Recently, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant teamed up to discuss five ways to “put aside partisan politics and think big on education,” with an eye toward putting “the interests of children first in a bipartisan or nonpartisan fashion.”
Maybe they hoped to calm acrimonious discussions about education policy and concerns about widespread attacks on school boards by offering an opportunity for folks to join hands and move forward together, perhaps toward some of the duo’s favorite education reform policies.
It’s worth noting that the op-ed was published in The Washington Times, a rightwing news organization. When I read the piece, the recommended items on the sidebar were “Dr. Fauci’s deadly lie of omission” and, ironically, “Ex-Obama education chief [Duncan] compares anti-mask Americans to suicide bombers.”
The article notes that Duncan and Bryant co-paneled at the 2021 Reagan Institute Summit on Education, so one gets the impression that Duncan is barely trying to look progressive these days.
Duncan and Bryant also shared their pride that Mississippi did well compared to other states on the 2019 NAEP test, the nation’s report card, but neglected to mention that those national scores showed a historic dip.
So what were their suggestions?
1. Set national standards
Does this seem familiar? It’s been a little more than a decade since Common Core standards appeared and Duncan used leverage from No Child Left Behind to strong-arm states into adopting them.
There is no compelling evidence that national standards improve education.
“The federal government is blocked from setting nationwide education standards,” Duncan and Bryant note. They fail to mention that this is largely because bipartisan backlash to the Common Core was so great that federal laws governing education, known as the Every Student Succeeds Act, were revised to specifically shift power from the feds to the states. In other words, it would be much harder to pass any kind of national standards now because the last time it was attempted it went very badly.
There is no compelling evidence that national standards improve education, nor is there reason to think that standards imposed top-down on a national level would be helpful.
For Duncan to call for a national repeat of his most infamous failure without even acknowledging that we’d been here before is a bizarre case of selective amnesia. We tried that, and a wide variety of folks inside and outside the education world—including Bryant himself—deemed the experiment a failure.
2. Fund education early
Expanded pre-K is one of the great “safe” education ideas in politics, and almost everyone loves it until you start talking about specifics. What exactly will be funded? Will it involve age-inappropriate testing or focus on academics? Will the Biden Administration even be able to round up votes from people on their own side of the aisle?
Once we start to plug in details, this turns out not to be the great uniter that Duncan and Bryant suggest. And pre-K done poorly could be worse than no pre-K at all.
3. Renew our approach to infrastructure investment
It’s a nice thought, but the Biden Administration couldn’t even get its request for school building modernization passed by Congressional Democrats.
Duncan and Bryant include heating, ventilation, and air conditioning on their list of school infrastructure that we can unite behind, but we have barely moved the needle over the past nineteen months, a time when these facilities were a matter of life and death.
They would also like to include teacher pay on this list, but it seems safe to say that national unity in raising teacher pay has remained elusive since, well, forever.
4. Foster accountability
This point offers the kind of sweeping language that Duncan could sometimes muster while in office:
“Federal officials, for instance, should take the lead on establishing the vision, equity, and funding, while local officials should prioritize uplifting family voices and needs. And everyone at every level of government must be accountable for academic progress, graduation rates, reading levels, and more.”
That sounds mighty fine. But under Obama and Duncan, the accountability piece ended up meaning scores on a standardized test, a terrible measure of educational effectiveness.
I will give them credit for one aspect of this idea—they are talking about holding more people accountable than just the teachers in the classroom. In the Obama years, all education problems were the fault of teachers and not, say, the legislatures responsible for funding schools.
5. Keep politics out of the classroom
Finally, Duncan and Bryant try to dispose of the “critical race theory” panic in just one paragraph.
Don’t deny the past, they argue, and don’t blame the descendants. Instead, support “informed patriotism” by letting students “openly and honestly acknowledge the continuing remnants of racism in our society, and make sure all children are grounded in the basic principles of civics and democracy needed to address them fully and finally.”
For better or worse, we live in an age that has injected politics into everything.
That sounds great, but a quick look at Virginia tells us that it’s not happening any time soon. With a victory aided by a far-reaching, well-funded media operation and barely-dog-whistle racism, some GOP operatives smell a winning strategy in claiming that politics are in the classroom.
And even if Duncan and Bryant’s plan were fully adopted, it would not constitute getting politics out of the classroom, as every one of the items they list is a statement of politics.
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, just proposed a law to block any state or federal requirements for COVID-19 vaccinations. For better or worse, we live in an age that has injected politics into everything, and that includes the classroom.
Yes, we ought to be able to talk about fighting disease, basic science, our nation’s history, and how best to promote equity in our classrooms without descending into political battling, but we can’t. And two men who used political maneuvering to push their own favored policies while in office ought to be able to understand that.
There is plenty of room to argue whether or not attacking public education was a winning stance in Virginia. What matters, however, is that many GOP strategists will now believe that bashing on public education is a path to victory.
Trying to revive failed policies of the past or wishful thinking about the future will not be a great defense against those coming assaults.