Professional Contrarian Matthew Yglesias has written a pair of articles drawing into question various practices surrounding DEI efforts in schools. His point is not to jump on the ludicrous CRT bandwagon, but rather to note that some of the controversial ideas of CRT are imbibed in graduate programs in education and come out in flawed practices.
Notably, he takes issue with the idea that poor performances by students of color on standardized testing means that the test are basically racist. In fact, it seems the evidence is much more suggestive that poverty, poor school infrastructure, poor school meals and poorly paid and trained teachers is a much more plausible root cause of poor performance. The stress of poverty, in fact, functions almost as a form of transient brain damage, no different than a concussion. Generational poverty therefore functions more like CTE.
Another point he makes - and again, I can see the merit here - is that parent anger about public schools is less about CRT and more about prolonged school closures. This goes back to the long internecine warfare between people like Yglesias and Jon Chait over teacher's unions. Teacher's unions are reliable voting pools for Democrats, yet they often stand in the way of needed reform. Bad teachers should not be rewarded with lifetime sinecure. Mediocre teachers should be given the resources and a mandate to improve. Good teachers should be rewarded. However, because "good" and "bad" are often measured by standardized testing, there is a powerful incentive for unions to decry the merits of a metric that might hold them accountable for their classroom performance.
I have long been skeptical of education schools' scholarship. Here is a good example of why. Rigorous, evidence-based social science is REALLY hard. Political science really struggles to account for causation vs correlation, and using evidence that does not come with some form of inherent or implied bias (in an academic, not a racial sense). It very often fails, but the field sees the wrestling with the nature of evidence as a critical part of its scholarship. Very often, education studies rely on small data sets and don't filter for confirmation bias.
Yglesias notes how phonics education for reading has really proven to work, yet schools stepped away from phonics. There was a really interesting comment from a parent whose child was struggling - to the point of tears - with algebra 1, because she had never memorized her multiplication tables. Phonics and memorization are "boring," our director of learning and pedagogy decries any attempt to drill into students basic facts via memorization. All the literature says "engagement" is more important.
If all this is true, how were we ever educated in the past? Of course, many millions were not educated well. Public education as "always been failing." And to a certain degree, pedagogy is malleable - a relationship between teacher and student. When I speak to current and former public school educators and they tell me that they have 160 students across six sections, I'm left speechless. It is almost impossible to find a pedagogical solution to those ratios. If I have 160 students, you're damned sure I'm going to give more multiple choice tests and fewer essays. At this point in the year, I'm starting to know exactly how each of my students write, what their relative strengths and weaknesses are, and what interventions they prefer, if any. Without knowing that baseline information, any blanket pedagogy is unlikely to help.
My school is excellent. It's not perfect, but it's excellent. We have amazing kids who are motivated to do well, both because they self-select to come here and because the environment promotes a culture of excellence. We have tailor-made supports for students who need them. It costs a shitload of money.
But I think it works, and I'm most proud of the dozens of students each year who come from the sort of backgrounds that typical don't produce four-year college students that we send on to very fine schools. We can change lives that way. Now, they self-select, they usually come through foundations that help prepare them to come here, they are not selected at random. However, it still works. And the evidence is, frankly, yes, some standardized tests like APs, and our college admissions picture. I had a wrestling captain whose parents lived over the bodega that they ran. He went to Johns Hopkins for pre-med. Those are my favorite stories, but they come with a measurable result.
So much of our DEI work has been...good? I guess? I know there's a playbook. We had a series of horrible acts of racist graffiti a few years back. We went through a series of meetings and ad hoc committees. After George Floyd, we added various affinity groups, held innumerable workshops, brought in guest speakers like Eddie Glaude, training over the summer...all the things the playbook says to do.
Maybe they helped? I don't know. I don't think we ever measured whether they helped. I would guess that affinity groups have helped students who are clearly a small percentage of our overall student body, feel safe to discuss certain things. But they also silo those experiences away from the White majority. What we have NOT done is measure the effectiveness of all those steps. We did not measure racial attitudes before and after we took those steps, especially among White students. If anything, the anecdotal evidence I got from my two (White) sons is that some of it may have unsurprisingly backfired. Our director of pedagogy is quick to note that lectures are often poor forms of instruction, and then we set off on a nine month sermon that probably reinforced racist or bigoted attitudes in exactly the sort of students we would have most liked to reach.
As a US History teacher, I feel very comfortable saying both that Thomas Jefferson was an extraordinary humanist, who introduced and advocated for popular rule and natural rights that was truly revolutionary, while predicating those amazing ideas upon a foundation of white supremacy. For democracy to challenge social hierarchies and castes, it had to be built upon racial hierarchies and castes. It can be both. And those ideas sowed the very seeds that destroyed the idea of racial castes and chattel slavery, even if their founder could not have imagined that.
In other words, education is messy and nuanced and incredibly human. If we are going to engage in improving it, we should probably account for that. And we should be skeptical of One Weird Trick pedagogies or the latest fad from the academy. My wife and I argue over the merits of having grades. The examples of schools that DON'T use grades and have success is great, until you realize that those schools have about 50 students over six grades. That's not a school, it's a tutorial. The "evidence" is not very rigorous.
As we - rightly - try and create a school system that is inclusive and is tasked with overcoming the history of racism in this country, we should make damned sure the methods that we use are actually working. I have no idea if they are.
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