False flag of insecurities

Yesterday I was on a panel at an event for policy grad students, and it raised some alarm bells about how we teach aspiring policy folks to think.

The panel I was on was called “The Insecurity Agenda” and it was supposed to focus on how out-of-school factors can impact academic outcomes, and also make improving schools more challenging. Housing insecurity, food insecurity, transportation insecurity, etc.

I agree that we need to understand how poverty impacts education, and when poverty makes it too difficult for a child to learn regardless of how good the school is. Except the challenge is that there are schools giving poor kids an excellent education, despite their list of insecurities. So should we care about the insecurity agenda?

I’m not sure I’ll get invited back, because I led off by saying that while it’s important to talk about these issues, it’s equally important that we don’t allow this to become a list of excuses as to why a school isn’t doing its job. Education is supposed to be the path out of poverty. To argue that we can’t expect much from education if we don’t first tackle poverty negates the purpose of education. If that’s the case we might as well do as Billy Crystal suggests as Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, which is “close up shop and look for loose change.” But that’s not why any of us here — we’re here to storm the castle.

Now, this panel was part of a broader 3-day session on education policy so I think these students got a lot of other messages about the field. But I still worry that there’s an idea circulating that the reason we haven’t fixed education is because we haven’t uncovered the real problem. That reeks of hunting for a silver bullet. Maybe the next generation of policy wonks and researchers dream of finding the One True Solution, but I don’t think supporting this aspiration is particularly useful to the field.

I do think that we can do a better job of giving teachers and school administrators better information on how to recognize when students are showing signs of homelessness or food insecurity. And then give those teachers and school leaders somewhere to turn - someone to call, a resource to use, a way to help the kid in crisis. There are over 1 million homeless K-12 students in America, a fact that should make us collectively ashamed. But the primary job of teachers needs to be teaching. And if you can’t teach the kids in your particular school, for whatever reason including what they live with outside of school, then we need a new plan.

This is actually why I remain bullish on tutoring. Maybe it’s not reasonable to believe that classroom teachers can provide the level of individualized support many students need today. Providing regular tutoring within the school day is thus a great way to support both teacher and student. But if I’m a policy student being asked to think about all the hardships and challenges students might walk into school with, I’m assuming a tremendous deficit for all these kids. I’m also not thinking about their intrinsic motivation, that they might want to do well in school, that their parents might demand that they do their homework, or anything along those lines. Is it even fair to kids to make these assumptions about them because of factors outside their control? I’m also not thinking great things about teachers. I’m assuming that teachers can’t do their jobs. So that doesn’t seem like a great framework for making policy.

The other red flag is that I’m not sure policy students are being asked to understand that policy is actually about relationships. To be fair, I went to policy school and I never thought about this. I think I left graduate school believing that you read a few studies, write a memo, and solve a huge societal issue. Oh to be young! It turns out that to make and implement policy, you have to work with other humans. The work of governing, of collaboration, of advocacy — this is all relational work. And some of those other people are going to want a totally different solution than you do! One problem with policy schools, from my experience, is that the students are all fairly left-leaning so they aren’t having a lot of internal debate (this would be the same problem if they were all right-leaning, but they aren’t).

When I was in graduate school, I used to argue that a benevolent dictator was better for developing countries than democracy, mostly because it’s really boring to have a class discussion where everyone agrees. Debating differing values and policy ideas changes when you have a relationship with the other person, because you can’t reduce them to only their policy views. Last month I went to an event with Congresswoman Virginia Foxx. She spoke about her relationship with Congressman Bobby Scott, who was the ranking member on the House Education and Workforce Committee in the last Congress while Foxx was the committee chair. “Bobby and I respect each other,” she said. “I like Bobby a lot. We would push each other as far as we could, and then we also knew when we couldn’t go any farther together.” This really struck me, in part because I don’t think their positive relationship is ever portrayed in media, and I was happy to hear that our elected representatives still have this kind of rapport.

Maybe there’s no better way to prepare future policy leaders. I’m not sure how you teach someone that making good policy is about laying relational groundwork, going to conference happy hours, becoming friends with people, and having a lot of patience. The insecurity bogeyman is good context for crafting policy but not what really matters.