Do today’s conservatives have an education-reform agenda worth paying attention to? Anything coherent? Anything beyond school choice and lots of it? Anything other than “fie on CRT and let’s not say gay, at least not in grade school.”
Two efforts to answer those questions have popped up on my screen and desk in the past ten days. Neither quite does the job.
The first is only marginally constructive. It’s House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s new “Commitment to America” manifesto, carefully timed to land before the mid-term elections, meant to outline a roadmap that a post-election GOP majority in the House would follow, and spanning a swath of policy assertions under four familiar headings—safety, freedom, prosperity, and government accountability.
The “future built on freedom” heading incorporates education, as well as health and “big tech,” but as many commentators have noted, it’s mighty thin on specifics. Its “plan to put student futures first” rests on four pillars: “Advance the Parents’ Bill of Rights; Recover lost learning from school closures; Expand parental choice so more than a million more students can receive the education their parents know is best; [and] Defend fairness by ensuring that only women can compete in women’s sports.” But only the first of those has any detail at all, namely five broad categories in which parents should have “rights.” All are reasonable as far as they go, but they’re mighty nebulous. What, exactly, is safeguarding “parents’ right to be heard?”
In sum, there’s nothing I find objectionable in the education portion of the manifesto, but nothing concrete, either, certainly nothing actionable. It boils down to a set of convictions.
Full stop.
Now let’s go to what might be called the opposite problem, the far-more-constructive 156-page volume newly published by my friends at the American Enterprise Institute titled Sketching a New Conservative Education Agenda.
Here the problem—if that’s what it is—is the efflorescence of ideas, sometimes nebulous, often concrete, covering a staggering array of issues and topics—and periodically colliding with each other. These take the form of forty shortish (two to three pages each) proposals from individual (and pairs of) members of AEI’s loose-knit “conservative education reform network.”
The volume most definitely demonstrates, as editors Max Eden and Hayley Sanon write in their conclusion, that conservatives suffer from no shortage of ideas when it comes to education—in this case mainly K–12, but with college issues (such as free speech) also represented. I’ve got a piece in there myself (about civics), as do Mike Petrilli and several others with current or previous Fordham connections.
It’s a grand buffet, actually, including both familiar ideas (easing teacher certification) and a host of novel ones, a few of them (e.g., “public-private microschooling” and “hybrid homeschooling”) arising from the ashes of Covid-induced school shutdowns.
The buffet table is loosely organized into three sections, dubbed “educational innovations,” “civic and philanthropic leadership,” and “policy ideas,” and so long as you’re not looking for a prix fixe meal with a chef-determined menu, you can graze happily here, filling your plate with interesting ideas, some almost mainstream, others downright exotic.
The collection as a whole indeed attests (as Rick Hess writes in its introduction) to “AEI’s fierce commitment to the competition of ideas,” and it most definitely displays the creativity and fertility of the right half of the ed-wonk world.
Sometime, however, we would surely benefit from an updated and coherent ed-reform platform that conservatives might gather on. It can’t be as ephemeral as what Kevin McCarthy produced the other day. But neither, in the end, can it be forty separate ideas, however fine many of them are.
SOURCES: “Commitment to America,” by Kevin McCarthy, September 2022; and “Sketching a New Conservative Education Agenda,” edited by Max Eden and Hayley Sanon, American Enterprise Institute, September 2022.
