Conservatives Shouldn’t Give Up on Public Schools

F ixing America’s public schools might be one of the toughest challenges out there. We’ve inherited a “system” that is 150 years old and is saddled with layers upon layers of previous reforms, regulations, overlapping and calcified bureaucracies, and a massive power imbalance between employees and constituents, thanks to the almighty teachers unions.

It’s a morass, a Gordian Knot, a Sisyphean task that has stymied would-be reformers for decades.

So it’s understandable when policy-makers and advocates study the issue, throw up their hands, and say, “To hell with all that. Let’s just give parents the money and be done with it.”

I get it — I’ve had those thoughts myself. It certainly seems to be where a lot of conservatives are today, viewing school choice, especially in the form of universal education-savings accounts, as the be all and end all of education reform.

But focusing on school choice alone would be a mistake. What we should embrace instead is an “all of the above” approach to reform. (Most Democrats are defaulting to a “none of the above” strategy due to their fealty to the unions.) For those of us on the right, this need not be a time for choosing between expanding parental options and improving traditional public schools. We can and should do both.

And that’s because, for the foreseeable future, our legacy public-school systems look likely to survive. As parental choice grows, they will lose some market share, just as they have over the past three decades of charter schooling, but they are unlikely to disappear. Public-school parents want their children’s schools to succeed — and aren’t afraid to vote accordingly. And as long as the public schools are educating millions of American children and adolescents, all of us should care about whether the education they’re providing is any good.

So like it or not, policy-makers need to dive into the mess that is public-school reform. But don’t despair. As my favorite Peloton coach likes to say, “We can do hard things.”

The good news from the perspective of conservative policy-makers is that there are plenty of reforms that haven’t been tackled yet, including in red states where the teachers unions don’t have veto power. Indeed, the 2024 Republican platform references several of them, explicitly supporting “ending Teacher Tenure” and “adopting Merit pay.” Progress on both counts could do a lot of good.

There’s plenty yet to do. Forty-six states allow public-school teachers to earn tenure, making it extremely hard to remove them from the classroom. Thirty-five states — including conservative ones like Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas — grant tenure to teachers after just three years or less. That’s crazy, and it should be a big fat target for Republican governors and legislators.

Relatedly, there are still 30 states, including 17 red states, that either permit or require seniority to be the sole factor when implementing staff layoffs, creating something akin to a Last in First Out (LIFO) system. There’s no legitimate rationale for such rules, and no excuse for conservative lawmakers to keep them on the books.

Then there is the issue of teacher pay. “Merit pay” — paying teachers based on performance — is the way to go, though it requires the creation of some sort of reliable system for evaluating teacher performance, a task that has proven difficult for states.

But at the least, red states could adopt a policy of doing no harm, as in not making our teacher-pay system more irrational than it needs to be. Specifically, states should not be mandating that teachers with master’s degrees receive extra pay, as 16 states do today. One of the most consistent findings in education is that most master’s degrees add no value in terms of the quality of teaching and learning. Stripping out the millions of dollars in extra pay given to teachers with those credentials would free up money that districts could use to, for example, pay more to teachers who are willing to teach in the toughest schools, a policy that does have solid research evidence behind it, at least if the salary supplements are high enough.

These ideas are not going to cut through the Gordian Knot entirely, but they might start to untangle at least a few threads. They are in line with the wisdom of former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who was an “all of the above” reformer during his time in office two decades ago, pushing for school choice but also public-school reform. Florida has now enjoyed more than 20 years without LIFO, teacher tenure, or salary boosts for master’s degrees. Its aggressive, comprehensive version of education reform is likely why it punches well above its weight when it comes to national test scores and other outcomes, especially for poor kids and kids of color. Public schools in Florida are hardly perfect, but their performance is much stronger than those in similar states.

So Republican governors and lawmakers: Keep working on school choice, but don’t give up on public-school reform. It matters, it’s not hopeless, and it just might leave a legacy you can be proud of.