I don’t like performative bipartisanship—those exercises where a foundation assembles a motley crew of “leaders” to craft a banality-stuffed joint proclamation. It’s the kind of self-congratulatory exercise that gives compromise a bad name.

Now, there are nuances here. I get the need for elected officials to find split-the-difference wording when crafting legislation. That’s their job. And I’m a big believer in respectfully engaging across our divides. Heck, that was the whole point of A Search for Common Ground, the book that USC’s Pedro Noguera and I penned a couple years ago. My problem is with vacuous virtue signaling, not good-faith engagement.

Here’s what I have in mind: I had a call a little while back with someone who’d gotten a lot of foundation money to organize a bipartisan group to tackle “green” education (how to teach environmental science, reduce education’s carbon footprint, and the like). They were going to address school facilities, curricula . . . the whole megillah. The organizer wanted to chat about how they should do this and get my reaction to the individuals they had on their target list.

Well, the names they shared included a slate of unapologetic progressives mostly drawn from the ranks of the teachers unions, academe, and advocacy. Meanwhile, the handful of putative “conservatives” were a mix of New York Times Republicans and folks who’d never once crossed my radar. The proposed co-chair was a long-retired, pretty obscure, semi-progressive Republican ex-governor from a blue state.

Now, this kind of tokenism might suffice if the goal is to provide political “cover” and issue a press release that includes names from the right and the left. But box-checking inclusion doesn’t actually supply insight into disagreements, surface hidden points of agreement, or buy credibility with a right-leaning audience. Faux bipartisanship actually sets you back by fueling the right’s cynical sense that we’re being disingenuously played yet again.

So I suggested adding a few people whom I regard as serious and more representative of right-leaning sentiment (spanning both the populist and more traditional varietals). I noted that there were places where one could easily find more such candidates, like the Heritage Foundation, Goldwater Institute, Hoover Institution, or Texas Public Policy Foundation. In response, I was frostily informed that they were seeking participants with “deep” expertise. I shrugged and just said that I was pretty confident that the options I’d mentioned were as knowledgeable about this stuff as many of the names already on their list. (That observation was not warmly received.)

This whole exchange was painfully familiar. There’s a decades-long dance in education in which funders or advocates identify a clutch of 40-yard-line Republicans and then pat themselves on the back for their bipartisanship and inclusiveness. Again and again, I’ve had a version of this conversation with funders and advocates who appear to think I count as a hard-core right-winger (people who know me and know much about the contemporary right find this amusing). I tell these good folks that they may imagine that I’m on the right’s 3-yard-line, but hard-edged right-wingers think I’m closer to the 25, or the 30. I don’t generally get the sense that they believe me.

Given the world they inhabit, I kind of get it. After all, as I’ve said many times, education is odd in that someone can support gun control, higher taxes, and abortion rights and still get labeled “right-wing” if they embrace school choice or oppose DEI mandates. The education community leans so far left that, for many of education’s smart set, any milquetoast Republican (or even a mildly heterodox Democrat) can seem right-wing enough. That’s how you end up with major “nonpartisan” organizations hosting education briefings for Congressional staff in which the left is represented by an Elizabeth Warren staffer . . . and the “right” by a former Obama official. (In the immortal words of Dave Barry: “I’m not making this up.”)

Potemkin bipartisanship is bad for a host of reasons. But I want to flag just three.

It provides a distorted view of what conservatives actually think. The result undermines the opportunity to identify points of agreement and craft solutions that will resonate on the right. If bipartisanship is not just about optics but also about getting things done, a failure to engage a huge swath of the American right makes it hard to change policy in more than 15 or 20 states (and tends to take federal legislation entirely off the table).

It means that school improvement efforts keep getting mugged by reality. Policies get shaped, messaged, and implemented in ways that fail to anticipate predictable problem points. If you dismiss right-wingers, or pitch your appeal only to the kinds of Republicans who appear on Morning Joe or NPR, you’re likely going to watch your efforts run off the rails in a way that will seem all too familiar to the self-assured champions of SEL or DEI.

And it perpetuates the lack of good-faith interaction between those in the field of education on the one hand, and right-leaning advocates, voters, and legislators on the other. You know all that stuff about bridge-building, inclusion, and forging trust? Well, this is the opposite of that. This is a recipe for teaching those beyond the 40-yard-line that they’re not wanted here.

Authentic bipartisanship is an admirable thing. But this Potemkin stuff? Not so much.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”