Will Hillary Clinton Continue Education Reform? -- NYMag

Will Hillary Clinton Continue Education Reform? -- NYMag:

Will Hillary Clinton Continue Education Reform?

In her economic speech today, Hillary Clinton spoke extensively about policies where her party agrees: inequality, social opportunity, public investment, and family-friendly workplace policy. Clinton’s remarks about primary education were almost literally a placeholder. (Those comments, in their entirety: “And in the coming weeks and months, I’ll lay out specific steps to improve our schools.”) Clinton’s position on primary education is the most significant outstanding domestic-policy question of the Democratic primary campaign, precisely because it is something upon which her party disagrees, often bitterly.

For all the attention to disagreements between the party’s centrist and populist wings, which Matthew Yglesias runs through ably, the two visions overlap heavily. The moderates focus their attention on using government to reduce inequality after the market has run its course. Populists want to use government to shape the distribution of incomes before taxes and transfers. The argument between the two is more academic than practical, because both camps favor elements of one another’s preferred policy goals. The centrists support a higher minimum wage, full employment, and opposing Republican plans to roll back collective bargaining. And the populists are happy to endorse a higher Earned Income Tax Credit, taxing the rich, and public investment. What makes the debate almost entirely academic is that, with Republicans in control of the House and highly unlikely to lose it under a Democratic president, neither the moderate nor the populist liberal policies stand a chance of enactment.

Education, on the other hand, is an issue where action remains possible, because the president can use administrative waivers to drive reform, or use the threat of waivers as a lever to force Congress to act. It’s also an issue where two Democratic camps propose to move in diametric directions. The Obama administration has embraced the education-reform movement. Reformers believe that new educational structures have the potential to produce dramatic gains for poor children, and can point to spectacular results in a small number of highly effective new urban charter schools. The reformers have concentrated on the importance of teacher quality — which, research shows, varies enormously and has a very large and (therefore) variable impact on student performance. The reformers believe in creating measures of teacher performance, using a mix of tests that measure student learning against an expected baseline, and classroom observation, and to pay them accordingly, including giving schools the Will Hillary Clinton Continue Education Reform? -- NYMag: