School Wars (w/ Jennifer Berkshire)

Know Your Enemy

It seems almost every big culture-war battle of the moment—from "Critical Race Theory" to COVID mandates—is being fought in America's schools. Meanwhile, Democrats, anxious about a midterm rout driven by angry Republican parents, too often are conceding these battles to the right, adopting their rhetoric and their terms of debate, and have been for a long time—despite supposedly being the party of teachers' unions. Does it have to be this way?

We put that question, and many more, to our guest Jennifer Berkshire, the coauthor (with Jack Schneider) of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and co-host of the education podcast Have You Heard. Jennifer guides us through the recent history of conservatives' war on public education—fights over desegregation, the Reagan administration's A Nation at Risk, the "parents' rights" movement of the 1990s, Obama-era ed reform, and the CRT gag-orders sweeping the nation today. Along the way we tease out some illuminating contradictions in the right's nationalist coalition, which seeks to cultivate a shared, sanitized story about American history while simultaneously dismantling the only system by which that narrative can be imposed. We also cast a critical eye on the triangulating, moderate Democrats who have utterly failed to provide a galvanizing, alternative message about the purpose of public education. As Jennifer makes brilliantly clear, the crisis of American education is real; the question is, who will be empowered to solve it?

Further Reading:

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (The New Press, November 2020)

Jennifer Berkshire, "The GOP Has Revived Its Obsession With Parents’ Rights," The New Republic, Dec 9, 2021

— "The GOP's Grievance Industrial Complex Invades the Classroom," The Nation, Oct 28, 2021

— "'Corporate Democrat Goes Down to Defeat in Virginia,'" The Nation, Nov 8, 2021

— "How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party," The Baffler, Nov 17, 2017

Sam Adler-Bell, "Behind the Critical Race Theory Crackdown," The Forum, Jan 13, 2022

Sarah Jones, "We're Having the Wrong Conversation About Schools," New York Magazine, Jan 12, 2022

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