Erin Scott/The White House
Members of the New Democrat Coalition meet with President Joe Biden at the White House, March 2022.
It has been a long time since the Democratic Party gave its full-throated support for public schools in this country. Now a coalition of Democrats in Congress is offering a new policy lens that could reverse the decades-long abandonment of the U.S. public education system.
Public education has been a political orphan for most of the twenty-first century. When No Child Left Behind launched in 2002 with bipartisan support, Democrats essentially agreed to the premise manufactured by A Nation At Risk, an influential government report released in 1983 that declared America’s public schools were failing and in need of radical reform. No Child Left Behind created a policy of test-driven accountability that was premised on the idea of failed public schools and was criticized for putting too much stock in testing and treating low-income schools unfairly. President Barack Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan altered some aspects of No Child Left Behind, but doubled down on the premise that public schools and public school teachers were in need of an overhaul. Democrats signed on to GOP-favored reforms like creating charter schools and implementing high-stakes testing, feeding the general trend of redirecting public funds away from public schools in the hope that the private sector held secrets for improvement, and that more effective schools alone would somehow solve poverty.
While President Donald Trump was largely indifferent to public education in his first term, his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was notoriously opposed to the public system. And yet, few Democrats in government spoke up to defend the public school system and the people who worked in it, or even offered a vision of what a robust public education system could be.
Now, the New Democrat Coalition has finally broken with that tradition.
The center-left New Democrat Coalition was founded in 1997, and is now “made up of 115 pragmatic House Democrats who work across the aisle and across the Capitol to advance innovative, inclusive, and forward-looking policies.” These lawmakers come from thirty-one states, plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
The coalition has released a Workforce and Education Agenda, which includes investments in public schools, training and credential pathways for students—including non-college paths— and workforce development programs for teachers.
Does the agenda present any ideas worth supporting? Here are the hits and the misses.
The strongest piece of this new agenda is its unequivocal support for public education. “American students deserve world-class public education from kindergarten onward,” the coalition writes. And that means every student. School reformers and proponents of privatization often argue that some students should be given the means to leave their zip code for a better charter or private school, but the New Democrat Coalition argues instead to “sustain strong federal support” for public schools. Instead of spending taxpayer dollars to allow a few students to escape a zip code perceived as failing because of historic disinvestment, the lawmakers are proposing that all zip codes should be served by quality public schools so that “every child in every zip code” is provided an excellent education.
The agenda also calls for every student to be made “college and career ready,” which is an unfortunate phrasing choice; “college and career ready” was the language widely adopted when “Common Core State Standards” became politically toxic and widely ridiculed. Common Core was intended to serve as a set of national standards that would improve education, but its methods for teacher evaluations, emphasis on testing, and contributions to mass school closures made it widely criticized by everyone from classroom teachers to comedians. The agenda also emphasizes that investment in high-quality education is necessary to help students’ “success in the twenty-first century economy,” leaving the impression that education is merely training for a job rather than a preparation for life and civic duty.
The New Democrat Coalition proposes to destigmatize non-college degree pathways, which is a break from the Obama-era insistence that we should be trying to get every student to enter college. The agenda promotes Career and Technical Education (CTE), which is having a well-deserved moment, as well as skill training and labor empowerment for workers without four-year degrees.
The proposal includes other policy highlights. It pledges to protect federal funding for public education, including Title I of the Every Students Succeeds Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). These policies allocated funds that are meant to support schools with high-poverty populations and students with disabilities; the current administration wants to turn them into no-strings block grants that states can spend on whatever education-related items they wish. These funds have also been regularly taken hostage by previous administrations in order to encourage states’ compliance with federal education initiatives such as Common Core. Protecting these funds for public schools should be a legislative priority. Support of policies that bolster CTE puts the Democrats squarely behind the support and growing support for CTE education, driven by increased interest in skilled trades.
On the other hand, the New Democrat Coalition calls on schools to train students in the use of artificial intelligence (AI), but “with clear guidance,” a meaningless nod to the frantic push to get AI tools into schools before anyone has a chance to determine if they are pedagogically useful. Democrats need to stand up for more than a mere suggestion for AI to be appropriately integrated into K-12 education.
The coalition’s call to “incentivize high-dosage tutoring,” a term that lacks a clear definition, is likewise weak, based on research that didn’t really prove effectiveness. If you want to increase the availability of any sort of tutoring, we already know exactly what is needed: people qualified to provide tutoring and money to pay them.
Further, the New Democrat Coalition’s measure of “world-class public education” is unimpressive. “Higher K-12 academic achievement” is policy-speak for higher student scores on the states’ standardized tests, a continuation of the high-stakes testing that has warped education for the past few decades. The group’s measures also include “expanded career opportunities,” an unfortunate echo of the old assertion of Democrats that if students get more education, higher-paying jobs will simply materialize for them. The coalition also repeats the dated notion of improved college completion rates being a sign of success. Instead, the agenda should focus on lowering student loan debt—a better K-12 education will not make college cost less, and college is not the best path forward for every individual.
Also notable is what the agenda doesn’t include. It doesn’t call for an increase in taxpayer-funded and privately owned charter schools—it doesn’t even mention charter schools. It doesn’t suggest that public schools are troubled and public school teachers are struggling.
Instead, it calls for investment and support for public schools and clearly rejects the Trump Administration’s call to dismantle education and education supports. There’s plenty of room for improvement here—and it remains to be seen whether this agenda will make its way into legislation—but after more than twenty years of Democrats chiming in on conservative GOP anti-public education policies, it’s a welcome step in the right direction.