Introducing The Center for Educational Progress

Education must reorient itself around a culture of excellence

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of the Center for Educational Progress, where I will work alongside Lillian Tara to orient education towards a culture of excellence. This summer and after law school, I will run it full-time; in the meantime, I’ll spend all the time I can find on it. I have never felt as strongly about another project in my life.

If you want to understand what it’s about, read our manifesto.

Schools Should Pursue Excellence

But if you want the personal side of the story, stick around.

When I was a toddler and a young child, my mom kept a journal for me. In between accounts of cute baby moments, it chronicles a procession of excited and often braggadocious learning:

 He knows the alphabet song and can count to six.

Today Jack said, “I can count backwards from fifty, Mom,” and I said, “Oh yeah? Let’s hear!” So he did! I was surprised and delighted!

Jack spells “desk” and “lemmings” and loves to count. His favorite number is 1890 and he likes to put numbers in the calculator and ask us what they are, exclaiming, “Wow! That’s sooo much!”

“I can read ‘Are You My Mother?’ very well.” “And I can claim very well. And that’s all—now can I draw?” Jack draws incessantly.

Jack can read upside down. He is very very smart! “I’m talented at reading upside down.”

Then I started kindergarten:

Jack is in school now. He won’t talk about it much. He says he likes it fine, but he also says he wishes he were in first grade and that he misses preschool. …I wonder if he is a bit lost still, and bored. Wondering when the action begins.

I wish I could say that sensation went away as I grew older, but I can’t say it ever did. I have a vivid memory of throwing my first grade homework away because it was “busywork.” There were moments! I loved a reading competition my school hosted when I was in second grade—spent every waking moment reading because I wanted to win so badly. I jumped at the chance to attend a gifted program in fifth grade, then left for online school in sixth grade in the hopes that it would let me push faster—and it did! I rushed through a few years of the online curriculum, then skipped seventh grade and had my first and only truly happy year in school as an eighth grader.

That year, in my speech and debate class, I gave what may have been my first prepared speech: “Schools care about No Child Left Behind. But what they need is No Child Kept Behind.”

From all outside metrics, I was a good student, or a good enough one. I loved tests—I still do. I loved competitions. For longer than I can remember, I have loved learning. But from the very first day I entered school, I had an acute sense that something was missing.

It’s not that my school was bad, as schools go. It was a reasonably affluent elementary school in suburban Utah County. And it’s not like my teachers were cruel or bad or even unpleasant—almost every educator in my life has seemed to genuinely want the best for me. But they had many kids to pay attention to. For me, school started slow, it stayed slow, and for my entire childhood, I learned that school was the place where I toss in some hastily scrawled work at the last minute and get a gold star.

The whole way through—start to finish—I wanted something else. Something sharper, grander, more serious. Something that I had a vague picture of, that I fundamentally felt should exist, but that I could not find.

An intrusive thought, again and again: something has gone terribly wrong in education.

---

Since I left school, I have circled around the topic of education, looking for the right foothold. Immediately after graduation, spurred by my experience of a year spent rushing headlong through online school, I envisioned building an elaborate edtech program, one that would map out everything there was to learn in K12 schools and organize it just right. I wrote out a five-year plan of research for it, mapped out what I would need to learn and who I would need to be to make it happen. Then I set it aside.

As an undergrad, I wanted to study Education. But—I didn’t want to specialize in teaching math, or teaching English, or go through the fluff in one of the education degrees actually on offer at universities. I wanted to understand, fundamentally, what it took to systematically develop expertise, and I was frustrated to find only courses of study indirectly gesturing towards it. So I studied computer science instead, figuring I would learn the rest on my own time, before taking a pleasant detour into the Air Force.

Thank You For My Service

My first serious piece of published writing was an adversarial collaboration on whether schools adequately serve advanced students. From there, in quiet corners of the internet I talked the ears off of everyone who would listen to me about K. Anders Ericsson and his expertise research, about Arthur Jensen and the interplay between intelligence and learning ability, about just how high the ceiling can be.

When I came across Art of Problem Solving, the curriculum used by almost all US math olympiad contestants, and its online learning system Alcumus, I cried a bit—it was beautiful, it was pristine, it was exactly the sort of thing I had dreamed of and it was real. I’ve never been quite so touched by anything else in education, but a few have come close.

I digress. As time passed, I became increasingly convinced that the problems I saw and felt were not problems of technology, but problems of institutions and of culture. I grew obsessive about tracking the cultural roots of modern education policy and the causes of institutional stagnation and failure. What caught my attention more than anything else in my coverage of the FAA’s hiring scandal? A test, and the ways it was weakened. Why did I spend long hours obsessively tracking the fine details of a story about an obscure Wikipedia admin? Because I saw a useful source of understanding systematically degraded.

When I left the Air Force, I planned to get a dual degree in law and education policy—not because I thought the policy degree would answer my questions, but because I hoped it would make others take it more seriously when I explained why I distrusted it. Law school, I should say, has been my first consistently positive experience in the education system. I always intended to enter policy via the back door, but it’s been a fun back door.

Anyway, enough about me. Policy, after all, is and must be about the trade-off between many different needs. My life is turning out better than I ever dared to hope when I was young. I still remember that kid, though. Every time I write about education, all of those emotions come rushing back.

My ethos when it comes to education can be summed up in two words: Pursue excellence. Institutions should stretch the people within them. Schools should offer their students productive challenge, alert to who needs more and who needs a breather. People can make it further with the help of good institutions than they can on their own. This is equally true for the slowest learners and the fastest, and serious education matters for each.

Freddie deBoer likes to point out that education cannot close academic gaps at scale, but as with the ways gymnastics has transformed in the span of a single lifetime,¹ I am much more compelled by the question of the barriers it can help us collectively overcome. Excellence is a good in and of itself. The closer I get to domains and sub-domains that once seemed unimaginably crowded to me, the more I realize how many corners of our collective social edifice rely on a few capable, determined people who take responsibility for them.

It is our collective duty to cultivate that excellence.

For a while in law school, I looked around for an institution I could join that would let me focus on this mission. I have always wanted mentors and instructors, always recognized that I am a passionate amateur feeling about a topic serious experts have spent lifetimes on. And through the start of law school, I had in mind that I would find the most-aligned groups and work with them until I was ready to set off on my own.

I came up short. The structure of legal and policy institutions in education is split, for the most part, between a progressive equity-focused frame and a libertarian choice-focused one. It’s not that I reject those frames, precisely, and it’s not that those institutions do no good work. But this is what I care about. This is what I want to see from schools. This is what I want to study and work on and argue on behalf of and focus on.

As I’ve looked closer, it’s become clear to me that the institution I wanted to work for simply does not exist, and it does not exist because I wanted to work for “me but better” and the only way I can see to summon that person is to build the best institution I can with the knowledge I have, and hope the picture has become clear enough that I can find the others who want the same thing.

Tracing Woodgrains will continue. I’ll always have plenty to say on other topics, and heaven knows I can’t stop myself from diving at a fascination when it consumes me. Moving forward, though, my central professional focus will be the Center for Educational Progress. At root, I still feel the same way I felt in kindergarten: something has gone terribly wrong with education, and it is well past time to make it right.

I hope you’ll join us.

Schools Should Pursue Excellence

1. See: