Op-Ed: Legislature Should Debate Education Funding, Avoid Race to Top Pressure to Revisit Charter Schools

Although Washington State voters have rejected charter schools on three different occasions, the issue will return to the state’s political agenda anyway, thanks to the budget crisis and the policies of the US Department of Education.

As Margie Slovan reported on Monday, supporters and opponents are already mobilizing their arguments for what will be another intense battle over education reform in the coming years.

Still, it is worth stepping back for a moment to assess the big picture, and in particular to learn from the experience of other states regarding education reform during the Great Recession and under the Obama administration.

Charter schools can offer specialized educational services and intensive teaching programs, but those kinds of services and programs can be adopted by school districts without creating charter schools. What makes charter schools unique is that they provide a fundamentally market-based approach to addressing the crisis in public education. They are grounded in the belief that school competition and merit pay for teachers are an essential component of educational reform.

The problem with these arguments is that the main political motivation for debating school competition and merit pay is not social science studies, but the fundamental desire to get more for less. This desire has been intensified by the Obama administration’s dangling federal money in front of cash-starved states with all sorts of strings attached. But the experience of California suggests that the reforms promoted by the Obama administration can have negative consequences, and that contrary to popular wisdom, the adoption of charter schools may not necessarily make states more competitive for federal money.

Getting More for Less
It should be no surprise that the state’s budget crisis is leading to a new round of discussion of charter schools and other methods of education reform. Charter schools are politically popular ways for dealing with the inevitable decline in the quality of instruction that occurs when school budgets are cut or when politicians are loath to raise taxes. Charter school advocates shift blame for education quality from lawmakers who enact budget cuts to students and teachers who are supposedly “underperforming,” just as the WASL advocates did in the 1990s.

Because these reforms are discussed in the context of a budget crisis, it is difficult to have a genuine debate about these reforms where all positions and solutions stand on equal footing. Reformers who believe the core problem is that schools lack the necessary financial resources to meet student needs are handicapped because few politicians are interested in giving schools more money while they are looking for places to cut the budget. Teachers unions are particularly disadvantaged because it is easy for opponents to frame their arguments as being motivated by a desire to preserve what they already have and not give up wages and labor protections.

State budget crises are an occasion for those opposed to new taxes to mobilize language and ideas that paint public employees and their unions as deviant, as dangerous to the operation of a free market, and as a threat to the wallets of everyone else in the state. Since reformers usually claim their proposals are cost-neutral, or may even provide savings to the state, their ideas get more traction in the Legislature, and are often promoted by newspapers and television news outlets that support these reforms. It’s not an easy position for teachers’ unions to debate education reform policy.

What makes the education reform debate in the current legislative session different from those that took place during previous budget crises is the aggressive push by the Obama Administration to force states to adopt reforms such as charter schools. This push is led by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who made a name for himself in Chicago by implementing controversial reforms that included charter schools and merit pay for teachers. President Obama hailed Duncan’s record in reforming Chicago schools when nominating him in late 2008, but others have argued that Duncan did more harm than good to Chicago public education. Duncan’s reforms led to mass teacher layoffs, closure of schools, and the demobilization of existing Local School Councils that had provided parent involvement and community input in the operation of schools. The jury is still out on whether Duncan’s reforms have improved student performance, and some Chicago residents have charged that Duncan’s reforms increased crime.

Despite these concerns, Duncan pushed for and won $4.35 billion in federal stimulus money for a program he called “Race to the Top.” Under Race to the Top, states would be eligible to compete for this money but only if they adopted a series of controversial reforms, including allowing charter schools, linking teacher pay to test scores, and enabling students to transfer between schools and school districts if they believe their own schools are failing.

Duncan’s move leverages the desperate need of cash-strapped state governments for federal stimulus money to get these states to adopt reforms they had previously rejected. Washington State and the 10 other states that don’t have charter schools are therefore prime targets for Duncan. His programs have given charter school supporters an opportunity to use the stimulus program to overcome an electorate that has been traditionally hostile to charter schools.

California’s Mixed Record
Yet it has to be remembered that Race to the Top is a competitive grant, not something that states are guaranteed to receive even if they make the reforms that are necessary to become eligible for the money, as California learned last week. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger enthusiastically embraced Duncan’s proposed reforms, and asked the state Legislature to implement those reforms so the state could seek Race to the Top funds. Democrats, who hold large majorities in both houses of the California Legislature, were very reluctant to implement the reforms, and education unions strongly opposed the changes. But the lure of federal stimulus funds proved difficult to resist, particularly for a legislature that had cut over $9 billion from the K-12 education budget a few months earlier, causing 30,000 teachers to lose their jobs. The state Legislature approved the proposed reforms in January 2010, and Governor Schwarzenegger signed it into law.

But when the first round of Race to the Top grant finalists were announced last week, California wasn’t included. States that were “most aggressive” in pursuing reforms were rewarded, with California being told to wait until a second round later in the year. The politics are clear: Duncan is using the Race to the Top program to push states to implement these reforms, often without a genuine public debate, and in the midst of a recession and a budget crisis that makes even the chance of federal stimulus funds hard to resist.

As to charter schools themselves, the debate over their effectiveness continues. A study by Stanford University found that only 17% of charter schools surveyed in 16 states showed improved student performance, with 37% performing worse than comparable public schools and 46% showing “no significant difference” between charter schools and traditional public schools. On Monday the California Department of Education released its list of “persistently lowest-achieving” schools, which are now under threat of closure unless major improvements are made. The list includes several charter schools, and the overall list of schools are predominantly located in low-income communities of color.

Setting the Agenda in Olympia
The state Legislature has already approved bills to make Washington State eligible for Race to the Top funds, but the bill is currently held up over a dispute between the House and Senate over long-term funding for shrinking class sizes. That debate gets closer to what the state actually needs to focus on in education policy than the Race to the Top reforms that were adopted with much less debate. The Legislature should focus its efforts on stabilizing school funding for the duration of the budget crisis and the recession, and consider these reforms once better financial days have returned.

There may well be arguments in favor of many of the education reforms championed by Arne Duncan and his allies. But it is difficult to see how those reforms can be debated honestly and fairly in the current moment, with the state budget deficit and Duncan’s federal stimulus funds distorting the conversation. In any event, no education reform is likely to be successful as school districts struggle to afford keeping teachers in  the classroom.

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