Educational Popularism

Take popular positions and don't talk about the bad ones

Author

James Shanahan
June 18, 2026

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Thursday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

Remember Popularism?

If you were somewhat center-left in the US and trying to figure out what to do in the 2022 midterms, chances are you encountered discussions of popularism. Its main proponent was political consultant and pollster David Shor, who argued that Democrats should focus on messaging about issues that polled the best for them and not talk about issues that polled poorly. Ezra Klien promoted Shor’s work directly. Others, like Matt Yglesias, agreed and took up this approach in their writing and advocacy. Yglesias says it’s an almost stupid argument to have to make and calls it “an almost childishly silly thing to argue about,” before laying out plainly what the argument is.

I believe that it is counterproductive to progressive causes to push candidates in tough races to take high-salience public stances in favor of unpopular progressive causes. Instead, you should encourage candidates to embrace popular progressive causes and allow them to make tactical retreats from fights where conservatives have public opinion on their side.

I tend to agree that, as a plan for winning elections, this seems like the right path. You have to play to your strengths and avoid giving your opponent ammunition. I also understand why this is controversial for a lot of people with heartfelt commitments to causes that may not poll well in general elections. It felt like the Shors, Kleins, Yglesias of the world were asking Democrats to throw women, immigrants, and queer people under the bus. I don’t think that’s a fair reading of their positions. They weren’t advocating for enacting policies against those groups. It was entirely about rhetoric and positioning politicians took during campaigns. Regardless, this all generated a lot of commentary (see also here and here) and despite its prominence in the discourse, I couldn’t tell you how impactful popularism has been in practice. Milan Singh recently wrote that centrists can’t win Democratic primaries and that has big implications for popularist positioning.

It’s one thing to tell progressives that, while you share their ultimate goals, your reading of the evidence suggests that the scope of what’s politically possible is narrower than they think, and therefore the best strategy is to moderate on select issues to maximize the odds of beating Republicans and push policy to the left.

That’s not an easy sell. Progressive political spaces are filled with well-meaning people who tend to have strong ideological views, so there is a natural tendency to engage in a little motivated reasoning.3

But it’s even harder to convince people to compromise on their deeply held principles and hopes when you don’t actually share the same end goals. Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani want to create social democracy in America. I don’t think that Tom Suozzi and Adam Gray do.

Should We Do Popularism for Education?

Okay, so you’re probably wondering where the education connection is to all this. Education is pretty middle of the road then voters are polled about policy priorities. Sure, it leans right and left depending on phrasing and which topics in education you ask about, but in general it’s just not high on the list of what people say they care about. They’re going to list things like the economy and crime way out ahead of education. Still, the public does care and we can learn what’s popular with the public from polling. I addressed some of this in a post last fall about the importance of advanced academics and I’ve looked at what polling suggests about the public’s preferences for schooling.

I was thinking a lot about popularism as I read Jennifer Berkshier’s post last week about how winning politicians are talking about education. She sees two wings in the Democratic party’s education policy. On one side there has been a resurgence in advocacy for 2010s era education reform policy. On the other side are Democrats who are running successfully against those policies by opposing vouchers, opposing testing, pushing against ed tech, respecting parents, resisting “college for all” and supporting unions. BUT these aren’t just progressive Democratic positions. Unions aside, many issues have cross-party salience. For example, conservatives also have problems with standardized testing.

Read enough of the impassioned calls to return to the times when school reformers called the shots, and you’ll discern a familiar tale. Back when the nation’s foot was planted firmly upon the accountability gas pedal, things were going great. And then came [insert specific actor and complaint here.] So all we have to do is go pedal to the metal once more, right?? Except in the real world, where no one has ever heard of EduWonk or the Fordham Institute, pols of both parties are competing feverishly for the title of who hates testing more. Case in point: Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott claims to have eliminated the state’s standardized test. Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who is making this a real race, talks up her opposition to testing constantly–because it’s a position that reflects overwhelming public sentiment in the Lone Star state. In fact, listen closely and you’ll hear an anti-testing, anti-school closure, anti-state-takeover, anti-corruption argument emerging that speaks to Texans across party lines.

What I think Berkshire is finding here is, more or less, popularism. If Democrats want to win “tough races” like Yglesias has said, then they can’t adopt the education reform positions of yesteryear. I’ve written about parental perceptions of testing before:

I think what I’m deriving from all this is that parents do see legitimate uses for standardized tests and a slight majority, as noted above, view standardization favorably but what they want is for those tests and those standards to make sense in the local context of their kid’s school. They support teachers in striking to gain more control over standards and tests and curricula because they want the actual humans who know their kids to attenuate some of the inappropriate aspects of standardization.

This also reminds me of a classic study from the ‘90s that looked at parents attitudes toward standardized testing. What they found was that parents generally viewed standardized tests positively but that they did not give preference to test results over other kinds of assessment such as report cards, hearing from a teacher, performance assessments, or seeing examples of student’s work. What parents ultimately wanted was comparative information that helped them to evaluate their child’s progress over the school year and viewed a standardized test as only one component of that information.

It makes sense, then, that parents don’t want a ton of focus on testing but also see many legitimate uses for testing. The more control over testing is held at the local level, the more parents see it as a useful yardstick for understanding their child’s learning and growth. That’s also why they would favor teachers striking to get more control over the standards/testing/curriculum process. It also jives with the idea that parents didn’t want testing during the pandemic but do once the pandemic is done. For them, standardized tests aren’t about measuring policy outcomes or using aggregate data to adjust funding levels. Parents want the tests to tell them something meaningful about their kid and probably felt that all the pandemic era remote schooling and closures would make those results unhelpful.

Vouchers, meanwhile, aren’t some great boons that will lift every school’s quality on a rising tide of school competition. Indeed, voucher advocates have said that improving educational outcomes is no longer their goal. In states where the public has now had experience with vouchers, they recognize that the vouchers are too broad with too little oversight. The public feels that vouchers invite corruption and enrich politicians who often have cozy relationships with schools receiving vouchers while states show up and take over their local public districts, removing local control and a common avenue for parental feedback and involvement. Beyond that, vouchers are technocratic. Rather than being seen as offering choice and freedom, vouchers are becoming a system of official control and management while funneling money from local schools to politically connected schools for the wealthy. When states use their rulemaking processes to decide that vouchers can only go to Christian schools, you know that choice and freedom are out. It turns out people don’t like this!

Anyway, you can read Berkshire’s article and my links for the fuller picture. What I really want to do is try and lay out what a Democrat who wants to talk about schools should say if they were following popularist advice. Remember, we’re talking about the things in education that people like while avoiding talking about the things they hate.

  • Standardized testing and the distortions it’s having on school curriculum are unpopular. This doesn’t mean you have to come out with some policy that seeks to end all testing or that you need to call testing racist or whatever. Popularism isn’t about taking the opposite position. It’s about shutting up. Don’t talk about raising test scores as a goal. Don’t talk about achievement or getting kids “college and career ready” by monitoring their academic progress. Don’t talk about holding schools or teachers accountable. Again, let me emphasize, this is talk, not actual policy. Just talk about making schools better and making them responsive to your kids’ needs.

  • School Choice is in an interesting space these days because what used to be the consensus around school choice has collapsed. I’m of the option that what the public wants is to feel like they have a lot of options. They want comprehensive schooling and a large menu of choices and services. Because the right-wing policy environment has moved over to unconditional voucherization (see below), systems of choice that allow movement between public schools or having lots of charter schools are becoming more left-coded. This is in part because the schools most harmed by vouchers are high-performing public schools and charter schools and it’s in part because, as the Heritage Foundation explains, charter schools are too woke. I think the popularist message here is actually about the harms of school closures. You should acknowledge that budgets are tight and it’s expensive to keep schools open in the face of declining enrollments but that other bad policies are draining money that could be used to keep your neighborhood school open—like vouchers.

  • Vouchers: you are talking about corruption and being good stewards of taxpayer money. You’re going to talk about how voucher proponents badly misjudged the money that would be spent and caused severe budget problems. It’s not about ending vouchers, it’s about corrupt politicians wanting no strings attached so their friends and family and churches can get your money. Vouchers are giveaways to the rich and they literally funnel money from your neighborhood school to the private schools that won’t admit your kids anyway. It’s about $2000 blank checks even though at many as 1 in 5 paid for services that violated the voucher rules. Maybe talk about the bipartisan bill being considered in Ohio called “Take the Dough, We Gotta Know.” We can’t have accountability in public schools but zero accountability for public money spent on non-public schools. Seems popularist to me!

  • EdTech is bad. Kids hate it. Teachers hate it. Parents hate it. The popularist approach here is to talk about reigning in ed tech and reducing schools’ reliance on digital platforms. Giving young children, like K-3 kids, Chromebooks and fully digitizing their learning is bad. A corollary of this that we need to let our teachers actually teach and not farm out all of that to distant technology experts and heartless corporations. Google doesn’t care if your child watches 13,000 YouTube videos instead of doing schoolwork. You know who does? Their teacher. The winning message is to invest in people, not tech. Maybe throw in some talk about how edtech is designed to be addictive? Don’t talk about 21st century learners or AI or innovation.

That’s the gist of it. If you’re a politician and you’re wanting to take popular positions about education while avoiding the negatives, there’s my advice. If you’re in need of a heuristic, then just remember that people like the idea of local control and want to see local schools and their employees supported. Your campaign rhetoric should emphasize that while minimizing elitist calls for technocratic reforms because those generate populist backlash.

Thanks for reading.