What Are You For? Plus, Stuff Is Happening. Is Philanthropy Happening? New Study On Teacher Strikes. More!
Welcome back!
Slow posting over the summer, I was in Maine, Massachusetts, Delaware, and elsewhere with my girls, squeezing all the time out of summer I possibly could. Caught a fantastic Springsteen show in Pittsburgh. They’re off to college, which is almost impossible to believe. It seems like this was just a few months ago. So, got a new dog.
Also rode the PMC in August, riding again in September, and still raising for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute through the end of September. Closer by the mile to a world where cancers are not what they are today. Thanks to all my fantastic and generous sponsors – especially those I was able to see along the route.
More regular posting – about education not my travelogue and charitable efforts – coming up as well as a lot of fish porn! For today:
On Thursday, this week, Tom Kane, Dan Goldhaber, and I are going to talk about Covid recovery – and specifically Covid recovery dollars. Great chance or you to engage with two of the leading researchers on these questions.
Bellwether and the U.S. Chamber have a new paper out today highlighting why business leaders are essential to educational improvement efforts: they help keep policy focused and on the rails. People can disagree about what caused what, but the retreat of business leaders from an education sector that has become toxic doesn’t help anyone who wants to refocus attention on student needs and what works. The political right wants competitiveness but doesn’t want to talk about equity as part of that strategy (which, in fairness, now is a term with a hundred definitions, but I mean the old fashioned way the sector thought about equity pre-awokening) and the left wants to “dismantle” structural barriers to opportunity but won’t talk about school choice or reform of school districts. Business can help bring some seriousness and focus to the conversation.
Earlier this month I asked a bunch of Minnesotans about Tim Walz, here’s what they had to say (and in some cases not say).
I’m getting asked by clients and peers what to think about Walz, or Harris for that matter, on education policy? Seems like the same as Biden. They’re pretty normal politicians. They will proceed accordingly and so should those who want to see actual school reform. Context and conditions matter. Change those. If you don’t believe me consider that in her acceptance speech Kamala Harris said multiple things that would have gotten you fired at a lot of education non-profits not long ago. And the reaction to that? Cheers. Fall in love with the change you want to see in the world, not the politics. The politics are ephemeral, the change matters.
As for Vance, I actually thought his book was OK, up until the last chapter, which felt rushed and slapped together. His education agenda, though, seems likely to be self-serving and opportunistic.
I recently sat down with Julia Freeland-Fisher to talk about cell phones in schools, you can watch/listen here if you missed it. Most people agree there is a problem, but what actual policy should be is a lot more complicated.
We have some exciting and forward looking news at Bellwether, Rebecca Goldberg will become managing partner later this fall. Learn more here.
What are you for?
I’m generally optimistic that we’re going to see another round of innovative education policymaking and dynamism around schools. There is a lot of energy out there and you can see some of the telltale signs of a shift from trough to wave. Still, I’m struck how often I talk to people who are very clear about what they’re against – conservatives, the teachers unions, choice, wokeism – or what they want to “abolish,” say school districts or “whiteness,” but are not especially clear or articulate about what it is they are *for*. What it is they are working toward.
This seems like a problem in a sector focused on human development and flourishing! We don’t need a unified vision about the ends of education, for some people its community, for others individual or shared prosperity or basic economic security. And sure, some things might need to be changed or even abolished to achieve those visions. Yet that’s a method, not the end game. The end game has to be a positive vision both to be effective for young people substantively and also to get traction politically.
Abolishing the teachers unions is an incomplete vision for a robust public education system. Just reflexively being against conservatives doesn’t move the needle for young people – and sometimes people you disagree with politically are right. Telling kids math, objectivity, or focusing on the right answer are racist is both absurd and seems hard to square with creating personal or collective opportunity and prosperity. These are negative not positive themes.
For me, I believe education and human development is about a life of choices and agency. That’s good for individuals and I believe for all of us collectively. I’m less hung up on *what* specifically those choices are than whether people are empowered and able to make decisions for themselves. I think that creates individual and shared prosperity
Anyway, the next time someone says, we need to get rid of school districts or teachers unions, or that we need to abolish this or that, ask how, why, and toward what end? Perhaps we do, but why?
Mixed Methods?
A point that Matt Pasternak makes here, and I think is important, is that we need a lot more boldness from philanthropy. His whole post is well worth reading.
I think the big education philanthropies should do what all entrepreneurs do: take risks and then de-risk those risks by following the scientific method.
Something that is odd to me is the disconnect between how people made their fortunes and then how they choose to deploy them philanthropically. I don’t mean in the Balzac behind ‘every great fortune there is a great crime’ sense. That’s clever but not always true and many of today’s funders made their money with boldness and smarts. I mean more in terms of willingness to be disruptive, make enemies, solve political problems and so forth. In practice, the teachers unions operate more like ruthless capitalists in pursuit of their political goals than the formerly ruthless capitalists do in pursuit of their philanthropic ones.
I disagree, however, with the ‘we’ve accomplished nothing’ rhetoric. On the contrary, in the context of U.S. social policy things were moving in a good direction on education until a one-two punch of throwing in the towel on the politics and then the pandemic. And while I have my disagreements with fashionable philanthropic strategy (see here, here, and here for instance) grantmakers have played an essential role in that progress.
Stuff Is Happening
Speaking of things hidden in plain sight, everyone says nothing much is happening in education. And that’s true in terms of federal policy, which is in an eight year drought. That would probably be less true if more people were willing to actually put their name on what they think rather than whisper it to Tim Daly. Chad Aldeman is a notable exception here. Again, Harris, like Biden, is a centrist in the sense that she’ll tack to the median position. That’s politics. You don’t like it? OK, change the politics.
Meanwhile, in the states a surprising amount of policy is happening. And, oddly, it’s happening on reading instruction, school choice, and finance. In some cases it’s bipartisan. Those are three issues long considered close to intractable.
Bellwether supports a lot of state finance work, led by Jenn Schiess, more on that here.
Teacher Strikes Are Happening
In a new NBER paper Melissa Arnold Lyon, Mathew Kraft, and Mathew Steinberg take a look at teacher strikes: do they make a difference? It’s an interesting analysis but I think it misses what is arguably the crux question here. The study looks at whether places where there are strikes see appreciable differences in measurable dimensions like teacher pay and most importantly student achievement. Yet the strike is the actual act of walking off the job. So the proper analytic baseline for this question at least insofar as teacher compensation and other benefits are concerned is not conditions before a strike and then after. Rather, it’s what was the district’s final offer before the strike compared to the final agreement afterwards. That’s the delta. I haven’t looked at all of them, but in many recent strikes the final offer is pretty similar to the final deal raising the question of whether the strike was even necessary. I have a story about the 2012 Chicago strike I will tell sometime that gets at this. After the recent Portland strike, for instance, the union’s chief negotiator quit because he said the strike was just a performative waste of time for students and did nothing to advance the deal already on the table.
In fairness, the authors didn’t have that data though AI can give you a quick and dirty look based on open source material like media accounts. This doesn’t mean strikes don’t matter, it’s plausible they do, but it raises the question of whether it’s the threat of a strike and actions ahead of time or the strike itself that really makes the difference. You can argue it’s a difference without a distinction because the threat of a strike has to be credible. But it’s a difference that matters to everyone whose lives are upended by these actions. Measuring threat is more challenging of course, but that seems likely to be the dynamic that is pushing local decision makers.
A second question I’m interested in is what happened pre-and post-Janus? The database the author’s built starts in 2007. Has there been a change in the post-Janus environment? That’s an important question to understand. The authors have that data and told me they plan to look at that question.
Big Blur
Ed Surge reports on the rising percentage of community college students who are still high school students. This creates some resource tension with school districts but is undoubtable in the best interest of students who benefit from more choices and options and potentially a jump start on college to set them up for a three-year college experience as PPI analyst and Johns Hopkins dean Paul Weinstein has advocated for.
What I’m Reading
I try to read a shipwreck book every summer. It’s an admittedly odd tradition. The summer it was The Wager, by David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon). Recommend. It’s a wild story of trials at sea, actual trials on land, betrayal, exploration, and the foolishness of empire.
This interview with new NAPCS CEO Starlee Coleman is worth checking out. She’s thinking about musical chairs.