In 1983, the Reagan administration published A Nation At Risk, an apocalyptic report into the condition of American schools. It ushered in 33 years of uneven yet enduring bipartisan support for presidents’ efforts to raise school standards. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), share more than quixotic names. Both were backed by majorities of both parties in Congress. Unfamiliar with such harmony, Barack Obama called ESSA, signed into law in December 2015, a “Christmas miracle”. 

This sort of collaboration could soon become a rarity. On November 23, Donald Trump, the president-elect, nominated Betsy DeVos, a philanthropist, as the next secretary of education. For three decades, Ms. DeVos has used her family foundation and her leadership of conservative groups to lobby for “school choice”, a broad term that can divide Republicans even from moderate Democrats.

For DeVos, this has meant support for two causes. The first is the rapid expansion of charter schools, fees-free schools that are publicly funded but independently run. The second cause is school-voucher schemes, which typically give public funds to poor parents to pay for seats in private schools. Though Michigan voted against adopting vouchers in 2000, DeVos has helped elect over 120 in-favour Republicans across the country.

Since ESSA was passed just 13 months ago, Congress will be reluctant to consider a new Bill on education reform. Trump’s proposal that $20 billion (Rs.135,000 crore) in federal education funding should be diverted towards voucher schemes would struggle to win enough support in the Senate, says Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank. Most Democrats would oppose it, he notes. So too might Republicans sceptical of another big federal programme. They would prefer states to make their own decisions about vouchers.

But DeVos will still have clout. Her department can interpret federal rules in ways that make it easier for states to spend federal money as they like. She could also use her pulpit and her influence with conservative foundations to cajole governors to embrace vouchers.

And though less than 1 percent of all pupils in America attend school on state-funded vouchers, this number is growing rapidly: from 61,700 in 2008-09 to more than 153,000 in 2015-16, according to the American Federation for Children, a school-choice group whose outgoing chairman is, as it happens, Ms. DeVos.

Would more vouchers help children? In theory they would, by more closely matching pupils to schools, encouraging new schools and fostering competition. But the evidence is mixed. A 2015 review led by Dennis Epple of Carnegie Mellon University concluded that vouchers are not “a systematically reliable way to improve their educational outcomes”. In cities such as Milwaukee, New York and Washington, pupils using vouchers tend to have higher graduation rates than peers in public schools. There’s also evidence from these cities, and from Sweden and Chile, that the competition stimulated by vouchers makes other schools improve their performance. However, once at private school, there’s little evidence that pupils using vouchers perform better in exams than if they had stayed put. They may in fact do worse. 

After three decades of progress, pragmatic reformers are thus in a bind. Led by teachers’ unions, the left is out to curb some of the country’s best schools. Meanwhile, the risk of a Trump administration is that it’s about to subsidise some of the worst. 

 

Policy Confusion

President-elect Donald Trump’s policies could include scrapping the US department of education, cutting back or privatising federal student loans, rolling back regulation of for-profits and reversing recent guidance on campus sexual assault allegations in a war on “political correctness”, suggest experts. Trump will enter the White House without the kind of detailed plan on higher education set out by his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who had outlined a proposal to make public college “debt free” by ending tuition payments for 80 percent of US households.

Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of higher education at Temple University and author of the recently published Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, says Trump has offered only “sporadic comments” on higher education during the campaign.

Prof. Goldrick-Rab, known as a vocal critic of Republican higher education policy in the state of Wisconsin, says it’s “hard to know whether (Trump) agrees with the GOP (Republican) platform or not — but the platform for the party on which he ran calls for ending the federal government’s involvement in student loans”.

“The federal government should not be in the business of originating student loans,” says the Republicans’ 2016 platform. Until 2010, the bulk of student lending had been made by banks, backed by federal government guarantees. But under Barack Obama’s presidency, the federal government took on a much bigger role by making those student loans direct. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he (Trump) unrolls that,” says Prof. Goldrick-Rab.

During the campaign Trump said he would drastically cut or even eliminate the department of education. Comments Prof. Goldrick-Rab: “I’m very concerned about how he views the US department of education in general. He’s part of a party that’s attacked it quite substantially and believes the states, not the federal government, should be making education policy… I’m not sure there will be a department. I really am not.”

Under the Obama administration, the department of education, which began operating only in 1980, has been a “big player in trying to crack down on low-performing (for-profit) colleges that are taking advantage of students”, she adds.

Another such area is federal oversight of how universities deal with sexual assault allegations on campus. Official guidance issued by the department of education in 2011 — through what is known as a “Dear Colleague” letter — told higher education institutions that they must use the “preponderance of evidence” standard of proof when adjudicating sexual assault cases, rather than the higher bar of evidence that some institutions were using.

The 2016 Republican platform states that the Obama administration used the measure to “micromanage the way colleges and universities deal with allegations of abuse”, saying this “must be halted before it further muddles this complex issue and prevents the proper authorities from investigating and prosecuting sexual assault effectively with due process”.