For President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan, incoming House Education and Labor Committee
Chairman
John Kline will likely be as much a thorn
in their school reform efforts as the National Education
Association and the American Federation of Teachers. The suburban
Minnesota congressman has already made
it clear that he will oppose additional
funding for Race to the Top, the $4.3 billion initiative that has
spurred states such as California, Michigan, and Massachusetts to
eliminate restrictions on the expansion of charter schools and on
the use of student test score data in evaluating teachers. Kline is
also pushing to eliminate the accountability provisions within the
No Child Left Behind Act — a fact that pleases the nation’s two
largest teachers’ unions and suburban districts embarrassed by
revelations of their academic mediocrity.
Nonetheless, Obama and Duncan will have some unlikely
allies in Republican governors Mitch Daniels of Indiana,
tough-talking Chris Christie of New Jersey, and newly elected Rick
Scott of Florida. These governors share common cause with the
president on challenging teachers unions and their fellow defenders
of traditional public education. This, in turn, highlights the
disagreement on education policy (and school reform) in GOP ranks,
one that is as wide as that between centrist reformers and teachers
unions within Democratic Party ranks.
Certainly Obama and Republican governors will square off
on other issues. Daniels is considered a possible (if longshot)
candidate
for the Republican presidential nomination. Along with their allies
in Republican-controlled legislatures, they will also gerrymander
congressional districts in order to ensure a Republican majority in
the federal lower house for years to come, leaving Obama with less
of a network to draw on in his own re-election efforts.
But when it comes to school reform, the administration and
the governors share similar playbooks. If anything, Obama’s sly (if
not always successful) approach to federal education spending —
along with the use of bully pulpits — has helped Republican
governors make their own school reform proposals stick.
In Indiana, Daniels and the state’s Superintendent for
Public Instruction, Tony Bennett, have already spent the last two
years beating back the state’s once-powerful National Education
Association affiliate to pass a series of teacher quality reforms
that include expanding the number of alternative teacher training
programs and requiring aspiring teachers to pass a test before
taking education school courses. Daniels and Bennett particularly
used the lure of Race to the Top to their advantage in 2009,
stopping an effort by the NEA essentially to cut off funding to
charter schools.
Now, with the Republicans gaining full control of the
state legislature, Daniels and Bennett are pushing through a
20-point
agenda that includes the creation of a
charter school board that will authorize more of the
publicly-funded, privately-operated schools. They are also looking
to ditch the Hoosier State’s arcane school funding formula for
something called “weighted student funding.” It could end the
practice of restricting students to a school in their particular
neighborhood — and even pave the way for school vouchers — by
allowing state education dollars (which now account for nearly all
of operating funds for Indiana’s schools) to follow the student to
whatever school he attends.
In New Jersey, Christie has spent the past year
successfully beating back the state’s bellicose NEA affiliate over
his effort to require teachers to contribute a modest 1.5 percent
to their pensions funds, and has helped rally taxpayers to vote
against increases in local school district budgets. Christie is now
looking to bring private sector-style performance management to
education by reforming how teachers are evaluated and
ending near-lifetime job protections. He’s getting help from a
Democrat-controlled state legislature more willing to turn its back
on the Democratic Party’s teacher union allies.
The most-intriguing work may come out of Florida, where
two decades of reforms begun under Lawton Chiles and Jeb Bush will
now be taken further by Scott. This will likely include the revival
of efforts to abolish tenure, the work status that has made
teaching a near-lifetime job at the expense of both students (who
must put up with laggard teachers who can’t be easily removed from
their jobs) and taxpayers (who pick up the tab for lousy work).
Scott’s predecessor,
Charlie Crist, vetoed such a similar Race to the Top-inspired
measure earlier this year in order to win over teachers unions, a
move that all but ended his wishy-washy career.
Republican governors (and even their Democrat
counterparts) have also embraced a measure originally spurred by
Race to the Top called
Parent Trigger. It allows 51 percent of parents to either
replace school principals and teachers with new staff or convert it
into a public charter school. In the past year, Parent Trigger laws
have been enacted and considered in California and Connecticut to
the
consternation of school districts and teachers unions alike;
similar measures are being proposed next month in 10 more states —
including such teachers union strongholds as
Pennsylvania and
Michigan.
All of these reforms challenge the concept of local
control of education by school district bureaucracies championed by
Kline and some of his fellow congressional Republicans. From where
they sit — and as championed by think tanks such as the Heritage
Foundation and the Cato Institute — No Child, Race to the Top and
other expansions of federal education policy championed by Obama
and predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are overreach. In
their minds, reform efforts will best be accomplished in local
school districts and the communities they
serve.
The fact that districts, along with the NEA and AFT, are
the most-obstinate opponents of the school choice and teacher
quality reforms they support never factors into their thinking.
They also remain silent when it is noted that other Republicans are
talking about reviving the now-defunct D.C. Opportunity school
voucher program, a federal program launched in the last decade by
another generation of congressional Republicans. (No Child, by the
way, is also a Republican party creation.)
Meanwhile Kline and his allies fail to realize that for
all but a few Republican governors, federal education policy hasn’t
exactly been all that burdensome. If anything, No Child has helped
force states to accept their full responsibility for America’s
public school systems.
Although education is perceived as a local concern,
schools and districts (along with busted teacher pensions) are
actually creations of state constitutions. Although state
governments played passive roles for most of the 20th century, that
has changed since the 1960s, when teachers unions successfully
lobbied for state laws requiring districts to sit at the bargaining
table and states became the main forces in shaping school
policymaking. This role expanded in the 1970s as school funding
equity lawsuits and property tax reforms such as California’s
Proposition 13 led states to pick up larger portions of the school
funding tab.
These days, state governments account for 48 percent of
education spending. But the heft of the NEA and AFT, with their
vast campaign coffers and rank-and-file numbers, and the clout of
local districts have made it difficult to enact any school reform
or choice measure. This has led reform-minded governors to look to
the federal government, which has had a more prominent role in
public education — from the formation of land grant universities
in the 19th century, to the Sputnik-inspired National Defense
Education Act of 1958 and the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act — than most actually realize.
For GOP governors and school reformers in both parties,
school reform is no longer a matter of philosophical
difference. Particularly for GOP governors in
Rust Belt states, overhauling public schools is part of efforts to
foster economic development and eliminate the drag of
long-term unemployment. As a result, the governors are more
than willing to team up with Obama, big-city mayors, centrist
Democrats, and conservative think tanks outside of the
Heritage-Cato axis to advance a more-expansive federal education
policy. Kline will find a few governors tapping on his shoulders
before he bangs his gavel.
