“Community Voice” Is An Almost Meaningless Construct That Falls Apart Upon First Contact With The Real World

Community voices? Well, that’s an important thing.

First, you’ve probably heard or received a text or two; there is an election next week. Education doesn’t feature prominently but matters a lot to voting behavior. Also, surprisingly, the candidates actually agree on a few eduthings, despite each claiming the other will destroy the country. This new deck from Bellwether provides a brief look at all that and more in terms of possible implications. You can read it while nervously refreshing your election forecasting/results site of choice listening to Bad Bunny.

And if you missed it, here’s Dale Chu, Derrell Bradford, and me talking about education and the election. Jed Wallace and I do the same here. I’ll be at UVA next week talking about this and other things, and at Harvard—the UVA of the North—tomorrow, doing the same. Get in touch for details. Then, next Thursday, I’ll be at the Power of Innovation Summit in DC, with Phyllis Lockett, JaneSwift, and Michael Moe. Yesterday, Tom Kane and I spoke to a group of corporate philanthropy officers at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about learning loss, recovery, and the role of business in keeping attention on that issue. Video soon.

“The demographics and the complicated nature of this election is probably the most I’ve ever seen.” — Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) to Puck

She’s clearly right. We won’t know for a few months exactly how this plays out. Exit polls have their utility, and we’ll be able to glean some trends on election night, but the best data takes months to merge. It’s clear that party alignments are changing, and that matters to education work given the role policy and politics play in the sector, as well as how hyper-political it is. It matters to how we think about “community voice.”

Something you hear around the education sector at various events and conversations—a lot—is that various groups aren’t monoliths. True. But that’s usually said as a predicate to ascribing some viewpoint to them or crudely lumping them together as “people of color,” casually erasing the diversity that exists within broad categories. This same problem of broad assumptions shows up a lot in the fashionable talk about “community voice” in education circles. You run into many people who offhandedly assume there is such a thing as a consensus community voice, or who basically posit that if you listen just the right way, you can discern an authentic community voice that is full of wisdom and will guide you to the proper decisions or choices. And, delightfully for them, those decisions and choices always seem to line up with what these people think about various questions. In other words, they almost always seem to confirm their priors. How nice.

Actually, that’s why this is mostly political nonsense. And why education leaders need to do a much better job of actually listening to communities and appreciating the limits of doing so. Community voices are a thing; community voice exists but is much rarer.

Good luck discerning community voice here.
Image: Sarah L. Voisin / The Washington Post

For starters, communities are diverse, and ecological fallacies are real. Knowing recent public opinion research and broad contours is useful, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the person right in front of you. For instance, in rough terms more than two-thirds of Black and Hispanic voters say they support school choice. That’s good to know. It also means there is a one in three chance that the person standing in front of you doesn’t. And there is only one way to find out: listening. (When it comes to Black voters in particular, there is a lot of evidence their political preferences and choices are constrained by the two-party system.)

This is why in education, statements like “the community wants school choice,” or “the community doesn’t want school choice,” or “the community wants stricter school discipline” or “the community wants more progressive school discipline” should be greeted with skepticism. Within the community, you’re likely to find diverse views on all those questions – and others. People have a variety of views; they often don’t fall cleanly along partisan or ideological alignments, as this election is showing. It’s messier than we allow.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, a lot of people were shocked when Muslim parents showed up to protest, along with others considered politically conservative, books that were being used in classrooms. This should only have been surprising if you have a really reductionist understanding of these issues and “communities.”

Among the various reasons I support expanding school choice is that majorities of Black and Hispanic parents want it, so I’m comfortable having it on offer. But that’s not the only reason. For me, values and empiricism matter too. And we should (and can) respect and account for the varied preferences in policy to some extent. Durable, effective policy schemes must take into account the diversity of viewpoints—for instance, balancing neighborhood school preferences with robust choice options. Instead, too often, we try to erase it. School discipline is a compelling example here, where we toggle from one fashionable approach to the next, ignoring the spectrum of views that exist among parents.

And again, despite the bromides, people tend to like community voice when they perceive that it aligns with their values—less so otherwise. For instance, on the issue of child brides, I don’t hear a lot of people in education circles calling for us to respect community voice. I don’t. These are mostly young girls. No thanks. Flying the Confederate flag? Sure, some communities are into that as an expression of voice. Count me out. In some communities, there is a fair amount of voice around trying to put gay people back in the closet. Are we to listen to that? Hard pass.

So, if you think we should obviously trump community voice on issues like these, that might offend you, then you’re not for it as any kind of principle. You’re simply for getting your way in politics when you can. Which is fine—normal actually—just don’t dress it all up as a fancy first principle.

Besides, it’s good to have a values system grounded in something besides what a lot of people say they want, which is the trap that “community voice” proponents blithely walk into. There is nothing inherently wrong with outlier views.

The point should be obvious: values matter too—to all of us, in different ways. That’s okay. And those values are going to come from various places for various people: empiricism, tradition, religion, progressivism, or liberal values.

So why does this idea of community voice rather than voices persist? What does it mean for education leaders?

When people argue for community voice as a way to decide things, they’re usually doing one of a few things. One is a simple power play. No one wants to be against “the community,” so it shuts a lot of people up, especially those with their fingers always in the air trying to discern how they should move—and especially in the last few years. Sometimes, though, it’s not even a deliberate act. Bubbles are real, and if your life experiences have been narrowly proscribed—for instance, elite schools followed by elite employment—then you may not have a lot of exposure to the messy heterodoxy of the American public. This is why working on campaigns, knocking on doors, and just listening to people is always a good learning experience.

Sometimes it is just the fashion. You see a lot of ideas, “defund the police” is probably the best recent example, that are so fashionable they blur the lines between what most people want and the perception of “community” preferences. The support for “defund” was really low, even at its peak. It doesn’t mean it’s the wrong position per se; that’s why we debate, and fringe ideas often become mainstream over time. But when people implied you were not with the “community” if you were not for it, that was empirically incorrect. The strong majority position among Black Americans was consistently better quality policing, not less. As it happens, white liberals were most in support of less. These are easy mistakes to make, professional politicians made this one and then recalibrated when they realized the political error. See, for instance, Harris, Kamala.

Stepping back, we design democratic institutions to help shape a process to distill different voices into something other than chaos, tyranny, or mob rule. Madison actually wrote an essay or two about this that are worth checking out. Elections—at least until the more recent introduction of the permanent campaign—settle things for a time so we can have governing. Not because everyone agrees, but because everyone agrees to disagree until the next opportunity to change things up. How to balance majority and minority desires and rights, turn factionalism toward productive ends, and allow things to be settled, at least temporarily, is the bread and butter of the American project. Community voice, as it’s generally considered in our sector, is not.

Nowhere here am I saying you shouldn’t listen. The opposite. Education leaders, I’d suggest, need to do a much better job of listening. The dominant views coming out of education nonprofits and ed schools align well with elite thought, not so much with any clear signal from communities. Again, maybe those views are the right ones—maybe not—everyone’s mileage will vary. But they don’t enjoy deep majority support and that’s not a matter of opinion. You have to listen a lot to discern the various viewpoints, understand them, appreciate nuance, and avoid confirmation bias. More listening than is generally the case now in media or advocacy. Too many visits to communities are Potemkin exercises or with self-selected representatives. Listening to three people saying the same thing to you might give you a great story, but is not the same as getting three perspectives on contested issues. And knowing that issues are contested in the first place matters a lot, and you have to get out of the bubble to even know that. That’s certainly more labor in the modern media environment with curated and tailored news.

Still, for us in education, anything less obscures the hard questions about how to design a pluralistic education system in a pluralistic country. That’s not a problem solved by just listening the “right way” or to the “proper” voices. Nor by simply abdicating any need to make some hard choices through some radical choice plan where everyone just does whatever they want. It’s a problem solved through the best information we can generate, democratic engagement, dialogue, and messy compromise in a diverse and complicated country. That’s a lot harder than defaulting to happy narratives.

In practical terms for reformers, this means building a cross-partisan politics that respects the variety of choices people want to make about their kids and does so in a way that allows for durable and sustainable education options and a durable and sustainable system. That’s not about any one best system or one specific approach. It’s about pluralism. Pluralism is hard in general, especially when tensions run high as they do right now.

And if you’ve read this far, Ashley Rogers Berner’s new book on education pluralism might be up your alley. After the election, however it goes, this is a conversation we must have.

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New WonkyFolk – Just No Steely Dan. Plus, Chu & Bradford Talk Politics, Stick To Science. More.

I’ll be at the Power of Innovation Summit with Phyllis Lockett, Jane Swift, and Michael Moe.

The election is 11 days away, so we’ve got election content.

WonkyFolk

Jed and I talk about the election in a new Wonkyfolk. We also talk about Denver, charter schools, advocacy, and inter-generational learning in the advocacy world. We apparently need theme music, send your ideas.

You can listen here, and show notes.

Or here:

If you like to watch, then:

The Election & Education

On Tuesday 50Can’s Derrell Bradford, consultant Dale Chu, and I talked about the election and its implications for education.

You can watch the discussion here.

Stick to Science

Sometimes around here we talk about activist capture. It shows up in education a lot. We talk about what Julia Galef calls “scout mindset,” basically accurate analysis of the landscape, accurate forecasting, whatever you want to call it. Basically engaging with the world as it is, not as you might wish it to be.

This is what you should not do, especially with publicly funded research:

If you don’t want your research politicized, then don’t politicize your research. It should go without saying, this isn’t good for LGBT youth, it’s toxic for them. By doing this you’re not a a warrior of some kind, you’re a liability. I get it, if there were not people trying to outright ban a class of medical treatment that is sometimes necessary then it would be a better climate (some version of that is true on most contested issues by the way, it’s not permission to abandon your commitments). But this has the opposite effect on the climate and it’s about as anti-empirical as you can get. And again, I recommend this discussion on The Disagreement.

RIP Phil. Thank you.

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Come Talk Ed Politics. Plus Here’s An Election Prediction: Expect Intra-Coalition Friction After 2024.

TL/DR — Dale Chu, Derrell Bradford, and I talk ed politics next Tuesday and you can ask questions, too. Join us!

As you may have heard, there’s an election coming. It’s a pretty important one, and it will have significant education implications, given that the sector is largely a politically controlled public sector undertaking.

So far, the biggest way education is showing up is in voting behavior. No, dear reader, you did not miss the flurry of policy proposals from both campaigns. Education levels continue to be predictive of voting patterns, with Democrats solidifying their hold on Americans with college and especially advanced degrees. That’s a mixed blessing. While it provides a reliable counterweight to the GOP base—though not in equal numbers—it also brings a bunch of cultural baggage that your average voter wants no part of. This is part of the reason Vice President Harris is underperforming among Black and Hispanic voters.

I’m not going to hazard any predictions—the presidential race seems like a toss-up as far as I can tell. If you’re a Democrat and want to panic, consider that given the overall environment and the fact that the other candidate is Donald Trump, Harris should be leading by at least a few points across key states. If you’re a Republican and want to fret, keep in mind that she still has time to close the deal, is showing a willingness to do that, and, although elections tend to break against the incumbent party, this one is unique since both candidates are incumbents in different ways.

(My hunch is that most people making confident predictions know they have a 50% chance of being right and looking prescient, and a 75% chance everyone will forget if they’re wrong. But I was pretty good in 2016, 2020, 2021, but sucked in 2022 so take this all with a grain of salt I might be on a losing streak.)

I will make one long-term prediction: whichever way the election goes, expect more intra-coalition acrimony. In a 50-50 country, political traction tends to happen within coalitions rather than between them. So, in education, expect more friction on the right around school choice and on the left around DEI, for instance. I’d view articles like this less as a one-off or hit piece than the opening shots of a different conversation in education.

And there will obviously be fallout and acrimony in whatever party fails to win The White House.

So, essentially this idea.

Derrell Bradford, Dale Chu, and I are going to talk about the election and its education implications, including state issues, next Tuesday at 2:30 pm ET. You can join us on LinkedIn, and I hope you will. Maybe those guys will make predictions?

Here’s a link to this tweet. He can land rockets upright but tweet embeds are still unreliable.

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Statement On Statements. Plus Is Education Always Last To Get The Memo? Plus Fish!

ICYMI — Laura Marcus from Tidelines Institute stopped by to talk about her education journey and the experiential education work she is leading in Glacier Bay, Alaska. Jed and I discussed several issues on the last WonkyFolk. Here’s a new analysis on AI from Bellwether. And here’s a new analysis of special education finance from Bellwether.

It took Harvard 388 years to catch up with Bellwether.

One of Bellwether’s most popular — or most frustrating, depending on your perspective — policies over our almost fifteen years is that we don’t take organizational positions or put out statements about things on behalf of everyone who works at the organization. The personal positions of the organization’s leaders don’t affect what people who work here can say, write about, or work on. Part of my job is editing and helping to strengthen arguments I don’t personally agree with on various issues. It’s not for everyone, but I believe it’s a good approach.

When the draft of the Dobbs decision was leaked in advance of the 2022 Supreme Court decision, I remember receiving an email from a prominent education advocacy/DEI organization with a bunch of employees saying they were all devastated. All? That struck me as odd. Unless your position on abortion is a litmus test for hiring, a diverse organization would likely have people on all sides of this complex issue. I know we do at Bellwether. (Why an education organization even has a position on abortion is a different issue, but these are the times we live in.)

Meanwhile, the data on abortion shows disagreement that transcends various demographic lines (and despite the best efforts of politicians to divide us, there’s a rough consensus that people aren’t okay with restrictions in the first trimester, are in the third, and disagree mightily on the second). About one in four Black Americans believe abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, as do about one in three Hispanic Americans. So you should expect some diversity on the issue in a diverse organization unless you’re actually screening for politics not diversity. Abortion is hardly the only issue where such differences arise. You see it on issues like immigration and on many education questions where polling may surprise you. It’s probably one reason Trump has steadily made meaningful gains among non-white voters since 2016. Life is more complicated than how it’s portrayed in most elite non-profit conference rooms.

People sometimes ask why Bellwether follows this approach, and the answer is straightforward: We work with various organizations across the sector. We don’t choose clients by segment but by whether the work is innovative and improvement-focused. We collaborate with charter schools, school districts, private schools, and people from a range of ideological viewpoints. We work in red, blue, and purple states with state leaders and public entities.

It’s challenging to work like this if you’re constantly taking positions on the issues of the day. Especially, because as anyone paying attention knows, these various essential positions often turn out to be surprisingly ephemeral. I’ve been in this field long enough to have seen reformers supporting and then opposing — and maybe supporting again — high standards, for example. What were once absolutely totemic beliefs are often quickly and quietly forgotten as fashions change. Note the Economist item below. 

Practically, it allows us to avoid circuses like this. Not surprisingly, more and more institutions are realizing that silence isn’t violence; instead, it’s a way to stay focused on your actual mission. (Around the sector, people sometimes argue that the mission is everything or some vague commitment to social justice broadly speaking. That’s not a mission; it’s a slogan.) Our team is free to express their political views on their own time. We don’t police editorial content or restrict what employees say or do outside of work, even regarding education issues (this happens more than you might think).

This approach can be frustrating. Externally, people want to know why we don’t take positions on certain issues. Or they suggest that not doing so will get us “coded” as having a particular stance. This is obviously silly — judge people and organizations based on what they actually say, not on everything they don’t say. Internally, some staff wonder why we don’t at least take positions on what are probably universally agreed-upon issues around the organization. Understandably, people sometimes want their employer to take a stance on something they or their peers feel strongly about. But that road opens up endless debates, internal persuasion efforts, and the like. You can’t only lean into a principle when it’s easy; it matters most when it’s hard. Besides, everyone believes their particular issue is so important it must be the exception to the rule.

What we don’t do is claim we’re open to multiple viewpoints and then quietly police them — something that’s also unfortunately common. While I don’t agree with organizations that fire people for unpopular viewpoints, at least they’re transparent about it.

In any event, the narrowing of the scope of statements view seems to be winning the day. A Bellwether perhaps. 

Lessons

Robert Pondiscio wrote an op-ed related to the Corey DeAngelis issue, pointing out that conservatives are more likely to be “canceled” than lefties. He’s not wrong, but it’s a case of whataboutism and hammer-nail thinking (if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail).

First of all, Corey wasn’t truly canceled — he was back at it just days later (tweeting and advocating, to be clear). Second, to the extent that any canceling happened, it was from the political right. He lost his role at AFC, but it’s not unreasonable for a pro-kid choice organization to find his actions a bit too much. Especially given the context in which Corey operated and fueled. They didn’t fire him for a controversial viewpoint. The left didn’t like Corey to begin with, so I guess they couldn’t cancel him — though they surely would’ve happily done so if it were on offer. 

Robert is certainly correct that left-wing radicals dominate education academia, where they outnumber right-wing radicals and where thought policing is disturbingly common. That’s because, in our long-running culture war, the right got state governments and institutions, while the left took academia and media — and we fight over the rest.

I’m not sure that DeAngelis doing porn sheds much light on any of that or on much of anything else beyond his personal story. Several of his allies have told me that if he hadn’t been such a toxic presence on social media, he probably would’ve had a much softer landing. That might be the lesson here.

Denver

It’s a poor reflection on the education sector that new studies showing important impacts are largely ignored if they don’t fit the prevailing narrative or political fashion. This tendency is how we ended up in the reading policy mess that leaders are now trying to untangle, but it’s a lesson few seem eager to learn.

A new study out of Denver is important for two reasons. First, the results of the portfolio approach show significant effects. Is it perfect? No, but the findings are significant. Yet we hear mostly crickets. Second, the results underscore how we tend to abandon reforms before they’ve had time to demonstrate their efficacy. Denver walked away from what seems like a crucial set of reforms.

USS Michael Bennet and Tom Boasberg weigh in on some of the implications.

What’s worse is that the district actually fought to keep the data from reaching researchers. It’s not uncommon in our sector — and that should also be a story! The local paper did gymnastics to undercut the findings. Public radio did better.

It’s not just the media. These implications should be central in education conversations, at conferences, and among leaders. You don’t make major decisions based on one study, but you do pay attention and discuss the findings. We don’t.

Also, someone might say thank you to Paul Hill. 

Education is always the last to get the memo?

The Economist recently examined the ebbing of “woke” sentiments, using data not just vibes. It touches on the issue of activist capture, which has done considerable damage to the education sector. The kicker:

Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank, says, “I think people will one day look back on the 2015 to 2025 era as being a bit of a moment of madness.” But even though Mr. Teixeira believes the woke wave has set social progress back, he notes that, over the long run, America has been reducing discrimination and improving opportunities for minorities of all sorts. That trend, he believes, is lasting.

There are plenty of problems, but in practice the country is depolarizing racially you see that in political behavior, social mobility, and habits. Raj Chetty just released some work that you’d think would get more attention about race and class. Most social indicators are going in the right direction. Yet activists have a vested interest in arguing the opposite on a host of questions and too often the education world is an easy mark.

20,000 parents walk into a bar…

This new survey from 50Can is worth your time, with great state-by-state breakouts.

Friday Fish Porn

Terry Ryan is one of the best people to work with in our sector. Committed, patient, impactful, interesting backstory, wonderful human. His daughters are gems, too. Here’s one with her boyfriend and a lovely trout on the Owyhee River in Oregon.

Want more fish? Check out this unique archive of hundreds of pictures of education types with their fish. Send me yours!

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*The one exception we have is issues affecting 501(c)(3) organizations as a class. It has never come up, but if, for example, changes to the tax code that could negatively affect an organization like Bellwether were proposed, we would weigh in insofar as it impacts our ability to do our work.

New WonkyFolk, Bellwether On AI, School Board Timing And Sleeper State Referendums. Plus Friday Fish!

Greetings! Will it ever stop raining? I hope so, because I’m riding in the PMC Unpaved this weekend in the Berkshires. If you see a rider with pink handlebar tape on a black gravel bike, that’s me—riding for a good friend. It’s not too late to join this year’s campaign, and I’d be grateful, as would the many who will benefit from your generosity.

ICYMI – new Bellwether work on AI is out. One ed tech founder called it the most useful resource they’ve seen to date. Check out why. If you haven’t signed up for Bellwether’s AI newsletter yet, a new edition is out this week.

On Monday, I took a look at the Corey DeAngelis situation. I’m not a fan (or I guess an OnlyFan, as it turns out…), but wow, on a human level. A few folks have tried to turn this into a big school choice story. It’s not. In the same way that when a teachers’ union leader gets indicted for corruption, it’s not really a union story, or when a school superintendent is charged with malfeasance, it’s more about personal failings. It doesn’t tell you much about the institution. This, too, is a personal story (and a culture war story as well). That said, it does warrant a closer look at how it all came about and lessons about educelebrity. The 74’s Linda Jacobson has advanced the reporting, rather than just summarizing it.

Jed Wallace and I discuss this further in the latest episode of WonkyFolk, but we also talk about a new study out of Denver that you should check out, ESA funding, what’s happening with education in Oaxaca, Mexico, and why Don Shalvey matters so much—plus, what a great human Larry Rosentock is.

You can listen and read through this link. At the player below. Or, if you like to watch, on YouTube:

Laboratories of Democracy

The Washington Post editorial board weighed in on two education-related ballot referendums. One seeks to eliminate some testing requirements in Massachusetts, spearheaded by the teachers’ union. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on there. The other concerns a proposed electoral reform in Florida that would require school board candidates to declare party affiliation. Currently, most school board elections are non-partisan, but this change would undo a prior Florida reform that made them ostensibly non-partisan.

Point: school board elections should be non-partisan. Counterpoint: too late!

A reform package I’m more interested in (and one Florida is considering) is around the timing of school board elections. We still hold them, in many places, at off-peak times, which gives special interest groups extra leverage. There’s very little evidence suggesting this is a good idea, and plenty suggesting it’s not. We should vote for school board members at the same time we vote for federal, state, and local officials. This would be low-hanging fruit for good government reform, and it’s surprising there isn’t more momentum behind it. Especially considering that many of the same people who complain about voter suppression are defending time and place rules for school board elections that depress turnout.

I’d also keep an eye on Amendment 80 in Colorado. In the late 1990s, a parents’ rights amendment was defeated there. This year, voters will decide on a measure that would create a right to school choice. While it sounds appealing on the surface, there are potential secondary effects, and the language is vague. Conservatives are sponsoring it, but some homeschoolers worry it could lead to more regulation. Public schools and many Democrats see it as a step toward vouchers. Coloradans have 14 proposed amendments on the ballot this year.

Friday Fish Pics

Here’s one of Julie Corbett’s kids (with some expert fishing guide work from grandpa) and a fat sheepshead in Lake Champlain in Vermont. When not being the fishing photographer, Julie’s a great consultant in our sector and is working on a doctoral dissertation on the systemic barriers that result in the underrepresentation on local school boards. I’m not entirely sure, but with the hats it looks like there is some Boston – NY stuff happening here in the background, too.

And Friday Fish Porn

Here’s Bellwether’s Amy Chen Kulesa (one of the authors of the AI report at the top of this post) with a nice one in Colorado.

New around here? Wondering what this is all about? Check out this unique archive of hundreds of pictures of education types with fish. Send me yours!

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The Bloom Is Off The Seth Rose. What To Think About Corey DeAngelis?

We do fish porn around here, sure. We don’t do the real kind, this is a family friendly publication. Yet this week the sector has a porn scandal. So here we are.

It turns out that self-described school choice evangelist Corey DeAngelis (who I know of professionally, obviously, but have never met) allegedly has a history in gay porn under the screen name “Seth Rose.” Not going to link here and it’s not safe for work (suffice it to say you can bet this is not the race theory Corey wanted to talk about), but you can look it up easily on social media. Pretty pedestrian porn name, but what do I know. He’s a beloved figure on the right and a favorite of culture war politicians. Not so much on the left.

It was a far-right website that brought this to light, it should be noted.

DeAngelis with Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt and state superintendent Ryan Walters. Source: Twitter/X.

My initial reaction to the claims was to figure they were some deep fake bullshit from the trench warfare corners of the internet where every day brings a stupid battle over something. Or look-alike and mistaken identity. How could this not have come to light sooner, I wondered? And given his combative style he was ripe for a hit. But Corey’s profile was removed from the American Federation For Children’s website where he has been a senior fellow. Also the Hoover Institution did the same. And the word on the edustreet is that there is something to this.

To me, something always felt a little off about Corey, this interview with Reason’s Nick Gillespie is a good inadvertently revealing example of why. Public affairs is about performance at some level, but this always seemed like too much of one. His popular Twitter account just seemed like trolling. I could never quite put my finger on it, and certainly didn’t guess this.

Anyhow, a few notes on the kind of scandal we don’t often get in education:

It’s not the the heat it’s the hypocrisy. I don’t care what consenting adults do. It does not change how I like my coffee and there is way too much ‘live and let me tell you how to live’ going around these days for my taste. The problem here is Corey has been a high-profile culture warrior, including on LGBT issues. Some of his positions don’t rise to the level of hypocrisy – for instance plenty of gay people think the current obsession with drag by progressive parents of kindergartners is a little strange and performative. Plenty of gay and transgender people don’t think schools should get in front of or supplant parents on gender transitions. But he traded in less defensible claims and a general context of ‘they’re coming for your kids’ as well. That’s going to be hard for his allies to defend in this context.

A little empathy. As is often the case with this sort of thing it seems like this is probably a deeply troubled person in one way or another. Corey may have been lacking a fully functional empathy or compassion gene, that doesn’t mean you should. It’s understandable to be frustrated by the apparent hypocrisy, angered by the climate he stoked, and still show a little grace.

This really isn’t a school choice story. Corey used culture war issues as an argument for school choice (I’m for giving parents choices but that’s an argument I disagree with). It will all get lumped together, of course, yet this really isn’t about choice, it’s a culture warrior story and a hypocrisy / human story. There might also be some lessons about celebrity culture in education.

Ed media is falling down again. I was in the mountains of Colorado last week and heard about this. It’s been days and still crickets from mainline ed publications. A correspondent for the Texas Observer is following on Twitter. This may not be a story you want to touch, but it is a story. At this point enough for a brief mention this is happening even if not a full story. This is an influential person with a big platform. And, upstream, why did no one vet this guy, this could not have been totally unknown?

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Tutoring Redux: How You Do Some Things Is How You Do Most Things.

Don’t miss this new package on the impact of enrollment on school finance from Bellwether, just released. 

On Monday I wrote about why Freddie deBoer is wrong about NCLB’s policy specifics, why that matters, and why you should read him anyway

Bonus recommendation: Read Dan Meyer on AI.

Today, I am re-upping a 2020 post and 2021 post that Mike Goldstein cited on LinkedIn, Dale Chu did on Twitter, and a few other people have mentioned to me with varying degrees of bemusement or despair. 

It’s related to this new work from Matthew Kraft that is getting a lot of attention. But I’m sharing for a different reason (though…the hacks who pushed back at the time for funding reasons…be better). There is this idea out there, it’s pervasive, that nothing works. Some people think that’s because we can’t expect a lot of kids to do well. Others because they think the system is hopelessly structured or broken. That’s wrong! Decline is a choice. Mediocrity is a choice. Policy is about choices. 

The number of policies that can enable better learning conditions, among them small schools, small classes, teacher evaluation, charter schools, and now tutoring, that are discredited because people won’t tell funders hard truths, foundation staff won’t tell principals hard truths, policymakers and funders make political compromises that erode effectiveness and fidelity, or we just do things in a slapdash fashion is discouraging. We should learn from rather than repeat that. 

(Related, and this is why Kraft’s work here is valuable, we should be evaluating actual initiatives, not funding streams.)

Anyhow, from October 2020:

Tutoring!

If you invest in the silver bullet market there is a buy opportunity coming in tutoring.  Not just any tutoring, high-dosage tutoring. The word itself sounds exciting – high-dosage!

It’s hard to miss a convergence around the idea that high-dosage tutoring is “the thing.” The research does favor it, Buzzy Hettleman lays out a good case here. (And the rich do it, which in 2020 makes it at once desirable and very bad).

Yet here is how these things tend to go: New idea – or not new but reintroduced idea – widely implemented through a funding and think piece gold rush. And widely implemented in uneven ways with little fidelity to the research because of the haste and good intentions coupled with lack of capacity around the field.

End result, good idea gets discredited because, on average, it shows little if any impact. You see this around the ed tech sector, class size, teacher evaluations, some reading initiatives, charter schools, teacher evaluation, are just some of the examples.

What all those ideas have in common with tutoring is a lot of promise. That’s all the more reason to be intentional, focus on equity, and not, to mix one more metaphor, spread everything around like peanut butter.

From March 2021:

For Tutoring The Best Of Times, And The Pretty Good Of Times, Too, But Some Risk…

If I put on my hat as someone who is concerned about the way the Covid school disruption, and Covid more generally, has disproportionally affected some students and communities then I see all the attention to tutoring pretty clearly one way: It’s an important remedy to help kids who need help, right now.

If I put on a different hat, as someone who wants to see good interventions, like tutoring, deployed as part of a more seamless and customized web of supports for kids, not just now but moving forward, then it’s different. In this case I see all the attention to tutoring and high-dosage tutoring as a mixed blessing.

Why? Hardly anyone doubts the efficacy of well-designed tutoring initiatives. Here’s a just released today study on that point (more from The 74 here). Rather, the issue is what happens if there is a gold rush or an effort to scale these programs rapidly or just do tutoring everywhere. When that happens in our sector, traditionally, a few things follow. First, fidelity to what makes something effective goes out the window. That’s obviously not a reason not to pursue an intervention that can help. It is, though, a reason to be intentional in crafting policy and rigorous about practice.

That’s because, second, usually the evaluations come back later and find no effect. This is because evaluating broad funding streams rarely turns up significant effects, we’re bad at thinking about differences in differences, and most fundamentally when you spread everything around you don’t get focus or efficacy. We saw this most recently on school turnarounds, where the overall results, and general discrediting of the idea, obscured some pretty important nuance about what worked and didn’t. Also small schools, a host of things around ELL and dual language, various curricular reforms, the list is long.

The so what? If you’re a tutoring advocate you should be excited, concerned, and probably most of all aware right now.

Recent, and not so recent, tutoring content: My caution on this, Goldstein Going Wild about tutoring, a Samuel Freedman tutoring story from back in the day, Slavin on tutoring risks and solutions, here comes the great Susanna Loeb!

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Let’s Debate NCLB And Testing – The Actual Policy, Plus A Substack Recommendation

ICYMI – Some colleagues and I, in partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, put out a paper on the business role in education reform. Business can provide some useful guardrails against the more extreme positions on both sides of the education debate. We need them back in the game. 

Tom Kane, Dan Goldhaber, and I talked pandemic recovery on LinkedIn. Was all that federal money wasted? No. Was it as high leverage as it might have been? Also no. 

Also if you missed the last WonkyFolk, it’s here

Today I want to do a short post that basically suggests you to check out a longer one by Freddie deBoer. Regular readers know I consider him one of the sharpest reform critics out there. Maybe help him out and subscribe to his blog? I did not agree with everything in his Cult of Smart, but it’s must-reading if you operate in this sector in any kind of consequential role in the sense that, to paraphrase Mill, if you only know half an argument you don’t know it at all. His Substack is the same way and you might find yourself agreeing and disagreeing in equal measure. 

DeBoer gets into the fraught topic of genetics and intelligence. It’s one of those issues where the received wisdom (on all “sides”) and what people actually working on the question talk about is very different. I agree with deBoer that an inclusive, meaningful, and kind economy and society has to provide opportunities for people who don’t have a specific kind of intelligence or go to a subset of colleges and universities. And I agree that material security is a predicate to freedom. 

I disagree, though, about what we can and should expect from our education system in these regards. That’s why I come to work each day. And today’s post is an illustration of why. DeBoer writes,

As I put it exactly three years ago, you can define the problem with blank slate thinking in four words: No Child Left Behind. The most radical and destructive piece of educational policy in our country’s history, passed with remarkably broad bipartisan report, could only have been conceived of by those who believed that students have no intrinsic tendency towards a given performance level. And the result was disastrous – there was an immense waste of resources associated with NCLB, students and teachers and schools were suddenly forced to undertake inefficient and unnecessary census testing, and teacher tenure and unions were attacked. All because of a cheery and casually destructive insistence that every child was in possession of the same educational potential.

This is a strawman. It’s similar to the mischaracterization of NCLB in Ibram X. Kendi’s popular Stamped and a common one. There are plenty of reasons to be critical of NCLB, I welcome that debate, like most debates, because that’s how progress happens. But let’s try to be on point. 

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In this case, it’s important to remember that NCLB said states had to get kids to proficient on their own state tests. Both those features matter – their own tests, their own definitions of proficiency. It’s not widely understood just how minimal many of those proficiency levels are because of all the mischief in how states set cut scores (what it means to be at various performance levels) on those tests and the lack of transparency there. Forget alignment with NAEP proficiency, where there is serious disagreement about the quality of that specific performance level, there is a gap in many states between NAEP “basic” and “below basic” and what states report as passing and proficient. Figures as politically diverse as Arne Duncan and Glenn Youngkin have called this an “honesty gap.”

This highlights Virginia, the state I’m most concerned with (though I like ‘em all) but shows the variance. 

The argument for NCLB’s approach was not that all students would perform at a high level but rather that all (with some obvious exceptions) would at a minimal level. And that level will vary by state so you have to be specific there, too. This looks different in say Tennessee and Virginia. You can certainly disagree with that theory of action, but that’s the actual policy to debate and that we should debate. Should we expect schools to get almost all kids to a minimal level of proficiency or not?

(Also deBoer is correct that you don’t have to do census testing for accountability at a school level but the problem is parents want to know where their own kids are at a point in time. Many teachers do, too. So do school district C-suites. It’s one of those things most everyone is for until they realize what it means in practice and are then like, what what?” And it’s why there are so many misaligned tests out there today in many places.)

In any event, his post today is worth checking out on the broader issues here. 

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Freedom? Sure, I’m In! Wait, What? Plus, Covid Learning Loss And Fish.

ICYMI – a lot of new content Wednesday including a look at the new study on teacher strikes, philanthropy, and policy change.

Jed Wallace and I want freedom, too (from dysfunction and lame education policies and for parents to choose schools…)

Jed Wallace and I have a WonkyFolk out today. Looks at the D and R conventions, education implications (that part is short), and what might be next. Plus, Jed talks about Milliken v. Bradley, an anniversary that passes with a lot less attention than Brown but is also quite important. I talk about how the off-the-rails Kamala Harris – Drew Barrymore “Momala” moment obscured a really interesting and significant moment and discussion with education and family implications.

Transcript and show notes here. Listen below or wherever you get podcasts:

YouTube if you’re a watcher:

Did federal Covid dollars matter?

It seems like you run into two relatively prevalent views about learning loss from pandemic policies. One is the idea that it’s mostly cooked up by politicians, designed to make schools look bad, or overstated in order to re-litigate pandemic-era decisions.

The second, said more quietly, is that the learning loss is so substantial it’s sort of a lost cause to try to address it.

These are both wrong. Learning loss is a big deal – especially for students already behind pre-pandemic. The average loss is a big deal, the more substantial impact is catastrophic. But, with targeted high quality interventions it can be addressed. Just as impact varied across districts, so does recovery. That’s important!

It’s also one of the things Dan Goldhaber, Tom Kane, and I discussed yesterday while talking about Covid relief dollars on LinkedIn Live. Tom and some colleagues have an analysis here and Dan and some colleagues here. Times account on both here. The Republicans say the money did nothing. The Democrats say the opposite. Both those claims are false according to the evidence. It did matter though not like it might have, and there are some lessons for how it might have mattered more that matter going forward. We get into all of that, learning loss, and what might be next.

As we note for transparency, the convo is a hive of personal and professional overlaps, Dan and I collaborate on projects, I’m on Tom’s advisory board for CEPR, friends etc…

This is just a picture, click here to watch.

End of summer Fish Porn

I am really behind on posting fish pictures. Here are a few good ones that have come in to land the summer:

Gemma Lenowitz of Samvid Ventures with a trout on the Salmon River:

Here’s Bellwether’s own Kate Neifeld with one on Montana’s Gallatin River, an amazing resource where parts of River Runs Through It were filmed:

Here’s Kevin Kosar, the mayor of Fish Porn, with a longnose gar from the Potomac River (we did this once before):

New reader? Wondering what this is all about? Check out this unique archive of hundreds of pictures of education types with fish. Send me yours!

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What Are You For? Plus, Stuff Is Happening. Is Philanthropy Happening? New Study On Teacher Strikes. More!

Slow posting over the summer, I was in Maine, Massachusetts, Delaware, and elsewhere with my girls, squeezing all the time out of summer I possibly could. Caught a fantastic Springsteen show in Pittsburgh. They’re off to college, which is almost impossible to believe. It seems like this was just a few months ago. So, got a new dog.

Gratuitous puppy picture

Also rode the PMC in August, riding again in September, and still raising for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute through the end of September. Closer by the mile to a world where cancers are not what they are today. Thanks to all my fantastic and generous sponsors – especially those I was able to see along the route.

More regular posting – about education not my travelogue and charitable efforts – coming up as well as a lot of fish porn! For today:

On Thursday, this week, Tom Kane, Dan Goldhaber, and I are going to talk about Covid recovery – and specifically Covid recovery dollars. Great chance or you to engage with two of the leading researchers on these questions.

Bellwether and the U.S. Chamber have a new paper out today highlighting why business leaders are essential to educational improvement efforts: they help keep policy focused and on the rails. People can disagree about what caused what, but the retreat of business leaders from an education sector that has become toxic doesn’t help anyone who wants to refocus attention on student needs and what works. The political right wants competitiveness but doesn’t want to talk about equity as part of that strategy (which, in fairness, now is a term with a hundred definitions, but I mean the old fashioned way the sector thought about equity pre-awokening) and the left wants to “dismantle” structural barriers to opportunity but won’t talk about school choice or reform of school districts. Business can help bring some seriousness and focus to the conversation.

Earlier this month I asked a bunch of Minnesotans about Tim Walz, here’s what they had to say (and in some cases not say).

I’m getting asked by clients and peers what to think about Walz, or Harris for that matter, on education policy? Seems like the same as Biden. They’re pretty normal politicians. They will proceed accordingly and so should those who want to see actual school reform. Context and conditions matter. Change those. If you don’t believe me consider that in her acceptance speech Kamala Harris said multiple things that would have gotten you fired at a lot of education non-profits not long ago. And the reaction to that? Cheers. Fall in love with the change you want to see in the world, not the politics. The politics are ephemeral, the change matters.

As for Vance, I actually thought his book was OK, up until the last chapter, which felt rushed and slapped together. His education agenda, though, seems likely to be self-serving and opportunistic.

I recently sat down with Julia Freeland-Fisher to talk about cell phones in schools, you can watch/listen here if you missed it. Most people agree there is a problem, but what actual policy should be is a lot more complicated.

We have some exciting and forward looking news at Bellwether, Rebecca Goldberg will become managing partner later this fall. Learn more here.

What are you for?

I’m generally optimistic that we’re going to see another round of innovative education policymaking and dynamism around schools. There is a lot of energy out there and you can see some of the telltale signs of a shift from trough to wave. Still, I’m struck how often I talk to people who are very clear about what they’re against – conservatives, the teachers unions, choice, wokeism – or what they want to “abolish,” say school districts or “whiteness,” but are not especially clear or articulate about what it is they are *for*. What it is they are working toward.

This seems like a problem in a sector focused on human development and flourishing! We don’t need a unified vision about the ends of education, for some people its community, for others individual or shared prosperity or basic economic security. And sure, some things might need to be changed or even abolished to achieve those visions. Yet that’s a method, not the end game. The end game has to be a positive vision both to be effective for young people substantively and also to get traction politically.

Abolishing the teachers unions is an incomplete vision for a robust public education system. Just reflexively being against conservatives doesn’t move the needle for young people – and sometimes people you disagree with politically are right. Telling kids math, objectivity, or focusing on the right answer are racist is both absurd and seems hard to square with creating personal or collective opportunity and prosperity. These are negative not positive themes.

For me, I believe education and human development is about a life of choices and agency. That’s good for individuals and I believe for all of us collectively. I’m less hung up on *what* specifically those choices are than whether people are empowered and able to make decisions for themselves. I think that creates individual and shared prosperity

Anyway, the next time someone says, we need to get rid of school districts or teachers unions, or that we need to abolish this or that, ask how, why, and toward what end? Perhaps we do, but why?

Mixed Methods?

A point that Matt Pasternak makes here, and I think is important, is that we need a lot more boldness from philanthropy. His whole post is well worth reading.

I think the big education philanthropies should do what all entrepreneurs do: take risks and then de-risk those risks by following the scientific method.

Something that is odd to me is the disconnect between how people made their fortunes and then how they choose to deploy them philanthropically. I don’t mean in the Balzac behind ‘every great fortune there is a great crime’ sense. That’s clever but not always true and many of today’s funders made their money with boldness and smarts. I mean more in terms of willingness to be disruptive, make enemies, solve political problems and so forth. In practice, the teachers unions operate more like ruthless capitalists in pursuit of their political goals than the formerly ruthless capitalists do in pursuit of their philanthropic ones.

I disagree, however, with the ‘we’ve accomplished nothing’ rhetoric. On the contrary, in the context of U.S. social policy things were moving in a good direction on education until a one-two punch of throwing in the towel on the politics and then the pandemic. And while I have my disagreements with fashionable philanthropic strategy (see here, here, and here for instance) grantmakers have played an essential role in that progress.

Stuff Is Happening

Speaking of things hidden in plain sight, everyone says nothing much is happening in education. And that’s true in terms of federal policy, which is in an eight year drought. That would probably be less true if more people were willing to actually put their name on what they think rather than whisper it to Tim Daly. Chad Aldeman is a notable exception here. Again, Harris, like Biden, is a centrist in the sense that she’ll tack to the median position. That’s politics. You don’t like it? OK, change the politics.

Meanwhile, in the states a surprising amount of policy is happening. And, oddly, it’s happening on reading instruction, school choice, and finance. In some cases it’s bipartisan. Those are three issues long considered close to intractable.

Bellwether supports a lot of state finance work, led by Jenn Schiess, more on that here.

Teacher Strikes Are Happening

In a new NBER paper Melissa Arnold Lyon, Mathew Kraft, and Mathew Steinberg take a look at teacher strikes: do they make a difference? It’s an interesting analysis but I think it misses what is arguably the crux question here. The study looks at whether places where there are strikes see appreciable differences in measurable dimensions like teacher pay and most importantly student achievement. Yet the strike is the actual act of walking off the job. So the proper analytic baseline for this question at least insofar as teacher compensation and other benefits are concerned is not conditions before a strike and then after. Rather, it’s what was the district’s final offer before the strike compared to the final agreement afterwards. That’s the delta. I haven’t looked at all of them, but in many recent strikes the final offer is pretty similar to the final deal raising the question of whether the strike was even necessary. I have a story about the 2012 Chicago strike I will tell sometime that gets at this. After the recent Portland strike, for instance, the union’s chief negotiator quit because he said the strike was just a performative waste of time for students and did nothing to advance the deal already on the table.

In fairness, the authors didn’t have that data though AI can give you a quick and dirty look based on open source material like media accounts. This doesn’t mean strikes don’t matter, it’s plausible they do, but it raises the question of whether it’s the threat of a strike and actions ahead of time or the strike itself that really makes the difference. You can argue it’s a difference without a distinction because the threat of a strike has to be credible. But it’s a difference that matters to everyone whose lives are upended by these actions. Measuring threat is more challenging of course, but that seems likely to be the dynamic that is pushing local decision makers.

A second question I’m interested in is what happened pre-and post-Janus? The database the author’s built starts in 2007. Has there been a change in the post-Janus environment? That’s an important question to understand. The authors have that data and told me they plan to look at that question.

Big Blur

Ed Surge reports on the rising percentage of community college students who are still high school students. This creates some resource tension with school districts but is undoubtable in the best interest of students who benefit from more choices and options and potentially a jump start on college to set them up for a three-year college experience as PPI analyst and Johns Hopkins dean Paul Weinstein has advocated for.

What I’m Reading

I try to read a shipwreck book every summer. It’s an admittedly odd tradition. The summer it was The Wager, by David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon). Recommend. It’s a wild story of trials at sea, actual trials on land, betrayal, exploration, and the foolishness of empire.

This interview with new NAPCS CEO Starlee Coleman is worth checking out. She’s thinking about musical chairs.

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