This is such an insightful piece, as always. You lay out the history of the ed reform bs in such a concise, illuminating way that anyone can understand. Thank you.
Peter, you're overinterpreting what Kamanetz wrote — the fact that ANAR cherry-picked data doesn’t mean that the commission members intended to tear down education. More broadly, this story feels deterministic. This was inevitable, it was all coming, it was planned from the start. Is that what you intended to convey? It's not persuasive.
Inevitable? No. And certainly not the only thread in the reformy narrative. But Hess suggests that this call for tearing down public education is a new product of an evolving movement, whereas I argue that it has been part of the movement since Day One.
I agree that the intellectual roots of today's universal voucher programs stretch back decades, but I don't think it makes sense to see a single reform movement -- yes, of course Friedman had an overall desire to destroy public schools, and was happy to join up with segregationists. But Hess is accurate that the ANAR authors saw themselves as bolstering public education. That doesn't mean that they were right, or that the long-term uses of ANAR matched their goals.
I see far more contingency than I think you do. To pick one potential alternative history that I think is revealing: imagine that Alexander had won the GOP nomination in 2000 and had beaten Gore, instead of Bush. I think that there's a good chance we would have seen something closer to ESSA in the early 2000s (and of course Alexander got to control that writing in 2015). And, as in 2001, no vouchers in the package (as the Democrats fought that against Bush). So what made the difference in the early 2000s is the rise of a Texas governor to the presidency who brought both his particular state reform (without vouchers) and his team (Paige and Spellings). Or, rather, the second consecutive rise of a Southern governor who brought his friends, albeit with Clinton a fellow former governor (Riley). We could as easily call this the Southern governors' reform movement as a centrist coalition. (Alexander also would've been a second Southern governor-to-president path.)
In none of those scenarios (the actual history or the alternatives) are voucher proponents prominent. To borrow from political scientists like John Kingdon, they've been eternal peddlers of a solution in search of a problem, and political and PR gold. But there were others, as well: The proponents of an opportunity framework were very much part of the reform conversation in the 1990s. And the comprehensive school reform folks, supported by Annenberg. I don't think alliances with the George W. Bush team did that much for voucher proponents in the long run, and that's why I don't see NCLB in the same linear narration that you do. Instead, I see three different developments as key: (a) Persuading Polly Williams to join Howard Fuller in seeing vouchers as the path to self-determination in education, (b) Jeb Bush's election as governor and pushing of several limited statewide programs in Florida, and (c) the GOP takeover of state legislatures in 2010, whose continuity led eventually to the universal programs we've seen passed in AZ, FL, etc. If NCLB had never existed, the first two were baked in, and the final political piece was independent of NCLB.
This is such an insightful piece, as always. You lay out the history of the ed reform bs in such a concise, illuminating way that anyone can understand. Thank you.
Peter, you're overinterpreting what Kamanetz wrote — the fact that ANAR cherry-picked data doesn’t mean that the commission members intended to tear down education. More broadly, this story feels deterministic. This was inevitable, it was all coming, it was planned from the start. Is that what you intended to convey? It's not persuasive.
Inevitable? No. And certainly not the only thread in the reformy narrative. But Hess suggests that this call for tearing down public education is a new product of an evolving movement, whereas I argue that it has been part of the movement since Day One.
I agree that the intellectual roots of today's universal voucher programs stretch back decades, but I don't think it makes sense to see a single reform movement -- yes, of course Friedman had an overall desire to destroy public schools, and was happy to join up with segregationists. But Hess is accurate that the ANAR authors saw themselves as bolstering public education. That doesn't mean that they were right, or that the long-term uses of ANAR matched their goals.
I see far more contingency than I think you do. To pick one potential alternative history that I think is revealing: imagine that Alexander had won the GOP nomination in 2000 and had beaten Gore, instead of Bush. I think that there's a good chance we would have seen something closer to ESSA in the early 2000s (and of course Alexander got to control that writing in 2015). And, as in 2001, no vouchers in the package (as the Democrats fought that against Bush). So what made the difference in the early 2000s is the rise of a Texas governor to the presidency who brought both his particular state reform (without vouchers) and his team (Paige and Spellings). Or, rather, the second consecutive rise of a Southern governor who brought his friends, albeit with Clinton a fellow former governor (Riley). We could as easily call this the Southern governors' reform movement as a centrist coalition. (Alexander also would've been a second Southern governor-to-president path.)
In none of those scenarios (the actual history or the alternatives) are voucher proponents prominent. To borrow from political scientists like John Kingdon, they've been eternal peddlers of a solution in search of a problem, and political and PR gold. But there were others, as well: The proponents of an opportunity framework were very much part of the reform conversation in the 1990s. And the comprehensive school reform folks, supported by Annenberg. I don't think alliances with the George W. Bush team did that much for voucher proponents in the long run, and that's why I don't see NCLB in the same linear narration that you do. Instead, I see three different developments as key: (a) Persuading Polly Williams to join Howard Fuller in seeing vouchers as the path to self-determination in education, (b) Jeb Bush's election as governor and pushing of several limited statewide programs in Florida, and (c) the GOP takeover of state legislatures in 2010, whose continuity led eventually to the universal programs we've seen passed in AZ, FL, etc. If NCLB had never existed, the first two were baked in, and the final political piece was independent of NCLB.