Does Ideology Matter When It Comes to Good Educational Ideas? (Opinion)

When you’ve been around as long as I have, one gets all manner of intriguing questions. While I usually respond to such queries in private, some seem likely to be of broader interest. So, in “Ask Rick,” I occasionally take up reader queries. If you’d like to send one along, just send it to me, care of Greg Fournier, at greg.fournier@aei.org.

Dear Rick,

I’ve seen your new book, Getting Education Right. The subtitle says it offers a “conservative” vision for early childhood, K–12, and college. That left me wondering why you’d tell potential readers they’d only be interested in what you have to say if they identify as “conservative.” Shouldn’t your ideas stand on their own merits without requiring the blessing of an ideological stamp? I don’t identify as a “conservative.” Does that mean I shouldn’t read your book? I would hope that your work reflects the truth as you see it, not the need to fit an ideological filter.

Sincerely,

Ideas Should Stand on Their Merits

Dear Ideas,

Thanks for a thoughtful note on an important topic. With education as politicized as it is today, this is a really timely issue. Your note prompts several thoughts. I’ll try to order them in a reasonably coherent way and move through them briskly.

First off, this book’s premise is that the American right has long failed to offer a robust educational vision or agenda. We wrote this book to help change that. So, yeah, it comes at these issues from an unapologetically conservative perspective. And, as guys who favor truth in advertising, my co-author, Mike McShane, and I wanted to be clear with readers about that. That does raise the question of what it means to be a conservative today. For us, it’s not about being a Republican or a Trump enthusiast. (This is a point I’ve been making at least since 2016.) Of course, if that’s not what we think conservatism is about, then what do we think it is?

We explore this at some length in the book. If I had to distill it, though, I guess I’d say that our kind of conservatism emphasizes habits of mind. It appreciates the remarkable nation we’ve inherited, puts stock in arrangements that have stood the test of time, favors competitive solutions to bureaucratic ones, and looks skeptically upon fashionable ideologies and ideological schemes. It emphasizes the personal, the local, and the decentralized, and, as we put it in the book, seeks to secure “freedom, community ties, and collective wisdom against the riptides of populism and utopianism.”

How do these apply in practice? Well, fundamental disputes over how schools model norms, set expectations, teach history, and much else are inevitably going to be informed by values. We think schools should unabashedly promote time-tested values like hard work and personal responsibility. We think that American history should not shy away from our many failings but should also take care to acknowledge the immense strides that we’ve made in advancing liberty, equality, and material well-being. We believe schools should set clear expectations for behavior and insist that all students abide by them.

As for excluding potential readers, we’ve done our level best to invite everyone in. To our minds, being clear about where we’re coming from is a sign that we respect our audience and want to be straight with it. As we observe in the preface, “Plenty of readers who don’t regard themselves as conservative may come across insights or proposals they find appealing. Good! You’re welcome to claim them, whether or not you think they’re conservative.” In fact, we’d be delighted if some readers put down the book and conclude that there’s more common ground than they’d thought.

That’s one reason why I’m proud that the book’s been endorsed by thinkers who are decidedly not conservative—like UMass’s Jack Schneider, author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, and Tough Liberal author Rick Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute. Even though these colleagues “disagree with [me] and McShane most days of the week,” as Kahlenberg puts it, I think they agree about the utility of respectful discourse grounded in clear principles. I believe it’s useful to be candid about our values and transparent about our perspective. That’s how we invite meaningful discussion about where we agree, where we don’t, and why. It enables us to explore whether disagreements are fundamental or if they’re narrower questions of research or practice and it helps us learn how we might bridge our divides. When we’re opaque or cagey about our beliefs, all of this gets much tougher.

And if you think debates about values are just posturing by awful right-wingers, which is the impression one can get reading education coverage, then I think we’ve stumbled onto the real issue: Many educational advocates, experts, leaders, and funders inhabit a blue ecosystem in which conservative concerns are frequently dismissed as instances of wrongthink or insincere posturing. The result has exacerbated our divides and alienated huge chunks of parents and community members. If anyone imagines we can get past that without talking forthrightly about views and values, I think they’re mistaken.