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This winter I mourned the passing of two great men: Bishop Reginald T. Jackson of Atlanta, GA and Dick Zimmer, a former New Jersey congressman and attorney. Jackson, the one time head of New Jersey’s Black Ministers Council and a Democrat, was a former school board member who also led the state’s effort against racial profiling on the New Jersey Turnpike. After moving to Georgia, he became a leader in the state’s voting rights efforts. Zimmer, a Yale law school graduate, believer in free markets, and a Republican, is perhaps best known for his sponsorship of the historic Megan’s Law, which was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996.
I knew them both as education reformers and my board members as I began my career in education policy. I learned as much from what they said as from what they left unsaid. And I knew it was their and other board members’ curiosity and willingness to work with strange bedfellows to reach shared goals, that powered what many remember as the state’s golden age of reform. Those were efforts, and times, to be proud of.
I thought of the bishop, the Congressman and their political collaboration to improve education when I reviewed the results of the 2nd Edition of the Educational Opportunity in America Survey from 50CAN and Edge Research, where we asked over 23,000 American families a range of questions not just about their educational preferences, but about their experiences navigating our education system. In the era of increased partisanship and “enragement is engagement” algorithms, several of the results were fascinating not just for what they expose about family preferences, but for the complicated coalitions they reveal, which could be necessary to drive the next phase of education policy change.
In advocacy, lukewarm support for a policy doesn’t get you very far. The parents who show up are the ones who say they “strongly favor” — not just “favor” — an idea. Using that high bar, let’s look at what the survey reveals. There is strong support on the issue of whether or not states should provide free tutoring to students, with 54% of Republican parents (the lowest) strongly supporting the issue and 73% of parents identifying as members of the DSA/Green party (the highest) strongly supporting it, as well.
Parents Want Tutoring, Summer Camp, Open Enrollment. Annual Testing? Not So Much
Free summer camp, similarly, features strong support with 47% of Republicans, 50% of Libertarians and Independents, 63% of Democrats, and 78% of DSA/Green party respondents strongly favoring the idea. Open enrollment also enjoys fairly uniform support across the survey with between 44% of Independents and 53% of Libertarians strongly favoring letting students attend the public school of their choice.
One might argue that tutoring, summer camp, and open enrollment are relatively anodyne and should enjoy an easy path to victory. Certainly their cross partisan endorsement creates a good base for policy change. But it’s worth noting that — in this age when no political party has close to majority support from parents — even for these popular issues to get a majority of parental support we need to reach across the aisle.
According to Gallup, in their most recent poll just 27% of American adults consider themselves Democrats, and the same percentage consider themselves Republicans. So that 63% of Democrats who support free summer camp is only about 17% of all parents. Only by bringing in Republicans and Independents do you get back to a majority of all parents strongly in favor of the idea.
For other issues, the logic of strange bedfellows is even stronger. When asked about the hot-button topic du jour of education savings accounts, the highest support was found among DSA/Green respondents, with 57% strongly favoring, with Libertarians and Independents bringing up the rear at 43% jointly. Charter schools, conversely, get their strongest support, at 44%, from Libertarians with all other groups between 34% ofIndependents and 38% of Republicans. Supporters of these issues can’t afford to turn anyone away.
So what can be gleaned from this data that might help in pursuing future policy change?
First, strange bedfellows will be the norm as building a diverse constituency, when no single party can guarantee success, will require new alliances with different political alignments. Second, it will require focus and issue discipline that allows groups to support the same policy for completely different reasons. And lastly, it will necessitate a dealmaking pragmatism that allows for the packaging of issues in unexpected ways. If you care about the future of ESAs, for instance, you might want to pair it with free tutoring or free summer camp to build a broader base of support. Politics is, after all, about addition.
The good thing is that we have some striking examples of this pragmatic approach to politics in action. They include Louisiana with its Steve Carter Education Program — part of the state’s larger tutoring initiative passed alongside its GATOR ESA — Massachusetts for early literacy efforts and New Jersey with its state funded Tutoring Corps; these programs ensure more students who need tutoring receive it. Arizona used its COVID relief funds during a Republican administration to run its sweeping AZ on Track Summer camp program. And Arkansas, Idaho, Nevada, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kansas under Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly have all recently enacted open enrollment laws.
ESA-like policies, which by some reports half of the nation’s children are now eligible to participate in, have been the shark allowing other policies to come along for the ride like a remora. Utah and Arkansas, for instance, added significant funds to raise teacher salaries when passing their ESA laws; Arizona did so separately. Texas — because everything is larger there -– increased public school funding by $8.5 billion,$4 billion of which was for teacher salary increases, when it passed its $1 billion ESA last year.
Arkansas also adopted the science of reading and eliminated its charter cap in the process. Indeed, there are many good examples already that show an education strategy that aligns interests of seemingly disparate groups and with popular or unexpected issues is an effective one. When it comes to the politics of education reform, more may indeed be more.
With all of this offered, the question left for us may be: In this age of stark differences can we really focus on the areas of agreement with people we may otherwise oppose? I suspect Bishop Jackson and Congressman Zimmer asked themselves these same questions before stepping forward to lead their state’s ed reform coalition of the time. Those differences never stopped them. And they shouldn’t stop us either.
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