Does education reform have regrets?

I recently wrote an essay for The Dispatch about the wave of regret washing over America’s political left…and the wave of regret building offshore of the political right.

But today I want to focus on regret and the “education reform” movement.

The sudden change

As some readers know, I spent much of my early career focused on K–12 education. I shifted away from that in part because, 10–15 years ago, the leading figures and organizations in the ed reform community moved far left and seemed devoted to excising people like me from that world.[1]

It’s not just me. Find any right-of-center person who had happily worked in ed reform when that change took place. They will probably have stories of suddenly being required to attend training sessions that taught that “the American Dream,” “boot-strapping,” and “melting pot” were now considered offensive and unacceptable terms. Of being told to read articles arguing that oppression was baked into all American institutions. Of being told that the slogan “work hard, be nice” perpetuated structural inequality. Of attending meetings and conferences suddenly devoted to a new dogma without any debate. Of being told that immigration laws were xenophobic. That the police had to be defunded. That individual success had to be understood through the lens of unearned privilege.

There’s little value in lingering on these particulars. I’m sure most people reading this are well aware of what happened.

But for the purposes of this column, I do want to emphasize three aspects of this shift.

Consequences of the change

First, the desire—sometimes it felt like a demand—for ideological purity was remarkable. I had been a right-of-center person working in the left-leaning education world for a while, so I had grown accustomed to being a bit of an outsider. But people knew that I’d committed myself to improving America’s schools, especially schools serving disadvantaged kids. I helped start a charter school for low-income students. I advocated policies that were designed to help the underserved. I wrote constantly about the unfairness of assigning students to failing schools. This work was meaningful to me. It was a reflection of my faith and my commitment to expanded opportunity.

But none of this mattered as ed reform took a hard-left turn. If you didn’t agree to the laundry list of new requirements, you were made to feel like part of the problem.

Second, so many of these new requirements had little to nothing to do with actually improving student learning. The new orthodoxy was built on an ideology about power and oppression that led to mandatory policy positions on the police, prisons, student discipline, tax policy, the demographics of newsrooms and boardrooms, housing, marriage, bathrooms, sports participation, immigration, the confirmation of judges, and on and on.

I wanted to help form kids into better people and help them learn more so they could succeed as adults. As a conservative in a mostly progressive field, I knew that I would disagree with other ed reformers on non-education issues. I was fine with that. That’s the nature of a coalition. But I thought that we would, when working together on education issues, focus on education issues. Not so. The new agenda had lots of non-education issues.

Third, dissent became verboten. The new priorities were not subject to debate, much less criticism. Critique an article advocating modern progressive social justice? No. Point out that critical theories assumed too much and demanded extreme action? No. Suggest that organizations’ hyper-progressive policies and public statements had gone overboard? No. Say you preferred a Republican candidate? NO.

So what was the result of all of this?

In just a matter of years, most right-of-center individuals had been exited from leadership positions in ed reform organizations, whether foundations, advocacy groups, service providers, or school operators. The only even-somewhat conservative figures remaining were those who understood that they had to accept the new orthodoxy or not fight against it. It was lost on most of these organizations that while they were advocating diversity and inclusion, they were simultaneously mandating ideological conformity and excluding those who dissented.

Regret

There seems to be some building recognition that the ed reform movement went off the rails. Maybe this is the downstream effect of AOC’s recently admitting that “Woke 1.0 was crazy.” Or the other instances of the left conceding its errors.

But on the education front, the big story is Nikole Hannah-Jones’s viral essay admitting that her ideology caused her to do wrong by her own child. The essay even implies that she understands that her advocacy encouraged others to make the same wrong decisions.

But that’s not all. An education journalist just wrote an essay admitting that he regrets his “misguided six-year foray into ‘social justice journalism’.”

Some of the regret is coming from the outside. Dale Chu, a reform-minded Teach For America (TFA) alum, recently explained how his former organization—arguably the most influential ed reform organization—became a progressive political-ideological enterprise.

Doug Lemov, one of the most respected researchers and practitioners of high-quality teaching, reached a similarly damning conclusion, writing, “Almost no other important organization lost its way as completely as TFA in the last 8–10 years.” Regarding their shift from focusing on education to focusing on ideological commitments, he wrote: “they traded that noble work for a set of political objectives that made corps members feel virtuous at the expense of the very students they claimed to serve.”

Frustration

I’m glad for this shift. Sincerely.

But I have to admit that I’m also frustrated.

I (and others) raised objections to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s positions years ago. We were ignored or worse. I had repeated conversations with leaders in Teach For America over years trying to get the organization to stop veering hard to the left. I got nowhere. I repeatedly asked journalists to stop acting like political advocates. Again, nothing. I probably talked to a dozen foundations and nonprofits asking—begging—them to hire some right-of-center people to arrest the leftward trajectory, to stop taking political positions on non-education issues, to encourage or just tolerate ideological disagreements. No success.

To be clear, I was not the only one dissenting. With these particulars, I’m only speaking about my personal experiences. There are many ed reform expats.

My larger point is that those who dissented while things were going sideways were often ignored, scolded, shunned, shamed, dismissed, and/or disinvited. If ed reform is going to recover, this should be rectified. They should be brought back into the fold.

Maybe the New York Times and other outlets could hire a slate of right-of-center education journalists to more fairly cover future events. Maybe reform organizations and foundations could hire and offer board seats to those who dissented over the last decade.

In short, meaningful regret includes changing your ways.

Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Governing Right.