That’s what made the exercise so heartening. A right-wing think tanker and the progressive dean of a prominent ed school found that we could still talk our way through hard questions. We wrote candidly and trusted one another to respond with arguments rather than insults. Boy, was that a nice feeling.
We disagreed, of course, on topics like choice, school spending, for-profit education, SEL, and civics. But the dialogue helped clarify our disagreements. We repeatedly found some sizable patches of common ground on most issues, especially when it came to problems and principles. Where we tended to part ways was, predictably, on crucial questions of policy and practice.
Well, Pedro and I were convinced to take another swing at it. With the rush of post-pandemic controversies—from DEI to dismantling the Department of Education to “techlash”—there were a host of hot-button issues to debate. And that’s where things got odd.
This time around, I was struck by how often the two of us were on the same page. At times, it felt like we spent more time skewering the performative hobbyhorses of the left and right than arguing with one another. What was going on? Well, for all our differences, both Pedro and I are ultimately two guys who put a lot of stock in common sense. Pedro had no problem acknowledging that a lot of the DEI craziness got out of hand or that sprawling bureaucracies are a problem. And I had no problem conceding that the DOGE-driven cuts to the Department of Ed were feckless or that it’s hypocritical for Republicans to respond to campus speech codes with their own brand of censoriousness.
At many points, the conversation was less about left vs. right than about common sense vs. performative grandstanding. Take the debate over dismantling the Department of Education. It often devolves into aggressively dumb arguments that are more symbolic than substantive. Democrats bizarrely insist that shuttering a building with 4,000 bureaucrats will devastate student achievement and well-being, while Republicans bizarrely promise that doing so (while barely touching the Congressionally funded programs) will radically shrink the federal role and turbocharge learning. To my surprise, Pedro and I found little to argue about: We were supportive of streamlining bureaucracy and critical of Trump’s reckless, legally suspect approach.
On issue after issue, it seemed contemporary debates had been co-opted by performance artists on either side. That meant Pedro and I often found our practical differences overshadowed by mutual agreement that our disputes were more tractable than they can seem. We come at DEI, for example, from very different places. But we readily agreed that, while equality and inclusivity are worthy values, schools and colleges have done a number of indefensible things in service of them. When it comes to “censorship,” it really shouldn’t be that hard to distinguish between keeping pornography out of middle school libraries and banning Toni Morrison’s Beloved—even if it’s a distinction that PEN America and the activist community seem intent on ignoring.
