In his life before politics, he in his home state. During his time serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, he to expand high-performing charters, citing hundreds of thousands of families on waitlists nationwide. And now, in his last year as Colorado’s chief executive, he has even in the Trump administration’s biggest K–12 policy initiative to date: a tax credit designed to expand school choice across the country. 

The benefit, which will come online next January, on their federal taxes by contributing to organizations that defray students’ educational costs, including private school tuition. Taxpayers from anywhere in the U.S. can give freely and claim the credit, but individual states must opt in for their students to receive the scholarships. To this point, 26 Republican governors they will take steps to do so; only Polis and one other Democrat, North Carolina’s Josh Stein, have done the same.

It’s a choice that can’t help but divide the party. Progressives have as , but those tied to the Democrats’ formerly dominant education reform wing (including former Education Secretary Arne Duncan) to stubbornly low student achievement. Polis himself to Fox News explaining his decision as one that would empower both scholarship donors and recipients.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Polis predicted that his fellow Democrats would eventually reach the same judgment. He also cited his own record as governor — including a huge expansion of free preschool — as an example to state and local leaders weighing how to govern schools as mixed signals emanate from the federal government over the direction of U.S. education policy. Considered a likely future presidential candidate over , he called for his party to adopt a more assertive K–12 agenda.

“Not a lot of change was driven out of Washington over the last few years,” Polis said. “That should change, and Democrats should be the party of change.” 

����Ӱ��: So far, you’re one of just two Democratic governors who has indicated that his state will participate in the federal scholarship tax credit. Why do you think that is?

Polis: I think most, if not all, Democratic governors will get there as they learn about the chance to boost charitable contributions in their state. If there are states that don’t, for some reason, people in those states can still give to charities in states like Colorado.

In other words, taxpayers everywhere will be able to get the tax credit. But if a particular state doesn’t opt in, then the donors in that state would be giving out of state. I do believe states will opt in as they see the opportunity for additional donations to help at-risk kids and middle-class kids in their state.

The analogy that’s been used is to included in Obamacare: A few red states still refuse to participate, but most have turned the page and accepted the federal funds. Do you see blue states following a similar path here?

Yeah, I think many of them will choose to do it because it’s free money. 

With the Medicaid expansion, Colorado was totally for it, but that initiative did put some state money on the line as well. It was originally a 90-10 split. I’m proud that Colorado did that — along with all the blue states and most of the red states — but this was an even easier decision because there are zero state resources on the line. It’s all additional resources to nonprofits that help kids. 

Colorado has had a similar thing on the books for a long time, the . If you give to an organization that provides early childhood care, either a religious or secular organization, you get a 50 percent tax credit on your state taxes. So you get $500 off your state taxes if you donate $1,000. We’ve had that in place for decades, and it’s been very popular on both sides of the aisle. The scholarship tax credit is a more generous one because it’s 100 percent, but it’s federal, so we don’t have to pay for it. That’s great from the state’s perspective.

The credit will only become available next January, near the end of your term, but I’m curious what you think of potential issues with implementation. Some warn that money could be channeled to schools that , and more broadly, that it could create an unaccountable private school choice sector. Do you share any of those concerns?

This isn’t government money. It’s not the state investing in anything, it’s individual donors making their decisions. Sure, I’ll be donating my $1,700 to great programs for education and tutoring and after-school care for kids that need it, and others might donate to scholarships or summer programs. It’s really up to the donors, and you can’t expect that you or I would agree with how somebody else donates their money.

The important thing is that in the aggregate, it’ll do a lot for kids.

Colorado is a really interesting case in that a huge number of families already take part in school choice through charters and open enrollment. But voters rejected voucher-type programs twice through referenda in the 1990s, and last year, they to school choice. How could the federal tax credit affect public attitudes?

It’ll help bring more educational services to more kids, and the form of that will be decided by what donors choose and what Coloradans want. For some it’ll be tutoring programs, for others it will be summer learning opportunities, and for others it could be scholarships for school. There are just so many ways for these resources to be used.

In Colorado, we trust the parents. We hope that some great nonprofits are going to be able to participate, and that many Coloradans step up and choose to make this $1,700 donation. Some donors will choose to give their money to organizations that don’t show value-adds for kids, so I do hope there’s transparency. And the more information for parents to take advantage of these programs that nonprofits offer, the better. We ultimately want this to show improvements to student achievement and success.

Does the national Democratic Party have a K–12 agenda right now? The Biden administration used a lot of its education bandwidth on things like student loan forgiveness, and I’m interested in whether you think your party needs to set clearer priorities on schools.

The party doesn’t have one voice, it has many. There are certainly many education leaders in Congress. It was a focus of my service there, when I was the ranking member on the early childhood and K–12 subcommittee. I worked with President Obama and Joe Lieberman and others on the [legislation, never passed, that would have provided competitive grants for the expansion of high-performing charter schools]. 

Democrats stand for opportunity and for making sure — no matter where you live, even in the poorest areas in the inner city or of rural America — that you have every opportunity and advantage, a choice of high-quality options that work and that can help you get the skills you need to live a great life. For me, it’s about opportunity, and I know a lot of Democrats feel the same way. 

But how do those values translate into policy? The period of No Child Left Behind-style education reform ended a while ago, and Republicans have responded with a big embrace of school choice at both the state and federal levels. If Democrats aren’t going along with them, and they’re not returning to the days of NCLB, how do they move forward?

Basically, we need to update the way we look at outcomes in education and make sure we have better transparency and accountability for providers at all levels. It’s not just about making sure kids can read and do math — although they do need to do that — it’s also about making sure they’re prepared with the skills that will help them get a good job. If they’re going to higher education, it’s about making sure they’re exposed to dual- and concurrent-enrollment in high school. How can they get a certificate that means something if they’re not going to a two- or four-year school?

These are the kinds of things we need to do a better job of measuring across all our schools and educational programs — public, private, and charter.

You have not ruled out running for president in 2028. What does the Democrats’ next leader have to do to recover some of the credibility that they’ve lost with voters, at least according to most polls, on education and other issues?

Democrats are the party of education, and we need to reclaim that with a bold agenda. When I ran for governor here in Colorado, we only had half-day kindergarten; parents had to pay for full-day, and they had to pay for preschool. One of the top items we got done is and preschool for every child in our state. We’re already seeing the benefits of that as that first class of kids is now in the second and third grades. We also want to make sure that high school graduates enter the workforce with a skill or credential that allows them to earn a living, or to go on to one of the many kinds of institutions of higher education, or apprenticeships, or skills academies. 

And we want to make sure we embrace choice. I’m a parent of two kids, and every parent knows that what’s good for one kid isn’t necessarily good for the other. Some kids learn from outdoor, experiential learning, some kids thrive in a dual-language immersion setting, and some will want a STEM experience. In Colorado, we have agriculture-focused high schools. We have dual-language immersion in Chinese and French. We have vocational opportunities — and not just in the traditional fields like auto shops or aviation, but also the healthcare workforce. You can get certified, right out of high school, to be a phlebotomist or an EMT.

Your time as governor has played out over parts of two Trump presidential terms, plus the pandemic and learning loss in between. What has your tenure taught you about improving schools and education?

We definitely focused on progress at the state level. There’s some chaos going on now in terms of who administers certain programs, but not a lot of change was driven out of Washington over the last few years. 

That should change, and Democrats should be the party of change. Better education and opportunity is the key to our prosperity as a nation, and for learners at the individual level. 

So the lack of activity certainly hasn’t held states back, and there are lots of examples of what states and school districts have done to innovate. As I mentioned, we’ve had many in Colorado: universal preschool and kindergarten, providing high-quality schools in education deserts, and providing more choices to empower parents to make better choices for their kids.

So is the lesson for Democrats to be as entrepreneurial as possible at the level of state policy, and to be as bold as possible about improving outcomes in the schools around them?

Yeah, don’t just wait out the chaos at the national level. No matter what happens nationally, we need to fight for change at the district level and the state level, so we can better serve every American — no matter where they live or the economic circumstances of their parents.

Who are you rooting for in the Super Bowl, the Patriots or the Seahawks?

Oh, I’m still bemoaning our Broncos. Such a close game, and a tragic ending on a snowy day.

President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race Sunday, he said in , creating an unprecedented vacancy atop the Democratic ticket one month before he was scheduled to officially accept his party’s nomination.

In a followup  less than 30 minutes later, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place as the Democratic nominee.

Biden’s withdrawal came after a weeks-long pressure campaign from party insiders following a  June 27 debate performance against GOP candidate former President Donald Trump.

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The move throws an already-unusual presidential race into further chaos, and it was not immediately clear Sunday how Democrats would choose a replacement for Biden in November’s election, though Harris would have a strong claim to lead the ticket.

Biden praised Harris as “an extraordinary partner” in the administration’s accomplishments.

Biden, who has been fighting a COVID-19 infection at home in Delaware since last week, was not specific about his reasons for stepping aside, but said he believed it was in the country’s best interest.

“It has been the great honor of my life to serve as your President,” he wrote in the one-page letter. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

Biden, 81, appeared frail and confused at several points throughout the debate, leading to worries among elected Democrats and the party’s voters that he was no longer up to the task of governing or contesting Trump’s bid to win back the White House.

As several congressional Democrats called for him to quit the race, others asked that he ramp up his public schedule and include more unrehearsed appearances that could demonstrate his fitness.

But a more robust schedule of news interviews, press conferences and campaign rallies did not sufficiently quiet the Democratic voices saying Biden’s candidacy was likely to throw the presidential race to Trump – whom Biden and others have described as an existential threat to U.S. democracy – and deeply handicap Democrats in other races up and down November’s ballot.

On Friday, Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and  brought the number of senators calling on Biden to drop out to four. A day earlier, Montana Sen. Jon Tester  Biden should drop his reelection campaign and that Democrats should hold an open nomination process at their Chicago convention next month.

In the U.S. House, 29 Democrats had called for Biden to withdraw from the race by the end of the day July 19.

In a post following the announcement to his social media site, Truth Social, Trump said Biden was “never” fit to serve as president.

“Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve – And never was!” Trump wrote. “He only attained the position of President by lies, Fake News, and not leaving his Basement. All those around him, including his Doctor and the Media, knew that he wasn’t capable of being President, and he wasn’t – And now, look what he’s done to our Country.”

More details of announcement

In the letter, Biden praised his administration’s accomplishments over three-and-a-half years, saying he’d worked to make “historic investments” in the country, lowered prescription drug costs, nominated the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court and “passed the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world.”

“Together we overcame a once in a century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Biden wrote. “We’ve protected and preserved our Democracy. And we’ve revitalized and strengthened our alliances around the world.”

Biden said he would “speak to the Nation later this week” about the decision.

He praised Harris and other supporters.

“For now, let me express my deepest gratitude to all those who have worked so hard to see me reelected,” he wrote. “I want to thank Vice President Kamala Harris for being an extraordinary partner in all this work. And let me express my heartfelt appreciation to the American people for the faith and trust you have placed in me.”

In follow-up posts, Biden said he was endorsing Harris and added a fundraising link.

“My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President,” he said. “And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”

Trump gains in polls

The about face in what was to be a 2020 presidential election rematch leaves Democrats searching for a new candidate as Trump, who promises authoritarian-style leadership, has gained support in recent polls.

With just 107 days until Election Day, Biden’s move marks the latest date in modern presidential history that a candidate has withdrawn from the race.

President Lyndon Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection that year, leaving Democratic delegates to decide on a replacement – ultimately Vice President Hubert Humphrey – at the party’s convention that summer in Chicago.

Harris appears to be in a strong position to replace Biden as the party’s standard bearer, though questions remain about how the process will play out and  would become the vice presidential nominee.

Democrats praise decision

Reaction poured in shortly after the Sunday afternoon announcement, with Democrats largely praising Biden’s record and calling his decision courageous.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement that he understood Biden’s decision to step out of the race was “not easy, but he once again put his country, his party, and our future first.”

“Joe Biden has not only been a great president and a great legislative leader but he is a truly amazing human being,” the New York Democrat said.

Several Republicans called for Biden to resign his office.

“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote on X. “He must resign the office immediately. November 5 cannot arrive soon enough.”

A crescendoing chorus to step down

Biden faced calls for him to abandon his reelection bid from congressional Democrats, even as he tried to stabilize the debate aftershock by holding a series of campaign rallies,  for  and holding a press conference at.

Democratic lawmakers   a public front of support for Biden in statements and passing interviews in the U.S. Capitol hallways with reporters.

What began as a trickle of dissent from rank-and-file Democrats —  with Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas and a handful of doubtful senior House Democrats — steadily grew to a torrent by Friday.

50-year career in Washington

Biden’s exit marks the closure of a long, storied career in Washington, including 38 years in the U.S. Senate, featuring stints leading the Foreign Affairs and Judiciary committees, and eight years as vice president under President Barack Obama.

Biden’s presidency was punctuated with major economic wins for Democrats, beginning with nearly $2 trillion to combat the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

His leadership with a Democratic majority in Congress resulted in substantial nationwide infrastructure investments, drove financial incentives to tackle climate change and revive the U.S. global role in semiconductor manufacturing, and strengthened flagging tax enforcement.

However, low approval ratings followed Biden throughout his presidency as Americans aimed their frustrations over inflation at the White House and assigned blame for record numbers of border crossings as a divided Congress – after Democrats lost their House majority in the 2022 midterms – failed to pass immigration restrictions negotiated with the administration.

Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war also hurt his support among young and progressive voters as Israel’s continued offensive against Hamas militants in the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip killed tens of thousands of civilians. Protesters against the U.S. supply of weapons to Israel interrupted dozens of Biden’s reelection campaign events through 2024.

Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report.

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Politicians of have made about the state of inner-city and majority Black schools. As the party that largely controls many large urban centers, and overwhelmingly wins the African American vote, Democrats politically own the outcomes in most of these jurisdictions. 

The Democratic Party has pushed to increase funding for low-income schools, aiming to solve a perceived lack of funding equity. However, the districts with the most income and racial segregation actually on low-income and minority schools than on wealthier, typically white-dominated ones. 

It’s time for Democrats to re-embrace an option that is effective at improving educational outcomes for poor and minority students: . Schools should be able to innovate, and nothing fosters innovation better than a dose of healthy competition.

An evolution in public education is already in motion. During the pandemic, Black parents started homeschooling their children in : 3% of Black students were homeschooled in spring 2020, increasing to 16% in fall 2022. While homeschooling can be a good option for many, it is not accessible to all. Therefore, Democrats need to take the initiative to embrace education reforms that can prepare large numbers of students for the 21st century economy, while maintaining enrollment in public education. Public charter schools fit this bill. 

Charter schools once enjoyed bipartisan support, but Democrats have largely ceded the movement to Republicans. Some of this can be attributed to Trump administration education secretary Betsy DeVos’ vigorous support for charters. But the root of Democrats’ abandonment of public charter schools is the teachers unions, which have always disliked charters because most are not organized. In fact, most charter schools are from union contracts. When put together, the cracks formed between Democrats and charters allowed the teachers unions, which heavily contribute to Democratic candidates, to coerce the party into withdrawing its support of these schools.

This shouldn’t be the case. In Washington, D.C., for example, which is 46% Black and controlled by Democrats, public charter schools have proven to be a major success at improving education outcomes for students. City officials first embraced the model in 2007, and today, nearly half of D.C. students are enrolled in a public charter school. Furthermore, the innovations that D.C.’s charter schools have adopted and the competition they create have caused traditional district schools to .

Because they are public schools, charter schools are still accountable for providing necessary science, math and humanities education. Accountability measures prohibit them from sprinkling in science-denying concepts like creationism or “Lost Cause” mythology in U.S. history. The same can’t be said for homeschooling or that can — — funnel taxpayer dollars into unaccountable private academies. If children are to be prepared for the jobs of the future, they must be provided with an education that prepares them. 

Charters have a among underserved, disproportionately Black students and offer opportunities for these children to have functional schools that provide a strong education. The Democratic Party has created a political conundrum for itself: It prides itself on anti-racism, but also on being friendly to labor unions. When needed education reforms conflict with union interests, Democrats risk losing the massive support of organized labor. But if Democrats want to retain the voter strength of the African American community, they have to get real and stop playing politics with its kids.

Academically rigorous public charter schools have been shown to work, especially for Black children. They allow parents and students to choose the type of education that works best for them. Black voters want their children to succeed in school; if the Democratic Party is to maintain their loyalty, the least it can do is get out of the way of children’s educational opportunities and support the public charter schools that support them.

Jonathan Chait has been writing about the fraught politics of education reform for over a decade.

The veteran political columnist for New York Magazine is a vigorous advocate for the pillars of liberal education reform: high academic standards, school choice, and test-based accountability for schools and teachers who aren’t meeting expectations. It was an outlook that largely fit with Democratic Party orthodoxy in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when Barack Obama and his allies in Congress successfully pushed many states to expand charter schools and adopt the Common Core standards. 

But as the years passed and the Obama era ticked down, his essays on K-12 schools took on a somewhat anxious tone. Resurgent teachers’ unions began exerting more influence at all levels of Democratic politics, including the effort to replace the federal No Child Left Behind Law. Then Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos arrived in Washington, further polarizing a debate around charters that had already begun to split the party. By 2018, Chait was openly to save his “forgotten education legacy.”

That was all before the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of American students suffered severe academic losses over months of prolonged school closures. Now, less than seven months from November’s midterm elections, Chait warns that Democrats around the country may lose the support of voters alienated by a faction that “doesn’t see educational achievement as something important.” 

Those views have earned Chait the enmity of some educators and activists, who have accused him of teachers over COVID-related school closures and intermittently called for him to “disclose” his wife’s career as an education consultant. In response, he has brought to intra-Left disputes that makes him one of the most compelling writers in liberal journalism.

In an interview with Kevin Mahnken, Chait offered a K-12 agenda for Democrats and explained why he believes that “the straightest line to better education reform probably involves running over the teachers’ unions, at minimum.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Education has always been an issue that Democrats have won on, and there’s some polling evidence that they still do. But you’ve expressed the view that it could be a liability for them this fall, in part because parents may not see the party as reflecting their values or priorities. What are the party’s vulnerabilities here?

There are a few potential causes, some of which they have more control over than others. One simple one was that the [American] Rescue Plan gave an enormous amount of money to states, more than they needed to fill their budget holes, and some of them used that money to increase teacher pay. That included [governors] in Florida and other Republican-controlled states, who were able to boost teacher pay and kind of seize the political center without having to pay for it with taxes. So that’s given them a leg up.

Number two would be the pandemic, during which Republicans have had a more aggressive pro-opening stance than Democrats. The Democrats have really caught up, and I can’t think of many places where schools are being closed anymore, so I’m not really sure that will be a big issue. But it’s possible that Democrats have lost some credibility on that issue because they were behind Republicans in calling for reopening in some states. And this is — there are some fears that this has given an opening to the Right to split Democratic constituencies from teachers’ unions and basically say, “Look, the unions had this irrational, harmful position. Maybe you should be questioning some of the other things they say.” Now, some people on the Left are framing this as a kind of diabolical plot on the Right and not as a mistake the unions made, which is how I think we should view it. Regardless, there is that danger that some people who didn’t really question the unions before are questioning them now.

But the biggest ongoing risk factor here is the potential for schools to become laboratories to introduce lefty ideas that don’t have majority support and, in many cases, don’t have strong empirical support. The reason for that is that education schools and unions have both become incubators for a lot of pretty radical ideas that don’t always hold up to evidence or to public opinion. This is a little hard to quantify, but you see it in some places that are scaling back the use of standardized tests, scaling back tracking. It’s exaggerated by the Right to a huge degree, but there are places where — they’re not really teaching “critical race theory,” but they’re teaching historical interpretations that are aligned with certain left-wing challenges to liberalism. That’s happening a lot in elite private schools, but probably a little in public schools too.

Because schools are an area where these policy changes can be implemented without democratic approval, it opens the door to people being exposed to ideology that springs from the far Left. You know, you have pretty left-wing people with ideas for all kinds of areas of American life. would say, “We should abolish the police! We should abolish private insurance!” But they can’t do that because you actually need to pass those proposals through a legislative body; to make changes to schools, you don’t need to do that. That’s the reason why schools are an area where the Left can operationalize policies that can’t really pass democratic muster, and it makes education a danger zone for Democrats.

While these are all areas of exposure for the party, education is one of those issues that really doesn’t have a history of turning national elections. Is 2022 going to be different, or are your warnings here just an example of the ?

Well, we don’t know how widespread these pedagogical changes are. I don’t really know how you’d go about measuring that, and I don’t think anyone has tried. And the second question is, even if they’ve spread widely, how much would that affect voting behaviors? We don’t know that either. That’s why I’d depict this as a risk factor, but how big a risk is really hard to say.

You’ve been writing for close to a decade about the decline in support among Democrats for what has loosely been described as “education reform.” What’s your theory for how the party began its transition?

What’s interesting historically is that the Democrats’ biggest education reform initiative [Race to the Top] happened under very unusual circumstances. It was thrown into the stimulus that was passed just a few weeks into the Obama presidency, in the middle of a massive catastrophe and at the absolute peak of the administration’s political capital. The president threw into this giant measure, as a very small percentage of the overall cost, a grant-based reform to the states to incentivize them to implement education reform measures.

When I went back and looked at the coverage of it in the national press, there were just tiny little details. So there really wasn’t time for opponents to mobilize against it — even though, if this had been a standalone measure that was introduced even a few months later, they would have gone to the mat to defeat it and probably succeeded. I also think that it was much more successful than even its advocates thought at the time. Certainly its critics didn’t realize how effective this would be at leveraging reform at the state level; it drove a lot of changes, and it took a while for those critics to say, “Wait a second, what’s going on here?” 

The problem was that Obama was deeply committed to this agenda, and the [teachers’] unions really didn’t have the leverage to go to war with him. If the unions had gone to their members and said, “The president is killing us — we’re going to support a primary challenger in 2012,” they would have lost more members than they would have hurt him. That was too risky, so the way they played it was , as if Duncan was running around implementing this reform agenda without Obama knowing anything about it. And when Arne Duncan decided to leave and Obama appointed another reformer, they decided they were against him too. The whole time, they had to keep up this pretense that these guys were acting against Obama’s wishes because they recognized that openly opposing Obama would have hurt them with their own members.

But when Obama left the scene, it gave the unions another opportunity to reset the playing field. They were pretty active in the 2020 primaries, trying to nail down all the candidates on commitments to their agenda, and they had somewhat more success there. The candidates who most strongly opposed reform — Warren and Sanders, and to a lesser extent Bill de Blasio, who was sort of making that his lane — didn’t win, but Biden was still much closer to their position than Obama.

I notice that we skipped over the 2016 election there, as well as the Trump presidency. But it really felt like those five years were the major pivot point.

That’s right. As harmful as Obama was to union organizing efforts, Trump was extremely helpful. 

The main goal of reform critics is to bracket together liberal reform with conservative reform — charter schools and vouchers, for example. Even though these are really different policies, they want them to be called the same thing: privatization. They don’t want to distinguish between those two ideas, and it’s their most successful rhetorical gambit. The fact that Obama was for charters but against vouchers was very difficult for them, but Trump allowed them to frame the terms exactly the way they wanted. So they really made a lot of headway during the Trump era, though they’re now in a somewhat different position under Biden.

I was just starting to look at the Biden administration’s new regulations on the Charter Schools Program, but that looks like a win for opponents of reform. It seems like they’re attaching a ton of red tape to make sure it’s as difficult as possible to access those funds. 

We’ve been expanding choice and using standards-based accountability for a few decades now, and there isn’t a great deal of evidence that student learning has dramatically improved since the beginning of the Great Recession. Do you think, even before Trump, there was a sense among Democratic elites that the gains we’ve seen since the ’90s just haven’t been worth the investment made?

It depends on what’s being invested. Federal spending is still such a tiny amount compared with the overall amount spent on education. To the extent that Democratic elites are thinking about a costly investment, it might be the investment they feel they made in reforms that have caused them significant damage with their own allies. From the standpoint of someone in Democratic politics who’s not primarily interested in education, they’re saying, “We’ve put ourselves behind these reforms and taken enormous blowback from within our base, so we need to measure the benefits of this reform against the very high price we’ve paid to do it.” Even if you’re getting some pretty good results for kids, it might not necessarily cost out as a good bet from that perspective. 

I wrote last year, and I focused on charters because I think that’s the area where the research has been most impressive. Initially, education reform really covered a lot of ground, and you’re right that the results have been kind of tepid in some of those areas. It is really hard to steer public education when so much of it is controlled in this fragmented way, and to have a national reform change something at the local level is so difficult. I think charters have been the bright spot. 

Granted, their effects have been really concentrated in one cohort — basically, non-white kids in cities. But that’s the biggest crisis in American education! It’s not the affluent suburban schools, not the middle-class areas, though you want those to be better. The inability to give non-white kids in urban schools anything like a decent education is the real crisis, and that’s where charters have made a big impact. So having a lot of success in that narrow area actually means quite a bit.

I’d like to go into the time machine one more time. Eleven years ago, right after in Wisconsin, arguing against Scott Walker and the whole effort to limit the collective bargaining power of public sector unions.

I’ve completely forgotten this!

It’s basically a defense of the necessity of teachers’ unions, including some hopes that they can be partners for reform in the future. In the kicker, you write that they “can’t hold off reform forever. And, after all the worst aspects of the tenure system disappear, education reformers will discover that teachers are their best allies.” Do you still hold that view? And do you still see teachers’ unions as necessary?

That’s a great question. I certainly expressed an optimistic view of where unions would go politically that has not borne out. They’re probably moving in the opposite direction. I guess you’d chalk it up to misplaced optimism.

Are teachers’ unions necessary? Let me put it this way: If I were designing my ideal world, they would exist. But given their political orientation, and the fact that so many of them are determined to put their efforts into defending the worst aspects of the system rather than pushing for more constructive changes, I would say no, I don’t think they are necessary. 

I’ve started to think of them more like police unions, which I consider the main problem in criminal justice. Police unions have just devoted so much of their efforts to protecting the worst, most abusive cops. You can imagine a world where police unions were on the side of reform, realized that it’s in the interest of police to be trusted by the communities they protect, and weeded out bad actors so that good cops don’t get the blowback that’s caused when abusive and racist officers mistreat people. But that’s not how they behave. 

So I think that busting up the police unions is probably the straightest line to getting to better criminal justice — and the straightest line to better education reform probably involves running over the teachers’ unions, at minimum. I would like to have a world where we can have teachers’ unions and better education reform, but the unions have made that really hard.

I actually wonder if the political influence of police unions can be compared to that of teachers’ unions. As both national and local actors, it seems like the latter are much more influential in election outcomes.

I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve seen plenty of examples where a mayor is trying to reform the police, and the police will just go all-out to sink that candidate. Police unions really put the fear of God into mayors and city council candidates who are trying to rein them in. I’m not sure they have the same power at the state and national level, but for the most part, that’s not where the criminal justice policy they’re most interested in gets decided. So they’ve got a lot of power.

That said, teachers’ unions have a power on the Left to define the way political activists think about the issue. That’s probably a case where there’s not an analogue on the Right. Conservative ideas about criminal justice and racism have their own sources, and you don’t really have police unions steering the Right toward those points of view. Whereas I feel like the role of teachers’ unions in setting the party line — by which I mean the progressive movement rather than the Democratic Party, but to some extent both — is very powerful.

In a on education, you take issue with what you call a “false binary”: the idea that Democrats can either focus on improving schools or on improving the living conditions of students and families. I think many left-leaning critics of education reform would argue that Democrats can do both, but also that mitigating social disadvantage is going to make a much bigger impact on how kids learn than expanding high-quality charter schools, for instance. How do you respond to that?

I think there’s actually a lot of room for school improvement. To characterize it broadly, you’ve got these urban areas whose schools have performed very badly — kids have basically no chance to learn as much as kids in suburban schools — and charters are able to substantially or completely close that gap. They haven’t necessarily found ways to make the suburban schools better, but within the realm of improving education, charters have a significant effect.

I don’t really see anything to this argument, other than that education can only do so much. And that’s true. Education can only do so much, health care can only do so much, anti-poverty can only do so much, lead remediation can only do so much. Nothing is a panacea. But that’s just not a standard that we hold other policies to: Is this a panacea for all our problems? That’s a ridiculous standard. I know you’re trying to steel-man this and turn it into a serious idea, but I don’t think it is a serious idea. That’s not the way we do, or should, measure policy innovations.

Well, to carry the law enforcement comparison a step further, I don’t think advocates for criminal justice reform would argue that we just need to reduce poverty. There’s a definite sense that something affirmative has to change about the way our police operate.

That’s a very good analogy, and I wish I’d thought of that before. The disparities, whether it’s in education outcomes or incarceration, are going to be very hard to dent if you don’t get rid of poverty. But there are still disparities that we can address within the system itself. So we should do that! 

It’s just not a real excuse. No one makes that point about incarceration because they understand that it’s not relevant to the question of what kind of criminal justice system we want. It’s just not relevant.

Do you think there’s something about how the progressive movement views education — as a means of fighting social injustice and cultivating democratic values — that just doesn’t sync up with how most parents see it, and therefore creates a political problem?

I don’t actually think there is disagreement about those aspects of schools. There’s disagreement about the nature of civic values you want to teach: People on the Left want to teach liberal values, and people on the Right want to teach conservative values. People on the Right might have an image of the Pledge of Allegiance and teaching about the greatness of our country, and people on the Left might have ideas of teaching antiracism and creating a space where gay kids can come out if they don’t feel welcome at home.

But everyone really does see schools as a place to inculcate values. The real disagreement is about whether educational achievement is important. That’s where  you have a numerically tiny segment — much less than 10 percent, probably — of the country that doesn’t see educational achievement as something important. The absence of achievement as a priority is what makes them focus on the other stuff as representing the value of schools, because otherwise there’s no rationale for them to exist, and you’re just a straight-out libertarian who thinks we should get rid of public schools.

It certainly does seem like the public K-12 discourse now focuses way more on cultural politics than on academic performance. In particular, the state laws being passed about instruction on controversial subjects have just dominated the news for months. Do you think these bills are a valid response to politicized teaching, or is it more a political play by Republicans?

I genuinely don’t know. I’m almost certain that there’s more quote-unquote CRT in the classrooms now than there was five years ago. But I think it rose from a low level, and it’s really hard to say whether you’re talking about something that’s a serious concern. There are so many schools in this country that you could just cherry pick another new example every single day, and it still wouldn’t prove that there’s a real problem. 

You can see on Twitter that crazy teachers become national news stories now. My daughter had an absolute lunatic as a high school teacher who would use the class as a platform for all sorts of right-wing rants that were extremely racist and sexist. And this was not even a social studies class. This is a big country, and there’s a lot of crazy people out there.

But the legislative solutions just don’t work. I don’t think you can design a law that can effectively rule out bad teaching practices without also ruling out necessary teaching practices. So having state legislatures try to steer this ship is really not going to work.

When I spoke recently with the historian Daryl Scott, he essentially argued that the anti-CRT perspective in these debates wasn’t even especially right-wing — that it was more about explicitly teaching patriotic history in a way that would have been familiar to postwar liberals. I wonder if you’d agree with that.

There are definitely areas where the Left position has moved so far left that it’s opened up space for conservatives to advocate what used to be a center-left position. But I also think there are some aspects of the debate where that is not true. He’s capturing a piece of the reality, but not the whole of it.

What should the Democratic Party’s agenda on education be right now?

They should be encouraging more charter schools in urban areas, because they work. They’ve got an effective policy tool that can help people who need help very badly. They should be expanding that tool rather than scaling it back.

They should also be doing what Michelle Rhee did in D.C. They should say, “We are going to massively increase the base level of teacher pay in this country.” And they should go further than that, doubling or tripling aggregate teacher pay and treating teachers like professionals. Which means subjecting them to assessments that can include quantitative and non-quantitative judgments, and replacing them if they’re ineffective. I can’t really point to evidence that says that would work, but I don’t think it’s really been tried at scale. 

D.C.’s reforms worked, but all you can really do by increasing teacher pay is attract more and better teaching candidates from other cities. What a city can’t do is change the kind of person who goes into teaching in the first place. You can’t make it so that everyone in college knows that if you go into teaching, you’re going to make a really good living. College students know that if you go into teaching, compared with other things you could do, you’re making a financial sacrifice. If that were not the case, you’d have different people entering the profession and a bigger pool of talent. That’s not something I can improve with experimental evidence because it needs to be done at a societal level. But if I were in charge of the world, that’s what I’d do.