Jonathan Chait

And now it's gone.

Right.

So the unions are part of it.

I was kind of oversimplifying.

They're the biggest source of opposition.

But there's also just a kind of larger superstructure of opposition to education reform and to academic rigor that the unions play into and have encouraged, but it exists outside of them as well.

Part of that is social promotion, as you mentioned.

But another part of what these southern states are doing is just having a tight script for how you teach reading.

There's a science of how you teach reading.

There's a right way and a wrong way.

And the thing the unions don't like about that is they believe in teacher autonomy.

They don't want to have to say, like, you've got to go A, B, C, D, E, F, G through these following steps.

They want to let everyone follow their own special journey of how they want to teach the classrooms.

And that works with great teachers, but it doesn't work with bad teachers.

And that's where the rub is.

Well, that was the right left coalition.

That was the pincer coalition against education reform that took over at the end of the Obama era.

It was the unions and the anti-education reform left with the anti-government right that weakened federal education standards and brought us to where we are now.