By Charles Barone, DFER Policy Director
Part 2 of 4
Yesterday’s post posited that recent bipartisan cooperation around other issues may augur more Congressional willingness to reach middle ground on ESEA reauthorization. One does not necessarily follow the other. But if the shift from polarization to pragmatism holds and extends to education, ESEA reauthorization goes from virtually impossible to politically plausible.
What would that look like politically for Congressional Republicans? First, they would have to figure out how far they can go on the federal role in education. State and local control of education policy plays well with the party base. But moderates and independents are less concerned about who-does-what than they are about what-gets-done. The problem for those Republicans, without whom ESEA reauthorization is impossible, is that they have already seen primary challenges from the party’s right wing take out their moderate colleagues.
Senate Republicans. Any Senate ESEA reauthorization has to be bipartisan and Senator Lamar Alexander, the new ranking member of the Senate Education Committee, is pivotal to that outcome. Right now, Alexander is much more to the right on education than toward the middle. Last month, Alexander reiterated an education proposal he offered to President Reagan in the 1980’s: “You, Mr. President, take all of Medicaid, 100 percent of it, and we in the states will take all of K-12 education.” That of course didn’t happen. But Alexander said he plans to introduce legislation to do just that later this year.
Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that states are about as uneven in ensuring equal educational opportunities for low-income students (the primary purpose of ESEA) as they are in providing health care to low-income families, the elderly, and people with disabilities (the primary purposes of Medicaid). Alexander is up for reelection in 2014. Because his track record of bipartisanship may make him vulnerable to a tea party primary challenge, he’s been shoring up endorsements and amassing a campaign war chest to scare off any such attempt before it can even get started. So more bipartisanship, on education or other issues, may not be on his agenda.
But because Alexander staked out his position on the federal role in education three decades ago, you can’t attribute his current stance solely to holding off a 2014 tea-party challenge. Based both on politics and ideology, it’s anybody’s guess how far he can go with the federal role and, in turn, bipartisanship. And he’s almost definitely going to have to go a bit farther than the Senate Committee bill did in 2011 because, as will be discussed in tomorrow’s post, so likely will Democrats.
Help On The Way? Help against a tea-party challenge may be out there for Alexander, if he wants it, and other moderate Republicans. Republican-leaning groups like the Business Coalition for Student Achievement and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed the Senate HELP Committee’s 2011 reauthorization bill because it had too weak of a federal role on accountability, an area Republicans used to own. That in and of itself won’t be enough. But if education is as high a priority as business leaders say it is, you would think stronger support from them for Republicans who support their education policies would be seriously considered.