New Covid Analysis And NOLA Katrina & Schools Discussion
Bellwether just released a new brief about Covid learning loss interventions, and what we can learn.
This is part of a larger Bellwether–CALDER partnership to look at the lessons of Covid disruptions. Essentially, the pandemic created all sorts of natural experiments as policies were suspended and emergency measures were put in place. Obviously, no one would wish for this but we also shouldn’t let all the opportunities for learning go to waste. That’s the idea behind this collaboration.
I have long been frustrated by the nationalization of the New Orleans experience after Katrina. Whether reformers and the oil spot idea, or the minimizing of the role people from New Orleans played in the education work—by both sides for different reasons—these are incomplete stories.
So I’m excited to lead a discussion on August 18th with Senator Mary Landrieu, and educators Alexina Medley and Jamar McNeely about what actually happened and their role in it. Doug Harris of Tulane will kick it off sharing research and data on the changes since the storm in the city’s education sector. It’s one part of a series of four online events looking back at what’s happened and forward toward today’s challenges and what is next. I hope you can join us.
Trump And Pennies
Penny Schwinn acknowledged the inevitable last week and withdrew from consideration as Deputy Secretary of Education, despite her nomination getting out of committee. Some Republicans were not comfortable with her, some Democrats felt they couldn’t vote for any more Trump nominees given everything going on even if they thought she’d be good in the job. After the past few weeks, though, on nominees and otherwise, the bottom fell out. The Tennessee governor’s race also played a role. A big one. Politics. But a telling episode about education politics.
My hunch is that anyone celebrating this (other than the Penny is too ‘woke’ crowd) is not going to be happy with Plan B, which could be consequential for long term Department leadership.
Dems Fighting About Vouchers
Dems in disarray I guess…about school vouchers. Though it was a refreshing break from all the stories about how screwed up men are, I’m not sure this new Times story advances things much beyond making clear the fracturing among the groups over the private school voucher question. I continue to think that as a matter of political geography Democrats can’t blackball ESA and voucher supporters – the programs are just too widespread and if you want to be competitive that’s an issue. But the party also doesn’t need to embrace choice in whatever form comes down the pike. Lost in some of the back and forth is the reality that the direct payment plans states can enact with federal tax credits under President’s Trump’s recent tax bill could be for tutoring or other things. They could benefit public schools, too. That’s an opportunity – politically and for kids.
Good a time as any to point out that vouchers remain the one issue where Republicans are like, ‘yes, let’s give the poor some money to do as they wish,’ and roughly the one issue where Dems are against that.
A Subtle Shift? And A Less Subtle Move.
The Democrats’ numbers are unbelievably bad, especially given the context right now. I continue to think education offers part of a way back, and will have more on that soon. But, this doesn’t mean the President’s numbers are that great. And he and Congress might be thinking about that. The midterm will be a referendum on them, not the Dems.
One indication? Well, life comes at you fast. The Trump administration unfroze education funding it had just been holding back. You can read more about that here and here. It’s worth noting: the freezing and unfreezing, or reviews, or whatever you want to call it, of these funds isn’t really a thing, legally speaking — there’s no formal process that authorizes it in this way. It’s just something the Trump Administration has been doing.
This latest reversal came on the heels of the restoration of PEPFAR – the international AIDS program—funds in the recent rescission bill after bipartisan pushback on that cut.
What’s notable isn’t just the policy outcomes—it’s how it went down. In both cases, Trump yielded to bipartisan pressure, backing down over the objections of hardliners. That’s a break from the pattern. In the past, when challenged like this, Trump would typically double down, escalate the rhetoric, and whip his supporters to push people to toe the line. The whole TACO zeitgeist overstates just how much Trump has bent Congress to his will. I never thought Trump would fail to get a reconciliation bill through Congress by whatever deadline he set, for instance. I did think he’d have to scale it back. That didn’t happen and instead he met his deadline with his bill largely intact.
But maybe things are changing? Last week the Senate Appropriations Committee essentially told the administration to pound sand with an appropriations package that rejects most of what they want to do.
I don’t want to over-read this, or get carried away. It could be nothing. An aberration stemming from some lack of focus. Donald Trump remains erratic and sometimes unpredictable. By this time next week, we could be at war with Switzerland or discussing 500% tariffs on Norway. Maybe it’s as simple as Ed Secretary Linda McMahon won the last round but OMB Director Russ Vought will win the next time in a rescissions package or next year’s budget request to Congress—both things you should keep an eye on to see what is happening here. They may try to use recent Executive Orders as a pretext to withhold other funding or scrutinize all the funding that impacts non-citizens.
Or, this may be a trend worth watching if normal political gravity is starting to reassert itself, even just a little.
One indicator to watch, in addition to the education appropriations bill, is the bipartisan effort to address some NIH funding that is now being slow walked, reviewed, whatever they are calling it. Keep an eye on what happens there, too.
We’re getting closer to an election in 2026 that is likely to put the brakes at least some of Trump’s policy ideas. That raises the question: are some of the loudest parts of Trump’s political identity—the posturing, the provocations, and the arm-twisting and coercion— starting to give way, however subtly, to the demands of the broader electorate, his party’s politicians, and mundane realities of politics?
We’ll see.
The Greatest Trick Randi Weingarten Ever Pulled
It’s easy to forget now, but in the late 2000s and early 2010s, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was giving speech after speech about the need for reform. Tenure, she acknowledged, couldn’t be a job for life and it sometimes was. She warmed to other reform ideas, too, like opening a charter school (that was later shut down) and was essentially telling her members: get on the reform bus or get run over by it. Those annual National Press Club speeches are wild to read now. The AFT even hired Kenneth Feinberg to design an expedited 100-day dismissal due process for teachers with tenure (an initiative that ultimately led to little change).
Then Chicago teachers’ union leader Karen Lewis offered a third option during the teachers’ strike there — the people on that reform bus, fight them. Chicago was a strike that didn’t even have to happen, the union wanted and needed it to happen. Lewis saw the opportunity to drive a wedge. Education politics hasn’t really been the same since. Lewis died tragically early from cancer in 2021, but insofar as reform is concerned we’re still operating in an education politics she galvanized.
After the strike, Weingarten pivoted. Lewis wasn’t a risk to unseat Weingarten, but she did have influence inside the union. One large union leader told me that after Chicago the question members were asking was, ‘why aren’t we fighting, too?’ Reform unionism, always a sickly patient, went on life support. Weingarten is a good tactician and seized the moment. Suddenly she was at once tone policing reformers, talking about how reformers were too disruptive and divisive and also fighting back hard on reform initiatives behind the scenes. She pressured politicians and philanthropists. What education needed, she insisted publicly, was collaboration and consensus. Behind the scenes, the unions came roaring back as the Obama agenda lost its edge.
And in one of the more remarkable political sleights of hand in recent memory, she convinced many reformers that she was right — that they were, in fact, part of the problem if not the problem with a system that had failed to deliver equitable or acceptable results for decades—especially for racial and ethnic minorities and poor kids.
This happened, of course, just as DEI discourse was taking hold in education organizations. Contrary to popular politics and retelling, it didn’t start with the 2020 reckoning; the shift began around 2014. Reformers began to wonder if they were too abrasive, too adversarial, too unwilling to listen. Or worse, if education reform, and by extension they, were part and parcel of issues like the abusive policing many reformers were just learning about. They didn’t think this up themselves, a then-cottage industry of DEI experts (that post-2020 would become Big DEI) was pushing it out. And if you felt guilty about the unearned, unfair, or whatever privilege that got you into Stanford, Princeton, or Harvard, here was a way to performatively assuage it.
So, many decided the answer to all these concerns was yes. The problem isn’t the system, which is structurally unfair, something that should be apparent to people ostensibly concerned with structural inequality, the problem is us! It wasn’t so much the Stockholm Syndrome that paralyzes the Democrats overall as it was abused spouse syndrome. And it worked.
So acrimony was out. Disruption was out. Consensus was in. It didn’t help matters when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. If he was for charter schools, for example, a lot of people decided that they were not. Weak, yes. Unexpected, no.
It all left a movement trying to transform a quarter-trillion-dollar system* — one deeply entrenched and politically defended — while shying away from the conflict that transformation inevitably requires and unable to work in a cross or bipartisan way. (If you’re just in this work for conflict, you’re a sociopath but political conflict is part of change).
The greatest trick Randi Weingarten ever pulled was convincing a lot of reformers they could somehow reform an enormous, powerful, politically controlled industry without some real acrimony and disruption and odd bedfellows political coalitions. And, that although they were trying to dismantle a system with notably inequitable outcomes, they were actually on the side of oppression. A lot of reformers, especially those donning a DEI hair shirt, turned out to be easy marks for all this.
If you’re new around here, the point is not that the unions are wrong about everything. At times their interests and the interests of students align. Sometimes their line leaders are savvy observers of the education scene and what might improve it. All else equal they want what’s best for kids, too, they’re not monsters. But all else isn’t always equal and they are big powerful institutions with prerogatives, power, and politics to advance. The problem comes up in the constant confusion about who is actually the client here and the adult-first politics that follow. (Correct answer: students, parents, and taxpayers.)
Anyway, at some level you have to tip your hat. Even pre-Janus the unions knew they faced an existential problem with demographics and membership. This strategy helped them sidestep it, buy some time, and regain relevance and leverage. But it’s a shame it contributed to the reform coalition becoming a shell of its former self.
Reformers, heal thyself? Good things will follow.
*editing mistake.
