Biden Must Reclaim Democrats' Discarded Mantle of Education Reform in State of the Union Address

President Biden’s ambitious policy agenda for Building Back Better is missing a key element – bringing America’s outdated public school bureaucracies into the 21^st Century.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up where Barack Obama and Bill Clinton left off, he should offer a radically pragmatic vision for bringing America’s outdated model for organizing public education into the 21^st Century. 

Here are the key elements of a new progressive vision for the 21^st Century public: (1) schools organized around expanded parental choice; (2) shifting decisions from central bureaucracies to autonomous schools; (3) measuring outcomes and closing schools that fail their students; and (4) offering personalized learning rather than one-size-fits-all instruction. 

Here are three concrete steps the President can take to seize the initiative in making sweeping changes in America’s K-12 schools:  

First, challenge the states to dramatically accelerate progress toward the 21^st Century School model. The federal government should create new incentives to states to follow the example of New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Camden, and other cities where public charter schools are achieving critical mass.  As the Progressive Policy Institute has documented, charter schools and networks with strong oversight are outperforming traditional district schools and narrowing racial and ethnic achievement gaps. 

Also promising is the partnership school model under development in states as dissimilar as Massachusetts, Tennessee, Colorado, Indiana, Texas, New Jersey, and South Carolina. Known variously as innovation, renaissance, zone, 1882, and other names, the partnership model grants schools varying degrees of autonomy from central district micromanagement and restrictive union rules.  They usually operate under performance contracts and can be closed or returned to district control if they fail to meet specific accountability targets. 

During the pandemic, performance and public charter schools often proved more flexible and responsive to nimble than district schools. They pivoted to remote learning quickly when schools closed and worked closely with parents to maintain student engagement. A new survey of more than 500 charter schools by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that, on average, those charter leaders reported an interval of just 3.5 days between closing their physical campuses in March 2020 and reopening for online instruction. By contrast, at least one contemporaneous account discovered that only 30% of teachers in district schools were in daily contact with their students as late as May 2020. 

Not surprisingly, in June 2021, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics reported that enrollment in public schools “fell by its largest margin in at least two decades.” Enrollment dropped three percent, or about 1.4 million students. According to a study by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, during the same period, public charter schools added nearly a quarter of a million students, doubling their year-over-year enrollment increase.  

Second, make closing the international achievement gap a national priority. President Biden says America is locked in a “strategic competition” with China for economic and technological leadership. We can’t win that contest if our students don’t receive education of comparable rigor and quality to their peers in China and elsewhere. 

Unfortunately, evidence from international tests shows that U.S. students are lagging far behind in mastering reading, math, and science. For example, the latest Program for International Assessment (PISA) tests show that U.S. students ranked 37^th in math, 18^th in science, and 13^th in reading. Chinese students were the top performers in all three subjects.

President Biden should announce a new federal initiative that links unspent education funds from the American Rescue Plan to efforts by states to harmonize their standards and tests with PISA and other international assessments. 

Third, raise public and political awareness of the need to link America’s K-12 schools to the world of work. Whether or not they are bound for college, U.S. students should learn about how job markets work and have opportunities for apprenticeships with local employers before they graduate from high school. 

Investing in young workers has high economic returns, yet research shows that employers are less likely to hire workers with little to no experience for the “first jobs” that many younger workers rely on to build their skills and credentials. Without those first jobs, many will face fewer paths to enter the workforce. 

As part of his Build Back Better plan, President Biden has called for grants to states to accelerate students’ attainment of quality credentials, degrees, and opportunities in job training programs. To help the non-college-bound, our education system needs to connect them with multiple pathways to skills and careers.

For decades Democrats led on education. We spearheaded the drive to raise school standards, test new models for closing achievement gaps, and hold schools accountable for educating all students. In the last several years, however, the party has outsourced its education agenda to change-averse unions and left-wing activists. The State of the Union offers Biden an opportunity to spur the party to make a course correction. With a challenging midterm election looming, he should seize it and put Democrats back on the side of progressive school reform.