Education has gotten polarized and hotly political over the past few years. This has frustrated many who thought that we’d entered a new, more bipartisan era of schooling in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Clinton, Bush, and Obama years were rich with debates about accountability, teacher evaluation, and academic standards, but those wonky disputes are a far cry from today’s culture clashes.

I totally get the frustration. Yet, my fatalist streak also suspects today’s hot-blooded disputes were inevitable, even healthy. Maybe it’s the summer heat, but I felt moved to go ahead and debate myself on this question (much as Checker Finn famously did on No Child Left Behind a couple decades ago).

Moderator Rick: Hi guys. Okay, so our topic today is whether the politicization of schooling is a problem. Frustrated Rick, please start us off.

Frustrated Rick: It’s a huge problem with grave consequences. We’re in a 21st-century environment where education is foundational for employability and citizenship. This was less true half a century ago, before the rise of the digital economy. Today, though, skills and knowledge are non-negotiable. While 19th- and 20th-century schooling featured lots of culturally fraught fights, recent decades have featured a lot of education bipartisanship precisely because we’re in an education economy and need to prepare students accordingly. The sudden return of the culture wars is a massive and unnecessary distraction.

Fatalist Rick: Look, you’re obviously right that there have been big changes over time, especially when it comes to the workforce. But let’s not overstate things. Schooling may have been less essential a century ago, but it still played an important role in fostering opportunity. And public education is always going to spark conflict simply because it brings together people who hold different views on intensely personal questions. I mean, it’d be odd if education debates weren’t value-laden in an era when there are raging disagreements about issues related to identity, ideology, and equity.

Frustrated Rick: Sure, there’ll always be tensions, but bad actors are weaponizing cultural disputes to score political points. In 2024, students need a whole set of skills and competencies to thrive after graduation. That’s why we need to focus on early childhood, the science of reading, intensive STEM instruction, and meaningful career pathways. There was broad recognition of this in the 1990s or early 2000s. It feels like we’ve backslid. The information age has gifted us new data, research, and management tools. We need to use these. In the 21st century, education matters more than it used to. The world has changed. We need to change with it.

Fatalist Rick: That sounds to me a bit like the education version of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Remember when he argued that we’d reached the end of mankind’s ideological evolution—that the “universalization of Western liberal democracy” was the “final form” of the nation-state? Well, we’ve seen how that prediction turned out. Fukuyama made it back when the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Three decades later, his argument reads like wishful thinking. That’s how your “world has changed” shtick hits me. I’ll grant that education in the Clinton-Bush-Obama era set a high-water mark for bipartisan reform efforts. But I don’t think that heralded a historic shift in our understanding of education. It reflected a centrist, post-Cold War era in our national politics—one that’s now in the rearview mirror. People are back to fighting about the things that matter to them. That’s normal. Heck, it’s healthy. Or at least it’s healthier than bizarre, histrionic intra-elite fights about “n sizes” or the validity of “value-added” measurement.

Frustrated Rick: Yeah, I get the Fukuyama analogy. But I think you’re conflating apples and oranges. Fukuyama offered a grand vision of how societies evolve. I’m making a much more straightforward claim: that enduring changes in the economy, technology, and employment have elevated the role of schooling. Education used to be a nice-to-have. Now it’s a got-to-have. There’s no going back, and schools must step up to the challenge.

Fatalist Rick: You’ve got too narrow a frame here. Folks were making similar arguments a century ago about the newly important role of schooling. Hell, by 1924, Dewey, Cubberley, and the whole Progressive Era crew had spent decades selling that line. And guess what? Those fights over language, faith, race, and ethnicity that dominated school debates in the 19th century just kept on going in the 20th. So, while you’re right that, by historical standards, the education debates were remarkably temperate during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years that reflected a political moment—not a permanent shift. The fights we’ve seen more recently are a predictable reversion to the norm.

Frustrated Rick: I’m not naïve. Of course, education fights are always going to concern values. But it’s good that we stopped squabbling about whether it’s okay for schools to teach German or to treat vocational education as a dumping ground for struggling students. We’ve moved forward. That’s a good thing. We’re enmeshed in a race between education and technology, and we need to act the part.

Moderator Rick: That’s all the time we have, guys. Thanks for your thoughts. I’ll leave it for our readers to decide for themselves which Rick makes the stronger case.    

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