The partisan politics of school choice

The chamber rang with members’ applause. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who sent her son to Virginia’s Episcopal High School, a tony private school boasting a $60,900 yearly price tag, was not among them. Instead, she simply scratched her nose and lifted her (yet untorn) copy of the speech to her face. (Incidentally, it has since been reported that Davis already attends one of Philadelphia’s most sought-after charter schools, Math, Science, and Technology Community Charter School III, or “MaST III,” where she has been enrolled since September.)

Trump concluded his discussion of education by calling on Congress “to give 1 million American children the same opportunity Janiyah has just received. Pass the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunities Act — because no parent should be forced to send their child to a failing government school.” Still no applause from the speaker, and scarce else from the other members of her party.

It was as clear an indication of the partisan state of education and educational choice as the occasion would allow. On the national level, this bifurcation appears to separate neatly into support for choice policies, such as charter schools, tax-credit programs, education savings accounts, and private school vouchers — and the Left’s opposition to such reforms. Underneath this partisan gloss, however, the politics of school choice are a bit more complicated.

Pointing out the political polarization of education is, of course, not a novel insight. Yet it is worth remembering that such stark partisanship is something of a new development. Until only very recently, education was a tried and true method for politicians to play to the middle and for candidates to show their electability. Indeed, one need only reach as far back as the Obama administration to find deep, bipartisan support for charter schools and school choice.

Charter schools, which are public schools that operate under an independent contract (a “charter”) and maintain greater autonomy than traditional public schools, sprung from bipartisan roots. As Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (and my former boss), summarized recently, “Charter schools were birthed in the early 1990s as a distinctly bipartisan project, one that married Democratic concerns for equity and educator empowerment with Republican concerns for parental choice and accountability.” In 1991, Minnesota passed the nation’s first-ever charter school law, which allowed for the creation of up to eight secular, “outcomes-based” public schools that would function outside of normal district regulations. It was the culmination of a half-decade’s worth of collaborative effort between education reformers, led by Ted Kolderie and Joe Nathan; Republican state legislators; and the previous governor of Minnesota, Rudy Perpich, a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

Every president since Bill Clinton has been a supporter of charter schools. On the campaign trail, Clinton championed Kolderie’s chartering paradigm as part of his “Third Way” in an effort to prove he was more than a tax-and-spend Democrat. “It is almost impossible for us to get President Clinton to stop endorsing [charters] in all his speeches,” the influential American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker (who had once endorsed charter schools himself) complained later. As president, George W. Bush poured roughly $1.4 billion into the federal Charter School Program and sought to expand school choice as a function of No Child Left Behind. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama even went so far as to signal his support for private school vouchers, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he was skeptical but would be open to them, “whatever my preconception,” if they proved to be “what’s best for kids.” In another interview, Obama reiterated his support for charter schools and pledged to double the amount of federal spending on public charter schools. “I’ve consistently said we need to support charter schools,” he told Politico.

This consensus has changed. Whereas President Bill Clinton in his budget for fiscal year 2000 had emphasized his administration’s commitment to investing in the growth of charter schools, candidate Hillary Clinton received boos from teacher union members in 2016 for daring to suggest that traditional public schools and charter schools should share ideas about “what’s working” in education. In the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, support for school choice and charter schools is held as virtually disqualifying. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have called for a complete moratorium on charter schools and for an end to the federal Charter School Program, which the Obama administration championed. And, as Jennifer Berkshire put it at the Nation, “even as ‘moderate-lane’ candidates like Buttigieg, Biden, and Klobuchar try to paint their further-left counterparts as out-of-touch spendthrifts on, for example, free college or Medicare for All, the top candidates are remarkably united when it comes to charter schools: They’re over them.” Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stands alone for his continued support of charter schools.

The Left’s move away from school choice began with the Obama administration. Obama had taken office under the promise of “unity, compromise, and post-partisanship,” and in fact represented little departure from the Bush administration’s educational agenda. But the pro-charter, pro-accountability bipartisan consensus on education he inherited masked growing political cleavages. Teacher unions had originally treated charter schools as a far less threatening policy concession than private school vouchers; indeed, some union leaders such as Shanker even viewed charters as a potential avenue for expanding (unionized) teacher control and spurring innovation. Yet as the charter sector expanded, including into major urban school systems such as those in Chicago, New York, and New Jersey, it did so largely absent union influence. Teacher unions began to push back at charter expansion, and this put pro-choice Democrats into a political bind. Meanwhile, conservatives and state leaders had begun to chafe under the onerous restrictions of No Child Left Behind and recoil from expanded federal intrusion into education.

Beginning in 2009, Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used Race to the Top, a competitive grant program paid for by $4 billion in stimulus funds, to coerce states into accepting fewer limits on school choice and more federal involvement in education. Race to the Top also pushed states to adopt the Common Core agenda. This noxious combination prompted backlash from both Left and Right. On the Right, Obama’s educational agenda became inextricable from broader critiques of his executive overreach. On the Left, the administration’s focus on school choice and teacher accountability further disenfranchised teacher unions, while the deficiencies of Common Core alienated the affluent and suburban communities that were becoming an increasingly important Democratic constituency. In 2014, the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, even went so far as to call on Duncan to resign.

Obama began to retreat from his support of school choice. His administration sought aggressively to defund the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which was a successful, federally funded voucher initiative serving around 1,500 students in the district. This despite the fact that an earlier evaluation of the D.C. program by the federal Institute of Education Sciences found that it “significantly improved students’ chances of graduating from high school.” In 2013, Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, filed a suit to close the state-funded Louisiana Scholarship Program, ludicrously maintaining that the program violated federal desegregation laws by allowing six black students to leave their failing elementary school. Even the Washington Post found this move excessive, stating in a September 2013 editorial that it was “bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due.”

This flip-flopping presaged the greater movement against school choice on the Left. In 2016, the NAACP called for a charter moratorium. High-profile Democrats, particularly those shoring up their political record in preparation for a presidential bid, began to change their tune on education. In 2016, Warren helped campaign against raising the charter school cap in Massachusetts, reversing her long-held support for market-driven school choice measures, despite the fact that Boston is home to the most effective charter sector in the country. During confirmation hearings for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Sen. Cory Booker, who was once held as the heir apparent to Obama’s education legacy, shamelessly reversed his support for both school choice and DeVos herself. Booker voted against DeVos’s confirmation despite the fact that he had been a longtime ally of the secretary and her choice agenda. In 2000, he had taken DeVos’s personal invitation to argue in favor of school vouchers at a Grand Rapids debate and in 2012 had given the keynote speech at the School Choice Policy Summit hosted by DeVos’s American Federation for Children, among other collaborations.

Meanwhile, as Democrats continued to turn away from school choice, Trump began to pick up its partisan mantle. On the campaign trail, Trump routinely blasted Democrats for their opposition to school choice. The Democratic Party, he told a Cleveland audience in 2016, has “trapped millions of African American and Hispanic youth in failing government schools that deny them the opportunity to join the ladder of American success.” His appointment of DeVos, a lifelong patron of choice-based, market-driven approaches to education, excited charter school advocates almost as much as it enraged choice opponents. As such, Trump’s SOTU lament about students trapped in “failing government schools” is as much a partisan attack as a call for system reform.

The politics of school choice, therefore, are politics of polarization. The Bush-Obama years federalized education as a matter of both policy and culture. Even with the passage of the Every Child Succeeds Act in 2015, which returned some power back to the states, the national focus on state and local education battles remains.

“Today, high-profile education positions are being crafted with an eye not to the persuadable middle, but to the party’s base,” Hess wrote last month. “That’s new. The information economy means that education will continue to grow in importance, but we can no longer assume that this will breed pragmatism or statesmanship. Instead, as politics have become more tribal, education’s very import has made it an appealing way to signal the base.”

When it comes to “the base,” however, the picture gets more interesting. For all the partisan rhetoric, neither Democrats nor Republicans are as monolithic when it comes to school choice as it may seem. There are important constituencies in both parties that cut against prevailing ideological winds.

Among Democrats, there is a sharp racial divide on charter schools and school choice. A poll commissioned last year by Democrats for Education Reform, a leftist advocacy group that backs charter schools, found that a significant gap exists between white and minority Democrats on the topic. While only 26% of white Democratic primary voters had a favorable view of charters, a majority of both black and Hispanic Democratic primary voters saw charters favorably (58% and 52%, respectively).

The most recent Education Next poll, which has tracked public opinion on charter schools for years, found similar discrepancies. Interestingly, support for charter schools among black and Hispanic Democrats held steady from 2016 to 2018. In the 2019 poll, 55% of African American Democrats and 47% of Hispanic Democrats backed charters. Among white Democrats, however, approval has dropped significantly over that time, falling from 43% to 27%.

This racial divide is consistent with other data. Zaid Jilani noted in these pages last week that “minority voters are often much more socially conservative than white voters, particularly within the Democratic coalition.” On education, too, minority Democratic voters seem to have different priorities than their white suburban counterparts. Yet at the national party level, it’s the white, suburban, union-following bloc that is driving the Democratic Party agenda on education at the expense of other Democratic coalitions. “The views of white Democratic voters seem to be a significant political impediment to parents of color gaining access to high-quality public charter schools that best serve their children,” concluded the Democrats for Education Reform survey.

Nor are Republicans’ views on educational choice and charter schools uniform, either. As Trump and his administration have embraced charter schools, the share of GOP voters’ support for them has increased. Sixty-one percent of Republican voters support charters, according to the 2019 Education Next poll, up from 49% in 2017.

However, not all Republicans are choice stalwarts. Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine broke party lines to vote against DeVos’s confirmation in 2017. To be sure, Collins and Murkowski are both centrists known to buck the GOP on difficult votes; however, they are also both from rural states. As the Brookings Institution’s Molly Reynolds and Elizabeth Mann Levesque have highlighted, “The reaction to the DeVos nomination suggests that an important part of public opinion on choice issues may be connected to geography, rather than simple partisanship. Even those who voted for her, such as Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY), inquired during her confirmation hearing what a school choice approach would mean for their constituents.”

Rural states tend to have a lower population density and their schools lower, sometimes far lower, budgets. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only about 11% of public charter schools are located in rural communities, compared with 29% of traditional public schools. As of this year, 44 states and the District of Columbia have charter schools. The remaining states without a charter school law are overwhelmingly rural: Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont.

Even outside of rural America, many communities across the country simply don’t have alternatives to traditional, local public schools. As such, calls for “school choice” that center on charter schools don’t have salience for many core Republican voters. This can hamstring the pursuit of choice policies at both the state and federal level.

Hot on the heels of his inauguration and DeVos’s partisan confirmation, Trump unveiled his initial “skinny budget,” which proposed a sweeping $20 billion school voucher program. Much was written about the proposal, but it ultimately gained little traction, even among the GOP. Plenty of Republican members of Congress, too, have proposed school choice bills of various stripes, ranging from allowing federal dollars to follow poor children as they transfer among schools, to expanding education savings accounts to cover K-12 expenses, to authorizing a federal tax-credit scholarship. Most have seen similar inaction. The lone legislative victory came with Sen. Ted Cruz’s 529 college savings accounts provision that was added as a last-minute amendment to the 2017 tax bill, and even that only passed because of a midnight tiebreaking vote cast by Vice President Mike Pence. (Nor is it without its conservative critics.)

GOP-controlled states, particularly those that are more rural, have not had an easy time expanding choice the past few years. Kentucky enacted its first charter school in 2017, yet as WKU’s Ryland Barton reported at the time, Republicans were divided on the issue of “whether to allow charters in all 120 counties in Kentucky, or just the two biggest — and urban — ones.” Since that time, the state has failed to continue its funding mechanism, essentially making the charter school law meaningless. Deep-red Arkansas has witnessed similar issues. Legislative proposals seeking to expand educational choice failed to pass in 2017 and 2019, despite Republican supermajorities in the statehouse. Even Texas is cooling off attempts at growing school choice.

Inez Feltscher Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum and the former task force director for education and workforce development at the American Legislative Exchange Council, told the Washington Examiner: “When I was working at ALEC, I often spoke to Republican legislators who were dubious about choice despite high polling numbers among Republicans. They cited fear of teacher union attacks, preserving jobs in their districts, and their beliefs that their rural constituencies would not have access or would not benefit from educational freedom.”

There are also conservative fears about the federal government seeking to promote school choice from Washington. The experiences of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top provide a clear picture of the potential consequences for federal-led education programs. Yet there are less heavy-handed ways to support choice on the federal level.

The “Education Freedom Scholarship” championed by Trump in his State of the Union address is one such approach. “While its particulars bear scrutiny,” AEI’s Nat Malkus wrote when the scholarship was announced last year, “the proposal’s overall design is a solid attempt to walk a tightrope of backing state efforts at school choice while protecting against federal meddling now and in the future. … Backing state developed tax-credit scholarships is the best, and probably only, way the federal government could support state efforts without overreaching.”

And while the politics of school choice have never been more polarized, there are still a few places where compromise seems feasible. The Family Stability and Opportunity Vouchers Act, which was introduced in December by Republican Sen. Todd Young and Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, has received bipartisan support from housing advocates, conservative economists, and even the NEA. The bill proposes to give half a million “housing choice vouchers” to low-income families with children under the age of 6 to move to neighborhoods with higher-performing schools and superior job prospects. “Housing vouchers,” writes John Bailey, “might be the most viable path for federal school choice policy. It would not only create economic opportunities for families and reduce housing insecurities, but also give lower income parents the means to have their children attend better public schools, including charter schools.”

There is also ample opportunity for the president and GOP senators to shift the politics of choice in their favor. It looks unlikely that the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives will pass the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act. The bill, which provides $5 billion in federal tax credits for contributions to state scholarship funds, has amassed 106 co-sponsors, but they are all Republicans. Yet, the disconnect between the educational views of black and Hispanic Democratic voters and the Democrats’ 2020 candidates is an electoral wedge just waiting to be exploited. We shall see if the president is up to the challenge.

J. Grant Addison is deputy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and the former program manager for education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.