Ohio House Speaker discusses education priorities

Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder recently sat down with the Ohio legislative press corps to discuss his priorities for the year. Householder spoke about a number of education issues, including Ohio’s school funding formula, school security, and his belief that charter school management companies be limited to non-profit entities. In terms of funding, he’d like to see a simpler and fairer formula but doesn’t see a reason to directly fund charter schools.

Columbus charter school welcomes community leader

KIPP Columbus is currently conducting a series of leadership breakfasts, which give students opportunities to interact with successful community members like Mayor Andrew Ginther, Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, and (most recently) Ohio State University President Michael V. Drake. During his recent visit, Drake talked about leadership, decision-making, and the importance of one’s core values.  

Can charter schools deny students?

Shaelyn Macedonio of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) recently wrote a blog addressing the misconception that charter schools can deny admission to some students. She explains how charter schools, like all public schools, serve students regardless of their income, religion, or ethnicity.

Rebuild America’s Schools Act

The Rebuild America’s Schools Act, a $100 billion public school infrastructure proposal, was recently introduced in Congress. The proposal would help to address the nation’s critical physical and digital infrastructure needs while also helping to create over 1.9 million jobs. As currently drafted, charter schools would be eligible to apply. You can read the bill in-full here and access a helpful fact sheet on the proposal here.

Upcoming events

There are a few upcoming events to look forward to in the charter school space. On February 21, the School Performance Institute is hosting a workshop in Columbus and NAPCS is hosting a webinar on how opportunity zones can benefit charter schools. In addition, registration is now open for the National Charter Schools Conference, which will be held from June 30-July 3 in Las Vegas.

1. We told you a while back about a Toledo native and “herbal entrepreneur” (shall we say) who says he’s got a great plan to boost education in Frogtown and apparently plenty of green stuff with which to implement it. This week, dude went before the school board to hash out details. The Toledo Bud has the story. (Toledo Blade, 2/8/19)

2. St. Mary School in Elyria is in danger of closing after 160 years due to a funding shortfall. This piece from the Chronicle says that “more students” is the only answer, noting prominently that the school accepts students with EdChoice vouchers. But, seriously, bro, you sure that’s the ONLY answer? ‘Cause the good folks in Toledo could have a new vein you might consider tapping for some additional green. Just sayin’. (Elyria Chronicle, 2/8/19)

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In my last post, I described a demand-side approach to bringing evidence-based practices into schools by developing programs and processes that help educators ask the right questions and find new solutions that work for them. Now I’d like to tackle the supply side: the creation and marketing of tools, especially curriculum, that can help drive evidence-based change in the classroom.

While the Golden Age of Education Practice might still be a figment of my imagination, the Golden Age of High Quality Curriculum is here and now. That’s because a number of promising curricula have come onto the market in recent years, driven by the opportunity window opened by the Common Core. (And no, despite what you may have heard, that window has not yet closed. Most state standards are still very close to the Core.)

Here’s how Jared Myracle, Chief Academic Officer of the Jackson-Madison school district in Tennessee, puts it:

[A] few years ago, there weren’t many curricula aligned to the new standards. Fortunately, that has changed—education leaders describe a “curriculum renaissance.” I’ve seen that firsthand: All four curricula that we adopted in Jackson-Madison County became available in the last few years.

He’s right: According to EdReports, thirteen products have met its high standards for alignment and usability in elementary or middle school English language arts; ten in math. These include programs by nonprofit upstarts, like Great Minds’ Wit and Wisdom and Eureka Math K-5, EL Education Language Arts, and Open Up Resources Math, authored by Illustrative Mathematics, and as well as offerings from for-profits and legacy publishers, including American Reading Company’s ARC Core, Pearson’s ReadyGen and MyPerspectives, and McGraw-Hill’s StudySync. 

To be sure, reasonable people may dispute whether validation from EdReports, or other entities that review instructional materials, makes a curriculum “evidence based.” These new curricula haven’t been around long enough to have gone through experimental-design studies and demonstrated impacts on student achievement. But they are aligned to state standards, which themselves are informed by evidence, and have also been found by educators to be teachable in real-world settings. That’s something.

This raises a key question—one recently posited by my friend Rick Hess—about what we mean when we reference “evidence based practices.” Do we mean discreet teacher behaviors, like how best to instruct students on phonemic awareness? These are the sorts of practices you’ll find in the What Works Clearinghouse practice guides, or the National Reading Panel reports.

But another approach is to bundle a bunch of evidence-based practices and insights together into a coherent and teachable whole. When this is also aligned to academic standards—the what plus the how—we call that a high quality curriculum. Of course, there’s a risk that curriculum designers will stretch the evidence and make claims that can’t be defended; who doesn’t say that their pet curriculum is based on the best evidence? So until we can subject new curricula to experimental studies and check on the effectiveness of the whole package, the best we can probably do is rely on expert and educator reviews, like those from EdReports.

If you build it, they won’t come—not without a marketing budget

So let’s stipulate that schools and districts have an increasing number of high quality curricula to choose among, the kind that do a solid job incorporating evidence-based practices and that track the academic standards states have adopted. Surely these programs are sweeping the country, right?

Sorry. As far as I can tell, only 10–15 percent of districts are using the good stuff today. And while that portion may rise somewhat with time, as textbook adoption cycles come around, or as states follow Louisiana’s lead and make buying the good stuff easier, we’d be nuts to think that the non-profit upstarts in particular will be able to compete without a serious investment in sales and marketing.

Even medicine, which many evidence-based-practice enthusiasts look to with envy, has a challenge with the adoption of new and proven methods. And that’s even though doctors number in the hundreds of thousands, not millions; they operate with a high degree of professional autonomy; and they received lengthy, rigorous pre-service training in scientific fields.

That’s why, as you may have noticed, pharmaceutical companies spend zillions of dollars advertising to doctors and patients—because medical practice doesn’t automatically change because of new findings in respected journals, either.

But just running more ads in Education Week or the ASCD SmartBrief won’t be enough to get great curricula adopted by schools. The new providers need massive sales forces, too. Consider this passage from a great Atul Gawande piece in the New Yorker on the challenge of changing doctors’ and nurses’ practices. (Thanks to Ben Riley of Deans for Impact for pointing it out to me; I’ll return to more of this article in a future post.)

I once asked a pharmaceutical rep how he persuaded doctors—who are notoriously stubborn—to adopt a new medicine. Evidence is not remotely enough, he said, however strong a case you may have. You must also apply “the rule of seven touches.” Personally “touch” the doctors seven times, and they will come to know you; if they know you, they might trust you; and, if they trust you, they will change. That’s why he stocked doctors’ closets with free drug samples in person. Then he could poke his head around the corner and ask, “So how did your daughter Debbie’s soccer game go?” Eventually, this can become “Have you seen this study on our new drug? How about giving it a try?” As the rep had recognized, human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.

The legacy textbook firms have sales reps all over the country—often former superintendents with personal relationships with the people they are marketing to, with budgets for steak dinners, golf games, and such. Not to mention, less salaciously, big-time budgets for free samples of books, which can get expensive quickly given the large size of many districts’ selection committees.

So if funders and advocates want to see a dramatic uptick in the uptake of high quality materials, especially those produced by the non-profits, they need to face these facts. We can’t just invest in building great curricula—we need to invest in marketing them, too.  To my knowledge, only Great Minds has committed serious money to constructing this sort of sales force, and it’s one reason why Eureka Math is grabbing significant market share. Other new entrants will need to do the same if they want to play in the big leagues.

There is another approach, which is get legacy publishers to create and sell high quality curricula. As noted above, some of that’s already happening, according to EdReports, at least in some cases. Or the non-profits can dance with the devils, as Illustrative Mathematics did with its new deals with McGraw Hill and Kendall-Hunt. Rather than compete with the legacy companies, team up with them. Unleash their armies of sales reps to promote good stuff.

This too is not without risk, though. Stories are legion of high quality titles getting abandoned by corporate publishers when not enough copies sell fast enough.

There are also big question marks about how traditional publishers support the professional development needs of districts. Districts and schools risk “implementation failure” if they adopt new curricula that tee up major shifts in practice for teachers, as the high quality curricula do, without supporting teachers with implementation. Historically, publishers have included professional development “free with the purchase” of a curriculum, and the running joke among districts is that it’s worth about what they pay for it. Shallow “spray and pray” PD won’t help teachers improve their practice, and it remains to be seen whether traditional publishers will build quality services around this need.

So the challenge of getting high quality, standards-aligned, evidence-infused instructional materials into schools is daunting. But let’s end on a positive note: Ten years ago, most of these materials didn’t even exist. We’ve made real progress thanks to the hard work of thousands of developers and educators over the past decade. Compared to many other reforms in education, getting more schools and districts to adopt one of the growing numbers of strong programs is eminently doable.

Florida has been a national leader on private school choice for a long time. The state’s tax credit scholarship program is the largest of its kind the nation, supporting over 100,000 low-income children in 1,800 participating private schools. A new study this week from the Urban Institute suggests those students are more likely to go to college and graduate than their peers in traditional public schools. The state also offers private school options and assistance to children with special needs, victims of bullying, and those in grades three through five who are having difficulty reading.

Now the political stars have aligned to allow Florida Republicans—if they choose—to push the school choice agenda even further. With the election of Governor Ron DeSantis, a victory credited by The Wall Street Journal to African American “school choice moms” voting to protect tax-credit scholarships and charter schools, choice proponents are champing at the bit to push school choice into the middle class, even making Florida the first state in the nation with universal choice.

Republicans have had “trifecta” control of the governor’s office, Senate, and House since 2011. But what has school choice advocates dreaming big is three new appointments DeSantis has made to Florida’s Supreme Court since taking office January, which leaves no Democratic appointees on the bench. The state’s highest court has been a stumbling block to the school choice agenda, and a sore point among choice advocates dating back to the 2006 Bush v. Holmes decision, which ruled the state’s Opportunity Scholarship voucher program unconstitutional. The state’s various private school choice options in the years since have all taken the form of tax credit scholarships or state-funded programs targeted to students with special needs making them politically difficult to challenge.

What was once a five-two liberal majority is now six-one a conservative court—by some accounts the most conservative top state court in the nation, and one that’s presumably open to reversing Holmes. Speaking at a School Choice Week event two weeks ago at the James Madison Institute, a free-market think-tank in Tallahassee, Florida’s new state education commissioner Richard Corcoran remarked, “It’s hard not to be a little giddy right now.” DeSantis’s election and his court appointees make it “just a whole different world and different paradigm,” he said.

Almost without exception, every state official and school choice advocate I recently met in Florida believes the state will be the first to have “universal” education savings accounts, opening private school choice options to all who seek them. But a debate has emerged between Republican lawmakers who are wary about “biting off more than we can chew,” and those who see an opportunity to “go big or go home” while the GOP has control—a delicate state of play that is unlikely to last forever in a state with one of the nation’s most evenly divided electorates.

For school choice advocates, all the pieces are in place: a supportive Governor; an education commissioner who was an aggressive choice supporter as Florida’s House speaker; and committed Republican majorities in the House and Senate, who are apt to cooperate with the new Governor during his honeymoon first year in office. Twenty years of private school choice programs mean there are already thousands of schools serving scholarship students—and serving them well based on the new Urban Institute findings. The shift in the court’s composition clears away the last foreseeable hurdle. 

However Florida’s GOP lawmakers are wary about overplaying their high cards. Interviews with several of them suggest they are more inclined to push the choice agenda incrementally, continuing to build political support for it. “We have to get rid of the low-income waiting list before we proceed to anything else,” said Republican Manny Diaz, Jr. who chairs the Senate Education committee, echoing DeSantis’s call to get 13,000 students currently waiting for placements off the waitlist for tax credit scholarships. “We should make sure the [private school] market can sustain and provide quality options for whoever’s entering it for their educational options,” Diaz said.

The apparent reluctance to press immediately the full choice agenda is causing at least some frustrations among school choice advocates, who argue the opportunity to include the middle class in private choice options is not just good for students, but smart politics. “Florida should be wary of becoming the next Massachusetts,” says one, alluding to the failed 2016 ballot initiative to raise the Bay State’s charter cap. Their argument is that where choice programs are seen as serving only low-income students, the middle class can easily turn against them because their children don’t benefit—particularly when teachers unions and others rally support for the idea that choice and charters damage traditional public schools.

No state in the country has a more delicate political alchemy than Florida. When DeSantis was elected by a razor-thin margin, one wag on Twitter noted that even if Florida had to choose between ice cream and a kick in the face, it would still go to a recount. Republicans see school choice as a vote-getter; school choice advocates look at the same set of facts on the ground and urge boldness. “It’s just such a slim margin, says Erika Donalds, a former Collier County School Board member and chairman of School Choice Movement. “I wouldn’t want to put all my chips on current school choice moms swinging it one way or the other.”

It falls to DeSantis to be either incremental or bold. To see which way the wind is blowing, keep an eye on education commissioner Corcoran. A Republican colleague who has worked closely with him describes him as a “brilliant strategist” with first-rate political instincts, and someone whose “heart is all in” on school choice. “Everything we did in the last ten years was to create the environment to be able to get to universal choice,” says this veteran Republican. “If it’s possible and there’s a window to do something aggressive, he would be jumping in and leading the charge.”

If you haven’t read Dylan Wiliam’s Creating the Schools Our Children Need, there’s now more reason to do so. In addition to a helpful review of the book by Robert Pondiscio, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) recently posted an enthralling nineteen-minute interview with Wiliam. In his conversation with NCEE’s new CEO Tony McKay, they spent much of their time unpacking the book’s subtitle, Why What We're Doing Now Won't Help Much (And What We Can Do Instead).

A global education leader who has won acclaim on the other side of the pond, Wiliam’s perspective is welcome at a time when the national discourse on education—to the extent there is one—is ever more polarized. His principal concern is that the effect sizes of the reforms we’ve been implementing in the U.S. are nowhere worth their opportunity cost to prepare young people to meet the increasingly complex demands of work and society. Moreover, these reforms are often expensive—with a marginal return on investment—and difficult to implement.

For instance, Wiliam points to recent efforts to pay good teachers more, a timely example given the labor unrest here in Denver around the district’s leading-edge pay model, known as ProComp (Professional Compensation Plan). He notes that the effect size of increasing pay on student achievement is nominal, and that substantially more money would be required to have an impact. To wit, as groundbreaking as ProComp was, pundits generally agree that it merited attention only because it was “better than awful.”

The conversation between McKay and Wiliam explores ways to improve teaching and learning. He persuasively argues for more humility in our efforts to improve teacher effectiveness, and offers a four-step framework to evaluate how we might better go about what we invest in. According to Wiliam, prioritizing a knowledge-rich curriculum and improving the decision-making tools at our teachers’ disposal would be a wiser use of time and effort.

As a former teacher, principal, and district leader, I found myself nodding in agreement with Wiliam’s ideas, but as a policymaker and advocate, it was less clear what implications his message might carry. At one point during the interview, McKay steers clear of the topic of alternative pathways into teaching after Wiliam makes his viewpoint known: “I don’t want the best and the brightest if they’re not going to stay in teaching… Schemes like Teach For America [TFA] aren’t going to have a big impact because when those teachers are just getting into their stride, they often leave.”

It’s a familiar criticism—one I’ve heard often as a TFA alumnus—and not one without any merit. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the money and effort spent to recruit and support TFA teachers, and similar routes that bypass traditional schools of education, might be put to better use investing in those who intend to make a career of teaching. Yet one would be hard-pressed to identify an entity that has had more of a lasting effect on public education, especially from a policy and advocacy standpoint, where alumni have led on, among other issues, trailblazing curriculum reforms.

To be fair, Wiliam’s critique of TFA is a relatively minor point in the interview, which I would encourage watching in its entirety. But it raises the question of what to do when educational best practices don’t intersect with sound education policy. All the more so given the big shifts currently underway in education reform.

We get a hint of Wiliam’s thoughts on the policy-practice divide in response to McKay’s final question on whether states have a role in ensuring that effective classroom practices are able to flourish. (A trigger warning to fellow policymakers: his answer on this point is less than satisfying.) Wiliam says that states are primarily political obstacles that practitioners should navigate or work around. It struck me as a cynical response, and one that misses the central role policymakers can and should play in creating better schools.

Indeed, variation across states—including in instructional practices—is caused by what state policymakers do (or don’t do). Testing and accountability may have fallen from grace, but states have other levers they can pull—under-recognized ones like evidence-based grantmaking or mundane ones like licensing and accreditation—to engender the improvements that Wiliam describes. Rather than viewing them as a hurdle, states are uniquely positioned to help accelerate and amplify best practices.

Consider Florida as an example. When Jeb Bush became governor twenty years ago, he made education his top priority and implemented a comprehensive reform model that included school choice, annual testing, and grading schools on an A–F scale. Many of those reforms endure to this today, and achievement gaps have been significantly narrowed. “First do no harm” is a fine adage for state officials, but as states like Florida show, it’s possible to help too.

Getting all of this right is as important as ever with states preparing to pump gobs of money into well-intentioned efforts of questionable cost-benefit. Policymakers are certainly guilty of not getting up on the balcony enough to properly examine the impact of their policies, but asking them to take an auxiliary role misses the significant part they must continue to play in driving system-wide reform.

Building upon the well-known work of Caroline Hoxby and her colleagues, Kalena Cortes and Jane Lincove recently conducted a study that examines the “match” between underserved students and their choice of college. The study exploits Texas’s automatic admissions policy, which granted automatic admission to all public universities in the state to all students who achieved the top 10 percent in class rank as juniors in their high schools (that’s since been changed). This is the sole admissions criteria, although students are still required to complete a college application and take the SAT. (So again, they are admitted regardless of their scores on the SAT, the caliber of their high school, or the courses they took.)

Analysts estimate the differences in the effects of this admissions offer on both low- and high-income students who graduated from public school in 2008 and 2009. Specifically, whether knowing that they are automatically admitted to any public university in the Lone Star State fosters less “undermatch” or more “overmatch”—in other words, when students enroll in institutions where the average SAT score is, respectively, lower than or higher than their own. Analysts also look into whether nonacademic factors play a role in the choice of college, like location and proximity, and whether students prefer colleges with same-race peers, or students from their same high school.

They run a number of sophisticated models that control for numerous variables, but one thing they obviously have to acknowledge is that low-income students are likely more responsive to college costs than are high-income students. So the study essentially compares the effect of perfect admissions information across income groups; they need not assume that students have similar ability to pay. That said, the range of tuition in Texas for public universities is fairly narrow, in part due to the state’s common application system. Analysts are also able to demonstrate that, on average, students do not change their “matching behavior” after they receive financial aid offers.

There are key findings—some of which are fairly nuanced. First, the automatic admissions policy reduced undermatch among low-income, high-achieving students, inducing them to apply to and enroll in more academically challenging state universities. They did not find a similar effect on high-income, high-achieving students, which suggests that the information narrowed the income-related differences in college quality among highly-qualified applicants.  

However (cue second finding), regardless of the automatic admissions offer, high-income students with low SAT scores are more likely to overmatch than their low-income academic peers. So the admissions offer appears to improve the quality of colleges applied to and attended for low-income students only if their observable qualifications (a.k.a. SAT scores) are also well matched. The admissions offer alone was not enough to change their application behavior; they appear to follow the (deterring) signal of their SAT performance, even when those scores do not count for admission.

Third and finally, the results show that most students prefer campuses with students who are like them both demographically and socioeconomically, and who attended the same high school. The exception: Only highly-qualified, low-income students will choose universities where they have fewer same-race and same-income peers.

The bottom line is that while automatic admissions policies help lessen undermatch among low-income high achievers, their SAT scores still sway their behavior, regardless of whether they are used for entry. The irony is not lost: Although there’s a growing list of colleges that say the SAT doesn’t provide useful information about a potential applicant’s likelihood of success, those very same applicants appear to think otherwise about their scores.

SOURCE: Kalena E. Cortes and Jane Arnold Lincove, “Match or Mismatch? Automatic Admissions and College Preferences of Low- and High-Income Students,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (December 2018).

1. This week’s Dayton City Schools board meeting was supposed to be about reading and reviewing a draft strategic plan for future awesomeness. While that did occur, some on the board were more concerned that all would be for naught if the district gets a crappy report card for the third year in a row and falls into Academic Distress. The discussion on that score (“anti-takeover measures”, don’t you know?) was far more interesting if you ask me. (Dayton Daily News, 2/5/19) A busy day in Dayton yesterday as the former CEO of Microsoft (no, not THAT former CEO; the other one) came to visit the Dayton City Club and everyone talked about how much awesomeness is already extant in Montgomery County in terms of education and attainment and how much more there could be with the right money and the right programs. Note that we’re talking about the whole county. Not Dayton by itself. Just sayin’. (Dayton Daily News, 2/5/19)

2. Columbus City Schools’ efforts to improve third grade reading test scores apparently took a cold, wet blow last week due to the big winter storm that rolled through here. Not because of the cancelled school days, mind you, but because of the cancellation of an extra reading bootcamp session scheduled for Saturday. The school board already seems resigned to another “F” on its state report card as a result. Seems a bit of an overreaction to me, but I guess if one day of teacher training can apparently turn Dayton City Schools around, one day of extra reading practice could probably do the same for Columbus. But if we accept this, of course, it begs the question of what both districts have been doing for the last fifteen years. (Columbus Dispatch, 2/5/19)

3. A visit by a U.S. Representative to the local career center was a big hit this week in Springfield. According to the News-Sun report, “Career tech is changing the way Springfield readies the next generation of workers.” Read for yourself to see if you agree. Personally, I have some follow up questions. (Springfield News-Sun, 2/6/19)

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Stacey Abrams became something of a household name in the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterms and tonight she will give the Democrat response to the President’s State of the Union Address. Abrams shot to political stardom when she came close to becoming Georgia’s first Black woman governor. And there would have been much to cheer about that glass ceiling being broken, especially in a southern stronghold like Georgia. Abrams is an unapologetic progressive, former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, and fierce advocate for voting rights. Oprah even went door to door for her in the final days of the campaign.

Welp, I suspect that Oprah either doesn’t know or chose to overlook Abrams’ positions on education. Oprah helped to propel the issue of school choice into the mainstream and she has been a vocal supporter of parents, especially low income ones, having choices about the schools their children attend. Stacey Abrams does not share that view. In fact, most people who proudly wear the progressive label are opposed to all versions of school choice. They are adamant about the need for more funding and even more adamant that only one kind of school is entitled to those public dollars. Did you see Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s tweet about the recent teachers’ strike in Los Angeles? Or the tweets of every Democratic 2020 presidential hopeful who had declared by the time of the strike? They were unanimous in their blind support for the striking teachers but had nothing to say about the families left scrambling or the schools that have had staggeringly low student outcomes for generations.

Parents—especially Black and Hispanic parents—support school choice in large numbers. And in Georgia, as recently as 2012, more than two thirds of Georgia voters demanded more educational choice at the ballot box—and the support was bipartisan with some of the strongest supporters representing Democratic strongholds in urban Atlanta. Abrams voted against the constitutional amendment to make the state of Georgia a charter school authorizer and she opposed the creation of an Opportunity School District that would have allowed for a state takeover of the lowest performing schools. The Georgia Federation of Teachers didn’t think that Abrams’ opposition was robust enough or that she had done enough to keep the Opportunity School District off the ballot. She lost their support. The measure was defeated by voters anyway.

Stacey Abrams has certainly learned her lesson and she has staked out more robust union-friendly positions on education. She has chosen to back only one kind of educational delivery system—traditional zip code zoned public schools—over empowering parents to make the decisions that they believe will best suit their children. And while it may be the politically expedient position to take—especially in the era of Trump— there is a striking cognitive dissonance between her tireless advocacy for the voting rights of African Americans and her opposition to giving African American parents some agency over the education of their children.

I don’t get it.

According to a January 2018 poll of Georgia voters, education is the “single most important issue facing Georgia.” And according to every poll I’ve seen, African American voters are much more likely to support charter schools, vouchers, and education savings accounts than they are to oppose them. The same is true of Hispanic voters. And white voters too, though to a lesser extent. (All photos are below are from the 2018 Education Next poll here.)

The Georgia Education Association, a state affiliate of the NEA, was one of Abrams’ biggest cheerleaders in her race for Governor. The first reason they cited for supporting her candidacy? Her opposition to vouchers and charter schools. The image below is cut and pasted directly from the NEA website:

Abrams is a courageous risk taker by nature—we can see it in her life trajectory and in her campaign for governor. But when it comes to her education platform, that innate courage and willingness to take risks quickly evaporates. I sincerely wish Abrams well tonight as she tackles the tricky job of delivering the State of the Union rebuttal while at the same time hoping that she changes course on education and joins in the fight to give parents the agency to choose the school that is best for their child.

This essay was originally posted on the author’s blog, Good School Hunting.

A narrative has emerged that Democrats don’t care much for education reform anymore. Maybe there is some evidence to support this. Legislatures that passed teacher evaluation reforms with bipartisan majorities have been running away from those policies ever since. Senator and now presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren famously caved to pressure and bailed on charter schools during the Massachusetts cap fight (despite having once been a voucher supporter).

Meanwhile, in the Empire State, many of New York’s ed reform Democratic moderates lost their seats in the fall election’s anti-centrist wave, and the jury is out on the new members. The Garden State’s Democratic governor Phil Murphy promised his New Jersey teachers union allies he’d roll back state assessments the moment he got in and has been trying to do so.

Ed reform looks left in the lurch, and Democrats appear to be widening the gap.

On the surface, this line of reasoning makes sense, but I am not sure it’s the right conclusion. Instead, I believe there is an argument to be made that charter schools, choice, and education reform writ large are merely among the best places to see a series of policy conflicts play themselves out in the Democratic Party. This is to say that looks can be deceiving; in this case, though these issues seem like they’re about education, it’s also possible they aren’t at all.

Issues like: What makes something “public”? What are the roles of the private sector and competition in improving performance? Who knows best? These are important questions, and they power the great spinning policy wheel within both parties. But we shouldn’t ignore their roots in larger social and economic anxiety or the role of reform opponents in planting and co-opting them strategically to support their own ends.

As with lots of questions, the answers you get depend on the person you ask. In recent years, there have been newly emerging sets of answers among Democrats, and none of them have the character of Democratic centrism—the deal-making orientation that helped create the contemporary education reform landscape.

One answer comes from the anti-private-interest left that has come to typify the convergence of urbane progressivism and the party’s Democratic socialist wing. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, his Bros, and New York’s newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are perhaps best known for this ethos. Their platform includes government control over large sections of the economy, government-guaranteed jobs, and free college (a plan many on the political left argue amounts to a college subsidy for the wealthy), which is of course popular with millennials feeling the brunt of college costs.

Their arguments center on a perceived failure of the American economic system to distribute wealth, and perhaps a protean notion of justice, equally. They believe distribution should be left to them and not the private sector or, more importantly, to individuals. They also embrace a sentiment of public control as the best control, which is fundamentally friendly to unions and often at odds with the private sector. To sum it up, they think America’s economic, social, racial, and health care problems exist primarily because they themselves have not been empowered to solve them.

Another answer is powered by growing unrest among left-leaning urbanites (like those who elected Ocasio-Cortez) and (largely, but not exclusively) millennials toward capitalism, as illustrated during a 2017 exchange between former and current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and an NYU student. The student, citing a Harvard study showing that a majority of millennials no longer favor capitalism, asked if there was any way Democrats could move further left on economic policy. To which Pelosi responded, “Well, I thank you for your question, but we’re capitalist. And that’s just the way it is.”

Interviewed later, the student offered that “She can’t possibly understand where I, or millions of other millennials who are drowning under capitalism, come from,” noting that Pelosi is very wealthy and attuned to the establishment. “She refused to admit that the Democrats needed to move in a populist direction, which is what so many millions of Americans are crying out for them to do.”

These folks believe that college is a right and should, therefore, be free. They believe the government has the power to grant rights and should be empowered to do just that by making higher education free. Tuition at NYU during the 2018–19 school year is approximately $50,000.

As an aside, I am guessing there are plenty of good schools out there that don’t cost $50,000 a year—but maybe that’s just me.

If you’ve got a problem with capitalism or distrust the private sector, you’re likely to have a problem with the capitalists as well. Union heads, activists, and others who have an outsize voice in Democratic agenda-setting have a long history of attacking “the rich” for what they perceive to be greed or an unwillingness to pay their “fair share” for broad social goods like health care and education (it’s always worth noting that these people and their businesses are among the nation’s largest funders of public schools through taxation). But the housing crisis and Thomas Picketty’s work on wealth inequality—made wildly popular by former president Barack Obama—helped concretize the current iteration of anti-capitalist sentiment.

Current policy “ideas” surfacing in the Democratic House of Representatives—including the 70 percent marginal rate on high-income earners—are less revenue raisers than they are political caps on wealth and, by extension, a way for politicians to control the wealthy. That these proposals are normalized by very smart people in the press says a great deal about how far the public perception of the nation’s wealthiest people has fallen, not just on the political left, but perhaps there most acutely.

So what does any of this have to do with education?

It’s not worth ascribing any “Eureka!” moments of divine insight to the antagonists of “ed reform,” but, as the old saying goes, even a broken watch is right twice daily. And the class and opportunity divisions sown by ed reform haters have lined up with the hour and minute hands of the current political moment quite nicely.

Years ago, Diane Ravitch, Randi Weingarten, and their fellow travelers launched attacks at “the billionaire boys’ club” (shorthand for a universe of philanthropists supportive of reform) as a way to undermine their efforts in an era when elected officials embraced collaboration among the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Social impact bonds, education tax credits, and, yes, charter schools are all the fruit of a worldview that does not believe the elected class, or public governance, has all the answers or is always the best vehicle to deliver essential elements of the American promise to all people. That the attacks on the “public schools industrial complex” were selective—focusing on wealthy supporters of education reform primarily and not “the rich” in total—said and says everything about the strategy. Give money to a charter school network, you want to destroy public education. Give millions to a local fund for public schools, get a gold key to the district office. The difference is clear.

Case in point: Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers famously released a Nixonian enemies list of fund managers that also reads like a Who’s Who of some of education policy reform’s greatest supporters. As notable for who appears (New York charter benefactor Paul Tudor Jones) as who doesn’t (Warren Buffett, who, despite having committed his money as part of Bill and Melinda Gates’s Giving Pledge, believes we should abolish private schools), it’s ed reformer first, rich second. The list also ignores the complicated nature of societal change. Paul Singer, for instance, who also appears on the list, was a key financier of marriage equality efforts in New York state—a policy supported by Democrats of all stripes.

You can see this anti-capitalist, anti-choice, pro-“public” governance sentiment in the statements of some of the current crop of successful Democratic candidates, but you see it among the flops, too. Last year’s gubernatorial smashup of political newcomer Cynthia Nixon, who described charter-supporting Dems like incumbent Gov. Andrew Cuomo as “corporate Democrats,” is an excellent example.

Too many corporate Democrats like Andrew Cuomo are taking charter school hedge fund money.

We have to stop diverting education funding into privately run charter schools, and put the focus back where it should be: on strengthening our public schools and keeping them public.

— Cynthia Nixon (@CynthiaNixon) April 13, 2018

Nixon wants to keep the public schools “public”—which, for her purposes, means “not charter.” This as she sends her own child to one of the city’s whitest schools, which also has among its most opaque admissions processes. Is that “public”? That’s a good question. Here again, though, we see the standard anti-reform sentiment on the clock’s six as the political second hand sweeps by. We also see that, having lost almost two to one, this dogma isn’t always a winner for Democrats, especially in a place where a majority of black parents exercise some form of school choice.

So what does all this mean?

If you think the private sector is the problem, you will oppose it and its solutions whatever they are. You’ll also oppose philanthropy’s attempts to provide new opportunities to people where the public sector has been unable to because you’ll be skeptical of the rich and how they made their money.

If you think the problem is that you aren’t in control, you’ll oppose governance by anyone but you. You’ll also oppose other people choosing things you don’t like, in large measure because you don’t respect the choices of those people or you believe those choices are ill-informed.

If you believe capitalism is irredeemable and must be brought to heel, you’ll oppose market pressure and extra-governmental efforts to innovate or improve society. If you’re in New York, you’ll do this while you skip the buses and call an Uber, but you won’t notice the inconsistency.

And if you believe all these things, as a loud but small cabal of current Democrats does, you’ll oppose reform, charters, and choice…not because you hate them—or even know enough about them to do so—but because your beliefs when tied together conflict with the reform and choice crowd’s foundational tenets: that government doesn’t have all the answers. That the nonprofit sector has a great deal to contribute. That philanthropy is a mercurial but necessary ally. That societal change makes complicated bedfellows. And that parents know their children best and should be empowered to choose the right education for them regardless of where they live, the color of their skin or how much money they make.

Those seem like a pretty good set of principles to get behind. But, again, perhaps it’s just me.

If a broken watch is right twice a day, it’s also wrong the rest of the time. Let’s hope folks realize this current brand of aristocracy masquerading as progressive populism is the same way.

This essay was originally published by The 74.

1. The Speaker of the Ohio House held an (extremely) informal presser late last week, talking about his priorities for the new General Assembly session. Several items regarding charter schools got the attention of the attendant journos. To wit: The proposed elimination of for-profit charter school operators in the state… (Columbus Dispatch, 2/1/19) …and the Speaker’s aversion to direct-funding charter schools in favor of passing charter funds through traditional districts as per the status quo. (Statehouse News Bureau, 2/1/19)

2. That was quick. The new CEO for East Cleveland City Schools was named late last week. He is the current assistant supe for nearby Maple Heights City Schools. You can read his introductory words in the PD, including the very weird quote that provides the title for today’s clips. If you ask me (which nobody ever does, of course, dude is taking a whole lot of credit for a dubious “achievement”. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2/1/19) Of course, all of this naming and tasting and seeing and lauding of “Ds” will all be moot when someone successfully takes down the state’s new(ish) Academic Distress protocols. Maybe it will be the elected board of East Cleveland City Schools, whose court case to achieve such a take down last week got the green light to move forward. (Elyria Chronicle, 2/3/19)

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