Close Reading, Critical Thinking, and the New American Presidency

Any teacher out there looking for a writing assignment requiring writers to build an argument with a compelling thesis, a clear cause and effect chain, and incontrovertible evidence?

Instead of a literary work as the text to read closely, annotate, and critically interpret, students can find their thesis, their premises, and their evidence in the press. We have a perfect location in current events to launch a new assignment format.

Our current national predicament might be different if these sorts of tasks had been part of the ordinary curriculum since 2012 and the advent of the Common Core State Standards.

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On the evening of January 29, 2025, a catastrophic midair collision occurred near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. American Eagle Flight 5342, carrying 64 people, collided with a U.S. Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter carrying 3 people during its final approach to the runway. The crash happened at approximately 8:48 p.m. EST over the Potomac River.

The collision caused both aircraft to plummet into the icy river. The jet broke apart upon impact while the helicopter flipped upside down nearby. Tragically, there were no survivors among the 67 individuals aboard both aircraft. Emergency responders faced harsh conditions, including freezing water temperatures and strong winds, as they transitioned from rescue to recovery operations.

The incident was captured on video by a webcam at the Kennedy Center and showed an explosion in the river. Early reports indicate that air traffic control staffing was strained that night, with one controller managing duties typically handled by two people. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is leading an investigation into the tragedy¹.

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Competing arguments have arisen about the cause of the collision. The immediate mechanical causes await findings from a formal investigation, but the President of the United States, speaking before the cameras, proffered a particularly intriguing thesis, scraping off layers of text to read closely the layers that had been written over by time. Trump blamed Biden and Obama.

Former President Donald Trump attributed the January 29 collision over the Potomac to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring policies implemented during the Biden administration. Trump argued that these policies prioritized diversity over competence, lowering standards for air traffic controllers.

He claimed, “We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system,” adding that DEI initiatives led to hiring individuals with “severe intellectual disabilities” and other impairments, which he deemed unsafe.

Trump also criticized the Obama administration for initiating efforts to diversify the FAA workforce, stating that a group within the FAA determined “the workforce was too white” and pushed for immediate changes.

He emphasized that “competence” should be the sole criterion for hiring air traffic controllers, asserting, “It’s irrelevant what their appearance is… We cannot have average individuals in these roles.”²

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How about challenging our high school students to do some old fashioned critical thinking about the premises of Trump’s thesis? Let’s name them and see if there might be at least one weakness for each.

1. Premise: DEI policies prioritize diversity at the expense of competence.

Weakness: This creates a false dichotomy - it assumes diversity and competence are mutually exclusive rather than potentially complementary. High-performing organizations often benefit from diverse perspectives and experiences.

2. Premise: Current FAA hiring standards have been lowered due to DEI initiatives

Weakness: The argument doesn't provide evidence of actual changes to technical qualification requirements or performance standards. FAA certification requirements remain rigorous regardless of who applies.

3. Premise: The collision was caused by DEI hiring practices

Weakness: This constitutes a post hoc fallacy - attributing causation without establishing a direct link between hiring policies and this specific incident, especially before the investigation's completion.

4. Premise: Pre-DEI hiring practices ensured "only the highest standards."

Weakness: This romanticizes past hiring practices without evidence that they produced superior outcomes. Historical data might show safety incidents occurred under various hiring systems.

5. Premise: Workforce demographics should be irrelevant to hiring decisions.

Weakness: While merit is crucial, this overlooks how systemic barriers might prevent qualified candidates from traditionally underrepresented groups from accessing these positions in the first place.

This would make an excellent critical thinking exercise for students, I think, because it requires them to identify unstated assumptions, evaluate logical connections, research for facts like FAA hiring standards, and explore complex relationships between diversity and performance. With a politician like Donald Trump at the helm, material for teaching the making and breaking of arguments will be abundant.

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History’s manuscript bears the marks of countless rewritings, each generation scraping away at what came before, yet never fully erasing the ghostly imprints of past truths. Sometimes, when the light slants just so, we glimpse traces of those earlier tellings, whispers of discarded narratives, fragments of forgotten voices, shadows of lost certainties. Our present truth is written in a hand that trembles with the weight of all these layered meanings, each new interpretation both obscuring and preserving what lies beneath.

And still we write, adding our own layer to this eternal parchment, knowing that future hands will someday scrape our words thin and write their own, leaving us too as mere echoes bleeding through the pages of time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Here is a timeless example.

The American Civil War exists not as a single fixed narrative, but as layers of interpretation laid down across generations, each new understanding partially erasing yet never fully obscuring what came before. What began as battlefield dispatches and early histories penned by Union and Confederate participants gave way to the Lost Cause mythology of the late 19th century, its romanticized vision of the antebellum South seeping through subsequent historical accounts.

The early 20th century saw these interpretations challenged by revisionist historians who emphasized economic factors, while the Civil Rights era brought renewed focus on slavery's centrality to the conflict. More recent scholarship has unearthed the voices of formerly enslaved people, women, and common soldiers, their experiences rising like ghostly text through the accumulated layers of previous tellings.

This palimpsestic nature of Civil War historiography reveals itself in our evolving understanding of key figures like Robert E. Lee from Victorian paragon, to tragic hero, to skilled tactician complicit in slavery's defense.

Even seemingly straightforward events like the Battle of Gettysburg have been repeatedly reinterpreted, each generation finding new significance in the three-day engagement, from military turning point to democratic symbolism to environmental watershed. The very monuments erected to commemorate the war have become palimpsests themselves, their meaning repeatedly scraped away and rewritten by changing social consciousness.

In examining the Civil War through this lens of accumulated and partially erased interpretations, we begin to understand how historical knowledge itself is constructed, not as an objective singular truth, but as a dynamic interplay between past understandings and present perspectives, each new layer of meaning both obscuring and preserving what came before.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Donald Trump’s account of the cause of the crash over the Potomac provides a flagrant example of an attempt to scrape away writings from 45 years ago completely, making his DEI thesis not only self-serving, but middle school in understanding.

The 1981 mass firing of air traffic controllers under President Reagan has had enduring effects on the profession, contributing to challenges in staffing and working conditions that persist today³. While not a direct cause, these historical actions set the stage for systemic issues that may have influenced the conditions leading to the recent midair collision near Washington, D.C.

The Reagan administration’s dismissal of over 11,000 controllers and the subsequent ban on rehiring them disrupted workforce stability and weakened union power, making it harder to advocate for better staffing and working conditions⁴. Today, over 90% of U.S. air traffic control facilities are below recommended staffing levels, including Reagan National Airport, which had only 63% of its target staffing in 2023.

Reports confirm that the air traffic control tower at Reagan National was understaffed during the collision with one controller performing tasks typically assigned to two people. This reflects broader systemic issues caused by decades of insufficient hiring and training investments.⁵

The demanding nature of the job, lengthy training periods (up to four years), and high failure rates among trainees have compounded recruitment difficulties. These challenges were exacerbated by delays during the COVID-19 pandemic and inconsistent federal hiring policies.⁶

The decertification of PATCO (the air traffic controllers’ union) after the 1981 strike weakened labor protections and advocacy for improved working conditions. Although NATCA was established later in 1987, its influence has not fully offset these earlier setbacks.

While Reagan’s actions are not solely responsible for the collision, using Trump’s own logic, they are obviously relevant. The fact is the tower was understaffed due to hiring problems that contributed to a legacy of understaffing, fatigue, and strained working conditions in air traffic control—factors implicated in this tragic incident.

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The layers of history rarely yield their secrets to simple explanations, but this instance is a rare case. Trump's attempt to inscribe DEI policies as the cause of this tragedy reveals more about contemporary political narratives than aviation safety. Meanwhile, the inessential imprint of Reagan's 1981 confrontation with PATCO bleeds through, its consequences still rippling across decades of understaffing and strained working conditions.

Teaching students to read these palimpsests of power - to trace how past policies shape present crises - offers a more vital form of critical thinking than parsing literary devices in canonical texts.

When we challenge young minds to evaluate competing claims about aviation safety, labor rights, and public policy, we prepare them for the essential work of citizenship. Let them learn close reading by examining press reports, congressional testimonies, and historical documents that illuminate real-world controversies.

As much as I love the Bard, in the end, critical thinking isn't nearly so well learned from spotting symbols in Shakespeare as it is from spotting the machinations of a President convicted of felony fraud.

This type of critical thinking is about scraping away at manufactured narratives to reveal the complex truths beneath, about teaching students to question authority and demand evidence, about preparing them to be active participants in democracy rather than passive consumers of utter nonsense.

The text we must teach students to decode is the one being written daily in the headlines, policy decisions, and public debates that will shape their future.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Our persistent focus on interpreting literary fiction and nonfiction texts from the past—staying within the text’s four corners as literary critics—is necessary but not sufficient for democratic education, especially now with AI hovering in the background.

As much as it pains me to even think it, it may be too late to teach critical thinking relying on a free press. A more ‘pressing’ assignment could be a nationwide writing contest, debating the value of a free press in a democracy with no holds barred. May the most cogent argument win irrespective of the role AI played, cognitive offloading be damned.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_collision

2. https://www.newkerala.com/news/o/trump-criticises-biden-administration-dei-policies-aircraft-collision-559

3. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/over-90-percent-u-s-airport-towers-understaffed-air-traffic-controllers-data-shows/

4. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trumps-racist-rants-conceal-the-rights-air-safety-failures/

5. https://www.newsweek.com/air-traffic-control-staffing-shortage-dc-plane-crash-2024608

6. https://wtop.com/dc/2025/02/air-traffic-controllers-union-says-staffing-levels-are-critically-low/