How To Talk [School Choice] So Americans Will Listen
By Jennifer Wagner
The title of this post comes from a handout one of my coworkers left on my desk last year. It was from the American Enterprise Institute, and it contained seven tips “to become a highly effective conservative communicator.”
As a communicator whose background is on the opposite end of the political spectrum, I was very interested in the guidance a highly respected right-leaning think tank was giving to its ideological faithful. Here it is:
- Be a moralist.
No matter the topic, never start with what you want to talk about; start with the WHY. If you lead with your heart you’ll have a better shot at winning people over.
2. Fight for people, not against things.
Don’t just oppose bad ideas. Remind people who you’re fighting for: struggling Americans who need our help.
3. Get happy.
Good humor has to be authentic or people see through it in an instant. To be a happy warrior, you must genuinely be a happy person.
4. Steal all the best arguments.
Most Americans don’t want to choose between compassion and morality, or between leadership and empathy. They want leaders who have all these traits. So expand your moral imagination, and emulate your opponents’ best traits.
5. Go where you’re not welcome.
Get out of your comfort zone! Attract people who don’t see things the same way, and enlist them to the cause. Conservatives must be more than a motivated minority. Expand your horizons, and engage with true believers, persuadables, and even hostiles.
6. Say it in 30 seconds.
A great speech treats the first opening seconds like the scarce and valuable commodity they are. First priority in making a good impression? Don’t blow your opening lines.
7. Break your bad habits.
The old way isn’t working. It’s time to change the message; it’s time to change the way it’s delivered. Don’t be afraid to give up what’s comfortable for something that is scary but has an opportunity for success.
I’ll be honest: Their advice surprised me. Not because it’s bad advice. It’s great advice. It’s similar to the advice I try to build into every presentation I give. I was surprised by the messenger. What were these conservatives doing leading with their hearts? Becoming happy warriors? Starting with the why?
Oh, Arthur C. Brooks, you’re speaking my language.
And you’re speaking it because you have to — because decades of pointing at trend lines on charts, citing economic theory and talking about people instead of to them netted you an army of incredibly well educated, dedicated true believers who can only talk to each other.
Joseph Q. Hoosier does not give a tinker’s cuss what Arthur C. Brooks thinks about the free enterprise system. Joseph Q. Hoosier cares about his life, his job and his future. And if Joseph has kids, he probably cares about K-12 education.
Let me get a spoiler alert out of the way right now: We’ve been talking about educational choice all wrong for decades.
Without a doubt, the best part of my job is helping train advocates. I love meeting people from all over the country, learning about their state- or region-specific challenges and equipping them with skills and solutions. I usually present to small audiences of fewer than 100 folks, and they always seem to perk up most when I get to the “words that work” section — as if I’ve stumbled upon the secret sauce that will enable them to pass or expand school choice programs in their state.
Sadly, I have not. I have, however, identified a fundamental flaw in the school choice narrative. Brace yourselves:
WE TOLD PEOPLE THEIR SCHOOLS WERE TERRIBLE.
THEY DID NOT APPRECIATE THAT ONE BIT.
It’s similar to how people view Congress: They hate the legislative body in its entirety, but they love their local representative.
This is how people view the K-12 system overall:
But this is their level of satisfaction with their own schools:
Yes, private school and home schooling parents are more satisfied than public and charter school parents, but everyone seems to be feeling pretty good on balance.
Which is why the technocratic ed reform movement — including yours truly back in the day — ticked lots of people off by forcing kids to take high-stakes tests to determine what letter grades or star values would be assigned to their schools (and in some cases affect teacher pay!).
At the end of the day, even if a student is in an underperforming school, parents don’t want to be told that if there are no other options available.
That’s the whole point of the choice movement, right? Give families more options so they can find what works for them. Because a school can be A-rated but not delivering what a particular child needs. We can trust and empower parents to know when things aren’t right without berating schools and teachers.
But that requires us to change our vocabulary, which is harder than it sounds if you’ve been saying things a certain way for a long, long time. We need new words, and I want to share my suggestions with you.
I should note that whenever I get to this part of a presentation, there’s always someone in the audience who pipes up and says, “Yeah, but Jennnnnnnn, what if I’m talking to a room full of Libertarian economists? Shouldn’t I talk about competition and free markets?”
Yes.
You probably should.
And you will likely find many school choice supporters in that room, which will make you feel extremely fulfilled but will not necessarily expand the army beyond true believers who already signed up. (True believers are the bedrock of any coalition. But coalitions also need unlikely allies to grow new audiences. Alas, that’s a post for another day.)
I put these words out there not as a template for every single conversation you ever have about school choice; think of this instead as your do-no-harm school choice lexicon. If you don’t know where someone stands, there are sure-fire ways to start a conversation — and sure-fire ways to kill one. If the conversation dies, so do our hopes of convincing someone to consider our viewpoint.
So, let’s get to it.
OPPORTUNITY, NOT COMPETITION
There are plenty of people who come at the issue of school choice from a free market perspective: If we level the playing field, everyone will be able to compete, and more families will have access to better schools. But that’s just one way of approaching the issue — and it’s frankly not one that most families care about. Families, however, do care that students have the opportunity to find a school that meets their needs.
LOW-INCOME, NOT POOR
Poor feels like a judgment: He did a poor job on that report. Those kids are behaving poorly. You are poor. Low-income is fact: You make less money than others, but we are not going to judge you for that. And we are going to make sure that like middle- and high-income earners, you have the same opportunity to find schooling options that work for your kids.
SCHOOLING, NOT SCHOOLS
This one is subtle and nuanced and possibly less urgent than others, but K-12 education looks and feels different than it did even 10 years ago. Kids don’t just attend brick-and-mortar schools. Beyond home schooling, there are online and hybrid models where kids infrequently or never walk into a traditional classroom. Adding the “-ing” to the end of “school” addresses the activity without specifying the location.
ASSIGNED SCHOOLS, NOT GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS
Milton Friedman, who founded our organization, believed government had a responsibility to fund K-12 education but did not necessarily need to be the service provider: Families should be empowered to direct the money set aside for a student to the best schooling option for that student. In other words, government should fund all schools. When people refer to “government schools” in a pejorative way, they’re actually referring to the government-backed system of directing kids to schools based on where they live, not what they need. So let’s talk about the real problem: assigned schools.
“NOT MEETING NEEDS” OR “GETTING IN WHERE YOU FIT IN” INSTEAD OF “FAILING”
This one is super-duper important and relates back to the earlier observation about how we wound up in this situation to begin with: We told people their schools were terrible, awful, failing places, and they didn’t appreciate it one bit. Instead of projecting our views on their lives, let’s trust people to make their own determinations about whether a school is or is not meeting their needs. This also opens the door to the conversation that not all schools meet all students’ needs. You can have four kids and need four different schooling options for them — and that’s okay.
If you’re looking for a more positive take on “not meeting needs,” you can adopt our informal slogan that all kids deserve a chance to “get in where they fit in.”
PRO-TEACHER, NOT ANTI-UNION
This one might net some feedback, but I’m going to say it anyway — and not just because my parents were both public school educators who belonged to the union. We are pro-teacher. Why? Because everyone should be pro-teacher. For heaven’s sake, these people spend hours upon hours in the classroom or online or after school working with our kids, and they aren’t doing it for the money. But teachers and unions aren’t the same, Jen! That’s technically true, but we don’t live in a technically true world. We live in reality. And in reality, we will get much further reaching new audiences if we adopt the baseline position that teachers are amazing, wonderful people.
Well, there you have it.
A whole lot of words to share a handful of words that hopefully will help you talk to folks about the benefits of educational choice. Remember, this is no panacea; it’s simply a starting point. And if you think I’m wrong, you won’t hurt my feelings. I’m always up for a spirited debate about the way we have our spirited debates.
Jennifer Wagner is a mom, a recovering political hack and the Vice President of Communications for EdChoice, a national nonprofit that supports and promotes universal school choice.
