No one captured the moralistic high of the Obama-era reform movement quite like journalist Steven Brill. In his book Class Warfare, Brill told a Manichean story of the holy and righteous “reformers” trying to “reform” the system in the face of intransigence from the dark and selfish “anti-reformers.” To smear the “anti-reformers” he even went so far as label some of them “school reform deniers”—with that word’s obvious overlay with Holocaust denial.
A little over a dozen years on, Brill seems to have finally realized that “reform” movement was doomed from the start. Not because the “anti-reformers” were so insidiously mighty, but because “reform” was predicated on trying to change the incentives of a public education system that Brill said, last week in an interview with The74, has “no incentives.”
Yet the purpose of his interview seemed less to make a public mea culpa for having profoundly misdiagnosed the political and administrative reality of public education than it was to plant a new flag in today’s education policy debate. Whereas the main lines in education policy back in the early ’10s were whether you were for or against “reform,” the main fissure today is whether you’re for or against universal private school choice. If a journalist writes a Brill-esque historical account of our era, he might label Brill a “school choice denier.”
Brill takes the common anti-choice line that choice does not provide meaningful “accountability.” Most school choice proponents counter this by arguing that choice has more meaningful accountability than any other system—parents choose to put their kid in a school and they can help assure its quality because, if it’s not up to snuff, they could put their kid elsewhere. Brill provisionally accepts that this theory could be true, but seems to insist it could only really be true amongst his peer set of rich Manhattanites. Sure, they have the savvy to hold their schools’ feet to the fire to ensure that their kids get an admissions edge to Brown University, but that’s surely not the kind of thing that the median family in flyover country could pull off.
To be fair, probably not in the exact same way. Brill bemoans the “equity” ideology that’s become ascendant in education spheres, and it’s reasonable to imagine that many of his rich Manhattan friends aren’t rabidly woke either. And yet, elite NYC private schools have gone extremely woke and parents are, apparently, willing to risk their kids learning to hate them if it raises their long-term chances of landing in private equity. The median American family wouldn’t make this tradeoff. But they would want their kids to get the academic basics, be reasonably prepared for a career, and—perhaps most importantly—to have their schools reinforce their values.
Brill goes even further than most teachers’ unions in musing that the entire system of public education could be better if it were totally compulsory. If parents were simply not permitted to send their kids to private schools, then parents with the greatest socio-economic status would be forced to take a more active interest in the traditional public schools their kids are literally trapped in. Maybe higher socio-economic parents would be marginally politically savvier. But adding more people into a system without incentives doesn’t change the incentives of that system. A school is just as capable of ignoring the voice of 10 loud parents as it is of 100 quieter ones.
Aside from the oddity of returning to the public debate to side with the heirs of the “school reform deniers” that he decried last decade, Brill’s interview offers an interesting occasion for reflection. Not only the players, but the basic terms of the debate from the early 2010s have all vanished into the wind. Teacher evaluation? Tenure reform? Last-in-first-out firing practices? Rubber rooms for abusive teachers? No one really talks about any of these things anymore.
Instead, a smaller set of conservatives who never really wanted to talk about any of those things—but who always preferred to steer any conversation back to school choice—seem to have had their finger much more on the pulse.
A dozen years from now, though, will school choice triumphalists seem so dated and have as little to say? It seems unlikely. School choice has two things that “reform” never really had: incentives, and constituents.
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