Weekend To-Do List

11/16 - 11/17

and

Nov 16, 2024

1. Trump’s Education Overhaul

READ: Matt Barnum and Douglas Belkin previewed President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed education agenda for Wall Street Journal readers, from closing the Department of Education and promoting universal school choice to combating so-called “woke” ideologies in education. While the platform has strong conservative backing, significant obstacles remain:

An Associated Press poll last year found that nearly two-thirds of Americans said the federal government spends too little on education.
“I don’t think you’ll see enormous cuts because that’s super unpopular,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank.
Trump will have to fill the education secretary role for now.

2. Debating Federal Oversight

READ: Calls to abolish the Department of Education have been popular among conservatives ever since the ED was created in 1980. Erika Meltzer examined the implications of such a decision, which critics have called an ideological move that could threaten civil rights protections. Proponents say many responsibilities could shift to other federal agencies or return to the states, while skeptics question if we’re having the right debate:

[Rick] Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, said he doesn’t oppose eliminating the department, but the idea has become a kind of “boogie man or quick fix” that’s become a substitute for substantive debate on the federal role in education.
“So much of the culture war that reached a boil during the pandemic focused on schools and colleges, which made the department more contested terrain and made education more contested terrain,” he said.
He’s skeptical that a future Trump administration would get any closer to eliminating the department than the first one did. And a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision limiting the power of administrative agencies could make it even harder to make dramatic changes via executive order, Hess said.

3. Will Elon Musk Transform U.S. Schools?

READ: Elon Musk will lead President-elect Donal Trump’s vision for dismantling federal bureaucracy, including the Department of Education. But what does the tech billionaire envision for today’s schools? Musk has previously advocated for tech-driven, gamified learning and argued for new policies on STEM education, AI use in schools, looser regulation around social media, and banning funding for programs and schools that support transgender students. Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, cautioned that Musk will need to adapt his approach to his new role:

In the tech industry, the focus is on efficiency and growth, Collins said. Efficiency is a good idea to bring into education and education reform, but “education isn’t an industry [whose impact] we can judge by immediate growth outputs,” he said.
Education is “about ensuring that students are equipped with the academic and durable skills needed to confront the world’s most pressing problems,” Collins said. “It’s going to be different for different students of different backgrounds and different capabilities.”

Read more from Alyson Klein and Lauraine Langreo in Education Week here.

4. Meritocracy’s Promise and Pitfalls

READ: David Brooks took to the pages of The Atlantic to reflect on America’s meritocracy and why it no longer serves the country. He argues that the shift from a system favoring social pedigree to one centered on merit initially helped to create a leadership class based on intelligence and achievement but has since led to a favoring of the affluent and a perpetuation of inequality:

If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we’re sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.

5. Reading v. Calkins

READ/LISTEN: Helen Lewis profiled Lucy Calkins, the once-revered figure in American literacy education whose “balanced literacy” philosophy has faced significant backlash since the Sold a Story podcast changed the world of reading two years ago. With her legacy under fire and 40 states pivoting to phonics-based methods, Lewis explored why Calkins, who has since adapted her curriculum to include phonics, continues to fight for her vision:

At 72, she has both the energy to start over again at Mossflower and the pragmatism to have promised her estate to further the cause once she’s gone. She still has a “ferocious” drive, she told me, and a deep conviction in her methods, even as they evolve. She does not want “to pretend it’s a brand-new approach,” she said, “when in fact we’ve just been learning; we’re just incorporating more things that we’ve learned.”
But now that balanced literacy is as unfashionable as whole language, Calkins is trying to come up with a new name for her program. She thought she might try “comprehensive literacy”—or maybe “rebalancing literacy.” Whatever it takes for America to once again feel confident about “teaching Lucy.”

Read more in The Atlantic here, and listen to Chris’s interview with Sold a Story’s Emily Hanford here.

6. Innovation Meets Equity

READ: Are we missing the real promise of income-based sliding-scale Education Savings Accounts? Thomas Arnett says the model’s potential to drive both equity and transformation in the education system has been overlooked by too many:

ESAs do more than expand school choice; they create a vehicle for incubating new education models that could one day replace the outdated conventional “grammar” of schooling. Over time, these new models funded by ESAs could surpass today’s traditional schools in their capacity to engage students, accelerate learning, and equip students with the skills and adaptability needed for the modern world. But without well-calibrated sliding scales, ESA-generated innovations in schooling will likely bypass disadvantaged students, thereby deepening societal divides.

7. Learning Behind Bars

READ: Wayne D’Orio spotlighted California’s first bachelor’s degree program in a maximum-security prison, led by Cal Poly Humboldt at Pelican Bay. The program has already fostered profound growth and highlights the potential of prison education to reduce violence, break barriers among inmates, and create safer communities:

Baca isn’t the only person incarcerated at Pelican Bay who has rejected possible transfers to other prisons. Others said they made the difficult decision to pass up the chance to be moved closer to home and earn a lower-security designation because they wanted to continue in Humboldt’s classes. “I told my family, ‘I want to see you and get closer, but I can’t transfer,’” said Davion Holman, 35, who is originally from the Los Angeles area. Holman, sentenced to 31 years in 2013, told his classmates that before being arrested, he liked school. “I knew I was smart, but I was content being stupid,” he said.
“We take it serious because it is serious,” he added.

Read more in The Hechinger Report here.