Brad Wilson
Trump’s support for charter schools isn’t the only reason the so-called school reform movement is losing steam.
U.S. News recently reported that “school choice” has a branding problem. In that piece, reporter Lauren Camera quotes Senator Ted Cruz, who is carrying the Trump Administration’s water for a $5 billion school choice tax credit proposal, as saying, “We need to expand our coalition.”
Ignoring for a moment the unlikely image of Cruz building a bipartisan coalition, even with his new facial hair, we’re looking at old news.
Camera says that the school choice tent has been a large one, and in some ways she’s correct. School choice has its roots most firmly in conservative free market ideology, folding in both those who sincerely believe that the free market is the best way to raise educational quality and those who sincerely believe that a free market approach to education would give them a chance to get their hands on a ton of taxpayer dollars.
The leftward wing of the coalition included those who sincerely believed that an alternative was needed to a public school system that was not serving minority students, as well as those who sincerely believed that school choice would give them a chance to get their hands on a ton of taxpayer money. The Democratic wing of the coalition also brought in the neoliberals, who believed that education could be better provided by private businesses.
Trump’s embrace of school choice made it poison to many people.
That coalition held under the Obama Administration. Its pro-charter stance made it okay for Democrats to support school choice. The major teachers unions dealt with some tension, as members pushed back on administration-favored policies like Common Core, and union leadership tried to support administration positions..
Camera does not talk to anybody outside of the choice camp, and so she presents the most common narrative about the current struggles of the choice movement: it’s Donald Trump’s fault.
That is certainly part of it. Trump’s embrace of school choice made it poison to many people. At Politico, Mackenzie Mays quotes Margaret Fortune, a California Democrat who runs a group of charter schools and previously advised two governors: “Has it been damaging that Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos have given an unwelcome bear hug to charter schools? Absolutely.”
In reality, very little about school choice policy coming out of D.C. has changed—other than the names attached to it. It’s not entirely unfair to blame the Trump Factor for the splintering of the charter alliance. But there are other things to consider.
The marriage of left and right on education reform was always one of convenience. Way back in May of 2016, Robert Pondiscio kicked off a fairly thoughtful discussion among reform advocates about whether or not the social justice wing of the reform movement was pushing aside the conservative wing.
Charters and choice have now been around long enough for the general public to get to know them.
When it comes to choice, the hard right has argued that what matters is choice, choice, and also choice—that parents be free to choose. But on the left, the concern is that if choice leaves students no better off than they were before, then what is the point? And while right-tilted choice advocates may have felt they were being pushed out of the conversation, Betsy DeVos is much more of the right-tilted way of thought, and so her administration leaves left-tilted choicers feeling they have no true ally in D.C.
But beyond the splintering of an uneasy alliance, choice faces a bigger branding problem. Charters and choice have now been around long enough for the general public to get to know them.
School boards across the country are feeling the financial pinch of having revenues redirected to charter schools. More and more communities have watched the trouble that comes from charters that crash and burn, sometimes in the middle of the school year. The hashtags #AnotherDayAnotherCharterScandal and #CharterSchoolFail present running tallies of the many and varied ways charter schools flame out in a burst of fraud and incompetence every single day. The report “Asleep at the Wheel” from the Network for Public Education shows that roughly $1 billion of federal taxpayer dollars have been lost to fraud and waste in the charter sector—and that’s just the federal money being spent.
Charters promised all sorts of miraculous educational achievements at low, low prices. But those achievements haven’t appeared; these “laboratories of innovation” have produced no new educational techniques (sure, charters have shown that more spending, smaller classes, longer hours, and only teaching the students that suit you all work—that’s hardly news).
Charters have, for the most part, not done a better job than public schools. And in many states, charters have shifted from their promises of great education on the cheap to demanding that they deserve more money. In Florida, for example, public school voters who raise taxes to improve their own public schools must now hand some of those tax dollars over to charters.
On top of all that, communities are becoming increasingly sensitive to how charter and choice programs strip local control. More and more people are understanding that what we’re really talking about is not a new type of public school, but the privatization of our public school system.
By mid-2018, education reformers were asking the question, “Why is charter growth slowing?”
After twenty years, almost every trick in the education reform tool box has been tried, including charters and choice. When your product has failed, you have more than just a branding problem, and for the nominally lefty-tilted education reformers, the current administration provides none of the protective cover that Obama and Duncan did. As Pedro Noguera put it in The Nation :
“For almost 20 years, reformers have had their chance to demonstrate what their vision for education could achieve, and they’ve failed to deliver the improvement they promised. Now, many of them find themselves bereft of ideas and unsure of how to distinguish themselves from Trump’s right-wing education agenda.”
Many reform supporters are still intent on fixing the optics. Camera references an analysis from University of Arkansas that tries to claim that charters are more efficient by computing schools’ ratios of cost-per-pupil to points on the Big Standardized test. Although it’s weak and paper-thin, Betsy DeVos has been citing it even as she calls for education policy to be non-partisan.
But trying to build a bipartisan coalition to support a long-tried and widely-failing partisan policy is a losing game, and it will take more than Ted Cruz with snappy facial hair to pull it off.
Let me suggest an alternative. Instead of asking, “How can we convince more left-leaning folks to support the privatization of public education,” maybe progressives could ask, “If charters and choice really aren’t the answer, what are some better ways to improve U.S. public education?” Maybe someone could build a coalition around that.