Whither Education? Resolve for the New Year
This piece first appeared in the Dean's Substack account.
To say the world of education is facing headwinds surely qualifies for understatement of the month.
Where to start? With the November election, which left just about everyone somewhere between distraught and exuberant depending on political leanings, came familiar rumblings that the US Department of Education might be sentenced to the political guillotine, and, if so, what will happen to funding for disadvantaged youth, financial aid, students with disabilities, national assessment, data collection, civil rights, and many other essential programs. Then, as we had to contemplate the symbolic and practical meaning of federal withdrawal – just when data were pointing to the disastrous effects of COVID on average student performance – came news of a calamitous drop in US scores on international tests with even more depressing evidence of widening gaps between majority and minority students.
In the wake of the pandemic, it would have been bizarre had the international assessments not registered decline – we had already seen the effects on NAEP after years of modest gains – but still our showing on comparative tests was hard to swallow. And the fact that similar declines were suffered by most other industrialized democracies offered only faint comfort, although not for those of us dispirited by the sudden inversion of trends in human progress worldwide. How well those scores predict valued outcomes, say the competitiveness of our economy or our quality of life, is debatable, and gloomy scenarios are again worth seasoning with chunky grains of salt.
In any case, it’s worth remembering why the last major push to dismantle the Department failed, circa 1983: even the most ardent dreamers of a reduced federal role had to square their ideology with evidence (imperfect as it might have been) that we were a Nation at Risk – and that this was not a good time for our government to signal abdication from its national responsibilities. (For a terrific recap of the political machinations leading to the establishment of the Department, see here.) Whether lessons from 40 years ago, and what we’ve learned from wandering over the rocky terrain of education policy since then, will be applied in 2025 remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that decent people everywhere know it will take concerted political will to get us back on track.
For many of us, the phrase political will seems to have been overtaken by political willfulness, as zealots of left and right uphold their extremist traditions and blame convenient scapegoats for our real and imagined woes. Even if you’re not moved by declining achievement scores, surely the smog of anger and the rising tides of tribal polarization that drown out rational discourse – in education and more generally – must give pause. At risk of pushing the idiom, the ideological climate is proving as deadly as the meteorological kind, and the storms are spreading. It’s bad enough that prospective K-12 teachers anticipate active-shooter training as an early part of in-service professional development; on top of that they can look forward to attending local school board meetings if they want to experience rhetorical (and even physical) violence among parents, legislators, principals, and peers fighting the latest culture wars. In higher education, protests staged by handfuls of students and faculty joined by mobs of local agitators – disproportionately congregated in the nation’s most selective institutions – cast a shadow over the whole academy. (In the New York Times alone, there were 1100 mentions of “campus protest” in the year following October 7, 2023, an average of about 35 per month or more than one a day; much of the coverage centered on places like Columbia and Harvard, where many Times readers and writers got their education.)
We are now half-way through the academic year, and it’s not clear what to anticipate or how we will cope. With certification of the electoral college and inauguration coming soon, installation of a new executive branch cabinet that promises to be, well, challenging to say the least, and geopolitical unrest in much of the world, who is not feeling unsettled? As an amateur historian of American education, I get some consolation, but only a little, by remembering our storied past, aptly called “a grand experiment.” It is a saga of expectations and disappointments, innovation and stagnation, noble hopes and dreams deferred, great progress and frustrating regression. One lesson is that in times of unrest, public attention spasmodically turns to the schools, for their alleged culpability and for their role in reversing wickedly complex economic and social trends. Both sides of that equation are shaky: whether it’s about economic productivity or national security or life expectancy, education makes a difference – but is neither the sole determinant of individual and social well-being nor likely to be able to fix things alone. (I elaborate on that theme in my recent book, which calls on schools to play a role – albeit in a drama that needs a sizable cast.)
What to do?
For those who believe in “evidence-informed” decision making, the good news is we have knowledge and experience to help us think about what’s happening and, perhaps more importantly, help us restore at least a bit of rational optimism.
But optimism is not an excuse for complacency and complicity. We have the professional and patriotic obligation to confront the demagogues who have again arisen to attack the essence of liberal education. I may suffer from a bad case of confirmation bias, but my sense is that good people everywhere are on the case, demonstrating the resilience of American political culture and community, a dogged determination to repair the world (or at least their parts of it), and a possibly unique capacity for introspection and engagement as core requirements for progress.
I italicize those words on purpose. For with our willingness to confront the forces we deem hazardous to our collective future must come an acknowledgement that we bear some responsibility for our fragile present, and that we had better look into ourselves as we push back against those “others.” We need to resist the temptation to fortify the membranes of our bubbles, discredit and demean the opposition, and insist on preserving a comfortable status quo. Is it just linguistic coincidence that complicity, complacency, and comfort all start with the same three letters?
To complicate things further, here lies what might be called a paradox of humility. Honest and open-minded people who are willing to acknowledge their own flawed thinking, who know the value of hearing others’ viewpoints, are perhaps also the most likely to be aware of their personal limitations. Even morally upright citizens may legitimately conclude that they can have only negligible impact, and that it’s therefore naïve to expect them, qua individuals, to invest the resources needed to make a real difference. (I am reminded of the small statue of Don Quixote on our mantle that my dad would point to when he heard me seething, understandably, about this or that injustice in the world…) As the great political economist Mancur Olson argued some 60 years ago, the cost of organizing collective action can be a nontrivial obstacle to its implementation.
But “can be” is not the same as “is.” It is emotionally damaging and empirically wrong to lose hope in the prospect of human collective response to the complex challenges we face. This was, in grossly simplified terms, the insight of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, who challenged the relentlessly dismal predictions stemming from the theory of the “tragedy of the commons;” and is an enduring lesson of the great 20th century economist and activist Albert Hirschman, who bristled against the inevitability of “exit” in the face of social and economic decline. I believe that as scholars of pedagogy we are especially well positioned to lead in the needed collective response, and that as rational decision makers we should welcome possibilities for partnership to reinforce our resolve.
From rhetoric to action: the role of education schools
At risk of stating the obvious, universities with an abiding commitment to serve the “public good” must assert and reaffirm their allegiance to norms and principles of liberal education. If we are to be faithful to the vision and hopes abridged in our mission statements, we must seize the current moment and invest what we can in educational excellence and in the pursuit of egalitarian, democratic, pluralist principles enshrined in our young republic’s founding documents.
To do that well, we can take advantage of our education schools, home to faculty, students, and staff with the expertise, experience, and passions that are essential to the cause. Who better than we to re-calibrate the teaching of difficult history, to demonstrate the value of pedagogy oriented toward analytical thought, to convene our intellectually and demographically diverse colleagues for civic exchange and scientific discovery, to revive trust in objective inquiry as essential to moral democracy, to take the lead in reviving the liberal academic enterprise?
And just think of the counterfactual: what message would we be sending by under-investing in the people and projects of our complex ecology of university-based education programs? If the symbolic effect of closing the Department of Education is disturbing – especially at a time of national anxiety over the quality of schools and schooling – then by analogy we must consider the damage that would result from institutions stepping back from their role in preparing future educators and education researchers. What better gift to the enemies of liberal education than our surrender?
Yes, this may sound self-serving, just more special pleading, another argument against the temptation for short-term savings that risk ruinous long-term consequences. But you don’t have to be a die-hard believer in the magic of markets to acknowledge that sometimes self-interest coincides with the common good. So, my role as dean of an education school should not automatically disqualify me from touting our comparative intellectual advantages. Nor does it require me to stodgily defend an aging status quo, either. This is not the time to dig our heels into the muddy turf of all our existing programs and insist that what we’ve been doing is all we should be doing. On the contrary, it means rising to the occasion and making sometimes tough decisions, based on review of available data; it means experimenting with “best bets” for innovation in the content and form of our work; it means evaluating our efforts and adjusting to evidence of imperfection or failure (to paraphrase from Bill Gates, “innovation without evaluation is just another fad.”)
Leading education schools across the country (including ours at GW!) have been engaged in that assignment for some time, propelled and circumscribed simultaneously by exogenous changes in “demand” for our products – some “structural” but most the result of the pandemic and other (hopefully unique) circumstances – and the reality of reduced resources. (News of budget woes – here and here, for example – is troubling, to say the least.) To quit now would be analogous to turning back, fatigued, after swimming half-way across the English Channel. We have come a long way and many of us have had to implement painful program and staff cuts. From my local experience and discussions with fellow deans, I’ll go out on a limb and project that many education-school faculty and staff today are feeling depleted, if not exhausted, but are energized by a vision of leadership and progress. To borrow the familiar adage, we have shown how to not let a crisis go to waste. Now we must stay the course on our journey of rebound, reform, and reimagination.
Lessons from education as a field of study
Although often treated as the unwanted sibling of the behavioral and social sciences, education enjoys a remarkable track record of high-quality research and methodological rigor built on rich theoretical foundations. Here I mention two themes, which will be familiar to philosophers and practitioners of teaching and learning, which I hope might anchor our discussions and actions.
I used to think …
“Positionality,” the practice of acknowledging prior experience, dispositions, and values that may affect the design and interpretation of research, is de rigeur in various academic circles. Critics may cringe at the intrusion of personality and identity in the workings of science, but when used judiciously it can flag hidden biases and other threats to objectivity. In that spirit, I suggest we work with our colleagues across the disciplines to encourage introspection and humility. For inspiration, I recommend an anthology called I Used To Think…And Now I Think, in which education researchers reflected on how their minds changed in response to evidence. Edited by a distinguished political scientist of education (a friend who passed away recently), the short book is a model for scholars and teachers who have the courage to update their “priors” based on new findings and interpretations. My friendly amendment is to retitle the rubric as “now I [still] THINK,” the triple-entendre to suggest it is okay to change one’s positions, or hold on to them, if the choice is based on rational deliberation. As argued in this masterful history of the United States, evidence and inquiry were themes of the American revolution, so this should not be a big ask.
Balancing the “what and how”
A fundamental question is whether we are supposed to emphasize “what to think” or “how to think.” It was a central theme in the doctrine of academic freedom issued by the American Association of University Professors in 1915. I used to think (!) teaching in the US was relatively less prone to indoctrination than in other countries, but thanks to my colleague Jon Zimmerman of the University of Pennsylvania I now think that was probably too charitable. In any case, I lean toward equipping students with habits of mind to help them reach (or revise) their own resolutions of complex questions, with minimal interference from teachers, administrators, school board members, media moguls, partisan operatives, self-righteous pundits, and religious authoritarians. I’m not suggesting that teachers (or administrators) purify themselves of values or feign total neutrality, which would be a disservice to the ideals of civic engagement in our messy and argumentative pluralist democracy. Finding the right blend of moral clarity and objective inquiry requires deft handling: for guidance, I turn to work by scholars and practitioners of the social studies and humanities. If members of our academic community – across our diverse disciplines – voluntarily applied an imagined scale of neutrality and indoctrination to their work, we might dispel the perception that our institutions are trapped in grips of ideological fervor at the expense of rigorous evidentiary inquiry.
From theory to practice
Just as schools alone cannot “save democracy,” so too no single university or college of education should be tasked with the broad agenda of repair. Cognizant of incentives and disincentives that constrain rational action, I am encouraged by possibilities to join forces with like-minded institutions and initiatives. Here I will mention just three.
AAU education school deans
Founded in 1900, the American Association of Universities currently has 71 members with significant research programs that produce over 600,000 degrees (undergraduate and graduate) and that employ close to 900,000 people. Deans of education schools in AAU institutions meet regularly to learn from one another and think together about their role as “influencers” in the broader enterprise of teacher preparation and education research. (There were some 1.5 million students in education programs in 2020, or roughly eight percent of the total postsecondary student population, enrolled in over 2100 programs). At a recent gathering, topics ranged from campus climate to academic freedom to the future of diversity to the advent of artificial intelligence – among the most pressing issues we face. Whether such deliberations will make a difference depends, of course, on the deans’ commitment to participate, on the support they receive from their home institutions, and on the willingness of colleagues across the disciplines to engage. One goal should be to leverage the reputation and accomplishments of the AAU in meetings with government and other leaders: the next meeting is planned for Washington, DC (to be co-hosted by GW and the University of Pennsylvania).
Penn Washington
A new initiative aims to enhance the role of universities in preserving and reinforcing the nation’s democratic values. Its most recent project, entitled “Penn Project on Rebuilding Government-Higher Education Relations,” addressed “the growing distrust between Congress and higher education institutions … and devising strategies for future enhancement.” I was honored to be among the invited participants from major colleges and universities, media outlets, foundations, and the private sector, for discussions of trends in college pricing, academic freedom, and the future of liberal academic values. With a picture-window view of the Capitol literally across the street from the meeting room, the symbolism was sharp: what are the most promising strategies to uphold the centuries-long tradition of academic-government engagement? Our deliberations put evidence ahead of advocacy, and the mood was cautiously optimistic about how such projects might advance the cause of liberal education in the near and more distant future.
Democracy and education
We will soon announce officially the launch of a new multi-year initiative, housed at GW, to advance research-informed strategies for improved civics education in schools and other settings. The project is intended as a collaborative hub for education leaders, foundations, think tanks, scientific societies, and institutions of higher learning. Its principal goal is continued attention to the dual roles of education as producer of “human capital” and “social capital,” the former signifying attention to workforce skills and the economy and the latter reflecting renewed public interest in education to foster knowledge and dispositions needed in pluralist democracies. The concept of “hub” emphasizes that good leadership includes building coalitions needed to sustain progress in our grand experiment; and it means connecting education to social justice, political economy, and the physical environment. Both through its process – balanced deliberations focused on empirical evidence and professional experience – and its products – briefing papers, research agendas, public workshops – the initiative will shine new light on promising innovations and on the need for diligence in reinforcing foundations of democratic education. (Stay tuned for more information about this project in the months ahead.)
Happy New Year
As we bid farewell to a terribly stressful year and welcome what we hope will be better days ahead, I’ll paraphrase a familiar joke: pessimists may be worried about 2025 … while optimists are starting to worry about 2026. My advice is that we “worry efficiently,” that we find a healthy balance between anxiety over observed trends and confidence in our ability to fix them. I remember a walk I took near Reagan Airport a few days after 9-11. The eerie quiet of parked planes brought tears. Then a passerby in military garb patted my shoulder and said, “don’t worry, we’ll be back.”
This isn’t the first time our educational values have been placed at risk. We’ll be back.
Best wishes to you and your loved ones for a year of peace, freedom, and good health.