Democrats Seize Education Reform

 

One startling development obscured by partisan battles over union contracts in Wisconsin and New Jersey is the degree to which high-profile Democrats have also been going toe-to-toe with teachers unions, a key bloc in their political base. “Faced with a $25 billion budget gap, California gubernatorial recidivist Jerry Brown is threatening deep cuts in K-12 education,” Katherine Mangu-Ward writes in Reason magazine. “In February another Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo of New York, proposed reductions in education funding and Medicaid to trim a $10 billion budget shortfall, saying the cuts were a necessity in his ‘fundamentally bankrupt’ state.”

Meanwhile, “The National Education Association—the largest teachers’ union in the country at 3.2 million members—spent $40 million in the 2010 election cycle, giving $2 million directly to Democrats,” Mangu-Ward reports. “The American Federation of Teachers, with another 1.4 million members, gave $2.6 million directly to Democratic candidates (compared with a piddling $8,000 to Republicans).”

The tide turned, to badly mix a metaphor, when a major disaster washed out a metropolitan school district, and its union representatives fled to other zip codes. “New Orleans has the most choice-friendly school system in the country, with more than 70 percent of its students attending charter schools,” Reason editor Nick Gillespie notes. “This was Hurricane Katrina’s silver lining: After the long-failing school system was finally destroyed, it could be rebuilt from the ground up.”

“The thing that we’re most focused on is making decisions that are based on what’s in the best interest of children and not necessarily what’s in the best interest for adults,” New Orleans school superintendant Paul Pastorek told Gillespie. Pastorek has served in that position since 2007. Hurricane Katrina occurred in 2005.

“Online courses, charter schools, vouchers—these are the kinds of things that, if we were only focused on what’s in the best interest of kids, we would want to proliferate,” Pastorek told Gillespie.

Pastrorek is also clear on what stands in the way of such innovations. “The biggest inhibitor to being able to do this more choice-type environment is the existing system seeing its finances go away,” Pastorek asserted.

In the meantime, the aforementioned vouchers are getting rave reviews in one of the first cities they were launched in. “Students in Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program have a better chance of graduating from high school than their peers, a study of the 21-year-old voucher program finds,” Lindsay Burke reported in the March 2011 issue of School Reform News. “According to the report for School Choice Wisconsin by University of Minnesota sociologist John Robert Warren, Milwaukee choice students were 18 percent more likely to graduate high school than students from all economic backgrounds in Milwaukee public schools.”

“Warren used seven years’ worth of data to track the graduation rates of students enrolled in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP).”  School Reform News is published by the Heartland Institute.

Lindsay Burke is an education policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

Against this backdrop, the relative timidity of a longtime supporter of virtually every form of choice in education is rather surprising. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush told Gillespie that, at the top of his “education reform list” is “applying digital learning as a transformative tool to disrupt the public education system, to make it more child-centered, more customized, more robust, more diverse, and more exciting.”

If he indeed harbors the presidential ambitions that seem to run in his family, it is not just the public education system that needs to become more robust and exciting.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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