Do conservatives today have a noteworthy education reform agenda? Is there a coherence? Is there anything other than school choice? Anything other than “Let’s shoot CRTs and not say gays, at least in grade school.”

Over the past 10 days, two initiatives have popped up on my screen and desk that answer these questions. Neither do the job at all.

The first one is slightly constructive. It is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s new “Commitment to America” ​​manifesto, carefully timed to land before the midterm elections and outlining a roadmap to be followed by the Republican majority after elections in the House. under four familiar headings: security, liberty, prosperity and government accountability that span a range of policy advocacy.

The “Future Built on Freedom” headline includes education, health, and “big tech,” but as many commentators have pointed out, the specifics are very thin. is. His plan to put students’ futures first is based on his four pillars: Recover lost learning from school closures. Expanding parental choice so more than 1 million students get the education parents know is best. [and] Protect equity by allowing only women to participate in women’s sports. ” But only the first of them has details. So, five broad categories in which parents should have “rights”. All are reasonable, but very vague. What exactly does it mean to protect the right to hear the opinions of parents?

In summary, there’s nothing I dislike about the education part of the manifesto, but nothing concrete or actionable. It boils down to a set of beliefs.

Full stop.

Now let’s go to what is called the opposite problem. It’s a much more constructive 156-page book newly published by our friends at the American Enterprise Institute. A sketch of a new maintenance education agenda.

The problem here, if true, is the flowering of ideas, sometimes vague, often concrete, covering a surprising number of issues and topics, and regularly clashing with each other These take the form of 40 short (2-3 pages each) proposals from individual (and paired) members of the AEI’s loosely bound ‘Conservative Education Reform Network’.

This volume, as editors Max Eden and Haley Sannon write in their conclusion, most clearly shows that conservatives suffer from a lack of ideas when it comes to education. also represents I myself write articles (about citizens). So does Mike Petrilli and several others he is or was previously associated with Fordham.

In reality, it’s a grand buffet of both familiar ideas (relaxing teacher qualifications) and many novel ideas (eg, “public-private microschooling” and “hybrid homeschooling”). School closed.

The buffet table is loosely divided into three sections called ‘educational innovation’, ‘civic and philanthropic leadership’ and ‘policy ideas’. You’ll happily graze here, filling your plate with interesting ideas, some almost mainstream, others downright exotic.

The collection as a whole really demonstrates (as Rick Hess puts it in its foreword) “AEI’s fierce commitment to the competition of ideas”, and best represents the creativity and fecundity of the right half of the ed-wonk world. shows clearly.

However, there is no doubt that it will benefit from a modern, coherent platform for educational reform where conservatives congregate. It doesn’t get as ephemeral as the one Kevin McCarthy produced the other day. But in the end, no matter how good many of your ideas are, they can’t be 40 separate ideas.

source:”Commitment to America”, Kevin McCarthy, September 2022. When “A sketch of a new maintenance education agendaedited by Max Eden and Hayley Sanon, American Enterprise Institute, September 2022.