Edu-Election 2012 Wrap-Up
by Frederick M. Hess • Nov 9, 2012 at 7:24 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
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We hosted an intriguing conversation at AEI yesterday on the aftermath of the 2012 elections and what they meant for education. (You can catch it here in the C-SPAN archive if you missed it.) The panel featured Andy "Eduwonk" Rotherham, Alyson "Politics K-12" Klein, House Speaker John Boehner's edu-ace Katherine Haley, pollster Kristen Soltis from the Winston Group, and yours truly. Guided by top-notch moderating from my colleague Andrew Kelly, we touched on any number of things. Here are my four takeaways:
1. The split on the Republican side. For a number of years, there's been an assumption that Democrats are split between the "reformers" and the union wing, but that Republicans can be counted on to support all types of popular reforms (like merit pay and school accountability). In practice, that's a dubious assumption. Middle class and suburban Republican voters who like their schools and their kids' teachers have little cause to embrace disruptive reforms. They've been quiescent when legislators supported school choice for urban communities, and they express mixed feelings about reforms that threaten to discomfit their schools and systems. This is usually lost amidst the focus on other issues, but the failed initiatives on merit pay and
