Heritage: How To Make More Babies

I'm not sure where to start--this is the most mind-blowingly boneheaded "report" I have ever seen come out of a reformster activist group in maybe ever. This is not off the rails or in the weeds. It has left both rails and the weeds far behind, careening into some parched plain where the blazing light of political desire has dried up every drop of sense. Let the record show that I am perfectly capable of engaging in serious discussion with serious making serious ed reform arguments, but this is spectacularly unserious.

The title of the blog post masquerading as a report is "Education Policy Reforms Are Key Strategies for Increasing the Married Birth Rate" produced by Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke for the Heritage Society, and it needs a "Not The Onion" label, but I suppose it signals yet another tack for the culture panic crowd. Heritage made this point with a little less verve just last year, and it was bunk then, too. I've read it so you don't have to. Let's dive in.

The Problem We're Trying To Solve

The United States fertility rate has dropped below the replacement rate, and that is Very Bad. Fertility rates are dropping all over the planet, and resist policy efforts. 

While no silver bullet can increase the married birth rate, developing pro-family policies is essential if Americans want to maintain their political and cultural traditions, avoid economic decline, and strengthen national defense.

Spoiler alert: by "pro-family policies," they do not mean what you think that means. This will not be a discussion of how to provide support for young families, nor will we talk about how the US trails the rest of the industrialized world when it comes to family leave. We just love to talk about supporting families in this country as long as it doesn't inconvenience employers or involve spending taxpayer dollars. 

Sure, some governments try financial incentives and subsidized services. But that, they argue, doesn't work all that much. Besides, raising kids has always been expensive. So with a quick wave of their hands, they dismiss any economic concerns that might be holding young folks back.

No, they argue, "the decline in the number of children is driven primarily by values and priorities." Kids These Days lack the moral fiber to have kids these days. Why, back in 1970s (when, they remind us, that birth control pill was first legalized) the standard of living was lower, the GDP was lower, but people were popping out babies left and right. Now people have more wealth and less inclination to spend it on children.

Now, there's a ton of research out there about this very question, but Greene and Burke aren't going to bring any of that up. Some of it actually offers some support for their idea that we're seeing a slightly selfish values shift (and some of it says "Shut up, Boomer-- you're the selfish ones"), but it also brings up a host of other concerns, including economic worries, the environment, the general state of the world. But never mind any of that. They have a different thought.

"The general standard of living and overall societal wealth" are up compared to 100 years ago, they point out, and at this point I, a non-academic non-sociologist, would question how those "general" terms break down. Averages hide a lot of highs and lows, and lots of folks don't get to participate in "overall societal wealth." But never mind. People are getting married later than they used to. If you know actual young people, a hundred possible explanations may spring to mind, but we aren't looking at any of that, because Greene and Buke have a different culprit in mind.

College. Specifically, college financial aid.

People are spending more time in college. "Much of the trend can be explained" by the "subsidy-induced explosion" of college enrollment, and college campuses don't include many young student parents. 

Put plainly, massive and unnecessary education subsidies are artificially steering people into delaying or even foregoing marriage and children.

Has college enrollment exploded? Has college financial aid exploded? How "non-existent" are married parent students? These all seem like points for which actual data exist, but none will be mentioned here.

And if you were getting to make the excuse that the job market demands increased skills and education, Burke and Greene say no, it doesn't. Only a third of secretaries have degrees, compared to 9% in 1990, which proves... something? There are too many "excess" credential requirements, and too many subsidies keeping too many people in college for too many years, postponing markers of adulthood. 

I have more questions. Like, if college is the culprit, what part of the population does that affect? About five seconds of research reveals that roughly a third of the adult population had a bachelors degree. So what about everyone else? Are they slacking off, too, or is the college crowd just dragging the numbers down all by themselves? 

Finally, a Heritage post about education wouldn't be complete with a demand for privatization:

Finally, to reverse the tide of declining fertility rates, it is necessary to consider barriers to parents educating their own children in ways that increase the likelihood that those children will have pro-fertility values.

They call this "universal education choice," but it is clearly meant to be one particular education choice. They want it for "all families" which of course means "wealthy families already using private schools." 

Let's Drag Religion Into It

Here comes the Institute for Family Studies, another Bradley and Koch funded right wing outfit creating a basis for policies right-tilted folks want--in this case, traditional straight parents raising children with mom at home. IFS has connected the lower birth rate with a decline in religious connection. Church attenders make more babies, and fewer people attend church so the decline accounts for “virtually 100% of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019.”

Now, other countries with higher religious observance don't have higher fertility, admit the authors, but that's because the politics, economics, and culture are different. There's a lot implied and suggested by that observation; the authors will not be examining any of it. We're just going to leave it at the idea that religiosity differences affect fertility differences with countries, but not between them. Because, I guess, there's no such thing as meaningful political, economic, or cultural differences within a country. It sure would have been interesting to examine, say, fertility differences between the different sub-cultures and regions of the US, but we're not going to do that.

Anyway, religious people put more value on children, making parents "more greatly appreciate the personal, societal, and even eternal benefits of having more babies" and therefor not mind the cost.

Now we get to some big time baloney.

When the government compels parents to enroll their children in school and then provides secular, public schools as the only tax-supported option, it is erecting a significant barrier to parents giving children a religious education.

This is simply not true. I've made the long argument before, but this time, let me offer a simple observation. If we're looking for data, let's consider that the decrease in religiosity in this country has occurred at the same time as the rise in school choice. Most of the religious people making this argument themselves came through public school with their religious devotion entirely intact. That's because not telling you what to believe is not the same as telling you what not to believe. Public education leaves the religion spot in a student's life wide open for the family to fill in as they like. 

Conservatives like to argue that they don't co-parent with the government, but this complaint amounts to a demand that the government should co-parent with them, to back them up on a faith that apparently they can't inculcate and grow in their children without someone else's help. 

Then there's this:

Families must be able to afford to pay twice—once in taxes supporting the district public school, and a second time for private school tuition—to be able to access instruction that matches their faith and values.

No. Families don't even pay for tuition the first time. That's the beauty of the system--nobody pays all of the tuition ever. This is especially true for some quiverfull family with multiple children. Do they also suggest that it is unjust for folks with no children at all to pay taxes? (They do not). But the unspoken premise of modern choice is that education is a service provided to families; it ignores the notion that public education is there not to serve only families, but to serve the public as a whole. 

Nor do religious private schools serve even a large number of families. The authors argue that vouchers put religious private schools on a level playing field with public schools. They do not, at least not as long as private religious schools retain the right to reject and expel students for any and all reasons. And not only do they pick and choose which families to serve, but they frequently fail to serve society by failed and unaccountable teaching.

Greene and Burke argue that religious private schools make children more likely to grow up religious, and gee, that's a pretty thought, but it also shows for the gazillionth time that this is not about actual school choice at all--it's about replacing a public system with a particular, limited set of values. It's about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools. "Parents should have a choice of schools--as long as they choose a properly religious school."

Education savings accounts, tax-credit-supported private school scholarships, and vouchers should be viewed as key pro-fertility policies. Lowering barriers to families selecting a school of their choice, including religious education for their children, increases the odds that parents will have children and that a larger share of those children will retain religious beliefs and practices that boost marriage and fertility.

"You know, Ethel, I wasn't really planning on having children, but now that our state offers school vouchers, let's go ahead and pop out a bunch."

Early family formation and damn that college racket

Greene and Burke lead with a bunch of stats showing that the median age for getting married and for having children are higher than they used to be, and pair that with the assertion that "fertility is significantly reduced for people who delay" those activities. 

Now for some research slight-of-hand. The next paragraph will start by saying that while "many factors" contribute to the late start, "one of the most important is the longer period of time that people spend in school." This is followed by a lot of stats showing that people spend a lot of time in school. Is there anything to connect the cause and effect, other than putting sentences together in one paragraph? There is not. Data about what percentage of late starters are college-educated? Nope. 

They note that grad student population increased from 2.9 million to 3.2 million from 2010 to 2021. So... those 300,000 grad students are the cause of the nation's fertility drop? They blame that hop on the Grad PLUS loan program. That has "likely" played a key role, they argue (without data). Some number of people are spending 6 to 10 years in higher education. What number? "Most of them" put off marriage. How many?

We do finally at some data. 43% of women with degrees wait till 30 to have children; of high school diploma women, the figure is 8.5%. Of degreed women, 22% will never have children; for diplomas, it's 11.5%. How do men figure in this? 

The authors decry businesses that "chase degrees," which they do in part because those damn "overzealous" enforcers of civil rights have "made it exceedingly difficult for businesses to administer job-related pre-employment tests, and I would love to learn more about this thing that I've never, ever heard of before, but there is no source cited for this widespread practice. But you know-- emphasis on degrees over merit has tricked people into pursuing credentials that they don't need, but which keep them from taking advantage of their peak baby-making years. It's that damned government "free" money in the form of loans (which are kind of the opposite of free money, but if they want to argue that 19-year-olds don't fully grasp that, I won't disagree) and those loans create a huge debt load that further delays baby-making.

Here follows an assortment of data to support the notion that college is expensive and doesn't pay off for lots of folks. Again, I won't argue this. 

Now, you might think that a logical conclusion here might be to argue that the government could hand out more grants instead of loans, or that colleges should be restructured to be less money-grubbing, or that government needs to address the economic weaknesses that result in so many people stuck in so many crappy jobs that pay subsistence wages while still allowing employers to demand credentials just because they can further fueling the notion that a college education is important for involving life in the bottom of America's economic barrel.

But this is the Heritage Foundation, so no. Instead, the proposal is for the government to stop helping people go to college and just start working at a young age so that they get straight on to that baby-making. I am sure that everyone at Heritage, and their many fine rich donors stand behind this and refuse to put any of their children through college, insisting that they get out there and get a job. But I get the feeling this is aimed at the poors.

Proposals to cut subsidized student loan programs should therefore be seen as key pro-fertility policies.

The actual agenda here--  "An Education Reform Agenda to Increase the Married Birth Rate and Support Families"

Here's what Burke and Greene say the states should do.

Adopt Universal School Choice.

Well, not choice exactly. But if taxpayers would fund religious private schools so that more students would attend them, more students would grow up religious and go through the "success sequence" by graduating high school, getting married, getting a job, and then having kids, just like Jesus wanted them to. 

Eliminate Teacher Certification Requirements

Speaking of too much emphasis on college, how about teachers? Why get certification? Just let school leaders hire folks "whom they deem to have sufficient subject-matter expertise to teach in K–12 classrooms" so that teachers can get straight to baby-making (though I'm not aware of certification lengthening teacher college time). They cite some research from reformsters that I am not going to take time to chase here to argue that certification doesn't make teachers any better. 

Eliminate Bachelor’s Degree Requirements for State Government Work.

Eliminate degree requirements for government work, because surely a high school diploma is enough. Hell, over the next four years, we may find that a high school diploma is too much. 

Eliminate PLUS loan programs

Both Grad and Parent loan programs should be tanked. Go get a private loan, or a job. 

So, to summarize our argument so far, in K-12, lack of resources should not deprive families of educational choices, but after high school, if you are too poor for college, tough noogies. Also, if government aid causes tuition inflation in colleges, will it do the same in K-12 (spoiler alert: yes).

End Student Loan Cancellation

This seems backwards--after all, if you want young adults to stop worrying about their debt and start making the babies, making the debt go away seems like a productive choice. But the authors are afraid that such largesse encourages more debt. Better to make sure that young men and women understand right up front that college will mean crippling debt, and maybe they should just not bother with such aspirations beyond their class and get on with the job and the baby making.

Revive Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Programs (IRAPs) to Expand Apprenticeships.

Also an excellent path to getting to work and making babies sooner without wasting time at college.

Good Lord in Heaven 

So many questions, and so little curiosity. Why are young adults putting off family stuff? What are the economic and cultural factors? Are there any patterns surrounding where, and among whom, this does or doesn't happen? Are there other policies that could support family formation, like doing something about the world's worst family leave, plus other measures that would make it possible for women to have a family and a job (maybe even make it as easy as it is for men)? What about minimum wage? Are there any possible solutions that fall outside the preferred social engineering policies of right wingers? How effective are religious schools at creating religious adults? Are there any actual data connecting college and late-starting families? If college is an issue, are there other policy solutions to the weight of extra years and financial burdens? What does the data tell us about who does and doesn't follow the "success sequence" and why? What does the data tell us about people who follow the sequence and end up with a crappy job and a family they can't support (and is that related to a reliable supply of meat widgets who can't afford to leave no matter how poorly their employers treat them)? What is really behind the drop in church attendance in this country (hint: there are whole books about this)? How do schools add religion without needing a government bureau of religion approval? Wouldn’t increased immigration be a possible help here? Oh, and do private voucher systems produce good educational results that benefit society as a whole?

There is a whole lot of territory to cover in questions about national birth rates, national religiosity, college and university policies, changes in family structure, and credentialling for various professions. But Greene and Burke show no interest in actually examining these areas--they are simply intent on hewing out a path that leads to their pre-selected conclusions. 

Do they hit on some worthy points along the way, like the effects of over-selling college to a generation? Sure. But mostly they craft an incurious case to support the policies they want to support. This "report" is just a blog post in a tux.

One thing to note--this adds to the list of items revealing some sort of baby panic on the right, an apparent fear that they will somehow run out of pliable meat widgets. It lurks around forced birth policies, the end of child labor laws, the attempts to create parallel education system (one for the haves and one for the have-nots), as well as the concern that a social safety net makes it too easy for the poors to walk away from crappy jobs. The hum and buzz suggest that a certain sector of the country is really worried that they're going to run out of cheap laborers, that our meat widget supply is in trouble. Whether Greene and Burke share that fear or are simply playing on it to sell taxpayer subsidies for religious schools is up for debate

Eating Our Education Vegetables

We may never be done talking about accountability. Back before the election (roughly a thousand years ago), Rick Hess was contemplating another possible directional change in the Politics of Education.

Hess considers the Bush-Obama years and the serious concerns of Dems and the GOP , and he points at accountability (which he labels a GOP concern) as a point of difficulty.

While accountability appealed in the abstract, its allure curdled pretty quickly once voters saw it in practice.

Hess called this Eat Your Vegetables education policy and goes on to explain how visible and immediate sacrifice tends to beat out invisible and long-term reward, and that's what happened to education reform ideas from the BO days.

I have an easier explanation (maybe two, actually).

The accountability systems of the BO era were not Eat Your Vegetables policy. They were Eat These Sharp Pieces Of Plastic That We Swear Will Be Good For You. Also, when you complain that the shards of plastic are hard to swallow and aren't much like vegetables, we are going to accuse you of being against vegetables because if you had to eat them everyone would see what awful teachers the unions are trying to protect.

Teachers are all about accountability; it is baked into the job, right down to the instant accountability of the classroom--deliver a crappy lesson and your class will punish you for it immediately (not by critiquing your pedagogy, but by making your life miserable for 45 minutes). Teachers are not opposed to accountability.

But the Big Standardized Tests foisted on us were not good accountability tools. They did not--and still do not--give a useful, accurate, fair, valid or reliable measure of student achievement or teacher quality. I cannot say this hard enough (and I've been saying it for decades). Watch students take these damn things. Read the questions. Look at the crazy-pants results (last year Mrs. Teachburger was distinguished and this year she's in need of remediation). Read books like The Testing Charade by test expert Daniel Koretz. Sift through the many kafkaesque tales of teachers evaluated by the results of a test on a subject they don't teach taken by students they don't have in class.

BS Tests were like examining elephant toe nail clippings and using them to assess the elephant's hearing. 

You get my point. If not, reference the sixty gazillion posts I've already made on the topic. TLDR: the accountability systems created and nurtured back in the BO days did not actually provide accountability. 

Also-- if we see the ed reform world as Team Burn It Down and Team Make It Work, with educators far more sympathetic to Team Make It Work, test-based accountability faced another problem because it harbored so many people who pretended to be Team Make It Work ("We'll use these accountability measures to locate weak areas and provide resources to strengthen") but turned out to be Team Burn It Down ("Your scores are too low, so we're going to charterize it and/or encourage everyone to flee").   

The other problem with accountability vegetables is that opposition has emerged from the school choice crowd, which has largely resisted accountability and whose new allies, the culture panic crowd, doesn't care for accountability at all.

Hess posits that further discussion of the education menu benefits from "setting aside the main course of culture-infused policy fights" and just talk about the side dishes, which has a kind of "Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play" feel to it. 

Hess consigns Career and Technical Education and teacher pay to the sugar-frosted stuff list. I'd argue that they're essential parts of making the system work well, but I think his point is that they are sugar-frosted because they (and some other items) are easy political sells (though teacher pay is a good example of an issue where politicians need only express support without ever actually delivering). He tosses some other items into the discussion (wisely sidestepping reading wars) including, of course, choice, which is complicated because the benefits and adverse consequences are both immediately evident (I'd argue that the benefits are both small and visible only to a small number of beneficiaries). 

Hess ends by making his predictions for the years ahead (remember, he's bravely doing so before the election). First, there will be a tug of war between political promises and actual costs of things. Well, yes. And the sun will probably rise in the East as well.

Second, we might see budget cuts, but Hess argues there's "no obvious appetite for them." Now we know there's a huge appetite for them among billionaire unelected Presidential advisors, so we'll see how that plays out. Right now I like George Will's line-- "The world's richest man is about to get a free public education." 

Third, he sees an uphill battle for accountability fans, and makes a last pitch Eat Your Vegetables ed policy. But here's the thing, over and above all my bitching about the accountability we were served in the BO days-- it was never, ever about eating vegetables.

Educational accountability is hard--desirable, but really really hard. The whole pitch in the Bad Old days was that it would be really, really easy. "We'll just give students a single standardized test. It'll be quick and simple and hardly interfere with the school year at all. And it will generate a bunch of data! In numbers! And that magical absolutely trustworthy and valid data will make it easy to see who's doing the right thing and who's doing the wrong thing, and that magical data will make it easy to design policies that will totally fix all our education system."

Accountability was never vegetables. It was pitched as a bucket full of sugar that would make the medicine go down, and it turned out to be those damned shards of plastic.

If accountability hawks really want to try this again, here's my advice. Rewind way, way, way back. Back to the point where some damn person apparently said, "Instead of talking about what we want to measure and discussing how we could possibly measure that, let's talk about what we can measure in ways that generate easy, sexy data points." 

Then start over.

Answer some basic questions. What is the purpose of education? How can we tell whether that purpose has been achieved? How can we use instruments that are valid and which do not immediately trigger Campbell's Law? Who are the intended audience for the accountability system results, and what do we expect they'll do with those results? And how will we manage the inevitable shortcomings of whatever system we come up with (pro tip: pretending they don't exist won't help)?

Yes, these questions are incredibly complex and difficult, but we now have 25-ish years of demonstration that when you try to skip past them or shortcut your way to an answer, you end up with junk, a wheelbarrow full of Twinkies that have been left in the sun too long, a pile of stuff that neither nourishes nor delights. 

I swear-- go after accountability that provides real, valid, reliable measures with actionable results, and educators will gladly snap it up like a hearty meal. 

Curiosity Saved The Cat

A critical quality for education--a quality too rarely discussed-- is curiosity.

We spend a lot of time talking about things like "critical thinking" and other items that are supposed to help students get good at learning things and knowing things and using the knowledge that they've acquired. But one doesn't really start working on the question "What is true here" unless one first wonders about the truth.

To answer a question, one has to want to ask the question.

For the last half of my career, I felt some frustration around this issue. Here were my students living in a world in which it was increasingly easy to get an answer to any question, and yet, they just didn't. Lord knows I modeled it for them. "I'm not sure, but let's find out," I'd respond to some random question, and turn to my friend Dr. Google to find out. But sitting there with their smart phones and school-issued netbooks, they rarely showed enough curiosity to move to consult the collected knowledge of the internet.

It ought to be one of the great shifts of the last half-century. Used to be that when you wanted to know something, you had to find an expert or dig out a book or slog through a long search. Now you search. Granted, a double layer of curiosity is needed, because after you find an on line answer, one needs to ask, "I wonder if that's right."

But we seem to live in an age of the incurious (check out these "undecided" voters who mostly just weren't curious enough about the candidates to try to learn something about them). There's a good case to be made that Tea Partiers and their MAGA descendants are fueled largely by people who don't understand how stuff works and are angry about it. Go back and look at how many 2020 Big Lie proponents simply didn't understand how voting works. When Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion from the US budget, I have to conclude that he just doesn't understand the budget or how the country works. If some voters are "low-information" in this day and age, it's because they choose to be. See also, anti-vaxers. And lord knows that ed reformsters from all across the political spectrum have demonstrated that they don't understand how schools work and never bothered to try to find out.

The great enemy of curiosity is believing that you've got things All Figured Out. If that is a central part of your identity ("I'm the guy who has all the answers") then curiosity becomes a threat, particularly if there's a mountain of evidence piled just outside your window. 

Like many important features of the classroom, it shouldn't be taught instead of the course content, but is part of how to teach that content. Curiosity is one of those qualities that clashes with test-centered schooling ("Don't be curious-- just answer question, correctly, RIGHT NOW!")

In all my years in the classroom, curiosity was one of the factors I chased with limited success. It may well be that this is one of those areas where home is where the students acquire it (or don't). Children learn that it's okay to be curious (or not) and that the world is for exploring in search of all sorts of answers (or that there's just one answer, so when you can, just skip ahead to that one answer). They may even learn that adults know the One True Answer and questioning that is an act of insubordination.

So what's a classroom teacher to do? Ask questions. Be curious. Make the classroom a safe place to be curious (and not a place where asking the wrong question gets you mocked or belittled). Model feeding the curiosity itch. Train yourself NOT to say, "That's interesting, but we don't have time to look at it right now." 

Also--and some folks may disagree--don't underplay the importance of direct instruction. Curiosity rests on a platform of prior knowledge; one can't be curious about something without the something. Requiring that students be curious all the time in order to collect even the smallest bits of understanding--that's a self-defeating approach. 

And of course, teach the practical skills to sorting out the information that a search for answers will turn up. There are a gazillion guides to evaluating online sources that can be found, yes, on line. 

The world needs more curious people, needs them desperately. It's a critical part of life long learning, and therefor a worthy emphasis for classroom teachers, even if it doesn't affect Big Standardized Test scores. 

Is It Time For Conservatives To Get Back To Ed Reform

Robert Pondiscio was at AEI after the election to wonder if the time had come for conservatives to get back to the ed reform biz. It's an interesting question, partly because Pondiscio has correctly called the winds of change in the past, partly because a new Trump administration is a fine time to consider how "conservative" and "liberal" don't precisely map onto the education debates. I haven't changed my mind about ed reform; I still love public education and disagree with massive critical chunks of the reform agenda. But for purposes of this discussion, that's momentarily beside the point.

Did conservatives go somewhere?

Here's my over-simplified history of the modern school choice movement.

Since Milton Friedman helped birth the modern choice movement, its heart has been small government, free market conservatism--and that has never been enough. At first the only people to run with it were pissed off post-Brown racists. Reagan tried to set the stage with A Nation at Risk, beginning the process of eroding public faith in and support for public schools. 

Skip ahead to No Child Left Behind, a policy project that was either an attempt to improve public education or an attempt to start loosening the bolts so it could be dismantled. Either way, it birthed a new bipartisan movement centered on accountability, standards and charter-style choice (and in barely a whisper, vouchers). 

That coalition required a sort of bargain. For conservatives, an emphasis on market-empowered choice, and for their partners, a promise that choice would be aimed at improving equity in education for marginalized group. That deal was hard to maintain, especially as it emerged that 1) choice didn't really fix America's equity issues and 2) free market conservatives didn't really mind. Some conservatives complained at being pushed out of the coalition, but then Trump was elected and the coalition was pretty much blown apart-- the social uplift side was not going to have anything to do with Trump, but there were some conservative issues as well.

Meanwhile, dating all the way back to the Obama administration, a new anti-public school wave was building, a culture panic fed by opportunists like Chris "Critical Race Theory Is Scary" Rufo and wackadoo scares like the Great Imaginary Litter Box Panic. 

In February of 2022, we could the closest thing to a formal announcement of a new partnership. Jay Greene, who in a somewhat symbolic move left academia to join right-wing activist group the Heritage Foundation, published "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars." He argued that trying to pretend to care about things that lefties liked such as equity and uplift wasn't helping the cause (also, the growing body of research showed that, academically, vouchers are a losing proposition), so instead, why not throw in with the culture panic crowd.

Which they did. The problem for conservative free market fans is that the culture panic crowd has zero interest in school choice. They have worked for two goals-- a taxpayer-funded public system that is dominated by their values, and a private taxpayer-funded voucher system dominated by their values. So instead of arguments for letting a hundred education flowers bloom and to each their own, Greene went on to cobble together fake research to show that school choice would end wokeism in education. 

So what could be changing now?

Pondiscio sees an opportunity within the election results, specifically the observation that the GOP made big goals in Florida and Texas, two states that have pushed school choice hard. Pondiscio also notes that "Republicans’ 'red state strategy' has been a yielded important victories, particularly passing universal Education Savings Account (ESA) programs in about a dozen states in the past few years."

He also sees the need to try, because (as Pondiscio regularly points out) the vast majority of students are educated in public schools, so walking away from public ed reform is essentially giving the other team a bye. "The majority of American children—future entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, soldiers, and citizens—will continue to be educated in traditional public schools for the foreseeable future. Surrendering these institutions to the left would be an act of educational and cultural self-destruction."

There are obstacles and opportunities

It’s also an opportunity for thoughtful conservatives to re-evaluate past missteps and even make amends. That means engaging with public school teachers, a group that has borne the brunt of conservative ire in recent years. As I argued recently in National Affairs, while it’s true that teachers’ unions have often been obstacles to meaningful reform, there’s more common ground between conservatives and teachers than most people realize on a host of issues including teacher training and pay, school safety, student discipline, even curriculum.

Well, yes. It has been a couple of decades, starting with No Child Left Behind operating on the premise that a bunch of teachers were everything wrong and failing in public education, continuing with Common Core premised on the idea that no teachers could do their jobs without careful direction, and all the way up through assertions that teachers are satanic groomers and pedophiles. Not all of that is the fault of conservatives, but is true that conservatives--or anyone else--who wants to work with teachers (and they all should) will have to first apologize and second prove they aren't there to punch teachers in the face again. 

The bigger obstacle is hinted at in Pondiscio's piece. Choicers may have gotten voucher bills in many legislatures, but vouchers were on the ballot in three states and they all lost, decisively. The path to implementing vouchers remains what it has always been-- around the voters and through the legislature.

The presents a problem for conservatives, because the folks in legislatures are increasingly MAGA, and MAGA is not conservative in any traditional sense of the word. Sure, they have some of the language down, but consider, for instance, the Trump MAGA plan for education, which boils down to 1) we want to dismantle the department of education because the federal government should have no control over local schools and 2) we would like to exert total control over what local schools may and may not teach.

Actual Queen of Rumania

One key problem with choice has been accountability. Market forces do not create accountability, certainly not the kind of accountability needed to protect the educations and futures of young humans. Likewise, the argument that we can't "just trust" public schools with all those taxpayer dollars, but handing those dollars to private or charter schools is just fine-- that's not particularly conservative accountability. But MAGA is not real big on any accountability at all, which means more choice legislation that forbids taxpayers from knowing how their money was spent.

That's why I have my doubts about conservatives finding a path back to the heart of education reform, because that path is being guarded by MAGA, and if MAGA is conservative, I am the Queen of Rumania. 

But there is a useful piece of an idea here, because I'm going to argue that you can in education find plenty of conservatives involved in education. The place is schools.

Conservative and liberal and education

I have been surrounded by conservatives my whole life. My grandmother was a staunch GOP legislator in New Hampshire for much of her life, and my father was a faithful Republican as well. My ideas about conservatives come from direct contact, not what the liberal media says about them. I don't spend a lot of time worrying about political labels, and I have never fully understood exactly how political labels track onto sides of education debates.

Free market conservatives are a fine old tradition for conservatives; I think their belief in the invisible hand is sometimes sorely misplaced, but I get it. The supposed leftie allies of ed reform? That never tracked for me. Democrats for Education Reform was a deliberate attempt to manufacture a palatable political package for Democrats. Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates-- liberals? Neoliberals seem like Friedman's nieces and nephews. 

Trying to track a Dem-GOP divide in education seems fruitless, particularly now that MAGA has squeezed most actual Republicans out of their own party. Too many actors are just muddying the waters by using party affiliation to cover their actual affiliation, which is to power and money.

In education, let's instead divide the teams up this way-- Team Burn It All Down and Team Make It Work. 

Conservatives and liberals, nominal Republicans and Democrats can be found on both sides of the debates. But I would argue that "Let's take this time-tested institution and simply trash the whole thing" is not a particularly conservative point of view. Likewise, I think we would find among choice fans both people who want to trash the current system to make room for choice and people who want to use choice to make the system work better. Unfortunately, MAGA and the culture panic crowd are largely Burn It Down--and they just won an election.

As for public schools-- most everyone working in the school wants to make it work better (I suppose it's theoretically possible that there are schools which everyone believes cannot be improved, but I doubt it). Preserve and improve the institution is a fundamentally conservative position, and if you look closely, I believe you'll find that most schools have adopted policies that draw objections not because they are trying to embark on a leftie crusade, but because they believe those policies will help the school work better. Teachers mostly support free lunch and breakfast for students not because they want to promote socialism, but because students are easier to teach when they aren't hungry. 

In other words, education debates can go so much better if folks worry more about the goals and less about which team jersey the policy is wearing.

This is not to say that there isn't a huge divide between the Burn It Down and the Make It Work folks, as well as some huge and definitive differences of opinion amongst the Make It Work crowd. And as with every issue in America these days, the entire field is clogged with unserious people who are simply trying to find an opportunity and angle; red and blue don't matter much to someone focused on green. 

So what were we talking about, again?

Could traditional ed reformsters from outside the Burn It Down crowd get involved in the education debates again? Are there bridges that can rebuilt and fences mended? Can any of it be done while Trump is unleashing God-knows-what over the next few months, and the Burn It Down crowd rules the discussion? And would you like to argue that all I've said is void because you disagree with my definition of conservatism?

Lots of maybe's there, but I do know this-- the last few years we've had lots of really loud reformster voices hollering nonsense. It surely wouldn't hurt to have more rational voices concerned about education rather than politics, and maybe not burn everything down.

ICYMI: Catch Breath Edition (11/10)

I have nothing to add. I can't read any more hot takes about the election (they are mostly crap) and I have just about arrived at the point of getting past grief and getting back to the work at hand. But I have a few pieces from the week for you.

Backward, in High Heels

Nobody is better than Nancy Flanagan at connecting the personal with the professional and even the political. This is a powerful piece.

Stockard on the Stump: Get ready to learn the Earth is 6,000 years old

Tennessee's governor wants him some vouchers. Sam Stockard at Tennessee Lookout has a look at what that might mean.

Florida may be red. But on schools, voters put partisanship aside

Jeffrey Solochek at the Tampa Bay Times breaks down the education issues that Florida's red wave did not carry.

They Bought a Legislature

Josephine Lee looks at the giant mountain of money spent to put voucher supporters in the Texas legislature.

The Invention That Changed School Forever

At the Atlantic, Ian Bogost takes a look at the invention of the school book bag.

“Off Balance” As Classroom Management

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider talks about managing a classroom as a force of nature.

Christian Nationalists and Separation of Church and State

Thomas Ultican looks at some of the work being done to smack down that pesky wall. 

Don't Obey in Advance

Jose Luis Vilson reminds us to keep at it.

What Next?

Steve Nuzum examines Rebecca Solnit's advice that "it's always too soon to go home."

Ending School Vouchers: Finding Hope for Public Schools

Vouchers were defeated at the polls yet again.

Metaphors Describing Classroom Teaching: Command-and-Control or Eating Pasta?

Larry Ferlazzo examines metaphors for management, and it doesn't have anything to do with election, so there's that.

Post Election Reflection: Public Education During Donald Trump’s 2nd Term

Who knows what promises he'll keep and which he'll break, but Jan Resseger reviews what could be coming down the pike.

I've been reviving my participation at Bluesky. If you're over there, look me up at @palan57.bsky.social

As always, I invite you to subscribe on substack. It will always be free and it makes it easy to get all my stuff in your inbox.

Betsy DeVos Has Some Thoughts On Trump 2.0

Betsy DeVos, former US Secretary of Education and lifelong rich education privatizer, talked to Alyson Klein at Education Week about the upcoming Trump administration. It's brief interview, but long enough for her to rewrite the past, ignore the present, and fantasize about the future.

DeVos sees the second Trump administration as a continuation of the first, and sure, maybe. She doesn't know what Trump is going to do. I don't know. You don't know. Probably not even Trump, with his increasingly impaired goldfish-like faculties, knows. Sure there's Project 2025, but that's over 900 pages long and he's not going to read it. I can make a few predictions will stage a high-profile round up of immigrants in some city (like Aurora, Colorado), declare the immigrant crime problem solved, and give all the rich folks who depend on migrant labor for their business a wink and a smile. He will take the booming Biden economy and declare it the Trump economy. But who knows-- what he chooses to do next will depend a lot on whose voice he's listening to at the time.

Anyway, Betsy thinks that the time is ripe for the federal tax credit scholarship program that she couldn't sell last time. She still thinks that there is support, not just among members of Congress, but "broadly" because the pandemic opened peoples' eyes blah blah blah. However, despite this supposed "broad" support, she should note that three states had choice and vouchers on the ballot, and in all three states, voters rejected vouchers. And they rejected them hardest in the same states that went hard for Trump. 

But that's okay, Like most privatizers, she's not really counting on that "broad" support.

The environment is completely changed.

I think more members of Congress and [their staff] are more informed about what education freedom really is, and what it means, and how it can actually be implemented through a federal tax credit, not creating any new federal bureaucracies or departments or agencies or anything.

People don't have to support federal vouchers. Just legislators.

Of course, as folks who work in government, legislators and their staffs are also smart enough to know that this "not creating any new federal bureaucracies or departments or agencies or anything" stuff is pure baloney. DeVos is proposing a program where taxpayers deposit money in a fund, somewhere, and then get tax credit for it, somehow, and then money from those funds are distributed to private schools, through some process and all of it monitored somehow, maybe even a process for deciding which private providers are eligible. It would have bureaucracy out the wazoo, and add to the federal deficit, too, though I don't suppose anyone cares.

She also sees Title IX on Trump's radar, because there is no panic like trans panic (like all good trans panickers, DeVos doesn't really care about trans men).

She also sees fixing FAFSA as a priority, and she's not wrong. 

But of course top of the list is getting rid of the Department of Education. "De-powered" is her term. She uses the talking point that they just want to push the money out to the states to use as they think best. This talking point never includes the part of Project 2025 where Title 1 funds are supposed to be zeroed out entirely. 

Klein calls her on her resignation after the January 6 insurrection, an occasion on which DeVos did a fair imitation of a woman whose principles include respect for the country and the processes that keep it safe. But she would like to take all that back now. Here's what she said on January 7, after saying they should be highlighting their great accomplishments:

Instead, we are left to clean up the meds caused by violent protestors overrunning the U,S, Capitol in an attempt to undermine the people's business. That behavior is unconscionable for our country. There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.

Impressionable children are watching all of this, and they are learning from us. I believe we each have a moral obligation to exercise good judgement and model the behavior we hope they would emulate. They must know from us that America is greater than what transpired today. To that end, today, I resign from my position...

Here's what she told Klein:

If you recall, my resignation was specifically out of concern for putting myself in the seat of young kids and families. There was an opportunity to lead in a different way, to say things at more opportune times. I felt strongly that we had accomplished many good things, and that we should be talking about those things as we left office.

I know that President Trump has a heart for America and Americans. And he has a very tender heart for kids and families who want the best for their kids.

Also, as she has now said several times publicly, she would be "very open to talking" to Trump about coming back (if he backs her preferred agenda). Way to stick to those principles! Not that she'll be invited back-- she was there likely on the pull of Mike Pence, and that plus her January 7 letter probably flunks her on the Loyalty to Beloved Leader test.

She has other folks in mind that would be great for the job. She thinks an ideal would be a governor "who's led their state in reform issues," and I'm trying to think of a privatizing governor who would like to take his career on a side trip through Trump's education department. 

Her advice for the new person is basically "set the same goals that I would." Klein also asks if DeVos has advice for them if they face angry crowds, though I reckon that it would be hard to find someone with less experience dealing with The Rabble than DeVos (an ineptness that scored her a lot of fair and unfair abuse). If DeVos demonstrated nothing else, it was that rich folks used to buying political compliance aren't very good at actual politics. 

DeVos says "change is hard" (by which I think she means "making other people change is hard") and "you just have to be willing to deal with the noise and stay focused on the vision for students." This is doubly hard when you think every other person is just a source of noise. 

 

 

The Handle That Fits Them All

We are already talking about the worst, ugliest, most misogynistic and racist impulses that will be boosted by Trump's election. But for all of us in general and teachers in particular, I'm concerned about one other feature that will be super-charged by this administration.

We are now fully entered into a post-truth society. Folks voted for a Trump who doesn't exist to solve problems that aren't happening.

Yes, I'm solidly on record arguing that there is no such thing as One Truth, but there are truths that have a basis in reality and evidence, and there are views that are based on nothing but fabrication divorced from reality. There's point of view, and there's spin, and then there's just utter reality-divorced bullshit.

Yes, Democrats made all sorts of mistakes; Bernie Sanders pointing out the failure to reach working class people may be on the mark. But to think Trump is the working man's friend requires a head stuffed firmly in an alternate reality. Treasonous Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, and to believe otherwise is to accept a big lie. To think he's some kind of genius requires a stretch of miles and miles and miles. Trump stole classified documents and tried to weasel out of giving them back. He's a felon, a man found guilty of sexual assault, a serial grifter, a misogynist, a racist, a man whose character so lacking in character and honor that the notion of him as a Christian champion makes no more sense than the idea of a great dane teaching advanced calculus. 

I get that some of his support is transactional, that he is such a weak man that he attracts people who figure he can be used by them for their own gains (e.g. I'd bet that much of his right-wingnut christianist support comes from people who see him as a brick that will open the door for True Believers). It's a dangerous game, because Trump is in it for Trump, but at least these grifters have a reality-based picture of who Trump is.

But the vast majority of voters appear to have settled for the lies. Exit polls show they decided on issues like the economy, as if Trump's universally-panned-by-experts plan will "rescue" a post-pandemic economy that is the envy of the rest of the world. They worried about trans athletes (because who wants to live in a country where you can't harass young trans persons). And they believe in his victimhood, the idea that all these court cases and charges and all the rest are just Democrats "persecuting" the man who has "give up so much for this country." 

Trump voters could overlook his flaws because they were standing atop a mountain of lies. 

And one lesson from the campaign is that disinformation works, that alternate facts work. And yes, I understand that this is not exactly news, but given our hyper-powered media and communications world, I think we've entered another level. This is a level where folks can decide that consensus reality, facts, standards, science--none of it-- requires even lip service. 

I worried about this in 2016. Never mind the public examples being set about propriety and basic kindness-- how do you teach when the nation's leaders demonstrate that facts are for suckers. Make up your own and just keep repeating them. And it was bad back then, but it feels so much worse this time. The first Trump administration felt like a trial balloon, a first shot at pushing the limits of anti-factualism. But now they can look back at some of the biggest lies ever pushed on the country and see that not only were there no negative consequences, they have been rewarded for it.

There is no need to even try to be tethered to reality. Just pick what you wish was true, and sell it. It's an epistemological collapse, a suspension of any need to have a path to knowledge, because there is nothing to know except what you (or dear leader) wants to know. 

Also, these are a lot of fancy ways to describe a simple thing-- a lie.

In this context, teaching about things like finding text evidence to support an opinion seems quaint. Why discuss whether or not a body of Core Knowledge matters when knowledge itself has been cut loose? Why have reading wars about how to decode and define words when only suckers believe that words have meanings? Why worry about teaching scientific method and how to support an idea when it's obviously simpler to just make up whatever you want to make up?

The answer of course is that all these things are doubly necessary in times like these, that society needs people raised and taught to function in reality based on real things. The Work of educators is now more important than ever.

It won't be easy. This anti-factualism will trickle down and parents will come after teachers and schools for contradicting whatever counterfactuals they prefer (again, not a new thing, but now carrying the imprimatur of the White House). There were many signs on state and local levels that people still value public education and keeping it out of the hands of culture panicked anti-factists; I hope that holds up.

Meanwhile, school choice in the hands of culture panickers will look increasingly like Deliberate Ignorance Academy. Actual old-school conservatives, the kind who actually liked cold hard facts and accountability, are no more welcome in Trumpland than bleeding heart liberals. 

So what do we do?

If you're a teacher, teach. Do the work and stand up for reality. Teach logical fallacies. Teach about how to check for lies and disinformation.

For the rest of us, I have a request that may seem silly or inadequate, but I think it matters.

Resolve to tell the truth. 

I don't mean speak as if you have personally collected stone tablets from God. But speak the truth, as best you understand it, and do it in the face of lies as well.

Lies are toxic, and right now much of our lines of information ecosystem are a toxic sludge. Standing up for truth, and for reality-based means of finding and refining truth may seem like small things. And it's tempting, in an arena choking on lies, to try lies of your own to cut through. There may come a time when you have to withhold truth to keep someone safe. And honestly, it's hard to live in your truth all the time. But it is more exhausting to live in a lie. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes has one of my favorite lines--

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.

So much bad behavior, poor choice, destruction, and just crappy human action requires a disregard for the truth, for reality, to enable it. 

It's not the only thing to be done, not the biggest thing to be done, but it is a thing that every individual can do. Teachers ought to be doing it. People who want to keep their bearings should be doing it. It's always a good idea, but moving forward under a truth-averse administration, it will be extra important.