John Hanna/AP Photo
Private and homeschool students, their parents, and advocates crowd part of the second floor of the Kansas Statehouse at a rally for school choice, January 25, 2023, in Topeka, Kansas.
In last November’s midterm elections, conservative candidates for school board elections performed worse than they had hoped in most places across the country. The most visible issues in these matchups were culture war panics about so-called “woke” schools infected with critical race theory curricula, sports teams with transgender athletes, and lingering COVID-19 restrictions. The legitimate discontent parents had with wanting their children inside schools was tapped into by right-wing groups such as the 1776 Project PAC and Moms for Liberty, which supported candidates who would purge “cultural Marxism” and promise to bring a “culture of Liberty.”
Instead of overwhelming success that would prove the lasting power of a grassroots constituency of fed-up parents all across the country, those conservative groups overcalculated the saliency of the issues they ran on. Before the midterms, the 1776 Project posted a 70 percent success rate in elections it worked on. In November, the group won 20 races of the 50 endorsed, good for 40 percent. Moms for Liberty fared a bit better. They won 50 percent of endorsed races nationwide.
The wins were concentrated in Republican states; Moms for Liberty had its best performance in Florida. Meanwhile, more liberal-leaning states passed initiatives that provided additional funding for schools. In Wisconsin, 64 school referendums totaled almost $1.7 billion. Voters in Colorado passed free meals for all public schools. In New Mexico, voters made the state the first in the nation to guarantee early-childhood education as a constitutional right.
The new culture war over the future of education is a stalking horse for the same old battle over school choice. The not-too-hidden goal of denigrating public schools is to weaken support for teachers and their unions, and to redirect funds into school vouchers and other programs that pummel public education even further.
Polling conducted by the American Federation of Teachers in mid-December found that the culture-war framing was unpopular. Instead, voters and parents saw strong academic, critical reasoning, and practical life skills as most important, when compared to anti-wokeness. Furthermore, among the sample group, when given the option between improving public education and giving parents more school choices, 80 percent preferred improving public schools. Most revealing was that two-thirds of voters said that culture-war battles distracted public schools from their foremost role: educating students.
If anything, what has allowed the new education reform movement to go unchecked has been the fact that school systems, including some charter schools, are relatively flush with cash from pandemic assistance. By the end of 2021, Congress had allocated around $190 billion for K-12 schools through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act, and the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act. The CARES Act provided $13.2 billion, CRRSA provided $54.3 billion, and the ARP provided $122.8 billion.
Congress allocated the money to state boards of education, which then allocated the money to school districts. In the first two rounds of funding, state-level boards were required to report annual performance ratings to the Department of Education. For the largest chunk of funding from the ARP, state education boards were required to submit plans to the Department of Education for approval. All of those supplements have sunset dates by which the funds must be used. Most have already passed. And the latest one will be the ARP’s on September 24, 2024.
The new culture war over the future of education is a stalking horse for the same old battle over school choice.
Because of lags in data reporting, the Department of Education’s latest report only shows fund disbursement until June 2021. But so far, that has included about $14.2 billion on student academic and social needs, operational costs, and physical health and safety upgrades, and a fraction of a percent for mental health services. In other words, there’s some $170 billion in federal money for schools still on the table.
On the Republican side, the maximalist culture-war arguments do little to sway independent voters. But they are a unifying issue for its future hopeful presidential candidates. Nikki Haley is tweeting how critical race theory is un-American. Former President Donald Trump is trying to outflank Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis from the right on education. In a recent education policy video, Trump makes mention of “massive funding preferences and favorable treatment” for states and schools by cutting school administrators who work for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. How that would look in practice is hard to imagine.
SOME REPUBLICANS ACROSS THE COUNTRY are resisting the embrace of school choice by the GOP. In Iowa, nine Republicans in the House, and three in the Senate, voted against a bill that would pull $345 million of taxpayer money over a four-year period into family private-school costs. Thanks to the margins in the Iowa legislature, the bill still passed. The state’s education department expects it would include an additional drop of $46 million from public-school funding as a result of more students in private schools.
After the vote, a Republican lawmaker told the Des Moines Register, “It came down very simply to my constituents. I’m in a very Republican, very conservative district and they were telling me no.” The effect of Iowa’s rollbacks in education spending could prove politically toxic after the law is implemented, much like it did in Kansas under the tenure of Gov. Sam Brownback, leading to a reversal of the cuts by the state Supreme Court and a Democratic replacement governor now on her second term.
In rural Texas communities, the introduction of school voucher programs pose the threat of compounding consequences. Former state school superintendent Michael Lee, now the executive director of the Texas Association of Rural Schools, told The Texas Tribune, “When you lose enrollment, you have less money and have to make adjustments. The only way you can do that is through personnel cuts.” The Texas Tribune reported how state Rep. Ken King, a Republican representing a rural area in North Texas, vowed to fight any bill that introduced vouchers.
School choice critics explain that such voucher programs have snowballing effects. In the case of a hypothetical $10,000 yearly voucher, those taxpayer dollars go further when spread across students in a district as opposed to a personal education savings account. A simple example is the cost of utility bills. One fewer student in a school district, thus $10,000 less a year for a given district, doesn’t mean that all utility bills decrease at the same rate. It instead translates to more sudden and specific cuts in funding for teachers, extracurricular activities, English-as-a-second-language programs, special-education programs, school bus drivers, janitorial services, coaches, and so on. In places like Newton, Texas, strapped budgets already force teachers and principals to take on additional jobs inside the school district, such as coaches and bus drivers.
Conditioning aid benefits few. Democrats learned this lesson firsthand through former President Barack Obama’s efforts to expand charter schools, neutrally labeled as “education reform.” Defying state leaders, Obama lifted the caps for charter schools, becoming their biggest champion. The fever swept across the Democratic Party’s hopefuls. In 2012, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) delivered a keynote speech for the American Federation for Children, for which Betsy DeVos served as chairwoman until she joined Trump’s administration as secretary of education. Booker walked back his school choice support in 2019.
Under Obama’s watch, the most devastating effects of education reform took place in Democratic-run cities, which have disproportionate numbers of nonwhite students. Those cities included Detroit, Philadelphia, Newark, Oakland, Chicago, and others. Among the most notable, Chicago closed 49 elementary schools in 2013, the largest mass closing.
By 2016, Hillary Clinton took a middle-of-the-road stance on school choice, satisfying neither teachers unions nor charter school proponents. Now, the tides of education reform have shifted from the Democratic Party. Last spring, the Biden administration imposed heightened restrictions on federal funding for charter schools. Those included greater transparency between schools and for-profit entities, and forced grant applicants to demonstrate community demand for such schools and analyses of the effects the charter schools would have on public-school districts and segregation.
As the culture war takes form as a front for school choice, it has become a unifying call for most Republicans. But that momentum could stall out for Republicans as they find themselves replaying the same game Democrats did in the 2010s. Only this time, it’ll affect the school systems for the districts they represent, not the Democratic-run cities that experienced the first wave of systematic gutting.
