
We need *considerable* investments in transit and education, but I absolutely do not buy that making such expenditures between 1980 and 2010 would have yielded results that were worth a damn.
The problem, of course, is that now that our political culture is hugely improved, the state GOP has gone completely batshit insane. Not much to do for that except wait and see if Picozzi turns out to be worth a good goddamn and Shapiro will play hardball.
I suppose you can say this about the rest of the country about the idea of liberal programs and spending being good vs. the reality of how it is spent and also the GOP going batshit insane
It's better still to have more than one party in the context of a polity that at least generally speaking wants similar things and sees each other as part of the same community.
For example, currently in the PA legislature there's a funding fight that could result in draconian cutbacks to SEPTA up to the closure of five regional rail lines. It'll probably be resolved in some negotiated deal, but why does it have to be so hard? The five counties of SE PA are rich enough to fund their own local transit system, and would if they were their own state, but everything like that becomes harder and more difficult when it has to run through Harrisburg with concessions and buyoffs to people who are opposed to the very idea of a regional commuter rail line, because it's not relevant to them.
We *could* fund the damned buses, we just endlessly choose not to, a decision justified by the politicians saying that Harrisburg owes us this because we're the economic engine of the state.
The reality is that Philly is just as heavily subsidized by PA tax receipts as any of the northern tier counties with no one in them. The Collar Counties get the shaft, but their SEPTA service is much less crucial to them, so they chip in a small pittance.
Once the city pension fund is 100% funded in 2032, we need to take a long, hard look at BIRT's gross receipts tax, local SEPTA funding, and capital programming for Parks and Rec.
Don't spend that $800M windfall on a single fucking new program or new handout to some favored constituency, just do two basic things well and ditch a cripplingly stupid tax.
Does New Jersey have a strong state identity? I always thought the idea of state identity was weird when I was growing up there, given that the central identity issue in the state was whether you were basically part of New York or basically part of Philadelphia (or the weird rural bits of the state). I don’t think anyone other state organized their identity in ways so strongly connected to something out-of-state as New Jersey does, and especially not two different something’s in different states.
"Allow (indeed, encourage) the most effective charter schools to expand, while shutting down the least-effective ones."
This is exactly what has proven not to work. As much as anything has failed in ed reform, this has failed, the notion that you can simply scale up charter schools that seem to be succeeding. And the reason why? Because those schools manufacture the appearance of better performance through selection bias coming in (admissions fraud) and going out (attrition and backfill manipulation).
Why do so many charter schools fail to do this work of replicating the success of a small number of sui generis urban charters with suspiciously good outcomes? Because the student body pruning is the source of the perceived difference. The much-ballyhooed first class of Success Charter Academy had 83 students coming in. 17 of them graduated. And the media credulously reported the improved averages of the 17!
I think we should recognize there's been a sea change in the broader public. It is no longer important to many (most?) people that all children receive an adequate education. There are enough people out there now who would look at those other 66 kids and shrug. The steady march of vouchers will cull the charter herd anyway because they won't have as many "good kids" to select from.
Those 66 kids might not be able to graduate with a college-ready transcript, but one that was more appropriate for their level could lift them to their potential.
Did Success Academy provide them with an education appropriate for their level? Presumably not if they failed to graduate. I guess I'm confused what the question is?
My view is that every kid deserves a free and appropriate education to the level of whatever standard their state may set. Success Academy is in New York. You can find New York's graduation requirements here: https://www.nysed.gov/standards-instruction/graduation-requirements . More generally, an adequate education would, for me, be one that allows students to pursue whatever options they want after graduating. If a kid wants to go to college, their time spent in school should prepare them for that. If a kid wants to go into the trades, their time in school should prepare them for that. If a kid goes into some low-end service job, their education should be good enough that they can do those jobs too.
What I worry about is that my view is no longer a mainstream view or that people who differ make up a large enough minority that it's going to mean we stop trying. This gets to some of what Matt is nostalgic for. He wants democrats to pick up the education mantle again and start remining everyone that all kids deserve a good education. I fear the reason democrats are not picking up that mantle is because many people do not much care if all kids get a good education. They may care about their kid, or maybe their local school but what if the school is full of illegal immigrants? What if it's a poor "urban" school? People have a hard time wanting time and effort and resources to go to those places because they will not directly benefit. If that's the satiation we're in, it's going to be difficult for the state to provision adequate schooling for all kids because the polity just isn't there.
> every kid deserves a free and appropriate education
Yes, I know those magic words too.
A failure to graduate can be the fault of the school. It can also be the fault of the student. Doing social promotion where kids get onto the next grade despite doing no work isn't the answer. It's often part of the problem, as students get to high school without any ownership of their own outcomes. Someone else always helps drag them across the finish line.
We'd need to look closer at those 66 kids to see what's going on. Maybe the school and teacher is doing everything right. Maybe not. Maybe it's the situation on the right
We should also consider that New York's graduation requirements may be too rigorous, and/or we need to accept that the meaning of "high school diploma" is the ability to do symbolic manipulation that some people just will never be able to do.
I mean, they’re not only magic. FAPE is part of several laws and is involved in numerous Supreme Court decisions.
I’m not sure how to square your circle between social promotion being bad but also wanting to lower graduation requirements.
I think it is reasonable to expect almost all students to be able to pass an algebra 1 exam. This is not advanced math and, barring a disability, most students can learn to do algebra. Maybe they take it too early or require some kind of remediation but I doubt there’s a huge population of kids totally incapable of “symbol manipulation”.
Social promotion is pushing ahead kids who can't or don't do the work, regardless of what the standard is.
Determining those standards is a separate issue.
Someone of 80 IQ will likely be able to figure out "if I have 2 buckets of water and each bucket has 10 gallons, how many more buckets do I need to have 75 gallons?" Even counting it out, they'll get it. Ask a 80 IQ student to factor x³ - 36x and you'll be there all day. Just kidding, they'll guess C and move on.
So we need to decide what to do with the lower performing students.
1. Just give them a high school diploma for showing up. Or maybe not even showing up, we don't want to be mean. (And make sure the student could decide to just apply themselves for 3 hours on the last day of the semester and pass. We don't want to discourage them!)
2. Give them a curriculum that challenges them and requires them to do work and apply themselves. They aren't going to factor polynomials, but they can use a calculator to figure out the tip. They may not be able to calculate continuous compounding but they can see a payday loan explodes to infinity (infinity as far as they're concerned). Some won't graduate because they won't try. Some will try and take an extra year or two to graduate. Some will succeed on the first try. Maybe some finish but in a way we don't call graduation.
3. Torture them for 4 years insisting they learn the thing that seems so natural to you and me. Before Algebra I can start you'll teach them that to add 2 fractions you can't just add the numerators and denominators. They were supposed to already know that but no one ever taught them that before you! And then 3 weeks later when you give them 2 fractions to add, they're adding the numerators and denominators again. Well, that's fine, I'm sure they'll be able to rewrite x^(2a + b) in a month.
I have devoted my whole professional career to improving the quality of our public schools—both as a teacher in high need schools and my work on various aspects of accountability since leaving the classroom.
But this idea of differentiated pay is never really thought through, carefully.
1) Teachers simply do not want it. It's being imposed on them.
2) Efforts to measure teachers performance and teacher quality are notoriously...challenged. Most barely pass the smell test, and I don't know if any that survive serious examination.
3) So, how to do you reward the best teachers if you can't validity identify them?
My own work has orbited around this question of identifying good teachers. There are two major challenges.
A) The ratio of supervisors to actual teachers is extraordinary low in k-12 education—and the supervisors have many many other responsibilities as well. They simply do not have time to engage in the kind of observation and coaching that gives the real knowledge of who the best teachers are. Best at classroom management? Sure. But teaching is more about far more the keep students in line. In theory, it's about fostering student learning.
B) Matt is long since sick my beating this drum but the standardized tests simply do not measure what they are supposed to measure. I do not simply mean that they are racially biased. I mean that they are not focused on the the actual grade-appropriate learning goals. All of my work is currently focused on this, but what we are measuring actually matters. And it matters if it is not the learning goals for those children.
Unfortunately, waving a magic wand that claims we can already identify the best teachers, just assuming that we can already do that, doesn't solve these problems. Charisma? Sure. Easier to recognize. Classroom discipline? Yeah, like I said. But actually helping students to grow in the ways we expect teachers of that grade(s) and subject(s) to? Nope, we need to do far far far better there.
I mean, surely part of the reason that teachers do not want differentiated pay is that some of the draw of teaching right now is that it's a profession in which you're largely immune from being held to performance standards. Given that status quo, you select in people who are averse to being held to performance standards and select out people who are high-performing and want to be recognized for it. So it's not surprising that it's unpopular with the current population of teachers, but that's the problem!
Your comments on identifying best-performing teachers sound to me a little like you're saying, "Hey, it's hard to reliably identify a top 5% teacher from a top 20% teacher," which is fair enough, but I don't buy that it is thus similarly hard to identify a top 20% teacher from a bottom 20% teacher. Maybe classroom discipline and charisma aren't enough to be a top 5% teacher, but if you don't have classroom discipline and you don't have charisma, are you really going to be an even adequate teacher?
I can still tell you now, 30 years later, which of my high school teachers were clearly top 20% and which were clearly bottom 20%. It was obvious to the students which ones were just phoning it in.
This wasn't necessarily the same as which teachers gave the easiest grades.
Maybe because teachers look at the rest of the professional world and see "performance standards" basically are "the whims of whatever people in C-Suite's matter this year and not what actually matters for their job."
Like, do you think most people w/ professional white collar jobs think Sigma Six or whatever the hot MBA thing of the moment is accurately tracking their performance?
Also, just for example, who's better at classroom discipline? A 9th grade teacher in Lakehurst who's had no incidents at all or a 9th grade teacher in Camden that's kept their rate from rising as opposed to other teachers. That doesn't even account for the part where in a group of 100 kids, maybe you get the 5 shitbirds out of 25, while another teacher only gets 2.
I think it's obviously true that in most organizations, most people's job performance is rated relatively accurately.
Not perfectly accurately, and there are dysfunctional organizations where job performance evaluation is really out to lunch, but decently accurately. I think people who throw up their hands and are like, "IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW WHO IS A GOOD WORKER AND WHO ISN'T" are silly.
I think you highly overrate how many people, especially in an office environment, think their bosses do a job of determining who is and who isn't doing a good job.
It's just that teaching is still one of the few jobs where the workers have actual power, as opposed to being able to be bowled over by whomever is in charge of them, you actually need to win over the employees, not just tell them, too bad for you like so many people seem to want too.
This isn't just teaching - look at how tech bosses turned to fascists after the slightest bit of pushback from their employees.
And vice versa, I think that you're in the grips of a conspiracy theory.
Like, I just don't even really know what else to say. Like, I get that there is political hay to be made by blowing up the magnitude of differences in evaluation by 10x, and that some people find it freeing to imagine that they're the victims of conspiracy, but it's just obviously not true.
I mean, I've seen cases where I strongly believe that someone who is actively bad at their job is retained and promoted due to their being good at company politics. And I've seen cases where someone who genuinely has big strengths and big weaknesses are given overall evaluations that I disagree with. But this idea that everyone across all jobs everywhere their performance is just completely illegible? Come on. Nobody I've ever worked with has ever believed that. It's just cope by people who don't want their performance evaluated.
I mean, yes, I think in most 'email jobs' (not saying that as a dunk, but as a descriptor), outside of something like sales, when it comes to people outside of the bottom 10-15% and maybe the top 10-15% and I question the latter part, everybody else is in fact, pretty difficult to determine where they actually are.
The good news about teaching and determining whose good and bad is about 40% of teacher's leave after the 1st five years - obviously, some of these people are 'good teachers' who can't deal with the stress or very specific issues with teaching, but the reality is much like DOGE trying to find actual waste in government, finding bad teachers who don't self-select out of the job is actually pretty difficult outside of obvious situations, which makes the job of reformers who like the message of bad teachers ruining education as a fix (as opposed to y'know, poverty and other major issues that effect things far more than a teacher that scores a 5 instead of 6.5 on some rubric).
Yes, there will be a lot of just adequate teachers, just like there will be a lot of just adequate HR people, a lot of just adequate programmers, and so forth, because most people are just adequate.
No, I’m not. My wife San employment attorney, and this issue is central to her work.
She talks about the importance of job descriptions, feedback, evaluation, performance reviews, documentation. It’s all there in office and other types of jobs.
There’s more data there. There are far better structures. There’s more awareness of performance.
Perhaps you do not know little supervision time school administrations have for teachers
The political dynamics are a little more complicated than Matt lays out. In a multi candidate field if you pick a fight with the guy with 35 million to spend and he goes negative on you the winner may well be a third candidate who avoids the fight.
Also the teacher union guy doesn't seem to be getting much traction at the moment, so differentiating one's self from the fifth place guy is maybe less of a priority.
That said, on the merits, I would hope one of them takes up promoting excellence in math and science and accountability.
I worked for a large CMO as a teacher for nearly a decade. Without getting into too much I will say the pandemic completely broke the organization. While I still support the existence of charter schools to provide better options for families, I won’t assume that a charter school is by default better. I am grateful that my organization emphasized expectations and teacher coaching but a lot of those efforts went away after the summer of 2020. I would be grateful for Dem politicians to talk about these issues in a way that makes sense for the moment we’re living in but it feels so low priority.
I’m no fan of public sector unions, but as a “human capital” skeptic I don’t think most school reform ideas focused on education itself will do anything useful. (Reforms can often show benefits at some specific school, but that’s probably just some combination of selection, signaling, and giving some specific kids a leg up on the next round of the zero-sum game. None of these actually benefit society in aggregate.)
Maybe you could make a workable political program out of a package of popular common-sense reforms and pro-family policy.
1. Free school lunch and breakfast
2. Disciplinary policy that starts soft but is capable of escalation for repeat or serious offenses. Referral, suspension, transfer to the special school for hard cases, juvenile detention. Keep all options on the table.
3. Longer school hours and more school days per year, less homework. (This one means a fight with the union, but not as hard as if we were trying to go after their job security, and since we don’t care about teacher quality we can mostly leave them alone on that front.) Kids get optional vacation days that parents can schedule.
4. Bus systems that work, so parents don’t have to do as much pickup/dropoff.
I assume the idea behind the longer days is to improve the daycare function, and not the education function?
Serious question, if you don't really believe school is all that significant anyway, why even bother with the theater and not just provide school-linked daycare services? It's a lot easier to hire a daycare worker than a qualified teacher.
That’s a good refinement and I like it. You expand the school day but not the amount of real class time that requires teachers, add “study hall” and recess periods in, hire people without degrees to monitor the kids during study hall and recess.
I mean, it's never said it as such, but a lot of the insane level of after-school clubs and such in a place like Japan is basically government subsidized day care for parents working insane hours.
Education feels like one of those policy areas where most reform ideas in either direction don’t make such a big difference, so it’s OK to embrace popularist/strategic positioning.
Given that so much is ultimately downstream of housing and development policy, I have trouble taking anyone seriously anymore who thinks that education is the paramount issue. The whole debate is stuck in shitty 80’s-90’s platitudes about how important education supposedly is, but for several generations now, not one single reform has made anything resembling the promised impact, even when they’re otherwise successful reforms.
For example, affirmative action was supposed to uplift communities, but just ended up lifting people OUT of their communities.
At this point, I’m just so sick of the debate and the outsized role it takes up in the public discourse. It makes me yawn and groan every time education comes up, because it feels like the lack of any real policy impact has given the electorate an excuse to just turn 90% of the debate into yet another battleground for performative culture war bullshit.
"But thinking about it seriously, if we’re talking about learning loss (and we should be), shouldn’t we be talking about the old education reform standbys of standards and accountability?"
There is a vibe on the left - am I the only one who feels it? - that standards and accountability are... kind of bad? It's like there was such an overreaction to the punitive mindset that conservatives bring to every issue - education, crime, immigration, welfare, you name it - that we started to think that accountability and punishment are indistinguishable.
The left's obsession with "power dynamics" also feeds into hostility to standards and accountability - after all, a person who is enforcing standards has more power than the person they are enforcing them on, which in modern leftist orthodoxy automatically makes them the Bad Guys. And that sounds over the top, but honestly guys, it's not even really a caricature, it's absolutely what we've been doing. Some of us more emphatically and recklessly than others.
Yeah it’s the phones, but I feel like the fact that it took a DECADE for a critical mass of the education community to go “no seriously what the f—-, put your phone away” is emblematic of the problem I’m describing.
By no means am I trying to ascribe everything to “liberal permissiveness,” and all things considered it is probably not near the top of the list. But it’s a contributing factor in both reality and (especially) the public impression.
Yeah, I think even your most left-wing sort of teacher this comment section would despise for their views on education and social issues would also happily ban phones and honestly, go back to a 2003 standard of what's acceptable in electronics.
Like, I might be finally becoming an old man, but most of the so-called improvements in actual education pushed by all wings of the education movement from right to left outside of maybe digital/electronic blackboards actually seem to be a positive for education.
Agree with your first sentence. Every one of the 200+ teachers at my school would LOVE to have phones banned. There is not enough parent and community buy-in to make this happen. The school board doesn't want to make parents mad. Parents complain a TON if you take away phones. Also, there are landline phones in every class with emergency buttons.
Matt writes: "I was disappointed by the trajectory of education policy in both of those cycles, but I did understand what everyone was thinking. The New Jersey gubernatorial primary, by contrast, seems like a situation where there is an objective incentive for someone to take some positions fearlessly, without regard for union politics."
Some Republican friends of mine are befuddled that the GOP is taking positions against trade, against international coalitions, and for government intrusion into private organizations. They can't quite come to grips that their GOP -- the GOP of the Bushes, Romney, McCain, Reagan -- does not exist any more.
I think the same is true for you and the Democratic Party of Clinton (Bill), Obama, Carville, et al. That Party doesn't exist anymore. I hope today's essay, like the Common Sense Democrat Manifesto series, will start to resurrect it.
I think there is some false equivalence here. MAGA is totally rampant in the GOP. Their base clearly supports MAGA. DSA, which I guess is the closest equivalent in the Democratic Party, has 3 Representatives and 1 Senator (Bernie, unofficially I think). Even if you go wider and look at the Congressional Progressive Caucus, they have 1 Senator and 97 Reps. So even that's a clear minority.
It's been extensively discussed how they wield power through a mix of activism, staffing, lobbying and threatening to abandon the coalition if they don't get their way. They have not persuaded the bulk of Democrats to their point of view.
>I think there is some false equivalence here.<
Gee ya think? LOL.
Democrats have moved to the left. Republicans have moved to the lunacy. Single payer healthcare and slavery reparations may not be everybody's cup of tea (they're sure not mine), but they're a far cry from elections denialism, vaccine quackery, and invading Greenland.
There is a version of election denialism in the Democratic Party that I wish got any attention: the propensity of Democrats to falsely attribute Republican legislative majorities to gerrymandering even when the Republican majority is proportional to the GOP's share of the legislative popular vote.
I've seen that from random people on social media, but also Hakeem Jeffries and writers for the NYTimes.
I've seen a belief among Democrats that a "fair map" would produce a Democratic majority, even on a minority of the popular vote.
Again, it's not just randos who say this. This assertion about a "fair map" being a Democratic one in part comes from assessing gerrymanders by the "Efficiency Gap, " ignoring how the Efficiency Gap has a large structural bias in favor of the Democratic Party. This bias, which I haven't seen explored by anyone yet, exists because the Democrats tend to win low-turnout districts and the Republicans tend to win high-turnout districts and that tendency produces more "wasted" votes for the Democratic Party. Hence, Democrats can construe proportionality or slight Republican disproportionality as Republican "gerrymanders."
I might well be missing the swell of these Democratic election denialists who focus on gerrymandering, but when I hear Democrats complain about gerrymandering broadly, the advantage isn't that killing gerrymandering will = massive democratic wins, but that it will = less partisan candidates. E.g., in a gerrymandered district, partisans can get away with pushing an extremist because all you need is people to default to partyline voting to win. In a competitive district, candidates have to appeal much more broadly and win votes across the aisle. Which, theoretically, will produce a congress that cares more about getting things done than impressing the base with posturing.
tl:dr—I think getting rid of it would be a huge win but not because there will be a massive Democratic sweep.
I think you're correct that having less partisan candidates is a motivation by anti-gerrymandering Democrats and that they are sincere in that, but I think that belief about gerrymandering exacerbating partisanship is erroneous.
Just to focus on Republicans who are considered extreme, several of the most notable, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, come from places that would be Republican under any plausible House map. Northwest Georgia and the Florida panhandle are simply very conservative.
Several other extreme Republicans, like Lauren Boebert, represent districts that are centrist. They simply are very conservative people who don't care if they lose reelection (Boebert changed districts because she was vulnerable in her original district). I forget her name, but there was another Arizona Republican extremist who came from a competitive district.
The current chair of the Freedom Caucus, Andy Harris, is from Maryland and is the result of a _Democratic_ gerrymander.
If we were going to combat that kind of extremism, the more viable electoral change would be to change the primary process, ie to have a top-two primary, or, even better, top-four RCV (or top-four STAR).
It is true that 95% of US House districts have become non-competitive, but that is the result of the "Big Sort" and each party making itself unacceptable to moderates who a generation or two ago would have been swing voters. If you analyze results by _county_, you'll see that most American counties have become single-party dominant, despite county boundaries never changing.
Finally, there is a huge problem in drawing House districts to be competitive, in that these swing districts tend to swing to the same party together, so more competitive districts = bigger disproportionalities. IMO, if we have to use single-member districts, the least-bad way to do it is to draw for proportionality.
https://www.legbranch.org/2018-1-5-no-gerrymandering-is-not-the-cause-for-non-competitive-congressional-elections-and-legislative-polarization/
Or we could just build more housing and do proper Congressional apportionment? I don't think many people in America feel appropriately represented, Gerrymandering aside, we need to expand the House.
Love the “evil republican gerrymandering” crowd, whose blinders eliminate California and Illinois among others.
The fact is, of the states that are purplish on the legislative level, a majority of the worst gerrymanders are Democratic, including Nevada, which is the absolute worst, where the Democrats turn 45% of the vote into 65% of the seats.
This also includes New Jersey and Colorado, where immense Democratic disproportionalities exist despite the use of non-partisan commissions.
The absence of any commentary on Democratic gerrymanders is partly media bias and partly the bias of academia, but also partly because the Republican Party is so passive on Democratic gerrymanders that the GOP itself doesn't give the media much to cover.
(At least in California you could argue that the Democratic disproportionality is the natural result of a very large popular vote majority electing a body through single-winner districts.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Nevada_Assembly_election
I happily admit there's a Nevada gerrymander and would also happily agree to a national law that would severely limit state and congressional gerrymanders, but I'm not going to argue the Democrat's should shoot themselves in the head to play fair.
Thanks for great data. I suspect that republicans could spend 24/7/365 pointing out the reality without effect. Reality doesn’t fit the narrative of the true believers.
California is not gerrymandered. It's just hugely Democratic.
45% isn’t democrat. Show me anything near that percentage of representatives not in the Democratic Party or demonstrate my number is wrong.
And those are good reasons to vote Democrat rather than Republican right now.
But plenty of people didn't think those were good enough reasons, so maybe just saying(even accurately) "but the other side is way worse" isn't good enough?
*Maybe* saying "the other side is worse" isn't good enough?
I'd say "without a doubt" it's not good enough.
(1) For political purposes, it's better to take positions that are popular than positions that are unpopular.
(2) Republicans are now much worse than Democrats on nearly all issues.
Both things are true.
Yeah I used a more passive voice construction with "maybe", but I was trying to gently disagree with you supporting the "false equivalence".
I don't want us to ignore point 1 because we're always pointing out point 2.
Don't worry Democrats have had their share of plenty of lunacy.
Defund the police, open borders, mutilation of children under the misguided notion that you can change a person's sex.
There's always plenty of lunacy to go around. Just pick your flavor
> Defund the police, open borders, mutilation of children under the misguided notion that you can change a person's sex.
Which mainstream democrats are saying this? The progressive wing of the party (The Squad) basically lost the majority of their members the last cycle. And I see people saying people can change their gender identity, not sex. I also don't seriously see any Democrats supporting defunding of the police, open borders or child mutilation (sex changes I assume?). I see people saying kids should get gender confirming care but sex changes don't even poll well for kids under 16 amongst Dems.
Don't let the loudest social justice leftists on Twitter lump us all together.
The changes in the GOP are larger and the alienation of the Reagan / GHWB conservatives are more profound, but I don't think it rises to "false equivalence" to point out how far the party has moved from the time of Bill Clinton and first term Obama.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
I agree the Dems haven’t moved that far left, but the pathological degree to which they’ve been captured by the Groups (teachers unions as in this case, envuronmental groups on energy policy, and trans activists on gender issues) has a lot of explanatory power in terms of their inability to govern or win important elections.
100% agreed.
On the Dem side I think that's not quite right. This is like the tenth year of the 2016 primary. Biden's synthesis attempt ultimately failed, so we're probably back to the two factions but with a new generation.
I think the Abundance stuff being embraced by actual politicians is a genuinely good sign. Education reform policy is behind in development. Partially it's because of deference to unions, but also because the old reform agenda is old and was only marginally successful.
But, I suspect there's an appetite by both the voters and Abundance friendly pols for a new reform agenda. Luckily, in the Obama Foreign Policy theme, there's a lot of low hanging fruit in the "Stop Doing Stupid Stuff" vein.
Maybe this is naive but I find myself wishing for an in-person Common Sense Democratic club to brainstorm concrete ways to persuade/expand the tent over beers/coffee/whatever.
I find the idea of this much more compelling than standing on a street corner in a blue city/town holding up anti-trump signs exhorting drivers to honk in support, which seems to be the only option right now in the 2 places where I spend time (DC and Ann Arbor MI). Perhaps I’ve read too many accounts of the historical importance of coffeehouses…
I was thinking this morning about how I miss Pope Francis and then thought about Benedict and then John McCain. Leaders make an organization and its culture. When they are gone these organizations can turn alien.
"...John McCain. Leaders make an organization...."
In hindsight, McCain was not the worst that Republicans had to offer. But McCain was also never a leader of the party -- his brand was always "maverick." And he sure as hell was not the pope of the Republican Party. I think he had very little effect on the culture of the party, throughout his political career -- the Reagan cadre and the Bush family were far more central during his era.
He selected Sarah Palin as his running mate! What a harbinger of the Republican Party to come, ushered in by lovable maverick John McCain.
You could make the argument that McCain was the John the Baptist of Trumpism. But I thought Dan was presenting him as the Pope of the older, saner Republican Party. It's the latter judgment I was disagreeing with.
"Prepare ye the way of the Lord."
You want the meek to inherit the earth? You can't do it, my friend!
Presidential nominees typically don't give much thought to their VP choices, except how it might give a tactical political advantage. Lincoln picking Johnson; FDR and his choices, etc.
Probably because to take the choice more seriously must begin with the premise, "I need to make a good choice because I might fall down and d--" and that's when thinking immediately stops.
In the post '72 primary reform era current/former VPs have won 50-60% of presidential nominations they've run for. It's easily the single best way to get a future pres nomination, see how much it turned Biden and Harris from primary flops to future nominees. They've got to start giving way more weight to "Do I want this person to be my party's next nominee and potential next president?" questions, rather than "Will this person give me a 0.4% boost among *demographic*?"
Yes, you'd think they'd take the decision more seriously.
Palin would be an improvement over the current GOP…
Would she? In hindsight she's quite struck me as a proto-Trumpist figure.
I am saying the Palin of 2008 is a much better person than the modal Republican today.
McCain wanted to see the 2008 financial crisis go thermonuclear by opposing "Bank Bailouts" as the Republican presidential candidate. He also championed that psycho VP populist and he spoke to the right wing populists who became the Tea Party. Hence the exodus of the educated and affluent to the Democrats and our branding as "PMC" "neoliberal", or whatever.
McCain is the chief villain in my personal narrative about how Republicans became the party of the stupid, poor losers. Moreover I believe his anti-technocratic brand created the environment for not only Trump but also Bernie.
He did rather descend into crankdom toward the end, didn't he? And he gave a boost to GOP anti-intellectualism with his running mate selection.
On the other hand his vote to save Obamacare was solid, and to my mind seems practically unimaginable in today's GOP.
Yes, I agree there is some positive in McCain's legacy and in general people are complex. Nonetheless, Americans have always loved our "outside the system" candidates, including not just Trump and Bernie, but also Obama, Bill Clinton, Reagan, etc. Just was no point in McCain centering his brand on being a "maverick" as he gained institutional power.
To a lesser extent, Obama also struggled with evolving his brand as he gained institutional power. At least Obama and his team leaned in to the challenge and was increasingly thoughtful about messaging and actions. But it sure would've been easier if he and Democratic leadership didn't have to fight grass root Republican populism during the 2008 presidential election to manage a complex financial crisis.
Would've been much better if Romney was running in 2008 such that Republicans could better own the bank bailouts and both parties would share in credit and blame. Instead, Obama himself became a major target of Occupy Wall Street and other lazy left wing populist movements.
Romney would not have won in 2008. Maybe Lincoln would have, but no other Republican.
John McCain was a corrupt (google Keating Five) less openly religious reactionary hawk who ran against a more religious conservative in a primary, got rightly upset over terrible attacks by people associated with said religious conservative and thus stumbled into voting the right way on some bad tax cuts, got religion over campaign finance (in part likely due to those PAC attack ads), and then was pretty straightfowardly terrible for the next 20 years including during his Presidential run, then got rightly upset at another personal attack by Trump and thus voted the right away on ACA repeal.
Then he died before he could ruin his reputation again, like the Senator from South Carolina.
"got religion over campaign finance (in part likely due to those PAC attack ads)"
The campaign finance reforms backed by McCain and Democrats have been absolutely terrible for America as it has removed almost all real power from parties while empowering outside forces.
I also think they were bad, but I also think they, along with Citizen's United have become kind of overrated by the kind of person who want the parties to have more power.
As long a small donor donations and the Internet exists and our parties were never parties the same way the UK Labour or German CDU is, something like this is inevitable.
Maybe things aren't quite as bad, but the days of LBJ being able to end a career by threatening to turn off the party spigot was already over.
Jamaal Bowman lost his primary. Not the general election, but his primary. Because Israel/Palestine was so much in the news at the time, there was a lot of theories that his loss was attributable to his positions regarding the conflict. Given the demographics of his district, that probably played some role. But its also probably important to keep in mind that Bowman was very possibly the most prominent Democrat espousing the super left positions on education that Matt (rightfully) pushes back on. He was especially prominent regarding scaling back and even eliminating standardized testing. https://pelhamexaminer.com/56336/announcing/rep-bowman-introduces-bill-to-end-over-testing-in-schools-that-would-eliminate-federally-mandated-exams/ * And in an election (by definition) made up of only Democratic voters, he lost.
Which is I think Matt's point to a degree. You're correct to note that the Democratic party has moved left generally since the time of Clinton and even Obama. Matt has written a number of posts about this. A lot of the commentators below have pushed back with some critiques of your post that I think have some merit, but overall you're correct. And and a lot of issues I'm very glad for it (I suspect most of the commentators on here are pretty happy the Democratic party has moved left on the topic of gay marriage since Clinton's time for example).
But on education? Yeah, it's not at all clear that the progressive education reformers who had a lot of influence on Democratic education policy since 2020 represent the median Democratic voter let alone the electorate at large. Which is why I'm pretty sure Matt is pleading with some of these Democratic candidates to take a more moderate position on education given a) you have no chance of getting the Teacher's union endorsement anyway and b) there's a decent chance it will actually win you support from Democratic voters. What's the downside risk here basically.
There is a lot of talk last 10 years that as Democratic party increasingly becomes the party of the upper middle class this will push Democrats rightward on taxes. And for the most part this hasn't happened. What's been underrated is that the changing make up of the Democratic party likely makes super progressive positions on education less popular among its voters, not more.
I had a 5 hour flight Monday and didn't really feel like working so I went back and watched a bunch of Obama's '08 campaign speeches and (1) wow ... he's brilliant but (2) I just don't see any throughline from Clinton (Bill) to Obama. He literally ran against *a* Clinton in the primary from the Progressive left (e.g., anti-war, anti-NAFTA, anti-corporation). His Ohio and Wisc. speeches pulled directly from Perot in '92 (e.g., NAFTA = a giant sucking sound of lost factories to Mexico).
The grass roots support for that sort of party totally exists. Who has the cunning to harness it?
Who indeed? If one wants a Dem as president, as I do, finding someone with the savvy and brains to "harness it" is our only hope.
This is a very online take.
New Jersey education policy is 95% about how much money is going where, largely because the NJ Supreme Court prescribes that as the main metric for ensuring that the state provides the constitutionally guaranteed fair access to education, via the Abbott cases. To wit, courts don’t primarily look to test results or graduation rates, they look at whether the poor districts are getting enough money.
There are a considerable number of charter schools in Newark that do pretty well, on average, and whether to raise the cap on the number of charter schools has historically been the other main education issue NJ governors face during their terms.
I was disappointed Matt didn't mention the Abbott cases in this piece, because NJ actually in many ways is a success story of official liberal policy (very high and equitably distributed funding, towards the top of the country in demographic adjusted NAEP scores for 8th grade reading, the exam that is hardest to achieve success on). The entire framing of the debate in Jersey needs to be around how that investment, while meaningful, has produced diminishing returns against low spending states while crushing suburban taxpayers.
And I’m not sure if things have changed in recent years, but (when I was more well read on this issue a few years ago) NJ was specifically a leader in education performance in high poverty high diversity districts. at least suggesting that Abbott was effective, albeit not necessarily cost-effective
How could Matt write an article chiding politicians for not supporting what he wants (ie. union busting) if he admits New Jersey and the evil teacher unions seem to be doing a pretty good job on education?
The interesting take, which Matt won’t touch, is whether investing educational resources in high poverty areas is cost effective. Creaming would certainly be cost effective, but that requires measuring that might illuminate awkward racial gaps in achievement .
The other thing is, like, people in New Jersey like their schools and the schools are generally pretty good to REALLY good? As an issue I get that people are talking about it but my sense from my Jersey based in laws is that they are annoyed taxes are so high but believe the schools are good enough to justify it.
This from the outside seems to be the political dynamic in every state once you get past the borders of Pennsylvania - people complain and whine about taxes and the government but the vast majority of people would still prefer it over say, the Texan or Florida government.
Before anybody responds, yes, a lot of people move out every year - that's still 90% housing prices and that it sucks to be cold 6-8 months out of the year. One of the few things I'll continue to irrationally believe without evidence is that you could completely flip the political values of the Northwast/Great Lakes states and Southern states since 1975 and the population changes would be about the same because people hate being cold and enough housing hasn't been built, not taxes, unions, or even really social views (Florida since 2020 might be an exception).
Growing up in New England in the 90s, my classmates thought it was weird that my grandparents didn't live in Florida since that was the default for so many of them.
Yup, at this point, I could argue the current political valence of the South is hurting their population growth. While I'd still have issues, if you had a bunch of Jeb's running things as opposed to the weirdos who have taken over, you wouldn't be able to stop people moving to North Carolina or Georgia.
As a dirty leftie, I'd be opposed to some of the policies they'd pass, but even I know my more politically involved but still pretty normie friends wouldn't be totally against ever moving to a red state.
Eh, I dunno. There are frustrations. Because of union dominance, there are a higher than usual number of half days, which are inconvenient for parents. And that’s leaving aside the political objections to trans/DEI elements of curricula. But as a general matter, yes, people are satisfied in the same way that most Americans are satisfied with their health insurance.
While Education is a Democrat issue, I don't think boosting it's salience helps Dems because many left wing activists believe really weird and mad things about education and are willing to shout them in public. Activists expressing concepts like maths tests are racist, the idea violent kids shouldn't be expelled and bad teachers should never be fired etc are really good for the GOP.
The point here is that Steven Fulop should come out and say math tests are great, violent kids should be expelled, and most especially that bad teachers should be fired. Also that good teachers who have been in the job for only a few years should get paid more than mediocre ones who’ve been there a long time, and that there should be a lot of standardized testing to figure out which teachers are doing well enough to get the big raises and which are doing poorly enough to be put on PIPs and eventually fired. And that all of this is safe for Fulop to say politically because he is literally running against the avatar of education lunacy, the head of the teachers' union.
TLDR; you are correct, that is why it’s a great way for a moderate Dem to do it.
I hope his staff reads this strategically unpaywalled post!
I wonder what % of Dem primary voters work in education.
I don't think that necessarily makes them pro teacher's union.
I think the antipathy toward teacher's unions among actual Democratic voters is highly overrated by a certain kind of highly educated center-left person in urban areas.
Not to say they all think they're perfect but again, a lot of the supposed moderate minority voters that we were told to listen to over out of touch activists backed the teacher's on not wanting to open schools.
Like, there's a reason like the best thing to be in a Democratic primary is probably a former school teacher just like the best thing to be in a Republican primary is a veteran (well I guess in 2025, the best thing to be is a weird right-wing social media infliuencer).
If Karen Lewis the president of Chicago's teacher union ran for governor, would her affiliation with the union help or hurt her?
I agree that Dem primary voters like teachers (this is through intuition rather than data) but I'm skeptical that a representative of an unpopular teacher's union would be a good candidate.
Also, I find it interesting when folks like you and Matt decide that Democrat's need to listen to the people and stop telling them what to think and when elitist outsiders are supposed to takeover and impose decisions from above.
As I pointed out in another thread, it was disproportionately minority parents and teacher unions in a coalition that stopped school openings in much of the US, while more well-educated people were mad at them.
I mean, yes, the one actually out there very unpopular teacher's union (though I think there's still probably 1/3 of Chicago's population that's support her over a moderate candidate) is a bad example.
I think the President of the Minneapolis teacher's union or here in Seattle, the president of the Seattle teacher's union would do fine in a mayoral election.
Hell, we just saw recently in Wisconsin, while they did worse than the judge, the union-backed candidate for statewide education office won despite various moderate Democrat's backing her opponent.
I think the median Democrat thinks there are some teacher's that have some silly ideas and are bad, but they still trust teacher's when it comes to what or how to teach or who or who shouldn't be fired over say, non-teachers who want to impose their will on those teacher's because of studies.
Especially when seemingly everytime the reformers get their way, there are stories of beloved teachers getting fired because they get the right scores on whatever system a MBA from Chicago U made up.
100% agreed, as a former Jersey City resident Fulop is great and he should be more outspoken about this sort of common sense stuff.
Cool, can you tell me how to determine a "bad teachers" in a way a majority of teachers will agree with, as opposed to a method a majority of people whose main job in life is to break teacher's unions?
Look, I'm not designing the policy, just clarifying what it is, substantively, the piece is recommending that the moderate Democrats not named Sean Spiller should do. I'm not commenting on whether or not this is correct.
Democrats really need to get used to again in the online era telling the weirdest loudest screamers to STFU.
Kind of surprised the author here doesn’t take the opportunity to examine why education policy- or at least the perception that things at schools went really bad- put Youngkin in the governors office in Virginia.
" Activists expressing concepts like maths tests are racist, the idea violent kids shouldn't be expelled and bad teachers should never be fired etc are really good for the GOP."
Isn't that your opportunity to punch left and stand out as a moderate?
I mean, the first is really a problem in like 10-15 school districts in the country which makes it difficult to make a point on and makes you seem like a weirdo obsessed with conservative politics outside of those districts, everybody loves zero tolerance policies on violence until it's their kid getting suspended and part of the reason why you had changes in policies was parents being upset over how their kids were being treated, and whom reformers think is a bad teacher and who teachers, parents, and student is a bad teacher doesn't always overlap very well.
Like, sure, if you're in San Francisco run on how math tests aren't racist. In suburban New Jersey and likely even in Trenton or Camden, probably far less of an issue.
I'm quite sure you have at least a few activists (most likely union leaders) sprouting that nonsense in NJ.
Do some nutpicking, take a stand against the nuttiness and win points as a moderate.
“ But a lot of suburban Americans are relying on socioeconomic segregation as their de facto education policy.”
Ding ding ding! Too bad this was buried in the middle of the piece.
Solving this is (politically, not substantively) in tension with the desire to have advanced classes be more fair, automatically enrolled, etc.
In the south we mostly have integrated schools, unlike the north where they kept segregation. Partly this is because of a greater number of mixed-income neighborhoods but it's mostly because schools draw from both poor and rich neighborhoods. The suburban parent solution is to replace actual school segregation with the creation of de-facto segregated advanced classes. In my experience this works a lot better, because rather than being a hard barrier like school zoning, it's a soft barrier that sufficiently motivated parents can overcome with relative ease, and it works sufficiently well to stop upper-middle-class parents from opting out of the public school system by default. I went to a high school that was only 30% white and was mostly poor students and my AP classes were maybe 60% white and an even greater percentage of wealthy students, but there were still more minority and low-income students then you'd get in a school that used the housing market to ensure almost all students were from wealthy families.
I think if you try to break this system, you will create even greater political backlash over the idea of ending school segregation, and you might end up recreating the education dynamics of the old south (i.e. private academies whose entire value proposition is segregated student bodies).
Middle-class parents may have replaced race with class but ultimately they still want their kids to be around other kids *like them*, and the state has limited tools to overcome that when said middle-class parents are the core political constituency.
"The suburban parent solution is to replace actual school segregation with the creation of de-facto segregated advanced classes."
When you put it that way, it looks as though the academic stratification is a means to racial segregation: "I don't care much whether Johnnie does calculus or not, but if it will keep him away from the blahs, then I'll make him do his homework!"
Is that really the way that the parents you are referring to think about it?
Because I would have thought that the motivation to get your kid into a more challenging class is...so that they'll learn more, or get a jump on college, or hang out with the bright kids (of any color) or lots of other motivations. But not, "what I'd really like is actual school segregation, but I guess I'll make do with advanced classes leading to de facto segregation."
Notice that is not the motivation that Matt attributes to many "suburban Americans." They might just be thinking, "I want Johnnie in a challenging school; I believe urban schools are less challenging; so I'm going to move to the 'burbs." The driver in this case would be the desire for an academically superior school, and the racial segregation would merely be a byproduct of that.
I think it's a bit of both! There are absolutely parents who are sincerely racist (this is the south, after all) and want their kids in advanced classes for this reason alone. A somewhat unexpected turn of events when I was a teacher is that the only people who are *open* about this motivation are non-black minority parents (i.e., Hispanic parents, Asian parents, etc.) but I am sure there are plenty of white ones too who just don't say it out loud.
But there are also lots of parents who are just concerned about the 'peer group', and want to avoid low-performing whites and low-performing minorities equally, and don't mind minority students in their kids' classes as long as they are high-performing.
The main thing, though, is that very few parents (or people in general) are actually egalitarians. They have some sorting mechanism in their head (race, class, academic success, etc.) for high-quality and low-quality people, and believe that it is important for their child's future that they spend time around the high-quality people. To your point, they do want their kid to learn calculus -- and they believe the presence of low-quality people will inhibit that objective.
"They have some sorting mechanism in their head (race, class, academic success, etc.) for high-quality and low-quality people...."
Absolutely. I've met fairly few people who had no racist prejudices of any kind, but even fewer who were not committed to some kind of elitism or another.
I think it’s impossible to disentangle people committing statistical discrimination from people using statistical discrimination as a pretext for taste based discrimination, but the product of both is de facto segregation because parents don’t want their kids around “bad kids” and the demographics being what they are in a lot of the south, those bad kids look a certain way.
Interesting data point. My son’s rather affluent southern elementary school is about 5% black and does not have gifted classes. There is “enrichment” for the gifted kids a few hours a week, but they are in standard classes. This means my son is in a math dessert.
Next year, in 6th grade, his school will draw from a bigger district that includes apartments and where 10% of the students get subsidized lunches. Tracking begins in sixth grade.
No, the race of the kids really doesn't matter. It's the socio economic status.
Because people think that the poor kids (especially the poor students) will get your kid into trouble
I attended one of those supposedly magical bussed schools. I lived in the wealthy north part of my school district and my high school was about a 10 minute walk from my house. My school district bussed in students from the poorer south part of the district. But my advanced classes were almost entirely filled with students from the north part of the district where I lived. The average skin color of the students in the advanced classes was also a lot whiter than the student body as a whole.
This is interesting and not my experience here in a very large diverse district in Texas. The school is about 50% white. I am regularly in AP classes of all subjects, and I can tell you that white kids make up about 20% of the class. The other 80% are all of Asian descent. It appears to be a cultural thing where the children of recent immigrants are the ones pushed to take the hardest classes and get the best grades. These students make up most of the top strata of the graduating class.
My more politically unlikely than actual socialist revolution policy for this is school district consolidation...like a ton of it. As in, no more than one school district per county and within that county, all the public schools should be lottery based, with some advantages built-in for people within the neighborhood as everything I've seen shows that sending poor kids to good schools helps them a lot while sending rich kids to less well-off schools doesn't really hurt them.
I know this is more politically toxic than wanting refugees given new luxury apartments in the middle of San Francisco.
The closest analog I can think of is what happened in California (I forget the proposition number that standardized funding and District size) and the unintended consequence is that housing construction ground to an absolute halt.
I seem to recall it was a court case, and the result was Prop 13, which kept taxes to a minimum, since they could no longer be used in an exclusive way. (And Prop 13 then has knock on effects on housing.)
Fascinating to hear this described as a southern thing. I grew up in the Baltimore suburbs—in most ways culturally northern but with a southern legacy, especially around segregation—and this perfectly describes my high school.
spot on
Kind of a side topic but I’m kinda surprised the resistance to charter schools hasn’t been accompanied by arguments that taking money from affluent public school districts would likely hurt home values?
It's fine. Vouchers will fix it! /s
Not quite sure if this is what’s going on in New Jersey teachers union but what I observed through my wife, who’s a public school teacher is there’s basically three factions in the union
1. Status Quo keeper: by far the largest, leaders are from this faction and tend to stay in power for long time
2. Sensible reformers: second largest
3. DSA types
What I observe is basically group 1 is basically catering to group 3 to prevent challenges from group 2 - like group 2 wants more tangible actions while group 3 wants… performative stuffs, so it’s much easier for group 1 to cater to group 3.
Other interesting dynamics is elementary school teachers are the largest in number but the most vocal ones tend to be high school teachers. And elementary school teachers constitutes of group 1.
My personal wish is group 2 wields more influence to bring a reasonable change to the teachers union…
Thank you for sharing this. Intra-union dynamics are not something I've really seen discussed in the education reform sphere. (Probably my lack of wide reading, TBH.) The point about HS teachers vs. elementary ones is intriguing to me. The skills required for one job are pretty different from those required for a different job, yet the tendency is to lump "school teachers" together as a group. It wouldn't surprise me if education reform policies both effected and made sense differently for teachers specializing in different age groups.
Is there a reason education policy, unions, etc. tend to lump all grades together? E.g., different union contracts or differently-incentivized pay structures for Elementary vs. HS teachers?
Good point and I am not an education policy specialist so not quite sure…
It’s def interesting tho as there are separate unions for principals etc so there could separate unions.
My guess is, bc the primary role of unions is to negotiate the salary with the city (or county), there exists an incentive for union to have more members for negotiation power
Does this make sense, politically? It assumes (a) the head of the teacher's union has a reasonable shot to win the primary, on which I'm guessing the three leading candidate have plenty of internal polling data, and (b) the median New Jersey Democratic voter is unhappy with the state of their public schools. If you think about the richer Democratic voters they're mostly trying to appeal to (after all, this is a primary electorate and the voting demographic skews richer), you'd figure that most people not sending their kids to private school probably already pay high taxes and live in a high performing district. So would they want "reform" that might upset that balance? It seems like an unnecessary risk.
I've heard a theory that Spiller is running so that the NJEA has cover to not endorse one of the other major candidates. The theory makes sense to me as a way to preserve its power and influence. Perhaps the other candidates know this and are playing ball.
On the other hand, I've seen polling that has Spiller in second...
As an explanation for why the other candidates are not following Matt's advice, this seems very plausible.
I take that you are not necessarily endorsing the path of caution, just pointing out its attractions.
I don't live in New Jersey, but I do live in a relatively high tax, high performing Northeastern school district. If a candidate proposed radical school reform, as a voter I'd be wary. I also wouldn't vote for the head of the teacher's union to be my governor! So I'm struggling to understand the "why" particularly since Matt frequently endorses popularism as a political strategy.
Matt isn't suggesting that all moderate candidates do this, only that at least one of them should take the risk of proposing reform.
For a "Common Sense" Dem agenda, the best case scenario is that education reform is back at the table, and the most likely worst case scenario is that the pro-education reform moderate loses to another moderate dem.
Torres is endorsing Gottheimer? That's disappointing. Gottheimer is the sort of moderate who manages to pick the wrong side of every issue. For example here. He wants to go all DOGE on New Jersey but won't piss off any public sector unions? Sure buddy. Where do you think the waste is?
Anyways...
Issues of crime, housing, and education are all interrelated. As Matt points out, if the schools aren't well run, parents will be incentivized to become more NIMBY so their kids' schools aren't full of badly behaved kids. Progressives would rather ignore this, but it's obviously true if you've either worked in schools, or talked to parents. For that reason, school discipline is important the same way crime prevention is important.
I was talking to a new family in town at my son's T-ball practice yesterday. Hispanic family from LA, moved here a few years ago, I mention I'm from Long Beach originally, we talk about the Dodgers, the weather, blah blah blah. Then they ask me how the schools are here in the burbs compared to Portland. "How are the schools" can mean a lot of different things, but I basically said "it's not really any different than LA, if there are shoes on the telephone lines, the schools are like that too, but if the neighborhood is decent, the schools are too. The difference is that in Vancouver, you can actually afford to live in the neighborhoods with good schools." Come to find out that's basically exactly what they were asking about. He works for Portland PD and has dealt with the tweakers and all that. And they weren't sure about Vancouver public schools, so they're sending their son to a private Catholic school. I'm much more sympathetic to religious schooling than many here, and I don't have a problem with people doing that, but if you want to have good quality schools, you want parents with, I'll go ahead and call it "bourgeois values," to be willing to send their kids there. If they don't trust the school system, you'll have a vicious cycle, where the most involved parents pull their kids out first.
It's interesting, living in a school district with huge problems but also a lot of potential. Philly has been "two steps forward, 1-3/4 steps back" on this for a long time.
We have some good catchment schools at the elementary and middle school level, and many have been getting better, but we've also killed one or two by suddenly changing their catchments to encompass a bunch areas where families aren't engaged and kids bring discipline problems and even violence. Once that happens that elementary school is done for a generation.
We've fallen about as far as most blue-area public schools on the need for discipline and early interventions, and we're badly resourced to try to get the school system to act as a replacement for parenting, but there've been some programs and some schools that have done well.
Our charters range from top-notch ones (often run by non-profits with community ties, as the one my older goes to), through the range of "do better than public schools partly due to selection effects and partly due to accountability" to "just as bad or worse than the worst public schools." But on the whole they've probably improved educational outcomes and offered better discipline and safety policies than the district schools they've replaced or pulled students from.
And then we've got, somehow, no less than half a dozen (maybe as many as ten, I would have to look) excellent select-admit/magnet high schools that crank out grads who can go toe-to-toe with kids from the best districts in the burbs. These play roles ranging from "aspiring poor black families ride their kids like hell to get them into these schools because they set them up for good colleges" to "white professionals leave the city if their teens don't get into these schools, so their excellence shores up the tax base permanently as they stay after their kids leave and the pressure is off." Naturally, the "equity" nuts have desperately tried to kill basically all of them at every damned turn.
When Biden imploded in the debate, zero major Democrats made a bold bid for power. Pete Buttigieg tarnished his own brand by doing almost nothing to lower construction costs as Secretary of Transportation. Maybe it’s safetyism, maybe it’s malaise. Maybe with six candidates everyone is worried about covering their downside if they lose. Whatever it is, Democrats need better elites. Soon. I sincerely hope our next Presidential nominee is someone whose name I barely know.
I was highly intrigued by Pete in 2020 and I think he has a lot going for him coming into 2028. 3 elections in a row democrats have nominated a terrible communicator with no independent vision of where they want to take the country and no ability to spread that message convincingly. In the shadow field so far Pete seems best suited to do that. And as a Pete fan, FAR AND AWAY to me his biggest blinking red light risk is that he will be attacked for knowing of Biden's diminishing capacity and won't have a sufficient explanation to ppl for that. The idea that the secretary of transportation is responsible for inflation and YIMBYism seems...... dubious.
Nah, far and away his biggest political liability is being married to a man. And I say this is as someone who agrees with you that he is head and shoulders above the rest of the Democratic field in communication style and general projection of strong thinking and competence (although I’d be pretty cool with Booker too.)
"...his biggest political liability is being married to a man...."
Holy shit, that's a political bomb-shell. Does his husband know about this?
When he was in the primary last time, lots of people had no idea he was gay. If he advances further along, it will become more well-known. I would like to think that we are now at a place where that won't matter so much, but I honestly have no idea what voters will do with that information.
Is he a great communicator, though? He sounds great sparring on Fox News. Does he give rousing speeches? Can he get a crowd to roar and surf on top of its enthusiasm like Obama and Clinton could?
Maybe he'd be great at something like FDR's fireside chats, but you only get to do those kinds of things after you win.
I strongly expect he could if given the opportunity, although I admit that my "listening to rousing speeches" time budget is approximately zero minutes per year these days.
If a smart technocrat cannot address construction costs having been given more power over transportation than any other single American, what are smart technocrats good for?
Do you really think this was the limiting principle here? Pete had a giant “Lower costs now” button on his desk that he didn’t push for four years? amidst all the tentacles of local regulatory barriers Matt talks about here constantly? Of every democratic politician in America I am exceedingly confident Pete is in the 99th Percentile of Abundance Pilled
In the short-term, actual politicians talking about the abundance stuff mostly has me worried that they're going to start creating offices of abundance management, abundance coordinators, abundance community outreach liaisons, institutes of abundance studies, etc, and nothing is going to improve other than the student loan balances of well-credentialed bureaucrats, academics, and staffers.
You have to actually fix the stuff!
But what did he do?
I think Buttigieg wants to make an omlette without breaking eggs. That kind of complacency should have died in the 2016 election, yet here we are.
Smart technocrats are good at building teams that can work to gradually bend systems in directions that eventually lead to good outcomes. You might call it the slow boring of hard boards.
More importantly, they don’t just come in and smash everything in the name of efficiency while forgetting whether they are talking about billions or trillions or millions.
musk is not a smart technocrat, but buttigieg had four years. he didn’t have to smash anything quickly, he has time to study and choose fights wisely
Pete struggles with working class people. Obama seemed to alleviate working class concerns with his elite demeanor and he came across as accessible. Pete does not have that in his toolbox. But in fairness, most Democrats don’t. 2020 Biden did. In close elections in the Midwest this matters.
Imo, it's also partly the result of the erosion of elite power (candidates who were endorsed by the county party had favorite position on the primary ballot, but courts struck that down last year). If the party line system still existed, there would almost certainly be fewer than six candidates in the race
That elite power was removed in part because it was insanely corrupt. Like, basically half of Jersey's Democratic party was controlled by one corrupt guy, as opposed to the evil Group's.
does a county party committee count as elite?
They count(ed) as a political elite imo in the sense that it was basically impossible to win without backing of the folks running the county parties
I don't have strong opinions about what New Jersey should do with it's education policy, but I'm sure they can figure it out. In general, and especially compared to the neighboring states of PA and NY, New Jersey is a state that works as a state. A relatively cohesive political community with a strong state identity. And as a result, not nearly as much push-pull gridlock between regions that simply have irreconcilable preferences and desired ways of doing things.
"...New Jersey is a state that works as a state...."
True. Trenton makes, the world takes.
Interesting, my experience in SE PA is the exact opposite and I am infinitely more grateful for the mere concept of “opposition parties*”, just for having looked at NJ or MD governance. Or Chicago…
*Even if ours is insane, it restrains our own morons.
The synthesis is that NJ's administrative state and judiciary are adequately funded, have good SOPs, and have strong esprit de corps, and so can deliver services efficiently. But the lack of political opposition means a lot of political decisions are stupid, counterproductive, or corrupt. In PA the administrative state is strangled by a lack of resources, bad SOPs, and demoralization, (to say nothing of the state’s overpoliticized and lazy judiciary) but healthy political competition keeps the actual policies from being too wild in either direction.
All things considered, given the relative lack of frequency with which many people interact with the judicial system in particular, I prefer our circumstances. I can only imagine what Philadelphia would have done to itself over the last several decades with a blank check from Harrisburg.
About the only (possible) upside would be a better funded and better functioning SEPTA, and whether more money would have actually translated to more service in that instance is questionable at best.
I think Philly really could use a lot more resources and investment
I don't disagree in the least, but I have, based on the examples of Baltimore, NJ, and Chicago among others, absolutely zero faith that we would have used such funding well if we'd had it.
Most of the city institutions that function well now are downstream of the interplay between Philly, the Collar Counties, and Harrisburg between 1980 and 2010 or so. Our budgeting process, our improving pension and debt service costs, the school district's overperformance relative to funding levels compared to most of our peers, SEPTA's operational efficiency by North American standards, our relatively clean governance, a somewhat responsive civil service...
We need *considerable* investments in transit and education, but I absolutely do not buy that making such expenditures between 1980 and 2010 would have yielded results that were worth a damn.
The problem, of course, is that now that our political culture is hugely improved, the state GOP has gone completely batshit insane. Not much to do for that except wait and see if Picozzi turns out to be worth a good goddamn and Shapiro will play hardball.
I suppose you can say this about the rest of the country about the idea of liberal programs and spending being good vs. the reality of how it is spent and also the GOP going batshit insane
It's better still to have more than one party in the context of a polity that at least generally speaking wants similar things and sees each other as part of the same community.
For example, currently in the PA legislature there's a funding fight that could result in draconian cutbacks to SEPTA up to the closure of five regional rail lines. It'll probably be resolved in some negotiated deal, but why does it have to be so hard? The five counties of SE PA are rich enough to fund their own local transit system, and would if they were their own state, but everything like that becomes harder and more difficult when it has to run through Harrisburg with concessions and buyoffs to people who are opposed to the very idea of a regional commuter rail line, because it's not relevant to them.
We *could* fund the damned buses, we just endlessly choose not to, a decision justified by the politicians saying that Harrisburg owes us this because we're the economic engine of the state.
The reality is that Philly is just as heavily subsidized by PA tax receipts as any of the northern tier counties with no one in them. The Collar Counties get the shaft, but their SEPTA service is much less crucial to them, so they chip in a small pittance.
Once the city pension fund is 100% funded in 2032, we need to take a long, hard look at BIRT's gross receipts tax, local SEPTA funding, and capital programming for Parks and Rec.
Don't spend that $800M windfall on a single fucking new program or new handout to some favored constituency, just do two basic things well and ditch a cripplingly stupid tax.
Maryland is sneakily one of the worst run states I have ever seen, and they have zero excuse for it.
Does New Jersey have a strong state identity? I always thought the idea of state identity was weird when I was growing up there, given that the central identity issue in the state was whether you were basically part of New York or basically part of Philadelphia (or the weird rural bits of the state). I don’t think anyone other state organized their identity in ways so strongly connected to something out-of-state as New Jersey does, and especially not two different something’s in different states.
"Allow (indeed, encourage) the most effective charter schools to expand, while shutting down the least-effective ones."
This is exactly what has proven not to work. As much as anything has failed in ed reform, this has failed, the notion that you can simply scale up charter schools that seem to be succeeding. And the reason why? Because those schools manufacture the appearance of better performance through selection bias coming in (admissions fraud) and going out (attrition and backfill manipulation).
Why do so many charter schools fail to do this work of replicating the success of a small number of sui generis urban charters with suspiciously good outcomes? Because the student body pruning is the source of the perceived difference. The much-ballyhooed first class of Success Charter Academy had 83 students coming in. 17 of them graduated. And the media credulously reported the improved averages of the 17!
I think we should recognize there's been a sea change in the broader public. It is no longer important to many (most?) people that all children receive an adequate education. There are enough people out there now who would look at those other 66 kids and shrug. The steady march of vouchers will cull the charter herd anyway because they won't have as many "good kids" to select from.
What do you mean by "adequate education"?
Those 66 kids might not be able to graduate with a college-ready transcript, but one that was more appropriate for their level could lift them to their potential.
Did Success Academy provide them with an education appropriate for their level? Presumably not if they failed to graduate. I guess I'm confused what the question is?
My view is that every kid deserves a free and appropriate education to the level of whatever standard their state may set. Success Academy is in New York. You can find New York's graduation requirements here: https://www.nysed.gov/standards-instruction/graduation-requirements . More generally, an adequate education would, for me, be one that allows students to pursue whatever options they want after graduating. If a kid wants to go to college, their time spent in school should prepare them for that. If a kid wants to go into the trades, their time in school should prepare them for that. If a kid goes into some low-end service job, their education should be good enough that they can do those jobs too.
What I worry about is that my view is no longer a mainstream view or that people who differ make up a large enough minority that it's going to mean we stop trying. This gets to some of what Matt is nostalgic for. He wants democrats to pick up the education mantle again and start remining everyone that all kids deserve a good education. I fear the reason democrats are not picking up that mantle is because many people do not much care if all kids get a good education. They may care about their kid, or maybe their local school but what if the school is full of illegal immigrants? What if it's a poor "urban" school? People have a hard time wanting time and effort and resources to go to those places because they will not directly benefit. If that's the satiation we're in, it's going to be difficult for the state to provision adequate schooling for all kids because the polity just isn't there.
> every kid deserves a free and appropriate education
Yes, I know those magic words too.
A failure to graduate can be the fault of the school. It can also be the fault of the student. Doing social promotion where kids get onto the next grade despite doing no work isn't the answer. It's often part of the problem, as students get to high school without any ownership of their own outcomes. Someone else always helps drag them across the finish line.
We'd need to look closer at those 66 kids to see what's going on. Maybe the school and teacher is doing everything right. Maybe not. Maybe it's the situation on the right
https://theweek.com/cartoons/793951/editorial-cartoon-education-grades-teachers-parents-school
We should also consider that New York's graduation requirements may be too rigorous, and/or we need to accept that the meaning of "high school diploma" is the ability to do symbolic manipulation that some people just will never be able to do.
https://www.nysedregents.org/algebraone/125/algone-12025-exam.pdf
I mean, they’re not only magic. FAPE is part of several laws and is involved in numerous Supreme Court decisions.
I’m not sure how to square your circle between social promotion being bad but also wanting to lower graduation requirements.
I think it is reasonable to expect almost all students to be able to pass an algebra 1 exam. This is not advanced math and, barring a disability, most students can learn to do algebra. Maybe they take it too early or require some kind of remediation but I doubt there’s a huge population of kids totally incapable of “symbol manipulation”.
Social promotion is pushing ahead kids who can't or don't do the work, regardless of what the standard is.
Determining those standards is a separate issue.
Someone of 80 IQ will likely be able to figure out "if I have 2 buckets of water and each bucket has 10 gallons, how many more buckets do I need to have 75 gallons?" Even counting it out, they'll get it. Ask a 80 IQ student to factor x³ - 36x and you'll be there all day. Just kidding, they'll guess C and move on.
So we need to decide what to do with the lower performing students.
1. Just give them a high school diploma for showing up. Or maybe not even showing up, we don't want to be mean. (And make sure the student could decide to just apply themselves for 3 hours on the last day of the semester and pass. We don't want to discourage them!)
2. Give them a curriculum that challenges them and requires them to do work and apply themselves. They aren't going to factor polynomials, but they can use a calculator to figure out the tip. They may not be able to calculate continuous compounding but they can see a payday loan explodes to infinity (infinity as far as they're concerned). Some won't graduate because they won't try. Some will try and take an extra year or two to graduate. Some will succeed on the first try. Maybe some finish but in a way we don't call graduation.
3. Torture them for 4 years insisting they learn the thing that seems so natural to you and me. Before Algebra I can start you'll teach them that to add 2 fractions you can't just add the numerators and denominators. They were supposed to already know that but no one ever taught them that before you! And then 3 weeks later when you give them 2 fractions to add, they're adding the numerators and denominators again. Well, that's fine, I'm sure they'll be able to rewrite x^(2a + b) in a month.
I have devoted my whole professional career to improving the quality of our public schools—both as a teacher in high need schools and my work on various aspects of accountability since leaving the classroom.
But this idea of differentiated pay is never really thought through, carefully.
1) Teachers simply do not want it. It's being imposed on them.
2) Efforts to measure teachers performance and teacher quality are notoriously...challenged. Most barely pass the smell test, and I don't know if any that survive serious examination.
3) So, how to do you reward the best teachers if you can't validity identify them?
My own work has orbited around this question of identifying good teachers. There are two major challenges.
A) The ratio of supervisors to actual teachers is extraordinary low in k-12 education—and the supervisors have many many other responsibilities as well. They simply do not have time to engage in the kind of observation and coaching that gives the real knowledge of who the best teachers are. Best at classroom management? Sure. But teaching is more about far more the keep students in line. In theory, it's about fostering student learning.
B) Matt is long since sick my beating this drum but the standardized tests simply do not measure what they are supposed to measure. I do not simply mean that they are racially biased. I mean that they are not focused on the the actual grade-appropriate learning goals. All of my work is currently focused on this, but what we are measuring actually matters. And it matters if it is not the learning goals for those children.
Unfortunately, waving a magic wand that claims we can already identify the best teachers, just assuming that we can already do that, doesn't solve these problems. Charisma? Sure. Easier to recognize. Classroom discipline? Yeah, like I said. But actually helping students to grow in the ways we expect teachers of that grade(s) and subject(s) to? Nope, we need to do far far far better there.
I mean, surely part of the reason that teachers do not want differentiated pay is that some of the draw of teaching right now is that it's a profession in which you're largely immune from being held to performance standards. Given that status quo, you select in people who are averse to being held to performance standards and select out people who are high-performing and want to be recognized for it. So it's not surprising that it's unpopular with the current population of teachers, but that's the problem!
Your comments on identifying best-performing teachers sound to me a little like you're saying, "Hey, it's hard to reliably identify a top 5% teacher from a top 20% teacher," which is fair enough, but I don't buy that it is thus similarly hard to identify a top 20% teacher from a bottom 20% teacher. Maybe classroom discipline and charisma aren't enough to be a top 5% teacher, but if you don't have classroom discipline and you don't have charisma, are you really going to be an even adequate teacher?
I can still tell you now, 30 years later, which of my high school teachers were clearly top 20% and which were clearly bottom 20%. It was obvious to the students which ones were just phoning it in.
This wasn't necessarily the same as which teachers gave the easiest grades.
Maybe because teachers look at the rest of the professional world and see "performance standards" basically are "the whims of whatever people in C-Suite's matter this year and not what actually matters for their job."
Like, do you think most people w/ professional white collar jobs think Sigma Six or whatever the hot MBA thing of the moment is accurately tracking their performance?
Also, just for example, who's better at classroom discipline? A 9th grade teacher in Lakehurst who's had no incidents at all or a 9th grade teacher in Camden that's kept their rate from rising as opposed to other teachers. That doesn't even account for the part where in a group of 100 kids, maybe you get the 5 shitbirds out of 25, while another teacher only gets 2.
I think it's obviously true that in most organizations, most people's job performance is rated relatively accurately.
Not perfectly accurately, and there are dysfunctional organizations where job performance evaluation is really out to lunch, but decently accurately. I think people who throw up their hands and are like, "IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW WHO IS A GOOD WORKER AND WHO ISN'T" are silly.
I think you highly overrate how many people, especially in an office environment, think their bosses do a job of determining who is and who isn't doing a good job.
It's just that teaching is still one of the few jobs where the workers have actual power, as opposed to being able to be bowled over by whomever is in charge of them, you actually need to win over the employees, not just tell them, too bad for you like so many people seem to want too.
This isn't just teaching - look at how tech bosses turned to fascists after the slightest bit of pushback from their employees.
And vice versa, I think that you're in the grips of a conspiracy theory.
Like, I just don't even really know what else to say. Like, I get that there is political hay to be made by blowing up the magnitude of differences in evaluation by 10x, and that some people find it freeing to imagine that they're the victims of conspiracy, but it's just obviously not true.
I mean, I've seen cases where I strongly believe that someone who is actively bad at their job is retained and promoted due to their being good at company politics. And I've seen cases where someone who genuinely has big strengths and big weaknesses are given overall evaluations that I disagree with. But this idea that everyone across all jobs everywhere their performance is just completely illegible? Come on. Nobody I've ever worked with has ever believed that. It's just cope by people who don't want their performance evaluated.
I mean, yes, I think in most 'email jobs' (not saying that as a dunk, but as a descriptor), outside of something like sales, when it comes to people outside of the bottom 10-15% and maybe the top 10-15% and I question the latter part, everybody else is in fact, pretty difficult to determine where they actually are.
The good news about teaching and determining whose good and bad is about 40% of teacher's leave after the 1st five years - obviously, some of these people are 'good teachers' who can't deal with the stress or very specific issues with teaching, but the reality is much like DOGE trying to find actual waste in government, finding bad teachers who don't self-select out of the job is actually pretty difficult outside of obvious situations, which makes the job of reformers who like the message of bad teachers ruining education as a fix (as opposed to y'know, poverty and other major issues that effect things far more than a teacher that scores a 5 instead of 6.5 on some rubric).
Yes, there will be a lot of just adequate teachers, just like there will be a lot of just adequate HR people, a lot of just adequate programmers, and so forth, because most people are just adequate.
No, I’m not. My wife San employment attorney, and this issue is central to her work.
She talks about the importance of job descriptions, feedback, evaluation, performance reviews, documentation. It’s all there in office and other types of jobs.
There’s more data there. There are far better structures. There’s more awareness of performance.
Perhaps you do not know little supervision time school administrations have for teachers
I’m not saying that at all. To the contrary. I am saying that we’ve been unwilling to take best in the systems we would need to do that.
I want those systems to be put in place. But they ain’t there, now.
The political dynamics are a little more complicated than Matt lays out. In a multi candidate field if you pick a fight with the guy with 35 million to spend and he goes negative on you the winner may well be a third candidate who avoids the fight.
Also the teacher union guy doesn't seem to be getting much traction at the moment, so differentiating one's self from the fifth place guy is maybe less of a priority.
That said, on the merits, I would hope one of them takes up promoting excellence in math and science and accountability.
I saw his ad and it was very cringe
I worked for a large CMO as a teacher for nearly a decade. Without getting into too much I will say the pandemic completely broke the organization. While I still support the existence of charter schools to provide better options for families, I won’t assume that a charter school is by default better. I am grateful that my organization emphasized expectations and teacher coaching but a lot of those efforts went away after the summer of 2020. I would be grateful for Dem politicians to talk about these issues in a way that makes sense for the moment we’re living in but it feels so low priority.
I’m no fan of public sector unions, but as a “human capital” skeptic I don’t think most school reform ideas focused on education itself will do anything useful. (Reforms can often show benefits at some specific school, but that’s probably just some combination of selection, signaling, and giving some specific kids a leg up on the next round of the zero-sum game. None of these actually benefit society in aggregate.)
Maybe you could make a workable political program out of a package of popular common-sense reforms and pro-family policy.
1. Free school lunch and breakfast
2. Disciplinary policy that starts soft but is capable of escalation for repeat or serious offenses. Referral, suspension, transfer to the special school for hard cases, juvenile detention. Keep all options on the table.
3. Longer school hours and more school days per year, less homework. (This one means a fight with the union, but not as hard as if we were trying to go after their job security, and since we don’t care about teacher quality we can mostly leave them alone on that front.) Kids get optional vacation days that parents can schedule.
4. Bus systems that work, so parents don’t have to do as much pickup/dropoff.
I assume the idea behind the longer days is to improve the daycare function, and not the education function?
Serious question, if you don't really believe school is all that significant anyway, why even bother with the theater and not just provide school-linked daycare services? It's a lot easier to hire a daycare worker than a qualified teacher.
That’s a good refinement and I like it. You expand the school day but not the amount of real class time that requires teachers, add “study hall” and recess periods in, hire people without degrees to monitor the kids during study hall and recess.
I mean, it's never said it as such, but a lot of the insane level of after-school clubs and such in a place like Japan is basically government subsidized day care for parents working insane hours.
Education feels like one of those policy areas where most reform ideas in either direction don’t make such a big difference, so it’s OK to embrace popularist/strategic positioning.
Given that so much is ultimately downstream of housing and development policy, I have trouble taking anyone seriously anymore who thinks that education is the paramount issue. The whole debate is stuck in shitty 80’s-90’s platitudes about how important education supposedly is, but for several generations now, not one single reform has made anything resembling the promised impact, even when they’re otherwise successful reforms.
For example, affirmative action was supposed to uplift communities, but just ended up lifting people OUT of their communities.
At this point, I’m just so sick of the debate and the outsized role it takes up in the public discourse. It makes me yawn and groan every time education comes up, because it feels like the lack of any real policy impact has given the electorate an excuse to just turn 90% of the debate into yet another battleground for performative culture war bullshit.
Do you have a school age child?
You’ve tried this particular “gotcha” before, and it’s STILL bullshit the second time.
It doesn’t fucking matter. Period. People who don’t have personal stakes can very well the fuck have legitimate fucking opinions.
your tone is unseemly
Your “gotcha” attempts are even more unseemly. I have zero respect for that bullshit.
it’s a fair question. it’s hard not to think about policy issues that concern one’s children. learn manners.
Oh grow the fuck up. This pedantry and manner-policing is fucking childish.
"But thinking about it seriously, if we’re talking about learning loss (and we should be), shouldn’t we be talking about the old education reform standbys of standards and accountability?"
There is a vibe on the left - am I the only one who feels it? - that standards and accountability are... kind of bad? It's like there was such an overreaction to the punitive mindset that conservatives bring to every issue - education, crime, immigration, welfare, you name it - that we started to think that accountability and punishment are indistinguishable.
The left's obsession with "power dynamics" also feeds into hostility to standards and accountability - after all, a person who is enforcing standards has more power than the person they are enforcing them on, which in modern leftist orthodoxy automatically makes them the Bad Guys. And that sounds over the top, but honestly guys, it's not even really a caricature, it's absolutely what we've been doing. Some of us more emphatically and recklessly than others.
Learning loss is almost entirely about iphones. Seems odd to be placing blame on anything else.
Yeah it’s the phones, but I feel like the fact that it took a DECADE for a critical mass of the education community to go “no seriously what the f—-, put your phone away” is emblematic of the problem I’m describing.
By no means am I trying to ascribe everything to “liberal permissiveness,” and all things considered it is probably not near the top of the list. But it’s a contributing factor in both reality and (especially) the public impression.
My understanding is the education community has been “put the phones away” since forever. They were put the beepers away 30 years ago.
It’s the parents who were freaking out about how will I contact little Madison is there is a school shooting.
Yeah, I think even your most left-wing sort of teacher this comment section would despise for their views on education and social issues would also happily ban phones and honestly, go back to a 2003 standard of what's acceptable in electronics.
Like, I might be finally becoming an old man, but most of the so-called improvements in actual education pushed by all wings of the education movement from right to left outside of maybe digital/electronic blackboards actually seem to be a positive for education.
Agree with your first sentence. Every one of the 200+ teachers at my school would LOVE to have phones banned. There is not enough parent and community buy-in to make this happen. The school board doesn't want to make parents mad. Parents complain a TON if you take away phones. Also, there are landline phones in every class with emergency buttons.