Cate Eland

@romancingnope

Intrusive, intense, and annoying. she/her

1,020 Following2,045 Followers8,387 Posts

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Cate Eland@romancingnope· Jul 13

So Lindsey Graham was the human sacrifice required to resurrect Mitch McConnell. Got it.

Mitch McConnell and his wife, former Sec. of Labor and Sec. of Transportation, Elaine Chao. McConnell is smiling in a hospital bed wearing a button down and jeans, holding a current newspaper.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· Jun 25

To be an out lesbian who professionally writes about queer culture and to say this during PRIDE, of all fucking things, is blowing my mind. You have a job where you can be open about your sexuality because decades of LGBT+ people refused to be quiet, to hide, or to go back into the closet.

I also think about this in terms of representation, where on the podcast we’ve been more skeptical of the value of representation and “firsts” and stuff in movies. The “exclusively gay moment” in Disney movies or, like, people breaking the glass ceiling or whatever the gay version of that is—the mesh ceiling. I don’t think that’s doing the most for us either. It turns out representation in politics only really does a lot when you have a robust and functioning democracy, which we don’t really have right now. And so while I think it’s certainly valuable to have queer and trans people at the table in politics, I’m just a little skeptical that it’s done much for us.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· Jun 25

I'm so fucking tired of white cis LGBs who don't know know the decades of brutal public policy and discrimination their elders endured *for them* to live openly, but are the biggest beneficiaries of that activism and sacrifice of their elders while throwing their contemporaries under the bus.

On the other hand, I completely agree with you, Bryan, that visibility—for trans people who just wanted to live their lives, not necessarily stealth or anything, but literally just live without being a political movement and a hyper-politicized identity and an issue—visibility has been terrible. And I’ve been thinking a lot about why it was so different for LGB people, because that was Harvey Milk’s big strategy, to come out, and it worked. That was why the gay rights movement wasn’t quashed in its early stages, because people came out and everyone realized, like, Oh, queer people are all around us and they’re, like, pretty OK, or at least as OK as cishet people.

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But I think trans identity really threatens the underpinnings of gender and gender hierarchy in a way that gay identity only kind of brushes up against. And you can see that in the issues that the right has pinpointed, like gender-segregated spaces, sports, and bathrooms, and for a political movement that is really invested in a gender hierarchy and gender norms, transness is super threatening. They can make the argument that “This really threatens our way of life” in a way that gay marriage or whatever doesn’t, where you just have to kind of don’t pay attention to that if you don’t want to.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· Jun 23

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reed Charles O'Connor (born June 1, 1965) is a Republican activist chief United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. He was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2007.

Critics claim that O'Connor has become a "go-to" favorite for conservative lawyers, as he reliably rules against Democratic policies and for Republican policies.[1][2] Attorneys General in Texas appear to strategically file cases in O'Connor's jurisdiction so that he will hear them.[3]

O'Connor has widely been described as conservative, and many[vague] of his rulings have been reversed on appeal.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· Jun 22

This is the crux of it, isn't it? Democratic party leadership fails even to inspire their most faithful, enthusiastic voters, shuts them out of the conversation when they ask questions, then doubles down on the shit message that's not even working with their loyal base when pushed. "We know better!"

When I reached out to Clyde, the Ohio Democrats chair, to ask about her experience at the GRR meeting, and about what specific lessons Democrats have learned since 2024, her office sent back a statement that did not directly address any of my questions. “Ohio Democrats are laser-focused on lowering costs, protecting Ohioans’ freedoms, and getting our state and country back on track,” the statement attributed to Clyde stated. “Ohioans of all political backgrounds are getting involved with our Democratic candidates because of the strength of their winning message.”

Cate Eland@romancingnope· Jun 18

Look at this shit.

Weather report for today, June 18 in Austin, Texas:

12 pm, it's 87° but the humidity is 81% and the Feels Like is ONE HUNDRED FIVE DEGREES.

WTAF?!

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 30

So what are these big, bold ideas Project 2029 is putting forward as a rebuttal to Project 2025's 900-page behemoth of nightmare fuel and corruption? The same boilerplate bullshit that's been in every Dem spam mailer begging for cash for the last decade.

01
Reward Hard Work
Our economy should reward hard work and not just huge wealth. We need to rebuild the ladder of opportunity for Americans and for American communities getting left behind.

02
Give Americans Their Government Back
In today’s Washington, wealthy and well-connected people and interests call the shots and drown out the voice of the people. Government needs to work for everyday Americans – and it just plain needs to work by delivering real progress.

03
Restore Law and Order
No one should be above the law – whether they’re on the street corner, in the corner office, or in the Oval Office. It’s time we strengthened our laws and our law enforcement to crack down on dangerous criminals, corporate wrongdoers, and corrupt public officials.

04
Make America Affordable Again
Americans are working harder but still finding it harder to make ends meet. They’re getting crunched by rising costs for housing and health care and squeezed for time as they try to take care of their kids or parents. We need to give them a helping hand and stop corporations from ripping them off.

05
Jumpstart Economic Growth
America needs to win the global race to make sure the jobs and technologies of the future in areas like AI and clean energy are here at home. New innovations need new rules of the road so that we protect consumers, lower prices, and stop big businesses from stifling entrepreneurs and competition.

06
Protect America’s Security and Prosperity
It’s time for a new global agenda to open the doors of global economic opportunity for American workers and business and to ensure America stands on the side of democracies and not dictatorships.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 24

Every election cycle

Distracted boyfriend meme where the Boyfriend is labeled "Democratic party", is ogling a girl in a red dress labeled "Republican voters", while the girlfriend who is dressed in blue and staring in disbelief at her boyfriend is labeled "Democratic voters".

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 24

Genuinely, why do people who feel like this--and this take bubbles up every few weeks--stay here? I'm here because I like it. My friends are here. I like the content. I'm not on X because it had stopped being fun to me. Why be in a place you don't like being?

‪Corey Atad‬
and fwiw, the users are definitely the problem here, because in a way it's why they came here. to escape the constant, ugly drama of other sites and protect against that. but the platform itself is a problem. so much effort toward self-moderation has meant a culture of people talking to themselves.

‪Corey Atad‬
when this critique is made, it often feels like it's about politics, like the answer is to just let the Nazis on here, but that misses why X, despite it all, is still a more fun place. it's because the "no fucks given" style there means *more* willingness to engage in roiling, exciting conversation.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 21

So many words to say nothing.

Finding our way back to this level of success will not be easy, and it will not happen overnight. But the reason we will win is twofold. The first is that we do not plan to advance alone. Winning Anywhere is the shared mission and purpose of the DNC and its partners. We will do the hard
work to reassess our strategies, our messaging, and our targets, and challenge our partners, including Labor and other progressive organizations, to hold us accountable as we move through the next ten years and beyond.

Secondly, once we win, we will ensure our newly elected and re-elected officials move consistently and decisively to instill faith and confidence in the American voting public. The rage of the voters, stoked daily by information silos, talking heads, and even politicians, has contributed to most Americans having a lack of confidence in both parties. Democrats must accept it is more important than to deliver on what they promise and then make sure our constituents are aware we are fighting for the things they care the most about.
We have to meet this moment with creativity, purpose, and openness. We must align our values with our investments to maximize the impact of our year-round efforts. We must reform our party’s structure and practices as the means to rebuild and reposition our party to re-earn the trust and confidence of everyday Americans.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 21

I just cannot believe that this is the product of a major national political party analyzing what went wrong in the last election cycle. The best parts of this read like an earnest high school essay. The worst parts are just not there at all. democrats.org/wp-content/u...

Effective parties, understanding history rarely repeats itself, it does often rhyme, make it a point to study electoral outcomes after each cycle to identify potential improvements to every aspect of their campaigns. John Adams argued “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right…and a desire to know.”
This desire to know, to understand what is going well and needs to be maintained, along with understanding what is not working and needs to evolve, is at the heart of any substantive effort to evaluate the relative impact of strategies and tactics tied to a specific election cycle and
specific candidate matchup in order to generate insights about what happened. A thorough review can provide a blueprint for future campaigns, establishing a series of “lessons learned” to drive continuous improvement in future efforts.
In this regard, the 2024 election was no different from any other. There were many dramatic moments framing the narrative of the national campaign, thousands of candidates seeking support from voters, and billions of dollars spent across the ballot and throughout the electoral
ecosystem to advance particular interests.
There are many books already written, and many more to come, presenting analyses of “what happened” for both sides, the efficacy of the strategies advanced, decisions made, and actions taken during the presidential campaign. These analyses, in order to present a thorough picture of the will of the people and the choices they made, must extend beyond the presidential campaign to include those strategies, decisions, and actions taken by other federal, state, and local candidates on ballots nationwide to examine why so many were able to succeed where others came up short.
Understanding that “little d” democracy is the will of the people and “Big D” Democracy represents the systems and structures in place to advance or inhibit the will of the people, there must also be a review and analysis of the

Why Now?
Democracy is a very old institution, and yet what keeps democracy going is the ability of those who seek to lead to look at the data and determine the source of success as well as setbacks. This after-action report specifically aims to identify and elaborate upon the actions the Democratic Party must take after what happened in the 2024 cycle. The report identifies the programs and priorities for consideration and implementation to build our Party to win over the next ten years, and to again become the party of the people well into the future.

This report includes a thorough evaluation of voter behavior in the context of the individual-level collection of voter contact data and localized demographic data. The analyses aim to identify gaps in participation, determine the correlation between the frequency and distribution of partisan voter contact, and

Executive Summary is highlighted with a line to an outlined red box that reads "This section was not provided by author."

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 17

The rocketship Gen Z is being offered a seat on:

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 16

This paragraph about parent outrage at their kindergarteners stuck out to me. Not only do parents not know how the data being collected from their children is being used, but also, no one knows whether the use of ed tech will be helpful or harmful in the long-run*.

When Pelz, Dugan’s wife, came to the microphone, she had her young son in her arms and her kindergarten-age daughter at her feet. “You are experimenting on our children,” she told Chancellor Samuels. School administrators are telling parents “that AI is inevitable,” she said, but when Pelz asked about specifics, no one had answers. How are AI-based learning programs learning from her children? What do the programs really help her kid learn? “If it is so good for my children, why is it a secret?” she asked. Every few sentences, she shifted her son, now sucking his thumb, back onto her hip. She warned of a “groundswell” of rage from public-school parents as the city stocks classrooms with AI-enabled screens: “My kindergartener has been given an iPad. It came home in her backpack. Shame!”

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 13

The solutions offered up? Boosting attendance, identifying students who need more targeted support, and teaching reading with phonics instead of the whole language approach. All of these are legitimate.

Superintendent Brawley credited a number of other strategies, including giving short, weekly quizzes to assess student learning and using the results to identify students who need tutoring. The tutoring happens during the school day — not after school — an approach he says is crucial for reaching the neediest students.
Washington, D.C., another district with test score gains, has also invested in tutoring, and was an early adopter of the science of reading, which emphasizes direct, sequential teaching of phonics, vocabulary and other skills.

The new report found that science of reading reforms were necessary, but not sufficient, to improve scores. Only states that had embraced science of reading reforms showed improvement from 2022 to 2025 — yet not all of those that did saw gains.
Washington, D.C., has also taken more unusual measures trying to find “the right recipe,” said Lewis D. Ferebee, the chancellor. Teachers who are deemed highly effective, a rating that includes raising test scores, are eligible for bonuses up to $25,000. Teachers receive a bigger bonus for working in the highest-need schools.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 13

To be clear: the evidence shows that when students have less access to personal devices at school, there is no improvement in their performance.

It’s harder to keep students’ attention, even after the district banned personal phones and smartwatches during the school day, said Sharon Schaefer, assistant to the superintendent: “We know screens are so stimulating to our students.”

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 13

Most schools who are no longer teaching full texts are doing so because they are trying to teach kids to pass standardized tests, which require reading *passages* not books. But let's not talk about how standardized testing is fucking up education. Let's blame it on iPads.

In turn, schools expect less from students, assigning fewer whole books and simplifying the curriculum, said Carol Jago, associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 13

Up next: we're going to blame kids spending too much time on screens. Is there evidence to back this conclusion? No. Are we going to argue it anyhow, because "kids these days"? Yes, yes, we are.

Few rigorous studies have teased out the role of devices in academic outcomes. Yet educators say there’s no question that swiping has decreased students’ focus and persistence, and time on devices has displaced time spent reading or studying. Far more teenagers — nearly one in three — now say they “never or hardly ever” read for fun.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 13

So what does the NYT see as the root of declining test scores? The roll back of NCLB and thus the notion that accountability pressures on schools and teachers lowered. Nevermind that NCLB was *replaced* with ESSA, which shifted accountability responsibilities to the states.

The end of federal accountability
Some experts believe that the end of No Child Left Behind, the contentious school accountability law signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, explains some of the recent test score declines.
The law set a goal that all students would be proficient in reading and math, and schools that did not show progress could face penalties. It coincided with a period of rising test scores, especially in math, though reading scores improved more modestly. Low-performing students saw the biggest gains.
The law, though, was deeply unpopular with many educators and parents. Critics said it put an outsize focus on testing, pushing schools to teach to the test and spend less time on other important subjects, like the arts or social studies. In 2015, Congress replaced it, and many states dialed back on requirements.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 13

This data is based on the Education Scorecard, produced by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. educationscorecard.org/about/ I'll want to go down the rabbit hole on funding and methodology of this later.

Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score data released Wednesday by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford.
Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 13

I wonder if the loss of $600+ billion in public education funding since 2016 will be mentioned in this article. My money is on no, but I would love to be proven wrong.

The New York Times

The Upshot

Your School District Is Probably Scoring Worse than 10 Years Ago
The drops in US scores go beyond the pandemic and cut across income, geographic and racial divides, new data shows.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 12

Higher education institutions with name recognition, massive alumni groups, and even more massive endowments will survive, not because of their football teams, but because they will continue to receive support from wealthy individuals and institutions and be a prestige target for potential students.

And the death of our current universities? What does that look like?
I think there’s contraction. The big flagships are going to stay the same, because they have the football players and all the other things. I’m at the University of Utah—I think it’s going to be fine. We’re going to pick up the lifeboats from the places that crumble. But, ultimately, at the very top, presidents and provosts are going to have to understand that expertise is their mission. Yale, even, went back to making their mission statement about knowledge, not about making a better world. We’re not in the making-a-better-world game anymore. We’re in the knowledge game, and that means getting rid of some of the feel-good stuff. ♦

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 12

1) Why is education portability a problem in the first place? 2) If you support specialization, it seems like the ability to transfer would be a massive benefit, because it means students can change schools when their need/desire for specialization changes. So what's the objection?

I think there’s going to be some move-fast-and-break-things. Parents are going to have to stop asking, “If my kid starts here and it doesn’t work out, will they be able to transfer?” That question has to end. That question is the problem. If you start approaching education as portable, transferable to other institutions, then you’ve already not bought into what you’re buying. The kid needs to think, I want to study with this person who knows these things so that I can learn those things, in a kind of apprenticeship model.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 12

The Alpha School is a massive grift that claims AI can teach kids at a wildly exorbitant cost to parents. It's not even AI education. It largely leverages non-proprietary, non-AI digital education software, like IXL (which is used in many public schools, including Austin ISD), to "teach".

But what I think will spring up are these small institutes. I spent some time with the Alpha School people in Austin—that’s pre-K through eight, two hours a day on A.I., and then enrichment. I think that can be scaled up for higher ed. I wrote a piece called “The Two-Minute Mile Problem” on what that would look like. Why does it have to be four years? Can you get through faster? Can you get student loans that are based on semesters, if you get through everything in eighteen months?

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 12

I went to the UT Austin in the Vince Young era. It was a top research university, but also a famous party school with an amazing football team and a massive Greek presence. Again, do I have some news for you about why kids were deciding to attend certain colleges 25 years ago...

What does the destruction of the current model look like?
Even right now, we’ve seen big institutions pivot to selling experience. The experience is still going to sell to a lot of people who can afford it—I’m getting the college experience, the frats, the football. You’ll get a lot of things that are very hollow. Maybe that will get you a job. But what I

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 12

The great middle of America is not going to be able to afford to attend college because of the rising cost of higher education and caps placed on student borrowing. This is a backlash to the democratizing of higher education and how accessible college degrees have become to those outside the elite.

Do you think an OnlyProfessors model would be good? That the dissolution of the vast majority of the higher-education infrastructure, with this replacing it, would be a good outcome?
I worry about where the great middle of America is going to go. I do think students are going to have to withdraw enrollment from schools unless things change. And I don’t think institutions are going to change themselves. They’re caught up in this bureaucratic system, this transfer system, these standardization agreements across state lines, so that anybody can move anywhere. The idea of delivering a standard education product is so embedded within the current structure that it will never change unless students say, “This is not what I want from going to college.” So, yes, OnlyProfessors is an alternative.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 12

I need a shower after reading this.

There’s a growing idea I’ve seen in some circles that college could be replaced by conversations between an A.I. tutor and a student. When I think about your model, I wonder why college even needs to exist. If I can just seek out a tutor, somebody that I like, and they just charge me a little bit, and we go through these edge-knowledge cases together, what’s the degree for? Couldn’t you, as Hollis Robbins—not only a specialist in African American sonnet traditions but also an idiosyncratic thinker on the subject of A.I. and the future of the academy—just set up your own shop?
I was in Austin, Texas, a couple of times in March with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old billionaires. This is what they’re looking at. Instead of having the credential from the institution, why not have the credential from the professor? If you have a Hollis Robbins education, what would that signal? What would that credential mean as opposed to a degree from a university? There was some conversation about what that would look like, and one guy at the end of the dinner said, “Instead of OnlyFans, it’s like OnlyProfessors.”

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 12

Ma'am, I have some news for you about how a whole lot of students were getting their information to pass their college classes 25 years ago...

They’re going to be coming in with a different baseline. Once upon a time, you walked into class and a hundred per cent of what was delivered to you was through your professor. Now, you go to a class, maybe you’ll do the reading, but you’ll also ask ChatGPT or Claude. And so your course content is already coming from somewhere else. This is a problem that higher ed has not addressed substantially. What does it mean for me to grade you on something where you got all your information from somewhere else and not from my reading list? That is a complicated question. The only thing that works is for us to get to the edge quickly.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 12

AI can definitely produce *a* paper on the poems of Marcus Christian. Will it be good? No. But the same is true of the quality of a paper AI can produce about, for instance, the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne for an Intro to US Lit class.

If I’m teaching a Harlem Renaissance class, and I’m going to deal with a poet like Marcus Christian, whose poems are obscure but who influenced everybody in a hidden way, the student I’m working with will have to do some work and produce a paper that A.I. cannot write.
Another example: if A.I. can begin to translate the Lenape language, or Miwok, we can know a lot more about stuff that we don’t currently know. I think that is all to the good. Obscure social science will go away, and edge knowledge that is pushing the frontiers of things that we don’t yet know will be in, pushed by A.I.-specialist faculty members. I think that’s the future.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 12

You can't move to the edge of any subject if you don't understand the basics. If you don't know the basics, you don't even know where the edge is. This is what the first two years of college are for, and you can't replace it with asking ChatGPT questions.

So, in my ideal vision of the academy, you’re going to be in class with a mentor who isn’t going to have to teach you Chemistry 101 but will want to quickly move to where the edges are, to do something new. Maybe they would decide together to 3-D-print some new material that has never been printed before, or what have you. Whatever they decide together will not be something every university is going to be able to do. It will be what’s particular at this place.

Cate Eland@romancingnope· May 12

1) Students already look for this specialization...in grad school. 2) AI can generate false information about African American sonnet tradition as easily as it can about US history or college-level Algebra. If we are equating reading a summary with knowledge, your specialization offers nothing.