Harris Could Set Democrats’ K–12 Agenda By Reviving Ideas from 2020

This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.

Fortified by a stream of Democratic endorsements and high-dollar donations, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared every bit the presidential contender when she appeared before the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers last week.

Addressing thousands of her party’s most loyal supporters just days after being endorsed by President Joe Biden, the newly ascendant Harris pledged to defend labor rights and beat back Republican plans to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education. Above all, she heaped praise on members of the nation’s eighth-largest union, which she said was engaged in “the most noble work: teaching other people’s children.”

“And God knows,” she quickly added, “we don’t pay you enough.”

Harris made no firm commitments in her 20 minutes of remarks, only her second major speech as a 2024 candidate. Yet that near-digression unmistakably echoed the signature idea of her 2020 presidential campaign — and quite possibly provided a preview of what she intends to accomplish in the White House.

More than five years ago, when then-Sen. Harris was considered one of the betting favorites to win the Democratic nomination and contest Donald Trump’s reelection, she pitched her first major policy offering directly to teachers. While her fellow progressives broadcast their ambitions to enact wealth taxes and single-payer healthcare, she unveiled a $315 billion plan to raise teacher salaries with state and federal funds, potentially closing the earnings gap between educators and other comparably educated professionals.

The proposal reflected the upheaval of the #RedforEd movement, which had launched a wave of teacher strikes the previous year, remembered Sarah Shapiro, a former staffer at the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) who volunteered for Harris’s failed 2020 bid. But it also demonstrated Harris’s abiding focus on schools and their employees, she said.

“It showed how ambitious she is in advocating for public schools and supporting that workforce, which has continued to struggle since the pandemic,” said Shapiro, now a Democratic staffer in the U.S. Senate.

Whether the vice president dusts off her promise to boost teacher pay is one of several questions that could define the K–12 agenda going forward if she prevails over Trump in November. With the Democratic National Convention just weeks away, she and her advisers will soon decide if voters want sweeping changes to federal education policy — in effect, a progressive version of the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 — or a more measured continuation of the program that Biden and Harris have pursued the last four years.

Those efforts have included massive expenditures in pandemic relief aid and student loan forgiveness, but little drive to comprehensively lift academic achievement or transform how education is delivered. Nearly a decade after the eclipse of the No Child Left Behind Act, some longtime observers believe the Democrats’ always-fickle dance with school reform and choice has faltered completely.

Michael Petrilli, president of the reform-friendly Thomas B. Fordham Institute and an alumnus of the Education Department from the early days of NCLB, said Harris had a unique opportunity to realize her own vision for schools. Unburdened by primary challengers who might have obliged her to define her goals earlier, he argued, she could spend the remainder of the campaign filling a blank canvas.

“She hasn’t had to make any specific promises, and she hasn’t put any policy positions out there that are her own,” Petrilli said. “So she’s got a free hand.”

Red for Ed’s legacy

Harris was presented with a somewhat similar freedom in 2020, albeit in drastically different circumstances.

That primary campaign featured an astonishing 29 major candidates, including brand names like Bernie Sanders and would-be giant killers like Pete Buttiegieg. From the outset, the freshman senator was considered one of the field’s heavyweights, drawing huge crowds to her speeches and enjoying enviable polling numbers.

Early on, then-Sen. Harris was considered among the favorites in the 2020 Democratic primary field. (Getty Images)

In the middle of that honeymoon phase, Harris opted to wade head-on into the K–12 debate. Her teacher pay reform would have given the average American teacher a $13,500 raise, with Washington picking up 10 percent of the tab. Thereafter, the campaign said, the federal government would pay $3 for every dollar contributed by states to close their compensation gap between teachers and other professionals with similar credentials and experience.

It made for an unusual centerpiece to her campaign rollout. At a time when her opponents were brainstorming billion-dollar initiatives seemingly every week — from Andrew Yang’s push for a universal basic income to Cory Booker’s enthusiasm for baby bonds — comparatively few addressed education. Surveyed about their positions on the issue, the hopefuls gave answers that mostly touched on forgiving student debt, making community college free, and whether they’d sent their own children to public schools. When Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s famously detail-oriented campaign released its principal contribution on children and families, it focused on childcare subsidies rather than schools as such.

Jorge Elorza, a rising star in the Democratic Party then serving in his second term as mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, said he appreciated Harris’s willingness to throw down the gauntlet to her primary opponents.

“It was during a campaign where many of the other candidates didn’t propose much around K–12,” said Elorza, who now leads the advocacy group Democrats for Education Reform. “I give her credit for thinking big and coming out with a significant proposal on education.”

Democrats had spent much of the prior four years trying to forge a new path on education and shed some of the dissension that had wracked their coalition throughout much of the reform era. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016 showed a willingness to move away from standardized testing and toward a closer embrace of teachers’ unions, whose leaders were some of Clinton’s closest allies.

The Trump administration only accelerated that process, with Democrats finding it “hard to be associated with anything” the president or Education Secretary Betsy DeVos supported, Elorza recalled. When thousands of teachers, dissatisfied with paychecks that had never recovered from cuts enacted during the Great Recession, marched on state capitols in the #RedforEd summer of 2018, Harris signaled her unqualified support for the cause.

When she announced her presidential candidacy a few months later, she also benefited from the help of some of the progressive movement’s most influential thinkers on education. Catherine Brown, then the vice president of education policy at CAP, assisted the campaign as a volunteer by helping draft its K–12 plans.

Alongside the sizable commitment to increased teacher pay, Harris’s agenda included a slew of ideas to bolster the attractiveness of teaching, including more resources for professional development, career ladders and mentorship programs, and a large fund dedicated to training teachers at minority-serving colleges and universities. Many of the same recommendations appeared to be inspired by CAP’s now-dormant “TeachStrong” campaign, launched in the late Obama era in the hopes of modernizing the profession.

Brown said Harris’s team went through a “really strong policymaking process” to develop its education platform, including multiple iterations, cost modeling, and thorough consultations with K–12 experts. Even five years later, bits and pieces of its workforce proposals are mirrored in the Department of Education’s plans to deal with increased teacher turnover following the pandemic. Though her primary campaign ultimately fell short of the finish line, running out of money by the end of 2019, its legacy was unique, she continued.

“I don’t remember a lot of other elected officials coming to us and saying, ‘How do we make these ideas real?’ So that was exciting.”

Open playing field for choice

The question now is how much Harris will seek to build on her previous bid and its various policy items.

The Biden presidency offers scant clues about what direction its desired successor might take. While it mobilized unprecedented federal funding to cope with the post-COVID crisis in student learning, those resources were, by design, awarded without substantial obligations for states to reform longstanding practices or demonstrate much evidence of achievement growth. In comparison with the Obama administration’s highly prescriptive Race to the Top initiative — or even Biden’s own maneuvers to wipe out billions in student loan payments — its goals have, at times, appeared hazy to outsiders.

The lack of clarity is notable at a moment when, according to recent testing data, eighth-graders still lag far behind their pre-COVID learning trajectories. A long-awaited revision of Title IX regulations will be held up in court indefinitely following challenges from Republican officials, while the Department of Education’s effort to consolidate its K–12 priorities, called “Raise the Bar,” has yet to break through to public attention. Meanwhile, last week’s public embrace of unionized teachers could trouble the waters with parents who still blame them for putting the brakes on attempts to lift pandemic restrictions on in-person learning.

Carmel Martin, a veteran Democratic staffer who served as Harris’s domestic policy advisor through 2023, wrote in an email that her former boss saw teachers as “the most important assets that our education system has” and would likely continue to press for better pay on their behalf.

“The vice president was acutely aware of the toll in terms of academic progress, but also the mental and emotional health of our children,” wrote Martin, now a special secretary to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore. “As president, I am sure she will continue to prioritize investment in our students, teachers and schools.”

Brown said the party has long since accepted the breakup of the reform consensus, but hasn’t yet produced a roadmap for the next Democratic White House.

“I don’t think K–12 was unimportant to [the Biden administration], but we’ve sort of gotten past NCLB, and there’s a moment now to ask, ‘What’s the priority now?’” she said. “I’m sure a lot of people are working on that, but that question has not been answered yet.”

Petrill believes the issue of education could be the ideal avenue for Harris to outflank Trump by moving to the center. In addition to whatever new spending commitments she may prefer, the vice president could take advantage of her background in law enforcement to strike a more assertive tone on school discipline.

Such a tack might lead to the development of a federal response to eye-watering rates of chronic absenteeism, which could easily derail any possibility of a meaningful learning recovery. In a move that later proved controversial, Harris used her powers as both San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general to curb truancy among elementary schoolers. Given that most states have adopted absenteeism in their federal school accountability frameworks, a President Harris could have scope for public intervention.

As a state attorney general in California, Harris was willing to use law enforcement tools to curb chronic truancy of elementary schoolers. (Getty Images)

Better still, Petrilli added, Harris could once again embrace charter schools, which previously had the support of Presidents Clinton and Obama but fell out of favor under Trump. With the GOP now increasingly focused on facilitating the rapid spread of education savings accounts, which channel public funding to families to spend on educational costs like private school tuition, he said it is possible to re-engage the millions of parents who rely on public school choice.

“You’ve got Republicans, who have moved away from public education reform into just talking about private school choice, and the Democrats are mostly just talking about more money,” Petrilli said. “That does leave a lot of the playing field open.”

At the same time, the likely nominee must tread carefully around the issue of public support for private schools. Already, an alliance of education advocacy groups has publicly asked her not to tap Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate; Shapiro has previously agreed with Republicans in his home state to support a form of school vouchers in exchange for increasing funding for public education.

Elorza praised the K–12 record of the Biden-Harris administration, which he credited with providing desperately needed funds to keep schools’ doors open and payrolls solvent. But now that the emergency is over, he said, there should follow a “moment of realignment” that scales up promising new innovations in education, from personalized learning to high-dosage tutoring.

“I remember being mayor at the time of the pandemic, and what we needed was resources to make sure we could keep the lights on,” said Elorza. “Now there’s an opportunity to craft a new agenda.”