To anyone who has been following the education debate on social media over the past ten years, the name Chris ‘Citizen’ Stewart is well known. He’s a father, a former Minneapolis school board member, a blogger, a podcaster, and, for me especially, a Twitter debate opponent.
If you ask most people on the pro-public school side of the education debates what they think of him, they will probably say that they don’t like him very much. Certainly if all you have experienced about him was his Twitter barbs, I can see why. He’s frustrating on Twitter because he has a quick wit and is good at twisting your words around and using them against you. Sometimes he seems to pretend that he doesn’t understand what your point was and latches onto a different interpretation of something you wrote. If you don’t have a lot of time to concentrate on what you are tweeting, it’s best not to get into a Twitter debate with him. I’ve sometimes regretted it though we have had some legendary debates over the years.
In a few months I’m going to be on a panel at the NPE conference about how reformers have evolved their messaging in recent years. As part of my research I checked in on Chris Stewart’s latest project, a podcast called ‘The Citizen Stewart Show’ which I accessed on Apple Podcasts. It launched about a year ago and there have been around 30 episodes so far. His co-host is Ravi Gupta who was an Obama staffer and who founded the RePublic charter school network in Tennessee.
My plan was to listen to just one episode, But to my surprise, I really liked it so I continued listening to about five more episodes.
The dynamic between the two hosts is that one of them is the more moderate reformers and the other is more extreme. Shocking to me was that Chris Stewart was the moderate one. He was often admitting that ten years ago he would have had a different view on things but he has evolved his thinking. So Chris Stewart is looking at all sides of the issue and being skeptical of the extreme reformer view. And Ravi Gupta even though he is closer in his views to the 2015 Chris Stewart, Ravi is also a skeptic of the oversimplified kinds of arguments that someone like Michelle Rhee used to use.
This is part of a bigger trend I’ve noticed. Even the most extreme reform website, The74, is tweeting things like this about of the out of school factors that, years ago, would just be considered ‘excuses.’
What I like about the podcast is that Stewart and Gupta are really trying to look at the issues from all sides, even if they are very sympathetic to the things like charter schools and opposition to LIFO, for example. I think that the podcast is good but won’t be great until they can learn to think like a reform skeptic even more.
In one episode called ‘Zero Students Proficient In Math’, they discuss an article from FOX news about how in Baltimore, 23 schools had no students ‘pass’ the Maryland MCAP math test. Though they don’t blame the teacher’s union and Chris Stewart says that this is a problem that shows that it is too much to expect just in school interventions to help, there are certain questions that would come to mind to a reform skeptic that they seem to miss.
They take at face value that ‘zero students proficient in math’ means that there are truly no students in these 23 school where any student excels in math. Never does either of them at least wonder, “Is this MCAP a good test?” Statistically speaking, percent of students reaching a certain bar isn’t always the most useful information. Like if I told you that there’s a high school track team where zero students can run a 5 minute mile, maybe you picture a bunch of kids who can hardly run. But maybe many students can run between a 5:30 and 5:00 mile and the picture isn’t as bleak as you think. I actually went to the Baltimore public website and found that some of the highest rated schools there, using a composite of various measures, also had less than 5% of students ‘proficient in math.’ (I’m not doing a full deep data dive here — life is short — but I did enough research to know that the sensational FOX news story does not tell the whole story.) I can guarantee that if they were to visit one of these schools where supposedly ‘zero students are proficient in math’ they would find that the word ‘proficient’ might not always mean exactly what we expect it to.
An episode that I was particularly interested was called ‘The Looming Fiscal Crisis’ from 12/13/22 because it has a 30 minute segment starting at the 8 minute mark about Teach For America. They were discussing how TFA has had to downsize and are losing their popularity. Chris Stewart is a big friend of TFA so he was positive about TFA, especially about how many alumni have become reform leaders. Ravi Gupta was not so keen on TFA. He was especially critical of the support they give to the corps members during the school year. Some of the TFA corps members he hired to work at his schools in Tennessee had to go to TFA training at night and he went once and felt that the trainers were completely out of touch with the needs of his teachers. Of course this is the sort of thing I have been saying for 30 years, not just about the school year support, but for the training at the institute. And Chris Stewart was even laughing about the out of touch training Gupta described. So I’m sitting there feeling pretty good that they’re making the same sort of critiques of TFA that I have been making for years.
In their analysis of why TFA is downsizing, they started talking about how there are not enough alumni publicly coming our in support of TFA. At the 31 minute mark Stewart talks about how many TFA corps members struggle in their first year. Then from 31:55 to 32:15 there was a 20 second part that really got my attention.
Stewart: “And I saw them do two different things. Some of them rose to the occasion and had the toughest battle they ever had. And in some cases they broke away and became, um, haters of TFA.”
Gupta: “Yeah”
Stewart: “Uh, and they became …”
Gupta: “Like Gary Rubinstein”
Stewart: “Gary Rubinstein is a great example which is why, you know, I defended TFA for so many years because there were people like him that were super smart that couldn’t do the job that got out there and were always throwing rocks at TFA.”
So, just to set the record straight. if there are two types of TFA alumni, ones who struggled in their first year and became haters and others who ‘rose to the occasion’, which category would I belong in? I did have a rough first year in 1991-1992. But then I turned it around my second year and stayed in Houston for a 3rd and 4th year, winning teacher of the year at my school in the fourth year. I then started speaking at the institute helping the new recruits and then joined the staff for one summer. After that summer I spent the next fifteen years continuing to do workshops over the summer and recruiting for TFA and then writing some books about teaching to help other teachers avoid the rough first year that I experienced. And then in 2011 after 20 years of being involved and supporting TFA, I got frustrated with TFA for exactly the things that Chris and Ravi were discussing. So I do not think it was fair to characterize me as someone who ‘couldn’t do the job’ and then ‘broke away and became a hater.’ It’s just not accurate and it makes me wonder if that’s really what Chris Stewart thinks my backstory is, which would explain why he used to be very resistant to my point of view. Either way, if there was someone who was listening to this who had never heard of me before, they now know me as a guy who was a failure as a teacher and gave up and spent my life as a victim blaming TFA rather than someone who accomplished a lot.
OK, so other than that 20 second inaccuracy that was very personal to me, I have liked the Chris Stewart Podcast. The hosts have a good chemistry. They try to present a balanced point of view, as best as they are able to, and they are generally interesting, entertaining, and, dare I say, likable.
Gary Rubinstein's Blog 
Gary – Thanks for the thoughtful write-up, and I would love to ensure we don’t get anything about your background wrong. Would generally love to connect anyway to learn more about you and your perspective. I’ve provided my contact info in the form. – Ravi
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