Obama Draws the Line on Charter Schools

One of the most important education lines in President Obama's speech was "We will expand our commitment to charter schools." This is best understood not in terms of any particular public policies but rather in terms of the awesome power presidents have to define the boundaries of public debate. To see evidence of this in education, we need go no further than Obama's predecessor.

Education was one of the most important issues in the early pre-9/11 Bush presidency, with intense negotiations around the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which ultimately led to No Child Left Behind). As Nicholas Lemann described in a terrific New Yorker article, in mid-2001 the press was mainly focused on one issue: vouchers. This was understandable; the standard conservative Republican line on federal education policy had been, since at least the Reagan era, mainly about abolishing the U.S. Department of Education and privatizing K-12 schools through vouchers. 

But Bush wasn't interested in that. Instead, he went the opposite way, empowering the feds and focusing on improving public schools through test-based accountability. Reasonable people can disagree about how well this worked, but it's very clear that it had the effect of marginalizing vouchers and privatization as national issues. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation, which are influential in many other areas, were completely shut out of the DC education debate. If you define yourself as being more extreme and conservative on an issue than a president who is widely seen as extreme and conservative, you don't leave much space on which to stand.

Obama's forceful position on charter schools is likely to have the same effect, but this time on those who want no forms of choice in public education at all, who reject the idea of letting independent, mostly non-profit organizations run public schools. If you believe, as some people do, that charter schools are nothing more than a stalking horse for the Wal-Mart-ification of public education, you're in for a long eight years.