Wait. Did Education Reform Just Become Inescapable?
If the idea of giving local school leaders more room to innovate while holding them accountable for academic improvement sounds familiar, it should.
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The Washington Post鈥檚 Jennifer Rubin not that long ago arguing that Democrats have an opportunity on K-12 issues:
鈥淒emocrats would be wise to reclaim the issue of K-12 education, starting with a recognition that the United States has long been falling behind international competitors and suffered another blow with COVID. They might consider a multipronged approach at both the state and federal levels.鈥
Rubin鈥檚 argument is intuitive: there鈥檚 that the pandemic left U.S. kids reeling. There鈥檚 also proof that American families are about their kids鈥 and progress.
As kids struggle, as parents and caregivers fret, some prominent conservatives are currently exploring whether public schools can be meaningfully improved if we give enough families public for private schools and/or if we can figure out precisely which books to ban. These are not serious responses to the problems 鈥 and anxieties 鈥 most American families face. Democrats would benefit if they offered something more substantive than this low bar.
But what? Rubin suggests a three-pronged framework. Democrats should:
- Push for significant education funding increases
- Pay teachers better and hold teacher-candidates in training to higher standards
- Decentralize more decision-making authority to school districts who are willing to draft innovative plans for reaching 鈥渢he goal of educational excellence, mastery of subject matter and parental satisfaction.鈥
It鈥檚 a reasonable starting point. . Teacher pay is low, , and it hasn鈥檛 increased enough . U.S. teacher training programs are not particularly effective, when it comes to candidates to .
The educational benefits of decentralization are less obvious: U.S. history is pretty clear that local control of schools often sustains inequities and fosters civil rights abuses. Absent top-down pressure to focus on equity, () decisionmakers regularly to decisions that are convenient, comfortable and bad for historically marginalized communities.
Funding inequities generally thrive under . The erosion of federal pressure to integrate schools gave local authorities room to resegregate schools through , and other surreptitious changes. Combine these trends, and it鈥檚 easy to see how funding inequities are systemically racialized鈥攊t鈥檚 easier to underfund children of color鈥檚 educational opportunities when Black and brown children have been concentrated into segregated campuses.
Still, there鈥檚 some promise in a governance approach along the lines that Rubin suggests: giving local authorities more room to innovate on process while holding them accountable for showing evidence of academic improvement.
But wait. Does that idea sound familiar? It should. Arne Duncan, President Obama鈥檚 first secretary of education, as 鈥渢ight on goals, loose on means.鈥 This 鈥渢ight-loose鈥 approach is also a key facet of the public charter school model .
This is the trouble with the opportunity that Rubin outlines: her 鈥渘ew鈥 education platform for Democrats sounds an awful lot like the () education reform movement. The playbook sounds a whole lot like Duncan鈥檚 old reform one: with tighter goals and more flexibility for how schools and districts reach them.聽
Same goes for Rubin鈥檚 push to raise teacher pay and standards鈥攖hat鈥檚 an echo of core reform initiatives like . And the reformers over at have been pushing to improve teacher preparation programs for years.
Say it plain: that鈥檚 why Democrats will struggle to as a political issue. Even though education reform is politically stalled after a decade of criticism 鈥攁nd the utterly toxic embrace of and Donald Trump 鈥 there鈥檚 no alternative, actionable progressive slate of ideas to improve schools.
It鈥檚 true that Democratic policymakers have some education policy ideas. and other blue places have launched models for community schools offering 鈥渨raparound鈥 social services like health, nutrition, dental and career-training services. Early education investments like universal pre-K remain popular with progressives (and several conservatives).
But none of these progressive ideas provide a theory of action to address unfairness and dysfunction in K鈥12 schools. They鈥檙e all 鈥淰ery Good Things鈥 with solid evidentiary support from prior studies (and support from reformers like Duncan and Rhee, incidentally). They just don鈥檛 address the core challenge of improving 鈥 you might even say, 鈥reforming鈥濃 the foundations of elementary and secondary education in the United States.
Why is this so difficult? It鈥檚 partly because reform鈥檚 ideas aren鈥檛 as substantively useless as their political unpopularity suggests. For all the angry about standardized tests, for instance, they generate data that protect and provide key proof points for lawsuits identifying how states鈥 or districts鈥 school funding choices harm families of color.
The real reason that progressives can鈥檛 quit reform, though, is that we haven鈥檛 yet figured out how to dissolve a core tension in our public education thinking. On the one hand, progressives have grown 鈥 correctly 鈥 suspicious of the structural biases built into public systems. On the other hand, progressives are prone to waxing nostalgic about the fragile, diminishing greatness of American public schools. Many of us tend to imagine that this system was, at some point before No Child Left Behind or Teach For America or the Reagan administration, etc., a shining exemplar of democratic investment in fairness and social mobility.
This tension makes progressives stalwart defenders of public education as a concept, so much so that we generally resist efforts to substantially overhaul its governance as “attacks on public education.” But it鈥檚 also clear that the long history of American public education is saturated with examples of schools replicating and amplifying social inequities. Some of the most sacred elements of American public education have reliably served as toxic firewalls against progress towards racial justice in the United States.
To move beyond education reform, progressives need to face this uncomfortable incoherence in our thinking. Our post-reform public education platform can鈥檛 just be about adding grades in the early years and enveloping K鈥12 schools with more social services. Sure, public schools could use deeper resources and broader systems of support. But many of the central mechanisms of the K鈥12 system are themselves unfair against communities of color, low-income families, linguistically diverse children and other historically marginalized groups. Schools won鈥檛 serve those students better without being made to do so.
If Democrats want the political benefits of credibility on public education, they need to center, and solve for, those inequities. And if their best proposals for doing so keep circling back to education reform ideas, perhaps that鈥檚 a hint that they abandoned that movement too early.
Dr. Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and a partner at the Children’s Equity Project. He is also a working father with three kids. These views are his alone, and are not necessarily shared by his employers鈥攐r his kids.
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Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Previously, Williams was the founding director of New America's Dual Language Learners National Work Group. He began his career as a first-grade teacher in Brooklyn. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master鈥檚 in science for teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College.
