The Building Bridges Initiative

Lessons from the Building Bridges Initiative: Don’t give up on bipartisanship just yet

By Amanda R. Aragon

September 14, 2023

As the Executive Director of an advocacy nonprofit focused on education policy, I deal with the ugly realities of a fractured political environment and their impact on our work to improve New Mexico’s education system daily, and to be honest, it wears me down. Since launching NewMexicoKidsCAN five and a half years ago, we have grappled with the politicization of some of our key policy issues, including accountability and school improvement, public school choice, and literacy instruction. All of which are policy priorities that can and should be discussed on their merits and impact on students, but are rather often discussed with political overtones and dead ends. On my worst days, I questioned whether my urge to find common sense solutions that bring people of varying political beliefs together to create a better education system for our country’s students was a pipe dream that I needed to give up.

This was one of the reasons I eagerly agreed to participate in the Building Bridges Initiative. I believed it would be an inspirational morale boost and a reminder that bipartisan progress was possible.

What I learned in the last year is that a bipartisan education agenda is not a pipe dream, but a viable reality, if we are willing to respectfully discuss lines of difference, make compromises, and put in the work.

I will admit that when the Building Bridges Initiative began our work to create and publish A Generation at Risk: A Call to Action, I thought that finding common ground and creating a compelling call to action would be challenging, but I never questioned whether it was possible. After all, though there were many people I had not met before included in the group, I knew we all shared a common goal: to enact bold changes to meet the crisis in student achievement and mental health and to lay the groundwork for a more responsive education system going forward.

One of our goals was to rebuild relationships strained by the growing political polarization in recent years. Though we all came from diverse areas and perspectives, we did succeed in conducting respectful conversations with one another and listening to each other’s views; no small thing in today’s world.

But nine months into our work, we were stuck. Our first attempt at a collective statement failed to garner support among the group, and revisions were fraught. Finding common ground on a policy agenda was harder than I thought it would be, given the wide diversity of thought within today’s reform movement.

This may sound overdramatic, but I was devastated. I was not upset that a report would not be published, but I was wracked with concern about what this meant for our collective work to improve America’s education system. If we—a group of passionate, motivated advocates—could not come to an agreement about what our next steps should be to ensure a generation of students is not left behind in the wake of the devastating effects of Covid, then what hope was there to find common agreement in the halls of Congress or state houses across the country? Was bipartisan reform really dead?

Despite disagreements and challenges, our group didn’t give up.

The months that followed were some of the best of our collective work. Issues that had been set aside had to be faced head on, with honest, direct, and respectful conversations. Fortunately, we as a group recommitted to finding common ground, with the understanding and hope that our example could inspire others across the political spectrum and across the country to follow. We ultimately created a statement that not only represents consensus, but that describes critical short-term needs (post-pandemic) and the education system of the future.

In that spirit, I invite you to join us in our commitment to work harder to erase political lines of difference in the conversation about education in this country. As we state in the report, “For too many years now, the education debate has been taking place inside echo chambers, in shouting matches, or not at all. We will only progress as a nation and meet this moment if we listen to one another and find great ideas from the left, right, and center.”

It is easy to view each other as the caricatures that extremists on both sides of the aisle want us to believe those with opposing views are. It is much harder to sit at a table, engage in conversation, and commit to finding common ground.

Call me naive, but I believe the latter is the path that will lead us to a productive future, a future that ensures that we do right by this generation of students and every generation that follows. Failing to do so would be a dereliction of our duty to provide our nation’s students with the education they deserve, the education they need to unleash their potential. I hope you will join us on this journey.

Amanda Aragon is the Founding Executive Director of NewMexicoKidsCAN, and a member of the Building Bridges Initiative.