You can smell the panic in the air; even a renowned lefty like Matt Yglesias is admitting that the Democrats’ stance on education is a losing one. It’s a good read; summary posted below.
Have I mentioned how much I am looking forward to the 2022 election? It’s shaping up to be a bloodbath.
This is an enormous issue that warrants (at least) a two-part post. Today’s is about three related and widespread trends in progressive education circles:
1. Extended closures of schools that hurt students’ measured learning outcomes and widened the racial gap in measured learning outcomes
2. The adoption of racial equity initiatives with little demonstrated efficacy in improving outcomes
3. The stigmatization of the kinds of tests that are our main tool for assessing whether or not children are learning
Democrats at the national level largely have not endorsed these ideas, but they have been pushed by a number of state and local governments, and elected Democratic leaders have generally not spoken out vocally against them. That trend is, I think, both politically damaging and substantively bad. If we stigmatize tests because they tell us bad news about racial gaps in academic achievement and then flood the zone with questionable initiatives whose efficacy we refuse to even try to measure, bad things are going to happen to the country.
