By James C. Sherlock
Northern Virginia’s morning newspaper, The Washington Post, arrived on lawns and driveways on Monday with cautious suggestions for Democratic education platforms for the 2023 and 2024 elections.
Virginia Democrats, having lost the Governorship to education issues, are running in 2023 and have the first shot nationally at trying to find a winning message.
Right now Democrats like Lashrecse Aird are running on a single-issue education agenda – more money. She offers that, exclusively, as her vision for education.
Teachers’ unions find additional funding to be the single acceptable “reform.” And they run Democratic education policy.
Every Virginia Senate Democrat likely to have more comprehensive views of education reform lost in primaries. To teachers’ union-backed candidates.
The Post’s Jennifer Rubin has helpfully broken Democratic elite silence on some education issues, but not the most important one.
In her circles, she is otherwise relatively fearless.
Virginia as background. Governor Youngkin has supported increased school funding, higher teachers salaries, standards of learning reform and a massive program to improve mental health services.
He supports school choice, including charter schools, but finds himself blocked by Virginia’s Charter School Law which, backed by the powers of school boards enumerated in Virginia’s constitution, makes school boards the sole charter authorities.
Which is why in the entire state of Virginia we have only seven charter schools.
Recognizing that obstacle, Youngkin has gone as far as he thought he could in school choice – supporting Regional Alternative Education Programs and proposing c0llege-based Lab Schools to a Senate with a Democratic majority.
He has not proposed either open inter-divisional enrollment or additional charter authorities, likely because both will take an amendment to our state constitution. He has also not proposed vouchers.
I think he is making a mistake by not sponsoring one or more constitutional amendments to provide for more school choice.
Ms. Rubin starts with a statement that schools are failing in their core mission, education. She backs that up by reciting statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that she found on NPR.
She even admits that the problem predates the pandemic. Then:
Whether sparked by covid-19, school and neighborhood violence, social media, or other factors, the student mental health problem also has exploded.
Their children’s mental health was the biggest concern for parents, according to a Pew Research poll this year.
So far so good, and much further than any Democratic candidate (and some Republican candidates) in Virginia has gone or appears likely to.
Rubin further opines:
Education has always been a bread-and-butter issue for Democrats, but they certainly cannot limit the discussion to guns or mental health services. Moreover, additional funding without reform or accountability would be politically untenable.
“Politically untenable.”
She offers a “multi-pronged approach”:
- Increased spending. I happen to support, as has Governor Youngkin, increased spending. But increased spending without reform is good money after bad in the worst school divisions. Rubin admits that:
Spending alone won’t fix schools, but it’s a predicate for real reform.
- Increasing the rigor of education training programs, a subject on which I have criticized schools of education for years;
- Teachers unions and schools negotiate allowing schools to more quickly weed out underperforming teachers in return for superior credentialing and higher pay. (Good luck, but brave to recommend.)
- Another:
With the goal of educational excellence, mastery of subject matter and parental satisfaction, the federal government and/or the states could challenge school districts to come up with their own plans, bid for grant money and continue the grants as long as they are making demonstrable progress toward high achievement for all students.
But federal and state innovation grant programs are in place and have been for years.
She also recommends, without mentioning any specific instance, programs similar to Matt Hurt’s Comprehensive Instructional Program (CIP) centered in Southwest Virginia and expanded into central parts of the state. Another good idea.
After bringing it up, she does not mention mental health supports in her recommendations, assuming Democrats are already going there.
Then she comes off the rails.
- Purposely ignoring Youngkin and his education and mental health reforms in Virginia and the huge gains in school choice in Republican-led states, she accuses Republicans of focusing on “niche” issues.
- Then this:
when it comes to rotten test scores, they inevitably resort to blaming teachers unions or proposing to abolish the Education Department.
Those two items may be there to maintain street cred in progressive Washington while attempting to get her friends to explore new ideas.
Republican governors and legislatures in red states have sponsored school choice in all of its variations – including inter-district open enrollment, public charter schools and vouchers.
School choice started at the state level in Wisconsin and spread first to blue states like New York. But Democrats now fight it every step of the way.
Ms. Rubin cannot even use the words “school choice.” It is as if Democrats think they will wind up like Lot’s wife if they look there. That is her major concession to the teachers unions. But it is a disabling one.
So we are left with her proposals for Democratic support to:
- higher spending, which is a Democratic platform plank never in doubt;
- teacher cooperative programs like CIP;
- better teacher training and coaching (It is perhaps understandable that she fails to suggest what rigor means, what pedagogy new teachers will be taught and by whom); and
- quicker dismissal of poor teachers, knowing that there is no precedent and no appetite for that in the unions themselves.
In doing so, she attempts to broaden the conversation about education among Democrats.
It is a worthwhile attempt, unusual among her circle and appreciated by many who are not in it.
But she is handicapped by the fact that she does not, and perhaps thinks she cannot, mention, much less recommend, competition – school choice – lest she turn into a pillar of salt.
