This is where we are these days-- a politician who says that public schools are an okay thing to have still lands to the left of the MAGA party. Which may be why Rahm Emanuel is somehow managing to draw press as an "education guy" who might be running for President, some day.
Emanuel was part of the Obama administration, an administration that doubled down on the bad education policies of the Bush II administration. Then he became mayor of Chicago and took an ax to public schools there, in a move that has not been vindicated in the years afterwards.
Emanuel appears to understand just a part of the Democrat problem on education. From Matt Barnum's Chalkbeat piece about the maybe-candidate:
Whatever the flaws of the prior reform era, Emanuel says, at least Democrats had a clear agenda. Now he dings his party for extended virtual schooling during the pandemic and for allowing Republicans to own education issues. “You know that the Republicans are for vouchers. You can’t tell me what the Democratic calling card is,” said Emanuel, who served as ambassador to Japan under Joe Biden.
Well, yeah, Dems had a clear education agenda. Of course it was A) indistinguishable from the GOP agenda and B) a lousy agenda. But he has half a point. Democrats continue to be feckless and aimless when it comes to public education, and GOP/MAGA education policy has moved on from reform-era policies to now look for the end of public education, replaced by an unregulated marketplace navigated by on-their-own parents and marked by forced taxpayer support of private christianist schools.
Somehow this shift has resulted in a bunch of reformsters from both tribes waxing nostalgic for the days of No Child Left Behind and high stakes testing and charter schools. Like all nostalgia, it rests on selective amnesia about what those days were really like. They were abusive of teachers and schools, injected a toxic testing culture from which schools have still not recovered, and opened the door to the anti-public education policies that are now attacking the US system.
Being nostalgic for the days of NCLB reform is like wistfully saying, "You remember how, right after we stepped off that cliff, there was a moment that felt kind of like weightless floating? I wish we could go back to that."
But here's Emanuel being "alarmed" that neither party's leaders are making it a priority to get Big Standardized Tests back up. “Nobody’s going to break a sweat trying to solve it,” he told Barnum, not bothering to explain why anybody should assume that this battery of student-numbing mediocre assessments should drive anybody's policy.
Emanuel shares some ideas for school improvement, all underlining his lack of actual engagement or understanding of schools and the people in them. Let's imitate Mississippi, he says, and since people are going to keep bringing this up, I'm going to keep saying that any call to imitate Mississippi that doesn't acknowledge that understanding what Mississippi actually did and what they actually accomplished is complex and nuanced-- well, they're just whipping up slogans and not making a serious attempt to create education policy.
Emanuel also says that high schools should require students to have a clear plan for when they graduate, which is exactly the kind of policy that sounds good to someone who has never paid attention to what goes on inside a classroom. What would such a policy look like? Will schools say, "Well, you passed all your courses and got all your credits, but we don't have your Future Plans paperwork, so no diploma for you"? Who will determine whether the student plan is clear or not? Is there any reason that students will not interpret the requirement as "You just write some BS about future stuff and you graduate"?
Another policy proposal is right out of the old NCLB-era playbook. Emanuel suggests, says Barnum, that funds be cut for schools with high absentee rates. This makes non-sense on so many levels. We've got the old NCLB notion that if a school is struggling, you give it fewer tools to work with. We've got the old reformster premise that all problems are the fault of the school. Can somebody ask him if he thinks the Minneapolis schools experiencing high absentee rates during the ICE occupation should have funding cut?
There's a certain mentality that believes that the only way to motivate people--or at least Those people-- is a combination of threats and punishment. That mentality is always problematic in positions of power.
Emanuel can call himself an education candidate if he wants, I suppose. Voters rarely elect politicians because they are education candidates, and when they do-- well, lots of folks thought Obama was going to reverse the anti-public ed policies of Bush II and instead we got more of the same, harder. The latest New York Times/Siena Poll shows that fewer than 1% of voters think that education is the most important problem in the United States today-- and that holds across all age groups, genders, and ethnicities. If you want to ride to the White House, the education bus is probably not the one to ride-- certainly not the one Emanuel is proposing.
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