Can You Tell the Education Scholar from the Conspiracy Kook?

Academe is a good gig, especially if you’re keen to dress ideological screeds up in the trappings of learned expertise. A MAGA kook who posts long Substack articles insisting the 2020 election was stolen by Venezuelan ghostware is more likely to attract ridicule than research grants. But conspiracists with the proper politics can get tenured at taxpayer-supported universities and published by prestigious academic presses.

Consider the handiwork of the four authors—Elena Aydarova, T. Jameson Brewer, Emily M. Hodge, and Serena J. Salloum—who collaborated to pen Manufactured Outrage: The Conservative Industrial Complex’s War on Education and How to Fight Back. All professors of education at public research universities, the four set out to solve the not-so-mysterious mystery of why, in the early 2020s, many states moved to combat CRT, dismantle DEI, adopt the “science of reading,” and ban cell phones in schools. The result is their long, winding, and frequently laughable complaint about a nefarious “Conservative Industrial Complex” (CIC) and its “highly coordinated campaigns” to destroy American education. Ultimately, the authors do little to expose a conspiracy but an admirable job of revealing the frailties that disfigure so much of education research today.

The CIC really does sound awful. It’s a fascist, fear-mongering enterprise that promotes “privileges for white, conservative, and Evangelical Christians,” protects “predatory capitalism,” pursues “authoritarian populism,” and strives to “weaken democracy.” It seeks the kind of “privatization, corporatization, and resource extraction” usually seen only in “colonial” or “occupied” lands. It’s even contributing to “the impending climate catastrophe.”

The CIC’s education agenda is quite the grab bag. It seeks to “dismantle public education” and erase “protections for vulnerable groups.” It wants schools to adopt “overt Christian nationalist curricula” and advance “anti-democratic,” “neoconservative,” and “far-right values.” It supports the science of reading in order to “deprofessionaliz[e] the teaching force” and school choice in the service of illiberalism and discrimination.

While the name trades on Eisenhower’s notion of a “military-industrial complex,” CIC is really just a generic tag for the supposed right-wing cabal that has become a trope in a cottage industry of left-wing education diatribes (see The Privateers, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, Slaying Goliath, The Education Wars, The Death of Public School, or They Came for the Schools). Like their tin-foil-hatted peers, Aydarova et al. imagine an interlocking directorate of countless foundations, advocacy groups, think tanks, nonprofits, and more—though it’s never clear why so many would wish to be part of this sprawling, evil enterprise. (One amusing aside does claim that a card-carrying member of the CIC tricked “two Democratic legislators” into thinking they were “reasonable people with good ideas” by awarding the politicos scholarships to join them at a national gathering in “scenic” San Diego.)

That kind of dime-store villainy is of a piece with the authors’ cartoonish view of coalitional politics and political mobilization. I know plenty of Democrats who’d be, by turns, amused and offended to hear that science of reading laws and cell phone bans are the work of a right-wing conspiracy. But Aydarova and her coauthors wantonly mash together right-leaning, centrist, and center-left entities as partners in this malevolent enterprise. At various points in the narrative, the American Enterprise Institute (where I’ve directed education policy studies for 20-plus years) pops up. I smiled at seeing AEI, which routinely gets slammed in MAGA circles for being overly bookish and insufficiently partisan, lumped in as an interchangeable cog in the CIC machine alongside an eclectic host of name-checked collaborators, including the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Washington Examiner, Koch Foundation, Daily Wire, State Policy Network, 50CAN, National Parents Union, Walton Family Foundation, Fordham Institute, ExcelinEd, Education Next, and The Federalist.

This is the leftist equivalent of a MAGA podcaster insisting that Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Democrats for Ed Reform, Bill Clinton, AOC, Ralph Nader, Randi Weingarten, George Soros, Joe Manchin, Josh Shapiro, and Kamala Harris have all been partners in a shadowy conspiracy to collectivize the U.S. and hand control over to deep-state communist agents. For those who operate in reality, there’s no convincing way to put the lie to any of this when a fearmonger is so obviously lost in a miasma of agit-slop.  All one can really do is back away slowly, try to avoid sudden movements, and hope that normies recognize how silly this is.

In service to their caricatures, the authors ignore disputes on the real-world right, such as the ferocious disagreements between Reaganites, populist culture warriors, and libertarians. On issues like the design or regulation of school choice programs, there’s nothing to suggest they are even aware of bitter disagreements among conservatives. Indeed, one sometimes gets the sense that the authors have never actually talked with Republicans. They tend to sound less like analysts explaining domestic debates than anthropologists describing an odd tribe they’ve stumbled upon in the South Pacific.

A hallmark of accounts like Manufactured Outrage is that they have trouble keeping their conspiracies straight. Last year, Harvard Education Press published Josh Cowen’s screed The Privateers, which credited the evil Council for National Policy (CNP) with masterminding a vast right-wing education conspiracy to push school vouchers. In his review of Cowen’s book for Education Next, Jay Greene noted that the index catalogued 93 mentions of the secretive CNP, while admitting he had never before heard of this nefarious outfit during decades spent in the thickets of conservative education policy.

You might think that Manufactured Outrage would be shot through with the CNP’s continuing machinations. But, boy, would you be wrong. This time, the CNP is conspicuous only for its near absence, appearing in the index precisely twice, and never after page 12. One gets the sense that those two mentions are nothing more than an obligatory nod to their mutual publisher. Why doesn’t this nefarious council loom larger? Are the authors blind to what’s really going on? Or are both books just make-it-up-as-you-go tripe spun into fantastic stories of right-wing boogeymen?

I suspect it’s the latter.

Manufactured Outrage gives short shrift to genuinely interesting questions. The authors could have explored how the past three decades of education policy—which includes Common Core, de-tracking, test-optional admissions, whole language instruction, and class size reduction, among other developments—have shaped today’s conservative coalition. They might’ve asked whether the anti-DEI pushback was an inevitable response to the excesses of 2020 and 2021 or explored the intriguing coalitional politics behind phone bans and the science of reading. They don’t do any of that. Instead, it’s all just a right-wing conspiracy all the time (spelled out in sections with titles like “Educational Reforms and Social Fascism” or “Culture War Fodder and Fear-Mongering”).