Education / Youth – Sheila Kennedy

Unintended Consequences

One of the trickiest problems facing policymakers is the risk of unintended consequences. Even policies passed with the best of intentions can produce very negative outcomes, often to seemingly unrelated issues. Good policy decisions rest both on proper diagnosis–that is, a thoughtful and informed analysis of the problem to be solved and its causes–and on recognition of the effects a proposed policy change might have on other areas of American life.

Those two requirements of sound policymaking–proper diagnosis and an understanding of what we might call the “inter-relationship” of policy areas–require policymakers to be competent and informed. Enormous damage can be done by ideologues impatient with pesky realities, or self-important ignoramuses acting with limited understanding..

Considerable harm can be done unintentionally by people who lack the knowledge necessary to see the probable consequences of their ignorance. What makes the coming Trump administration so terrifying is that it is composed almost entirely of such people.

Trump himself is clearly unable to understand the logical outcomes of his threats–think his love affair with tariffs, which would vastly increase inflation, or the effects of his plan to deport millions of immigrants, many of whom American farmers rely upon to pick their crops.

I thought about the problem of unintended consequences when I came across an article focused on the unfortunate effects of even well-meaning legislation passed by thoughtful legislators.

Richard Rothstein wrote The Color of Law, a book I heartily recommend. It was an eye-opening history of the many laws that created America’s residential segregation, and any reader who comes to it while laboring under the misapprehension that such neighborhoods arose by chance or choice will discover otherwise. (I will admit to being shocked when I read it, and I did know some of what he covered.)

In the linked article, however, he takes analysis a bit farther, and shows how that shameful history led to a seemingly unrelated bill that worsened the negative outcomes of residential segregation.

I was recently asked how I came to write The Color of Law. The answer is this: In the 1990s and early 2000s, I had been a journalist and policy analyst studying public education. At the time, it was conventional wisdom that the “achievement gap”—black students having lower average performance than white students—was caused by lazy or incompetent teachers of low-income children. In 2002, this view, shared across the political spectrum, was enshrined in federal legislation: the “No Child Left Behind” law. Its theory was that if we shamed teachers by publishing their low-income African American students’ test scores, the teachers would work harder and the achievement gap would disappear. Residues of this law continue to this day. If you wonder why elementary and secondary schools are so obsessed with administering standardized tests and reporting their scores, it’s because of that policy.

Rothstein eventually concluded that lower average achievement of these pupils wasn’t due to deficits of instruction, but to the

social and economic challenges that children brought with them to school—for example, greater rates of lead poisoning that resulted in damaged cognitive function; living in more polluted neighborhoods that led to a higher incidence of asthma that kept children up at night wheezing and coming to school drowsier the next day; lack of adequate health care, including dental care, that brought more children to school with distracting toothaches, and on and on…

Looking back on this now, it’s remarkable that the book treated these all as individual student disadvantages, and made very little mention of segregation. But I soon thereafter realized that it was one thing if individual students came to school with one or more of such challenges; it was quite another if many students in a school did so, overwhelming the ability of even the best teachers to overcome them. We call such schools “segregated” schools and so I began to think of school segregation as the greatest problem facing American public education. And as I thought about it further, an obvious fact struck me: the reason we have segregated schools is because they are located in segregated neighborhoods. For me, a logical next step was to view neighborhood segregation as a school problem, one that writers about education policy should consider more carefully.

That insight led Rothstein to write The Color of Law. It should caution us to recognize the complex and inter-related nature of so many of the issues modern America faces.

We will soon see what happens when the government is run by people who don’t understand H.L. Mencken’s observation that “For every complex problem, there’s an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

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The Voice Of The People

We Americans talk a lot about democracy. Those conversations multiplied during this year’s election cycle, when it became obvious that democracy was under attack by a MAGA base that preferred Trump’s promised autocracy. That said, those conversations rarely focus on the Founders’ approach to democratic governance, and the constitutional mechanisms they employed as a result of their concerns.

It is a truism that the Founders weren’t fans of what they called “the passions of the majority.” In addition to limiting the right to vote to those they trusted with that power–White guys with property–they crafted a system that limited the operation of democratic decision-making; the Bill of Rights was a list of things that government was forbidden to do even when a majority of voters wanted government to do them. The limitations were founded on that libertarian premise I frequently cite, a belief that government action is legitimate when necessary to prevent citizen A from harming the person or property of citizen B, but not when government is trying to restrict an individual”s personal liberties, the choices that–in Jefferson’s famous words–neither pick a neighbor’s pocket nor break his leg.

The Founders’ decision to restrict the areas that were remitted to democratic decision-making is why many people who don’t really understand that basic framework often claim that America wasn’t intended to be a democracy, but a republic. To be accurate, our system is a democratic republic, in which we elect representatives who are supposed to respond to the democratic will of the people when legislating in the large number of policy areas where majority rule is appropriate.

Those of us who have been sounding the alarm over America’s retreat from democracy have pointed to the growing lack of proper representation–and the numerous systemic flaws that have separated government’s performance from the expressed will of its citizens. Thanks to pervasive gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the filibuster, and the composition of the U.S. Senate, among other undemocratic systemic mechanisms, elected officials have increasingly felt free to ignore even clear expressions of popular sentiment.

That retreat from representative democracy isn’t simply a federal phenomenon; it occurs with regularity at the state level. Two recent examples may illustrate the point.

Example one: In the wake of the Dobbs decision, several state legislatures imposed draconian bans on a woman’s right to obtain an abortion. Polling clearly showed that–in most of those states–large majorities of voters opposed those bans, and subsequently, in states where the electorate had the opportunity to oppose the bans through referenda (a democratic mechanism not available in my state), they overturned them.

Example two: Right-wing ideologues have waged consistent war against public schools. In a number of states, legislatures send tax dollars to private schools–predominantly religious schools–through voucher programs. I have posted numerous times about the negative effects of those programs: their failure to improve educational outcomes, their disproportionate use by upper-middle-class families, and the degree to which they deprive public schools of critically-needed resources.

When citizens of a state are able to vote on those programs, they lose.

In ballot initiatives, voters delivered a stunning rebuke to school vouchers, which siphon scarce and critical funding from public schools—which serve 90 percent of students—and redirect it to private institutions with no accountability.

Although the outcome of the 2024 election may test the resolve of the most committed and determined public education advocate, educators and their allies can find strength and inspiration in what happened in Nebraska, Colorado, and Kentucky. In those states, support for public schools was put on the ballot and won a resounding victory.

As the NEA President noted,

“Voters rejected diverting public school funding to unaccountable and discriminatory private schools, just like they have done every time vouchers have been on the ballot. The public knows vouchers harm students and does not want them in any form.”

Thanks to the distortions in our electoral systems, voters in the United States have been steadily losing the right to democratically direct their governments. The 2024 election was different only because the further threat to democratic decision-making was so transparent. The truth is that, thanks to the operation of the cited anti-democratic mechanisms (aided and abetted by low levels of civic literacy and engagement and funded by the plutocrats), the voice of the people has become more and more irrelevant.

The cranks and ideologues have used those poorly-understood mechanisms to attain and retain public office, and they no longer feel constrained by the demonstrable wishes of even large majorities.

If and when the resistance manages to overcome MAGA, that will only be a beginning. We haven’t had majority rule–aka democracy– for quite some time.

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How We Got Here

There are many reasons for the dramatic divide between Americans who voted to put a mentally-ill convicted felon back in the White House, and the rest of us. All of those reasons, however, connect to deep wells of resentment and grievance, a need to blame something–some other–for life’s disappointments.

There is a disinclination to see that divide for what it is, and to blame populist disaffections on the more privileged among us. For example, we are routinely treated to disputations on the supposed “elitism” of educated folks. Despite the fulminations of self-important pundits, however, “elitism”–while it certainly exists– is different from expertise, and much of what is decried as snobbish elitism really reflects hostility to people with knowledge and education.

A few years ago, I read Tom Nichols book, The Death of Expertise. It was a penetrating examination of the way knowledge and expertise have been attacked as “elitist,” a description of how and why people without the specialized knowledge and/or analytical skills increasingly required by modern societies have come to resent those who possess such expertise.

The educational advancements that have enabled social and economic progress, Nichols tells us, have fueled a backlash– “a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues…. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.”

We can see evidence of Nichols’ observation all around us. It reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s often-quoted observation:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

Nichols says that this backlash has been facilitated by a number of things: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and especially by the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine.

Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both.

To call Nichols’ 2017 book prescient is to belabor the obvious.

This resentment of expertise has been vastly amplified by an information environment that indulges confirmation bias. There’s Fox “News,” of course, and the Internet offers a wide array of “news” sites that allow users to choose the “facts” that they prefer. Want to believe that an election was stolen? That Justice Department’s prosecutions are political vendettas? That vaccines are poisoning us, and Jews are encouraging immigration in order to “replace” White Christians? That those “libruls” are looking down their noses at “real Americans”?

As I used to tell my Media and Policy students, if you are convinced that the aliens landed in Roswell, I can find you Internet sites with pictures of the aliens.

The “Wild West” that is our media environment is a primary reason Americans inhabit different realities. Among other things, the Internet breeds false confidence among those who have “done their research” online, and feeds their disdain for those with actual, hard-won expertise.

And I don’t know what can be done about it.

America’s devotion to Free Speech rests on the belief that in a marketplace of ideas, truth will emerge. But the effectiveness of such a marketplace depends upon an exchange of facts and beliefs by a largely informed and rational public. When facts can be manufactured, when participants in that marketplace have no respect for the opinions of those with relevant education or expertise–when they reject any suggestion that person A’s education or training has provided her with more and better information than person B, who lacks such training –and that to suggest otherwise is “elitism”– society fails to function, let alone advance.

The problem is, there’s no easy “fix” that I can see. (It’s certainly not to give government control of information.) Long term, the answer is education, teaching children how to differentiate between credible sources and propaganda, between what constitutes reliable evidence and what doesn’t. Such instruction is increasingly unlikely, since the nation’s children are increasingly being diverted into private religious schools via vouchers, and legislators are demanding that universities devolve into job training institutions.

So here we are….

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Policies Matter

One of the most unfortunate aspects of our current politics is the way tribalism has obscured policy differences. As we head into the 2024 election, few–if any–voters will base their votes on the candidates’ different policy positions. That’s not a criticism of America’s voters. At the top of the ticket, our choice is between a senile megalomaniac whose sole “policy” (if it can be dignified by the term) is hatred of “the Other” and an opponent whose sanity and competence outweighs other considerations.

This won’t be a Presidential election where thoughtful policy differences drive votes, and that’s frustrating for those of us who are policy nerds.

The situation is somewhat different at the state level, however. America’s states have settled into Red/Blue tribal divisions that may or may not hold. For those of us who follow policy preferences and their outcomes, those Red and Blue states provide a rather striking natural experiment, and Blue state policies have emerged as clearly superior.

For example, The American Prospect recently ran an article comparing Oklahoma–a very Red state–with Blue Connecticut.

In Oklahoma, nearly a quarter of children live in food-insecure households, one of the highest rates in the country. The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT, its annual compilation of child well-being data, ranked Oklahoma 46th in the nation overall—as well as 49th in education and 45th in health.

Yet Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt rejected the roughly $48 million of funding for the 2024 Summer EBT program and announced in August the state would also not participate in the program next summer. Oklahoma was one of 13 Republican-led states that declined this year’s summer grocery benefit. “Oklahomans don’t look to the government for answers, we look to our communities,” a spokesperson for the governor said in a statement regarding the decision to decline the funding, which they referred to as a “handout.”

Halfway across the country, KIDS COUNT ranked Connecticut 8th overall, 3rd in education, and 11th in health. But the state, which also participated in Summer EBT this year, faces a hunger problem as well—more than 15 percent of children live in food-insecure households. In fact, Connecticut was one of the first states in the country to pilot its own program in 2011.

The article noted numerous other differences attributable to policy choices. Life expectancy in the two states had been roughly equal in 1959; today, folks in Connecticut live 4 years longer on average than those in Oklahoma. Oklahoma–with Wild West gun laws similar to those in Indiana– had the 13th-worst rate of gun violence in the U.S., while Connecticut had the 45th-worst rate.

Research shows that, as political parties nationalized, state governments followed the governing party’s ideology. Differences in outcomes followed.

State government, after all, plunges into the day-to-day minutiae of our lives through decisions about health, education, social services, criminal justice, and more. For example, families in some states get money to keep their kids fed during the summer; in other states, they don’t.

The lengthy article illustrates the multiple ways in which these ideologically-driven policy differences affect both individual citizens and economic performance in the state. It’s well worth a read.

Another article–this one from the American Prospect—focuses on educational vouchers, a policy choice I frequently discuss. The article warns that Red state expansion of universal school vouchers is likely to have profound impact on the lives of young people.

As states race to pay for families to send their kids to private schools, blowing up state budgets in the process, the schools attended by the vast majority of kids will be left with far fewer resources, blunting their prospects. By design, funds are being shifted away from students in poor and rural areas and into the pockets of affluent parents, entrenching inequality in the process.

Among the other detriments of these programs is an almost-total lack of oversight. In Arizona, for example, parents are allowed to direct education funds, not just to the school of their choice, but to anything they might call “education.”

As Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne, a loud proponent of vouchers, admitted in an interview, the state’s emphatically hands-off approach means that there’s nothing to prevent parents from using public dollars to teach their kids that the Earth is flat. Indeed, state law prohibits any kind of public oversight over the burgeoning nonpublic sector of private schools, homeschooling, and microschools, which are for-profit ventures in which small groups of students learn online while being monitored by a guide.

If, as economists insist, economic development depends upon the existence of a well-educated workforce, vouchers don’t just shortchange the children in sub-par private schools. They eventually impoverish the state.

Policies matter.

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Those “Indoctrination” Charges

In a recent New York Times essay, Jamelle Bouie considered the accusation–increasingly leveled by the Right–that educators (especially but not exclusively at the university level) “indoctrinate” students.

When I first stumbled across that accusation, I found it ludicrous. As any professor will confirm, teachers are lucky to “indoctrinate” students sufficiently to get them to read the course syllabus. Like so many of the loony-tunes beliefs that have currency on the MAGA Right, this one is prompted by the conviction that no one could really disagree with their perspectives, so if many younger Americans reject their world-view, that rejection must be due to pernicious activity by those hated “libruls.”

As Bouie notes, they’re paranoid. He began his essay with examples:

According to Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Montana, young people have been “indoctrinated” on the issue of abortion.

“Young people, listen up, they’ve been indoctrinated for too long. We don’t even try to talk to them anymore,” Sheehy said at an event last year.

This idea that young voters have been indoctrinated — or even brainwashed — to reject Republicans and conservative ideas has significant purchase on the political right. Last month, responding to suggestions that institutions were controlled by left-wing ideologues, Dan Crenshaw, the pugilistic Republican congressman from Texas, declared that “the Left” had “turned higher education into a tool for indoctrination, rather than education,” and that “the Right needs to fight back” and “challenge the ideological chokehold on education” lest “woke elites” keep “pushing irrational leftist ideas.”

And last year, Elon Musk told his more than 100 million followers on X that “parents don’t realize the Soviet level of indoctrination that their children are receiving in elite high schools & colleges!”

As Bouie concedes, ordinary Americans often worry that, as their children find friends and have experiences outside the home, they will adopt ideas that differ from those with which they’ve been raised. But as he says, that is not what we have here. “What we have here, coming from these conservative and Republican voices, is the paranoid assertion that the nation’s institutions of higher education are engaged in a long-running effort to indoctrinate students and extinguish conservatism.”

After all, the ideological defection of one’s children couldn’t possibly be attributable to their encounters with reality. It must be a result of nefarious “grooming” and “indoctrination.” As Bouie points out,

To start, a vast majority of young people attending institutions of higher education in the United States are not enrolled in elite colleges and universities. They are not even enrolled in competitive or selective institutions. Instead, most college kids attend less selective schools where the most popular degree programs are ones like business or nursing or communications — not the ever-shrinking number of humanities majors blamed for the supposed indoctrination of young people….

If, as the latest youth poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics suggests, most young people in the United States reject the Republican Party’s views on abortion or climate change or health care or gun regulation, it’s less because they’ve been indoctrinated to oppose ideological conservatism and more because, like all voters, they have come to certain conclusions about the world based on their experience of it. A young woman looking ahead to her future doesn’t have to be brainwashed to decide that she wants the right to decide when and whether to have a child. A young man with memories of school shootings on the news and shooter drills at school doesn’t need to be indoctrinated to decide that he wants more gun control.

These students haven’t been indoctrinated; they’ve encountered reality–facts, evidence and experiences at odds with the beliefs of the cult. As Bouie says, “It’s the same with any group of voters. That’s just the way democracy works.”

But Republicans have made “democracy” a dirty word. And they seem to have given up on persuasion in favor of trying to win power through the brute-force exploitation of the political system. Why win over voters when you can gerrymander your party into a permanent legislative majority? Why try to persuade voters to reject a referendum you disagree with when you can try instead to change the rules and kill the referendum before it can get on the ballot? Why aim to win a broad national majority when you can win — or try to snatch — a narrow victory in the swing states?

Why consider the possibility that you might be wrong about climate change denial, or the government’s right to force a woman to give birth?

In the real world, professors lack the ability to indoctrinate, Jews don’t have space lasers, and liberals don’t control the weather.

The kids are just sane.

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