"Community Voice" Is An Almost Meaningless Construct That Falls Apart Upon First Contact With The Real World
Community voices? Well, that's an important thing
First, you’ve probably heard or received a text or two; there is an election next week. Education doesn't feature prominently but matters a lot to voting behavior. Also, surprisingly, the candidates actually agree on a few eduthings, despite each claiming the other will destroy the country. This new deck from Bellwether provides a brief look at all that and more in terms of possible implications. You can read it while nervously refreshing your election forecasting/results site of choice listening to Bad Bunny.
And if you missed it, here's Dale Chu, Derrell Bradford, and me talking about education and the election. Jed Wallace and I do the same here. I'll be at UVA next week talking about this and other things, and at Harvard—the UVA of the North—tomorrow, doing the same. Get in touch for details. Then, next Thursday, I’ll be at the Power of Innovation Summit in DC, with Phyllis Lockett, JaneSwift, and Michael Moe. Yesterday, Tom Kane and I spoke to a group of corporate philanthropy officers at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about learning loss, recovery, and the role of business in keeping attention on that issue. Video soon.
"The demographics and the complicated nature of this election is probably the most I’ve ever seen." — Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) to Puck
She's clearly right. We won't know for a few months exactly how this plays out. Exit polls have their utility, and we'll be able to glean some trends on election night, but the best data takes months to merge. It’s clear that party alignments are changing, and that matters to education work given the role policy and politics play in the sector, as well as how hyper-political it is. It matters to how we think about "community voice."
Something you hear around the education sector at various events and conversations—a lot—is that various groups aren't monoliths. True. But that's usually said as a predicate to ascribing some viewpoint to them or crudely lumping them together as "people of color," casually erasing the diversity that exists within broad categories. This same problem of broad assumptions shows up a lot in the fashionable talk about "community voice" in education circles. You run into many people who offhandedly assume there is such a thing as a consensus community voice, or who basically posit that if you listen just the right way, you can discern an authentic community voice that is full of wisdom and will guide you to the proper decisions or choices. And, delightfully for them, those decisions and choices always seem to line up with what these people think about various questions. In other words, they almost always seem to confirm their priors. How nice.
Actually, that's why this is mostly political nonsense. And why education leaders need to do a much better job of actually listening to communities and appreciating the limits of doing so. Community voices are a thing; community voice exists but is much rarer.
For starters, communities are diverse, and ecological fallacies are real. Knowing recent public opinion research and broad contours is useful, but it doesn't tell you anything about the person right in front of you. For instance, in rough terms more than two-thirds of Black and Hispanic voters say they support school choice. That's good to know. It also means there is a one in three chance that the person standing in front of you doesn't. And there is only one way to find out: listening. (When it comes to Black voters in particular, there is a lot of evidence their political preferences and choices are constrained by the two-party system.)
This is why in education, statements like "the community wants school choice," or "the community doesn't want school choice," or "the community wants stricter school discipline" or "the community wants more progressive school discipline" should be greeted with skepticism. Within the community, you're likely to find diverse views on all those questions - and others. People have a variety of views; they often don't fall cleanly along partisan or ideological alignments, as this election is showing. It's messier than we allow.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, a lot of people were shocked when Muslim parents showed up to protest, along with others considered politically conservative, books that were being used in classrooms. This should only have been surprising if you have a really reductionist understanding of these issues and "communities."
Among the various reasons I support expanding school choice is that majorities of Black and Hispanic parents want it, so I'm comfortable having it on offer. But that's not the only reason. For me, values and empiricism matter too. And we should (and can) respect and account for the varied preferences in policy to some extent. Durable, effective policy schemes must take into account the diversity of viewpoints—for instance, balancing neighborhood school preferences with robust choice options. Instead, too often, we try to erase it. School discipline is a compelling example here, where we toggle from one fashionable approach to the next, ignoring the spectrum of views that exist among parents.
And again, despite the bromides, people tend to like community voice when they perceive that it aligns with their values—less so otherwise. For instance, on the issue of child brides, I don't hear a lot of people in education circles calling for us to respect community voice. I don't. These are mostly young girls. No thanks. Flying the Confederate flag? Sure, some communities are into that as an expression of voice. Count me out. In some communities, there is a fair amount of voice around trying to put gay people back in the closet. Are we to listen to that? Hard pass.
So, if you think we should obviously trump community voice on issues like these, that might offend you, then you're not for it as any kind of principle. You're simply for getting your way in politics when you can. Which is fine—normal actually—just don't dress it all up as a fancy first principle.
Besides, it's good to have a values system grounded in something besides what a lot of people say they want, which is the trap that "community voice" proponents blithely walk into. There is nothing inherently wrong with outlier views.
The point should be obvious: values matter too—to all of us, in different ways. That's okay. And those values are going to come from various places for various people: empiricism, tradition, religion, progressivism, or liberal values.
So why does this idea of community voice rather than voices persist? What does it mean for education leaders?
When people argue for community voice as a way to decide things, they're usually doing one of a few things. One is a simple power play. No one wants to be against "the community," so it shuts a lot of people up, especially those with their fingers always in the air trying to discern how they should move—and especially in the last few years. Sometimes, though, it's not even a deliberate act. Bubbles are real, and if your life experiences have been narrowly proscribed—for instance, elite schools followed by elite employment—then you may not have a lot of exposure to the messy heterodoxy of the American public. This is why working on campaigns, knocking on doors, and just listening to people is always a good learning experience.
Nowhere here am I saying you shouldn't listen. The opposite. Education leaders, I’d suggest, need to do a much better job of listening.
Sometimes it is just the fashion. You see a lot of ideas, “defund the police” is probably the best recent example, that are so fashionable they blur the lines between what most people want and the perception of "community" preferences. The support for "defund" was really low, even at its peak. It doesn't mean it's the wrong position per se; that's why we debate, and fringe ideas often become mainstream over time. But when people implied you were not with the "community" if you were not for it, that was empirically incorrect. The strong majority position among Black Americans was consistently better quality policing, not less. As it happens, white liberals were most in support of less. These are easy mistakes to make, professional politicians made this one and then recalibrated when they realized the political error. See, for instance, Harris, Kamala.
Stepping back, we design democratic institutions to help shape a process to distill different voices into something other than chaos, tyranny, or mob rule. Madison actually wrote an essay or two about this that are worth checking out. Elections—at least until the more recent introduction of the permanent campaign—settle things for a time so we can have governing. Not because everyone agrees, but because everyone agrees to disagree until the next opportunity to change things up. How to balance majority and minority desires and rights, turn factionalism toward productive ends, and allow things to be settled, at least temporarily, is the bread and butter of the American project. Community voice, as it's generally considered in our sector, is not.
Nowhere here am I saying you shouldn't listen. The opposite. Education leaders, I’d suggest, need to do a much better job of listening. The dominant views coming out of education nonprofits and ed schools align well with elite thought, not so much with any clear signal from communities. Again, maybe those views are the right ones—maybe not—everyone's mileage will vary. But they don't enjoy deep majority support and that's not a matter of opinion. You have to listen a lot to discern the various viewpoints, understand them, appreciate nuance, and avoid confirmation bias. More listening than is generally the case now in media or advocacy. Too many visits to communities are Potemkin exercises or with self-selected representatives. Listening to three people saying the same thing to you might give you a great story, but is not the same as getting three perspectives on contested issues. And knowing that issues are contested in the first place matters a lot, and you have to get out of the bubble to even know that. That's certainly more labor in the modern media environment with curated and tailored news.
Still, for us in education, anything less obscures the hard questions about how to design a pluralistic education system in a pluralistic country. That's not a problem solved by just listening the "right way" or to the "proper" voices. Nor by simply abdicating any need to make some hard choices through some radical choice plan where everyone just does whatever they want. It's a problem solved through the best information we can generate, democratic engagement, dialogue, and messy compromise in a diverse and complicated country. That's a lot harder than defaulting to happy narratives.
In practical terms for reformers, this means building a cross-partisan politics that respects the variety of choices people want to make about their kids and does so in a way that allows for durable and sustainable education options and a durable and sustainable system. That's not about any one best system or one specific approach. It's about pluralism. Pluralism is hard in general, especially when tensions run high as they do right now.
And if you've read this far, Ashley Rogers Berner's new book on education pluralism might be up your alley. After the election, however it goes, this is a conversation we must have.