It Was Capitalism All Along

One of my favorite discoveries of the pandemic was the podcast You’re Wrong About. I describe it as MythBusters for the major media stories, scandals, and moral panics of the 1980s to 2010s. On one episode co-host, Sarah Marshall, uttered an exasperated throw-away line that has stuck with me for nearly two years. After a long retelling of a sensationalist moment of media coverage by her co-host, Sarah retorted, “come to find out, it was capitalism all along.” She nailed it, perfectly. 

So much of what we argue about in the US: the culture wars, climate inaction, housing policy, health care access, school privatization, policing, etc. are just capitalism doing its exploitive thing. The dominant class and their interests drive policymaking. When we take our eyes off that, we can end up in all sorts of weird places and tirades. I have fallen for this at times and this week I want to offer a bit of a mea culpa.

I wrote a piece in 2017 that got a fairly large online response. It  was a critique of Boomer politics but on revisiting it, it misses the mark. The culprit is neoliberalism and imperialism, not just the Boomers. Yes, the last forty plus years of US politics are basically inter-generational theft via tax cuts. Yeah, Reagan ushered in an era of disinvestment in infrastructure and the commons that leaves our roads jammed and bridges crumbling. Sure, we spent 8 trillion dollars (8,000,000,000,000 USD) on Forever Wars that could have gone to education, transit, climate mitigation, or countless other things. That’s a pretty damning list and what really irks me is that collectively we haven’t learned much of anything from any of it. 

On the other end of the generational hot-take spectrum from my piece, are people who should know better writing “what’s the matter with kids these days?” articles in US media. A generation of journalists that carried around Tamagotchis in the 90s and spent countless hours in AOL & ICQ chats unironically bemoan Gen Z’s embrace of TikTok. Listen, there’s  nothing wrong with “the kids” except what is being perpetrated on them by the exploitative practices of late-stage market capitalism.

For example, I offer you the triannual national panic over PISA scores. Each time the numbers are released the usual suspects, who want to dismantle or as they put it “reform” schooling in America, try to collectively rub the noses of the teaching profession in the wet spot of criterion-referenced test scores. These scores aren’t rocket science—they are more a manifestation of what’s happening in society than they are of what’s happening in classrooms:

Fifty-nine percent of kids from low-income families said they’d gone to school hungry, and 46% of those kids said that hunger had hurt their performance in school. Hunger impacts learning and academic performance throughout the year, not just on a specific date. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about hunger on any date—high stress, low stress, test day, normal class day. We have the tools and the resources to ensure every child in this country gets the nutrition they need to learn and grow…

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed millions of families into unemployment, food insecurity, and hardship, exacerbating already unacceptable levels of hunger and poverty. As a result, 1 in 4 kids could face hunger this year. - National Honor Society

I have seen this particular PISA scores panic cycle at least five times in my career. It’s the same routine every time: scores come out, the media runs headlines decrying American ruin, corporate reformers blame unions (even for scores in non-union states), and months of headlines and whitepapers fly to and fro. Can you tell that I am tired of it yet? 

It’s a tired merry-go-round and I want off.

As the new year approaches, I’m making some resolutions and I am going to ask you to join me (if you want):

• Let’s retire generational hot-takes. Yes, there is very likely mass lead-poisoning among Boomers but even that was due to capitalism. 

• Let’s also stop blaming individuals for systemic problems. I think I will write more on this next week.

• Lastly, I was really bothered by some of the Islamophobia and racism that I saw from self-professed progressives during the Qatar World Cup. Let’s stop holding individuals responsible for the actions of the regimes they live under. No, it wasn’t my fault that George Bush (both of them) invaded Iraq. Why should a random Qatari or Russian, for that matter, catch hell for the actions of their states? 

Giving Flowers

This week the dean of US soccer journalism, Grant Wahl, passed away unexpectedly while covering the Argentina vs Netherlands quarterfinal match at the World Cup. His passing was sudden. He was eulogized by many. I appreciated Dave Clark's tribute in Sounder at Heart. Notably, there was an outpouring from corners of the internet I never expected and a tearful farewell on the Athletic's soccer podcast.

Each time we lose someone like Wahl, gone far too soon, I am reminded that we shouldn't wait until people are no longer with us to give them their flowers. So this week I decided to praise some folks; I want the important people in my life to know how much I appreciate them.

Flowers for Trusting Leadership - When I worked at Lincoln High School, my principal Pat Erwin, had a simple leadership style. He scouted out teaching talent: hired hard-working, committed educators, and empowered them to run the school. He acted more as a GM for a pro sports team than a principal. Our staff planned our own PD, based on our needs. If we needed money for a field trip or a classroom resource he’d find money somewhere in the budget. Major decisions around things that impacted the entire school were made collectively by a site-based decision making committee. He had an open door and faculty could come see him at any time with concerns or ideas. I didn’t appreciate it as much then as I do now, but he often served as a bulwark between teachers and the decisions made by other power centers outside our building. The Lincoln staff under Pat was the best teaching staff in the state of Washington and it wasn’t particularly close. He assembled a great team and gave them a sense of ownership–every student deserves that in their school. 

Flowers for Excellence and Professionalism - I have an amazing pair of colleagues in Abu Dhabi, to protect their privacy we’ll call them LeBron James and Minnie Driver. My admiration for them is bottomless. Jord… er… LeBron might be the hardest working person I have ever taught with.  She leaves me in the dust when it comes to organization and long-term planning. I love to sit with her and revise unit plans and assessments. She’s a good thought partner, principled but also pragmatic. Our collaborative sessions are efficient, productive, and (I think) we maintain a good distribution of labor and responsibilities. I can be honest with her if I think a task is wack and needs to be redesigned;  she is honest with me, if she thinks I am being ridiculous (which I often am). 

Minnie Driver is perhaps the most efficient person the Lord has ever created. She is the consummate professional–she knows when a meeting should be an email–when she has a meeting they are brief and focused. When I go to her with a professional dilemma or seeking a sounding board, she provides nuanced takes that are grounded in best practices and her deep experience in the classroom. She's the only person in my professional life who regularly makes me go "man, I gotta get my stuff together." She is organized in ways that I don’t even bother to aspire to, because there’s no way I’ll ever be on that level. Minnie is that dude. If she decided to leave our school, I’d start shopping around myself.

Flowers for Courage - Anti-Blackness is real. Sexism is real. People who hold anti-Black and sexist views online are often very loud about their opinions and travel in rabid digital packs. Few people I know have faced more abuse from online mobs than Shana White. She is the moral compass of the faction of justice-centered educators that I view as my fellow travelers. She is courageous–I am constantly in awe of her dogged commitment to speaking truth to power. In the face of threats, waves of harassment, even a months long suspension from Twitter for fighting back against a particularly egregious right-wing troll, she remains unbent and unbowed. If everyone in our profession had her courage, our schools would be a much better place. We need more people like Shana.

Leaning into the Silence

Sometimes I catch my students having a conversation that’s so on-point I have to stop and reflect with them on their collective progress. It only happens a few times a year, but when it happens it feels dope. “Y’all remember when you couldn’t figure out [now elementary concept that previously confounded them]? Now listen to us talk about [a far more advanced concept, that I learned about in college]. That’s wild!” Usually, they’ll chuckle and someone will quip something along the lines of “yeah bro, we sound smart now.” Then I groan, loudly. High schoolers are dorks like that, they love to ruin a moment.

I had one of those moments this week. Here in Abu Dhabi, I teach a Comparative Politics class. In the course, we talk about the political institutions and societal trends in six comparative states: the UK, Mexico, Nigeria, Iran, Russia, and China. This unit on political culture, we're looking at civil society organizations and how they strengthen democracies. Because I'm extra, I rotate in additional states each unit. So we’re also examining Indonesia and the Philippines and tracing their trajectories, along the path of democratization, from former colonies → authoritarian states → emerging democracies (or whatever you consider them now). 

We Want a Revolution! No, Not Like That! This week students were assigned excerpts from Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men. It’s a book about the twentieth century history of Iran and revolutionaries that toppled the Shah’s monarchical regime, only to find themselves under theocratic rule. I joked at one point that this is the downside of revolutions–you can topple the government in place but the faction that’s most organized is best prepared to dictate the terms of the aftermath. In the case of Iran, it was the Mullahs and Ayatollah Khomeni. 

My opening question for discussion was “What do you think about the particular story being told by the Kinzer (the author) and what he chooses to include/exclude?” This is actually a fine question once their brains are warmed up but it was my opener and the silence afterwards was notable. But I leaned into it. Pedagogy nerds call it wait time. We sat there for nearly a minute before a student chimed in to reflect on the prevalence of male voices in the text. Then one by one the gears started grinding. Another talked about how the Mullahs were referred to several times but never really quoted in the text; they were seen but heard. Another student chimed in about the in-fighting between various reformist factions creating a power vacuum that allowed religious hardliners to take power, because they had a pre-established hierarchy. Someone joked about how the Shah's wives turned on him. Another explained that the tighter the Shah squeezed the weaker his coalition became. Others mentioned that whatever side was backed by the west was well-funded but lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the public. We went on for like twenty minutes on that question. 

None of that wonderful conversation would have happened earlier in my career.  One of the hardest parts of teaching (and life) is knowing when to shut up. Often our instinct is to fill the silence, when the silence is actually students processing. Earlier in my career, I would've tried to reword the question, gone on to the next one, or (God forbid) started answering it myself. I’m a deeply impatient person but I am more patient in the classroom than I am in my own life.  It took me years to appreciate the power of contemplative silence in my classroom. But I get it now and I lean into it. I've been thinking more and more about the idea of silence lately. My new goal is to continue my reset from years of being hyper-online and lean more into the silence in my own life.