Jack Despain Zhou on Nikole Hannah-Jones and Why Excellence in Education Is So Controversial

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. And Sandeep, I'm super looking forward to today's podcast about education and blue cities. We had planned this episode before Nikole Hannah-Jones came out with her piece for the New York Times that everybody seems to be talking about. We're definitely going to get into that in much, much more in just a minute.

[00:00:37] But first, we would be remiss if we failed to mention our upcoming live taping in collaboration with the GeekWire podcast on September 29th in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. We're calling it Two Cities, One Industry, Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco. That's September 29th. We're going to put a link in our show notes about how to get tickets. And Sandeep, right, there's an all-star cast of panelists that we're going to be talking to.

[00:01:04] Yeah, it's at the National Nordic Museum on Tuesday the 29th, as you said, and in conjunction with GeekWire. And yeah, our panelists, we've got Jonathan Weber, who is a veteran San Francisco journalist. He was the LA Times first Silicon Valley correspondent starting back in 1990.

[00:01:20] And he just wrote a really good book called City on the Edge, Technology, Politics and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco. We had him on as a guest earlier to talk about his book. But we've also got Margaret O'Mara, University of Washington historian, who's written the definitive book on the history of Silicon Valley.

[00:01:41] It's called The Code, Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. And then our third panelist is John Cook, the co-founder and publisher of GeekWire. And John is somebody who's a friend and I think somebody who knows pretty much everything there is to know about Seattle tech, the Seattle tech world. So super interesting topic. Big Tech really has remade San Francisco and Seattle in the last 20 years. So we're going to dig into all that.

[00:02:05] Yeah. And especially with the continuing controversy or AI and data centers, there's a lot that we're going to get a chance to dig into and kind of understand the history and future of some of that stuff. But first, today's show, education. And our guest is Jack Despainzo, co-founder of Education Progress, a think tank centering on orienting education toward a culture of excellence. Jack, thanks so much for joining us. It's a great pleasure to be here.

[00:02:32] So Sandeep's got lots and lots of questions for you, but I just want to start out by asking a really basic one, which is what is Education Progress and why'd you start it? Education Progress is a new think tank that, as you mentioned, is focused on orienting education towards excellence. And it started because I had a lot of writing that I wanted to do, a lot of specific things that I wanted to talk about and advocate for.

[00:02:55] And I was looking around and I was like, you know, I don't actually think anyone is doing the specific things that I want. So what I saw essentially, particularly around 2020, 2019, when I was really thinking about a lot of this stuff, is I saw a lot of local initiatives where people were saying, this seems like a really bad idea. Why is this happening? So you saw, for example, in San Francisco, the removal of eighth grade algebra.

[00:03:21] And then you had a lot of parents and local people advocate and say, hey, we actually want our kids to be able to learn algebra. And it got to a ballot and something like 80, 90 percent of San Franciscans voted for it. Or you saw in New York City people trying to attack the specialized high schools and tear them down. And a lot of locals advocate and say, no, actually, we value our specialized high schools. We like these specialized high schools. Please don't do this.

[00:03:46] Then you saw, for example, in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson High has changed its admissions criteria. You saw here in Seattle people attacking gifted programs. And you essentially saw this wave that looked to me like a fairly coordinated wave of things that I would describe as somewhat anti-excellence policies, things where people were looking at any example of kids learning at different rates and saying, this is a problem. We need to change this and we need to ensure that all kids are learning at the same pace in the same way.

[00:04:16] And you saw this very coordinated attack on these things, but you saw only really local responses to it. And so I realized there was this massive gap between institutional interests where you had a lot of policymakers and a lot of institutional advocates who were fairly aggressively against some of these excellence things. And what people on the ground actually wanted, where you pulled people on the ground and they're like, no, actually, we do think that it's good for kids to learn their own rates. We do think that advanced programs are good. We do think advanced classes are good. We think selective schools are good.

[00:04:46] We think a lot of these things are good. And so what I realized essentially is that you wanted some sort of coordinating force and some broader coordinating movement between all these local things that people on the ground sort of thought and assumed and hoped would be happening well to push back against this trend of what I would say is anti-excellence policy. Let's get into some of the content here.

[00:05:13] And one of the topics I wanted to bring up specifically was math and some of the great work you mentioned that you've been doing looking at algebra in San Francisco. And I'll just bring up the fact that my spouse and I ended up sending our kid to private school in Seattle. And we did it for a number of reasons, including the fact that a number of parents at the local NPR station where I worked kind of warned me and said things are not really working that well in Seattle public schools.

[00:05:41] And this is back in the golden age that Sandeep writes about, sort of in the aughts. Things were not great then. One of the things they were concerned about was the arrival of something called discovery math. So this was a series of textbooks, including discovering algebra, discovering calculus. I don't really know. There's a whole bunch of them. And the idea was, you know, new and innovative. And I think the critics thought that it demanded an awful lot of students and teachers in ways that just didn't work in practice.

[00:06:11] And the upshot is it ends up actually widening the achievement gap, especially for disadvantaged students. I wonder if you are familiar with that program and or if you can talk a little bit about some of the work you've been doing, talking about math curriculum, especially algebra. Yeah, definitely. So that specific program, I won't speak to the particulars of it, but I can talk to the broad discovery versus direct instruction and learning and what has been going on.

[00:06:37] Because it's, you know, every fight in education is much older than I think people often realize. So when you're looking at this sort of like, oh, we have this new innovative discovery approach where we want kids to explore towards solutions on their own versus what proponents of that approach might characterize as the sort of rope drill and kill. Like the teacher tells the kids exactly what to do and then the kids do it. You know, this has been a debate for more than 100 years in education.

[00:07:06] You can go back to like the founding of common schools in America and they were already like talking about, you know, we're not so sure about phonics. This phonics thing seems like a boring way to learn reading. What if we have this more exploratory way? And so what often happens with curricula like this discovery one is they're presented as, you know, this new innovative progressive way versus this old traditional way when it really is a much older fight. And in education, our intuitions often lead us wrong is what I would say.

[00:07:36] So and what feels most fun, what feels most exciting is often not what is best in general. So because people are, I would say, people enjoy the experience of curiosity, of poking around, of learning and pressing against things that they don't know. That often feels like intuitively a better learning experience.

[00:07:58] But in practice, if you look at the way people actually progress through known fields, it is almost always much more effective if there is a known field, if there is a known problem to say, here's how you solve it. Now that you've seen it, let me give you some practice examples. Let me watch you do this. If you get this wrong, then we will correct you on this. This very direct, like, you know, instruct, give example, watch, correct, loop.

[00:08:26] And so what often happens with these curricula is people treat kids as if, like, they should be exploring the very frontier of these fields with very basic known things. And what that does is it winds up, you know, if you look at the history of math, like, it took a long, long time for people to feel their way towards geometry, to feel their way towards algebra, to feel their way towards calculus. That is not an efficient process of learning. And now at the frontier of those fields, it is not efficient to be going around and looking at that.

[00:08:55] So when you have this known body of work, it's just much more effective to teach people these things directly. But that feels less fun and less intuitive to a lot of people. So a lot of these discovery curricula persist. Yeah, I mean, it seems to me – let me broaden this conversation out a little bit because one of my frustrations is that this seems particularly true of the public education space.

[00:09:19] Which is that it seems especially prone to kind of trendy and faddish kind of ideas that come along, right? There's something in particular about – there's a lot of changes that have happened within the kind of culture of what I would call progressive cosmopolitanism, right, over the last decade plus. Lots of new ideas that we might associate, for lack of a better term, with like the woke one period or what have you.

[00:09:49] And it seems like particularly in the education space, there's this almost like unmediated way where these activist ideas are sort of latched onto and translated into kind of programs of pedagogy, right? Without a whole lot of credible basis to argue that these are actually improvements on the kind of traditional way of doing education.

[00:10:15] So, you know, I'm thinking of folks like Joe Bowler and ideas like detracking and, you know, that sort of came into real vogue, particularly in blue jurisdictions, blue cities. So, Jack, speak to that.

[00:10:28] Am I off base here that there has been this kind of – just these kind of waves of I think often kind of misguided ideas or misdiagnoses of the kind of problems that affect us and that are leading to poor outcomes in public education? Yeah, you're completely on base. Everything you said there, I co-sign it. I endorse it. That has been happening. It has been happening for a very long time.

[00:10:55] And in fact, like there wasn't really a golden age of education schools. You know, education schools have always been caught in this spot where they're like halfway between a trade school and an academic institution where they sort of want the respect that the rest of universities have without necessarily wanting the rigor and so forth.

[00:11:15] And so, you know, they have a task, which is to train teachers, and then they have a bunch of academics who are set loose to – I would sort of maybe a little uncharitably, but I think accurately say just sort of toss whatever nonsense at the wall that they want to. And it winds up being this very, very unrigorous, very faddish environment that chases, yeah, a lot of very strange and silly ideas down a lot of rabbit holes. And in particular, you're talking about detracking.

[00:11:40] What happened, I would say understandably, is that education really centered itself around – after Brown versus Board – around desegregation as the goal of education and equalization as the goal of education. And this made a lot of sense in the context of Brown specifically and made a lot of sense in the context of, for example, southern United States schools where there was de-ger segregation, where there was a lot to untangle with that.

[00:12:05] But if your goal is equalize all students in education as a whole, like if your goal is to get all students to learn the same material at the same pace in the same ways, and for a lot of people that became the goal, that will never happen and that should never happen. And it will not happen because kids learn at different rates. Because some kids – any parent who has multiple kids even can see this. Some of their kids will pick some material up very quickly, will struggle with other material.

[00:12:33] Kids do not progress through everything smoothly in the same way. And so when you have a goal of this whole ecosystem, which is get everyone to learn the same material at the same pace in the same ways, and you have the reality of how kids learn, which is kids have different paces and they need different things at different times, then what you wind up with is a series of solutions that sort of turn education against itself. So things like detracking where you're like, you know, the most efficient way to teach –

[00:13:01] or the best way to teach math per detracking advocates would be to have like kids who might be ready for advanced algebra and kids who are struggling with basic arithmetic in the same classroom learning the same material. And so they looked for a lot of ways. How can we make this work better to have these kids in the same classroom learning the same material? Like can we tweak this? Can we tweak this? Can we tweak this? And the reality is that it went wrong from the beginning with things like that. It went wrong from the premises. The premise that kids should learn the same material at the same pace in the same ways was never going to work.

[00:13:31] And so you have a tremendous amount of institutional effort, a tremendous amount of research, a tremendous amount of resources going towards how do we make this thing proceeding from these flawed premises work. I wonder if this is a good time to bring up journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones and her piece in the New York Times that's making quite a splash in the last couple of days. It's all over my social media feed. Folks may well remember her from the arguably flawed 1619 project.

[00:13:56] And I do not say that as a conservative critic of her effort to try to bring issues of slavery and African-American history front and center. That obviously should have happened. But go check out an article by Leslie Harris, an African-American historian, who says that her efforts to fact check that piece were basically ignored by Nicole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. It's a sad read. I was looking back at it.

[00:14:22] But anyway, Nicole Hannah-Jones writes about sending her kid to an underperforming New York City public school. And in this piece writes a kind of courageous mea culpa of sorts where she says she screwed up. But I think both of you think that her rethinking of that may not go quite far enough. What do you take to be her mea culpa? And what questions do you have about it? So, yes, the piece is all over the internet.

[00:14:51] It kind of blew stuff up as soon as it came out yesterday. And it is a mea culpa, right? There's a kind of funereal tone to it where she's sort of – she's admitting she got stuff wrong and she kind of privileged her own ideology in some sense above the needs of her own child. And, you know, her child has rebelled against that and she's having to kind of confront the reality of what she did.

[00:15:16] And so I think it is commendable in that it is in some ways searingly honest. But in other ways I think there's a lot of avoidance going on in that piece too under the surface. And so, David, I think you put it well to me when you described her piece as a mea culpa that sort of says the culprit here was segregation, right?

[00:15:45] Which is sort of her initial premise to begin with that – in other words – Which certainly in part it was. Right, right. So what she's saying is that the structural inequities in how New York City runs their schools where there are schools that are filled with poor and minority kids and they get – she argues, less attention, less quality, less resources.

[00:16:11] We can talk about that in a second here versus schools that cater to more affluent white – mostly white children. They get better teachers, less attention, less education, less education, less education, less education, less education, less education, less education. And that kind of structural racism, right, that structural segregation of the schools is at the root of what went wrong with her daughter's education when she deliberately chose to put her daughter in one of these lower performing but minority schools.

[00:17:09] So, okay. Brown kids in New York City's incredibly elite public schools. Syracuse and Bronx Science, much, much higher percentage of the demographics of those schools had much, much higher percentages of black and brown children back then.

[00:17:23] And the enrollments of those kids collapsed starting in the 80s and 90s really because in most of – in many of the kind of poor black and brown school – schools in those communities of New York, activists came to the forefront and they essentially detract those kids out of gifted and talented programs,

[00:17:49] out of advanced learning in the 80s and 90s and 90s.

[00:18:19] About what she wrote. About what she wrote. And so, yeah. Yeah. I do have a ton of thoughts. So the first thing that I want to say about it is that I was really – so I'm not personally a fan of Nicole Hannah-Jones or her work in general. Like she has, I think, fought against a lot of things that I find very valuable and I think she has pushed a lot of ideas that are very destructive. I was really impressed by this article.

[00:18:43] And I thought that this article was a really sincere act of love towards a daughter who she felt like she had wronged. And so what I saw in this is essentially like – I would make the case that the article that she wrote undermines a lot of her education program, a lot of her education vision, a lot of her education goals. But she wrote it because her child was unhappy with what she did for her.

[00:19:09] And I think that's really courageous and really admirable. So what do you see in the article? So I would say like the thing that I noticed first is it maintains this frame of this narrative that, yes, that you have this like very segregated system where these poorer schools are starved of resources. And you have all of these kids who are sent to these struggling things where like the wealthy students get much better, much higher resourced schools and everything.

[00:19:39] And the first thing to say is that this frame is completely false. In New York City, in these blue cities like this, this frame has been false for 50 years. So the school that she sent her child to – and she talks about horror stories about this school. And they are real horror stories. She talks about going to the lunchroom and seeing like kids running around and getting in fights mostly unsupervised.

[00:20:02] She talks about chronic absenteeism and like principal and teachers who are not really willing to get in touch with her and not really willing to work with her. She talks about like basically fake assignments and assignments that weren't checked, things like that. All these happen. But you look at the resources that this school gets. This school gets $52,000 per student in the 2024 to 2025 school year.

[00:20:23] This school that she's talking about is incredibly well-resourced relative to the average school in the country. And this is because New York has prioritized funding these lower-income schools aggressively and has prioritized it for years. So you don't actually have in places like New York this funding disparity between schools like this and other schools.

[00:20:48] You have a reverse funding thing, but then you have a system that is tuned only to ever press the funding lever. So because it's easy to say we want to fund these schools more, you wind up with this sort of eternal ratchet with these things where it's like, no, more funding will cure this, more funding will cure this, more funding will cure this versus these structural problems. So that's one thing that stuck out to me with it. But another is that her daughter immediately knew that something was wrong there.

[00:21:17] You know, her daughter was immediately not liking school, not happy with what was going on, not comfortable with it. And she sent her daughter to this school because she felt like parents should send their kids to their neighborhood public schools, essentially whether or not these schools are serving their kids well. Because then the parents can direct their time and attention and resources to improving those schools for the public. And that's an understandable theory of change.

[00:21:45] And I think it's really admirable, in fact, that she sent her kid in line with this theory of change, in a sense, instead of doing what a lot of people do, which is hypocritically saying, oh, yeah, I support all that in theory, but then sending their kids to private school.

[00:22:00] The thing is, I think that theory of change is bad, and I think that it undermines her program, essentially because, as she found out, like, these problems are not just one parent swoops in as the superhero and saves the day for these things. These are complicated, deeply intrenched problems that any one parent will really struggle to fix and will really struggle to make a dent in, and their child only gets one childhood.

[00:22:28] And so every parent looking at situations like this, or many, many parents looking at situations like this, make what is both irrational and ultimately, I think, better for all students' unbalanced decision, which is, I want to figure out where is best for my child. I want to send my child there, and I want to help them with that. I want to advocate for schools that will teach my child at their level in safe, comfortable, good environments. I want to fight for that. I want to push for that. And I will send my kid to that.

[00:22:58] And if a public system does not provide that, I will withdraw my child from the public system. That is a rational, sensible, good thing for a parent to do, and that is a thing Nicole Hannah-Jones has spent at least a decade fighting against parents doing and struggling and wrestling against parents doing. And the result of that is because she did not do that with her own kid, because she did not advocate for her own kid, because she did not push for her own kid to find an environment where her kid would be happy and comfortable and do well,

[00:23:25] her kid learned less than she would have done. She had much more miserable school experience in a lot of ways than she otherwise would have, and the schools that she sent her to in order to nominally improve those schools didn't improve at all as a result in her telling, and in fact damaged her child's education and left her child unhappy. So that was the consequence of her frame for her kid. She doesn't really reckon with that.

[00:23:53] She turns around and says, oh, these selective public schools, you know, they're sort of a bargain with the devil to keep white students in the public system. These selective public schools, they're like, I've been fighting against them, like this test-based admissions and everything. I've been fighting against that, the things she talks about. All this is clearly bad, clearly a bargain with the devil. And the results of that ideology in her child's own life was to harm her child.

[00:24:18] So then she looks around at all these other parents who make the same decision and say, no, it is correct for me to look for, advocate for these selective schools, and I'm not going to keep my kid in a public system that is not adequately serving my student. She looks at all these parents as villains, as part of the problem, so forth. And I just think that's fundamentally wrongheaded. It is the duty of a parent to do what is right for their child. It is the duty of a parent. If a school is not serving a child well, it is not the child's obligation to serve the school.

[00:24:44] It is the parent's duty to figure out what is an environment that suits my child, that serves my child well. And I think that, you know, this fundamentally wrongheaded, ask not what your school can do for your child, but what your child can do for your school approach led, as she found, to an unhappy child and a school that remains dysfunctional. I will say this has nothing to do with race. But when we sent our kid to private school, a lot of our friends told us we were wrong, we were being unethical, that they would never do that themselves.

[00:25:14] And then quite a few of them ended up either sending one or more of their kids to private school or sort of wishing that they could because the public school system wasn't working for them in various ways. And, you know, although some continued on in public school for sure. And I was thinking when you were talking, Jack, this is part of this essay seems a little bit like that column, the ethicist at the New York Times. I don't know if either of you read that.

[00:25:37] It's sort of like, dear ethicist, we had this tough decision and like generations of black parents who came before us. We felt an obligation to make an educational decision based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. Now our daughter's mad at us. Who's right here? Right, right, right. It has a little bit of that advice column quality to it. And she's, you know, she's saying, oh, gosh, my daughter's really got a point. She's answered the question herself. So as an ethical question, I think it's a pretty compelling essay.

[00:26:08] As a diagnostic of what went wrong, there's a lot missing. I kind of worry that it's taking up a lot of space in that sense and that people aren't going to be as open to seeing other diagnoses as the problem. Because this is a pretty powerful, powerful essay that's out there. Sandeep, what do you think? Well, so I think that she does say my daughter was right and, you know, we should have done things differently.

[00:26:32] But her explanation for it is, like, my daughter was right because she says the system is so structurally fucked that, like, there was no way, despite all of my and my husband's efforts to, like, you know, guide our daughter through the system and stuff. We were just defeated by the structural segregation that exists in the New York City public schools. And now I realize that it was a mistake to ever try to fight that.

[00:27:01] And we should have just, like, rolled with the flow and done the upper middle class thing and tracked our kid into a good school and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, but again, for me, so let me put it this way. One of the, like, heroes in the piece or one of the very sort of positively presented people in the piece is her daughter's middle school principal. And it's somebody who clearly shares Nicole's, you know, kind of anti-racist worldview.

[00:27:29] And, you know, she spends a lot of time talking about the middle school and how cool it is. But then the daughter goes to a more selective high school. And it turns out, like, she thought she had gotten A's all the way through in algebra. Turns out, like, she doesn't even know basic math, right? She can't do, so she's, like, not only can't do algebra, but she has these huge deficiencies. They have to bring in intensive tutoring to help her try to think.

[00:27:58] She hasn't been getting grades. Nobody's even been grading her work at all. It's so horrible. And there's no homework, right? They didn't give her any homework the whole time. Well, these other kids she's competing with now in a better high school like the white kids, well, they had homework in, like, elementary school and junior high. They're used to, like, doing this work and she's not. And so then she actually goes back and has a conversation with the middle school principal who she really likes and is friends with.

[00:28:23] And this is the one point where they kind of admit that something went wrong there in their thinking about how to do education. And the middle school principal says to her, quote, having a lot of homework, it's almost like a proxy for this is a good school, Paige said. I remember Nadia sitting here in my office and saying, what about us?

[00:28:49] It feels to me the way that I understand when kids are asking that is, quote, will you honor my academic self? That's what she's asking. And I think in not giving homework, we didn't honor their academic selves. And that's where I could cry because it's just awful. And she goes on to say, you know, maybe what we did, quote, it's racism under the guise of anti-racism. Well, no shit. Right. Like that to me is sort of the heart and the nub.

[00:29:18] And when I grappled with these things in the Seattle public schools, that that line to me is the nub of kind of what happened in Seattle, I think, with why our our gaps grew larger over the last decade. Because we did all this anti-racist stuff that really, in some sense, perpetuated or inculcated this kind of soft bigotry of low expectation stuff, these weird faddish ideas that kids don't need to do homework. Homework doesn't matter.

[00:29:47] You know, you don't you do equity grading so that nobody fails. You do all this identitarian belonging stuff. And you know what? That's not how you lift up poor black and brown kids. It's just not. So yeah. Yeah. Well, yes. And there's even more I think that's worth poking at there, which is that when she so during this whole adventure, at some point, like she pulls her child out for some private tutoring and everything. And then her daughter comes home crying because she's not being called on in class as much.

[00:30:16] And then later she like wrestles with this experience where like, yeah, her kid seems to be doing well in class and then doesn't like finds out that she's not actually learning much of anything. And that was a huge shock. The thing I want to emphasize is that this is structurally inevitable based on the things that Nicole Hannah-Jones promotes.

[00:30:33] It is structurally inevitable that if you say all kids must be at this specific level and we are going to have like an algebra class for all these kids, whether they have this underlying mathematical knowledge or not. Schools are not going to say, oh, yeah, we're just going to have everyone fail algebra. They're going to teach like fake algebra and give people fake A's and then tell people that, yes, you've faked done well in this class.

[00:30:58] Or if you have a classroom where a teacher has a bunch of students struggling with basic material and one student who is not struggling with that basic material, the teacher has to triage their time and attention. The teacher can't spend their time and attention on these kids who are far ahead of the rest of the class. They're going to triage and they're going to say, OK, well, what are these struggling students who are these, you know, squeaky wheels who are taking up a bunch of my time and effort? How can I help these ones more? So these things are not happenstance.

[00:31:26] It's not just happenstance that she stumbled into schools that did these things. These are structurally inevitable when you say we are going to teach all kids the same material at the same pace in the same ways and we are going to provide very strong incentives for them to act like everyone is succeeding. And that's the incentive structure that they have been creating. You know, I have a minor I don't know. It's a pushback question for for both of you or not.

[00:31:52] But, you know, this idea of let's get rid of advanced math programs, et cetera, and tracking it because, you know, we we we're going to do that in the name of equity, even though we know that like for some poor kids, including kids of recent immigrants, this has been one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in existence.

[00:32:14] That's crazy. Right. But the old system wasn't always working for everyone and especially underperforming kids. We do have a kind of a one size fits all solution in America, which is this is the land of meritocracy. Everyone should go through the same educational system without tracking like they have in Europe into trades and things like that.

[00:32:39] And if you kind of fail, if you're struggling at struggling in algebra, well, you know, we're all equal here. This is what's best for you. And I wonder about that, like, I wonder how compassionate that really is. Like, don't we have a kind of unfair system that, you know, was and is not serving underperforming kids terribly well, in part because we don't do a kind of tracking like they do in Europe and other countries.

[00:33:07] Hey, Blue City Blues listeners. We've got a special event coming up later this month for folks who live in Seattle. It's called Two Cities, One Industry, Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco. A live taping of Blue City Blues and the GeekWire podcasts at the National Nordic Museum featuring historian Margaret O'Mara.

[00:33:33] She's at the University of Washington and she's the author of The Code, Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. We also have GeekWire's John Cook and journalist Jonathan Weber. He's got a newish book out called City on the Edge, Technology, Politics and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco. So the conversation is going to look at how these two different cities became the twin capitals of tech and how the relationship between big tech and local governments that host tech continues to evolve.

[00:34:02] Recorded live for both podcasts, Sandeep and I are going to be asking some questions. So check that out. September 29th, starting at 6 p.m. We'll put a link in our show notes if you want to get in on that. And we hope you can join us. Thanks. There's a lot in there. One thing that I'll say is I want to quickly – there's this instinct I think people have of here is the old system where we did things one way. Here's the new system where we do things another.

[00:34:30] One thing I want to emphasize is that these really are old, old battles. So from the 1930s, there's this great research paper that I love citing where it talks about that at the time there had been for as long as people remembered two competing ideals of what democratic education should be. That one ideal of democratic education was teach all students the same material in the same place in the same ways to prepare them for this place in an egalitarian democratic society.

[00:34:54] And the other was that education can't be democratic unless it reaches kids where they're at and pushes them and teaches them and pushes them to the levels that they can reach. Essentially, this individualized versus equalized thing. And that equalized school of thought has won out in education schools for a century. It has been the dominant paradigm in education institutions for a long time.

[00:35:20] And while it is not universal – so what happens is often it will like come in contact with reality. It will come in contact with reality. So all these detracking initiatives, you have sort of this honors cycle where people in line with these ideals in education schools will go in and they will detrack a school. And then they will realize, oh, it actually really sucks to have kids who are at a bunch of different levels who are not prepared for the same material in the same classroom and this just isn't working.

[00:35:48] And so they will reluctantly start reinventing like this tiered system and so forth. And so it just keeps on this cycle where they keep like deleting and reinventing, deleting and reinventing, deleting and reinventing because they have this ideological opposition to kids learning at different rates faced with the reality or paired with the reality of kids learning at different rates.

[00:36:08] There is though – you're right to point to this like difference between America and Europe where America has always had this sort of like comprehensive public school vision or I say always has for several generations had this comprehensive public school vision whereas Europe often tracks people into technical versus academic tracks and so forth. And so when people in America are worried about tracking, they're often worried about this like separation into fully separate – like you have this destiny.

[00:36:38] We have determined that you will be a plumber and you will go forth with all of that. I don't think that sort of like full vocational split is needed in America. I don't think that we would need to go back and say, oh, we need to undermine this whole American premise and make sure that people are on very different tracks.

[00:37:00] I think that you can – essentially a lot of the inequalities in education reflect just people having different levels of knowledge and different levels of preparedness for different material. So you are not going to fix all the inequalities in society by saying education must be equal because when you do that, you're just essentially going to – as I like to say, you're going to not fix the weather but break the thermometer.

[00:37:27] So a lot of times people have thermometer-breaking solutions in education with these things. Education does its job essentially if you are teaching kids useful material at a level where they are prepared to receive that material. And so you can, I think, cut through a lot of this like what should be taught, when should it be taught, everything by just looking and saying, well, what specifically does this kid know? And is the material that this kid is learning specifically, are they prepared for it? Are they learning it effectively? Is it going well for them? And if not, what can we do about that?

[00:37:57] And I'll just restate my question to you, Sandeep. I mean, are we thinking enough about what it feels like to be an underperforming kid in school from K through 12, which I don't think any of us particularly were? And to never feel like any of this is your thing. You're always like bottom of your class every day. Every day you go in. This is not a place where you're building any skills necessarily or self-confidence beyond sort of the bare minimum at best.

[00:38:24] And yet we're being told everyone must learn algebra. You've got to do that. And it would be condescending to you to say that you could become an electrician or a plumber. You know, God forbid you have to be subjected to a career like that. I don't know that it's more compassionate. What do you think? I do think that this has become, interestingly, recently a much more live public conversation. I think for decades, really dating back to the 80s or 90s.

[00:38:54] I think that the belief took root that the primary purpose of a K-12 education was to prepare children. We should be gearing our education, our public education, to prepare all children to go on and to be ready to go on to then get further education, right?

[00:39:17] To go on to college or a university and get a university of education because in the new economy that was emerging and the new kind of world of, you know, kind of knowledge-based systems, a high school degree, you know, or diploma was not enough. Everybody needs to be thinking about going to college. We should sort of create that belief, right?

[00:39:40] That, you know, every kid should graduate high school and then go on to some kind of further education to prepare them for better entry into their adult lives. And I think that is really coming into question now, right? I mean, the value of a higher education is, you know, for a number of different reasons under challenge in the last few years. And so I think there's some rethinking going on.

[00:40:05] And look, is there opportunity here for us to maybe start to think about more vocational training, more, you know, different pathways that are less academic and more, you know, preparatory for kind of entering into other walks of life the way they do in Europe? I'm fine with that. And in Seattle, we do have programs in various high schools.

[00:40:28] Like there's a maritime training program or there's like an aviation high school, right, where you learn kind of, you know, aviation training and stuff like that. I think we probably do need more of that. And I do think the way the world is changing with AI and stuff like that, it probably makes sense to create more kind of different, you know, more pathways for kids to follow their natural aptitudes and abilities, right?

[00:40:51] I mean, the fundamental – I'll just say this, the last thing I'll say about this – the fundamental philosophical divide here, I think, if you really want to get to the core of it, is are we liberal individualists, right? Do we believe that we are all kind of individuals living in a liberal polity and that, you know, we should create equality of opportunity for people? We should try to get rid of barriers that are holding individuals back from attaining their natural sort of potential in life? Or are we collectivists, right?

[00:41:19] And do we believe in these kind of – do we take it as paramount that we have equal outcomes, not equal opportunities, right? And that is where I think the philosophical battle has been, not just in the education space but around a whole bunch of different things, particularly on the left, right? So, Jack, I guess I'll let you just jump right in there on the question of equity versus equality of opportunity when it comes to how we think about education.

[00:41:50] I am actually – I'd like to jump in a little more on a different thing Sandeep said, which is that way AI is changing these things because I do think this is actually essential in this moment. And it touches on both this equality of, you know, equity versus equality of opportunity versus everything because right now we are living through a moment where we can no longer count on intellectual skills being primarily human at the top end.

[00:42:16] We can no longer count on the best math in the world, for example, being done by humans. We can no longer count on the best like computer science work in the world being done purely by humans. We can no longer count on any of these white-collar professions being purely human at the top and we can no longer look kids in the eye and say, yes, you definitely need education for these specific things because these specific technical skills will push you forward in a competitive world.

[00:42:42] We cannot say that because we are living in a time of extraordinary uncertainty and nobody really knows what exactly the future will look like. But it is almost certain that the future will include machines that are comparable to human professionals at least at the great majority of human skills. And what this means I think is that it is really a time in education to refocus on, well, what do we want humans to get out of education?

[00:43:10] What is the purpose of this for all these students? What are we putting in? And it can't just be, oh, this will get you ahead in the rat race. What if it doesn't? What if education no longer gets you ahead in the rat race? Oh, it can't just be, oh, this is important for – if you don't do this, then there will be no way to get this thing done. Well, what if you can just press a button and that thing gets done?

[00:43:34] And in schools, like schools right now are having to face down, well, what if students do and they will just like fake their way through essays and hold degrees even because now AI does this work for them? And I think a lot of the answer has to be, well, what internal changes are we trying to bring to the student? What culture are we trying to build? What values are we trying to build?

[00:43:57] What expertise are we trying to build in this person and what remains valuable with that after all these changes happen? And I think what remains valuable is not going to be – in this past era, it wasn't – and in the future era, it will not be all kids learn the same material in the same ways at the same time.

[00:44:15] What it can be and what it will be is, well, what is – what will build this person up in meaningful ways and how can we orient education towards turning people into the sort of people we want to hand the future to? And it's going to be increasingly pressing in this age of AI.

[00:44:41] A controversial blogger, prominent blogger, Freddie DeBoer, writes a lot about education, has a lot of strong feelings about it. I don't know how similar or different your views are from his, Jack. But one of the things he talks about is IQ. And he says that liberals are kind of unwilling to consider IQ in ways that are really important. Part of this has to do with education. Part of it has to do with the fact that he's a socialist.

[00:45:09] So he ultimately believes that some folks shouldn't be relegated to shitty lives economically as a result of being born with really low IQs. If your IQ is like 80 and you can become, say, a baggage checker or whatever, but it's going to be hard for you to be a rocket scientist, you shouldn't have to live a shitty life. That's part of his point. But part of his point has to also do with education and how we think about it. And he thinks that maybe some kids aren't smart enough to pass algebra.

[00:45:37] I don't totally agree with him, but I'm wondering what you think. Yeah, great question. And this is fantastic because Freddie DeBoer is one of the big inspirations for me in starting this because I think he is right about so much and then wrong about everything that's most important. So Freddie DeBoer basically argues that education can raise the absolute performance of students, but it will never change kids' relative rank order in aptitude.

[00:46:04] And he says, therefore, you know, we need to reorient society around socialism to let everyone live a dignified life. You also have sort of this counterpoint on the right, Brian Kaplan, who says, you know, education will never change the rank order. Therefore, it's mostly signaling. Therefore, we should massively defund public education. And coincidentally, he's an anarcho-capitalist. And both of them wind up with programs that basically meet their political ideals. I think that they're basically correct that education won't change the relative rank order of students.

[00:46:29] I think they really underestimate just how much it can raise everyone's absolute skill and how much you can train expertise and cultivate expertise in everyone. And so where Freddie says, you know, education won't change relative rank order. Relative rank order is all we care about. Therefore, let's focus on non-cognitive skills and build a society adapted to the least. Kaplan says, oh, it won't change relative rank order. Therefore, it's all signaling. Therefore, let's massively defund public education. I say, okay, sure.

[00:46:56] It might not change relative rank order, but we can learn and we should learn and we should understand how to learn effectively and how to teach effectively. And I want to see just how far each person can go. I don't care that it won't change relative rank order in the end. I don't care that you can say, oh, yeah, in theory, like this kid at this aptitude, like you can use the same material for someone at this higher aptitude and that kid will fall. Whatever. I don't. How far can they go? How well can they do?

[00:47:23] How much excellence can we bring each student towards? And I think that's the question that both Freddie and Brian just fail to answer properly because you can teach people and you should teach people. And it matters that education does, in fact, work to raise the absolute level of students. That, I think, is what Freddie misses. That is what I think schools should focus on. Not equalizing everyone, but how far can we push people? Yeah, that is well said. And let me just say, I was super honored that Freddie kind of hated my piece.

[00:47:53] It's a badge of honor. Yeah. No, it is. I took it. Look, he was engaging with it and, you know, it was clearly bothering him. He wrote a couple of things about it, you know. And I'm a Freddie fan, right? Freddie's been a guest on our podcast. We've talked about it. He came on early on when we started this podcast to talk about involuntary commitment, where I think he's 100% right on that topic. And while I disagree with him, I think in some sense, exactly along the lines of Jack that you're talking about,

[00:48:20] I appreciate that he's giving, you know, he's putting a – I mean, he clearly thinks about these issues a lot, even though he hated my piece. So, Jack, thank you so much for coming on. I find it absolutely fascinating and maddening and just crazy that the idea of pursuing excellence in public education

[00:48:43] is so controversial, really, in some circles and so kind of outside the mainstream of how we actually do practice public education. So the work you all are doing, I think, is super cool. Well, I've been glad to even tangentially be part of that project and, of course, to have you on today to kind of talk through some of these issues because I do think they're fundamentally important to how we order our societies, right?

[00:49:10] I mean, schools are the backbones of our communities and how we do education is the fundament of how we build a civic society, it seems to me. Well, thank you so much. It's been a great pleasure. Jack, thanks so much for being here. And I just want to remind folks again about our upcoming taping and collaboration with GeekWire that we mentioned at the top here. That's coming up September 29th. Two cities, one industry. Big tech, power, and politics in Seattle and San Francisco, September 29th.

[00:49:38] We'll put a link in our show notes to show you how to get tickets. And I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. Thanks, everybody, so much for listening.