Whenever you encounter Democrats for Education Reform, it's important to remember that they are not meant to be actual Democrats. As explained by their founder Whitney Tilson (the guy who just got smoked in his run for NYC mayor), reminiscing about the days he was trying to help a reformy anti-public ed group--
The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…
And that has been DFER's function ever since. Take right wing talking points, polish them up a bit, and insist to Democratic politicians, "This is what Democrats really believe and need to do to win."
Their "new path for education reform," floated back in May, is more of the same. Jorge Elorza, former Providence mayor and current DFER chief, issued a white paper (a "white paper" is a blog post on good stationary) entitled A Democratic Framework for An Abundance Education Agenda, and it's the same old same old.
The attempt here is to tap into the abundance movement, and if you're wondering what that is, join the club. Maybe it's about redirecting philanthropy, or maybe it's about getting Democrats out of the red tape business and into the teaming up with private business business, and if you're thinking, "Hey, I smell neo-liberalism," you're not alone, though there's also a valid point in there about how some Democratics are lousy managers of whatever they've been put in charge of. Fortunately for our purposes, it doesn't matter, because Elorza is just waving at "abundance" (Abundance is about outcomes, not ideology—Abundance is about Getting Big Things Done) while he does the same old DFER dance.
Elorza says that abundance can help the party that turned out to be broken in 2024.
Abundance offers a home for those of us who share broadly progressive aims, who not only want to enhance government’s capacity to deliver but also believe market-based solutions should be enlisted in the effort, who believe in the power of innovation and in technology’s ability to accelerate progress, and who, ultimately, want our policies to lead to real, material improvements in people’s lives.
Yeah, neo-liberal techbro stuff here. All throat clearing to get ready for a swing at education.
Dems used to be viewed positively on education, and now they're not. Elorza will not connect this to Dems themselves deserting public education and teachers through support for Common Core, Race to the Top, and varieties of school choice, all buttressed with the argument that schools are failing and teachers suck. Elorza says "Americans are not buying what we're selling" and then recaps the Clinton and Obama education years as if they were education wins, so I'm not sure which salespersons he's dissing here. No, he's pointing fingers elsewhere--
Many Americans believe Democrats kept schools closed too long during the pandemic, that we have focused too much on ideological battles, and have focused too little on classroom success. Meanwhile, too many Democratically-run cities and states are home to failing schools, sluggish Covid recovery, widening achievement gaps, and students who are unprepared for the future.
All false, but I'm not taking the time to debunk here. I'll just note that here he is simply amplifying right wing talking points.
He wants Dems to know that the GOP has been wining in education by "championing school choice and making education a centerpiece of their national and state-level platforms" except that of course what they've made a centerpiece is a bunch of culture panic noise, not education at all. He gets one thing right-- he says that Dems have no clear national education vision.
On he rolls with more right wing talking points. We spend so much money on education, but our test scores are low! Gaps!
And then we give more funding to failing schools, he gasps. Dems have "abandoned the spirit of innovation that gave birth to new school models and changed lives at scale in New Orleans, Camden, Washington, D.C., and many other places" he says, citing several locations where ed reform failed to achieve anything that it promised.
Remember the old right wing reformy complaint about looking at inputs instead of deliverables? He's dusted that one off too. Did you miss someone claiming that schools look exactly as they did 100 years ago? He's got that, too (also, cars and houses look a lot like they did 100 years ago, unless you give them more than a superficial glance).
But he's got three pillars to guide us in this attempt to get behind that same reformy apple cart from 25 years ago.
Pillar #1-- Innovation
We need a "start-up style ecosystem," because it is cool to run experiments on children. He cites charter schools, learning pods, microschools, hybrid education, and unbundled learning as "new school models," which they absolutely are not.
Also, get rid of barriers to innovation by scrapping regulations and "reforming restrictive teacher contracts," because the visionary CEO model of schools just hates it when the help gets uppity. "Break the culture of compliance" is one I'll go along with, except of course that the whole point of reforming restrictive teacher contracts has always been to have power to force teachers to be more compliant.
Create systems that adapt? Again, if you don't think schools have been adapting like crazy for the last century, you haven't spent any time inside them.
Treat and pay teachers like high skill professionals, not assembly line workers. Everyone says this. Nobody wants to foot the bill.
There's a paragraph that pretends to connect all this to abundance, but it doesn't.
Pillar #2-- Accountability
Man, these corporate guys love their deliverables.
At a systems level, accountability doesn’t necessarily mean testing regimes or micromanagement—it means focusing on continuous improvement and student-centered results. Politically, it is about having a sense of urgency, it is about shifting our focus from inputs to outcomes, and it is about refusing to write a blank check for things that are not working.
Except that for several decades now, accountability has meant exactly testing regimes and micro-management. You can't just breeze past the "measuring" part of accountability, because it's really, really hard to even agree on what should be measured, let alone how to measure, and no politicians, least of all Democrats, have shown an inclination to delve into that hard stuff.
He's very hung up on giving funding to failing schools, because if a school doesn't have the resources for success, then don't give them more resources until they... what? This was another great old failed policy-- failing schools would be taken over by turn around experts, and it virtually never, ever worked.
He wants to get rid of tenure, of course, because we can fire our way to excellence. Oh, and stop social promotion of students.
Abundance? Well, the test score gap is large and we need to Try New Things (though all his suggestions are Old Things). "Our North Star should be outcomes for kids, period" is a great line, until we have to decide which outcomes and how and when we'll measure them, and policy makers never want to deal with this difficult nitty gritty by which their policies live or die. What does this have to do with abundance? No idea.
Pillar #3-- Choice
DFER wouldn't be DFER if they weren't arguing for choice policies (just like the GOP). Charter school, vouchers, vouchers with other names that test better with voters-- Elorza is for all of it. Dems can shape these "tools to align with Democratic values" by putting most needy families first, protecting civil rights, public accountability-- three examples of policies that choice fans have consistently rejected.
Abundance message? There's no one size fits all education solution. Yeah, nobody ever thought of that before abundance was a thing. Elorza envisions a national system in which schools are really, really different from each other, rather than, I guess, community based schools. One thing that always burns my toast about ed policy discussion--why is it that these folks always talk as if every student in America lives in a population-dense cityscape.
Frameworks and champions
Elorza thinks this all makes a nice broad framework on which to campaign and govern on. Sure, for campaign. Govern on this? That's a joke. Every one of his ideas depends entirely on the specifics and nuts and bolts (e.g. all your schools are really different, so how does transportation work).
Because "disrupting the status quo is almost certain to incur the wrath of powerful stakeholders—teachers’ unions, bureaucrats, community activists, and local political leaders" (because DFER agrees that teachers are the enemy of reform), Elorza thinks that governors are best positioned to lead, because if there's anything that works great in education, it's top-down policy edicts that roll over local control.
DFER deserves to die
This white paper has nothing to offer that is either A) new or B) not GOP-lite. If you believe all the stuff he's laying out here and you're picking the governor you'd like to live under, why would you pick Josh Shapiro over Ron DeSantis?
DFER was always an attempt to get right-tilted conservative policies into power when the actual right-tilted conservative politicians were not in power. But the political calculus in this country has changed. There is nothing new in this pitch except the attempt to throw "abundance" into the rhetoric, and no audience for this tired reformster dance.
