Your Lesson Plan Won’t Save Democracy

Billionaires (and two authors) would like teachers to try to solve the problems caused by billionaires.

We're heading into an election year here in the United States and our democratic institutions seem more fragile than usual. In just the last year, we have seen a dramatic increase in gerrymandering, voter suppression, and other anti-democratic efforts. Policies that are very popular like public health insurance, legal abortion, expanded background checks for gun purchasers, and legalized marijuana have little to no chance of becoming law. We have seen challenges to the legitimacy of our elections themselves, all amounting to a country that seems less and less governed by the collective will of its people.

How can we resolve this crisis? Who represents the solution here and what is it? Some commentators suggest "teachers" and "better teaching."

For example, in his recent book Dear Citizen Math, Karim Ani writes that "[math teachers] may have more influence over the trajectory of democracy than anyone else in the country." In Education Week, mathematician and co-founder of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy Ismar Volić writes that "the only substantive solution to this problem [an imperiled democracy] is more education aimed at cultivating political numeracy." 

Both authors see the same problem—partisan division and political gridlock—and ask math teachers to solve it, specifically through better or different lesson plans. 

If you're a teacher, it may be tempting to accept the responsibility for the fate of our democracy. Teaching is hard work for low pay, so teachers often accept extra compensation in the form of particular positioning in social and civic life. But this request from both Ani and Volić falls in a long line of requests people make of teachers to solve problems for which teachers have little responsibility and over which teachers have little influence. I hope teachers politely decline to try to save democracy through their lesson plans, both for their own sake and, ultimately, for the sake of democracy.

Influence

Teachers have tremendous influence. There is substantial evidence, for example, that teachers are the largest in-school factor affecting whether or not students learn. Beyond influencing student learning, teachers also influence a student's sense of themselves as capable learners, their sense of belonging in a class, a school, or a discipline, and a host of other socio-emotional outcomes. Anecdotally, adults I meet in my travels frequently communicate to me how a particular teacher many decades earlier communicated a particular message at a particular time that changed the course of their professional or even personal life.

Teachers should claim those areas of influence—their school, their classes, their lessons, their students—and reject the others. 

They should reject the blame heaped on them by reactionary politicians from both parties whenever some national indicator declines, whenever other countries advance economically, technologically, militarily, or in this case, whenever our democratic institutions are imperiled. 

There simply isn't sufficient evidence to suggest a teacher's influence extends to institutions as large as democracy itself. For example, educators are often asked to help close gaps between racial groups. But a Duke University analysis of consumer finance data found that "on average, a black household with a college-educated head has less wealth than a white family whose head did not even obtain a high school diploma." If the influence of education isn't sufficient to democratize wealth, teachers should hesitate before accepting responsibility for democracy itself.

Perhaps teaching hasn't yet had an impact on these large institutions because math teachers haven't yet, in unison, adopted the math lessons Ani and Volić prefer. We'll never know. But we have made large-scale nationwide changes to our teaching and curriculum in the recent and distant past, and none of them have corresponded to significant changes in any outcome or institution as large as our democracy.

My first claim is, pretty simply, that teachers should reserve their energy and obligation for areas of the world they can influence rather than areas they can't.

Responsibility

Both writers ask teachers to save democracy, an institution they obviously care a lot about, so it's surprising how little attention they pay to the people who are responsible for its diminished state, people who are right now stripping it for parts.

For example, Ani describes sitting in a contentious town hall meeting about the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and thinking, "If we could just have this conversation using seventh-grade probabilities, how much more productive would it be?" Volić similarly laments that we don't teach children about "mathematically superior ways to vote, such as ranked-choice methods that incorporate more information about voters’ preferences."

Both Ani and Volić regret the knowledge voters don't have, however neither commentator engages much with the competing knowledge voters do have or where it came from.

For example, from 2010 to 2014, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 30–40% of voters believed the Affordable Care Act had a provision for so-called "death panels"—the false idea that the ACA created a government panel to make decisions about an individual's end-of-life care. That one false idea was directly responsible for a great deal of the anger Ani witnessed at his town hall.

But false ideas like death panels didn't emerge organically from the mist. They didn't float through the air and attach to an unused place in your uncle's brain that a teacher should have filled with a lesson on probabilities back in the seventh grade.

Instead, ideas of that sort were developed, disseminated, and coordinated by extremely well-funded organizations, including the health insurance industry and other pro-business groups.

This is what teachers and their lessons on probabilities and ranked-choice voting are up against. The health insurance industry makes billions of dollars of annual profits. The executives and shareholders of the private health insurance industry don't just take their profits and use them to buy yachts and mansions and other nice things. They pool those profits and invest them in lobbyists, media campaigns, political action committees, think tanks, research grants, political candidates, and other investments all designed to create the kind of status quo-preserving political gridlock Ani witnessed at the townhall in 2009.

The health insurance lobby has spent $498 million so far this year to influence the trajectory of our democracy, 30% more than the next largest lobbying sector. If you're a teacher and you're thinking about accepting responsibility for our democracy, you have to ask yourself, "What is my school's investment in my curriculum and instruction and how does it stack up next to $498 million?"

In spite of that massive asymmetry, Ani and Volić identify teachers as the people responsible for our coarse debates and frail democracy, rather than the ultra-rich, rather than an exploitative economic system that makes billionaires wealthy at the expense of their workers, rather than campaign finance laws that let them use their wealth to protect and strengthen their dominant position, rather than any of a number of more suitable targets.

In this, Ani and Volić actually find common cause with billionaires, who would love nothing more than for teachers to take responsibility for the problems caused by billionaires.

What should teachers do?

Teachers should teach interesting math lessons, lessons that examine the material, social, and mathematical worlds. They should adopt teaching practices that connect students to their own humanity and the humanity of their classmates. Teachers should recognize that every lesson is an opportunity perhaps not to save democracy, but certainly to model democracy, to model shared decision-making, shared knowledge construction, shared authority, and the equitable distribution of power and resources with their students. Teachers should do all of that because it is good for their students in the here and now, in the immediate and local, not because any of it will solve climate change or prevent the next pandemic or restore our democracy or reach into any of the areas teaching has never yet been able to reach.

If teachers can do anything to strengthen our democracy directly, I believe they'll do that work outside of their classrooms. That work will require an understanding of the ways our economic system concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the few, and the ways the wealthy and powerful work to protect that system. It will require the moral clarity to name an economic system that has allowed the richest 125 households to hoard more wealth than the 64 million poorest households combined as unjust and totally busted.

Our economic system distributes the vast wealth of our world to a very small number of people, even though all of us were born into it exactly the same way—naked and crying. Saving democracy will require our country to redistribute wealth from the few to the many and for teachers to realize that they are the single largest professional group within the many. It will be their numbers, their solidarity, and their moral clarity, far more than their lesson plans, that will amount to a teacher’s greatest influence over the trajectory of our democracy and the future of our country.

What Else

Where My Cynicism About Education Ends is a must-read from Michael Pershan. He reckons with the limits of his teaching's influence on students and society and emerges on the other side of that reckoning with more purpose and power rather than less.