However, I wanted to have my facts straight. So I decided to meet with families across the city and spend some time better understanding the Opportunity Scholarships initiative. It’s amazing what one can learn from talking to parents.
The outreach I did about the Opportunity Scholarships was part of a countless number of meetings I had with parents over the course of my time in D.C. Many of those parents were young mothers who came to me looking for answers. Although they were different in many ways, they often came with the same goal: better schooling opportunities for their children. Usually mothers would request meetings with me during the school selection process that takes place each January and February.
The typical mom would come to the meeting armed with data and talking points. For example:
“I currently live in Southeast,” she would say. “Our house is zoned to the local elementary school. I have done quite a bit of research into the school and was shocked to find that only twenty percent of the children are operating at grade-level proficiency. That means my child has an eighty percent likelihood of failure. That’s simply not acceptable for me and my family.”
“Absolutely right,” I would think.
Then the mother would tell me she had gone online and researched all the best schools in the district. She had read about Mann and Key elementary schools, in Northwest D.C. She told me either would give her child a better education, even though it would mean two hours of commuting a day. She had applied to those schools and a number of others through a lottery process that allowed out-of-boundary students to attend certain schools.
I knew what was coming next.
“But we didn’t get in. I was devastated. So now I don’t know what to do. I went to DCPS. My parents went to DCPS. I believe in public schools, but I simply can’t send my child to the local school. Can you help me?”
It was a painful experience for me, each and every time. My instinct was always to tell the mother that I’d let her kid into Mann or Key and make the school make room for one more child. But honestly, it just wasn’t doable. Or fair. There were so many parents who visited me with these requests and so many more who were on waiting lists for those schools who had followed all of the rules.
Oh, I could have found a spot for them at another D.C. public school, perhaps marginally better than their home school. But that wasn’t what they wanted. They were looking for the exact same thing that I wanted for my two girls: the best school possible.
“Who am I,” I thought, “to deny this mom and her child an opportunity for a better school, even if that meant help with a seventy-five-hundred-dollar voucher? If they got a voucher, and her child could attend a really good Catholic school, perhaps, why would I stand in the way—especially since I don’t have a high-quality DCPS alternative?”
I just couldn’t look mother after mother in the eye and deny their children the opportunity I wanted for my own children. It would have required me to say, “Gee, I’m sorry, you’re just going to have to suck it up. I know your elementary school is a failing school, and your child will probably not learn how to read, but I really need five more years to fix the system. And while I’m fixing the system, I need you and your neighbors to be really patient. Hang in there with me. Things will get better. I promise.”
If someone said that to me, I’d have said, “You may need more time to fix the system but my kid doesn’t have time. She has only one chance to attend first grade, and if she can’t learn to read by the end of first grade, her chances for success in life will be compromised. So with all due respect—heck no!”
After my listening tour of families, and hearing so many parents plead for an immediate solution to their desire for a quality education, I came out in favor of the voucher program. People went nuts. Democrats chastised me for going against the party, but the most vocal detractors were my biggest supporters.
“Michelle, what are you doing?” one education reformer asked. “You are the first opportunity this city has had to fix the system. We believe in you and what you’re trying to do. But you have to give yourself a fighting chance! You need time and money to make your plan work. If during that time children continue fleeing the system on these vouchers, you’ll have less money to implement your reforms. You can’t do this to yourself!”
“Here’s the problem with your thinking,” I’d answer. “My job is not to preserve and defend a system that has been doing wrong by children and families. My job is to make sure that every child in this city attends an excellent school. I don’t care if it’s a charter school, a private school, or a traditional district school. As long as it’s serving kids well, I’m happy. And you should be, too.”
Here’s the question we Democrats need to ask ourselves: Are we beholden to the public school system at any cost, or are we beholden to the public school child at any cost? My loyalty and my duty will always be to the children.
NOT EVERYONE BOUGHT IT. In fact, most of my Democrat friends remained adamantly opposed to vouchers. It was interesting, though: they were always opposed to the broad policy, but they could never reconcile their logic when thinking at the individual-kid level.
I was having a heated discussion one day with one of my closest friends, a public school teacher. She was deriding voucher policy. My public policy wonkiness was not serving me well, so I decided to change tactics.
“You watched Waiting for ‘Superman’?” I asked.
“Of course,” she answered. “One of my best friends was featured in the movie.” She chuckled.
“Do you remember that scene with Bianca?” I asked.
Waiting for “Superman” director Davis Guggenheim did a brilliant job of distilling pretty complicated education policies into easy and understandable terms. But more important, he humanized the problems by following five families in their quest to find a high-quality public school for their children to attend.
One of the most poignant stories was about a little girl named Bianca. Her mother had had a negative experience in the public schools herself. So she was committed to giving her child a better chance. When Bianca was in kindergarten her mother enrolled her in the Catholic school across the street from their apartment, and she worked extra jobs to be able to pay the tuition.
Unfortunately, with the economic downturn, her hours were cut back, and she fell behind on her tuition payments. There is an emotional scene in the movie when Bianca is gazing longingly out the window. It is the day of her kindergarten graduation. She’s watching all of her friends and their families file in for the graduation ceremony, but she’s not allowed to attend. Tears are streaming down her face.
“Remember,” I pleaded, “her mom owed the school money so they didn’t let her go to her kindergarten graduation? How did that make you feel?”
“Ugh, that was awful,” my friend said. “It was totally wrong of the school. It was absolutely heart-wrenching! I mean seriously, I wanted to write the five-hundred-dollar check myself!”
“Right,” I said, “that would be a voucher.”
MOST PEOPLE IN THIS country do not favor vouchers in education, because they don’t want public dollars going to private institutions or businesses. But the logic holds absolutely no water.
We have federal Pell grants that low-income students use all the time to attend private colleges. Pell grants aren’t limited to use at public universities. We have food stamps that low-income families redeem at nongovernment grocery stores. And let’s not forget about Medicare and Medicaid.
Think about it this way. Say your elderly mother had to be hospitalized for life-threatening cancer. The best doctor in the region is at Sacred Heart, a Catholic, private hospital. Could you ever imagine saying this? “Well, I don’t think our taxpayer dollars should subsidize this private institution that has religious roots, so we’re going to take her to County General, where she’ll get inferior care. ’Cause that’s just the right thing to do!”
No. You’d want to make sure that your tax dollars got your mom the best c
are. Period. Our approach should be no different for our children. Their lives are at stake when we’re talking about the quality of education they are receiving. The quality of care standard should certainly be no lower.
FIVE YEARS AGO I could not have imagined winding up working with Republican governors such as Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels. As conservatives, they hold many views that contrast with mine, especially on other civil rights issues including LGBT and women’s rights. It surprised me when I started to find common ground with them on matters of education and public schools.
But working through the voucher issue, I realized that Republicans as well as Democrats can be blinded by ideology and interest groups.
When I launched StudentsFirst in late 2010, with school vouchers as one of our signature issues, a number of conservative Republicans embraced me. “That’s wonderful!” one told me. “Just wonderful! It will do so much for the movement to have a Democrat like you advocating for vouchers.”
But for some, the honeymoon ended quickly. At the end of the day, I have a very different perspective on the issue of vouchers than many conservative Republicans have. I don’t believe that an unregulated, publicly funded marketplace will work miracles for children. And I am not in favor of choice for choice’s sake. The only reason I care about vouchers is that they can be used to help students get a great education. I’m about choice only if it results in better outcomes and opportunities for a child who is being denied that chance by his or her parents’ socioeconomic circumstances. To that end, I believe that voucher programs should be strongly regulated—especially to ensure accountability.
My disagreement with many pro-voucher Republicans manifests itself the most around accountability. In my view, publicly funded vouchers should go only to schools that demonstrably improve student achievement. Any private school that wants public funds should administer similar tests as public schools and should be held accountable for the same student achievement growth metrics to which we hold public schools. We should hold charter schools accountable in the same way.
This point of view gives some ultraconservatives fits. I remember a conversation with two wealthy Republican men in a fancy office building, in which I said that private schools needed to administer public tests and meet the same standards as public schools. “But parents are the best judges of what’s right for their kids,” said one. “You don’t need the industry to be regulated. Parents will pull their kids out of any school that’s not good. The market will address the issue.”
To me, the argument that we should wait for the market to fix the problem is just as unsatisfactory as telling parents to wait for the government to fix the problem. Government sometimes fails, and markets sometimes fail. We cannot put ideology ahead of students. We have to be ruthlessly focused on students, and promote both policies and markets that will drive student results.
In addition to accountability, another argument I have with hard-line Republicans relates to so-called universal vouchers. Some on the political right argue that every family in the country should have immediate access to a voucher program. This strikes me as unrealistic. At a time when state and local budgets are slammed and huge numbers of children are trapped in failing schools, I am not convinced at all of the urgency of spending taxpayer dollars subsidizing the private school education of a Fortune 500 CEO. Sorry.
I explained all that to the two Republican men in that fancy office.
“Look,” I concluded, “we don’t let any nut job with a propeller run an airline. That’s because it’s dangerous and people’s lives are at stake. The same is true in education. Kids’ lives are at stake, so the market has to be carefully structured.”
After several rounds of back and forth, I realized I wasn’t going to convince these folks of anything. I think they felt the same way—and so have many other hard-right conservatives along the way. For some, it is about ideology. They can’t countenance an argument that doesn’t slavishly worship the power of the market. For others, it is political. They are loyal to private school operators who don’t want to administer public school tests, perhaps because they are not confident that they will deliver results. Either way, just like union-beholden Democrats, they have priorities other than the interests of students.
My beliefs about vouchers didn’t allow me to fit nicely into a Democratic box, but my conversations with Republicans convinced me that neither party always puts students first. This made me a political agnostic on matters of public education.
THE TÊTE-À-TÊTE WITH ULTRACONSERVATIVES didn’t reflect the thinking of all Republicans. I have come to believe that many Republicans in education reform are concerned with quality schooling, better outcomes for all children, and elevating the teaching profession. I believe that Democrats are on that course as well, but it’s much harder for some of them to embrace reform.
For decades, the teachers unions have been a powerful political force. In the words of Joel Klein, they are as effective as they are at influencing policy and policy makers “because they have millions of dollars and millions of people.” They use those dollars and those people to elect politicians who support their positions. The laws they favor pass, and the laws that they don’t want fail.
It’s important to understand that both the people and the money matter. In elections, you need to be able to run TV and radio ads, but having boots on the ground—people knocking on doors and running the phones—is equally important. The teachers unions have typically provided both in overwhelming numbers.
In fact, the teachers unions’ influence on the Democratic Party is staggering. At least 10 percent of delegates to the Democratic National Convention are teachers union members. The two national teachers unions together contribute more money politically than the top seven defense contractors combined. In the past ten years, they have spent more than $330 million on political campaigns and candidates. The National Education Association was the top combined contributor to state and federal races in 2008, contributing $45 million, more than 90 percent of which went to Democratic campaigns.
In many cities, teachers union presidents fancy themselves kingmakers in Democratic politics. We see the impact across the country. I’ve been in far too many meetings with Democrats who’ve essentially said to me, “Look, I actually agree with you philosophically. But I am not going to do you or anyone else any good if I’m not in office. If I took on these issues, the union would skewer me. I just can’t go there.”
The frustration that the reform community has felt with the lack of support from the vast majority of Democrats is palpable, particularly because most of us are Democrats. The ideal that we are fighting for—that all kids have a fundamental civil right to access to an excellent education—is a Democratic ideal, after all.
This reasoning led me to the uncomfortable conclusion that the lack of Democratic support was owed to cowardice. It wasn’t until recently that I understood that it’s actually much more complex. When I started StudentsFirst, my staff and I often talked about how it would be a game-changer if we could get a high-profile Democrat as an endorser. We’ve spent hours brainstorming names. Time and time again, we returned to one person who would, in fact, change the game: Bill Clinton.
BILL CLINTON IS CLEARLY the standard bearer for the Democratic Party and its ideals. There is no more gifted a politician and advocate than Clinton. Getting him out there talking about our issues would completely shift the political landscape. I have several staffers at StudentsFirst who used to work for Clinton, and they still have strong ties to the Democratic Party. After several conversations, we devised a plan. The key, they told me, was Douglas Band.
Doug Band is President Clinton’s gatekeeper and confidant. If Clinton is going to take a meeting with anyone, it’s only going to be because Band recommends it. So one crisp winter morning, I went to meet with the infamous Doug Band. We met for breakfast in a New York hotel.
“First of all,” he began, “let me start off by saying that there is no more impo
rtant work than what you’re doing. Education is the most important issue this country faces. If we don’t fix it, our country is screwed, plain and simple.”
Sounded promising.
“That said . . . ,” he continued.
I could almost hear the tires bring the promise to a screeching halt.
“My job is to create and protect the president’s legacy. And that is much easier done in other realms than education. For example, if we can negotiate a seventy percent increase on AIDS medication from a pharmaceutical company to distribute in Africa, we can quantify exactly how many lives we’ve saved. If we raise three million dollars to bring clean drinking water to a Nigerian community, we know exactly how many diseases we’ve avoided.”
I liked the way he thought.
“The problem with education,” he said, “is that there is no clear path to victory. You can’t list the three, four, or five things that need to happen that will improve student outcomes by eighty percent. So, when you’re talking to a politician, the lack of a clear payoff makes it a very difficult sell. ‘Hey, come take on this powerful interest group that will work to unseat you. Take a chance on these policies that we can’t guarantee are even going to work.’
“What person in their right mind would take you up on that?” he asked.
He was right. Why would Clinton, or any other Democratic politician with his wits about him, for that matter, take on the issue of school reform given how much pushback they’d get with no guarantee of results? Honestly, I couldn’t even ask him to do it. I came to the realization that in order for Democratic politicians to tackle the issue, we’d have to guide them on a path to victory.
The path will never be as direct as Doug Band would like. But as a foreshadowing of the fact that it is possible, Doug threw caution to the wind and joined the board of StudentsFirst, New York. We now both know that neither the solutions nor the payoffs will be easy to describe and quantify. The journey will be long, the route circuitous, the finish line forever ahead.
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