"Us Too-ism" Turns Off the Normies

You may have heard that a group of Columbia University administrators were sacked after someone posted screenshots of text messages where they were snarking at a panel on campus antisemitism they were in the audience for.

When that story broke, I was (and largely remain) of two minds on this. On the one hand, all of us have snarky texts that ripped out of context probably look pretty bad -- this sort of policing really doesn't end well for anyone. On the other hand, university administrators have a pretty grim reputation right now of treating antisemitism claims as trivial annoyances by bad faith actors, and these messages fit into that paradigm. There's a fundamental trust problem: many Jews do not trust that Columbia administrators are interested in seriously tackling antisemitism, and see these texts as verifying that disdainful dismissal; many academics do not trust Columbia's leadership to respond to antisemitism complaints with anything but reflexive brute force, and see this response as yet more kowtowing to an unappeasable media feeding frenzy. Both camps, in all honesty, have reasons for their mistrust.

But that's not what I what to concentrate on here, exactly. Rather, I want to take stock of one response in particular -- that of Kevin Drum. I'm a longtime fan of Drum's writing, which I think is a good exemplar of reasonably thoughtful and well-informed center-left "normie" politics. Seeing how he was responding to Israel's Gaza campaign was a good barometer of what people not in the hothouse of terminally-online left politics were thinking; in particular, it suggested that the belief that the current Israeli government is a fundamentally bad actor is not one confined to the "usual suspects" on the far-left.

In any event, one component of the Columbia controversy was the claim that the administrators themselves indulged in an antisemitic "trope" -- the suggestion that the panelists were hyping up instances of antisemitism as a "fundraising" opportunity allegedly feeding into claims about Jewish greed and/or perfidy. To this, Drum gave the textual equivalent of a giant eyeroll. He explained that he's long been suspicious of the word "tropes", which he said "in practice [is] used exclusively to imply someone has said something vaguely offensive without having the receipts." And this case, for him, fell squarely into that category:

I took a look at these text messages a couple of weeks ago and came away believing there wasn't much there. Since then the entire text conversation has been released, but it doesn't change things. During a panel discussion about antisemitism, the three deans in question shared private texts that you could fairly describe as snarky or irreverent. But that's about it.

To the Columbia administration, however, which was under siege from outraged alumni demanding that the three deans (plus a fourth) be fired immediately, the texts conveyed "a lack of seriousness about the concerns and the experiences of members of our Jewish community."

This is precisely backward. What the deans did was fail to show unconditional earnestness and obeisance toward every last grievance lodged by a particular community, no matter how ridiculous or overstated. This is apparently the price of admission to progressive society these days.

This whole thing is bonkers. The grievances of specific communities deserve to be given fair consideration, but they don't automatically demand absolute deference. In this case, the deans privately exhibited moderate skepticism toward a few of the claims from the panelists, some of it expressed a little bit caustically. None of it could reasonably be called antisemitic, and at most they deserve a verbal reprimand. Instead they're all out of jobs.

Drum thinks that antisemitism allegations here are thin gruel. Maybe you disagree. But one argument I've often heard, as against the claim that Columbia is overreacting here, is to say in essence "maybe so, but that ship has sailed -- every other group gets this sort of response when they claim to be the victims of discrimination, so it's only right that we the Jews do too." It's a version of what I've termed "us too-ism", and I've already outlined many of its pitfalls, not the least of which is the fact that the perception of what "every other group gets" is often not matched by reality. 

But Drum's reaction illuminates yet another problem: for many of the people who do perceive that this is what colleges "normally" do, they don't view that as a good thing. They view it as a bad, toxic practice they at best generally roll their eyes at. Indeed, I suspect most of the "normie" center-leftish Jewish commentators take that general perspective: when we're not talking about antisemitism, they view this sort of heavy-handed administrative response as indicative of wokeness gone wild, which is why when we are talking about antisemitism they defend similar behavior not on its own merits but rather via the us-too bank shot of "well, it's what everyone else gets." The problem is that when non-Jewish normies see this happening, they don't think "aha -- now the chickens have come home to roost, for the Jews also get to claim this bounty!" They think "oh great, yet another instance of overzealous activists peddling a grievance scoring one for cancel culture," and just slot Jews and anti-antisemitism politics into their mental category of "minorities who face some genuine discrimination but are taking things too far."

Again, all of this is aside from whether Drum is right "on the merits" to dismiss the antisemitism angle here. The point, rather, is to emphasize yet another problem with the "us too" argument -- more often than not, its reception outside the Jewish community is not going to be "well, fair is fair"; it's going to be to associate Jews with whatever malformed and exaggerated perception of identity politics gone wild already prevails within the broader public. It still might be a hit worth taking if one genuinely can defend the practices and arguments in question on their own merits, without relying on the crutch of what other groups are imagined to get. But if one's main basis for trying to draw blood is simply the "us too" entitlement, then it's definitely a fool's errand.

.... And Getting Worse Roundup

This will not be my cheeriest roundup. But there are a bunch of links burning a hole in my pocket, so here you go.

* * * *

Apropos yesterday's post on Fugitive Uterus Laws, a Washington Post article on similar efforts underway to set up checkpoint towns in Texas designed to capture any pregnant women who has designs on leaving the state for freedom.

North Carolina Republicans considering impeaching a state supreme court justice because she talked about racism. While I can't fault Slate for juxtaposing this against the undisclosed largesse heaped upon Justice Thomas, my mind more rapidly went to efforts in Wisconsin to impeach a state supreme court justice because she might vote for democracy.

A politically engaged fifteen year old kid asked a (not even that tough!) question that made Ron DeSantis uncomfortable on the campaign trail. So he sent his goons to rough him up.

You see, the real problem with the "War on Drugs" is that it's too metaphorical.

The latest Fifth Circuit crack-pottery: it's probably illegal for the FDA to tell humans they're not horses (yes, this is the latest conservative institution to burn its remaining dignity in defense of ivermectin conspiracies).

Georgia school district: saying the word "gay" around fifth graders is like graphically describing the horrors of the Holocaust to kindergarteners. 

The LLM Blues

LLMs depress me.

It's not so much the existential threat to my profession and livelihood (though that does lurk in the background, at least over the midterm).*

Rather, right now the depression stems from the fact that LLMs are almost inevitably going to diminish the importance of teaching writing skills in my law school classes. And helping people become better writers is one of my great joys as a professor. It's something I truly love doing. Yet the take-home essay -- essential to providing the sort of close reading and feedback I use to develop people as writers -- feels like one of those assignments that LLMs are going to make largely obsolete, or at least shift dramatically in terms of structure. I'm already pivoting in my syllabus -- this year is going to be a relatively experimental in terms of how to accommodate the existence of LLM -- and while I still expect that I'll do some amount of writing coaching, it definitely feels like the ground is shifting, and I'm already mourning what I anticipate losing.

* On the more existential threats, there does seem to be a bit of literary irony here for persons in the highly-educated literati contingent. I don't think I've personally engaged in this, but on a class level it certainly seems that the intelligentsia often blithely responded to the risks of tech disruption with "learn to code!" bromides, back when we thought that the machines were going to displace largely blue-collar workers. It turns out that while it's hard for a machine to develop the fine motor coordination necessary to serve as your plumber, one thing the robots are really great at is being smarter than the smart people. Whoops. "Learn to woodwork, radiologists!"

Wisconsin is a Failed State

Folks are cackling at a line-item veto Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) made which took a one-year increase to the school budget and, though some clever deletions, turned it into a four-hundred year increase. The veto goes "for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year, add $325." The new version reads: "for 2023-2425, add $325."

Obviously, this is hilarious and, as trolling goes, it's trolling for good. And there's nothing new about this in Wisconsin either -- when I teach about the line-item veto, I show an example from former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, who similarly vetoed individual bits and bobs from an enacted law to create a brand new spending program where none previously existed.

But still, it's fair to say that this is not how a functioning government should proceed.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republicans have blocked a proposal to require schoolchildren be vaccinated against meningitis. It's become increasingly clear that the anti-vaxx takeover of the GOP no longer has anything to do with COVID, and has become a general opposition to public health initiatives of all stripes. While this isn't Wisconsin specific, it is another instance of the state's ludicrously-gerrymandered legislature drinking fully and deeply of the waters of the death cult.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the chaos that has afflicted the Wisconsin Supreme Court in recent years. Of course, we all remember when one justice on that august court tried to choke out his esteemed colleague. More recently, members of that Court have repeatedly flirted with 2020 election denialism. One former member compared affirmative action to slavery. And while it may be the single funniest thing I've ever witnessed, having the Court's liberal faction celebrate the victory of a progressive challenger by marching into a watch party room to "it's bad bitch o'clock" also probably isn't exactly the sign of a perfectly healthy judicial body.

So yeah, Wisconsin isn't in great shape. Maybe folks should try Minnesota instead?

Build Back Better Colleges

In the wake of last week's anti-affirmative action decision, Larry Summers wrote an editorial urging that elite colleges respond by becoming less exclusive. Grow. Admit more students. Add more programs. Invest in education.

I could not agree more. And it's something we need to do on all fronts. Yes, the Ivy Leagues should get bigger. But the great public universities in our country should also be expanded on. The University of California system is one of the great engines of economic mobility and advancement in large part because it is huge. But there has not been a new UC campus created in almost twenty years, and UC-Merced is by far the smallest undergraduate campus in the entire system. You have to go back another forty years for the most recently established UC campuses which are of a size comparable to the system average (both UC-Santa Cruz and UC-Irvine were established in 1965). Why not create a new UC in Sacramento, or in the Bakersfield or Modesto? Or hell, put one up in Redding? 

Higher education is in a weird moment where there is simultaneously an approaching demographic cliff that will obliterate demand at the bottom end of the scale even as student demand for the top schools surges to unprecedented heights. I don't have answer to the former problem. But the only way to respond to the latter is to increase capacity in "elite" institutions, and that in turn will take a massive investment in education to absorb the tidal wave of demand. 

It's not enough for colleges to exist -- we probably have enough dorm room beds already in the United States. They have to be great colleges -- colleges that are well-supported and well-endowed and well-resourced so that the students who attend can afford to go and know that they're getting an excellent education from top-level professors. Certainly, the far longer-standing crisis in graduate education means we don't lack for supply in the last category. But we also know there's a huge difference between setting up a new fly-by-night program that exists just to exist, versus actually investing in new educational opportunities. UC-Irvine Law School immediately stormed to a top-50 ranking from nothing when it was founded in 2006 because, unlike most other newly-established law schools, it boasted a level of public and private investment that showed it was serious about being a serious institution.

The problem we're experiencing is not actually one of bad minority students taking away the rightful spoils of White and/or Asian students. The problem is one of meritocracy and equalization paired with scarcity: an explosion in students applying for (and being qualified for) "elite" positions with no increase in the number of elite positions available.

Equality means that more and more people have at least nominal potential access to elite institutions, which means that it's harder for any one individual person to access these institutions, which results in a terrifying and never-ending arms race to become (and stay as) one of the elect few, which generates new inequalities in terms of who has access to the resources that allow them to win the arms race and who doesn't.

In a very basic way, it is true that "equality" is the problem here. In the old days, if you were an elite, you could be pretty confident your kids would stay elite so long as they were basically competent: with relatively few people who could or were allowed to compete for prestigious social positions, being "okay" generally was good enough. 

Once the doors are flung open, though, you're competing against everyone, and now it's off to the races. Today, we don't want to say that "only the children of elite university attendees should attend elite universities"; we want to say that every child should have an equal chance to join the Talented Tenth. But saying that means that, if you're in the top 10% right now, you're committing to the notion that your kid should only have a 10% chance of staying in your social strata, and that's a very unpleasant thought that only grows worse as the gap between the top 10% and everyone else increases. But unless your solution is "we should go back to reserving elite roles for the current incumbents", this is necessary feature of an egalitarian social sphere combined with extremely limited "elite" social roles. So if we're not going to accept going back to overt exclusion, we need to tackle the omnipresence and power of scarce "elite" roles. The only actual way to ease the sting of redistributing the pie is growing the pie. The actual, actual villain here is terrifying inequality -- the massive and growing gap between the power, influence, autonomy, and life chances of the elites versus everyone else, which makes so that not getting into Harvard feels like a death knell.

The only way to ease the sting of redistributing the pie is growing the pie. If you're panicking at the seemingly impossible task of seeing yourself or your child admitted to an elite institution, ending affirmative action will not help you. Nor, if we're being honest, will ending legacy admissions. The only thing that will make a difference is a true commitment to investing in education to such a degree that there is space for each of our outstanding youth to receive an outstanding university experience. There's no shortcut, no scapegoat that can substitute for that.

We are blessed as a nation right now to have surfeit of incredibly talented, hard-working, diligent young people who are eminently qualified to attend a great university and deserve to have that chance. The only thing standing in the way is our own willingness to pay for it.

Schoolchildren Shouldn't Have To Live Like Jews, Part II

This weekend, Lewis & Clark Law School hosted the 2nd Annual Conference on Law vs. Antisemitism, a conference which (I don't think it's immodest of me to say) I did the lion's share of organizing.

Part of that organization was making sure, at the outset, to contact Lewis & Clark campus security to inform them of the event and have a security plan in place. This included having a security officer on site, requiring registration and check-in, alerting the Portland Police Bureau of the event and having them monitor the chatter of "certain" sites to ensure we weren't going to be a target, and other sundry efforts to address what I called our "elevated risk profile" compared to a standard law school event.

All this, to me, felt very normal and unremarkable. I'm hosting a conference on antisemitism -- of course I need to take extra steps to ensure that it is secured.

The day-of grunt work for the conference was provided by a set of Lewis & Clark law school student volunteers, most if not all of whom were not Jewish. They all did, to be clear, a fantastic job. But I think it is fair to say that for them, this sort of extra security was very much not normal. Which I recognized, and at various points during the run-up, I'd update them on the various security measures we were emplacing, trying to balance between "we're a conference on antisemitism, there's inherently heightened risk" and "but there's no reason to fear, most likely nothing bad will happen, this is all just precautionary." I was aware that my normal is not their normal.

The conference went very well, and without any problems or disruptions of any sort. As is the case, 99% of the time. The vast majority of cases where a synagogue brings in extra guards to watch over high holiday services, nothing bad happens. We just had a great event. So I felt kind of bad, forcing all these student volunteers to deal with the anxiety of all those extra security precautions. My normal shouldn't have to be their normal.

After Uvalde, I wrote a deliberately provocative post titled "Schoolchildren Shouldn't Have to Live Like Jews." The basic thrust of the post was to argue that all the various ways Jews have enhanced local security, "hardened the target", etc. etc., are not good models for how to protect schoolchildren from mass shootings. That they're normal for us -- a beleaguered, regularly threatened minority group -- should not make them normal for everyone. 

Less than a year later, in the wake of yet another school shooting, this time in Nashville, I couldn't help but return to the same thought. I mourn for the families, not just for their immediate loss, but for the extra wave of grief they will endure upon realizing just how little the American people care about them. But the fact is that when the only response to a shooting is "more guns" -- taking the firefight as inevitable and just hoping it occurs earlier in the process -- we're tacitly (or not so tacitly) conceding that "we're not going to fix it". It is taken for granted that to have your children in public schools is to run the risk of having them gunned down -- a price that too many politicians treat as one families are agreeing to pay, as opposed to being coerced into accepting (witness Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett's blithe response when asked how to "protect people like your little girl": "Well, we home school her.").

It doesn't have to be like this. Our normal shouldn't have to be their normal.

Schoolchildren Shouldn't Have To Live Like Jews

In the wake of the Uvalde massacre, the internet is replete with proposals on how to avoid or at least mitigate the risks of yet another school shooting. Some in the Jewish community have suggested adopting some of the measures we have taken to keep our schools, centers, and synagogues safe -- things like controlled entry, on-site security, and other forms of "hardening the target".

Some of these suggestions might be good ideas, and most are being made with the best of intentions. But I feel like they overlooking something very important.

Growing up Jewish, these sorts of security interventions are so normal one can almost forget how abnormal they are. Of course there is a noticeable police presence during high holiday services. Of course someone has to check you in at the door before you're allowed to even enter the synagogue. Of course there is onerous keycard entry requirements if you want to access the building for a evening Torah study session. It is jarring to encounter the freedom of places that don't have that sort of security because they don't operate with the background presupposition that someone could be trying to kill their patrons at any moment.

Because these interventions are so normalized, we forget that having to impose these sorts of security measures is bad. These measures make Jewish life worse -- less open and more stressful, less accessible and more cloistered. Does anybody think that the ideal synagogue experience is like this? They may nonetheless be necessary because of the dangers Jews face -- but that's just it: they are reflective of Jews being a persecuted minority who are regularly targeted with violent threats and assaults. What does it mean to cross-apply them to the context of public elementary schools? It's saying that every 5 - 11 year old in America is as vulnerable as a member of the minority group that is, per capita, the most common target of hate crimes in the country! That's terrible! That should be seen as a catastrophe! If that is indeed the state of being a student in America, that is an appalling failure!

The title of this post is deliberately provocative. Jews should not have to live like this either. We should be able to live our communal life open and without fear, not looking over our shoulders for the next active shooter. But we've resigned ourselves to an inability to eliminate the root cause of our problem, antisemitism. We can't do it on our own, and broader society is not interested in investing the effort to make the project a success. So stuck with the reality of persistent violent antisemitism, at least over the medium term, these measures are suboptimal ameliorations of the consequences of our continued marginalization.

If schoolchildren are in the same boat, that must mean we've reached the same conclusion for them: as a polity, we just have given up on our ability to actually eliminate the threat to schoolchildren. We cannot be bothered to make the social and political investments necessary so that the status of schoolchildren is not analogous to that of a persecuted minority regularly targeted by violent threats. We have resigned ourselves to that level of vulnerability for our children, and now just seek to ameliorate the effects. That is appalling. It is appalling that Jews are forced to accept this; and it is a perverse form of justice that this quiescence be extended to every family with minor children.

I do not claim that the experiences of the Jewish community cannot be helpful in building out better security for public schools, in this decidedly suboptimal world where we have apparently decided to just accept this terrible vulnerability as a baseline. But we should not lose sight of the fact that if our experiences are even analogous -- what a striking indictment that is of our society. People should not have to live like this.

The (Non-)Prevalence Problem of CRT

Years ago, I remember reading a famous paradox concerning how Americans viewed the subject of foreign aid. If you asked them "should the US spend more or less on foreign aid," most Americans would answer "less" -- they thought we spent way too much money on the issue. But when you asked them to estimate how much the United States spent on foreign aid each year, they gave an answer that was an order of magnitude higher than what we actually spent. And worst of all, if you asked them how much they thought we should spend on foreign aid, their answer was still far higher than what we actually did spend -- and remember, this is from people who thought their position was that we needed to cut foreign aid!

At one level, this confluence mostly just shows that most people are innumerate. But taking it somewhat at face value, there is a nettlesome political puzzle here. What does one do if people say they want to adopt position X, but actually advocate for moving away from X, because they are under the misapprehension that the status quo is on the far side of X and thus believe that moving away from X actually means moving towards it?

This is a problem with some folks who've joined up on the "anti-Critical Race Theory" crusade. Of course, there are plenty of people who make no bones about their position -- they think CRT is a Globalist Marxist Socialist Communist Soros Triple Parenthesis plot, and they want to destroy it. But others at least purport to believe that Critical Race Theory should be taught, it just shouldn't be the only thing that is taught. For instance, David Bernstein of the "Jewish Institute for Liberal Values", a prominent anti-CRT voice in the Jewish community, took the position that any school which teaches a "traditional" narrative about civil rights should also teach a CRT perspective.

I absolutely believe any school that teaches a traditional narrative should teach a CRT based approach as well. I don’t know if there are more schools in the traditional category.

— David Bernstein (@DavidLBernstein) January 30, 2022

Now here's the thing. If your opinion is that every school should teach both a "traditional" and "CRT" style approach to civil rights, you are advocating for a position that is way to the left of the status quo. The vast majority of primary and secondary schools in the United States do not teach "CRT" at all. In some small number, you might get a CRT-influenced approach in conjunction with more traditional accounts. The number of students who are only being exposed to CRT, and no other perspective, is absolutely negligible. Objectively speaking, if your view is "students should hear both traditional and CRT views", you should be pushing for far more inclusion of CRT into public school curricula than is present in the status quo.

In other words, the entirety of the barrier to getting to the world Bernstein claims he wants to see comes from folks like the Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, who's trying to get the University of Wisconsin to rescind its hiring of respected scholar Jennifer Mnookin as Dean because Mnookin (this is a direct quote) "supports critical race theory being taught on campus". It's Texas passing laws limiting what can be taught in the classroom with the express goal of seeking to "abolish" CRT. It's Florida with a veritable cavalcade of legislation seeking to target and suppress "woke" ideologies.

Yet Bernstein, like the ill-informed respondent on foreign aid, has adopted a politics that sprints off in the exact opposite direction from where he claims he wants to go, because he has a wildly off-base assessment of how common Critical Race Theory is. He thinks CRT is everywhere, so getting to a position of even-handedness means pushing back against CRT's hegemony, even if it means making common cause with some unsavory actors. The reality is that CRT is still relatively obscure for most Americans, and so getting to evenhandedness would mean a more aggressive deployment of CRT into the American educational curriculum than would be dreamed by even the philosophy's most fervent supporters. 

Is he actually that ignorant about the true (non-)prevalence of CRT in the American educational system? I think he probably isn't; but there is something to be said for a certain type of elite who forgets the world exists more than 10 miles beyond Brooklyn and so confuses what is commonplace in a Williamsburg coffeeshop with the national status quo. A little of column B, a little (a lot) of column B, I'd wager. 

Seeing Double Standards

A new article co-authored by Albert Cheng, Jay P. Greene, and Ian Kingsbury was just published in Antisemitism Studies purporting to show that highly-educated people are more prone to adopting antisemitic double-standards. 

The authors had previously publicized their findings in a Tablet Magazine article, and at that time I actually shared critical feedback with one of the co-authors explaining some serious methodological flaws that severely undermined their conclusions. I had hoped that these concerns would rectified or at least addressed once the article was submitted for peer-reviewed publication. Unfortunately, the final published piece continues to ignore the issues outright -- not even acknowledging their existence, much less meaningfully responding to them. So I'll raise them publicly here, so unwary readers are not led astray.

The basic thrust of the article relies on the notion of the double-standard -- treating Jews differently (worse) than similarly-situated non-Jews should be viewed as a form of antisemitism. Unlike some, I am not instinctively averse to the idea that a double-standard is evidence of antisemitism or other discrimination -- indeed, it seems to me that the core of what discrimination is treating likes unalike. However, the devil in such analysis always is figuring out what counts as a "similarly-situated" case (in anti-discrimination law, we call this a valid "comparator"). If there is a different characteristic than the one being measured that distinguishes the comparators from the base (Jewish) case, then it's entirely possible that that characteristic is what drives any differences in resulting treatment.

For example, suppose one wanted to measure if baseball teams performed better against opponents based in the eastern United States. One thing you might do is look at 2020 MLB records and compare how teams fared against Pittsburgh Pirates compared to the Los Angeles Dodgers, where you would find that teams typically did much better against the Pirates. Hypothesis confirmed? Obviously not -- the Dodgers won the World Series that year, and the Pirates were awful. If we had instead compared the Atlanta Braves (top of the NL East) against the Arizona Diamondbacks (bottom of the NL West), we'd have reached the opposite conclusion -- but the real conclusion is that "it's not geography, it's the quality of the team". The choice of comparators ends up driving the conclusion.

The article constructs four pairs of "cases" which it claims are similar enough such that, if the Jewish-coded option is treated worse, we should infer a double-standard is at work. The pairings are:

1. Whether "the government should set minimum requirements for what is taught in private schools," with either Orthodox Jewish or Montessori schools given as the illustrating example. 
2. Whether "a person's attachment to another country creates a conflict of interest when advocating in support of certain U.S. foreign policy positions," with either Israel or Mexico offered as illustrating examples. 
3. Whether "the U.S. military should be allowed to forbid" the wearing of religious headgear as part of the uniform, with either a Jewish yarmulke (kepah) or Sikh turban offered as illustrating examples.
4. Whether public gatherings during the pandemic "posed a threat to public health and should have been prevented," with either Orthodox Jewish funerals or Black Lives Matter protests offered as illustrating examples.

Highly-educated respondents tended to be less favorably disposed towards the "Jewish" examples in these pairings, which the authors claims is proof of an antisemitic double-standard in that cohort.

When I saw these pairings, though, what jumped out at me is that each of the "comparator" examples was culturally-coded as to the "left" of its Jewish partner. Montessori schools are associated with wooly progressivism, attachment to Mexico most associated with immigrant communities under siege by Trumpists, Sikhism being a predominantly non-White and non-European religious community, and BLM ... well, that one's obvious.

Hence, it struck me as plausible -- if not likely -- that what we really were seeing in these results is favorability towards perceived cultural-ideological compatriots, given that highly-educated Americans tend to have left-of-center cultural-ideological attachments. If we used comparators which were culturally-coded as to the "right" of the Jewish example, I suspect the double-standard would disappear (or even reverse). Another commenter similarly observed that the "Jewish" examples are consciously stacked towards Orthodox Judaism in at least two and arguably three of the four examples, which also means we might be picking up on views about Orthodox Judaism rather than Judaism writ large.  That's definitely still meaningful, but it is also a more specific finding and one that arguably fits well within my own theory about of cultural-ideological attachment.

Indeed, it was striking and dare I say suspicious how one-sided the choice of comparators was -- even in circumstances where there was a far more obvious comparator that would have coded as more conservative. The clearest example is in Orthodox Jewish funerals versus BLM protests -- Evangelical megachurch services is right there, is far more obviously parallel (as a religious rite) to an Orthodox Jewish funeral than a political protest, and was very much in the news as a substantial area where COVID restrictions were being deliberately flouted under claims of religious practice. Choosing to "compare" the Orthodox Jewish funerals to BLM in those circumstances is, well, it's a choice, and one that feels very clearly motivated by a desire to come to the "correct" result.

Imagine, instead, that the study used the following as its comparator pairs:

1. Whether "the government should set minimum requirements for what is taught in private education," with either Jewish day schools or Christian home-schooling given as the illustrating example. 
2. Whether "a person's attachment to another country creates a conflict of interest when advocating in support of certain U.S. foreign policy positions," with either Israel or Russia offered as illustrating examples. 
3. Whether "the U.S. military should be allowed to forbid" the wearing of religious apparel as part of the uniform, with either a Jewish yarmulke (kepah) or a large crucifix offered as illustrating examples.
4. Whether public gatherings during the pandemic "posed a threat to public health and should have been prevented," with either Orthodox Jewish funerals or Evangelical megachurch services offered as illustrating examples.
5. Whether medical professionals should be able to receive exemptions from laws which conflict with their religious commitments, with either "Reform Jewish doctor asking for a religious exemption from laws preventing him from prescribing contraceptives" or "Catholic doctor asking for an exemption from laws requiring him to prescribe contraceptives" as illustrating examples.

In those pairings, the non-Jewish comparator is coded to the "right" of the Jewish example, and my hypothesis is that highly-educated respondents would be more favorably disposed to the Jewish examples compared to the non-Jewish alternative.

To be clear, this would not demonstrate that actually highly-educated Americans harbor a philosemitic bias, for the same reason why the published study does not show highly-educated Americans harbor an antisemitic bias. Rather, we'd have a situation where highly-educated persons treat Jews worse than some cases and better than others, and we'd need an explanation why -- and my proposed explanation is "perceived ideological-cultural compatibility".

It is unfortunate that the study did not do a better job picking its comparators (to be charitable -- the uncharitable take is that the authors did exactly the job they were intending to when picking their comparators), and it's still more unfortunate that the authors did not even address this criticism. The closest they come is in the following passage in the conclusion:

Of course, critics of this research might object that our four paired items are not truly comparable. They might claim that the public health dangers of BLM protests and public funeral gatherings are not the same, or that a yarmulke and turban are not the same, or that dual loyalty concerns with respect to Mexico and Israel are not the same. However, we are all limited by the lack of a clear objective standard for defining bigotry and for making defensible distinctions based on different circumstances. In fact, every bigot claims that the groups they treat more harshly are deserving of that treatment. All we can do is appeal to the critic to consider whether public health is jeopardized more when Jews gather than when protestors gather, whether yarmulkes interfere with military necessity more than turbans, or whether dual loyalty is more problematic if it involves one country over another. Like the average individual in the general public, we do not see differential treatment in any of these scenarios as defensible. That said, we do encourage the creation of new item pairs that closely correspond to each other and cover a variety of other scenarios so that any observed differences in response patterns can be attributable to whether the item concerns Jews or non-Jews as opposed to any other potential differences across the items.

The first part does not actually confront the criticism I offered. Certainly, one could argue that the paired items are not actually "the same" in relevant respects. But the criticism I'm leveling relates not to how the proposed non-Jewish comparators differ from theirs Jewish counterparts, but between how the proposed non-Jewish comparators differ from potential alternatives that have a more conservative as opposed to liberal cultural-ideological valence. Perhaps it's still the case that, for example, the public health dangers of BLM protests and Orthodox funerals and Evangelical megachurch services are the same, such that the truly virtuous (and public health minded) deliberator should treat them all identically. But if they don't, the reason why most likely relates to a different sort of in-group affinity than antisemitism -- particularly if they are relatively less favorable towards the Jewish case compared to the BLM example but more favorable compared to the Evangelical example. So while I'm heartened to see the authors encourage the "creation of new item pairs" that can drill down on these questions, that doesn't excuse the authors' own failure to construct their study with appropriate care and rigor.

What To Draw from the San Francisco Recall

A recall election targeting three progressive members of the San Francisco school board has succeeding by a thumping margin, with the pro-recall side taking around 70% of the vote. I was following this saga semi-closely (I never lived in San Francisco, but being just across the Bay I still paid some amount of attention). And while everyone is going to have their hot takes on this, I'll provide the hottest take of all by serving mine at room temperature.

I will say that I'm going to try to avoid a normative assessment about whether the decision by the voters here was good or bad. You're going to get a lot of either (a) "Even in liberal San Francisco...." or (b) "San Francisco views itself as so liberal, but when push comes to shove...."; you don't need me to adjudicate that for you.

Anyway, when you read stories about the recall, the narrative seems to focus primarily on three things: (1) the failure of the Board to prioritize reopening schools; (2) the Board's insistence on renaming a huge swath of schools whose namesakes were deemed historically problematic; and (3) the Board instituting a "lottery" for admission to an elite public high school which had previously used a competitive, test-based admissions regime (this reportedly aroused the anger of the city's Asian-American community, which had a large presence at the school that it thought would be reduced under the lottery system).

Of course, everyone wants to tell the story in such a way that it fits their political priors. If you are fulminating about the excesses of "wokeness", then the renaming controversy is going to loom large. If you are excited about the new flexing of Asian-American political muscle, the controversy over Lowell HS admissions will be a major factor. And so on.

My lukewarm take is that one should not read too much into this because it's really the confluence of factors, taken together, which was a bit of a perfect storm. For example, there are plenty of school renamings that go off without a hitch, but here the board's buzzsaw like approach targeting dozens of schools (often on thin-to-nonexistent research) really smacked of performance over substance (and we could ask -- performance for who? Who, exactly, wanted this -- or more accurately, this much of this?). The Board just clearly got too far in front of its shoes here; it wildly overestimated the demand and the appetite for this sort of endeavor (noting that "overestimated" is not the same thing as saying there is no appetite at all).

But even that would have been probably overlooked for the most part except that it was occupying much of the Board's attention instead of the seemingly more pressing matter of figuring out how to reopen schools. I have some amount of sympathy here because "reopening the schools" is a genuinely difficult problem and it's not something the Board could have just fiated into existence with a finger snap. That said, if you seem to ignore the most pressing public education issue of the year for the sake of a comparatively lower priority and you appear manifestly incompetent at addressing the thing which you've (wrongly) decided to make agenda item #1, yeah, that's going to piss people off. That reopening the schools is hard is a compelling argument that one needs to very clearly and publicly exert all your effort on figuring out how to make it happen; the worst thing you can do is appear to shrug your shoulders at the whole endeavor and say "you know what seems like a lot more fun than trying to get kids back into the classroom? Figuring out whether Dianne Feinstein should have her name on a building!"

So for me, the lesson to be learned is not "San Francisco voters reject wokeness", but it is very much that competence matters and San Francisco voters are not going to just blindly accept anything its elected pols do just because they drape themselves in the cloak of "wokeness". It has to be about substance, not symbolism. That goes for the school renamings too -- if one thinks it's all about symbolism and "sending a message", then maybe the execution doesn't matter so much. By contrast, if one actually views this issue as one of substantive import, then one should be willing to do the hard work of doing research and consensus-building and line-drawing. Arguably, one could say than San Franciscans want actual, good, thought out "wokeness", which they do not define (contra the semi-strawman version) as just pulling out a flamethrower and torching everything in sight.

But more fundamentally, the takeaway is that the basic, often dull, but bread-and-butter policy work of making sure the schools function has to come first. That's my big conclusion (and if one wants to say this is me just promoting my political priors, I don't judge you). A lot of good politics is the dry endeavor of just competently insuring that things work. The best political leaders do that and can innovate and inspire and push the ball forward. But the fundamentals have to be in place before one can build flair on top.

Get the foundation down, and you can do great work building on top of it. But if you elect people who aren't interested in the foundational work because they're mostly excited about some high-level ideological vision -- well, that can work if the underlying structure is strong enough that the system can manage itself on autopilot. But if you enter a time of stress or strain, like we are now in COVID, you need people at the helm who are both capable and committed to doing the slow boring work of making government work.

Bay Area District Doesn't Adopt California's Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum

The controversy over Ethnic Studies in California continues apace, as the Castro Valley school district (in the East Bay) voted to sign a contract with the "Liberated" ethnic studies group of educators who had been responsible for the discredited initial draft of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. When California substantially changed their draft and adopted the much-improved final draft of the curriculum, the "Liberated" contingent disavowed the project and set out on their own to independently promote their initial vision.

First things first: this is a bad decision, and the Jewish community (which spoke out against it) has the right to be upset. From one Board member's Britta Perry-like "I lived in New York!" exclamation for why he'd never vote for anything antisemitic, to the blithe dismissal of the inclusion of Jews in the framework because Ethnic Studies is "not about religion. It’s about the American experiences of those who are marginalized and displaced" (golly, what could Jews know about being marginalized and displaced?) this was not a shining moment for the Castro Valley school board. There is little question that the school district's decision is going to result in a curriculum that is hostile to the Bay Area Jewish community in a way that was obviously and easily avoidable.

What happened here? Some people, inexplicably,* are suggesting that Castro Valley's decision discredits the Jewish community's decision to rally in favor of the California model curriculum -- again, the curriculum Castro Valley just rejected and which the educators they hired have actively disavowed. There is something profoundly strange about having heard endless wailing from groups like ACES about how the model curriculum was barely an improvement over the "liberated" curriculum, how they were two peas in a pod, how they were basically different branches of the same tree -- and then those same groups expressing horror when a district adopts the "liberated" curriculum. I get why I'm upset, but why are they mad? I'd been arguing that there was a huge difference between the two approaches; they'd been saying they were essentially identical. Now they suddenly can understand the difference that we've been harping on for months? Welcome to the party!

In terms of what happened, well, that's actually pretty simple to answer. We already knew that the California ethnic studies bill did not alter the status quo where local school districts could choose their own curriculum, and that's what Castro Valley just did. The only failproof check against that would've been to make the model curriculum mandatory, but of course team "the model curriculum is a disaster" would never have supported that. The California Jewish Legislative Caucus claims that its amendments to the Ethnic Studies bill put up guardrails preventing groups like Liberated from implanting anti-Jewish measures into even local curriculum; we'll see if they hold up (I'll be honest in saying I don't think these guardrails are that robust).

In a circumstance where local school boards are empowered to make largely independent choices about their curricular offerings, there is always the possibility -- and arguably the inevitability -- that some will make distasteful or even bad and hurtful choices. If that risk cannot be dissipated entirely, it can be mitigated via presenting a credible "off the rack" curriculum that becomes the cheapest, path-of-least-resistance option for local boards. That doesn't mean all will adopt it -- but they're far more likely to adopt it if they know it has widespread communal support and backing. The months we spent in-fighting based on ticky-tack objections to the model curriculum didn't make the curriculum any better and didn't make it harder for local boards to make autonomous decisions -- all it did was make the model curriculum less viable as an expression of mainstream consensus support, and accordingly make alternatives comparatively more attractive.

It'd be too strong to blame the model curriculum critics for the decision by the Castro Valley board. They might have voted this way no matter what happened, and in any event they're responsible for their own choices. But there's little question that the model curriculum critics made it more likely that local boards will not adopt the model curriculum, and it cannot surprise us when groups like the "Liberated" curriculum swoop in to fill the ensuing void.

* Obviously it's entirely explicable, it'd just be rude to state the explanation out loud.

The New Holocaust Minimization from Europe to America

It is a common cliché to claim that 21st century American antisemitism will follow the trajectory of 21st century Europe's, lagging only by a couple of years. I hear it most often in claims that the Democratic Party will inevitably Corbynify (I never hear the follow-up of what is supposed to be the American iteration of "... and then Corbyn is trounced in the general and summarily tossed from his leadership post"). Far less frequently is attention paid to how the American right can and will follow in the footsteps of its European peers.

On that note, I want to put two stories in conversation with one another. The first is a right-wing party in Romania under attack for dismissing Holocaust education as a "minor topic". The second is a Republican legislator in Indiana, State Sen. Scott Baldwin, taking flak for insisting that, under his proposed "anti-CRT' law, educators must and should take a "neutral" stance on Nazism.

The Indiana incident is hardly the first of its kind. From the outset, the anti-CRT push has undercut Holocaust education initiatives -- an utterly predictable consequence that thus far has barely even registered an iota of worry amongst Republicans who just a few months ago were holding themselves as the last hope against an incipient tidal wave of antisemitism (then again, it was barely a year ago when Republicans were still holding themselves out as defenders of free speech in education -- who can keep up?).

But it is worth putting these developments in America in conversation with what's happening in Europe, and why it is exactly that they find the Holocaust to be so disposable. For the most part, it is not that I think that the legislators in Indiana or Texas are secret Hitler admirers. However, I do think they may possess, and be acting on, a sort of annoyed indifference to the Holocaust's preeminence. Much like Republican frustration over how all political scandals end in -gate, there is frustration over how the main "shared" exemplar of pure political evil is a right-wing phenomenon. Sometimes this frustration manifests in absurd attempts to pretend that Nazism was "actually" a left-wing ideology. But another play is to seek to undercut the Holocaust as "just another" historical event, one that shouldn't receive undue attention or be subject to special condemnation. Who cares about the Holocaust when somewhere, someone is reading a book on how to provide support to LGBT youth? It's not pro-Nazi so much as it's anti- expending any resources to fight Nazism or inculcate the view that Nazism is bad. 

On the European side, the new far-right parties are not (yet) outright praising Hitler, but they're very much taking the view that we obsess too much over Hitler. Nazism is a minor blemish, an inkblot, a footnote in an otherwise glorious White European history, and bringing it up is just an obnoxious distraction from the "real" threats posed by immigrants, Muslims, and multiculturalism. And of course, the American right is increasingly lining up with these parties -- Steve King was just a touch ahead of the curve, but the snuggling up to Viktor Orban in Hungary has long since passed into the GOP mainstream. Why should the view of the Holocaust resist the trend? Indeed, the Indiana and Texas cases already show the GOP is happily galloping along with it.

The "Rigorous" Case Against Teaching More Students More Math

California is in the process of updating its statewide framework for Mathematics education, and unsurprisingly there is controversy -- controversy that will strike many observers as having striking similarities to the recent flare-ups about "ethnic studies" in the state. Monica Osborne in Newsweek has a concise summary of the position of opponents (largely summarizing the objections made in this open letter). There are the de rigueur drive-bys against the curriculum becoming too "political" and non-"neutral", to the point at which it is allegedly not even "mathematics" anymore -- I actually addressed some of those objections in a prior post. But the main objection is claiming that the new math framework abolishes (or at least sharply discourages) "accelerated" or "advanced" math classes, doing disservice to students who genuinely are "gifted" in a misguided nod towards "equity".

One thing I will say is that the open letter (perhaps learning from the Ethnic Studies debacle, where a refusal to do basic citation led to outright fabrications being bandied about by curriculum opponents) does everyone the helpful service of citing its sources so one can see where, exactly, the Mathematics Framework allegedly does say the things its critics contend it is saying. It isn't perfect -- for example, the letter claims that the Framework "[e]ncourages keeping all students together in the same math program until the 11th grade and argues that offering differentiated programs causes student 'fragility' and racial animosity (Ch. 1, p. 15)"; but I wasn't able to find either the "keeping all students together" claim or the "racial animosity" claim on that page (as for the "fragility" point, which was mentioned, it is interesting to note that -- perhaps contrary to one's intuition reading that word out of context -- the claimed "fragility" is that of the gifted students who come to "fear times of struggle in case they lose the label"). Nonetheless, it is tremendously helpful in assessing these claims that they are consciously linked to particular portions of the draft framework. Kudos for that!

Having said that, what do we make of how the new framework addresses issues like "tracking" and "giftedness" and other like practices? To some extent, there seems to be the usual "talking past one another" that one finds in controversies such as this; the State Board explicitly denies that the new framework removes programming to serve "gifted" students, or eliminates "accelerated" classes. But clearly they are attempting to make some alterations that are designed -- I think it is fair to say -- to de-emphasize the degree to which math education is sharply divided between the naturally-gifted "haves" and the hapless "have-nots". Are those modifications salutary? Do they underserve brilliant minds? Or are they increasing access to rigorous mathematical education for all students?

I want to digress for a moment to talk about my own journey through mathematics education. I am not, to be clear, a math teacher (though I am a teacher, and so to that extent have practitioner-level experience with pedagogy in general). I also never considered myself, and to this day do not consider myself, "good at math" (a label which to some extent makes this debate more interesting to me). This is so even though under any objective metric I was actually very good at math -- I got a 720 on my math SAT and a 4 on my AP Calculus exam. That's quite good, especially for someone who always considered himself "bad at math"!

My recollection of how math education occurred at my (high-performing, suburban public) school is that between sixth and seventh grade students made a single, fateful choice. They could enroll in advanced math -- that would put them on track to take advanced calculus (multi-variable calculus) by twelfth grade. They could enroll in honors math -- that would put them on track to take regular calculus in twelfth grade. Or they could enroll in some form of "basic" or "remedial" math, in which case they would not be on track to take calculus at all.

Notice that this single choice at age 12 basically laid out the entirety of one's mathematical education for the next six years. There was essentially no moving up the ladder once one made the choice (there was theoretically the possibility of falling down the ladder, although that was a terrifying prospect that kept many a "gifted" student awake cramming at night). For my part, I chose the middle ("honors") route -- I didn't think of myself as "good at math", so the top path wasn't for me, but I was a conscientious student, so I wasn't going to go the bottom route either. And from that point forward, my path was set; and to a large extent so was my self-identity vis-a-vis math. Despite the fact that I objectively was perfectly capable of doing well at math (again, check those SAT and AP scores), I always viewed myself as not a math guy -- the people who were taking the advanced classes; they were the ones good at math. As someone who tends to think very verbally, I never connected with math, never fully saw its usefulness to someone like me and with my interests.

This persisted even after I graduated high school. Carleton had a math/science distribution requirement, which I skirted as best I could with classes like "Science and Society" or "Conservation Biology" (which basically was a semester of taking pleasant hikes through nature). The political science department did require one to take a statistical methods sequence, which I satisfied by taking (1) the lowest level stats class the school offered and then (2) a "methods" class where I resolutely avoided doing any of the hard statistical analysis by deliberately choosing a research question where I found no correlation between my variables (so no need for robustness checks). When I got to graduate school, there was no way in hell I was going to touch the methods classes (which were not required for political theorists) -- that was way to advanced for little ol' anti-math me. I can't quite say I "regret" not taking them -- even now, the thought of it fills me with dread -- but I can say that lacking the ability to conduct independent empirical research is probably the biggest gap in my scholarly toolset dividing the sorts of scholarship I'm interested in doing from that which I'm capable of doing, and I do regret that.

Thinking back on it, it is simply insane that this entire mathematical-education arc was more or less set in stone via a single decision made when I was twelve. That's nuts! All the more nuts since it ended up becoming quite obvious that I was perfectly capable of learning advanced math; the choice made then did not map onto any "natural" capacity I did or did not have. I can fully accept that some other students at twelve might have had more fire in the belly for math than I did at the time, and that in turn could suggest different styles of teaching math to them than would have been appropriate for me. But to lock either of us into a particular rigid track at that age, telling us "you will go exactly this high, and no further" (and "you can go lower, but only if you cop to being a disgraceful failure") seems absolutely absurd.

It was remembering that personal trajectory that informed my read on what California is proposing. The core of their argument is, more or less, "all or nearly all students are capable of learning high-level math, and so making decisions in middle school that lock students in or out of taking high-level math classes at the end of high school is both unnecessary and foolish". Instead, we should restructure math education so that there are many different pathways that offer the opportunity for more students to end up enrolled in high-level math courses -- the choice you make at twelve shouldn't be your destiny. And likewise, we should recognize that "calculus" is not the only example of "high-level" math -- it is one, but not the only one. The current system is defined by the "race to calculus", where success is defined solely by whether and how fast one gets to the calculus class of the math sequence. This was certainly my experience -- the advanced students got there in 11th grade (then took an extra class of advanced calculus senior year), the middle group I was in get there in 12th grade, and the bottom group doesn't get there at all and is thus looked down upon. We actually had an AP Statistics class offered as well, but I honestly do not recall who even took it -- it was definitely seen as the "lesser" math class, even though in retrospect a strong knowledge of statistics would have been far more useful to me than the calculus class I did take. But it did not lie on the rigid trajectory of the math sequence, which meant it was implicitly downgraded as the off-ramp for the failures.

Math education, even more so than other disciplines, is addicted to the "cult of the genius", where we can identify relatively early on certain students as naturally gifted and others as hapless drones, and sort them into appropriate tracks based on those assessments. The California Framework suggests that this cult, like many cults, is not backed by empirical evidence -- one needn't be a gifted genius to learn high-level math, and working on the assumption that one does need to be such a genius means providing decidedly suboptimal math education to the median California student. We could be successfully teaching more students more math, but we don't because we somehow decided that we can sort the geniuses from the worker bees at the tweenage years and after that we just let nature take its course. It is unsurprising that these gut-check instincts about who is a "genius" track the usual lines of social hierarchy and stereotyping, but that is just the tip of the problematic iceberg.

The reformulation proposed by the California framework is not to prohibit strong, enthusiastic math students from being able to pursue their interests. For those students, it suggests that optimal math education is not defined by racing them to calculus as soon as possible, but may entail giving them more opportunities to explore more elements of math in greater depth or rigor. Moreover, by broadening the pathway that leads to high-level math, we reduce the sometimes overwhelming pressure that falls upon these student where if they struggle anywhere they are a failure and have sacrificed their future. It stands to reason that there will be plenty of "gifted" students for whom algebra clicks easily and for whom geometry is a nightmare. The status quo assumes that anyone who happens to be good at that type of math that is prevalent in grade seven will likewise sail through all the other math concepts at a similar pace. It would be better if we recognized that all students likely will have some parts of math they find easy or which naturally connects (or which they just enjoy more), and other areas they find difficult and need more time on (or just find profoundly uninteresting), and that acknowledging the latter does not come at the cost of giving up one's chance to take upper level courses. The rigidity of the current framework doesn't serve "advanced" students even on its own terms. It locks them into a rat race with only one destination and exceptionally high stakes for failure. It is not a good thing that strong math students at my high school essentially could not take AP Statistics even if that interested them more than AP Calculus.

But the bigger reform being pitched is that, for the average California student, the math sequence being offered isn't rigorous enough. It knocks too many students off the path of taking advanced math classes at far too early a point. Pluralizing the sequence of math classes and making it so that many students -- not just those identified as "stars" as tweens -- are in position to take advanced coursework in the field is a step towards stronger math education. It is step towards teaching more students more math at a higher level -- an unambiguously good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

In this, Osborne's reference to the opportunities wealthier families have to place their children in bespoke math "enrichment" programs actually proves the opposite of her point. It is unlikely, after all, that all or even most of the students who enroll in such programs are "geniuses". But that's the point -- they don't have to be: give them access to advanced programming, and they're perfectly capable of learning the material, because this education is not the province of geniuses but of ordinary students. The lesson California draws from those programs is that most of their students, "genius"-labeled or no, can and should have access to strong, rigorous mathematical education. So they should reorient their math education away from rigid, imprecise sorting at young ages, and instead think in terms of providing a plurality of pathways to get as many students as possible to advanced classes. Rich parents get this already; they can provide their kids with advanced instruction regardless of how they're labeled as tweens. This is powerful evidence that the rest of the public school system should follow suit.

What may be true is that California is trying to at least diminish the obvious hierarchy within math, where we can say the students who took multi-variable calculus their senior year are better than the those who only took AB calculus are better than those who didn't take calculus at all (recall my high school, where taking AP Statistics was a sure mark of being a lesser student). Reorienting the math curriculum so that many different end points (calculus, statistics, formal modeling, and so on) are all rigorous and robust means consciously trying to blur hierarchical lines that say one of these ends is "higher" than the others. If the most important part of math education is providing for status-differentiation -- being crystal clear about who are the elite students and who are the normies -- then this is a loss. It is, we should be clear, a very different loss from depriving "gifted" students of the opportunity to learn advanced math -- they're still learning it, they if anything have more choices on exactly what arena of advanced math they want to concentrate on, but they are not simply by virtue of staying on the top rung of the ladder they climbed at age twelve automatically viewed as superior math students to their peers. There is good ground to believe that it is that loss --the status loss, not the educational loss -- which is what's motivating much of the anger at the reform (how can I guarantee I'll get into Stanford unless everyone knows I'm better than my classmates who weren't imprecisely identified as math geniuses as a tween?). 

But California is making a conscious decision to trade having clear ordinal hierarchical ranking for giving more students more rigorous math instruction than they have now. That, to me, sounds like a good trade. And to the extent it isn't -- the problem isn't that the new curriculum lacks rigor or ambition, or tries to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. It is because it is sincerely committed to doing more for more students that the framework is generating this animosity.

Three Feet Shorter

When the Supreme Court upheld an affirmative action program at the University of Michigan Law School as pursuing the compelling state interest of "racial diversity", Justice Scalia was scornful. The values of diversity -- inclusivity, tolerance, learning to work with people across differences -- were best taught to students "three feet shorter and twenty years younger" than the typical law student.

Four years later, though, when the Court in the Parents Involved case considered programs securing racial diversity in primary and secondary schools, this logic disappeared. It turned out that Scalia and the conservatives didn't want to inculcate these values at a younger age; they just didn't want them inculcated at all.

I was thinking about this upon reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's fusillade against "critical race theory" in primary schools. The scare quotes are appropriate, since as Ali concedes, the racial justice initiatives she objects to in primary education do not go by the name "critical race theory" even as the right labors feverishly to place them under the label. In a truly spectacular leap of logic, that the right calls things "critical race theory" that are not "critical race theory" is not evidence that they're simply making things up, but rather is demonstrative of the theory's proponents showing a "remarkable ability to shape-shift".

But I digress. Ali's main argument is that affirmative action programs have been "clear failure", listing off a bevy of racial inequalities that still exist in the fifty years following the civil rights revolution. Of course, the crit would suggest that this shows the problems of racism in America run deeper than a few diversity initiatives can fix; and even the non-crit might find it odd to see evidence of ongoing racial inequality mustered as proof that we need to think less about matters of racial inequality. But Ali, ever the iconoclast, puts the entirety of the blame on affirmative action itself -- specifically, Richard Sander's "mismatch" theory. Leave aside the various criticisms one might have of that theory. Its core logic is that, by the time we reach the point of a collegiate affirmative action program, it's too late to undo the failures of the primary educational system to provide the foundations and skills necessary for students of color to thrive in elite university settings. The intervention occurs too late in the day.

So the obvious implication is that we should be investing our energies earlier in the process -- concentrating on students when they are twenty years younger and three feet smaller. And yet, it turns out, Ali -- like her fellow conservatives -- doesn't support this either. In fact, they're even more enraged when the persons concerned about racial inequity begin focusing on the primary rather than the collegiate level (even though the "mismatch" arguments that nominally undergirded their objection to the latter have no relevance to the former). The objection, it turns out, has nothing to do with the when, but is entirely about the what: an ideological opposition to trying to dismantle racial inequalities in education -- no matter how tall or short the students may be.

How California's Jewish Community Sealed Its Win in the Battle Over the State's Ethnic Studies Program

The California legislature has passed AB 101, a law mandating ethnic studies instruction for all high school graduates starting in 2030. The bill was passed with the strong support of California's Jewish legislative caucus as well as Jewish community leaders throughout the state. This marks a decisive moment in the years-long battle over Ethnic Studies, where Jewish activists successfully rallied to reject an early, antisemitic draft curriculum and instead worked tirelessly to create pathbreaking course plans and curricular resources that ensure antisemitism and Jewish experience takes pride of place in state schools.

Unsurprisingly, the die-hard opponents of the bill -- those who insist that Ethnic Studies must always and ever be antisemitic -- are, well, dying hard. AMCHA, one of the leading groups on the Jewish right trying to muster opposition to Ethnic Studies, lamented in a press release that the law "Open[s] the Door to Antisemitic Curricula". While admitting that the new law actively disavows the antisemitic first draft and urges local school boards not to use it, AMCHA says the bill "does not, and cannot, prohibit a school district from using the antisemitic first draft of the model curriculum" (or other potential antisemitic alternatives).

AMCHA may not even be correct about this: the statement from the California Jewish Legislative Caucus contends that its amendments to the bill "expressly prohibit the use of curriculum that was rejected because of concerns about anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias". And at the very least, the law puts up several hurdles in front of any school board that wishes to adopt out from the state-recommended curriculum -- both in the form of heightened public meeting and deliberation requirements for opt-out districts as well as demonstrate that its proposed alternative does not "reflect or promote, directly or indirectly, any bias, bigotry, or discrimination". To the extent there are potential antisemitic Ethnic Studies courses still under consideration, these provisions -- and the last one in particular -- seem to provide, if not an insurmountable hurdle, then the highest hurdle the California legislature can reasonably impose.

But even taken on its own terms, we should reflect on just how weak AMCHA's objection actually is. Their headline is that the law "opens the door to antisemitic curricula". But that isn't true -- if, as AMCHA puts it in the body of its statement, the problem is that the law doesn't prohibit a district from adopting antisemitic curricula, then there is the inconvenient problem that California school districts already weren't prohibited from adopting such a curriculum. The law doesn't open any doors; at worst, it doesn't fully slam one shut.

Framed that way, though, the opposition to AB 101 becomes even harder to swallow. The choice is between a world where districts are free to adopt antisemitic curricula with minimal restriction, and one where their freedom to do so is at worst highly circumscribed by specific state disapproval, heightened regulatory restrictions, and the placement of the very-much-not antisemitic model Ethnic Studies curriculum as the default offering. Those concerned about antisemitism in California schools obviously should pick door #2, and so it isn't surprising that AMCHA has been very lonely in its crusade against the law.

And as we mark this moment, I want to reflect on how it might demarcate a sea change in how the Jewish community relates to these "identity politics" brouhahas which have sapped so much of our collective energy over the past few years. After a period where it seemed as if reactionary forces could simply mutter "intersectionality" in a foreboding tone and get the entire Jewish press to snap to attention, it was striking to see just how thin the opposition to California's reformed curriculum was. The infamous Tablet article which resorted to outright fabrications (in addition to smearing a one-of-a-kind curricular unit devoted to Mizrahi Jewish history as "crude" and divisive) to make its case was one example. AMCHA's press release blaming  AB 101 for a problem that would be worse in its absence is another. Far from driving the conversation, the efforts to tar any and all Ethnic Studies offerings in California as irretrievably racist or antisemitic had surprisingly little influence on Jewish communal discourse.

One can tell these critics are a bit disoriented. They expected that they would be at the vanguard of a righteous Jewish battle against the evils of Ethnic Studies. Instead, they found themselves mostly alone and entreating against the overwhelming Jewish communal consensus that was positively oriented towards the idea of Ethnic Studies and committed to constructively working through and fixing any flaws. Faced with the possibility that Ethnic Studies was not, contrary to the unfalsifiable hypothesis, immune to reform or alteration to accommodate Jewish voices, the critics were left befuddled and disorganized.

To some extent, I think this might be the story of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values as well. At first, I thought it was an example of prominent mainstream Jews engaging in another round of ridiculous and destructive hyperbole directed at caricatured versions of anti-racist scholarship. And I still think that, but now I want to attach a rider to "mainstream". Increasingly, I think JILV came into being because its progenitors think the "anti-woke" movement is losing ground in mainstream Jewish circles. They can't trust the big name organizations and federations to fight these fights anymore, so they need to go independent. JILV is not a vanguard, it is a rear-guard -- a group of bitter dead-enders who can sense that the tides in Jewish communal life are changing and that the organizational consensus is moving away from reflexive (and often ill-informed) condemnation and towards collaboration and mutually-affirming constructiveness.

As a marker of the change, there are worse symbols than the passage of AB 101 -- a diverse group of Jewish organizations and politicians who put in the work and can take pride in its fruit, standing over largely routed and vanquished opponents who did not notice the sands shifting under their feet.

A Tale of (the Private Schools of) Two Cities

Within a day of one another, the New York Times and the City Journal released articles on anti-racism curricula in the private schools of two cities, New York and DC (respectively).

It really is amazing to behold the difference. The Times has some genuine indicators of just bizarre behavior in the schools it profiles (e.g., refusing to allow Glenn Loury to speak because his views might "confuse and/or enflame students"). The City Journal, by contrast, mostly captures very normal things it seeks to put under grainy, menacing lighting (High schools are assigning Ibram X. Kendi's books! Administrators are attending DEI training sessions!).

I'm not really sure what explains the difference. It might be just the baseline chasm in quality one would expect from the NYT versus the City Journal (notably, the Times' article is by an actual journalist, while the City Journal's piece is written by an activist with the right-wing National Association of Scholars). Or it might be a difference in the private school cultures that exist in New York versus DC.

My baseline bias, having grown up in outside DC, is a pre-existing disdain for the local private school ecosystem there. Even as a kid, my view was that if you lived in Montgomery County -- which had a superb public school system -- I struggled to think of a reason to attend private schools that wasn't just pure snobbish status-flexing. But if the City Journal (despite its best efforts) is to be believed, schools like Sidwell and Georgetown Day are actually doing a decent job. Nothing will ever be perfect, but I cannot be horrified that students are recommended Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.* Of course, it's also the case that the private schools aren't doing anything that the public schools can't. That's not a bad thing -- one would hope that solid anti-racist education is scalable to all sorts of schools -- unless you're using it as a selling point for why Maddie and Connor simply must go to private school, $50,000 price tag be damned!

Which brings us to New York. I have never lived in New York, and my exposure to New York private schools comes primarily through, well, sensationalist stories in the New York Times. It's hard to know from afar whether these stories are out-of-context snipes at the foibles of the elites versus whether the culture at these schools truly is just nuts. I can imagine the former, but to the extent it is the latter, I can imagine the problem being the extension into "anti-racist education" of the pathologies of conspicuous consumption. New York private school parents believe that with enough money one can purchase easy solutions to any personal problem. They view racism -- or more accurately, the possibility that their children will be, or be seen as, lacking in how they relate to racism -- as a problem, and so they also believe that they can solve that problem by chucking money at it. Indeed, any solution that doesn't look like the sort of thing that costs a truckload of money will be seen as inadequate. It has to be ostentatious for it to count.

An ostentatiously bespoke anti-racism curriculum with elements that are both conspicuously resource-intensive and often a little absurd in practice is like a school cafeteria that serves only genuine Marseilles bouillabaisse on Thursdays. It stands out as something "normal schools" can't do, which ends up being the only thing that recommends it. And if normal schools say they don't want to do it, what you're doing is nuts -- well, that shows how unrefined and gauche their palettes are. Of course they don't know good anti-racism when they see it -- they're a public school. 

As in all things, the exclusivity is the merit. Just like the best steak can only be found at a fine (expensive) steakhouse, the best "anti-racism" is of the sort that you could only possibly find at an elite private school in New York (to say it aloud underscores how ridiculous it is). And notice how different this is from what the DC schools are said to be doing.  Any school can do have a piddling "recommended reading list"; it takes a truly elite institution to be able to invite a prominent Brown University faculty member to give a lecture and then pull the offer because he's a bad fit.

In any event, my view on anti-racist education continues to be that 90% of it is a subject-specific synonym for "good education." Most of the time, that means I sniff at right-wing panics on the subject where basic elements of good pedagogy like "assign interesting readings" or "don't be a gratuitous jerk to your students" are presented as "cultural Marxism".  Occasionally, it means sniffing instead at overly self-satisfied performances of anti-racism that substitute presentation for substance. It would not at all surprise me if some posh New York private schools fell into the latter category. 

* I actually read CRT: An Introduction in high school, though not because it was assigned -- I came across the topic indirectly in a debate round, and purchased and read it of my own initiative. Remember: if you don't assign critical race theory in high school where it can be read under adult supervision, your kids will just read it on their own in some back library alley, and come to who-knows-what conclusions!

Democrats for More Democrats

One of my favorite social campaign slogans of all time is "Neighbors for more neighbors" -- the mantra of supporters of upzoning in Minneapolis-St. Paul. And to co-opt it, Democrats should support policies that create more Democrats.

At one level, that's obvious; at another, it's obscure. What does it mean for a policy to "create" more Democrats? It'd be nice if "good policy that makes people's lives better" had a direct connection to getting more votes, but I'm dubious. Typically, the process through which people become members of a political party is a little less straightforward -- working through cultural affinity and other group dynamics as much if not more so than policy preferences. And on the other side, we should not support a policy that's objectively unethical just because it might redound to the transient political advantage of the Democratic Party. All politics is, in a sense, a trade-off between what's right and what's expedient, but the very best political moves -- the true no-brainers -- are those which are both right and expedient. What we'd want, then, are policies that are both (a) objectively good and (b) are likely to inject more Democratic voters into the polity. 

Statehood for DC (and the other colonies) is an obvious one -- it rectifies a clear injustice of areas under permanent American jurisdiction which lack political representation, and most of the relevant places are strongly blue-leaning (at "worst", places like Puerto Rico are swingy) and so would add more Democrats into American politics.

Immigration reform is, potentially, another. Again, it is correct on the ethics, but it also is likely that many (not all) of the immigrant populations will be inclined to vote blue -- particularly if Republicans insist on declaring loudly and consistently that the immigrants aren't welcome here. Accelerating paths to citizenship -- basically, creating a fatter spigot of naturalized U.S. citizens -- will likely yield more Democratic voters.

A less obvious play is policies which enhance college accessibility ("free college" or related programs), resulting in more Americans getting college-educated. The big story in American voter behavior over the past decade is that partisanship is now sorted almost entirely along the dimension of education -- higher-education cohorts voting blue, lower-education cohorts voting red (this holds even accounting for differences in wealth -- high-ed/low-income voters are still blue, high-income/low-ed voters are still red). 

Does this mean that, if more Americans go to college, they'll come out Democrats? Not necessarily -- it could be that "people who are Democrats are more inclined to go to college" rather than "going to college makes people more inclined to become a Democrat" -- if that's the case, then adding new college attendees won't change the underlying partisan composition of the electorate. But I'm inclined to think that the causal arrow does flow in the direction of "college attendance --> Democrat" rather than vice versa. One hint that this is right is that we're seeing a big shift in voting patterns from college-educated voters who are long-since removed from college, which seems more compatible with college attendance --> Democrat than Democrat --> college attendance.

But what makes the pattern work? It's not because lefty professors are successfully indoctrinating students (as we often remark, we can't even get them to read the syllabus!). In part, it may be that college exposes students to people from a wider range of backgrounds and experiences than might otherwise be the case; that horizon-broadening experience fits better with political progressivism. But right now, I think the larger answer is simply a form of cultural affinity (or, to be a little cruder, tribalism): college-educated persons now are far more likely to be liberals than not, and that very consensus makes it more likely that each marginal member of the college-educated cohort will also be liberal (the same is true for non-college educated voters, but in reverse). People tend to adopt the politics of their surrounding community; if their community is fellow college-educated persons, they'll trend towards the predominant views of that set.

What this means is that if Democrats make a big push to increase the number of Americans who get college degrees, it is likely that the result will be more Democratic voters. It's not going to be everyone, of course. But I suspect if one randomly assigned a sample of Americans who were not planning to attend college into two groups -- one sent to college, one not -- the former would in four years have more Democratic voters than the latter.

It's good to give representation to places under American sovereignty. It's good to welcome immigrants who want to make their home here into the fabric of America. And it's good to increase college accessibility and affordability for Americans of all backgrounds. But each of these policies, in addition to their moral goods, may have the additional happy consequence of creating more Democratic voters. Democrats for more Democrats, please.