Platitude Schmatidude

We all have a list of platitudes that grate on us (that's not just me, right?). High on mine are common refrains in K-12 education, "we just need to focus on the kids" and its cousin, "keep kids at the center of the work." Like the annoying Disney theme park song that once cued harasses me all day, Nicholas Kristof's column today about school closures brought the empty slogans to mind and set them on repeat. Kristof's piece doesn't actually say either of those two things, but it's the implied petition. As long as we can all feel good simply parroting "we need to focus on the kids" we can avoid considering how inaction is often an active choice.

To his credit, Kristoff shares who he thinks are responsible for inaction. Rather than using the column to explore the forces these leaders were contending with, however, he instead seeks to prove what's already evident: school matters for students in poverty.

"The blunt fact is that it is Democrats — including those who run the West Coast, from California through Oregon to Washington State — who have presided over one of the worst blows to the education of disadvantaged Americans in history. The result: more dropouts, less literacy and numeracy, widening race gaps, and long-term harm to some of our most marginalized youth"

There are too many forces at play and it's too complicated to reduce the challenges West Coast Democratic political leaders (and others) are facing to the unions. The close relationship the teacher unions maintain with Democratic leaders is a complicating factor but it's not the driving factor explaining why 3,000,000 students haven't gone to school, either in-person or virtually, since last March.

Instead, the driving factor is just how weak the politics of the public education system have become. For an annual expense that often ranks as one of the largest in a state's budget, education is not under the practical, day-to-day control of a state's executive. Even more, when that same executive would benefit from a balanced array of factions within the sector, many of the more powerful actors have already removed themselves from it. They have selected private schools for their own children or have retreated to relatively homogenous and property tax rich suburban schools. These two factors then combine to create a third: there is little clear-eyed development of strategic trade-offs that can produce the type of bold action that would have kept more kids in school this year. In the face of uncertainty over the past year, when nearly every system across our society and economy was running on overload, the public education system had....platitudes: "keep kids at the center," "keep our focus on the kids," and now Kristoff's "we must right this wrong."

What's the platitude I convey when I want to be done with platitudes?

via GIPHY

*cover image and GIF from Dumb and Dumber, New Line Cinema, 1994.