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The rift in the Democratic party over charter schools will be on sharp display again Thursday, as advocates, parents and students rally outside a Los Angeles presidential primary debate to protest what they say is an attack on their freedoms.

Advocates frame Democrats’ increasingly sharp rhetoric against charter schools — present at all levels of government, but recently exemplified in proposals by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to crack down on the sector — as an attack on the rights of African-American and Hispanic families to steer the destinies of their children.

“This is a solution that has worked for our families. Why is it being abridged, why are people pushing against this? If it’s a solution that works, we should allow that solution to go forward,” said Ricardo Mireles, founder and executive director of Academia Avance, a charter school in Los Angeles.

Protest leaders found a particularly ripe location for protest in Los Angeles, which has 277 charters serving more than 138,000 students. Unionized public school teachers went on strike earlier this year over the issue, and the city’s school board ultimately agreed to pass a resolution calling for a charter moratorium.

Maria Padilla, who will attend Thursday’s protest, sends her daughters Savannah, 7, and Madison, 5, to Equitas Academy in Los Angeles. But she didn’t set out to send them to a charter. It was Equitas’s high academic scores, particularly the small gaps between the performance of students of different races, that sold her, she said.

“They should know that these charter schools are really making a significant difference in our community,” she said.

The debate protest comes on the heels of a teachers union-sponsored forum Saturday, where Warren was challenged about what she’d say to the families of color who can’t wait for traditional public schools to improve.

She emphasized that she doesn’t doubt the sincerity of those families, and that her plan wouldn’t affect existing charter schools.

“My proposal is how about we put $800 billion into our public schools and make them all excellent schools,” she said. “This is about equalizing opportunity. This is the big division in America today.”

Following a protest at a speech in Atlanta last month, Warren pledged she’d revisit her charter proposal and make sure she got it right.

But she was also widely derided for comments in an interview she gave to the National Education Association, released earlier this month, in which she seemingly blamed families assigned to poor public schools.

“If you think your public school is not working, then go help your public school,” she said. “Go help get more resources for it.”

Democratic candidates, including Warren, have pointed to scandals in the sector, and say that charters pull public money from traditional schools without being subject to the same accountability measures. Teachers in most charters are not unionized.

The idea for the debate protests grew out of the National Alliance for Public Charter School’s annual conference in Las Vegas this summer, when advocates noticed a rhetorical turn against charters among many Democrats, Mireles said.

The advocates, working through the Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools, have since protested outside Democratic debates in Houston; Columbus, Ohio; and Atlanta this fall.

Leaders have learned important lessons from previous debates, like being in the right place to attract media attention, and at the right time, Mireles said. The action for Thursday is scheduled for 3 p.m. Pacific, the perfect time for a spotlight on evening news broadcasts ahead of the debate two hours later.

It’s difficult to tell if the protests are working to change the perception of charters, but they are getting the word out, Mireles said.

“It’s clear that prior to these efforts, it had been very one-sided. … The focus on charter schools was only on the anti-charter side,” he said.

Parent advocates say they just want the candidates to listen, and acknowledge their right to school choice and the successes their children have had in charters.

“We want to be heard. That’s all we want, is to be heard by people who may end up running the country,” said Sarah Carpenter, an organizer with the Powerful Parent Network.

Carpenter, who emphasizes that she isn’t pro-charter school so much as in favor of giving families options, was part of a group that protested outside Warren’s speech in November, and an effort to protest and meet with candidates at the Pittsburgh forum. But for a prior commitment at home in Tennessee, she’d be in Los Angeles, she said.

“When parents aren’t afraid to stand up for their kids, that’s what success looks like to me,” she said. “If we don’t fight for our children, who else is going to do it?”

Lost in much of the national debate around charter schools is the relatively little impact a president, of either party, has on the sector, with most decisions on charter policy made at the state and local level.

Congress must approve funding for the federal charter school program every year; House Democrats had sought a 10 percent cut to the program this year, but the final compromise released this week holds spending flat at $440 million. And the program itself is a drop in the bucket of the $40 billion in federal spending on K-12, itself only about 10 percent of what is spent on schools in the U.S.

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Democratic presidential candidates’ proposals to spend more money on education should come with more detail on how their plans will get better results for students, two former Democratic education secretaries said.

The 19 Democrats left in the race have proposed several high-priced education plans, including universal pre-K, dramatically increased spending on low-income students and free college. Hours before the event, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a long-shot candidate, released his education plan, which his campaign touted as doubling the federal investment in K-12.

As they work through these proposals, candidates should focus on broad goals, like raising the high school graduation rate or making the U.S. the nation with the most college graduates, former education secretaries John King and Arne Duncan said. Both declined to endorse a candidate.

“We have to think about more dollars with the things we know will make a difference,” King said Friday at an event on the 2020 election and education at the Brookings Institution.

Many candidates have, for instance, proposed dramatically increasing spending on Title I, which helps the education of low-income students. But increased dollars could be tied to more targeted efforts such as increasing teacher diversity or integrating schools, King said.

Proposals to add federal dollars to boost teacher salaries, meanwhile, could be vehicles to examine teacher pay models, outside the usual step-and-lane system that ties salary increases to years of experience, to give higher raises to top-performing teachers earlier in their careers, Duncan suggested.

On the subject of free college, similar issues arise. The former secretaries pointed to low college completion rates, particularly for students of color.

“We have to talk about results. Are people just being admitted to college, or are they actually walking across the stage [at graduation]?” Duncan asked. (He also said he’d prioritize free pre-K over free college.)

In many states, programs that purport to be “free college” aren’t well-targeted to the neediest students, or are littered with catches that make them difficult to use, said King, now the president of The Education Trust. And many states are spending less on their public higher ed systems now than they were before the recession, a factor that drives up costs for all students, he added.

“The details of the policy matter, and we have to design them in a way that is focused on equity,” King said.

Though the candidates generally agree on the broad contours of education policy, like universal pre-K, higher teacher pay and some level of free college, one area where the field has split is charter schools.

Both King and Duncan, who now works on gun violence issues at the Emerson Collective, are longtime supporters of charters. King, in response to a question, cast part of the blame for some Democrats’ opposition to the schools on the Trump administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, particularly her support of what he called “low regulation, low oversight and low accountability” for the sector.

Duncan, meanwhile, said Democrats shouldn’t be swayed by Republican support when making their own policy choices. “As Democrats, as citizens, we should have a moratorium on bad schools and we should want a lot more good schools,” he said.

Though he had plenty of thoughts about policy, Duncan, who since leaving office hasn’t shied away from criticizing the Trump administration, said education shouldn’t be the deciding factor next year.

In a normal election, more people should be voting on education — but this isn’t a normal election, Duncan said.

“This election should not turn on any one education policy … This is not a time to support or not support any given candidate based on some agreement or disagreement on some education policy,” he added.

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Half of the nation’s teachers have seriously considered quitting in recent years, amid concerns about low pay, stress and lack of respect, a new poll finds.

“We’ve got a real crisis going on,” said Joshua P. Starr, CEO of PDK International, the teachers’ professional association that conducts the annual poll. “There’s absolutely a real issue, and we have to confront it nationally if we want to ensure our kids are getting the best possible teachers.”

Teachers who feel undervalued by their community, who say their pay is unfair, who make less than $45,000 annually, or who teach high school were more likely to say they’ve considered quitting. The 51st annual poll surveyed 2,389 people online in late April, including 1,083 parents of school-age children and 556 public school teachers.

The result comes after the large-scale “Red For Ed” movement last year that saw teachers in several states strike for higher pay and more education funding.

A majority of teachers surveyed said they would strike for additional funding for school programs, higher pay, and more say in school standards, testing and curriculum. A smaller number, 42 percent, would strike for more say in teaching conditions. Even higher percentages of parents would support teachers striking for any of those reasons, the poll found.

Last year’s PDK poll found that for the first time, a majority of parents, 54 percent, would not want their children to become teachers. Similarly, 55 percent of teachers in this year’s poll said they wouldn’t want their own children to follow in their footsteps.

“I work 55 hours a week, have 12 years’ experience and make $43K. I worry and stress daily about my classroom prep work and kids. I am a fool to do this job,” one of the surveyed teachers said in an online focus group.

Pay is a big issue for teachers — 60 percent feel their pay is unfair, the poll found. But so too is the overall climate of schools, including an emphasis on standardized tests, Starr argued.

The challenge for policymakers is to understand that progress is important, without accepting lower standards, Starr said.

“The blunt instrument of an absolute score on a standardized test at the end of the year, it does a disservice to the profession,” he added.

The poll found that 94 percent of teachers feel that students’ growth over time is a better way to measure school performance than just the percentage of students who pass a test. Parents and the general public were more split, with about three quarters saying growth over time is a better metric than straight proficiency.

Support for mandatory civics, optional Bible classes

The poll also looked at public support for broadening curriculum in new ways, finding majority support for optional Bible classes and mandatory civics.

Starr said the results reflect a desire to see schools serve a deeper purpose.

“We’ve sort of lost the soul of education in some ways…Schools should be the place where we have dialogue in very diverse communities. That’s more important now than ever,” he said.

Just 6 percent of respondents said Bible classes should be required, while 58 percent said they should be offered as an elective. Support was higher among respondents who identified as evangelical Christians, Republicans or conservatives.

President Trump earlier this year spurred discussion of Bible classes, as several states considered legislation to adopt them as electives in high schools.

Support was much higher for civics, with 70 percent saying it should be required, and another 27 percent saying it should be offered as an elective. Teachers were more likely than the general public to say the classes should be required, at 81 percent, and parents less likely, at 60 percent.

There are potential hurdles to teaching both: church-state separation issues in a Bible class, and allegations of political bias in civics.

But there are teachers who manage to walk those lines effectively, Starr said: “I think that our results show that people are thirsting for it. We just kind of have to rise to the occasion.”

Disclosure: Carnegie Corporation of New York provided financial support for this survey and for The 74. 

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People are brought out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a shooting at the school Feb. 14, 2018. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The federal government should do more to force schools to adopt best safety practices, advocates from Florida argued at a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C. last week.

“We know that we cannot prevent 100 percent of these school mass murders, but we know that we can absolutely mitigate a lot of the risk,” said Max Schachter, whose son Alex was killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year. “Every school can do things today that can improve school safety, and many of these things are basics that cost little or no money.”

Three of the four witnesses at the hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee came because of their connections to the February 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida. The shooting was the impetus for a federal school safety commission led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; its report called for changes like arming teachers, increasing school police and “hardening” schools.

Separately, a group run by the Department of Homeland Security will meet for the first time next week to help create a national clearinghouse of school safety best practices, Schachter said. A spokesperson for the Secret Service confirmed the meeting to The 74 and added that it won’t be open to the public or live-streamed, likely because of the sensitive nature of the issues to be discussed.

• Read more: Trump school safety commission recommends rejection of Obama-era discipline reform, encourages more armed staff and physical security

Schachter and others suggested that federal funding — which nearly every public K-12 school receives — should be predicated on schools’ adoption of at least the most basic school safety practices, such as requiring that classroom doors be locked during class periods and creating a shooting response plan.

“This is not an academic discussion. Kids and teachers have been dying. School starts in less than two months,” said Stand With Parkland treasurer Tom Hoyer, whose son was killed in the shooting.

Though states have adopted some of the safety proposals, and they could become part of federal recommendations, there’s little reason to think Congress will pass any large-scale safety mandates anytime soon. Gun control bills have failed, many lawmakers are hesitant about imposing the federal will on local schools, and basic school safety grant programs often get bogged down in debates over arming teachers.

One witness and some Democratic senators, though, cautioned that as schools adopt security measures, broader changes to school climate should be considered, and added that some safety interventions can have adverse effects on some groups of students.

Increasing school resource officers, particularly in day-to-day discipline, leads to more students being suspended, expelled and referred to law enforcement for everyday misbehavior, said Deborah Temkin, senior director of education research at Education Child Trends.

Students of color and children with disabilities are particularly likely to face these harsher consequences, she added.

Active shooter drills should also be approached with caution, she said. She pointed to the importance of not making them so routine that real emergencies get ignored, or so realistic that they upset students and teachers, as has been widely reported in the media.

“We have to be careful, when we’re recommending these [safety interventions], that we consider these unintended consequences,” Temkin said.

Beyond tying federal aid to the adoption of safety measures, some changes to other laws might also be needed, the Florida advocates said.

There should be a K-12 version of the Clery Act, the nearly 30-year-old law that requires colleges to publicly report incidents of violence on campus, and a system for rating school safety, Schachter said.

Others suggested tweaking federal laws governing information privacy in education and health care, commonly known as FERPA and HIPAA, respectively. Restrictions on information sharing among school personnel, law enforcement and health care providers may have prevented Florida school officials from sharing key information about the Parkland shooter with law enforcement, a state commission convened after the shooting found.

“There’s a lot of room and a lot of opportunity” to update FERPA in particular, which hasn’t been changed since it was enacted 40 years ago, said Bob Gualtieri, chair of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission and sheriff of Pinellas County, Florida.

• Read more: Lessons from Parkland: 6 big things we’ve learned about student safety, school security and resilience since the tragic 2018 massacre

Informing school and medical officials about the exemptions in the law would go a long way, too, he said.

“[The laws] are overly applied by the people who are charged with interpreting them and applying them, and the exceptions are not as understood as they need to be,” he added.

Others suggested what are sure to be more contentious changes, like the adoption of “red flag” laws that allow police to seize guns from those feared to be a danger to themselves or others, or broader background checks before gun purchases.

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Democratic presidential hopefuls (from left) Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg, former U.S. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and U.S. Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders speak during the Democratic primary debate. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

EDlection 2020 pop quiz: What do the K-12 platforms of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg have in common?

Answer: They all want to increase spending on Title I, the federal grants started in the 1960s to boost the education of low-income children.

Biden and Sanders want to triple the funding, currently $15.9 billion a year, while Buttigieg seeks to “massively increase” it.

It’s a politically expedient proposal: Title I is a generally popular program in Congress, and there’s support among voters, across party lines, for additional spending on education.

But pushing more money through the program, without accompanying reforms, might not make any difference for the children it’s supposed to help, experts said.

“Absent attaching some new criteria to new Title I funding, you’re just going to throw new money into the system, and you wouldn’t really expect much change,” said Charles Barone, chief policy officer at Democrats for Education Reform.

Title I is the largest portion of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which originated as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. It has become the anchor for some of the biggest education policy changes in the last two decades, No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Questions about the program have trailed it since its inception, such as whether it reaches the neediest children or schools use the funds appropriately. One district in Louisiana infamously used Title I dollars to purchase two Olympic-size swimming pools.

Research about the program’s effectiveness has varied. A 2015 Brookings Institute paper, for instance, argued that the activities Title I dollars often go towards, like professional development and class size reduction, aren’t effective, and that districts should have the flexibility to better concentrate dollars on the highest-poverty schools and students.

Nonetheless, the candidates’ plans are an important signal about the importance of education funding, said Scott Sargrad, vice president for K-12 education policy at the CAP Action Fund.

But given that more than 90 percent of school districts already get at least some Title I dollars, “that’s not going to improve equity if we keep sending money to districts that don’t really need it,” he added. A 2016 investigation by U.S. News and World Report found that districts with very low rates of child poverty often end up with very high annual allocations.

Part of the problem is the complex way Title I is distributed to schools, through four subgrants that all weight the number and percentage of poor children differently. Some also give more federal dollars to schools in states that spend more. And some set minimum allocations for small states, regardless of their relative level of poverty.

That means the pool of federal dollars varies by state, from $984 per eligible child in Idaho to $2,590 per child in Vermont, and within states, with big cities and the furthest-flung rural areas generally getting the most per student, the National Center for Education Statistics said in a recent report.

Big-city districts in the northeast probably already spend enough on low-income children, but additional funds could have a big impact where spending is lower, like in the Deep South, said Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. (Spending per pupil in Washington, D.C., for instance, is more than double that of Mississippi: $19,159 versus $8,702 in 2016.)

If state accountability systems remain strong, the additional spending could help, he said: “The details matter, and it matters about where that money ends up.”

Outside of changing the formulas, education policy advocates suggested several other possible policy changes, like pushing the additional money into states’ set-asides for school improvement. Or, now that ESSA requires states to publish per-pupil funding figures by school, it could be used to boost spending at schools that lag behind others in their districts.

Some conservatives, meanwhile, are skeptical of calls for additional spending in an era of ballooning federal debt, and fear that additional Title I dollars would come with too many federal strings attached. School district leaders have long complained about onerous reporting requirements and auditing oversight.

Title I, a small portion of overall education spending, already drives too many decisions at the district level, in ways that often “seem to reflect something other than instructional logic,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“The idea that what we need is more federal micromanagement of spending seems to me a very clear step in the wrong direction,” he said.

To be sure, plenty of research shows that money matters in education, and Title I would be an easy way for the federal government to demonstrate that.

But there’s also precedent showing that adding money through Title I doesn’t bring big changes at the school level: Congress in 2009 poured an additional $13 billion into the program at the height of the recession, and most states didn’t do anything particularly innovative with the money, Barone said.

Ultimately, the call to increase Title I funding without accompanying reforms fits within a broader pattern of education policy proposals this cycle, which have focused on additional federal investment without demanding accompanying changes, Barone said. That includes plans like increasing teacher salary without targeting it to in-demand fields like special ed or STEM, or reducing student debt without discussions of how to remedy low college completion rates, he said.

“It’s more of like a Santa Claus approach to education policy, where we’re just going to put money basically through existing streams, or ramped-up versions of existing streams, and not ask for anything necessarily in return,” he said.

WATCH: Everything You Need to Know About Title I — and the $15 Billion It Directs to American Schools — in 2 Minutes

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Protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court in April while the justices heard oral arguments over the 2020 census citizenship question. (Credit: Aurora Samperio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Education advocates were hopeful but still concerned after the Supreme Court ruled the Trump Administration — for now — cannot add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

“The Supreme Court’s decision to not include the citizenship question in the 2020 census is the right thing for public education,” L.A. Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner said in a news release.

Both civil rights advocates and government officials said that adding the question, for the first time since 1950, would lead to an undercounting of immigrants and Hispanic residents.

Census counts are used to allocate funding for a number of education programs, including Title I grants for low-income students, Head Start preschool programs, and school lunches, so including the citizenship question would leave some school districts without the federal funding they need and are entitled to, education advocates had warned in briefs filed with the court.

L.A. Unified, the second-largest district in the country, faced a loss of as much as $20 million in Title I funding if the citizenship question was included, money which pays for some 200 teachers, Beutner said. About a quarter of L.A. Unified’s roughly 486,000 students are English learners and nearly 75 percent are Hispanic.

“The citizenship question is not some abstract, legal issue. It has real consequences in our schools,” he added.

The complicated, multi-part ruling from the high court said the Commerce Department’s alleged justification that the information is necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act was not sufficient, with Chief Justice John Roberts saying it “appears to have been contrived.” Justices sent the case back to lower courts.

Civil rights advocates who had brought the case said they didn’t believe there is time for the administration to bring the case back through the courts with a new justification, particularly given their repeated claims that they have to begin printing the census forms on Monday.

“I think there really, really is not time, and if the administration tries to rush it, that’s a clear red flag,” Dale Ho, the head of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said on a call with reporters after the ruling Thursday.

Other officials have said the government could wait until the fall to print the census, several news outlets reported. President Trump on Thursday afternoon criticized the decision, writing on Twitter that he had “asked the lawyers if they can delay the census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter.”

Education advocates panned the president’s call to delay the census.

“The wheels of the federal government should not grind to a halt just so the administration can have a do-over,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools.

The National School Boards Association and its state affiliates will continue to watch the case and “continue to advocate for the removal of the citizenship question from the 2020 census in order to preserve federal funding for the myriad programs that benefit the more than 50 million children attending our public schools, their families and their communities,” CEO Thomas Gentzel said in a release.

Though the citizenship question is off the table for now, urban communities in particular still face challenges in getting an accurate census count, given housing mobility, language barriers and a general wariness of government officials, the Council of Great City Schools said in a release.

“The challenge for urban school officials, local government leaders, and community groups will be to effectively reach out to residents to encourage universal participation in the 2020 census survey,” the group, which represents large urban districts, said.

Civil rights leaders have launched a collaborative campaign with dozens of organizations to encourage participation in the census next year. “We know our work isn’t over. It’s just beginning,” Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights, said.

https://twitter.com/Lily_NEA/status/1144285281748750337

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Education, an issue that has been pushed to the sidelines in recent presidential cycles, is getting some more attention in the early days of the 2020 contest.

Mentions of universal pre-K and college affordability are practically stump-speech mandates. Teachers unions, riding a high of public support after successful strikes last year, have deep pockets and devoted members; addressing their concerns will be key for candidates seeking the groups’ backing. And, of course, there are few public officials more vilified by Democratic voters than Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, so candidates will be eager to draw a clear line between themselves and the Trump Administration.

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the top two in nearly every poll of the race, have released comprehensive plans that touch on everything from more federal funding for special ed to mental health services in schools, as have a few of the lesser-known candidates.

• Read more: EDlection 2020: Comparing K-12 Plans on Teacher Pay, Pre-K and More From Democratic Front-runners Biden & Sanders

Education could have its biggest moment yet as the packed primary field begins its first debates. The two-dozen member field was slightly winnowed to a more manageable 20, who will face off over two nights of debates this week.

On Wednesday, the contenders are: Sen. Cory Booker, former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, Mayor Bill de Blasio, former Rep. John Delaney, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Gov. Jay Inslee, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Rep. Tim Ryan and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

And on Thursday, it’s: Sen. Michael Bennett, Biden, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Kamala Harris, former Gov. John Hickenlooper, Sanders, Rep. Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang.

(The links direct to the K-12 platforms of candidates who offer more than one specific policy proposal focused on preK-12 and go beyond generalities like ensuring good schools or expanding STEM education. Note: There aren’t many.)

Here are five ways education could come up during this week’s four hours of debate:

1. Free college: This holdover from 2016 is often used as the partition line between the moderate and liberal wings of the 2020 field. Candidates fall into a few camps, ranging from free community college to free four-year tuition for families under a certain income, to free tuition for all plus expenses.

Some candidates have also proposed forgiving existing student debt — most prominently Warren, who would forgive debt based on borrowers’ income, and Sanders, who earlier this week introduced a bill to forgive all outstanding $1.6 trillion.

Though Sanders and Warren are perhaps most associated with the issue, every candidate has been asked about it. Young Democratic activists in New Hampshire are particularly focused on the issue, given the high cost of in-state tuition there.

• Read more: Free College. Debt-Free College. Higher Ed Affordability. Whatever You Call It, It’s the First Big Education Issue of the 2020 Campaign

2. Charters: Though Democrats at the state and federal levels have long supported charter schools, the tide is turning, particularly as school choice has become so closely associated with DeVos.

• Read more: For Democrats, Race Plays a Key Role in Support of Charter Schools, New Polling Shows

The federal government plays only a small role in how the charter schools are funded and governed. But that hasn’t kept the issue from attracting plenty of media coverage. And it’s currently in the spotlight in West Virginia, where Republican leaders and teachers unions are at loggerheads over a bill to permit them for the first time.

Sanders came out swinging (rhetorically, at least) against charters last month, urging a ban on for-profit schools and a moratorium on federal dollars for new charter schools. Others have also taken a hard line against for-profits and generally expressed skepticism, with even longtime backers like Booker publicly calling some charter laws “sickening.”

Education pundit Douglas Harris of the Brookings Institution in a recent blog post ranked the “top-tier” candidates on their charter positions: Warren, O’Rourke and Booker are in the “supported charter schools in the past but since backed off” camp; Biden is listed as “currently a skeptic”; Sanders and Harris are “long-time opponents”; and Buttigieg is listed as “no current position.”

3. Early ed & family issues: Universal pre-K has been party orthodoxy for several years (President Obama put forward a plan in 2013, and it was part of the 2016 platform), and discussion of early-years programs has only expanded in the years since.

• Read more: Even after ‘historic’ federal spending, today’s child care system serves only 1 in 6 eligible kids. Now Congress might approve billions more to stem the crisis

During the debates, look for topics like universal child care (Warren has a plan); maternal mortality, particularly the disproportionately high rates among black women (Harris and others have discussed it); and paid family leave.

4. School safety: This is another area where a historically non-education issue has a big impact on what happens in schools. This is a clear opportunity for the candidates to separate themselves from the Trump Administration, particularly on the issue of arming teachers, which the president supports. Gun control is another easy debate win in a party that increasingly endorses it. Social-emotional learning and mental health services could also be part of the conversation.

5. School lunch: Viral “lunch shaming” stories, where schools give a different meal to students whose families carry a debt on their lunch bills, have attracted widespread public criticism and government remedies, with state lawmakers passing new legislation to ban the practice.

• Read more: Inside the School Lunch Affordability Gap: Too Affluent for Free Food, Can’t Afford $1.75 Meals

If the issue comes up, look for candidates to talk about the success of “community eligibility,” a change in the 2010 reauthorization of the school lunch bill that allows every student at school to receive a free lunch if at least 40 percent of students are eligible. It reduces stigma for students who need the assistance, and cuts down on paperwork for districts. Both Sanders and Castro have proposed making free lunch universal.

Seventy percent of districts reported no incidences of seclusion and restraint in the 2015-16 Civil Rights Data Collection, but an analysis indicates that it likely didn’t capture all data, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office wrote to members of Congress.

The agency studied large districts that educate more than 100,000 students each. According to department figures, each should have had at least one incidence of seclusion or restraint. Of the 30 districts that met that description, 10 reported zero incidents in the last data collection. But only one of those 10, the district that covers Hawaii, actually had no incidents. The rest couldn’t report the data, so they should have left the response blank and explained why, according to GAO. An additional data veracity check that’s already part of the reporting system for those districts didn’t catch the errors.

The figures remained uncorrected in public reports. That disparity in big districts means there’s likely problems elsewhere across the country, according to GAO.

“It is important that Education immediately take steps to address underreporting. Failure to do so will result in data that continues to provide an incomplete picture of the prevalence of restraint and seclusion, leaving [the Office for Civil Rights] unable to reliably use a key tool in carrying out its enforcement of civil rights laws,” Jacqueline Nowicki, director of GAO’s education, workforce and income security division, wrote in a letter to lawmakers.

Students with disabilities, boys, and students of color are far more likely to experience seclusion and restraint than their peers, and advocates have worked to reduce the use of the practices in schools.

Advocates said they were not surprised by the findings.

“We knew that there were incidents of restraint and seclusion happening even though there were zero reported,” said Denise Marshall, executive director of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates.

The Education Department in January launched an initiative to combat “inappropriate” uses of seclusion and restraint, so it should be focused on getting accurate data, said Deborah Ziegler, director of policy and advocacy at the Council for Exceptional Children.

“If you’re going to help states and locals address this problem, you’ve got to have clear evidence that there is a problem,” she said.

GAO recommended that the Education Department take several steps to remedy inaccuracies as it collects 2017-18 data that will be reported next year, including clarifying when districts should report zero instances versus leaving a part of the report blank to indicate a lack of data, and following up with districts that indicate zero incidents.

The department agreed with most of the recommendations but said it isn’t feasible to go back and change past collections once they’ve been publicly reported, as GAO suggested.

Congressional Democrats from both chambers urged the department to follow GAO’s recommendations, and two House Democrats said the report shows that federal legislation on seclusion and restraint is needed.

“Today’s report is also further evidence that the state patchwork of restraint and seclusion standards is failing to protect students and educators. Congress must establish a nationwide minimum safety standard that gives educators, school districts, and states the tools and training to use more effective, evidence-based strategies that improve school climate,” Reps. Bobby Scott and Don Beyer said in a release.

Scott, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, called a hearing earlier this year on seclusion and restraint and argued for federal legislation, which he and Beyer have introduced in the past. They’ve said legislation will be reintroduced shortly for consideration in this Congress.

Republicans at the hearing agreed that schools should limit the use of seclusion and restraint but were skeptical that congressional intervention is necessary, limiting the chances of a bill ultimately becoming law.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

U.S. child care is widely seen as being in crisis. It’s costly, in many states more expensive than college tuition, and hard for parents to find. Workers in the field receive low wages, leaving many eligible for public assistance. And the programs available for many families are often not up to the quality standards that support learning at a crucial stage of young children’s brain development.  

Last year, Congress dramatically increased the major federal source of child care funding, allowing states to begin chipping away at problems left unaddressed after years of stagnant funding.

The increase, an additional $2.37 billion each in fiscal years 2018 and 2019, allows states to add more children to program rolls, increase payments to providers, and pay for new congressionally-mandated safety and quality improvements.

There’s been bipartisan support for the issue, with figures as politically divergent as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and presidential daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump making it a policy focus.

“There’s a real national conversation going on about broadening eligibility, universal child care,” said Christine Johnson-Staub, senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy. “I feel like this is a moment where no matter which side of the aisle people are on, people really get that child care is a critical issue for families and it’s a lynchpin issue economically.”

Though advocates hailed the increase as “truly historic,” they are seeking more funding for the program, which still only serves about 1 in 6 eligible children. Early ed groups asked Congress for another $5 billion for fiscal 2020; House Democrats proposed adding about half of that, $2.4 billion next year.

The House is now consider that bill. But despite the bipartisan appetite for new dollars, additional funds for child care, like everything else, are contingent on Congress and President Trump agreeing to a budget deal that raises overall spending caps.

The new funding goes through the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which has existed in its current form since the 1990s. It sends money to states, territories and tribes to fund child care for low-income families. Participating children must be under the age of 12, with at least one parent who is working or in school. Federal laws set the maximum family income at 85 percent of a state’s median income, though states can set that bar lower.

Like Social Security and Medicare, the bulk of the program’s funding is considered mandatory, meaning it is covered annually without congressional action. But that mandatory funding — about $3 billion a year — hasn’t increased since the mid-90s.

“This program historically has been underfunded,” particularly given its dual purposes as both an educational policy for kids and an economic policy that allows more parents to work, said Jay Nichols, director of federal policy and government affairs at Child Care Aware of America.

Despite that flat funding, Congress in 2014 mandated needed, but often costly, quality improvements for federally-eligible child care providers. That combination meant fewer children were covered than just a few years ago: 1.37 million on an average month in 2016, the lowest number served since the mid-90s.

Long-term, it would probably take about $100 billion annually to cover every eligible child, Nichols estimated, based on current spending and the number of eligible children served. Policymakers would also have to address widespread child care deserts, where providers simply aren’t available.

To allow states to make more long-term plans, much of that funding should come from mandatory sources, meaning it wouldn’t be subject to congressional whims, he added.

“Basically, there needs to be much more — more longer-term congressional support down the road,” Nichols said.

States decide how to use new dollars

Advocates estimated that states could use the new funding to implement the 2014 recommendations and add up to 230,000 children to the program nationwide.

A February study by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found 44 states planned to use the new funding to meet some of the 2014 law’s regulations, like professional development for child care workers. More than half of states reported they’d use the new funding to help pay for background checks of workers required under the 2014 law.

Fewer states, 16, planned to add families to the program from their waiting lists. Two states, Arkansas and Mississippi, went so far as to clear their waiting lists.

Many states increased the monthly value of the vouchers, which gave families more options and sent more money to low-paid providers.

One was Iowa, which has lost 42 percent of its child care providers in the last five years, largely due to low wages.

“Any way that we can increase the income that our providers are making, hopefully we’ll be able to [keep] from losing another 42 percent over the next five years,” said Dawn Oliver Wiand, executive director of the Iowa Women’s Foundation. “It won’t help everybody, but for the providers it is helping, it’s a huge benefit to their bottom lines.”

In Maryland, lawmakers added state dollars on top of the federal increase. That allowed the state to increase the subsidy rate to cover 60 percent of average costs by the summer of 2021, and to double the income cap for participating families, to over $70,000 for a family of four. They also added enough funding to clear their waiting list.

That means new families can participate and that they’ll have more choices, and hopefully that more providers will take vouchers in the future, said Christina Lopez, co-president of the Maryland Association for the Education of Young Children.

“It’s meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Most substantially, what it says is that Maryland has made a commitment to early childhood education, to families and to the understanding of how these early years impact us,” Lopez said.

Despite the increase, there’s still much to be done to provide truly high-quality options to all families, Lopez said. “It’s a great investment and we’re excited for it, but we know that the work isn’t done.”

Rucker Johnson (photo by Peg Skorpinski); book cover courtesy of Rucker Johnson.

Most Americans believe that after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, everyone tried their best to integrate schools and it just didn’t work. But that’s a myth, professor Rucker Johnson argues in a new book.

Johnson in his new book “Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works” argues that integration did improve the academic and life outcomes of black students, and that America ignores those lessons at its peril, particularly as schools have become starkly re-segregated in recent decades.

“We’re both in a place where we have unprecedented racial diversity among our population of today’s schoolchildren … [and] the classrooms in which they’re being educated are hugely segregated, to the point that it’s really hard to detect that Brown ever occurred,” said Johnson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Johnson’s book examines the effects of integration, particularly during the peak of desegregation in the 1970s and 1980s. The slow roll-out of school desegregation efforts across the country meant that otherwise similar students were effectively divided into “treatment” groups that experienced integrated schools and “control” groups that did not. Data from school districts and a nationally representative data set of life outcomes, when paired with the “treatment” and “control” groups let Johnson set up what he called “parallel universes” to evaluate the effects of desegregation.

Among his findings:

• Black children who experienced integrated schools from K-12 completed more than a full year of education than comparable black children in segregated schools.
• Five years in a desegregated school led to increased wages and work hours that, combined, came to a 30 percent increase in earnings.
• Exposure to desegregated schools in elementary school led to a 22 point decline in the probability the student would be incarcerated as an adult.

Johnson argues that a combination of three education policies — integration, high-quality preschool, and school funding reforms that funnel more money into high-needs schools — is the best way to improve outcomes.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Was there a golden age of school integration?

Rucker: It’s a 10-15 year window, and it wasn’t universal across the country. It depended on which district got that 10 or 15-year window. That’s actually being generous in some places. I definitely document a kind of golden period in which we were moving from desegregation to integration, and we were moving from access to inclusion, and we were moving from exposure to understanding. But as soon as those processes were really beginning to take hold, the politics of reform, the impatience that governs looking at just short-run test scores, and just the gravitational pull that incentivizes segregation [ended it.]

I think there’s a number of factors that hijacked its continued success, but there was definitely a period in which we saw unprecedented narrowing of academic achievement gaps, of educational attainment. We saw widespread college enrollment rates among 18- and 19-year-old black students by the mid-’80s that had risen to the same level as white 18- and 19-year-olds. Then we’ve seen a significant stagnation and a widening of many of those academic achievement gaps, in some respects, but certainly not a narrowing of them.

I think what’s important about this work is it’s not just that these interventions can be profound in their transformative effects on educational outcomes, but it’s the way in which they have significant impacts in narrowing racial differences in earnings and the annual incidence of poverty in adulthood and adult health. It’s really recognizing that schools can play a pivotal role in the intergenerational transmission of either opportunity, poverty, or upward mobility. That’s what one key emphasis of the work is — that our schools can play a catalytic role in providing opportunity, but they can also play a role in reinscribing and reinforcing inequality and reproducing it.

How did you go about researching the book?

We’re following more than 15,000 kids from childhood to adulthood, but we’re able to really use data as a time machine to trace out the exposure of pre-school opportunities that they may have had, the exposure to [greater] per-pupil spending and [smaller] class size and the extent of school segregation…and then we’re able to look chronologically at their subsequent development and academic achievement…and then trace that further as they enter their 20s, 30s and 40s, to look at their adult earnings and their likelihood of being in poverty.

Those are pieces, but I would say one of the reasons we’re able to do that is precisely because the timing of school desegregation, the timing of school funding reforms in this country and the timing of the rollout of high-quality preschools, have been uneven and the kind of slow pace of that really created policy laboratory conditions to look at the interventions independent of other factors — to be able to isolate the role of school quality on these later life trajectories.

That’s the way that we do it in a quantitatively rigorous way, but that’s not really enough to get inside the black box of what is actually happening in the schools. That’s where our qualitative interviews really helped us, interviews with superintendents and teachers and jurists who presided over major court rulings around school funding reforms and school desegregation. [We could] couple the aerial view that’s coming from the quantitative data to the qualitative insights about how and the way in which the reforms are implemented, [in addition to looking at] how do those things matter and make the process of integration a reality.

Of all the findings in the book, is there any one that sticks out?

When you look at student outcomes and you look at the fact that we have significant achievement gaps today by socio-economic status and race…I think what’s missed is [not only] how instrumental a role school policies can play in narrowing those gaps, but how inconsistently as a country we’ve committed to the investment in lower-income families and communities that can yield those results.

When I first started this book, I had done quite a bit of work on school desegregation by itself, but not as connected with school funding reforms or early pre-school investments…It’s really that synergy that was the big eye opener that unlocked to me a lot of the answers for what’s plaguing our current educational investments, and the siloed ways in which we invest in kids, and invest much too late to address many of the challenges that face them.

Why did you decide to look at Head Start, when pre-K is still often seen as outside the public K-12 system?

A big descriptive fact that illuminates the significance of the pre-K environment is simply that half of the achievement gap that we observe among third graders was already apparent at kindergarten entry. It became clear that what precedes the kindergarten experience has to close some of the school readiness gaps that exist by socio-economic status.

Even today, half of 3- and 4-year-olds in California, which has had significant increases in public investments in pre-K, don’t have access to a high-quality pre-K. These are not just historical exercises in policy analysis but rather the kinds of implications that are very relevant today. There’s significant school spending disparities between low-income and more affluent communities.

[The lessons learned from this research] really bring dividends when we import those lessons into today’s contemporary debates about how to address the persistent opportunity gaps that exist between low-income children and their more affluent counterparts.

Has any district ever achieved your ideal trifecta of integration, school finance reform and high-quality pre-school?

I don’t think that I could have done the analysis without there being some representative examples of that, but at the same time, they aren’t places that were able to sustain that commitment.

We don’t have a large number, for example, of high-poverty schools where kids systematically, year in and year out, are overcoming the odds. The reason for that is because there are significant challenges in just thinking you can throw money at the problem. The school funding reforms that redistribute state resources and dollars to lower-income communities, so that the health of their schools is not dependent on the wealth of their communities, has been a significant impact in narrowing achievement gaps. But at the same time, when all of those reforms are done in very segregated, concentrated poverty conditions, the return on those investments aren’t nearly as big and beneficial as when they’re able to be done in more integrated spaces.

We would like to have closed the book on highlighting a specific district that really had the hallmarks of this trifecta prescription that we’re describing, but you’ll notice the book doesn’t end on a specific district, because we weren’t really able to identify such a model that was sustained into today.

That’s kind of the point: A lot of the good work that was able to be done wasn’t documented in real time. When myopic politicians are focused on short-run budget deficits, sometimes very important public investments in children get undermined. Hopefully, the evidence will allow some of those efforts to be sustained so that all kids are getting better access to opportunity.

How would you evaluate current integration efforts?

I would say that they need to be resuscitated. I would say that they are in the hospital. I would say they are needing intensive care units. I would say they don’t have that much of a heartbeat.

It’s deeply concerning, and yet I think there’s a groundswell of movement that is positive and actually that is being mobilized through student voices and perspectives that we have found to really invigorate and revive the movement towards integration. Kids, who understand what being confined to segregated spaces contributes to their learning environment, are voicing these very important ideas. They have a strong research base. We need some courageous adults to have the conviction to get behind [them].

I think part of this is that it requires a coalition, and a racially diverse coalition. This is not a zero-sum game. This is not like benefits that positively affect minorities somehow negatively affect non-Hispanic whites. This is something that has the potential to boost all of our collective outcomes.

What other areas deserve more research?

I think the school choice movement and with charter schools…whether that is leading to a greater expansion of opportunity or actually cutting off many children from good opportunities.

Those are outstanding questions, in terms of the way gerrymandered school district boundaries are being used to exclude children of color and lower-income students from certain school communities. Those are real policy choices that are happening in ways that are re-segregating our schools. Those are things that we certainly try to highlight in the book, because those are things that aren’t happening by coincidence but through explicit policy designs for those aims.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (Photo by Getty Images)

Following his proposal Friday to limit charter schools, Sen. Bernie Sanders over the weekend released perhaps the most substantive K-12 platform of any of the major presidential candidates. It touches nearly every area of K-12 policy, from protections for LGBT students to teacher pay to special education, but perhaps what sticks out most of all is the huge increase in spending he proposes.

In what Sanders touted as the “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education” — named for the future Supreme Court justice who argued against school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education — the Vermont Democrat “calls for a transformative investment in our children, our teachers and our schools and a fundamental rethinking of the unjust and inequitable funding of our public education system,” his campaign said on its website.

• Read more: Bernie Sanders Wants New Limits on Charters, but Impact May Be Less Than Revolutionary

Merits of the individual ideas aside, it would cost an eye-popping amount of money — more than double the current budget — to pay for all of them.

Some of the proposals are without specific price tags, like creating a fund to train teachers at historically black colleges. Others, like his plan to “close the gap in school infrastructure funding to renovate, modernize and green the nation’s schools,” would seemingly be a one-time investment. Still others, like raising teacher pay to a minimum of $60,000 and setting a minimum per-pupil spending, would probably require new state dollars.

Ignoring those unspecified and one-time expenditures (and the additional $6 billion in funding for the Agriculture Department that would be required to provide universal free school lunch) brings the total to an additional $74 billion a year for the Education Department. That would more than double its funding, currently about $71 billion a year, and doesn’t include any higher ed proposals, including Sanders’s free college plan, or any changes to early childhood programs.

Here are some of the biggest-ticket proposals, and how much additional spending they’d require:

1. Triple Title I funding — $32 billion

This proposal is mentioned several times throughout the Sanders plan, as a remedy for both high-needs schools and special education costs. Current funding is $15.86 billion, so tripling that figure would be $47.58 billion a year, or another $31.72 billion annually.

2. Increase special education funding — $30 billion

The original bargain of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was that the federal government would provide 40 percent of additional costs for educating students with disabilities, in exchange for states and schools providing that education. But the federal government has never done so, and increasing federal funding has bipartisan support.

Sanders, though, wants to go further and raise the federal government’s share to 50 percent. Based on calculations in IDEA full funding bills introduced in Congress, it would take about $43 billion a year to hit that 50 percent mark, an increase of $29.75 billion from current funding.

3. A new community schools program — $5 billion

Sanders proposes a $5 billion community schools program. There isn’t one currently, but House Democrats have proposed spending $260 million in the coming fiscal year.

4. Additional funding for afterschool and summer programs — $3.8 billion

Sanders wants to raise funding for these programs to $5 billion, up from the $1.2 billion they receive this year. The Trump administration has proposed eliminating this funding three times, to widespread backlash — a fact Sanders notes in his campaign literature.

5. New funding for career and technical education — $3.7 billion

Spending on CTE, like IDEA, has bipartisan support. Sanders calls for $5 billion for federal grants for the program, which get about $1.3 billion annually under the current spending deal.

6. More money for magnet schools — $893 million

Sanders proposes $1 billion for the federal magnet school program, up from the current $107 million. These schools of choice have often been used to promote desegregation, and Sanders touts the new funding as a way “to help integrate our schools.”

(Photo: Getty Images)

American middle schoolers are performing better on a national assessment of technology and engineering, an improvement driven largely by girls.

Overall, students’ average score on the National Assessment of Education Progress in Technology and Engineering Literacy increased two points from 2014, the first time the test was given. Several subgroups showed statistically significant improvements, including white students, black students, students eligible for free and reduced-priced lunch, and students whose parents did not graduate from high school.

Girls’ average score in 2018 was 155 out of a possible 300, five points higher than the boys’ average score of 150.

“The girls have done extremely well on this assessment,” Peggy Carr, assistant commissioner for assessment at the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a call with reporters Friday.

A change of two or three points means the difference is “not random” and statistically significant, Carr said, “so girls improving to the point that they’re now five points ahead of boys is a meaningful statement.”

The results come in the midst of an increasing focus across the country to get more girls, particularly girls of color, into science, technology, engineering and math careers.

The gender gap was present in the 2014 results as well, though it was smaller four years ago.

The test also asked students whether they had taken any classes related to technology or engineering. More students overall are taking these type of classes — 57 percent versus 52 percent in 2014 — and students who took the classes did better on the tests overall. Girls, however, still lagged behind the boys in taking those classes.

Though overall scores increased, and more students are reaching “proficient” benchmarks set by testgivers, fewer than half of students, 46 percent, reached that bar. And achievement gaps between white and Hispanic students, and between white and black students, remained.

The assessment was given in 2018 as part of the NAEP, the test often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card and better known for its biannual release of reading and math scores for fourth- and eighth-graders. It was given on laptops to about 15,000 eighth-graders in 600 public and private schools.

• Read more: Petrilli —The 7 Key Storylines in This Year’s Disappointing NAEP Results
  

Rather than a baseline measure of knowledge, the test assessed how students used their knowledge of technology and engineering to interact with the world, Carr emphasized.

Sample questions, for instance, required students to look at a chart comparing traditional and energy-saving light bulbs and highlight the information that might convince someone to buy the more energy-efficient version. Another asked students to explain how the simplified packaging companies can use when selling products online would benefit the environment.

This article was produced in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Rodney Robinson on Wednesday was named 2019 National Teacher of the Year. (Photo courtesy of Richmond Public Schools)

Rodney Robinson, a history teacher at a Virginia juvenile justice center, plans to use his new platform as 2019 National Teacher of the Year to highlight the school-to-prison pipeline and the need for juvenile justice reform.

Much like last year’s selection of Mandy Manning, a teacher of refugee and new immigrant students, Robinson’s win, announced Wednesday, highlights the unique needs of a special student population.

But Robinson’s students are just regular teenagers, he said.

“They like cheesy teenage romance novels. Their favorite show is ‘Teen Wolf.’ They’re just kids. They’ve made mistakes, and America is a country of second chances. We just want to make sure they have a quality education to take full advantage of their second chance,” he said.

Robinson, a 19-year veteran educator, has spent the last few years teaching history in the Virgie Binford Education Center, a school inside a juvenile detention center in Richmond, Virginia.

He wants to use his new platform to work on issues like equitable school funding, increasing the hiring pool for teachers of color, and ending the school-to-prison pipeline, particularly by limiting out-of-school suspensions.

Robinson, called “Big Rob” by his students, also wants to take advantage of the recent bipartisan support for reforming the justice system.

“My goal now is to get the juvenile justice system involved in some of those reforms,” he said. “This is a bipartisan effort and we need to take advantage of this momentum right now.”

JUST ANNOUNCED: The 2019 National Teacher of the Year is… Rodney Robinson! He teaches social studies and history at Virgie Binford Education Center, a school inside the Richmond Juvenile Detention Center. #NTOY19 pic.twitter.com/KBtHildnEE

— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) April 24, 2019

Young people leaving the juvenile justice system face some of the same problems adults do when leaving the prison system, Robinson said. Beyond education, they need social services to keep them from re-offending, which they often do just in a need to survive, he added.

Two of Robinson’s former students, who are now teaching elementary school, were highlighted on CBS This Morning, which revealed the news Wednesday morning.

“I was always taught…it’s your job to bring up the next generation so they can be there for their generation,” he said. “It means that I’m putting forth my mission.”

Check out past Teacher of the Year coverage:

—2016 winner Jahana Hayes, who was elected to Congress last year

—2017 winner Sydney Chaffee, and finalists Chris Gleason, Megan Gross and Athanasia Kyriakakos

—2018 winner Mandy Manning, her visit to the White House, and her public teach-in to challenge immigration policies.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

Discussion of K-12 education was next to nonexistent in the State of the Union address Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s second.

The president mentioned the issue just once, when he said, without elaboration, “To help support working parents, the time has come to pass school choice for America’s children.”

The words echoed Trump’s 2017 address to Congress when he called on lawmakers to pass a bill that would allow students to attend the school of their choice, no matter the type.

He didn’t offer any details then, either. The only substantial change to federal school choice law during his administration thus far was the expansion of 529 tax-advantaged savings accounts to cover private K-12 tuition.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in a press release praised the president’s call for school choice and said she looks forward to continuing to work with Congress on the issue.

“The freedom to choose the right education should not only be for the rich, powerful and connected. All students should have the freedom to pursue an education that develops their talents, unleashes their unique potential and prepares them for a successful life,” she said.

The dearth of K-12 talk in Trump’s speech stood out even more when contrasted with the Democrats’ response, given by Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia state representative and Democratic candidate for governor.

While Trump devoted just one sentence to K-12, Abrams touched, albeit very briefly, on school safety, the cost of higher education, high-quality schools, and teacher pay.

“We owe [children] safe schools and the highest standards, regardless of zip code,” she said, calling for new gun safety measures. The country also should “support educators and invest what is necessary to unleash the power of America’s greatest minds,” Abrams said.

In Trump’s speech, larger issues that could have touched substantively on education either didn’t (in the case of immigration) or were only briefly discussed (in the case of infrastructure).

Most of Trump’s immigration discussion focused on enforcement, border security, and his call for a wall on the border with Mexico. He didn’t address the fate of the DACA program that protects young undocumented immigrants; the issue, currently tied up in legal battles, was a focus of last year’s speech.

He claimed Tuesday that “mass illegal immigration” is leading to “overburdened schools.” (The Supreme Court in 1982 ruled that states may not discriminate in K-12 education based on a student’s immigration status.)

On infrastructure spending, a repeated call from his last State of the Union, the president said only that the parties should unite on the issue, one trumpeted by both parties.

“I am eager to work with you on legislation to deliver new and important infrastructure investment, including investments in the cutting-edge industries of the future. This is not an option. This is a necessity,” he said.

Democrats have already said any large-scale legislation to rebuild roads and bridges should also include crumbling schools, though the administration hasn’t included schools in previous proposals and Congress has historically been reluctant to appropriate federal dollars toward educational infrastructure.

One area in which education got a spotlight was among the guests invited to watch the speech from the House chamber.

Both Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought parents of students killed in the Parkland, Florida, shooting nearly one year ago, and Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, was among the labor union leaders Pelosi invited.

Trump and First Lady Melania Trump invited Joshua Trump, a middle schooler from Delaware who, according to his parents, is bullied because of his last name. (Commentators pointed out the irony of the invitation and the first lady’s broader anti-bullying campaign, given the president’s frequent Twitter insults and the rise of bullying since his election.) The president did not address bullying in his speech.

Education has been an infrequent star in presidential addresses, like last year, when DACA was the only school-related issue in Trump’s speech.

Though Trump has largely stayed out of K-12 education, President Barack Obama used State of the Union addresses to unveil and push a few big initiatives, including a free community college program in 2015 and a pre-K expansion in 2013. Neither became law.

Many of the Trump administration’s biggest K-12 proposals, such as one for a voucher program, have come through its annual budget requests. Though officially due on the first Monday of February, presidents routinely flout this deadline; Trump’s will be delayed until mid-March due to the government shutdown, the Office of Management and Budget said Monday.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Education reform, at least its most contentious elements, didn’t have a great night Tuesday.

In Arizona, nearly two-thirds of voters rejected a bid by lawmakers to provide education savings accounts to all students.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, a villain of teachers unions, lost his bid for a third term to state Superintendent Tony Evers, who wants to overturn limits on collective bargaining and the state’s voucher program.

In Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer won the governor’s contest pledging to “end the DeVos agenda in Michigan.”

But are those losses truly caused by voters rejecting specific education reform proposals, or are they the collateral damage of other political trends, including a repudiation of President Trump?

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that while very few people cited education as their top electoral concern, some of the results stand as a repudiation of what he called “the hard-edged definitions of school reform.”  

“Voters showed, and policymakers showed, a massive distaste for a lot of where school reform has brought us,” Hess said at a panel Wednesday.

An analysis he conducted this spring of gubernatorial primary candidates’ education platforms, in fact, showed most concentrated on a far more bipartisan issue: career and technical education. Few mentioned testing or accountability, and almost none did so positively.

There was a movement away from the reforms that have been “bitter and hostile and frustrating,” he added. “Folks in the education space would be well served by taking a big deep breath.”

Others, however, cautioned not to be too myopic about the importance of education. All elections are local, particularly when it comes to education, and to the extent the midterms were about any larger national themes, they centered on issues like health care and immigration.

In fairness, education reform did have some wins in the midterms, like Jared Polis’s primary win for Colorado governor, when he fended off a union-backed candidate on his way to winning the general election Tuesday.

“I think we have to be careful not to over-interpret any of this in terms of education, because it was such a peripheral issue,” said Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank.

Ed reform policies like tough standards and rigorous teacher evaluation, once considered more centrist and bipartisan, have lost some magic in our increasingly polarized political era.

“We are at a very low point in education policy. There hasn’t been this little activity — sort of new, big ideas — for 20 years. I think that period started two years ago, and we’re still in the middle of it, and there’s just not an appetite,” he said.

The bipartisan coalition that supported education reform through the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies has weakened, said Tom Loveless, an education researcher formerly with the Brookings Institution. He blamed that faltering coalition on disappointing results.

“I do think we’re at some kind of turning point, or we have already turned, and school reform does not have the same kind of political firepower that it had five, 10, 15 years ago,” he said.

That distaste for, or disinterest in, education reform may have some real consequences.

The void of voter and policymaker interest in the middle leaves a “Titanic battle at the top among the extremes,” said Sandy Kress, a senior education policy adviser to President George W. Bush. With no center, the combatants are teachers unions and their allies on the left, and extreme anti-tax and government control advocates on the right, he said.

New Mexico has been one of the exemplars of education reform, with well-known state chiefs driving hard on issues like test-based teacher evaluations, A-F school grades, and rigorous standards. Voters Tuesday elected Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham, who campaigned on overturning those reforms, particularly teacher evaluations.

What once was “one of the states that was really holding firm” to those initiatives, now “seems very likely it will not be in that camp in two years’ time,” Hess said.

• Read more: EDlection2018: Michelle Lujan Grisham Will Be New Mexico’s Next Governor, Promises a Rollback of Her Predecessor’s Education Reforms

In Nevada, the Democratic sweep of state government, the first time the party has held the governor’s mansion and state Assembly and Senate since 1992, almost assuredly means lawmakers won’t move to find a new funding source for their universal education savings account program, and could jeopardize the future of its state takeover district.

Rather than pushing for more big reforms, education advocates should build on initiatives already in the works, like implementing the Common Core or improving charter quality, Petrilli said.

“We’ve got to wait. To some degree, we’ve got to hunker down and wait for the politics to hopefully return to normal,” he said.  

Several advocates interviewed said the lack of political attention may actually be a good thing, allowing the work to continue out of the political fray.

If voters care more about issues like health care, the economy and LGBTQ rights, “if you can bring together a platform that does all those things as a Democrat, and education isn’t the top issue, you may be able to go farther than you could have otherwise,” on education reforms, said Charles Barone, chief policy officer at Democrats for Education Reform.  

He pointed to candidates like Polis, or Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut who was easily reelected Tuesday after pushing hard to put accountability provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Looking ahead, the results of this election could continue to impact whether and how campaigns deal with education in 2020.

Because white suburban voters were so key to Democrats’ big wins, they’ll be an important bloc in the 2020 presidential elections, said Joanne Weiss, former chief of staff to then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Those are the very voters who believe education is working and more reforms aren’t needed, setting up a counterweight to the black and Latino voters who traditionally vote Democrat and care a great deal about the issues, she said.

“That means that education reform…issues are going to be problematic because they’re going to play to black and Latino voters, but they’re not going to play well to the suburban white voters,” she said.

Trying to attract two groups of voters with competing priorities might mean the Democratic candidates for president just ignore it, she said: “It’s probably going to make it so that education is just going to fly under the radar and not matter at all.”

Students march in support of gun reform legislation in February in Silver Spring, Maryland. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The February school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and subsequent student activism around school safety and gun control are fueling young people’s political engagement ahead of next week’s midterm elections.

“We can argue all we want, but the only way we win the argument [for more gun control] is when we go and we vote on these decisions,” Mei-Ling Ho-Shing, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said at a conference Friday.

Ho-Shing and eight other high school student activists from around the country spoke on a panel during the Council of the Great City Schools’ annual conference in Baltimore days ahead of a new poll confirming the strong link between the Parkland shooting and the civic engagement of students. A study released Monday from the Education Week Research Center found that 40 percent of the youngest eligible voters, those ages 18 and 19, cited the Florida shooting as having quite a lot or a great deal of influence on their political engagement. It tied with “reaching the voting age,” and edged out President Trump and his administration as drivers of engagement, the study found.

However, the Baltimore forum and a spate of youth-focused polls offered some mixed signals about whether students of voting age would show up to the polls next week in any large numbers.

Students have led a wave of activism in the eight months since the Parkland shooting, including a national school walkout and the March for Our Lives in Washington. Leaders of the movement from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School led a national bus tour this summer to register young voters, and a group of students last weekend wrote a School Safety Bill of Rights calling for better mental health care in schools and gun control reforms.

• Read more: Unleashing the youth vote: Power California’s Luis Sánchez is bringing 25 years’ experience mobilizing young people to the polls this November — along with thousands of new voters

On school safety questions, the students at the Baltimore conference were generally, though not universally, opposed to increasing the number of metal detectors, school safety officers, and other common security measures on campus.

“We should always be empowering our students, not disenfranchising them. More guns has never been the solution to any problem,” said Esther Ubadigbo, a junior at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa, said of arming teachers, another proposed solution to school shootings.

Beyond gun issues and school safety, they discussed their concerns with the environment, immigration, the MeToo movement, and lowering the voting age.

The student panelists’ concerns about school safety and gun control are also reflected in broader public opinion polls of young voters.

In the Education Week survey, which was funded by the Education Writers Association, 15 percent of young people cited either school safety (8 percent) or gun control (7 percent) as the most important social problem facing the country. They were the most cited concerns among a long list, above issues like terrorism (4 percent) or health care (3 percent).

A separate study released last week of a broader group of young people also found a high degree of concern about guns: two-thirds of voters ages 18 to 29 said school shootings are one of the most important issues facing America, and 70 percent said gun laws in America should be more strict.

That’s similar to the general population: 68 percent of people surveyed by Pew in September said gun policy was a “very important” issue affecting their votes this fall, close behind Supreme Court appointments (the poll was conducted in the midst of the confirmation fight for now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh), health care, and the economy.

Despite the walkouts and increased media presence of student activists, the leaders at the Baltimore conference, most of whom aren’t yet old enough to vote, weren’t particularly optimistic that their slightly older peers would turn up at the polls next week.

“We tend to represent a very small amount of students that are civically engaged,” Nick Paesler, a senior at Cleveland High School in Portland, Oregon, told the conference. “Students don’t really see how their voice and their vote can make a difference.”

Some of the students on the panel said there isn’t a larger youth voting movement because there isn’t one bipartisan issue that unites young people’s advocacy, like ending the Vietnam War or lowering the voting age did in the 1970s.

Others said it’s because those in power make decisions that ignore the voice of young people.

“We see everything in our country and we think, or I think, ‘Man, our country really doesn’t care about me,’” Kay Galarza, a student in New York City, said. “Our country either doesn’t see us, or hears us but decides to silence us even further.”

The Education Week study, which surveyed just the youngest eligible voters, found very different results: nearly two-thirds of respondents said they plan to vote.

But there is cause for a high degree of skepticism. If anywhere even close to the 63 percent of those young people actually vote, it would be a historic high. No more than 20 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 have turned out in any midterm election in the past 20 years, according to the U.S. Census. In 2014, the turnout was particularly low for that age group, just 15.9 percent.

Other surveys predict far less robust participation by young voters: a June poll found that just 28 percent of those 18 to 29 said they are “absolutely certain” they’ll vote next week.

• Read more from The 74: 

Students Ratify School Safety Bill of Rights Calling for New Gun Control, Mental Health Programs

David Hogg Wants to Knock NRA-Backed Candidates Out of Office. His Biggest Obstacle? The Lackluster Voting Habits of His Young Peers

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

(Courtesy: Student Success California)

The Senate voted narrowly Tuesday to confirm Jim Blew, a longtime education reform advocate, to be an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education, rounding out the department’s K-12 team.

Senators voted 50-49 along party lines to confirm Blew as assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development some 10 months after he was nominated. He was the fourth Education Department nominee to be confirmed with only Republican votes, including Secretary Betsy DeVos, Deputy Secretary Mitchell Zais, and Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kenneth Marcus. The latest confirmation reflects the deep partisan divide in Congress over President Trump, DeVos, and school choice.

Blew was educated in LA Unified schools and graduated from Reseda High School. He earned his bachelor’s from LA’s Occidental College and an MBA from Yale.

Several less controversial nominees have been approved by voice vote, a general taking of ayes and nays that indicates no senator wanted to register individual opposition. Monday evening senators voted 85-0 to confirm Scott Stump, an industry executive and former Colorado Community College System leader,  as assistant secretary for career, technical, and adult education.

DeVos congratulated both men in a statement late Tuesday afternoon, noting Stump’s “overwhelming support” and saying of Blew, “After many months of waiting, I am glad to finally have Jim on our team. Through the many years I have known him, he has continually proven himself to be an objective and thoughtful voice for policies that are working to help meet students’ individual needs and prepare them for successful and meaningful lives and careers.”

Democrats’ opposition to Blew’s nomination focused on the same topic — primarily, private school choice — with which they have clashed with DeVos.

• Read more: Ed Dept. picks including LA’s Jim Blew are confronted in confirmation hearings with same battles that faced DeVos: vouchers, ESSA, Title IX

Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said DeVos has continued to advocate the same policies on vouchers that the public rejected in its wide opposition to her confirmation, that she isn’t doing enough to hold states accountable under the Every Student Succeeds Act, and has scaled back civil rights protections for students.

A tough assistant secretary is needed to stand up to DeVos — but that isn’t Blew, Murray said on the Senate floor Tuesday.

“Given the actions and decisions by Secretary DeVos, it is very clear we need an independent voice in this position. Unfortunately, Mr. Blew has proven he is not up to that challenge,” Murray said.

Blew, who has worked in education policy for decades, is well qualified, GOP HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander said.

“Mr. Blew’s sin, with some of my friends on the other side, is that he’s in favor of giving low-income children a choice of a better school and in favor of public charter schools …. No one should be surprised that a Republican president would nominate such an assistant secretary of education,” Alexander said.

In fact, every Republican has nominated education secretaries and assistant secretaries who hold that belief, Alexander added.

No senator besides Alexander and Murray spoke on the floor about Blew’s nomination.

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, on Twitter said Blew will be a “valuable and thoughtful presence” at the Education Department.

Good to see Jim Blew finally confirmed by US Senate as Assistant Sec for Policy at @usedgov. It took far too long, but he’ll be a valuable and thoughtful presence.

— Frederick M. Hess (@rickhess99) July 17, 2018

The Senate has not yet considered the nomination of Mark Schultz to be commissioner of the Rehabilitative Services Administration. By Tuesday, the Trump administration had yet to nominate anyone for assistant secretary of post-secondary education. Nominations for two other positions have not been put forward because they are slated to be eliminated under the department’s reorganization, which awaits approval by Congress.

Blew was nominated last September. His confirmation hearing focused on vouchers, particularly civil rights protections for students with disabilities who use them, the same issue that plagued DeVos, a longtime private school choice advocate, throughout her contentious confirmation and first months in office.

In opening testimony at the November 2017 hearing, Blew said that although he focused his career at the state and local level, the federal government has an important role to play in enforcing civil rights protections and aiding the education of low-income children and those with disabilities.

“I appreciate the confidence and support that President Trump and Secretary DeVos have placed in me and education reform with this nomination,” he said.    

The pace of Cabinet-level confirmations has lagged across the Trump administration, particularly in the Education Department.

The administration was slow to offer names for Senate consideration. Senate Democrats, unable to block nominees on the floor, have drawn out the process by demanding confirmation hearings and forcing Senate leaders to use debate time considering the nominees.

At one point in late 2017, the Education Department had the highest percentage of positions yet to be nominated, and this spring had among the fewest nominees confirmed.

Blew has been serving as the acting secretary of the department’s office of innovation and improvement. He was director of Student Success California, an education reform advocacy organization affiliated with 50CAN (the 50-state Campaign for Achievement Now), a national advocacy group. He is the former president of Students First, the national advocacy organization founded by former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

Blew served for 11 years as director of K-12 reform investments for the Walton Family Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of charter schools. He has held advisory and governing roles for education reform organizations, including the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, the American Federation for Children, which was founded by DeVos, and the Policy Innovators in Education Network.

He was part of the team that started one of LA’s first inner-city independent charter schools. Watts Learning Center celebrated its 20th anniversary last fall.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

This article was published in partnership with The 74.

(Photo: Credit: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

After much waiting and Twitter speculation, President Trump announced on live television Monday night that he is nominating conservative D.C. Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy.

With only one school district under the D.C. Circuit’s jurisdiction, District of Columbia Public Schools, Kavanaugh’s record on school-related cases is relatively thin, particularly when compared to the others rumored to have been on the short list of possible nominees.

A D.C.-area native, Kavanaugh’s mother was “a white schoolteacher in the city’s predominantly black high schools in the late 1960s and early ’70s,” the Washington Examiner reported in 2006.

She taught history at “two largely African-American” high schools, McKinley Tech and H.D. Woodson, before going to law school and eventually becoming a judge in Maryland, Kavanaugh said Monday night. “Her example taught me the importance of equality for all Americans,” he said.

Kavanaugh attended Catholic schools in suburban D.C. including, like current justice Neil Gorsuch, Georgetown Preparatory School.

“The motto of my Jesuit high school was ‘Men for Others,’” he said.

He comes with Ivy League credentials, having graduated from both Yale University and Yale Law School. Kavanaugh said he was hired as a professor at Harvard Law School by liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.

Kavanaugh and his wife, Ashley, have two school-age daughters, Margaret and Liza. They live in Maryland. Kavanaugh described himself as being part of a vibrant D.C. Catholic community and said the priest he once served as an altar boy 40 years ago was in the audience and that the two now serve meals together to the homeless through Catholic Charities.

Kavanaugh was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2003 by President George W. Bush, after working on Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign and in the Bush White House. He also previously worked for Kenneth Starr in his investigation of President Bill Clinton. Kavanaugh’s nomination was held up for years over Democrats’ accusations that he would be too partisan. He also clerked for Kennedy.

The Supreme Court in the past three years has taken up several education cases.

Justices ruled in 2017 that students with special needs are entitled to a more rigorous education, and, perhaps most notably, the court less than two weeks ago ruled that dissenting public employees, including teachers, could not be forced to pay union dues to cover the costs of activities from which they also benefit, like collective bargaining. Kagan wrote the dissent in the Janus dues case. (Read more: Divided Supreme Court Ends Mandatory Dues and — in Further Blow to Unions — Rules Members Must Opt In)

Last year, the court ruled that churches can’t be excluded from public programs because they are religiously affiliated. The latter issue surrounded what’s known as a “Blaine Amendment,” a provision in many state constitutions barring public funding for religious education.

The clauses have been at the center of several funding lawsuits regarding state vouchers and education savings account programs, and the high court ordered the New Mexico Supreme Court to reconsider its decision barring religious schools from a state textbook lending program based on its Blaine Amendment. Catholic and other religious schools are among the strongest supporters of state-level voucher and education savings account programs, which can help low-income families and others cover the cost of tuition.

Kavanaugh wrote an essay praising former Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s efforts to turn back the staunch wall of separation between church and state.

Rehnquist wasn’t able to expand the role of prayer in public school but “had much more success in ensuring that religious schools and institutions could participate as equals in society and in state benefits programs, receiving funding or benefits from the state so long as the funding was pursuant to a neutral program that, among other things, included religious and nonreligious institutions alike.”

Without that string of cases, Kavanaugh wrote, the 2017 Trinity Lutheran ruling that said a church-affiliated preschool in Missouri could not be excluded from a state program for resurfacing playgrounds wouldn’t be possible.

Kavanaugh’s own most notable actions on school-related issues came before he took to the bench.

In 2000, Kavanaugh wrote an amicus brief on behalf of a congressman arguing that student-led prayer should be permitted at school-scheduled events through the public address system; the Supreme Court eventually ruled that it violated the First Amendment.

He also was among a team of attorneys that defended Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a lawsuit that challenged that state’s voucher program in 2000. Kavanaugh’s ties to the Bush family were said to be a drawback to his nomination in the eyes of Trump, who ran against Jeb Bush in 2016.

Kavanaugh is a “judge’s judge,” Trump said Monday evening, adding that he is “universally regarded as one of the sharpest and finest legal minds of our times.” Kavanaugh coaches youth basketball — his daughters’ teams — and tutors children at local elementary schools, Trump added.

Progressive groups immediately blasted the nomination, and protesters rallied outside the Supreme Court. Kennedy has been the swing vote on the court in cases involving affirmative action, marriage equality, and abortion.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said earlier he was confident the Senate would confirm the president’s nominee, though the calculus is tight. Republicans have just 50 votes while Arizona Sen. John McCain remains ill with a brain tumor. Some more moderate Republicans could vote against the judge, while Trump and Republicans have courted Democrats up for re-election in conservative states that the president carried in 2016 and who could support the nominee.

This article was published in partnership with The 74.

Activists rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Feb. 26, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The Supreme Court in a sweeping decision Wednesday upended the way public-sector unions do business, ruling that dissenting employees cannot be compelled to pay any dues, and that union members must affirmatively opt in to membership — rather than requiring dissenters to opt out.

Forcing dissenting employees to pay dues violates First Amendment protections against compelling speech, Justice Samuel A. Alito wrote for the majority in the 5-4 decision that was both highly anticipated and widely expected.

“Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they find objectionable violates that cardinal constitutional command, and in most contexts, any such effort would be universally condemned,” Alito wrote.

A few hours after the decision was announced, news broke that Justice Anthony Kennedy, 81, would retire, giving President Trump another pick that could shift the court’s ideological balance more sharply to the right.

The ruling, in Janus v. AFSCME, overturns a precedent from the 1970s known as Abood which had held that dissenting public-sector workers could be exempted from funding unions’ explicitly political activities, but could be forced to pay so-called “agency fees” that fund contract negotiations and other traditional labor activities.

The court’s four liberal justices dissented in an opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan. She criticized the majority for overruling Abood with “little regard” for the court’s usual deference to precedent, and said the court is inappropriately weighing in on whether agency fees should be required, an issue currently being debated in the states.

“Judicial disruption does not get any greater than what the Court does today,” Kagan wrote.

Plaintiff Mark Janus and others had argued that Abood should be overturned because even traditional labor activities, like contracts and layoff policies, are political when they affect taxpayer dollars and public policy.

Janus, a child support specialist from Illinois, praised the ruling.

After waiting in the courtroom to hear it, he described the decision as “a big sigh of relief, actually, that we now have a finished conclusion to this long road.”

“We’re doing this for worker rights across the country, the 5 million public sector workers that now have the opportunity to decide on their own [whether or not to join a union],” Janus told The 74.

Unions, for their part, slammed the decision as elevating the privilege of conservative donors who have funded Janus and similar lawsuits over the rights of working people.

“Strong unions create strong communities. We will continue fighting, caring, showing up and voting, to make possible what is impossible for individuals acting alone,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in a statement.

In overturning Abood, the court rejected arguments that it struck a balance between protecting dissenters’ First Amendment rights and maintaining “labor peace” while preventing “free riders” from benefitting from union-negotiated contracts without helping pay for them.

Alito in the majority opinion extensively discusses the First Amendment issue, particularly the issues on which dissenting members may disagree with their unions, including a number of education policies.

Specifically, he lists teacher tenure and transfer policies, merit pay, and evaluations as areas that could be negotiated in collective bargaining that are “of great public importance.”

Critics of how some of these policies play out in the classroom say teachers unions sometimes protect the interests of their adult members over the educational needs of students. There are lawsuits pending in several states arguing that some of these union-negotiated protections, specifically tenure and seniority-based layoffs, directly harm low-income students of color, by keeping poor performing teachers in the classroom, denying students their right to an adequate public education.

The ruling has the potential to greatly diminish the monetary and political influence of unions, a key ally to Democrats.

President Donald Trump noted that fact in a Tweet praising the ruling and calling it a “Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”

Supreme Court rules in favor of non-union workers who are now, as an example, able to support a candidate of his or her choice without having those who control the Union deciding for them. Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2018

Teachers unions could be particularly hard-hit, Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said in a release.

“Losing agency fees won’t kill teachers unions, as the recent teachers’ strikes in non-agency fee states prove, but it could permanently weaken one of the nation’s largest interest groups,” he added.

Alito’s decision goes farther than some had expected, clarifying that dissenting employees cannot be forced to opt out of union membership as they are now, following what those workers say are sometimes overly burdensome requirements for doing so.

“Unless employees clearly and affirmatively consent before any money is taken from them, this [First Amendment] standard cannot be met,” he wrote.

Both Alito and Kagan acknowledged the ruling’s potential to disrupt unions’ usual functions and relationships with employers.

The loss of payments from non-members “may cause unions to experience unpleasant costs in the short term, and may require unions to make adjustments in order to attract and retain members,” Alito wrote.

But he had little patience for those arguments, when compared to what are now illegal forced dues payments.

“We must weigh these disadvantages against the considerable windfall that unions have received under Abood for the past 41 years. It is hard to estimate how many billions of dollars have been taken from nonmembers and transferred to public-sector unions in violation of the First Amendment,” he wrote.

Kagan, meanwhile, noted that the decision upsets state law in 20 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, requiring rewrites of those statutes and renegotiation of thousands of contracts.

New York City alone has agency fees in 144 contracts with 97 public-sector unions, she notes.

“Across the country, the relationships of public employees and employers will alter in both predictable and wholly unexpected ways,” she warned.

In New York City, teachers sign two cards, one which makes them union members and another that authorizes the city to automatically deduct dues, United Federation of Teachers officials said on a call with reporters Wednesday.

Educators may revoke their membership at any time. New York law allows unions to set the standards for opting out of the automatic dues payments. UFT requires employees to notify the city in writing between June 15 and June 30 if they don’t consent to the automatic deduction and want the part of their dues returned to them that they could claim pre-Janus, the portion that covers political activities, union officials said.

From those agency-only fee-payers, UFT could lose as much as $1.5 million in dues in the coming year, out of its $185 million budget, representatives said. That doesn’t include current members who pay full dues but may choose to stop doing so after the Janus decision.

A number of pending cases challenged the requirement in many states that those who wanted to leave the union explicitly opt out of doing so, rather than mandating that all employees who want to be union members affirmatively join.

One of those, Yohn v. California Teachers Association, challenges California’s rules that required teachers who wanted to only pay agency fees to affirmatively opt out of the union, rather than requiring teachers who want to join the CTA to opt in.

“We had hoped that the court would go beyond the narrow question and address the consent issue that’s implicated in these opt-out rules …There was no better than a 50-50 chance that would happen, and I think that helps move things forward on the ground without a lot of needless litigation,” Terry Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, told The 74. The center brought the Yohn case.

Lawyers will ask California for a summary judgment in Yohn’s favor based on the Janus ruling, Pell said.

“There’s really nothing else to litigate,” he added.

California teachers Bruce Aster and Darren Miller said they would stay with their local union but break away from the state and national affiliates if given the chance.

The Supreme Court’s pending decision in the Janus case has the potential to decimate the clout and size of public-sector unions by allowing members who disagree with the union’s activity to opt out of membership.

But another path to maintaining membership in local unions may be emerging: a split from the more divisive and politically charged state and national affiliates that turn off many of those disaffected members.

Local unions in Florida, Tennessee, and Indiana have split with state and national affiliates in recent years. The most notable break came earlier this year in Nevada, where teachers in metro Las Vegas broke from the Nevada State Education Association and the National Education Association in late April after questioning how their $6 million in annual dues were being spent.

• Read more from The 74: Vegas Split — Clark County Teachers Union Cuts Ties to National Education Association, Major Loss to Largest U.S. Labor Union

“The teachers who pursue that are usually feeling under-supported by the state and national unions. They are aware of how much they’re paying in dues to the state and national unions and aware of what they’re getting back in services,” said Colin Sharkey, executive vice president of the Association of American Educators, a California-based, nonunion professional organization that says it promotes excellence and collaboration “without a partisan agenda.”

The group has assisted about a dozen local groups across the country to learn more about dissolving their association with state and national groups, he said, including referring them to local attorneys to help with the process.

In the pending Supreme Court case, Illinois child support specialist Mark Janus argues that he shouldn’t have to pay the “agency fees” that fund contract negotiations and similar union activities, because public-sector employment issues are inherently political. Dissenting employees have been able to opt out of supporting political activities since the 1970s; unions say the agency, or fair-share, fees are necessary to prevent free riders from benefiting from the higher salaries and superior benefits they negotiate on workers’ behalf. Teachers unions also provide liability insurance to members and represent them in disciplinary proceedings.

A decision is due before the end of the court’s term in June; most court watchers expect the justices to side with Janus and end mandatory dues.

Representatives of the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s two largest teachers unions, did not respond to requests for comment, though NEA President Lily Eskelsen García addressed Janus’s potential impact at a recent conference.

At least some of those most opposed to mandatory dues — plaintiffs in a separate lawsuit also challenging required fees — said they’d be happy to pay them if their local affiliate broke away from state and national groups.

The California educators, with lead plaintiff Ryan Yohn, make the same First Amendment arguments as those in the Janus case, and also contend that the current opt-out process for dissenting members is too difficult and that educators should instead have to opt into union membership.

• Read more: After Janus, Another Key Lawsuit Targeting Unions: How California’s Yohn Case Targets Opt-Out Rules

A number of teachers in plaintiff Bruce Aster’s Carlsbad, California, school district will opt out of union membership if Janus is decided against the unions, he said, but not because they don’t like the local.

“It’s the CTA [California Teachers Association], NEA connection that’s the big bugaboo,” he said.

Leaving state and national affiliates could mean lower dues and better contract outcomes, said Darren Miller, a high school math teacher in suburban Sacramento, also a plaintiff in the Yohn lawsuit.

“We could hire the best labor-law attorney firm … as opposed to having marginally trained teachers up against district accountants and attorneys. I think disaffiliation would be a net benefit for teachers,” he said.

About 90,000 of the NEA’s 3 million members are currently agency-fee-only payers, García, the president, said in mid-May during a panel on Janus at the Education Writers Association national conference. She said the NEA believes the right-to-work advocates pressing the case are looking not only to stop the required fees but to diminish labor unions in size and influence.

The group is focused on winning over members and potential members primarily through one-on-one conversations, she added.

Lee Adler, a professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said he doesn’t think disaffiliating is a good strategy to maintain membership, at least in the short term, because it would be difficult to immediately remove the political stigma some members associate with the national unions, and locals would lose the expertise of state and national union staff.

Unions instead should work to explain to members how they separate political and non-political dues, he said.

Local affiliates can look to the 28 right-to-work states where teachers and other public employees already don’t have to pay dues, but many educators choose to join unions, Adler suggested.

“For local schoolteacher unions to go back to the drawing board and internally reorganize … that will make them more attractive, irrespective of whatever the policies of national unions are,” he said.

• Read more: Labor in the Age of Janus: 6 Things to Keep in Mind About American Unions on the Eve of a Pivotal Supreme Court Ruling

State and national unions should also pay attention to recent teacher strikes in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona, Adler said. Many of those efforts started at the grassroots level away from state-level unions, built alliances with others in education, and have focused on educational issues more broadly, beyond just teacher salary.

“It’s a much more ecumenical approach than is traditionally associated with educational unions, and that’s what makes it so fascinating and potentially attractive to even the folks that don’t want to pay dues,” he said.

Should local chapters decide to break ties from state and national affiliates, the exact process may either be disaffiliating the local chapter or decertifying the affiliated group and re-forming a new local union, depending on the individual chapter’s bylaws, Sharkey, of the Association of American Educators, said.

Ed Dawson, an attorney in Washington state, has helped one or two local unions in the eastern part of the state disaffiliate from the Washington Education Association for each of the past five years. Before becoming an attorney, he was a teacher for two decades. He disagreed with the union, particularly its support for Planned Parenthood, he said, and filed a religious exemption, donating to a local nonprofit dance company rather than pay dues.

Thirty percent of a local union must sign a card expressing their interest in disaffiliating from the WEA. Those are then taken to the state Public Employement Relations Commission, which orders an election. If more than half of employees decertify the WEA, they can then find a new bargaining agent or form their own, Dawson explained.

The pace of disaffiliations has slowed dramatically in the past six months to a year in the shadow of the Janus case, he said, as people believe a decision allowing them to opt out of dues will sever their affiliation with the state union.

What union dissenters don’t realize, though, is that even if they don’t have to pay fair-share fees to the Washington Education Association, they won’t be rid of the union’s influence, Dawson said. Most states require unions to represent all employees, even non-members, so dissenters would be bound by the salaries, working conditions, and benefits the unions negotiate on their behalf.

“What they don’t realize is that even if the Janus decision is favorable as far as we’re concerned, the Washington Education Association will still be the bargaining agent,” he said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74.