This article originally appeared on Imbroglio. Imbroglio is a newsletter from The Branch about how we bring about the education revolution. Most of our posts will focus on the future of K-12 and higher education, but we’ll also cover the imbroglio itself — the politics, misdirection, the excuse-making, the mediocrity. Occasionally we’ll also meander into the general science of learning outside of the traditional education system.
On a recent episode of the Citizen Stewart Show, my friend and co-host Chris Stewart gave me a hard time because my essay outlining my dream high school called for a yearly course on what I dubbed “attention management.” He didn’t take issue with teaching kids to have a healthy relationship with technology and social media, but he did question whether an hour a day was essential and pushed against what he dubbed “toxic productivity.”
To some of these productivity critics, time management gurus like Cal Newport (author of Deep Work, among other books) are pushing a vacuous, capitalistic ethos that values:
From my experience with successful young people, what you need, put simply, is a drive to keep working, with a laser-like intensity, on something even after you’ve lost immediate interest. Tenacity. A grating thirst to get it done. These are the precursors of accomplishment.
Having good productivity habits compliment this crucial skill. They take this intensity and place it in a schedule. They keep small things from crowding your mind. They eliminate the stress of what appointment you might be forgetting or what vital errand has to be done. But productivity is not a substitute for this work. Within the scope of this reality, productivity plays a crucial role. If you want to get ahead in a meaningful, low-stress, controlled manner you have to pay attention to these little habits.
I agree with Newport that productivity is essential and misunderstood, but the word has become too loaded to be helpful. This is why the course I wish to design for a high school is called attention management (a term I didn’t invent)and not productivity. The latter is an economic term of art used to describe a company’s outputs (profits, goods) relative to its inputs (by which we often mean worker time). The term conjures up images of Amazon workers peeing themselves because they don’t want to log a bathroom break in the Orwellian tracking software.
Attention management is different. It means mastering your time to focus on the work, passions, and people you care about the most.
What’s a task that must be done but requires low cognitive lift?
What work do you care most about that requires you to be at your best?
How do you organize your day to maximize the latter while still getting the former done?
Can you sustain periods of frustration and boredom in the ways an elite athlete can endure fatigue?
The image I have in mind here is a high school student spending three hours every morning writing their first novel, in front of a canvas sketching their first masterpiece, or in the editing bay stitching together their first short film.
Attention management is a skill that can be taught, practiced, and mastered over many years. It’s also an increasingly rare skill, which means those who attain it stand a great chance of rising above the rest. In this sense, it’s not a recipe for capitalistic exploitation; it’s an antidote to it.
Notice that nothing about this vision is incompatible with what many productivity critics are calling for. Only the most privileged and lazy have both the desire and ability to devote themselves to a life of leisure. The rest of us must work whether we like it or not. Let’s make it as enjoyable and efficient as possible. The surest way to lose time for hobbies, family, friends, or simply doing nothing is to task switch and scroll the internet when you’re supposed to be producing professional work or mastering your craft. We must stop pitting deep work against these other meaningful aspects of life.
It’s also worth mentioning that the skill of attention management applies equally well outside of the professional world. Talk to any parent, and they’ll tell you how hard it’s become to keep phones away from the dinner table. Ask a young woman how rare it is to go on a date with someone who can carry on a basic conversation. Or ask a football coach how the spirit of locker room camaraderie has changed in the era of social media. As adults, we are painfully aware of how hard it is to build the capacity to truly focus. Many of us had the benefit of building habits before the age of the smartphone, streaming content, or hyper-realistic video games. Think about how much more difficult this must be for our kids. Many of them simply don’t know what it’s like to focus. Our job as educators is to teach them how.
What Do Stress, Surfing, And School Choice Have In Common?
Illustration: Aidan Wharton
By Ravi Gupta The Branch, Founder & CEO
This article originally appeared on Imbroglio. Imbroglio is a newsletter from The Branch about how we bring about the education revolution. Most of our posts will focus on the future of K-12 and higher education, but we’ll also cover the imbroglio itself — the politics, misdirection, the excuse-making, the mediocrity. Occasionally we’ll also meander into the general science of learning outside of the traditional education system.
They are all topics Lost Debate covered in the past week. Here’s a rundown of some education stories and segments you may have missed from around the Lost Debate network.
What Parents Want
Last week on the Lost Debate show, I spent an hour with Todd Rose, CEO of Populace. During the show’s first half, we discussed his team’s groundbreaking study on what he terms “collective illusions” – instances when people’s public and private views are out of sync. Rose convincingly argues that we’re self-censoring more than ever. We spent the second half of the interview on a separate multi-year study Populace conducted asking parents and the general public what they want from schools. Todd found that throughout the pandemic, the public’s desire for college prep in high school dropped. At the same time, their support of what they deem “practical skills” and personalized learning has risen.
The End of Education Reform?
On yesterday’s episode of Regressives, I interviewed Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute about a provocative and informative piece he and Chester Finn wrote about the history and demise of education reform. The first half of the interview is a thorough retelling of how a bipartisan education policy coalition came together in the early 90s. Things get spicy in the second half of the interview, where we posit theories on why the coalition fell apart and what the future holds.
Is Stress Good?
On last week’s episode of Sweat the Technique, Ryan Hill and I interviewed Stanford Professor Dr. Kelly McGonigal about her book The Upside of Stress. Before reading her book and talking to her, I believed stress could only be bad for you. But she changed my mind. McGonigal argues that stress is only bad for you if you believe it is. I know that sounds wacky, but listen to the interview. If it doesn’t convince you, she will challenge you. We also discuss the implications of this theory on the K-12 system.
Surfing As Teaching
On this week’s episode of Sweat the Technique, I interviewed Ru Hill, the founder of Surf Simply, which is widely viewed as the most successful surf school in the world (read more about the school here in the New York Times). Ru introduced me to surfing and helped me go from complete novice to fairly advanced-ish (we won’t be fact-checking that) in two years. We discuss how Ru does the seemingly impossible and how his approach to learning and coaching can serve as a model for people trying to learn anything. A related point: if you are a tax expert, kindly email me with some guidance on how many more of these interviews I must do before I can write off my trips to Costa Rica.
What Teacher Shortage?
On last week’s episode of our Spanish language podcast Pulso y Péndulo, hosts Carlos Curbelo and Fabiola Galindo debunk disinformation around teacher shortages.
Trouble in Tennessee?
On a recent episode of the Citizen Stewart Show, Chris Stewart and I unpack the controversy around the Hillsdale-linked charter school group trying to open many schools in Tennessee. I spill the tea on the local dynamics, including a potential split (imbroglio?) between MAGA school choice proponents and the more moderate and progressive charter supporters. Listen here.
Education Savings Accounts
What’s the country’s most important trend in K-12 education right now? Not ChatGPT and not CRT. It’s Education Savings Accounts. Rikki and I discussed this relatively new and growing method of school choice and what it means for kids, parents, politicians, and educators.
That’s all for now. Make sure to subscribe to our shows here. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review.
This article originally appeared on Imbroglio. Imbroglio is a newsletter from The Branch about how we bring about the education revolution. Most of our posts will focus on the future of K-12 and higher education, but we’ll also cover the imbroglio itself — the politics, misdirection, the excuse-making, the mediocrity. Occasionally we’ll also meander into the general science of learning outside of the traditional education system.
Writing in exile during the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin famously noted that “there are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”
I spent my K-12 glory years during a decade in which nothing revolutionary seemed to happen. Ironically, when I first signed up for the work, I thought I was joining a revolution. I quit my job in the Obama administration in early 2010 and moved to Tennessee just as the school reform movement peaked. Tennessee had recently won a Race to the Top grant, prompting a flood of eager, messianic educators like myself, who wanted to transform the system but would spend the next decade scaling innovations from prior decades. We did meaningful work and, in some cases, dramatically improved the odds for many kids, yet, with few exceptions, we didn’t fundamentally challenge the prevailing K-12 model.
If our movement had an intellectual father, it was Jim Collins. The buttoned-up author of Good to Great was a constant topic of conversation in conferences and workshops that underscored the need for sustained, incremental improvements and steady leadership. To be fair, the unsexy work of scaling what works is essential (especially when it helps kids), and some significant innovations did take hold throughout the decade, such as the (rocky and fraught) adoption of the Common Core standards. But even those changes had been cooked up and set in motion years before.
As we approached the decade’s end, the common debates around the K-12 policy and practice felt small and repetitive. In many cities, warring political factions had reached a stalemate and, at times, seemed bored by their own wars of attrition.
Then, 2020 threw the entire K-12 system into a wood chipper. In the early days of the lockdown, every educator I spoke to said the existing system wouldn’t emerge intact from the pandemic, but they were too busy with existential issues to think clearly about the changing landscape. Now that we’ve gotten our feet under us and secured enough distance from the lockdowns, we can look back (and ahead) and say that the past three years have unleashed something genuinely different and destabilizing.
In this post, I’ll outline the four most important forces driving that change.
Education Savings Accounts
In the past few weeks, Iowa and Utah have passed legislation giving parents access to education savings accounts (ESAs), joining Arizona, the first (and, until now, the only) state in the country to make ESAs universally accessible to students.
What are ESAs? Here’s a helpful explainer from Education Week:
“In an ESA program, the state sets aside money, usually based on its per-pupil funding formulas, in individual accounts for participating students. Their parents or guardians can then withdraw that money to spend on approved educational expenses. That may be private school tuition, but it may also be used for tutoring, online courses, transportation, or even some types of therapy. In addition to helping families send their children to private school, an ESA program can also allow them to home school or cobble together a hybrid public-private education.”
ESAs are more expansive than school vouchers, which tend to be more narrowly tailored and usable only for paying tuition at a private school.
Over a dozen states have introduced ESA legislation over the past year. If the current trends continue, ESAs could spread to nearly every red state, drawing significant shares of families out of the public school system. Consider Arizona:
Source: EdChoice
Now, 30,000 exits isn’t a lot, considering that almost one million students attend public schools in the state, but if the exponential growth trend continues, its effect on Arizona’s system will be more dramatic than that of any statewide school choice regime we’ve ever seen. And if other states follow Arizona’s trajectory, we’re in for a full-blown disruption of K-12 schooling as we know it.
There isn’t a lot of great polling on this issue yet, but one poll from YouGov (commissioned by yes. every kid., a pro-ESA group) found that Americans support ESAs by a four-to-one margin, with a third undecided. Paradoxically, the poll found that ESA support is stronger among Democrats than among Republicans, which makes me somewhat skeptical of the data because there’s no chance that Democratic politicians will support ESAs. In fact, progressives have begun to elevate opposition to these as a national cause. It’s also worth noting that the school reform coalition is split on ESAs—driven by worries that the issue will imperil their fragile political alliances.
The issue is an outgrowth of the larger Republican project around parent choice that grew to prominence through Glenn Youngkin’s successful gubernatorial campaign in Virginia and has become a hallmark of Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration. In this sense, ESAs are part of a broader conservative narrative of distrust of the public school system, often accompanied by parents’ bill-of-rights laws, curriculum transparency bills, and other more controversial pieces of legislation.
Needless to say, we can expect the issue to play a significant role in 2024, from the presidential contest to the down-ballot races.
The Decline of College?
On today’s episode of Lost Debate, I spoke to Todd Rose from Populace. His firm recently released a studythat unearthed some startling changes in Americans’ attitudes toward higher education:
“Before COVID, respondents ranked being prepared to enroll in a college or university as their 10th highest priority for K-12 education. In post-COVID America, this is no longer the case. When given 57 priorities for children’s K-12 education, Americans ranked it as #47. However, they believe it is other people’s third-highest priority, demonstrating a deep societal misunderstanding of one another.”
Todd and I discussed some theories about what’s driving the shift. One factor we considered was whether debates around student loan forgiveness may have highlighted how debilitating the runaway costs of higher education tuition have been for our young people. Those costs likely seemed all the more absurd during the pandemic, when families were shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for Zoom classes. Add to the mix a sustained right-wing attack on higher education, and you can see why the public is skeptical of college.
I know that this piece is about trends upending K-12, but if parents and kids question the value of a university education, that can and should reverberate through the rest of the system.
The most durable added value of higher education will likely continue to be as credentialing and validating mechanisms for employers. There is, after all, only one path to becoming a physician in this country. This distinction may explain why non-certificate associate’s and bachelor’s programs are hemorrhaging students at the fastest rates:
Until recently, most colleges and universities believed that the demand for their products was relatively inelastic. That’s why they’ve had no trouble jacking up tuition across the board for so long. However, consumers may be hitting a breaking point. Over the past 10 years, college enrollment has dropped from 20.6 million students in 2012 to an estimated 18.2 million in 2022. That’s a net loss of about 2.4 million students. For-profit colleges have taken the brunt of the losses (showing that at least some categories of customers are becoming more price- and quality-conscious). Online-only colleges like Southern New Hampshire saw the most significant gains.
In short, different segments of this sector seem more elastic than others. I predict that the carnage will continue to be most severe in programs where the government doesn’t require a degree. In a future post, I will discuss these categories in greater detail and examine enrollment and price data by profit model, delivery method (e.g., online vs. in-person), price, and profession.
Unsteady Labor Market
At Lost Debate, we’ve done many segments attempting to determine whether we have a national teacher shortage. This has been a challenging task as the available data are extremely poor. Neither the federal government nor the majority of states collect and share raw numbers on the extent of teacher shortages. Available evidence suggests that by the middle of last year, we had 36,000–52,800 vacant positions and at least 163,000 jobs held by underqualified teachers. These estimates reflect the limitations of the available dataset, which excludes 13 states that don’t release vacancy estimates.
What we know for sure is that teacher shortages are unevenly clustered across the country. For example, Mississippi’s vacancy rate is more than 159 times higher than Missouri’s. The problem in Mississippi is so severe that some districts have had to take the depressing step of holding classes without teachers. Here’s a scene from one high school, as reported in the Washington Post:
“It’s near the end of the day at West Bolivar High School, and Jordan Mosley is stuck. The 15-year-old sophomore stares at her laptop and restarts the video. Her teacher that day is a stranger—a nameless long-haired man on the screen. He explains two-column geometry proofs and how students could use the software to complete them. “Prove if the length of AB is equal to the length of EF,” the man says. But there is no one to ask for help in this classroom, where students stare sleepily at laptops amid the din of a portable air conditioner. There is only a teacher’s assistant who can print out additional worksheets if they run into trouble.”
As we reported on Lost Debate, survey data from Mississippi First suggest that this is only the beginning and that growing numbers of the remaining teachers struggle financially and are at significant risk of leaving the profession.
Mississippi may be the most dramatic example, but many other states face alarming teacher shortages. Those most at risk are Alabama, Maine, Wisconsin, Montana, New Mexico, Hawaii, West Virginia, and Kansas.
When we at Lost Debate survey school leaders, the issue of teacher vacancies—and the related issue of teacher burnout—is the number one concern that we hear. That’s regardless of the state. Here are just a few excerpts from recent interviews we’ve conducted with school leaders:
“People are leaving faster than we can replace them, including school leaders.”
“We would benefit from more research to better understand why teachers are leaving…. We need to pay teachers and leaders more so we can attract better talent….”
“After the pandemic, people don’t want to work in a physical space every day—but school has to be that, and teachers have to be in schools. We don’t have the people we need to succeed at scale.”
“More teachers called in for “mental health leave” last year than in the 18 years before. It required us to put in rules around it, so now we have a sick-day policy…. We had more teachers than ever who went on leave mid-year last year; the attrition was 75% higher than usual. Normally, it is 15–20%, but last year, it was more like 27–30%. During the year, there was a lot that people leaving the profession could do—a new job, ed tech, and other cushy stay-at-home jobs.”
Notably, none of the leaders I quote above work in any of the hardest-hit states. Even those schools that aren’t yet displaying teacher vacancies are very likely at risk if the historically low overall unemployment rate continues. This will inevitably lead to more kids without classrooms, larger class sizes, and more under-qualified educators. We can only hope that it will also lead to increased investment in teacher salaries, training, and reforms and improved recruitment and promotion practices.
Artificial Intelligence
Sometimes the cliche is true. As annoying as the hysteria around ChatGPT has been, we can’t ignore the fact that AI tools will have a dramatic impact on our schools. Our company has covered this topic at length in several podcasts, including these two segments on the Lost Debate show. Given the pace of change in the field, we’ve had to revise our takes on the issue every few days.
As of now, I see three different categories of ways in which AI will affect our schools.
Student output: I’ve read dozens of articles like this one predicting that AI will spell the end of the student essay. Though I believe that many of these claims are overblown, there’s no question that schools must adapt student assignments, technology protocols, and academic integrity policies to account for these new tools. Most notably, schools may no longer be able to assume that students alone are completing their writing assignments unless these are done under tightly controlled in-school conditions.
Standards and curriculum: Much of the AI educational commentary has focused on high school English and the role of the essay. However, the most significant disruptions from AI will start with the world that students will enter after their graduation. Will we have fewer radiologists, computer programmers, and finance quants? Will new jobs that we can’t even fathom today be created (like what happened with the ascendance of computer programming)? Educators must monitor these trends carefully and adapt their standards and curricula to ensure that students are truly prepared for this new reality. This, in my opinion, is the most critical work of the AI era—and the most urgent and nimble schools will have a distinct advantage.
School administration: There are a growing number of tools that can help schools take advantage of AI to improve their operations, such as AllHere. Some of these innovations help increase the efficiency of back-office staff and allow parents better access to critical information regarding their children. The key for schools will be how to take advantage of these applications without making interaction with parents impersonal, like what you get from your airline chatbot.
Conclusion
I could go on and talk about other significant forces, such as the rise of homeschooling, the movement against standardized testing, the crisis around student distraction, teenage isolation/depression, and the ascendance of personalized learning platforms. These are all massive shifts that we should add to the list above.
But let’s go back to where I started.I opened this piece by talking about the need for revolution. Yet, many of the forces I describe above aren’t necessarily good or purposeful. Take ESAs, for example. To many readers, these policies could lead to the destruction of public education as we know it. (I’ll give my full opinion on the issue in a future piece.)
That’s why Lenin’s quote is instructive. I wouldn’t describe the change he brought as positive, but no one disputes his impact. What Lenin knew and his enemies didn’t was that when a storm comes, you either harness the wind or get blown away. The Bolshevik movement relied on factors outside Lenin’s control (such as the incompetence and delusions of the Czar and the outbreak of World War I), which is also what those seeking to transform our current education system are doing (e.g., seizing on pandemic frustrations). Lenin also purged his movement of the moderate Mensheviks, which is precisely what education reformers fear is happening with ESAs (charter supporters aren’t radical enough).
I’ve gotten thoroughly carried away with the metaphor. Bottom line: The forces I describe here—whether man-made or extraneous, real or imagined, good or bad—will come together to foment something truly seismic in the K-12 space. If history is a guide, we have a limited window to steer them in the right direction.
This article originally appeared on Imbroglio. Imbroglio is a newsletter from The Branch about how we bring about the education revolution. Most of our posts will focus on the future of K-12 and higher education, but we’ll also cover the imbroglio itself — the politics, misdirection, the excuse-making, the mediocrity. Occasionally we’ll also meander into the general science of learning outside of the traditional education system.
I’ve split my professional life between two worlds.
In one world, I’ve been a loyal progressive operative—working for Obama’s first campaign and in his administration before founding and leading Arena, the most extensive training effort for Democratic campaign staffers in history. In another world, I founded and led a charter school network that primarily served low-income students of color in the South.
It’s always struck me how stark the difference is between how each of those worlds viewed the concept of school choice.
Most progressive operatives, donors, and luminaries I know will blanketly state that they oppose school choice. Nearly all of the fiercest opponents of charter schools I’ve faced were self-proclaimed liberals. Yet the Black and brown families I served in the Deep South were overwhelmingly in favor of school choice, as were our more conservative and moderate allies in the business community and state legislatures.
By and large, each of those groups exercises school choice when available. For Black and brown families, school choice most often comes through charter schools, vouchers, and educational savings accounts. For affluent white progressives, school choice comes in the form of private schools, magnet schools, and, most commonly, using their means to move to the “right” neighborhood with high-performing schools.
Need help following this? Here’s a nifty chart to help you track it all:
In each of these cases, parents have more than one schooling option. They make a choice. However, for some reason, we only use the term school choice when it involves the primary methods used by Black and brown families.
Of course, not all Democratic leaders are alike. President Obama and a handful of Democrats like Senator Cory Booker and Governor Jared Polis are more favorable to charter schools, and some governors like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro and Illinois’ JB Pritzker have warmed to some forms of education savings accounts or private school scholarships. However, most prominent Democrats on the national stage over the past decade have been largely critical of charter schools and downright hostile toward vouchers and education savings accounts. (Note: We will discuss the performance of these voucher and education savings account programs on today’s episode of Lost Debate, which will drop on this feed later today and discuss charter school performance data on this episode.)
President Biden has stated, “I am not a charter school fan,” and moved to tighten restrictions on schools. Senator Bernie Sanders called for a blanket moratorium on public funding for new charter schools. Senator Elizabeth Warren also proposed killing federal funding for charter schools, even though she enthusiastically endorsed a form of vouchers before she ran for office. In Warren’s 2004 book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke, she wrote about the urgent desire of parents to “save their children from failing schools” and that “fully funded vouchers would relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.”
Warren’s reversal mirrors that of many white progressives, whose support for charter schools began to wane in the latter half of the Obama administration before precipitously dropping around 2016.
A poll from Democrats for Education Reform found an even more pronounced split by 2019, with a 26/62 favorable/unfavorable split among white Democrats versus a 58/31 for Black Democrats and 52/30 for Hispanic Democrats.
President Trump and Secretary Betsy Devos’ embrace of charters is undoubtedly a huge factor in this trend. Still, it’s notable that Black and Hispanic support for charters has remained constant during the same period.
What accounts for this divergence? These are, after all, members of the same party.
It all comes down to perceptions of different kinds of school choice. For many white progressives, their form of school choice is taken for granted and largely immune from criticism. They move to the right neighborhood with the shiny, high-performing school. They brag about sending their kids to “neighborhood schools.” They are “proud public school parents” who oppose “privatization” and claim to lock arms with parents from across town who also send their kids to their zoned schools.
This is all a rhetorical sleight of hand. The neighborhood schools being championed by the more privileged bear almost no resemblance to the experiences of those they claim to speak for. Here’s my friend, Neerav Kingsland, writing years ago for the Washington Post:
“For much of our nation’s history, neighborhood schools have been bastions of exclusion, not inclusion. And this exclusion persists to this day.
For every child who gets preferred access to a neighborhood school, there are many other children denied access to this same school. What is inclusive for one set of students is exclusive for a much larger set.
Historically, having neighborhood schools kept black students from learning alongside white students; poor students from attending school with wealthy students; immigrant students from studying with native-born students — and the list goes on.”
This isn’t just about history. Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren have quantified what it means to be lucky enough to live in the right neighborhood. They studied 7 million families who moved across commuting zones and counties, finding that neighborhood quality dramatically shapes a child’s earnings, college attendance rates, fertility, and marriage patterns. This dovetails with the work from Joseph G. Altonji and Richard K. Mansfield, who found that the difference between attending a ninetieth versus tenth percentile neighborhood school has life-altering effects on graduation rates and lifetime wages.
The problem for my fellow progressives is that they claim to speak for that 10th percentile but disproportionately draw their national elected leaders, operatives, and donors from the 90th percentile—something others like David Shor have pointed out. (The conservative commentator Cory DeAngelis pointed out that nearly all of the 2020 Democratic contenders either attended private school or sent their kids to private school, making them six times more likely than the average American to exercise private school choice. Yet every one of them opposed vouchers or education savings accounts.)
When many white progressives think of the neighborhood school, they picture Pleasantville. Kids walking to school on clean, safe streets and waving to the mailman. Glistening school buildings with a stable crop of experienced teachers and a healthy dose of enrichment programs and gifted and talented options. And if, God forbid, anything goes awry at that school, these parents will, without hesitation, place their child in a private school, lobby their way into the right magnet school, or simply move to a different neighborhood. Civil rights leader Howard Fuller put it colorfully: “A lot of folks who are hollering about neighborhood schools, left that neighborhood as soon as they had the money and the resources [to do so] and then they go out to wherever they are and holler back at us about how important these neighborhood schools are.”
What about everyone else? What about the parents who don’t have that luxury? Here’s Elizabeth Warren’s advice for them:
“If you think your public school is not working, then go help your public school. Go help get more resources for it. Volunteer at your public schools. Help get the teachers and school bus drivers and cafeteria workers and the custodial staff and the support staff, help get them some support so they can do the work that needs to be done. You don’t like the building? You think it’s old and decaying? Then get out there and push to get a new one.”
Warren, who herself sent her son to a private school (and lied about it when confronted by a Black mother), is telling parents it’s on them to fix their schools. Imagine if she’d made this argument about any other area of public policy. Imagine if she said this:
“If you think the health care system is not working, then go help your hospital. Go help get more resources for it. Volunteer at your local clinic. Help get the doctors and nurses and EMTs, help get them some support so they can do the work that needs to be done. You don’t like the emergency room? You think it’s old and decaying? Then, get out there and push to get a new one.”
If Warren stood on a debate stage and said this to a room of Democrats, she would be booed off the stage. It’s an ethic of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps personal responsibility that would make Reagan blush. Yet when she talks like this about schools, it attracts little notice.
The Democratic Party leadership can only tolerate this cognitive dissonance for so long. At some point, those outside Pleasantville will start calling out this double standard. And when they demand change, my hope is for a new breed of politicians to rise up and lead the way to a more egalitarian future.
This article originally appeared on Imbroglio. Imbroglio is a newsletter from The Branch about how we bring about the education revolution. Most of our posts will focus on the future of K-12 and higher education, but we’ll also cover the imbroglio itself — the politics, misdirection, the excuse-making, the mediocrity. Occasionally we’ll also meander into the general science of learning outside of the traditional education system.
We’re excited to launch Sweat the Technique, a new podcast from Lost Debate.
The show is all about how we get better, faster. Each week, we’ll apply lessons from the classroom to all areas of life — from parenting, to relationships, to sports, to hobbies, and more.
Sweat the Technique is hosted by four former principals and superintendents who’ve led gap-closing schools.
That includes:
Doug Lemov, author of internationally bestselling books and trainer to many successful educators and leaders in professional sports
Ryan Hill, founder and CEO of a network of 23 KIPP public charter schools in New Jersey and Miami
Stacey Shells Harvey, founder and CEO of ReGeneration Schools
Me, Ravi Gupta, former leader of Tennessee’s highest performing network of charter schools and founder of the largest-ever training organization for Democratic candidates and staffers
In our first episode, I interview my co-host Doug Lemov about his seminal book Teach Like a Champion, which revolutionized the training of educators across the world. We discuss why teaching, like any great art, can be broken down into discrete skills – and how you can teach those skills to novices with awe-inspiring results. We also discuss critiques of his work, why he believes they are misguided, and why the techniques from his books are relevant to everyone, not just teachers.
Listen here and if you like it, share the episode with friends and leave us a review.
