Op-ed: Will DeVos avoid the Beltway education trap?

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Share on
LinkedIn
+

usatoday

By Jim Stergios and Charles Chieppo

Read this op-ed online at USA Today.

Education nominee could improve on past secretaries by backing state and local innovation.

Every administration since President George H.W. Bush’s has pinned its hopes of transforming American K-12 education on several thousand bureaucrats in the Lyndon B. Johnson Building in Washington, D.C. and the Beltway lobbyists perched on their doorstep. Betsy DeVos, president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Education Department, needs a different plan.

Given that the federal government contributes approximately 10% of the total spending in the nation’s sprawling, decentralized landscape of 100,000 public K-12 schools, it is neither plausible nor desirable that an Education secretary chase the chimera of a transformational national education policy.

Arne Duncan’s seven years as President Obama’s secretary of Education were just the latest iteration of a muscular federal role in K-12 policy. The administration aggressively pushed a school turnaround initiative, as well as Common Core and national testing consortia, through grants, legally questionable waivers from federal regulations, coordination with philanthropies, and alignment with lobbyists.

The oxymoronic goal was to get states to adopt federally defined, one-size-fits-all approaches to school “innovation.”

As the 2015 results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress demonstrate, taxpayers spent tens of billions of dollars annually on “federal innovation” without improving the academic performance of our public schools. Just-released scores from the Trends in International Math and Science Study assessment show that, again, the U.S. was a below-average performer. Since 2009, our scores have also declined on the international PISA test.

Duncan’s experience hardly differs from that of his predecessors, and that should impart an important lesson to Trump’s incoming education secretary: Policies hatched by the federal government and its inside-the-Beltway partners like the National Governors Association, Council of Chief State School Officers, the Fordham Institute, and Achieve, Inc. have failed repeatedly, and at great taxpayer expense.

A better path for DeVos is to support state and local innovation and state policies that boost opportunity and student achievement.

The incoming secretary is an avowed charter public school advocate. Her advocacy should be shaped by results. Lax rules for determining who can open a school are among the reasons why charters in her home state of Michigan perform only slightly better than the traditional public schools there.

She would do well to advocate for an approach like what is used in Massachusetts. There, a rigorous authorization process and strict oversight, under which schools that don’t live up to the terms of their charter are shuttered, has yielded outstanding performance. A number of urban charter schools have posted some of the best scores in Massachusetts (which has the nation’s highest-performing public schools) on state tests. A Stanford University study found that Boston charters outperform other groups of public schools in the country in closing the achievement gap.

DeVos should also use the bully pulpit to make the case against so-called state anti-aid amendments and laws that prevent public money from flowing to private and religious school families. If she pairs this initiative with targeted changes to the federal tax code that give tax credits for educational expenditures, DeVos could open up new high-quality educational options for low-income households.

Despite consistently outperforming their public counterparts, Catholic schools have suffered from changing demographics and rising labor costs. The number of U.S. students enrolled in them has dropped from 5 million to 2 million over the past 50 years. Allowing public money to follow low-income students to parochial schools would benefit both students and the schools.

When it comes to the national K-12 English and math standards known as Common Core, DeVos has undergone a post-nomination conversion. Upon appointment, she announced “I am not a supporter — period.” Let’s hope that is true. The D.C.-driven Common Core standards reflect a view of public education as just another workforce development program. Research and data show that focusing on academic content and the liberal arts produces both better citizens and more skilled workers.

DeVos should stop support for the federal consortia that are developing Common Core-based tests. Instead, she should encourage the highest-performing states and those that had shown significant improvement to share their standards-based success stories with other states. These include California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Indiana and Texas, which previously had developed academic standards far superior to Common Core.

The federal education department should also curb the collection of non-academic student data. Oddly, Duncan went so far as to dabble in monitoring students’ “beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, values” and self-perceptions and the measurement of non-cognitive “psychological resources.” DeVos would be wise to revisit the 2013 amendments that gutted the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the faddish “social emotional learning provisions promoted by the Every Student Succeeds Act signed last year by Obama.

DeVos will face constant pressure to expand her school reform portfolio outside the limited areas where she can succeed; that’s the nature of D.C.-based education policymakers and lobbyists. If she surrenders, she will once again set American education on a path of mediocrity and decline. However well-intentioned Beltway bureaucrats and lobbyists may be, DeVos needs to understand that the best school innovation comes from states, localities, and parents.

Jim Stergios is Executive Director and Charles Chieppo is a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank.

Poll Finds Charter Schools Widely and Broadly Popular in Massachusetts

More than six years after the failure of a statewide ballot initiative that would have increased the number of charter public schools in Massachusetts, a poll shows that 62 percent either strongly or somewhat favor them, with only 16 percent opposed.

Study Urges Massachusetts to Embrace Innovative School Models

A new policy brief from Pioneer Institute urges Massachusetts policymakers to encourage the proliferation and progress of non-traditional models that offer families creative, flexible, personalized and low-cost private education options.

Poll Finds Strong Majority of Massachusetts Residents Support Restoring U.S. History MCAS Graduation Requirement

Sixty-two percent of Massachusetts residents support restoring passage of a U.S. history test as a public high school graduation requirement, according to a poll of Massachusetts residents’ attitudes toward education policy commissioned by Pioneer Institute and conducted by the Emerson College Polling Center.

Two Stars in a Glowing Voc-Tech Education System

“A Tale of Two City Schools: Worcester Tech and Putnam Academy Become Models for Recovery” is a new white paper by Pioneer Institute that analyzes how Worcester Tech and Putnam Academy — schools with high numbers of low-income and special needs students — leapt from the bottom of Massachusetts voc-tech rankings to become leaders among local schools.

Toolkit Highlights Keys to Massachusetts’s Vocational-Technical School Success

Alternating weeks of academic and vocational education, school autonomy, and close ties with local businesses have been key to the success of Massachusetts's  vocational-technical high schools, according to a report published today by Pioneer Institute.

Book Finds Massachusetts Voc-Tech Schools Are National Model, Calls for Expansion

Massachusetts vocational-technical schools -- boasting minuscule dropout rates, strong academic performance, and graduates prepared for careers or higher education -- should be expanded to meet growing demand, according to a new book published by Pioneer Institute.

METCO Works Well, Small Tweaks Could Make It Even Better, Study Says

The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, or METCO program, has successfully educated thousands of students for 56 years, but several minor changes could make it even better, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

Pioneer Institute Statement on the Latest State Audit of the Boston Public Schools

The third review of the Boston Public Schools (BPS) in fewer than 20 years makes clear: Things are getting worse.  Graduation rates are down, achievement gaps are up, an unacceptably large percentage of students attend schools ranked in the lowest 10 percent statewide. In a cruel twist, more than three in five students still are not taught material on which they are tested. There remains no clear strategy for improvement.  

Study Finds Continued Growth in Education Tax-Credit Scholarship Programs

Education tax credits grew increasingly popular in 2021, with four more states enacting programs.  There are now 28 tax-credit scholarship (TCS) programs in 23 states, and they serve more than 325,000 students, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

Study Recommends State Receivership for Boston Public Schools

After 15 years of rapid decline marked by low overall performance, yawning achievement gaps, instability, bureaucratic inertia and central office ineffectiveness in the Boston Public Schools (BPS), the Commonwealth should initiate receivership of the district, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

New Study Shows What Works for Civics Education

Americans strongly disagree about how our K-12 schools should teach our system of self-government. Dozens of organizations offer rival civics education resources and many of them don't work. A new study published jointly by Pioneer Institute and the National Association of Scholars offers in-depth evaluations of 15 leading civics programs, grades them on their effectiveness, and offers recommendations for how Americans should build upon these programs.

Study Finds Massachusetts Would Benefit from Adopting Education Savings Accounts

Massachusetts provides fewer options for students to be educated outside their assigned school districts than most other states do, and educational savings accounts (ESAs) offer an effective tool for giving students additional opportunities, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

Virtual Learning Grows During COVID

Virtual learning in K-12 education continues to grow due to the health threat caused by coronavirus variants and the assistance this learning model can provide to at-risk students, according to two papers released today by Pioneer Institute.

Pioneer Institute Files Amicus Curiae Brief in U.S. Supreme Court School Choice Case

Pioneer Institute has filed an amicus curiae brief in Carson v. Makin urging the Supreme Court of the United States to strike down a provision of Maine law. The Court will hear oral arguments in Carson this morning (December 8) at 10 am. The Maine law being challenged allows districts that don’t have their own schools to contract with a school or pay for students that choose to attend public or private schools, but explicitly excludes religious schools.

Study: After Years of Steady Increases, Homeschooling Enrollment Rose Dramatically During COVID

After steadily increasing for years, the number of parents choosing to homeschool their children skyrocketed during the pandemic, and policy makers should do more to acknowledge homeschooling as a viable option, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

Poll Finds Mixed Views About Schools’ Pandemic Performance

A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, Massachusetts residents have mixed opinions about how K-12 education has functioned, but they tend to view the performance of individual teachers more favorably than that of institutions like school districts and teachers’ unions, according to a poll of 1,500 residents commissioned by Pioneer Institute.

Study: Systemic Failure in IDEA Implementation for Private School Students with Disabilities in Additional States

On the heels of a $3.8 million settlement for private school students with disabilities in Massachusetts for the state’s failure to comply with provisions of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that require provision of equitable, publicly funded special education services to students in private schools, a Pioneer Institute study finds that two states and three school districts around the country for which data are available also appear to be out of compliance.

Key Madison Park Program Lags Other State Voc-Techs, but Shows Signs of Improvement

The co-operative education program at Boston’s Madison Park Technical Vocational High School, which places students in paid positions with local employers, lags far behind other Massachusetts vocational-technical schools in terms of both placements and number of employer contacts.  But with the school as a whole beginning to improve after years of turmoil, the co-op is also showing promising signs, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.