Biden breaks the Obama mold on teachers union strife

When teachers were upset about the stringent accountability measures Barack Obama imposed on them as president, their union boss turned to Joe Biden for some empathy.

“He listened,” recalls Randi Weingarten, who heads the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers. Obama’s vice president may not have agreed with her during those conversations, Weingarten said in an interview this week, but Biden became her “go-to” when things got tense amid the regime of education reform.

Now the good cop has to call the shots — and Biden’s rhetoric and policies suggest the president-elect is still listening closely to teachers unions in a way Obama often did not, including as Biden’s team considers potential nominees for Education secretary.

Obama was questioned about possible signs of daylight between the two men on education policy in a recent interview with New York magazine. When asked whether Biden seemed intent on rolling back his “education-reform legacy,” Obama demurred, “Ah, we’ll see.”

“Here’s what I know,” Obama said. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris also believe that every child should get a good education, and that requires changes in how we teach that go beyond just money."

Biden, a self-described "union guy" whose wife is a community college professor, may soon find that it is far easier to be the compassionate vice president than it is to make the tough political calls on education policy himself. While it’s unifying to rally Democrats around their shared hatred for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her anti-union agenda, the work of reviving a U.S. education system upended by the pandemic will be difficult and often unpopular.

“I know it's going to be controversial with some of you,” Biden warned governors in a call Wednesday to detail his plans to reopen most U.S. schools within his first 100 days in office.

The president-elect benefits from witnessing the union blowback against Obama, who enraged educators when he publicly supported the firing of teachers at an underperforming Rhode Island school in 2010. The National Education Association — Jill Biden's union — even called on Obama’s first Education Secretary Arne Duncan to resign amid fights over academic standards, public charter schools and testing, though tension faded when Obama in 2015 signed bipartisan legislation to overhaul No Child Left Behind.

By contrast, Biden is starting off with a plan that his wife, while pointing to herself, likes to say is “teacher-approved.” He has pledged to nominate a former teacher as his education secretary and told union members, “You will never find in American history a president who is more teacher-centric and more supportive of teachers than me.”

But within the Democratic party, the spectrum of ideology on education issues is far more complex than “pro-teacher.”

Biden will need the support of teachers and Congress as he tries to meet his goal of safely reopening most schools in the first days of his administration. But he will also need to navigate sharp divisions that remain within the Democratic party on charter schools and student assessments — both flashpoints during the Obama administration as well.

The president-elect has been critical of charter schools. And the Democratic Party platform — written with input from teachers unions — argues against education reforms that hinge on standardized test scores, stating that high-stakes testing doesn’t improve outcomes enough and can lead to discrimination.

But it’s an open and pressing question whether Biden’s education secretary will waive federal standardized testing requirements this spring for K-12 schools for a second year or to carry on, despite the pandemic. Teachers unions say it isn’t the time, but a host of education and civil rights groups say statewide testing will be important to gauge how much students have fallen behind during the pandemic.

This early decision for Biden will be telling, said Charles Barone, vice president of K-12 policy at Democrats for Education Reform. DFER is among groups that support carrying on with testing, but Barone said the “pressure on Biden, being union aligned” is to take a different direction.

“How does he resolve that political tension?” he asked.

While the nation's two major teachers unions endorsed Biden late during the Democratic primary, the unions didn’t back Obama in the 2008 primary. The National Education Association sat out the contest and the American Federation of Teachers backed Hillary Clinton, though both unions endorsed Obama during the general election.

Clashes with the Obama administration followed over initiatives such as “Race to the Top,” a competitive grant program used to encourage states to, among other things, adopt rigorous academic standards and teacher evaluation systems based in part on student performance and growth.

Obama told New York Magazine that the initiative attempted to give schools an incentive to come up with accountability measures that work and not necessarily through standardized testing. “I think a lot of the unions, all they heard was accountability equals more testing,” he said. “And that continues to be a challenge, I think, for nationally engineered education reform.”

Weingarten said Obama administration officials believed in public education but initially had a different view on how to strengthen it. At the start, it was a top-down approach that relied heavily on using standardized test data as an “accountability hammer,” she said.

“They had people that they listened to who thought you could reduce teachers to an algorithm and kids to test score,” she said. “We thought that you needed to … focus on well-being of kids, on great teaching and learning, on real engagement.”

Weingarten noted that the Obama administration “shifted considerably” on education, eventually working with educators to replace No Child Left Behind and moving away from high-stakes testing as it became clear that there was “too much fixation” on that approach. When Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, the main federal law governing K-12 education, the legislation gave more power to states on assessments and accountability.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, said she does not expect the Biden administration to recycle the education policies of the Obama years.

Biden has called for tripling federal spending on low-income school districts, boosting funding for special education, increasing teacher salaries, helping states establish universal preschool and modernizing school buildings. His education plan also calls for creating more community schools, with expanded "wraparound" support for students — a big priority for unions.

“The Biden administration is going to support public schools, which means not only turning away from the policies of Betsy DeVos — that’s a given — but also turning away from Race to the Top,” she told POLITICO before the election. “It’s going to be very different.”

Burris said she still expects “a lot of resistance” against Biden's efforts to scrutinize charter schools, considered part of Obama’s legacy. Obama is credited with launching the first federal program to replicate and expand high-performing charters, which are publicly funded but independently run. But the schools have always been a flashpoint, particularly with teachers unions, which argue charters siphon funds from traditional public schools.

Biden has called for banning federal funding to for-profit charter school operators but has vowed to impose tighter standards on charter schools in general. The administration will require all charter schools to be authorized and held accountable “by democratically elected bodies like school boards and also held to the same standards of transparency and accountability as all public schools,” Stef Feldman, the Biden campaign’s national policy director, told the Education Writers Association in October.

Barone, whose group supports charter schools and public school choice, said that policy is “problematic, because the model of the charter is to have autonomy.” Telling parents that the same school district they fled will now be running the charter school they sought as an alternative is “even a little cruel," he said.