In mid-April, in a rare moment of bipartisan comity on Capitol Hill, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted unanimously in favor of passing the Every Child Achieves Act out of committee. Political reporters lauded Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., on their adroit statesmanship in bridging their political divides to produce a truly bipartisan bill.
At first, the two sides “were miles apart,” according to a Politico reporter, but Democratic and Republican staffers were able to find common ground in a seven-day-a-week “Shake Shack Summit,” eating burgers and making compromises. Finally, when the bill was put to amendments in markup, Alexander and Murray encouraged their respective colleagues to withdraw the most controversial amendments and postpone them for debate on the Senate floor.
Alexander and Murray are certainly due the praise they received from reporters and pundits. But the inevitable focus on the pleasant story of the process of drafting the bill partially obscured the big picture: The center of gravity on education politics has shifted significantly to the right since No Child Left Behind.
If signed into law, the Every Child Achieves Act would substantially scale back the role of the federal government in education. It would not only end the practice of the Department of Education steering education policy via waiver, but also put in place significant safeguards against future executive overreach. It would end federal mandates around teacher evaluation, return the responsibility for developing accountability systems back to the states, give states the freedom to determine the interventions they’ll use to improve low-performing schools, and consolidate and strengthen charter school support programs.
Now, the fact that the Every Child Achieves Act falls well to the right of No Child Left Behind doesn’t necessarily indicate that education politics writ large has shifted that way. It might merely reflect the fact that the Senate is under Republican control and that Murray and Alexander managed to pass a unanimous bill in committee by tabling the most partisan questions. But a look at the amendments introduced and then withdrawn by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who is widely regarded as one of the Senate’s most liberal members, strongly suggests that the line of scrimmage has shifted.
Warren put forth and withdrew four amendments to the Every Child Achieves Act. Two were modest in scope: an amendment to Title V would have created a pilot program to inform students in high-need schools about higher education options, and an amendment to Title I called for taking disaggregated test data for the state report card and further cross-tabulating it in a way that would not be used for accountability. Two were more ambitious: One would have required states to intervene in schools that had less than a 67 percent graduation rate; the other proposed setting “ambitious but achievable” multi-year academic achievement goals for all students as well as for racial and socioeconomic subgroups.
Yet even if every one of Warren’s amendments passed, the Every Child Achieves Act would still fall well rightward of No Child Left Behind; states would still have the freedom to determine their own interventions for schools with low graduation rates, and “ambitious but achievable” is refreshingly more modest than No Child Left Behind’s “100 percent proficient” target.
What has happened since No Child Left Behind to shift the ground so significantly that the most liberal senator’s withdrawn amendments add up to a more conservative bill than the status quo?
On the right, the story is simple. Under the Obama administration, between Race to the Top, waivers and the Common Core, conservatives began to see their worst fears about the slippery slope of federal intervention come to fruition, and returned to their limited government roots.
On the left, the story is more interesting. The Obama administration has shifted Democratic education politics significantly to the right. President Barack Obama leveraged the federal government to implement ideas that a Republican governor circa 2008 could expect a hard fight in his state legislature over, such as teacher evaluation, higher standards and expanding charter schools.
But the what of the Obama education agenda became less important than the how. The Department of Education has pushed these reforms in such a heavy-handed and technocratic way that even the teachers unions have come around to the virtues of limited government. It doesn’t hurt that the federal bureaucracy is the level of government over which the unions have the least power, but on a broader level, unions that were founded to protect teachers from management are now increasingly seeing their roles as protecting teachers from policy. This is why folks like Randi Weingarten at the American Federation of Teachers and my boss, Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute, who otherwise have their fair share of differences, have both spoken favorably about the Every Child Achieves Act.
And on the whole, education politics just doesn’t play out like other issues. The center-left and center-right both promote a technocratic “reform” agenda, whereas the union left and the tea party right both broadly oppose top-down change. So in a way, it’s not quite fair to pick on Warren as being more “conservative” than her predecessors. The normal left-right spectrum doesn’t fit for education politics, and Democrats like Warren appear further to the right because of, not despite, their overall lurch to the left.
No Child Left Behind was passed in 2001 at the high water mark of centrist bipartisanship in education. Since then, Republicans have moved further to the right and Democrats to the left. This has made compromise more difficult on just about everything. But on education, the brief shining moment of bipartisan concord reflected more than just Alexander and Murray’s statesmanship. Even as liberals and conservatives are growing further away from each other on just about every issue, they are both, each for their own reasons, coalescing around a vision of a more limited federal role in education. However different their motivations might be, the result is an opening for a compromise that both parties would welcome.
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