Cohen slams the Democratic candidates in last week's DC-based presidential debate for calling for more school funding without acknowledging that the DC school system is reasonably well-funded and still does a terrible job. Fair enough. But then he continues:
The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. Not a single candidate offered anything close to a call for real reform.
The salient fact about DC is not that it has education problems. Every big city in America has those. The overriding issue is that our schools are worse than other big cities that also have kids, parents, and teachers unions. In fact, the Washington Teachers Union has kept a pretty low profile since being humbled by a massive corruption scandal a few years back. In DC at least, they're not the big issue.
But that kind of nuance is lost on Cohen. He's doing what far too many center-left types do when discussing education: playing off the conservative agenda, rather than taking time to come up with an agenda of his own.
The standard right-wing education agenda has three and only three principles, which have stood unchanged for decades:
1) More money won't fix education.
2) Teachers unions are the problem.
3) Vouchers are the solution.
The great advantage of these principles--in addition to being easy to remember--is that they fit like a glove with, respectively, conservative anti-tax, anti-labor, and anti-government principles. And since this country is never going to actually de-fund and privatize public education while breaking the teachers unions, you never have to come up with something new to say. George Will, for example, clearly has a column on each of these topics on file, which he republishes once a year after a few minutes of updating names and dates with, one assumes, the "find and replace" function in Microsoft Word.
That said, there are elements of truth in each case. Money obviously matters in education, but many public school systems, like the DC schools, are terribly inefficient. Teachers unions are strong advocates of public education and protect rights that teachers deserve, but they also stand in the way of sensible ideas like tying teacher pay to performance. And issues of constitutionality and larger public policy concerns aside, there are plenty of disadvantaged students in bad public schools who would, in the short term, be much better off in a private school.
This, in turn, creates space for people with an independent image to maintain--your Cohens and Mickey Kauses--to burnish their street cred by selectively adopting one or more of the conservative education principles. So Cohen denounces calls for school funding, Kaus is always looking for a chance to take shots at teachers unions, contrarian-by-design publications like The New Republic trumpet their support for vouchers, etc. As with the three principles themselves, little of this is about education policy per se. Rather, it's about using education policies as a proxy for other things. Maybe there was a time when this came across as gutsy truth-telling, but at this point it all feels like pro forma gesturing and nothing more.
The sad thing is that there are plenty of ways to apply the center-left mindset to education without simply adopting simplistic right-wing bromides. Instead of simply supporting or denouncing more school funding, reform the way funding is distributed within school districts, or adopt a "weighted funding" approach where money follows the student. Instead of being for or against vouchers, support expanded choice in the context of public education, with charter schools. Instead of being reflexively pro- or anti-union, work with unions to reform things like teacher pay and help create a labor-management relationship for 21st century schools.
There are ways to do all of these things, and to talk about them sensibly. But that would mean paying attention to education for its own sake, something too few pundits and politicians seem willing to do.
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