Those classes included three players who would shape the future of District of Columbia schools: Michelle Rhee (future D.C. chancellor), Kaya Henderson (Rhee’s successor) and, perhaps most importantly, Susan Schaeffler, 55, who is retiring after 25 years as the founder of the KIPP DC Public Schools charter network.

It was Schaeffler (pronounced SHEFF-ler) who proved with her 2001 launch of KIPP KEY Academy that hiring highly motivated and skilled teachers could make academic success stories out of high-poverty children with multiple at-risk flags. Six years later, standardized math and reading tests in grades 5-8 would show KIPP students outscoring their D.C. Public School peers, particularly in eighth grade and most strongly in math.

In a few years, Rhee would choose the same strategy, pushing hard on teacher quality. And Henderson would do the same.

It was Schaeffler who showed that her one school was not a fluke. By 2006, she ran three successful middle schools with long waiting lists: Today, there are 20 KIPP schools in D.C. that educate roughly 7,300 students, of whom nearly 70% meet the at-risk definition (students with families on income or food support and those who are wards of the state, homeless or overage in high school).

In the early KIPP years, veteran education reform expert Andrew Rotherham recalls leading a tour of mostly charter skeptics when they visited one of her schools. “Susan was giving a talk on how they do things and one guy thought he was really going to dunk on her, so he said: ‘I heard you talking about performance, fundraising and management, but I haven’t heard you talking about loving children.’”

That was a mistake. 

Schaeffler paused, looked at the guy, and as Rotherham recalls, firmly responded: “Let me tell you something. The way you show you love children isn’t talking about it. It’s building effective places for them to be and that means knowing how to raise money, deploy money, manage people, all of it. Doing things really well for them is how you show children you love them.”  

Don’t be thrown off by Schaeffler’s blonde suburban look: She’s got a very sharp edge, world-beating relentlessness and a mind that doesn’t shy away from the unconventional.

Shannon Hodge, who is taking over at KIPP DC’s helm, said before she met Schaeffler she asked around about her and was told: “You’ll be in a meeting discussing something and Susan will have five ideas. Two of them will be illegal, two of them will be impossible — but the last one will be the visionary thing no one ever thought of.”

Finally, it was Schaeffler and other charter operators. working with first Rhee and then Henderson, who forged the crucial compete-but-play-nice stance in D.C. that’s missing between charter and district schools in most cities.

All the experts agree: That competitive cooperation and the unwavering focus on teacher quality on both sides are the biggest reasons why D.C., across multiple school-quality measures, from the percentage of 3- and 4-years-olds enrolled in pre-K to fourth- and eighth-grade scores on the highly watched National Assessment of Educational Progress, shot  

“Part of D.C.’s story is that it is one of the few places where the charter sector and the district came together and created a culture of putting kids first,” KIPP national co-founder Dave Levin told me last week. “Susan modeled that from the start, pushing for things that were good for D.C. as a whole.”

This strategy could have happened in other cities. But for the most part, it hasn’t.

Teachers with ‘the whatever-it-takes mindset’

That Baltimore TFA experience was wild: Rhee and Schaeffler slamming into the brutal realities of urban teaching in Baltimore. It was from that time that I got the title for my book about Rhee, , after she swatted and swallowed a bee her kids were crazily chasing around the classroom.

After Baltimore, Schaeffler gave teaching in a traditional D.C. elementary school a try, but her desire to give her students the option of staying longer than the dismissal bell to allow them to catch up ran into a stone wall. It worked for a bit, but not for long. We just don’t do that here, she was told.

“I got to the point where the system was preventing me from doing what I knew needed to happen to make sure our kids are ready for college, or ready for the next grade,” Schaeffler told me in a recent interview.

The KIPP founders in Texas heard about her, sent plane tickets to come to Houston and convinced her to start a KIPP school. Their preference, Atlanta, got rejected by Schaeffler. D.C. is home, she said, and being able to tap into the talent network she knew there was crucial.

The founders relented, and soon Schaeffler was recruiting the handful of teachers who would launch KEY Academy. “I definitely wanted to recruit teachers who had the whatever-it-takes mindset. We were going to be creating and implementing and revising all at the same time.”

Schaeffler looked to the Teach for America network and then expanded by interviewing friends of friends. ”You would say, ‘I need a teacher who can work long hours, has great classroom management and gets results.” Before hiring anyone, she observed them in the classroom.

It would appear Schaeffer recruited well. Among that first small group of hires for KIPP KEY were several who in the future would launch their own new KIPP schools. 

‘The school down the street is outperforming us’

Now entering the D.C. picture in 2007 was newly appointed Chancellor Rhee, who took note of the rising quality challenge presented by Schaeffler’s KIPP network and other charter operators and stomped the accelerator on school improvement. And by school improvement I mean teacher/principal quality.

Rhee took over a bona fide mess of a school district, one that regularly was described – — unchallenged — as the worst (and most expensive) in the nation. In my book, the chapter where I recite the dismal outcome data for D.C. students is titled, “Welcome to the Nation’s Education Superfund Site.”

The city’s corrupt mayor, Marion Barry, used the district to stash political buddies. The former teachers union president got sent to jail for embezzlement. Even simple tasks such as delivering textbooks didn’t happen. There was no curriculum. In comparison to other urban districts, D.C. lagged far behind. 

Rhee moved into her role as chancellor with a bullrush, much to the distaste of many in Washington, especially teachers who preferred the status quo. Rhee told everyone that she wanted teachers with “snap.” Teachers soon learned what that meant: a mashup of energy and effectiveness that creates classroom magic.

That didn’t always go over well.

I accompanied Rhee on many school visits, and while sitting in the back of the room watched teachers dramatically roll their eyes in protest. Many teachers appeared to see their role as more social workers than academic instructors, which probably explained the abysmal test scores.

One elementary school had this sign posted: “We’re doing the best we can with the children sent our way.”

But Rhee’s vision was made easier to explain to others by the example Schaeffler set. “In community meetings,” Schaeffler told me, “I heard Rhee say that the school down the street is outperforming us.” And “that school” was KEY Academy. 

In 2007, when Rhee arrived, 100% of KEY eighth graders scored proficient on D.C.’s standardized math test, compared to 34% of district students.

There’s another aspect to KEY’s success: When researching my book , I searched nationally for schools where boys were succeeding at the same rate as girls, and KEY turned up as one of the few where that happened. I approached Schaeffler in 2006 for permission to observe, and she gave me full access to KEY. In short, teacher quality (and a relentless push on literacy skills) explains the gender equality.

Thus began Rhee’s own full-on press for principal and teacher quality, a process that would lead to several hundred teachers getting fired along with lots of principals. Those firings, however, were accompanied by the newly designed IMPACT teacher evaluation system, a first-in-the-nation attempt to define, measure and boost teacher quality — a plan that handed out bonuses to the highest-performing teachers.

The reforms began to take hold, but Rhee’s fierceness why Adrian Fenty, the mayor who appointed her, lost reelection in 2010. The new mayor, Vincent Gray, quickly fired Rhee. 

But then something interesting happened: Not only did Gray promote Kaya Henderson, Rhee’s deputy, as the new chancellor, but IMPACT survived, despite intense teacher opposition (The American Federation of Teachers to ensure Rhee and IMPACT would disappear.)

Why did the new mayor allow Rhee’s reforms to survive? When the chancellor got fired, IMPACT was only about a year old, and thus too young to measure its effectiveness. But its potential was clear to everyone.

“My last major public event before I left DCPS was “Standing Ovation” which we held at the Kennedy Center to honor the highly effective teachers in the district,” Rhee told me in a recent interview, referring to the first group of top teachers identified by the evaluations. “Watching a bevy of teachers dressed to the nines, giddy at the recognition they were receiving, made me know what we put in place with IMPACT was working and made everything worthwhile.”

That meant that the twinned philosophies of pushing teacher quality and collaborating with the charters, pioneered by Schaeffler, became permanent fixtures in D.C. One prominent example: , launched in 2017, an application/lottery system shared by parents seeking seats in either system.

There was also the leadership training program for both charter and district teachers at Georgetown University. Schaeffler’s top example: During the pandemic, everyone on both sides held hands to figure out how to teach remotely and when to return to school.

Finally, the D.C. mayors have a great incentive to make sure the two sides work together. “We can’t have half the kids not be successful,” says Schaeffler.

Two leaders who quickly bonded

Fervent D.C. school advocates at the polar opposites hate the suggestion that D.C. charters and district schools get along. They see great injustices aimed at their side. What they miss, however, is that their quibbles pale compared to the destructive hatred between the two sectors in other cities. 

Boston has some of the highest-performing charters in the country (see Edward Brooke Charter Schools), and yet the state’s powerful teachers unions ensure that those charters can’t expand to take in more students. In Los Angeles, charter leaders and district leaders talk to one another mostly through lawyers in courtrooms. 

New York City and Newark are home to what may be the nation’s most successful charter network, Uncommon Schools, that pulls disadvantaged minority students into its classrooms, who then experience college acceptance and college graduation rates close to well-off white students.

How could any district not want to tap into that expertise?

Years ago, I sat through some small-scale Uncommon collaborations in New York and Newark, which seemed promising. But those have disappeared — no teaching collaborations in New York since 2020. 

There is no way Rhee and Schaeffler would have let that opportunity slide by.

When Rhee arrived in D.C., the two leaders bonded quickly. Rhee told me she had been on the job only a couple of days when she took an urgent call from Schaeffler: “We’re starting a summer school (in a district building) and it’s 90 degrees and we have no air conditioning!”

Rhee immediately called maintenance, sent them hustling over to the summer school site and got the AC working. The next day Schaeffler called back incredulously. “Holy crap, they came out and fixed it.”

Rhee knew KIPP ran quality schools, so she never fought against them.

 “I was open to giving charters our buildings,” Rhee said. “Why would we deny families of Wards 7 and 8 (D.C. ‘s highest-poverty) schools like [the ones] KIPP runs? Everyone would want to send their kids there.”

Rhee’s memories of Schaeffler? “Throughout the time she was so helpful, so supportive.”

School choice now part of D.C.’s DNA

Today, D.C., parents embrace school choice as an unquestioned right, whether it’s choosing a charter or a non-neighborhood district school. Only about a third of D.C. parents select their neighborhood school. What that means is that choice is embedded, with schools vying to outperform and, therefore, attract students. 

In the mostly white, highly affluent 3rd Ward, there are no charters and parents send their kids either to local elementary schools, where they are surrounded by other children from well-off families, or private schools. In the 7th and 8th Wards, charters are the go-to places. Where it gets interesting are the rapidly gentrifying in-between wards, where charters often get selected by well-off “progressive” families, many of whom may frown upon charters as a concept, but love having a close-by high-quality school.

Overall, s, or about 48% of all D.C. students, attend its 133 public charter schools. D.C’s gentrification may explain why district students now outperform charter students in both math and reading (45% of district students are at-risk, compared to 69% of charter students).

“Competition between sectors is healthy,” said Schaeffer. “It pushes both sectors to get better for students. Over the last two and a half decades, that dynamic has raised the bar across the city. As the city has changed, so have the needs of our students.”

KIPP and other charters are still struggling to raise scores, she said. “At the same time, the long-term outcomes tell an important story and remain strong. Year after year, our graduates enroll in and complete college at higher rates than the city … The forward momentum between the traditional and charter schools is promising and should be celebrated. Both sides are seeking the best ways to educate and prepare our students for success.”

Where next for Schaeffler?

 “I haven’t looked around in 25 years to see what’s out there for me. I am energized to find my next thing but my priority is a successful transition. I will be transitioning from CEO in February to a special advisor role. I will always be a cheerleader for the amazing staff and students at KIPP DC.”

The bottom line remains: worst to most improved. Twenty years ago, no one could have foreseen this outcome. This could have happened in cities such as L.A., but it hasn’t — and doesn’t appear to be in their future.

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When Scott Pearson took over the D.C. charter board in 2011, and became KIPP’s overseer, he recalls visiting Schaeffler at her office and finding her and KIPP DC President Allison Fansler sharing an office.

 “Many great charters are like great British rock and roll bands. They always had two key people, and it was the genius between the two that made the band great,” he said. “Here you had the CEO of a multimillion-dollar organization and she shared an office. It wasn’t five minutes that went by that they didn’t talk to one another. Constant interaction.”

Fansler shared an office with Schaeffler for 16 years. Whenever a call came in about a problem at a school site, Fansler said Schaeffler would immediately grab her coat and head out. The two of them, no matter which bolted for the door, shared a text code for that: Imonmyway.

Deputy Mayor Paul Kihn said when he sees his cell phone light up with Schaeffler’s name, “I know I am going to get an earful on behalf of her students. She is going to tell me the real story about how something is working and what I need to do to fix it. I am incredibly sorry to see her go.”

Of all the reformers who helped with D.C.’s recovery, Rhee and Schaeffler probably qualify as the fiercest. As Kihn puts it, “Susan is a force of nature.”

All you need is the patience to wait for that fifth idea to pop up.

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham sits on �鶹��Ʒ’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this article.

As an assistant district attorney in 2013, Willis turned heads in one of her first big cases: She helped convene a grand jury that indicted decorated Superintendent Beverly Hall and nearly three dozen other educators for cheating on state standardized tests. In the end, Willis brought a dozen cases to trial, with a jury convicting 11.

This week, Willis invoked the same statute — Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act — to indict Trump and 18 others in an alleged plot to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. 

In doing so, she offered a reminder of her role in a divisive chapter in the city’s recent history. While the former president that Willis is, among other things, “a rabid partisan,” the cheating prosecutions left fissures in her own community, where many say she stood up for children but others accuse her of turning her back on Black educators. 

‘Cooking the books’

Hall, the Atlanta superintendent, arrived in the district in 1999, eventually leading what she would call a data-driven turnaround. She told observers that under her tenure, Atlanta schools were “debunking the American algorithm that socio-economics predicts academic success,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution .

By 2009, her efforts had earned her one of education’s top honors: . But the same year, the Journal-Constitution the first of several stories analyzing Atlanta’s results on the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. The analysis found that scores had risen at rates that were statistically “all but impossible.” It also found that district officials disregarded internal irregularities and retaliated against whistleblowers. 

Critics would soon compare Hall to “a Mafia boss who demanded fealty from subordinates while perpetrating a massive, self-serving fraud,” the city newspaper reported at the time. Willis pursued Hall using the same tools many prosecutors employ against Mafia bosses and drug kingpins. In bringing charges under the state’s RICO Act, Willis alleged that Hall and her colleagues used the “legitimate enterprise” of the school system to carry out an illegitimate act: cheating.

Lonnie King, a former head of the local NAACP, the newspaper that when he looked at the data, “I thought Beverly Hall was cooking the books” as early as 2006.

The newspaper’s coverage led Gov. Sonny Perdue to appoint a team of special investigators, who conducted 2,100 interviews and reviewed 800,000 documents. By 2011, they uncovered cheating in 44 of the 56 schools they examined, concluding that 178 educators participated. Investigators eventually found widespread tampering with test papers and concluded that Hall stood at the center of “a culture of corruption.”

Special investigator Michael Bowers, a former state attorney general, in 2013 that interrogating teachers in the scheme had left him in tears.

“The thing I remember most was talking to some of the teachers who had been mistreated, mostly single moms,” he said. “And it’s heartbreaking. They told of how they had been forced to cheat.” One told him, “I had no choice.”

‘On the backs of babies’

Hall retired in 2011, but on March 29, 2013, a Fulton County grand jury indicted her and more than 30 others in what Willis called a conspiracy comprising administrators, principals, teachers and even a school secretary.

Similar to this week’s indictments, the Atlanta defendants faced charges of racketeering, conspiracy and making false statements. Hall also faced theft charges because her rising salary was tied to test scores — in 2009, the year she was named Superintendent of the Year, she got , prosecutors noted.

If convicted, Hall could have served as many as 45 years in prison, but she soon fell ill and the judge in the case indefinitely postponed her trial. At an April 2014 hearing, Andrew Young, a former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador, rose in the courtroom and asked the judge to be “merciful” and drop the case against her.

“Let God judge her,” he said.

Hall died of breast cancer in 2015, at age 68.

Public opinion on the case was sharply divided, with many Black commentators accusing Willis of overreach. But eventually, 34 of Hall’s subordinates faced criminal charges.

Brittney Cooper, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, : “Scapegoating Black teachers for failing in a system that is designed for Black children, in particular, not to succeed is the real corruption here.”

Cooper noted that former Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is Korean-American, had also been for creating a “culture of fear about test scores.” An by USA Today revealed findings similar to Atlanta’s, but an inspector general report found of widespread cheating and Rhee never faced prosecution.

While most of the Atlanta educators eventually pleaded guilty to avoid jail time, 12 went to trial in 2014. As with the Trump case, this one was complex: Jury selection took more than , and jurors sat through complex statistical analyses of answer-sheet erasure patterns, among other matters. At a few points in the trial, a dozen or more lawyers offered different versions of events.

In an early case that went to trial in 2013, Willis said supervisor Tamara Cotman worked to protect educators’ jobs by advising principals under investigation not to cooperate with state investigators — a charge Cotman denied — and by vowing to return high test scores at any cost.

“She did it on the backs of babies,” Willis during closing arguments. The jury acquitted Cotman, who was later convicted of other charges in the larger case.

In court, Willis told the jury of “cheating parties” at which educators got together to erase children’s incorrect answers on test sheets and pencil in correct ones. At a few of the parties, she said, educators “ate fish and grits — I can’t make this up.” 

The jury convicted 11 of the 12 of racketeering and other charges.

The Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, at the time senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church — he now serves as a U.S. Senator — The New York Times, “There’s no question that this has not been our finest hour. It’s a dark chapter, but it’s just that. It’s a chapter.”

In 2015, commentators Van Jones and Mark Holden that the educators convicted in the case were “the latest victims of overcriminalization,” facing serious jail time because of Willis’s “unprecedented use” of RICO. Three were sentenced to seven years in prison, they noted, while others received one- or two-year sentences if they didn’t accept plea deals. 

“These punishments do not fit the crimes,” they wrote. 

Since then, several of the defendants have loudly proclaimed their innocence, even as they’ve served prison time or pursued appeals to avoid it. A handful of those cases remain outstanding. In several instances, they and their defenders say they’ve spent their life savings pursuing appeals.

In 2019, Shani Robinson, one of those found guilty, about the ordeal. In an interview, , “the thought of being blamed for something that I did not do is horrifying. … I felt like if I was on the right side of justice, that one day I would be vindicated. That was the moment that I decided that I would never take a plea deal.”

But many parents saw it differently.

Shawnna Hayes-Jocelyn had three of her four children in classes at schools affected by the cheating. She said Willis rightly brought RICO charges. 

“You’d better believe she did the right thing, because that was the worst Black-on-Black crime example that could have ever happened around education,” she told �鶹��Ʒ. “Because what they did to those children is that they didn’t give those children options and opportunities.”

Hayes-Jocelyn said her mind was made up once she read the state report that alleged widespread cheating among educators. 

“When I read that report and saw what was happening in that school system, yeah, people said, ‘Oh, this is RICO. We think about RICO as organized crime.’ I said, ‘This was organized crime.’” 

Those familiar with Willis’s work say she’s tenacious. Atlanta NAACP president Gerald Griggs, one of the defense attorneys in the cheating trial, told The Guardian this week that Trump is “going to be very surprised when he’s sitting across from her for months on trial. He’ll find out how great of a lawyer she really is.”

Asked in 2021 if she had regrets about pursuing the school cheating cases, Willis was blunt, the Times that by going after teachers, principals and administrators, she was “defending poor Black children.” Public education, she said, offers these children their only chance to get ahead. “So if what I am being criticized for is doing something to protect people that did not have a voice for themselves, I sit in that criticism, and y’all can put it in my obituary.”

Jonathan Chait has been writing about the fraught politics of education reform for over a decade.

The veteran political columnist for New York Magazine is a vigorous advocate for the pillars of liberal education reform: high academic standards, school choice, and test-based accountability for schools and teachers who aren’t meeting expectations. It was an outlook that largely fit with Democratic Party orthodoxy in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when Barack Obama and his allies in Congress successfully pushed many states to expand charter schools and adopt the Common Core standards. 

But as the years passed and the Obama era ticked down, his essays on K-12 schools took on a somewhat anxious tone. Resurgent teachers’ unions began exerting more influence at all levels of Democratic politics, including the effort to replace the federal No Child Left Behind Law. Then Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos arrived in Washington, further polarizing a debate around charters that had already begun to split the party. By 2018, Chait was openly to save his “forgotten education legacy.”

That was all before the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of American students suffered severe academic losses over months of prolonged school closures. Now, less than seven months from November’s midterm elections, Chait warns that Democrats around the country may lose the support of voters alienated by a faction that “doesn’t see educational achievement as something important.” 

Those views have earned Chait the enmity of some educators and activists, who have accused him of teachers over COVID-related school closures and intermittently called for him to “disclose” his wife’s career as an education consultant. In response, he has brought to intra-Left disputes that makes him one of the most compelling writers in liberal journalism.

In an interview with Kevin Mahnken, Chait offered a K-12 agenda for Democrats and explained why he believes that “the straightest line to better education reform probably involves running over the teachers’ unions, at minimum.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Education has always been an issue that Democrats have won on, and there’s some polling evidence that they still do. But you’ve expressed the view that it could be a liability for them this fall, in part because parents may not see the party as reflecting their values or priorities. What are the party’s vulnerabilities here?

There are a few potential causes, some of which they have more control over than others. One simple one was that the [American] Rescue Plan gave an enormous amount of money to states, more than they needed to fill their budget holes, and some of them used that money to increase teacher pay. That included [governors] in Florida and other Republican-controlled states, who were able to boost teacher pay and kind of seize the political center without having to pay for it with taxes. So that’s given them a leg up.

Number two would be the pandemic, during which Republicans have had a more aggressive pro-opening stance than Democrats. The Democrats have really caught up, and I can’t think of many places where schools are being closed anymore, so I’m not really sure that will be a big issue. But it’s possible that Democrats have lost some credibility on that issue because they were behind Republicans in calling for reopening in some states. And this is — there are some fears that this has given an opening to the Right to split Democratic constituencies from teachers’ unions and basically say, “Look, the unions had this irrational, harmful position. Maybe you should be questioning some of the other things they say.” Now, some people on the Left are framing this as a kind of diabolical plot on the Right and not as a mistake the unions made, which is how I think we should view it. Regardless, there is that danger that some people who didn’t really question the unions before are questioning them now.

But the biggest ongoing risk factor here is the potential for schools to become laboratories to introduce lefty ideas that don’t have majority support and, in many cases, don’t have strong empirical support. The reason for that is that education schools and unions have both become incubators for a lot of pretty radical ideas that don’t always hold up to evidence or to public opinion. This is a little hard to quantify, but you see it in some places that are scaling back the use of standardized tests, scaling back tracking. It’s exaggerated by the Right to a huge degree, but there are places where — they’re not really teaching “critical race theory,” but they’re teaching historical interpretations that are aligned with certain left-wing challenges to liberalism. That’s happening a lot in elite private schools, but probably a little in public schools too.

Because schools are an area where these policy changes can be implemented without democratic approval, it opens the door to people being exposed to ideology that springs from the far Left. You know, you have pretty left-wing people with ideas for all kinds of areas of American life. would say, “We should abolish the police! We should abolish private insurance!” But they can’t do that because you actually need to pass those proposals through a legislative body; to make changes to schools, you don’t need to do that. That’s the reason why schools are an area where the Left can operationalize policies that can’t really pass democratic muster, and it makes education a danger zone for Democrats.

While these are all areas of exposure for the party, education is one of those issues that really doesn’t have a history of turning national elections. Is 2022 going to be different, or are your warnings here just an example of the ?

Well, we don’t know how widespread these pedagogical changes are. I don’t really know how you’d go about measuring that, and I don’t think anyone has tried. And the second question is, even if they’ve spread widely, how much would that affect voting behaviors? We don’t know that either. That’s why I’d depict this as a risk factor, but how big a risk is really hard to say.

You’ve been writing for close to a decade about the decline in support among Democrats for what has loosely been described as “education reform.” What’s your theory for how the party began its transition?

What’s interesting historically is that the Democrats’ biggest education reform initiative [Race to the Top] happened under very unusual circumstances. It was thrown into the stimulus that was passed just a few weeks into the Obama presidency, in the middle of a massive catastrophe and at the absolute peak of the administration’s political capital. The president threw into this giant measure, as a very small percentage of the overall cost, a grant-based reform to the states to incentivize them to implement education reform measures.

When I went back and looked at the coverage of it in the national press, there were just tiny little details. So there really wasn’t time for opponents to mobilize against it — even though, if this had been a standalone measure that was introduced even a few months later, they would have gone to the mat to defeat it and probably succeeded. I also think that it was much more successful than even its advocates thought at the time. Certainly its critics didn’t realize how effective this would be at leveraging reform at the state level; it drove a lot of changes, and it took a while for those critics to say, “Wait a second, what’s going on here?” 

The problem was that Obama was deeply committed to this agenda, and the [teachers’] unions really didn’t have the leverage to go to war with him. If the unions had gone to their members and said, “The president is killing us — we’re going to support a primary challenger in 2012,” they would have lost more members than they would have hurt him. That was too risky, so the way they played it was , as if Duncan was running around implementing this reform agenda without Obama knowing anything about it. And when Arne Duncan decided to leave and Obama appointed another reformer, they decided they were against him too. The whole time, they had to keep up this pretense that these guys were acting against Obama’s wishes because they recognized that openly opposing Obama would have hurt them with their own members.

But when Obama left the scene, it gave the unions another opportunity to reset the playing field. They were pretty active in the 2020 primaries, trying to nail down all the candidates on commitments to their agenda, and they had somewhat more success there. The candidates who most strongly opposed reform — Warren and Sanders, and to a lesser extent Bill de Blasio, who was sort of making that his lane — didn’t win, but Biden was still much closer to their position than Obama.

I notice that we skipped over the 2016 election there, as well as the Trump presidency. But it really felt like those five years were the major pivot point.

That’s right. As harmful as Obama was to union organizing efforts, Trump was extremely helpful. 

The main goal of reform critics is to bracket together liberal reform with conservative reform — charter schools and vouchers, for example. Even though these are really different policies, they want them to be called the same thing: privatization. They don’t want to distinguish between those two ideas, and it’s their most successful rhetorical gambit. The fact that Obama was for charters but against vouchers was very difficult for them, but Trump allowed them to frame the terms exactly the way they wanted. So they really made a lot of headway during the Trump era, though they’re now in a somewhat different position under Biden.

I was just starting to look at the Biden administration’s new regulations on the Charter Schools Program, but that looks like a win for opponents of reform. It seems like they’re attaching a ton of red tape to make sure it’s as difficult as possible to access those funds. 

We’ve been expanding choice and using standards-based accountability for a few decades now, and there isn’t a great deal of evidence that student learning has dramatically improved since the beginning of the Great Recession. Do you think, even before Trump, there was a sense among Democratic elites that the gains we’ve seen since the ’90s just haven’t been worth the investment made?

It depends on what’s being invested. Federal spending is still such a tiny amount compared with the overall amount spent on education. To the extent that Democratic elites are thinking about a costly investment, it might be the investment they feel they made in reforms that have caused them significant damage with their own allies. From the standpoint of someone in Democratic politics who’s not primarily interested in education, they’re saying, “We’ve put ourselves behind these reforms and taken enormous blowback from within our base, so we need to measure the benefits of this reform against the very high price we’ve paid to do it.” Even if you’re getting some pretty good results for kids, it might not necessarily cost out as a good bet from that perspective. 

I wrote last year, and I focused on charters because I think that’s the area where the research has been most impressive. Initially, education reform really covered a lot of ground, and you’re right that the results have been kind of tepid in some of those areas. It is really hard to steer public education when so much of it is controlled in this fragmented way, and to have a national reform change something at the local level is so difficult. I think charters have been the bright spot. 

Granted, their effects have been really concentrated in one cohort — basically, non-white kids in cities. But that’s the biggest crisis in American education! It’s not the affluent suburban schools, not the middle-class areas, though you want those to be better. The inability to give non-white kids in urban schools anything like a decent education is the real crisis, and that’s where charters have made a big impact. So having a lot of success in that narrow area actually means quite a bit.

I’d like to go into the time machine one more time. Eleven years ago, right after in Wisconsin, arguing against Scott Walker and the whole effort to limit the collective bargaining power of public sector unions.

I’ve completely forgotten this!

It’s basically a defense of the necessity of teachers’ unions, including some hopes that they can be partners for reform in the future. In the kicker, you write that they “can’t hold off reform forever. And, after all the worst aspects of the tenure system disappear, education reformers will discover that teachers are their best allies.” Do you still hold that view? And do you still see teachers’ unions as necessary?

That’s a great question. I certainly expressed an optimistic view of where unions would go politically that has not borne out. They’re probably moving in the opposite direction. I guess you’d chalk it up to misplaced optimism.

Are teachers’ unions necessary? Let me put it this way: If I were designing my ideal world, they would exist. But given their political orientation, and the fact that so many of them are determined to put their efforts into defending the worst aspects of the system rather than pushing for more constructive changes, I would say no, I don’t think they are necessary. 

I’ve started to think of them more like police unions, which I consider the main problem in criminal justice. Police unions have just devoted so much of their efforts to protecting the worst, most abusive cops. You can imagine a world where police unions were on the side of reform, realized that it’s in the interest of police to be trusted by the communities they protect, and weeded out bad actors so that good cops don’t get the blowback that’s caused when abusive and racist officers mistreat people. But that’s not how they behave. 

So I think that busting up the police unions is probably the straightest line to getting to better criminal justice — and the straightest line to better education reform probably involves running over the teachers’ unions, at minimum. I would like to have a world where we can have teachers’ unions and better education reform, but the unions have made that really hard.

I actually wonder if the political influence of police unions can be compared to that of teachers’ unions. As both national and local actors, it seems like the latter are much more influential in election outcomes.

I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve seen plenty of examples where a mayor is trying to reform the police, and the police will just go all-out to sink that candidate. Police unions really put the fear of God into mayors and city council candidates who are trying to rein them in. I’m not sure they have the same power at the state and national level, but for the most part, that’s not where the criminal justice policy they’re most interested in gets decided. So they’ve got a lot of power.

That said, teachers’ unions have a power on the Left to define the way political activists think about the issue. That’s probably a case where there’s not an analogue on the Right. Conservative ideas about criminal justice and racism have their own sources, and you don’t really have police unions steering the Right toward those points of view. Whereas I feel like the role of teachers’ unions in setting the party line — by which I mean the progressive movement rather than the Democratic Party, but to some extent both — is very powerful.

In a on education, you take issue with what you call a “false binary”: the idea that Democrats can either focus on improving schools or on improving the living conditions of students and families. I think many left-leaning critics of education reform would argue that Democrats can do both, but also that mitigating social disadvantage is going to make a much bigger impact on how kids learn than expanding high-quality charter schools, for instance. How do you respond to that?

I think there’s actually a lot of room for school improvement. To characterize it broadly, you’ve got these urban areas whose schools have performed very badly — kids have basically no chance to learn as much as kids in suburban schools — and charters are able to substantially or completely close that gap. They haven’t necessarily found ways to make the suburban schools better, but within the realm of improving education, charters have a significant effect.

I don’t really see anything to this argument, other than that education can only do so much. And that’s true. Education can only do so much, health care can only do so much, anti-poverty can only do so much, lead remediation can only do so much. Nothing is a panacea. But that’s just not a standard that we hold other policies to: Is this a panacea for all our problems? That’s a ridiculous standard. I know you’re trying to steel-man this and turn it into a serious idea, but I don’t think it is a serious idea. That’s not the way we do, or should, measure policy innovations.

Well, to carry the law enforcement comparison a step further, I don’t think advocates for criminal justice reform would argue that we just need to reduce poverty. There’s a definite sense that something affirmative has to change about the way our police operate.

That’s a very good analogy, and I wish I’d thought of that before. The disparities, whether it’s in education outcomes or incarceration, are going to be very hard to dent if you don’t get rid of poverty. But there are still disparities that we can address within the system itself. So we should do that! 

It’s just not a real excuse. No one makes that point about incarceration because they understand that it’s not relevant to the question of what kind of criminal justice system we want. It’s just not relevant.

Do you think there’s something about how the progressive movement views education — as a means of fighting social injustice and cultivating democratic values — that just doesn’t sync up with how most parents see it, and therefore creates a political problem?

I don’t actually think there is disagreement about those aspects of schools. There’s disagreement about the nature of civic values you want to teach: People on the Left want to teach liberal values, and people on the Right want to teach conservative values. People on the Right might have an image of the Pledge of Allegiance and teaching about the greatness of our country, and people on the Left might have ideas of teaching antiracism and creating a space where gay kids can come out if they don’t feel welcome at home.

But everyone really does see schools as a place to inculcate values. The real disagreement is about whether educational achievement is important. That’s where  you have a numerically tiny segment — much less than 10 percent, probably — of the country that doesn’t see educational achievement as something important. The absence of achievement as a priority is what makes them focus on the other stuff as representing the value of schools, because otherwise there’s no rationale for them to exist, and you’re just a straight-out libertarian who thinks we should get rid of public schools.

It certainly does seem like the public K-12 discourse now focuses way more on cultural politics than on academic performance. In particular, the state laws being passed about instruction on controversial subjects have just dominated the news for months. Do you think these bills are a valid response to politicized teaching, or is it more a political play by Republicans?

I genuinely don’t know. I’m almost certain that there’s more quote-unquote CRT in the classrooms now than there was five years ago. But I think it rose from a low level, and it’s really hard to say whether you’re talking about something that’s a serious concern. There are so many schools in this country that you could just cherry pick another new example every single day, and it still wouldn’t prove that there’s a real problem. 

You can see on Twitter that crazy teachers become national news stories now. My daughter had an absolute lunatic as a high school teacher who would use the class as a platform for all sorts of right-wing rants that were extremely racist and sexist. And this was not even a social studies class. This is a big country, and there’s a lot of crazy people out there.

But the legislative solutions just don’t work. I don’t think you can design a law that can effectively rule out bad teaching practices without also ruling out necessary teaching practices. So having state legislatures try to steer this ship is really not going to work.

When I spoke recently with the historian Daryl Scott, he essentially argued that the anti-CRT perspective in these debates wasn’t even especially right-wing — that it was more about explicitly teaching patriotic history in a way that would have been familiar to postwar liberals. I wonder if you’d agree with that.

There are definitely areas where the Left position has moved so far left that it’s opened up space for conservatives to advocate what used to be a center-left position. But I also think there are some aspects of the debate where that is not true. He’s capturing a piece of the reality, but not the whole of it.

What should the Democratic Party’s agenda on education be right now?

They should be encouraging more charter schools in urban areas, because they work. They’ve got an effective policy tool that can help people who need help very badly. They should be expanding that tool rather than scaling it back.

They should also be doing what Michelle Rhee did in D.C. They should say, “We are going to massively increase the base level of teacher pay in this country.” And they should go further than that, doubling or tripling aggregate teacher pay and treating teachers like professionals. Which means subjecting them to assessments that can include quantitative and non-quantitative judgments, and replacing them if they’re ineffective. I can’t really point to evidence that says that would work, but I don’t think it’s really been tried at scale. 

D.C.’s reforms worked, but all you can really do by increasing teacher pay is attract more and better teaching candidates from other cities. What a city can’t do is change the kind of person who goes into teaching in the first place. You can’t make it so that everyone in college knows that if you go into teaching, you’re going to make a really good living. College students know that if you go into teaching, compared with other things you could do, you’re making a financial sacrifice. If that were not the case, you’d have different people entering the profession and a bigger pool of talent. That’s not something I can improve with experimental evidence because it needs to be done at a societal level. But if I were in charge of the world, that’s what I’d do.