Central Air - A Declaration Against Interest (feat. Jonathan Chait)

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.comThis week: Jonathan Chait joins Josh, Ben and Megan to talk about Nikole Hannah-Jones' candid and thought-provoking essay reckoning with her decision to send her daughter to a neighborhood public school that was low-performing — and outrage from her daughter, now in high school, that she could have chosen a different path for her. We also discuss why Democrats have seemingly lost interest in making 'let's improve public education' part of their political project. And then we take on another thorny topic: the division within the Democratic Party about support for Israel. Paying subscribers hear that conversation and cocktail hour, in which we discuss pretty bad cocktails, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh raising rates last week, and the Paramount deal.To hear the whole episode, upgrade your subscription at www.centralairpodcast.com.

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack Newsletter, Calm Down, and Megan McArdle, columnist for The Washington Post. Since we convened last week and I got feedback from the two of you about my hair, constructive criticism, it's important to have the difficult conversations. I've been getting a lot of in-person feedback from people, including people who listen to the show. And one person told me that the two of you were, quote-unquote, dicks about it. And my mother actually showed up in the comments section to defend me and to say that I'm not having a crisis and that my hair looks good.

It's always good when your mom has to show up to your work to vouch that you're not in a crisis. But I remain confident in the decisions that I've made and that any nays saying here is just wrong. Oh, by the way, in case any of you didn't listen last week, I have platinum blonde hair now. And some people here buy into the theme that that means that a gay man is in crisis. A long time ago before I was like on the internet doing a lot of stuff, there was some photo that made it on the blogs that they said, Ben Dreyfus and Rumor Willis were in a photo together. It was like a celebrity, Richard Dreyfus's loser son, rumor Willis. And then my mom called me and said, what's wrong with your, you don't even look right in this photo? What's going on with you in the photo?

And I said, I haven't seen rumor in ears. What do you mean? And I pull it up and it's someone else. And the person does look completely different. And I was like, well, thank you, Mom. She was like, I went in the comments and said, I don't even think that's you. I was like, you're in the comments of Perezhilton.com or something saying like, no. But also, I loved that she was there to fight for me.

When I joined the Washington Post, my mother finally consented to look for my writing. She generally refused to read what I wrote. I asked her why once and she said, it makes me too anxious. And like maybe I was going to screw it up and then she wouldn't like me anymore. Oh, no. So, but when I joined the Washington Post,

my mother got excited and she asked how to find me. And I said, Google Megan McArdle, Washington Post. Three hours later, maybe, I get a phone call. And she's like, do you know what they're saying? about you on the web because, of course, like, all of the, like, left-wing Gawker successors had lost their minds and were writing these totally bonkers things, recycling these rumors, sadly untrue that had circulated for years before. Like, I roomed with Ezra Klein.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Literal thing people believe still. What an awful rumor is read. The real one was I had this huge trust fund, and my father had, had, My rich father had gotten me my job at the Atlantic because otherwise no one would have hired me. Because as you know, the heavy construction industry has a lot of influence with David Bradley, owner of the Atlantic. None of this was true.

But my mother was like, what is this trust fund? You have a trust fund? My parents were divorced at this point. I was like, no, mom, people just write random things on the internet. And she's like, I'm going to tell them it's not true. Tell me how to comment. Oh, no. And I, I, and then like, I was like, mom, I am not telling you.

how to comment. You are not allowed to comment. And then she called my sister. And I got to my sister like five minutes before. It's like, don't you dare tell mom how to comment on the internet. Don't explain discus. No, she never learned. We have a special guest with us this week, Jonathan Shate, who currently works at the Atlantic. Yes. I got Megan her job. I am Megan's father. Yes. The Darth Vader of the Atlantic. Then why is she so tall? Jonathan, has your mom ever shown up to defend your honor at work? Thankfully, no. But I don't think anyone's ever criticized me on the internet, so it's really, I don't really know what would happen in that eventuality. Have you ever dyed your hair because of a personal crisis?

No, and I would never make fun of anyone's hair. I'm way smarter than that. I did not make fun of it. I just said, Josh, wow, your hair. Yes, yeah. I made fun of it. Well, first of all, Ben did make fun of it. And then also, I mean, one of the things that I have noticed is that a lot of people find ways to make observations about the hair that are, that don't, way in on whether it's good or bad. Like, wow, your hair is a classic thing to say when you can't think of something nice to say about somebody's hair. Just, you know, that hair is remarkable. I liked you so much the old way, Josh.

Thank you. I had to adjust. It's like when someone says like, hey, will you read my screenplay? And then you read it and like it's terrible. And you don't want to tell them that. So you say, oh, it's so creative. I really like the dog character. The formatting is wonderful.

You nailed it. Yeah. So we have Jonathan with us this week, in part because Jonathan is, I like to think, as part of our broader project that we have here at Central Air trying to carve out an effective space for the political center at a time when it feels under threat in the United States. And we have a couple of stories this week that I think are especially good for Jonathan to weigh in on in that regard from a center-left perspective. I want to talk first about a story for the New York Times that has been getting a lot of attention over the weekend, which is a long and very interesting essay from Nicole Hannah Jones, who was the force behind the 1619 project over there at the Times. She had written a cover story for the New York Times magazine 10 years ago about her choice to place her then kindergarten age daughter in a school that was heavily low income, performing poorly on standardized tests, heavily black school. and basically saying that, you know, a key problem in American education is efforts by parents with resources to flee from what are quote-unquote bad schools creates segregation not just

by race, but also by socioeconomic status. She's generally critical of selective schools, school choice in various formats, including in public schools. And she's living her ideology there, saying, I'm going to send my daughter to this school. And as a parent with resources, I'm going to engage and, you know, try to build an environment that's better for all kinds of black children in New York. And as recently as two years ago, she was talking about how satisfied she was with that decision. But this really interesting essay that she talks about how her daughter, who is now in high school, is very upset about the choices

that her parents made along the way about her education, putting her in this low-performing elementary school and then in a non-selective middle school, whereas she and her mother describe it, the academic offerings were just very poor. There were a lot of, kids with behavioral problems in the schools who distracted teachers and they weren't able to complete their lesson plans. A lot of work wasn't even getting graded. She describes discovering to her horror in the fourth grade when she finally gets to see some of her daughter's math assignments that like the answers are wrong and they're not being corrected and her writing assignments are full of errors that don't get corrected. And it culminates in her coming out of this

middle school believing that she is good at algebra daughter. But then she says she wants to go to a selective high school. And she, it's not one of the, not one of the state managed exam schools, but, but one of these New York City public schools that has a selective screen she ends up at. And initially has great difficulty there, in part because it turns out that she has huge performance gaps that her, that she and her family were unaware of. Her math teacher saying, not only does she not know much algebra, which she theoretically learned in eighth grade, but she can't do long division and has gaps with fractions, things she should have been learning in middle school. And so it sounds like they've been.

made up some of this ground in the intervening time. But her daughter basically says to her, why did you choose to send me to these schools where I wasn't going to get a good education when you had the resources and choices to have done something different? And the essay is really interesting in a number of ways. I appreciate how candidate is. People don't write very often about having made big mistakes, about having regrets, and about having big mistakes that are driven by things that they, you know, professionally have written and influenced about. So I think it's, I think it's admirable in that regard. I think, and we can get into it. to this, I think that there are some indictments in here of Nicole Hannah-Jones' ideology with

regard to education that she ought to rethink that she doesn't really appear to have rethought as a result of the essay. But, John, I wanted to first get your take on that, because I mean, you and Nicole Hannah-Jones, I think it's fair to say, have been on the opposite side of a number of these policy arguments over the years. And here she is basically making this long declaration against interest. That's exactly right. I had the same reaction. It's a wonderfully written essay. She deserves tremendous credit. Everyone should read it because it's just, just so thought-provoking. But it's fundamentally wrong, in my opinion, in the sense that she's just trapped by dogma, that she hasn't been able to escape. She's able to understand the problems

that her own daughter has encountered, but hasn't really arrived at what I think are the correct conclusions as to the cause of these problems. I don't think she recognizes that testing and accountability are working solutions that are actually effective at helping low-income students perform at higher rates, and that I think she has trouble still perceiving that there are positive sum changes in education that can actually create better outcomes for poor students and still sees the world through a zero sum prism, right, in which racism and resource inequality is the entire source of all problems that low-income students face. And, you know, when she wrote that piece 10 years ago, I also thought it was a very interesting piece.

And I thought to myself and didn't have the guts to say publicly, this is not going to end well. And it didn't end well. But, you know, I think we all agree that it would be nice to see her think more broadly about the education system in better ways to address the problems that she identifies, I think, very shrewdly. Yeah, I mean, interesting in that regard with standardized tests, you know, Hannah Jones has been a critic of the use of standardized testing for a variety of purposes in education and saying that, you know, it's wrong to measure schools by standardized test performance. And one of the things she describes in this essay is before her daughter gets to this more rigorous high school

and sort of runs headlong into the fact that she did not, in fact, learn algebra at her middle school, is that her daughter fails the state standardized test in algebra in eighth grade, which she just sort of chalks up to, well, you know, some kids just aren't good at standardized tests, and my kid is one of those. And so it's like the ideology seems to have blinded her to what should have been a big data point that says, you know, not even just, you know, about how Sandra Issa should be used in the system as a whole, but that says your daughter has not learned algebra. And she sort of didn't believe that the first time she was handed evidence of that. Right. And she seems determined to blame choice for all the problems the school system has when that is not the source of the problems the school system has. And in some ways, is the remedy to some of the problems the school system has. The, you know, residential segregation is reinforced by traditional public school boundaries, right? Like you buy your way into the quote-unquote good school systems by having a high income and being able to afford a house or a home in a wealthy neighborhood.

And that's reified by the system that she's defending. Now, that's not the aspect of the system that she likes, but it is a system that she's so wedded to that she sees choice. as the problem for the school system when choice is a way that many poor students have of escaping that crushing problem. A couple of episodes ago, we had on Gabriel Rossman to discuss school reform in California. Yeah, we had Gabriel Rossman as a professor of sociology at UCLA to talk about how the UC system went test blind and how that led. I mean, I think you're going to go here, Ben.

One of the problems at the UCs is they're getting a lot of kids who don't know algebra, who have theoretically passed algebra in their schools. This, I think, gave me a little bit of insight into how that's happening. Yeah. And I remember asking him, what is the defense for those schools where they say, they're all passing, but then they all fail the statewide tests? Or they're all, you know, getting A's in their AP classes, but then getting ones on the tests. And he didn't have much of an answer.

You know, neither did I. There were, in fact, some thoughtful comments from teachers in the comments to that podcast about it. But this essay, the thing that Nicole Hannah-Jones does is she does. then go back to the middle school headmaster or whatever it's called and sort of what it's not called that principal i didn't go to public school all right i'm not sure how it works but like he goes to the principal and says you know what happened here and she she paints this very you know pastoral image of with tears in her eyes the principal said oh it's always been and always will you know but um one of the things that has always been hard for me to wrap my mind around when it comes to these

sort of situations where parents will think this kid is doing great. But then inevitably, you know, reality comes in in this situation because you entered ninth grade in a more rigorous class. But eventually it's going to come in in some other way, whether it's when you're into the job market or whatever. And you then go, who, why did I, why did this happen? And who is the accountability for? When we spoke to him, one of the questions was, was in the frame of, you know, the unions being kind of a push against this, against giving real teacher accountability here and stuff. And she doesn't approach that at all.

You know, she doesn't, in this essay, she doesn't touch on maybe we should be looking at this and saying, these unions, maybe shouldn't be so controlling, so protective of these terrible teachers. But I do think that that was an interesting aspect of it. Yeah, I mean, just to give some perspective on, you know, one of the questions I had is, well, what does it look like in an algebra class

where the kids don't know algebra, what do you do with their work? And she describes in here, you know, her daughter was not assigned homework until high school, until she went to this more rigorous high school. And you get people saying, well, you know, studies say homework doesn't matter for performance. And a lot of these kids, they're just not going to do the homework. So we have them do assignments in class. So there's this whole justification for how you would have schools with no homework. And then she says that she, when her daughter was in elementary school, she spent a while trying to get her hands on certain assignments. And then when she got them, she found that the math assignments were just not being marked at all.

Yeah, like her daughter was saying, I love math. It's my favorite subject. I'm really good at it. And the reason she thought she was really good at it, despite the fact that she was getting all these problems wrong, is that literally no one was checking her work. I can tell you two situations like this. One, my elementary school, our neighborhood elementary school in Washington, had a fifth grade teacher not doing his job.

Homework assignments would be turned in and never graded, ever. through the entire year. And the teacher was actually sleeping for hours at a time during class. Wow. And the principal just made excuses for it. It became clear at this meeting the principal was operating from the premise that the teacher enjoys complete and total autonomy in all facets of his job performance. And the most she could ever do would be to make suggestions to him that he could choose to accept or reject.

but she could never fire him, could never tell him to do anything differently. And she further believed that achievement was not especially important. So these parents were mentioning that these kids were going on to middle school, completely unfamiliar with the math concepts they needed to take the next courses that they were supposed to have been taught and weren't. And she just said, well, these kids are being taught math too quick. You know, they're accelerating through the math stages too fast these days. And I said, so you actually are deliberately trying to slow down their progression through math.

And she kind of affirmed that, yeah. But it all really stems from a premise of teachers have autonomy. Now, there was a different experience we had in high school, which is also a neighborhood high school with a teacher who just didn't do his job. I should note, by the way, Jonathan is in Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., yeah. So this was a teacher who used his class to rant about politics and social questions and not teach the material in any way, shape, or form. This administration was very alarmed about this state of affairs and wanted to do something about it and eventually did. But it took the entire school year documenting literally every single day of this teacher not doing anything remotely related to his job.

and took the entire school year to finally replace them. During that school year, our daughter had a related teacher in the same field who was actually doing a wonderful job. But that teacher was laid off because they had mandatory layoffs and it was last in first down. So she was young. And so she was just a home run, but they had to fire her. And meanwhile, keep the complete non-achiever until the end of the school year. To push back a little on the unions as the core problem here, or at least being a sufficient thing to address here, there are a number of problems that are described in this essay.

Absolutely. That seem like they could be put at the feet of, you know, staff not being held accountable for whether they're doing their jobs or not. But some of it goes at policies that sound to me like they would be very unpleasant for the teachers as well as the students. And this is in particular things that take away tools to discipline students to remove problematic students from classrooms, that seems like something that undermines the learning experience, but also seems like something that must make teaching a less pleasant job. And it was interesting

to me when we talked with Gabriel Rossman about UCLA, that the big driving force trying to bring back standardized tests for admissions at the UCs is a faculty campaign. And it's because the faculty find it more difficult to do instruction when they have students of wildly different ability levels in classes of what are supposed to be selective institutions. So some of this stuff, I was looking at it and thinking, like, why doesn't the teachers' union complain about this? Because it seems like a workplace conditions issue in addition to being an issue that causes problems for students. That's a great question. I mean, I certainly don't want to imply that the teachers' unions are the only cause of educational problems in the United States. There are a lot of problems. I do think that they are politically the driving force within the Democratic Party against reform.

So if you want to understand why the Democratic Party has abandoned education reform and is really a base. and all interest in educational performance. You don't even see Democratic candidates for office making improving schools an important part of their platform the way they did under Clinton and Obama. And I think the unions are the main explanation for that, but they're only a partial explanation as to why education reform is itself lagging.

One part of the essay that I thought was a little fascinating was that even, you know, as you were saying, Josh, two years ago she was happy with this situation. You know? But, uh, so for eight years, this was all working out great. But in the essay, she talks about how almost immediately, you know, in second or third grade, she was getting tutors for her very smart and, you know, scholastically enthusiastic student. And I completely support people getting tutors and stuff like that. But one way of, of having your cake at eating it too, if you're like, I'm going to subject my kid to this terrible school, but is to then,

hire the best teachers and the best tutors in the world. And it's a cheat code. You know, it's a little bit like, ideally, you shouldn't need these tutors. Ideally, you shouldn't have to be doing that. Most people can't do that. Most of the people in that school can't do that. And so, I think if you were looking at this situation, looking at the school and going like, we did this all right, but only because we had enough money to pay someone to come in here and do what is effectively a one-on-one private school every other day or whatever, it was, it then means that there's something wrong with the school. Like, like, that is not, you shouldn't need that. And most people are going to get that. And it makes already the

idea that her daughter was sort of like a test case, like, or an example of these other, of other people wrong, at which point, then I, I've agreed with her daughter about, like, why didn't you just send me to friends? Like, why didn't you send me to a, to a private school? I'm interested in Jonathan's point about that quality of education seems to have fallen off the agenda for Democrats. When Democrats talk about education, it's very often they're talking about expansion of universal pre-K, which in certain ways sits in our policy discussions more as a daycare program than is an educational program. They like to talk about college financing and, you know, that canceling student loan debt or things that would make college cheaper or free. some of it feels like there was a disconnect that hit during COVID, where like COVID happened and

the position of the teachers unions, you know, prioritized preventing COVID infections among teachers above all else. And also sort of involved arguing rhetorically for why it wasn't important for kids to be in school. And then you also had, you know, the sorting overall on COVID between the two parties and the positioning of the COVID obsessives who were terrified of getting infected, that issue was taken up by the Democrats. And so they got used to arguing that it wasn't important for children to be in school. And that took away, like, if you had said in 2018 that it didn't matter whether kids were in school or not, the teachers' unions would have gone apes shit at you. They would have talked about how that's, you know, that, of course, obviously extremely important.

And usually it's easier for people to flip-flop on things. I would have sort of expected people to go back to the way it was before. But it seemed like there just came this commitment to the idea that, you know, the content of education didn't matter as much as it once did. It also, it also interfaced with, you know, changes in views on the left about crime and policing, you know, like Kamala Harris came in for a lot of hate for having prosecuted parents for their children's truancy. And if you talk about that it's important for kids to go back to school and to fight chronic absenteeism, you end up having to talk about holding parents accountable in a way that Democrats don't want to talk about. But it feels like something

broken COVID, where their ability to talk about education is in. important and that's why we pay for it fell away. And then there was basically nothing left to say about it. I want to argue that it wasn't that it broke during COVID. It's just that COVID made it explicit. And like, look, we we ask schools for a lot of things. We ask them to provide babysitting. We ask them to provide somewhere for where kids can be all day that's not like making shoes in a factory for 50 cents an hour or whatever while their parents are working. We ask schools to provide a credential, we asked them to provide skills. And then we have tacked on all these other social services. And to some extent, I mean, I don't know if anyone saw the incredible, the other

viral education, New York Times piece this week, which was, I believe her name is Miriam Powell, who wrote a piece basically saying, okay, so maybe the kids at the UC system, University of California system. Can't do math. But they're graduating at record rates. Right. And it's like effectively arguing that like the skill, the skill part is irrelevant. What matters is that they literally have this piece of paper. And she seems to not, and I suspect she should go back to school because she seems to not grasp that if you don't do the skills part, the piece of paper isn't very helpful because no one will care that you have the piece of paper that tells you absolutely nothing about whether this person is capable of doing math or writing a complete sentence.

But like those things have somewhat been in tension, right? We want people to get these credentials to help with income mobility. And the fact that that requires skills that some of the kids haven't mastered makes it more difficult, right? It becomes a barrier for those kids when they get out. It makes people very unhappy. And one way to reconcile that is to just not, is just to provide the credential and not test the skills. And I think, like, those tensions were kind of paper. The teachers union has always

focused on solutions that do not require them to prove that the kids have learned any skills. And if I want to defend the teachers union a little bit, right? In a high poverty school, there's so much going on. You have kids who are coming from these terrible living situations. They are, like, they find it hard to sit down. They are, like, really behind. They don't get their parents helping them with homework or whatever. A lot of them have IEPs now because the Americans, I guess it's the education, it's idea. The education law requiring you to take care of kids with disabilities, more and more of them have disabilities diagnoses that you have to cope with. There's a ton of paperwork. We've layered paperwork on to cope with things like racial inequalities

and suspensions. So, and like when all of those things clash, the easiest thing to do, there's a, you know, Goodhart's law when a measure becomes a metric and ceases to be useful as a measure. The easiest thing to do is mess with the measure. It's to just keep passing kids so that it looks like you're doing the stuff that people want you to do, even though that job feels like Herculean, Sisyphian, impossible, right? And like, so I think that that has always been an issue, but like the Teachers Union had other stuff that it could get the Democratic Party to agitate for, like smaller class sizes. Or spending more money on schools. we pretty much run that out, right?

The school that Nicole Hannah-Jones was sending her kids to is spending more than $50,000 per kid. It has a 10-to-one student-to-teacher ratio. And, like, this is not a money issue. It's just, like, obviously not. What is this supposed to be $400,000 per kid? How much money are we supposed to spend on primary education per child per year? The class sizes are quite small. And so, like, what's left?

And I think what is left for the teachers union is to just say, like, no, you can't measure us. You can't make us do this stuff. And, like, really, those teachers do have an incredibly hard job in the schools, like the one she sent her kid to. They are dealing with very hard to teach students. And, like, if they have a kid who's disruptive all the time, and that's disrupting the rest of the class, and policy is that you send that kid to the office and the kid comes back in, like, half an hour, what is that teacher supposed to, how are they supposed to be responsible for teaching kids when they can't even keep order in their class? class. And like, one of the reasons I have a lot of sympathy for Nicole Hannah-Jones is, like, I was

that kid. My parents sent me to public school from second grade to fifth grade. Like, they didn't have, you know, school kindergarten when I, and back in the dark ages, there was no, like, public school kindergarten. That is amazing for you. And I, yeah, and I skip first grade. So, like, I, yeah, I went to to West Side Montessori. Megan says she was declared. This is not a joke. Megan says she was declared to be too tall for the first grade and was sent into second grade. Yeah.

I did also know how to read in my defense, but I'd know how to do math at all. Sure, sure, right. It's not just physical. I remember people making fun of me because I didn't know how to add two-digit numbers, which they had apprehended in first grade, and I had not gotten the memo yet. And like my school was, my school was not that high poverty school. It was like a third kids from, you know, like really poor kids, a third, like, working class. kids from the neighborhood back when there were working class kids on the Upper West Side.

And then it was like a third, you know, highly educated parents' kids. And in my fifth grade class, because New York did not allow you to spend kids for very long, there were two boys who just became incredibly disruptive. And the teacher couldn't really do anything. They would disappear for a few days. And then they come back, and this went on all year. And the school also, I wasn't learning that much before, honestly. The classes went quite slow.

And my parents eventually figured out that there was a problem. But, like, I was there for three years. And then when they pulled me out and they sent me to private school, it took me years to catch up. And I had tutors. I remember, like, sixth grade was just a brutal round of tutoring and everything. And it wasn't an ability problem. I wasn't, like, the stupidest kid in my high school class. It was, like, I, you know, at the, by the end of my high school career, I had caught up and I was

doing well on my standardized tests and so forth. But it took me, like, until ninth grade. to really get back on track because the school was so much less rigorous than the school that I ended up in. But, like, it's hard to know. Right. As someone said on Twitter, you know, if your third grader shows her writing and it's bad. Like, well, third grader writing is bad. Do you know what the comparison is supposed to be?

Are you a third grade writing expert? No, most parents aren't. And so there are some things like math where it's really easy to tell. If your kid's supposed to be doing long division, you can actually, I take that back. Now with all the new math methods, you also can't tell if they're doing that right. One thing that's remarkable to me looking at this piece, Jonathan, is that, like, it seems to me like education schools are just a completely malevolent force in our society. Worse than useless.

Always coming up with the dumbest ideas imaginable and somehow getting people to believe that their best practices. I mean, you know, we've gone through this, you know, the last 15 years, getting schools to teach phonics again because this, like, completely nonsense, reading teaching methods came out that don't seem like they should have a political valence. And I think, you know, once you get rank and file Democrats and Republicans to think about phonics, it doesn't have a political valence anymore. But there are these ideas that come out of these education schools, like stop using ways that actually teach kids to read and do it this other way.

And once we fight back against that, then they're doing it in math. Then they're coming up with ideas like don't assign homework. It just amazes me that this stuff still goes through into the schools and that, you know, neither party seems to focus sufficiently on, you know, on pushing back against that. Right. There shouldn't be an ideological component to what kind of reading instruction you use, but the people who had the bad kind of reading instruction understood that politics was the lever that they would use to keep their methods in vogue.

So they deliberately set out to politicize the debate. And that was a successful tactic for them, but it was a disastrous one for those cultural I mean, like, I think that that kind of reading, the philosophy of that kind of reading is associated with a certain kind of woo mentality. I associate with the left. And to be very clear, that's not to say that the left is the only one with woo mentality. They just have different woo mental mentalities from the right. Yeah, the right's gotten very into woo in the last few years, unfortunately. Yeah, exactly. Wait, what the hell is woo? Like, magical. Anti-impericism. This is like asking a fish what water is, right? You grew up in Hollywood, so you can't see. see it. Yeah. It's, you know, it's Marianne Williamson and that kind of shit. It's just kind of magical thinking. Okay. Okay. I mean, part, a big part of it is not wanting kids to ever not enjoy learning. And as it happened, I really liked my multiplication tables because I'm good at memorization. But I understand that for many people, they were not an enjoyable part of school life. And so what you do is you take out the parts that are just like drill and kill.

because that's regimented and patriarchal, and it's not about having a happy spirit of learning. Oh, I see what you mean by Wu. Okay, I get it. So just to take the most charitable take that I can find on the lessons that Nicole Hannah-Jones has drawn from this experience. I mean, I take her objection broadly to choice systems in schools to be that it's a problem when schools are segregated, by race or by socioeconomic status and that what we want are schools that have a representative mix of students and families feeding into them and the pressures that high-income families, high-education parents put on schools. You want them in all of the schools so that there can be an uplift for everyone and that everyone is in everything together. Now, of course, one of the

problems with that is that you cannot actually prohibit exit. And so if you take a system like New York's that has a fair amount of choice opportunity within the public school system, including charters and selective magnet schools and such and options to send your children outside the neighborhood school that they're assigned to, if you take those opportunities away, you get a lot of affluent parents, disproportionately white and Asian parents exiting the school district entirely. Either they send the kids to private school, they move to the suburbs so that they get outside the geography. And so you end up having a system that just has fewer well-resourced families overall. And so, you know, I think part of what she hasn't seen there is that basically that,

you know, that's the outcome that you're seeing in these schools, that, you know, the families that have fled these schools, they are necessarily going to flee these schools, especially if they operate under these terms where there's no testing, no accountability, no way to force, you know, a more rigorous academic environment. So I guess, you know, then where does that leave parents who are in these, in these districts. I mean, what should be done for the children who are, you know, who do end up at unison middle school, which Nicole Hannah-Jones has changed her view on whether it was a school that was performing well for her daughter and the others there? I mean, you know, like, her daughter should have been sent somewhere else. But what about all of the other kids there whose parents were less

involved and less well-resourced than Nicole Hannah-Jones? I mean, I think that just brings you back to the boring work of education, reform, and improvement in finding out what methods we have that can, you know, coax better outcomes out of schools like that. There are some. It's hard. None of them is transformative. But there are methods that work better than other methods. And a lot of those methods are not being used. And that's what you have to focus on. And testing and accountability is the foundation of all those things. Because without that, you don't know what works and doesn't work and you're not trying to make things work better. So that's, that's just step one. But even getting to step one now starts a big fight within the, within the Democratic Party, and within a lot of

schools, too. You know, a lot of parents, not only teachers, but parents, don't like their kids being tested, especially in the suburbs. So it's just really difficult even to get to the point of being able to measure progress before you even start implementing better methods of obtaining it. Yeah, I mean, I, I, this also like really did shed some light for me on that UC conversation that we had, because I, there's an important nuance in the problem that was created by going test blind in the UCs where, you know, not only do they not have the information that comes from the standardized tests, having the standardized tests also makes grading more informational, which is to say that if you have standardized test scores from the applicants, you see that a student with a 3.5 at a low performing school does not have the same aptitude as a student with a student with a. 3.5 at a high-performing school. Basically, it allows you, even if the grades are somewhat fake at the school, you can make them real by adjusting for the school's overall performance. Well, it also deters the school from cheating.

Right. You might as well inflate everyone's grade if there is literally not going to be any information on what that grade means going to anyone. Right. And as Gabriel described, in addition to going test blind, the UC system has basically made a change in the way that it looks at those schools' GPAs. And effectively, you know, when they were looking at standardized test scores, they were effectively applying a penalty to the students from the low-performing schools, saying that, you know,

your GPA is less good than it looks. With the test gone, they started going the opposite direction, applying a bonus instead of a penalty. So, you know, they, not only do they not have the information from the tests, they were greatly overestimating what the grades meant for these students. And that's how you ended up with, you know, students who are just drastically unfit for Berkeley. And it's, you know, it seems like there's an effort that, you know, well, if we never measure, then we never have to notice when there are achievement gaps. And, you know, the problem is that, you know, at some point someone goes on the job market. But it's a remarkable experiment there in saying, you know, what if we move this all the way up to the post-secondary level where we never really look

and see whether people know anything or not? Can I just say before we move on from this subject? This entire essay is framed around her daughter coming home because she wanted to know if she would be able to get into the top schools because she was an honor student at her high school. And that she looked and found out not a lot of kids go from that school into the best schools in the country. And as someone who was a fuck up in high school that had a thing. famous parent. She's going to get in everywhere she applies. This girl has been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine twice now. All right? They're going to be offering her every merit scholarship she can get. I think she might be a little bit smarter than you work, Ben. Yeah, probably, exactly. She'll deserve them

maybe, too. Let's take a quick break, and then we're going to come back and talk about Jonathan's home state of Michigan. This is Central Air. Okay, so Jonathan, you are from Michigan, a graduate of the of Michigan. I gather that people in Michigan like it when they beat Ohio. We like to beat Ohio. Yes. This is a reference to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate, who is also a graduate of the University of Michigan. He made this beat Ohio comment that lots of national college football commentators made fun of him for because, of course, the rivalry is with Ohio State, the Ohio State University. But I gather that's like a local Michigan like nagging thing. Not everyone does that, but But some Michigan fans have and always have omitted the state for reasons that I never actually

even understood. It's like how Republicans call it the Democrat Party. Exactly. Yeah. So Abdul al-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, not your preferred candidate in that race. And you've been writing about, you know, that he reflects, you know, the two-front war that the center left is now fighting, you know, in the Democratic Party. I'm just wondering, you know, you're writing about that back in early August when the result came down.

I'm wondering how you're thinking about that now because, you know, first of all, I think Abdulsaid is probably going to win this general election just because it's such a good year for Democrats. It's hard to lose a statewide race in Michigan this year. So where do you feel as a Democrat who was, you know, who really did not care for him as you watch him run what is probably going to be a winning campaign? Yeah, he's made a couple steps in the direction that I would like him to take. Not nearly as many steps as I would like, but I'll give you one example. During the primary, one of his supporters basically shut down a Haley Stevens event, you know, went into the restaurant where she was holding the event and just like harassed, everyone screamed and broke it up.

And then the restaurant said, like, we can't do this. This is over and shut it down. And he said nothing about that. And then last week, one of his supporters started following her around with the camera and screaming at her about genocide. And he said, this is inappropriate. Don't do that. So one of my concerns about Abdul Al-Sayad, and I have many, is that he really seems to be encouraging and normalizing this style of political confrontation that is really about making anyone who's Zionist at all. uncomfortable in progressive spaces in the Democratic Party, even walking around in public

through just confrontation and name-calling and sometimes even terrorism. And, you know, his supporters have engaged in that. He has refused to condemn it. And I think he really doesn't see a problem with that. But at least here he took some steps to say, let's chill out. Now, whether this extends past the November election when he needs these Democrats to vote for him remains to be seen. But at least that's a step in the right direction. As I look at this fight that has, you know, emerged in the Democratic Party, the split over Israel.

You know, I look at some of the trends there and feel uncomfortable about them in the way that you're describing here. That's it for this week's free episode of Central Air. For paying subscribers, we have our effort to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. I think we're really close here. I think we're right on the cusp of things. We also look at the Federal Reserve, and Donald Trump's claim that he told Kevin Warsh to go ahead and raise interest rates,

which, yeah, sure, Jan. And our look at the emerging Warner Brothers Paramount merger settlement. It does appear that people wanted to get the yes here, and there is a binding agreement to issue a lot of movies into theaters. And Ben and Meg and I discuss who got what they were looking for out of that settlement

and why we're going to see that merger go ahead. So if you want to hear all of that, go to centralairpodcast.com. You can become a paying subscriber, get every full episode, hear us in cocktail hour as we discuss the lighter side of certain things. Join our comments sections and be part of our community. We'd love to have you. Thanks.