here’s the thing that’s so hard to reconcile as i move into the last third of my life:
as much as i appear to my peers to overshare about my inner life, i feel like a tentative teenager when i consider the world i thought i would find myself in as an adult human,
growing up as i did on the expressive output of people whose writing i resonated with:
walt whitman, a.a. milne, gertrude stein, e.e. cummings, countee cullen, langston hughes, henry miller, anaïs nin, julio cortázar, charles bukowski, james baldwin, jack kerouac, allen ginsberg, frank o’hara, kenzaburō ōe, anne sexton, sylvia plath, audre lorde, angela davis, maya angelou, david bowie, jim harrison, erica jong, jim carroll, eve babitz, kate bush, prince, kathy acker, dorothy allison.
the world was supposed to be more gay, more unmasked, more nuanced, more accepting of complexity, more nonbinary. we were supposed to have seen through the inhuman demands of industrial capitalism. we were supposed to find ourselves on the other side of the world we had inherited. we were supposed to have embraced obvious but nontraditional solutions. we were supposed to have found family in people willing to be authentically themselves.
we were supposed to not get mad when someone disrupted the narrative. we were supposed to welcome disruption of the narrative.
instead, we find ourselves beholden to the productivity cult, to getting-things-done, to apologizing for oversharing, to wondering how to monetize our downtime and create passive income, to figuring out how to remain relevant. to deciding how many dead children are a fair trade. to fitting our expressions into a platform, our visibility decided by an algorithm. to sidelining the skills we invested skin in when we were young. to surviving in this economy, in the richest country the world has ever known. to choosing whether it’s worth the effort to just be authentic.
what. the. fuck. happened?
and why is what i am doing considered oversharing, when i feel like i’m late to the game, and barely scratching the surface, just saying the things i think are supposed to be obvious?
do you feel me? am i an old mf, shouting at a cloud?
I’m 60Mf (that’s how I’ve been indicating a male-presenting femme-relating person). I’ve always known that I’m different on the inside, and I’m so glad that it is becoming normalized to express ourselves about the nuances of our experiences relative to gender.
I’ve also recently been diagnosed AuDHD, and that has really helped me understand a lot about myself. None of the labels around gender or sexual orientation have ever landed in a way that gave me a feeling of “yes! that’s me!” but the term neuroqueer feels really right, and bigender has been feeling close enough since i’ve tried it on.
I’ve learned that I was living fairly unmasked through my 20s, but became very high masking starting in my 30s until recently. the way that that relates to gender, for me, is that i experienced a lot of cultural acceptance around gender fluidity in the social circles i moved through in my teens and 20s, but then a couple of things happened. i feel there was a cultural shift in the 90s back to more binary norms, which has kind of continued to this day. But then also, moving into my 30s i felt a certain need to ‘grow up,’ and ‘get with the program,’ so i tried to become as consistent and legible as possible, if that makes sense. As someone who has always been recognized as being ‘different’ or ‘off,’ i think i just kind of minimized those parts of myself that i recognized would create friction. A lot of my masking behavior I chalked up to ‘adulting,’ and just thought it was what everyone my age had to do to survive. It was only after I found myself in burnout and sought diagnosis that i started to understand that what i thought was adulting was costing me a lot of energy and was totally draining me.
I wasn’t, by any means, trying to make myself into a heteronormative male—i’ve always had more women friends and felt fairly unsafe in male-oriented spaces—but i just wasn’t out and proud about my nuanced self, and in intimate relationships there has been a lot of effort devoted to responding to what I now know was me not matching the expectations that my partners brought with them about how a male partner was supposed to relate.
With the diagnosis, i have decided to unmask as much as is possible and practical, while still trying to read the room and pay attention to when it is to my advantage to kind of disappear into my appearance, if that makes sense, and just not challenge people’s perceptions of me too much. Choosing my battles.
But mostly, unmasking has been great for my mental and physical health, and for many of my relationships. And that speaks to one of the ways I’m not trans (one of my offspring is a trans adult, so there’s a relationship to how the terms are different within our culture, even though they’re arbitrary social constructs).
Even though I experience the world in both masculine and feminine ways, both through my internal perception and through others’ perceptions of me, it feels safer to me (i have a lot of issues around relational safety) to live in the body that i have and to allow my inner feelings to be what they are, and not interfere too much in trying to conform to any specific track. In practical terms, that means that i recognize that for me to be perceived as either heteronormatively male or female would require a great deal of masking, and that’s just not something i’m willing to do anymore. I’m fine with the contrasts and contradictions of having both things going on within me at any given time, and i’m more and more comfortable continuing to be myself even when i recognize that who i am is confusing to someone i’m interacting with.
The result, at least at the place I find myself, might be described as a precocious girl or young woman who presents as a rather salty older gentleman, who is attracted to feminine people, regardless of gender, and kind of put off by performative masculinity and the feminine counterpart it attracts. I respond to any pronouns—masc, femme, neutral, singular, or plural—at any given moment. I try to tread lightly through the busy world of public life, and be as rambunctious and outside the lines as i feel with my 2 or 3 trusted people. In that regard, I recognize the privilege of masculine presentation, in terms of safety, and don’t take it for granted. I wish i could give every woman i know the opportunity to wear a giant mansuit out in the world, and feel the safety that comes with that. I need to go cry for a minute. Be right back.
I know this has all been about me. That’s because, you being young, I feel a responsibility to model how a nonconforming person comfortable with themselves describes their experience of themselves, at least one version of that. I don’t want to give advice, because we all have to discover our own way. I hope that this has been helpful, and i just want to send all the hopes—that you experience deep relational safety with at least a couple of trusted people; that you experience ’enough’ relational safety to test the boundaries of who you see and feel yourself to be and how that person wants to present themselves; that you find fulfilling work that sustains you; and that if partnering is something that you want for yourself, that you find your way to people who see you and accept you as you see yourself.
Part 1 in a series. In my study of what works in the effort to serve children’s needs and help them to become happy and healthy adults, I take copious notes. I find it helpful, occasionally, to compile and summarize these notes into a narrative. Why? Because my brain saves all of these notes, and may conversations are built from them, but sometimes the conversations don’t last long enough to articulate the internal narrative I’m working from. This series is an attempt to share my internal narrative, and open it to peer review. I take my notes from memory, and almost never cite sources. That being said, I invite the reader to connect any of the points made here to existing research and share their conclusions. This is a conversation, not a dissertation.
Most histories of American education tell a story of progress: a nation that began with schooling reserved for the privileged few, and gradually, through democratic idealism, reform movements, and federal legislation, built a universal public system open to all. That story is not wrong, exactly. The institutions changed. The rhetoric evolved. The paperwork became more equitable. But a careful look at each era reveals something more stubborn than progress: a sorting mechanism that didn’t disappear so much as go underground—moving from explicit, externally enforced separation by class, race, and sex to subtler forms of stratification woven into the internal logic of schools that called themselves common. What follows is a sweep of that history in roughly fifty-year intervals, with attention to who the system was actually built for, who it served, and who it left out—which is often, in retrospect, the same question asked three different ways.
Note: This is not original scholarship: it’s simply an overview in a legible timeline to point out trends and policies that have been covered in depth elsewhere. Let it be a springboard to deeper inquiry, rather than a document of record.
1750–1800: The Colonial Inheritance
Education for school age children (roughly 6-18) in colonial America was a class-sorted branching system with no pretense of universality. At the top sat the Latin grammar schools, preparing boys of means for Harvard, Yale, and William & Mary—a curriculum descended from European scholasticism, oriented toward ministry, law, and civic leadership. The classics of Latin and Greek literature, philosophy, science, and morals, for the purpose of the cultural reproduction of a specific kind of man.
Below that: dame schools, itinerant tutors, apprenticeships, and church-sponsored charity schools for the poor—when anything existed at all. Girls of any class were educated in domestic management. Enslaved children were legally barred from formal learning. Indigenous children were beginning to encounter the first missions, the early edge of a centuries-long civilizational assault framed, with grim consistency, as education.
The tracks were not hidden. They were considered natural—a reflection of a divinely ordered social hierarchy in which learning, like land, followed the contours of birth.
The baseline: Explicitly multi-track schooling sorted by class, sex, and race, with no universal access and no pretense of it. Classical grammar schools at the top; charity schools, apprenticeships, or nothing below.
Who benefited: White boys of property and standing, educated for ministry, law, and civic leadership. A small sliver of the population receiving a coherent, purposeful education.
Who was excluded: Girls of every class, enslaved people by law and violence, Indigenous children by conquest, and the white poor by economic circumstance. The majority, in other words.
1800–1850: The Republican Experiment
The new republic needed citizens—or at least a story about citizens. Horace Mann and the common school movement began making the case that democracy required a literate public. Massachusetts led: the common school—free, public, non-sectarian in theory—began to take institutional shape.
But common was relative. The common school was, in practice, for white Protestant children. It ran on rote recitation, McGuffey Readers, and moral formation. Its hidden curriculum was assimilation—to Anglo-Protestant norms of industry, deference, and civic identity. The revolutionary claim was not that everyone deserved an equal education, but that a certain kind of American deserved a common one.
The tracked system persisted beneath the common school ideal. Academies and preparatory schools served the wealthy. Apprenticeship and early labor absorbed the working class. Black children were excluded in most states. The Indian boarding school logic was beginning to solidify at the margins. The track had not been dismantled. It had been papered over with a rhetoric of shared citizenship that the structure declined to honor.
The baseline: The common school ideal emerges—free, public, non-sectarian—but applies in practice to white Protestant children. Private academies and prep schools continue serving the elite in parallel.
Who benefited: White Protestant children of the middle classes, given a common civic formation. Wealthy white families, still sending their sons to academies that fed higher institutions.
Who was excluded: Black children in most states, Indigenous children facing early boarding school assimilation, Catholic and non-Protestant immigrant families, and girls beyond basic literacy instruction.
1850–1900: Industrialization and the Sorting Machine
The Civil War and Reconstruction forced a brief, violent expansion of the common school ideal. The Freedmen’s Bureau established schools across the South; Black communities built educational institutions with extraordinary energy and sacrifice. Then Reconstruction collapsed, and with it most of those gains.
Meanwhile, industrialization was reshaping what schools were fundamentally for. The factory needed disciplined, punctual, task-following workers. Schools began to look more like factories: age-graded classrooms, standardized curricula, bells, rows of desks, a teacher functioning as foreman. The Prussian model arrived and was adopted with enthusiasm.
The Morrill Act (1862) began federalizing agricultural and mechanical education for white men. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in 1879, its founding superintendent offering the institution’s purpose in plain terms: kill the Indian, save the man. Education as cultural genocide entered its full institutional phase.
At the upper end, the private academy and boarding school circuit was consolidating—Exeter, Andover, the New England schools—feeding the Ivy League and reproducing an intergenerational owning class with increasing sophistication. Two systems, one called universal and one called elite, were producing what they were designed to produce: workers and managers.
The baseline: Public schooling becomes factory-modeled, oriented toward producing compliant industrial workers. The elite boarding school circuit consolidates in parallel. Indian boarding schools institutionalize cultural erasure as federal education policy.
Who benefited: Industrial employers, who received a trained and disciplined workforce. Wealthy white families, whose children attended institutions that preserved class continuity. Black families during the Reconstruction window, briefly.
Who was excluded: Black children after Reconstruction’s collapse; Indigenous children subjected to boarding school erasure; the white working class, offered schooling calibrated to their station rather than their potential.
1900–1950: Progressive Reform and Its Contradictions
John Dewey arrives with a genuinely radical vision: education is for democracy, for experience, for growth. Learning by doing. The school as a model community. It is widely influential and almost nowhere fully implemented.
What gets implemented instead is a managed version. Vocational tracking enters the public school officially. The Smith-Hughes Act (1917) funds vocational education, formalizing a two-track system within the nominally universal public school. The guidance counselor emerges—partly to support students, partly to sort them.
IQ testing, imported from France and rapidly weaponized by American eugenicists during and after World War I, provides the pseudoscientific infrastructure for tracking. Students are measured, sorted, and placed on trajectories—academic, general, vocational—that correlate almost perfectly with race and class, now laundered through the language of aptitude and potential.
The GI Bill (1944) produces a brief, anomalous democratization of higher education for white veterans. For Black veterans in the South, it mostly funds separate and unequal institutions. The common school ideal reaches its widest nominal coverage — and its most sophisticated internal mechanisms of stratification.
The baseline: Progressive ideals enter the discourse but the implemented reality is a tracked public school with academic and vocational lanes. IQ testing provides scientific cover for sorting students along lines that map closely onto race and class.
Who benefited: White middle-class families whose children were steered toward academic tracks; white veterans through the GI Bill; employers who received pre-sorted workers matched to predetermined roles.
Who was excluded: Black, immigrant, and working-class children consistently sorted into vocational tracks regardless of capacity; Black veterans largely denied equitable GI Bill access; students whose intelligences didn’t conform to the narrow testing instrument.
1950–2000: Desegregation, Standards, and the Accountability Era
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is the legal end of de jure segregation. The actual desegregation of American schools is incomplete, fiercely contested, and largely reversed over the following decades by residential sorting, white flight, and the systematic dismantling of busing programs. The ruling changes the law. It does not change the neighborhood.
The 1960s bring a surge of federal investment: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), Head Start, Title I—money flowing toward low-income students for the first time at federal scale. The rhetoric of equity reaches its legislative peak.
Then A Nation at Risk (1983) reframes the conversation entirely: the problem is not equity, it is excellence. American students are failing to compete internationally. The response is standards, testing, and accountability—a framework that will dominate the next four decades and fundamentally reorganize what schools understand themselves to be doing. The track hadn’t been eliminated. It had been internalized—Advanced Placement versus general versus remedial, operating within the same building, reproducing the same demographic gradients with slightly different paperwork.
By the 1990s, the private school market is mature and growing. Charter schools emerge, initially as experiments in progressive alternative pedagogy, and are quickly captured by a privatization logic that uses the language of equity to accelerate the defunding of public systems.
The baseline: Legal desegregation without structural integration. Federal equity investment in the 1960s followed by a standards-and-testing turn in the 1980s that reorients schools around measurable outputs. Internal tracking replaces external segregation.
Who benefited: Families with the resources to navigate the system — selecting neighborhoods, accessing honors and AP tracks, using charter and private options as public funding eroded the common school.
Who was excluded: Black and Brown students in re-segregating schools; low-income students in districts where property-tax funding meant unequal resources; students sorted into lower tracks from which upward movement was statistically rare.
Change Brings Resistance To Change: The Backlash Grammar (1970s–1990s and beyond )
Something important happens in the negative space between the equity legislation of the 1960s and the accountability turn of the 1980s. It is not an event so much as a reframing—a political and rhetorical operation that converts the modest redistribution of public educational resources into a story about unfairness to white families. Understanding this is essential, because the logic it establishes doesn’t stay in the 1970s. It is still operating now, in more sophisticated form.
The starting point is busing. When federal courts began ordering mandatory busing to achieve racial integration in northern cities—Boston, Detroit, Louisville—the resistance was immediate, organized, and often violent. The public argument was rarely made in explicitly racial terms; it was made in the language of neighborhood, choice, and parental rights. Families, the argument went, had a natural claim to the school nearest their home. Forced busing violated that claim. What went largely unexamined was the prior question: how those neighborhoods had been racially engineered in the first place, through redlining, restrictive covenants, and federally subsidized white suburban flight. The injury being remedied was invisible; the remedy was presented as the injury.
This rhetorical move—erasing the history that made a corrective necessary, then framing the corrective as the original offense—becomes the template. Affirmative action in higher education is recast as discrimination against white applicants who played by the rules. Bilingual education programs are framed as preferential treatment that disadvantages English-speaking children. Title I funding directed toward low-income schools becomes, in this telling, a subsidy that drains resources from districts that earned them. In each case, a policy designed to counteract a documented structural disadvantage is inverted and presented as itself a form of structural disadvantage—against people who had benefited from the original structure without ever having to name that benefit.
A Nation at Risk is partly a product of this climate. Its effectiveness is that it reframes the entire conversation away from equity and toward excellence—a word that sounds universal but lands differently depending on where you’re standing. If the problem is that American students aren’t competitive, then resources should flow toward competitive students. The logic of remediation becomes a drag on the logic of achievement. What looks like a neutral turn toward standards is also, in effect, a withdrawal of the equity framing that had briefly organized federal education policy.
By the 1990s, the backlash has acquired institutional infrastructure. Think tanks produce research framing school choice as a civil rights issue—using the language of the movement it is, in many cases, designed to undermine. The word merit does enormous work during this period, naturalizing outcomes that are in fact the product of accumulated advantage while delegitimizing interventions designed to account for accumulated disadvantage. The common school, already strained, begins to be discussed as a failed experiment rather than an underfunded one.
What this period seeds is a political grammar that the anti-woke movement of the 2020s will inherit and extend. The core structure is consistent: identify a corrective measure, strip it of its historical context, reframe it as an act of aggression against a neutral baseline, and then defend that baseline as if it were natural rather than constructed. Busing becomes an assault on neighborhood schools. Affirmative action becomes racial discrimination. Equity-focused curriculum becomes indoctrination. Diversity training becomes ideological coercion. In each iteration, the move is the same: the remedy is made visible; the wound it addresses is made to disappear.
The anti-woke movement does not invent this grammar. It inherits it, amplifies it, and applies it more broadly—extending from education policy into corporate culture, medical care, military service, and public accommodation. What is new is the explicitness: where earlier iterations maintained a studied neutrality, claiming only to defend fairness, the current iteration is increasingly willing to name its targets directly and frame the defense of existing hierarchy not as neutrality but as virtue. The mask, in other words, has come off.
The through-line is unbroken. Each generation of American education has produced a backlash proportional to how seriously it threatened the sorting mechanism. The 1960s reforms were serious enough to produce a serious backlash. The seriousness of the current moment’s reaction is, in that sense, a rough measure of how much was at stake.
2000–Present: Accountability, Austerity, and the Fracture
No Child Left Behind (2001) makes standardized testing the organizing logic of public education. Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) modifies but does not dismantle it. The school-to-prison pipeline becomes a named and documented phenomenon. The achievement gap becomes a major policy object—widely discussed, essentially unmoved across a generation of intervention.
The 2008 financial crisis produces a wave of teacher layoffs, school closures, and defunding from which the system never fully recovers. Arts, music, counselors, libraries—the enrichment layer is stripped first, and stripped disproportionately from schools serving low-income and non-white communities. The result is a system where the wealthiest public schools increasingly resemble private ones, and the poorest increasingly resemble management environments.
COVID accelerates every existing fracture. Families with resources exit into private schools, microschools, and homeschool pods. Public schools are left holding the highest-need students with diminished capacity. Remote learning reveals, without ambiguity, that access to broadband, quiet space, and adult support are themselves educational infrastructure—and that their distribution follows the same lines privilege always has.
The neurodiversity framework enters the mainstream slowly and unevenly. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (1990) established rights; the practical implementation has often been punitive, siloed, or institutionally self-serving. Genuine intercognitive design—building environments where multiple modes of being and learning are structurally welcomed rather than merely tolerated—remains the exception rather than the rule.
The baseline: A testing-and-accountability regimen that narrows curriculum while failing to move equity outcomes. Austerity strips enrichment from under-resourced schools. COVID accelerates stratification. Neurodiversity rights exist on paper; inclusive design rarely follows in practice.
Who benefited: Families with the wealth, flexibility, and cultural capital to exit the public system or navigate it selectively. Testing infrastructure companies. Charter networks with access to public funding and private governance.
Who was excluded: Low-income students in resource-stripped districts; neurodivergent students in schools without meaningful support; students of color caught in the school-to-prison pipeline; every family for whom exit from the public system was not an option.
The Through-Line
What looks, from a distance, like a progressive arc—from explicit multi-track sorting to universal public education—is more accurately described as the internalization of the track. The mechanism moved from external enforcement (separate schools by class, race, and purpose) to internal architecture (sorting within a nominally common institution). The rhetoric of equity arrived faster than the structure. In each era, the question of who deserved what kind of education was answered—consistently, if not always consciously—in favor of those who already had privilege.
Understanding this pattern is not an invitation to despair. It is an argument for looking at things precisely. Reform efforts that work within the sorting logic—adding a program here, adjusting a metric there—have had limited purchase because they accept the flawed premise.
What a genuine alternative requires is not a better version of the mechanism, but a different foundation: one that treats the full range of human cognition, culture, and circumstance not as a variable to be managed but as the very material of education itself.
We have been acculturated to the language of equity masking a reality that simply doesn’t add up.
When a business is telling you they pay a living wage, 9 times out of 10 they either don’t understand the term or they are gaslighting you. This is allowed to happen because most people don’t do the math, and most people over a certain age grew up in a very different ecosystem.
Living wage for the East Bay is $100,000/yr. Most people think that looks like a big number, but if you figure for living alone in a market rate apartment, current food, utility, and healthcare costs, $100k is modest at best. Living wage, then, if you factor in 50 40-hour workweeks, a living wage is $50/hr. It’s just that simple. So if you’re working anywhere that’s paying $20/hr, the only way that’s a living wage is if you have another job paying far above $50/hr to make up for the deficit that is created by working a $20/hr job. And it’s clear that most small businesses would not be able to pay the equivalent of $50/hr full time for most positions.
Life no longer adds up. When I was my son’s age, I could work less than full time at a cafe and pay all of my rent and bills and save money and travel a few weeks a year. My son works at an equivalent job, and doesn’t have enough to rent an apartment.
We can battle with small business owners all day. It doesn’t add up. That’s why everyone is trying to unionize, and getting tons of pushback. If we don’t solve income inequality, places like the East Bay will just become unlivable for the average person.
About tip culture: Because I’ve worked lots of restaurant and service jobs, I don’t buy into the “tipping as a reflection of service quality” mindset, and see tipping for what it is—a wage subsidy for low paid workers. Tipping-as-merit is a way to make the consumer think like a privileged person—the power to bestow and withhold is intoxicating, until you recognize the reality that low paid workers often simply couldn’t afford to work their jobs without tips factored in, because employers, due to margins being what they are, simply wouldn’t be able to pay what a worker needs to make without that subsidy.
Because it’s become part of the ecosystem, it buries a portion of the cost of doing business—in other words, consumers would be unwilling to pay the price that businesses would have to charge for goods and services if they reflected the actual cost of doing business. Understanding this, I automatically add 20% whenever I’m at an establishment where I know the workers are making a lower-tier wage; but first, I ask an employee how the management distributes tips—some businesses keep them outright, while others distribute them equitably.
I’m writing this as a person who has never earned what has been considered a living wage for the area. Rent control, beans and rice, and making sure to never become sick or injured are all that are allowing me to stay in the area.
Please vote! And remember that as long as capitalism doesn’t have safeguards that manage the ratio between the highest and lowest earners, things can only get worse.
I was recently trying to explain equity in education to someone who experiences language around equity as “mumbo jumbo,” (in their words). My mind makes analogies, and tries to find common ground. As we (me and my debate partner) are both Californians, my mind latched onto car culture—Americans love their cars, and California has a specific stake in the dissemination of car culture. Also, there is a deep relationship between car culture, social structure, and education culture, and, for reasons that will become clear, the Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, is a major player in this landscape, and works elegantly as a character in my story.
Thanks for bearing with my complex sentences. Neurodivergents love sentences with bonus content.
Recognizing that this metaphor might be helpful for others, I submit to you: the difference between equality and equity in education.
You have a central auto shop system, implemented around the country, set up by the Ford Motor Corporation when they were the dominant maker in the marketplace. You advertise that you will work on any make and model of car. That being said, when the shop is set up, the shop only receives shop manuals for the Ford Taurus. So for a while, any car that comes through the shop gets spark gaps, valve clearances, and timing settings for the Ford Taurus.
At some point, the vehicle owners, the shop managers, and the mechanics notice that all of the Tauruses that leave the shop are running great, but the Focuses, the Transits, the Broncos and Mustangs, along with Chevys, Dodges, Jeeps, Subarus, Kias, Volvos and Land Rovers are not running their best.
A shop manager from Ford comes in to investigate. “I see your problem right here: All of these cars are being tuned to Taurus specs. Where are your shop manuals for the other models?” They order the manuals for the Focus, Transit, Bronco and Mustang, and lo and behold, every Ford that leaves the shop runs at its best.
The other makes still have timing issues, are not firing on all cylinders, and experience electrical problems. The Ford Motor Corporation claims that this is evidence that the other makes are just deficient.
At some point, a team of independent investigators, with an understanding of the wider market, looks into how the shop is servicing its vehicles. They see right away that no shop manuals or supply chains are being made available for non-Ford vehicles. They submit their recommendations: that manuals, parts, and training specific to non-Ford makes and models be provided immediately, and that this will result in a) all vehicles being tuned to the proper specs; and b) all vehicles receiving appropriate parts, without the need for modifying inappropriate parts or fudging adjustments.
There are many Ford-only communities working on the same shop model, and all of their vehicles appear to be doing fine. The Ford Motor Corporation, having set up the shop model in the first place, with significant influence and a vested interest in their vehicles appearing to be the most reliable, moves decisively to thwart these findings and advocate for the Ford-only model to be enforced throughout the country.
A few communities that service a wide variety of makes and models adopt the independent investigators’ findings: they provide manuals and supply chains that ensure that all vehicles leaving the shop are running at their best.
The Ford Motor Corporation sees this as a threat to their ascendancy in the marketplace, and they advocate strongly that only Ford manuals and supply chains be standard, and that other accommodations are simply designed to steal market share from a native maker and transfer it to makers who are encroaching and have no claim to a place in the market.
They never point out that serving each vehicle to its unique specifications does not make Fords run worse—it simply ensures that each vehicle runs at its best. No one is asking that Chevys be supercharged, or that Subarus get special fuel injectors, or that Dodges get enhanced suspension. It’s just about servicing each vehicle with the appropriate parts and adjustments.
Equality is treating each car like a Ford Taurus. A move toward equity without actually achieving equity is treating each car as some model of Ford. Equity is providing the proper parts and tuning for every make and model that comes through the shop.
Equality is treating each vehicle the same. Equity is treating each vehicle like itself.
Someone who says, “but children are not as different as different makes of cars” has a fundamental misunderstanding of the trajectories that different children travel before they enter the education system. Some people have a vested interest in maintaining the appearance that every child has had access to the same resources and comes from backgrounds with the same cultural expectations. This is similar to maintaining the appearance that all cars are Fords. Only the Ford ecosystem benefits from this. By treating all cars equally (as if they were Fords) we are not treating them equitably (by giving them the parts and adjustments specific to their needs).
The Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, provides a good analogy for the foundation of our education system. Like Henry Ford, (the parent of the factory model of human organization), the people who designed the sorting system that is expressed in standardized testing in education were racists, eugenicists, capitalists, and anti-unionists. They designed a sorting mechanism that recognized the need for low-paid workers, middle managers, and highly paid executives, and devised a shop system that was predicated on labeling these social tiers early, and making sure everyone stayed in their lane.
Being a diverse and unevenly distributed nation, we have what are essentially Ford-only communities—communities that are predominantly white and culturally homogeneous—alongside mixed-make communities—communities that include a vast variety of different cultural and relational realities, as different as different makes of cars.
The culture wars around education are really an expression of different priorities regarding a variety of specific needs, and a breakdown in the translation layer between understanding the diverse needs of different models of vehicle and a variety of makes of vehicles—between communities loyal to the Ford ecosystem and open-market communities.
Since single-make communities exist, distributed throughout the country, there is a significant voice within the national conversation that advocates for the Ford-only model. Consider a variety of predominantly white Anglo communities throughout the US:
Provo, Utah
Bismarck, North Dakota
Owensboro, Kentucky
Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Rutland, Vermont
Southlake, Texas
Findlay, Ohio
Florence, Alabama
Altoona, Pennsylvania
Medford, Oregon
Alongside this homogeneous cultural distribution, just as widely represented and on the ascendancy, are the open-market communities, where a variety of makes and models are part and parcel of everyday life:
Dearborn, Michigan
Flushing, Queens, New York
Lowell, Massachusetts
Anchorage, Alaska
Houston, Texas
Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota
Oakland, California
Clarkston, Georgia
Garden City, Kansas
Miami, Florida
Viewed in this way, the culture wars we are experiencing are not so much about a competition for resources, but simply a difference in scale of specific needs. For those acculturated to a monoculture, there is a cognitive load required to understand the needs of a more diverse community. And this cognitive load becomes weaponized by actors who have a stake in maintaining a monoculture.
This is the Ford Motor Corporation’s most effective move: not the shop design itself, but the management of the conversation about it. By framing equity as a threat to Ford drivers, they redirect the legitimate frustration of communities whose own Broncos and Transits are sitting in the remedial bay—tuned to Taurus settings, diagnosed as deficient—toward the communities asking for their own manuals. The Bronco in Altoona and the Kia in Oakland are being failed by the same structure. They have been positioned as opponents. The people who benefit from the Taurus-only model funded that positioning.
The Ford Motor Corporation’s original pitch was simple: bring us any make, any model. We’ll get it running. Equity doesn’t challenge that pitch—it holds the Ford Motor Corporation to it. The independent investigators found nothing that undermines Ford’s stated goals. They found only that those goals were never applied fairly. Serving the Kia to its own specifications doesn’t make the Taurus run worse. It makes the shop better. The players in the open market that Ford made possible are simply asking the Ford Motor Corporation to honor the contract it wrote.
Equity is not the subversion of the shop’s mission. It is, finally, its fulfillment. Aren’t we better, together, when each is at their best?
In the early 90s (in my mid 20s), I was studying guitar at Musicians Institute in L.A. Our improvisation class was taught by a fusion guy with the obligatory curly mullet—nice enough, but also kind of a doofus. Our assignment was to bring in a recording of a guitar improvisation to listen to and analyze.
I was trying to understand free improvisation at the time, and I brought in this track by eastbay stalwarts (this was before I moved to the eastbay) Henry Kaiser, Hilary & John Hanes, with John Abercrombie. I thought it was ‘fusiony’ enough that the instructor would find some way to talk about the logic of the thing.
He cued up the CD and the sound came over the speakers. I could see his face trying to figure out what to make of it.
About halfway through, he turned the volume down, gave kind of a dopey smile to let us know he was kind of kidding, but mostly not, and said,
“You call that music?”
My (unknown to me at the time) autistic brain went into analysis-and-resolution mode, which can chew through a moment like this in milliseconds. Without missing a beat, my unconsidered response was,
“You call that a haircut?”
By which I meant no ill will whatsoever. I was just pointing out that one’s musical choices are not unlike one’s tonsorial decisions. But, of course, there wasn’t time to give the backstory of the decision-making process that caused my response.
There was a long pause. Then suddenly, the tension was broken as everyone in the room, besides the instructor and myself, erupted into laughter. The instructor and I just looked at one another with curiosity, awe, and a sense that we would be laughing as well if we were just witnesses, and not protagonists.
After that, thankfully, there were no hard feelings, at least that I was aware of. There was a quiet peace between us, even when I would ask overly complex (unknown to me at the time) autistic questions.
Actually, now that I’m remembering, he told me once after that that he had a dream where I was reaching my arms out to him, and pleading, “Daddy! Daddy!” I remember masking heavily (before I knew that was a thing), and trying to hear his dream in a neutral way, and not hear it as creepy, but to respect his experience, and not react.
Thankfully, that was pretty much the end of that episode of that story.
Some of you have made music with me over the years. You know what being in the room with me is like. Since my birthday is coming up, I’m hoping you’ll take a moment to hear what I’m asking for.
This past year, I decided to start something new. I wanted to nurture spaces that are explicitly neurodiversity-affirming. I wanted to make music that reflects the histories and cultures of the communities I’m in—not a fixed repertoire, but a living one. I wanted more instruments, wider age ranges, and a room that doesn’t sort people by developmental milestone or tax bracket. I wanted people to be able to attend as often as they like without paying more.
And I wanted to charge less than it costs to run the program, on purpose, knowing I’d be fundraising constantly to fill the gap. For years I taught in programs I couldn’t have afforded myself. That felt like a problem worth solving.
Enter imeetswe. We’re in our first year, and this is our Spring fundraising appeal. It would be a bait-and-switch to offer sliding scale classes and then only appeal at fundraising time to folks that are enrolled, so I’m reaching out to you. If any of this resonates—as a donor, a sharer, or just someone who wants to know more—I’d love for you to take a look, and share widely. Thank you!
Three conversations happen regularly in our community.
A colleague texts: “what are you charging for lessons?”
Another sends an email: “a school offered me this schedule and this salary—is that reasonable?”
A third says, in person, something harder to articulate: “I feel like I need to charge more for a private gig, but I don’t know how to explain why.”
These are not three different questions. They are the same conversation, framed in different contexts—and the reason it keeps coming up is that most of us learned to price our work by looking sideways at what others were charging, or by accepting what we were offered, rather than starting from what we actually need to live.
Our starting point needs to be what an artist (or other part-time gig workers) needs to live—not what any particular institution, context, or tradition has decided an artist’s time is worth.
Start with the number
A living wage in the Bay Area—meaning housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and modest participation in ordinary life—runs roughly $100,000 per year for a single adult. That number will be uncomfortable for some. Sit with the discomfort for a moment before moving on, because the discomfort itself is information.
The numbers bear this out. A one-bedroom apartment in Oakland or Berkeley—the most affordable corners of the inner East Bay—currently runs between $2,000 and $2,300 per month, with Berkeley averaging around $2,270 and Oakland around $1,980 for a one-bedroom. That is before utilities, renters insurance, or the reality that many working artists need a dedicated space for practice or instrument storage that a standard one-bedroom does not accommodate. In San Francisco proper, a one-bedroom averages $3,790—a number that effectively removes the city from consideration for an artist building a career from scratch.
Food for a single adult cooking most meals runs $450 to $600 per month in groceries, with monthly grocery bills for a single adult ranging from $400 to $600 depending on shopping habits and dietary preferences—and that figure assumes discipline and time, two things a fractured freelance schedule does not reliably provide. Add modest dining out and the occasional meal grabbed between gigs, and a realistic food budget lands closer to $650.
Healthcare is where the arithmetic becomes genuinely alarming for independent workers. The enhanced federal subsidies that had made Covered California plans affordable for freelancers expired at the end of 2025 and were not renewed. For those earning above 400% of the federal poverty level—roughly $58,320 for a single adult—the full unsubsidized premium now applies, which in many Bay Area metro plans exceeds $700 to $900 per month for a single adult on a mid-tier plan. An artist earning $100,000 gross is above that threshold. Health insurance alone, at the lower end of that range, costs $8,400 per year before a single co-pay or prescription.
Transportation compounds everything. An artist who carries instruments—a cello, a keyboard, percussion equipment, a sound system—cannot reliably depend on BART and a bicycle. A car means insurance, registration, gas, and maintenance: conservatively $400 to $500 per month. Going car-free is possible, but transit gaps are real—and the rideshare charges that fill them have a way of arriving all at once, on the weeks you can least afford them.
Then there is the tax structure of self-employment itself. A freelance artist earning $100,000 gross pays self-employment tax of approximately $14,130—the employer and employee share of Social Security and Medicare combined—before federal and California income taxes. Total tax liability at that income level runs roughly $30,000 to $34,000 annually depending on deductions. Take-home is closer to $66,000 to $70,000.
Run the budget: $2,200 rent, $650 food, $800 healthcare, $450 transportation, $200 utilities and phone, $150 in professional expenses—instrument maintenance, strings, reeds, music, scores—and $25 in renters insurance. That is $4,475 per month, or $53,700 per year, before a dollar of savings, before an emergency, before a plane ticket to see family, before anything goes wrong. At $66,000 take-home, what remains is $12,300—just over $1,000 per month—for everything else a life requires.
$100,000 gross is not wealth in the Bay Area. It is the arithmetic floor of a life that does not require choosing between healthcare and rent.
We are going to work backward from $100,000.
A sustainable working year for an artist looks something like this: forty working weeks, thirty hours of paid work per week. That is 1,200 billable hours annually—not the hours you spend preparing, maintaining your instruments, traveling between gigs, managing your schedule, or recovering from an intensive week. Just the hours a client is present and paying.
$100,000 divided by 1,200 hours is $83.33.
We’ll call it $85. The extra $1.67 per hour is not generosity—it is a small buffer against the gap between a clean calculation and a life that does not run on clean calculations. Instruments need repair. Gigs fall through. A student cancels the week you needed them not to. The $85 baseline assumes that a working artist’s year will be, in some measure, imperfect—and builds that assumption into the rate rather than leaving the artist to absorb it after the fact.
That is your baseline hourly rate. Not your asking price for everything—as we will see, some work warrants more—but the floor below which a straight hourly arrangement stops supporting a dignified life.
Not all hours are equal
Here is what the baseline assumes: that you work a relatively clean thirty hours per week during working weeks, with predictable scheduling, minimal dead time between commitments, and enough calendar continuity that you can plan your life.
Most of us do not work under those conditions. And the gap between the baseline assumption and the actual texture of freelance arts work is where the money disappears.
Consider three types of client relationships, and what each one actually costs you.
The single-hour client wants one hour, at a time that works for them, possibly in a location that requires travel, possibly with an instrument you have to transport. That hour does not exist in isolation. It brackets dead time on either side. It may strand you somewhere between other commitments. It requires the same preparation as a longer session. And if it falls in the middle of your day, it fractures the working block that might otherwise have generated two or three additional hours of income. A single-hour commitment carries a real cost beyond the hour itself, and your rate should reflect that. A reasonable premium is somewhere between twenty-five and fifty percent above your baseline—not punitive, but honest.
The contiguous block client offers two or more consecutive hours in the same location, without travel between. This is the condition under which the baseline rate makes sense. The overhead is amortized across the block. Your preparation serves multiple hours. Your day remains legible. This client is not doing you a favor—they are simply meeting the basic condition that makes the baseline viable. The baseline rate is appropriate here. It is also the floor. Volume alone is not a reason to discount.
The multi-block client—a school, a program, a recurring institutional relationship—offers the most, and should be asked for the most in one specific sense: not a lower rate, but a more useful schedule. An institution that can offer you Tuesday and Thursday mornings, consistently, across a full session, is giving you something more valuable than money alone. They are giving you a scaffold on which to build the rest of your calendar. Adjacent blocks from other clients can attach to that scaffold. Your week becomes a coherent structure rather than a collection of isolated obligations. When negotiating with institutions, the scheduling ask is as important as the rate conversation.
One of the most powerful things an artist can do for their own calendar is to stop building it around individual client availability and start building it around their own working architecture. This means choosing your times first—the blocks that fit your energy, your transit patterns, your instrument load, your recovery needs—and then inviting clients into those times, rather than the reverse. A client who asks “when are you available?” is asking a reasonable question. The answer that serves you is not a list of every open hour in your week. It is an offer: I teach Tuesday and Thursday mornings, in this location, at these times. Here is what is open. That framing is not inflexibility. It is the structure that makes a sustainable practice possible.
Group instruction fits naturally into this architecture, and it is worth saying plainly to prospective clients why. A group lesson is not a compromised version of a private lesson—it is a different and in many respects richer learning environment. Students in a shared setting learn not just from the instructor but from one another. A beginner watching an intermediate student work through a passage learns something about the path ahead. An advanced student asked to demonstrate or explain consolidates their own understanding. Mixed-age and mixed-skill groupings, far from being logistically inconvenient, replicate the way musical knowledge has always actually traveled—through communities, through listening, through proximity to people at different stages of the same journey. Peer-to-peer learning is not a pedagogical concession. It is a feature.
For the artist, the case is also straightforwardly economic. Three students in a ninety-minute block, each paying a group rate, generate more income per hour than one student in the same time—while requiring a single preparation, a single location, and a single slot in the calendar. The efficiencies are real and they compound across a well-structured week. When you share this with prospective clients, you are not upselling them or managing them. You are inviting them into a model that works better for everyone: for the artist who needs a coherent schedule, for the student who benefits from a learning community, and for the parent or patron who is, whether they know it yet or not, investing in something more durable than a transaction between two people in a room.
This framing belongs in your intake language from the beginning. Before the first lesson, before the first invoice, a prospective client should understand how you work—not as a disclaimer, but as part of what makes working with you worth it. Something as simple as: My teaching is organized around group and paired sessions, which I find produce better outcomes for students and allow me to maintain a sustainable practice. I’d love to talk about how that might work for your situation. That sentence does several things at once. It positions group learning as a pedagogical choice, not a scheduling workaround. It signals that you have a practice with a structure, not a collection of available hours. And it opens a conversation rather than closing one.
The Bay Area layer
Everything above assumes a relatively frictionless working life. The Bay Area adds friction at every point.
Housing costs are the most visible part. At $100,000 gross, after taxes, a Bay Area artist is navigating one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. The living wage figure is not generous—it is the minimum required to remain housed and functional.
Transportation compounds this. Getting from one gig to another takes longer here, costs more, and frequently involves carrying instruments or materials that make transit difficult. A lesson in someone’s home in the hills is not the same as a lesson in a studio two blocks from your house. The travel is real work, and it belongs in your rate calculation.
Space is the hidden variable most artists underestimate. When a client invites you into their home or their school, they are providing infrastructure—a room, a piano, a floor. When they do not, and you are expected to provide or rent space, the math changes dramatically. Studio rental in the Bay Area can run $40-60 per hour or more. That cost does not disappear because it is inconvenient to discuss. An hourly rate that does not account for space rental is subsidizing the client’s infrastructure out of your own pocket.
Finally, schedule density. The Bay Area’s geography and the complexity of people’s lives means that filling a room—building a class, a cohort, a consistent group—is genuinely hard. When you find a time and place where people can reliably show up, that configuration has real value. Protecting it is not rigidity. It is asset management.
A note on scheduling as access
Many artists in our community are neurodivergent—autistic, ADHD, or both. The overlap between neurodivergence and a life in the arts is not coincidental. The same pattern-recognition, intensity of focus, and sensitivity that makes the work possible also shapes what sustainable working conditions look like.
For autistic artists, regular schedules and replicable routines are not preferences—they are the infrastructure of functional work. Unpredictable scheduling is not merely inconvenient; it carries a cognitive load that accumulates across the week and affects the quality of the work itself.
For artists with ADHD, intense focus periods need protection on both ends. A schedule that allows for deep immersion followed by genuine recovery is not indulgence—it is the condition under which the best work happens. A scattered calendar of single-hour commitments spread across the week is, in this light, not just financially inefficient. It is architecturally hostile to the work.
This is worth naming not as a disclosure but as a design principle. A schedule built around predictable blocks, protected recovery time, and calendar adjacency is better for neurodivergent artists. It is also, it turns out, better for everyone. The neurodivergent case just makes the logic visible.
Bringing it back to the three conversations
Your colleague who texted asking what you charge: now you have a number to start from, and a way to explain it. $85 is the floor for a contiguous block. Single-hour work, travel, space, and schedule friction each adjust it upward.
Your colleague evaluating a school’s offer: the salary question cannot be answered without knowing the schedule. How many hours per week? Are they contiguous? Is travel involved? Does the schedule allow for adjacent income? A number that looks reasonable in isolation may not survive contact with those questions.
Your colleague who felt she needed to charge more for a private gig but couldn’t explain why: she was right. She was absorbing travel, instrument transport, space provision, and schedule fragmentation—and pricing none of it. The discomfort was her knowledge of the real cost, looking for language.
The discomfort was understandable. The words just needed to catch up. What follows is the language our community has been reaching for—a framework built not from what the market offers, but from what we actually need to live, work, and keep showing up.
Let’s take a moment to say something out loud: there’s a lot of terrible writing in the world; and a lot of terrible writing is one of the reasons many of our kids are not excited
to sit and squint and parse, under fluorescent lighting, at desks that wreck their bodies, in rows of kids, not allowed to wiggle or whisper or pat a beat to read along to. Somewhere,
someone decided that rhythm and rhyme were not important enough to take the time to craft. Here’s what that someone wasn’t paying attention to: Rhythm and rhyme unlock the neurotransmitters;
Dyspraxics, aphants, dysgrahics, and dyslexics are often able to entrain to a rhythm, or find a rhyme, if they know that one is coming: (you’ve hopefully had that experience, haven’t you?, when
the person reading leaves out the last word of the poem, and the word pops in your mind?) (If you haven’t, you should try it with a friend). When you recognize that the Odyssey and the Iliad
were part of an oral tradition, encoded in rhythms and rhymes, and familiar phrases, that invited memory to do the work of storytelling, passed from tongue to tongue for about as long
as Europeans have occupied the Americas– you might start to wonder which skills we should be focusing on, when passing information along to our kids, that we hope will be memorable.
You can do the human math–(I’ve done it, and with confidence can say what I’m going to say)–I guarantee you: many, if not most of the poets and writers of ages past were people
who would have, today, been branded as neurodivergent; for whom encoding a human event in a rhythm was just the way they knew their brain would remember it; and in doing so, made the event accessible
to shared, collective memory. ’cause if you listen, you’ll hear the way these bite-sized pieces flow; the calming force of human expectation, and satisfaction of expectation, over,
and over, and over, and over, and over again, like a crocheted blanket, wrapped around your shoulders, that your grandmother made in a ridiculously short amount of time. (who has time for that, these days?)
