What Is the Point Of All This?

Fundamentally, this is a question of identity: When you identify yourself with a team, whether you choose it or not, meaning attaches to you. This is more true for fans who embrace the identity, but still, when you’re a fan, you carry that baggage.

In 2026, what does it mean to identify with the Kansas City Current?

At the CPKC Stadium season opener on Saturday, March 14th, 2026, I saw a fan with a custom Kansas City Current jersey, with Renėe Good’s name on the back.

They prompted this essay, for better or worse.

This winter, during the Second Trump Administration’s civil war in Minnesota, I’ve become active in organizing. No need to get into specifics, but during this winter of despair, sometimes I’d get by thinking about the spring thaw and walking the Missouri Riverfront Heritage Trail to CPKC Stadium to watch the Kansas City Current.

Last year, I fell for the Current more than any team I’ve ever loved: The 1985 Royals, 2008 and 2022 Kansas Jayhawks Men’s Basketball, 2013 Sporting KC, the Mahomes Era Chiefs Dynasty–even the magical 2014 and 2015 Royals that, I believe, helped prompt Kansas City into investing in itself and becoming one of the model mid-sized cities in the United States. There’s a reason three of the top seven men’s World Cup teams chose their base camps here. The Soccer Capital of American thing is real.

Some of Us Have Been Doing This Since The Wizards Played in Arrowhead

Still, there’s something unique to the Kansas City Current.

It wasn’t the Supporters Shield: In Kansas City, we’ve punched above our weight in championship parades.

More than any American city, in Kansas City the NWSL team is visible: the streetcar, the merch, the flags, the shop on the Plaza, it’s everywhere. The Longs and Mahomes invested in a women’s team, building not only a stadium, but an entire entertainment district on the literal dumping ground for the collapsed roof of Kemper Arena from the 1970s. It prompted the city to create a rail line to the Missouri River, almost single-handedly reconnecting Kansas City to its roots as a river town.

Beyond the business, though, the Kansas City Current’s supporters make it stand for something beyond sports: They use sports to create an inclusive space, when sports culture in the United States is mostly toxic and MAGA-coded. This includes the Kansas City Current ownership group, especially Brittany Mahomes, who Donald Trump has praised by name multiple times:

Patrick Mahomes’ Mother Randi on the Eve of the 2024 Election.

These two things—ownership and the supporters groups—are in conflict. It’s not an open-war conflict—there are no “Sell the Team” signs—but the tension is there. This is true to different degrees with every sports franchise, but with the NWSL, it’s unavoidably political.

Sports is always political–especially soccer clubs, which are literally rooted in associations of churches, neighborhoods, working class professions, and political groups. Even in non-soccer sports, like when Fox News’ Laura Ingraham told Lebron James to “Shut Up and Dribble,” she was responding to Black journalist Cari Champion’s interview with Lebron and Kevin Durant, where Lebron talked openly about the difficulties of Black celebrity, a racial slur vandalized on his house, and President Trump’s racism.

In sports, there is no Shut Up and Dribble. Among other works, Lebron’s foundation opened the “I Promise” Elementary School–as an Akron Public Schools district school! He dropped the “U bum” tweet!

Conservatives have to admit that sports is always political: The whole nation witnessed the embarrassing spectacle of FIFA President Gianni Infantino “awarding” President Trump the entirely fake “FIFA Peace Prize.”

In a way that is easy to memory hole, but gets to the heart of the matter, so it is with the Kansas City Current. When ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renėe Good, her and her wife Becca’s SUV had a KC Current sticker. They were fans of the club, having lived in my Waldo neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri. Anyone who chooses to see the incident clearly understands: She was murdered for being a lesbian, with a wife who was not properly deferential to a man who saw them as less than human.

She wasn’t murdered for being a Current fan, of course, but her identity helps us understand why women’s sports fandom is a political act, why in this moment, being a Current fan at CPKC Stadium is a political act, whether fans choose it or not. Don’t take my word for it: Newsmax said as much in their coverage of her murder. We will get to all that.

What Is the Point of Sports Fandom?

Let’s start at the beginning.

For me, Roger Bennett–the impresario of the Men in Blazers, who has turned a podcast with his English-in-America ex-pat buddy Michael Davies into a soccer media empire–offers the clearest answer:

Making Memories.

His favorite phrase is “a sense of wonder,” that when we go to a soccer match, we don’t know what we’re going to experience, but as long as we have a sense of endeavor, of courage, of collective spirit, we can conjure joy or take comfort by sharing our grief.

Let’s dive deeper. Rog is an unlikely sports media warlord: A lad from Thatcher-era Liverpool who got obsessed with American culture, moved to the United States to become a sportswriter, all of which he documents in (Re)born in the USA: An Englishman’s Love Letter to His Chosen Home. Rog also frequently quotes English poetry from memory on every single podcast.

Bennett is undoubtedly the most well-read sports talker in America, and certainly can draw on more Phillip Larkin than the rest of the sports talkers combined. Here’s Rog reading Larkin’s “There Be the Verse”.

Listening to Rog is an emotional journey: The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat in the same episode. Rog’s humanity carved out Men in Blazers’ niche in the sports world: MiB exists for fans of all soccer clubs to feel their feelings. At its best, Men in Blazers is the communal experience for just, you know, dealing with whatever your team is putting you through right now.

Thinking about Roger Bennett got me to thinking about “The Age of Johnson,” the 18th Century school of “Doctrinal Criticism” associated with the poet and critic–and inventor of the dictionary–Samuel Johnson. The Age of Johnson was characterized by Wordsworth and Coleridge’s (both Bennett faves) pioneering work in Lyrical Ballads, which marked a transition from Enlightenment-based reason to more Romantic-based feeling in poetry.

The Age of Johnson is also called The Age of Sensibility. Why? Writing later in the Modernist Era, the critic E.R. Dodds cited Johnson in his famous essay “On Misunderstanding Oedipus Rex” for the purpose of Greek Theater:

The true function of the artist, which I should be disposed to define, with Dr. Johnson, as “the enlargement of our sensibility.”

For the Greeks, theater dramatizes emotions that exist, mostly, at the extremes of our lives. To process these meaningful moments, we prepare ourselves for feeling these things by experiencing them first in the constructed world of the theater. The dramatist, then, stages the play so we feel these emotions in something unreal that simulates the real, provoking the response of pathos or terror or joy or despair or whatever the emotion may be.

If sports is theater, this is what happens in our fandom: Through the simulated drama of sport, we enlarge our sensibility to feel things that we wouldn’t normally feel. This often makes us angry at our rivals and bitter towards those who failed us, but at its best–the way the Greeks used theater as a quasi-religious ritual–sports fandom can bring us together because we share the common human experience of……being a fan, with all that means.

It’s what makes soccer the most important of the least important things:

The sense of wonder we experience at the soccer match.

Samuel Johnson Holding Court at The Literary Club, an 18th Century Dinner Club Where Johnson and the Boys Would Discuss Important Matters of the Day. Today They Would Likely be Chelsea Supporters and Frown On Arsenal’s Reliance on Corners as Too Working Class.

If we cross two English media moguls from different eras, for Charles Dickens and Roger Bennett, sometimes It Was the Best of Times, like when you get your American Citizenship::

Sometimes It Was the Worst of Times, like when your team loses:

Sports Fandom as Identity

This is a complicated question, which is answered differently in soccer. American professional sports teams like baseball, football, basketball, and hockey are “franchises”: Explicitly business operations, run by an ownership group, to make a profit. They were created as capitalist enterprises, rooted in the invention of Sports as a Business in the early 20th century. This was the Gilded Age and the Roaring 20s, when cities boomed, disposable income abound, and transportation brought cities closer together. This is why there is more team relocation in the United States than in world soccer: Franchises are businesses that aren’t necessarily “rooted” in the community.

In the rest of the world, most soccer teams are “clubs”: They grew out of a tradition of sporting clubs, where the men of the community would play sports together. They were deeply rooted not just in cities, but in neighborhoods. Clubs were often named after professions, church groups, or social clubs. This is why London has 17 professional clubs: A combination of neighborhood-centric growth, public transportation, and economic growth.

This is also where football clubs get their identity: In their roots, they became a “Badge of Identity”, where your choice of a club signaled your personal values, class, and politics.

Then, as these clubs grew bigger and more organized, they would travel to neighboring clubs for competitive matches, and the system grew from there. Over time, of course, these “clubs” became businesses where players were paid, and as such, not actually from the community.

So, the identity of soccer clubs has flattened as the business has gotten bigger, but because supporters pass on their support to their kids, the strongest club identities get passed through the generations. This dynamic is why powerful supporters groups sometimes actually have an ownership stake in the team, or actual representation in the boardroom. And, because they are organized to act as collectives, they can wield real power. This community grounding is why it’s very rare for European soccer clubs to move–and in American soccer, it’s why soccer clubs have organized and influential supporters groups that wield influence not seen in traditional American sports franchises.

Manchester United Fans Protesting the Glazer Family’s Ownership in 2025. The Green and Gold are Symbols of the Protest, Recalling United’s Roots as Newton Heath in 1878, When the Club Was Founded as a Working Class Association That Grew Out of the Horrors of Industrial Factories in the Manchester Textile Industry.

Who Is A Sports Team, Exactly?

If the point of sports fandom is making memories that enlarge our sensibility, then who makes the memories that define our team? Who is it that defines the team’s identity?

A modern sports franchise isn’t a unified block of like-minded, like-positioned fans. It’s a complex mix of ownership, front office leadership, players, club legends, and, of course, the fans. The franchise’s stage is the stadium, the city, the neighborhood, the local bar scene, which can be characters in themselves.

All of this combines into a unique identity, but within that, there are main characters. They give you your “ness.”

Sometimes, especially in the billion dollar leagues, some franchises are, more or less, the Team Owner. They basically operate like absolute monarchs, and especially in the NFL, franchises are family businesses passed by heredity to the children. In this dynamic, the owners make themselves the Main Character of the drama: Jerry Jones is the Dallas Cowboys, trading his best players for no reason, making vibes-based draft picks, installing his son Stephen as the heir apparent.

Sometimes it’s front office leadership. This is a newer phenomenon in the “management” age of sports. How could you think about the Oakland A’s without Billy Beane, or the curse-breaking Red Sox and Cubs teams without Theo Epstein?

Sometimes it’s Club Icons: Who are the Yankees without the names and numbers in Monument Park? The Steel Curtain. The Hogs. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. These groups transcend the magical seasons to become permanent parts of the lore.

Sometimes there’s a magical chemistry where the city embraces the current team to transform the city itself, in real time weaving themselves into the lore: We know this well in Kansas City with the 2014-15 Kansas City Royals and the Mahomes-Era Chiefs.

In some special situations, the fans themselves are the identity. This is where franchises begin to feel more like clubs. The fans, as a group, take on a specific personality: Bills Mafia, Philly Fans, the St Louis Cardinals’ Best Fans In Baseball, Raider Nation.

Often, the stadium itself is a main character, not just as a stage for the theater, but so inextricable from the team that it’s a synecdoche for the franchise: Lambeau Field, Arrowhead Stadium Tailgating, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, etc.

The Main Character of the Kansas City Current Drama

Who Is the Kansas City Current? What Is the Identity?

The one thing nobody will ever be able to take from the Current: The first stadium in the world custom built and owned by a women’s sports franchise.

It’s the first stadium in the world where a women’s sports club could make memories in a place of their own.

At its best, when I think of the most memorable moments at CPKC Stadium, I think of people celebrating each other. Not just victories–we only have one major trophy and have suffered some catastrophic defeats over the past two years–but as a place to share each other’s joy and sorrow.

It’s where we celebrate moments.

I mean, we are the home of the Celly Queen, Lo’eau Labonta.

The Supporters Shield, of course.

Or when then- Ellie Wheeler’s boyfriend Roman Bravo-Young proposed on the field. He kneels, presents the ring, she says yes, jump-hugs him…..and then turns around a sprints to her teammates, who mosh to celebrate her friend. He’s just…standing there.

Or when the CPKC Stadium crowd chanted “We Want Lo!” so loudly that we more or less bullied coach Emma Hayes to sub her in so we could celebrate our captain.

Or when Claire Hutton picking up her “Bestie” (with a homemade sign) Ally Sentnor at the airport after she was traded to the Current.

Or when two-time league MVP Temwa Chawinga sprinted all the way across the field to embrace her coach Vlatko Andonovsky.

Or Croix Bethune’s birthday goal curtsey and blowing out the candles.

Or smaller moments, like when Halie Mace embraced her girlfriend, now fiance, Rafaelle Souza after last year’s match against Orlando.

It’s Club President Raven Jemison–one of the few LGBTQIA+ Black women in the corporate sports world–celebrating being cancer-free after a breast cancer diagnosis.

Club President Raven Jemison Does It All for the Kansas City Current.

My first memory of CPKC Stadium is from the first time I walked through the gates during the Season Ticket Holder preview in 2024. Basically, a trial run: walk through security, find your seats, pick out your food vendors, see the field, get the pre-game routine. But most importantly, revel in the fact that this is the only stadium in the world built for women.

On the concourse, I saw a lesbian couple in Current gear wearing bridal headpieces. They were celebrating their post-rehearsal at CPKC Stadium. They were taking pictures on the concourse, later they were down behind the goal in the supporter’s section, framing pictures towards the goal, scoreboard, and the Missouri River.

While in line for Yoli’s nachos, I remember saying something about the venue. One lady said, yeah, we couldn’t do this at the Arrowhead, The K, T-Bones Stadium, Children’s Mercy Park, “Or that high school football field they used to play on.”

My Family Headed to CPKC Stadium for the First Time

For me, this is the Kansas City Current. They are the main characters.

They are who gives the Kansas City Current their identity. Most NWSL supporter groups explicitly create LGBTQIA+ friendly spaces, and they are in coalition with each other to make the NWSL a safe space. But Kansas City is the only space where the stadium was built for, and owned by, a women’s team itself.

And, because of that, on Opening Day 2026 when walking through the gates at Helzberg Plaza, I thought about Kansas City Current fans Renėe and Becca Good, their children, and their dog.

I did not know them and don’t know if they ever attended a game, but the supporters who define Kansas City Current fandom have made CPKC Stadium a place *exactly* for people like them. So much so that on Saturday, someone wore a Current jersey with her name customized on the back.

This was a stark reminder that CPKC Stadium’s identity is created by the Kansas City Current supporters sections–the Blue Crew, Surface Tension, Undertow and others–which has explicitly made CPKC Stadium a LGBTQIA+ and non-white embracing space. In American 2026, this is a political act.

The Tension Between Ownership and Supporters Has Very Real Stakes.

Renėe Good was murdered by a federal agent who, if you choose to see what happened clearly, was triggered by the presence of a lesbian couple that wasn’t properly scared of him. She had a pulse for 15 minutes while ICE denied her access to a doctor, bleeding out while her spouse Becca was next to her, and their elementary kid’s toys were stuffed in the glove compartment and the door. The dog was in the back seat.

Hours later, prominent Newsmax host Greg Kelly tweeted, and then went on air, saying TOTALLY JUSTIFIED SHOOTING!!!! NOT EVEN CLOSE!!!

And pointed to the stickers on the back of Renėe and Becca’s car. Greg Kelly went into character assassination mode to justify the murder, trying to paint Renėe and Becca as some sort of “domestic terrorists” who “deserved” to be shot.

Guilt by Association. He asked what “WACK JOB” groups and affiliations are these?

Apparently, the Kansas City Current is a WACK JOB group that gives ICE agents “federal immunity” to murder you.

This guy has no idea what the Kansas City Current is, only cares about women’s sports to use it to bully trans women. But in a sense, he’s right: In the MAGA worldview, if you are LGBTQIA+, then any organization that celebrates this is, by law, a Domestic Terror Organization. The Kansas City Current won’t get the Antifa label from the government, but it is a WACK JOB space where LGBTQIA+ love can be celebrated through our collective enjoyment of women’s soccer.

This simple, human act of celebration makes LGBTQIA+ friendly gatherings contested political spaces. The NWSL is that space.

This is why you rarely see openly LGBTQIA+ couples at NFL stadiums like Arrowhead or most MLB stadiums. It’s less true for men’s soccer stadiums, but there has been fights to rid supporters groups of homophobic chants for years now.

At CPKC Stadium, and for fan groups around the NWSL who have staked out the league as the space for LGBTQIA+ fans to embrace, and be embraced.

Now, as we embark on the 2026 season, we have to ask, is the NWSL and the Kansas City Current in particular a target for ICE?

This is not a paranoid, nonsense question. Last year, we saw Mexican fans of Nashville FC, “We Are Not All Here.” after they were targeted by ICE.

We live in a political environment where Palantir-built facial recognition technology employed by ICE captures the identities of protesters, and label them as Domestic Terrorists. This is very likely why Jonathan Ross had a gun in one hand and his phone in another when he shot Renėe Good.

Do Kansas City Current fans have to worry that ICE will be present outside the stadium on game days? Will ownership declare CPKC Stadium and “Fourth Amendment” business and not allow ICE to enter without a proper judicial warrant?

Again, this is not a paranoid question. This is also a source for conflict over the club’s identity. The stadium is a contested space for what the Kansas City Current means.

Even though the Longs and the Mahomes built and own the stadium, and we should celebrate the investment and the transformation of the Riverfront—even if one of our owners is openly MAGA and gets shout-outs from Donald Trump.

But, last year, a Current game occurred on the day of a No Kings protest, and Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe activated the Missouri National Guard “As Precautionary Measure in Response to Unrest.” There was a real question about what to do if ICE or the Missouri National Guard appeared in the River Market: Would you decide not to attend a soccer game for fear of political violence and possibly being arrested and disappeared to a warehouse concentration camp?

This essays focuses on the LGBTQIA+ side of things because of Renee Good, but you could do an entire other essay on the tension between ownership and Black fandom: The seeming attempt to create the Current as an upscale sports lifestyle brand for white folks. This essay is already way, way too long, but to take a recent example, ownership apparently approved of naming Current Landing’s first nightclub “Sundown.”

In the State of Missouri. With its history. During the Second Trump Administration. While the team also decided not to honor Juneteenth this season, after doing so last season.

“Sundown Hi-Fi” touted that it’s Black-owned while being melanin-free in this and the rest of the mockups.

The Blue Crew supporters group made their statement, and soon enough, the Palmer Square Real Estate withdrew the project. Casio McCombs called the criticism “a difficult contradiction to sit with”…..but so would requiring a radically inclusive fanbase trying to enjoy a public space next to their stadium, shadowed by a nightclub explicitly calling back to the violent racist history of this state—at a time when ICE has specifically targeted sporting events for raids.

Were we really going to ask one of the best soccer podcasters and Kansas City Current beat reporter for Shea Butter FC, the inimitable Thombomb, to have to walk by Sundown Hi Fi on the way to work—doing the best live-post commentary in soccer and reporting for The Current Moment podcast?

I mean, is a nightclub in a billion-dollar real estate development really the place for the political project of “reclaiming” racist language from a past that, especially in the time of an explicit white nationalist movement, isn’t really past?

And if you don’t think the politics of all this lie just below the surface, reliable right-wing dog-whistle rag The Daily Mail attacked the KC Blue Crew by just saying the quiet part out loud, using the same coded language and visual cues right-wing media used in the demonization of Renee and Becca Good. The headline says it all:

The Kansas City Current Will Always Be About This Political Moment

For those of us with friends and family in Minneapolis, who have learned from them and prepared to resist ICE in our schools and neighborhoods, felt the horror and anger of a rising fascist movement in our midst, it was the winter of despair. That what you saw in Minneapolis can come for anybody, anywhere in this country—but it is targeted at cities and neighborhoods that didn’t vote for Trump’s bigotry.

To see the murders captured so blatantly on film, disseminated across the world, then have the basic facts double-thinked by the authorities into a defense of Big Brother. To see Renėe called a “fucking bitch” right after her wife, yes, talked shit to the agent, but then they simply tried to drive away and didn’t make it.

Then to find out that, not so long ago, they lived here in my neighborhood. They cheered for my team, likely because it represented the same thing that I love about my team.

As said by Katelyn Burns, her “queerness isn’t an aside–it’s a key part of her story.” When you think about who defines NWSL fandom, what gives it a unique identity as a queer-friendly sports space, it’s people exactly like Renėe and Becca Good.

At the third No Kings rally, Jane Fonda read a statement from Becca, saying that she and Renėe stand for “radical kindness,” and in a gesture of genuinely radical kindness, Becca says that she and her wife believe that fostering radical kindness is the belief that we can admit mistakes, that we are allowed to change our minds, “that what we believed before is not what we believe anymore.” That to “change your mind is powerful and beautiful and brave.”

Becca Good is inviting people who, before Renėe was murdered, might not have fully accepted she and her wife, but were moved by the video to understand that it was wrong and why it was wrong—she understands that it takes courage to cross over to the other side, and we will love you for it. The speech is not only moving, but an impressive pieces of rhetoric, and very much worth watching in full, about five minutes. You find out that the dog is ok.

Coming out of the winter of ICE and back into another season, for me, Renėe and Becca and all the radically kind fans is the Kansas City Current. The identity tied up in the Current is the same reason why the fascists continue to justify her murder. This may not be true for everyone who wears teal, but for me, the point of Kansas City Current fandom in this moment is to continue to make sure our stadium is safe for everybody who wants to make memories and celebrate being together.

In Today’s Political Environment, The Supporters Section at CPKC Stadium Is a Political Space

The Meaning Is In the Poetry

As I’ve learned from Roger Bennett, the poetry of memory is the best way to understand what it all means.

Renėe won the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize for her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” It’s a piece about her memory of dissecting a pig in school: The theme is dissection itself, reducing living things to merely experiments by slicing them open, analyzing and classifying their component parts, ultimately cutting the life out of them, literally and figuratively. The fetal pig is no longer a living being that walked on this earth, but

Life is merely

To ovum and sperm

And where those two meet

And how often and how well

And what dies there.

When we dissect the pig solely to analyze where life begins, what dies there is our humanity, our respect for life:

It’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit,

This scientificalization of life dehumanizes us, slicing and dicing literal lives into material components to be analyzed–-dissected for meaning, as if analyzing component parts of the living being are more meaningful than the life itself. Life becomes less than the sum of its parts. Instead of enlarging our sensibility, we numb ourselves to it.

The fetal pig becomes a test to be graded, rather than a life lived. The video of an ICE officer, shooting his gun in one hand while holding his phone to enter data into a Palantir facial recognition app in the other, is reduced to a frame-by-frame analysis to distort reality and devalue the life that was lost and the others that were ruined in that moment.

In a vastly smaller but similar way, in our soccer fandom it’s how VAR’s frame-by-frame analysis distorts the play rather than clarifies, until we no longer understand what a handball even is. So, when the ball hits the net, our celebrations are ephemeral—we are celebrating everything and nothing, lest the Zapruder-film analysis captures just the right angle to make us question what we just saw. The forensics of “how” is paramount; the “objective” analysis obscures the truth and sucks the life out of the game. The humanity of celebration is devalued, and we’re left with the lesser moment when the “analysis” confirms “reality.”

At its best, soccer fandom is a celebration that we’re all here together, with the people we love, without distinction, in this unique space making memories while the most remarkable women athletes in the world do wondrous things.

Or, as Renėe’s poem says about bibles she donated to thrift stores, and other holy books she’s read, they tell us one thing:

“Make Room for Wonder”

May her memory be both a blessing and a call to vigilance to protect the spaces that are important to our community. Let us continue to enlarge our sensibility to make room for wonder.

The Author Celebrating All the Trans People in My Life and Beyond, Let Us Keep Fighting So We May Continue to Gather at CPKC Stadium.

“The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” by The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch.

Horowitch’s article has, let’s say, concepts of a plan to explain why today’s college students lack the capacity to read full books.  The article is much like the elite college students it’s worried about:  It knows something’s wrong, but lacks the perspective, context, and historical thinking skills to figure out why.   

Now, you probably think that college students can’t read books because “everybody is always on their phones, grade inflation dumbs everything down, and kids don’t listen to anybody,” and sure, that’s a large part of it.  

But below the surface, there’s a more important story about how the standardized testing regime has, collectively, degraded our ability to think about “wicked problems”:  A catch-all term for the big, serious, thorny, complex, systemic issues, where every policy choice involves a series of trade-offs that require value judgments because “silver bullet” technocratic solutions don’t exist.  

This is where the Humanities excel:  Most complex problems cannot be data-analyzed into fix-all solutions, so real leadership requires historical thinking, cultural context, and moral reasoning.  You know, the types of things that aren’t on the test.  

Excelling on Standardized Tests Will Get You Into College While Diminishing Your Ability to Excel After College

Horowitz opens with Professor Nicholas Dames, teacher of Columbia’s “great-books” course, reporting that his students say “the reading load feels impossible.”  Crucially, he cites a conversation with a student who says that, in high school, she had only been assigned “excerpts.”  He concludes:

It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading.  It’s that they don’t know how.  Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to. 

It’s worth pausing on this point, which we’ll return to several times:  Students will read, understand, and apply longform critical thinking skills–if we give them the skills and the purpose.  

This isn’t a lame attempt to somehow make literature “relevant,” but to teach Humanities so that it develops the skills essential to tackling the world’s Wicked Problems.  There’s a reason so-called elite schools, that were founded mostly as leadership academies for the aristocratic class, grounded their studies in the liberal arts of Humanities and History.

Back to the article, Horowitz says there is “no comprehensive data” on students’ inability to read books, so she relies on interviews with thirty-three professors from, presumably, “elite” universities for her conclusion.  Fair enough, but the real question is why.

In search of an answer, Horowitz cites research saying that high schools teach fewer books, blaming the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and, later, the Common Core curriculum that ushered in the “accountability” era of high stakes testing.  

Horowitch explains that NCLB and Common Core “emphasized informational texts” and “short informational passages,” which “mimic the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.”  The tests do not assess your ability to comprehend long, complex narratives, nor can they easily assess whether you can apply context to your understanding of those narratives.  And, in the age of accountability-based teacher evaluation, if it’s not tested, there’s “little incentive to teach it.”  

So, why did the NCLB and Common Core emphasize excerpts-based reading comprehension?  As Antero Garcia, a Professor of Education at Stanford and outgoing Vice President of the National Council of Teachers of English, says, the switch to “excerpts” (often called “passages” in test-speak) was “intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts.”

Follow the Yellow Brick Road:  Standardized Testing “Passages” Train You to Walk Pre-Determined Paths

To pick up where Horowitch’s article leaves off, let’s talk about the Education Reform Movement and the 21st Century Standardized Testing Regime.  Specifically, I want to explain precisely why the emphasis on “passages” is crucial to understanding why much school curriculum has, mostly, abandoned teaching longform writing–fiction, history, scientific, or otherwise.  

A little personal context:  I began teaching in 1998, teaching high school English in a small midwestern rural school, where I also became the Gifted Program Coordinator.  I earned a Master’s degree at one of the few Centers for Gifted Education in the country, which gave me a rare background in the explicit teaching of critical thinking skills.

As such, Garcia raises one of my longstanding gripes about NCLB and the Common Core:  The writers and developers of this curriculum largely do not understand, at all, basic critical thinking concepts.  

I do not want to recount the entire history of corporate-influenced ideas in education.  But it’s hard to overstate the extent to which NCLB and the Common Core reflect a technocratic worldview, over 50 years in the making.  For a comprehensive deep-dive into the roots and rise of the Common Core and the modern standardized testing regime, Wil Greer’s 2018 article from The Journal of Educational Foundations (free to download from the U.S. Department of Education) is a great primer.  Or, read about the outsized role the Gates Foundation’s money and influence played in the “Swift Common Core Revolution”, and here’s one of the best discussions of the Common Core’s failure, where even the guys who say “stay the course” have to admit that it’s done very little to improve education outcomes.  

Said another way, NCLB and the Common Core reflect what corporate business leaders think critical thinking is, mostly because they believe that data analysts are the smartest people in the room.  The problem is that they believe “critical thinking” and “analysis” are synonyms, but in reality, “analysis” is simply one type of critical thinking, and a lower-order one at that.

Analysis is, by definition, process-based thinking where you break a whole into parts to understand how it operates.  This is algebraic thinking, the rhetorical equivalent of solving for X.  Or, think of “analysis” like this:  When something doesn’t work, analysis is a trouble-shooting guide.  When something does work, analysis is a recipe.   

To explain how that type of thinking infects the teaching of reading comprehension, let’s apply this thinking to “passages” style reading questions.  SAT, ACT, and all other manner of reading comprehension tests present excerpt-based passages that ask for the author’s main idea.  This is almost purely analytical thinking, the reading equivalent of solving for X.  You use the tools of textual interpretation to decode the author’s meaning, which, under the rules of the test, is the only “correct” way to interpret the passage.

Now, let’s think about how the test itself is constructed:

Because the test has to be standardized to create a “correct” answer, which has already been determined by the test-writer, the questions themselves must be intentionally constructed like a road-map so the student can reach the single, unequivocable, “objective” answer! 

There’s very little for the test-taker to do for themselves.  In fact, “thinking for yourself” will only lead you off the path towards wrong answers!  To get the right answer, designed by the test-makers themselves, you follow the already-constructed path, like Dorothy down the yellow brick road to get the answer from the Great and Powerful Oz.

Standardized Tests Have Trained The Past Two Generations Of Students to Cower Before the Great and Powerful Oz

So, what does this teach students who have had this kind of thinking pounded into them–not just by SAT or ACT test prep in high school, but on a daily basis in nearly every part of the curriculum during the entirety of their schooling?

If you’re an experienced professional in your field, you have probably encountered this from a younger hire:  You give them a reading-and-interpretation task of some sort, or anything that requires independent problem solving–and it absolutely paralyzes them.  

They come to you and ask “Is this right?” or “Is this what you’re looking for?”  And you say, well, I don’t know, that’s why I asked you to read it and give me your insight.  And they’re completely bewildered, or as University of Virginia Professor of Chinese Literature Jack Chen says in the article, they “‘shut down’ when confronted with ideas they don’t understand.” 

It’s actually worse than that:  It’s not that they don’t understand the ideas, they have been trained not to have their own ideas!  Look at what these standardized tests drill into students:  There’s a pre-determined answer that is someone else’s answer, and whatever interpretation you might conjure up is not only irrelevant, it’s wrong.  You show how smart you are, you qualify and credential yourself for college and the workplace, not by having your own ideas, but by solving for somebody else’s X. 

And if you come back with the wrong broomstick, a tiny man behind the curtain, pretending to be an all-powerful demigod, yells at you through a microphone and blows red smoke in your face so that you feel shame for having failed. Or, if you’re a school administrator, you have to admonish students that because you didn’t do well enough on the tests to show enough Adequate Yearly Progress, as mandated by No Child Left Behind, that we’ll have our funding cut and get tagged as a “failing school.”

Real Problem Solvers Don’t Just Need Brains:  They Need Hearts, Courage, and Dog-Like Instincts Too 

Advanced critical thinkers can look at things from a systems level, within cultural context and with historical perspective to try to understand why things are how they are, with a values base that can imagine a better world.

This requires higher-order critical thinking skills like, say, “synthesis,” which compares different analyses, generating a new, original-to-you interpretation that makes sense of a bigger problem or a bigger narrative.  This is what scientists do when they generate “theories,” when economists develop “models,” and when artists find their unique voice.  

Now you see the problem:  Excerpt-based, information-driven “analysis” is a lower form of critical thinking than what we want people to do.  It’s easier to test and assess, but it doesn’t require sustained concentration, following a complex narrative, or historical or cultural context that would complicate the analysis with possibilities other than the pre-determined X.  

Synthesis is a higher-order critical thinking skill:  It’s a meta-analysis at the systems level.  Beyond analyzing data in isolation, synthesis requires qualitative analytical skills to try to find more human explanations for the data–and then you compare different analyses to try to uncover insights underneath that somehow unify the data.  It’s this combination of quant and qual, used in tandem, that generates original insights.  

So, how did this lower form of “analytical” thinking come to define the era of NCLB and the Common Core?  In the 1990s, a movement emerged around the idea that the purpose of education is, above all else, to create the future workforce to drive the economy.  

Thus, “education reform” needed to create curriculum and systems to “create the workforce of tomorrow.”    

How did that manifest in education policy?  

To understand the education reform vision, 1990s context is essential:  This was the beginning of the internet and the “dot com” boom.  The “jobs of the future” would require college degrees because we’d all be working on computers now.  The blue collar manufacturing jobs are all headed to Mexico.  No longer could you create a middle class life by working with your hands:  The road to the middle class passed through college.

What kind of curriculum would determine “college readiness”?   Well, one based on analytical thinking, assessed by rigorous standardized tests, administered by a system that held educators accountable for results.  

In other words, No Child Left Behind and the Common Core.  For over the last twenty years, high school curriculum has bent towards this kind of thinking.  The result?  Young people have been trained to read excerpts and can no longer follow full-length books. And they’re absolutely terrified of being wrong because that will disappoint you.

To be clear, I don’t think this is entirely true: I think students today are more aware and more worldly than ever, which is an undercurrent in the “culture wars” over book banning and curriculum since 2016. That said, as a teacher, you have to work really hard to build enough trust that they’ll believe you when you say, “The goal is for you to develop your own insights, based on your evidence-based analysis and a values-driven perspective that clarifies the situation for other people.”

That’s harder than solving for X. It can’t be learned through excerpts and passage-driven standardized tests. And as Professor Dames observed up front, they want to do this kind of thinking, but we have to understand what that thinking is, and also how to teach it. And that requires reading the whole book.