Tied Up in Knots

For the 'reform' wing of the Democratic Party, education is a knotty business

This page has been noticeably quiet in recent weeks, but I’ve got a good excuse. I’ve been hard at work, reporting a forthcoming feature about the relationship between Democrats and education. In a word, it’s complicated. And yet as I’ve been interviewing candidates across the country, including Democrats who flipped seats in districts that Trump won, a story has begun to emerge that is wildly at odds with what we keep hearing from pundits and education reform advocates who are desperate to get the Obama-era school fixing, teacher-bashing band back together.

The candidates I’ve been talking to are smartly centering an impassioned defense of public education as part of an affordability agenda. They’re forcefully opposing vouchers and tapping into the rising backlash against ed tech. Finally, they’re avoiding the ‘college for all’ trap that has left broad swaths of the working class feeling looked down upon by Dems. You’ll be able to read my full report in the September issue of the New Republic, but here’s a taste of what I’ve learned so far–about why the education issue is powering some campaigns and sending others floundering.

Let’s start with vouchers

Find me a Dem who flipped a seat in a district that Trump carried, or is running competitively in a red state, and I’ll find you a voucher opponent. As Matt Barnum reports for Chalkbeat, Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa, has made calls to rein in that state’s off-the-rails voucher program the centerpiece of his campaign, an issue that is even more relevant after GOP primary voters went with the guy who runs an “unconventional” private school in Kansas, that he cofounded with Charles Koch’s son Chase. The choice of a Christian Nationalist voucher extremist seems like a gift to Sand, but it also highlights the weirdness of the political argument being made by the likes of Democrats for Education Reform. As I’ve chronicled on this page, there is a forceful, and deep-pocketed, effort underway to push Democrats to embrace Trump’s voucher plan. Except that opposition to vouchers turns out to be among the best ways for Democrats to win over disaffected Republican voters.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

“[T]he Democratic edge on education has dwindled.” Repeated endlessly in op-eds and ‘thought pieces,’ this lament is a reform standby. (For a fun activity, take this version, exhumed from the time machine circa 2014, and swap out the old policy faves with the latest edition.) Whatever the era, the logical conclusion is that in order to regain the now dwindled edge, Democrats should run as education reformers, armed with tough talk about test scores, standards and teacher accountability. Except that judging by the measurable performance of reform candidates, none of this appears to resonate with voters at all. Rahm Emanuel has been grabbing plenty of headlines but has “failed to gain much traction,” as the Washington Post noted this week, a somewhat sunny gloss on the fact that he still mostly fails to register in national polls at all. Then there’s Matt Mahan, the TFA alum and mayor of San Jose, who also ran as a Democrat for governor of California. An unreformed reformer, Mahan thrilled the reform crowd with his nods to Mississippi and talk of ‘educator excellence,’ but with voters he was a complete flop.

Your kids are dumb (and you’re not so smart either)

School-fixing moderates turn out to be a uniquely poor fit for our pitch-forked moment. (Mahan, by the way, was the Silicon Valley fave and, coincidentally the only Dem in the race to oppose the proposed billionaire’s tax.) But there’s another reason why these candidates are flailing. Remember when Arne Duncan made his infamous remark about suburban parents being unhappy with the Common Core because the tests revealed “their kids aren’t as brilliant as they thought they were”? I do! Arne would characterize this as the time he “infamously jammed his foot in his mouth,” but he accidentally pulled back the curtain on something fundamental about education reform. Beneath the talk about grades, standards and the ‘honesty gap’ runs a familiar theme about young dum dums and their oblivious parents. (See also references to kids these days as “the lost generation” or ‘cognitively impaired.’) At a time when the right is leaning hard into the mantra that ‘parents know their children best,’ and that education should flow from this premise, reform scold-speak lands with a particular thud.

Stop trying to make Mississippi happen

As I’ve written here, there is much to be learned from the success of Mississippi (and insisting that any increase in achievement must be a scam doesn’t exactly aid the cause of public education.) But a big part of what excites what’s left of the bipartisan education reform coalition about the ‘Southern Surge’ is that these states spend so much less on education than their blue-state counterparts, thanks in large part to the weakness/nonexistence of teacher unions. When candidates, blue and mostly red, run on ‘make [insert state] more like Mississippi,’ voters likely hear something along the lines of ‘we’re spending too much on your kid’s education’–a sure loser of a message. For a fascinating real-world example, the recent special election in Michigan is illustrative. Firefighter Chedrick Green ran an inspiring campaign that centered public education as a centerpiece of an affordability/worker power agenda. His GOP opponent ran on school choice and making Michigan more like Mississippi, including eliminating universal free school lunch. Spoiler: the race, which was regarded as an bellweather for the midterms, was a blowout…

Almost everybody hearts unions

Speaking of unions, political scientist Michael Hartney is out with fascinating new research on the attitudes of Democratic voters towards teachers unions. He finds that while GOP views have remained consistent–and consistently negative–over time, Democrats have grown steadily more supportive of teachers unions, which they now view “not simply as education interest groups or mere political allies, but as progressive bulwarks against Donald Trump and the Republican Party.” In recent months, Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel, DFER’s Jorge Elorza, and Matt Yglesias have all made the same case that in order to attract swing voters and win back disaffected Democrats, the party needs to go harder at teachers and their unions. Concludes Hartney: “The fundamental challenge for these Democrats, however, is that the electorate they hope to persuade has changed. Put simply, today’s Democratic voters are much closer to the very interest groups these reformers hope to confront.”

Everybody hates standardized testing

Read enough of the impassioned calls to return to the times when school reformers called the shots, and you’ll discern a familiar tale. Back when the nation’s foot was planted firmly upon the accountability gas pedal, things were going great. And then came [insert specific actor and complaint here.] So all we have to do is go pedal to the metal once more, right?? Except in the real world, where no one has ever heard of EduWonk or the Fordham Institute, pols of both parties are competing feverishly for the title of who hates testing more. Case in point: Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott claims to have eliminated the state’s standardized test. Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who is making this a real race, talks up her opposition to testing constantly–because it’s a position that reflects overwhelming public sentiment in the Lone Star state. In fact, listen closely and you’ll hear an anti-testing, anti-school closure, anti-state-takeover, anti-corruption argument emerging that speaks to Texans across party lines.

Bucking the backlash against ed tech

As I’ve written on this page, the divide over how to respond to AI is a key fracture among Democrats. Think of it as pitchforks vs. school books. The ascendant left populist wing of the party is calling for taxing billionaires, while the heirs to Clinton-era centrism are singing a familiar tune about endless retraining, digital badges and, above all, preparing youngsters for what’s left of the jobs of the future by fixing the schools. Alas, the fast-moving backlash against big tech–data centers, AI, screens in schools–puts the centrist in a tricky spot, because he likes the part where youngsters are being tested and remediated constantly, and thrills to the possibility of Khanmigo living up to its press release potential. Then there’s the inconvenient reality that the backlash against edtech is also a backlash against standardized testing. Consider, for example, the grassroots parent revolt against the much loathed iReady, now used by one-third of students across the country. The iReady pitch, as NBC’s Tyler Kingkade notes, is essentially the pitch for education reform: endless data collection, personalization, test score increases.

And lest you think this is merely a US conundrum. Here’s British Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledging to crackdown on AI chatbots while also making them the centrepiece of his inequality narrowing, gap closing agenda.

The ‘college for all’ trap

There may be no trickier subject for Democrats to navigate these days than college. Flash back to 2009 and Obama was instructing everyone in the land to commit to at least one year of secondary education–in response to the collapse of the financial industry! Within four years, he was hemorrhaging voters without college degrees, setting in motion our present-day calamity. Fast forward to the present and the party seems finally, maybe?, to be reckoning with the fact that embracing ‘college for all’ as THE path to economic mobility has alienated vast swathes of the country. And yet the decades-long habit of selling college as the “way to punch your meal ticket,” as one would-be 2028 contender contended recently, is hard to break. Meanwhile, populist Dems are making the case that kids who want to be able to go to college should be able to, without ending up shackled by debt. But they’re also running on worker power and strengthening unions, a key difference from their centrist counterparts.

Moderate, schmoderate

In my conversations with Dems who flipped seats in Trump districts, a distinct pattern has emerged. The GOP’s sharp rightward shift, particularly on education, created an opening for them, not just to rally members of their own party but to appeal to disaffected Republicans. Which is why I find the loud calls from the party’s ‘combative centrist’ wing for Dems to retake the middle by, say, embracing school vouchers or merit pay for teachers so puzzling. Join me, if you will, on a quick and instructive field trip to Sioux City, Iowa where Democrat Caitlin Drey flipped a seat last year, breaking the GOP’s supermajority as a result. Republicans released attack ads showing her with pink hair and painting her as “kooky”–a charge Drey embraced, if indeed fully funding public schools, clawing back state voucher money, and making child care and housing more affordable were kooky. I have another word to describe the popular policy agenda that powered Drey’s decisive victory over a far-right opponent: ‘moderate.’

Broken business

Finally, a shout out to my beloved who has the fortitude to occasionally listen to Tucker Carlson for our family. He recommended that I listen to this endless interview to get a sense of how skillfully Carlson is tapping into the backlash against elites, billionaires and ‘college for all.’ Listen closely and you’ll hear him trying to stitch together a coalition of working class voters without college degrees and the swelling ranks of the downwardly mobile college educated. Immigrants took the jobs of the first group, he rails, AI is coming for the jobs of the second. Carlson’s goal is to harness the rising populist rage and yoke it to xenophobia. Whether he is successful will depend upon whether someone emerges with a powerful counter message. Spoiler: any pol who thinks that a sales pitch grounded in ‘access,’ ‘innovation,’ ‘competition’ and ‘achievement’ will defeat the likes of Tucker Carlson is a fool. Do Democrats understand this? We’re about to find out…