THE RADICAL-INCREMENTAL CHANGE DEBATE, RACIAL JUSTICE, AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TEACHERS' CHOICE.

• Author: Tang, Aaron

INTRODUCTION 2016 I. TEACHERS, SCHOOLS, AND (SUBURBAN) PARENTS 2022 A. Teachers 2023 B. Schools 2025 1. Integration 2025 2. School Choice 2026 C. Suburban Parents 2028 II. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TEACHERS' CHOICE 2029 A. Teachers' Choice 2030 B. The Political Economy of Teachers Choice 2035 C. The Political Economy of Teachers' Unions 2037 CONCLUSION 2038 INTRODUCTION

Radical or incremental change? In this profound moment of racial reckoning, that is the fundamental question that divides those within the growing movement for racial justice. (1) It is also a question at the crux of several essays in this important trans-journal symposium.

Consider demands to "Defund The Police." Should proponents of this slogan settle for nothing less than the abolition of police departments, or should they be satisfied with the shifting of resources from police departments to Black communities? (2) Or take recent calls to increase legal accountability for police wrongdoing. Should reformers aim for deep, structural changes, or more incremental reforms such as the modification of qualified immunity doctrine? (3) These debates extend beyond the police context, too. For instance, when institutions of higher education consider their role in racial inequality, should they dismantle long-held norms--such as the belief that the top students belong at the top schools (4)--or is it sufficient to embrace diversity in more limited ways?

These examples illustrate the basic tradeoff between the pursuit of radical and incremental change. (5) Given the deep, structural problems that undergird racial injustice in America, radical change will often be preferable as a first-best solution. But calls for radical change also provoke the strongest political opposition; incremental change is thus typically more achievable. (6) So which path should we pursue? In this critical moment of public concern for the lives of Black Americans, should we settle for less on the belief that something is better than nothing?

This Essay has two principal aims. Although the debate over radical and incremental change is susceptible to no single or simple answer, the Essay's first objective is to shed a bit of light on the debate through the lens of America's tragic legacy of racial inequality in K-12 public education. In doing so, the dominant theme that will emerge is that whether reformers should settle for something less than their full-on, radical demands turns less on some idealized vision of what successful change looks like, (7) and more on a close analysis of what the something less is. To this point--and this is the second aim of the Essay--I hope to make the case for a particular kind of "something less" in the field of educational inequality: a policy intervention I'll describe below as "teachers' choice."

As an initial matter, America's legacy of racial injustice in K-12 education is, of course, depressingly familiar: a pernicious academic achievement gap divides our children along racial lines and sows the seeds for lasting political, economic, and social inequality. (8) Our nation's short-lived experiment with radical change in public education is familiar, too. Court-ordered school integration commenced nominally after Brown v. Board of Education, (9) but truly hit its stride in the early 1970s. (10) And once in force, it worked: integration narrowed the achievement gap by nearly half. (11)

But almost as soon integration began to bear fruit, political reality caught up with it--the quintessential challenge for efforts to implement radical change. Professors Jim Ryan and Michael Heise offered a powerful explanation in their seminal article, The Political Economy of School Choice. (12) Desegregation's downfall, they observed, was attributable to a simple political constituency: "suburbanites, especially suburban parents." (13) For as Ryan and Heise put it, "[w]hen suburbanites perceive a threat to their schools, they fight back, and they usually win." (14) Consider the response to desegregation even in ostensibly liberal cities like Boston, "where riots broke out and black children who were being bused by federal court orders into white schools were pelted with rocks." (15) It is suburban opposition, in other words, that explains the Supreme Court's fateful decision in Milliken v. Bradley, which held that suburban schools may not be compelled to participate in cross-district bussing orders to alleviate segregation in urban schools. (16)

Ever since the fall of court-ordered school integration, educational equity advocates have labored to find worthwhile interventions to pursue in its place. Although several contenders have emerged, (17) perhaps the response that has most captivated public attention has been school choice, by which I mean policies that provide children of color the ability to transfer out of low-performing public schools, whether to a different public school, a charter school, or a private school via a publicly funded voucher. (18) But it turns out school choice itself has been beset by the same tension between radical and incremental change. Radical school choice--by which I mean a policy that would permit students of color to enroll in any public school, regardless of district boundaries--would have sweeping egalitarian potential. (19) Yet the same suburban voters who fought against cross-district bussing orders have also blocked genuine public school choice. (20) Policymakers today argue over the merits of allowing children of color to choose charter schools, private schools, or other public schools within their districts, but no real consideration is given to letting them attend high-performing public schools just minutes away in the suburbs for fear of the political backlash it would produce. (21)

America's experiences with integration and school choice thus reveal that efforts to radically restructure the way America educates our children of color face the stiff obstacle of suburban political opposition. (22) So should we give up those aims in favor of more incremental changes? The answer depends on the efficacy and attainability of those incremental alternatives. And to that point, this Essay suggests a modest intervention that may mitigate the problematic political economy Ryan and Heise identified so perceptively years ago.

Doing so requires first saying a word about what exactly it is that drives educational success in K-12 schools. Research shows that when it comes to improving educational outcomes, the most significant in-school factor is access to great teachers. (23) One oft-cited study found, for example, that providing Black students with access to "a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap." (24) Sadly, students of color are disproportionately likely to be taught by our lowest-performing teachers. (25)

Once great teachers are understood as the fulcrum of our in-school efforts to address the educational opportunity gap, we can start thinking about politically achievable ways to reduce that gap. And on this point, the first thing to notice about our prior responses to the achievement gap--integration and school choice--is that they have involved efforts to move massive numbers of children to schools with better teachers. It is that movement of students, however, that "threatens" the demographic preferences of suburbanites. So why not invert the movement in the other direction through a policy that creates incentives for those same great teachers to transfer to schools predominantly serving children of color?

Perhaps unexpectedly, there is already strong evidence that this kind of intervention--which I call "teachers' choice" because its use of fiscal incentives (rather than a government mandate) leaves the ultimate choice over where great teachers choose to teach in the hands of the educators themselves--is both achievable and effective. A randomized study involving ten large school districts found that offering top-quintile teachers a $20,000 bonus (paid over two years) to transfer from high-performing to low-performing schools with higher concentrations of minority and low-income students produced between a four and ten percentile point annual learning gain for elementary school students at the receiving schools. (26) This is a staggering difference: the entire black-white achievement gap is roughly twenty-nine points. (27) Yet, by and large, districts and states have failed to employ this intervention in aid of their most needy students. (28)

But even more critical than its efficacy is the different political economy teachers' choice would generate. For a number of surprising reasons--including the seemingly trivial fact that public school teacher assignments are usually made via lottery just weeks or even days before the start of the school year--suburban parents typically lack settled expectations regarding the specific teachers who will teach their children in the future. The result is that teachers' choice would trigger significantly less of the dual psychological biases that generate intense suburban opposition to integration and genuine public school choice: loss aversion and status quo bias. Teachers' choice is more winnable because it is less threatening to what suburban parents hold sacred about their local schools.

In explaining why I believe teachers' choice is an attainable intervention, one aim of this Essay is to spur equity advocates and policymakers to consider it as an incremental strategy for dismantling America's tragic legacy of unequal educational opportunity. I aim to write objectively, but I should be up front in admitting my own biases. As a former teacher in inner-city St. Louis, I came face-to-face with the staggering challenges that Black and Brown children confront on a daily basis, including hunger, lack of access to medical care, and physical violence. Through it all, however, I...