Keeping Our Eyes on the Ball in K-12 Classrooms
Teach Kids the Joy of Learning Because They’ll Need It and We Need It
Few Americans could escape noticing this past week Republican Glenn Youngkin’s win of the Governorship of Virginia and the near upset of New Jersey’s incumbent Governor Democratic Phil Murphy. Much of the commentary, from both ends of the political spectrum, attributed Youngkin’s win, in particular, to the suburban voter backlash against “critical race theory,” coupled with the statement by Youngkin’s opponent, former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, that parents should have no say in what is taught in K-12 classrooms. It is all but certain that other Republicans will follow the Youngkin playbook in the 2022 mid-terms.
You can find as many definitions of CRT as you have the time to surf the Net. Even controversial (and here I am doing my best to be civil, in the spirit of my post from last week) Fox celebrity Tucker Carlson, whose show helped popularize/demonize the term candidly admitted: ““I’ve never figured out what ‘critical race theory’ is, to be totally honest, after a year of talking about it.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/04/tucker-carlson-is-very-mad-evil-critical-race-theory-whatever-it-is/.
Yet how one defines the term determines the answer and reaction to it. One way, which I believe to be the correct way, is that all students should learn about all facets of our history, even if much of it is uncomfortable. It was little noticed that Youngkin agrees with this approach, as he stated in his closing argument before the November election: “We will make sure all history is taught, the good and the bad.” https://newrepublic.com/article/164283/virginia-election-democrats-education-policy.
As Peggy Noonan reported in her weekly column yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, recent polling indicates that Americans, belonging to both political parties, overwhelmingly agree with this.
The wrong version of CRT, the way that apparently drove many suburban voters away from McAuliffe, is to blame white children for being part of an “oppressor” class and to classify all black children as “the oppressed.” No one really knows, however, the extent to which this is happening and where, because it hasn’t been systematically studied and peer reviewed. But to the degree this alternative, caricatured version of CRT is being taught, and it clearly is in some places, then it shouldn’t be, nor was it intended to be. Don’t take this just from me, but from one of the legal scholars who teaches CRT at Columbia Law School, Kendall Thomas:
“[Making white children to be made to feel guilty and being taught that white people are oppressors] is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an idea or tenet behind critical race theory. To the contrary, critical race theory recognizes that racial inequity and exclusion hurt all Americans, whatever our race or color. In the famous Brown decision, the Supreme Court emphasized that education is the 'very foundation of good citizenship.' The families and teachers who oppose the attacks on critical race theory know that we can't censor classroom discussions about the meaning of race if we want to prepare young Americans for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship in our increasingly diverse multicultural society." https://news.columbia.edu/news/what-critical-race-theory-and-why-everyone-talking-about-it-0.
Unfortunately, now that “CRT” has entered the political bloodstream of America, it threatens to divert attention away from what all of us should want most out of our public (and private) schools: to equip the next generation, and the ones that come after them, not only with facts and skills, but to learn to enjoy learning. That is because in this century, when people on average will change jobs and careers ten times or more due to constant changes in technology and shifting consumer demand, along with major disruptions like pandemics, life-long learning offers the best chances for future workers to achieve the American Dream.
I know this will sound like a broken record, given last week’s post about the virtues of using debate techniques in all middle and high school classrooms, but this is precisely what debate in classrooms will do. If parents want to get actively engaged in education, as the Virginia voters tell us they want, then why not insist on teaching kids to be able to verbalize and persuasively defend and, where appropriate, critique what they are taught? Once they become proficient at that, they improve their understanding of the material, and they will retain more of it. Perhaps most importantly, debate in the classroom will engage students in the fun of learning, and thus the motivation to engage in lifelong learning. More immediately, proficiency in debate will give kids two of the skills – communications and listening – which employers have been saying for some time they most look for (and too many graduating students lack) in hiring workers. Those two skills are essential for starting and growing any business, too.
Indeed, the current furor over CRT provides a teachable moment for all educators, parents, students, and voters. As Americans, we have long celebrated two facts about our country: our commitment to ensuring equal opportunity and our democratic system of government. Both have always been works in progress, and now both are threatened. At least by high school, if not before, why not use debate in classrooms to have active, fact-based discussions about how we can do better on both fronts? Teach students to argue cogently, persuasively, and in a civil manner, taking two or more sides of an issue, all toward reaching common ground, not simply to score points. I know in the current political environment asking teachers to take such a step would take guts, but we need guts right now.
Those discussions can and should begin with some basic facts. It is not a coincidence that our two cherished goals are simultaneously under threat. The combination of slower economic growth and widening income and wealth inequality explains why the American Dream has receded for roughly half of America. In turn, that has eroded trust in all institutions, not just in government, but also in each other. A politically polarized economy is mirrored in a polarized economy, aggravated by the highly unequal way economic growth has been achieved. As I report with several distinguished co-authors -- Ella Bell Smith and Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business (where Matt is Dean) and Robert Lawrence of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government – in a recently released essay commissioned by S&P Global, between 2000 and 2019, the top one-fifth of zip codes in terms of economic well-being captured more than 60 percent of U.S. economic growth. https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/featured/introduction-major-21st-century-post-pandemic-challenges. (We have a lot of other useful things to say and recommend in this report and in the companion profiles of entrepreneurial individuals and organizations that are making a difference and give us some hope, but which still need to be scaled).
Second, speaking of zip codes, economic research led by Harvard’s Raj Chetty and colleagues has thoroughly documented how much they matter. Simply put, your odds of having an economically successful and healthy life are strongly influenced by the income and educational attainment of your parents. Zip codes are rough proxies for those important variables. The research shows that opportunities in America are not equal. This is true for whites, blacks and other minorities.
Third, Harvard’s Robert Putnam, one of the leading political scientists in the country, has uncovered a conundrum in his latest book Upswing¸ which we highlight in our own report for S&P Global. Since the late 19th century, across multiple dimensions – health, education, income, wealth, and voting – the relative gap between black and white Americans had been consistently improving before the 1960s, when our major civil rights laws were enacted, despite continued legal discrimination before then against blacks in housing, the workplace, schools, and voting. In contrast, since the mid-1960s these trends in relative improvement have halted—and in some instances even reversed.
As we note in our S&P Global report, this means that, measured by absolute indicators, today black Americans on average remain substantially behind whites in life expectancy, educational attainment, income, and wealth, where the white-black ratio has been hovering around 10:1 for at least three decades. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/12/08/the-black-white-wealth-gap-left-black-households-more-vulnerable/
The income differences are not just a matter of differences in educational attainment. We cite a McKinsey report issued in June 2021, which shows that the median wage of Black workers remains 30 percent below that of white workers, and that racial income disparities in occupations employing just 4 percent of all Black workers -- those requiring a college education or more, especially in professional and managerial jobs -- account for 60 percent of the median wage difference.
Social scientists will continue to research and debate the extent to which current racial discrimination and the lingering effects of past discrimination account for these differences, but it is hard to deny that they are a substantial factor.
Although racial attitudes have improved during my lifetime, racial discrimination, not just in policing, but in the workplace and housing markets, still exists. This doesn’t mean America is a racist country, only that some Americans still discriminate against blacks and other minorities. Even Republican Senator Tim Scott, who firmly rejects claims that America is racist, nonetheless described how as recently as 2016 that he had been “pulled over [by police] for nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial,” inferring that it was because he was black. He added that “"I do not know many African American men who do not have a very similar story to tell—no matter their profession, no matter their income, no matter their position in life.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-tim-scott-has-said-about-racism/ar-BB1gbhHn.
Likewise, the effects of past racial discrimination, not officially outlawed in this country until just 50 years ago, continue to have effects today. That is because legalized discrimination impaired blacks’ education, their opportunities for work, and their ability to build up wealth in their homes, the most important asset for most Americans.
This is not to diminish the celebrated accomplishments of many black Americans – such as Barack and Michelle Obama and now the late Colin Powell, among many others – who clearly “won” the race life, despite these handicaps. But having to compete in that race carrying the weight of historical discrimination reduces the odds of success. That’s the point.
What do we do about all this, to ensure more equal opportunity for all Americans in all zip codes? This is the debate we should be having as a nation, but it’s not too early to start at the high school level. You’d be surprised at how cogently these students can tackle the toughest of issues, if given the training.
There are enormous gains to be had throughout the American economy, for people of all races and ethnicities, if we can close just black-white educational achievement gaps. We cite in our report a calculation by Mary Daly, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, that had educational achievement and skill gaps between blacks and whites been eliminated since 1990, the U.S. would have gained an additional $71 trillion in economic output. In 2019 alone, the additional output would have totaled nearly $3 trillion, a roughly 15 percent gain.
Cutting the educational achievement gap by just a quarter – a feasible goal with wide use of debate techniques throughout middle and high school across America, but especially in schools with substantial black and minority student populations -- would thus generate an additional $750 billion trillion in annual economic output. This would mean not just extra income for black Americans, but for all other Americans who also make the extra goods and deliver the extra services on which blacks would spend their additional income.
In sum, more equal opportunity is not a zero-sum proposition. Let’s not let slogans or 3 letter acronyms of the moment distract us from the hard work this nation, its leaders, and you and I, all must do to make this country a more perfect Union, which will broadly benefit us all. That is, after all, the objective of our Constitution. And it is our collective commitment to that objective that defines us as Americans.