Once upon a time, America thought it had the answer to its housing crisis: construct massive, government-run housing projects for low-income families. But these concrete behemoths, towering over their urban landscapes, soon became symbols of well-intentioned policy gone wrong, living embodiments of our nation’s broken dreams. As crime and decay took root, it became clear that this approach didn’t alleviate poverty; it exacerbated it. Rather than provide a ladder out, they trapped families in a perpetual cycle of hardship and despair. In searching for a better way to house the poor, Congress passed the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974. This created a system, soon known as Section 8, which provided vouchers to help cover the costs of renting on the private market.
The political evolution of Section 8 reveals a peculiar partisan cycle. Here’s Jeremy Johnson, writing in Social Science History:
Vouchers were originally proposed as a Republican alternative to Democratic public housing construction and slowly emerged as a viable component of housing policy in the United States. In the mid-1990s, a shift occurred in which Democrats embraced vouchers and Republicans retreated from their innovation.
Government-sponsored public housing construction, an ambitious program forged during the New Deal, aimed to provide decent housing for low-income Americans. The plan faced conservative and Republican opposition necessitating compromises that diminished the scale of the program, yet expansion of the supply of low-income housing through publicly financed construction dominated policy for decades. Republicans, who argued against the prospect of socialized housing, eventually proposed rental vouchers (originally called housing allowances) as a policy alternative. The competitive electoral environment of the latter half of the twentieth century ensured rental vouchers would continue as a lynchpin for partisanship.
At first most Democrats derided rental vouchers; they appeared as half-measures compared to expanding the supply of affordable housing. Over time, however, Democrats came to acquiesce in the implementation of the Republican policy and by the mid-1990s they were promoting it. For their part, the Republicans eventually won the voucher program they had long championed. However, as Democrats embraced vouchers, many Republicans reversed course and opposed what was once their own reform.
Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Democrat who opposes Section 8. Though few Republicans want to outright rescind the program, you can findplentyof them who are skeptical of it. That begs the question: could we eventually see a similar realignment on school vouchers and Education Savings Accounts?
It’s hard to imagine such a world, but it’s important to remember the time horizons. Section 8 took about 20 years to see the parties trade positions on the issue.
It’s easier for me to see Democrats eventually embracing vouchers and ESAs than Republicans abandoning them. That’s because I believe most, if not all, Republican states will embrace universal eligibility (like Arkansas and Arizona have). That means the program will be more analogous to Medicare (a more popular program with the GOP) than Medicaid (one less so). If every family in America, regardless of income, received a Section 8 voucher, then it would be politically difficult for either party to oppose that program after enacted (it’s why Social Security and Medicare are called the “third rail”).
For Democrats, I could see a few reasons they’d eventually get behind school vouchers and ESAs. The first is that they generally support vouchers in other contexts. If a Democratic candidate for office campaigned on ending Section 8 or Medicaid and replacing either with only government-run options, they’d be booed out of the room. You could imagine, years from now, after the acrimony over implementation has faded, that Democrats view school vouchers and ESAs as an entitlement to be protected at all costs. Ironically, Democrats will be even more likely to support these programs if Republicans turn on them (which is more likely if they are confined to low-income families), as they’ve done (somewhat) on Section 8. Such is the nature of our partisan society.
Of course, the difference between ESA/vouchers and Section 8/Medicaid is the presence of teachers unions. Though organized labor was involved in public housing construction and the running of public hospitals, they were nowhere near as robust back when those laws were passed than the teachers unions are now. If they were, families would likely still be trapped in Robert Moses-esque poverty factories and overwhelmed government hospitals. I doubt unions would ever get behind school vouchers and ESAs, but if their overall ranks of members diminish after many families leave the traditional system, they may lose the power to dictate the terms of Democratic policy.
I wouldn’t hold my breath. The Democratic candidates I’ve worked with would bend to the will of a public sector union even if it only had ten members. That means, regardless of whether unions see their ranks shrink, we can count on a showdown between two democratic constituencies: organized labor and communities of color. The latter are much more likely to benefit from school vouchers or ESAs if the laws are written, as some states have, to begin eligibility with the lowest-performing schools and lowest-income neighborhoods. That could be why initial polling on the issue (albeit from pro-voucher groups) seems to suggest Black families are particularly supportive of ESAs. I’d want to see more polling on the subject from neutral organizations. Still, I wouldn’t be shocked if families who feel they aren’t being served well by the current system embrace a policy that gives them more options and more control. After all, they’d simply be getting what affluent families take for granted.
From henceforth, Lost Debate will be called The Branch.
Why the name change? To start, we rarely debate on our shows. We more often have respectful discussions and nerdy deep dives. Our team briefly considered a change to “Lost Discussion,” but that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.
The Branch has a double meaning. It evokes an olive branch to political and ideological opponents, a good-faith effort to engage with those whom we disagree. That spirit permeates all of the work we do. I’m a former Obama staffer and lifelong Democrat, but I host our flagship show with a Gen-Z libertarian/conservative New York Post columnist. Our Spanish language show Pulso y Péndulo pairs a former Republican member of Congress with a more liberal-leaning Univision journalist. And our education commentators span the gamut from conservative Gen-X veteran educators to socialist teenage students. But we aren’t Crossfire; our conversations aren’t performative. We’re all genuinely trying to find truth and understanding.
Our new name is also an allusion to the fourth branch of government, a term used to describe the role of civil society and the media in ensuring a vibrant and enduring democracy. In this sense, we focus on the stability, improvement, and longevity of our civic institutions, laws, and norms. Big yawn, I know. Our vibe isn’t as fun as the down-with-the-system populist ethos of our friends in alternative media (more on that below), but we believe our democracy (or republic, if you will) is extremely fragile and totally underrated. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it!
What We Do
We’re a non-profit digital media company. We believe the most critical conversations in society happen in the dark corners of the internet—on platforms dominated by political arsonists, nihilists, and extremists. Our mission is to infuse more empathy, nuance, and objectivity into those conversations.
In service of that mission, we strive to provide objective and entertaining news and commentary. And we approach that work in a few unique ways:
Target the overlooked: We focus on audiences other media has underinvested in: political eclectics, independents, Black and Brown moderates, Gen Z, Spanish speakers, and international audiences.
“Whole buffalo” approach: We aren’t wedded to any one platform and adapt content from the same show for YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
Ideological diversity: Our hosts have different political beliefs yet complementary values around democracy, dialogue, and disagreement.
Surprise the audience: Our independence means we keep our audience guessing about where we’ll come down on the key issues.
Using this model, we’ve achieved promising early results. In 2022, our podcasts were downloaded 4.4 million times and social media users engaged with our content 2.2 million times. Learn more about our shows and newsletters here.
New Media, Old Problems
When we started this journey over a year ago, we thought we’d primarily be an antidote to an insular, biased, and ossified mainstream media. In that sense, we eagerly took our seats at the “alternative media” table in the cafeteria. Many of our comrades at that table have pushed us to sharpen and, in some cases, change our perspective on critical issues. For example, I took the Wuhan Lab Leak theory more seriously and earlier than many of my progressive friends because of conversations with hosts and writers from other outlets. The same could be said of a host of issues unrelated to the pandemic, such as debates around policing, regulation, and campus free speech.
Yet despite the many strengths of our alternative media colleagues, too many of them are repeating the same mistakes they sought to correct — and are showing an alarming lack of rigor and humility.
They practice motivated reasoning, overselling evidence for their pet theories and underselling or ignoring evidence for inconvenient ones.
They embrace a faux populism, playing on the emotions of their audience by telling simple stories with half-baked and disingenuous solutions — and clear heroes and villains.
They see the humanity in their friends but not their opponents. If an institution they hate makes a mistake, it’s often because of some core sinister motive. If an ally or ideological fellow traveler makes a mistake, to the extent they acknowledge it, it’s chalked up to good intentions gone wrong.
They throw many darts at the board, claim credit for the ones that hit the bullseye, and ignore the rest. “January 6th was an inside job. Ukraine is a wag the dog play. The 2020 election was stolen. Biden will never indict SBF. Ivermectin is a miracle drug. The press is suppressing the Wuhan theory.” When one of many theories turns out to be accurate, they hold it up as an example of their credibility while often quietly moving from the rest.
They “just ask questions” to avoid owning irresponsible theories while steering their audiences with reckless speculation.
They overemphasize the mainstream media’s role, painting them as the big bad and themselves as the underdogs — failing to consider that their own alternative media outlets often garner significantly larger audiences than any cable news show.
I could go on and talk about both-sidesism, the insular back-scratching, or the creeping anti-intellectualism. I trust you get the picture.
This is, of course, itself a generalization. “Alternative” media is a diverse ecosystem that includes a multitude of voices, some of whom avoid many of these fallacies. The worst offenders, however, command the largest audiences. In fact, what we call alternative media is much larger than what we consider mainstream media.
Nothing I write above absolves the legacy media of their many sins. I could write a long list of their common fallacies and biases, but others have made those points much better than I have. I’m also less concerned with traditional outlets because they lose audience and influence daily. They are yesterday’s story. The more important question is what we replace them with.
In short, I thought we were setting out to correct the problems in mainstream media, but I have become convinced that our colleagues in alternative media are growing more smug and powerful and less accountable or reflective than any traditional outlet has.
How We’re Different
We’ve sometimes made the moves I criticize above. That’s why we spend a tremendous amount of time critiquing our own work — and refining our values, which consist of the following:
Aggressively Humble: We “steel-(wo)man” our arguments by identifying the strongest and most nuanced forms of the other side of a position before engaging with it. We also admit mistakes and rectify those mistakes with an effort commensurate with the harm caused by our errors.
Anti-populist: It’s easy to say, “fuck the experts” or “abolish the FBI” when you don’t have skin in the game or an obligation to articulate an alternative. That’s why we believe in the power of institutions to improve people’s lives and think they should more often be reformed than torn down. We also fight the urge to tell simple stories about complex issues and are careful not to overuse emotions like outrage, hate, and contempt.
Independent: We say what we believe, even when it’s unpopular or costly to do so. That means we aren’t afraid to take on powerful interests, invite heat on social media, or offend our friends.
Ethically Contrarian: We provide little value as the thousandth voice in a chorus. Whenever consensus forms around a position, it is usually of little interest to us unless we challenge that consensus. At the same time, we aren’t Skip Bayless and Shannon Sharpe; we aren’t contrarian for its own sake. Instead, we aim to find the stories and arguments that are both true and overlooked.
Focused on the Future: We believe most media outlets spend too much time looking backward, rehashing old fights, and nursing past grudges. Our job is to paint a vision of the world we want the next generation to inhabit, which means we spend considerable time on how our schools can best set up kids for success.
Welcoming: We believe a diverse team is a strong team, and we embrace colleagues from different political, racial, ethnic, economic, and cultural backgrounds. But we’re defined not by our differences but by shared values and goals.
These values are, of course, a work in progress. If they look the same a year or five years from now, we’ve done something wrong.
What Next?
We’re making a few key investments in the years ahead.
Unbiased, Un-sensationalized 2024 Coverage
This coming election will be the most education-focused we’ve ever seen. With the rise of DeSantis, the prominence of hot-button topics like Critical Race Theory, trans rights, Education Savings Accounts, and the looming Supreme Court decision over Affirmative Action — candidates for office up and down the ballot will be talking about K-12 and higher education every day. We believe both traditional and alternative media have a hard time thinking straight about many of these topics — and often favor superficial and sensationalized analysis over substance. Given the expertise of The Branch’s team, we have both an opportunity and obligation to get out and engage with voters across the country and help our audience make meaning of debates as they unfold.
Quite frankly, this is what we’ll be best known for in the years ahead: the quality and depth of our education policy, practice, and politics reporting and commentary. We have covered and will continue to cover many issues outside of education. Still, the best of what we produce will always be about our kids and their future.
Gen-Z Newsroom
The majority of our audience is Gen Z, which happens to be the most malleable and independent generation. They are political eclectics — more resistant to party politics or simple labels.
Where do they learn about the world? A quarter of U.S. adults under 30 now regularly gets news on TikTok, and a similar percentage of Gen Z relies on YouTube. That’s double the amount who stay informed through Twitter. News outlets have been slow to invest in these platforms, particularly TikTok because it’s hard to monetize.
That’s why we’re working this year to launch a newsroom dedicated to Gen Z. It will provide a steady stream of breaking news and in-depth explainer content for TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube (it’s important to diversify in the event of a TikTok shutdown). We’ve hired a cadre of Gen Z creators and journalists and have been busy testing content ahead of our launch.
The Global Fight
Wherever we look, we see struggles very similar to our American fight for democracy. Whether it’s India, Israel, Italy, Mexico, or Brazil — institutions, norms, and ideals are under attack by populist nihilists bent on creating illiberal democracies or worse. These movements consume much of the same media and trade in the same ideology across borders. That means it’s on us to link with like-minded citizens of these other countries to cover authoritarian overreach and tell a different, more compelling story about the future. We have several projects in the works on this front that we’ll begin to roll out over the next year.
This Is Personal
Me with my sister and mother in 1988.
I’ve spent all of my adult life — and much of my childhood — deep in the wondrous hellscape that is American politics. I was born into polarization — with a Republican dad and Democratic mom, who, before they got divorced, would fight incessantly about politics. One of my earliest childhood memories is of my parents arguing over which president was responsible for starting the Vietnam War.
I still believe in this fucked up country of ours, despite having ample reason not to. I may be one of the only people left who clings to Obama’s vision of a more united and generous politics. I see it in my family, where we still love and care for each other despite our different politics and our collective trauma.
I see it in my childhood neighborhood in Staten Island, one of the last swing districts in America — where half of my close friends voted for Trump (enthusiastically) but who still cheered on my career in Democratic politics.
I saw it during the Obama campaign, where I saw the man himself up close and can say without a shadow of a doubt that he’s a decent, talented, and visionary leader. The fact that our politics yielded him — perhaps the best we could have possibly produced, means our system may not be totally doomed.
I saw it down South, where I was welcomed with open arms by Republicans, who became some of my closest friends and collaborators as we built a network of schools and lobbied for better education policy.
I saw it at Arena, where I was privileged to support young, visionary leaders like Lina Hidalgo and Lauren Underwood.
And I see it now at The Branch, where I get to work with a group of young, diverse, eclectic thinkers who genuinely listen and persuade each other.
The Branch is not for profit. By removing the profit motive, we have the freedom to tell the stories we want to, the way we want to. This means we depend on your generosity so we can keep creating meaningful content. Support our work here.
This article originally appeared in 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.
(This article is the first in a multi-part series on the presidential cycle’s campaign education policy and messaging.)
As 2024 approaches, all signs point to this being one of the most consequential education-focused elections in recent memory. Governor Ron DeSantis has made K-12 and higher education his top messaging and policy priority, while Donald Trump has raced to outflank him by releasing an education policy “platform” and recently attackedDeSantis’ K-12 record. The House GOP passed a “Parents Bill of Rights” bill modeled after states like Florida. Meanwhile, over a dozen conservative legislatures have recently proposed, and in some cases passed, sweeping legislation on Education Savings Accounts, representing the most significant expansion of private school choice in our nation’s history. Amidst all of this Republican activity, President Biden is doggedly pursuing student loan relief, while the Supreme Court stands poised to deliver a potential landmark ruling on affirmative action in the coming months. Add to the mix a series of durable and polarizing debates like those over Critical Race Theory and the rights of trans minors.
This is a marked difference from recent presidential election years that saw scant attention to education issues. If you remember, the most significant K-12 exchange in the 2020 primary came when then-Senator Kamala Harris jabbed Joe Biden over bussing — a policy that hadn’t existed in any meaningful way for decades.
The critical question will be how the candidates and parties weave these issues into a compelling narrative. The race to define the very question voters ask is the most critical battle of any campaign, and whoever frames the choice in the election usually wins. For example, you can convince people you are the most intelligent, prepared, and ethical person in the race — but if the electorate is looking for who will shake things up, you’ve wasted your time and resources. This dynamic has played out many times in our lifetime:
If the 2000 election was about who was the smartest, Gore would have won. Bush framed the election about who was more likable (remember the “who you’d rather have a beer with” conversation?).
If the 2008 Democratic primary was about who was the most experienced, Hillary Clinton would have won. Obama made experience a liability, tying Clinton and eventually McCain to the old Washington way of doing things. Trump did something very similar in 2020, albeit with a different flavor.
The most common tug of war over the framing of the election is “change” versus “more of the same.” Generally, if you are an incumbent, you want to convince the electorate that everything is heading in the right direction and that you are here to preserve or incrementally improve the status quo. The most famous example of this framing was President Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, which featured the now-famous Morning in America ad:
Notice that the ad doesn’t even feature any video of Reagan himself, mention his opponent, or outline any plans for the future. It just highlights how great things were going (for suburbanites).
If you are a challenger, however, you want to convince the electorate that everything is going to hell — and that you are the only person/party who can turn things around. My favorite example of this is Al Gore’s 1992 “upside down” rally speech:
I know, I know. Not the same Al Gore you remember, is he? If that version of him had run for President in 2000, that election would have turned out much differently. Anyway . . .
Every now and then, an incumbent can pull off the seemingly impossible and run as a change agent or as the opposition. That is sort of what Biden and Democrats did in the midterms when they framed the election around the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and election denialism. Yet those opportunities are rare. Usually, the incumbents are the “more of the same” party.
That brings me back to the 2024 election and education policy. Republicans will be running as change agents. Like it or not, the story they tell the electorate is quite clear. It goes a little like this (my words):
It’s time for parents to regain control over their kids’ education. They desperately want to take it back from radical leftists who want to teach our kids to hate their country and hate each other, adopt radical ideas on race and gender, and to question the very idea of hard work and merit. That’s why we’re codifying a Parents Bill of Rights that for the first time gives parents the ability to see their children’s curriculum and lesson plans, to participate in any meaningful life conversations that school staff is having with kids, and to hold staff members who attempt to indoctrinate our kids accountable. And through our historic expansion of Education Savings Accounts, we’re allowing parents to use their tax dollars however they see fit to educate their children. Private schooling will no longer be the exclusive option for the rich. We want every family to have the opportunity to access the best schools — whether zoned, magnet, charter, or private. Speaking of which, we’re also taking aim at the bloated and unaccountable higher education establishment who’ve been running up costs, pushing extreme views, and discriminating against white and Asian applicants. That’s why we’re weakening tenure protections for professors — allowing us to hire and fire based on performance — and why we’re investing in the expansion of career and technical education, so we can once and for all break the higher ed monopoly and give you better choices for your children.
This is a classic change message. There’s a clear and simple description of the problem, a compelling villain, and a series of solutions with the parent at the center.
Notice I use the phrase “take back control” — which was the successful pro-Brexit slogan. I believe the GOP will use nearly identical language because the slogan can mean different things to different parts of their current coalition and persuadables alike. During the Brexit campaign, Take Back Control could be a racist dog whistle, but it could also be about economic and legal independence, a call for more sovereignty, or a primal scream against a rapidly changing world. Similarly, a “control” message around education could, of course, motivate voters over issues of race and gender in schools — but it could also appeal to lower-income parents fed up with their options, suburban parents with lingering frustrations over Covid closures, or any parent who simply feels the world getting scarier and their children slipping away. Republicans are banking on Democrats going the way of the “remain” crowd — attacking all opponents as racist and failing to see the complexity of their opposition.
And like Brexit, the GOP doesn’t have to defend the actual implementation of many of their most ambitious policies. They can sell an idea. For example, most of the recent Education Savings Accounts bills include a multi-year ramp-up — where the most significant shocks to the system won’t be felt until well after the 2024 election. They can capitalize on hopes and dreams without owning the downsides.
If it’s not obvious, I believe the GOP education message will be highly effective.
What about the Democrats’ message? Here’s Biden’s education message from the most recent State of the Union address:
Restoring the dignity of work also means making education an affordable ticket to the middle class. When we made 12 years of public education universal in the last century, it made us the best-educated, best-prepared nation in the world. But the world has caught up. Jill, who teaches full-time, has an expression: “Any nation that out-educates us will out-compete us.” Folks, you all know 12 years is not enough to win the economic competition for the 21st Century. If you want America to have the best-educated workforce, let’s finish the job by providing access to pre-school for 3- and 4-year-olds. Studies show that children who go to pre-school are nearly 50% more likely to finish high school and go on to earn a 2- or 4-year degree, no matter their background. Let’s give public school teachers a raise. And we’re making progress by reducing student debt and increasing Pell Grants for working- and middle-class families. Let’s finish the job, connect students to career opportunities starting in high school and provide two years of community college, some of the best career training in America, in addition to being a pathway to a four-year degree. Let’s offer every American the path to a good career whether they go to college or not. And folks, in the midst of the COVID crisis when schools were closed, let’s also recognize how far we’ve come in the fight against the pandemic itself. . ..
“Let’s finish the job” is classic more of the same messaging. You can find it in hundreds of speeches from mayors, governors, and presidents running for reelection over the years.
What’s notable is how little in Biden’s speech is new. How often have you heard about 21st Century jobs, Pell Grants, more teacher pay, or expanded pre-K? Take out the references to Covid, and much of what Biden says here could have been in a speech from Clinton’s second term. That’s not to say it’s terrible policy, but it’s far from a fresh or compelling narrative (Democrats often confuse the two). Biden and Democrats need to link together these (and ideally more) policies and tell one compelling story. In a future post, I will propose a few options on this front along the lines of what I do for the Republicans above.
Remember, this is what the best and brightest speechwriters and policy minds in the Democratic Party could muster — during Biden’s most high-profile speech as president to date. At a time when his political opponents are talking about education issues daily.
One could argue that the GOP education message isn’t fresh either. After all, Republicans have talked about private school choice and racial grievance for as long as I can remember. But the scope and coordination of their policy moves and the sophistication of the message are more expansive and effective than ever before. If you don’t believe me, read the recently passed education bill from Arkansas and then watch Governor Huckabee Sanders’ accompanying speech. As we’ve recently discussed on the Lost Debate, you can argue with her choices, but you can’t say it isn’t bold or new. In the coming years, we’ll see many more bills of this kind passing through other state houses, and you can be assured most 2024 GOP candidates (up and down the ballot) will propose legislation along similar lines, telling nearly identical stories.
Democrats, being the party of more of the same, will likely defend the status quo (and perhaps add incremental improvements). If parents love their current school options, vouchers and Education Savings Accounts sound radical and dangerous. If they love their teachers and principals, they’ll balk at onerous “transparency” requirements or weakened tenure. But if they are frustrated by their current options or resentful of the indignity and inequality of the system, then they are likely to be much warmer to significant change.
So what does the polling say? Are parents satisfied with their options? Recent polling from Murmuration found the following:
Only 7-in-100 registered voters rate the performance of the U.S. education system as excellent; about three times that many (22%) rate it as poor. Overall, we find that about one-third rate our schools as either excellent (7%) or good (27%), while 60% see them as only fair (38%) or poor (22%); 6% declined to offer an opinion.
While voters are more likely to rate the public school system in the neighborhood where they live better than the nation’s system, still only 12% rate their schools as excellent. In total 46% rate their local schools as excellent or good (34%), 29% as only fair, and 15% poor. Among parents, the ratings are slightly better as 54% rate them excellent (16%) or good (37%), and 42% only fair (31%) or poor (11%).
This gives either side confirmation of their theory. Democrats will point to the fact that parents are more likely to rate their own school as positive even if they aren’t satisfied with schools generally. Republicans, on the other hand, will point to the anemic enthusiasm for the system as a whole as an opportunity to sell a change message.
The Murmuration poll also found that Democrats have a 10-point edge on education issues writ large and that teachers’ unions are viewed favorably by most voters, especially younger voters. However, other recent polls have found more trouble for Democrats. Here’s a summary from the conservative American Enterprise Institute from 2022:
In March 2022, when Rasmussen asked 1,000 likely voters, “[w]hich party do you trust more to deal with education issues, Democrats or Republicans?” 43% reported that they trusted Republicans, compared to just 36% who favored Democrats. Other polls confirm this finding: A June 2022 poll by Democrats for Education Reform found that 47% of voters in battleground districts trusted Republicans on education while 44% trusted Democrats. Another poll of voters in battleground states by the American Federation of Teachers revealed that 39% of voters trusted Republicans on the issue, giving them a one-point lead over Democrats.
I’m not sure what to believe in the polling other than that the electorate is movable. This may be bad news for Democrats because they’ve long taken their advantage on education issues for granted — and depend on an electorate that believes the current system works.
If the polls are unreliable on these issues, they may be in a way that should give Democrats even more reason for concern. For example, Populace found that one of the largest collective illusions is on the issue of education, with 74% of people aged 30-44 saying privately that they believe parents should have a say over public school curriculum even though only 48% are willing to say so publicly.
When you combine that reality with the differences in the party’s narratives, Democrats should feel some urgency to start telling a clear, compelling, and coordinated story about our kids’ future.
In my next post, I will discuss the various options for Democrats on that front — weaving together policy and communications. I’ll also dig deeper into the polling to discern what voters really want.
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.
Image Credit: Warner Brothers
Let’s get some background out of the way:
Abbott Elementary is a popular show on ABC about a group of educators at a traditional public school.
The show’s creator is a woman named Quinta Brunson, who attended a public charter high school.
Season two of the show features a storyline about a charter school that opens up across the street.
The story is not flattering for charter school supporters.
As you can imagine, I’ve received many nervous messages from educators asking how we “handle” the show’s treatment of charters.
Let’s start with how you shouldn’t handle it. Exhibit A is the following tweet from a woman named Jeanne Allen, who is the founder of the Center for Education Reform:
I'll share it again.
The creator, lead writer and co-producer of @AbbottElemABC@quintabrunson is from West Philly and attended charter schools her entire education. She reportedly loved it at the time, heaped praise on it. Once upon a time.
The creator, lead writer and co-producer of @AbbottElemABC@quintabrunson is from West Philly and attended charter schools her entire education. She reportedly loved it at the time, heaped praise on it. Once upon a time.
As I see it, there are several problems with Jeanne’s approach here. I don’t know her and don’t want to pile on what has likely been for her a tough few days. But we can learn a few lessons from how she handled this.
First, it’s important to emphasize that Brunson is an alumnus of a charter school. That means she was once one of our students. And we love our students as much when they are adults as we did when they were kids. Every time we engage them, including on issues with which we may disagree, we should do so from a place of compassion. We should also assume the best, which is not what Jeanne did when she accused Brunson of being motivated by profit.
Second, the profit motive accusation is absurd. The show was already popular, and I can’t see why Brunson would have profited more from an anti-charter plot than a pro-charter plot. (Though, I can attest that being pro-charter is often a humorless existence.)
Third, it’s a TV show. I confess to being frustrated with the show’s treatment of charter schools the first time I saw it (I even podded about it), and I continue to be frustrated by how the haters have weaponized it. But it’s a fictional show, not a Frontline documentary. When we fight art with logic, we look lame. Now, we should treat differently any statements Brunson or others (like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Congressman Jamaal Bowman, or Jessica Winter from the New Yorker) make about charters outside of the show. I’ll get to that below.
Fourth, to the extent there is a debate to be had with Brunson, Jeanne Allen is not the one to be having it. There are times when everyone — from grassroots to grasstops — has a role. This isn’t one of those times. It would be one thing if Jeanne were arguing with commentators trying to make meaning of the show to shape policy (we should all fight that stuff), but we should step aside and let others with a more authentic connection to Brunson’s experience engage with her on the meaning of the show.
Fifth, if we insist on engaging Brunson, start with curiosity. I’d love to interview her and learn more about her experience and how it shaped the show. I have friends who I respect a ton who’ve worked for the network that ran her school, but I don’t know a lot about their model, their performance, or the particular campus she attended.
Sixth, there’s a way to view this saga as flattering to charter schools. She’s one of our alumni, after all, and she made it big. She must have received a great education to be able to write and lead like she does. I can also sympathize entirely with her conflicting feeling of love and frustration with her experience. Her journey reminds me of years ago when many of my fellow Staten Islanders hated Pete Davidson because they felt he talked down about them, which he occasionally did. He also loved the island, which became apparent over time when he did works like The King of Staten Island or this unforgettable video. People are complicated.
Now, let’s take our focus off Brunson and examine the broader context. There’s a concerted effort by affluent, mostly-white progressives to undermine the kinds of school choice they don’t use (charters, vouchers) and defend their methods of choice (neighborhood schools, private schools, selective admissions magnets). I’ve written about this at length. These elite liberals often hide behind intellectuals of color who agree with them (e.g., Nicole Hannah Jones, Ibram X. Kendi) while ignoring and attacking those who support school choice (e.g., Howard Fuller, our very own Chris Stewart). They want to smuggle false claims about charters through the debate around Abbott Elementary. Claims like:
Charters receive more money
Charters aren’t popular
Charters don’t perform as well
Charters don’t serve special needs students as well
I’ve spent years battling back these claims. For most of them, there’s extremely compelling evidence for the exact opposite. I don’t need to go through that data here, but we’ve done many many podcast episodes outlining the contours of those debates.
The point is we have a gazillion advocacy and communications people who ostensibly get paid to tell the truth about charter schools, and we have countless alumni who’ve had wonderful experiences at their schools. Get out there and push back against the army of blue checkmarks and out-of-touch journalists pushing false claims instead of attacking Brunson’s character.
This saga should also underscore that you should build your own rails if you don’t like the tenor of journalistic coverage. It’s never been easier to start a new publication and to build an audience.
And if you don’t like Abbott Elementary, create your own art. A few years ago, a Hollywood studio asked me to write a show about my experience as the principal of a charter school. I wound up writing a treatment for a show (it was never made) that had less to say about education policy than about criminal justice issues and race, in part because the didactic debate around charters and reform makes for lame art. Perhaps that’s what Brunson was grappling with. It’s hard to make the stuff we do poetic or funny. I couldn’t do it. If you can, let me know and I’d be happy to help.
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.
In 2013, President Obama shook up the world of higher education by proposing a bold plan: the federal government would rate and evaluate colleges and universities to keep them accountable for skyrocketing costs and lackluster outcomes. Set to fully launch in 2015, the new rating system would consider a school’s tuition, the debt load of its graduates, and even the proportion of low-income students the school served. The end goal: reward high-performing institutions with more federal aid and give students a better bang for their buck.
Obama stated during the program’s announcement, “Colleges that keep their tuition down and are providing high-quality education are the ones that are going to see their taxpayer money going up.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan further emphasized the importance of responsible use of federal funding, stating, “We have a financial and moral obligation to be good stewards of these dollars.” While the rating system could have been established through executive action, tying federal aid to performance would have required congressional approval.
The congressional GOP’s response to Obama’s proposed plan was immediate and fierce. Rep. John Kline, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, labeled the program as “arbitrary” and a dangerous move toward “federal price controls.” Senator Lamar Alexander, the top Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, warned that requiring all 6,000 higher education institutions to conform to the same standards would essentially turn “Washington into a sort of national school board for our colleges and universities.” Senator Marco Rubio, a leading contender for the 2016 GOP nomination at the time, criticized the plan as a “slippery slope” that would ultimately lead to the private sector relinquishing more of its freedom to innovate and take risks.
Many university officials were even more critical of the plan. Robert G. Templin Jr., president of Northern Virginia Community College, referred to it as “a sledgehammer to the whole system.” Ken Starr, president of Baylor University, labeled it “quite wrongheaded.” The American Council on Education president, Molly Corbett Broad, vowed to be “vigilant in working to prevent tying the receipt of aid to metrics” on behalf of the organization that represents colleges and universities. Charles L. Flynn Jr., president of the College of Mount Saint Vincent, stated that the rating system “cannot be done well” and criticized the initiative as “uncharacteristically clueless.” Similarly, Adam F. Falk, president of Williams College, warned that the system would be “oversimplified to the point that it actually misleads.”
The barrage of attacks from higher education and skeptical Republicans worked. Here’s the New York Times from September 2015, the year the system was supposed to go into effect:
President Obama on Saturday abandoned his two-year effort to have the government create a system that explicitly rates the quality of the nation’s colleges and universities, a plan that was bitterly opposed by presidents at many of those institutions. . . . The White House on Saturday unveiled a website that does not attempt to rate schools with any kind of grade, but provides information to prospective students and their parents about annual costs, graduation rates and salaries after graduation. . . . White House officials noted that . . . the new website will not be linked to student aid.
No ranking. No link between quality and funding. No accountability.
At the time, some university leaders said they did not need a government ranking system because they already had private ranking systems, such as the U.S. News & World Report lists. But currently, many elite schools are undermining the private rankings as well. In recent months, several prestigious law schools, including Yale, Harvard, Georgetown, Stanford, and the University of California Berkeley, have announced that they will no longer provide data to the U.S. News & World Report, effectively pulling out of the rankings altogether. Top medical schools, such as Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, have followed suit. Many of these institutions have also dropped standardized testing requirements, depriving the public of the only transparent and objective data points available.
Eric Gertler, CEO of U.S. News & World Report,fired back, arguing that elite universities were ducking accountability:
Elite schools object to our use of a common data set for all schools because our rankings are something they can’t control and they don’t want to be held accountable by an independent third party. There is added urgency as the Supreme Court considers a pair of cases on affirmative action that could change admission norms. Some law deans are already exploring ways to sidestep any restrictive ruling by reducing their emphasis on test scores and grades—criteria used in our rankings. By refusing to participate, elite schools are opting out of an important discussion about what constitutes the best education for students, while implying that excellence and important goals like diversity are mutually exclusive.
Where is the Biden administration in this fight? Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona attacked the rankings. “It’s time to stop worshiping at the false altar of U.S. News & World Report,” he said. “It’s time to focus on what truly matters—delivering value and upward mobility.”
This is an astonishing victory for the higher education establishment. A decade ago, they were in the crosshairs of a Democratic president who wanted to hold them accountable in unprecedented ways. They not only beat back that effort but are now poised to squash key pillars of non-governmental accountability while removing many transparent and objective admissions standards—and they are doing so with the full backing of a Democratic president. This is the same president who has attempted to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans without requiring anything from the institutions that have been driving up college costs.
College administrators claim their opposition to standardized testing and the U.S. News & World Report rankings are fueled by a desire for greater equity. I have already shared elsewhere why this is a faulty argument:
These elite schools will find a reason to oppose any ranking, including those in the Obama proposal, which planned to emphasize equity and would not have considered standardized test results. Notably, many of these institutions claiming to act in the name of equity have refused to abandon legacy admissions policies.
If elite higher education has its way, students applying to their schools will have no objective metrics to predict admissions success, poor and piecemeal data on program quality, and no rating systems to incentivize schools to improve on key metrics. Under no pressure to deliver results, schools can hide behind opaque criteria and manicured data. In essence, students will be left to tap-dance their way through admissions processes that emphasize elaborate and expensive extracurricular activities, professionally edited essays, and demeaning selection interviews.
I do not claim that the U.S. News ranking or Obama’s proposed rankings are perfect, but they are better than no rating system at all. Ideally, we would have a diversity of governmental and private rankings that students and parents can review. When Obama abandoned his effort, Planet Money created its own ranking system—one that emphasizes graduates’ earnings relative to tuition cost, favors colleges that contribute best to upward mobility, and preferences graduates’ ability to pay off loans fastest. U.S. Newsconsiders many of these factors, but I am skeptical of their formula. For example, social mobility and graduate indebtedness contribute only 5% to a college’s score. They also factor in alumni giving rates, which I would not include at all.
In his 2013 bus tour promoting the rating system, Obama addressed an eager audience of 7,200 students, saying, “Colleges are not going to just be able to keep on increasing tuition year after year and passing it on to students.” He added, “we can’t price the middle class and everybody working to get into the middle class out of college.”
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 recently had coffee with an NYC teacher friend who casually mentioned that, at her school, they “don’t do summer training.” “How could that be?” I asked. “You mean you just don’t do enough training? What are we talking about here? A week of summer professional development?” “No,” she said. “We come in for a day or two to set up our classrooms and attend administrative meetings.”
I thought she was exaggerating, but it turned out she was right. This is how NYC public schools allotted time at the start of the 2022–2023 school year:
August 29: administrators return
September 6: teachers return
September 8: students return
During the entire school year, there are only four full professional development days, not including external training that teachers arrange to keep up with their certification.
Let’s assume that the average school day is six hours long. In a 180-day instructional year, the typical student spends around 1,080 hours, or 64,800 minutes, in school. That means an NYC teacher is given a little over one minute of dedicated in-school professional development for every hour a student spends in the building.
This is a recipe for disaster and almost without comparison in the professional world. College basketball teams, for example, often train for up to eight weeks before the start of the season, and college football teams are allowed 25 practices before their first game (and you’d better believe that the most competitive teams are taking advantage of each one of those practices). Imagine one of these teams taking to the field or court after only two days together. They’d be a mess. Engineering 180 strong school days is much more complex than anything we ask of these sports teams, yet, we don’t give our educators anywhere near the amount of training time we give our athletes.
Today, it’s fashionable to decry the deprofessionalization of teaching. For liberals, the problem is poor compensation; for conservatives, it’s a lack of accountability. For a brief moment, the compromise was to increase compensation for greater accountability.
We should add a third variable to the mix, which should be less polarizing: the time we spend on training, planning, and collaboration—all critical ingredients of any flourishing profession. That’s why I’d push for a different compromise: increasing teacher pay in exchange for an additional thirty days of teacher training. That may seem like a lot, but the average private sector employee works 260 days a year and the average public sector employee works slightly less than that. Even with the extra thirty days, teachers in most cities would still spend far below the average hours at work.
What would I do with this training time? Consider what I did when I was principal at Nashville Prep.
I like to visualize the school year in terms of entropy. As the year begins, entropy is low, with schools in a relative state of calm and order. With time, entropy tends to increase as students push boundaries, and teachers get worn out as their trust dissolves and pressures mount.
Summer training at Nashville Prep was an entropy inhibitor—an opportunity to develop relationships that would endure under pressure, to learn and practice skills that would lead to calmer and more consistent classrooms, and to plan for contingencies that would otherwise take us off track. By taking time out over the summer to plan ahead, we also gave teachers and leaders a head start so that they spent less time crafting curriculum and lesson plans in the first few weeks and more time troubleshooting the unexpected. I’d then sprinkle full-day staff development days throughout the summer to serve as refreshers, allowing us to get together to let off some steam and reset, retool, and reconfigure our systems and techniques.
As I look back at my time at Nashville Prep, I believe that our summer training was our secret sauce—the design element that allowed us to achieve results such as the following after just one year:
Highest math, science, and social studies TCAP scores of all open-enrollment public schools (district and charter) in Nashville (in our grade level)
Highest reading growth of any public school in Nashville
Math scores that exceeded those of Williamson County, the highest-performing county in Tennessee
Recognition as the “Most Innovative School of the Year” by the Tennessee Charter School Association
In our first few years, we were ranked the highest-performing charter school in Tennessee, according to both the state’s value-added metric and Stanford’s CREDO.
Here are a few critical design elements of our training program:
Schedule: While school typically began in the first week of August (the South tends to start earlier), the typical teacher started training in the first week of July, giving them an entire month of training. In addition, we had eight to ten staff training days throughout the school year, and we ended the school day three hours early every Friday to train and plan together. And all this didn’t include the external training our teachers did, often through Teach for America, the New Teacher Project, or local colleges, such as Lipscomb.
Here’s Nashville Prep’s third summer training camp agenda:
We split our time between various types of sessions:
Mission and vision setting: We started our training by discussing why we had created our school, why we had set ambitious goals for it, and why we believed that we could achieve them. We layered in examples of other professionals (both within and outside education) who had overcome the odds to do great things. We also mixed in meetings with key stakeholders in the neighborhood we served, who spoke about their hopes and dreams for our school.
Teaching techniques and practice: We used videos gathered from excellent teachers nationwide (mainly through Doug Lemov’s workshops and materials) to level-set the instructional moves that every team member was expected to master. We watched videos of great teachers using the technique, discussed its nuances, and then relentlessly practiced it. Our practice started with drills (often two teachers practicing the same technique together), and then we worked our way up to full-group mock classroom practice sessions in which teachers taught their first week’s lessons to the others, who pretended to be non-compliant students. As you can see from our schedule, we had spent over half our time practicing techniques by the final two weeks of the training camp. Teaching is a lonely profession, and I found that teachers loved these sessions because they were fun opportunities to showcase their skills to each other.
Systems and operations: Inspired by Excel Academy in Boston (perhaps the most systems-driven school I’ve ever seen), we geeked out on every aspect of student life. We fine-tuned our procedures and operations from the mundane to the complex. During the first two summers, we developed reliable systems for the following:
A tutoring program that allowed us to create unique student–teacher pairings each day in response to data from the day before
Student transitions and the setup and takedown of classrooms in the school building, which functioned as a night school for college students the minute we left the building (we rented space from Tennessee State University)
Daily student progress reports that included up-to-date behavioral and academic information for families (this was before the time of the fancy apps that allow such reporting to happen seamlessly)
Academic planning time. Initially, we had to build our scope and sequence and design our curricula and assessments. We were a small team, so teachers were heavily involved in the process and had deliverables throughout the summer (see below for that schedule of deliverables from the first summer)
Team bonding: Over time, we became much better at offering less-structured activities, such as optional group workouts, team dinners, and book clubs. These were often the highest-rated sessions each summer.
Time with students and their families: During our summer training camps, we held our parent orientation events, which gave our teachers time away from the pressures of the school year to develop the critical teacher–parent relationship. We also ensured that a team member visited every family home (or held a meeting in the neighborhood if families didn’t want us to come to their homes). Though our Director of Family Outreach, John Little, and I handled most of these visits, nearly all teachers went on at least a few visits each summer. During these visits, our team members talked to parents and kids about their expectations and goals for the school year and reviewed key school policies and practices.
Adult culture: We dedicated time to drilling down on professional norms—and practicing them. Teachers performed role plays in which, for example, a colleague approached them to gossip about another colleague, insulted a student or parent, or showed a lack of integrity in their work.
Throughout the first few summers, I learned several important lessons:
It’s tough to lengthen the training period after you’ve launched. Colleagues with established schools who tried to extend their summer training were met with much staff resistance. While it’s worth powering through such resistance, I advise you to err on the side of extended training if you’re starting a new school. You won’t regret the extra time, and even if you do, it’s always easier to take the days away later than to add them if you undershoot.
Differentiate the duration of the camp based on teachers’ experience. If teachers had already attended one of our summer camps, they could come in a week later than the rookies, shortening their summer camp to three weeks from four (this is what the NFL does with its rookie minicamps).
Principals, give yourself time to plan ahead. Over time, I started taking off the final month of school so that I could return in June with a full tank of gas (while almost everyone else is still completely off). This gave me an entire uninterrupted month to plan training camp. The side benefit of this approach is that it allowed my second-in-command to develop leadership experience during a fun time of year (post-state testing, heavy on field trips and field days).
Create themes. Taking a page from Phil Jackson, each summer camp has a theme. For example, our second summer was “Better,“ meaning that although our results were great, we knew that we could do better (and a reference to the book by that name by Atul Gawande). For our third camp, “Taking on Goliath” was our theme, as we had started to get some pushback from some powerful forces on the school board and in more affluent neighborhoods, which were beginning to feel threatened by charter schools. We aligned our readings with the theme and even created special logos and T-shirts.
Summer training only works if you have a strong vision. As much as I believe in long and excellent summer training, it only works if the school leader has a strong plan and the authority to carry it out. I’ve talked to many teachers over the years who’ve been dragged into weeks of chaotic and unhelpful summer professional development by principals constrained by either union contracts, district bureaucracy, or a lack of intention.
Finally, through a fellowship with Building Excellent Schools, I had the good fortune of spending a year traveling the country, before we opened the doors to our first school. I visited dozens of high-performing schools and networks—such as Uncommon Schools, the Sci Academy, and the Excel Academy—and begged, borrowed, and stole ideas from them as we built a vision for our first summer training camp.
About eight years ago, I began hearing that many successful school networks were starting to shorten their summer teacher training in the interest of teacher sustainability. Over recent years, many of these leaders have told me they are experiencing a little buyer‘s remorse: they long for the days when they had the time to build a shared sense of excellence before students set foot in the school building. This is especially true of the post-lockdown days, when many schools feel compelled to reset their systems and culture but don’t have the time to do so. This makes me sad.
If I were a funder or a policymaker, I’d prioritize reversing this trend.