I just finished a new book with USC’s Pedro Noguera. (It’ll be out next April.) It’s got me reflecting on how odd the education discourse has gotten. But let me back up a bit.

In 2020, Pedro and I penned our book A Search for Common Ground. It consisted of a back-and-forth correspondence that played out while the nation was paralyzed by Covid-19 and rocked by the killing of George Floyd.

Reasoned, respectful debate was in short supply. Even before the pandemic, it had gotten damn hard to tackle thorny questions in good faith.

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.

For all the polarization that we see on social media or cable news, the data make clear that rumors of American division are greatly exaggerated. Most people aren’t fighting on X or Bluesky. In fact, the lion’s share of Americans never tweet at all. Most Americans aren’t watching the histrionics on cable news. And keep in mind that 80 to 90 percent of Republicans and Democrats agree that it’s “very” or “extremely” important to protect freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal protection under the law, and the right to vote.

Given all that, why does the education discourse feel so nasty and aggressively performative? Well, shifts in media and technology have sorted us into information bubbles, while influencers and personalized feeds (assisted by Russian and Chinese bots) ensure that we’re bombarded with edge-case anecdotes designed to infuriate us. The result: We spend a day or two arguing bitterly about some teacher in Tennessee or a community college professor in Colorado, until algorithms amplify the next viral controversy and trigger the next rage cycle. Rinse and repeat.

This isn’t deliberation. It’s not even healthy debate. It’s an exercise in Pavlovian distraction and an assault on common sense.

Look, don’t get me wrong. Pedro and I still disagree about much that matters. But what’s striking is how modest those substantive differences now feel compared to our shared frustration with the partisans and provocateurs who just like to brawl.

In 2020, Pedro and I found that we could still reach across our divides with sufficient time, discipline, and intention. This time, after a half-decade of hysteria, distrust, and bad behavior, I found it a helluva lot easier to bridge our principled divides than it used to be. It’s not where I expected my reprise with Pedro to wind up. But I’ll take it.

Learning we could still talk through our differences was hugely reassuring amidst the chaos of 2020. Today, realizing we can make common cause in defense of common sense made for an equally bracing Round 2.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”