Don't Just Copy Obama (on Education)
His policies didn't work well, and the situation has changed
Over at Slow Boring,
has been writing a series on immigration and arguing that Democrats can’t just “go back” to Obama-era policies. Yglesias makes the convincing case that the world has changed, and immigration policies need to change with it.But in a footnote, he writes:
It also makes me a little bit sad that “go back to Obama’s approach from 2008 and 2012” isn’t the conventional wisdom on a larger set of issues. There are lots of controversial topics, like energy policy and K-12 education, where I think “copy Obama” would work well in a very literal way.
To give Matt the benefit of the doubt, I think he’s correct in referring to Obama’s general interest in K-12 education policy and his willingness to step outside the union-driven consensus that characterized the Biden years. But like immigration, the facts on the ground have changed and Democrats would be silly to run back the Obama playbook on K-12 education.
What was Obama’s K-12 playbook?
Barack Obama the candidate talked openly about the need to raise student achievement. He supported public charter schools. He angered the teachers unions by calling for merit pay and extra incentives for teachers who worked in hard-to-staff schools and subjects. The official Democratic party platform of 2008 called for parents to, “turn off the TV once in a while, put away the video games, and read to their children.”
All of these themes still make sense in today’s world. But they don’t necessarily reflect the policies that Barack Obama the president actually adopted. As president, Obama overreached on teacher evaluation policy and in the process ended up undermining support for annual testing and weakening federal oversight, first with a set of waivers he granted to states and eventually to a new law that significantly rolled back accountability for schools and districts.
The evolution here is instructive, because when most people think of Obama’s K-12 education playbook, they might start with the Race to the Top program. Armed with $5 billion in one-time federal funds as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his team created a competitive grant program with a bundle of priorities that included:
Adopting a set of common standards that were aligned to “college- and career-ready” expectations (what became known as the Common Core);
Adopting common tests that were aligned to those standards;
Implementing robust teacher evaluations that evaluated teachers in “significant part” on the contributions they made to student growth;
Identifying the bottom 5% of schools for serious improvement efforts; and
Eliminating charter school caps and allowing high-performing providers to expand; plus
A grab bag of other policies around things like data infrastructure and STEM and teacher preparation.
These policies could all make sense as part of a competitive grant program where the winners get money to execute their plans. In retrospect, I think it would have made more sense to handle these discretely rather than as a full package, but the most recent research suggests that Race to the Top did improve academic outcomes for students in the winning states.
But Obama didn’t stop there. When Congress struggled to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act early in his first term, he decided to authorize a set of comprehensive waivers from the law. In return for getting out of the most onerous parts of NCLB, states had to commit to adopting Race-to-the-Top-lite reforms.
I was part of the team working on waivers at the U.S. Department of Education at the time. I was in the audience in the East Room of the White House when Obama announced the initiative. I recall private conversations where we worried that it was over-reach and most states weren’t ready for it, but it seemed like a clever way to integrate and extend the Obama education reform agenda. Other Democrats either agreed or were willing to stay quiet about it.
As it turns out, Obama made a bad deal. He traded away a strong federal requirement that states pay attention to and intervene in low-performing schools and districts in exchange for fuzzy promises around standards, weak commitments around teacher evaluations, and a pinkie promise that states would finally do something about their lowest-performing schools.
At best, the waivers provided a temporary Band Aid. At worst, they put Obama on the path to eventually signing an even more watered-down version of federal law with the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.
And ultimately, all of Obama’s signature policies suffered from weak implementation efforts and largely failed to have their desired effect. The push for higher academic standards did not lead to higher student achievement. States responded to the teacher evaluation push by making a lot of surface-level policy changes without much real change on the ground. Even after the new “tougher” policies went into effect, very few teachers were identified as ineffective and the reforms ultimately had no discernible effect on student learning.
All of this sounds quaint now in an era where federal leadership on education is scarce. The Biden Administration (wrongly) bet it could win over working class voters by following the union policy playbook. He largely ignored K-12 education during his presidency while reading and math scores slid down to multi-decade lows. For his part, Donald Trump pins the blame for today’s declines on Jimmy Carter creating the U.S. Department of Education back in 1980, even though student achievement rose, for all groups of students, throughout most of the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s.
We need a new playbook for federal K-12 policy
When Obama first took office, he was the beneficiary of gains made under his predecessors. At the time, the challenge in K-12 education was to accelerate those gains and to keep pulling up the lowest-performers.
But since then, things have been trending very differently. American student achievement scores started declining across a range of tests, grade levels, and subject areas around the time Obama started granting waivers. (Other research argues the declines started as early as 2009.) Worse, those declines have been especially bad for the lowest-performing kids.
Other cultural phenomena aren’t helping. Like their parents, kids today are spending less time reading for fun. Support for public schools is falling. Teacher dissatisfaction is high, and the supply of new teachers is low. And thanks largely to COVID-related school closures, more kids are missing more days of school.
These trends demand a different set of responses than the ones Obama pursued as president.
That starts with leadership. Donald Trump, for example, is famously not a reader. He doesn’t read his briefing documents. He watches a lot of television and spends a lot of time on social media. While he has been successful in business and politics, his attention span is poor and he struggles remembering details.
I don’t mean to pick on the president here, but these traits are emblematic of the times we’re living in. Kids too are affected by too much screen time and shallow digital content. Politicians can’t just turn into scolds here, but they also shouldn’t be afraid to make knowledge cool again. Kids really can’t “just Google it.” They will never develop into the creative, critical thinkers we all want for them to be unless they start with a solid foundational base of facts and dates and formulas on which to inform their thinking.
The next president has an opening here if they choose to accept it. America can be a country of achievement and rigor and excellence without sacrificing our values around helping the neediest students. That takes leadership though. It requires speaking the harsh truths about our current situation and learning from history about how we got here.
Reading List
12 Truths and No Lies: Guiding Principles for the Future of American Education
PPI’s Compact for Educational Excellence
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