During his campaign, Joe Biden sat down with National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garcia to talk education reform. Garcia explained that NEA members (who include Jill Biden) have been pushing back against “very misguided school reforms — like charter schools.” She frames education reform as a zero-sum game that pits charter schools against public schools (never mind that charter schools are public).
The NEA, the nation’s largest teachers union, represents a significant political force. So naturally, when Garcia prompted, “You know how we feel about charter schools,” Biden responded, “Same way I feel.” Next, he listed off a few talking points about holding charter schools accountable to the same standards as public schools.
Politicians, at the highest level, have generally been favorable to school choice. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama supported some school choice legislation, as has President Trump, though his administration’s strong support for school choice, like anything in Washington these days, is almost hopelessly polarized. “When we first started this, there was more bipartisanship,” education reformer Howard Fuller told me before the election. “The problem with bipartisanship at this moment is if you talk to any Democrat about bipartisanship, they’ll laugh at you. People are saying to be bipartisan means you support Donald Trump. And vice versa.”
Now, under a Biden administration, where does education reform go? There’s more opportunity for bipartisanship, perhaps. But what do the Left and the Right have to unite around? Over the past few years, identity politics have increasingly complicated the reform efforts that were intended to help underprivileged students. The push for education reform of the past few decades may be stalling, with little hope for the bipartisan convergence that advanced it in the first place.
The start of a movement
In 1983, the U.S. Department of Education published “A Nation at Risk,” an alarming assessment of American literacy and mathematical aptitude that warned we were falling way behind our international peers. “Some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate,” it reported, “by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension.” Seven years later, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, created the first voucher program in the United States, directing public funds to private schools, with the help of the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Thanks to the unlikely coalition of Tommy Thompson, the state’s white Republican governor, and Annette “Polly” Williams, a black Democratic legislator, school choice grew up as a bipartisan effort.
Howard Fuller, a civil rights activist (and former black power advocate and Marxist), became the superintendent of Milwaukee public schools in the early ’90s, and he pushed for more school choice and voucher programs. During a speech in 1998, Fuller explained that “the current system does not work well for a significant number of kids, and many of these kids are poor and they are kids of color. And for these kids and their families, despite all of the rhetoric about how good things are and despite all of the apologists for the existing system, there is a crisis, and we have to have a sense of urgency about doing something about this crisis.”
These reformers may have had little in common, but they united around one idea: that students, especially low-income, minority students, deserved better than they were getting. School choice, in the form of voucher programs, was just the first step. In 1992, St. Paul, Minnesota, birthed the nation’s first charter school. The KIPP charter school network was founded in 1994, followed by other networks such as Uncommon, IDEA, and Success Academy. Today, there are more than 7,000 charter schools serving 3 million children across the U.S.
In 2001, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program was established, making it possible for donors to give tax-deductible gifts to K-12 student scholarships, so students could afford to attend private schools. Donors across the ideological spectrum, such as Don and Doris Fisher, who gave to KIPP, and John Walton and the John Bryan Family and Challenge Foundation, were crucial to the development of charter schools and school choice programs. In 2006, the Charter School Growth Fund was co-founded by Don Fisher and Walton to support charter networks across the U.S.
Whitney Tilson, one of the founders of Democrats for Education Reform, says it was important that both sides of the aisle come together to help students, which is why he helped create a group to galvanize Democrats. “We don’t need to convert the Republican Party to our point of view, and this is an issue that, for decades, the entrenched forces of the status quo have very successfully resisted change by making this issue a Republican vs. Democrat issue, and it’s not,” he says in A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine School Reform. “It’s a ‘people who like the existing status quo and will fight fiercely to preserve it’ vs. ‘people who are looking out for the kids that are not being well-served by the status quo.’ That’s the real issue here.”
Over the years, these school choice reforms led to success. Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that from 2006 to 2012, urban charter schools provided “significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading” compared to their traditional public school peers, and learning gains were “larger by significant amounts for Black, Hispanic, low-income, and special education students in both math and reading.”
As school choice and charter schools grew in popularity, so did the mantra “No Excuses.” When the Heritage Foundation published No Excuses: Lessons From 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools in 2000, it documented radical, success-driven charter networks such as KIPP, which then had two mantras: “Work hard, be nice” and “No excuses. No shortcuts.”
Yet some 30 years since the education reform movement began, the bipartisan coalition that once supported school choice and other reforms is unraveling. Politics and partisanship have stepped in, but they’re not the only problems. Arguments over how to approach issues of race have divided the Left and Right on education reform. “No excuses,” the mantra that drove schools such as KIPP, has been targeted as a racist tag line for ignoring systemic inequality. Anti-school choice lobbyists have cried “racism” at school choice itself. And the Left-Right coalition, supported by civil rights activists in its early days, has suffered.
Politics in the way
Despite favorable winds in the White House, this type of education innovation hasn’t been popular across the board. Antagonists toward school choice argue that it takes funds away from public schools and even enables discrimination. In January, the Orlando Sentinel ran a piece criticizing corporations for donating to Florida’s voucher program because it directed funds to “anti-LGBT” schools. In reality, funds can follow families to religious schools of their choosing, including those that hold biblical views of sexuality.
A recent USA Today opinion piece implied that private schools can discriminate based on race, by stating that only half of voucher programs “protect students from race discrimination.” Corey DeAngelis, director of school choice at the Reason Foundation, says this simply isn’t true. Citing the 1976 Supreme Court decision Runyon v. McCrary, he explained, “It’s a way to try to tarnish the proposal that overwhelmingly benefits disadvantaged students as being bad for them, even though it’s not.” The Runyon decision determined that private schools cannot discriminate based on race.
A few years ago, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, lambasted charter schools as the “slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” “It’s just ridiculous,” Fuller said. “It shows the limits they will go to in order to prevent black and brown families from having any option other than the ones that they control. For me, when I hear that argument, it’s clearly coming from someone who’s trying to protect their power and using whatever arguments they think might work.”
One prominent education reformer, donor, and Democrat, who asked not to be named, said Democratic candidates are now more “open to alternatives in education” than in the past, though there is still strong opposition to charter schools.
“I think the thing that is always a little frustrating about the ‘no excuses’ discussion is that it was meant to be about adults more so than children,” he said. “We’re not taking excuses from adults about why the kids are not learning.” But mischaracterizing “no excuses” gives anti-charter school activists an easy dig. “Some of it was intentionally hijacked,” he said, “because that’s a pretty depressing system, where kids have no excuses.”
As much as school choice antagonists argue that diverting funds from public schools will disproportionately harm low-income and minority students, charter schools have been serving these students from the beginning, and with good results. Center for Research on Education Outcomes studies from 2009 and 2013 showed that students in poverty perform better in charter schools than traditional public schools.
Yet in July, Joe Biden, with Bernie Sanders, released a set of policy proposals that were less than amenable to school choice, including further regulation of charter schools, no federal funding for for-profit schools, and opposition to “any and all” voucher programs, such as education savings accounts and tax credit scholarship programs.
Some of this division over school choice, and education reform more broadly, has been driven by politics. Some of it is driven by teachers unions, who see their funding and monopoly power threatened by more options for students. Whatever the cause, politicians and reformers spar over the future of education reform, with little hope for consensus in sight. There is some good news for the coalition, though. “In almost every state, there are still groups trying very hard to work in a bipartisan fashion,” said education policy analyst Chester Finn. But the unity of the 1990s to the early 2010s, as Yuval Levin writes in How to Educate an American, is “effectively over.”
KIPP’s choice
To understand exactly how this identity politics-fueled breakdown began, take a look at KIPP. In the mid-1990s, two Teach for America corps members founded a charter school network with a simple mantra: “Work hard, be nice.” Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin opened two public charter schools, one in Houston and one in New York City, with this philosophy of high expectations and character development.
Today, the Knowledge is Power Program is the largest network of charter schools in the U.S., with 256 locations in 20 states. By 2014, 96% of KIPP eighth graders were performing better than their district peers in reading, and 92% surpassed their peers in math. Contrary to the narrative that charter schools do not serve low-income and minority students, more than 95% of KIPP’s students are black or Latino; some 88% of them are eligible for federally subsidized meals. In 2007, the Brookings Institution concluded, “In recent years, charter schools such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) … have upended the way Americans think about educating disadvantaged children, eliminating the sense of impossibility and hopelessness and suggesting a set of highly promising methods.”
“What KIPP showed was possible was amazing, and it was done when lots of people, most of them public school districts, were saying it wasn’t possible,” said Scott Hamilton, who joined KIPP leadership in its early years. Hamilton co-founded the KIPP Foundation in 2000 with $15 million in seed funding from Don and Doris Fisher. The foundation helps train KIPP teachers and open new KIPP schools. Hamilton pitched it to Don, the Gap co-founder who, with his wife, ended up investing some $100 million into the fledgling charter network. Last year alone, the KIPP Foundation received more than $41 million in donor support.
Much of the mindset that made KIPP successful was encapsulated in its slogan: “Work hard, be nice.” “It’s not just a slogan,” said Aaron Brenner, who founded KIPP’s first elementary school. “It’s part of the ethos that drew people from diverse backgrounds together on behalf of children, families, and communities.” Brenner says the “common mantra” of rolling up one’s sleeves and learning to work with both friends and enemies drew a diverse collection of supporters to KIPP from all different backgrounds: “It’s one key reason we were inspired by the movement.”
In the wake of the nation’s latest push for racial justice, charter schools across the country were quick to signal their support for racial equality. While many schools were posting #BlackLivesMatter on social media, KIPP took its expressions of solidarity a step further. It dropped its 26-year-old slogan, “Work hard, be nice.” In a July blog post explaining the decision, the network’s leaders wrote that the recently axed slogan “ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want.”
At the time of this writing, a new slogan has not been chosen. The decision appears to have been fully supported by KIPP’s board of directors, including donors such as Katherine Bradley, Reed Hastings, and Doris Fisher. A few former KIPP leaders, however, were not so pleased with the decision. Scott Hamilton was blunt: “I basically took it as an indication that KIPP is dead.”
When the “no excuses” charter school movement began to gain traction, KIPP was one of its pioneers. “KIPP was started by some of the first educators I’d come across who said, ‘I don’t care about poverty or skin color — you can perform just as well as your more advantaged peers,’” Hamilton explained. “That was really powerful because education was full of people who for decades made excuses based on poverty.” Brenner takes a more sympathetic, if still leery, view: “I have deep empathy for the leadership of KIPP. I think they have struggled with, does our ethos align with the political landscape, and how do we align ourselves with the themes and movements that have arisen in the last few months?”
Even before the turmoil of the spring and summer of 2020, academically rigorous schools with primarily minority students, such as KIPP, have faced criticism for promoting the narrative that goals such as working hard and being nice will be sufficient to achieve success in life. The “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality doesn’t fit the cultural moment in which White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo’s primer on systemic racism in America, is a bestseller. In the past, the idea of elevating effort has been central to KIPP’s mission. Whether that changes remains to be seen.
“Some charter schools are virtue-signaling,” said Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “Most charter schools have their heads down trying to educate kids. In this moment, with debates around racial justice, we have to distinguish between ‘real’ world and ‘online’ world.”
Division within schools themselves
Yet it seems clear that the “online” world is increasingly encroaching into reality. For many conservative education reformers, KIPP’s shift away from its founding principles, even if only in vocabulary, is the first step down a familiar path toward leftist ideology and political concerns. Teach for America, for example, was once the most bipartisan organization in school reform. Now, it is not only politically hostile to even right-leaning views but has traded many of its educational concerns for activism, routinely issuing grand pronouncements on culture war issues far afield from the classroom. Such experiences have left many reformers on the Right wary of bipartisan projects.
This dismissal of the Left-Right coalition could be a good thing for conservatives, Yuval Levin writes, so they can focus on two elements of education that they have traditionally prioritized: character formation and civic education. Right-leaning parents and education reformers might not love what they see in traditional public schools and even some charter schools, where these emphases are increasingly scrapped in favor of a curriculum taught through the lens of activism and social justice.
“When the Left says that America is innately racist and that concepts of personal responsibility or being on time are vestiges of white supremacy, there’s not much for conservatives to work with,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. As one example, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture released a graphic this summer decrying “hard work” and “self-reliance” as aspects of “white culture.” “What’s happening here is that a troubling and authoritarian philosophy is being championed under an ‘anti-racist’ label that sounds, at first blush, innocuous and even admirable,” Hess argued.
Charter schools are not immune to these trends. Last year, Steven Wilson, the founder of Ascend charter schools, was fired after he penned a blog post defending intellectualism in education. The Ascend board emphasized that Wilson’s untimely sacking was not in response to a single incident; yet, it came on the heels of a petition denouncing Wilson’s “white supremacist rhetoric.”
What offensive ideology was Wilson peddling in his blog post? “Liberal education is under fresh attack, this time as ‘whiteness.’” And “How tragic it would be if any child was taught that a reverence for the written word was a white characteristic.”
Wilson also lamented that “civil rights advocates inadvertently exacerbated the tendency to exclude children of color in underserved communities from academic schooling. … Civil rights activists were concerned that requiring students of color to undertake demanding academic work would discriminate against children already harmed by prejudicial treatment in other aspects of their lives.” On this perhaps most controversial point, “history backs Wilson up,” notes Columbia University professor John McWhorter. “In 1987, for instance,” McWhorter wrote for the Atlantic, “the New York State Board of Regents distributed a booklet claiming that black kids prefer ‘inferential reasoning rather than deductive or inductive reasoning’ and ‘show a tendency to approximate space, number and time instead of aiming for complete accuracy,’ with the implication that this is an alternative ‘learning strategy.’”
Yet in response to Wilson’s “destructive” post, more than 500 people signed a petition decrying its “offensive and oppressive content that perpetuates white supremacist ideology.” Four months later, Wilson was ousted as CEO of Ascend, having already been stripped of his responsibilities as early as July, just one month after expressing his heterodoxy.
At KIPP, an education leader who operates a network of classically inspired charter schools for the underserved, who asked not to be named in the article, says she encountered an ideological battle of her own. She heard from two of her leaders who participated in the Fisher fellowship program through KIPP that leadership dismissed the classical model of learning, telling them that type of education is inherently racist.
An alternative vision
The question of how to address race may divide schools across the country, but some educators are finding that they can focus on both social justice and classical modes of teaching. Stephanie Saroki de Garcia, managing director of Seton Education Partners, which supports Brilla College Prep charter schools, says classical schools such as Brilla may not adopt the rhetoric of anti-racism, but they won’t avoid tough discussions. “When you orient everything around the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness, that makes things much clearer in terms of the honest conversations about race and racial injustice,” she said. “We don’t shy away from those conversations.” “The most anti-racist thing is the work of charter schools like KIPP,” de Garcia added. “Not just to say you’re against racism, but to do something against racism.”
Brilla Schools Network includes 1,300 students in five elementary and middle schools in the Bronx. Its vision is to help its students “build moral character and achieve academic excellence through joy, balance, discipline, and empowerment.” The school centers on classical education, with an emphasis on modern issues as well. “You can see Aristotle next to I Am Malala on our bookshelves,” de Garcia said.
Luma Mufleh, founder of Fugees Academy, a school for refugee children, said racial justice “should be embedded in everything you do.” And when it comes to making decisions at the school, “Our North Star is our students. If you’re too far removed from students’ experience, you’re trying to appease all of these outside stakeholders. It’s very easy to get caught up in that.”
Kathleen O’Toole is the assistant provost for K-12 education at Hillsdale College and leader of its Barney Charter School Initiative, which supports classical charter schools across the U.S., 24 and counting. There are 12,000 students enrolled in these schools, with a rigorous curriculum that includes Latin starting in sixth grade. “Classical education has this reputation of being only for certain populations of students,” O’Toole said. “No, it’s for every kid.”
These schooling models offer localized attempts to bridge the gap on these difficult issues. Yet the wide, and widening, ideological divide remains. The Trump presidency served to polarize the education landscape further, particularly around matters of race and history-based curriculum and school choice. It’s unlikely to see any significant de-escalation during the Biden administration.
Madeline Fry Schultz is a writer in Washington, D.C.
