Like just about everyone these days, my brilliant co-author and podcast co-host Jack Schneider is troubled–make that frightened–by our political landscape. But he’s convinced that however deep our divides may be, there’s one issue that can, if not bring us together, allow for at least a conversation. The dismantling of the public education system would be so obviously bad for all of us that maybe, just maybe, a shout from the other side of the partisan divide might actually be heard. That was Jack’s hope in penning this Letter to a Trump Voter. You can read or listen, but we hope you appreciate and that you’ll drop us a line to let us know what you think.
Letter to a Trump Voter
By Jack Schneider
We aren’t so different, you and I. Sure, I fit the urban progressive stereotype, in just about every way. And if you’re my target audience—someone who cast a ballot for Donald Trump last November—you don’t. But if we encountered each other in a foreign country, we’d immediately see all that we have in common. Sitting in a bar on the other side of the world, or standing on a sandy beach in some faraway paradise, I think we’d be more inclined to talk.
Eventually, it would become clear that we don’t share the same politics. Yet I think we’d be decent to each other, even as that fact revealed itself. Part of that exchange of decency—one that is so rare in these times—would be the conversational waltz of trying to find some common ground between us. Rather than starting with the things that divide us—those non-overlapping parts of our intersecting circles—we’d start with the parts that occupy the same space.
At home, though, we tend to imagine each other as completely dissimilar. I say “imagine” because we’re unlikely to actually meet. Our country is politically segregated, meaning that our neighbors tend to vote the way we do. And that, in turn, fuels polarization. Because, although we aren’t so terribly different in real life, our imagined differences are as numerous as they are irreconcilable.
In the age of the internet we don’t even need to encounter divergent views in what we watch, listen to, or read. So we end up totally surrounded by those who share our political viewpoints. And it becomes harder and harder to picture a real live person—one with a beating heart and an active mind—who would actually disagree with whatever our side is saying.
You’re encouraged to see me as a cardboard cutout enemy. I’m a lefty college professor who grew up on one coast and now resides on the other. My family and I live in a so-called sanctuary city, in which roughly 90 percent of residents voted against Donald Trump each time he ran for president. The houses in our neighborhood fly rainbow flags and post Black Lives Matter placards in the windows. Statewide, here in Massachusetts, we probably have more vegans in the legislature than Republicans.
I am encouraged to imagine you as a morally upside-down version of me and my neighbors. You live in what at least one person I know calls flyover country, and you’re more likely to own a gas-guzzling pickup than an EV. Trump won your county by a landslide all three times, and you watched the election returns on Fox News or one of its equivalents. You fly a confederate flag, or maybe the thin blue line flag, possibly a Trump flag.
This is about all that we know about each other.
We have substantive disagreements, and we shouldn’t minimize those. Yet I’m not convinced that either of us is stupid or that one of us has a hateful heart. Instead, I think that we inhabit non-overlapping Americas—one red and one blue. Those different political and cultural ecosystems foster distinct values and concerns, which I am not prepared to simply dismiss. But instead of figuring out how to make decisions that we all can live with, we’ve been pitted against each other.
Rather than recognizing our points of overlap and learning to respect our points of departure, we have been encouraged—by our leaders, our media, and our friends—to caricature and mock one another. And the result is that we hate each other much more than we actually disagree with one another. Our points of divergence have become points of pride. Any overlap in our values and commitments is seen as an act of disloyalty to our political tribe.
I’ve spent most of my career writing for outlets that you likely never read—papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, magazines like The Atlantic and The Nation. My last four books have been published by either Harvard University Press, which tends to sell books to coastal elites, or The New Press, which on its website says that it “amplifies progressive voices for a more inclusive, just, and equitable world.” So I’ll excuse you if you stop listening right now.
But I think it’s a problem that we mostly address only those inclined to agree with us. Intellectual segregation makes us all a little lazier and a whole lot less effective at solving the problems that affect all of us.
What are the venues in which we might interact across difference? There are so few of them in real life, given our current political maps. And there are even fewer of them online or in print, where it’s even easier to self-select into places where we don’t have to engage the enemy.
I am not suggesting that finding common ground will be easy. Some of what Donald Trump has done so far while in office shocks my conscience and makes me fear for the future of this country; if you have been cheering him from the sidelines, there is a chasm between us. But I do believe that our present politics are pathologically unproductive. We fight like hell to sweep our side into office—to correct the presumed excesses of the previous administration—only to find ourselves on the losing end in the next go-round. The pendulum swings, victories become defeats, and the sense that something might soon detonate looms over all of us.
So let me try to convince you of some common ground we share, even as I do so without hiding my own personal views. Because maybe if we recognize that we share one thing—just one thing—we can begin to open ourselves to the possibility that there is still something we might call the public good
I want to talk about public education together. And I’m going to do so in good faith, hoping to be received in that same manner, even if we don’t agree entirely. Schools, I think, are a good starting point for trying to reimagine the idea of common ground, because there’s so much that Americans do agree about and so much that our political factions have wrong when it comes to our schools. Plus, I’m an education professor and I wouldn’t really know how to start this kind of conversation about any other subject.
Let’s start by acknowledging the reality that most American families send their children to public schools, and that they’re more or less happy with the education their children are getting. Whatever you may think about the nation’s schools as a whole—and I would argue that none of us really know what’s going on in the roughly 98,000 schools we’ve never set foot in—the views of families are clear.
Of course, most of us would like things to be different in our children’s schools. That’s because we care so much. But most of what we would change isn’t due to politics—it isn’t that our schools have been captured by the left or the right—it’s due to things like budgets. We want things like smaller classes and better facilities for our kids. And in those cases where politics are at the root of things we don’t like about our local schools—because, inadequate though they may be, there are still ways in which the public can shape what happens in education—we generally recognize that this is how democracy works. You don’t always get what you want. There’s a give and take involved in living alongside one another.
But this isn’t what we hear.
We are in an all-out culture war right now, and our public education system is ground zero. Claims about critical race theory, gender ideology, grooming, and that old standby—Marxism—have been used to fuel our conflict. And it’s all so easy to believe because we simply don’t trust each other anymore. Ironically, our schools, which I think are the most fundamental common ground we can find, are also pretty easily used to divide us. We have 13,000 districts and 98,000 schools in this country. What’s happening inside those buildings? Mostly we have no idea. We might know what’s going on in the school across the street; but when it comes to what 3.5 million teachers and 50 million students are doing all day, that’s a big canvas for storytelling. It’s easy to claim that our schools are full of propaganda and abuse, because the system is too big for us to gain real on-the-ground knowledge. Those of us who are satisfied with own children’s schools are encouraged to view our institutions as the exceptions to the rule. But the math doesn’t add up. How can most of us be the exception?
For the past few years, most of the assault on public education has been directed by the Republican Party and its allies at organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. But the stories we’ve told about “the nation’s schools” have been pretty negative for the better part of a half century, and Democrats are hardly innocents in that regard. People often cite the Reagan administration’s release of the A Nation at Risk report from 1983 as the Chicken Little moment—the first claim that the sky was falling. But even several decades prior, from at least the onset of the Space Race, leaders—including Democrats—were saying that our schools weren’t doing enough to fend off our international competitors. And it carried on well after Reagan, too, with Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama spinning plenty of their own negative stories about America’s schools.
The Democratic Party didn’t just tell tales. They also pushed a vision of public education that was elitist, uninspiring, and out of touch. What we’ve heard from them for the past 35 years is that the path to social mobility runs through our schools. If you’re struggling, it’s because you haven’t gotten enough education, or at least not a good enough education. Sure, they blamed schools for some of it. Remember, Democrats were the party of so-called school reform. But Americans, themselves, were also supposedly to blame. America, the Democrats argued, was a meritocracy in which schools were the lynchpin. You could almost hear them saying “Don’t be mad just because those of us who earned Ivy League degrees are smarter than you.”
Along the way, we all lost sight of what public education really is. That’s not why we came apart as a nation—I’ll leave it to others to explain that. But it does help explain how we find ourselves in this moment, when we are fighting so fiercely over something that was designed to unite us. It sheds some light on why the common stake we all have in our schools is suddenly in so much peril.
Yet it’s still there, even if we don’t recognize it.
So what is our common stake in public education? I think we know the answer to this question, and that most of us agree. We just haven’t talked about it in such a long time that the words can be hard to find.
Providing a taxpayer-funded education for every young person is how a free and democratic people preserve their society. It’s our investment in the future of our communities, so that there are things we can count on everyone knowing and being able to do.
Yes, public education is about ensuring economic productivity, as so many past presidents—Republicans and Democrats—have insisted. But it’s also about socialization into local and national ways of life. It’s about training the next generation for different forms of civic responsibility. It’s about preparing young people for independent living that maximizes their talents and abilities. Public education brings young people together in a shared experience—in the classroom, in the laboratory, on the stage, and out on the playing fields—so that they can live productively alongside one another in our society.
That’s a vision that all kinds of Americans support. The polling on this is clear. And when you sit down and talk to people, as I have done, you hear the same things repeated over and over.
So there is common ground. But it’s better politics to pretend that there isn’t. Donald Trump knows this, and he has used culture war to score political points. He isn’t the first to do this, but he has been perhaps the most effective and relentless at telling stories about the schools in a manner that frightens people into action. Whereas Barack Obama told us we were failing to keep up with Finland or Singapore or China, and that we needed interventions like Common Core, Donald Trump has made the argument that schools are infecting students with the woke mind virus. Neither narrative is particularly true, and both are designed to advance a political agenda. Yet Trump’s story has created a window of opportunity for something truly unprecedented—the wholesale dismantling of the public education system.
And so if I have convinced you at all that there is common ground for us in the form of supporting public education, I hope I can convince you that we should exercise extreme caution at this moment in time—a moment when the unthinkable has become possible.
Donald Trump’s culture war wasn’t designed to end public education. It was designed to get votes. And it worked. But there has long been a very small faction within the Republican Party seeking to dismantle our system of taxpayer-supported schooling. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, acolytes of free-market economist Milton Friedman became enamored with the idea of school vouchers. Instead of taxpayers funding schools and allowing all children to attend for free, with elected boards governing the operation of schools, education could be run as a market. Private schools, like private businesses, could cater to customers. Eventually, most of the cost could be turned over to families.
This fringe movement has never been mainstream in the Republican Party. It has always been too wonky, too ideological, and too out-of-touch with how most Americans live. But the true believers were patient. They built institutions. They were willing to wait. And for the past few years they have been ramming through as much legislation as they can. The culture war has helped—it has been a good distraction, and it has rallied people around the idea that maybe our schools really have gone off the rails. Maybe now is the time to throw it all away.
Folks like me, on the political left, have been trying to sound an alarm. But this isn’t a left/right issue, if you’re willing to look closely. You can hate the Democratic Party and despise its leaders and still recognize that we all benefit from a strong public education system. Yes, different communities have different things to lose. In rural areas, for instance, public schools are hubs of community in ways that many urban dwellers don’t understand; the school district is also often the largest employer. In urban areas, public schools are often frontline service providers for children—offering free breakfast, free lunch, and free routine medical care. But across geographies and across parties, across race and class and other identity markers, public schools ensure that we all get a say in what the future of this society looks like. That’s worth fighting for.
This isn’t a call for Republicans to become Democrats. Instead, it’s a call for all of us to break with our parties when our parties break from us.
We aren’t going to agree on everything about school. What should priorities in the history classroom be? What books should be taught in English? How should we deal with instruction around race and gender? Is there any space for religion? We disagree on these matters, and other matters, too. But I’m not convinced that our disagreements are inherently irreconcilable. And I’m certain they won’t go away, especially if we walk away from each other. They’ll just move out of the public realm.
Let me extend an olive branch before I make a case for preserving what we’ve got: You aren’t wrong about what you see with your own eyes. If you are looking at an assignment that your child has brought home or a book that the class has been asked to read, and you have concerns, then you aren’t wrong merely because I don’t have the same concerns. If you feel marginalized and outnumbered in your school district, if you feel that your child’s needs aren’t being met, if you feel that your values are being trampled, I’m not going to tell you that I know better.
Of course, the deal is off if the basis for your claim is rumor or myth, or even a single instance someplace else. Across our 98,000 schools, there’s a classroom someplace—on at least one day of the 180-day school year—where something is happening that shouldn’t be. In other words, a 99 percent success rate will still give you thousands of cases to cherry-pick for storytelling.
And I hope we can agree to recognize the inherent dignity of all people, because no one in a public system should be treated like a second-class citizen.
But I will say as loudly as you need me to that there needs to be a place for you in this system, just as there needs to be a place for each of us. The public education system can’t be “blue” anymore than it can be “red” if it is going to exist.
So let’s talk about what we currently stand to lose, since it isn’t just private school vouchers that threaten the future of public education in this country. It’s a whole slate of policies and executive orders that are beginning to come fast and furious and that should make all of us worry about the stability of our system of schooling. What we have been able to count on for so long—our schools as we know them—are on a razor’s edge.
David Tyack, a mentor of mine in graduate school as he was nearing the end of his career, suggested to me that we ought to have a “conservation ethic” in education. There’s so much so-called reform in education, seeking to quote-unquote remake school as we know it. But while there is an entire industry dedicated to “disrupting” education, there’s no counterweight suggesting that we’ve actually accomplished quite a lot over the past two centuries.
School certainly can be a drag. The curriculum can seem pretty fusty, students are too rarely engaged in active learning, textbooks leave a lot to be desired. Yet if we jumped in a time machine and rocketed back to our first public schools, we’d be horrified. Teachers weren’t trained and often possessed only slightly more formal education than their students. Students were often packed into classrooms like sardines. Learning by rote was standard, as was corporal punishment. There were no extracurricular activities. Schools turned away students with disabilities, segregated young people by race, and often forced them to tolerate instruction in a religion different from how their families worshipped at home. There was no regular schedule, the schoolhouse was hot in summer and cold in winter. I could go on, but I imagine you get it.
The conservation ethic, as David Tyack suggested, would encourage us to identify the things that are good in schools, so that we could protect them. It would get us talking about how far we’ve come, what we’ve gotten right, and what we shouldn’t fool around with—in the same way that we protect places like Yellowstone and Yosemite. I didn’t really buy it at the time. I was young and radical and wanted to burn the system down and remake it according to my own idealistic vision of the world.
But I’ve learned a lot over the past two decades. And what I’ve learned is that we could do a whole lot worse. In fact, we’ve done worse for most of our history. Each passing generation gets a better and more equal education than the last.
What I’m trying to say is that we have a lot to lose. It took centuries of steady work to get here, even if present conditions are imperfect. My leftist credentials might be revoked for saying this, but sometimes the right answer is to proceed slowly, with respect for what has come before, and with humility about how much smarter we are than our forebears. That’s a pretty conservative approach.
Do I want radical change to happen right now? You bet I do. If I had a magic wand, I’d get right to work. I’d make schools and communities feel safer for kids who are marginalized. I’d pour more money into schools serving kids from low-income families. I’d scale-back standardized testing and tear a big hole in the curriculum. And that’s just the beginning.
But I don’t have a magic wand. And no one has appointed me as our national education wizard. The schools belong to all of us, and the only way forward is together. That is, unless we decide to throw it all away.
We could do that; in fact, we’re close. There’s a wrecking ball already swinging. But we need to know that this is an irreversible move. We’ll be turning back the clock 200 years—to a time we clearly weren’t satisfied with—and once that happens there’s no undo button. How confident are we that we won’t regret the decision? How sure are we that the future will be better than the past?
I’m not saying any of this naively. We are a deeply divided people, and some of those divisions are rooted in mutually exclusive beliefs. If you voted for Donald Trump, I think you’re wrong about a lot of things; you likely feel the same about me. I’m also not naïve about the fact that many on the political left will think me a traitor for suggesting that there may be common ground between us. But I think we can agree on a few things.
First, I think we can agree that every young person should get a relatively equal education. One of our deepest and most widely shared values as a people is our belief in equality of opportunity. However we feel about unequal outcomes, most of us don’t like the idea that your chance in life comes down to a dice roll. Moreover, nearly every child in this country will one day be an adult. So, if we’re going to use our tax dollars for anything—and I get that some people do not believe in taxation at all—we should use those dollars to create opportunities for kids.
Second, I think we can agree that we all benefit from a system that educates every young person. Students, themselves, are the most direct beneficiaries of schooling. But think of everything we get as members of an educated society, even those of us without children. We are the most innovative country in the history of the world. We have a democracy that has survived for 250 years, in spite of all the challenges we’ve faced. And like every other country that invests in educating the young, our communities are safer, happier, more vibrant places because of the schooling we provide for all. Education doesn’t just benefit students.
Third, I think we can agree that if we are going to pay for educating everyone, we want to have some say over what’s happening in the schools. In keeping with the “relatively equal education” piece I began with, I think we want to make sure that the institutions we fund are living up to our idea of what a school ought to do; schools should have a baseline level of quality. And in keeping with the “we all benefit” argument that I was making, I think we want to make sure that our schools are advancing aims that we all agree on; schools shouldn’t be advancing values or beliefs that undermine the strength of our society.
Fourth, I think we can agree that if we’re going to have some say over what’s happening in the schools, it ought to be democratic in nature. If we are going to make decisions about what taxpayer-supported education looks like, we should all have a chance to participate. As imperfect as our current democratic structures are, I think we can agree that the cure for them is more democracy not less.
Fifth, I think we can agree that if we are going to pay for this, we want to know where the money is going. Financial transparency is a pretty basic part of the deal.
Finally, I think we can agree that we value having institutions in our communities that bring people together. These don’t need to be schools, of course. But how many other kinds of deeply public institutions do we have in our towns and neighborhoods? My daughter’s former elementary school, which is across the street from our house, is where she learned how to swim. It’s where my wife and I vote. It’s where youth and adult basketball leagues are run. It’s where outdoor exercise classes are held during the summer. Across the nation, schools are places where community members can go to watch sports and theater, to gain access to adult education, to attend public meetings, and to host events. I wish we had more places like that, but I’m grateful for the fact that we have 98,000 public schools in this country.
All of this makes private school vouchers a pretty frightening proposition. In fact, it should make us worry about any effort to weaken our public schools; and that includes dismantling the Department of Education, which mostly channels funds to schools serving low-income students in urban and rural communities, to programming for students with disabilities, and to federally subsidized loans for college.
I don’t think we can all agree on what should be taught in tomorrow’s 10th grade U.S. History class, or what new books the school library should purchase. Still, I do have confidence that we can figure those things out. I believe that however much we may disagree today, we will collectively come to our senses. We have disagreed before, many times; we will disagree again. But we have everything to lose right now, and I am deeply afraid that in our anger we will act in a manner that cannot be undone.
I’m not asking you to compromise your beliefs or your values. You’re entitled to those, just as I am entitled to mine. But I am asking you to break with your party on this issue. Weakening public education, whether that is through premeditated privatization or wrathful destruction, isn’t what any of us want.
There is still some common ground for us. But it is shrinking every day. What know about all that divides us—those non-overlapping parts of our intersecting circles of values and beliefs. So let’s start with the parts that occupy the same space.
Maybe if we can agree to protect public education we can find other things to agree on, as well—like we’re in some far off land, where we might be more inclined to talk. Not as friends, but as Americans.
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