Well, the names they shared included a slate of unapologetic progressives mostly drawn from the ranks of the teachers unions, academe, and advocacy. Meanwhile, the handful of putative “conservatives” were a mix of New York Times Republicans and folks who’d never once crossed my radar. The proposed co-chair was a long-retired, pretty obscure, semi-progressive Republican ex-governor from a blue state.
Now, this kind of tokenism might suffice if the goal is to provide political “cover” and issue a press release that includes names from the right and the left. But box-checking inclusion doesn’t actually supply insight into disagreements, surface hidden points of agreement, or buy credibility with a right-leaning audience. Faux bipartisanship actually sets you back by fueling the right’s cynical sense that we’re being disingenuously played yet again.
So I suggested adding a few people whom I regard as serious and more representative of right-leaning sentiment (spanning both the populist and more traditional varietals). I noted that there were places where one could easily find more such candidates, like the Heritage Foundation, Goldwater Institute, Hoover Institution, or Texas Public Policy Foundation. In response, I was frostily informed that they were seeking participants with “deep” expertise. I shrugged and just said that I was pretty confident that the options I’d mentioned were as knowledgeable about this stuff as many of the names already on their list. (That observation was not warmly received.)
This whole exchange was painfully familiar. There’s a decades-long dance in education in which funders or advocates identify a clutch of 40-yard-line Republicans and then pat themselves on the back for their bipartisanship and inclusiveness. Again and again, I’ve had a version of this conversation with funders and advocates who appear to think I count as a hard-core right-winger (people who know me and know much about the contemporary right find this amusing). I tell these good folks that they may imagine that I’m on the right’s 3-yard-line, but hard-edged right-wingers think I’m closer to the 25, or the 30. I don’t generally get the sense that they believe me.
Given the world they inhabit, I kind of get it. After all, as I’ve said many times, education is odd in that someone can support gun control, higher taxes, and abortion rights and still get labeled “right-wing” if they embrace school choice or oppose DEI mandates. The education community leans so far left that, for many of education’s smart set, any milquetoast Republican (or even a mildly heterodox Democrat) can seem right-wing enough. That’s how you end up with major “nonpartisan” organizations hosting education briefings for Congressional staff in which the left is represented by an Elizabeth Warren staffer . . . and the “right” by a former Obama official. (In the immortal words of Dave Barry: “I’m not making this up.”)