Tutorize, Don’t Privatize, Public Schools

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

The subject of K–12 education barely came up during the 2024 presidential campaign. But it’s likely to be a big issue in Washington soon if, as many observers expect, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans push for federal legislation to allow families to use tax dollars that would have gone to their public schools to pay for private schools. It’s a terrible policy idea on the merits—in addition to weakening public schools by draining away their funding, such “privatization” programs mostly benefit the affluent, and there is a lack of evidence that they improve student performance. But a GOP effort to privatize public education could be a golden political opportunity for Democrats if they fight it hard and propose a better plan to improve the nation’s schools—a plan that, as of now, they don’t have. 

Allowing public tax dollars to flow to private schools has been a dream of conservatives for decades. Scores of states and cities set up such programs, typically using private school vouchers, in the 1990s and 2000s. But these were often small scale and targeted to low-income families. Betsy DeVos, the education secretary in Trump’s first term, included provisions in her budget requests that would have allowed families regardless of income to use public money for private schools. Democrats in Congress shot down those proposals. But in the past few years, eight GOP-controlled states have launched what conservatives euphemistically call “universal choice” programs that are open to even the wealthiest families. And, not surprisingly, affluent families have so far disproportionately taken advantage of them.

Just because education privatization is growing, however, doesn’t mean it’s popular. In fact, it’s deeply unpopular, including with many Republican voters who live in small towns and rural areas where the local public schools are treasured civic institutions and private school options are sparse. The November elections made that clear. A ballot measure in Colorado over a state constitutional amendment that would have merely opened the door to private school programs in the future went down to defeat roughly 51 to 49 percent thanks to tepid support in rural counties. In Nebraska, a less urban state than Colorado, 57 percent of voters chose to partially repeal a state-funded private school scholarship program. And in heavily rural Kentucky, 65 percent of voters rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have given every student in the state the right to use public money to attend private schools.

With that record in mind, you would think Trump would hesitate to push universal choice programs at the federal level. Prudence, however, has not been his defining characteristic. Rather, he offered praise of universal choice in the rare occasions when he talked about the issue during the campaign. The idea was also endorsed by the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 and by its rival transition organization, the America First Policy Institute, which was chaired by Linda McMahon, Trump’s current pick to be secretary of education. Despite the risks, the temptation to privatize a vast part of the public sector will be hard for Trump to resist, if history is any guide.

George W. Bush didn’t talk much about privatizing Social Security during the 2004 campaign, either. Yet once he was reelected, he grabbed the third rail of politics with both hands by pushing for the creation of individual retirement accounts using Social Security funds. The result was an epic failure. The more the public learned about his plan, the less they liked it. Minority Senate leader Harry Reid and minority House leader Nancy Pelosi whipped their caucuses into unified opposition and refused to negotiate with the Republicans. GOP leaders retreated, and the measure never came up for a vote. Bush’s approval ratings fell and never recovered.

Democrats should treat any plan to privatize public education the same way. But they will be missing an opportunity to help the working-class voters they most need to win back if they offer no alternative agenda for improving America’s public schools. And right now, the party generally lacks any such plan beyond “Pay teachers more” and similar items on the wish lists of teachers’ unions. 

The inequities in education spending and quality that have long diminished the life chances of poor and working-class kids are still there, even if we don’t talk about them as much as we did in the 1990s and 2000s. The federal reforms of that era—higher academic standards, test-based accountability mandates, and support for charter schools—helped boost some metrics of learning but proved divisive and lost political support. What Democrats need are new reform ideas that would be popular with voters, measurably improve student outcomes, unite the Democratic caucus, and possibly win some support across the aisle. 

One such idea is tutoring. Affluent parents have long known the value of paying private tutors to boost their kids’ academic success. But over the past three years, the federal government funded a vast, nationwide experiment to provide that benefit to millions of poor and working-class students. The American Rescue Plan, the mammoth $1.9 trillion COVID-relief measure that President Joe Biden signed in March 2021, contained an estimated $7.5 billion in funds that public schools used for online tutoring programs to help students during the pandemic. Not all the tutoring efforts panned out. But as Thomas Toch and Liz Cohen wrote in these pages last summer,

Schools that implemented “high-impact” tutoring—where students work in small groups during the school day with the same tutor in 30-minute sessions three times a week over several months—have been strikingly successful. Those programs are producing an average of more than four months of additional learning in elementary literacy and nearly 10 months of additional learning in secondary school math, says Susanna Loeb, a Stanford education economist who leads a highly regarded tutoring research center. “The effects we see for high-impact tutoring are larger than what we see for most other education interventions, including class-size reduction, extended day, and technology support for students,” Loeb says.

Federal money for this giant experiment in school reform is running out. But its success has prompted governors in both blue states (New Jersey and Oregon) and red ones (Tennessee and Florida) to pledge funding to continue tutoring programs. 

Despite this bipartisan enthusiasm at the state level, Republicans in Washington have shown little interest in continuing to fund a tutoring program that blossomed under Joe Biden. But there are other evidence-based education reforms that they might find more politically satisfying. For instance, in recent years, education experts have increasingly signed on to a “science of reading” consensus that the best way to teach young children to read prioritizes phonics, a traditional approach that conservatives have long championed but that got sidetracked for decades in favor of the whole language system and other methods. Democrats could give Republicans a chance to spike the ball by agreeing to support a new grant program to states and districts that embraces the new science of reading. 

Even in the minority, Democrats have the ability to develop and publicize ideas like these that have real potential to improve the quality of the schools that average Americans send their kids to. And once the war over privatizing schools is fought and won, they might be in a position to turn those ideas into policy.  

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