Please Get A Better Map

The radical agenda these days might simply be the better schools agenda

I remember one (well funded, natch) education non-profit leader telling me at a dinner a few years ago how crazy, and disrespectful, it was for me to say that Black people might vote for Donald Trump in numbers. OK.

Here's a chart of shifts in national vote patterns in last week's election. From a political standpoint the Democrats are probably approaching ceiling on those blue bars. So persuading some of these other demographics rather than trying to squeeze more out there is going to matter a lot to how Democrats climb out of the hole they're in. Education matters to that.

Now juxtapose all that, and this chart, with how you hear these issues discussed in the elite precincts of the education sector. Or just juxtapose it with who is in those elite "spaces" or "centered" as people like to say.

OK, then.

Below is recent data from Echelon Insights via a chart in The Financial Times. See a pattern? But it's not new as a feature, we've talked about it around here for years. The invaluable Tom Edsall spent much of the last decade calling attention to it. And of course, Ruy Teixeira as well. His election post-mortem is must reading.

This helps explain the disconnect between what's on offer in elite ed reform and what people want, and the consequent breakdown of an effective education reform politics.

One of the best articles on all this I've come across is this 2021 Freddie deBoer article. Strong recommend.

And the short and fast version of all this is in Julia's Galef's book.

ICYMI here's some new Raj Chetty data worth your time. This sector needs to discuss race and class in a more sophisticated way if its leaders want to have a national footprint.

Michael Powell on why understanding the landscape matters.

Some data on transgender issues. Helen Lewis on the debate du jour:

We haven't done music around here in a while, here's Leon Russell with a Dylan cover.