By Tressa Pankovits and Will Marshall
President Biden’s ambitious policy agenda for Building Back Better is missing a key element – bringing America’s outdated public school bureaucracies into the 21st Century. As the politics of education heats up around the country, he needs to fill the vacuum for a progressive vision for modernizing public schools.
Education is mostly a local responsibility, but it’s fast becoming a national issue. Many U.S. parents are dissatisfied with the way their children’s public schools performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. They are frustrated by lengthy shutdowns and learning losses, by political wrangling over vaccines and mask mandates, and by opaque central school bureaucracies that did not seem to listen to their concerns.
Right-wing populists also are trying to make our K-12 schools battlegrounds in America’s culture wars. Controversies are erupting over efforts by conservative state legislators to ban books and discussions of gender, as well as the extent to which parents should control what their children are taught about the nation’s racial history and other fraught subjects. Following last year’s victory in Virginia, Republicans are planning to run campaigns in this year’s midterm elections around the theme of “parent power.”
Conspicuously absent from the Republican cultural offensive is a commitment to raising school quality and student performance. Yet that’s a growing concern for U.S. voters. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted this month, 58% said “improving education” should be a top priority for the President and Congress this year. It was the fourth-most pressing priority, ahead even of concern about crime.
Unfortunately, Democrats seem ill-prepared for the intensifying debate on education. National party leaders in recent years have largely abandoned the fight to give parents better school choices for their children and hold schools accountable for improving the performance of all students. As a result, the public is apt to default to the view that Democrats are defending a status quo urgently in need of change.
We urge President Biden in his State of the Union speech to pick up the discarded mantle of K-12 reform and modernization. Taking up where Barack Obama and Bill Clinton left off, he should offer a radically pragmatic vision for bringing America’s outdated model for organizing public education into the 21st Century.
Read the full piece in Real Clear Education.
