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The Dallas Miracle! Superintendent Wants Joy in the Classroom, Not Test Prep!

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2023 //
22

Bethany Erickson wrote in D Magazine about the revolution in Dallas. The superintendent, Stephanie Elidzalde, declared that test prep is dead. She is determined to make school joyful. Imagine that! I have been waiting a long time for a superintendent with the brains and guts to do what she’s doing. The teacher shortage in Dallas has shrunk dramatically. Not surprising. What wonderful news.

Erickson writes:

School started at Dallas ISD today, and parents of students attending school at any of the 230 campuses may notice something different this year.

During her state of the district address last May, superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said the district would soon eschew the numerous tests designed to find out whether students were ready for the STAAR in favor of, as she put it, more “joy” in the classroom.

In last year’s address, she declared teaching to the test was “officially dead,” and added that some schools were testing as frequently as every few weeks in preparation for the STAAR test, and doing classwork in between those assessments that also practiced STAAR strategy.

“How about we put them all together and we have a huge bonfire?” she said.

That doesn’t mean that there won’t be occasional checks to make sure a student is understanding concepts learned in the classroom. But it does mean that Elizalde recognizes something many parents have been saying for years—the frequent testing only amps up anxiety about the test.

“Do kids need to know what the tests look like? Yes,” Elizalde said in May. “But do we need to be doing that once every six weeks, once every nine weeks? No we don’t. … Because we worry so much about the test, we have added pressure in a way that actually is hindering the success of how students do.”

And while there wasn’t an actual bonfire, Elizalde reiterated that stance last week in a note to students and parents.

 “As I said in my State of the District speech, test scores will take care of themselves if joy – and on-grade-level materials – are in the classroom,” she said. “We do not need to drill and kill to prepare for the state assessment.”

Elizalde said the amount of testing and preparation for testing had “gotten completely out of control.” The district tallied up all the time teachers were spending preparing for tests and testing, which equated to roughly 18 school days. 

The district is providing a full curriculum to teachers with lesson plans that will allow them more time to teach, Elizalde says. The aim at uniformity will also help a district where students often switch schools during the school year.

During her state of the district address, Elizalde said the goal was to provide a consistent framework, not to have teachers reciting lessons by rote.

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Anecdotally it appears that mileage varies on teacher experiences with the lesson plans. Some teachers have said they didn’t have all the materials their lesson plans required. But others said they felt they had a great deal of freedom to teach beyond the lesson plan, so long as they met their specific goals and taught the required skills. 

The other lynchpin in Elizalde’s joy ride is making sure every student has a teacher in their classroom on the first day of school. Earlier this month, she told teachers at the Dallas ISD’s New Teacher Academy held at the Winspear Opera House that the district had fewer than 140 open positions out of its 10,000 total teaching jobs. (Last year, that number was 220.)

She also reiterated to those new hires that they would not be teaching to the test. “This whole movement is going to allow teachers to truly feel both the science and the art that is teaching,” she said.

It will be interesting to see which provides the district with a path to success. As a parent of a student, I’m rooting for the joy plan, especially if we can also figure out a way to pay teachers what they’re worth, and the state legislature can come out of the next special session robustly funding public education.

Categories Courage, Creativity, Curriculum, Dallas, Education Reform, Joy, Standardized Testing, Texas

Leonie Haimson: Reducing Class Size Is a Powerful Reform

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2023 //
18

Matthew Chingos and Ariella Meltzer of the Urban Institute published an essay predicting that New York City’s class-size reduction plan is likely to benefit white and Asian students most, thus adding to the inequities in the school system.

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, has been fighting for class size reduction for years. She responds here to the Chingos paper.

Haimson writes:

Comments on paper by Matthew Chingos and Ariella Meltzer, “New Class Size Mandate May Reduce Education Equity in New York City”

The primary claim made in this paper is that lowering class size would inequitably benefit white and Asian students rather than Black and Hispanic students, who tend to have lower class sizes already in NYC public schools.

However, several points appear to undermine that claim:

  1. As much research shows, Black and Hispanic students as well as students in poverty tend to gain twice the benefits in terms of increased learning and non-cognitive skills from smaller classes compared to their peers. Thus class size reduction is one of only a very few reforms that have been proven through rigorous research to narrow the achievement/opportunity gap and represents a key driver of education equity;
  2. Only 8% of high-poverty NYC schools already comply with the class size caps in the law, according to the Independent Budget Office;
  3. The estimates in this paper in Table A2 project that Black students would see their class sizes reduced on average to 16.7 students per class, the smallest class size of any group, with Hispanic, low-income, and students with disabilities second at 17.3, a highly equitable outcome. English language learners would come next at 17.4. In short, all high-needs groups would receive smaller classes than non-low income students ( t 17.6), White students (at 17.7) or Asian students (at 18 students per class).
  4. Finally, the paper’s findings also show that English language learners students at the elementary school level are more likely than non-ELLs to have large classes even now, and thus would likely gain substantial benefits from class size reduction as well.

There will be challenges for sure, to ensure that lowering class size doesn’t drain more experienced teachers from the neediest schools, but this could be avoided by targeting high-poverty schools first for class size reduction, as the law requires.

In addition, there are several studies that suggest that class size reduction may lower teacher attrition, especially at the highest-poverty schools, so that in the long run, the effort may lead to a more effective, stable, and experienced teaching force over time.

Our questions are these:

  1. Why cite the IBO cost estimates of 17,700 additional teachers needed, of $1.6 to $1.9 billion annually while relegating DOE’s far lower estimates of 9,000 new teachers at $1.3B to a footnote? Did the authors decide one estimate was more authoritative than the other, and if so why?
  2. The authors also cite an early School Construction Authority estimate of $30B-$35B for capital expenses, yet the SCA has admitted that this was “a back of the envelope” estimate and now has been omitted from the DOE’s July version of their draft class size plan, as compared to the earlier version submitted in May.

1. https://classsizematters.org/research-and-links/#opportunity

2. https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/how-would-the-new-limits-to-class-sizes-affect-new-york-city-schools-july-2023.pdf

3. See https://3zn338.a2cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/FAQ-7-myths-6.5.22-update.pdf and https://3zn338.a2cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Summary-of-Class-Size-Reduction-Research-NY-updated.pdf

4. May version posted here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gv9DZ6aENexWyzozVWV0SwhnlXLVVJ2a/view July version here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BOYliiFZ5U7Q3q8gN6JRRIHgIf9j_Vp/view

Categories Accountability, Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, New York City

Rather and Kirschner: Our Fragile Freedoms

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
37

Dan Rather and Eliot Kirschner write a blog on current events called “Steady.” We are reminded about how much we miss Dan Rather on the news. In this post, they write about Trump’s latest indictment.

They write:

In an era of unprecedented upheaval, it is difficult to find suitable context and perspective for the latest indictment of Donald Trump.

After all, this isn’t the first indictment he has faced, or even the first in federal court. It isn’t the first time we have had to grapple with his moral failings, the unleashing of political violence, or the degradation of our constitutional order.

Much of what is in the document made public on Tuesday we knew before. We saw it unfold on TV. We read the reporting of its aftermath. We heard the gripping public testimony in front of the bipartisan House Select Committee that investigated the insurrection of January 6.

It wasn’t even that the indictment was a surprise. For a long time, the investigation has been in the public consciousness. After Trump announced that he had been told he was a target, it was mostly a matter of when, not if.

It is important to keep in mind that this latest indictment does not charge Trump with arguably the gravest potential crimes, like insurrection or sedition, even though many who watched in horror the events leading up to and cresting on January 6 think it obvious he is guilty of both.

Randall Eliason, a former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, argued in a New York Times opinion piece titled “What Makes Jack Smith’s New Trump Indictment So Smart” that the special counsel wisely chose to limit the scope of the case (and the number of defendants) to just Trump despite the six other unnamed but easily identifiable co-conspirators. Smith did this, the piece points out, in order to proceed quickly to trial and yield the best chance at conviction. “Although it might have been psychologically gratifying to see Mr. Trump charged with sedition, the name of the legal charge is less important than the facts that will make up the government’s case,” Eliason wrote.

In other words, Smith decided not to try to prove too much; keep the charges few and based on what facts he believes are most likely to convince a jury — and whatever part of the public may be open to persuasion.

Let us stop for a moment to ponder these facts and the narrative they tell. They are chilling, but we must remember the Department of Justice will have to prove them in a court of law. Trump is presumed not guilty until and unless he is proven otherwise. He has every right to mount a vigorous defense. It’s probably best for the country that his lawyers fight hard and smart. The more thoroughly this case is adjudicated, the more its conclusion is likely to be strengthened by the process.

But in reading the indictment, all who love and care for our precious republic and its democratic traditions should feel a deep shudder of fear that we were driven to such a precipice. The writing itself is not fancy — no stacking of dependent clauses or diving into a thesaurus in search of adjectives. Reading the introduction aloud, it almost has the syncopation of a children’s picture book, even if the story it tells is one of horror:

The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020.

The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.

Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.

So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.

These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.

But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.

The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.

He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures.

His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.

Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election result.

What follows that in the indictment is a story we all saw unfold in real time, laid bare in a double-spaced legal document. There is also a lot to read between the lines. Even former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, who enabled many of Trump’s worst instincts and misled the American public about Trump’s fitness for office, told CNN he thinks prosecutors have more evidence than what they have shared thus far. He called the indictment “very spare” and added, “I think there’s a lot more to come and I think they have a lot more evidence as to President Trump’s state of mind.”

Be that as it may, these 45 pages comprise one of the most consequential pieces of writing in American history. It does not have the earth-shattering rhetoric of our Declaration of Independence, the poetry of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” or the urgent morality of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But it is a clear statement at one of the most pivotal intersections in our nation’s narrative; that autocracy and the fomenting of political violence to subvert the peaceful transfer of presidential power is not only anathema to our values — it is illegal.

History is riddled with “what ifs.” We are left to ponder what the worst outcomes might have been if things had turned out differently, from our own revolution, to World War II, to the Cuban Missile Crisis. January 6 should be added to that list.

As bad as it was, it could have been (and came close to being) much worse. And that reality bursts forth from this indictment. According to what is written in the indictment, violence was expected by Trump and his co-conspirators. They understood that their schemes to steal an election would almost certainly plunge the nation into chaos. That was the plan.

In the end, their plot was unsuccessful, but the danger has not receded. Trump is running for president. At this point he is the favorite, by far, to win the Republican nomination. And that means he could win reelection. That result would likely usher in chaos, greater and deeper division than even what we now have. It could very well end the country as we know it.

That may sound to some to be hyperbole, but by any reasonable analysis, that is a lesson to be learned from this indictment. And that is what Jack Smith hopes to prove in federal court. One can make a credible argument that this is one of (if not THE) most consequential criminal cases in American history.

A former and potentially future president is accused of trying to destroy the United States. His own vice president is a key witness. You couldn’t make this up. But this is the reality of what we face. Democracy is always fragile and must be fought for to survive. A free people must constantly be on alert and working to preserve their liberty.

At the birth of our nation, Benjamin Franklin is said to have quipped that the Framers had produced “a republic, if you can keep it.” Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, spoke of how the Civil War was a “test” of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.” We, the people, can take nothing for granted.

This concept of the United States of America, still relatively new in human history, is impossible to maintain without the continual peaceful transfer of power at the top. That is what this new indictment is about.

In his first inaugural address as governor of California in 1967, Ronald Reagan spoke eloquently of this truth:

“We are participating in the orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people. And this is the simple magic of the commonplace routine, which makes it a near miracle to many of the world’s inhabitants. This continuing fact that the people, by democratic process, can delegate power, and yet retain the custody of it. Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”

This is what is at stake for the generations alive today. It is an epic battle that will now take place in federal court as well as at the ballot box.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom

Jeff Bryant: What the New York Times Overlooked in Reporting About N.C. Turncoat Tricia Cotham

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
7

When newly elected Democratic legislator Tricia Cotham flipped parties earlier this year, her switch had a profound effect on North Carolina politics and it was national news. Her change from Democrat to Republican gave the Republican Party a super-majority and enabled them to override the Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s vetoes. It also cleared the way for Republican plans for vouchers and abortion.

The New York Times reported that she was wooed by Republican leaders before the election, meaning she ran as a Democrat knowing that she would switch after the election because of GOP promises to her.

But seasoned journalist Jeff Bryant, who lives in North Carolina, writes that the Times’ reporters missed the real story, which was right in plain sight. Cotham was bought by the charter industry.

Bryant writes:

A July 30, 2023, headline in the New York Times promised to give readers an “inside” story about why North Carolina lawmaker Tricia Cotham changed her political allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in April and handed conservatives a veto-proof majority in the state House. But the ensuing story shed little new light on what motivated her decision to flip and overlooked how her deep dive into the right-wing networks promoting charter schools was likely instrumental in steering her change in political leanings.

For sure, Times journalists Kate Kelly and David Perlmutt are correct in reporting Cotham’s actions as having profound impacts in a purple state, but they erred in adopting an unlikely storyline about who and what lured her to jump.

As I’ve previously reported, Cotham’s own explanation for her party switch strains credibility. And just because Republican officials encouraged her to run in 2022—the Times article’s supposed big reveal—doesn’t mean they, or the Democrats with whom she had purportedly grown disenchanted, were the only, or most important, actors who mattered in her decision.

Yet Kelly and Perlmutt chose to amplify that narrative rather than delve more deeply into Cotham’s legislative record and the business associates she cultivated in the years she was out of office, from 2016 to 2022.

As I reported, Cotham’s split from the Democratic Party first became evident toward the end of her legislative tenure from 2007 to 2016. At the end of that period, Cotham had already decided to leave the North Carolina House to seek office in Congress. But she was soundly drubbed in the Democratic primary contest and returned to Raleigh, perhaps facing joblessness.

It was at that time that Cotham, who had voted strictly the Democratic Party line on legislation related to charter schools, chose to buck her party’s majority to join with just four other Democrats to vote for the creation of the Achievement School District (ASD). The ASD, whose name was eventually changed to Innovative School District (ISD), was created to take charge of low-performing schools and hand them over to charter school management companies.

But Kelly and Perlmutt either didn’t look back that far into Cotham’s legislative record or didn’t believe that vote was important. “In office, Ms. Cotham had criticized charter schools, but now her firm supported private investments in the public school system and charter schools,” was their open-and-shut assessment.

Nor did they bother to note to whom that vote would have mattered the most—Oregon billionaire John Bryan, who not only bankrolled the lobbying effort to enact the ASD/ISD but also founded the Challenge Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for charter schools, operates a firm that builds charter schools, and started a charter school management company called TeamCFA.

Bryan has also been described as “a national figure in libertarian circles when it comes to charter schools” and a donor who “contributes heavily and regularly to conservative causes.”

Cotham’s vote for the ISD preceded a series of career opportunities for her, which the Times article mostly ignored.

The first, beginning in 2017, was a stint at McGuireWoods Consulting, a highly influential lobbying firm whose clients include a long list of organizations closely associated with the charter school industry and right-wing school choice advocacy, including at least one organization funded by the Challenge Foundation. McGuireWoods was also the lobbying firm pushing the bill to create the ISD.

The second in Cotham’s series of business opportunities, which Kelly and Perlmutt did report on, came in 2019 when she was hired to lead Achievement for All Children. Achievement for All Children, the reporters noted, was picked to “turn around” Southside-Ashpole Elementary, a “foundering public school” in the state.

But what Kelly and Perlmutt left out of their reporting was that Achievement for All Children was a charter management company previously led by Tony Helton, who, as I reported, had previously worked for Bryan’s firm TeamCFA. Also, they completely left out the fact that Southside-Ashpole was under the control of the state because it was a school—the only school—incorporated into the ISD.

While Kelly and Perlmutt noted Cotham’s years as a lobbyist included a business relationship with C. Philip Byers, whom the article called “a major donor to state Republicans” and “president of a company that built charter schools,” the reporters didn’t mention that the company he led (Challenge Foundation Properties) was part of Bryan’s Challenge Foundation enterprises.

Cotham’s ties to right-wing individuals and organizations promoting charter schools don’t stop there, as my article reported. But wouldn’t it stand to reason that if Kelly and Perlmutt were to examine all the various possible influencers in Cotham’s decision to switch parties, then focusing on the billionaire in the room would make the most sense?

Further, reporting that Cotham’s switch to the Republican Party was mostly because of her changing relationships with fellow legislators, on both sides of the aisle, as the Times article suggests, trivializes a matter of huge import in a state that figures to be pivotal in the 2024 elections. It also overlooks the growing influence of the big money behind the charter school industry in American politics and its destructive force in the Democratic Party.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Categories Education Reform

Gary Rubinstein: What Should the Math Curriculum Be? Part 5.

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
10

Gary Rubinstein teaches mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, a highly selective school where admissions are based on one test. He has written a series about what’s wrong with the math curriculum taught today and how to improve it. This is Part 5.

Gary writes:

If you’ve read parts 1 to 4 of this series, you may be confused. I the first part I said that not much of the school math is useful. In the second part I listed a few of those useful topics. In the third part I listed some topics that I don’t consider so useful. If I ended it there, it would seem like the best course of action would be to cut the amount of math we teach by at least half. But in the fourth part I wrote about something that seems to negate the point of the first three posts. I said that some of that ‘useless’ math was just as important as the useful math because it is engaging in the way that art or music can be useless but engaging. So this fourth part could be used to defend the position that no math topics should be put on the chopping block and we should just leave the math curriculum exactly how it is, maybe cutting the topics that are deemed ‘useless’ and not thought provoking but maybe expanding the remaining topics so those can be learned to more depth.

If you’re worried that that’s where I am going with this series, you can relax because in this post I will suggest a radical change to the K-12 math curriculum. But before I can do that, there are three really important questions that have to be answered: 1) What is the current K-12 math curriculum? 2) What is the current K-12 math curriculum trying to achieve? and 3) What is the current K-12 math curriculum actually achieving?

I think I should answer question 3 first. What the current K-12 math curriculum is actually achieving is traumatizing the vast majority of students. We know this because the moment that math becomes optional for the vast majority of students, they never take it again. And they forget most of the math they learned and are left with a vague memory of how much they hated math.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, History

Jersey City: The Secret to Retaining Teachers!

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
16

Something exciting is happening in Jersey City, New Jersey. As schools adopt the community schools model, teachers are teaching, enjoying it, and not jumping ship. Pay attention!

Joshua Rosario wrote in the Jersey Journal:

We swear on Dumbledore’s Elder wand, no spells were cast to keep teachers from walking out the door of this Jersey City school.

At a time when schools nationwide are struggling to keep and recruit educators, the preK-through-8 Mahatma Gandhi School has retained its staff by using a community-based model that allows them to focus solely on teaching; as well as a Harry Potter-type friendly competition in which students and teachers are split into four teams to accumulate points throughout the year.

Teachers Michelle Duarte and Lindsay Boland said before the school, located at 143 Romaine Ave., transitioned to the community-based model, teachers had to be attendance officers, guidance counselors, therapists, nurses and even act as another parent for students.

“It just comes down to you can teach, you can interact with students and not worry about all the extra stuff that used to get thrown at you in the past,” Duarte, a teacher for 23 years at the school said.

At least 55% of teachers, many of whom take on multiple roles beyond educating their students, are considering leaving the profession earlier than they planned, according to a survey by the National Education Association, one of the largest teacher unions in the country.

“I am not saying that I don’t think about work when I get home … but when I get home I can shut my computer down and not have to type up lesson plans,” said Boland, who has taught at three schools. “I had one of my students tell me he missed school for a week because he had no shoes.”

Superintendent Norma Fernandez and Mahatma Gandhi Principal Peter Mattaliano credit the community-based school model for a 95% retention rate. The community-based model allows the school to give its 1,000 students, of which 62% are considered economically disadvantaged, and their families access to more services than traditional schools can provide.

Out of the 85 teachers at the school, also known as School 23, only five teachers had filed for retirement this past year, Mattaliano said.

While many teachers would pay out of their own pocket to provide a student with shoes, teachers at Mahatma Gandhi can reach out to the school’s community coordinator. The children and their families are not only connected to needed financial help, but the school provides a food pantry, clothing shop and even a full medical clinic that includes visits from a pediatrician and dentist.

“They didn’t even know what a dentist was or owned a toothbrush, which was really alarming and depressing,” said Boland, who teaches first grade. “A lot of times kids tell you there is no food at home, so a few times a week we take some of our students down there and go food shopping.”

School 23 is one of five community-based schools in the district, along with schools 15, 34, 22, 29 (which opens in September) and Snyder High School.

Open the link and read on.

Categories Community Schools, Education Reform, Funding, New Jersey, Teachers and Teaching

Perry Bacon Jr: Is “Education Reform” Dead?

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2023 //
32

In 2020, when I published my last book, Slaying Goliath, I opined that education “reform” as defined by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (standardized testing, school closings, school grades, charter schools, evaluating teachers by student scores, merit pay, Common Core, etc.) was a massive failure. The test-and-punish and standardization mandates had turned schooling into a joyless, test-obsessed experience that demoralized teachers and students alike. None of the promises of “reform” came to pass, but privatization via charter inevitably led to vouchers and the defunding of public schools.

The failure of federally-mandated reforms seemed obvious to me but Congress continues to use standardized tests as the ultimate gauge of students, teachers, and schools, despite the destruction that was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. And the reviewer in The New York Times slammed my book for daring to doubt the virtue of the “Ed reform” movement.

Perry Bacon Jr. wrote an article recently for the Washington Post titled “‘Education Reform’ Is Dying. Now We Can Actually Reform Education.” It was amazing to see this article in The Washington Post because for years its editorial writer was a cheerleader for the worst aspects of that destructive movement (Rhee could do no wrong, charters are wonderful, firing teachers and principal is fine). But the education editorial writer retired, hallelujah, and we get to hear from Perry Bacon Jr., in addition to the always wonderful Valerie Strauss (whose excellent “Answer Sheet” blog does not appear in the printed paper but online).

Earlier today, John Thompson earlier today responded on this blog to Bacon’s brilliant article. I meant to post the article by Bacon but forgot. Here it is. What do you think?

Perry Bacon Jr. wrote:

America’s decades-long, bipartisan “education reform” movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline. What should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.

Joe Biden is the first president in decades not aggressively pushing an education agenda that casts American schools and students as struggling and in desperate need of fixing. He has not stated that “education is the civil rights issue of our time,” a sentence said by presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. His administration has backed policies, such as an expanded child tax credit, that view giving people more money, not more education, as the main way to reduce poverty.

There is a push from experts and politicians across partisan lines, including from Biden, to get employers to stop requiring college degrees for so many jobs. There is also a growing defense of college students who study English, literature and other subjects that don’t obviously lead to jobs in the way that, say, engineering does.

An education gospel is being dismantled, one that was 40 years in the making. In 1983, the Reagan administration released a report called “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” It warned that America’s status as an economic powerhouse was under threat because its students were doing so much worse than those from other industrialized nations on standardized tests. That report put education reform on the national agenda and explicitly tied it to economic growth.

But this education fixation wasn’t just about the economy. The two parties couldn’t agree on racial policy. Democrats wanted more funding and explicit policies to help Black people and heavily Black areas to make up for past discrimination, and the Republicans largely opposed them.

What Democrats and Republicans could agree on was making education a priority. So Republican politicians, particularly Bush, pumped more money into schools, as Democrats wanted. And Democrats broadly adopted the view that education was the main way for Black people to make up for the effects of racism, thereby shifting responsibility for Black advancement from the government to individual African Americans, as Republicans wanted.

Eventually education, particularly getting a college degree, became viewed as the primary way for economic advancement for not just Black people but people of all races who weren’t born into the middle class.

The result was a bipartisan education fixation for much of the period between 1990 and 2016. It included the expansion of charter and magnet schools as an alternative to traditional public schools; an obsession with improving student test scores; accountability systems that punished schools and teachers if their kids didn’t score well; increased government spending on college loans and grants as part of a movement to make college essentially universal; and a push for Black students in particular not to just get college degrees but ones in “STEM” fields (science, technology, engineering and math) that would help them get higher-paying jobs.

This agenda was racial, economic and education policy all wrapped into one.

The problem is that this education push didn’t work. While the number of Americans who have graduated from high school and college have skyrocketed in the past three decades, wages and wealth haven’t grown nearly as much. Black people in particular haven’t seen economic gains matching these huge increases in education levels.

Instead of increased education benefiting Americans broadly, this education dogma created a two-tiered system. White-collar, secure, higher-paying jobs with good benefits went disproportionately to college graduates, while those in the worst jobs tended to not have degrees. And to get those degrees, Americans often had to borrow tens of thousands of dollars.

So Americans started revolting. The Black Lives Matter Movement emerged in 2013 and expressed frustration not only with police brutality but also with the continued economic struggles of Black Americans. In the 2016 presidential campaign, both Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Trump appealed to voters who felt abandoned by a bipartisan political establishment that appeared unbothered by the disappearance of manufacturing and other jobs that didn’t require higher education. Sanders called for free college, appealing to young people frustrated that their best path to a good job was accruing tens of thousands of dollars in education debt.

After Trump’s election, both parties embraced the idea that they must try to help Americans, particularly those without college degrees, who feel stuck in today’s economy. So politicians are no longer casting education as the ideal solution to economic or racial inequality. Biden and the Democrats are specifically trying to create jobs that would go to non-college graduates, and they are pushing policies, such as expanding Medicaid, that would disproportionately help Black Americans even if they don’t have much advanced education.

But if the real aim of education policy is no longer really economic and racial policy, what should its goals be? Neither party seems to have a clear answer. Most Democrats defend teachers, a core party constituency, and extol public schools and community colleges, trying to shed the Democrats’ reputation as the party for graduates of Ivy League schools. But they don’t have a broader theory of education policy.

The Republicans are doing something much worse. At the state level, they are largely abandoning public schools and instead aggressively pushing universal voucherlike programs for K-12 education to help as many families as possible to enroll their kids in private and/or religious schools. They are also casting K-12 public school teachers and in particular college professors as propagandists who impose liberal values on students. At the college level, Republicans are trying to force out left-leaning faculty and push campuses to the right.


I certainly prefer the “teachers, professors and public schools are good” perspective (the Democratic one) over “teachers, professors and public schools are bad” (the Republican one). But neither is a real vision for American education.

Here’s one: Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.

They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. Our schools and universities should of course also provide people the core skills for jobs that actually require higher education. They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt.
What our education system should not be is 16 years of required drudgery to make sure that you can get a job with stable hours and decent benefits — or a punching bag for politicians who have failed to do their jobs in reducing racial and economic inequality.

“What I think colleges and universities should do right now is to stop selling this myth that education is going to be the great equalizer,” University of Wisconsin at Green Bay professor Jon Shelton said in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed.

Shelton, author of a new book called “The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy,” added, “I think what we need to do is focus on being the institutions that are going to help society solve these bigger problems, to be the place where people can encounter controversial ideas on campus, where we can have far-reaching conversations about what needs to change in our economy, and how we’re going to create the kind of world in which climate change doesn’t destroy our entire way of life.”

Blessedly, education reform is dying. Now we can reform our schools and colleges in a way that actually improves teaching and learning.

If you can open the article, you will see two graphs displayed: one shows that Black educational attainment has risen substantially (the percent who have graduated high school and college) but Black income and wealth has stalled. Those who were counting on education alone to eliminate poverty were wrong.

Note to reader: a version of this post was published at 1:30 p.m. This was WordPress’s error. This is the finished version. Too complicated to explain.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Cruelty, Disruption, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Real Education, Standardized Testing, Teacher Shortage, Teachers and Teaching

John Thompson: Is “Education Reform” Dead?

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2023 //
52

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reacts to an article in the Washington Post.

He writes:

I agree with Perry Bacon’s excellent and optimistic Washington Post analysis and its new path for improving America’s schools – with the possible exception of his first sentence and the first sentence of his last paragraph. After decades of working for the education policies and principles he supports, I’ve become too pessimistic to not doubt his title, “‘Education reform’ is dying. Now we can actually reform education.” I sure hope I’m wrong and he’s right.

Bacon writes, “Joe Biden is the first president in decades not aggressively pushing an education agenda that casts American schools and students as struggling and in desperate need of fixing.” Biden offers a 21st century path away from the 40-year “education gospel” launched by the 1983 Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk,” which was joined by presidents of both parties. Bacon then described the bipartisan “fixation” which:

Included the expansion of charter and magnet schools as an alternative to traditional public schools; an obsession with improving student test scores; accountability systems that punished schools and teachers if their kids didn’t score well.

But this reform ideology was worse than that. Bacon explains, “This agenda was racial, economic and education policy all wrapped into one.” He also cited Jon Shelton’s “The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy,” which:

Blamed growing economic insecurity in the United States — caused in actuality by corporate disinvestment in American industry and efforts to fight unions tooth and nail beginning in the 1970s — on the supposed failures of the education system.

“By 2001 and the passage of No Child Left Behind,” Shelton further explains, “Democrats and Republicans competed with each other to remake our education system under the pretext that our schools needed to be held accountable to the long-term economic fortunes of American workers.” Since they could only agree on making education a priority, Bacon added, the Republicans adopted the Democrats’ “view that education was the main way for Black people to make up for the effects of racism.”

Based on decades of experience teaching in the inner city, and studying what it would have actually taken to achieve equity, I’ve seen the way that the students who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of accountability-driven, competition-driven mandates, were damaged the most. And on-the-cheap, quick fixes hurt these kids in the way educators and education research predicted. Even worse, I would add, the Billionaires Boys Club turned education into a reward-and-punish, data-driven privatization campaign based on the neoliberal venture capitalist model.

Having seen how worksheet-driven “accountability” and segregation by choice reforms drove our school into the lowest-performing mid-high in Oklahoma, and hearing my students protest that they had been completely robbed of an education, I thoroughly support Bacon’s vision of education.  He writes:

Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.

They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. … They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt.

But, I’ve also seen the rightwing attacks on public schools. And these assaults come after decades of destructive, neoliberal corporate reforms. The difference was that they sought to “blow up” the education system so that entrepreneurs could rebuild it. Today, we have to resist extremist and conservative privatizers who are going for the kill while education is on the ropes.

And that gets me back to Bacon’s optimistic introduction and conclusion. Yes, he is correct in beginning, “America’s decades-long, bipartisan ‘education reform’ movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline.” The vast majority of the people I know agree that these reforms failed, and “what should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.” I hope I’m being too pessimistic because of my state’s rightwing minority’s assaults on democracy, but I don’t see evidence that the majority of parents and educators, as well as researchers, will be listened to.

Similarly, his last sentence is true, “Now we can reform our schools and colleges in a way that actually improves teaching and learning.” Yes, we can, but what will we be able to do as we again go up against market-driven elites and, worse, MAGA zealots?

I must emphasize that I have always been an optimist so, ordinarily, I would celebrate his sentence, “Blessedly, education reform is dying.” But after four decades of undermining the principles of public education, I worry that its decline has come too late, and I see no sign of progress in my state. Even so, regardless of the odds we face, we must draw upon the wisdom of Jon Shelton and Perry Bacon, and that requires us to keep our hopes up.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Vouchers

Gary Rubinstein: Is the Math Taught in School Useful? No.

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2023 //
69

Gary Rubinstein teaches at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. In this post, he questions whether the math taught in school is “useful” and concludes that it is not. This is the beginning of a series of posts in which he explains why he is disappointed in the usual school math and what he thinks should take its place.

Gary writes:

I’ve dedicated my life to teaching a subject I love and have loved since I was a small child.

This country, and throughout the world really, a lot of resources are dedicated to teaching students math. From Kindergarten to 12th grade almost every student takes math and in many elementary schools math is taught for ninety minutes a day. And then in college students often have to take some math, sometimes a Calculus class, as part of their degree, even when the degree is in something like business. And for all the time and money that are put into math in this country, when it is all done very few adults remember anything about math. Maybe they know a little about percentages and vaguely something about how the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.

Yes, the same could be said about some of the other subjects, like how much Chemistry or Physics do most adults remember from high school, but the difference is that math is done for 13 years so you would think that more of it would be retained. Fo all that we invest into math in this country, we are not getting the ‘bang for our buck.’ I think I know why this is. I think about this on a daily basis since it is my life’s work and I’m so bothered by it. I’ve written about this before but I want to go deeper into this and explain what the issues are, what it would take to fix the problem, what the obstacles would be in improving math instruction, and whether or not it might be better to diminish the obsession that we have in this country with math instruction.

Part of my evolution in thinking about these ideas comes from watching my own kids who are now 15 and 12 go through the standard math curriculum. They have had decent teachers throughout the years and have always gotten 4s on the New York State tests so you would think that I’m thrilled but when I look at the things that they learned (because they were part of the curriculum) and the things that they have not learned (because they were not part of the curriculum) it frustrates me. Many parents who are not math teachers might feel the same way when they look at what their children are learning in math but they don’t dare question it. It reminds me of The Emperor’s New Clothes, nobody wants to seem like they aren’t smart enough to know why we have to learn how to multiply mixed numbers with different denominators. But as a math teacher who thinks about things like ‘what is the goal in learning this concept?’, ‘Is this concept needed to learn a more difficult concept?’, ‘Does this topic provide opportunity for the students to have ‘aha’ insights for themselves?’, I am constantly critiquing what I see my children learning about. And within my own teaching I am always trying to teach whatever topics are in the curriculum in a way that gives my own students an experience where they get to use their reasoning skills and not just blindly follow an algorithm.

The title of this series is: Is most school math useless? Depending on what you think ‘useless’ means, you will have different answers to this question. There are different ways to define ‘useless’ but the most straight forward way is to say that something is ‘useful’ if you will one day have an opportunity to ‘use’ it for something in your life or your job. We hear all the time that if you don’t know math you won’t be able to compare two competing cell phone plans or you won’t know how big of a ladder to buy so that when you put it at an angle it still reaches the height you need it to. We are told that math is ‘useful’ in this way and while it is true that some math is useful in this way (like knowing the difference between a loan that has a 2% interest rate vs a 20% interest rate, for example), the vast majority of the math that is taught in school is absolutely not useful.

To follow Gary’s thoughtful reasoning, open the link and read the rest of his post.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Teachers

Washington Post Asks Eight Left-Leaning Columnists About Biden

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
167

I enjoyed reading this candid conversation among left-leaning columnists at the Washington Post about Biden’s candidacy. The conversation was moderated by Chris Suellentrip, the politics opinion editor of the Post.

What do you think?

President Biden is 80 years old and is running for a second term, more or less unopposed, in the Democratic primary. So I gathered a group of our left-leaning columnists for a conversation over email and asked: How do you feel about that?

Has Biden failed to be a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders, as he pledged to be in 2020? Should he have declared himself “one (term) and done,” like a college basketball star? Should the party have held a competitive primary instead of clearing the field, as is traditional for an incumbent president? Is the fascination with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s not-gonna-happen campaign a sign of nervousness about Biden 2024 in some portion of the Democratic primary electorate? And will you change your mind about any of these things if someone other than Donald Trump is the 2024 Republican nominee?

Dana Milbank: If hand-wringing translated into votes, Democrats would never lose an election. I find their fretting over Biden’s age tedious — and probably exaggerated by the disinformation from the right portraying him as drooling and senile. The wandering speeches, the gaffes and the other traits people now assign to his advanced age are the same traits I observed when covering him in the 1990s.

As a Gen Xer, sure, I would have preferred if Biden had offered himself as a one-term anti-Trump savior and cleared the way for a new generation. But a competitive primary would only have turned him into Carter ’80. It’s also just as likely that a decision not to run for reelection would have had the effect of anointing Kamala D. Harris, who by virtue of being a woman of color would make it easier for Trump to foment a 2016-style backlash of racism and misogyny.

Would all this change if Trump (or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) isn’t the GOP nominee? Well, sure. I suppose if Asa Hutchinson were the nominee it wouldn’t matter as much whom the Democrats put up, because he wouldn’t pose the same existential threat to American democracy. But I’m not yet declaring victory for Hutchinson.

Jennifer Rubin: So Biden is 80. Live with it. He’s certainly sharp enough to have solidified and expanded NATO, snookered Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the debt ceiling negotiations and racked up as impressive a first-term domestic record as any incumbent in memory. If inflation is less than 3 percent and job growth is still strong on Election Day, Biden will have pulled off the near-impossible soft-landing (with Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell as his co-pilot).

Paul Waldman: Of course Biden’s age is a concern, even if at the moment it’s only a theoretical one. The presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job, and it would have to be a pretty unusual 86-year-old (the age Biden would be at the end of a second term) who could handle it. But we haven’t yet seen any evidence of age having an effect on Biden’s decision-making or his energy. There are occasions when he appears old in public — a shuffling gait, a momentary inability to find the word he’s looking for — but that’s not the same as him not being able to perform the job.

For all the talk of building a bridge to the next generation, Biden was never going to serve one term and step down. He spent half a century trying to get to the Oval Office, and he won’t leave it voluntarily.

Perry Bacon Jr.: I am not thrilled that Joe Biden is running for a second term.

His approval ratings are significantly lower than Bill Clinton’s, George W. Bush’s or Barack Obama’s were at this stage of their presidencies, midway through their third years in office.

They are very similar to Trump’s numbers. In polls of a potential 2024 matchup, Biden is effectively tied with Trump. Biden would be the favorite against Trump (and probably DeSantis). But that’s because of how unpopular those two Republicans are, not Biden’s political strength.

I think the driving factor here is Biden’s age. People just feel like he is too old. I personally don’t see any evidence that Americans shouldbe worried about his health or mental capacity. But I hear concerns about his age all the time from people in my life who aren’t partisan Democrats. This concern about age shows up in basically every poll.

I think an incumbent Democratic president with Biden’s record who wasn’t 80 years old would be more popular and therefore have a better chance in next year’s election. And while I don’t think just any Democrat under age 80 (or 70) who was the party’s presumptive nominee would be polling better than Biden is against Trump, I think many younger Democrats would be stronger candidates in a 2024 general election.

For example, it seems pretty clear that if Democrats could agree, without a primary, that the party’s 2024 ticket would be Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (Mich.) as president and Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.) as vice president, that would be stronger electorally than Biden-Harris. Or say, Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.). What I mean is a ticket with a White person and a person of color, a man and a woman, two people who are generally in the mainstream of the party ideologically — and no one over age 70.

But there is no magic way to skip a primary, of course!

Ruth Marcus: Riffing off of how Perry phrased it, I wish Biden did not have to run for a second term. He is too old. No, he is not the drooler of overheated GOP imaginings, but he has slowed down, obviously and measurably. And 80 is too old, period, for the demanding job of the presidency. Let the torch be passed, etc.

Except for this: Biden needs to run. He (and Democrats) are correct about that assessment. If he were to have announced that he was stepping aside, the internecine warfare that would have erupted over Harris, the heiress apparent, versus everyone else, would have torn the party apart, or risked doing so, and opened the door too wide to risk a Republican president being elected.

And not just Trump. He is the biggest, most existential risk, and the primary driver of my “Biden must run” mentality. I used to believe Trump was a singular threat, and that there would not be Trumpism without Trump. But that was wrong. The forces he has unleashed are powerful and dangerous, and exist even in his absence from the scene. From my point of view, the risk to the Supreme Court alone is enough to justify doing whatever it takes to maximize the chance of a Democrat being elected (which means: Biden, Biden, Biden).

Eugene Robinson: Look, we all wish that Biden were, say, 60 instead of 80. But is there a younger Democrat who could have beaten Donald Trump in 2020? I doubt it. And is there a younger Democrat who could beat Trump in 2024? Maybe. I like Perry’s ticket of Whitmer and Warnock. But I don’t like the idea of taking another existential gamble with our democracy. If Trump is the GOP nominee, which seems likely, this will almost surely be another close election. We don’t have landslides anymore; and no matter how queasy Republican voters might be about four more years of Trump’s insanity, we should expect most of them to support their party’s nominee. It is unwise to count on the justice system to bail the nation out. On Election Day, Biden will be 82 and Trump will be 78. The “age issue” should be de minimus.

And, not incidentally, Biden has been a highly effective president who has instituted policies, at home and abroad, that I support. A president with his record deserves a second term — and congressional majorities to go along with it.

Greg Sargent: Improbably, Biden has been the guy with enough appeal to the middle needed to both beat Trump and to pass (parts of) a historically progressive agenda (bringing Bernie Sanders into the tent) while recasting it to the electorate (including affluent suburbanites who supposedly lean right economically) as sensible moderation. Biden seems uniquely well-positioned to not just beat Trump again but also to cement a broad, center-left ideological consensus with paradigm-shifting durability.

As for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., historically there have always been candidates who tap into disaffected pro-insurgent constituencies in the Democratic Party (Bill Bradley, Howard Dean, etc.). Kennedy represents a particularly ideologically heterodox and unbalanced version of this. It’s hard to imagine his support, such as it is, says anything meaningful or predictive about eventual support for Biden.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Early in the administration, I thought Biden wouldn’t seek a second term. He would find it appealing, I thought, to declare that he had achieved what he promised when he decided to run in the first place. He saved the country from a Trump second term, defended democracy, solved a bunch of big problems, restored the country’s standing abroad, notched a number of bipartisan victories and created an opening for a better kind of politics. Call it the Cincinnatus Option. He would spend the rest of his term being more praised than damned, the Republicans would have less interest in attacking him, and his popularity would go up because a lot of Americans (with their instinctive mistrust of politicians) would admire someone who could walk away from power.

That still sounds pretty good to me, but it’s not what happened. The reason it didn’t is, as Greg suggested, that Biden might be the only Democrat who can sit atop the various factions of the Democratic Party and bring them together.

If you ask yourself why Democrats are united behind Biden, why only cranks are running against him, it’s because Democrats across their various divisions agree that now is not the time for ideological Armageddon, which is what would happen if Biden stepped aside. And anyone who claims that a tough primary would be good for Biden should consider history. When they were incumbents, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were all weakened by primary fights (against Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan, respectively), and they all lost in the general election.

Does Biden’s age create challenges? Of course. Especially against anyone other than Trump. At the margins, Biden’s age could cost him votes, and the margins matter. My hunch is that Biden’s camp will try to find subtle ways of making his age at least a partial asset by stressing his seasoning, wisdom, experience, etc. It won’t be easy, but they have to do some of this. His camp also made a mistake by not lifting up Harris early on and trying to turn her into an asset. They have realized this and are working on doing that now. Biden’s age means more voters will be looking at her as a possible successor, and her favorability ratings need to go up.

Rubin: It’s a relief to have an empathetic, decent human being in the White House. While it is fashionable to pine for someone new and young, with our democracy still frightfully fragile and with war raging in Europe, I don’t think a younger governor or senator would be a better choice. Biden can pass the baton in 2028. Maybe with age comes some old-fashioned sense of propriety, civic virtue, common courtesy and, dare we say, dignity. I’ll take it.

Milbank: I think the Biden-is-too-old theme is itself a demonstration that we’re all forced to live in a world shaped by disinformation from the right. We’ve been hearing from Fox News since the 2020 campaign (when Biden was hidden in his “basement”) about Biden’s “cognitive decline” and his struggle to “string two sentences together.” He has been routinely described since then as “senile,” as a man with “obviously declining mental faculties” who is “a cognitive mess, and he has no idea that today is Wednesday.” During the debt ceiling fight, Kevin McCarthy offered to bring “soft food” to the White House for Biden. After the debt deal, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) marveled that “Republicans got outsmarted by a president who can’t find his pants.”

There’s every reason to believe this “senile” old coot will outwit his Republican opponent in ’24.

Sargent: Democrats have won or outperformed in the last three national elections. Yet we’re still constantly running down rabbit holes into debates about why Dems suck so much at politics and how Trump continues to outfox them among working-class voters.

Democratic struggles with some working-class constituencies are real, but some proportion is in order here. MAGA continues to alienate a majority of the country.

Robinson: I’ve had a couple of occasions to spend extended periods of time with Biden, including a long chat on Air Force One, and I can attest that whatever else anybody thinks about him, he’s not senile. And I’ve seen him turn a scheduled quick half-hour of meet-and-greet with supporters into an hour-plus marathon, at the end of a long day, that exhausted aides half his age.

Dionne: Without formally breaking with either Clinton or Obama, Biden has moved the party’s policymaking past the consensus that influenced those earlier administrations. His appointments have given the party’s progressive wing a strong voice in areas such as labor rights, civil rights, trade and antitrust, even as he has kept the party’s more middle-ground legislators and voters on his side — by, for example, refusing to challenge the Federal Reserve’s efforts to contain inflation (even if the administration devoutly hopes it lets up on rate increases).

And the president’s economic record turns out to be very good. Inflation has come down much faster than Biden’s critics expected, and the country has so far avoided the recession many of those detractors predicted. It’s a long way between now and November 2024, but at least for now, Biden has the better of the economic argument.

The age issue is obviously one of the right’s favorite talking points, but from my own encounters, I share Gene Robinson’s view that a picture of Biden as some sort of doddering old guy is flatly wrong. Biden is especially sharp when he turns to U.S. foreign policy and makes a persuasive case that the United States is now in a much stronger position in the world, partly because it is building alliances across Asia to contain China’s power. Foreign policy won’t decide the next election, but voters who have a sense of security are more likely to support the incumbent.

But realism requires coming to terms with the age issue anyway. Like it or not, Biden’s age will be brought into play whenever he makes a miscue or garbles a sentence or stumbles or looks less forceful — even if whatever is going wrong has nothing to do with his age. Beneath the surface, the Biden forces know it’s something they have to struggle with, not because of what Fox News commentators will say but because of conversations among not particularly ideological voters over back fences and in neighborhood cafes.

Bacon: If the Democrats’ only potential options for the 2024 ticket were: 1) Nominate Biden without a real primary; 2) Conduct a primary in which Harris would likely win without any serious challenge; 3) Conduct a primary in which Harris carried the Black primary vote overwhelmingly but lost to someone with a heavily White base (say Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg), I can see why the party kind of informally opted for No. 1. After all, Harris wasn’t a great candidate in 2019, few Black voters backed Buttigieg in that primary and Biden has the electoral advantages of being White, male and the incumbent president.

But I suspect there were two other potential outcomes, if Biden had announced in January that he was not seeking a second term: 4) Harris wins against a crowded primary field and in doing so demonstrates she is a strong candidate for a general election, like Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016; or 5) Harris runs but another candidate (say, Whitmer) builds a broad coalition and decisively defeats her in the primary.

So I am frustrated that Democrats are running a candidate who in my view is too conciliatory and centrist in the face of a radicalized Republican Party, but also a candidate whose centrism and conciliation isn’t being rewarded by centrist/independent/swing voters with more approval and support. Biden’s age makes his reelection really dicey — something voters keep saying in poll after poll but the Democratic Party has decided to ignore.

All that said, Biden has been fairly good on policy and would be much better than any of the Republicans running. So I will be voting for him next November without any hesitation. I think he has been a better president than Clinton or Obama. He has been less centrist and cautious than I expected. He has embraced the progressive thinking that emerged from 2013 to 2020, instead of being stuck in old ways. He has appointed some great judges, most notably Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. He has also been very pro-labor and more skeptical of big business than other modern presidents.

The Democratic Party has moved in a more liberal direction — and Biden moved with the party. Great.

Waldman: The good news for Democrats is that, at the moment at least, they have so much going for them heading into 2024: a strong economy, a broadly popular agenda, and an opposition committed to a hateful politics that their base seems to want, but that a majority of the electorate finds repugnant.

Finally, you have the likely nomination of Trump, who cost the GOP the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022. Everything that made people choose Biden over Trump three years ago — that Biden is a decent human being with conciliatory impulses who would govern in a responsible way — is no less true today than it was then. So for all the unease among Democrats (which Perry is absolutely right about), they’re in about as good a position as they could have hoped for.

Categories Biden, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Politics, Republicans, Trump
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