The Left Doesn't Like School Choice. The Right Doesn't Need Them To.
A new paper in the Journal of School Choice finds that the ed reform movement is a political monoculture. Philanthropic grantees and education researchers, it can now be revealed, are “overwhelmingly align[ed] with Democratic Party and progressive political positions.”Author Ian Kingsbury, who wrote it while at the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins, has verified empirically what everyone knew all along: Education reform movement is dominated by folks who lean not just to the left, but dizzyingly so. This political homogeneity, he concludes, “might be fertile terrain for groupthink to flourish.”
That might be an understatement, but it could actually be a net positive. It is clarifying. Ed reform’s political monoculture threatens the bipartisan case for school choice, but there’s good evidence that suggests choice does not need a coalition of support to flourish. In politics, it is helpful to know who your friends and allies are and whose support is merely contingent. And now we know.
Based on an anonymous survey of grantees receiving support from the Gates and Walton Family Foundation, Kingsbury’s analysis reveals that education reformers “hold appreciably more progressive views than Democratic voters nationwide.” He notes that Gates and Walton Grant recipients “occupy a central role in the education reform movement, at least in the imagination of reform critics” like Diane Ravitch and her acolytes.
“Generally speaking,” he writes, “Gates and Walton grantees resemble generic Democrats in their attitudes toward economic issues, though they are appreciably more progressive than an average Democratic voter in their stance on social issues.” The conventional wisdom long popularized by anti-reformers and echoed in schools of education holds that ed reform is a conservative “billionaire boys club” or greedy corporate elites seeking to privatize education to enrich themselves.
But in recent years, reform’s biggest challenges have come from within the movement — not voluble outside critics. Kingsbury’s analysis follows another paper for the American Enterprise Institute authored by Jay Greene and James Paul, which demonstrated that not only is bipartisan ed reform a myth, it’s not even necessary. The much ballyhooed “Year of School Choice,” was almost entirely a one-party affair. “Of the 18 states that passed or expanded new programs, only two had houses and senates led by the Democratic Party,” Greene and Paul found. Moreover, of 70 votes held in state legislatures on final passage for private school choice legislation, “there were only three instances when Republicans needed any Democratic votes to reach the 50 percent threshold…On four separate occasions, Republicans provided enough votes to reach exactly 50 percent on their own,” they reported. In short, school choice did not need bipartisan support to put wind in its sails.
Rather than resist this finding, perhaps it’s time to lean into it. The bipartisan reform movement of the late 90s and early aughts coalesced out of political expedience around the shared goal of closing the achievement gap and addressing the shameful state of education available of Black and brown children. As my colleague Rick Hess observed several years ago, this left-right compromise required conservatives to accept massive increases in federal authority, race-conscious accountability systems, and a prohibition on talk of parental responsibility and the virtues of the traditional family. Left-leaning reformers “mostly toned down their demands for new public programs and took care not to accuse their conservative allies of bigotry,” he wrote. “Over time progressive reformers simply changed their minds deciding that it was a mistake to separate education from the Left’s broader economic and social agenda.”
Twenty years later, there is a generation of reformers who conceive of the effort as a race-based initiative, either by political preference or predilection, or simply because they’ve never known a day when reform was not purely a social justice project. That early bipartisanship agreement now feels like a design flaw, particularly as progressives have come to embrace structural racism as a heuristic and the thing — not union and school district recalcitrance, not low standards, not a lack of accountability, etc. — that explains everything. This more contemporary view has even dragged into disrepute some of reform’s signature victories, such as “no excuses” charter schools, still very much beloved by parents and conservatives.
Indeed, the progressive cast of ed reform that Kingsbury’s study lays bare suggests a possibility, bordering on inevitability, of a grand realignment of the fractured ed reform movement along clear lines of political and social interest. It’s already happening. I know of one leading school choice advocacy organization whose leadership has been wrestling for months with staffers accusing nominal allies at other choice organizations of emboldening white supremacy. The CEO of another well-funded organization routinely makes such charges publicly and unabashedly on social media.
These internecine fights within and between school choice advocates are almost certainly irreconcilable. As choice gains popularity among a new generation of activist groups like Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, and others that oppose critical race theory and other manifestations of “woke” education, a clear schism has opened between those who favor choice as a counterweight to in-school indoctrination, and reform’s political progressives who value choice as a mechanism to empower disadvantaged families, useful only insofar as it advances the “equity” agenda that remains their principal project.
It may be that choice simply fits more organically on the right than the left. It is not news to say that Democrats have broadly soured on education reform. The party’s progressive wing has long nursed a dim view of choice, charters, and any other challenges to traditional public education. This estranges ed reform’s overwhelmingly progressive troops from the left’s agenda at a time when political parties of all stripes are impatient with divergent thinking within their ranks.
Connect the dots: If ed reform organizations’ views on race, gender and class (as well as immigration, housing, policing, etc.) are the same as teachers’ unions and the public education establishment — and if it’s structural racism and white supremacy that’s depressing student outcomes — then they might decide they have more in common than not. If so, the next era of ed reform battles will look very different than the last.
Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on K–12 education, curriculum, teaching, school choice, and charter schooling.
