Is America’s Educational System Becoming More Pluralistic?
The past year has produced a cross-class coalition for educational
choice that reaches deep into the suburbs.
President Joe Biden has made it clear that he wants to “reopen school doors
as quickly as possible,” and that he’s willing to spend generously to make
this happen. But he’s not going to get his wish. Even if Congress passes the
president’s pandemic-relief plan, which includes $130 billion for the
reopening of K–12 schools, in addition to the $67.2 billion Congress has
already authorized under the CARES Act and the pandemic-relief legislation
that passed in December, some teachers’ unions are setting out conditions
for reopening that will be exceedingly difficult to meet, and threatening
further “safety strikes” if they don’t get their way. In some districts
where the teachers’ unions are especially powerful, the return of in-person
learning might not happen until well into the 2021–22 school year. And the
longer the COVID-19 disruption lasts, the more likely it is to have a deep
and lasting impact on the politics of public education.
The heavy toll of school closures—on parents who are finding themselves
under intense economic and emotional strain, on students who are
experiencing profound learning loss that threatens to compound over time—might have been expected to put
teachers’ unions at a political disadvantage. That’s certainly the
impression you’d get from recent reports of fierce battles over school reopenings in cities and towns across the country. Judging by recent surveys,
however, parental opinion of teachers’ unions has barely budged since the start of the pandemic.
Why has the political response to school closures been so muted? For one,
at least 28 percent of students are receiving instruction that is fully in-person, and
many reside in Republican-leaning districts. As the political scientists
Michael T. Hartney and Leslie K. Fingers recently observed, the best predictor for whether a school district offered in-person
learning this fall was Donald Trump’s vote share in that district in 2016.
In California, for example, public schools in politically competitive and
right-leaning areas such as Fresno, San Diego, and Orange Counties are
mostly in-person while schools in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los
Angeles remain entirely remote. Reopening battles between unionized teachers and parents desperate for
in-person learning are mostly taking place in Democratic cities and
suburbs.
