U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue look on during a briefing on the coronavirus pandemic in the press briefing room of the White House on March 27, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)

As President Donald Trump makes his case for re-election and the nation confronts a school system in disarray, the results of a new poll taken in the early days of the pandemic show a majority of Americans giving him a failing grade on key education issues.

While 53 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance on education policy, there’s a clear partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats, according to the national public opinion poll, which was released on Tuesday by PDK International, a professional association for educators. While 86 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s education performance, just 11 percent of Democrats agreed. Nearly half of independents gave a nod of approval to Trump, who accepted the GOP’s nomination for a second term on Monday on the first day of the Republican National Convention.

In the fourth year of their first terms, disapproval ratings were less stark for former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. In a Gallup poll at the time, 43 percent of voters disapproved of Obama’s education performance; 45 percent said the same of Bush in a similar ABC News/Washington Post poll.

But this year’s PDK poll, the 52nd annual iteration, comes with a major caveat: It was conducted in March 2020, just as the pandemic began to close schools nationwide. The findings suggest a subtle shift in Americans’ opinions on education policies — rather than a sudden, pandemic-induced shock. But Joshua Starr, PDK’s CEO, predicted that Trump’s approval rating on education has only deteriorated since schools shuttered in the spring and people saw “what a disastrous response to COVID has meant for public schools.” As the new academic year begins, the Trump administration has pushed districts to reopen campuses for in-person learning while some parents and many teachers unions have challenged the safety of such a move.

“One thing we’re seeing at the local level is, the absence of a national strategy for COVID mitigation, testing, etc., has resulted in schools not being able to open physically,” Starr told The 74. “That could have been avoided and is something that people — rightfully so — lay at the president’s feet.”

Even before the pandemic, 6 in 10 respondents — and 7 in 10 parents — said public education plays an important role in how they plan to vote come November. Among Black respondents, 79 percent said the president’s performance on education is key to their vote, as did 71 percent of Latinos. Just 52 percent of white voters agreed.

Starr was skeptical that many voters will cast their ballots based primarily on the candidates’ education platforms because the issue “never looms that large in national elections,” yet he acknowledged that the partisan battle over school closures and the pandemic could generate a sense of heightened urgency.

A nationally representative sample of 1,030 adults, including more than 200 parents with school-age children, participated in PDK’s online survey. Digging deeper into the nuts and bolts, a whopping 85 percent said the federal government should place a greater emphasis on attracting and retaining quality teachers, and 77 percent wanted to see more effort on making college more affordable.

The survey was also conducted before George Floyd, a Black man, died at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in May, igniting a fresh wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the country. Still, more than two-thirds of respondents said they favor a greater federal focus on protecting students from discrimination in school. While 90 percent of Black and 77 percent of Latino respondents favored a greater emphasis on combating discrimination, just 62 percent of whites agreed. Among Democrats, 85 percent favored greater attention being paid to discrimination, as did about half of Republicans.

“More and more white people who previously did not seem to be very aware of the racial issues and the institutional racism that exists in our schools are more likely to be aware of those issues now than ever before,” Starr said.

Meanwhile, just 38 percent said they want to see the Trump administration focus more energy on expanding the number of charter schools. Roughly half of Republicans favor a greater federal focus on expanding charters, compared with just 29 percent of Democrats.

But for the 19th straight year, respondents said a lack of money is the biggest issue that their public schools face. With the pandemic already spurring an economic crisis, education leaders have warned of devastating cuts to school budgets.

“We know that state and local coffers will be decimated by the economic collapse that we’ve had during COVID,” Starr said, adding a prediction that the public will put a greater emphasis on school funding in the years to come. “People want more money going to public schools, no matter how you slice that data.”

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Just one month after the worst K-12 school shooting in American history, then-Vice President Joe Biden held back tears as he addressed a nation mourning the 26 people killed, most of them young children.

“We have a moral obligation — a moral obligation — to do everything in our power to diminish the prospect that something like this could happen again,” Biden said of the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. “The world has changed, and it’s demanding action.”

Part of that action, the Obama administration announced, was a plan to use millions of federal dollars to hire an additional 1,000 school-based police officers.

Several years later, campus officers returned to the national spotlight when a viral video showed a South Carolina sheriff’s deputy throwing a black student across a classroom. The incident prompted a national conversation on the presence of police in schools, particularly their disproportionate impact on students of color.

Now Biden is heading into a South Carolina primary in which black voters are viewed as crucial to his presidential aspirations. Once the front-runner in a crowded field of Democratic hopefuls, Biden needs a resounding victory Saturday after an unexpectedly weak showing in early voting states.

Biden’s pitch to voters includes a plan to bolster gun laws, including an assault rifle ban. Yet his plans make no mention of cops in schools, though he’s been a champion of their presence since long before the mass shooting at Sandy Hook. Biden’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

“I’m hard-pressed to find someone who has embraced law enforcement for as long as he has,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. After Sandy Hook, Wexler and other law enforcement leaders met with Biden at the White House to discuss ways to prevent gun violence. “He likes cops and firefighters, so when he came into that meeting after Sandy Hook, it was like he knew most of the people in the room. He didn’t need to be introduced.”

While mass school shootings have led to a surge in campus police over the past few decades, evidence that such practices curb campus violence remains startlingly thin. Meanwhile, a growing body of research suggests their rapidly growing numbers have unintended consequences.

Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, blamed Biden’s efforts in the early 1990s for getting “the ball rolling” on school “militarization” and called on him to offer an explanation as he seeks the White House.

“All of these years later, now we know that in communities of color those cops are not there to protect and serve, but they are there for law and order purposes,” said Browne Dianis, whose Washington-based nonprofit focuses on racial justice issues. “White kids get protect and serve. Black and brown kids get law and order.”

Crime bill

By the time then-President Barack Obama tapped Biden to lead his post-Sandy Hook gun safety task force, the vice president’s reputation in law enforcement was well established. As a senator from Delaware, Biden steered significant criminal justice legislation, with support for school police going back decades.

In 1990, Biden became the key author of the Gun-Free School Zones Act, which outlawed firearm possession on campuses. Four years later, he championed the most expansive law enforcement legislation in U.S. history. That law, signed by then-President Bill Clinton and generally known as the 1994 crime bill, included the Violence Against Women Act, funds for firearm background checks and a now-expired assault-rifle ban.

It also created the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services — known simply as the COPS Office — to distribute billions of dollars in federal money to hire thousands of police officers, including in schools. A second Clinton initiative, created in response to the 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, provided funds for thousands of additional school-based officers. Since its inception, the COPS Office has spent about $1 billion on campus safety efforts, primarily on school resource officers.

The initiatives came after decades in which very few campuses had any police presence. In the 1970s, just 1 percent of schools were staffed by police. By the 2015-16 school year, 43 percent of public K-12 schools — and 71 percent of high schools — had armed law enforcement officers on campus, according to federal data.

When federal grants lapsed under the George W. Bush administration, Biden offered a stern warning. In a 2006 press release, he argued in the face of scant evidence that the program had been successful in preventing school violence. “It is incumbent on the federal government to support programs that work — and this one does when funded — especially when the fate of America’s young people is on the line,” he said.

But those federal grants came with unintended consequences, according to a recent study published by the University of Texas at Austin. Federal funds to hire school resource officers in Texas school districts were associated with a 6 percent increase in disciplinary rates among middle school students, a change driven by low-level violations, with the largest increases among black children, according to the report. Meanwhile, the grants were associated with a 2.5 percent drop in high school graduation rates and a 4 percent decline in college enrollment rates.

Though overall federal aid for school police trails local spending, investment from Washington “sends a message that this is the approach that local governments should be taking,” said Sarah Hinger, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program. School shootings are statistically rare, and federal data indicate that campuses have become safer in recent years, but the anxiety they cause frequently fuels public policy.

Parents want to know “that there’s something being done in a quick and immediate way,” Hinger said, and investment in law enforcement “seems like an easy and ready place to say, ‘We’re doing something.’”

Since the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the COPS Office has spent more than $50 million on school safety initiatives, most of it on security technology like surveillance cameras and panic alarms.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden meets with officials from sportsmen’s, wildlife and gun interest groups in 2013. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The task force

In the wake of Sandy Hook, Biden turned once again to the federal COPS Office as part of a broad response to preventing further carnage.

As chairman of a White House task force on gun violence, Biden held hours of meetings with leaders from hundreds of organizations, from the American Federation of Teachers to the National Rifle Association. He also sought advice from Mike Bloomberg, Biden’s rival for the Democratic nomination, who has faced his own criticism for aggressive law enforcement policies as mayor of New York City.

In a “very emotional, intense conversation” at the White House, Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum said Biden “recognized how law enforcement could be an ally.”

In the end, Biden’s work informed Obama’s wide-reaching response to Sandy Hook, which included four legislative proposals and 23 executive actions, including an expansive overhaul to federal gun laws.

Barbara Boxer, then a Democratic senator from California, took credit for the proposal to expand the ranks of school police, telling the Washington Post at the time that Biden was “very, very interested” in the idea.

Boxer declined to be interviewed, but a spokeswoman said the former senator believes the long-term answer to gun violence is “to pass sensible gun laws.” Until then, she said, Boxer believes it’s “important to make sure our school campuses are safer.”

On the right, the National Rifle Association criticized the administration for rejecting a proposal to station armed guards at every school, calling Obama an “elitist hypocrite” because his daughters had Secret Service protection at school.

But the administration also faced criticism from civil rights groups like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which issued a report arguing that proposals to hire more school police simply “satisfy our desire to appear secure” by relying on the theory that “the only way to keep us safe from guns is to have more guns.”

In a report post-Sandy Hook, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service offered a sober analysis of the state of play. Though children were more likely to face arrest for minor offenses in schools with police, it found evidence of the effectiveness of school resource officers underwhelming. Crucially, it observed that existing research on campus officers “does not address whether their presence in schools has deterred mass shootings.”

Viral outrage

Nearly three years after Sandy Hook, a 2015 altercation between a South Carolina officer and a high school student led many to question the approach Biden championed.

A school resource officer employed by the county sheriff’s office was called to a high school classroom in Columbia, South Carolina, when a black student refused to put away her cellphone, resulting in a scuffle. The officer was filmed flipping the girl onto the floor and flinging her across the classroom.

In response, the sheriff said the officer’s actions made him want to “throw up.” The officer was fired from his job but did not face criminal charges. A Justice Department inquiry was settled after local officials agreed to provide training to officers on how to de-escalate tense situations and avoid racial bias.

Thomas Dixon, a South Carolina pastor who ran an unsuccessful Democratic bid for U.S. Senate in 2016, said the graphic video “forced an awareness that had been previously overlooked.”

“That was just indicative of a long-standing, ongoing problem that we’ve had with school officers,” said Dixon, who is also a member of the board of directors of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “There’s been a misuse of authority within the school system for a long time.”

The incident prompted a lawsuit from the ACLU, leading to the repeal of the state’s “disturbing schools” law, which allowed police to arrest students for issues like talking back to a teacher or being loud in class. Hinger said the law was “overly broad” and mischaracterized “typical childhood behavior as criminal,” with disproportionate effects on students of color and those with disabilities.

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said the incident was “a bad day for folks that work in our field.”

“It’s not the first bad day that we’ve had and it won’t be the last,” he said. While his nonprofit provides training for school resource officers, most states and the federal government don’t require instruction on issues like how to interact with children.

The incident prompted a national dialogue on school police, with some advocates arguing that school police should be removed from classrooms altogether. Among them was Brown Dianis of the Advancement Project, who said police violence against students of color “was not a concern” for Biden.

“Black kids in particular receive the same treatment by cops in schools that they do on the streets,” she added. “We tie that right back to the responses to the crime bill, to the gun-free schools act, and that’s where it all got its start.”

Recently, criticism of campus police has been overshadowed by the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, said Anthony Petrosino, director of the WestEd Justice and Prevention Research Center.

The Parkland shooting prompted Florida lawmakers to require armed guards on every school campus. In South Carolina, the state responded to Parkland by spending $12 million to hire more than 200 additional school resource officers.

“The police are more entrenched than ever, and I suspect it is going to keep going in that direction,” Petrosino said. Meanwhile, “the research is not showing a safety effect but it is indicating some harmful effects.”

In South Carolina, state police arrested a school resource officer in September on assault and misconduct charges for alleged “excessive force” on a student. That officer, officials alleged, slammed a middle school student’s head into his patrol car and lied about it on an incident report.

The campaign trail

Despite decades of support for school resource officers over the years, Biden does not mention the issue in his presidential platform. In his education plan, Biden argues against arming teachers, promising instead to enact “rational gun laws” to make schools safer.

But Dixon, the South Carolina pastor, said Biden should have “talked to enough people” after Sandy Hook to know that a ramped-up campus police presence “is not going to stop mass shootings” and to recognize their harmful effects on students of color.

Biden’s silence on school-based police is shared by most of the Democratic field. Only Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, offers a plan on campus officers. In that document, Warren argues that “the militarization of our schools does not improve school safety” and that if officers “have to be in schools,” then “they should receive training on discrimination, youth development and de-escalation techniques.”

Citing the ACLU, Warren’s platform notes that 14 million students attend schools with police officers but lack a counselor, nurse, psychologist or social worker. Browne Dianis of the Advancement Project said Warren’s campaign reached out to her organization for advice on the topic, but none of the others did.

Biden, she said, should have to answer tough questions about his long embrace of school police before the Democratic primary in South Carolina.

“South Carolina, being the site of one of the most notorious school police assaults, should be a place for that conversation,” Browne Dianis said.

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

University of Virginia professor John Holbein, co-author of Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action. (University of Virginia)

How do you get America’s youngest voters to actually turn out on Election Day?

It’s a question that experts have asked for the last half-century, and one that may determine the outcome of the 2020 elections. Abundant survey data indicates that voters under the age of 40 don’t favor the prospect of a second term for President Trump, and many are attracted to the primary campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Given that millennials have recently displaced baby boomers as the largest generation in the electorate, a decisive swing among young people could hand control of the federal government to Democrats this November.

Whether that’s likely is another question entirely. Yes, youth turnout hit record levels in the 2018 midterm elections. But that only meant that one out of every three eligible young voters exercised the franchise that year. As ever, they remain an enigma.

John Holbein is attempting to solve the mystery. An assistant professor of public policy at the University of Virginia, his research focuses on education and political participation. His new book with Duke University professor D. Sunshine Hillygus, Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action, will be released Thursday by Cambridge University Press.

The hidden driver of low youth turnout isn’t a lack of political interest or motivation, Holbein and Hillygus write. It’s that the act of voting is “costly.” Citizens have to expend time and effort familiarizing themselves with candidates and policies, decide which they prefer, and then overcome life’s distractions long enough to find the right polling station on the right day (assuming they met the registration deadline, of course). It sounds simple enough, but for tens of millions of Americans, the abstract duties of democratic participation can only be considered after picking up the groceries.

When the media warns of a “civics education crisis,” they’re usually referring to the stream of new surveys showing that most adults can’t name a single Supreme Court justice. In Holbein and Hillygus’s view, though, the crisis goes deeper than that: Young people may know which policies they support and have every intention to vote, but lack the wherewithal to follow through.

To counter that, they recommend that K-12 schools work to strengthen students’ non-cognitive skills — traits of thought and behavior that govern self-regulation and teamwork — to prepare them for the demands of citizenship. While Holbein and Hillygus acknowledge the importance of teaching American history and government, they also believe that kids will struggle to become responsible democratic actors if they don’t learn to overcome obstacles and treat others with respect.

“Even if lots of people could name their local elected official or accurately say who controls Congress, is that the type of knowledge that would help citizens be actively involved and informed about policy debates?” Holbein asked. “I don’t think so.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

LA School Report: It’s well known that young people are the electorate’s least reliable voters. What, if anything, do K-12 schools have to do with that? Are they appreciably worse at preparing students for democratic participation, for instance, than for college? Or for the workforce? 

John Holbein: One of the important things that should be taken away from our book is that we should be thinking about the civic outcomes that schools produce, and we should be thinking about them on par with the other outcomes.

All the focus over the past few decades seems to have been on test scores and college readiness, and part of me wants to say, “This has consequences.” It’s great to focus on those things, but it sort of crowds out the public mission of schools. If you go back into why public schools were made public in the first place, in large part it has to do with their capacity to make an electorate that is informed and engaged. We’re not doing that right now.

We don’t want to come down too hard on schools, because they face a lot of incentives to focus on other outcomes: increasing educational attainment and college-going, being a mechanism for reducing social inequities, and so on. But we can’t just ignore the civic effects. The way public policy has treated it in recent years, there’s been a sort of tension — we have to give up courses that would take away from reading and math. That comes with costs.

Has the rate of youth voting declined over time since the 1970s and ’80s? It certainly doesn’t seem to have risen.

It looks like it’s stagnated. There was a higher level of youth turnout in the ’70s. The tough thing about this is that for the period before the ’80s, it’s hard to get good data on voting by age and other demographics. My impression is that it was at a higher level — maybe 50 percent — in 1972, which was the first election after the voting age was changed to 18, and for subsequent presidential elections, we’ve been operating around 40 percent turnout for young voters. There was a decline through the ’70s to the level that it’s been for the last 30 or 40 years.

But voter enthusiasm has been higher in recent elections, right? It seems like this era of hyper-partisanship and constant political news has driven higher voting rates in recent years.

Yes, but we’ll see if it lasts. The last time we saw a similar spike in youth participation was 2008 and the Obama campaign. And it’s sad to say, but by the next presidential election, we were already down almost 10 percentage points from that. A good chunk of those young voters who turned out in 2008 are older now, and the young citizens who are replacing them aren’t necessarily turning out at the same rates.

If you think about the types of political participation that many people engage in, it’s online discourse: debating politics on Twitter or posting about some political issue on Facebook. And it’s not clear that those actions actually translate to the types of political power that we want people to use: at the ballot box, but also in local community organizing, registering and canvasing to get out the vote.

We have a little evidence that suggests that elected officials view social media engagement sort of warily. At least, they think that if they can weather the storm when bad press comes — a school shooting or a climate march — they’re in the clear. Whereas if we think about the types of engagement that actually pressure elected officials, it’s who turns out to vote, who writes their members of Congress. They’re labor-intensive, difficult forms of political action.

I have a working paper under review right now looking at whether or not there’s a spike in voter registration after school shootings, and whether those shootings shape political participation. What we find is that there’s a massive spike that jibes with what we see online; if you’re looking at Google Trends data or Twitter topics, there will be big spikes after school shootings that, subsequently, turn into discussions about gun control. But then, two weeks later, that’s gone, and sadly, nobody in the interim has said, “Hey, let’s register to vote!” Political events come and go, but I’m not sure they’re enough to mobilize young citizens in a durable way that will make them active caretakers of democracy, as the Founders envisioned.

There are reasons for optimism. I don’t think it’s bad that people are engaged on social media. But the story can’t be, “All is well.”

We’ve been talking a lot about voting, voter registration, voter turnout — the theme of your book is how to get young people to vote — but there are other valuable forms of democratic action. There’s volunteering, donating to campaigns, attending meetings of local government bodies. Why focus on voting specifically?

Many of the findings in our book about voting actually hold up for volunteering as well. The book focuses on voting because it’s the primary mechanism for the transfer of political power in the United States. But we’re finding that the lessons we’ve talked about are true in other domains. Going to the polls, showing up to volunteer in your community, attending a community meeting — those are acts that require time and energy. They’re not “free” in that sense. Young people have a notion that they should be doing these things, that these activities are part of being a good citizen, but when the rubber hits the road, they often fail to follow through.

Young people who are exposed to a traditional civics education — the kind of vanilla, fact-focused distillation of politics and government and American history — are no more likely to volunteer than their peers who get less of that. It’s also true that if you teach young people to follow through on their good intentions, give them the non-cognitive skills they need to set a plan and execute it, that will yield more volunteering.

We don’t want to say, by any means, that the only thing civics should be doing is producing voters. It should be voting and being knowledgeable about politics, being tolerant toward those with opposing views, being active in one’s community and civic life.

You mentioned the importance of non-cognitive skills in making engaged citizens, which is the centerpiece of your book. Most people think that the main problem in civics education is a lack of knowledge, typified by annual surveys showing that most Americans can’t name Supreme Court justices or list the rights enumerated in the First Amendment. 

Yeah. The people who think Judge Judy is a member of the Supreme Court.

But you seem to be saying that the core problem in civics education isn’t really the lack of factual knowledge about government and politics. Can you elaborate?

Civic knowledge is necessary, but not sufficient. Young people need to know certain things, but if civic education is exclusively that, that’s where there’s trouble. Even if lots of people could name their local elected official or accurately say who controls Congress — is that the type of knowledge that would help citizens be actively involved and informed about policy debates? I don’t think so.

What’s underlying this book is an argument against focusing narrowly on the types of things that are easy to measure and that have been part of the fabric of civic education for a long time. If you think of the things that young people need to know to be engaged, it’s actually the mechanical stuff about how to be involved in politics. It’s knowing when you have to register and how that process works. It’s knowing when, where, and how you can vote. And of course, we also want them to know about the issues at hand, and where elected leaders stand on those issues. If you unravel the set of things we want young people to know, they’re really not addressed in most civics education courses.

As part of our data collection, we interviewed civics teachers and said, “Okay, what are you doing?” They mostly said they were following the classic civics model: teaching people about the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, etc., and not really talking so much about the mechanics of political engagement today and what’s going on in the world around us. One of the reasons they cited was that many teachers feel that if they were to delve into these topics, they’d face a backlash from parents. In a polarized environment, they worried that talking about LGBTQ issues or climate change or gun policy would earn them a nasty email from parents to the school board. There’s a real hesitance to teach the things that are necessary for people to know if they’re going to take part in democracy.

It’s a tricky problem to balance the incentives of civic education such that we’re producing knowledgeable citizens but doing so in a way that teachers don’t fear losing their jobs.

Let’s return to the subject of non-cognitive skills. When we talk about the obstacles people face when voting, we usually start with suppressive measures like voter ID laws and voter purges. After that, you run into the lack of civic knowledge or inclinations — people don’t know who’s running for office, and they might not care. But Making Young Voters postulates that, even if people know whom they want to vote for and are not procedurally barred from voting, they often still don’t vote. How do you explain that?

I want to be careful here. We do think those obstacles matter, and we show that young people are especially sensitive to how hard it is to register to vote, for instance. But we should also acknowledge that, in addition to these external or institutional challenges, people also have lives. Voting’s not so different from a lot of the other types of human behaviors that we feel like we should do but often don’t, even when it’s really easy.

This is a silly example, but it illustrates the point: I put a treadmill in my basement so I would get more exercise. I literally made it as easy as possible to exercise. The costs are basically zero, just walking down the stairs. But sometimes I still don’t use it, and not because of external forces. It’s because life is busy and complicated. Your kids get sick, or you’ve got a big project at work, you get overwhelmed, and what falls by the wayside are the types of things that we feel we should do, but don’t have the energy to do.

In the case of voting, yes, institutional obstacles matter, and yes, we need to make voting and registration easier. But if that’s all we focus on, we’re going to miss a huge slice of the population that is interested in politics, cares about politics, sees voting as important, but doesn’t do it because they don’t have the preparation or capacity to follow through.

We could make voting easier, and we could increase people’s knowledge about politics, but we should also think about teaching the next generation that when obstacles get in the way, you keep going. Even if it’s difficult and hard, and they’re tired, they keep going, such that they can achieve their goal of participating in politics.

I’ve been drawn to this idea since writing about a study you published with Professor Hillygus in 2018. The main finding was that kids who showed efficacy and self-belief — who saw themselves as able to persevere through challenges — were also more likely to say they intended to vote later in life. That paper followed earlier research you conducted on disadvantaged students who were exposed to the Fast Track program, which specifically aims to teach kids grit, problem-solving, and emotional regulation. In their 20s, those kids were between 7 and 9 percent more likely to vote.

But as interesting as those findings are, they raise questions: Can we really expect most schools to inculcate kids with civics skills?

I think the answer is yes, and it’s possible to do it earlier than we do now.

First, a general focus on non-cognitive development — even outside a civics framework — actually has payoffs in terms of civics. Because you’ve taught students to do things that they’d need to do in politics. By teaching kids to interact well in the classroom, to work with their peers, to not be hostile toward other people, you’re teaching skills that are really useful in a democracy!

But there are really specific applications as well. We write a lot in the book about the Democracy Prep charter schools. That’s a network that pushes groups of students to do things together — it’s teaching them how to solve problems in their community, how to mobilize other citizens. They’re essentially saying, “We’re dealing with individuals who aren’t necessarily old enough to vote. How do we get them practicing and developing the skills they need to work with others and overcome challenges?”

You can integrate non-cognitive development across classrooms, not just in civics. We put a lot of pressure on civics, but the public mission of schools wasn’t intended to be explored in just one academic course. As Horace Mann conceived it, it was meant to be a holistic, fully immersive educational experience.

Duke political scientist D. Sunshine Hillygus, co-author of Making Young Voters. (Duke University)

Let’s get even more specific. How can we equip schools to build non-cognitive skills in kids? Is it through programs like Fast Track, for instance?

I think that’s one part of it. A lot of these programs take time out of the classroom, but they’re not necessarily taking hours each day. For really young kids, you’re setting aside time to build capacities that they might not otherwise pick up. It’s really important to have time for kids to think about their lives and consider how they will face obstacles or social difficulties at school. That’s very valuable.

As children get older, it’s a little trickier, because there hasn’t been a lot of research into what [social-emotional education] looks like in middle and high school. But we should consider how to engage teenagers in thinking about how they might work with other people. I’m not advocating for Fast Track as the be-all, end-all program, but I think it’s right that there should be some portion of the school day focused on the development of skills that aren’t picked up by standardized tests.

What that looks like, and how much time gets used, I’m not sure. It should be up to schools to tinker and experiment on those decisions. But it’s definitely worthwhile to think about teaching kids perseverance, empathy, problem-solving. Again, there’s lots to be learned from Democracy Prep: They’re having kids choose a social problem in their community. The kids work together, and they realize that their plan for dealing with that problem won’t just come together easily.

The lesson is that we need to allocate time in the day for developing and fostering these non-cognitive skills. The payoffs go way beyond academics, or what we see in the labor force.

Democracy Prep is an example of a network that probably couldn’t do more than it’s already doing to build civic engagement. Kids have to pass the U.S. citizenship to graduate eighth grade. They participate in get-out-the-vote drives even as third- and fourth-graders. They complete year-long senior projects to address social problems in their communities. 

This is a model that can’t be replicated wholesale in every school in the country, and while they’re doing a good job getting graduates to participate in democracy — one study found that their alumnae are 12 percentage points more likely to vote — the returns are finite. Have you thought about what lessons the average school can learn from a program like that?

That’s right. Democracy Prep is unique in that it builds civics instruction into everything it does. But when you look down the spectrum, there are lower-cost interventions in civics that work.

In the book, we cite a study that tested the effect of a one-time, in-classroom voting demonstration. The author set up a voting booth in a classroom, took in voter registration forms, explained the process, and gave a 45-minute presentation about the particulars of voting. She showed, with a pretty incredible research design, that that had significant effects on young people’s later rates of voting.

I totally get that the capacity of schools to implement some of these ideas is going to vary. But we do have some evidence that, even if we go down to a lower-level intervention that really gets into the practical details of how, when, where, and why to vote — that helps. My view is that anything schools can do to move from the traditional, bland civics education approach to a more applied, active learning environment, that’s going to help. As you do more, it’ll probably have larger effects.

There are diminishing returns when you’re trying to close the age gap in voting. At a certain point, you’ve done all you can from an educational perspective, and you’re bumping up against some of the structural issues we have in the United States. The same is true for the black-white achievement gap: Even if we implemented all the reforms that we know are effective, would they work? By the same token, we can go a long way toward the goal of increasing youth turnout; we might not get all the way there because of poverty, or institutional racism, but we can still get part of the way.

The point is that it doesn’t have to be Democracy Prep or bust. The things that schools should be thinking about are applied, active learning, giving young people the resources to help them vote, and providing information that’s relevant to today rather than 200 years ago.

• Read more from The 74: Teaching Democracy: How One School Network Has Baked Civics & Activism Into Its DNA — and Produced Graduates Who Are More Likely to Vote

But at the same time, there’s a danger in active civics instruction that you alluded to earlier. Many parents are wary, and perhaps justifiably so, of their kids being indoctrinated. There’s a difference between teaching kids about the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and engaging them in discussions of live political issues in 2020. 

Is there a danger of students forming political identities in school? And do you think the very perception of that danger is, itself, an impediment to schools devoting more time and resources to civics?

This is really tricky. I’m imagining a superintendent somewhere reading our book and asking, “How do I do this in a way that doesn’t just become overtly partisan?” And there are voices on both sides who would say that it should be overtly partisan. Some people undoubtedly think that civics education isn’t being done right unless we’re teaching young people to fight against the forces that brought us Donald Trump. On the flip side, you’ve got people saying that civics education isn’t being done right unless you’re talking about patriotism.

That’s probably a whole other book. But one of the things we found in our research was that interventions to build non-cognitive skills don’t necessarily change people’s political attitudes. It’s a really interesting non-effect. The Fast Track program, for example, increased voter participation significantly — without influencing whether people registered as Democrats or Republicans.

It’s worthwhile for educators to wade into the muck and figure out how to do these types of active learning in a way that enhances public virtues that transfer across the ideological spectrum. We want schools to establish the values and skills that we all agree are important: compassion, selflessness, hard work, and determination.

There’s got to be some thought about how to do this in an environment where parents get upset over school mandates. These initiatives have to be shaped in ways that take into account parents’ values and perspectives because it’s not just schools that are developing these non-cognitive skills. We know from economic and child development research that families play a key role in developing kids’ non-cognitive abilities. So there should be a level of interaction between schools and the home in cultivating skills that will help kids build communities, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats.

This is actually the ideal of education: confronting difficult ideas and allowing people the freedom to do so in the way they choose, yet forcing them to engage. But I don’t think the current status quo — where we just resort to boring, inoffensive civics to avoid controversial topics — is workable.

• Related: A growing achievement gap in civics education: What a new study reveals about social studies, class and race

A few communities have already lowered the voting age in local elections to 16. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang has recommended that the same be done in federal elections. What’s your stance?

The big challenge here is that this move is generally restricted to municipal elections. We tried to do a study for the book looking at the few towns that lowered their voting age, and the problem they’re facing is that not many 16- and 17-year-olds are taking advantage of this right in municipal elections. Rates of voter participation are so low in these off-cycle, odd-year elections for mayor and school board.

I’m just not optimistic that, even if everybody did it, it would make a big impact. It’s one thing to give younger kids the right; the key mechanism, however, is actually using it and learning how it works. Until there’s a resolution to go beyond low-turnout municipal elections, I’m just a little skeptical that lowering the voting age will have the effects we might want.

Yes, it’s a pretty low-cost way of trying to do better. But if you think about the ideal system, it’s one that automatically registers or pre-registers young people at school, reminds them of when the voting process is happening, and builds in steps along the way to create the kind of interaction that happens in federal elections. I don’t want to sound like a Debbie Downer, but it’s a real difficulty when we’re relying so heavily on local elections where not a lot of people vote.

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

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Do the presidential candidates understand what it will take to ensure our public education system serves all students? It’s hard to know because they haven’t said enough in debates and other public sessions, so far, about how they plan to improve public education. We know they agree with us that increased funding is necessary and way overdue. But, we need much more if we want to ensure that both resources and results matter.

The majority of students enrolled in public schools in this country are children of color, too many of whom are stuck in a cycle of intergenerational poverty our subpar educational system is perpetuating. They need to be prioritized. They need a president who will follow the examples set by visionary people of color who are improving outcomes in schools across the country because they see public education as an urgent priority, and a fundamental anti-poverty measure.

We belong to Education Leaders of Color — a community of black and Latino leaders in education who are dedicated to providing all children in this country a world-class education in order to end generational poverty. We are more than 300 strong, bringing a distinct and invaluable perspective to the debate because we share the experiences black and Latino students and their families live every day. We can be authentic partners because two out of three of our members were Pell grant recipients, and one out of two are first-generation college graduates. We are examples of what success looks like when our public education system works as it was intended. We won’t stop until the opportunities we had become permanently commonplace.

Importantly, our network is united by Third Way Values intended to break through the polarizing divides that have consumed efforts to improve public education. They are the commitments we believe any viable presidential candidate should honor, and every voter should require. When our values manifest as policies and practices in schools, children do better.

We recently released an educational platform that illustrates what we think it would take to successfully improve public school outcomes. It calls on our leaders to execute on a bold vision that is more holistic than what we’re hearing from the presidential candidates so far.

For example, our leaders must commit to putting low-income children at the center of proposals for universal access to high-quality early education, rigorous academic curricula and enrichment activities, and college access and completion. Education policies must address the intersection of health, housing, community development and reinvestment, job creation, and career pathways.

Solutions must be developed in partnership with those directly affected, which requires our leaders to value the often-overlooked assets in our communities, and build the capacity of local leaders as agents of change within their local schools. This means giving them access to school performance information and a seat at the decision-making table.

We must collectively redefine expectations with the understanding that children in poverty deserve the same high-quality academic experiences and access to resources as their affluent peers. This commitment is only meaningful if our leaders provide adequate and equitable funding, regardless of zip code, to maximize opportunities for all children.

Finally, our leaders must accept that educational success is inextricably linked to issues that go beyond education, and we have to advance multiple solutions in order to make an impact. We must fight for the resources, supports, and policies low-income and underrepresented families need because all children have the right to attend inclusive, safe, and supportive schools.

Too many students are underserved by the status quo. It would benefit everyone, regardless of race, to elevate the dialogue around public education and avoid easy, divisive labels. Our children have no political voice. Their futures depend on us adults pressing our lawmakers to set a bold new vision that ultimately fulfills the promise of public education.

Layla Avila is the CEO of Education Leaders of Color and Ana Ponce is executive director of Great Public Schools Now.

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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.

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

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Last week, Democrats made history as 12 candidates crowded the debate stage, the most ever to participate in a single debate.

With so many candidates and topics to cover, it’s hard to have a substantive conversation on any of the issues — especially education, which received only a scant mention last Tuesday (and was raised only once in the past three primary debates).

Yet when it comes to education, voters want more than a sound bite — they want candidates to push past applause lines to promote an education policy agenda that embraces new investments, new ideas and real changes for our schools.

A nationwide poll by Education Reform Now Advocacy and Benenson Strategy Group released this month shows that Democratic candidates have an opportunity to connect with both primary and general-election voters by owning the need for investments in our school system that go beyond addressing underfunding in public education.

Voters support a range of education policies that combine resources with reforms to increase school funding and make it more equitable, improve teacher quality and preparation, maintain choice and accountability in the public school system, and ensure that higher education is not just cheaper but also fairer and better for all.

It’s a frame that was heavily embraced by President Barack Obama, and one that remains popular among Democratic primary voters, with 61 percent saying they agree with his policies designed to “promote innovation and choice in public schools and raise standards for every student.”

Voters also agree that we must go past writing the check for more funding to make sure we’re bringing in new ideas and holding our education system accountable for producing results for children.

Seventy-four percent of all voters — including 8 in 10 Democratic primary voters — said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who called for making schools more fairly funded.

There’s also strong support among Democrats, Republicans and independents not only for raising teacher salaries but also for providing pay incentives for teachers in high-needs subjects like special education and English as a Second Language and in high-needs schools, which is favored by 72 percent of voters. It’s a proposal several candidates have adopted — such as Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s plan to raise teacher salaries in Title I schools.

In higher education, resources with reform means moving the conversation beyond affordability to include accountability for institutions that aren’t serving students.

Eighty-six percent of Democratic primary voters support tougher standards so colleges can’t receive federal funds or student loans if they rip off their students or act as dropout factories where few graduate and find good jobs. At the same time, these voters also agree that the federal government should provide additional funding to schools that both enroll their fair share of low-income students and students of color and graduate them with the skills necessary to find a job.

Despite attempts to make public school choice a polarizing issue in this election, 8 in 10 Democratic primary voters support expanded access to public school choice options, including public charter schools.

I’m hopeful that these findings will help to expand the discussion around public education to include bigger and bolder ideas that will disrupt the drivers of inequity that persist in our education system.

This isn’t the time to be timid. For the 2020 candidates looking to distinguish themselves, these findings give permission to think outside the box and adopt innovative platforms that combine more funding with new and better policies that build on the lessons of the past and move us toward a more equitable future.

Shavar Jeffries is president of Democrats for Education Reform.

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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Boston students ride a bus to school in 1975. (Photo: Getty Images)

So are the Democrats going to bus kids across town to integrate schools, or what?

That’s the question that has captivated the political media the last two weeks. While the Trump administration has careened from one news cycle to the next, absorbing damaging headlines on everything from its treatment of detained migrants to the president’s feud with the U.S. women’s soccer team, the Democratic side hasn’t budged from a sticky dispute over racial justice and public schools.

The fight was first triggered by Vice President Joe Biden’s remarks on segregationist politicians James Eastland and Herman Talmadge, which some construed as a misguided apologia for the Senate’s racist past. But it was kicked up a notch during the second debate of the Democratic presidential primary, when Biden was challenged by California Sen. Kamala Harris about his record on school busing in the 1970s. The vice president’s response — that he had supported voluntary desegregation efforts by states and cities, but not those mandated by the federal government — didn’t clarify whether he would act on racially segregated schools as president.

The exchange was by far the most memorable of the two-night debate, with pundits agreeing that Harris had scored a hit that could damage Biden’s standing with black voters. Polls have confirmed that Biden’s commanding lead in the primary has dropped several points in the period since, while Harris has enjoyed a meaningful surge in support.

Children arrive at school on the first day of school desegregation in Berkeley in 1968. (Photo by Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

But while the debate has lingered, it’s unclear whether the boundaries around the divisive issue of busing have truly been redrawn. Biden has offered an apology for his statements on Eastland and Talmadge, but Harris’s stated position on mandatory integration has softened in recent days, at times seeming to mirror Biden’s own. At the same time, several other Democratic candidates have offered their own plans to make American schools more diverse.

The somewhat halting intra-party conversation has commenced amid renewed interest in the idea of school integration, with journalists and academics drawing attention to the still-significant racial barriers surrounding many school districts. But even as Harris and Biden tangled on the controversy, they did so without taking it in new directions, instead manning battlements left over from political wars fought a half-century ago. And while Harris — herself bused to an integrated school as a child — succeeded in seizing the initiative, she appears unwilling to fully support a return to the days of compulsory busing.

Kfir Mordechay, a professor of education at Pepperdine University and a researcher at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, said he welcomed the revival of busing as a live political priority after decades of neglect, but wondered whether America’s political dialogue is equipped to accommodate such a charged topic in 2019.

“How do you judge someone and their opinions about an issue 40 years ago, and how do you have conversations about something that is a little bit more nuanced?” he asked. “It’s just really difficult to have that conversation, especially in the debate format we have right now.”

Busing remains unpopular

The reemergence of school integration on a Democratic primary stage could be seen as surprising in some ways and utterly predictable in others.

In one sense, Biden’s front-runner status made it inevitable that he would eventually be attacked for his lengthy and convoluted history on the issue, whose salience has grown over the last few years. Education experts and activists have warned of a creeping “resegregation” of American classrooms triggered by the decline of court orders forcing school districts to bring together students of different ethnic backgrounds. By some measures, black and white students encounter one another less in school now than they did 40 years ago.

• Read more: Brown v. Board at 65: Will schools ever be integrated?

But a full reappraisal of busing would also be shocking purely on political grounds. Overwhelming political resistance to the practice — chiefly among white parents, but also coming from many minority homes — led to the outbreak of violence in putatively liberal cities like Boston, where terrified black children had to be protected from mobs as they made their way to school. Republicans like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were both able to mobilize the controversy on their way to landslide national victories.

In response, policymakers have spent decades devising ingenious systems to achieve more diverse schools with some measure of family consent, including the introduction of magnet schools and ranked-choice systems of school assignment that offer students a variety of options besides their neighborhood school. Many of the loudest voices in favor of integration, including the leaders of the left-leaning Century Foundation, cheer the emphasis of choice rather than top-down mandates. In several large cities, socioeconomic status is used as a proxy for race to gain even greater distance from the raw politics of the 1970s.

• Read more: Integrating schools by income, not race: Why cities are embracing ‘an idea whose time has come’
  

Halley Potter, a Century Foundation fellow who has written several reports on the success of latter-day integration efforts, argues forcefully that multiple methods exist to address the problem of segregated schools. She said the viral debate moment was “frustrating” because the controversy around busing has historically birthed arguments “specifically designed to undermine integration.” By focusing on the long commute times endured by students being transported to far-flung schools, she said, critics of the policy elided the social and economic conditions that made busing necessary in the first place: residential patterns that were meticulously segregated through years of discriminatory lending and zoning.

“It assumes that school integration means that students need to travel long distances,” she said. “That’s certainly not always the case, and there are many examples where schools become more integrated without increasing travel times for students much at all…If you’re talking about busing, that tends to assume that our school zones, to begin with, made some kind of sense that wasn’t racialized. And the truth is that in many cases, that wasn’t true.”

Sen. Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden speak as Sen. Bernie Sanders, center, looks on during the second night of the first Democratic presidential debate on June 27 in Miami. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Another reason to skirt the issue of mandatory busing? It’s still not very popular. According to a 2017 poll from the education organization PDK, a sizable majority of parents value the principle of diversity in public schools. But both white and non-white parents said they’d prefer their child attend a less diverse school that was closer to their home — by a 61-32 margin among whites, and a 52-40 margin among non-whites.

Pepperdine’s Mordechay said that the distinction between ‘70s-style busing and integration plans of a more recent vintage “is hard to get across in these debates,” since so many parents see education as a zero-sum proposition: One child’s newfound opportunity could come at their own children’s expense. Still, underlining the agency of families is the method least likely to incur backlash, he said.

“You can have this system of controlled choice where, ideally, parents get to choose where they send their kids to school and get their top choice,” he said. “Of course, where you’re talking about neighborhoods that are segregated, that doesn’t always happen; but incorporating this choice element is a framework that is much more likely to be exported and accepted.”

‘Rarely a winning issue’

It’s not obvious whether candidates like Biden and Warren will land on the dispute. After basking for several days in the success of her debate moment, Harris has proven somewhat evasive in characterizing her own stance on integration.

After stating that she forthrightly approved of school busing as a means of desegregating schools in 2019, she backtracked over the July 4 holiday, clarifying that the practice is merely “a tool in the toolbox” that districts could consider if they wished to achieve integration.

The apparent retreat caught the attention of both reporters and politicos, who openly wondered how that position differed from the one that Biden was criticized for offering during the debate. A Biden staffer later tweeted that Harris was “tying herself in knots trying not to answer” the question that she had posed to the vice president only days before.

It sounds here like @KamalaHarris is now taking something more like the @JoeBiden position on school busing. So what was that whole thing at the debate all about?https://t.co/bRDGzp7nvy

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) July 4, 2019

Whatever the outcome of the dust-up, integration advocates are generally pleased at the renewed relevance of integration in schools. Jason Sokol, a historian at the University of New Hampshire, said that he was encouraged by the debate and that while he didn’t think it necessary to “focus that much on the specifics of court-ordered busing,” Democrats should make the cause of disadvantaged children their own.

“It’s actually really significant for some leaders to be taking a stance on school integration,” he said. “I understand that it’s not all that politically wise to say that they want to bring back mandatory court-ordered busing. But if they want to think more creatively about ways to integrate our schools, then more power to them, and it’s really important for the leaders to be doing something like that. Because it’s rarely a winning issue politically to talk about ways that white parents in the public school system might send their kids to school with racial minorities.”

Sokol has written a lengthy account of then-Sen. Biden’s turn away from busing in the mid-1970s, and how the anger of white parents helped stall further victories for the civil rights movement. When Biden took sides against federal efforts to achieve school integration through busing, calling it an “asinine” policy that deepened racial divisions, he opened the door for other liberal Democrats to retreat as well, Sokol found.

That could be seen as a significant loss, given the research and personal narratives pointing to the victories earned through a generation of intensive integration. One study of schools desegregated in Louisiana during the 1960s found that increased resources and more exposure to racially mixed classrooms led to a significant increase in the graduation rate for black students; additional research has suggested that the benefits of integration carried on well into adulthood.

“Everywhere that busing was tried, it had mixed results, but in some places, it really broke the back of the Jim Crow education system,” Sokol said. “But the media focused on places like Boston, which erupted in violence. And also, anti-busing leaders like Biden, who were playing to their angry white constituents, were successful in drawing this distinction between integration and busing, which was a false distinction.”

The Century Foundation’s Potter agrees that the past is a fair guide to future integration efforts, even while positing that “busing” is a limited — and limiting — lens to perceive the issue.

“It’s consistent to do both: I think we need to look back at the history, rethink why busing is always framed as a negative thing, and look at some of the real progress and the lives that were changed through those programs,” she said. “But if it’s possible, we should do that in a way that the conversation about school integration doesn’t stop there. That would be my way of having my cake and eating it too.”

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