Assume good intentions? Not so fast

As the (opinionated, mouthy) parent of an elementary school student, I attend a decent number of meetings at which we are exhorted to "assume good intentions" at all times.

No, I will not. Not if you're a person in a position of power demanding the assumption of good intentions as your response to criticism of your official acts.

I'm not just talking about refusing to assume good intentions of a Donald Trump or a Samuel Alito here, although, for the record, this does also apply to the strain of thought prevalent in the media that it's unacceptable to call someone racist if you don't magically know what is in their heart, only what the effects of their actions are. Anyone who wants to do that can fuck all the way off. But I'm talking much more broadly.

The first time I recall stopping and thinking "No, I will not and should not assume good intentions" with regard to a school issue was before the 2023-2024 school year started. Our district had rushed in a new elementary school schedule that was staggeringly developmentally inappropriate for the younger kids. It was hard to imagine that the people who had come up with such a schedule had ever met a five- or six-year-old child, let alone followed the research on the importance of play-based learning.

Following a torrent of public criticism, our district's superintendent chided people to "assume good intentions." But if I assumed good intentions, I had to assume staggering incompetence. They hired an outside consultant for a rushed process that took input from few educators and didn't offer chances for community feedback, and on this basis they were eliminating quiet time for kindergarteners and increasing the blocks of direct instruction for the early grades to a point that, when I described it on separate occasions to two different retired professors of education, they both said, in shocked tones, versions of "that's so developmentally inappropriate!" If you, as a public school district leader, do this with good intentions ... you're incompetent.

It seemed more respectful, frankly, to assume competently executed bad intentions, or at least intentions that are, in my values system, bad, vs. assuming blazing incompetence.

If we extend the concept of "good intentions" to include "you are doing a bad thing that you should be equipped to realize is a bad thing, but you think it's a good thing," then what does "good intentions" even mean? The "good intentions" here, as best I understand them, were that this would mean more time for kids to be drilled in the math and literacy that would be measured by standardized tests, thereby allegedly improving standardized test scores. First, in my values system, putting standardized test scores above everything else in education is a terrible approach that dismisses the value of the whole child. Second, significant amounts of research does not even support the idea that drilling kindergarteners in math and literacy for extended periods of time is the best way for them to learn math and literacy. Third, even if you as an education professional believe, truly believe, that this is the best way to educate kids, if you're a district leader and you can't or won't bother to try to convince your district's educators and caregivers that this is a good idea, you're not much of a leader, are you? But a reason not to try to bring people along to support your policies might be that you know it can't be done because they have principled, informed objections to your policies, and it's just easier to try to silence their objections than overcome them.

We all screw up. We all need the benefit of the doubt – the assumption of good intentions – sometimes. But when people in positions of power try to quiet criticism of their official acts by demanding to be treated as if they're a friend who showed up late or a spouse who forgot to put the trash out, that's just a demand to be allowed to evade responsibility for doing their jobs. And it goes much higher than school district leadership.

The signs are that over the next four years we'll see Democrats screwing up constantly in their responses to Trump and Elon Musk and the rest of them. We'll see the likes of Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Bernie Sanders thinking they can be clever by saying "I think Trump/Musk/whoever has a point about government spending – what about the defense budget?" You're not hoisting them on their own petard, guys, you're just validating them. We'll see Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calling for bipartisanship in an effort to look serious or whatever, but mostly showing that he shouldn't be leading a damn thing. And at a certain point, when the same powerful people keep screwing up in the same ways time after time, if it comes down to a choice between thinking they are incompetently executing good intentions or competently executing bad ones, at a minimum it does not make sense to assume that the intentions are good. That doesn't mean they want to help Trump. But if they cannot or will not see where their actions are ineffective at actually opposing Trump, it's reasonable to assume something else – personal ambition, the desire for praise from one source or another, fear, discomfort with bruising norms even as the other side is shattering them – is at play.

And our responses, even to people who are technically on our side, may change if we refuse to continue extending the assumption of good intentions.