Many Democratic voters — and not a few pundits — have found the 2024 presidential election outcome to be profoundly puzzling and disorienting: How could so many minorities and working-class Americans have voted for Donald Trump?
One observer who found Trump’s showing with these groups to be unsurprising is Steve Bumbaugh. Ever since the 1990s, he has worked on issues involving college access, upward mobility, race, and class. For some of that time, he worked with large organizations such as the College Board, which is the one of the key institutions that has shaped the modern meritocracy through college entrance tests such as the SAT and Advanced Placement courses and exams. At other points in his career, he worked directly with young people from disadvantaged communities. His work with students in a deeply impoverished inner-city neighborhood in Washington D.C. during the early 1990s, when the city was known as the nation’s “Murder Capital,” is described in the documentary Southeast 67.
In this podcast conversation, Bumbaugh discusses the rise and fall of public school integration efforts in America — an arc whose impact he experienced personally as well as professionally. He describes current criticisms of meritocracy, particularly at the level of selective college admissions, and the ways in which the elite universities could do more to make the system more representative as well as more truly meritocratic. Bumbaugh reflects on the working-class anger and frustration that helped drive Trump’s reelection in 2024, much of which was invisible to the Democratic Party as it transformed into a predominantly college-educated, managerial- and professional-class party. And he concludes that the Democrats “don’t have the ability to communicate on the same level as Donald Trump. They had better do something.”
Transcript
Steve Bumbaugh: Bad as it seemed on the ground in Anacostia, we created a little bubble. We essentially ran a school. What that showed me was you could turn things around with the right combination of resources. That was the central lesson I took.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to The Vital Center podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Steve Bumbaugh. He’s a friend and college classmate of mine. But more to the point, he is Senior Vice President for College, Career, and Digital Access Technologies at the College Board. Welcome, Steve!
Steve Bumbaugh: Thanks, Geoff. It’s a pleasure.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s a pleasure for me too. I wanted to talk to you because, well, we’re overdue for a conversation. But I also wanted to get your views on the present political situation in which we find ourselves. Donald Trump is coming back into the White House with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. And more than that, this may have been a realigning election in which the Republican Party assembled a multiracial, multiethnic working-class coalition that, in some ways at least, seems to resemble the Democratic Party of yesterday. And the Democrats, meanwhile, seem to have become a predominantly college-educated party rooted in the managerial and professional classes, in a way that makes them curiously reminiscent of the Republican Party of yesteryear.
It has also been suggested by many commentators that the Democrats lost because they embody an establishment that has become out of touch with the majority of the population and no longer represents the majority’s cultural perspectives or material interests as it once did. But Steve, it seems to me that not only do you have some particularly interesting opinions on politics, but you also come at them from the perspective of the office you hold at the College Board, which is one of the key meritocratic institutions that has reshaped the American elite over the past several decades. So maybe the best place to start would be if you could tell me: What is the College Board? And what are your key responsibilities there?
Steve Bumbaugh: Sure. The College Board is best known for a suite of college entrance exams — the best-known amongst them being the SAT — and for advanced high school coursework known as AP, Advanced Placement. And those courses are designed to mimic introductory college-level courses. Those are the two categories for which the College Board is best known. My role — and by the way, just to be clear, after a decade of work there, I left two weeks ago…
Geoff Kabaservice: Oh, wow.
Steve Bumbaugh: …to set sail for something new. So my job for a decade was to move underserved students — those are low-income students, first-generation students, rural students, Black, Latino, Native American, all the categories that you’re familiar with — onto college pathways. Because the evidence is overwhelming that a BA is one’s entry pass into the American middle class. So that’s what I’ve spent the past decade working on — really the past thirty-five years.
Geoff Kabaservice: I should add here that one of my earlier podcast guests was Sam Chauncey — Henry Chauncey Jr. — who was a long-time administrator at Yale and whose father, Henry Chauncey Sr., was the founder and first president of the Educational Testing Service, which was partly founded by the College Board and two other organizations in 1947 but is separate from the College Board. Do I have that right?
Steve Bumbaugh: That is correct. That sounds right to me. They’re a valued partner, yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: The ETS administers the SAT, but the College Board devises it — is that right?
Steve Bumbaugh: ETS scores the SAT at this point. We develop it. We deliver it through proctors and test centers, which are usually high schools. But we design and deliver the assessment and ETS scores it.
Geoff Kabaservice: Got it. Congratulations, by the way, for being tapped to join the Board of Trustees of the Southern Education Foundation. I think that was only announced a little more than a week ago.
Steve Bumbaugh: Oh, wow. You’re really good. Yes, thank you. I love this organization. It’s the first board invitation I’ve accepted in years. I deeply believe in their mission.
Geoff Kabaservice: Can you tell us what the Southern Education Foundation is?
Steve Bumbaugh: The Southern Education Foundation basically is committed to doing what I’ve tried to do in my career, which is move underserved young people on pathways to BA completion. Southern Education Foundation is mostly though not exclusively focused on African American students. They have a commitment to underserved young people.
Geoff Kabaservice: And from what I understand, its roots go back to 1867 with the creation of the Peabody Education Fund. So this is actually a legacy of the Reconstruction era, which is a time period that represents one of America’s great missed turning points and that I’ve spent a lot of time talking about on this podcast.
Steve Bumbaugh: Yes. The Southern Education Foundation was born from the movement that gave rise to, for example, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, HBCUs. It comes out of that movement and that tradition. And it remains a viable organization 160 years later.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, that’s terrific, Steve. I wish you a lot of luck with that very distinguished organization.
Steve Bumbaugh: Thank you.
Geoff Kabaservice: One of the ways that I define moderation is the state of being caught between those on the right who say you’re too far to the left, and those on the left who say you’re not radical enough. And that would seem to apply to last year’s controversy over the College Board’s framework for the AP African American Studies class. Were you involved with that controversy?
Steve Bumbaugh: Yes, I was one of the primary architects of that course.
Geoff Kabaservice: Now that the dust has settled a little bit from a year on, can you just give us an overview of that?
Steve Bumbaugh: I would say the big lesson I learned from that faux-controversy… It really diminished my trust in mainstream American media. And the reason is this — and I’m going to get quite precise here. On January 25th, 2023, a big-state governor held a press conference and said that AP African American Studies amongst other things lacks educational value. One week later, we released the framework for the course in a big glitzy event we held at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. That framework had gone to print the prior December. It was already done.
The New York Times ran a breathless front-page article suggesting that we made changes to this 300-page framework at the behest of the big-state governor who called out parts of the framework as being offensive. There’s absolutely not one shred of truth to that. It’s just not true. The framework was already complete. So I spent months engaging with media outlets trying to set the record straight. Additionally, there were widespread reports that we had removed content that was actually there.
So it was one of those situations where we were caught between the right, which is opposed to any content about Black people amongst others, and the left, which had an axe to grind, really upset about the right’s efforts to censor education materials. They just landed on the wrong target, which was the first comprehensive accounting of the African American experience available at scale in the United States public education system.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, I’m sure that cost you a lot of missed sleep, and I’m sorry about that. How have the results been one year on then?
Steve Bumbaugh: This course is available in 43 states plus Washington D.C., so I think that efforts to protect it have been successful. And I also just want to say… I don’t have a Ph.D. I’m not a scholar — I’m not a trained scholar. I had almost nothing to do with the actual content of the course. I’m not qualified to develop content for such a course. What I was promoting was a mechanism to get an underserved demographic group into the ecosystem of advanced coursework, to pull more African American students in. And that thesis is holding.
I would love to do the same for Latino students, for low-income students everywhere: think about ways that coursework can be relevant for them as a way to make AP US History and AP World History and Government and Politics and all those other essential core courses applicable to them. Because I have found, over the course of thirty-five years, that many students who fall under the categories of underserved, they simply don’t see themselves in the curricula — and so it’s less interesting to them.
Geoff Kabaservice: Was your work in any way impacted by the June 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious admissions programs at colleges and universities?
Steve Bumbaugh: Not really. The second that the Supreme Court agreed to hear that case, I knew with 100% certainty what the outcome was going to be. I never said, prior to that ruling, “If the Supreme Court kills the consideration of race and ethnicity admissions…” I said, “When…” So, personally, I was prepared for that ruling. The College Board doesn’t really play a role in admissions. We provide some of the data that admissions offices use. We did produce an amicus brief for the Supreme Court, but that’s not the game we play, so it didn’t really affect our work.
Geoff Kabaservice: Okay. Steve, I find it hard to characterize you politically in some ways, because it seems to me that you have a mix of positions, some of which in the current climate code as progressive and others of which code as conservative.
Let me back up. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation and then my first book about Kingman Brewster Jr., who was the president of Yale University, our alma mater, in the 1960s and ‘70s. He helped usher in the modern meritocratic order, along with a handful of other like-minded leaders in that era. And meritocracy was in those days perceived as a liberal, transformative principle that opened the elite to people from all walks of life, after centuries in which the ruling class had been in effect an aristocracy limited mainly to affluent White Anglo-Saxon Protestant males.
But in recent years, meritocracy has come to be stigmatized in many circles as a kind of reactionary force. And we’ve seen elite universities and schools dropping standardized entrance tests in the wake of the George Floyd demonstrations in 2020, although some of those institutions have now brought testing back.
David Brooks, who’s no radical, just recently published a 10,000-word article in The Atlantic called “How the Ivy League Broke America,” in which he charges that the elite colleges have changed America’s opportunity structure in a way that has worsened America’s leadership class and distanced the elite from the rest of the society, in a way that maybe allowed Trump to triumph. So how do you respond to the charge that meritocracy, as it has manifested through standardized testing and selective admissions, works against the vision of a just and progressive society?
Steve Bumbaugh: I read Brooks’ article. I found it very interesting, actually. I found myself agreeing with, oh, 80 to 90% of his analysis — probably 95% of his analysis and probably I agreed with 80% of his proposed solutions. I don’t often find myself agreeing with David Brooks, but I did find it… It was a very, very interesting article. And I think what he was saying is what I have long believed, which is that the Ivy League — and by saying the Ivy League, what I really mean is highly selective colleges and universities — they’re not meritocracies. And so I’m going to give you a long response here.
You and I are exactly the same age. And we grew up, we started kindergarten… If you look at the height of public school integration efforts, most researchers will agree they began in 1971, the year that you and I started kindergarten, and essentially sunsetted in 1988, the year you and I graduated from college.
I am the sort of quintessence, the example of the promise of public school integration. I don’t know much about your background, Geoff. I see your Facebook posts… I don’t know if you’re a third-generation Yalie or if you’re somebody who went to public school and just sort of made your way out. I am the latter. And I was able to sit next to students whose parents were economists at the World Bank, who were senior officials at the State Department, who were editors of sections of the Washington Post. And I divined all sorts of secrets about college, about the world beyond high school classrooms, by sitting next to classmates who were from the so-called American elite.
We may look back on the 1970s and the ‘80s, when we grew up, as a twentieth-century Reconstruction, because we have now completely moved away from that. And while I don’t think public school integration was true integration — it was a flawed experiment — it did allow people like me, who had absolutely no proximity to the Ivy League, to get there if we found our way into the AP classes and such.
Now the so-called elite — which would include me at this point — have really figured out how to play this game. So I have a son at Yale; he’s a junior at Yale. He’s doing very well. I have another son who’s a senior in high school, and he has a real shot of being admitted to Yale; if he’s not admitted there, he’ll get into some fantastic, highly selective college. They’re both very, very bright and they work very hard. But I know the rules of the game, and I impart those rules on my sons, and I encourage them to play by them. Very few families in this country at a granular level understand how the Ivy League college admissions game is played — very, very few. So they’re so hamstrung in trying to get their kids into these sorts of schools, because this game starts at three years old. If you don’t know those rules, it’s very unlikely that you’re going to find your way there.
So I would say what we call meritocracy now… I agree with what Brooks wrote in his article. I have met with, befriended, and studied the research of Raj Chetty and John Friedman. And we don’t have a meritocracy in terms of college admissions. It’s just a different game. I would suggest that when you look at our alma mater, all of those students are remarkably talented, remarkably talented. And that is a difference between what prevailed when 94% of legacy applicants to Harvard were admitted.
I’m going to call him out because he’s famous, not because I have anything against him personally — but George W. Bush was a C student in high school and he got into Yale. He wouldn’t be admitted today, and he might even admit that he shouldn’t be. So that formula has changed, but it is a new formula that has been perfected by people like me. And I don’t know if you have children, but if you do… Well, if you did, you would know the rules of the game because you played by them to get there. So I contend that we don’t have a meritocracy in college admissions.
Geoff Kabaservice: I definitely want to get back to the Brooks article and some of what you’re talking about, but I would love to get at that through your own experiences. So if you don’t mind me asking, I always ask people to come on this podcast to tell something about themselves. So what can you tell me about where and how you grew up and some of your earliest educational experiences?
Steve Bumbaugh: I have an unusual biography, which I rarely discuss. But I was born to a teenage mom in a public housing project on the South Side of Chicago. And she had a lot of challenges, and I ended up in foster care. I was in the system in Chicago and was eventually adopted by a couple, one of whom was a minister on the South Side of Chicago. They had three biological children, and they adopted me. And that’s who I call my mom and dad.
My mom and dad did not have much money; we were economically lower-middle-class. But we were intellectually wealthy. My parents are intellectuals. And I would sit around the breakfast table listening to them debate the Vietnam War, and that was a master class on all of the big issues of the day in the ‘70s. And so the advantage that I had even over some of my more highly-resourced peers was that I heard all the big words that were tested on the SAT from the time I was four years old. I was familiar with Proust and the cave allegory… All the little building blocks of core knowledge that one needs in order to be admissible to a place like Yale, I imbibed organically just by listening to my mom and dad talk.
Geoff Kabaservice: How much do you know about your birth father?
Steve Bumbaugh: A lot, actually. He was a highly accomplished intellectual who was in the United States on the same visa program, started by the Kennedy administration, that brought Barack Obama’s father over here. He was Kenyan and he went to college at Marquette. A very, very talented man who likely found himself in a bind of his own making, but one that was an accident. And he went back to Kenya and worked in the post-colonial government.
Geoff Kabaservice:
In one of the pieces you’ve published in the Washington Post over the years, you wrote that “Like Obama, I was born in the 1960s to a white American mother and a Kenyan father who was a foreign exchange student. He and I are part of a tiny fraternity of sorts.” Tell me more about that fraternity.
Steve Bumbaugh: Actually, the fraternity I was referring to wasn’t like “Kenyan father and white American mother.” It was more that we have these lives that span categories of divide in the United States. That is why Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, because he knew how to speak to different tribes in this country in ways that very, very few people do. And I’ve also been raised… I mean, in my life, I have had one foot in the Black American community and one foot in the white American community. And when I moved to California, I added Latino and Asian communities to that footprint. East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, college in New England… I would say people like Obama and I — who are much more common in terms of our multiculturalism, in our widened aperture — it’s much more common in our children’s generation. For our generation, it’s actually quite unusual.
I have come to look at it as a gift. I did not when I was growing up. But I’ve now come to look at it as a gift, particularly in these political debates that are happening now. I mean, I have brothers who are hourly wage-earning working-class Americans. I have aunts and uncles who work for Mack Truck and are prison guards. And I have friends like you who I turn on the TV and I see being interviewed on broadcasts that are being sent across the globe. So I continue to live in a lot of worlds that tend not to communicate with each other. And I think that gives me… It doesn’t give me all the answers necessarily. But I think I have — by no fault of my own, just by happenstance — a wider pipe of inputs than most Americans.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think that multiculturalism has been a big advantage for you, as it was for Obama. But we’re looking at the positive side of that now. And it’s my opinion that one of the greatest works of oratory of the twenty-first century was Obama’s March 2008 speech in Philadelphia on race. And that was in response to some of the controversy that had arisen around some of the more inflammatory statements by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who was the pastor at the Obamas’ church in Chicago. But I remember that part of that speech was Obama saying that various commentators through the years had considered him to be either too Black or not Black enough. Did that resonate with you too?
Steve Bumbaugh: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, yes, yes. It’s a fine dance that every African American who is going to a predominantly white institution or is working in a predominantly white organization — it’s a tightrope that we all have to walk, well beyond people like Obama and I who have this strange, esoteric experience.
Geoff Kabaservice: Interesting. So at our college reunion last year, I helped organize a panel around our common experiences as members of Generation X. And I thought all the panelists did a great job and I loved hearing their stories. But the panel did bring home to me a few things. First, while most of the people at that reunion lean politically left to varying degrees, our generation overall is I think the most conservative generation alive right now. I mean, we’re considerably to the right of the Baby Boomers, and I’m pretty sure the final exit polls will show that our generation supported Trump by greater margins than any other generation. Do you have any guesses as to why that might be?
Steve Bumbaugh: Well, that’s an interesting factoid. I hadn’t heard that. If that’s the case, which it probably is — you do your research — it could be because we’re also the first generation in the history of the United States that is unlikely to attain the economic status of our parents. And I have watched this with siblings, I have watched this with aunts and uncles: I’ve watched their way of life collapse, their ability to make a living utterly collapse. And I did not predict that Trump would win this election — I thought it was a coin-flip — but I wasn’t surprised.
And here’s the sort of nub of the issue. I hope the Democrats, if they survive, will listen to this. Kamala Harris — who I think top-to-bottom ran a fine campaign under unusual circumstances — my take is that she presented herself as the candidate who was going to return us to normalcy. And normalcy is a bright, flashing red light for so many Americans. What is normal in their lives is this catastrophe where they work harder and harder and they fall further and further behind. And that sounds like a platitude, but I have watched this with people I know well and love over the past forty years. Normal isn’t working for them, so they’re going to take the abnormal guy who says he’s going to burn it all down. I think they don’t necessarily believe that Trump is going to put money in their pockets or make their lives better. He’s going to punish the people they believe are responsible for their demise. And I don’t see the apparatus of the Democratic Party having any cogent response to this anger — which I think is justifiable, the anger.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, I’m with you on that. And I was also struck by your analogy that we kind of lived through a second Reconstruction. Let me ask… I think your family moved from Chicago to Alexandria, Virginia at some point, is that right?
Steve Bumbaugh: That’s exactly right, yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: And there’s another Post article of yours I’ve come across where you talk about starting at Hollin Hills Elementary in 1971. And further north in Alexandria is T. C. Williams High School, and people will know that through the film Remember the Titans, which is about their early experiences with integration, which also took place in 1971.
Steve Bumbaugh: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: So this didn’t happen in some sepia-tone century. This was our lifespan. So the experience of being in one of the early classes to integrate elementary school in a state that had engaged in “massive resistance” not too many years before, how did that affect you?
Steve Bumbaugh: When you’re five years old, everything seems normal, so I don’t know that it… It took me a long time to realize the particulars on the ground. And I’ll give you an example… My junior year of high school, we were all required to write a research paper documenting some aspect of the history of Virginia. And I chose to write my research paper on a local swim club that was forced to integrate by the Supreme Court — and again, this happened fifteen years before I was writing this paper. So the litigants were alive, and they were generous with their time: they allowed me to interview them. Even the ones who wanted to keep the pool segregated were happy to let me into their living rooms and talk to me in a way that was honest.
But in doing the research for this paper, I discovered that my physics teacher, for example, had fought to keep our school segregated. And I learned that my AP U.S. History teacher — a great, great man named Jack Hiller — had been on the other side of that argument and had fought for integration. I realized that the ghosts of Jim Crow existed in my high school, and I wondered if I could get a fair shake from the people who were on the wrong side of that argument. And I looked around and I was the only African American student in my AP Physics class — I was the only African American student in a school that was 50% African American. In most of my AP classes, I was always the only African American male. So I think as I got older and I got a sense of local history, I realized that the systems that had been in place, that advantage some students and disadvantage others, were still in place. And I was able to jump over those hurdles because of the unusual circumstances of my existence.
Geoff Kabaservice: What made you want to apply to Yale?
Steve Bumbaugh: I don’t know if you remember, Geoff, but back in our day, before the internet, there were these big, thick books that Princeton Review would put out, and they would list every college by state. So you’ve got Alabama, Alaska, Arizona… And I just went to what I considered to be the best colleges, and I looked at their average verbal and math scores for the SAT and their average GPAs. And when I saw that I was above all of those, I was like, “I’m going to apply to Yale. I’m going to apply to Harvard. I’m going to apply to Stanford. I’m going to apply to Brown. I’m going to apply to the University of Chicago.” I applied to those places based on the information I found in the Princeton Review book on colleges.
Geoff Kabaservice: I didn’t have a hugely more informed reason for wanting to do that. But when we showed up at Yale, which it’s kind of shocking to think was…
Steve Bumbaugh: Forty years ago…
Geoff Kabaservice: …forty years ago now, that was a culture shock to me too.
Steve Bumbaugh: Where are you from?
Geoff Kabaservice: By background, I came from Florida, where a certain governor presides. And I don’t want to say it was a provincial background, exactly, but it was peripheral. And I was running into students who were from very central circles — central to the power structure of the country — and that was kind of a shock. You had a similar experience?
Steve Bumbaugh: Yes, although here’s what’s so fascinating… It is so natural for 17- and 18-year-olds to feel like outsiders. So I may have felt like an outsider because I was from a lower middle-class family, because I was African American. But I was from the Washington, D.C. area, right? It seemed like 70% of our class was from the area between D.C. and Boston. You’re from Florida, and there were not a lot of students there in our generation from Florida. So I may have looked like someone from the in-crowd to you because I was from the D.C. area, and you may have looked like someone from the in-crowd to me because you were a white male. So wrestling with all of this is interesting.
But I did feel… Yeah, I’d never met people who… My idea of wealth before I went to Yale was completely turned on its head when I got there and met people with last names like Stratton — Briggs & Stratton — a lovely, lovely classmate of ours. But I was blown away when I learned, “Oh, wow. This is the American aristocracy here.” I had never heard of Choate or Groton, I’d never heard of Andover or Exeter. It seemed like everybody was from those schools. I’d never heard of Dalton. So there was a whole world that I learned of that first semester at Yale.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’d read The Preppy Handbook, so I had a little bit of preparation. That was kind of a bestseller in our era.
Steve Bumbaugh: You weren’t preppy though, were you?
Geoff Kabaservice: I was kind of a self-made outsider, I guess. I had and I still have a peculiar relationship to Yale. I found a lot of my classes interesting, but I was a sporadic student because, well, the thing that interested me most was actually the institution itself. So like I said, Florida was kind of a peripheral place to be from, and I was interested in history even as a high school student, but Florida hardly seemed to have any history to speak of. I mean, Miami wasn’t even incorporated until 1896, when it had a population of 300. But Yale was 75 years older than the United States. So in a way, I tried to make sense of American history and American society through the university’s history and the people who were there.
I don’t know how enjoyable for the rest of our classmates or you it was to have me looking at you through at least one eye as a sociologist, but I appreciated your tolerating me and keeping me around. But it occurs to me, and it actually occurred to me even then, that when we arrived on campus in 1984, the first class that had had more than a dozen Black students had graduated only sixteen years earlier. And the first coeducated class had graduated only thirteen years earlier.
Steve Bumbaugh: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: Meritocracy didn’t still have that new car smell around Yale, but there weren’t that many miles on it either.
Steve Bumbaugh: It was stunning to me when I considered how recently women had been admitted to Yale. I mean, we were alive… when we were born, women were not allowed to go to Yale. And as you well know, Geoff… By the way, were you a sociology major? A history major?
Geoff Kabaservice: I was actually a political science major, but I eventually found my way to history.
Steve Bumbaugh: We were in a lot of the same classes, I’m sure. 1969 was also the year that Yale under Kingman Brewster made a commitment to ethnic diversity. I believe, and I may be wrong about this, that it was also the year Yale stopped the de facto cap on Jewish students who could be admitted. When I considered that all of this happened within my lifetime… And I worked the reunions at the end of the school year. I realized that most of the reunions that I staffed, they were all men, and they were very nearly all white men; when you consider the generation they came from, they were very nearly all not just Christian but Protestant.
It was fascinating how much that institution had changed in a very short period of time. And I often found in those reunions that the alums were confused about who I was. Was I a worker from New Haven, which meant I would be treated differently than if I was a student trying to get by, by working the reunions and seeking tips? There was a confusion about which category to place me in, which was clearly a function of me being African American at a time when 4% of our class was African American. So yes, I really struggled with how to interrogate Yale’s recent history. But I was always grateful to be there. Always. I always knew how lucky I was to be there.
Geoff Kabaservice: Even when I was an undergraduate, I took on a project that led to what became first my dissertation and then my book about Kingman Brewster and Yale in the ‘60s…
Steve Bumbaugh: And may I ask you, Geoff, what did you get your Ph.D. in?
Geoff Kabaservice: I got my Ph.D. in American political history. John Blum, the political historian, and Kai Erikson, the sociologist, were among my advisors, along with Cynthia Russett and Gaddis Smith from the History Department.
Steve Bumbaugh: Oh yeah.
Geoff Kabaservice: And so one of the things I found myself doing in my senior year of Yale was going through the yearbooks from the twentieth century looking for African American students. And that was mostly an exercise in tedium, to be honest. Because if you’re looking at the 1931 yearbook and there’s 700 white men in there, you find yourself wondering if this person in this blurry black- and-white photograph might be African American — or is he just sporting a particularly intense Palm Beach tan?
But I found some interesting things, which is that Yale actually used to be considerably more diverse in the years leading up to World War I. I did a really deep dive on the Class of 1916. And out of a class of like 700 students, there were five African Americans, there were a number of Asian Americans, there were two Armenians, two Turks, a Brazilian, and a German who left Yale in his sophomore year to fight for the Fatherland. But all of that came to an end after World War I. And then you go for decades without finding any Black students at all until you get to the ‘50s, when there’s one or two. And it was really the Class of 1968 which was that class that had more than a dozen Black students in it.
And that class contained Armstead Robinson, who started what we now know really as the Black Student Alliance at Yale, BSAY, and also was really instrumental in starting the Afro-American Studies program even as an undergrad. And I knew a little bit more about him because my brother, when he went to the University of Virginia, had him as a professor there.
Steve Bumbaugh: Fascinating.
Geoff Kabaservice: He was quoted as having said in his senior year: “Yale is by definition white. In many respects, it is the epitome of whiteness. To be Black here is a fundamental contradiction for anyone with a positive Black identification.” Did you feel that way at all?
Steve Bumbaugh: Well, I think I would agree in my experience with the first part of his statement: that Yale is fundamentally white. I mean, that was obvious when you looked at just the paintings and the photos and the statues and who the buildings were named after. It was white male — and again, probably white male Protestant. I mean, we did have a Catholic president when we started there, but he was the first one.
I had some really amazing Black professors while I was there, and particularly a woman I took five classes with, a lit professor named Gloria Watkins, who wrote under the pseudonym bell hooks. So Yale was really… And this is a very common theme you hear with college-educated Black Americans: Yale was the first time I ever encountered scholarship related to Black people, ever. So classes I took with John Blassingame, I had TAs like Herman Beavers and Saidiya Hartman, who are now giants in their respective fields. I went to college with people like Imani Perry, who’s now a huge deal in her field. So I didn’t feel that it was a… I had access to a lot of really great what I would call Black scholarship when I was at Yale.
Geoff Kabaservice: What was your major at Yale?
Steve Bumbaugh: Economics and Political Science, but really I took more Lit classes than anything else.
Geoff Kabaservice: After graduating, you went down to D.C. and took a job that was pretty similar to a lot of jobs that our classmates were taking — I think with the Federal Reserve, right?
Steve Bumbaugh: That’s right, yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: But then after two years, you took a job that was extremely, extremely untypical. So let me just set the stage here a little bit. There’s an organization in New York called the I Have a Dream Foundation, right?
Steve Bumbaugh: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: My understanding is that they found people who could give money to guarantee people from deprived areas, mostly minorities, that if they graduated from high school, their college tuition would be paid for.
Steve Bumbaugh: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: And in this particular case, in Washington D.C., it was a person who’d made money in the hotel industry who gave these kinds of funds, and he focused on Kramer Junior High School in Anacostia, which is a very impoverished neighborhood in Southeast D.C. And there was a guarantee of scholarships for people who graduated, but there also was funds to hire two teachers to look after the 67 students who were kind of the control group selected from this junior high school class, and you got hired as one of those teachers. And I’m telling this because I have seen the documentary called Southeast 67, which is about the experiences of “the Dreamers,” as these students were known, and your interactions with them. I think it probably was a good thing you didn’t quite know what you were getting yourself in for at that point. But tell me about that experience.
Steve Bumbaugh: I loved it, actually. I really did. And I have some sort of contact with one of my — I call them “Dreamers” — former students every day. That was what I call my Ph.D. program. I mean, I grew up six miles from Anacostia. I was an arrogant 22-year-old when I started that job, who thought I knew everything, who thought I could go and change the lives of these kids if they just listened to me. And I was disabused of that naivete before I even walked through the door of my first class. I had no idea what life was like on a minute-to-minute level in Anacostia. And Anacostia is a microcosm of urban ghettos all over the United States. I just contend that those people who live in those communities don’t enjoy the protections of the United States Constitution. I was just stunned by what I saw. It’s hard to even know where to begin.
Geoff Kabaservice: The fortunes of Anacostia have risen and fallen over the years, but you happened to be starting there in 1990 at the height of the crack epidemic, which was also the height of the murder epidemic…
Steve Bumbaugh: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: …when almost 500 people a year were being killed in DC, giving it the reputation as the nation’s murder capital.
Steve Bumbaugh: Yeah, it was rough. I mean, with my own eyes, I saw people murdered. It was a very difficult place for a child to grow up. I’m sort of overwhelmed trying to think about that experience. The community was not organized by itself, and the systems that organized that community didn’t do so in a way that provided opportunity. So you had to walk through a metal detector to go to school. You purchased everything at corner stores behind thick layers of plexiglass. The police were not there to protect you. That was one of the… I mean, it was so shocking to me to see how the police treated people in that community. The police at that time in Washington D.C., they were almost entirely African American, and the way they treated people in that community was really just shocking to me.
And I’ll say all the things that everybody says when they go to communities like this… There wasn’t a single movie theater. There was one real grocery store. There was one bank that just didn’t have any of the resources that people need to thrive. They were controlled behind incessant police pat-downs, behind metal detectors and plexiglass. I mean, the whole world shouted to them that “We don’t trust you and you are a threat that should be contained.” It was stunning to me. And it radicalized me, it really did. Just being there and knowing those kids and their families intimately and seeing how they lived, through no fault of their own, it really… I don’t really know how to put it other than it turned my world upside-down. Yeah, it still bothers me.
Geoff Kabaservice: There are a lot of heartbreaking aspects of that story. I think about how you said that when these kids got out of D.C. on a field trip, let’s say, or to Ohio, where there was another school that was maintained by this program, they reverted to being even younger than they actually were. It’s like they had to put on so much psychic battle armor to get through living in Anacostia that when they got out of there, they became the children they weren’t allowed to be.
Steve Bumbaugh: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: They even would suck their thumbs in that sense. That’s just heartbreaking. Tell me more about the lessons you took from that experience.
Steve Bumbaugh: Well, a few things… I chose to work at the intersection of education and poverty as a result of that experience. Because, listen, that program took place at the height of the American murder epidemic, and 20020 — the zip code in which our students resided — had the highest homicide rate of any zip code in the United States. So we were at ground zero. Pretty much 100% of our students were poor when we started the program. Today, about 90% of them are middle-class, and very nearly 100% of their children are college graduates, enrolled in college, or on a college track.
And so the biggest lesson I learned is that with the right mix of skills and head and heart resources, you could actually move the dial pretty substantially on these longstanding issues around class and race. And it is a great frustration to me that those lessons have not made their way into broader reform efforts.
But the biggest takeaway for me is that as bad as it seemed on the ground in Anacostia, we created a little bubble. We essentially ran a school, and we created a little bubble where my coworker and I, we had pretty good academic skills. She was a masterful teacher. She taught me how to teach. We loved our kids deeply. We weren’t afraid of them. We went into their homes, we went into the neighborhood. We became part of the community. We held the students to high standards. We didn’t feel sorry for them, let them stay home if something bad happened. What that showed me was you could turn things around with the right combination of resources. That was the central lesson I took.
The second lesson I took — and this was kind of heartbreaking to me, and it was a lesson borne out of my own experience but also working with these kids — is that in the United States, outcomes are a birth lottery. And there’s an empirical basis for what I’m about to say. An American’s long-term outcomes are predicated more than anything on the family to which they’re born. And that’s not really a big part of the narrative in this country, but it’s the truth. That’s part of what David Brooks was getting at in his article; he didn’t state it that explicitly, but it’s true. It’s a birth lottery. And that’s it. That’s a shame. And we are seeing folks who lost the birth lottery rise up, and they voted for Trump. I didn’t vote for Trump, but I understand why they did. I do.
Geoff Kabaservice: And to go back to your first point, that was sort of a natural experiment because you had 67 kids who were mentored by you and your co-teacher and then others who didn’t. And although there were a lot of obstacles in those kids being able to take advantage of the scholarship that was offered to them, and relatively few did — some kids ended up in prison and a lot of the girls ended up becoming pregnant — nonetheless their long-term outcomes seem to have been better than the people who weren’t part of that Dreamers group.
Steve Bumbaugh: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: That, to me, suggested — and also the thirty-years-later interviews that were done with some of the members of this group — that they really were impacted by the work that you did and the sense that there were other possibilities out there. And they might have made some bad choices, but they also knew that they were capable of more things than they would’ve been had you not been there. So that to me was a real takeaway. And the question is: How do you scale that?
Steve Bumbaugh: I don’t think there’s a clear answer for how to scale it. We’re not even at the point where some of the underlying precepts for what we did are recognized as being particularly useful. For example, we were a force multiplier. These students had mothers and grandmothers, mostly female relatives, who worked very, very hard to make sure that they were safe and moving on a productive path. And we were the force multiplier there. And the kids not in our program, they didn’t have that, and the schools weren’t designed to educate them.
There were a few things that we did that could easily be scaled. There’s a term in education called “looping.” It means teachers stay with the students year after year after year. We didn’t even know what looping was, but our program was resource-constrained, so Phyllis Rumbarger and I worked directly with these students year-round for several years. And in doing so, we developed relationships with them well beyond what was typical of a teacher who might have more than a hundred students on any given year. And the fact that we knew them to the point where we knew who their cousins were dating made a huge difference. They knew that we loved them — we really did, and we still do — and that meant that they weren’t going to come to school and fight, they weren’t going to disrespect us. I didn’t have kids…. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen The Wire, Geoff?
Geoff Kabaservice: Of course.
Steve Bumbaugh: I enjoyed The Wire, but the classroom part of it was not realistic. I never had a student curse at me ever, not one time. Because one, they knew I’d pick up the phone and call their grandma if they did, and they didn’t want to deal with her. And they also respected me, and I respected them. So even the component of the program that was essential — which is that you really do have to love your students and treat them as fully formed human beings — that’s scoffed at. People roll their eyes often, the education reformers, when you say those sorts of things: “You should loop so that you get to know your students better. You should go visit them in their homes and their churches and the places where they reside. You should become part of their community rather than only having that traffic move in one direction. It’s validating to show them that sort of respect.”
That’s a big part of what worked. It also worked that Phyllis Rumbarger is one of the best instructors I’ve ever seen. It also helped that she and I had a pretty vast range of academic skills and could teach everything from calculus to U.S. history. Those things are important, for sure. But the way we engaged with our students… She engaged with them. She was a mom. She engaged with them as if they were her children. I engaged with them as if they were my younger siblings. That made a really big difference — a really big difference.
Geoff Kabaservice: To collapse some of your career history here… You got an MBA from Stanford after this experience with the Dreamers, and you worked in various education-related projects and foundations. And you came back to DC, and I want to say that Muriel Bowser also put you on the Public Charter School Board for the city as well. You have some pretty strong opinions about charters, I know, some of which work and some of which don’t.
Steve Bumbaugh: Yes. I’m not pro- or anti-charter. They’re a collection of individual LEAs. Some of them are fantastic, some of them are awful, and most of them are not substantively different than the District public schools that they’re replacing. That’s my broad take on them. They’re not some panacea. A charter is just a governing model. That’s all it really means. The only difference between a charter and a District school is the way it’s governed. And I do think that there are some lessons that the District systems can learn from the highest-performing charters, and I think there are some lessons that the charters can learn from the District schools that have to take anybody who comes through their doors and do their best to educate them. So I’m neutral in the charter-versus-District wars. But I do say that that experiment hasn’t produced results that are significantly different than what they are intended to replace.
Geoff Kabaservice: I want to go back to the election, and I don’t want to get into particular critiques of Kamala Harris or the Democratic strategy. But I do think there is something to the point Brooks is raising in his article about how the establishment, as embodied by the Democratic Party and its institutions, has sort of forgotten how to make the argument. And I think one of the enduring images of this election season is actually going to be a white progressive on CNN shouting down and canceling Shermichael Singleton, who’s a very talented Black guy that I know, because he didn’t use the right language around the trans issue. And there’s a sense that so much of that establishment has sort of lost interest in persuading and making a case to people on a level they can understand, as opposed to using academic language and shaming.
And actually, though I am a registered Republican and conservative in some ways, I disagreed very strongly with the Supreme Court’s decision against affirmative action. And the reason that I felt that has to do with hearing people like you and your experiences particularly with the Dreamers, but also my own research.
I remember sitting in the Yale Manuscripts & Archives Library in the early stages of my graduate school research and coming across this article written in 1960 in the New Yorker that was about Yale’s admissions. And this was kind of early days of selective admissions… I think Yale only admitted a third of the people that applied, as opposed to 3% or whatever it is nowadays. But there were a number of portraits of candidates there, and one of those in this article was a boy who was pseudonymed as “Bob.” He came from an unnamed Eastern city and a big, multiracial public high school. This is, again, circa 1960. And Bob was African American. He’d had a straight-A average since the seventh grade, and he was the number one student in his class. He also was the first African American president of his school’s student council. He was the varsity quarterback. He was the captain of the second-ranked basketball team in the state.
He came from a very disadvantaged background. His father was near-illiterate and disabled. His mother worked in a laundry. His two younger brothers had dropped out of school. He had to work to support them even while he was achieving these things. And he was so impressive that the local businesspeople and I guess churches had put together a scholarship to guarantee his passage through school, and they wanted him to apply to Yale because it was the best school that they knew of.
And Yale looked at this application and said, “Sorry. He didn’t meet our SAT cutoff. Rejected.” And I looked at that and I said, “Are you kidding? Really? Come on.” And meritocracy began at Yale under Kingman Brewster alongside a drive towards something like what we would call affirmative action, and it was based on this kind of example. There are people from circumstances that don’t allow them to necessarily perform as well on tests like the SAT. But in those cases when there’s someone who, with a lot of the character that isn’t testable, that Brooks is writing about — things like curiosity (which was always the most important quality I looked for in my students) and creativity and empathy and emotional IQ — then you want to extend them some understandings, I think. Maybe give them a test prep course and see how they do. Maybe give them a year of remedial education to see if they can measure up.
But there was a feeling, and it was a sort of a complicated mix of these things, that on the one hand, the society was changing, and there were people from disadvantaged circumstances and minority backgrounds who were going to have leadership opportunities extended to them in a way that there hadn’t been in the 1950s, when 90-plus percent of America’s doctors and lawyers were all white men.
And some of it was greedy on Yale’s part. They wanted a share of those future leaders. But they also thought that Yale could actually make a national contribution by taking people who would benefit the most from the opportunities that they were given. I’m proud of your work with the Dreamers. I think Kingman Brewster would’ve been proud of your work with the Dreamers. There is no way that I could have done what you did, with all the best will in the world. And I think this is the advantage you have in the multicultural background you come from, of being able to bridge these worlds in a way that other people can’t.
And I think it’s that kind of understanding and transparency that the institutions need nowadays, to ask people, “How would you decide if you were presented with these hard cases? What would you do? What seems important to you?” Instead of just being a technocracy and saying, “Trust us. We know best.”
Steve Bumbaugh: There’s a lot in there, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, as usual.
Steve Bumbaugh: I’d say a few things… With the applicant you just mentioned, it is true that when Yale — and I’m using Yale as a microcosm for highly-selective colleges — makes a bet on an applicant who’s under-resourced but has distinguished herself or himself from their peer group in spades, that’s a higher-risk play. And I have worked with some low-income Black students from D.C. who have gone on to Yale, and many of them have struggled, for a variety of reasons. The military academies in this country, when they find students like Bob, they give them an extra year of high school under the auspices of the academy. It’s a prep program. I think that the highly selective colleges should do the same — they have plenty of money, they could afford to do that — as a part of a social acculturation and just making sure these kids understand the pace of reading and writing and problem sets and such that they’re going to face at Yale. It’s a pretty intense place. That’s one. It’s a very specific prescription that these institutions could afford.
Two, I contend that the Supreme Court did not outlaw affirmative action. They outlawed a form of affirmative action with which they disagreed. They’re going back to the sort of affirmative action — or I think the six conservative members of the Supreme Court aspire to this type of affirmative action — that allowed someone like George W. Bush. Again, I don’t mean to pick on him, but he’s very clear about the fact that he was a C student both in high school and college. But he came from the right family.
Our friend who was a year in front of us, and is on the Supreme Court now, never mentioned in his decision that he benefited from a form of affirmative action. He’s a legacy admit. He knows he’s a legacy admit. And he can say with a straight face or can write with a straight face that the consideration of race and ethnicity is unfair? But if you’re a deep-pocketed donor, if you’re a multi-generational legacy, that’s okay. And even, frankly, if you’re a farm kid from Iowa who’s bringing a different point of view into an institution that’s populated with kids from coastal urban centers — that person still gets extra points on his or her application. And I think they should. Because when you’re having a conversation at one in the morning about the big issues of the day, and you grew up on a farm in Iowa, you’re probably going to have a different point of view than that fiftieth kid from Manhattan whose father is a lawyer or is in finance, whose mom runs some sort of social club. And you’re going to enrich the conversation.
I think that’s also what happens with African American and Latino students. They enrich the conversation because we have a different point of view than our white classmates, just by virtue of our different experience. So I think that was a mistake, that decision. I wasn’t surprised by it. But I do want to make the point that affirmative action wasn’t killed; the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions was killed.
Geoff Kabaservice: Steve, as a final question… The Democrats do seem to be in this situation where they need to communicate again with a much broader swath of Americans, and it seems to me that the perspective you are articulating would help them do that. If you could have some advice to the people who are going to shape the strategy of the Democratic Party in the next few elections, what would you say?
Steve Bumbaugh: Geoff, I was reading the same Facebook threads from our classmates that you were reading. I do not think it’s a communications issue. I don’t think the Democrats can say something that’s going to shake people out of their stupor and make them go vote for Democrats. I think they have to do something.
If you think about the Democratic president who was able to stitch together a generational coalition, it was FDR, and he did it with the New Deal. And he did it with the New Deal because he fed people who were on the cusp of starvation. He gave jobs to men, Americans who had lost their jobs when the employment rate was 25%. He employed people. He met their material needs. And here he is, this patrician from New York, who is suddenly an icon with working-class white Americans. Who’s the Democrat who is proposing meeting the material needs of a really long-suffering American middle and working class? Who is that?
And it’s not happening on the Republican side either, but what Donald Trump offers them is vengeance. I mean, he is an elite in many ways, but he doesn’t talk like one. He really communicates like a working stiff, as it were. And he talks about exacting retribution for the world that the elites have created.
It reminds me very much, Geoff, of growing up in the DMV when Marion Barry was the mayor here. Marion Barry was much smarter than Donald Trump, and he had much better political skills, but the formula was really quite similar. He was a god amongst low-income African Americans in D.C. They will have now a photo of Jesus (or rather a painting of Jesus) next to Marion Barry. maybe Barack Obama’s on there now as well. And they didn’t believe that Marion Barry was going to change their economic prospects. But he took his finger and he poked it in the eye of a wealthy white establishment that low-income Black people blamed for their demise. And he was a god. And that’s what Donald Trump offers the American — it’s not even the white working-class anymore, it’s the American working class.
And the Democrats, they don’t have the ability to communicate on the same level as Donald Trump. They had better do something. I think Biden tried and was not able to get his legislation through. It doesn’t happen in one fell swoop. There has to be a real belief that government should work on behalf of improving people’s lives. I don’t think either party believes that. But the Democrats’ path to salvation is actually doing something with the functions of government that improve their daily lived experience. And I don’t actually see that on the horizon for the Democratic Party. I think they’re in deep, deep trouble right now.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, I hope they heed your counsel, Steve. It occurred to me when I was in college that one of the greatest things about being there was that you were surrounded by interesting people, and you could with relative ease collar one of them and go off to a cafe somewhere and have a great conversation. Nowadays you have to get them on a podcast. But I really appreciate your talking to me, Steve, and I wish you tons of luck with your next project.
Steve Bumbaugh: Thank you so much, Geoff. I appreciated the conversation. Thank you.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to The Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. If you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.