In 2014, Neel Kashkari wanted to be the governor of California. Running as a Republican, he promised to fix a “failing” public school system by pitching a spread of free-market reforms, such as expanding charter schools. Of course, he lost that election to Jerry Brown.
But this hasn’t stopped Kashkari, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, from crusading for a privatized education system. Now he’s just doing it in a different state.
By 2016, Kashkari had rebounded in the Midwest, landing as the head of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. Since 2019, he’s thrown his weight behind an effort to alter the state constitution that would open the door for a publicly funded voucher program.
To bolster his efforts, Kashkari is helping to spearhead a group calling itself the Our Children MN coalition. Led by Mike McFadden (who, like Kashkari, was an investment banker and ran for public office as a Republican), the coalition is an unlikely one that also includes Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and former state Supreme Court Justice Alan Page.
Our Children MN’s wide-ranging support is perhaps unsurprising. It’s a powerhouse group, organized around a seemingly progressive message: Minnesota’s schools are rife with racially driven academic disparities, and so they must be dramatically retooled.
Kashkari used a similar argument on the West Coast, and it’s a common line among those who seek to privatize public education across the United States—from former president Barack Obama to current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
“Our public schools had been the envy of the world, but the world caught up,” Obama said in 2016, in an address to students at Benjamin Banneker High School in Washington, D.C. He then outlined a number of progressive policy goals, including free two-year college and better pay for teachers, while also promoting his administration’s key education initiatives: Race to the Top.
Under Race to the Top, states were required to compete with one another for additional resources, despite across-the-board funding cuts. It also coerced states into agreeing to the expansion of charter schools, in exchange for more cash flow.
DeVos, with support from President Donald Trump, has sought to “fix” America’s schools through school choice schemes, including vouchers and privately managed, publicly funded charter schools. Boosting teacher pay or offering free college has never been part of DeVos’s vision.
Against this bipartisan backdrop, the Our Children MN coalition is taking a similar policy stance.
First, the coalition is proposing a small but significant change to the state constitution. Currently, Minnesota’s constitution mandates that the state must provide a “uniform system of public schools” to all children.
As the clause dates back to 1857, when Minnesota was becoming a state, Kashkari and Page are casting it as an antiquated guarantee of access to an “adequate education system.” More than a “system,” they argue that students need a “quality public education.” The distinction seems small, but its consequences could be massive.
As Page put it: “Updating our constitution by making quality education a civil right for all children will put power in the hands of families, where it belongs.” Supporters of this are framing it as a way to “put children first,” a frequent tagline for the choice-based reform movement.
Will Stancil, a University of Minnesota researcher who studies civil rights law, strongly disagrees with the premise put forward by Our Children MN.
Stancil labeled their proposal a “trojan horse” that could allow for a return to segregated, separate-but-equal schools.
For one thing, the suggested constitutional amendment lists “uniform achievement standards set forth by the state” as the sole measure of success for a school. A successful school will rank high in comparison to these “uniform achievement standards,” at least when the sole metric for success is measured by standardized test scores.
Rather than break new ground, this concept forms the foundation of all the neoliberal education policy reform ideas since the early 1980s.
Rather than break new ground, this concept forms the foundation of all the neoliberal education policy reform ideas since the early 1980s.
Good schools, as authorized by the infamous No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, are those that boost student test scores.
Everything else–from a student’s disability status to their family’s income level–is an afterthought.
Stancil also notes that the proposed alteration of Minnesota’s constitution would lead to the further segregation of the state’s public schools. “It greatly weakens the current law,” he insists, by seeking to throw out the state’s responsibility to provide a “general and uniform system of public schools.”
But in 2019, the state’s supreme court noted that this phrase prohibits segregation—something Kashkari and Page's alteration makes no mention of.
This is significant for obvious reasons, as well as for the fact that there is a lawsuit currently moving through the Minnesota court system that could require public school districts throughout the state to once again tackle segregation head-on and break up “racially isolated schools.”
The lawsuit, Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota, is also challenging the 1999 stipulation embedded in state law that exempts charter schools from following the state constitution’s desegregation mandate.
So far, a judge in the case has ruled that Minnesota’s charter schools—which do tend to be highly racially and economically segregated (along with most charter schools in the United States)—can no longer maintain this exemption. A trial date for this case has yet to be announced but is expected to take place some time in 2020.
Reducing a school’s purpose to only that of raising test scores is, Stancil claims, a “long-time dream for education reformers.” Stripping them of any other obligations around desegregation, or equal access to books, teachers or adequate facilities, is a way to turn public education into little more than a deregulated landscape of winners and losers rather than a democratic institution worthy of full support.
In contrast, the statewide teachers union, Education Minnesota, has also pushed back on Kashkari and Page’s reform idea. The path to better schools, Education Minnesota President Denise Specht has argued, is through more progressive reforms, including smaller classes, fully funded schools, and greater mental health support for students.
Kashkari and Page have so far committed to touring the state to rally support for their proposed amendment, which has thus far drawn cautious interest among lawmakers.
Still, Kashkari’s background as an advocate for vouchers and the expansion of charter schools should give pause to those tempted to fall for what looks like a minor, civil rights-focused change to the state constitution.