Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who died last week at age 82, was, for much of the 1990s, one of the most articulate and persistent legislative advocates for school choice.

Lieberman’s death prompted admiring statements from political figures across the spectrum who noted his contributions across a wide range of issues, from civil rights to the environment to national security. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on and celebrate his school-choice-related achievements, some of which are still benefiting millions of American families. Lieberman’s experience as Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, and his subsequent late-career path as a “No Labels” advocate and political independent, also point to the constraints that school choice advocates face within the Democratic Party, where teachers unions have formidable clout.

After initially winning election to the Senate in 1988, Lieberman backed a series of efforts to expand school choice to include private schools. Typically they were means-tested or experimental programs, rather than sweeping universal ones.

For example, in March 1995, Lieberman joined Senator Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican, to introduce the “Low-Income School Choice Demonstration Act of 1995,” which would have appropriated $30 million for between ten and 20 “demonstration projects” to “determine the effects on parents and schools of providing financial assistance to low-income parents to enable such parents to select the public or private schools their children will attend.”

The bill didn’t pass, but Lieberman’s remarks on the Senate floor on introducing the legislation encapsulated the way he saw and communicated about the issue—linked to religious faith, and as a way of helping poor children. “It is clear that the public schools are not working for all students, particularly in our poorest communities. We have a responsibility to seek more effective ways to address the needs of these children,” the senator said.

He went on: “Private school choice opens doors for children in our poorest neighborhoods, where religious schools—particularly Catholic schools—often have had better results than public schools. I have long believed what some research has shown—that the success of parochial schools is in part due to their students’ and teachers’ shared beliefs and strong moral values.”

 

D.C. Scholarships

In 1997, again working with Coats, Lieberman introduced the District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act of 1997. Congress approved it, but President Clinton vetoed it. Eventually, in 2003, the vouchers became law.

There have been ongoing battles over renewing the funding for it, but the program remains in existence today, offering individual scholarship awards of up to $16,070 for high school and up to $10,713  for elementary and middle school. In the 2022–23 school year, 1,707 students used the scholarships. Of those students, 79.8 percent had an “African-American/Black” racial background, and their average family income was $20,572, according to a “fact sheet” available at the program website.

About 12,000 students have been awarded the scholarships over two decades, and survey data show high-school graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and parental satisfaction rates above 90 percent. The Washington Post editorial board has embraced the program as “worthy” and describes the federal funding for it as “well-spent.”

Arguably, the small voucher program has had a positive effect even on the many more students in the traditional DC public schools and charter schools, which, spurred by the threat of the private school scholarship program, upped their game in ways that translated into gains on standardized tests of reading and math. The DC school improvement story has a lot of protagonists—Mayor Adrian Fenty, Chancellors Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson—but in a way it’s also a little-noticed legacy of Lieberman.

 

Federal Education Savings Accounts

In April 1998, Lieberman took to the Senate floor again, this time to speak in favor of a federal education savings account that would have let parents earning less than $160,000 save $2,000 a year in after-tax money tax-free for K–12 expenses, including private school tuition. “At a time when many parents are seeking more choices for their kids, especially for the students who are trapped in failing and unresponsive local schools, this bill would help make private or parochial school a more affordable option for those families who decide that is the best choice for their child, or in some cases, the only chance to get a decent education,” Lieberman said.

Explaining the fierce opposition to the plan, he said, “I fear that our critics are so committed to the noble mission of public education that they have shut their eyes to the egregious failures in some of our public schools and insisted on defending the indefensible. And they are so conditioned to believing that any departure from the one-size-fits-all approach is the beginning of the end for public schools that they refuse to even concede the possibility that offering children a choice could give them a chance at a better life while we are working to repair and reform all of our public schools.”

“Parents increasingly are demanding more choices for their children—be it in the form of public school choice, charter schools, or scholarships for low-income kids to attend a quality private or parochial school. And they are seeking more of a focus on results rather than a defense of the system and all who function in it,” Lieberman said then. “Hopefully we can begin to change the dynamic of what for too long has been a disappointingly dogmatic and unproductive debate on education policy in this country and lay the groundwork for a new bipartisan commitment to putting children first.”

That particular upward adjustment to the contribution limits for Coverdell accounts, named after Senator Paul Coverdell, Republican of Georgia, eventually was enacted in 2001 and took effect in 2002. And the overall concept of tax-advantaged savings for private school expenses was expanded further by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which allowed Section 529 college savings accounts to be used for K–12 education expenses.

 

The Vice Presidential Nominee

The paradox of Lieberman’s political career is that his biggest win—the Gore-Lieberman ticket won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election—was also his biggest loss, as a litigated recount in Florida that went to the Supreme Court concluded in the loss of the state for Gore and Lieberman, and the presidency of George W. Bush. Lieberman’s stint as vice presidential nominee can also be seen as something of a simultaneous high and low for his school choice advocacy.

The policy position was a sign of the independence, bipartisanship, integrity, and swing-voter appeal that helped Lieberman get chosen by Gore to begin with. Lieberman attracted a lot of attention for being a Democratic vice presidential nominee who was a longtime, enthusiastic school choice advocate.

In August 2000, when Gore announced Lieberman as his running mate, there was a burst of attention around the question of whether the ticket would back private school choice. “School voucher foes find Lieberman a vexing choice,” was a Los Angeles Times headline. A spokesman tied the senator’s support for vouchers to Connecticut Catholic schools, not the senator’s own observant Jewish faith. A New York Times opinion piece by Nina Rees, then at the conservative Heritage Foundation, reported Lieberman “has supported at least seven bills to promote school choice since 1992.”

The apparent conflict was resolved, more or less, by Lieberman saying that he’d provide discreet counsel to Gore, but that President Gore would call the shots. That’s typical for a vice presidential nominee, so it’s hard to fault Lieberman too much. Yet in the presidential campaign, the Democrats let Republicans take the advantage on the issue. Private school choice wasn’t among the Democratic policy proposals on education in the 2000 campaign. As the GOP candidate, George W. Bush did propose vouchers as an accountability mechanism for failing public schools. As president, however, Bush abandoned it eventually in negotiations with congressional Democrats over what became the No Child Left Behind Act.

 

Democrats and Independents

That becoming the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee involved Lieberman’s downplaying one of his key domestic policy positions was an indicator of a broader tension between the politician and the party that also involved other issues, such as national security policy. In 2006, when Senator Lieberman faced a primary challenge from Ned Lamont, an antiwar heir to a J.P. Morgan fortune, the state AFL-CIO backed Lieberman, but the teachers unions backed Lamont. Lieberman lost the Democratic primary but won reelection to the Senate as an “independent Democrat.” He kept sponsoring school choice bills but without a lot of Democratic company. For example, on March 16, 2010, a Lieberman amendment to reauthorize the DC opportunity scholarship program failed, 42 to 55. The only Democrats who voted for it were Senators Dianne Feinstein of California, Bill Nelson of Florida, and Mark Warner of Virginia. Of those, only Warner remains in the Senate.

At the time of his death, Lieberman was co-chairing a “No Labels” effort to find a presidential ticket to run against Biden and Trump. Biden, like Lieberman, backed some private school choice legislation as a senator but has shelved it as president. Trump has expressed support for it but didn’t get it done in term one.

Yet perhaps the story of school choice and the Democrats won’t have ended entirely with the passing of Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman had told interviewers repeatedly that he was attracted to politics initially by the promise of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. He wrote his Yale senior thesis about a Connecticut political boss, John Bailey, who helped to deliver the Nutmeg State to Kennedy, and he also worked, early in his career, for Abe Ribicoff, another Connecticut Democrat who served as JFK’s secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

Some Kennedy family members ardently disavow Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign, but it’s worth noting that RFK Jr. told Bari Weiss last year, “I had a choice of where I was going to send my kids to school, just because I have resources and it, and, you know, all Americans should have that choice.” Kennedy hasn’t made choice a signature issue, but there’s still plenty of time before Election Day.

In its equal-opportunity, unifying way, Kennedy’s comment was an echo of Lieberman’s vision that, as he once said in the Senate, “Lower-income parents who want their kids to learn in a religious environment should have that chance, just as wealthier parents do.” Lieberman did not live to see that vision fully realized, but he helped to bring it closer to reality.

Ira Stoll, a former managing editor of Education Next, writes regularly at The Editors.

Americans are fed up with politicians. Understandably so, given the climate: inflation, investigation, recrimination, deterioration, polarization.

In 2016, voters rejected a former senator and secretary of state and instead chose Donald Trump, a reality television star/businessman who had never before served in government. Going into 2024, the impulse to turn to a non-politician-candidate is again strong. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has been pushing the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Another businessman, Vivek Ramaswamy, has entered the race and is getting some traction, outpolling senators and governors and even Vice President Pence. An environmental activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been polling well, too; he has lots of politicians in his family, but the presidency would be his first elective government office.

Perhaps the different kind of leadership really needed to cure the country of its current malaise, though, doesn’t come from business or from environmental activism but from academia, which puts a premium on consensus and community-building. Success at the helm of a modern university features, in the best cases, a combination of intellectual rigor, innovation, listening, navigating diversity, sophisticated data analysis, decisive strength, awareness of the competitive landscape, civil negotiation of differences, and rootedness in values—all things we could use in Washington.

A politician with 65 percent of the vote is winning in a landslide. By contrast, a university president who has lost the support of 35 percent of the faculty, students, or members of the board of trustees is in big trouble. The recent resignations of the president of Stanford University, Mark Tessier-Lavigne, and the president of Texas A&M, M. Katherine Bank, attest to that. In national politics, unlike at universities, weakened leaders don’t typically leave; they linger on, until term limits kick in or they lose an election.

There are precedents for the elevation of presidents from colleges to the White House. After Dwight Eisenhower was a five-star general and the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, he served as president of Columbia University until January 1953, when he moved into the Oval Office. Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University, then governor of New Jersey, before getting elected president. Eisenhower presided over what historians describe as the “age of consensus,” while Wilson championed the League of Nations, aimed at global peacekeeping. Shortcomings of both the Eisenhower and Wilson administrations in Washington are clear in retrospect, but the themes—consensus, nonviolent dispute resolution—remain relevant.

Who are the visionary higher-education leaders of today?

High-Tech Growers

The high-tech growth that has been driving recent financial market returns is also a theme in higher education. The president of Northeastern University in Boston, Joseph Aoun, is so ahead of the curve that he published a book, Robot-Proof, about “higher education in the age of artificial intelligence” in 2017, years before the ChatGPT breakthrough. After taking office in 2006, Aoun shut down the school’s football team and opened more than a dozen satellite campuses, including in London, Toronto, Vancouver, California, Virginia, Seattle, Charlotte, and Portland, Maine (and opening in fall 2023: Miami). Families appreciate that the co-op work experience, part of a Northeastern education, puts students on a path to a paying job. Speaking to graduates this year, Aoun emphasized humane qualities: “For the foreseeable future computational power cannot express empathy. Microprocessors cannot comfort the afflicted.”

Scott Pulsipher, president of Western Governors University, recognized that with much of the higher-education action moving online, one way to broaden the university’s appeal was to make course content more accessible, less costly, and attractive to non-traditional students. A Harvard MBA who spent 20 years working for Amazon and other consumer-focused tech companies, Pulsifer has guided Western Governors to serve more than 200,000 students, graduating between 45,000 and 50,000 a year. He told the House Education and the Workforce Committee earlier this year that when he attended his first WGU commencement, many of the graduates “were in their thirties and often accompanied by both parents and children.”

Paul LeBlanc’s parents didn’t graduate high school, let alone college. His father worked in construction as a mason, his mother in a factory stitching car tops. They earned extra money cleaning houses, LeBlanc writes in his 2021 book Students First. LeBlanc himself paid his way through Westfield State College and Framingham State College by working construction in the summers. “It’s the classic American story of immigration, opportunity, and economic and social mobility,” he writes. Since 2003, when LeBlanc took over as president, Southern New Hampshire University has grown to more than 160,000 students from 2,800. Four-year tuition for an online bachelor’s degree in business administration is $39,600.

At Arizona State University, President Michael Crow doubled the enrollment from the 55,491 it was at when he took over as president in 2002. He also expanded the school’s racial and ethnic diversity dramatically, even after a state referendum banned the use of race as a factor in admissions.

Presidents from Politics

Ben Sasse resigned from the U.S. Senate to become president of the University of Florida. Sasse—a Harvard graduate who got his Ph.D. in history from Yale—only arrived in February 2023, but he’s already making some newsworthy hires. He brought economist Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach in as associate provost and senior advisor for academic excellence, and he lured William Inboden, a biographer of Ronald Reagan, from the University of Texas. While serving in the Senate, Sasse wrote a whole book about the idea of “community, friendships, and relationships” as the antidote to the crisis of loneliness and deaths of despair.

Mitch Daniels, as president of Purdue from 2013 through January 1, 2023, froze tuition for 11 years, saving families more than $1 billion. He experimented with income-share agreements that let students pay for Purdue with a percentage of their future earnings. He also expanded Purdue’s internet-based offerings, acquiring Kaplan University from Graham Holdings Company. Daniels came to Purdue with government experience, having served two terms as governor of Indiana and as director of the Office of Management and Budget during the administration of President George W. Bush. Richard Vedder, an economist and longtime critical observer of higher education, describes Daniels as “not only competent but kind and considerate.”

Also worth mentioning: a former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts during Mitt Romney’s administration, Kerry Healey, who championed women entrepreneurs during a six-year stint as president of Babson College.

The Ivy Leaguers

Before becoming president of Brown University, Christina Paxson served stints at Princeton as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and as chairman of the Department of Economics. Her academic work focuses on social policy, especially involving children and health. She dealt with Washington and Congress on multiple issues, including a term as chairman of the Association of American Universities. Like Daniels, she was an early advocate of bringing students back to campus during the pandemic. At Brown, she has improved the campus climate in part by deliberately cultivating religious life. In a February 2022 interview with Bloomberg, she said that religion was an elemental part of the diversity she was seeking in recruiting incoming classes. She’s followed through with a broad range of initiatives that have made Brown, once a battleground, increasingly tolerant.

Also worth mentioning: Richard Levin led Yale through a growth spurt from 1993 to 2013, then was CEO of Coursera, an online education company that says it has served more than 113 million learners.

The Southerners

Much of the population growth and economic vitality in America has been moving southward. Higher education is no exception. Since taking over as president of Tulane University in 2014, Michael Fitts has doubled the endowment, renovated the campus, and made undergraduate admissions more selective. Star author and journalist Walter Isaacson joined the history faculty. Fitts talks about values in a countercultural way. “Malice and spite have infected politics, entertainment, and public discourse,” Fitts said in his 2023 commencement speech. “But that doesn’t mean it’s the right way to live your life,” Instead, he advised, “Cultivate kindness wherever you go.”

At Paul Quinn College, a historically Black college in Dallas, Texas, President Michael Sorrell took a page from Aoun’s playbook, eliminating the football program. He turned the field into an urban farm, growing spinach and sweet potatoes. The school’s graduation rate has improved, and, in part because of a program that combines work and school, students are taking on less debt. Sorrell talks about “the four Ls of Quinnite Leadership: leave places better than you found them, live a life that matters, lead from wherever you are, love something greater than yourself.”

As president of Georgia State University from 2009 to 2021, Mark Becker helped to increase the six-year graduation rate by 23 percentage points while also reducing the average time to earn a degree by almost a full semester, saving students $21 million in tuition each year, the school says. Becker, now president of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, has a doctorate in statistics, and GSU used predictive analytics and data to drive student success. A merger in 2016 with Georgia Perimeter College made GSU the largest university in the state.

The Northern Pandemic Leaders

For all the action in the South, some Northern schools and their leaders are also holding their own, handling the Covid-19 pandemic with unusual character. At Colby College in Waterville, Maine, President David Greene attracted national attention in spring 2020, when amid a national economic downturn, he launched a campaign to get a job for every one of the college’s 500 graduating seniors. “I am not aware of another college ever taking on such an ambitious effort for a graduating class, but we do things differently at Colby,” Greene said. “We know we are on this journey together, and we look out for one another along the way.” Greene, like Aoun, was early to the artificial intelligence trend; Colby launched the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2021. Applications for admission to Colby have soared to nearly 18,000 in 2023, up from about 5,000 in 2014. In 2022, the college acquired two islands off the Maine coast, totaling 500 acres; Greene said they’d become “laboratories for important research and places of quiet reflection and artistic creation.”

The president of Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York, Brian Casey, moved into a small college dorm room with no air conditioning for a required 17-day quarantine at the start of the fall 2020 semester. It made the point that both the students and the campus elites would be subject to the same pandemic rules. “It was actually kind of joyful. I was with the students and we were going through something together,” he told CNN, making a point about “common purpose. We’re saying we can only do this if we all do this together.” Casey is halfway to the goal of raising $1 billion for the university.

American higher education is far from perfect. Survey data such as a recent Gallup poll show public trust in higher education trending downward especially among Republicans. Even after the decline, though, the polls found that Americans still have more confidence in higher education than in many other institutions, which are also seeing declining levels of trust. The headlines focusing on research fraud, racial preferences, and student debt are obscuring a more positive story. On a number of campuses, civility and community are on the rise, and there seem to be green shoots of optimism poking through. Harvard; Stanford; St. Philips College in San Antonio, Texas; Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida; and California State University in Bakersfield are running an “Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership Fellowship.” There’s a bottom-up aspect of this, too, driven by student yearning for authenticity in an age of algorithms. The Wall Street Journal detects what it calls a “surprising surge of faith among young people.” Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, attracted 50,000 people to a two-week-long Christian revival.

College campuses, of all places, might help America shift the tone for the better. It could come through the presidents and faculty getting involved in government service in Washington, refreshing the tired political talent pool, either via the major parties or by the No Labels movement. Or it may arrive if students educated in some of these institutions take away not only the substance of what they learned but also something of the spirit.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com. He was managing editor of Education Next from 2019 to 2023.

When I started as managing editor of Education Next in January 2019, the conventional wisdom was that education reform had run out of gas, or at least stalled out. Much of the Democratic Party, or at least many of its leading politicians, had backed away from previous cautious support for charter schools. Much of the Republican Party, or at least many of its leading politicians, opposed the Common Core State Standards. And neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seemed particularly interested in pushing for once-promising ideas like merit pay for teachers or standardized-test-based accountability.

As I leave the job nearly five years later, the conventional wisdom on education is even grimmer. Republicans complain the schools have gone “woke,” prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion and social-emotional learning instead of reading and math. Democrats complain that Republicans are wasting precious education energy on counterproductive culture wars about transgender sports participation, critical race theory, and the content of school library books. And Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike bemoan the youth mental health crisis and the results of standardized tests showing, indisputably, that the Covid-19 pandemic and the reaction to it have significantly, maybe even catastrophically, set back student achievement.

I’ve got a different view of it. Discount it, perhaps, for my personality, which tends toward optimism, or maybe more precisely, provocative contrarianism. But what’s happened over the past five years has made me more hopeful than ever about the future of American education.

What’s so encouraging that most people are failing to focus on? Start with the U.S. Supreme Court, which in a series of rulings—American Legion v. American Humanist Association, Kennedy v. Bremerton, Espinoza v. Montana, and Carson v. Makin—has expanded the space for free exercise of religion in schools. These decisions open the way for many changes, including the establishment of religious charter schools; the nation’s first was initially approved in Oklahoma in June 2023. If you believe, as I do, that religion is, on balance, a force for community, humility, gratitude, kindness, civility, and dignity, then this is a positive and not yet fully appreciated development.

Then consider state legislatures, which have been expanding state tax-credit tuition scholarships (See “School Choice Advances in the States,” features, Fall 2021) and increasingly making Education Savings Accounts universally accessible (see “As Many More States Enact Education Savings Accounts, Implementation Challenges Abound,” features, and “2023 Is the Year of Universal Choice in Education Savings Accounts,” school life). If you believe, as I do, that parents are generally the best informed and situated to make education decisions involving their own children, these are significant and positive developments. People point out that these programs only affect a fraction of students in a fraction of states. But word spreads to the point where people with children are actually migrating to states, such as Florida, in part for the purpose of participating in the programs. Once the programs are established, eligibility and funding tend to expand rather than contract. As with religious charter schools, the potential of Education Savings Accounts is just beginning to be unleashed.

Finally, the culture wars at school boards and state boards of education may not be so entirely the dead-end distraction that the Acela Corridor education-policy sages imagine. Which is better—that the substance of what happens in schools is left entirely to technocrats and the teachers-union-dominated political structure? Or that parents pay attention to what is happening in school, and make their voices heard? Once the giant political force of parent involvement awakens from its slumber, it might well have effects not only on locker rooms and library books but also, constructively, on school safety, on teacher quality, and on broader issues related to the productivity of education spending.

It may seem pollyannaish to think of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of expanded education choice and parental involvement rather than mainly in terms of years of lost learning. It may be true, too, that it’ll take decades before the positive effects outweigh the negatives. But another big thing I learned at Education Next is that it can take a long time to get a full picture of the effects of education policies. The chance of positive outcomes will be increased by the presence of this journal to report, clear-eyed, with empirical evidence on whether optimism turns out to be misplaced or, as I hope it is, genuinely warranted.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com. He was managing editor of Education Next from 2019 to 2023.

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Stoll, I. (2023). What I Learned Editing Education Next: The education landscape may be in better shape than most “experts” think. Education Next, 23(4), 5.

In the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, four of the candidates called for the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education, while three also vowed to crush teacher unions.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, Vivek Ramaswamy, Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, and Vice President Mike Pence all said that, if elected, they would eliminate the federal Department of Education. Ramaswamy, former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also threatened the teacher unions, with Scott saying, “The only way we change education in this nation is to break the backs of the teachers unions.”

The U.S. Department of Education was created by a law passed in 1979 under the administration of President Jimmy Carter and began operating in 1980. Before that, from 1953 forward, the federal government’s education-related functions were part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Fox News, which hosted the debate in Milwaukee, devoted a segment toward the end of the two-hour program to education, with moderator Bret Baier referring to the Nation’s Report Card exposing a “crisis” of chronic absenteeism and steep declines in reading and math achievement.

“The decline in education is one of the major reasons why our country is in decline,” DeSantis said. “In Florida, we stood up for what was right. First, we had schools open during Covid, and a lot of the problems that we’ve seen are because these lockdown states locked their kids out of school for a year, year and a half. That was wrong.

“As president, I’m going to lead an effort to increase civic understanding and knowledge of our constitution,” the Florida governor added. “We cannot be graduating students that don’t have any foundation in what it means to be an American.”

“Let’s shut down the head of the snake, the Department of Education,” Ramaswamy said. “Take that $80 billion, put it in the hands of parents across this country. This is the civil rights issue of our time. Allow any parent to choose where they send their kids to school.”

Ramaswamy also said he’d “end the teachers unions at the local level.” He did not specify how he would achieve that. Neither did Senator Scott.

Christie said Scott was correct about the need to break the back of the teacher unions. “I started this in 2010 by going right after the teachers unions in New Jersey and drove them down to an all-time low popularity rating because they’re putting themselves before our kids,” the former governor said. “That is the biggest threat to our country.”

Pence, who served in Congress and as governor of Indiana, said he’d fought against earlier Republican-backed efforts to link standards, testing, and accountability to federal funding. “I was fighting against No Child Left Behind,” Pence said. “I’ll also shut down the Federal Department of Education. And when I was governor, we doubled the size of the largest school choice program in America, and we’ll give school choice to every family in America when I’m in the White House.”

Governor Burgum defended educators. “Teachers in this country, the vast majority of them care about those kids. They’re working in low-paying jobs and they’re fighting for those kids and their families,” he said.

The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, also hit back. “Let’s be clear: When Tim Scott and Chris Christie attack teachers unions, they’re attacking teachers. Teachers unions exist to give teachers a voice so that they can do their best for kids,” Weingarten said in a post on “X,” the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Former governors Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Nikki Haley of South Carolina also participated in the debate. In their education policy answers, Hutchinson spoke about expanding computer-science education, while Haley highlighted reading remediation and vocational education. “Let’s put vocational classes back into the high schools. Let’s teach our kids to build things again,” Haley said.

Former President Donald Trump, who polls show with a wide lead among Republicans, chose not to participate in the debate. Instead, he sat for an interview with Tucker Carlson that was available on X (Twitter). Education policy did not come up in that interview.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com. He was managing editor of Education Next from 2019 to 2023.

Massachusetts appears headed for another high-profile, and expensive, education-related ballot initiative battle—this time, over standardized testing.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, a 115,000-member union that is a powerful political force in the state, is backing an initiative that would eliminate the use of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Test as a high-school graduation requirement. Education reform and business groups are already beginning to mobilize to preserve the testing requirement.

If voters approve it, the initiative would change state law. Currently, passing the standardized test in math, English language arts, and one science is required for graduation. Under the proposed change, school districts would instead sign off that students had “satisfactorily” completed coursework certified as “showing mastery of the skills, competencies, and knowledge contained in the state academic standards and curriculum frameworks.”

Union leaders spearheading the campaign blame the graduation test requirement for worsening racial and economic differences.

“The MCAS has not only failed to close learning gaps that have persisted along racial and economic lines, but the standardized tests have exacerbated the disparities among our student populations. We are one of the last states using this outdated method of assessing academic mastery,” the union’s president, Max Page, and its vice president, Deb McCarthy, said in an August 6 statement.

The union leaders emphasized that they aren’t asking voters to eliminate the MCAS entirely, just to stop using it as a graduation requirement. “Indeed, the MCAS will, following federal law, continue to be taken by students,” the statement said. “At present the MCAS graduation requirement is doing nothing more than proving the wealth and education levels of parents, while also harming competent students who, for a variety of reasons, struggle with standardized tests.”

Advocates of the test firmly reject the idea that it is to blame for worsening racial or economic disparities. Voices for Academic Equity, a coalition that includes the National Parents Union, the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, the Boston Schools Fund, Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, Educators for Excellence Massachusetts, and Education Reform Now Massachusetts, issued a report that called the test “a tool for equity.”

“The test exposes our profound societal inequities. But without it, we lose our ability to hold up those inequities and demand better opportunities for the students who are entitled to a high-quality education and have not historically received it,” the report says. “Given our nation’s history of systemic racism, MCAS serves as a mirror to see reality so we can make it better. We do not break a mirror because we don’t like its reflection.”

The Massachusetts policy director of Democrats for Education Reform, Erin Cooley, warned in a statement to Education Next that removing MCAS as a graduation requirement “would diminish the value of a Massachusetts diploma.”

“Students, parents and families across the state want high standards for their children and want schools to meet those standards,” Cooley said.

The executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, Ed Lambert, told WBUR that the MCAS test and the graduation requirement had helped propel Massachusetts to the top of national achievement rankings. “Undoing it could set back Gov. Maura Healey’s efforts to make the state more economically competitive,” WBUR paraphrased Lambert as cautioning.

A statement from the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education said that “Eliminating the MCAS graduation requirement would leave us without a common standard of achievement that all students, across all communities and all walks of life, in every corner of Massachusetts are expected to meet.”

If the union succeeds in winning passage of the initiative, it would be the third time in a decade that it prevailed in a statewide vote.

In 2016, Bay State voters considered a ballot resolution that would have lifted the state’s limit on charter schools, which are public schools that operate outside of the traditional school-district bureaucracy. Political spending on the question was more than $41 million, and the state’s residents wound up voting 62 percent to 38 percent to keep the cap on charters in place. It was a stunning defeat for charter-school advocates who had sponsored the initiative.

In 2022, teachers unions poured $23 million into a misleading campaign to raise Massachusetts’ state income tax to 9 percent from 5 percent on income over $1 million a year. The proceeds of the tax increase were to be spent on education and transportation. The anti-MCAS campaign is off to a similarly factually challenged start; a Boston Globe staff editorial and a Globe column by Scot Lehigh faulted the union for overstating the number of seniors that the test requirement prevented from graduation by ignoring the fact that the vast majority of students who fail the MCAS also do not meet local graduation requirements. Yet the union’s direct mailings and other paid media reach far more eyeballs than do the Globe or the similarly skeptical Contrarian Boston substack, which are behind paywalls.

The state attorney general has until September 6 to rule on whether the initiative is okay to proceed. If it gets the legal clearance, supporters will then need to gather 75,000 signatures to place the proposition on the November 2024 election ballot.

The union also supports legislation, the Thrive Act, that would both eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement and the threat of state receivership for school districts. If the legislation passes, it could render the ballot resolution moot.

In addition to the union-backed initiative, there was a separate initiative originated by Shelley Scruggs, a parent from Lexington, Massachusetts. On August 16, Scruggs and the union announced they were joining forces behind the union-backed initiative.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com. He was managing editor of Education Next from 2019 to 2023.

A class of 6th graders from the Nathan Hale School in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood listened intently as Linda Henry explained how her husband John Henry’s childhood interest in baseball statistics had inspired a love of math that fueled his career, from a card-counting blackjack system to a statistically based commodities company to, eventually, owning the Red Sox.

Then the students heard the head of MassMutual U.S., Mike Fanning, talk about how he had lived as a kid with his immigrant grandparents, who taught him that “America is a land of opportunity,” and that “the key to unlock opportunity is education and hard work.”

Fanning described how Henry and the ownership group that bought the Red Sox in 2002 used data analytics to help the team win four World Series victories, breaking a dry spell that had dated back to 1918. “Be curious, and be a lifelong learner,” he advised the students.

And then, after a surprise visit from Red Sox third baseman Rafael Devers, who earlier this year signed a $331 million, 11-year contract extension with the team, the students went off on the first-ever tour of what the team is calling the Fenway Park Learning Lab.

The Red Sox Foundation and the Mass Mutual Foundation plan to start with 1,000 students this year and ramp up over the next 4 years so that every Boston Public Schools 6th grader visits the ballpark for the educational experience. The district currently enrolls 2,852 6th graders, according to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

The six-stop tour has students learning history, geography, math, and science. Student visitors get baseball caps, t-shirts, and a backpack full of other souvenir items like baseball cards, binoculars, a calculator, and a pen. The most important piece of equipment may be a 40-page, seriously substantive workbook, developed with the Boston Public Schools, that students work their way through along the hourlong guided tour.

A baseball stadium turns out to be surprisingly fertile ground for teaching a wide range of subjects. Looking at the Red Sox win-loss record on the manually operated scoreboard on the left field “Green Monster” wall, students are asked to figure out how many games the team has played, and the team’s winning percentage. A stop at the Red Sox Hall of Fame has students reading the text on the historic plaques—and writing a plaque “for someone in your life who inspires you.” The turnips, arugula, scallions, and swiss chard growing in 2,400 milkcrates in the rooftop “Fenway Farms” are an occasion for a brief science lesson about oxygen and carbon dioxide. During a visit to the Fenway press box, students look at maps to locate the home countries and states of Red Sox players. History, and the integration of baseball, comes up when students peer out at the number 42 posted at Fenway in memory of Jackie Robinson. Financial literacy is taught by having students budget a meal based on a Fenway concession menu.

Fenway has been open to guided visits by paying tourists for years. The tour guide for the Hale School students, David Ranen, had more than 40 years of experience as an educator, 39 of them working for the Amherst-Pelham School District in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. He has served as a music teacher and guidance counselor and seemed quite comfortable questioning the students, keeping their attention, and leading the students through the educational activities.

Seven or eight of the students, and Hale school principal Candice Whitmore, raised their hands to indicate it was their first time ever inside Fenway Park. It was a reminder that for the Red Sox, the program might work not only as a way to help its hometown but also as a way to cultivate a new generation of fans.

The executive director of the Red Sox Foundation, Bekah Salwasser, responded to a question from Education Next in a telephone interview in advance of the May 4 event by saying that the foundation would be open to expanding the opportunity beyond Boston Public Schools district. With additional funding and staffing, she said, the program could “ideally spread far and wide,” to also include charter and parochial school students, and perhaps even those outside Boston or Massachusetts, as far away as Maine or Connecticut. “Red Sox nation is everywhere,” she said.

A 2014 Education Next research article found educational benefits of a field trip to an art museum. This program is too new to evaluate, but if the effects of early, inspirational exposure to baseball statistics on Boston public school 6th graders are anything like what they were on John Henry, the impact may be both significant and positive.

Ira Stoll is managing editor of Education Next.

Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail are making a big push on “parents’ rights.”

Former President Trump, in a March 6 email to supporters, included excerpts from a campaign speech in which he described himself as a “champion of parent’s rights.”

“I will fight for PARENTS’ RIGHTS, including universal school choice, and the direct election of school principals by the parents,” Trump said in the email. “If any principal is not getting the job done, the parents should be able to vote to fire them and select someone who will.”

On March 2, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy held an event to highlight the Parents Bill of Rights Act, legislation introduced the day before by more than 70 Republicans. A fact-sheet on the bill from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce said, “parents have a God-given right to make decisions for their children.”

The text of the legislation elaborates that right with considerable specificity. The rights would include, at “a minimum,” “the right to meet with each teacher of their child not less than twice during each school year,” “the right to a list of the books and other reading materials contained in the library of their child’s school,” “the right to information about violent activity in their child’s school” and “the right to information about any plans to eliminate gifted and talented programs in the child’s school.”

These plans might pose some practical challenges. Both the principal-firing plan and the parent-teacher-conference plan, for example, might clash with collective bargaining agreements (yes, in a lot of school districts the principals are unionized). For a teacher with large classes, one-on-one parent teacher conferences might consume so much time that it would interfere with the teacher’s ability to teach. The federal legislation stops short of mandating the length of the meetings, though it does say they should take place “in person.” And a parental vote on principal retention could raise some of the same issues that complicated the 2020 presidential contest, in terms of voting methods, the temptation to interfere with the outcome, and what happens if a loser fails to accept the result.

There are philosophical, ideological, and potentially even legal issues as well. Some Republicans at least rhetorically supported the idea of a federal government limited to constitutionally enumerated powers. They have criticized a left-wing approach that sees everything in terms of “rights” rather than responsibilities. They have called for curbing excessively prescriptive, top-down regulation from Washington that imposes “unfunded mandates” on state and local governments. They have emphasized experimentation, competition, and choice rather than centralized rules for school operations.

One might reconcile the two approaches—regulation versus competition—somewhat by arguing that in order for choice and competition to work, the consumers need reasonably good information, and that is what this legislation is trying to achieve. But the Republican press release promoting the legislation doesn’t make that clear. Instead it quotes Cade Brumley, the Louisiana State Superintendent of Education, saying, “Children belong to their parents and it’s essential to codify these undeniable rights.”

One potential upside to the Republican push on parents’ rights is that it could serve as a balance to the recent Democratic push for higher pay on behalf of the Democratic party’s key education constituency, unionized teachers. There are more parents than teachers, after all, though the parents have frequently been a less formidable political force because they haven’t been as well organized. There are recent signs—in the Virginia governor’s race, in the San Francisco school board recalls, and elsewhere—that parents are emerging as a significant interest group in the politics of education. Trump and McCarthy’s efforts have their rough and clumsy edges. It’s a positive development, though, when politicians anywhere begin looking beyond unionized teachers and start paying attention also to additional interest groups such as parents and taxpayers. With any luck, the ultimate beneficiary may be the one group whose rights neither major political party seems particularly excited about championing—the students. They don’t vote.

Ira Stoll is managing editor of Education Next.

Democrats are making a big push to raise teacher pay.

President Biden highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address. “Let’s give public school teachers a raise,” Biden said in the February 7, 2023, speech.

On February 9, two Democratic members of the House of Representatives, Frederica Wilson of Florida and Jamaal Bowman of New York, introduced the American Teacher Act. It would provide federal grants to support a base minimum annual salary of $60,000 for classroom teachers in public elementary or public secondary schools. The official congressional website shows 46 original cosponsors for the legislation, all of them Democrats. The bill was introduced at a Capitol Hill press conference at which the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, and the president of the National Education Association, Becky Pringle, both spoke.

On February 13, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, hosted what a press release from his office billed as a town hall on the “teacher pay crisis in America.”

In remarks at the event, Sanders denounced what he called “the pathetically low pay teachers receive.” He said the starting pay for teachers “in almost 40 percent of our school districts is less than $40,000 a year.”

Sanders, an independent socialist who caucuses with the Democrats, said he would introduce the “Pay Teachers Act” to “ensure all starting teachers across the country are paid at least $60,000 a year.” He proposed to pay for it by increasing taxes on those who “inherit over $3.5 million,” which he said would raise $450 billion over ten years.

Senator Edward Markey said he’d been marching with striking teachers in his home state of Massachusetts. “I’ve been on the lines with those teachers as they strike, because we need higher wages for teachers,” Markey said. “Educators in our country need a raise.”

At the Sanders town hall, Pringle said teachers are “underpaid and disrespected.”

“This is an engine-is-on-fire, call 911 moment,” she said, saying the pay levels are forcing teachers to “have two or more jobs” or “postpone having a family.”

Weingarten said, “We have to find a way to create the dignity and respect, and frankly pay is a way to do that.”

The 2022 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion found support for higher teacher salaries at the highest levels in the survey’s 15-year history, with more than 60 percent of the general public favoring a raise. Support was higher among Democrats than among Republicans. But some Republicans are also focusing on the issue: Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia enacted what he called “the largest teacher pay raise in state history,” $5,000 a teacher, and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has boasted of investing more than $2 billion in increased teacher pay, bringing average starting salaries to $47,000 from $40,000.

At the national level, Republicans have been more focused on proposing support for school choice than on raising teacher pay. A recent Republican education secretary who remains active on education policy issues, Betsy DeVos, greeted the Sanders town hall with a tweet that said, “Nothing to see here… just three friendly Socialists discussing how the state can further take control of your kids.” She added the hashtags #EducationFreedom #HostagesNoMore.

Focusing on salary rather than total compensation tells only part of the story, because teachers and other unionized public employees frequently have pension and health benefits that are valuable.

As DeSantis has apparently realized, focusing on the starting salaries is more likely to be a political winner, and also may serve the practical purpose of luring new teacher talent into classrooms. In some states, salaries for experienced teachers have climbed; in New York State, nearly a fifth of educators, or 66,617 of them, earn six-figure salaries, the Empire Center reported. Nationally, kindergarten and elementary school teachers earn median pay of $61,350 a year and high school teachers earn median pay of $61,820 a year, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The teacher pay issue relates to the inflation issue, which isn’t something that the Democrats were particularly eager to stress in their public remarks. The costs of things that entry-level teachers need to buy—eggs, gas, and rent—have been climbing faster, in many cases, than entry-level teacher salaries.

In the past, policymakers have sometimes tried to use teacher pay as a lever for school reform—raises linked to teacher performance, or higher pay for work in harder-to-staff subject areas, specialties, or schools, or higher pay in exchange for a longer school day. Those sorts of linkages, too, have been largely absent, at least so far, from this round of discussion.

Ira Stoll is managing editor of Education Next.

In the Wall Street Journal, Alex Beam has a review of a new book by Tracy Kidder, Rough Sleepers. The book is a profile of Jim O’Connell, president of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Homelessness and medicine are a bit distant from our usual beat here at Education Next. But toward the end of the book review comes this passage, quoting the doctor: “Pay public school teachers $200,000 a year and maybe thirty years later homelessness [will] become a rarity.” Writes Beam: “According to Dr. O’Connell, the most accurate indicator of someone’s health is educational status. A stronger school system, he believes, would stanch ‘the faucet’ of homelessness.”

In an excerpt from the book published over the weekend in the New York Times magazine, Kidder quotes O’Connell saying, “homelessness is a prism held up to society, and what we see refracted are the weaknesses in not only our health care system, our public-health system, our housing system, but especially in our welfare system, our educational system, and our legal system — and our corrections system. If we’re going fix this problem, we have to work together to fix the weaknesses of all those sectors.”

Though the medical problems of the homeless discussed in the review—AIDS, tuberculosis, “wounds full of maggots”—are grim, the bit about education and teacher pay brought a smile to my lips.

The “maybe thirty years later” language was one reason for the chuckle. It captures so aptly the obstacles to experimentation along these lines. A cynic might say that for any public school teachers getting paid $200,000 a year during the 30 years it takes to find out whether this would “maybe” work, it’d be a pretty cushy situation. By the time anyone has a good read on the results of the experiment, the teachers will be safely retired. The same goes for any politician who adopts this approach as a solution to homelessness. Governors and mayors serve a few four-year terms, at best. Any promised result that is 30 years down the road is a time horizon so long that the politician will be unlikely to suffer any blame if the policy experiment fails or to reap any political benefits if it succeeds.

The other reason I smiled, though, is that the homelessness doctor talking about the inability to solve homelessness without improving education reminds me of the teachers and education policy people I often hear talking about the difficulty of improving math or English test scores, graduation rates, college enrollment or completion rates, or other measurable education outcomes without simultaneously addressing health and housing, perhaps with some kind of “wraparound” program. (See “Supporting Students Outside the Classroom: Can wraparound services improve academic performance?” features, Summer 2019).

It’s the health, education, and welfare analogue of the “grass is greener on the other side of the fence.” The social problem in your own domain is only solvable if a problem in someone else’s domain is solved. At best it can be a justification for an integrated, multifaceted approach to fighting poverty, along the lines of what Geoffrey Canada pioneered at the Harlem Children’s Zone and its HCZ Promise Academy Charter Schools. At worst it can be an excuse for inaction, an evasion of responsibility, or a justification for the status quo.

Anyway, one of the lessons of history is that education advocates latch on to whatever the cause of the day is—Cold War military readiness in the 1950s and 1960s, economic competitiveness with Japan in the 1980s—and use it to argue for spending more money on education. If street homelessness sparks renewed interest and investment in education reform as a possible solution, terrific.

Politically, the focus on teacher pay is promising. Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 backed increased pay for teachers. Republican governors have also raised teacher pay: Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia enacted what he called “the largest teacher pay raise in state history,” $5,000 a teacher, and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has boasted of investing more than $2 billion in increased teacher pay, bringing average starting salaries to $47,000 from $40,000. The 2022 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion found support for increased teacher pay higher than at any level in the survey’s 15-year history.

As a fix-all substantive solution, though, it has limits. With luck, the homeless advocates and their allies will figure out in faster than 30 years that improving education outcomes, just like solving urban homelessness, is a considerably more complicated task than simply doubling teacher pay.

Ira Stoll is managing editor of Education Next.

And here are the findings from a survey of incoming freshmen conducted by the Crimson, the student newspaper:

To those who would chalk the decline up to a lack of qualified applicants, or to a demographic decline in American Jewry overall, consider that between 2015 and 2022, the percentage of undergraduates who are Jewish at Brown, an Ivy League peer institution of Harvard, has climbed to 24 percent from 15 percent, according to the Hillel college guide.

Rosovsky’s family, according to the New Yorker article, comes from a village called Rosovo, near Minsk, in White Russia. Current Harvard president Lawrence Bacow’s father came to America from Minsk, as did my own maternal grandfather. Henry Rosovsky himself was born September 1, 1927, in the Free City of Danzig, after his family fled the Communists following the Russian Revolution. To avoid the Nazis, he moved to Brussels, then France, then Spain, then Portugal, then the United States, where he served in the Army during both World War II and the Korean War.

I came back to the office after the funeral to field a media query about a report that Harvard had the most antisemitic incidents of any campus during the 2021-2022 academic year. The Crimson, the student newspaper that in the spring editorialized in favor of a boycott of Israel, hasn’t yet published news of the antisemitism study. It only published an obituary of Rosovsky after I emailed a complaint about its absence. If Harvard isn’t careful, it is in danger of ending up like Minsk or Rosovo or Danzig: a place where Jews once flourished. It’d be an education, though not, alas, the sort Rosovsky designed.

Ira Stoll is managing editor of Education Next.