My job as Betsy DeVos's assistant secretary for policy often dropped to translating her reform vision into concrete legislative proposals, budgets, and grant competitions. It had been a stimulating, enjoyable job-despite the continual tumult developed by the unconventional president. There was also some unpleasantness due to the conventional labor unions that represent teachers in collective bargaining and elections, in addition to their Democratic allies in Congress. That was just an expected part of the job.
I had known and admired Betsy DeVos for a few decades before our time together in D.C., so none of her positions surprised or disappointed me. This is a risky aspect to say, given how partisans on sides have distorted her views, but it's an essential point given what did surprise and disappoint me. Even after developing a pretty good knowledge of the factions within education reform over Twenty five years, I had been stunned at the intensity with which so many reformers opposed Betsy DeVos.
As secretary, DeVos unmasked tensions and disagreements within the education-reform community. In some ways, which was healthy, but our open conflicts did give a benefit towards the defenders from the status quo and hampered reformers' efforts to effect policy changes. As compared to the concerns concerning the status quo, such policy differences should pale.
To be clear, I am not advocating for a reform orthodoxy. Given the range of informed thinking on complicated issues like federally mandated assessments or public charter schools, orthodoxy is neither beneficial nor even possible. My purpose here's to not settle scores or defend every aspect of DeVos's record. I actually do hope a better understanding of the divisions inside the reform camp will equip us to avert being divided and conquered. It ought to boost the likelihood of success in increasing the education system.
Let's start with the most popular denominator among reformers. All of us believe that the present education system needs to be reformed, transformed, or whatever nomenclature you choose. We believe the machine is failing to educate sufficiently a substantial part of children. As a result, a large number of children do not reach their potential as adults-never really succeeding at work, never contributing to their communities, rather than leading truly fulfilling lives. This isn't only bad for the individuals; it is also bad for communities, the nation, and also the world.
For those of us committed to equal opportunity in America no matter class, race, gender, or beliefs, the final results in our education system are especially disturbing. It appears that our schools systemically fail our low-income, Black, and Latino students, notwithstanding vigorous enforcement of federal civil rights laws over nearly Six decades. Some say that our education product is a manifestation of systemic racism. Others, like me, see evidence that our system reinforces racism and might be also a resource from it.
Reformers also don't believe that the current system will ever successfully educate all children to their full potential. Things as they are is mostly a one-size-fits-all model from the industrial era, where instruction targets an \”average\” student and provided by an \”average\” teacher. In practice, in this system, some students were highly educated and others, not so much. The machine might once have served America well, however it does no more.
This core thought that our bodies is antiquated and inadequately meeting America's needs is responsible for some reformers, including Betsy DeVos, to call for any total reimagining from the system. Once the goal would be to educate fully each and every unique child, why do we maintain age-based classes or seat-time rules? So why do we resist moving to some mastery-based system? So why do we obsess on limited academic content, whenever we know that successful adults also need critical-thinking and social-emotional skills and behaviors?
Some reformers, particularly those running excellent public charter networks in low-income communities, are not completely convinced that the commercial model is hopeless. They have shown that they can dramatically improve some outcomes inside the traditional model by raising expectations, attracting top teaching talent, personalizing instruction, and making 100 other one percent changes to classrooms, schools, and networks. These colleagues ought to be welcome within the big tent of reformers, because they also despise things as they are, and because we take advantage of a number of approaches to moving past the status quo.
If you are a visible education reformer, you have undoubtedly been charged with wanting to destroy or defund public education. It's worth saying: the opposite holds true. Reformers have confidence in public education-especially the core commitment that society (taxpayers) should foot the balance for this. (Public cash is, after all, important public.) Education is both a private and a public good that benefits our democracy and our economy. Out of our mutual interest, we ought to all be part of the price of educating all children, to allow them to secure good jobs and be productive citizens. We are able to debate who delivers that education (from the government monopoly to some laissez-faire marketplace), how much money should be allocated to individual children, and if the funds may come from local, state, or federal taxpayers. But reformers believe in public education as much as our opponents. That's why we spend our time, treasure, and talents trying to improve it.
Reform opponents possess a different view of the machine. To them, the century-old system is proven, basically sound, and could rise again to serve America well, if perhaps Americans would fund it substantially more generously. Meanwhile, public schools should not be attributed for reversing the impact of children becoming an adult in poverty or imperfect homes.
Although the road between the reformer and status-quo camps is apparent, neither group is a monolith. Among defenders of the status quo, such as the leaders atop the teacher unions, the factions aren't always obvious, since the public-facing position is often the hardline position. Similarly, divisions among reformers aren't reported much, and lots of of us think it's better to keep them out of sight. However the rifts are really the.
Debates over K -12 education usually have little or nothing to do with educating our students or preparing them for good jobs. Public schools end up being battlegrounds for America's culture wars. They are the backdrop for discussions of a wide range of policy issues-including immigration, gun control, police misconduct, racial equity, gender equity, transgender rights, and religious liberty. Curricula and instruction around these topics can seem to be doctrinaire and ideological, often sparking local battles and causing distress for parents who wish schools would focus on teaching how to read, write, do math, and think.
For people who wish to keep your concentrate on how our schools are failing a lot of children and need to become reformed, these culture wars are a frustrating distraction. You should be able to disagree on various culture-war issues and still agree that something must be done to fix our education system. But even people focused on fixing education often define their politics by these culture-war issues. It's impossible to escape from them.
Unless Congress had directed the Department to get in an issue, Betsy DeVos generally stayed out of it, because of her respect for federalism. Most commonly, she defaulted to punting culture-war issues to local officials, a tactic that enraged individuals who want the us government to dictate solutions. On transgender students, for example, she said that no student ought to be bullied which her Office for Civil Rights would investigate such cases, as enabled by federal law, but she held that bathroom accommodations for transgender students ought to be determined locally. However, she went through the grueling process of promulgating regulations for Title IX from the Education Amendments Act of 1972, formally addressing sexual assault and violence. The very first time, due process has become a clear requirement under Title IX.
Even though she rarely addressed culture-war issues, education reformers often thought that Betsy DeVos was on the opposite side of these. A part of their \”evidence base\” was that Secretary DeVos served as a cabinet member for the divisive President Trump. This association drove the behaviour of many prominent reformers. For instance, Dr. Howard Fuller, that has influenced and guided my work a lot more than anyone but John Walton, might have nothing to use the Trump administration following the so-called \”Unite the Right\” rally in Charlottesville, even though he agreed with most of DeVos's policies. He openly wondered how DeVos and I could stomach working with the Trump White House. He was not alone.
As when the Trump association weren't bad enough, the potential risks of aligning with Betsy DeVos were magnified after her rocky nomination process and also the personal vilification campaign that accompanied it. There are consequences to be related to not-cool people, and, as intended by her opponents, DeVos was definitely not-cool after her national introduction. Because reformers have a thin path to maintain credibility from the status quo, they frequently possess a heightened feeling of reputation. Once the DeVos team asked charter-school advocates the way we might be helpful, their explicit entreaty was that people mention charter schools as little as possible. Some particularly sensitive reformers even found methods to oppose a secretary whose policies they often supported.
While these issues of association and reputation played a job in many reformers' behavior toward Betsy DeVos, something else what food was in play. Many reformers pushed back (often alongside defenders from the status quo) due to substantive policy differences.
Reformers tend to be mavericks, and every people seems to have an individual \”theory of change\” for that system-that is, a functional hypothesis of which policy or operational changes today will ultimately result in educating a lot of students fully. These hypotheses-I think it's problematic to call them \”theories\”-are refined over years, informed by personal experience, and, all too often, owned psychically. Validation of them is personally satisfying, and refutation of them is personally threatening.
We can generally divide reformers into either the school-choice camp or the standards-and-accountability camp. In practice, most reformers tend to incorporate a little of both camps into their hypotheses, however they lean toward either. The generic hypothesis from the school-choice camp is the fact that, by empowering families (and teachers) to select among different educational options, we will incentivize schools and other providers to innovate and develop compelling, effective programs. Choice leads to competition, which leads to continuous improvement. Proponents of public charter schools, K -12 scholarships, and the abolishment of attendance zones fall under this camp.
For the standards-and-accountability camp, the generic hypothesis is that, by defining clear, rigorous standards for everyone, planning backward to achieve those standards, and then truly holding adults and students accountable for meeting them (through rewards and consequences), we can transform system performance. Strong incentives and management based on high standards leads to continuous improvement. When it comes to policy advocates, the standards-and-accountability camp is much larger than the school-choice camp, partly because more income is available to them, and partly because we have to set rigorous standards for thus many things. In addition to having groups that set standards for every conceivable academic subject from math to ethnic studies, we've reform-minded groups establishing standards for schools of education (e.g., the nation's Council on Teacher Quality), for data management (e.g., the Data Quality Campaign), to be used of education technology (e.g., Aurora Institute, Digital Promise, the EdTech Evidence Exchange), for financial productivity (e.g., Edunomics Lab), and for a large number of other facets of teaching and learning.
True system-defenders reject both the school-choice and the standards-and-accountability hypotheses, even though they confuse the problem by co-opting some of the language. School choice is a simple threat towards the government monopoly, since it could drain resources using their system. They might say they favor \”school choice,\” but they're only referring to the status quo, in which the monopoly creates and manages the accessible options, and where most affluent families exercise choice by purchasing homes in attendance zones with high-performing neighborhood schools.
Similarly, the status quo can tolerate standards and accountability, only up to and including point. If accountability is translated into substantial consequences for employees, positive or negative, it'll meet resistance. For example, reform-minded superintendents are welcome to set rigorous academic standards, but when they struggle to reward teachers whose students excel, or maybe they try to take steps to remove chronically ineffective and detrimental instructors from the classroom, they'll be put through an enormous amount of pain and certain lose their jobs. When there aren't any consequences, it's not really accountability.
The two generic reform hypotheses should live comfortably alongside each other. When we have a full-fledged system of choice and competition, every education provider will still need high standards and accountability, while not necessarily dictated through a top-down, command-and-control system. Once we are building toward that system of choice and competition, well-designed standards and accountability systems could be beneficial for students.
Most state-based reformers seem to agree, combining standards-and-accountability and college choice into action using their personal twists and flair. Governor Jeb Bush of Florida is really a premier example-at times promoting standards-and-accountability, such as prohibiting grade-promotion for illiterate third graders, and also at in other cases, pushing school-choice solutions, for example public charter schools or K -12 scholarships for disadvantaged students. Actually, a brief history of federal education policy can be seen as a bipartisan parade of state-based leaders-Governors Lamar Alexander, Bill Clinton, Dick Riley, and George W. Bush-who brought their teams and ideas about standards-and-accountability and school choice to Washington, D.C. A part of their experience involved learning to work with, perhaps even accommodating, the labor unions along with other defenders from the status quo because they attempted to improve education.
Trump and DeVos were a rest from the experience of such governors. Once the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association attacked nominee DeVos as \”unqualified,\” they were expressing their concerns about her lack of dealing with them-not her insufficient being a classroom teacher. Although DeVos had worked to improve K -12 education for more than two decades, she'd didn't have to accommodate the status quo. There have been no signs that they would start doing so in 2021. And she or he didn't.
During her time as secretary, Betsy DeVos publicly focused almost exclusively on promoting school choice and education freedom, particularly in K -12 but also in postsecondary, adult education, and civil rights. The focus wasn't only the result of having promoted the problem for decades, but additionally of strategic calculation. She concluded the possible lack of education freedom was the most crucial inequity to focus on if she wanted to pressure the machine to change.
Because of her school-choice focus, you might have expected more clashes with the standards-and-accountability camp due to competing reform hypotheses. The reasons for that relative harmony deserve a longer treatment, but for now, the reality is that Congress had largely resolved the debates over federal standards-and-accountability using the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, about a year before DeVos was installed. While decidedly shifting authority over K -12 education to states, Congress pointedly minimized the secretary's role, particularly regarding academic standards and accountability. The 115th Congress, which began in 2021, piled on by rolling back a number of mildly activist ESSA regulations promulgated within the waning months of the Federal government, an action that generally precludes most future rulemaking on the topic. All of this suited DeVos just fine, and she quietly implemented ESSA with fidelity, maximizing local and state flexibility and moving most standards-and-accountability battles to the states.
While the disagreements with standards-and-accountability reformers were notable mostly because of how modest they were, the disagreements with using one of the school-choice camp were notable because of how unrestrained they sometimes became. Inside the school-choice community, there are lots of factions. One key divide has ended whether school-choice programs should be universal-that is, open to all children-or geared to specific needy populations. Charter schools, for instance, are universal, despite the fact that low-income students are over-represented within their enrollment. So are magnet schools. In comparison, K -12 scholarship grant programs are almost always limited to low-income students or students with disabilities. This became an issue within the design of the government Education Freedom Scholarship tax credit DeVos championed, and DeVos astutely designed the proposal so that state leaders would decide student eligibility along with other design questions on their own, without the feds.
Another divide is over the proper level and type of accountability for schools of choice. At one end from the spectrum, some argue that parents supply the ultimate accountability because they can leave a school when it is no longer working for them, and absolutely nothing more is needed. At the opposite end, some reason that private schools and charter schools should have to abide by any most of the rules and burdens placed on traditional public schools. This divide is also happening in states across the country.
The most serious divide is between people who only support public charter schools and people who support a broader selection of options. DeVos is clearly in the latter camp. She supports charters as one of many mechanisms that empower parents with choice, and she and her team made it important to encourage states to create and replicate them. But she sincerely doesn't care whether families select a charter school, a personal school, a pandemic pod, a kind of school that hasn't yet come to exist, or a traditional public school.
Many from the successful charter-school operators and supporters have a different perspective. They begin to see the public charter school model as a promising hybrid that may single-handedly address various concerns and meet everyone's needs. The nation's Alliance for Public Charter Schools and most state associations need to constantly remind legislators that charters are \”public\” schools. They are funded by taxpayers, are tuition free, and therefore are available to all comers. But charter schools aren't like other public schools. They are managed and governed independently of the traditional school bureaucracy. They can innovate new models of instruction and learning, and they are often not unionized. Teachers-union leadership, for instance, never refers to charters as public schools.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, the City Fund, and others result in the good point the independent governance of public charter schools is the key to their long-term success. By establishing sustainable governance and transcending unstable and politically fraught elected school boards, charter schools will be able to continuously improve and outperform traditional schools. Over time, charter-school performance will help them end up being the norm across public education, because they curently have in New Orleans, D.C., Detroit, and elsewhere. Because the model is flexible, charters can evolve to satisfy the needs of all sorts of student. \”Portfolio\” districts covered with charter schools will emerge, where a \”harbor master\” will authorize new charters as needed or demanded by the community. Not one other choices are needed.
For some charter-school advocates, a student selecting a private school or other non-public provider ought to be supported exclusively with private funds. They oppose private-school choice, dismissing it as being a distraction from the real reform agenda of charter schools. To them, public funds should be restricted to public schools. That is a perilous position to take once the definition of \”public\” education is really debatable. Charter schools get funded using it . mechanisms as traditional public schools, and often, they sound just like defenders of this bit of the status quo.
Some charter-only supporters resist private-school choice mainly because they're uncomfortable with sanctioning faith-based decision-making. In our pluralistic society, many families do indeed make sacrifices and choose faith-based private schools, a majority of which are Catholic. Today, despite losing a lot more than two-thirds of the enrollment since the 1960s, Catholic schools still enroll about 1.5 million students, compared to charter-school enrollment of 3.A million. Public polls repeatedly suggest that many more low- or middle-income families would choose faith-based schools, if perhaps they might afford them. DeVos believes families should be able to choose among all education offerings, including faith-based schools, and she would empower families with public money so they could afford faith-based schools.
Add many of these divisions inside the school-choice camp towards the issues of association and reputation, and soon you had charter-school leaders openly parroting the labor union talking points from the secretary. A number of national charter-school advocates-such as Nina Rees, Eva Moskowitz, and Jeanne Allen-tried to balance the negativity, however their statements were largely buried.
Charter-school leaders had to create a difficult political calculus when responding to the campaign against DeVos. The attacks on the secretary in the teacher unions as well as their allies often centered on her support for charter schools. They felt their very own schools were being threatened, and many of these didn't know her or her work behind the scenes with respect to charter schools. According to their statements and letters to Congress, most of them have the symptoms of decided their finest hope would be to garner short-term favor with elected Democrats. When they thought Republicans would not notice or matter, these were wrong. If they believed that elected Democrats would stop taking their lead on charter schools from teacher-union leadership, these were probably wrong. I will be surprised when the federal Charter School Program isn't reduced or eliminated throughout the Biden administration.
Laying along with all education issues is a federalist structure, in which the local, state, and federal roles are continually shifting and being redefined. To completely understand DeVos's position around the federal role, it is helpful to ponder the opposite view of the labor unions representing teachers at collective bargaining tables and elections. At one level, they're merely greedy for more money from federal taxpayers. If their members will be to have good wages, benefits, and pensions, more income is needed. If their product is going to start fully educating every child, more money is required. And where easier to receives a commission than the federal budget? Unlike state and local budgets, the federal budget need not be balanced, so federal money is conceptually unlimited. This means that the teacher unions do not have to compete against other government-sector unions or other people for limited local and state resources, and they do not have to ask the general public to increase their taxes.
For school districts across the country, the mix of federal, state, and native revenue can vary dramatically. On average, about 47 percent comes from state taxpayers, 46 percent from local taxpayers, and merely 8 percent from federal taxpayers. In the unions' perspective, which means federal funding provides extensive growth potential. The three largest federal K -12 programs for FY 2021 were the nutrition programs ($20 billion, managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture), Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act ($16 billion), and Grants to States for college students with disabilities (about $15 billion). Those good sized quantities seem miniscule compared to $826 billion, the total K -12 receipts for school year 2021 -20.
The labor unions seem thinking about a lot more than money for his or her system. In the last decades, they've successfully increased union power and influence over our education system and also the Democratic Party. For them, it's been a virtuous cycle. More income results in more political power, which leads to more income, which results in more power.
The unions also are not limiting their vision to K -12 schools. Their long-term vision extends down through early childhood or more through college. Union leadership would benefit from such a government monopoly, where they actively elect officials after which \”negotiate\” with them. In the event that system is increasingly funded with the federal government, the important thing issues would be increasingly decided in the federal level.
That prospect should concern anyone already troubled by the power and influence of labor unions in our education system. That is certainly an issue for Betsy DeVos, who doubled recorded on limiting the government role. She maximized the flexibilities available to states and native districts under ESSA. She tried unsuccessfully to convert ESSA funding right into a no-strings-attached block grant. She even tried to contain the line on spending. Between 1989 and 2021, the Department of Education's discretionary budget had quadrupled to $68.3 billion from $17.1 billion. The final Trump request for the Department was $66.6 billion. Congress answered having a bipartisan $73 billion appropriation, not counting the $170.1 billion in Covid relief.
With regard towards the federal role, a lot of the reform community-both the school-choice and the accountability camps-was along the side of the teachers unions as well as their allies. For them, more federal cash is a good thing. The accountability camp relies on federal resources to facilitate their data and accountability systems. Charter organizations depend on federal resources to assist counterbalance the state policies that provide all of them with fewer dollars per student than traditional schools.
The teachers unions as well as their allies are leveraging the pandemic to increase dramatically the quantity of federal funding flowing to their K -12 system, as well as into their frontiers of early childhood and postsecondary education. For K -12, a lot of that money will be allocated using ESEA's Title I formula.
The Biden White House consistently describes Title I as targeted at \”children in high-poverty schools,\” but that terminology could be misleading. You may think that Title I money is mostly likely to help students in poverty. In reality, the Title I funds flow right through to nearly 90 percent of faculty districts. The unlucky 10 % of districts outside of Title I are typically small enclaves that lack much, if any, socio-economic or racial diversity. Within school districts, the Title I program serves 25 million students, nearly half of about 51 million public school students. In comparison, the portion of children (ages 5-17) living in poverty was 15.8 percent in 2021, historically low because of the pre-pandemic economic boom. That rate has undoubtedly grown throughout the Covid shutdowns, only one from the key provisions in President Biden's American Rescue Plan, the expanded and fully refundable child tax credit, will reportedly cut child poverty in two.
For 2021, the traditional Title I appropriation totaled $16.3 billion, as well as for 2021, it was $16.5 billion. The Biden Administration's \”skinny\” budget request 2022 included another $36 billion for Title I. On top of these funds, Congress pumped one more $190 billion to school districts between March 2021 and March 2021 using Title I shares with the Elementary and School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund. (There have been other federal enrichments for K -12, there are more coming, but Title I shares are the largest influx.)
All these funds will do little more than bolster the status quo. In fact, that's the point; the appeal with this money was explicitly in line with the need to go back to the status quo ante. At first, the a large number of D.C.-based groups representing school employees (from state chiefs to district superintendents to school administrators to teachers to support personnel) positioned ESSER as essential to make amends for precipitous drops in school revenues. When school revenues proved to be steady or more for most states (the exceptions are states like Hawaii that depend on tourism or Alaska that depend on oil for school revenues), the talking points widened to pay for the costs of safely reopening schools and of remediating the educational gaps which have been exacerbated by school closures.
My home state of California is a spectacular example of how this really is all playing out. By the end of March 2021, ESSER included an additional $23.4 billion for the Golden State. This federal aid is not contingent on safely reopening schools, and only 9 % of California's school districts were offering in-person full-time instruction.
California's enacted budget 2021-21 included $98.8 billion for those K-12 education programs. By the governor's revised May request 2021-22, that number had increased to $121.7 billion, a 23 percent jump. On the per pupil basis, spending swelled to $21,152 from $16,881 (more than 25 %), when accounting for all funding sources.
Even before the pandemic, 32 percent of California's 8th graders scored \”below basic\” around the NAEP reading assessment -mean-ing that about one-third our 8th graders cannot read and understand a fundamental, grade-level text. Perhaps the governor and legislature are preoccupied with getting buy-in from the teachers unions to safely open schools, but state offi-cials have not yet publicly grappled with how to remediate students to make up for the last year, much less yesteryear decades. Meanwhile, the system is tremendously grateful for that extra funds, therefore it can more easily continue business as usual.
Betsy DeVos unmasked a lot of divisions among education reformers, but she need not be the undoing from the education-reform movement.
While you will find real and important differences among us, education reformers have more that unites than divides us. Education reformers are attempting to address the inequities a part of our education system. We're a social-change movement, and like previous movements, we are facing an institution that serves vested interests and it is perpetuating itself. The education-reform movement should be based on the cause and the enemy that unites it. Our cause is educating a lot of students, regardless of class, race, gender, or beliefs, and our enemy may be the status quo education system that harms children since it fails to get results.
Realistically, though, that's not all that defines a movement to the public. We are a diverse lot, encompassing the spectrum of politics and personality. Yet, all education reformers do appear to have two traits in common: passion and grit. You want to acquire a better system, and we pursue that goal over many decades, even when it appears we might never succeed. We know that there is little improve when we do not attempt.
Movements are usually represented by their leaders-a precarious situation, because leaders are flawed, even when their cause is not. Betsy DeVos was thrust into representing the movement for a short time, but she is not the movement, and never was. You can reject DeVos and her specific policies without rejecting the movement. Even if you want the us government to play the dominant role in our system, or you want charter management organizations to dominate K -12 education, you and also Betsy DeVos have been in the same movement, since you wish to change the status quo.
We have a common cause, despite our differences in boldness and strategy and tactics. That suggests that education reformers have three options. You might go the bash-Betsy route-hoping to build credibility with our opponents so you can persuade them to see things the right path. You may operate in parallel with other reformers, ignoring or distancing yourself from, for example, faith-based decision-making. Or we all might work together strategically, using all of our competitive advantages. If that latter you like at all, let's talk. Recent progress in places such as Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and West Virginia is encouraging. But there's still a lot to do.
