At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, Madeline, and Maya spoke with Max Eden, who heads the Conservative Ed Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) think tank. While we are devoted to cross-partisanship, we don’t get to be in deep dialogue with strong conservatives often enough and we really enjoyed our engagement with Max, talking about various aspects of education reform and, most importantly, the impact of schools on the humans who people grow up to be. Max really helped us understand polarization and the culture wars in education reform specifically, and that the debates of today weren’t the debates we were having 10 years ago or even 5 years ago, when the focus was on fixing schools that serve higher need students through various modalities. All of that fell apart in 2015-6 in response to the Common Core Standards being poorly implemented and politically toxic. Foundations aligned with unions around the notion of institutional racism and that schools don’t need policy change, they need cultural change. Max feels there’s been a slow and steady build around DEI from 2016-20 which got ignited with the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and is now an inferno. He feels we have to view the current AP black studies controversy through this lens, and that a lot has gotten thrown into the curriculum inappropriately, including progressive causes that he feels are forced and wouldn’t allow participants to voice their own opinions. Max feels many teachers today are misconstruing their role, and that they should be agents of government rather than agents of social change trying to change the world through youth. Max also shared his perceptions of how progressivism has impacted early childhood in detrimental ways, from lack of emphasis on phonemic awareness to inappropriate attention to gender identity. We also found it helpful to hear about Max’s personal path, from being quite liberal in high school to becoming a conservative at Yale–a somewhat unusual trajectory catalyzed by his intrigue about counter arguments to common arguments he knew–and his commitment to shatter the notion that good people think one way. We closed with a fascinating conversation about whether or not schools should be values free and whether or not they CAN be. We’d love YOUR thoughts on this front. Thank you for listening!
