Why New Jersey’s Democratic Field Needs an Education Reform

A version of this essay appeared on Matthew Yglesias’ Slow Boring, a site dedicated to offering pragmatic takes on politics and public policy. 

Normally, Virginia is the interesting off-year gubernatorial election, and New Jersey is pretty boring.

But not this year.

One reason is that Virginia has trended bluer across the last few presidential cycles, while New Jersey has gone in the other direction. Kamala Harris got a slightly higher share of the vote in the Old Dominion than in the Garden State, which is a sign of a new era. Plus, Virginia Democrats have an uncontested primary, and the nomination is going to Abigail Spanberger, a sensible moderate Democrat who seems perfectly suited to winning the state. Virginia currently has a Republican governor, so the state’s soft Democrats don’t have to worry about any backlash. And not only is the president a Republican, he’s hammering the state with layoffs. Unless Spanberger screws up, she should win.

Virginia’s race is also not that interesting from a governance perspective. Even though Virginia is now pretty solidly blue, the Democratic Party has rarely held a trifecta, so the policy status quo is pretty clearly to the right of the electorate. Being a smart moderate Democrat in Virginia basically just means supporting the reasonable, politically viable progressive ideas and not the crazy ones, which requires good sense but not a ton of tough decision-making.

New Jersey is different.

The state is still solidly blue, and you’d expect the Democratic nominee to win, especially with Trump in office. But New Jersey Democrats face meaningful political headwinds, and if Kamala Harris were in office, they might be at real risk.

The question of what to do as governor of the state is also trickier. Phil Murphy is wrapping up his second term, and Democrats controlled the state legislature for both terms. A same-party successor always has a tougher job in a situation like this, because the low-hanging fruit of the Democratic agenda has already been picked. New Jersey has a minimum wage of $15.49, indexed to inflation. They have legal marijuana. They have a generous Medicaid program. New Jersey has the second-highest taxes in America, according to the Tax Foundation’s rankings. It’s less obvious what the next Democratic governor is going to do here than in Virginia.

And the field is large, with six primary candidates running.

There are good choices in the mix. Mikie Sherrill is a smart, pragmatic member of Congress who’s talking about the abundance agenda and seems to be leading the pack. Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, is a YIMBY champion who has walked the walk in a major way. Josh Gottheimer, another House member, is not my personal flavor of moderate, but he’s got support from colleagues like Ritchie Torres, Tom Suozzi, and Jared Golden, who I respect a lot. I feel torn between Sherrill and Fulop, but honestly, it’s an embarrassment of riches to have a field where Gottheimer is my No. 3 choice.

Another of the candidates is Sean Spiller, president of the New Jersey Education Association — i.e. the state’s teachers union. The New York Times recently had a piece on how unusual this situation is, with the union’s super PAC spending $35 million to try to elect Spiller and rendering the polite myth of non-coordination between campaigns and super PACs unusually untenable.

What the Times didn’t talk about, though, was the part that I find genuinely odd, which is that nobody in the crowded field is taking the opportunity to smartly differentiate themselves on education.

Democrats often seem reluctant to propose ideas that teachers unions don’t like, because they want their support (or at least non-hostility) in a primary. But I’m pretty sure the NJEA is going to back Spiller no matter what Sherrill or Gottheimer or Fulop say, so why not be bolder?

Democrats could use fresh thinking on education

As covered previously on Slow Boring, one of the most underrated developments in recent political history is that Democrats have lost their traditionally large issue advantage on education.

I think it’s also worth noting that voters rate education as a pretty important issue — more important than the issues related to climate change, abortion and child care that have dominated the progressive agenda in recent years.

The other thing about education is that while of course Democrats can’t, and shouldn’t, give up on trying to come up with smart, politically appealing things to say about immigration and crime, those are longstanding areas of GOP issue advantage.

Fundamentally, voters want “tough” policies on these issues. Even in 2020, the number of people who said the criminal justice system is not tough enough outnumbered those who said it was too tough by a 2:1 ratio, and mass opinion was more right-wing than that in every year both before and after 2020. And Democrats are just not the party that’s seen as “tough.”

Education, though, is a classic liberal issue, like health care. The hard part for Democrats should be persuading the public to care more about education than about immigration, not convincing them that Democrats can be trusted to handle education policy.

That loss of trust is multi-faceted, but I think it has to do not only with pandemic school closures per se, but with a larger vibe around school closures whereby Democrats started signaling that they don’t really think education is particularly important.

The prior cohort of Democrats wildly overpromised on education as a tool for achieving social equality, which unfortunately led the party to completely walk away from the question of how poor kids are doing in school. This was a mistake, because the evidence is overwhelming that school quality does, in fact, matter.

Good schools don’t generate equal outcomes for everyone, because students differ in their innate abilities and their life circumstances. But good schools still generate better outcomes than we’d see without good schools. And while I believe in the value of differentiated instruction, we don’t face a sharp tradeoff at a systems level. During the era when education policy was overwhelmingly focused on low-end performance, students did better across the board. In the more recent era, low-end performance has declined precipitously and the performance of the top students is essentially flat.

Related

Matthew Yglesias: Why New Jersey’s Democratic Field Needs an Education Reform

Weaker students and students from poorer families are, in practice, the canaries in the coal mine, because they’re the ones who really depend on public policy rather than parental supplementation. But there’s clearly a problem here, and Democrats should re-engage, because I think there are some pretty obvious ways to make things better:

• Reform teacher compensation: Raise entry-level pay, reduce regulatory barriers to entry, stop giving raises for low-value credentials, start giving raises to above-average teachers (and even bigger raises to above-average teachers who are willing to work in tough schools) and reduce job security for the weakest performers.

More abstractly, though, I would love to see a return to the Obama-style message that education is important — certainly too important to trust to Republicans, who don’t care and just want to cut and privatize everything, but also too important to spend money on without asking about results.

A disappointing Garden State discourse

On education, the candidates I like in New Jersey are … fine.

Fulop, as a housing-forward candidate, is very interested in school segregation:

Despite being the most diverse state in the country, New Jersey has the dubious distinction of having some of the most segregated schools in the country. The next governor needs to address this issue head-on as a “fair & efficient education” includes diversity. In Year 1, Gov. Fulop will impanel an independent board of educators, activists and state leaders tasked with producing a comprehensive, statewide plan to address segregation, including economic and social factors.

I agree with him that this is important and that it’s a noteworthy aspect of the New Jersey status quo. But an expert panel is going to tell him what he already knows, namely that school segregation is largely downstream of housing market dynamics. And Fulop knows the score on housing. But if anything, I think this linkage just goes to show that YIMBYs need to think more about K-12 education. The vast majority of anti-YIMBY arguments are nonsense. But a clearly true fact is that if more people lived in your town, some of them would send kids to your town’s public schools.

If the school system does a good job, this is a pure logistics issue — more students requires more classrooms and more buildings. But a lot of suburban Americans are relying on socioeconomic segregation as their de facto education policy.

Democrats in particular often seem more comfortable zoning low-income families out of whole communities than they do guaranteeing that schools will have reasonable discipline policies, ability-appropriate math coursework and best practices in literacy instruction. New Jersey needs better housing policy, but to get there, state officials need to take these questions of functioning public services seriously.

Sherrill says:

Across New Jersey, students in every district continue to face post-pandemic struggles with mental health and learning loss. That’s why I fought to bring back federal funding to safely reopen schools and get kids back on track, including by introducing legislation to provide high-quality tutoring to students. As governor, we’ll expand on this progress by supporting effective programs — like high-impact tutoring — that address learning loss. We’ll address the mental health crisis by increasing the number of school counselors, psychologists and mental health services in our schools. And as a mom of four, I know that kids learn better when their stomachs are full. I will make school meals available at no cost for every student in New Jersey because we know good nutrition is essential to academic achievement.

If a candidate asked me for a bunch of K-12 education ideas that make sense on the merits but won’t provoke any clashes with unions or the progressive education establishment, this list is basically what I’d give them.

But thinking about it seriously, if we’re talking about learning loss (and we should be), shouldn’t we be talking about the old education reform standbys of standards and accountability? High-dosage tutoring is a good idea, but it’s weird to put all the responsibilities for improving outcomes on tutors rather than everything else that happens in school buildings. More mental health inputs sounds like a good idea, but are we going to measure the outputs? We know that across the board in education, more inputs usually help. But just adding inputs is no substitute for measuring outcomes.

The centerpiece of Gottheimer’s whole campaign is that he wants to cut taxes and largely pay for it with government efficiency undertakings. He can’t do that without taking on some entrenched interests, and K-12 education is obviously one of the biggest line items. “Cut wasteful school spending so you can cut taxes” is not my favorite brand of moderation (I would rather reinvest the money in making schools better), but it’s not an unreasonable idea. Again, though, Gottheimer doesn’t call out any specific education changes or cross any union red lines.

If not now, when?

The education reform spirit is not entirely dead within the Democratic Party.

Recently, Senators Cory Booker (whose star is back on the rise thanks to his talking filibuster), Brian Schatz (a leading contender to succeed Chuck Schumer) and Michael Bennet (who’s running for governor of Colorado) were the Democratic sponsors of a bipartisan bill promoting charter schools. Both Fulop and Sherrill have made friendly visits to charter schools in the terrain they represent — they’re not wild ideologues on this issue or, as far as I can tell, any other. But the sense that it’s cool to occasionally be at odds with teachers unions has definitely vanished.

In the 2016 primary, Hillary Clinton broke with Barack Obama on education reform to score union support against Bernie Sanders, and Sanders lacked the creativity or ideological flexibility to make lemonade and present himself as more moderate than Clinton on this. In the 2020 primary cycle, Booker’s record as an education reformer was seen as a problem for him, and he never really ran on it. Joe Biden seems to have sincerely disagreed with Obama about this and did not stand up for the Obama-Biden administration’s legacy on education. I thought Julian Castro, who was in the Obama cabinet, might pick up the baton, but he went the other way.

I was disappointed by the trajectory of education policy in both of those cycles, but I did understand what everyone was thinking.

The New Jersey gubernatorial primary, by contrast, seems like a situation where there is an objective incentive for someone to take some positions fearlessly, without regard for union politics.

For starters, it’s a six-candidate field. The latest poll I saw had Sherrill leading the field with 20%, followed by Fulop at 14%, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka at 12%t, Gottheimer at 11%, Spiller at 9% and former state senate leader Steve Sweeney at 8%. In a field that big, almost anything you can do to stand out from the pack can be helpful. You also don’t need to take positions that a majority of Democratic Party primary voters agree with. Of course, taking positions the general electorate finds toxic would be a bad idea, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

And, again, to end where I began, the head of the teachers union is literally a candidate in the race. If the union is already committed to beating you, why not try to reap the upside by showing some refreshing boldness and independence of thought?

I think it was a mistake of Sanders not to seize this opportunity in 2016, but I get that he is literally Bernie Sanders, not someone who is inclined to take a heterodox position on a union issue, even if the relevant union is trying to beat him. But Fulop and Gottheimer and Sherrill are not Bernie Sanders — this seems more like passivity than ideological rigidity.

People forget that until recently, we had a lot of education reform Democrats, and it’s not as if they got knocked off in droves in primaries. The Obama legacy was abandoned at the presidential level for quirky, contingent reasons, and abandoning it hasn’t worked out well for the party. This weird Spiller ego trip is both a reminder that unions sometimes make bad calls due to weird leadership priorities and also an opportunity to assert a common-sense approach to public services. You can respect public school teachers and labor unions and also understand that the job of the union is to advocate for the interests of the service providers, while the job of an elected official is to advocate for the partially overlapping interests of the people who use the services. In fact, I feel like the New Jersey field includes multiple candidates who almost certainly get this. So why not say it?