Everybody is Wrong About Education

I'm tired of pretending the smartest people in the room are smart.

Let me start with the one thing everybody agrees on, because it may be the last thing we agree on for a while.

America has a vested interest in its young people becoming educated. Full stop. Left, right, center, libertarian, socialist, whatever you are calling yourself this week, you agree on that. You may disagree on everything else, but you agree that an ignorant country is a country in peril, that children who cannot read, reason, and compute are a problem, and that the schools we collectively fund and argue about endlessly are supposed to be the best answer.

After that sentence, the agreement ends. And the ideological misfires blossom.

I have seen this debate from every angle, and I have come to a conclusion that will make nobody happy. Everyone is wrong. Not partially wrong or wrong in minor ways that can be cleaned up with better messaging or a little more compromise. Wrong in ways that are actively damaging to children, and wrong in ways that are protected by politics, money, and tribal loyalty from ever being seriously challenged.

I am going to challenge them. All of them. And then I am going to tell you where I stand, which is not on the political spectrum at all.

Before I do, a note. I am not a researcher. I am not a credentialed educator. I am a person who watched his own poor education exile him to the margins of the economy, who educated himself through his children, who spent a decade in anti-poverty programs watching women get sent to Arby’s while men got sent to retraining programs, and who has spent twenty-five years in and around education advocacy watching smart people defend broken systems because the alternative was admitting the systems were broken. I have no institutional loyalty to protect. I have no curriculum product to sell. I have no political coalition to hold together. My only cause is to value educational outcomes more than educational theories. There is a freedom in being unpartisan. I intend to use it.

What the Right Gets Right

The conservative and right-of-center case for school choice is, at its core, a moral argument. One that I believe in. It says that it is unjust to trap a family, particularly a disadvantaged family, particularly a Black or Brown family, in schools that have failed their children for years, for decades, for generations, with no exit and no alternative. That argument is not only correct, it is obvious, and the fact that it took this long to be taken seriously by anyone in power is itself a scandal.

The entire American suburb was built on the premise that parents with means deserve to choose the educational environment their children grow up in. White middle-class and financially capable families have exercised school choice since the day they loaded the station wagon and moved to a district with better test scores and a newer gymnasium. The idea that this same agency should not be available to families without the dollars to move is a moral contradiction, and the people who live inside that contradiction while calling themselves progressives should sit with that for a while.

So yes. The right is correct that trapped families deserve options. That is a real and inescapable truth for ethical people.

What the Right Gets Catastrophically Wrong

School choice should only be understood as a moral intervention, not an educational one, and the difference matters enormously.

Moving a child from a failing school to a different school does not, by itself, produce a more educated child. The research on this is not ambiguous. Voucher programs in Washington DC, Indiana, and Louisiana all produced outcome data showing flat or negative academic results. That data was absorbed, noted briefly in policy circles, and never seriously reckoned with by the people who have long promised that choice would be the lever that finally moved achievement. The Betsy DeVos era at the Department of Education reorganized the entire federal education apparatus around school choice ideology at exactly the moment when the evidence from those programs was coming in and telling a complicated story that the ideology could not accommodate.

The right has become so committed to the market as a solution that it has stopped asking what the market is supposed to produce. They want the mechanism without the measurement. They want the freedom without the accountability. They want to win the political argument about where children go to school and never get around to the educational argument about whether those children can read after being there.

The science of learning, of teaching, of curriculum and instruction and intervention and assessment, does not care about markets. It cares about what works. The right has no serious answer to that inconvenient question because it stopped asking.

What the Left Gets Right

The left has always understood that schools do not exist in a vacuum. Children arrive having already been shaped by their homes, their neighborhoods, their nutrition, their exposure to stress and trauma and stability. A teacher standing in front of thirty children cannot undo everything that poverty and neglect and environmental toxins have done before those children walked through the door. The progressive insistence on attending to the whole child, the whole community, the whole built environment that surrounds learning is not soft. It reflects what the developmental science has shouted to deaf ears for decades.

The left has also always been correct that teachers are the most important in-school variable in whether children learn. How we recruit, train, compensate, support, and retain teachers is a direct proxy for how seriously we take the education of children. States where teachers are treated with professional respect, paid wages that reflect the complexity of their work, and given job stability tend to produce better educational environments. That correlation shows up consistently enough in the research to be worth taking seriously, even accounting for the fact that states with better teacher pay tend also to have more advantaged student populations. The relationship is not perfectly clean but it is not nothing, and the states that have systematically defunded and deprofessionalized teaching have not produced evidence that it was a good trade.

What the Left Gets Catastrophically Wrong

The progressive left is so beholden to a single model of schooling, the standardized, centralized, unionized, traditional public district school, that it has made protecting that model more important than educating the children inside it.

They will fight for funding. They will fight for class size. They will fight for teacher pay. They will not fight for proficiency. They will not demand that the system they are defending actually produce students who can read at grade level, do grade-level math, and graduate prepared for something other than remediation. The achievement gaps that have persisted inside the system they love are treated as unfortunate facts of life rather than as indictments of the model itself. The widescale segregation that happens inside progressive school districts, tracked classes, gifted programs, selective schools that sort children by advantage before the school day even starts, gets ignored because acknowledging it would complicate their stock story.

Look at the screened admissions process at selective public schools in New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago. All three cities are governed by progressive administrations. All three have selective public schools whose student bodies are dramatically whiter and wealthier than the districts they sit inside. This is not a secret. The data is public and has been public for years. The progressive response has been a decade of committee meetings and task forces that reliably produce reports and reliably change nothing, because the parents whose children benefit from the sorting are the same parents who show up to school board meetings and donate to campaigns.

The left wants to give teachers more without asking more of the system those teachers work inside. More money, smaller classes, better working conditions, and then no serious accounting for whether the children in those classes are actually learning. Calling that an education agenda is generous.

And here is the part that is hardest to say, and I am going to say it with a name attached. For decades, the dominant approach to literacy instruction in American schools was not based on how the brain actually learns to decode language. It was based on a theory built and sold by institutions like Teachers College Columbia, whose balanced literacy curriculum, developed and championed by Lucy Calkins, became the standard in urban districts across the country despite mounting cognitive science evidence against it. It survived not because it worked but because it was profitable, credentialed, and protected by people with professional reputations invested in its survival. When researchers and journalists finally forced the reckoning in the late 2010s, the damage had already been done to millions of children, disproportionately Black and Brown children, in the progressive urban districts that trusted the progressives selling them the product. Calkins eventually revised her curriculum. The children who learned not to read in the meantime did not get a revision.

The left does not want to talk about this either, and children pay for that silence.

The Self-Righteous “Center” Is Also Wrong

The centrist dream had its best moment in the early 2000s. No Child Left Behind was the product of a genuine bipartisan consensus that standards, measurement, and accountability for outcomes were the non-negotiable foundation of education reform. Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush stood together at the signing. It was the closest American education policy had ever come to putting evidence at the center of the argument.

It fell apart not because the idea was wrong but because neither side was willing to follow the evidence wherever it led. The right wanted accountability for public schools and unions but carved out exemptions for the choice sector it was simultaneously building. The left wanted the funding that came with No Child Left Behind, but fought the accountability measures that would have exposed the kids left behind even after funding increased. The center, rather than holding the line on the foundational premise, spent the next decade looking for a compromise that kept everyone at the table. They never found one.

The result was Race to the Top, which bribed states into reform with competitive grants, and then Common Core, which collapsed under the weight of a political backlash that neither side had the courage to defend against. By 2015 the bipartisan center had traded away every substantive accountability mechanism in exchange for a rent-seeking peace, and the kids who were supposed to benefit from all of it were averaged back into data oblivion.

That is the centrist record and they should own it. Not moderation. Not wisdom. A series of negotiated surrenders falsely labeled as pragmatism. The center has defined itself entirely in relation to the poles rather than in relation to the question, and so it has nothing original to offer. The midpoint of a tug-of-war rope is not a stable position. It is just where you end up when you stop pulling.

Where I Stand

My position begins with a single question. What does the evidence say works? Not what does the ideology prefer. Not what does the coalition require. What do we actually know, from rigorous research, about how children learn, what teaching practices are most effective, what curriculum produces the strongest outcomes, what assessments give us the most honest picture of where children are, and what interventions actually move children who are not yet meeting proficiency standards?

Those questions have answers and I am determined to find them. They do not have to be perfect answers or settle every argument, but they must be grounded in cognitive science and developmental research and decades of classroom evidence. Those answers are being systematically ignored by all three camps because they do not serve the narrative any of them can profit from.

The evidence was there the whole time. It kept being ignored. The balanced literacy disaster is only the most recent example of what happens when institutional loyalty beats scientific honesty in American education. There will be another one behind it if we do not change the standard by which we decide what counts as a good idea.

This is what I mean when I say my position sits on the scientific spectrum rather than the political one. I am not interested in whether a proposal comes from a conservative think tank or a teachers union or a centrist policy shop. I am only interested in whether it is supported by evidence, whether it has been rigorously tested against reality, whether it produces measurable gains in student learning, and whether those gains show up equally across racial and economic groups.

That is 100% of my education agenda. What does the science say works. How do we implement it faithfully. How do we measure whether it is working for every group of children. And what do we do, urgently and specifically, when it is not.

This will make the right uncomfortable because it refuses to treat school choice as an educational intervention when the evidence says otherwise. It will make the left uncomfortable because it refuses to treat inputs like funding and class size as sufficient when the evidence says they are necessary but not enough. It will make the center uncomfortable because it refuses to average the two and call it wisdom.

The children cannot wait for any of these groups to be comfortable.

Every major political camp in American education has decided that winning arguments matters more than educating children. The right chose markets over evidence. The left chose institutions over outcomes. The center chose balance over truth. I choose proof. The question most education advocates are afraid to ask honestly is what the research actually says works, rather than what their ideological commitments demand. I have spent decades asking that question. I am not done asking.

Proof is not a political position. It is a precondition for having one.