United States: End of Bipartisan Consensus

In 1983, the Reagan administration published A Nation At Risk, an apocalyptic report into the condition of American schools. It ushered in 33 years of uneven yet enduring bipartisan support for presidents’ efforts to raise school standards. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), share more than quixotic names. Both were backed by majorities of both parties in Congress. Unfamiliar with such harmony, Barack Obama called ESSA, signed into law in December 2015, a “Christmas miracle”.  This sort of collaboration could soon become a rarity. On November 23, Donald Trump, the president-elect, nominated Betsy DeVos, a philanthropist, as the next secretary of education. For three decades, Ms. DeVos has used her family foundation and her leadership of conservative groups to lobby for “school choice”, a broad term that can divide Republicans even from moderate Democrats. For DeVos, this has meant support for two causes. The first is the rapid expansion of charter schools, fees-free schools that are publicly funded but independently run. The second cause is school-voucher schemes, which typically give public funds to poor parents to pay for seats in private schools. Though Michigan voted against adopting vouchers in 2000, DeVos has helped elect over 120 in-favour Republicans across the country. Since ESSA was passed just 13 months ago, Congress will be reluctant to consider a new Bill on education reform. Trump’s proposal that $20 billion (Rs.135,000 crore) in federal education funding should be diverted towards voucher schemes would struggle to win enough support in the Senate, says Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank. Most Democrats would oppose it, he notes. So too might Republicans sceptical of another big federal programme. They would prefer states to make their own decisions about vouchers. But DeVos will still have clout. Her department can interpret federal rules in ways that make it easier for states to spend federal money as they like. She could also use her pulpit and her influence with conservative foundations to cajole governors to embrace vouchers. And though less than 1 percent of all pupils in America attend school on state-funded vouchers, this number is growing rapidly: from 61,700 in 2008-09 to more than 153,000 in 2015-16, according to the American Federation for Children, a school-choice group whose outgoing chairman is, as it happens, Ms. DeVos. Would more vouchers help children? In theory they would, by more closely matching pupils to schools, encouraging new schools and fostering competition. But the evidence is mixed. A 2015 review led by Dennis Epple of Carnegie Mellon University concluded that vouchers are not “a systematically reliable way to improve their educational outcomes”. In cities such as Milwaukee, New York and Washington, pupils using vouchers tend to have higher graduation rates than peers in public schools. There’s also evidence from these cities, and from Sweden and Chile, that the competition stimulated by vouchers makes other schools improve their performance. However, once at private school, there’s little evidence that pupils using…