Unpacking "The Education Wars" with co-author Jennifer Berkshire
Unpacking "The Education Wars" with co-author Jennifer Berkshire
A conversation about the forthcoming book (out July 2)
“That was really alarming. I think that’s when I started to understand that there’s something different going on here”.
-AJ Davis, cofounder of the Lowcountry Black Parents Association, cited in The Education Wars
Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider are hosts of the education policy podcast Have You Heard.
Schneider is a researcher and professor at UMass Amherst; his work has focused heavily on creating better and more valid metrics for judging school quality (and his book Beyond Test Scores is a great introduction to this subject).
Berkshire has a PhD in English, and spent six years editing the newsletter for the Massachusetts chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. She is currently a licensed teacher and an instructor in the Boston College Prison Education Program, as well as a journalist and a lecturer at Yale University.
A spiritual sequel.
At the outset of the pandemic, Berkshire and Schneider published A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, an excellent, deeply-researched, and nuanced exploration of America’s conflicting drives between creating and maintaining a democratically-constituted public school system, and a desire for an “unbundled1,” personalized, privatized education service economy (one which, seemingly inevitably, promotes and relies on the defunding of traditional public schools, along with the disenfranchisement of poor and minority students).
It is a must-read for anyone ready for a deep dive into the world of educational policy that makes the stakes for all of us extremely clear. It also, though no fault of the authors, almost immediately needed some updates when the COVID-19 pandemic created a perfect storm of conditions for education privatizers and voucher-hawkers to throw gasoline on the fire of traditional debates and conflicts around schooling. (As the most obvious example, Chris Rufo, the self-proclaimed father of the “anti-CRT” panic, explicitly stated during an address at Hillsdale College in 2022, “To get universal school choice, you have to operate from the premise of universal school distrust.”)
The Education Wars, a kind of spiritual sequel by Berkshire and Schneider, is a great companion piece to the earlier book. For many readers it might even be a better place to start, because it is both more immediate and more accessible for those who might be new to this ongoing and now-intensifying struggle.
The new book is slimmer by design, with an inviting layout that helps the chapters resemble a series of journalistic essays, and which features headings and subheadings for ease of navigation, as well as photos and useful charts, and short, highly readable sidebar pieces in each chapter from educational experts and advocates. It is extremely accessible, without sacrificing the careful research and journalism of the previous book.
If, as Peter Greene wrote in his Forbes review, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door is “the book that everyone you know who’s even remotely interested in education policy needs to read,” The Education Wars is positioned to be the book that everyone you know who has figured out that something is going on in education, whether or not they are ready to put that something into policy terms, needs to read.
In eight focused, well-researched chapters, the book moves from the importance of schools as a part of a functioning democratic society, to the history of anti-public school rhetoric, to the recent history of Moms for Liberty- style culture wars moving into school policy debates2, to the specific challenges of contemporary schools, and— most importantly— into the ways we can push to “reclaim education as a public good”.
The authors take the book’s subtitle, “A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual,” seriously, and the book looks and reads like information packaged to be used rather than just considered in the abstract.
And while news cycles are short and much local and national coverage of education amounts to either Wow, can you believe it? pieces about attacks on education, or carefully curated quotes from two “sides” of any particular policy issue (often to telegraph objectivity, while having the side effect of making every position seem equally reasonable), The Education Wars is careful to dive into the ways many of the seemingly novel culture war moves we’re seeing now are part of old playbooks from recent history.
For example, in a chapter called “Why Are We Always Fighting About Schools?” the authors cite the 1978 book Blackboard Tyranny: other than the date, that forgotten book sounds like its dire warnings of “indoctrination” by “Marxist” teachers could have been written today.
Again, this information is not just academically interesting, but, in the context of the book, can help would-be allies and advocates for students, teachers, parents, and schools, to understand and respond to current attacks.
Conversation with Jennifer Berkshire
I spoke with co-author Berkshire via phone in advance of the book’s release, and she said this focused and accessible style were part of a deliberate strategy.
“Our goal,” she explained, “was to write a book that reflected our own shared sense of urgency… that you could read it, and you could pass it along to somebody in your life who just wants to know, Steve, what’s all the fighting about in the schools?”3
The Education Wars more than meets this challenge. Without oversimplifying, the book clearly lays out the tactics of the “wars” and the motivations of the participants.
This time it’s different.
-The Education Wars
The book’s central thesis is that our era represents a continuation of a long struggle for an education system that prepares all students to be participants in a society built on an informed citizenry, but at the same time represents an unprecedented assault on those values.
The authors include a piece by education scholar Derek Gottlieb in which he writes, “Public schools are the places where we work out how (if at all) we will live in community, what (if anything) we owe to one another, and what (if anything) we might aspire to become together”.
Each chapter includes this kind of short piece from someone with a specific area of scholarly expertise or important perspective on education, something that was inspired by the podcast and was suggested by Schneider.
By 1965, a decade after the Brown decision, there were roughly a million students in southern private schools, most of them white. South Carolina led the charge to dismantle the system of free public schools in favor of a private school system, but virtually every southern state was close behind.
-The Education Wars
The Education Wars explains how, despite the very popular ideals enumerated by Gottlieb— ideals which ultimately culminated in the states, during the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, to begin offering a system of free, public education to all students— are now in a position of having to compete with extremely strong messaging from a temporary coalition of groups that want to undermine public education in order to create smaller, more isolating, more exclusive, and less regulated educational entities.
Near the end of the book, the authors write,
The consumer mentality has also made us susceptible to increasingly extreme policy ideas. In our previous book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, we made the case that school choice advocates envision a future in which schooling is ‘unbundled’— just as cable packages have largely been replaced by a custom-assembled collection of a la carte shows and streaming apps. As it turns out, we were right: a growing number of state-funded education savings account programs now function in exactly this way, with parents encouraged to purchase their kids’ schooling, course by course, product by product, via an Amazon-like marketplace of education vendors. Kelley Smit, the CEO of ‘micro-school’ company Prenda, likens its business to Airbnb for education, with parents searching for customizable content options the way a would-be vacationer might look for a beach cottage.
Sure enough, in her recent Heritage Foundation- sponsored summit with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina (perhaps the Congress’ most vocal and committed supporter of school vouchers) at Capitol Hill Christian Academy in Washington, DC, SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver uttered most of these talking points repeatedly and verbatim, enthusing about what she called “the great unbundling” and saying,
I’m really excited about the innovation of micro-schools. Because I think faith-based micro-schools could completely revolutionize education, especially in our neediest, most rural communities. And I’ll tell you, that’s what I have a heart for the most in South Carolina, are these places where people have given up. They’ve lost hope. And they don’t believe in themselves and they know no one else believes in them. And I want them to know that we do believe in them, that we do believe in their God-given potential4, and that through an innovation like a micro-school, essentially a one-room schoolhouse, that can be supported by education scholarship funds, those backpack funds, following the student… Maybe we don’t have to have a traditional brick-and-mortar school, we could have something smaller. Maybe there’s classroom space in a local church that’s just sitting there during the week, that we could harness.
This is what is most useful about The Education Wars: it allows, for example, someone without much background on Weaver’s very specific career track— from Bob Jones University to Jim DeMint to pro-voucher thinktank— to understand the implied worldview and agenda behind the buzzwords and slogans she crams into her remarks at the event, like she is in a hybrid of late-night infomercial and corporate branding session.
Innovation. Micro-school. Backpack funds. These terms signal to the base, as well as to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and to the school privatization lobby that Weaver is on board with their agenda, while sounding fairly innocuous to most of us.
For example, Scott and Weaver’s references to funds “following the student” are part of a popular messaging strategy from voucher and privatization proponents. Berkshire and Schneider develop a whole chapter— Chapter 6, “What’s So Bad About Funding Students, Not Systems?”— to unpacking where this talking point comes from, and why school funding doesn’t actually work that way.
After reading the chapter, readers might better understand why Weaver’s vision of a one-room micro-school in the local church masks a reality that often looks more like a fly-by-night “school” in a local strip mall, potentially run by someone with no education training or credentials, and completely unregulated by agencies tasked with protecting kids.
As University South Carolina law professor and educational law expert Derek W. Black— also cited in both books— tweeted this week, “Rural communities are the brick wall stopping vouchers in several states, so SC’s Superintendent is trying out a new sales pitch: vouchers can fund religious micro schools. She neglected to say the result will be the destruction of their community’s last civic institution”.
Similarly, if someone sees a news story about Weaver’s school book ban regulation— which went into effect (basically by accident) this week— and wonders, Why would someone who says she supports “school choice” and “unbundling” also want to make it so easy for random citizens from throughout the state to trigger statewide bans that restrict what other peoples’ kids can read?, the book gives a well-supported framework to understand those seemingly paradoxical statements.
Essentially, the book argues, “school choice” makes a sales pitch about providing “innovative” options for all families, but that pitch masks a more emotional and direct message about providing “alternatives” to a school system which folks like Weaver have, themselves, made less inviting for many students with policies that target minority students, LGBTQ+ students, and African American studies.
The idea is to create and spread the disease, and then offer a possible cure.
Currently, we ask schools to ameliorate the tremendous damage done by poverty, and we largely embrace the illusion that schooling alone is enough. It isn’t. As a result, we not only ask our schools to do the impossible, but we blame them for failing to do it.
-The Education Wars
As Berkshire told me,
When I look at voucher policies right now, again and again I just find myself thinking that [voucher supporters] cannot lose. You defund the public schools, you increase support for vouchers.
Consider something like what just happened in Louisiana with signing the Ten Commandments bill… all of the rightwing cultural stuff that we’re seeing now is incentivizing your parents who are not conservative to now consider leaving the public schools…
The fact that we’re fighting about everything, the fact that our trust in institutions is so diminished, the fact that things do feel so scary, it really has laid the groundwork for what feels like is going to— be or could be— a mass disenrollment from public schools. At least that certainly seems to be the aim.
But the flipside of this coin, according to the book, is that people still do mostly want public, community-driven schools, and large numbers of people have rejected the kind of divisive rhetoric represented by book bans and anti-trans legislation.
For example, Berkshire and Schneider’s analysis that school board races across the country by “parents rights” candidates (usually candidates supported by groups like Moms for Liberty or the 1776 Project PAC) have generally failed suggests that while bringing the culture wars to schools has been an effective way to excite and inflame the extreme base, this narrative doesn’t have broad appeal that the Rufo strategy assumes it might.
As Berkshire told me,
At a certain point, if these were issues that were really galvanizing a broad sector of the public, you would see that show up in elections, and instead the opposite has happened: the culture war candidates lose again and again. And so to me that says, there is something else happening here. This is not an organic grassroots movement…
In a state like Texas where this stuff has been particularly intense, even when they poll the base, the Republican base, they will say that they don’t care about transgenderism5. And yet that issue is being used to justify private school vouchers in Texas, you know the governor warning against a rising tide of transgenderism swamping public schools.
And as an even bigger silver lining, the authors write that “in communities that are successfully pushing back— against divisive culture war tactics and school privatization— the result is often not just the defeat of extreme candidates or bad bills. Local democracy itself emerges strengthened”.
In South Carolina, this played out pretty clearly in the first hearing for SC’s anti-trans bill.
Although the bill— which bans many medically-approved gender affirming interventions and requires teachers to out suspected LGBTQ+ to parents regardless of the situation at home— ultimately passed, the coalition that formed around opposing both it and related educational gag order bills like H. 3728 has been incredible to witness.
In that first hearing, Matt Sharpe, from the anti-trans dark money group Alliance Defending Freedom, was the only person to speak in favor of the ban, and he did so via Zoom from Arizona. The many South Carolinians who participated— healthcare providers, students, teachers, transgender individuals and their families and allies— testified passionately against the bill for hours.
And when the meeting was over, many of them kept in touch and continued to work together to oppose not only that legislation, but other proposed policies that hurt students, teachers, and schools.
But one thing that makes the book somewhat unique, and extremely valuable, is its empathy with all of the reasons people might have lost faith in the public education system. As Berkshire said, “In addition to trying to reach the broadest possible audience, another of our goals was really not to preach to the choir.”
Berkshire says she “reads politics like a novel,” and is inherently “interested in people,” and this empathy for people as people, and not as data points on a scatterplot about ideological or political orientation, shines through in the book (as it did in our conversation).
While the authors foreground the promise of education as a democratic institution, they also recognize that America has never fully lived up to that promise.
There must be a reason, after all that, seemingly bizarre arguments that public educators are indoctrinating students, or that they are trying to recruit children to “become trans” (or that they encourage children to use litter boxes in schools) have gained traction at all.
And of course most parent concerns are much less outlandish. “If you really try to dig into what people are upset about,” she told me, “people would explain in a really heartfelt way that they were worried that if kids, if all they learned was the bad stuff, that they wouldn’t believe in America… I can feel the emotion behind that.”
Where do we go from here?
The conclusion to the book begins, “This time it’s different.” In the last two chapters, the authors highlight a theme that has been present throughout: if divisive culture wars are the weapons being used to undermine public schools, it’s unlikely that they will be the way to save public schools. In other words, protecting schools can’t mean taking sides in the culture war.
Unfortunately, the data alone— that school vouchers cost taxpayers in the long run, that most voucher recipients were already attending public school, that there is no consensus that private schools perform better than public schools— won’t save us either. As Berkshire told me, “We think we can just change people’s minds by presenting them with a lot of facts, and that is not effective. And especially if you’re trying to communicate with people who already are sensitive to being talked down to.”
In a subsection of the seventh chapter, entitled “Finding Common Ground,” the authors cite Executive Director Heather DuBois Bourenane of the Wisconsin Public Education Network. Bourenane, when speaking with “parents who are worried about indoctrination… doesn’t respond to facts about what is and what isn’t happening in public schools. Instead, she asks these parents what it would look like if their students were getting the best possible education.”
The answers she gets generally demonstrate that most parents want the same things: “They want schools that are fully-funded and staffed by adults who care about their kids and recognize them”.
So, where possible, the solution might be to find common ground, to make peace where possible, rather than allowing discussions about education policy to be entirely captured by people who don’t actually want to help schools, and have every incentive to keep fanning the flames.
Berkshire suggested that Superintendent Weaver’s effort in South Carolina to make it harder for students to access AP African American Studies, for example, “is purely political. So few people are going to take that class. That’s just meant to gin up the base… It’s meant to make people mad, it’s meant to gin up the liberals and the base.” But she went on to say that many people are being sincere when they take issue with the way certain subjects are taught in schools. The problem is that the “education wars” suck up all of the oxygen in the room, making calm discussion difficult (as you might have noticed if you’ve attended a school board meeting in the past few years).
The point is not that we shouldn’t care about these issues, but that advocates for schools should realize that these issues are being used to divide us from our neighbors so that our schools can ultimately be conquered by privatizers.
Having a substantive, good-faith conversation about the merits of AP African American studies, or about the best ways to serve our LGBTQ+ students, would be positive things for school communities to do. But playing into the us versus them mentality may really only benefit those who want public schools to be a place mistrusted by people from all parts of the political spectrum.
Berkshire acknowledges this isn’t possible on every issue. “When the existence of a kid who identifies as trans is seen by the religious parent as undercutting their religious freedom. That’s not going to be something that can be worked out by just adding a book to the curriculum.”
That’s why the book’s focus on restoring the common value of schools as an institution that serves the entire community is so vital— because it seems like it may be the only way to both protect the rights of all students and at the same time move away from partisan divisiveness that undermines the institution.
The Education Wars is out July 2 from The New Press. One of the places you can buy or preorder the book is Columbia independent bookstore All Good Books. (Full disclosure: I work there a few days a week, but I do not directly make money from these sales.) It is also available for order through the book’s official website.
In A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, the authors write, “In an unbundled world, the single process of education would no longer be controlled and run by a single provider…. Perhaps the most serious problem of all is the fact that when schooling is unbundled, the broader democratic community has no say in how, and for what purpose, students are educated… In many communities, schools are at the very center of civic life. They function as gathering places, repositories of neighborhood tradition and identity, and an engine of local employment.”
Chapter 5, “What’s Really Behind the Push for Parent’s Rights?” is a particularly vital read, and features an appearance from South Carolina’s AJ Davis, an activist who, as I told Berkshire, would be my choice if I could have only one person speak for the state of South Carolina on educational issues. As she told me, “The point was, suddenly, parent meant a very particular parent. And so, the easy move would have been to talk to somebody who runs a group like ‘Moms Against Moms for Liberty’. But I thought AJ’s perspective was really interesting.”
As someone who is asked this question almost constantly, I appreciate this!
This “God-given potential” line is not new for Weaver. She generated controversy at the beginning of the past school year by requiring South Carolina Department of Education employees to fill out a form attesting to how they would help students meet their “God-given potential.” In retrospect, she might have been very pleased with the controversy as a way to increase her appeal to a minority base of supporters who reject a separation of church and state.
For example, in one recent Texas poll, “the plurality of Republicans, 42%, said it was ‘not important” for the legislature to address the treatment of students who are transgender’”. This is a trend the authors of the poll had seen hold true over time.