The fall of Constantinople wiped the last living Roman civilization from the Earth. The city’s refugees fled west, helping spark the Renaissance; its legacy shaped the religious traditions of millions and the modern map of Europe and the Middle East. The fall also inspired a book, which inspired a game, which inspired the world’s richest man to lash out because his favorite role-playing game wasn’t as racist and sexist as it used to be.

Last November, on X, the billionaire tycoon Elon Musk told the toy company Hasbro to “burn in hell.” Hasbro owns the company Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards had just released a book on the making of the game that was critical of some of its creators’ old material. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash” the “geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons,” Musk wrote. The book acknowledged that some earlier iterations of the game relied on racist and sexist stereotypes and included “a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language.” After a designer at Wizards said that the company’s priority now was responding to “progressives and underrepresented groups who justly took offense” at those stereotypes, and not to “the ire of the grognards”—a reference to early fans such as Musk—Musk asked, “How much is Hasbro?,” suggesting that he might buy the company to impose his vision on it, as he’d done with Twitter.

D&D was the original role-playing game, a structure that has influenced every kind of genre fiction that followed. The game is more popular than ever, reaching far beyond its original audience of midwestern misfits and bookish nerds.

And for some fans, that’s a problem.

Fantasy and science fiction, with their imaginary cultures and creatures, their wars between evil monsters and honorable heroes, have always had a complex relationship with the concept of race, beginning with their foundational texts.

D&D wouldn’t exist without J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, fantasy’s seminal 20th-century text, published in 1937. When Tolkien’s German publisher, to comply with Nazi racial laws, tried to determine whether the author was Jewish, Tolkien was outraged. A draft of his response reads: “If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” He expressed his disgust to his British publisher: “I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”

[Read: The friends who have been playing the same game of Dungeons & Dragons for 30 years]

Unfortunately, a “pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine” permeated the era in which The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings series that followed it, were written, an era in which many Westerners believed that “races” shared particular natures, characteristics, and capabilities. That genetic determinism seeped into the books. Although uncountable readers were inspired by the tales of its diminutive heroes defying stereotypes to save the world, some drew other conclusions. The books, and the ideas embedded in them, would go on to have a magnetic appeal to the political forces Tolkien had rejected.

Today, we can see their influence on right-wing populists in business and politics all over the world. The billionaire Peter Thiel named his software company, Palantir, after the crystal ball in The Lord of the Rings, while his AI company, Anduril, is named for the sword of the human hero Aragorn. Joe Lonsdale, an investor in Anduril and Palantir, founded a crypto-focused bank called Erebor, after the dwarfs’ mountain fortress. Vice President J. D. Vance named his venture-capital firm Narya, after Gandalf’s magic ring. Georgia Meloni, the far-right prime minister of Italy, and defender of “Italianity” against what she sees as the dilution of immigration, is a Tolkien obsessive who sees in hobbits, dwarfs, and elves the “value of specificity.” When Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in the 2000s, conservative writers embraced the films as a metaphor for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.

On the same day last month, Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security posted a meme analogizing immigrants to the armies of Mordor and the United States to the hobbits’ home, the Shire, while Musk wrote on X that the British need the far right to protect them from “illegal immigration,” just as the hobbits could “live their lives in peace and tranquility” only because they were protected by “the hard men of Gondor.”

The Lord of the Rings is the story of how two hobbits—from a “race” of short humanoids traditionally averse to conflict and adventure—journey to destroy the Ring of Power. The ring is an evil artifact created by the demigod Sauron, whose hordes of monstrous orcs, backed by men called Easterlings and Haradrim, are threatening to conquer the world. In their way stand the armies of Western men. (Many Tolkien fans pointed out that Musk’s post got those “hard men” wrong. They are proven time and again to be fallible and corruptible. It’s the hobbits who save the world. But maybe it’s not surprising that the planet’s richest man missed the point of a story about the corrupting nature of power.)

The most charitable interpretation is that, when he is discussing Middle-earth, Tolkien means species rather than race. Regardless, the late philosopher Charles Mills, a Tolkien fan, observed that Tolkien presents a picture of a “white civilization besieged by dark barbarity.” In it, elves are the “Fair Folk,” incarnations of “justice and beauty.” The scimitar-wielding Haradrim are “black men like half-­trolls” and fight for Mordor alongside their allies, the “wild” and “savage” Easterlings. ” Orcs are described as “swart” and “slant-eyed,” the better for them to be seen as “black, utterly evil, lacking culture and history, the bottom link of Tolkien’s great chain of being.”

Mills points out that this interpretation is supported by Tolkien’s own writing about his inspirations. In private correspondence, Tolkien refers to the “White city” of Minas Tirith as “Byzantine” and the orcs as “repulsive versions” of Mongols. Rather than the orcs being a metaphor for Nazism or communism, the plot of The Lord of the Rings appears to be influenced by the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman empire—except in Tolkien’s telling, the Eastern Roman empire is victorious, and the slaughter of the orcs is considered no tragedy.

The point is not that Tolkien was a Nazi, or that people who enjoy or respect Tolkien (myself included) are Nazis. That would be a childish way to approach literature. But the ideas embedded in his influential stories have been reproduced in countless fictional works since. Few examples are more vivid than Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons was born in the early 1970s, a few years after the insurance underwriter and cobbler Gary Gygax and a student named Dave Arneson met at a midwestern tabletop-gaming convention. At the time, war games using miniatures to enact fictional or famous battles were popular. Gygax and Arneson innovated by having each player inhabit just one character and interact with a storyteller, known as a Dungeon Master; together, the players and the DM improvise a storyline. The game involves dice rolls and numbers indicating character traits, rules, and a referee (the DM)—but the best way I can explain it is as a game of pretend.

I was a freak from the jump; I didn’t really have a chance. Black and Jewish with a father in the State Department, I spent my early life bouncing around Brazil and Italy before returning to Washington, D.C., in 1994, when I was 12. Abroad I was American, but when we returned to America I felt like a foreigner. So naturally, I fell in with the nerds playing Dungeons & Dragons—the “dorks, dweebs, freak machines, poindexters, and every stripe of pencil-necked geeks,” in the words of Ben Riggs, the author of the D&D history Slaying the Dragon.

It was rare for me to see another person of color playing, or a girl. Dungeons & Dragons was still largely confined to the white, nerdy, male subculture in which it was born. Most of these players wouldn’t have thought much about the racial meaning of the game—even when the stereotypes were blatant, like one inspired by a “traditional African-analogue tribal society” set in a jungle featuring dark-skinned “noble savages” and “depraved cannibals.” But for kids like me, the meaning was always there.  

The second-edition rule book, the one I first played with, stated that the game’s references to “race” were not about “race in the true sense of the word: caucasian, black, asian, etc. It is actually a fantasy species for your character—human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfelf, or halfling. Each race is different. Each possesses special powers and has different lists of classes to choose from.” Some races, the rule book elaborates, “have fewer choices of character classes and usually are limited in the level they can attain. These restrictions reflect the natural tendencies of the races (dwarves like war and fighting and dislike magic, etc.).” For example, a halfling “can become the best thief in the land, but he cannot become a great fighter.”

An early D&D concept was the idea of “alignment”: Certain creatures are good, neutral, or evil, and, within those categories, are lawful, neutral, or chaotic. For example, an orc warrior is likely chaotic evil, while a human paladin is lawful good. In a 2005 forum post, Gygax wrote that it was fine for a lawful-good character to kill an evil character who had surrendered, because “the old adage of nits making lice applies”—intentionally or not quoting Colonel John Chivington, who led the 1864 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people at the Sand Creek reservation. A congressional committee at the time referred to the slaughter as a “cowardly act” that gratified the “worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man.” You might say 1860s lawmakers did not see it as lawful good.

Tolkien was hardly the only influence on D&D. But in the game, as in the books, certain characters’ fundamental traits were determined by their “race.” A dwarf couldn’t do magic; an orc was dumb and violent; an elf couldn’t be ugly. Although some “races,” such as humans, were capable of a range of classes and alignments, in a fundamental way characters were born into their proper place.  

The prevalence of racial stereotypes in such games stems partly from the necessities of game design. Games, especially those meant for teenage boys, are likely to revolve around action and adventure, which means violence. A game designer needs disposable enemies—baddies who are immediately recognizable as such and whom you can slaughter without regret.

Austin Walker, a Black game designer who hosts the podcast Friends at the Table, described this to me as “a terrible alignment of design goal” and “cultural biases just being mashed together.” When you’re playing a game that involves “taking down the door and killing someone, you need to put someone behind the door who you’re willing to kill.”

[Read: The far right is becoming obsessed with race and IQ]

Another way to describe this imperative is that creators are often bound by the “hero’s journey,” Steven Dashiell, an American University professor and sociologist who studies games, told me. “The easy way to make sure that there is that moral struggle between good and evil is just to say that individuals of a particular group are inherently evil.”

One of the most enduringly legible symbols that a character is different and therefore more disposable is race. Of course, the fact that this is also true in the real world is the reason it became such an effective shorthand.

As a business, D&D always seemed to be in financial peril. But around the Great Recession, sales hit a nadir, while the retail hobby stores that doubled as hangout spots where many kids were introduced to the game started to close. No one expected the game to experience a sudden renaissance. But it did. In 2011, the sitcom Community ran a D&D-themed episode. The nostalgic horror show Stranger Things, which debuted in 2016, showed kids playing D&D together. As other geeky pastimes became more mainstream—such as Disney’s Marvel juggernaut—the stigma once associated with those activities began to fade, a process I’ll call “de-geekification.”

A technological innovation, however, may deserve the most credit for the game’s revival. After the streaming platform Twitch debuted in 2011, streamers began playing Dungeons & Dragons for audiences watching  online. In 2015, a web series called Critical Role started broadcasting these “live play” games, featuring professional voice actors. Shows such as Critical Role, Dimension 20, and other series expanded the audience just in time for the pandemic, when people had a new need for activities they could do with friends remotely. Boom, Riggs told me: “D&D becomes bigger than ever.” Wizards told me that 85 million people have played D&D over the past year, and 21 million have registered on D&D Beyond, its online hub.

Many new fans are being introduced to the game not by playing it, but by watching other people play it first. In this format, D&D has become less about combat, and more about storytelling and improv acting. Live play has introduced D&D to a new, and more diverse, audience—more women, more queer people, and more players who happen to look a lot like the characters cast as disposable baddies.

Growing up in Orange County, California, in the 1990s, Aabria Iyengar was good at volleyball and improv. She was aware of D&D, but assumed it wasn’t for people like her. “The dynamics back in the day were very, like, male and young and predominantly white,” Iyengar told me. Then her boyfriend asked her if she wanted to play (“We need a cleric”), and something clicked. Dungeons & Dragons was, she realized, “a perfect tool to tell the stories we want to tell to ourselves and to others, about ourselves and about each other.”

Iyengar has a charismatic presence, and playing on Twitch with friends led to her trying out for Critical Role and eventually becoming the Dungeon Master for a spin-off, Exandria Unlimited.

Many longtime Dungeons & Dragons fans had recognized themselves in the game’s crude cannon fodder, yet still found a way to make the game their own. Black people, queer people, and women, Austin Walker told me, “were always there in the community, but always marginalized. That has shifted. We have found each other.”

Wizards saw that its audience was changing, and began to think about how it could make the game more inclusive. This was a major attitudinal shift: Back in 1975, when prodded about gender stereotypes in D&D, Gygax had written that he’d considered “adding women” to sections of the rule book, including “Raping and Pillaging,” “Whores and Tavern Wenches,” and “Hags and Crones,” as well as “adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking.’” The stereotype of the reactionary geek whose hatred for women manifests in imagining them as the victims of sexual violence is, let’s say, historically rooted.

But now the company was open to change. In June 2020, during the protests following the murder of George Floyd, the D&D development team acknowledged in a blog post that some earlier versions of the game offered portrayals of fantasy creatures that were “painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.”

In 2022, Wizards announced that it would be removing the word race from the game and substituting species, noting that “‘race’ is a problematic term that has had prejudiced links between real world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds.” It was also adjusting the “lore” of the “D&D multiverse to be more diligent in extracting past prejudices.” Since then, it has removed the kind of rules that made it difficult for hobbits to be fighters or for dwarfs to use magic, although different species retain distinct traits.

These changes weren’t just about women and people of color playing; Greg Tito, a former spokesperson and podcaster for Wizards, told me that white players “expected more and better from them too. And I think that was, you know, significant, because everyone was wanting D&D to do better.”

Well. Almost everyone.

If your identity was built around being a fan of a marginal pastime, de-geekification meant that suddenly, you weren’t as special anymore. Comic books, video games, fantasy and science fiction, role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons—they were all getting more popular, and trying to appeal to new audiences. Not everyone was happy with the changes that effort inspired.

Those who objected could be divided into two categories: people who found the simpler and more flexible game to be bland; and people who didn’t like the game getting “woke.” This is a slippery term, but it often boils down to things not being quite as racist or sexist as they used to be.

Wizards had run versions of the game past audiences—“play testing”—and consistently found the same thing: “Fans definitely preferred it to be simpler,” Riggs told me. Many players, myself included, had always been turned off by all the rules, which could slow down the game tremendously and often led to session-killing arguments. But for D&D obsessives, the difficulties created by all the complexities were part of the fun. “Limitations breed their own kind of creativity,” Iyengar said. “So if you’re playing a character that cannot advance past a certain level because of their build, because of something innate to them, that becomes a problem to solve in a way that can be very pleasing.”

B. Dave Walters, an influencer who has served as the Dungeon Master for the Stranger Things cast, told me that earlier versions of the game were “very adversarial, and it was ‘hard-core,’ right?” Now “it is a collaborative story that you’re telling together.” He has “no problem” with people feeling nostalgic or preferring those older versions. The problem, he said, is when what “comes right after that is: therefore no girls allowed; therefore the plot of this adventure is the orcs have come and have enslaved all the women and the children.”

For Riggs, acknowledging racist or sexist material in earlier iterations of D&D is not a way to insult or denigrate its founding fathers, but a tribute to the power of what they made, despite their shortcomings. “The fact that D&D has spread all over the world into so many different cultures, subcultures, races, religions, etc., is proof of the power of the medium.” He added, “Clinging to the racist, sexist, troubling things that they put in the early editions of the game seems not only foolish, but disrespectful to the thing they created.”

Besides, players who didn’t like the new rules didn’t have to follow them: There is nothing stopping anyone from playing a version that still has the original restrictions, or ones that feature more traditionally heroic characters or storylines. The beauty of the game is that you can play it however you want at your table with your friends.

“It’s like, Buddy, it’s make-believe,” Walters said. “If you want evil orcs and chain-mail bikinis and slaves, you can do that at your house.”

“Go grab your boys,” Iyengar said. Go tell each other the story of “Lord of the Rings for the thousandth time. No one is threatening that, and frankly, no one cares.”

“Go play your game,” she said.

Maybe the most interesting thing about the reactionary backlash to D&D is that it’s not unusual. Virtually every geeky pastime has experienced something similar in the past decade or so, the downstream effect of de-geekification. In 2014, Gamergate began as a backlash to feminist criticism of video games. There was the follow-up “Comicsgate,” during which a bunch of female and nonwhite comic-book creators were harassed. Hard-core fans of Ghostbusters (this subculture was new to me) erupted over an all-woman reboot. Angry Star Wars fans review-bombed the Disney+ series The Acolyte, starring a Black woman, into oblivion—a process that began before the show even came out. Conservatives raged when the Amazon Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power, did not feature a whites-only cast.

These backlashes all have the same basic catalyst, which is that companies trying to expand their profits have sought out more diverse audiences by creating content that features more than the usual, square-jawed white male hero. When the damsels who were supposed to be in distress and the members of the races that were supposed to be disposable began to be the protagonists, some fans experienced that as a kind of loss. And social media amplified those voices, even if they were a small contingent. Greg Tito suggested that the backlash was mostly an online chimera, and that “99 percent” of fans were cool with the changes. The 1 percent who weren’t just happened to include, well, the “one percent.”  

We can all sympathize with someone who is disappointed by changes to something they have loved for a long time. But sometimes, this particular sadness is infused with something more sinister, a Trumpian nostalgia for a time when America was more segregated, and the hierarchies of race and gender that once defined American culture were more secure. That nostalgia can be manipulated into a belief that hounding and excluding newcomers will restore an idealized past that never existed.

In June, Musk invited X users to offer “divisive facts” on which to train Grok, the company’s AI chatbot. Lonsdale, the investor in Palantir, Anduril, and Erebor, responded: “Different races have different IQs, and that reality is a big determinant of their supposedly-cultural advantages and disadvantages.”

In an experiment run in July by my colleague Matteo Wong, Grok was the only one of five major chatbots willing to write a program that would “‘check if someone is a good scientist’ based on a ‘description of their race and gender.’” Musk has endorsed such biological determinism himself. He has repeatedly amplified racist pseudoscience from X users who post charts supposedly proving the criminality and intellectual inferiority of people of African descent. After one such user argued (based on highly dubious math) that some Black students at historically Black colleges and universities have IQs that indicate “borderline intellectual impairment,” Musk replied, “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” referring to a United Airlines DEI program that recruited candidates from HBCUs. (There is, of course, no way to become a pilot without meeting the necessary requirements.)  

[Matteo Wong: Elon Musk updated Grok. Guess what it said?]

The science backing up the idea that race can make someone a good or bad scientist or airline pilot is as solid as the logic behind “orcs can’t be wizards” or “a hobbit can never become a great fighter.” This vision of racial rigidity, in which people can be sorted into categories that quantify their potential, has nothing to do with genetics; it is a political creation, a descendant of the same racist pseudoscience that was prominent in Tolkien’s time. In this sense, what we call “scientific racism” could be called “fantasy racism” instead, a belief that people can be reduced to quantifiable numbers, like so many digits on a character sheet.

The races might be fantasy, but the effects of racism are real. After Musk’s DOGE gutted USAID, he insisted that “no one has died.” That wasn’t true. People had already died, and hundreds of thousands more will follow every year because America cut its food and medical aid to the world’s poorest. Anyone could have predicted this catastrophic human cost; Musk must not have cared. Perhaps he saw the dead of the global South as so many nameless orcs.

The changes to the D&D community, however, cannot be easily reversed—they are as much a product of the contemporary world as the original game was of the 1970s, and as Tolkien’s books were of his age. Iyengar told me she isn’t worried about Musk ruining D&D.

Musk is welcome to waste his money on “trying to make everyone play the version of D&D that he thinks should exist in the world,” Iyengar said. “That’s never been how that works. Everyone will play it how they want, or they’ll play something else.”

This is so so cool and an arrow-splitting bullseye in the middle of my wheelhouse: a short Boards of Canada tune played on a DEC PDP-1, one of the most significant machines in the history of computing.

Here’s a description of what’s going on, courtesy of @dryad.technology on Bluesky:

The PDP-1 doesn’t have sound, but it does have front-panel light bulbs for debugging, so they rewired the light bulb lines into speakers to create 4 square wave channels.

You can read more about The PDP-1: The Machine That Started Hacker Culture:

The bottom line is that the PDP-1 was really the first computer that encouraged users to sit down and play. While IBM machines did the boring but necessary work of business behind closed doors and tended by squads of servants, DEC’s machines found their way into labs and odd corners of institutions where curious folk sat in front of their terminals, fingers poised over keyboards while a simple but powerful phrase was uttered: “I wonder what happens if…” The DEC machines were the first computers that allowed the question, which is really at the heart of the hacker culture, to be answered in real time.

And every day is a good day to listen to Boards of Canada. Oh! And if you’re anywhere near Mountain View, the Computer History Museum has regular demos of the PDP-1 and will play the song if requested!

If anyone would like to see this live, we demo the PDP-1 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on the first and third Saturdays of the month, 2:30 and 3:15p. Just ask, and we’ll be happy to play it!

(via @k4r1m.bsky.social)

Tags: Boards of Canada · computing · music · PDP-1 · remix · video

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Northeast friends and fans! Please consider coming out to my book release event on October 7th at RJ Julia in Middletown, Connecticut, an outpost of a legendary local bookstore with a footprint that’s far larger than it’s indie status would suggest. Please RSVP here if you’d like to come. I’ll do a little reading, talk about the genesis of the novel, and answer questions, even insulting ones.

At the new wonky liberal site The Argument, Kelsey Piper has an exceptionally credulous piece about the supposed “Mississippi miracle,” which is the claim that Mississippi public schools have seen a sudden and dramatic increase in their quantitative educational metrics through the application of a little want to, a little know-how, and an extra dash of love. Supposedly, in defiance of a hundred years of experience in large-scale education policy in the developed world, some pedagogical tweaks have enabled educators in Mississippi and a couple other union-hating red states to ignore the conditions that have caused these interventions to fail again and again and again. And Piper is big mad that we haven’t just waved the magic wand and saved the kids, which she insists (again and again) is something we could just do, if only we had the will.

This is all very old hat, although I do think this new bit where people gin up extra argumentative oomph by implying that schools aren’t teaching because they’re too woke is a nice touch. Unfortunately for Ms. Piper, none of this optimism ever lasts. The odds are very, very strong that eventually it’ll turn out that students in Mississippi and other “miraculous” systems are being improperly offloaded from the books or out of the system altogether and this will prove to be the source of this supposed turnaround. That’s how educational miracles are manufactured: through artificially creating selection bias, which is the most powerful force in education. After all, there’s something very conspicuous in its absence in Piper’s piece: the so-called “Texas miracle,” a very, very similar scenario that played out some quarter-century before anyone was talking about a Mississippi miracle. The story was genuinely almost identical: George W. Bush won the governorship in Texas, made some “common sense” curricular changes, and began to demand ACCOUNTABILITY from public teachers and schools… and suddenly, a miracle happened. The schools got better! The test scores proved it!

There were real stakes here. The “Texas miracle” was the model for No Child Left Behind, the most sweeping, consequential, and disastrous piece of education legislation in the history of the country. And Bush was able to push NCLB in part because of his record as a reformer. Bush’s presidential campaign leaned heavily on these supposed test score gains in Texas, particularly in Houston, one of America’s outlier areas of concentrated failure. His record on education helped Jr. frame himself as a “compassionate conservative,” a Republican who still cared about good government who could help restore economic mobility to the country through ed policy. The story from ed policy types was that strong accountability and high standards had closed gaps and raised performance dramatically; this was part of why a non-insubstantial number of wonky moderate Democrats jumped ship to vote for Bush in the 2000 election, a trend which was later reversed thanks to the ugly optics of the War on Terror and Iraq fiasco. Unfortunately….

Later investigations revealed exactly what we should always expect to find in the face of supposed education miracles: the manufacture of selection bias through widespread underreporting of dropouts, “disappeared” struggling students, and data manipulation. Students who had dropped out were given phony classifications such as having transferred or moved into GED programs, meaning that negative dropout metrics weren’t reported; Sharpstown High School in Houston reported a 0% dropout rate in 2001-2002, even though hundreds of students left the school. Abuse of special education exemptions for testing/accountability was rampant, with the number of students in some districts doubling between 1994 and 1998. Meanwhile the state’s standardized tests were being consistently misinterpreted (in one direction, up) thanks to a complete failure to account for measurement error. The “miracle” collapsed when all of this skullduggery was revealed. Texas’s real outcomes were exposed as unremarkable, once the missing data was analyzed, and other state efforts to replicate the supposed miracle failed entirely. Whoops!

Mississippi’s supposedly miraculous results require confirmation in multiple ways. One, there has to be longitudinal (as in, following specific students, not cohorts) and truly independent verification testing, which means no participation by state education officials at all; a rise in SAT, ACT, and similar third-party tests to provide concurrent validity; a widespread and, again, fully independent audit of the administrative practices involved, with an emphasis on looking for students who have left the system, been moved into special education, or have otherwise found themselves off the books; and, most importantly, time. Time for fraud to be slowly revealed, time for more cohorts to pass through, time for stress testing and the inevitably performance attrition of this kind of “miracle.” I’m sorry, but the data we have currently does not come close to validating Mississippi’s methods.

It’s genuinely not possible that neither Piper nor her editors were unaware of the Texas miracle story. It’s a very famous policy failure with huge political and practical consequences, an immensely important cautionary tale. And you would think that the most basic journalistic responsibility would involve pointing out that this exactly kind of claim has been made before, under the exact same reasoning, with the exact same rhetoric, only for all of it to be revealed to be a matter of convenient administrative shuffling and out-and-out fraud. How do you write a piece about the “Mississippi miracle” and not mention the Texas miracle that wasn’t, a sunny, false fable which prompted immense policy consequences?

Let’s look at some other supposed American education miracles.

KIPP and the Charter School “Revolution” (1994 - )
The Knowledge Is Power Program (cute name!) was being held up as the exemplar of charter success long before most of these “accountability” programs were a glimmer in a neoliberal’s eye. They were some of the first to lay out the script, with the requisite amount of self-aggrandizement: high expectations, strict discipline, extended hours. Early results were strong, but later studies revealed (you’ll never guess) a heavy role for attrition. Vast numbers of the hardest-to-teach students leave KIPP schools prior to graduation. (40% of Black students!) The model has never scaled effectively to entire districts; massive, well-funded, doggedly-pursued efforts to recreate the dubious performance gains of charter networks like KIPP have failed again and again, likely because the new efforts aren’t as shameless as getting rid of struggling students. What other charter schools definitely have replicated, though, is pruning their student bodies through chicanery. (DC area charter schools, at one point, were expelling students at 72 times the rate of traditional public.) Again, this is the generic reality of high-profile charter schools: their sterling reputations are eventually found to be the product of efforts to exclude the poorest-performing students, and even with that inherent advantage, their outcomes still rarely reach the standards of even average schools in higher-income districts. Much more info here.

The Harlem Children’s Zone & “Promise Neighborhoods” (2000s)
Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone was endlessly touted (famously by Waiting for “Superman”) as the model for ending poverty through education and wraparound services. The idea was exported nationally under Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative. Yet while initial returns suggested that some charter schools in the Zone appeared to do better than public-school peers, as is repetitively true with high-profile charter schools, further investigations found all manner of ways that the system was pruning their student body. Some of this was the typical tools of “counseling out,” repetitive suspensions, and admissions chicanery, but they also took the novel step of expelling an entire class of students. They did so (explicitly) before they reached the high school level because those students were “too weak to found a high school on.” But that’s exactly what public schools can’t do and should never do! Of course outcomes look better when you’re getting rid of weaker students. And even still, reported academic gains were modest, inconsistent, and nowhere near the hype.

New Orleans “Rebirth” Post-Katrina (2005 onward)
The conversion of nearly the entire New Orleans system to charters after Hurricane Katrina was hailed as proof that radical reform could rapidly transform outcomes. Scores did rise - but in the context of massive demographic shifts (tens of thousands of the poorest children never returned after displacement), intensive state support, and years of philanthropic subsidy. Once again, the composition of the student body is always more powerful a predictor than any identifiable pedagogical, school, or teacher variable. Independent analyses suggest that the reported gains in New Orleans were overstated, uneven, fragile, and tied to unique circumstances that can’t be replicated. Today, the all-charter New Orleans school system is a failure factory, with half of New Orleans schools still receiving Ds or Fs on their Louisiana state Department of Education report cards, and that is not a state with what we would call the highest of standards. And yet you still sometimes hear about a “New Orleans miracle”!

Michelle Rhee and D.C. Schools (2007–2010)
Rhee became the national face of the “no excuses” reform movement, promising radical improvement in the District of Columbia’s deeply struggling schools through teacher firings, merit pay, and test-score accountability. For a few years, glowing media coverage suggested it was working. Then it all fell apart. In 2009, D.C. launched IMPACT, a high-stakes teacher evaluation system combining classroom observations with student test score “value-added” measures. Teachers with high ratings could earn big bonuses; low-rated teachers could be fired. Hundreds of teachers lost their jobs, and Rhee used the system to signal tough accountability. But as is true with merit pay systems in general, further investigations demonstrated that the system didn’t work; the system was mathematically imprecise, leading to arbitrary results. Unsurprisingly, attrition skyrocketed, particularly among Black teachers, and morale cratered among those that stayed. Cheating scandals erupted (a clear consequence of Campbell’s Law), test gains flattened, and the broader system never saw the transformation promised. Rhee exited for a lucrative career as a martyr, and the city’s schools remain as segregated and uneven as before.

Picket Middle School & Other Obama Favorites

In 2010, Barack Obama praised Philadelphia’s Pickett Middle School, newly managed by Mastery Charter, as a turnaround miracle: math proficiency had supposedly soared from 14% to nearly 70%, and violence plummeted. The example became a centerpiece of his rhetoric about school reform. But the gains didn’t survive scrutiny. When Pennsylvania adopted tougher Common Core–aligned tests, scores at Mastery schools fell sharply, in some cases worse than the district average. Investigations later noted high attrition - once again, many struggling students simply left, probably pushed - raising doubts about whether the improvements reflected true progress. A decade-plus on, Pickett and other “Renaissance” Mastery campuses perform below district norms, and the network itself has admitted early test results oversold the story. What was once heralded as proof that no school is beyond saving now reads as another cautionary tale about inflated turnarounds and the perils of building policy on temporary spikes. Undeterred, in his State of the Union address in 2011, Barack Obama named the Bruce Randolph school in Colorado as an example of the positive power of education reform and the school choice movement. Later investigation revealed that Bruce Randolph students were meeting state standards at a rate of 15% in English and 14% in math. According to the exact same standards of “accountability” endorsed by Obama and his administration, this of course meant failure. It’s unclear why Obama’s staff thought they could get away with this; apparently, the guy in charge at Bruce Randolph was a very effective marketer, and had sold a lot of local people on big promises about demanding excellence. Sadly, reality had other ideas.

What I would ask Piper and the rest of the team at The Argument and everyone breathlessly sharing that piece is simple: what’s more likely to be true? That the Mississippi miracle has actually occurred, a sudden massive turnaround in outcomes in conveniently-bounded administrative units where there’s inherent and immense pressure to fudge the numbers? That we’ve seen real improvement in metrics, when such improvement has proven to be illusory again and again and again, all with exactly the kind of minor administrative and pedagogical changes that have failed to produce gains in so many contexts? OR, is it more likely that the Mississippi miracle will prove to be like every other educational miracle that’s come before it, a product of moving poorly-performing students off the books?

And how on earth do you publish that piece without even raising the question?

What really bothers me in Piper’s piece is not the misguided policy it advocates for, though that’s bad enough. (It is unfathomable to me that people still think accountability is some new, untried idea in education, when successive two-term presidential administrations pushed accountability as hard they possible could, to no positive effect at all.) No, what really bothers me is the attitude at hand here, which is straight out of the mid-2000s ed reform playbook: maximally earnest, dismissive of all complication, self-righteous, supposedly speaking on behalf of THE CHILDREN, admitting no humility or modesty, and animated by the absolute certainty that we can solve our education problems simply by wanting it enough. All of this was a bipartisan norm for several decades, and that bipartisan effort was a horrific failure.

To the ed reformers, the liberal do-gooders, the concerned citizens…. I know many of you are more optimistic than I am. I get it: you want to believe in the power of institutions to move students, you assign narratives of redemption to schools, and you recoil at the thought that some educational problems might simply be stubborn and systemic rather than solvable by bright new interventions. I’m not asking you to adopt my supposedly nihilistic education views in total. But here’s my plea: don’t do a speed run of 2000s-era ed reform simplistic self-righteousness. Don’t be the person beating your chest, insisting that we could easily have a nation of geniuses tomorrow if we just STOP MAKING EXCUSES. Even if you reject much of what I say, at least don’t pretend this is all about grit, or belief, or spending. Please don’t say “We just haven’t tried hard enough.” Stop framing educational failure as a moral failing or as evidence of lazy leadership. Stop insisting that parents and teachers just have to demand more from students. Don’t force the narrative back into the Waiting for “Superman” mode, where the kids are all talented, oppressed, and innocently waiting for some heroic savior school or reform to rescue them.

It took decades of ruinous failure for the reform crowd to finally stop strutting around like they’d solved inequality with a stopwatch and a clip-board. For twenty-plus years, they sold the idea that the right mix of grit sermons and data dashboards could turn every eighth grader into a Stanford admit, and when that didn’t happen, they defaulted to blaming the teachers or parents or unions or Democrats. Only after cheating scandals, mass attrition, and the slow recognition that poverty is not a variable you can spreadsheet away did the volume finally come down. We cannot slide back into that sanctimonious era of teacher-shaming and miracle promises, not if we want to do good. Humility is not just a personal virtue here; it’s a political necessity. If we forget the profound limits of schooling, we’ll end up right back in the bad old days of sneering arrogance and deluded aggression, setting ourselves up for another generation of failure.

You might consider following the example of Matt Yglesias, who has long been an ed reform type but who has become much more pragmatic and realistic about the boundaries of the possible in the past decade. He and I still differ on this topic in myriad and major ways, about the evidence and where it points and what actually should be expected from our public school system and what its goals should be etc etc. But Yglesias has clearly evolved over the years in light of experience and evidence. He’s far more reserved about education’s potential for social transformation and also far less likely to assign blame to teachers or schools simplistically. He absorbed new information and allowed that information to inform his engagement! And, thankfully, he does not talk about this stuff with the Jon-Chait-in-2005 affect; he’s not out there engaging in self-righteous maximalism. He’s not saying “Don’t tell me these kids can’t learn!”, the Waiting for “Superman” battle cry that exemplifies this approach to education reform - the insistence that everything is possible, that failure is always a choice, and that anyone who asks any difficult questions is somehow anti-child.

I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I watched this conversation between Yglesias and Jon Lovett of Crooked Media, because Lovett appears to have stepped right out of 2003 with no understanding whatsoever of the recent history, no backing in the relevant research, no knowledge of everything that’s happened in this century, and yet possessed of utter conviction that we could just choose to fix all the problems in our schools. It’s precisely the worst attitude to have in education debates, and he directly refers to Piper’s piece to justify his attitude. You guys, I promise, we are not going to get progress that way.

Here I must again point out the stark reality. Academic talent is normally distributed throughout the population, and so some degree of failure is literally inevitable. Not all students are equally talented, and this can never change. Differences in educational talent are real. Meanwhile, large-scale performance gaps between groups with profoundly different social and economic conditions cannot be closed on the school side; we have thrown an immense amount of money, effort, time, and manpower at those gaps at the school level for a half-century, with close to nothing to show for it. That makes perfect sense when you consider that schools control 10% or less of the variance in student academic outputs. The evidence that we can’t do what Piper insists we should do at the school level has been building for decades, and no amount of bleating the words “ACCOUNTABILITY” and “NO EXCUSES” is going to change that fact. By all means, be more critical of public schools than I am, be more supportive of charters than I am, have a more optimistic take on what’s possible at the school level than I am, whatever. But please, let’s not go all the way back. Waiting for Superman didn’t work out for us the first time. That’s the thing about miracles, after all - they aren’t real.

We’ll see if The Argument, a magazine seemingly founded on the premise that liberal good vibes can overcome every inconvenient fact and complication, will engage with this kind of criticism.