In “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal,” Harvard University’s Jal Mehta and I examine the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. In a field full of buzzwords, our goal is simple: Tell the truth, in plain English, about what’s being proposed and what it means for students, teachers, and parents. We may be wrong and we will frequently disagree, but we’ll try to be candid and ensure that you don’t need a Ph.D. in eduspeak to understand us. Today’s topic is “standing up for unpopular truths.”
—Rick
Rick: A little while back, we discussed how education research became a partisan issue. You closed with a point that I wanted to revisit—the importance of standing up for truth even when it’s unpopular. You observed, “In the short term, it may be easier to shade the truth in ways that are likely to be palatable to our friends and social circles; however, in the long run, it is important to tell the truth as we see it.” As an example, you wrote, “During the height of the anti-racism era after George Floyd’s murder, for example, I knew . . . that workshops that focused almost exclusively on teaching white people to feel guilty about their privilege were not a promising way to achieve racial progress. And I said these things but hesitantly.”
We’ve all been there. A quarter-century ago, when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, I knew that its architecture was rickety; that its accountability framework and remedy cascade were full of problems. But I also thought that increasing academic transparency was crucial and that schools needed to be more accountable. So, I felt my way forward. I shared some criticisms but did so in very measured terms for the first year or two (at least until the shape of things became clearer).
Or, when the Obama-era fascination with value-added teacher evaluation took off, I knew there were major design problems. The idea made sense, but the value-added formulas were indecipherable to normal humans. Scores couldn’t be generated for the majority of teachers. The systems threw up obstacles to practices like team-based teaching or tutoring, since these didn’t fit the “teacher-owns-thirty-kids” measurement required by the model. I made these criticisms but hesitantly at first. I later became a relatively blunt critic, but it took me a couple of years to get there.
I could go on, but the point is that there’s a very human desire to give your friends the benefit of the doubt and to see how things shake before blasting an idea whose purpose you recognize. Plus, there can be consequences for speaking up. As I grew more critical of NCLB, I was seen as a “problem child” by friends in the Bush Department of Education. My concerns about value-added teacher evaluation made me suspect in the eyes of many “reformers.” Each time, there was a cost in terms of access, foundation support, speaking invites, and the rest.
In short, I’ve learned over the years that many forces can make it tough to stand up for truth. It’s a subject that Pedro Noguera and I kept coming back to in our book, In Search of Common Ground. It’s a tough topic, but it seems like a crucial one today. What’s your take on all this?
Jal: You are right about the social pressures. And, in the case of teacher evaluation, with the Gates Foundation having decided that it was the be-all and end-all, financial support was also at play. Foundations are an obvious but powerful deterrent to truth: If a foundation’s strategy is misguided, there is no one who wants to tell the emperor that they have no clothes.
OK, so if we are going to do better, what are some unpopular or inconvenient truths, past or present? As a progressive, one hard truth is that some of what is done in the name of progressive schooling isn’t always that great. Love the kids, listen to their interests, and try to help them find purpose and meaning in their work, but also hold the line on standards and rigor. One of the reasons Sarah Fine and I argued that deeper learning integrates mastery, identity, and creativity is that identity and creativity are essentially romantic virtues, and we wanted to counterbalance that with the more conservative virtue of mastery, with its associated expectations of discipline and practice.
The “white fragility” approach to white privilege is another good example. White privilege is real, but workshops that castigate people and make them feel guilty for their whiteness are not likely to help. That universities embraced these kinds of workshops, even though even a cursory read of the literature would suggest that they have null or even counterproductive effects, shows how ideology can triumph over evidence. Jessica Nordell’s excellent book The End of Bias: A Beginning, summarizes decades of research on how to actually reduce prejudice, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the critical ingredient is almost the opposite of what these workshops were doing—you have to empathize with why people take the positions they do, and, if you do that, they are more likely to reconsider some of their beliefs.
Rick—how about you—what are you not talking about today that deep down you know is important?
Rick: That’s a great question. I’ve started to see wildly exaggerated claims for how energetically public systems respond to school choice. This was a cottage industry in the late 1990s, which led me to write Revolution at the Margins. I want to reengage on that but haven’t yet had the time or impetus. I’m also growing more and more troubled by the Trump administration’s approach to higher education. I share the frustrations and support much of the substance but have grown increasingly troubled by the tactics. I’ve been broadly supportive, and only in recent months have I more explicitly emphasized my concerns (all while trying to ensure that I’m not accidentally defending campus leaders who don’t deserve to be defended). Similarly, I’m troubled that right-wing pushback to woke madness seems to be morphing into its own kind of madness, but it’s tricky to call this out without seeming to excuse the continuing excesses of wokeness.
I could go on, but I think these examples help illustrate the way this works. One, we’re all busy, so it’s easy to excuse not wading into an uncomfortable conversation. Two, as we’ve noted, there’s always that question as to whether to criticize something for which we’ve much sympathy. And three, there’s the concern that you’ll wind up providing aid and comfort to those who don’t deserve it. And I say this as someone who has enormous freedom from the day-to-day constraints of running an organization, working in government, or having to raise money. For those with fewer degrees of freedom, things get much tougher still. And it doesn’t help that the world is awash in hypocrisy right now, with tribal allegiance rewarded and consistency too often belittled as preciousness or pearl clutching.
Jal: I realize it is easy for me to say as a progressive, but the failure of some conservatives to stand up to Trump is a quintessential example of what you’re describing. They know that there should be a separation of powers, that it’s wrong for the president to personally profit from the presidency, but they are reluctant to call a spade a spade because of all it might cost them.
Is there any institutional way we might combat this problem, as opposed to relying on the bravery of lone truth tellers? For this to be done, leaders need to surround themselves with advisers who see the world in different ways—team of rivals style—if they want to be confident they have really considered a range of perspectives before making a decision. I wonder if institutions might be well-served by assigning someone to play the role of devil’s advocate in meetings, again ensuring that different perspectives are really heard. And it is up to those of us with long historical memories to remember that the zeitgeist at any given moment will always leave out, conceal, or suppress some other important truths, and that failing to find ways to honor those other perspectives will lead to backlash.
At the moment, many universities are scrubbing their DEI offices and replacing them with offices of “inclusion and belonging.” Talking across differences is the new hot topic—it’s like the milquetoast centrism of the 1990s is making a comeback. The result is that the folks who are heard from less are those whose identities have historically been excluded from universities and who worry that talking across differences masks critical power imbalances that exist in those discussions. Much as the anti-woke people were a few years ago, marginalized voices are again being silenced. But what we should have learned is that silenced doesn’t mean eliminated. The same concerns are still there, just below the surface.
A wiser approach would be to surface both sets of concerns and try to see if there are solutions that might integrate them. What would it look like to talk across difference in ways that acknowledge that historical patterns of exclusion mean that some have more power than others in this discussion? Or to build an office of belonging and inclusion for all people, but acknowledge that certain historically marginalized identities are particularly disadvantaged and need additional attention and support? We seem to oscillate between different poles when we should instead think about how to integrate the concerns of both poles simultaneously.
