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.
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!
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of people seem pretty freaked out about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s effort to lay out an agenda for a second Trump term. And also, it should be noted, seed their ideas into the policy conversation, which is a purpose of these ideas docs as well. Heritage updates their manifesto every few years, this is not some new whole cloth exercise despite what you may have heard. (In a sign of how stagnant education policymaking has been the last eight years, despite the pandemic, here’s Bellwether’s 2016 ideas book, many are still topical).
One way to think about Project 2025 as far as education (I have not read all of it across the range of issues but, not surprisingly, plenty in there I don’t like based on what I have read) is that it’s extraordinary, a unique threat. The other is that it’s mostly just more of the same, often longtime, conservative wish list updated with some 2024 culture war themes.
Every time someone comes along and says they’re going to “abolish” the Department of Education it’s treated as a new and unique moment. It’s not. Trump proposing it, as president, would not even be new.
Yet despite largely being more of the same Project 2025 is nonetheless important because elements of it could happen, especially with J.D. Vance on the scene. Despite his recent stumbles, Vance will care about policy. That’s not something Trump can be credibly accused of. Trump also has been generally indifferent on education policy. Vance likes these populist social issues. He’ll want to leave a mark on policy. Say what you want about Project 2025, it is chock full of policy ideas.
That’s where it gets interesting. Though not getting so much attention, for obvious reasons, Trump is distancing himself from Project 2025. Of course, we’re talking about Donald Trump, so this could be just what he instinctively thinks he needs to do in the moment and he’ll tack a new direction when it suits him. Or it could be a hide the ball play. But right now, rhetorically, the Democrats and the former President are largely in agreement on Project 2025. He’s called it “abysmal” and “seriously extreme.” Democrats would not disagree. At last, unity.
The unlikely publication to unite Trump and Democrats?
So here’s why and how Project 2025 matters. It’s the maximalist position right now. That’s worth paying attention to because those markers matter to the debate. Our politics are fluid and evolving and so sometimes outlier positions end up on the agenda. The Project 2025 people are not doing some Overton Window exercise. This is what they want and what they will work for.
It also matters because should Trump win in November he’ll have to staff a government. Ordinarily that’s a logistical problem but there are plenty of people. Trump’s situation is somewhat unique and different. We’ve never had a former president run for a second term with most of his senior Senate confirmed officials and many former aides saying they would not work again for that president and that they don’t even think he should be president. Even with the obvious caveat that in politics winning forgives a lot, Trump has a staffing problem.
So while everyone is saying lots of Trump people are attached to Project 2025 doing the former president’s bidding, the reality is probably the inverse. His administration will inevitably end up doing some of their bidding precisely because they’ll be buried in the various agencies where the day to day minutiae of policy happens. Trump may have consolidated power among Republicans on the big picture items – the gap between the RNC platform and Project 2025 is noteworthy on some hot-button issues. Still, incoherence remains. And that incoherence will be resolved in different ways on different issues. Personnel is policy. This is going to be a source of personnel. Control of Congress will obviously matter a great deal as well in terms of how much Project 2025 is a messaging document versus a policy document.
As far as the Department of Education is concerned the Project 2025 folks seem to realize that an outright straight-up abolition is unpopular and impractical so they’re talking a sort of Shawshank Redemption approach to it. Smuggle the department’s work out piece by piece into other agencies. The policy ideas here are more detailed than we’ve seen in the past.
This does begin to answer the serious follow-up question to cries for abolition, which is, ‘ok, if you get rid of the Department, what’s the plan for administering all the funds, programs, and regulatory roles that the agency oversees?’ That’s where big idea politics meets program administration.
I’m not a fan of many of the Project 2025 proposals for education but it’s not just a straight up wave your hand and abolish the Department of Education document, and every idea is not beyond repair. It has ideas for how to reform or move some of the programs. We could do worse than debate those from an efficacy point of view because pretty much everyone agrees there is some room for improvement. I’m not optimistic we’ll get that conversation, I didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. Some of the rhetoric in the document harkens back to when Republicans bullied civil servants at the Department of Education.
Again, keep an eye on J.D. Vance with all of this. He is going to want to do policy, and has to in order to set himself up for 2028. He’s caught lightning in a bottle but a disastrous second Trump term would upend that. Even a political shape shifter like Vance will have to make some commitments, this seems like a likely place.
Politically, Vance will help the ticket with young men, across demographic groups. In 2016, 51% of young men identified as Democrats, in 2023 that was 39%. He’ll also help in the rust belt, where the Trump campaign, too, seems to think this race will be won. But he’ll hurt among women – especially if he can’t get in front of his rhetoric – and that’s a group that’s been key to Trump’s success. Project 2025 is a liability there as well, including on education. There is a reason suburban Democratic door knockers are wearing buttons that say, “Google Project 2025.”
Trump had plenty of options to expand his map but went with Vance instead. It’s a Clinton picking Gore style move: define and focus the message. That was a better choice when the opponent was Biden. Now, facing Kamala Harris, the Trump team has to wish they had broadened the map. It’s a race with some underlying dynamics that matter a lot more than Project 2025.
Last week my colleagues Alex Spurrier and Marisa Mission launched the first edition of a new Bellwether newsletter focused on AI. I’m crossposting the first one in its entirety and hope you will subscribe to get future ones by signing up here.– AR
June 2024
ISSUE #1 By Alex Spurrier and Marisa Mission
We’re sharing the first issue of this newsletter with all our subscribers, but if you want to receive future updates on the latest AI news, be sure to subscribe here.
The education sector is no stranger to technological fads and shifts. Flipped classrooms, Massively Open Online Courses, 1:1 device programs, and other tech-forward approaches are variations on the same tune: over-hyped introduction, muddled and inconsistent implementation, and results that fall well short of their initial, transformative promise.
The introduction of ChatGPT nearly two years ago felt like a renewal of this all-too-familiar cycle. But there’s good reason to believe the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education will present a far different challenge to educators and policymakers, with far more impact than prior ed tech offerings. Within two months, ChatGPT reached 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing consumer app in history. New AI tools – including ChatGPT, Claude, and others – are already used formally and unofficially in schools by students and educators. Meanwhile, district, state, and federal policymakers have struggled to catch up and regulate a fast-moving environment.
Bellwether’s Leading Indicator: AI in Education newsletter helps folks working in the education sector, from teachers and administrators to policymakers and funders, stay current with the latest AI developments and understand what this fast-moving technology means for sector-wide policy and practice. We’ll cover education-specific AI patterns before they become trends by aggregating links worth clicking and providing expert analysis that separates signal from noise. We’re excited for you to join us on this trip.
Newark is one of many school systems across the country piloting and assessing the use of AI tools. In doing so, education leaders must grapple with evolving opinions from key stakeholders like teachers. Survey data from Pew and the RAND Teacher Panel last fall indicated that only 6% of teachers thought AI tools offer “more benefit than harm,” while 25% thought they offer “more harm than benefit.” The remainder thought it’s an equal mix of “benefit and harm” (32%) or were unsure (35%). Yet a new survey from the Walton Family Foundation conducted in May 2024 found that knowledge of and support for AI in education is growing quickly, with 59% of teachers feeling favorably towards chatbots. These survey results demonstrate that educators’ opinions of AI are a nuanced blend of skepticism, optimism, and curiosity. If school systems are serious about integrating AI tools into classrooms, there’s work to be done to get educators on board.
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Apple each held recent keynotes and product announcements that unveiled new and more powerful ways to integrate AI into everyday life. The Sal Khan-led demonstration of ChatGPT–4o tutoring his son is one example of how AI products built for a general audience can have education-specific applications. It’s impressive, especially given the progress of ChatGPT in less than two years. But it also has important limitations in an education context – see Dan Meyer and Ben Riley for more on the limits of this generation of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Google launches updates to Gemini as well as an education-focused model, LearnLM.
Microsoft unveils Copilot+ PCs, purpose-built to work with on-device and cloud-based AI models.
Apple announces Apple Intelligence, which will use a combination of on-device and cloud-based LLMs to provide personalized AI experiences while balancing privacy considerations.
Searching With Gen AI: Promising Tech or Highway to Hallucinations?
Confusing answers aren’t the only risks of AI-powered search; SEO and homegrown web publishers are worried about how the change threatens their livelihoods.
Pioneering Policy: AI Governance, Regulation, Guidance, and More
State policymakers are offering guidance for schools regarding the use of AI, but efforts are unfolding slowly. Absent leadership from state education agencies, districts are establishing policies and guidance on their own or in collaboration with peers. Meanwhile, the patchwork of state policies that govern what children can (and can’t) do is often inconsistent – as a recent Bellwether analysis highlights. Lawmakers considering policies related to children and AI should center the consequences both for children and bodies tasked with enforcing those policies, like schools.
We’re sharing the first issue of this newsletter with all our subscribers, but if you want to receive future updates on the latest AI news, be sure to subscribe here
David Winston and I discuss the upcoming election in a Bellwether Linkedin Live you can watch via this link. Among other professional work David is on the CBS decision desk for election night, so it’s an opportunity to hear how a professional thinks about the upcoming election. President Biden has his work cut out for him, especially on the economy, but the election is far from settled.
It seems almost certain that on one of the most special days in their life Butker made someone feel small, bad, or excluded when there was just no reason to do so and he could have made his broader points absent that. I’m not arguing for safetyism, thought and word policing, or any of the other absurdities infecting public discourse. I’m just pleading for manners and decency. For time and place.
Caitlin Clark discourse has been something, huh? It’s hard to miss the gap between actual experts and then the politicians and folks on Twitter/X and armchair types when it comes to discussion of why Clark won’t be on the Olympic roster. The experts talk about differences with the international game, experience, defensive prowess, and physicality. From others it’s talk about her media appeal, excitement, or role in the culture war.
This is a common thing with sports, everyone has an opinion but the experts see almost an entirely different game than the one casual fans watch. I remember watching an MLB baseball game once on TV at a bar with the wife of someone who was playing. There was a guy there vocal and full of opinions about all the mistakes that the manager was making in how he was using the bullpen. After a bit she calmly explained, in an almost My Cousin Vinny-style, all the dynamics this person was missing and why the manager was playing his hand OK.
My own ‘welcome to the NFL’ introduction to this was a few years ago doing some work with Brendan Daly, then a coach for the NFL Rams. The project was about what teaching coaching can learn from NFL coaching, but what was quickly clear to me talking with him was how little even people who consider themselves serious fans really understand about the subtleties of the NFL game – especially the action away from the ball on each play.
All this is why I recommend this new podcast from Alex Grodd on transgender medicine. Alex has Dr. Erica Anderson and Dr. Jack Drescher, two specialists who don’t entirely agree, on his Disagreement podcast to discuss the state of evidence and practice. But what they really disagree with is the popular discourse around the issue – on the political right and the political left. That has education implications.
The gap between how these two talk about these issues and what you hear in the public debate, and from leaders in our sector, is startling. For starters they are dismissive of the idea that that schools should socially transition kids absent their parent’s involvement and consent – something of an article of faith with a lot of people in our sector and credulously repeated by journalists. They parse what are complicated medical questions that have been boiled down to slogans by activists on both sides of this issue and also too often accepted uncritically.
Anderson’s work has been especially valuable to me as I’ve tried to learn about this issue and its policy implications and she’s personally been quite brave, empirical, and anti-tribal in how she’s approached these questions. Both she and Drescher are thoughtful and measured.
And where kids are involved is that, rather than activist capture, political sloganeering, and all the rest too much to ask for?
Unless you were sedated during May you probably heard the furor about Kansas City Chief place kicker Harrison Butker’s commencement address at Benedictine College, a small conservative Catholic private school in Kansas.
Butker said a number of controversial things in his speech, a lot of stuff I don’t agree with. And then came the predictable overwrought reaction. I don’t mean the criticism, that’s healthy just as it’s healthy Butker can express his views. But Butker discourse really took off – and again a lot of people seemed shocked to learn that a lot of professional athletes are conservative and an NFL sideline is not the hotbed of DEI many seem to think it might be.
Source: Benedictine College
At some level, who cares? This is a particular kind of school and an NFL place kicker’s views on the world have little impact on how you like your coffee in the morning. (Yes, I know he’s done a few other things in life but you would not have heard of him if he couldn’t effectively kick a football under pressure.) But in 2024 there is still no meeting for the people who didn’t like the speech and also didn’t like the hysterical reaction. Or who just didn’t care, which contra the “silence is violence” crowd is fine, too. You can’t get spun up about everything.
Marcus Aurelius reminds us that we always own the option of having no opinion. “There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control. These things are not asking to be judged by you” he wrote.
Yet one line buried in the address, that did not get as much attention as the bit about marriage roles, stood out to me and made me think that Harrison Butker is probably kind of an asshole. It was this,
I am certain the reporters at the AP could not have imagined that their attempt to rebuke and embarrass places and people like those here at Benedictine wouldn’t be met with anger, but instead met with excitement and pride. Not the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it, but the true God-centered pride that is cooperating with the Holy Ghost to glorify him.
I don’t care that he believes this. It’s disappointing, sure, I’d suggest it’s not all that Christian, and he should come check out the 21st Century in America where people can live their lives as they wish. It’s great, fun, and he might even like it. That’s just a gratuitous, ungracious, and unnecessary thing to say at a commencement ceremony where 485 people are getting their diplomas. Even accounting for the specific nature of this school you have to assume, just based on average statistics, there are gay people in that class, and among the family and friends that came to see them get their diplomas and celebrate them.
Here, too, one might channel Aurelius and say nothing. At a commencement. It seems almost certain that on one of the most special days in their life Butker made someone feel small, bad, or excluded when there was just no reason to do so and he could have made his broader points absent that.* I’m not arguing for safetyism, thought and word policing, or any of the other absurdities infecting public discourse. I’m just pleading for manners and decency. For time and place.
To lower the temperature in this country, and our debates about schools, we have to accept that people can believe what they want and allow them to do that insofar as it doesn’t trample the rights of others. You don’t have to bake that cake and we should not compel belief and expression – an issue that is showing up in school law lately. Harrison Butker should argue for what he believes as should those who disagree with him. You just don’t have to be an asshole about it.
*You see a version of this at some high school graduations, too. It’s great to celebrate the students who performed really well, and we should. You can do that, however, without making those who didn’t do as well feel lousy – especially on graduation day. I saw a graduation recently where the superintendent had graduates stand up in groups based on GPA – not a lot of fun for those with lower GPAs! And this at a school that proudly ditched class rank and recognitions of that sort. Pretty much exactly backwards.
But before we get to all that we disagree about the charter school musical chairs issue, agree about a concerning trend in state superintendent races (Truitt and Baesler in the dock, really, wtf?), talk cross-partisanship, and get a tutorial on Pennsylvania politics.
I moderated a session at the RISE conference with Indiana’s chief state school officer Katie Jenner, Ralph Smith, Tiffany Justice of Mom’s for Liberty, and Kerri Rodrigues of National Parent Union. You can watch here.
Yes, this headshot makes me look like a serial killer.
I was a participant in an Aspen Institute webinar on “cross partisanship” and new ideas about how to get things done in an environment of intense polarization and negative polarization. You can watch here.
No one knows how ESAs are going to play out. Most people are arguing from whatever their prior views on school choice are.
ESAs will have all the predictable quality issues of early-stage choice programs. Here, again, people’s priors matter. If you think choice programs can improve over time you’ll have one frame on ESAs, if you see it all as pretty constant then you’ll see it differently. Not all voucher programs have become academically stronger as they’ve expanded. Charters are improving, on average. There is something for everyone to seize on. Direct payment plans are not uncommon in public policy, they’re still relatively new in education. Expect bumps.
ESAs are proving to be wildly popular *and* expensive as a result. Those are related. A key metric to look at is people participating in ESAs who were not previously participants in public education. Here again people will look at that footprint differently based on their broader orientation toward public education. But it’s an opportunity for public education, and an upcoming collision.
There is not a singular ESA policy. These programs vary in their characteristics. That will be worth watching. Also, as a result, evaluating them and accountability around them is similarly a mixed bag given how some ESA’s are designed.
You cannot unring this bell. The era of direct payments in education is here. Something like what Louisiana just did would have occasioned an epic freak out 20 years ago, now it’s just another week in May.
Along with books like Patricia Hersch’s Tribe Apart,Fast Times is, in my view, essential to understanding 1980s suburban culture. But where Hersch, and others, documented what was happening or had happened, Cameron Crowe’s 1981 book really anticipated the direction things were going. The movie, directed by Amy Heckerling, while not a favorite of critics, was important as a cultural marker and stands up for capturing a moment in real time. More on that in a second.
Today, my kids and kids in California follow the same trends on TikTok and the same fashions and trends in the real world. Gather round kids and I’ll tell you about a time before social media, when trends largely moved west to east. When youth culture was transmitted by magazines, what you saw in the real world, and word of mouth. A time when you didn’t have a lot of knowledge about what was happening far away. A kid at your school would come back from California with new clothes, a year later most everyone would have them.
I also posted a picture from Fast Times, with Spicoli (Sean Penn) and Jefferson’s brother (Stanley Davis Jr.). It had little to do with the analysis but the post needed art. A certain kind of person hears, “Fast Times” and immediately jumps to ‘that movie is problematic.’ Sometimes they reach out to tell me that. Thanks. I had no idea…Actually, I have some troubling news for you: The ‘80s were problematic.
What picture did you think I was going to use? This is a family friendly publication.
The movie captured things that were going on. Cameron Crowe’s job wasn’t to make us better, it was to document and Heckerling’s to entertain. They masterfully did both and the project behind Fast Times is something that should be better known in the education world. Embedding as a student today would likely get you arrested, when Crowe pulled it off things were different.
A decade ago I was writing a daily “on this day” kind of thing for an education newsletter for RealClear Education with the fantastic Emmeline Zhao. On Judge Reinhold’s birthday, which it turns out is this week, I wrote about Fast Times and why it matters and why high school is still pretty screwed up. Being an adolescent is, too, as our report shows.
May 21, 2014 It’s Judge Reinhold’s birthday today. The actor was born on this date in 1957 in Delaware. He spent some of his childhood in Virginia and was a student at Mary Washington College for a while. Reinhold’s known for leading roles in Beverly Hills Cop and an acclaimed role as the “close talker” on Seinfeld. But for Americans of a certain age he’ll always be best recalled as high school senior Brad Hamilton in Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
That film had a who’s who of future movie talent in addition to Reinhold: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forrest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, Nicholas Cage (who appeared under his true name, Nicholas Coppola), and, of course, Phoebe Cates. Ray Watson, who perhaps is best known as a Broadway song and dance performer, is unforgettable as Mr. Hand. “What are you, people? On dope?” The film was based on Cameron Crowe’s book, which he wrote while posing undercover as a student at a California high school in 1979.
Fast Times works because it’s at once ridiculous and also a dead-on encapsulation of high school angst. It veers between the absurd, Sean Penn’s over-the-top Jeff Spicoli who lives only for “tasty waves” and “a cool buzz” to the serious, sexual pressure and teenage pregnancy. Hanging over it all is the palpable sense that despite the pressure and immediacy, real responsibility and stakes lie in wait just around the corner. Crowe stirred that mix just right and the film is as much sociology as it is entertainment. That’s why young people responded to the film even if critics didn’t.
The American high school experience is many things to different people. For some it truly is glory days, for others an important formative period, and for some a period of alienation and difficulty. It’s why we would do well to remember that the stereotypical experience at the comprehensive high school is foreign to many kids. The isolation can be particularly acute in rural communities where a single high school is the focus of so much. With some notable exceptions, overall school systems in all communities generally do a lousy job for the students who need or want something else besides the mainstream. High schools are a part of the American education experience long overdue for more customization.
Technology provides some avenues. Badging and competency-based education can make the high school experience more flexible. But fundamentally, policymakers and educators have to adopt a mindset that there is nothing sacred about the four-year traditional high school experience and students can succeed and thrive with different models.
We’re supposed to reinvent ourselves anyway. As Jeff Spicoli said in Fast Times,
What Jefferson was saying was, Hey! You know, we left this England place ’cause it was bogus; so if we don’t get some cool rules ourselves – pronto – we’ll just be bogus too! Get it?
For millennia and across different societies there have been formal and informal rites of passage for young people based on different and shifting conceptions about when and how the transition from child to adult happens.
This image has relatively little to do with the Edge of Seventeen analysis, but it’s a good opportunity to highlight a Fast Times picture.
Today, in the United States, we have formal laws and regulations and informal secular and religious rituals. For some, a quinceañera, bar mitzvah, hunting trip, or debutante ball mark the entry into adulthood or young adulthood. The age at which one is allowed to formally work, drive a car, or make certain health decisions on their own is also important, and is based upon government sanctioned markers.
In the past, young people often rushed toward these markers of adulthood, often out of necessity (e.g., needing to work and provide for their family, get married, or engage in community defense). Today some evidence suggests a leeriness toward “adulting” and a growing resistance to taking on some responsibilities of adulthood, for instance financial independence or even driving.
Rites of passage were often a matter of necessity, and in some cases still are today. I once visited what’s left of a ranch in the Utah desert that even in the 21st Century is a long day trip by jeep track or only accessible by river, as we came. Someone I was with had notes on the family that once lived there in the early-20th Century: a boy, his sister, and their father. When the father went to “town” he would leave the boy to care for his sister and run the ranch. The boy was about six, his sister three or four. He was, necessarily given ranch life, armed with a rifle.
Many of these issues, gender, firearms, social media, or health care occasion intense debate. Less debated are broader questions surrounding them, where are the lines between childhood and adulthood and how should a liberal society recognize and codify them in law?
Today, that would earn you a visit from child protective services. But what would fly, and why? It depends on who you ask because we don’t agree. For example, the age of sexual consent in Montana is 16, in Virginia it’s 18. Are young people in Virginia really two years less mature in their decision-making than young people in Montana? Maybe. Or maybe Montana’s law is irresponsible? Or is the gap simply an artifact of different lawmaking processes and norms? Whatever you think, it’s hard to make a case that the distinction makes any logical sense or is grounded in a body of evidence. These inconsistencies are global, too. Montana and other U.S. states with an age of 16 are not outliers. In England, for example, the age of consent is 16 as well. Yet plenty of reasonable adults think 18 is far more appropriate.
Despite being a more connected and communicative society than ever before, Edge of Seventeen shows we lack a clear or consistent conception of what it means to be a young person in the United States and consequently what law and policy should be. Where and how are we denying kids agency they should have prior to age 18? Where and how are we letting them make consequential decision too soon? When do laws fail to protect young people and where do we overprotect?
Of course, beyond the formal laws there are also informal distinctions as well. For instance, although the drinking age is 21 across the country, many parents allow their children at least some access to alcohol at younger ages. In other cases, young people find ways to drink alcohol on their own. We can ban minors from accessing porn, it doesn’t mean they’re not.
The current debate about transgender youth, perhaps our highest profile age debate right now, turns in part on age and at what age young people can make certain health care decisions. On the political right there is strong pushback on the idea of medical treatment for people under 18 who identify as transgender. On the political left there is an emphasis on ensuring unfettered access to medical treatment for minors. Yet in red states other kinds of consequential health care access such as mental health, abortion, or STI treatment can be available to minors even without parental consent. And in blue states one finds many restrictions when it comes to other body issues as trivial as piercings or tattoos.
When Mississippi banned medical procedures for transgender youth part of the reasoning was to protect children from irreversible decisions. Mississippi still allows people under 16 to get married with parental consent and a judge signing off. Hard to argue there is a consistent standard at work.
Some states are restricting a young person’s ability to control how they are addressed – the name or pronouns they are called in school for example – even as those same young people can make consequential health care and mental health decisions on their own. These examples also illustrate a lack of any sort of logical through line. It’s worth asking questions like why a young person can drive a car at 16 and handle a firearm to hunt or target shoot, but not decide how adults, who in the case of schools are agents of the government, address them in public settings?
Other than the title this, too, has little to do with the analysis. But I needed art for the post and she’s fantastic.
In Alabama you can have a gun at any age, but you can’t smoke until you’re 21. Wyoming, too, lets you have guns at all ages but restricts access to mental health care without parental consent until you’re 18. Rhode Island restricts mental health to 18 as well but the age of sexual consent is 16. Delaware lets you work at 12 but no gambling until you’re 21. You get the idea. There are inconsistencies across states, and within states.
In our analysis we look at coherence and incoherence as a way to frame the issue and illustrate the status quo. But it’s not self-evident that coherence is better. Perhaps these issues are so varied that incoherence is unavoidable, necessary, or even desirable.
Many of these issues, gender, firearms, social media, or health care occasion intense debate. Less debated are broader questions surrounding them, where are the lines between childhood and adulthood and how should a liberal society recognize and codify them in law? If you, left, right, or center, are really spun up about any particular issue have you considered the question more generally?
Schools, especially public schools, are squarely in the crosshairs of many these debates and policy questions because they are where young people spend a lot of time, and represent a place where activists on the right and left have staked out positions on contested political issues. School leaders and teachers have at times injected themselves into these debates as well. Schools also enforce some state laws and policies and school employees are generally mandated reporters on laws involving minors. In different ways, laws affecting everything from driving and employment, access to controlled substances, medical decision-making, social media, and gender and sexuality land at the schoolhouse door.
Our project is designed to call attention to the inconsistencies of our current age-related laws. Though I and the other authors certainly have our own views, and disagree with one another on some things, our goal is not to suggest how you should think about any particular question. We want to spur discussion not police wrong think or suggest a correct answer to specific questions – because on many reasonable people can and will disagree.
That’s because these issues are complicated and individuals will arrive at a position based on a blend of what they know about young people from a scientific standpoint, what they believe from a values or community standards point of view, their own experience, and increasingly, if we’re being honest, from negative polarization on the hot button issues.
That’s hard to falsify. So perhaps instead to have a better conversation about these issues – especially the contentious ones – we should broaden the aperture and think more broadly about what does it mean to be an adolescent in America in 2024? To be, with apologies to Stevie Nicks, on the edge of seventeen?
A few memories stay with me from the very early days of the pandemic. Mostly about what I got wrong or right, or just got lucky.
My wife and I throw themed dinner parties and on Feb. 29th of 2020 we threw a small one with a leap theme, about great leaps. We served grasshoppers among other jumpy food. The attendees included a managing editor at a media outlet, a former secretary of education, an artist friend, non-profit leaders, a FAANG type, that sort of thing. People who were generally connected to information. By that point everyone knew it was bad news, the worst was coming, and part of the conversation tended to, ‘probably the last dinner party for a while, enjoy it.’ People offered predictions about what was about to happen. I remember one guest saying that a lot of people were about to die, we just didn’t know who yet or all the characteristics they might share. It was odd to be talking about that over wine and leap themed dishes as the world sort of ticked on.
That was a Saturday. Early the next week I remember being at the supermarket with my kids. We filled three carts. They thought this was beyond embarrassing. “Everyone is staring at us,” one said with dismay because that really is hell on earth for an 8th-grader. They always think everyone is staring at them, in this instance they were right. We were buying a lot of groceries. A week or so later? Well, they they were glad for it.
Here’s the thing. We were late to all this and I slept on Covid in its early days, assuming it would be disruptive but more or less like a bad flu year. I chocked some of the more severe reports up to click-hungry media. In February 2020, some schools in Virginia were actually closed because of flu, so episodic not widespread closures wasn’t a radical idea. Epidemiologists, though, knew this was not the case. The rest of us not yet. Professionally, I underestimated it in the early going, still wondering if we could pull off a meeting in California in early March or some school visits and spring training in Florida before things had to really close down.
We’re not “preppers.” I don’t have a bunker in my back yard, closest full of ARs, or a year’s worth of food. I stockpile bourbon and DVDs of 80s films. Nor am I any more prescient than the next person. But I am connected to pretty good information flow. I have friends in various fields, government, aviation, sports, medicine and, although later than some, once I started paying attention I was able to piece together what was going on and likely to happen. (I was also moonlighting as an EMT doing 911 at the time so though we were basically treated like mushrooms we got some trickle down by early March). By March people I knew were making big financial or logistical moves. A friend who was getting regular non-public briefings told me that first week of March that all the decisions about work, life, travel, that seemed debatable would soon be obvious. It became alarming.
Most of the country was still not yet alarmed.
It seems like the same thing is happening with AI now, albeit in slower motion. To be clear, I don’t think AI is simply something to be alarmed about. It’s not like Covid. With AI there will be upsides and downsides, as with any novel technology. But, those downsides will be as acute in some cases as the upsides are profound. Adverse consequences are talked about quietly, generally in my experience by elites or those connected to the information flow. ‘A lot of people…we just don’t know who yet.’ (My own hunch is the next recession will create the permission structure for layoffs that are actually AI-related and those jobs will not come back.)
Some people are in the know, some are waking up, some have no idea. In that way it feels a lot like the early days of Covid.
Via DALL·E 2
In my experience, most conferences or meetings about AI have a very ‘in the know’ vibe to them. At one level that’s normal. If you went to a charter school meeting in the 1990s, for instance, you were talking about a new disruptive innovation that few people were yet aware of. I raise a lot of money for cancer research and try to stay connected but I’m sure there are all manner of emerging treatments I am unaware of but are common knowledge among insiders. Hang out with professionals in almost any field if you want to understand how little you know about some things. But AI is different in that the effects will be broad across the economy and society, they will affect all of us.
Some people are preparing for those effects more than others. They’re counseling their kids. They’re thinking about their careers. They’re thinking about efficiency and upside as well as risk. Others are unaware and will be buffeted. In our little corner of the world, people talk in hushed tones about what this might mean for education’s labor market and various roles wary of causing alarm or setting off political tripwires. In the media world you hear conversations about the serious impacts of AI on how people find and consume news. In elite government circles there is attention being paid.
If you trust tech, trust our tech leaders, think they have everyone’s best interests at heart, then rest easy and carry on. If you don’t, then something is coming that a small group of people understand – like Covid not fully, but in its broad dimensions – and most people don’t. This doesn’t mean you should go bury a shipping container in your yard. Or buy guns and antibiotics. (Though I will say those old John Cusack films stand up and you’ll want them on hand regardless.) But it does mean leaders should probably do more to ask questions, democratize the flow of information, and help people prepare for opportunity and disruption. Help people understand what’s happening and what it might mean – knowing we can’t be sure. And be more candid about the potential upsides and downsides. We should do that less in cloistered groups and as much as possible in a more open way around the sector and particularly among its organizing entities – various organizations and associations.
In 2020 we didn’t have a leader with the skills and manner to do this for Covid. With AI, in 2024, it’s on all of us.
Next week I’m participating in this webinar with Aspen about de-polarization and bipartisan policy work. Karen Nussle is a participant too. More on her below.
Speaking of Karen Nussle, who is a great person in the sector, here she is with some fish. A largemouth bass and a pike both from the same lake in Wisconsin.
Cautionary Tales
Road Work Ahead: New State and District Policies
