Selling Stories

Audrey Watters

Audrey Watters

— 8 min read
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Selling Stories
Chukar (Image credits)

President Reagan famously stated that "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.'" That attitude – that the government works against, not for the people – has become all too pervasive in the intervening decades. It isn't completely true, of course; and it needn't be true at all. (And it's more than a little ironic too, that even with the anti-government rhetoric coming from the most powerful people in leadership and in Silicon Valley today, it's pretty clear that "big government" works just fine for them. Palantir, Flock, Anduril, SpaceX, Starlink – they're all helping themselves at least to massive government contracts.)

The criticism of government regulations and programs extends to education as well – some conservatives use the phrase "government schools" to reframe and undermine our commitment to public education (and then, of course, to push in turn for "market-based" solutions like vouchers).

One of the cornerstones of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani's campaign and policy initiatives has been to challenge Reagan's famous utterance – implicitly and explicitly: the government can be here to help. As he noted in a speech unveiling a city-funded grocery store earlier this year, Reagan's words make "a good quote, but I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually, 'I worked all day and can't feed my family.'" (Conservatives, no surprise, lost their minds over the reference.)

But is the Mamdani administration here to help when it comes to schooling? There's been some pushback – and rightfully so – that Mamdani, and more broadly the DSA party, have not fully articulated their vision for education, let alone enacted significant policy changes. All this despite NYC being the largest school district in the country. All this despite teachers making up the largest donors by profession to the Mamdani campaign. All this despite education being one of the most discussed issues in the city (hell, in the country) particularly in the last few weeks, since Nikole Hannah-Jones published an essay in The New York Times about her daughter's school experiences.

(There was a public forum last week in which Hannah-Jones sat down with Chancellor Kamar Samuels to talk about school segregation -- a "ritual humiliation," as Hellgate put it. And yet and yet and yet, there are still no substantive policy updates from the Mamdani adminstration, even with the clear public demand that the government do something, that the government help.)

Jessica Winter has a good piece in The New Yorker that explores some of this: "Does the D.S.A. Have a Vision for Public Schools in New York?." And while CUNY professor Corey Robin does admit that "it might sound like a bit of a dodge" to say that, in fact, the DSA does, his argument that we need to have a more expansive idea of what constitutes "education policy" is pretty compelling.

In a 2005 paper titled “What ‘Counts’ as Educational Policy?,” the late cuny professor and Marxist theorist Jean Anyon examined how poverty-level wages, substandard housing, spotty public transportation, and unequal property-tax structures “create environments that overwhelm the potential of educational policy to create systemic, sustained improvements in the schools.” She argued for a more holistic response, one in which labor, housing, and taxation policies—the kinds of proposals that are championed by the D.S.A. candidates of today—were also understood as education policy. A trove of research has shown, for example, that snap benefits and child-related tax credits can have significant impact on children’s test scores and graduation rates.

And yet and yet and yet... By failing to have a clear education policy, those on the left might find that they have ceded this issue to others within the Democratic Party – and unfortunately, that means those who've long pushed for more standardized testing and more charter schools and more tech.

Despite the Mamdani administration's "AI moratorium," for example, it seems as though there's still lots of confusion (and – sigh – lots of "AI") in schools. School hallways are still covered in AI-slop posters. Students are still given AI-slop handouts. Tasks both big and small, instructional and bureaucratic, are still being outsourced to this machinery – all of which both implicitly and explicitly tells students that they aren't worth the investment of any human's time or effort. (LaGuardia HS students were among those in the city who staged a recent walkout in protest of "AI" – not just its use in their classrooms but as the dominant narrative about their future.)

People won't believe that you're here to help if you resolutely refuse to do so, if you continue to define "help" in ways that extend the reach and power and control of the tech industry.

When Anthropic filed its initial paperwork for its IPO, it revealed a net loss of over $80 billion for the first half of 2026. Over $80 billion. Do not ever let anyone tell you there is "no money" for education. Do not ever let anyone tell you there is "no money" for people. Our society has decided that all investment in the future should be directed to technology -- that that's how you "fix" things. It has decided that the wealthiest companies and the wealthiest individuals need not pay taxes. We can allocate the world's resources differently.

President Reagan famously stated that "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.'" But if you ask many an education researcher about the most terrifying words in the English language, I bet they'd tell you (perhaps in confidence) that the scariest sentence goes something like this: 'I listened to Sold a Story, and now I know what's wrong with education.'"

The first season of the podcast was massively influential, convincing hoards of people that nobody teaches phonics anymore (and by extension, that's why "kids these days" don't/can't read). Legislators in many states responded to Sold a Story, demanding curricular and textbook changes more aligned with what's been cleverly marketed as "the science of reading."

A few months ago, a friend of mine quipped that the whiniest winners in the history of education might just be the proponents of phonics, always claiming to be the downtrodden, marginalized, and forgotten when, in fact, phonics has always remained a part of literacy instruction. I'd bet he'd update his remarks now that Season 2 of Sold a Story is out: the whiniest winners in the history of education are the proponents of direct instruction. Good grief. Despite this very weird narrative that "everyone" is now fully committed to progressive education and to inquiry-based learning, that no one teaches anyone anything anymore, direct instruction, as Michael Pershan deftly argues in response, remains "the American default."

Sorry / not sorry. Like Ben Riley, I'm not listening to the podcast. And like Ben, I feel like it has "lost the plot." It's an all-too-convenient story right now, one that might distract us from the far more significant challenges public education faces. Say, rising fascism and efforts to dismantle public education? A techno-fascism that is explicit about its goals to automate teaching with scripted instruction? A techno-fascism that embraces eugenics and segregation – as philosophy, in practice?

(OK. Yeah. You're right. The whiniest winners in education history are obviously the segregationists.)

I haven't sent a Second Breakfast newsletter in a few weeks, so here's a massive link dump:

"As a television show, and a good one, Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television." – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

I'm off to Princeton next week for the launch of the university's Societal AI initiative. I'm absolutely thrilled to be joining fellow Luddite Brian Merchant on the program, as well as Alondra Nelson, whose work on the Black Panthers and community health was one of the inspirations to start Second Breakfast. Then I'm headed to Pittsburgh for the Tech Ethics symposium at Duquesne University. In addition to me and Merchant again, other speakers include Paris Marx and Molly Crabapple.

(Image credits)

Today's bird is the chukar, a particularly rotund partridge with a brown body, white face, black gorget, and red beak and legs. Native to Asia, the chukar has been introduced to many other parts of the world where feral populations persist – unaffected by hunting or loss of habitat, according to Wikipedia. (Apparently, they're not a particularly tasty partridge.)

"As young chukars grow, and before flying for the first time, they utilize wing-assisted incline running as a transition to adult flight," Wikipedia says. It's with this in mind that I chose the bird today – a nod to all those running the NYC Marathon on Sunday who'll be hoping for a little wing-assisted incline running as they make their way up and across all those bridges, through all five boroughs. Fly, my friends, fly.

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