Obama vs. teachers unions: It's still on
John B. King Jr. might sound like the kind of Secretary of Education who could help repair the Obama administration’s fractured relationship with reliably Democratic teachers unions. Not only is he a child of a teacher and a former teacher himself, he credits his Brooklyn public school teachers with turning his life around.
King’s mother, a school guidance counselor, died when he was in fourth grade at P.S. 276 in Canarsie. His father, a retired teacher and school administrator, died a few years later. In a recent interview, King credited his teachers with steering a troubled orphan away from jail or death. “They made school a refuge for me,” King told me. They encouraged his talents, whether he was memorizing world capitals or acting in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and they inspired him to pursue a career in education.
But as deputy education secretary under Arne Duncan, whom he will replace in December, and before that as the top education official in New York state, King’s relations with unions have been as rocky as Duncan’s—and for that matter Obama’s. The unions often argue that the deep problems of urban education have their roots outside the school, with impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods stripped of hope. King worries about those problems, but like Duncan and President Obama, he worries even more about using them as excuses for problems inside the schools.
“Yes, we should have better health care and housing and criminal justice reform,” King told me. “But school can save kids’ lives. It saved mine.”
With the possible exception of trade, education is the issue where Obama has veered farthest from his liberal base. It’s historically a local issue, but Obama and Duncan, his pickup basketball pal from Chicago, have reshaped the national landscape, using carrots (like the Race to the Top competition for stimulus dollars) and sticks (like the threat of sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Law) to nudge states into adopting reforms that unions hate.
By choosing King to succeed Duncan, the president is signaling that he cares more about continuing those fights—for higher standards, for charter schools, for standardized testing—than healing wounds or papering over differences within his party before the 2016 election.
Duncan has been the public face of those differences; the National Education Association called for his resignation, while the American Federation of Teachers put him on an “improvement plan” like the ones school reformers have endorsed for incompetent teachers. He is leaving with U.S. graduation rates at an all-time high and dropout rates at an all-time low, but there has been a growing bipartisan backlash over some of his favored reforms, like the Common Core math and reading standards (derided as “Obamacore” by many conservatives) or the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations (derided as “test-and-punish” by unions). I recently mentioned to Duncan that it seems like the main theme uniting his reforms has been the idea that adults in the education system should be held accountable for making sure kids learn. "Just a little bit!" he responded.
Like King, Duncan is the child of educators—he teared up today while discussing his late father, a professor at the University of Chicago, and his mother, who founded an after-school tutoring program in the downtrodden south side of Chicago—and he has sided with unions on issues like universal pre-K and increased school funding. But their anger over testing has overshadowed every other issue.
“He’s destroying what it means to teach, what it means to learn,” Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the head of the NEA, told me in a recent interview.
The backlash has been especially fierce in New York, where King helped implement the Common Core as well as a rigorous testing regime; this year, one in five students opted out of the statewide tests. Unlike Duncan, King is a former educator who used to teach high school social studies, but like Duncan, he got his start in management when he launched a charter school. And like Duncan, King was the subject of a vote of no confidence by the teachers union in New York.
Yesterday, a group of outspoken educators known as the Badass Teachers Association accused him of “dismantling public education by using corporate education reform tactics.”
“Sadly, at the same time we rejoice at the resignation of Arne Duncan, a man who has done more destruction to public education than any other secretary, we are horrified that President Obama has chosen to replace him with John King,” the BTA said.
But Obama has always taken the reform side of the public education wars; in The Audacity of Hope, he criticized liberals who “defend an indefensible status quo, insisting that more spending alone will improve educational outcomes.” His legacy in education isn’t as obvious as in health care or energy, but thanks to Race to the Top and his No Child Left Behind waivers, nearly every state has embraced higher standards. Most states have also adopted more aggressive testing regimes and ditched restrictions on charter schools. The House and Senate have both passed bills to roll back the federal role in education, but for now it has never been stronger.
Liberal critics often refer to the education reform movement as a “billionaire boys club,” noting its support from hedge fund managers as well as philanthropists like Bill Gates, the Walton family and Mark Zuckerberg. Its emphasis on tough standards and market-based competition does have a conservative pedigree; current Republican politicians don’t say nice things about Obama appointees, but former Republican Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana yesterday gushed about Duncan’s “valiant service…challenging the most intransigent and powerful special Obama vs. teachers unions: It's still on:
