Some thoughts on the school board election and community discourse

Or, how language makes dealing with reality difficult

[Note: I’ll start talking about something else real soon now, I swear.]

I.

A stylized exchange I saw online during the recent school board election:

Someone says, “This candidate seems like she’s trying to remake the community we love, and what if we like it the way it is?” and another person harrumphs, “God forbid the community be diverse and welcoming. How could you oppose something so obviously good as that?” Then, as if a spell had been cast, there’s a faint *poof!* and only the quickly fading echo of the first person earnestly pleading, “Wait, wait, I love and celebrate diversity in all its f-o-o-o-o-r-m-s!…” before they disappear in a cloud of electrons.

Or this:

Someone would accuse a candidate—usually one of the “3TosaDads”—of doing, supporting, or in some way being associated with something that Republicans do, support, or are in some way associated with. The candidate would first ignore it, hoping it might go away on its own. When it inevitably doesn’t, he’s forced to post a long message on his Facebook page variously denying the accusation, counter-claiming he neither personally knows or has even heard of the particular Republican person in question, further add that he has no interest in pursuing any policies implied by this association even if said association did exist— which it doesn’t!—and then remind the community that this is a non-partisan race, goddamnit, and won’t you please think of him as a human being with his own opinions rather than some partisan sock-puppet filled with quarters from Richard Uihlein’s piggy-bank?

For instance, there was one resident’s seemingly earnest attempt to determine whether a candidate was interested in banning books, because she is against banning books and wouldn’t vote for someone who was. She (I think, reasonably) took his initial non-response as at least slight evidence that he was indeed supportive of such a thing and informed others of her conclusion. Eventually, he informs her that: No, never! He’s not interested in banning books, or even thinking about such a thing. Indeed, the idea’s never crossed his mind, and now that he’s heard it, he actually feels a little ill, etc., etc.

But the question I had was, well, doesn’t it matter which books we’re talking about?

II.

Leaving aside the issue that one person’s book ban is another person’s thoughtful curation is another person’s allocation of scarce resources (see here), of course everyone’s against banning books that they like and think are important, educational, or useful. But what about one that was none of these? I’m sure there are books that progressives would prefer not to have in their children’s library. I’m sure that there are books that almost everyone in Wauwatosa would prefer not to have in their kids’ library. What about a book even Amazon refuses to carry any longer? What about this one which, from what I can tell, is still considered by some to be pretty racist, but has the additional wrinkle of also being somewhat influential in shaping the views of high-level staffers in previous White House administrations? Is it important for students to know what informs the worldview of influential political figures on certain highly contentious policy issues? Are you a book banner if you don’t want these in the school library? Does that make you good? Bad? Are you bad because banning a book is bad? Or does simply being for or against ‘book banning’ not entirely capture the full range of issues and concerns at stake?

If your response is that this is a kind of stupid whataboutism because the books they want to ban are a, b, and c and have particular qualities x, y, and z, and the ones I’m mentioning do not, I would agree that citing particular titles and details about what makes them important would be useful to include in the context of a discussion on the book-banning tendencies of potential school board members, and it would have been nice to see this occur.¹

If your response is that everyone knows what we’re talking about when we talk about book banning, we’ll come back to that.

But first, when someone wants to know if a candidate ‘supports book banning, yes or no?’ and the candidate double pinky swears that he would never consider such a thing, gosh where would you even get that idea, etc., etc., I start to suspect that neither person really sees language as a tool to reveal truth but instead uses it mostly to play signaling games out of a sense of self-preservation or rhetorical point-scoring.

There’s a sort of missing mood here. Reasonable and thoughtful people would care about the particulars—the circumstances and factors to be considered, the tradeoffs involved, where they think the weight of the evidence lies for one choice over another and a recognition that certain principles are in conflict with one another and that either decision will feel inevitably dissatisfying.

One obvious reason I think this doesn’t happen is because certain positions are considered extremely suspicious or not worthy of serious consideration, and it seems more expedient not to be associated with them at all.

For instance, you definitely didn’t want to be the candidate that was against diversity, mental health, inclusion, or equity, even if in reality these terms are so ambiguous that it would be hard to know what it would mean to be for or against them in the first place. And indeed, I heard precisely zero candidates take the following positions during the race:

• There should be less diversity

• We should focus less on people’s trauma

• There should be less inclusion and more exclusion

• There should be less equity and more hierarchy

Instead, everyone voiced support for the opposite while perhaps qualifying that support in vague, convoluted, and somewhat cagey language, worried at all times that they’d be cast out of polite society if they were to make a linguistic misstep. I felt this from both sides, by the way.

But I think a reluctance to articulate objections in this form, to frame arguments as “more or less” rather than “yes or no” or even to accept that such a frame is within the bounds of acceptable discourse encourages muddled-thinking and makes the discussion of complex and actually important issues even more difficult to understand and solve than they already are.

So, let’s try it. Briefly.

→ Diversity or Homogeneity: All candidates claimed they were ‘for diversity.’ Some supported the idea but tried to fit their own hobby-horse under it’s broad and many-hued umbrella. They were ‘for diversity, especially diversity of thought,’ they might say. No one claimed they were against diversity even though it seems clear that individuals vary along a great many dimensions, people could be for or against diversity along some dimensions and not others and that they could want more or less of it depending on the particular costs and benefits associated with its presence. We might want diversity of ethnicity or race but a relatively less diverse range of behaviors and attitudes. We might want more diversity of thought but still not want to include people on the school board who actively hate public education and think it should be abolished, for instance.

Robert Putnam, famed Harvard political scientist, most well-known for his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (one of the inspirations for this website) on the atomization of society and the decades-long dissolution of social ties among Americans, published a paper in 2006 finding “that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” A more recent summary of over 80 studies on the topic finds “a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies.” People of course disagree about the details—see here—and even Robert Putnam thinks the long-run effects of diversity are positive (although his data doesn’t address this question) even if the short-term results are worrying.

If you don’t like academic articles but want a vivid understanding of what it can feel like to live around people with very different values and attitudes than you, try reading Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America a bizarre tale about a small Iowa farming community’s reaction to a sect of Orthodox Jews who opened a kosher slaughterhouse in town and employed their friends and family to run it. Spoiler alert: It starts out good but goes south quickly.

Diversity—like literally everything else in the universe—has costs and benefits. Diverse populations have heterogeneous preferences and this can make free-riding more common and the provision of public goods more contentious even as it might introduce a broader range of perspectives that lead to better ideas or provide opportunities for people who might not otherwise have them. And it’s even more complicated than that because a tolerance for pluralism appears to be at least partly a function of high social trust which can in turn be undermined by pluralism itself.

→ Trauma or Resilience: One result from my article on Mike Zollicoffer was that it persuaded at least two people I know not to vote for him. They were no great fans of Jessica Willis but what pushed them into her camp was a comment he made during our conversation—that he didn’t understand when we, as a school district, became so concerned with people’s feelings at the expense of academics. Their concern—I think; this was relayed to me second-hand—was that meeting a student’s emotional and mental health needs was a prerequisite for effective learning. Happy students presumably make good students.

Taking the stance that we’re too soft on children I think marks you as something of reactionary troglodyte, the product of outmoded and debunked views on masculinity and child-rearing. We know those things don’t really work any more, which is why we’ve abandoned them in favor of “trauma-informed practices,” “multi-level systems of support,” and “social-emotional learning.”

But maybe we over-diagnose trauma and are too quick to point to it as a cause of behavior problems when it isn’t? This seems to be the claim of Joel Paris, former head of psychiatry at McGill University, in his book Myths of Trauma: Why Adversity Does Not Necessarily Make Us Sick. Other researchers, like Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at NYU point out that the most useful therapeutic intervention for a wide range of mental health problems—cognitive behavioral therapy—is very pointedly about getting people not to catastrophize their own experiences, but instead to tell themselves that they have control over their circumstances and to believe and act as if they are responsible for their choices and decisions. He claims that the education system’s (he mostly discusses colleges) ever increasing focus on harm reduction, protecting children from difficult or challenging experiences, worries about triggering students or retraumatizing them, and the insistent message that other people are responsible for one’s success in life and are actively conspiring to prevent it seems to be the opposite of that and maybe it’s contributing to the increase in mental health problems that we’re seeing.

If someone wants to point out that trauma-informed practices incorporate elements of CBT, then I think this is good (I admit I have a hard time figuring out what trauma-informed practices, multi-level systems of support, and social-emotional learning entail) but it’d be nice to know whether it’s being implemented in a way that actually works. A systematic review of research on this question found zero studies that rigorously measured the effects of trauma-informed approaches in schools. The review concluded:

While the intent of creating trauma‐informed approaches in schools is a noble one, relatively little is known about the benefits, costs, and how trauma‐informed approaches are being defined and evaluated (Berliner & Kolko, 2016). Adopting a trauma‐informed approach in a complex system such as a school building or district is a time consuming and potentially costly endeavor and thus it is important to assess the effects of this approach to inform policy and practice.

This doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, we just don’t know.

→ Inclusion or Exclusion: Candidates often signaled their desire for creating an inclusive and welcoming community, and this is smart in a political sense because it’s hard in the current moment (as in the example from the beginning) to imagine that anyone could be against this. But one point I’ll make is that groups are defined as much by who they include as who they exclude, and every cohesive and well-functioning social organization sets standards for what constitute in-group membership and the thresholds for inclusion. This is not so much a choice but a fact of human biology and sociality.

One of the examples Robert Putnam above mentions as a reason to be optimistic about the long-run benefits of diversity is the integration of the military in the 1940s. It worked, and it worked well. But I’ll note that the military is definitely not an organization in which you are encouraged to “bring your whole self” to work, and it is not one premised on who you are but rather what you can or should be. You are very much informed early on that you are indeed not special and can be easily replaced. And yet, the friendships I developed in the military are some of the deepest and most abiding ones that I have. In fact, I attribute the strength of these relationships, the feelings of community and the sense of belonging, largely to the ruthless and unforgiving nature of the organization and its rituals and rites of initiation.

→ Equity and Hierarchy: One interesting theme from my conversations with candidates, particularly Jessica Willis and Phillip Morris, was a concern about boys. Boys are rambunctious, they have a lot of energy. They are more violent. Mine are insane. They also do worse in school, are more likely to drop out and are less likely to go to college (Women earn more bachelor’s degrees than men, as they have every year since 1982.) They are more likely to become addicted to drugs and to commit suicide. Richard Reeves’ recent book deals with many of these things.

Does the design of schools disadvantage boys? I hear you laughing. Joyce Benenson, a lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Evolutionary Human Biology who studies “the development of human social structure with an emphasis on sex differences in competition and cooperation” says, “my sense with Academia is, number one, girls like it more, and they always outperformed. It's just they weren't allowed in a lot of educational institutions.”

But she also mentions that in general boys like to compete and be ranked. They like to test themselves against nature and against others. They like to know who’s best. They tend to favor hierarchical organizations and are more likely to make them because clear roles provide clarity about their place in the group and others’ expectations of them. In contrast, education is increasingly about sitting still, working quietly, seeking the praise of your teacher, and making sure nobody feels like they’re better or worse than anybody else about anything. Gone, claims Walter Ong in his book Fighting For Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness, is the disputation, the argument, rhetoric, and violent debate that characterized male-dominated education in the past. Has the push for greater egalitarianism in public education caused us to lose something? Of course! Hierarchy! Is it worth it? I don’t know, it’s a good question. Worth a discussion. But this can only happen if people agree that hierarchy has advantages, that it conflicts with other things we find valuable, and that reasonable people can disagree on the best balance between the two.

III.

So, I think my argument is that while it might be rhetorically useful to sort people into boxes based on whether they’re for or against something like diversity or book banning, I don’t think it actually helps you solve problems or make better decisions. These aren’t conceptually distinct categories that people are in or out of. They’re dials that we turn.

I think there are also reasonable arguments for why hierarchy, exclusion, solidarity, and adversity can be important. And while I may not have made those arguments exhaustively, I feel like I’ve at least motioned at reasons we might find value in them and how they might conflict with other things we hold dear. Of course, in the actual practice of everyday life we all accept and navigate these tensions—the board debates when or when not to expel a student, people organize groups around shared values and eject those who forsake them—but unless you have and accept a vocabulary to articulate why you might want to exclude; in what ways you should expect, desire, or even demand uniformity; when hierarchy and competition can be useful and what benefits it might provide, conversations about important issues will always contain a level of obfuscation and elision that never quite gets at the legitimate but conflicting expectations and visions among people.

There are two other problems I see.

One, there’s no inherent limiting principle to the words or ideas themselves. You may know what you mean by diversity and may think everyone else in your group who supports it has the same idea in mind. Then one day someone says something you’re not quite on board with and you either go along with it, shut your mouth, or else are cast out from a group that you otherwise have a lot in common with. This leads to weird preference falsification and destructive group dynamics.

Another is this:

From Facebook? I blacked out the person’s name on purpose. It’d be easy enough to find it, but there’s no need to mention it here. I think they deleted the comment and even rude and kind-of-thoughtless people should be able to distance themselves from things they later regret.

If you call everyone who runs against you or your favored candidate a “racist fascist” or even an “extreme ultra-conservative,” eventually all the people that have minor or well-founded disagreements but really worry about being labeled a racist fascist or extreme ultra-conservative will stop running. The only ones left will be people that don’t care about the label, either because they’re unusually principled and independent of mind or because they’re actually racist fascists. If you call everyone a witch, eventually you just end up surrounded by witches. This might be good from a tactical perspective—the more morally abhorrent you can make the opposing candidates out to be the more likely you are to beat them in an election—but I think the community probably loses.

1. I did see one thread on NextDoor where commenters actually named and discussed a particular title that they did or did not want in the school library. But this occurred after the election was over.