Convention requires presidential candidates to issue policy statements on all major policy areas. So while Mitt Romney’s election strategy centers on exploiting the weak economy, on Wednesday he checked the “education” box. But while the candidate’s mind may be focused on other things, Romney’s speech, and the corresponding white paper, deserve attention.
Romney chose to frame his education agenda as a critique of President Obama and teachers unions, but it’s actually something much more interesting: an extended argument with George W. Bush. More than anything, Romney’s education platform is a sign of how swiftly the consensus Republican position on education has been overwhelmed by Tea Party anti-federalism and the economic interests of big business.
Unfortunately, the policies that Romney proposes to empower parents are in no way plausible alternatives to NCLB. First, Romney calls for expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program as a “model for parental choice programs across the nation.” It is hard to imagine a more purely symbolic, un-scalable program than the D.C. scholarships, a federally-funded and Congressionally-imposed program that provides $8,000 to $12,000 awards to 1,600 low-income students in the District of Columbia (or about two percent of all the district’s regular public and charter school population) so that they can attend private schools. Studies have found that D.C. scholarship recipients are more likely to graduate from high school than similar students who stayed in D.C.’s oft-criticized public school system, but don’t seem to score better on standardized tests.
Romney’s white paper declares that “the program also saves taxpayers money because scholarship amounts are substantially less than per-pupil spending in D.C. Public Schools.” This is nonsense. The scholarships are funded by an extra federal appropriation, above and beyond what the local public schools receive. Many of the private schools that take scholarship students agree to absorb the substantial difference between the voucher and their standard tuition. The only reason the program is financially feasible for the government or the private schools is because it’s so small.
The purpose of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship is fundamentally rhetorical—a way for Republicans to upbraid Democrats and teachers unions for opposing a program that helps low-income minority students. In that sense, it’s fantastically cost-effective. Any attempt to make it a “model” for the nation, however, would quickly run into obvious problems of budgeting and arithmetic. Expensive private schools aren’t going to give a huge discount to, and the federal government isn’t going to provide an extra $8,000 for, the millions of students Romney pledges to save.
The second Romney choice proposal is to voucherize the federal government’s two biggest K-12 initiatives, the Title I program for low-income children and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for students with disabilities. Given that these programs distribute over $20 billion a year, this is a more serious idea.
First, adopt open-enrollment policies that permit eligible students to attend public schools outside of their school district that have the capacity to serve them. Second, provide access to and appropriate funding levels for digital courses and schools, which are increasingly able to offer materials tailored to the capabilities and progress of each student when used with the careful guidance of effective teachers. And third, ensure that charter school programs can expand to meet demand, receive funding under the same formula that applies to all other publicly-supported schools, and access capital funds.
It is, moreover, easy for people who live in cities to forget that large numbers of American schoolchildren live in suburban, town, and rural areas that will never be served by a private, charter, or any physical school other than the local public one. Online education can be a good option for some students in some circumstances. But a fourth grader struggling to read and learn math in a mediocre rural public school needs someone looking out for her interests. NCLB tries, imperfectly but with real intention, to prod the only school she will ever have to get better. Romney’s plan leaves her at the mercy of what her local school chooses to provide.
On the whole, Romney’s all-choice-all-the-time education agenda is less a serious proposal than one that aspires to merely seem serious while not offending the reigning anti-federalist/pro-market orthodoxy of the Republican party circa 2012. He is not wrong to say that many students would benefit from a greater array of high-quality educational choices than they currently receive, or that the educational establishment often stands in the way of innovative new providers that challenge the position of comfortable incumbents. But the huge project of improving American education—the seriousness of which he very accurately describes—demands an engaged, disciplined federal policy led from the White House. Romney proposes to leave students to vagaries of a marketplace that will not give them what they need.
Kevin Carey works for Education Sector, a think tank in Washington, D.C., whose CEO, John Chubb, is a Romney education adviser.