Stanford University Press Blog

The School Choice Agenda

Betsy DeVos believes charter schools and vouchers will improve education—but will they?

by STEVEN BRINT

A still capture from Betsy DeVos's Senate confirmation hearing, via C-SPAN. Public domain.

The express commitment of the incoming Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, to expand school choice options for American schoolchildren has thrust charter schools and voucher programs to the fore of education debates in the U.S. Over the years the DeVos family charitable foundation has donated some $10 million to organizations promoting the school choice agenda, both through the expansion of charter schools and the introduction of school vouchers to allow students to spend public funds on any school that would take them, whether public or private. While in the United States, voucher programs remain rare (the voucher campaign the DeVos family supported in Michigan lost resoundingly), charter schools have many advocates and have gained a lot of traction in recent years.

The DeVos family is only one of many wealthy families promoting charter schools (and school vouchers) as antidotes to what they perceive as a failing public system.

Publicly funded, but privately managed, charter schools are so named because they negotiate charters with local school districts that specify agreements about requirements, funding, curriculum, and oversight. Many of the original charter schools were organized by parents in school districts who were dissatisfied with the education their children were receiving. Today, school districts may sponsor an expanded role for charter schools by encouraging charter school expansion and making funds available to those who wish to run them.

The DeVos family is only one of many wealthy families promoting charter schools (and school vouchers) as antidotes to what they perceive as a failing public system. Large, politically conservative foundations, including the Walton Foundation (from the Walmart stores fortune), the Charles Koch Foundation, and the Adolph Coors Foundation, have poured millions of dollars into promoting charter schools, as have a number of billionaire hedge fund managers. All claim that they are trying to provide options for families, but many suspect that the real motive of many advocates is to shrink the public sector in every sphere, including education. Over the last three decades, many large school districts, faced with depressing student performance results, have expanded charter school options, including in cities like Cleveland, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

Millennials Just Want to Have Fun

Why the tenets of improv are key to thriving in today’s changing workplace.

by BOB KULHAN

Only two decades ago, most executives wore business suits to work almost every day. Then, as dot-com companies flourished, powerful corporate giants like Bill Gates tossed the tie and showed up to work in a dress shirt, blazer, and dress slacks. Now, in 2017, billionaire titans of industry casually wear hooded sweatshirts, T-shirts, and occasionally (gasp!) flip-flops to the office.

Many of America’s future business leaders desire a casual work culture, in which fun features as a fundamental part of the nine-to-five.

The evolution of workplace attire exists in concert with the ascension of millennials, who insist on a new type of corporate environment, different than their parents’ workplaces. Many of America’s future business leaders desire a casual work culture, in which fun features as a fundamental part of the nine-to-five, and corporate America is responding! Glance through any of the many lineups for “the best places to work”: Facebook, Twitter, SAS, and Google, (to name a few) are all successful, powerful, multibillion-dollar organizations, and they also each boast the reputation of being “fun” while thriving. The message: you can have fun and still be incredibly productive.

As work environments continue to evolve, one elementary truth holds constant: As long as there has been an aging workforce, there has been a need to find, engage, cultivate, and retain great, young talent. There has also been a struggle to bridge the communication gap between generations in meaningful ways—which can prove to be a significant hurdle.

When Ordinary People Get Involved

A return to community work may lie on the horizon for Obama—and should be a goal for us all.

by ERIK SCHNEIDERHAN

 

As President Obama prepares for life beyond the Oval Office, many wonder what he will do next. Will he leverage his fame to become a “super organizer” in Chicago? Teach constitutional law again and hold out for a Supreme Court Justiceship in the post-Trump era? Write another book? It is a moment that is pregnant with possibilities. It is also a moment that is full of tension: How to balance personal needs with the pull of continued public engagement and service? On the one hand, one can imagine that President Obama might feel the need to renew commitments to family and friends, focus more on his personal health (more basketball?), or even just have some time for himself on a regular basis.

As outgoing president Obama will face, to a profound degree, what I call the American’s Dilemma.

On the other hand, he has a unique opportunity to make a difference in communities across the globe His potential to become a change agent is substantial, and undoubtedly, Obama will receive countless invitations to do so—to serve on boards, help raise money, and act as spokesperson, pressures that will be heavy and relentless.

As outgoing president he will face, to a profound degree, what I call the American’s Dilemma. As Americans, we are instilled with competing and often incompatible pressures. We are told to "make a difference" or, as Obama said in his farewell speech in Chicago last week, to "show up." Americans help each other. We are also a nation of do-it-yourself individuals. We believe we are responsible for our own success. How to reconcile these different and competing pressures can leave us frustrated and stuck, unsure how to move ahead. Yet such dilemmas can also become catalysts for action, pushing us to create and find different ways to satisfy our needs. Once we figure out what works, we build it up into something that endures.

A New (Old) Narrative for the Left

In the Trump era Democrats need to revive their critique of the abuse of economic power.

by SOLON SIMMONS

Strikers during the 1933 Dressmakers' Union strike take a break in a diner. Photo from the Kheel Center. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

In the immediate aftermath of the November election, we witnessed what may well be the beginning of a political paradigm shift. Rooted in what might be best described as a literary crisis of political narration on the left, this crisis was exemplified in the reaction to a New York Times op-ed written by Mark Lilla, a political philosophy professor at Columbia. Lilla’s essay marked the demise of what he called identity liberalism, a public intervention notable not only for its argument but mainly for how that argument was received. On the right it produced little more than supportive jibes directed at the difference-based politics often celebrated by the Democrats, which Lilla painted as a failure. But on the left it was greeted with either a shock of realization or the kind of contempt reserved for heretics.

What provided Lilla’s essay with such moral force on the left was not its thesis, that class divisions were coming to replace cultural divisions in the hearts and minds of the people, which had been offered many times before, but the fact that such disastrous failure for their agenda now convinced progressives, for a time, that they truly did not understand how to make sense of recent developments on the political scene. What was increasingly called “the narrative” had shifted against Democrats and progressives, whatever the sanguine demographic predictions promised them.

Trump and the Paternal Heart

On the president-elect and the paternalistic logic of American conservatism.

by JEFFREY R. DUDAS

Donald Trump at a rally in Reno, Nevada, 2016. Photo by Darron Birgenheier. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

A cottage industry of political commentary developed during the 2016 American presidential election. A bevy of commentators and historians agreed Donald Trump would have made the nation’s founding fathers spin in their graves. Trump was: a “threat the founding fathers foresaw”; “the guy our fathers warned us against”; “the demagogue that our founding fathers feared.” Following his victory on November 8, some like-minded commentators hailed the electoral college, the very device that overrode Trump’s nearly 3 million vote deficit to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, as an institutional barrier that was designed by the “founding fathers…precisely for the purpose of guarding against the election of an unqualified demagogue such as Mr. Trump.”

Clearly these commentators were unpersuaded by the victor’s earlier pronouncement that Clinton’s policies, rather than his own, were the ones that were “direct affronts to our founding fathers, who wanted America to be strong, independent, and free.” Nor did they heed historian Joseph Ellis’s circumspection: we had no idea what the founding fathers would have thought of Trump, claimed Ellis, because “all efforts to transport them into our time zone are misguided, like trying to plant cut flowers.” But historical incongruities notwithstanding, “the urge to” interpret American politics according to the desires of dead American fathers, Ellis correctly noted, “is apparently irresistible.”

Beyond the Polls

Some saw the 2016 election as an upset but many indicators hinted at a Republican win.

by RAY C. FAIR

CC BY-SA 2.0 via Go Fish Digital and Flickr.

The 2016 presidential election was not a good year for pollsters. Most anticipated a strong Clinton win in both the popular and the Electoral College vote, precipitating a lot of subsequent discussion about why polls performed so poorly in this election. There are a number of possible reasons. First, polling needs random samples of people who will vote, and this may be getting harder to do. Second, in this election people may have been reluctant to give their true views. Third, people's views may simply have been unstable over time. Whatever the case, polls did not do that well.

The 2016 presidential election was not a good year for pollsters.

An alternative approach to predicting presidential elections is to look at the fundamental forces driving people's voting behavior. This is the approach I take in my election work. The approach does not take polling data into account. It does not ask people how they are going to vote, but tries to explain what motivates them to vote the way they do.

Using econometric methods and data extending back to 1916, I have found four conditions that affect votes for president. The first is whether the president is running again. If so, this has a positive effect on votes for the president. The second is how long a party has controlled the White House. Voters like change; when a party has been in power for two or more consecutive terms, this has a negative effect on votes for that party's candidate. The third is the slight but persistent bias in favor of the Republican Party.

Year-End Staff Picks (Part III)

Take 40% off of our staff picks—and 25% off everything else on our site!

by THE STANFORD PRESS STAFF

 

To celebrate the end of the year we’ve picked out a few of our favorite titles to share with you. Browse all of our staff picks here and peruse through parts one and two of our staff recommendations for more on why we love these books. All of our recommended books, including those below, are now 40% off—and everything else on our site is 25% off through the first week of January!

 

1

The Miracle of Analogy »
or The History of Photography, Part 1

by KAJA SILVERMAN

RECOMMENDED BY:
Emily-Jane Cohen, Executive Editor

Silverman’s endorsement of photography’s powers of revelation and her championing of the photographic imagination is a poetic yet historically informed attempt to rethink our relationship to the world and to each other. This beautifully written book thus has an ethical dimension that makes it more than “just” a brand new theory or history of a medium, though it is very much that as well.