Mark Bauerlein | Vox

The job of the education secretary isn’t to defend public schools. It’s to help kids learn.

2017-03-07T16:25:36-05:00

Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos, with Donald Trump. | Drew Angerer / Getty

Betsy DeVos doesn’t support public schools. She didn’t attend them as a student, and she has never worked in the system. Wealthy and religious, she has no experience with financial aid or Pell Grants, student loans or special education. Her passion is to help parents find alternatives to traditional pathways through charters and vouchers. As Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) stated in her decision against DeVos, the primary duty of the secretary of education is to “strengthen our public schools,” but everything in Devos’s background makes her a poor advocate for them. Her “lack of experience” disqualifies her for the job.

That’s the argument.

But when we cast a cold look at the performance of schools in recent years, it’s hard not to count the very vices alleged by her detractors as the opposite, as virtues sorely needed at the present time.

Last year at a public school in Southern California, my niece’s 12th-grade teacher led the students to the football field one afternoon for a little exercise in social awareness. She lined them up side by side and then pronounced a series of directions. According to their life situation, the students took one step forward or backward. The directions included,

“If you come from a single-parent household, take one step back”
“If one or both of your parents have a college degree, take one step forward”
“If you can show affection for your romantic partner in public without fear of ridicule or violence, take one step forward”
“If you constantly feel unsafe walking alone at night, take one step back”

It’s called the Privilege Walk, and it’s not an uncommon activity in high schools and college. You can see a version of it here. The purpose is to highlight disadvantages some have in life through no fault of their own. When my niece talked about it, she rolled her eyes, not because she denies inequities in the world but because the whole setup was so stagy and manipulative and solemn.

I had a different reaction: Why spend precious class time on non-academic social consciousness exercises when the academic results of public schooling in America are so poor? The Obama administration boasted of improving graduation rates, yes, but you can do that by lowering the bar — that is, lowering cut scores for graduation exams and inflating grades. But that won’t help students if they haven’t learned more math, history, science, and literature.

Consider the trends:

Since 2005, SAT reading scores have dropped by 14 points. A writing component was added to the SAT in 2006, and scores have dropped every year since then except for two years when they were flat. Math scores for 2015 were the lowest in 20 years. The expanding pool of test takers, a common explanation for the slide, doesn’t fully account for it.
On the ACT’s measure of “college readiness” in math, English, reading, and science, slightly more than one-third of test takers met the benchmarks in three subjects, while another one-third did not meet any(!) of the benchmarks. That means that one-third of high school seniors who aim to go to college are unlikely to earn a B in any of those subjects.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams (the “Nation’s Report Card,” administered by the Education Department’s National Center for Educational Statistics), only one-quarter of 12th-graders are proficient in civics, one-fifth in geography, just over one-third (37 percent) in reading, one-fifth (22 percent) in science, and one-eighth (12 percent) in US history. Only one-quarter of them reach proficiency in math.

These outcomes run against the rise in graduation rates as an indication of stronger student learning.

Per-pupil spending keeps rising, with dubious returns

At the same time, we have another discrepancy, outcomes versus public school funding. President Trump emphasized it in his inaugural speech when he mentioned “an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.” Adjusted for inflation, the national average for per-pupil spending rose steadily until the 2008 financial crisis, going from $8,600 in 1991-’92, to $9,900 in 2000-’01, to $11,600 in 2009-’10. In 2014, in spite of the strong hit that government revenues took after the crisis, per-pupil spending is still at $11,009. (See Table 8 of this report.)

As the cost-benefit numbers continue to look bleak, the qualifications of a public school insider should mean less and less. And the more politicians and commentators insist that the first responsibility of the secretary of education is to represent and support public schools, the more we have an example of “capture” in government.

Capture takes place when an agency charged with monitoring an industry or profession ends up in the service of it. The agency or official starts to regard the object of evaluation as a constituency that must be supported. When the governor of a state gets too close to the public employee unions around negotiating time, he has stopped representing the people of his state and become a partisan of special interests. He has been captured.

When the opponents of Betsy DeVos hail public schools as the first beneficiary of the Department of Education, they do the same thing. They forget the civic principle of “by the people, for the people.” I saw the pressures to do so while working at the National Endowment for the Arts in the mid-2000s. Whoever leads that agency faces a powerful group of artists, museums, concert halls, after-school arts programs, and state arts agencies that clamor for more support and more speechmaking in the bully pulpit by the NEA chair.

There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s exactly what they’re supposed to do. But the chair, while agreeing with their aims, must remind them that there is another group that comes first: the American people. The federal agency exists to support artists and arts institutions, but only insofar as their work benefits the citizens.

In the case of the Department of Education, the Cabinet secretary should not be primarily the representative of, or advocate for, public schools and all the people who work in them. His or her constituency is not teachers, superintendents, and the rest of the personnel. It is the students. He labors not, first, to ensure sufficient funding for facilities and research and curriculum and professional development. Those things count only as long as they improve the education of the young.

We ought to keep our minds open to promising educational alternatives

Traditional public schools are the main mechanism for educating young people, but we now have alternative models. Some of them are weak, but many of them are great successes with long waiting lists. Instead of focusing on public schools as the singular obligation of the secretary, let’s add to the list the kids at Harlem Success Academy, the youths who have profited from the voucher-based DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, homeschoolers who are increasingly favored by selective colleges, and teenagers who’ve stayed in school because of the flexibility of Florida Virtual School.

These alternatives to traditional public schooling should, of course, be held to the same standards. Indeed, one of the advantages of charter and for-profit schools has been that the failing ones don’t survive for very long. The system weeds them out. The secretary of education should support this quality control and be just as vigilant in monitoring progress with them as he is with the public schools. Indeed, as the alternative schooling movement spreads, one can imagine it attempting the same kind of capture that every other large industry aims for in its relations with the federal government.

If done with integrity, however, this diversification of primary and secondary education is clearly a threat to the privileged status of public schools. In objecting to Betsy DeVos on the grounds that she is insufficiently committed to the public schools above all other deliveries of education, her opponents are maintaining a narrow and disappointing status quo, whether they realize it or not.

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.

This piece is part of The Big Idea, a section for outside contributors’ opinions about, and analysis of, the most important issues in politics, science, and culture.

A conservative scholar makes the case that Trump is the disruptive force America needs

2016-10-12T09:02:36-04:00

Trump’s ability to steamroll establishment politicians underscored his distinctiveness. | Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty

After last week’s revelations of Donald Trump’s raunchy braggadocio, his opponents feel warmly vindicated. They knew it all the time. But they remain incredulous. How, they still ask, could such a vulgar jerk have ended up a nominee for president? In this, they fail to recognize a core aspect of his appeal — not his specific policies or economic acumen, but his ability to subvert social norms that many people have come to loathe.

For example, early in his campaign, Trump took to making a certain terse directive a feature of his rallies. He would interrupt his monologue and tell everyone to turn around and face the reporters and camera operators covering the event. “Look at them!” he would shout as 3,000-plus crowd members stared and pointed their cell phones. “They’re dishonest!”

It was a tense moment for the press and a pleasing one for everybody else. People who felt condescended to by Katie Couric et al were able to put them on the spot. This was participatory democracy! You could see the gleam on the faces of the audience as they rotated as one, photographed the photographers, and heckled the writers who, in one instance I watched, squirmed and grinned nervously in the light of Trump and the Trumpists’ disdain.

You have to appreciate the brilliance of the move. Suddenly, the rules of political spectacle collapsed. The rules say that the media are there to broadcast and not to be noticed. Office seekers respect them because they crave coverage of their campaigns. But here was a candidate who declared open war on the media, drawing them out of the background and into the arena. “Look at them.” This was no ordinary complaint of media bias. It was an antic, unnerving expose of fake neutrality.

Again and again, Trump changed the terms of the debate

It has happened again and again in the Trump campaign. Who would have thought that the establishment’s choice, Jeb Bush, could be discredited by so apolitical an epithet as low-energy? Trump drove the indignity home over and over, and Bush appeared flummoxed by it — thus proving the charge. Trump sensed that Republican primary voters didn’t want a sober, experienced conservative who might alter the course of the Obama years. They wanted a fighter.

Trump managed, too, to demolish the prevailing bipartisan free-trade dogma with another seemingly unhinged sally: the stark image of a 2,000-mile wall. It didn’t matter that such a wall would not be built, let alone that Mexico wouldn’t pay for it. The image did its rhetorical work. Trump instinctively realized that the way to broach free trade and immigration in the campaign was not with details. It was to go straight to the most contrary idea he could imagine and pare it down to one word, wall.

And has any Republican politician in the last 25 years been able to usher Bill Clinton, that alleged political genius, off the stage as handily as Trump did last December after Hillary Clinton raised the sexist charge against Trump? A few unsubtle threats involving the Clintons’ seamy past was all it took. It required a quirky kind of genius to change the terms so unexpectedly and make a presumed asset into a liability. This knack for breaking through political custom shouldn’t be underestimated or scorned as mere vulgarity and bombast.

Our culture has reached a point of exhaustion

While these actions enthralled primary voters, intellectuals and journalists witnessed them and judged Trump an aberration. Liberals saw him as a throwback to the days of sexism and racism. Conservatives thought that, with a weak candidate on the other side, the White House was theirs if only Republicans could find an accomplished center-right figure. Neither side saw Trump coming — but they should have.

Intellectuals are supposed to understand that history works on a deeper level than what day-to-day events show. We can look back on the past and see trends and truths underway that people at the time didn’t recognize. The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel terms it “the cunning of Reason,” the advance of certain ideals and values, the spirit of the age, running beneath or through particular actions and individuals.

When one stage of history begins to run down, Hegel says, a “World-historical individual” often arises, a willful, single-minded strong man who disrupts the status quo and embodies everyone’s profoundest hopes and fears. He needn’t be bright or virtuous, just in perfect tune with the moment. Sometimes he is creative, sometimes destructive, but he is inevitable.

Trump was inevitable (as was Bernie Sanders). Our culture in late-2015 had reached a point of exhaustion, and after eight years of Obama and eight years of W., people had little faith that politics-as-usual would reinvigorate it. It wouldn’t take long for a brash populist figure, crafty in his sallies, careless of social dogma, and belligerent to the media, to emerge.

If our problems were only economic and political — say, bad trade agreements and over-regulation — deliberate adjustments in law and policy could remedy them. Jeb Bush would be one to do it. But the current disorders run deeper than wage declines and failed adventures abroad. They strike to the meaning of America and the grounds of civic life. The national mood is sour, and it’s not all about jobs and medical costs. There is something else to many people’s dismay.

The problem is this: Our society has sunk so far into sensitivity and guilt that it has relinquished the liberalism that both liberals and conservatives espouse. I mean the liberalism that gives people a bit of room to think what they want to think; that doesn’t automatically define one’s character by one’s politics or religion; that accepts human frailty and forgives people for brief lapses into racism, sexism, and any other prejudice.

This liberalism demands of citizens a thicker skin. It accepts that an open society, religious liberty, and free speech cause individuals the occasional bump into annoying words and deeds. The bar of reaction and protest against them must remain high or else conflicts will get out of hand and we’ll regulate ourselves into a testy polity. A society filled with people easily offended ends up an illiberal one running on manners and norms of deference and guardedness. They make up an etiquette, not a doctrine. When someone violates it, we don’t argue with him. We deplore him.

Americans are tired of being told, "watch what you say"

This illiberalism is affecting more and more of our nation. The dean at Emory College recently sent us a memo regarding the riots in Charlotte and elsewhere sparked by police shootings of black men. The events have been “especially disturbing,” he writes; “many students of color have been emotionally affected.” Teachers are to keep counseling services at hand and grant students leeway if they miss class and fail to turn in assignments. They should be careful in class discussions, too, because it “requires mediating between competing voices that are under significant emotional pressure.”

I imagine most of my colleagues stopped reading after a few sentences, quickly gleaning the real message: “Watch what you say.” In a time of sensitivity, you never know what might cause distress. When Martin O’Malley said in a Netroots gathering in Phoenix, “Black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter,” he may have thought he was voicing Martin Luther King’s message of universal humanity. But boos arose instantly and Mr. O’Malley’s follow-up apology captured illiberal sensitivity at work: “I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”

Gov. O’Malley’s self-abasement was matched by the indignation of his accusers. Together they produced the 10,000th apology ritual in American public life, which grows phonier every time it is rehearsed. But everyone plays along. When feeling and passion — tremendous passion and depth of feeling — become the yardstick of conduct and right, amplified by the media and politicians, the nation is going to go a little crazy. This is not a society moving toward greater enlightenment and tolerance. It is the advance of taboo and tribalism. When “All lives matter” slides from a noble Civil Rights sentiment to a post-Ferguson misdemeanor, a correction is in order.

Trump provided one last February in a speech in Alabama. When a group of black youths marched behind him with fists raised, he muttered, “Ay, yi,” but then waited quietly until they passed. Some in the crowd started to jeer, but Trump intervened to contain the rancor and, more, counter the Black Lives Matter outlook. “Folks, folks,” he said, “look, we have to love everybody. All lives matter. Remember that. All … lives … matter.” Then he proceeded to talk about Marco Rubio sweating too much.

He made another correction in the South Carolina debate when he exploded the Republican dogma on Iraq. “Obviously,” he said, “the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake … We should never have been in Iraq.” The fact that Trump’s point, which shocked the other candidates, didn’t hurt him with the voters proves that it was a dissent in need of a voice. People question Trump’s claim to have opposed the war back then, but his honesty wasn’t the point. The point was that he had the pluck to say something many viewers believed but nobody else on stage was willing to say.

Intrusions such as these are necessary. Public life in America has become too repressed and scripted. When Mr. Trump pronounces, “America First,” some of the people in his crowds feel profoundly satisfied. Is it an assertion of jingoistic arrogance, a shot at global economics and multiculturalism, an echo of Lindbergh-ism? Or does it tap into, more simply, a natural impulse to defend your home and take pride in your nation? When Trump promised violence should Black Lives Matter activists grab at his microphone, as they had at a Bernie Sanders event, was he displaying racism, or just insisting that he had a right to speak and not to be silenced?

The problem today is that debates over such questions cannot proceed. Sensitivities over race, sex, citizenship, and religion run too high. In this situation, only a blunt, unpredictable, impolitic leader will intrude and force the conversation. The prevailing argument against Mr. Trump among conservative intellectuals is this: “Yes, our society is in a cranky, mendacious condition, but we have bigger problems than hypersensitivity, and besides, you’re a fool if you think Trump is the answer. He embodies the very suspicion and resentment you regret.”

A revolt against identity politics and class envy

Perhaps so. It certainly seems that overly delicate feelings in the citizenry are less important than a $19 trillion debt. But civic thinkers from the founders forward have understood that the American experiment depends upon what they called the “national character.” If individuals lose that rollicking independence hailed by Emerson and Whitman, if touchiness becomes an acceptable American trait, a reduction in the debt won’t help. As for the resentment Mr. Trump emits, yes, it is there, but it’s a different kind. His resentment counters the resentment found in identity politics, class envy, and anti-Americanism. And in a culture war, as an opening salvo, it’s a better weapon than the nuanced, policy-minded approach of professional politicians.

It looks like Trump has little chance of winning. When Secretary Clinton becomes president, she will face a decision. Did Donald Trump lose because of his insensitivity, and does it mean that her administration must promote sensitivity culture? Or does Donald Trump’s popularity with a fair portion of the populace mean that sensitivity has gone too far and her administration must pull back from it?

Given Clinton’s efforts to court African-American and LGBTQ voters, we may expect her to follow the first course. But as we can tell from what’s happening on college campuses, where everyone walks in fear of committing or receiving a microaggression, that is not going to make America more inclusive and civil. It is going to plant more anxiety in human affairs, and people won’t like it. They’ll turn to another Trump. This is what oversensitivity provokes.

Remember that Trump has talked about running for president for three decades, but his candidacies have gone nowhere — until now. That’s because the Era of Hurt Feelings hadn’t reached the point of summoning its opponent, someone to cry out, “Enough!” and mobilize all the ones who are sick of wearing a straitjacket. We’re there now, at the dead-end of offense taking, even though Trump looks to lose. People are people, they have a tolerance threshold, and utopians always self-destruct. President Clinton had better realize that.

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.