Republicans can’t sugarcoat their losses on abortion rights anymore

Originally published in Vox on November 8, 2023.

Even before Tuesday’s elections, many progressives insisted the question of whether protecting abortion rights wins elections was already asked and answered. Democrats made abortion rights the centerpiece of their campaign advertising during the 2022 midterms, a cycle where Democrats outperformed expectations, kept control of the US Senate, and staved off a red wave. Polls last year also found abortion rights to be a significantly motivating issue for both independent and Democratic voters.

Abortion rights ballot measures won in all six states where they appeared in 2022, including states like Montana, Kentucky, and Kansas that otherwise elected Republican candidates. Democrats have been winning in special elections where they ran on abortion rights, and surveys suggested voters have grown even more supportive of abortion rights since the repeal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Anti-abortion groups argued in turn that liberals were mistaking correlation for causation; they maintained that confidence in abortion rights messaging was misplaced, and voters would ultimately punish Democrats for their maximalist positions. They pointed out that Democrats tried and failed to unseat anti-abortion governors in the midterms, and applauded winning federal candidates who “went on offense” on abortion, like Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. The lost referendums, anti-abortion groups insisted, stemmed largely from Republican leaders failing to campaign hard enough and from being outspent, something they promised to never let happen again.

The polling on abortion rights, meanwhile, could be complicated and seem contradictory: Voters sometimes express support for second- and third-trimester bans while signaling strong opposition to restricting access to abortion.

The 2023 election cycle represented a big test: Were abortion rights activists right? Or were anti-abortion leaders correct that the earlier post-Roe losses stemmed from insufficient investment and mealy-mouthed campaigning?

A decisive 13-point victory for protecting abortion rights in red Ohio, wins for Democrats in the Virginia legislature where GOP candidates campaigned on rolling back abortion access to 15 weeks, and the decisive reelection of Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who made protecting abortion rights in his red state central to his campaign, provide the clearest evidence to date that voters of all political persuasions do not support the nationwide attack on reproductive freedom and are voting accordingly.

Anti-abortion leaders tested a host of new tactics this cycle — from rebranding abortion bans as “limits” to claiming the Ohio abortion rights ballot measure was really about curtailing parents’ rights. None of them worked. Republican strategists had been banking on November 7 providing them with proof that voters were sick of Democrats talking about abortion. Virginia was supposed to be a proof of concept that would let Republicans run on a “consensus” position on 15-week bans next year while changing the subject to other topics like crime and immigration.

So Tuesday’s results really were a resounding victory for Democrats and abortion rights supporters — but there are still some caveats and reasons for caution in 2024.

How abortion rights won in Ohio

Anti-abortion leaders recognized how important a win in Ohio would be to changing the narrative ahead of 2024. “A win here would show those other states that will have these ballot measures in the years to come, ‘Hey, these battles can be won,’” Peter Range, the executive director of Ohio Right to Life, told the 19th News in October. The anti-abortion movement threw everything they had at the campaign and still fell far short.

Instead, last night 57 percent of Ohio voters cast their ballot in favor of the constitutional amendment to codify abortion access, despite a significant array of obstacles in a solidly Republican state where Republican elected officials had come out uniformly against the measure.

“Generally speaking, ballot measures in Ohio don’t tend to win,” said Jonathan Robinson, the director of research at Catalist, a liberal voter data analytics firm.

Passing affirmative ballot measures is even harder. In the other conservative states where ballot measures won, abortion rights campaigners organized voters against anti-abortion proposals. Political scientists find it can be easier to be on the “no” side of ballot measure campaigns, since voters have a bias toward maintaining the status quo.

“The reality is Ohio is among the tougher states that we have worked in,” said Joey Teitelbaum, a pollster involved with the Ohio abortion rights campaign, who also worked on winning ballot measures in Colorado, Kansas, and Kentucky. “We stayed focused on a broad values-based message that went beyond partisan politics.”

Though polls indicated Ohio voters were broadly supportive of the proposed amendment, abortion rights advocates were dealing with new hurdles, including an expensive August special election that sought to raise the ballot measure threshold to 60 percent, voter roll purges led by the anti-abortion secretary of state, a misleading intervention from the state’s Republican attorney, and vocal campaigning from the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who urged Ohioans to vote no in a TV ad.

The Ohio Ballot Board also drafted its own summary language of the proposed ballot measure, using more politically objectionable terms like “unborn child” instead of “fetus” and refusing to state that the amendment would protect not just access to abortion but also to contraception, miscarriage care, fertility treatment, and continuing pregnancy. Researchers know that the specific language that appears on a ballot can have a significant impact on how voters vote, and a poll released in late October found support for the amendment dropped considerably when voters were presented with the edited language.

“I have never encountered such complete opposition by the state government,” said Ashley All, who served as communications director for the winning pro-abortion rights ballot measure campaign in Kansas and has since consulted on other post-Roe ballot referendums.

Anti-abortion advocates raised millions more dollars than they had in previous ballot measure campaigns, and worked to cast the Ohio amendment as an “anti-parent” measure that would effectively create a new right to gender-affirming surgery for minors. Legal scholars said the fear-mongering about parental consent was unjustified, given Ohio case law and the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court.​

That abortion rights won so decisively against all these odds — and that so many Trump voters proved willing to cross party lines to vote in favor of the amendment — is a sobering result that anti-abortion leaders will struggle to dismiss. For now, the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group is saying it lost because voters incorrectly believed pregnant patients could be denied life-saving medical care. But even in states with exceptions to abortion bans, doctors have been denying or delaying care, fearing funding cuts or criminal prosecution.

How abortion rights won in Virginia

Though Virginians were not casting votes on a ballot measure, it was no secret that the Virginia legislative elections were largely being fought over abortion.

“It almost feels like we’re running a single-issue campaign on this one,” J. Miles Coleman, of the UVA Center for Politics, said last week. Among women voters, who make up more than half of Virginia’s election, 70 percent rated abortion as a “very important” issue, up 47 percent from 2019.

All 140 seats in the Virginia General Assembly were up for grabs, and Democrats not only retained control of the state Senate but flipped control of the Virginia House.

Youngkin and anti-abortion groups bet that if they could win in Virginia by running emphatically on a 15-week abortion ban, something they cast as a “reasonable” and “consensus” position, then they could prove to Republicans nationwide that abortion need not be a political loser for their party. (The ban, which they called a “limit,” also would have exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.) They also hoped that staking out this position would allow them to more easily change the subject to topics they had advantages on, like crime and the economy.

Prior to the fall of Roe, national polls showed broad support for restricting abortion after 15 weeks, but since the Dobbs decision, voters have been signaling more opposition to the idea. A poll released in mid-October from Christopher Newport University found 54 percent of Virginians opposed the idea of a 15-week ban, and another October survey from the Washington Post-Schar School found 47 percent opposed and 46 percent approved.

Another way to understand the question in Virginia is whether voters would support lawmakers cutting short the window of legal abortion by 12 weeks, since abortion is currently permitted up to 26 weeks and 6 days of a pregnancy in the state.

Voters, though, had good reason to be suspicious Virginia Republicans really would stop at 15 weeks. In Florida, Republicans passed a 15-week ban on abortion in 2022, only to turn around and pass a six-week ban in 2023. Other GOP-led states like South Carolina, Georgia, and Ohio have passed six-week bans.

Multiple videos also emerged of Virginia Republicans admitting they’d likely push for more than they’ve publicly let on. In 2021, an activist secretly recorded Youngkin saying he’d go “on offense” if elected but needed to speak minimally about the topic during campaign season. Two months ago videos surfaced of a House of Delegates candidate saying he’d support a “100 percent” and “total” ban on abortion, and more recently a video of a candidate in a Virginia Senate race showed her saying she’d be interested in pushing beyond a 15-week ban.

A Washington Post-Schar School poll from October found that 51 percent of registered Virginia voters trusted Democrats to handle abortion, compared to 34 percent who trust Republicans.

There are real grounds for abortion rights optimism in 2024

The news out of Ohio is auspicious for those organizing abortion rights ballot measures next year in Arizona, Nevada, Florida, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado. Abortion rights have had a 7-0 winning streak on the ballot since Roe v. Wade was overturned, and Republicans’ fear-mongering rhetoric about parents’ rights and abortion “up until birth” seemed to have failed. While Americans tend to be more uncomfortable with abortions later in pregnancy, voters seem to understand they are extremely rare, and typically associated with fetal anomalies, threats to a mother’s life, and barriers to care that delay access to the procedure.

Evidence continues to mount that voters are willing to cross party lines when it comes to protecting access to reproductive health care. If abortion rights campaigners can continue to frame the issue in a nonpartisan way, their odds of success in the next round of ballot measures look good. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s strong reelection in Kentucky is also an encouraging signal that Democrats can campaign openly on abortion rights in red states and still win.

It’s hard to overstate how much the loss in Virginia complicates’ Republicans’ 2024 campaign plans. Virginia was supposed to show that Republicans could cast Democrats as extremists, proactively pursue reductions in abortion access, and still win, even among Biden-leaning voters. The GOP wanted to show Republicans could “neutralize” the abortion issue, so that swing voters would feel more comfortable voting on other topics they trusted Republicans on. Youngkin insisted voters are “ready to move on and talk about topics besides abortion.”

The fact that Republicans failed so spectacularly doesn’t mean Republicans won’t try this strategy again next year, but it does represent a rather clarifying result — and one that should make GOP strategists pretty nervous, especially given that most voters think Republicans want to ban abortion in all or most cases.

How things could still go poorly for abortion rights in 2024

While things have gone well for abortion rights campaigners thus far, most will admit they were certainly not sure things would play out as they did. And, as anti-abortion leaders are quick to point out, Democrats tried and failed to unseat anti-abortion governors like Brian Kemp in Georgia, Kim Reynolds in Iowa, Mike DeWine in Ohio, and Ron DeSantis in Florida last year, showing that it’s not dispositive that politicians will pay a price for restricting access to abortion.

“In the midterms, yes, abortion mattered in certain places, and democracy issues mattered on certain races. But not all of them,” Ashley All told Vox. “Florida voted exactly as Florida does. Political observers and pundits want to make blanket statements about how things will impact an election, but everyone who works on campaigns knows it doesn’t work like that.”

Another concern is that Youngkin’s prediction was just premature and that voters will in fact grow more tired of hearing about attacks on abortion rights the further out from Dobbs the country gets. Republicans bet wrongly on that happening in 2022 and 2023, but experts admit it’s hard to know what will be animating voters a year from now, especially given how exhausted the electorate seems to be these days.

“Generally people seem a little burnt out,” said Robinson, of Catalist. “The level of political donations for Democrats and Republicans is down a lot, which suggests a sag in interest in politics. Interest in the Republican presidential primary is really low.” Though turnout on November 7 was high, the abortion rights measure in Ohio received nearly as many votes as Republican Sen. J.D. Vance did in 2022.

Reproductive rights campaigners also say the public should not underestimate how tough a fight they faced this year in Ohio compared to the previous six ballot measure campaigns in 2022. Anti-abortion politicians are likely to continue their efforts to curb access to the ballot, and invest heavily in TV and digital advertising aimed at confusing voters. This year abortion rights activists benefited from Ohio being the only ballot measure campaign in the country, helping them to raise three times as much money as their opponents, with most money coming from out of state.

Next year, when there are more expensive ballot measures competing for both media attention and political donations, on top of a surely consuming presidential contest and a bevy of congressional and gubernatorial elections, advocates say the fundraising landscape for abortion rights referendums may be much more difficult.

Cities are asking the Supreme Court for more power to clear homeless encampments

Originally published at Vox on October 10, 2023.
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In 2018, a federal court issued a consequential decision about homelessness in America: People without housing can’t be punished for sleeping or camping outside on public property if there are no adequate shelter alternatives available.

The Ninth Circuit’s decision, Martin v. Boise, said that punishing homeless people with no other place to go would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Ever since, cities and states have struggled to comply with it, crafting convoluted policies like a new camping ban in Portland, Oregon that prohibits homeless camping during the hours of 8 am to 8 pm.

As municipal backlash to Martin grew, so has the nation’s homelessness crisis, especially in the nine Western states under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, where some 42 percent of the country’s homeless population now lives.

The Supreme Court declined to hear Martin in 2019. But they now could reconsider the decision. A petition was filed in late August concerning a similar case in Grants Pass, Oregon, a city of 38,000 people. In 2022, the Ninth Circuit decided it would be unconstitutional for Grants Pass to fine homeless people sleeping on public property if there was nowhere else for them to go. The city is challenging that decision.

The Supreme Court hasn’t indicated whether it will hear this significant case, a step it will likely take at the end of this year or early next. Supporters of the Martin decision say there’s no reason the high court should take up the request, as there’s no clear disagreement among circuit courts to resolve. In the half-decade since Martin came down, there have been dozens of cases affirming it, including in the Fourth Circuit in Virginia, and federal lower courts in Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Texas, New York, and Hawaii.

But a bipartisan coalition of cities and states is pressuring the Supreme Court to intervene. In the last month, dozens of local governments have filed briefs pleading with the court to reconsider Martin, including liberal cities like Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Seattle.

Some in the court system have also signaled they’d like to see the case overruled. This summer, when the full Ninth Circuit declined to review the Grants Pass v. Johnson decision issued by a three-judge panel in 2022, 16 judges dissented, arguing both cases were incorrectly decided. “Martin handcuffed local jurisdictions as they tried to respond to the homelessness crisis; Grants Pass now places them in a straitjacket,” one dissent read. A state judge in Arizona also recently urged the Supreme Court to take up the matter, arguing Martin and Grants Pass both “tie the hands of cities that seek in good faith to address the growing homeless encampment epidemic.”

California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom also filed a brief in August urging the Supreme Court to reconsider the cases. While Newsom insisted he is not objecting to the “narrow” Martin decision that people experiencing homelessness should not be criminalized for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go, the governor argued cities need more clarity on implementation, and that lower courts have interpreted Martin too broadly.

Despite Newsom saying that he’s not seeking to overturn Martin wholesale, homeless advocates say this is naive at best, since that’s what the lawyers representing Grant Pass are asking to do.

“Newsom and the other briefs that aren’t asking for a full overturn of Martin — just clarity around some of these restrictions — are fooling themselves, perhaps willfully so, and are being willfully ignorant of the consequences of their involvement,” Eric Tars, the legal director for the National Homelessness Law Center, told Vox. “The petitioners in this case are asking for a full overturn, that’s the question they have presented to the Court and that’s what they’ll be arguing for.”

Theane Evangelis, a Gibson Dunn attorney and lead counsel for the city of Grants Pass, told Vox they do believe Martin and Grants Pass are “legally wrong” and “are hopeful the Supreme Court will grant review and undo these harmful decisions.”

The Grants Pass v. Johnson case is about whether it violates the Eighth Amendment to fine or arrest unhoused people

Five years ago, about six weeks after the Martin decision was decided, three homeless individuals filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Grants Pass, Oregon, arguing that the city’s laws and customs — like its anti-camping ordinance — punished them for their status of being involuntarily homeless.

The lead plaintiff was Debra Blake, who had been experiencing homelessness for about a decade and was continually racking up hundreds of dollars in fines and fees for sleeping outside and allegedly trespassing. By 2020, Blake owed over $5,000 in penalties for living outside. In their lawsuit, attorneys representing the plaintiffs noted the dearth of affordable housing and homeless shelters in the city, and blasted Grants Pass’s arguments that unhoused people could simply leave and go elsewhere. Blake died a year later at 62, and so the case was renamed for another homeless plaintiff, Gloria Johnson.

In 2022, a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the homeless plaintiffs.

Opponents of the decision argued Grants Pass marked a radical expansion of Martin, since the Oregon city had issued civil penalties to unhoused people, not criminal ones. Some also alleged that Grants Pass created even further confusion for local governments, since the Ninth Circuit held that a Christian homeless shelter that had strict rules like mandatory church attendance could not be counted as available shelter in Grants Pass due to potential violations of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Many cities have only religious shelters or rely heavily on them.

Supporters of the Grants Pass ruling say it neither expanded Martin nor created confusion. “I see it as a clarification of Martin,” said Tars, of the National Homelessness Law Center, saying that Grants Pass clarifies “that you have to look at the collective impact of all these different ordinances — including anti-sleeping bans or rules barring being in parks after dark — that can make it illegal to exist basically anywhere in public even if they have no other place to do so.”

Ed Johnson, the director of litigation at the Oregon Law Center and the lead attorney representing the homeless plaintiffs in Grant Pass, told Vox that the decision is being greatly mischaracterized by opponents. “The opinion is exceedingly narrow and puts no limits whatsoever on a city’s ability to prevent permanent or even established encampments,” he said.

So is it a violation of the Eighth Amendment to issue tickets and fines against people experiencing homelessness?

Lawyers representing Grant Pass say no, emphasizing that enforcing local regulations should not be considered cruel and unusual punishments.

“I think the entire idea that it could constitute cruel and unusual punishment to arrest someone for sleeping on the street is incorrect,” added Timothy Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, a conservative legal advocacy group that filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to take the case. Sandefur told Vox that “it’s true” that arresting someone for a status like being homeless is wrong, but he argued it would be at most a violation of due process, not of the Eighth Amendment.

Homeless advocates in support of Martin and Grants Pass say ticketing, fining, and arresting unhoused people if they have nowhere else to go is indeed a violation of the Eighth Amendment. In a brief filed to the Ninth Circuit in support of the unhoused plaintiffs, lawyers with the Fines and Fees Justice Center argued that civil penalties frequently trap unhoused people in cycles of poverty and homelessness, ensnaring them in debt that prevents them from securing housing at all.

And given the insufficient number of shelter beds, the practical outcome of rules barring rest under a blanket on any publicly owned property or rest in a car overnight in a public park parking lot “effectively function[s] as a city-wide prohibition of homelessness” that “punish[es] their very existence.”

Overturning Martin and Grants Pass could have implications for forced treatment

As public frustration with tent encampments has grown, a movement urging a “get tough” approach has emerged, arguing that the costs of allowing tent cities to proliferate are too steep and that waiting for cities to build enough new housing before acting is unacceptable. Some argue that public officials have grown complacent with the homelessness crisis, and rely on Martin as an excuse to maintain the status quo.

In efforts to both crack down on encampments but comply with the Ninth Circuit decisions, some cities and states have pushed more punitive legislation, like bills to make camping a felony, or criminalize sleeping outdoors on public property except within designated areas. The question of whether these laws are constitutional under Martin remains an open question. Leaders recognize they probably can’t ban camping everywhere given the court rulings, but they’ve been looking to see if they can ban it in most places instead. If Martin was overturned by the Supreme Court, however, officials would likely feel much more empowered to resume city-wide anti-camping bans and prosecute those who violate them.

Tars, of the National Homelessness Law Center, said the major difference between now and five years ago is the emergence of a “concrete, well-funded movement” to criminalize homelessness, rather than a patchwork of local regulations decided by individual cities and towns. “Today there are groups actively working together, producing media, going on Fox News, to proactively push criminalization,” he told Vox. “That didn’t exist prior to Martin v. Boise.”

In a Supreme Court brief filed by the California State Sheriffs’ Association and the California Police Chiefs Association, the groups wrote “they, by no means, argue for the criminalization of the homeless” and are committed to “improving the outcomes” for unhoused people. Still, they said the “disastrous” decisions “impermissibly intrude” on their policing duties, and make it “all but impossible” to curb dangers associated with encampments.

If Martin and Grants Pass are overturned, it will not only have implications for clearing tents, but likely also for sending homeless people to substance use or psychiatric treatment programs.

In several of the briefs submitted by local governments, cities reported examples of homeless people “refusing help,” and as Vox has previously reported, the question of what to do with those who turn down offers of shelter has gotten entangled with broader, ongoing debates about involuntary treatment. As pressure to clear encampments mounts, many homeless advocates fear that new laws mandating treatment will be indiscriminately applied to those sleeping outside, and even more so if Martin and Grants Pass no longer provide a check on local governments’ behavior.

Some of the briefs filed to the Supreme Court in support of reconsidering Martin have already raised this issue. “Allowing people to live on the streets or in tents in a park is not a compassionate response to the problem,” wrote Sandefur in the Goldwater Institute’s amicus filing. “A compassionate response would consist of providing people with the care they need — including taking them into custody against their will if they are incapable of managing themselves.”

Asked about the connection between encampments and involuntary care, Sandefur told Vox these cases show that cities “are going to have to find a better solution than what they’ve been doing, which is largely ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away.”

A program that saved child care for millions is expiring. What now?

Originally published on September 29, 2023.
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This weekend, parents and child care providers across the nation are bracing for the end of an instrumental federal program that has stabilized child care programs and reduced costs for families over the past three years.

Some $24 billion worth of child care funding — one of the last remaining Covid-19 emergency relief programs still in effect — is set to expire Saturday. Issued as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the program marked the largest investment in child care in US history and allowed fragile businesses to cover rent and maintenance and raise wages for their notoriously underpaid staff. The Biden administration has reported that the grants helped 80 percent of US licensed child care centers stay afloat.

Frequently referred to as the “child care cliff,” the expiration of the grants is expected to renew strain on the child care sector, which already runs on tight margins, struggles to recruit and retain staff from higher-paying industries, and charges most parents far more than they can comfortably afford.

Many news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC, have cited an estimate from the liberal think tank the Century Foundation stating that 70,000 child care programs will likely close, resulting in 3.2 million children losing access to care.

That figure was derived from an October 2022 survey of 12,000 early childhood educators that found 34 percent of child care programs reported that they would have closed during the pandemic if not for the emergency grants. The grants covered 220,000 programs and 9.6 million kids, so the Century Foundation multiplied those figures by 0.34 to arrive at its estimate.

Experts in child care policy told Vox, however, that the “cliff” may prove far less of a tumble for providers and families than that popular statistic suggests — partly due to poor data on industry supply and demand and partly because most states have made unprecedented investments in their child care systems over the last two years.

The federal grants were authorized to help child care programs during the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, after lawmakers deemed the child care sector “uniquely vulnerable” to the crisis, and less able to access relief loans through methods available to other small businesses. In a US Senate HELP Committee report issued this past spring, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that emergency relief was needed because child care providers began “hemorrhaging money during pandemic shutdowns” as fewer children attended and they faced unexpected costs to comply with reduced group sizes, cleaning materials, and personal protective equipment.

Today, programs are no longer struggling to enroll students nor needing to cover the costs of pandemic safety regulations. “Saying you would have closed during Covid if not for the grants is not the same thing, that you will close after Covid if the grants don’t continue,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of another left-wing think tank, the People’s Policy Project.

One leading child care expert declined to comment on the widely cited Century Foundation estimate (“We didn’t do the number and I don’t want to speak directly to that,” Sarah Rittling, of the First Five Years Fund, told Vox), while another said that they knew no one who expected the loss of programs to reach anywhere near 70,000, but did not want to say so on the record for fear of alienating other leaders in their child care advocacy coalition.

“Will there be some adjustments [when the funds expire]? Yes, obviously, that’s fairly true, but you see estimates that a quarter of American kids will lose their child care spots and I will gladly take any bet that anyone at the Century Foundation wants to place,” said Patrick T. Brown, a child care policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. “I do not think 25 percent of kids are going to lose their child care. People have a vested interest in using strong frames and narratives to say we have a broken market.”

Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation, defended her organization’s analysis but acknowledged that the estimate of program closures is unlikely to come to pass, telling Vox it’s more like a “worst-case scenario.”

“A number of states have put forward their own state funding and our analysis did not account for that,” she said. “We don’t have numbers yet of how much will be mitigated by state investments, but from Alaska to Maine to Illinois, they have put their own funding in, and that will make a decent difference in reducing the losses.”

Why Congress isn’t extending the Covid-19 child care grants

The federal pandemic grants were objectively successful in helping to stabilize the child care sector over the last three years, leaving many people baffled that Congress would choose not to renew the funding now. The Department of Labor recently reported that the price of child care rose 6 percent in July over the previous year, nearly double the rate of inflation.

From Republicans’ perspective, the child care grants, like other Covid-19 safety net programs, were passed as an emergency relief measure, and now that the emergency is over, the pandemic level of spending should not become the new federal baseline. A strong current among conservatives supports “going back to normal” and reining in spending more broadly to address inflation and the deficit.

Democrats and progressives argue that funding for child care was woefully low before the pandemic, and returning to the status quo now, amid a tighter labor market and fierce hiring competition from other industries, would be untenable. Reduced federal funding could mean pay cuts or hiring freezes, or hikes in costs that families can’t afford, leading to fewer children served and, ultimately, closure of some programs.

In response to the impending deadline, congressional Democrats earlier this month proposed a bill to give $16 billion to child care providers each year for the next five years. It has no Republican co-sponsors and even its own authors concede that it’s unlikely to go anywhere. The Biden administration has declined to lobby for additional child care funding in the fraught ongoing budget negotiations, arguing that it needs to bargain with Republicans only over emergency priorities to stave off a government shutdown.

One recurring challenge for Democrats is that because they have so many areas they want to see new big investments in, and because they work within broad advocacy coalitions, leaders often struggle to home in on a few specific priorities, instead championing lots of big social investments at once.

This dynamic was on display during the failed Build Back Better negotiations and amid Inflation Reduction Act talks. Child care investments were in competition with new spending on preschool, affordable housing, paid medical and family leave, and the expanded child tax credit. In the end, virtually none won out.

Child care programs face tougher staff recruitment. Parents face higher costs.

Over the last two years many states passed new legislation to support child care access, affordability, and quality, including red states such as Alabama, Louisiana, Montana and North Dakota, as well as blue and purple states like Minnesota, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Illinois, California, Alaska and Vermont. Most states were in strong fiscal positions and built on the political momentum for child care investments that coalesced during the pandemic.

Linda Smith, who heads early childhood research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Vox that the impact of the expiring pandemic funds will vary by state, but she expects that broadly, retaining child care workers will become harder. In 2019, the median child care worker earned $11.65 per hour. Today their pay averages $14.22, but without public subsidy, programs may have to raise rates for families to continue paying workers those higher wages. The survey released last October and cited by the Century Foundation found that 43 percent of child care centers and 37 percent of home-based providers expected that they’d have to raise rates when federal relief dollars dry up.

“In lower-income working families, passing those costs on to parents is not going to be an option,” said Smith. These increased costs will also overlap with the resumption of student loan payments in October after a three-year pause, and higher interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, and car loans.

Some states are already starting to see the effects of diminished funding. In June, the Republican-controlled legislature in Wisconsin started reducing its federal stabilization grants from $20 million a month to $10 million, and the remaining funds are expected to end completely in January. Ruth Schmidt, the executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, told CBS that nearly 90 percent of day care centers are raising tuition in response. Some programs have closed.

Whitney Evans, the California director for ParentChild+, said she expects the decline in federal funding will affect low-income parents who are least able to work remotely. “For middle-income families, this is going to be a huge pain in the ass but they’ll figure out a way,” she told Vox. “But for children with the least access to resources, who won’t be able to pay more for slots if rates go up, there will be even less space available.”

Could this affect female workforce participation?

A big question looming over the expiring child care funds is whether a major disruption to the child care ecosystem would force parents — and mothers in particular — out of their jobs. Child care advocates have been saying for years that a failure to invest more in the nation’s child care system will result in that outcome; this was a key argument during the fight for the Build Back Better Act.

However, despite the failure of Congress to pass those new child care investments, workforce participation among moms, and even moms of very young children, has continued to rise. The latest data showed 66.6 percent of women who gave birth in the previous 12 months were working in 2022, up from 66.5 percent in 2021, and 61.6 percent in 2010. And more than 70 percent of mothers with kids under five were working this past summer — more than even before the pandemic. The expansion of remote work, which makes it easier for parents to juggle their jobs and child care responsibilities, is likely one major contributing factor.

Kashen, of the Century Foundation, credits the American Rescue Plan investments for staving off female workforce fallout, and said that the “reality is most parents have to work,” so even if moms are employed, it doesn’t mean they aren’t making hard trade-offs behind the scenes, including working later hours, facing declining mental and physical health, or spending less time with family.

Is there any chance child care funding will return?

The politics are challenging right now. Congressional Republicans are currently engaged in a fierce battle over cutting federal spending and have expressed little appetite for new social investments.

Still, the news isn’t all bad. Among parents, the child care issue is far less polarized. A recent poll of Kentucky voters and parents found strong support for investing more taxpayer money into child care programs, and a national poll conducted for the First Five Years Fund this summer found that 74 percent of voters, including 61 percent of Republican voters, back increased federal spending for child care.

Moreover, during the second Republican presidential debate earlier this week, the moderators pressed candidates on how they would expand access to care — even citing the expiring pandemic-era funds. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott blasted the Biden administration for allowing day care costs to exceed $15,000 per child, and Doug Burgum, the GOP governor of North Dakota, stressed that “child care is workforce infrastructure.”

That bipartisan support for affordable child care is likely why Republicans, after rebuffing Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the Build Back Better fight, agreed to a 30 percent increase last year of the Child Care and Development Block Grant, a federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. And this past summer, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) announced the launch of a new Bipartisan Affordable Childcare Caucus in Congress, and Reps. Salud Carbajal (D-CA) and Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) introduced a bipartisan bill to improve federal child care tax credits, legislation endorsed by advocacy groups and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Some Republican lawmakers remain ideologically against government involvement in child-rearing and oppose efforts such as increased spending on non-religious day care centers. This is partly why some Republicans are more open to expanding the federal child tax credit, which gives money directly to families to spend how they see fit. Expanding the tax credit is also a priority for Democrats, though it might be tough for lawmakers to secure new investments for child care and the child tax credit at the same time.

Progressives, for their part, are hopeful that they’ll have another opportunity to push new child care investments during the end-of-the-year omnibus tax package negotiations. Last year advocates secured new funding in this period for a maternal and child health home visiting program, doubling the amount of federal spending and reauthorizing the program for five years.

“The pandemic gave us all a better sense of what it means to have more money in the child care system,” said Rittling, of the First Five Years Fund. “We know that money needs to be sustained beyond Covid, and we’ll be looking at every possible way we can to make that happen.”

Some homeless people won’t go to shelters. Should they be left outside?

Originally published in Vox on September 14, 2023.
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PORTLAND, Maine — All summer, the tent city grew.

Along a popular walking path, the Fore River Parkway Trail, more than 60 people had pitched tents. They brought with them piles of wood, drugs, abandoned furniture, bikes, and shopping carts. They were a visible sign of a growing crisis: The number of people experiencing homelessness in Maine has more than tripled since 2020, and the arrival of more than 1,500 asylum seekers in 2023 alone had put unprecedented strain on Portland’s shelter system. Over 240 tents were spread across the city, but the Fore River Parkway encampment was the biggest.

On a Thursday morning in mid-August, 13 community leaders gathered to decide what to do next. The city’s plan was to clear the encampment on September 6, cleaning the grounds and forcing anyone left to leave permanently. Before clearing began, the group that organized the meeting — the Encampment Crisis Response Team — was supposed to work closely with residents, using “empathy, innovation, and a coordinated approach.” All summer, nonprofit workers had delivered daily meals and tried engaging residents on finding housing.

But it was no secret that their efforts would likely fail and that most of the more than 50 people who remained in the encampment would not move into housing or shelter by the September 6 deadline.

So far, nearly all of the Fore River residents who had been offered shelter spots had turned them down — saying they didn’t like the options or preferred to stay outside. In the weeks leading up to the clearing deadline, few residents living in the Fore River Parkway encampment said they expected they would have to actually leave.

This left Portland with a dilemma, one shared with political leaders in much bigger cities grappling with the growing challenge of homeless encampments: what to do when people staying in tents tell volunteers offering shelter that they’d prefer to stay outside.

As encampments grew in size and number over the last eight years, research into unsheltered homelessness — meaning those sleeping somewhere at night that’s not primarily designed for human residence — has revealed why some people might prefer tents to shelters. Some people experiencing homelessness have had traumatic past experiences at shelters, or object to requirements in many shelters to relinquish their pets and personal belongings. Others do not want to be separated from a partner at a gender-segregated facility or to comply with strict curfews and rules around substance use. I heard several of these reasons from people staying at the Fore River encampment.

Studies estimate that roughly one-third of people experiencing homelessness in the US have problems with drugs or alcohol. Complicating matters is the fact that between one-quarter and one-third of those experiencing homelessness in the US have severe mental illness, with even higher rates for those experiencing unsheltered homelessness.

As public pressure to clear homeless encampments has intensified, a growing number of advocates have argued that if a city is unable to provide an unhoused person with the kind of shelter they need or want (like an apartment or a private hotel room), then the most ethical and compassionate thing to do is to leave them be. “Respect autonomy and self-governance for encampment residents,” advises the National Homelessness Law Center. “Homeless people are the experts of their own condition.”

Some of this positioning comes from a deep concern for civil liberties and a fear of returning to the ghoulish days of mass institutionalization. Some of it is about resource constraints: Most cities don’t actually have available housing to help everyone who might want it, and so advocates sometimes end up defending situations that, while far less than ideal, seem preferable to forcing unhoused people into living situations they don’t want.

In the windowless conference room where the Portland crisis response team had gathered, these debates were playing out. One outreach worker argued that some people were now in shelters because the deadline had provided a sense of urgency. The choice, he said, was either to continue the team’s approach, “or decide that it jives with us morally to support the concept of, like, forever encampments and forever outdoors.” For people like him, he stressed, “that is a far greater sort of moral surrender.”

A few advocates in the room worried that new pink flyers posted up at the encampment the day before, warning that everyone must leave by September 6, would further traumatize the homeless people living there. Many had moved to the Fore River Parkway trail after they were abruptly forced out from a different Portland encampment back in May.

City officials, meanwhile, were unwilling to acknowledge that an encampment sweep was surely coming or to discuss how it might harm those living there. To talk about the risk of scattering unsheltered people was seen as being unduly negative and insufficiently committed to the original plan.

“I would focus on, you know, the fact that we have 21 days, we have three weeks, let’s try to get as many folks housed as we can and then see where we are,” said Aaron Geyer, the director of Portland’s social services. It was too premature, Geyer told me, to even discuss what a sweep would look like, suggesting — rather improbably — that by September 6, there might be no unhoused people left to clear out.

Homelessness advocates have been organizing hard against these new civil commitment laws, stressing that only noncoercive treatment and “housing first” — an approach focused on getting people housing and services, rather than requiring them to address health or behavioral issues first — can provide the aid that struggling people need. They are rightly concerned about how new laws mandating treatment could cast a wide, indiscriminate net on those sleeping outside. But other leaders have argued it’s naive at best to suggest that everyone who needs help will ever voluntarily accept it.

Cullen Ryan, who leads the supportive housing nonprofit Community Housing of Maine, said many of his fellow advocates are too quick to back off from encouraging people into accepting help or housing. It’s a dodge, he said, to take people at their word about sleeping outside.

“I hope that wiser minds will prevail, that we as a society will truly care about one another enough to insist that people all deserve to be inside,” he said. “But, you know, to just say, ‘Okay, well, I feel good, because this person’s at least making their own decisions and they want to be outside.’ … I don’t think that’s right. It’s a cop-out, and it’s very easy for all of us to join the cop-out.”

Some lawmakers argue forcing people into treatment is compassionate

Should people be forced to accept housing or treatment if it’s for their own good? The specter of old state psychiatric hospitals looms over the question. Originally meant to provide quality care to people with acute mental illness, these places became known in the 20th century as nightmarish jails not only for those with mental disorders but also for senior citizens, rowdy teenagers, gay men, those with drug or alcohol addiction, and those in poverty.

They were characterized by gruesome forced treatments: lobotomies administered without anesthesia and aggressive electroconvulsive therapies with severe side effects. A political movement to empty out these asylums gathered momentum in the 1970s. Deinstitutionalization was seen as a necessary corrective to decades of cruel state paternalism. The hope was that people with mental illness would be able to get care in their communities. Instead, many people who were released ended up on the streets.

Today, as politicians face pressure to act on homelessness and drugs, more elected officials have started to ask if leaders swung the pendulum too far in their turn away from involuntary care. In Oregon, Portland’s Democratic mayor, Ted Wheeler, told a group of business leaders last winter that he wants state laws changed to make it easier to force people into hospitals. “When I see people walking through the elements without appropriate attire, often naked, they are freezing to death … I don’t even know if they know where they are or who they are,” Wheeler said. “They need help and they need compassion.” Republicans in Oregon’s legislature pushed bills to expand criteria for involuntary commitment, though their efforts failed this year.

The state that’s gone arguably the furthest so far is California, where lawmakers have spent several years debating whether to amend a nearly 60-year-old law to expand involuntary psychiatric treatment.

The law, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967, is regarded as a bill of rights for Californians with mental illness, but it’s been blamed for enabling the abandonment of sick people experiencing homelessness, among other problems. Lawmakers in favor of changing the law say they see it as a moral obligation to make it easier to get individuals into treatment before they die or end up in jail.

One of those lawmakers is state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, who has pushed bills since 2018 to expand access to state conservatorship — a court-ordered status whereby a family member, friend, or public guardian controls another’s treatment plan. “Clearly we went too far,” Wiener told Vox. “We had these terrible institutions where people who did not need to be institutionalized were, but we went way too far in the opposite direction and I think it was an overcorrection.”

San Francisco Mayor London Breed has also framed forced treatment as the more compassionate course of action, saying of people experiencing homelessness, “Allowing them to deteriorate on our streets when they are incapable of caring for themselves is not humane.”

In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a controversial new law creating “CARE courts” — ostensibly aimed at helping up to 12,000 people with psychotic disorders statewide who are not voluntarily seeking treatment. Individuals could be referred to a CARE court for an evaluation, and if deemed eligible, they could be ordered to a treatment plan for up to two years. Newsom framed the effort as California finally “tak[ing] some damn responsibility for implementing our ideals.”

And now California lawmakers are pushing two more controversial bills to further expand access to conservatorships, including one co-authored by Wiener that would make it easier to subject someone to involuntary treatment if they had a mental health or substance use issue. Wiener insisted his legislation — which is backed by the California State Association of Psychiatrists and the California chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness — would be a “very focused and targeted” effort. Supporters point to statistics like the overdose death rate among people experiencing homelessness, which has soared in recent years.

CARE courts and bills to expand conservatorships have been fiercely opposed by civil rights groups, which argue these policies are dangerous distractions from real solutions like permanent affordable housing and may even siphon funds away from voluntary programs. They also worry that forced treatment pushes poor people out of sight, and note that California has long failed to keep track of how many people are subject to such coercive plans.

“Conservatorship is the most extreme deprivation of civil liberties, aside from the death penalty,” said Susan Mizner, the director of the disability rights program for the American Civil Liberties Union, in 2019. Activists also warn that loosening the laws will affect far more people than California lawmakers claim now, widening the path to criminalize or isolate the state’s sick, poor, and disabled.

For now, California officials have largely dismissed these objections, arguing the need to expand other support services is no reason to not move forward with psychiatric care reform, too.

“This is setting the basic ground rules, and changing the standard doesn’t mean everything is going to get immediately implemented in a perfect way overnight,” Wiener told Vox. “Absolutely we need more resources in this area and in mental health. We need more beds, supportive housing, mental health workers, guardians, but step one is let’s at least set up modernized rules that make sense, and then hopefully as soon as possible we can really ramp up the resources.”

The heated debate over whether involuntary treatment “works”

As states move to expand laws for involuntary treatment, the debate about them has grown louder and more urgent.

Opponents of forced treatment argue there’s little empirical evidence to justify the practice and plenty to suggest it can backfire, partly by traumatizing patients and fueling long-term distrust in medical professionals. Many forced rehab programs take place in prisons, and too many addiction programs in America are low-quality, humiliating, and brutal. One review from 2016 found some involuntary treatment programs even increased the likelihood of criminal recidivism.

But the existing evidence is more unsatisfying and murky than some critics of forced treatment acknowledge. Some studies have found involuntary interventions have led to improved outcomes, like being less likely to be hospitalized or staying fewer days in the hospital. The opinions of those forced to seek treatment vary: In surveys, 34 percent to 81 percent of involuntarily hospitalized patients have described their treatment as justified or beneficial. Patients are more likely to perceive forced care as fair and effective if they consider themselves ill, though people with psychotic disorders who report encountering barriers to health care are more likely to see forced care as unfair, even if they think it’s effective.

Researchers lack clear data on how many involuntary psychiatric holds there are in the United States, though estimates suggest they’re in the hundreds of thousands annually. Experts admit there’s a lot we still don’t know, partly due to poor reporting systems within and across states. There are few randomized controlled trials — often considered the gold standard for social science research, largely due to practical and ethical concerns.

Alex Barnard, a sociologist who has studied the push to expand conservatorships in California, writes, “there’s almost no recent evidence showing the efficacy of longer-term institutionalization or conservatorship.”

Barnard, who ultimately concluded that more people need psychiatric conservatorships in California than are receiving them, told Vox that he thinks opponents are sometimes willing to sacrifice lives in order to defend the principles of voluntary care and the “housing first” approach, which holds that housing should never be conditioned on getting treatment.

“There is a denial and unwillingness to figure out how to help some people who are never going to accept voluntary treatment,” he said. “I support ‘housing first,’ there’s a lot of evidence for it, but we have to figure out how to address the subset of those who just aren’t served by it.”

In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams instituted a new controversial plan last November to hospitalize unhoused people with serious mental illness and urged broader use of a state law that authorizes court-ordered outpatient treatment. Adams argued his plan would tackle a hard social problem that “everyone else punted on.”

Critics of Adams’s new approach said that without significant new spending on psychiatric beds, mental health crisis centers, and permanent supportive housing, vulnerable people will invariably end up back on the streets. Giving police discretion to decide who might be a danger to themselves or others, advocates also warned, was a civil liberties disaster waiting to happen.

Earlier this summer the New York Times reported on the first few people subjected to Adams’s involuntary care directive, including Mazou Mounkaila, who was handcuffed and transported to a hospital, where he spent the next 104 days treated for schizophrenia. The city’s care contractor, BronxWorks, argued the new forced treatment policy was working, and that most of their clients have since either moved into permanent housing or are on track to do so.

Mounkaila told the Times he liked his new life and even some aspects of his involuntary care. But he had been medicated against his will and said he continues to take antipsychotic drugs so as to not upset BronxWorks staff.

Portland opened shelter beds — but had almost no housing

As Portland’s encampments grew over the summer, complaints from residents and businesses began flooding government lines, Reddit, op-ed pages, and other civic forums. Some argued for a more forceful response, saying it was the status quo that was cruel. Others expressed frustration that unhoused people were turning down shelter beds.

Local advocates describe homelessness in the state as a “perfect storm” — new asylum seekers have arrived as federal pandemic money has run out, remote workers have relocated to Maine, and the affordable housing crisis statewide has worsened. In all but one Maine county, “the average house price is unaffordable to the average income household,” said the state housing authority last year.

An annual census taken in January found 4,258 people statewide, up from 1,297 in 2020. Until recently, Portland, the state’s most populous city, never had large tent encampments, but unsheltered homelessness increased over the last half-decade as rents went up, and as property owners realized they could capitalize on the city’s tourism industry by converting existing apartments into Airbnbs.

Aaron Geyer, the director of Portland’s social services, said city officials wanted to find a “middle ground” between advocates who didn’t necessarily want the encampment cleared at all and the daily complaints they receive from business owners and the public. “Our job, which is never an easy task, is to try to thread the needle and make sure both sides may not be happy but amenable to it,” he told Vox.

Homelessness experts said they don’t want people to draw the wrong conclusions about encampment residents who turned down shelter offers. Though Portland opened a new modernized facility in late March, it’s located in a more remote part of the city, is gender segregated, and bars pets that are not service animals. Other unsheltered individuals are worried about traveling too far away from the substances they’re addicted to. Some people I spoke with cited past bad experiences at shelters.

“When they say they don’t want to go into X shelter or X motel, it’s often because of some prior trauma that has resulted,” said Nichole Fiore, a national researcher on tent encampments with Abt Associates. “If the goal is to close down the encampment and get people indoors, I think we need to be asking, ‘What would it take to get you indoors?’ And really open up that conversation.”

Jessica Grondin, a city spokesperson, cited “health and safety” concerns as the main reason to clear out the encampment, though it was clear to anyone who walked through that there would be fewer sanitation issues if the city had dedicated resources to maintaining it. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the city, by keeping the encampment at a certain level of disorder and disarray, had made it easier to justify clearing.

“They blame things on it being dirty, but then they don’t provide resources to be clean,” said William Higgins Jr., the executive director of the Portland-based Homeless Advocacy for All.

In the weeks leading up to the September 6 clearing deadline, both residents living in the Fore River Parkway encampment and local business owners said they doubted the city would actually make unhoused people leave.

“If 21 of us just go to the courthouse on September 5 and protest, that’s how many people you need to stop something — at least temporarily,” Nate, a man living at the encampment, who’s being referred to by first name only to protect his privacy, told me in mid-August. “Whether that’s an official written rule or not, I don’t know, but that’s the number I heard and that’s what I like and it’s gonna work — guaranteed. Everybody knows it will.”

No mass protests happened, but on September 5, three Portland city councilors issued a statement, asking for a month delay at minimum. Leaders with Preble Street, a local nonprofit focused on homelessness, also asked the city to postpone its clearing.

But early in the morning on September 6, dozens of police officers, nonprofit staff, and city workers arrived for the clearing. Despite the city’s hopeful prediction that the people in the encampment might leave before the deadline, there were more than 65 tents and roughly 50 people still there on clearing day.

Portland’s parks director described the clearing as an “all hands on deck” situation. Kristen Dow, Portland’s director of health and human services, insisted their approach allowed them to employ “best practices.” But she and other city officials all declined to comment on the impact of displacing residents and the harms to people experiencing homelessness that research suggests such sweeps bring.

Over the summer, a total of 180 shelter beds had opened up — but just 18 people from the encampment had ultimately moved to shelter or housing. The residents’ remaining belongings were hauled to a local incinerator. Leaders were not sure where the people who had lived there would go.

A bold new federal experiment in giving renters cash

Originally published at Vox on September 12, 2023.
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A group of researchers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development have been quietly developing an idea that could fundamentally upend the nearly 50-year-old housing voucher program, which helps more than 2 million low-income families afford apartments in the private rental market every year.

The idea is relatively simple: What if, instead of traditional housing vouchers laden with convoluted red tape that landlords notoriously hate, low-income tenants could pay their rent with cash? Would that make it easier for tenants to find housing or move into better neighborhoods? Could that even save the government money by streamlining the aid?

Right now, due to funding constraints, only a quarter of those eligible for housing choice vouchers (formerly known as Section 8 vouchers) ever receive one. But if you are in that lucky 25 percent and are awarded a voucher, you might not be able to use it. The program is so cumbersome that only around 60 percent of beneficiaries can find a landlord willing to rent to them.

This isn’t the first time the federal government has explored questions around cash rental assistance: In the early 1970s, Congress successfully piloted a program to 14,000 families across 12 cities. That research, however, was largely forgotten about in the following decades. It wasn’t until recently, when some HUD employees stumbled upon old reports buried on an agency bookshelf, that policymakers realized the cash rental assistance model might be more valuable for modern times.

They are building on that older research as well as more recent developments: an ongoing related study in Philadelphia, the Covid-19 experiments with new kinds of cash assistance (including not just housing aid but also stimulus checks, child tax credits, and food subsidies), and dozens of encouraging guaranteed income pilots that have cropped up over the last few years. HUD officials now say it’s time to give federal cash aid a closer look.

The leaders behind this effort held their first official meetings last week, pitching philanthropic groups on the idea and asking for their financial backing. While the two virtual sessions were closed to the press, a HUD official told me “30 to 40 interested funders” came to their Tuesday pitch, and “dozens more” to their Thursday one. The team is convening a third meeting with nonprofits and housing researchers on September 19.

Though the HUD appointees who led the meetings — Brian McCabe and Aaron Shroyer — are framing the idea as a modest research project, officials involved are clear-eyed on where such a study could ultimately go. If, for example, a rigorously designed experiment provides new evidence for changing how vouchers are administered, that could have major implications for the $30 billion annual program and all the low-income families it serves. A small pilot could lead to a larger demonstration study, which could, officials say, then lead to pitching Congress on permanent change.

The wheels of federal policy reform move slowly: It might be 10 years until HUD makes any sort of long-term ask of Congress. But the wheels are turning now, in a way they never have before, to make the idea of cash aid a reality.

How the cash rental assistance policy might work

There are a lot of steps to getting housing with a federal voucher. First, a household has to prove eligibility. Then a public housing agency must issue the voucher subsidy to a landlord on the household’s behalf. For the household to benefit, the landlord must accept that voucher, the unit must pass an inspection, and the landlord must sign a contract with the public housing agency.

These are a lot of steps, and one hope is that by cutting out much of this bureaucracy, more people will be able to quickly move into affordable housing.

The proposed HUD study would look like this: Households selected from existing voucher waiting lists across a handful of diverse cities (ranging from smaller and suburban to dense and urban) would be randomly assigned to receive either the traditional housing choice voucher funded by HUD or a monthly payment for an equivalent value funded by philanthropy. The cash would not be unrestricted; it would need to go toward paying rent.

Researchers would then be able to study and compare the two groups over time (HUD says ideally for four years) to assess key housing policy questions, like whether one group had more success landing an apartment and staying in their unit.

A HUD official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said they don’t have an exact number of tenant participants in mind, but stressed they’d want to involve researchers from the very beginning so they could design a study capable of providing strong statistical analysis. An example they put forward was studying five cities, with 200 households per city.

Landlords would likely still know if renters were using philanthropic cash to pay their rent, as it’s common to ask prospective tenants for income verification. But this kind of study could help clarify whether landlords are more biased against renting to low-income people who rely on aid at all, or if landlord resistance stems primarily from the logistical hassle of the traditional voucher program.

“The idea — to the degree possible — is to make the [public housing agency] invisible,” explained the HUD official. “So a landlord knows they’re dealing directly with the tenant, and not the tenant and the PHA.”

Jack Landry, who researches guaranteed income programs for the left-leaning Jain Family Institute, said he’s excited about HUD’s proposed idea because it offers something distinct from the rest of the existing evidence base.

“There are a lot of UBI [universal basic income] pilots out there, but only a fraction of them are being rigorously studied, and a lot of them are funded by American Rescue Plan dollars, making it unclear what happens when the money runs out,” he told Vox. “I’m enthusiastic because I think HUD’s idea has really clear policy implications and a fairly clear route to translating to large-scale policy change.”

Congress won’t let HUD distribute cash directly — but philanthropists could step in

Todd Richardson, a longtime HUD staffer whose team inadvertently discovered old federal reports of the cash rental aid program that ran in the 1970s, proposed in a little-noticed blog post in 2017 that perhaps those research findings could inform an existing voucher program known as Moving to Work.

Moving to Work, which allows public housing agencies to spend federal housing funds more flexibly than is permitted under the traditional voucher program, has been around since 1996 but was expanded by Congress in 2016.

Two years ago, in a meeting attended by local and federal housing officials and this reporter, participants discussed the idea of using Moving to Work to test cash subsidies for renters. Attendees expressed enthusiasm for the idea, though Richardson, who was leading the meeting, warned that it might not “pass muster” with the agency’s legal department.

The reason HUD is now pursuing a partnership with philanthropy is HUD’s lawyers ultimately determined it would violate existing congressional law to distribute federal housing dollars as cash, even under the Moving to Work program. Though some renters accessed federal cash rental assistance during the pandemic, officials say that’s largely because the American Rescue Plan was more vague on how funds could be spent, and thus more flexible.

But if HUD isn’t allowed to distribute its vouchers as cash, foundations could step in, and then HUD could study how that goes.

This public-private idea is being tried already in one city: In Philadelphia, researchers are almost one year into a two-and-a-half-year cash rental assistance experiment studying 300 households selected to receive money on a prepaid debit card every month. HUD officials have been in touch with Philadelphia program leaders, but they envision designing their federal study differently, partly because state and local housing agencies have more flexibility on how they spend public funds.

Sara Jaffee, a University of Pennsylvania researcher involved in evaluating Philadelphia’s cash rental assistance program, told Vox they’re just finishing cleaning up data and should be able to share some initial findings within the next month. She said they’re testing a lot of questions related to housing outcomes, including around housing quality and the experience of leasing with landlords.

According to a HUD official involved, the federal demonstration could conceivably get off the ground in the next six to nine months, depending on how fast governments find charitable partners. They’re hoping they can entice local philanthropies interested in putting money back into their communities — like the Pennyslvania-based foundations that are supporting Philadelphia’s study — as well as national tech and progressive groups that might want to grow the evidence base for universal basic income.

Last week’s meetings marked only the first step to potentially changing how billions of dollars in housing aid to low-income renters are spent. But as far as first steps in federal policymaking go, they were serious ones.

Is public school as we know it ending?

Originally published at Vox on September 5, 2023.
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As the new school year kicks off, education advocates are bracing for continued attacks on America’s public schools. Yet despite the ongoing culture wars schools have faced in recent years, pollsters find that parents still generally like their kids’ schools, and most of the political opposition has come from those without kids in the public school system.

Cara Fitzpatrick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor at Chalkbeat, is the author of The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America, a book coming out next week that traces the history of the fight to define what “public education” means and who gets to decide. She lays out in clarifying detail the patient strategy conservatives embraced to expand their vision for schooling in America, establishing small school choice programs and then using those experiments to push the boundaries of state and federal law.

Senior policy reporter Rachel Cohen talked with Fitzpatrick about the trajectory of school vouchers as an idea and the future of public schooling in the US. Their conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Rachel Cohen

Your book does a very good job of showing how the boundaries between church and state have eroded over the last few decades, and why the legal arguments for private school vouchers have gotten stronger as a result. I think many readers will be surprised to learn all of this, so emphatically have we been taught that there’s a separation between religion and public institutions.

Cara Fitzpatrick

When I started doing the research, I thought there was going to be this very clear line between church and state, but the legal history was murkier, which is why then we’ve seen this progression of cases more recently leaning more toward the religious liberty side of things. One of the questions I often get asked is, “Well, how can you give money to a religious school?” And it’s like, “Here’s 40, 50, 70 years of case law that kind of explains it.” But if you’re not following all those cases, most people find that to be pretty confusing.

Rachel Cohen

Yeah, there’s always been a small legal window, and over time conservatives have cleaved that open wider. But we had basically been taught in schools that it was a firm, unchanging boundary.

Cara Fitzpatrick

And there have been justices on the Supreme Court who have spoken to the fact that it’s just this tricky area of law, and has been tricky for a long time. And then watching where the Court has gone recently with the Establishment Clause has been kind of wild, actually, because it’s pretty far from where they were when some of these early school voucher cases were litigated. I think it’s gone even farther than school choice advocates thought it would.

Rachel Cohen

Where would you say things are today?

Cara Fitzpatrick

I think it’s pretty clear that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been ruling in favor of religious liberty — not just in school choice cases but in a variety of cases — and I think the window is open for it to go even further than it has. I mean, I’m really interested in where it’s going to go with the religious charter school issue that’s coming out of Oklahoma. I don’t want to predict how that will go, but I think it seems like there’s definitely some room to believe that the conservative majority might eventually sign off on that.

Rachel Cohen

Private school vouchers have been picking up steam lately, making political gains in recent years. What were some of the most surprising things you learned about the history of school vouchers, and what, if anything, about that history feels important to understanding the programs we’re seeing today?

Cara Fitzpatrick

One of the things that was interesting for me to grapple with was that in the 1950s and ’60s, segregationists in the South essentially used the idea of school vouchers to thwart Brown v. Board of Education. But then in the 1990s and 2000s, school choice advocates argued this was a civil rights issue. So I’ve been trying to sort out and make connections between those two eras.

One of the main figures in the book is Polly Williams, who was a Black state representative in Wisconsin who very much viewed vouchers as a tool of empowerment for low-income kids, and particularly low-income kids of color. Her involvement in that issue was really fascinating and kind of linked those two periods in a way. Williams had fears that vouchers would become sort of what they’ve become today: subsidies for everyone, regardless of income.

I think one of the things I really wanted to do with the book was not take a hard and fast position on school choice or on school vouchers, but give someone who might come across a headline about universal school vouchers a way to understand how we got here.

Rachel Cohen

The title of your book is The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America. I hear you on not wanting to take a clear position on vouchers or choice, but I think conservatives may argue it’s simply a new era of public school, not the death of it. I wanted to invite you to talk more about your title.

Cara Fitzpatrick

I think the title and subtitle will please no one. But for me, I think it raises that question, right? Does this spell the end for the public school system? That’s something that I had to grapple with throughout because, even just a few years ago, it was very much a talking point from school choice advocates that choice can help drive improvements to traditional public schools. But then in the last couple of years we’ve seen some pretty aggressive attacks on public education by Republicans and the rhetoric has definitely become more extreme, referring to schools as “government indoctrination camps” and things like that. A few prominent conservative school choice advocates have pretty openly said we should really use these school culture wars to push the movement forward.

Rachel Cohen

Based on your research, do you see any sort of path for the more liberal, progressive vision of public education to mount a comeback? Is there any sort of competing strategy in the courts or politics?

Cara Fitzpatrick

It’s hard to predict. The book is landing — just coincidentally — at this moment in time when school choice is dominating the news cycle and “parental rights” are all over the place. But even just a few years ago, I remember in 2017 a couple people saying to me, “Well, aren’t school vouchers dead?”

Education can really change in a short period of time. It does feel to me like Milton Friedman’s side of the debate on the free-market vision for vouchers has really eclipsed what Polly Williams and some of the more progressive voices were about. But I think some of this may depend on how the new choice programs actually play out, including whether people take states up on these universal voucher programs.

Rachel Cohen

Is the lesson here to just stick with a political goal for 50 or 60 years and then eventually you might win?

Cara Fitzpatrick

Maybe! It is really fascinating: On vouchers, conservatives have played the long game and it seems to have worked out pretty well for them.

Rachel Cohen

There’s often this debate over whether charters or vouchers or tax credit scholarships result in better academic outcomes for students, either through competition or simply by injecting the power of “privateness” into the equation. Did your book lead you to any conclusions or clarity on those questions?

Cara Fitzpatrick

I think there’s a pretty solid amount of research at this point — not about universal vouchers, since that’s still kind of new and uncharted territory — but on some of these voucher programs that have existed for a long time. And what researchers have found is that the programs haven’t lived up to the promise of what the early advocates wanted or assumed would happen. I think there was this belief that private schools were just sort of inherently better than public schools, so if you just got more kids in private then all those kids would do better. A lot of the major research studies have shown either the same results for test scores between public and private, or actually a decline in private. And then there’s been a little bit of research on some other life outcomes that have been positive, like showing kids in some of these voucher programs are more likely to graduate.

There are a lot of studies out there, some far less rigorous than others, and I think wading through all that can be a little intimidating. What I believe and I wanted the book to show is that this debate in America is really more about values than about outcomes.

Rachel Cohen

We’re in a moment when the conservative legal movement is at its strongest on school choice and teacher unions are in a very weakened position. Can you talk about the role you saw unions play in accelerating or slowing down these policies? How much do you think it matters today that unions are in a less powerful position?

Cara Fitzpatrick

Unions were typically opponents of school choice programs, but I didn’t get into the role of specific union leaders in the book with the exception of [former American Federation of Teachers president] Albert Shanker, since he was sort of outside the mold of what a lot of union leaders were saying. But I didn’t see unions’ opposition making a huge difference for the most part. Mostly they become convenient scapegoats in the partisan conversations.

With teacher unions, what’s interesting is that a lot of their fears about where the programs would go seem to have come true. Unions warned from the start that this was not in fact going to be just a little experiment, that these programs are not going to be just limited to disadvantaged students, and now we are seeing these universal programs pass.

Unions have played pivotal roles in different places and in moments of time in blocking or slowing school choice, but ultimately I don’t think that they were necessarily going to stop all of this. They stopped some of it. A lot of voucher proposals failed. It’s just that enough of them passed to have this toehold over time.

The anti-abortion movement insists everything is really fine

Originally published at Vox on August 24, 2023.
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The anti-abortion movement is at a political crossroads.

Last year, abortion rights won in all six states with abortion ballot measures, including in red states like Kentucky and Montana that otherwise elected Republican candidates. Earlier this month, activists suffered yet another defeat when Ohio voters cast ballots decisively against a referendum that would have made it harder for constitutional amendments, including an upcoming vote this November on abortion rights, to pass in the future. Abortion was not on the ballot, but anti-abortion groups campaigned heavily in favor of the Ohio measure, and they lost.

Even the Republican presidential primary, which the anti-abortion movement had been planning to dominate, has been something of a mixed bag, and there are signs that the movement’s influence is wavering. During Wednesday night’s GOP debate, Fox News moderator Martha MacCallum argued that “abortion has been a losing issue for Republicans since the Dobbs decision.” A recent New York Times/Siena poll shows that more than a third of Republican primary voters think abortion should be legal all or most of the time, and in a CBS poll this week, most didn’t think it was very important for Republican candidates to talk during the debate about their plans to restrict abortion.

Some candidates, including former Vice President Mike Pence, are still eagerly courting support from the movement, but others appear less willing to take their campaign cues from those anti-abortion organizations.

Donald Trump, for example, has resisted calls from the leading activist group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, to endorse a national 15-week ban on abortion. He’s also refused to say if he supports the type of six-week abortion ban that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in Florida. Trump would say, however, that “many people within the pro-life movement feel that that was too harsh.”

And when DeSantis was dismissive of federal abortion restrictions in late July, saying he believed the anti-abortion movement would see more success from states and local communities, SBA Pro-Life America criticized his stance as “unacceptable.” DeSantis’s campaign didn’t seem to care, countering that the governor “does not kowtow to D.C. interest groups.”

Does that mean the anti-abortion movement is planning to rethink its own aggressive post-Roe strategy of trying to limit abortion as much as possible in as many places as possible? For now, the answer is broadly no. Instead, leaders argue that any losses they’ve suffered over the last year have not been because their agenda is unpopular, but because it hasn’t been pursued boldly and strategically enough. If anything, they say, winning will require an even stronger commitment to restricting abortion.

GOP presidential candidates are divided on federal abortion bans

Leading groups opposing abortion rights are divided on what they want to hear from federal candidates.

SBA Pro-Life America has said it will not support anyone who does not express at least a commitment to restricting abortion at the federal level after 15 weeks. Meanwhile Students for Life made clear that they oppose such a 15-week litmus test, given that more than 90 percent of abortions occur within the first 13 weeks. Instead, they asked each candidate to lay out their proactive vision for a post-Roe America, and emphasized that their own blueprint includes granting legal protections to unborn children, defunding Planned Parenthood, banning the distribution of medication abortion by mail, and reimposing other restrictions on abortion pills that were relaxed under the Biden administration.

During the first GOP primary debate, however, most candidates declined to do any of these things, and appeared divided on whether the federal government should limit abortion at all. DeSantis dodged a question on whether he’d support a six-week ban, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley stressed the fact that there’s little chance of getting something through Congress, and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum claimed a federal ban would violate the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution. Of the eight candidates on stage, only Pence and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott backed a 15-week restriction.

Yet while some GOP political consultants quietly worry about electoral backlash to abortion bans that voters consider too extreme, anti-abortion groups have urged candidates to stay the course, and to champion the post-Roe successes the movement has achieved so far.

“A year after Dobbs, 25 states have put pro-life protections into law — half the country,” SBA Pro-Life America stated after the Ohio election. Rejecting the idea that abortion rights were helpful to Democrats in 2022, they touted the midterm wins of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd, and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Catherine Glenn Foster, president of Americans United for Life, offered a similar rosy post-midterms reflection, noting that public officials who backed or enforced abortion restrictions were reelected in nearly 20 states. “Democrats didn’t crack state governor, state attorney general, or state house seats in red states that have enforced abortion limits since [Dobbs],” she argued.

The movement against abortion rights isn’t admitting defeat

While the attempt to make it harder to pass ballot measures — known as Issue 1 — lost by 14 percentage points in Ohio, anti-abortion groups say that does not mean they’ll face a similar fate when abortion is actually on the ballot in November. The proposed Ohio amendment would restore the right to an abortion up to the point of fetal viability, and permit abortions beyond that point if a patient’s doctor deems it necessary to protect their life or health.

In their post-mortem memo, SBA Pro-Life America said they lost for two reasons: they didn’t start their campaign against Issue 1 early enough, and some voters were motivated to vote no because of concerns about democracy and other policies, like the minimum wage or legalizing marijuana. The group claims it does not see support for abortion rights as a key reason for Issue 1’s failure.

Anti-abortion groups have also blasted Republican elected officials and business leaders for not campaigning hard enough. “The silence of the establishment and business community in Ohio left a vacuum that was too large to overcome,” SBA Pro-Life America argued. “So long as the Republicans and their supporters take the ostrich strategy and bury their heads in the sand, they will lose again and again.”

Terry Schilling, leader of the conservative American Principles Project, likewise slammed GOP donors for not spending heavily enough on the Ohio election, and he blamed Republican presidential candidates and national party leaders for downplaying its importance. Another national anti-abortion group, Students for Life, made similar arguments, noting that being outspent by opponents almost 5 to 1 “certainly helped create the confusion about what was at stake.”

While groups supporting abortion rights frame the Ohio results as a clear-cut victory for their cause, election analysts caution we don’t yet fully understand who voted for Issue 1 and why, and it is possible that voters who cast their ballot against the Issue 1 referendum in August will also vote against expanding abortion restrictions in November.

Students for Life has recently launched a “3-step plan” for defeating the abortion rights amendment, largely by mobilizing youth voters. The group is arguing that voters in states like Kansas are experiencing “buyer’s remorse” for approving a state constitutional amendment for abortion rights last year, and they claim they’ll dissuade Ohioans from making the same mistake. When asked for evidence of such remorse, spokesperson Kristi Hamrick told Vox it’s based on her group’s “lived experience [and] talking with people on the ground.”

Early polls on the November amendment bode well for abortion rights supporters; one from June found nearly 60 percent of Ohioans support the idea of an amendment for reproductive freedom. But political researchers say it’s generally harder for affirmative ballot measures to pass, given what’s known as a “status quo bias.” To pass the Ohio amendment, advocates may copy the playbook from Michigan, where abortion rights activists framed their winning 2022 ballot measure around the idea of restoring the rights of Roe v. Wade — bringing back the reality Americans had known for five decades. Opponents, meanwhile, will claim activists are trying to radically expand rights.

Anti-abortion leaders are already running with this strategy, claiming that Ohio’s proposed abortion rights amendment’s language is so broad that it would create a new right to gender-affirming surgery, and therefore invalidate the state’s requirement for parental consent.

In its post-mortem memo, SBA Pro-Life America argued that advocates in Ohio must stick with “a simple message,” framing the upcoming referendum as “an attempt by ACLU to eliminate parental rights and legalize abortion on demand in the Ohio constitution.” The amendment would only permit abortions past the point of fetal viability to protect a patient’s life or health, but SBA Pro-Life America is urging advocates to claim it will “legalize unrestricted access to abortion until the moment of birth, paid for by Ohio taxpayers.”

Anti-abortion groups note that the ACLU has long opposed parental consent laws, and an ACLU Ohio lawyer in February said existing laws that conflict with a constitutional amendment “should not be enforced.” Still, Ohio case law generally requires parental consent for youth medical care, and the amendment could only affect parental consent laws if someone were to successfully challenge the rules in court as unconstitutional. Given that Ohio’s state Supreme Court is controlled by Republicans, legal experts think a more sweeping interpretation of the abortion rights measure is unlikely. Andrew Everett, an ACLU spokesperson, told Vox in July they “have no plans to challenge parental consent laws in Ohio.”

Even the most unapologetic anti-abortion groups recognize they need to work on the movement’s image

While leading national groups insist there’s no real proof candidates should back away from abortion restrictions, activists are talking more about the need to speak more compassionately to the needs of mothers and children — driven partly by media coverage showing pregnant women and new mothers have suffered under new anti-abortion laws.

SBA Pro-Life America urged lawmakers to support legislation that requires child support payments to begin when a fetus is in the womb, and to expand the child tax credit and parental leave support. Students for Life similarly emphasized the need to better support pregnant moms and parents on campuses. Route Fifty reported that at least four states have approved new tax exemptions for pregnant people and anti-abortion centers, and nearly a dozen more are considering them.

A few dissenting voices in the anti-abortion movement have recently urged more compromise. Schilling, of the American Principles Project, said candidates should stick with 15-week bans that allow for exceptions for rape, incest, and protecting the life of the mother. “Abortion limits need to be reasonable and popular,” he told Politico. “15 weeks, build a genuine culture of life, revisit,” echoed Duncan Braid, a staffer at the conservative think tank American Compass.

But for now these are minority voices, and the anti-abortion movement is broadly urging lawmakers to get bolder, lest they meet the same electoral fate as failed Republican Senate candidates Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Adam Laxalt in Nevada — who SBA Pro-Life America claim ran from abortion in their midterm races and subsequently lost. “Going on offense is essential for any candidate who wants to win in 2024,” said the group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, at the conclusion of Wednesday’s debate.

How housing activists and unions found common ground in California

Originally published at Vox on August 21, 2023.
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Over the last decade, whenever California lawmakers tried to pass new legislation aimed at boosting the state’s alarmingly low housing stock, they’d come face to face with a politically powerful barrier: organized labor.

It wasn’t that unions wanted no new housing in California, but their top priority was ensuring that any new units would be built with unionized workers, and that the nearly half a million members represented by the State Building and Construction Trades Council, or “the Trades,” as it’s locally known, would be well positioned to find good jobs in the future. Keenly aware of how sharply industry standards have declined in parts of the country with less union power, and still reeling from job losses during the last recession, the Trades have assertively fought bills they deemed threatening to their way of life.

In the Democratic and proudly pro-labor state, opposition from the Trades has often been sufficient to kill housing bills. Liberal lawmakers have been sympathetic to union arguments that the state’s housing crisis will not be solved by driving construction workers into poverty themselves. Sometimes unions would object to bills that failed to require certain wage standards, or bills that didn’t require enough union workers to do the jobs. And when they’ve objected, labor leaders have not been hesitant to flex their political muscle, running attack ads against bill sponsors and donating tens of millions of dollars to political campaigns.

Today, though, a major sea change is happening across California, with some unions now either actively supporting the major housing bills winding their way through the legislature, or otherwise signaling that they’ll no longer fight them. This shift in pro-construction, “Yes in My Backyard” (or YIMBY) politics has been dramatic, and one that hardly anyone foresaw just three years ago.

Getting to this point involved some unions being willing to break with the rest of organized labor, as they argued it was worth expanding the number of good-paying construction jobs even if lawmakers could not guarantee those would be union jobs per se. These dissident unions promoted an alternative vision for membership growth, and provided cover to California politicians who worried about being branded as anti-labor.

The stakes for workers, though, are high: The vast majority of California construction workers are not unionized, and toil away on sites with weaker protections, earn far less than their unionized counterparts, and fall too frequently victim to injury and wage theft. Though construction accounts for about 6 percent of California’s total workers, it makes up 16 percent of the state’s fatal workplace injuries.

A new coalition of pro-housing activists and labor unions has emerged in the Golden State, hoping to prove what is admittedly still an untested proposition: Can lawmakers accelerate housing production fast enough to meet the needs of their growing population without sacrificing standards for workers?

Early attempts at housing bills went, well, not smoothly

A number of issues have stymied housing development in California over decades: restrictive zoning codes that favor existing homeowners over potential new residents, lengthy lawsuit-laden approval processes, soaring costs for construction and land, and a shortage of available workers to build.

Starting in 2016, then-Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown pushed a plan aimed at tackling at least one element of this stalemate: He proposed accelerating the approval process for certain housing projects in California, so long as they included a portion of units dedicated to affordable housing. One reason housing production has been so slow is because individuals and organizations can challenge development in court, under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. Originally passed in the 1970s to ensure local construction considers possible effects related to issues like air quality, noise, and natural resources, CEQA court challenges have since become a top tool for NIMBYs (which stands for “not in my back yard”) to block or delay new housing, by dragging out projects in costly litigation.

Today, it’s typical for a proposed housing project to face at least three or four years in court battles, with added costs in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Making this CEQA process both harder for opponents, and faster for developers, is referred to as “streamlining” in California policy circles.

But unions in 2016 objected to Gov. Brown’s proposed “streamlining” bill, arguing it would strip them of needed opportunity to negotiate higher wages for workers. Labor groups worried about accelerating the approval process for private-sector projects but not requiring developers to pay “prevailing wage” — which typically means the going union rate for labor costs in an area. Unions often use CEQA challenges to force developers’ hands on hiring union workers, though laws requiring the payment of “prevailing wage” historically have only been used for publicly financed projects, not the kind of private-sector development targeted by Gov. Brown.

The Trades mobilized hard against Brown’s legislative package, ran ads against his top housing official, and framed the whole effort as a giveaway to real estate tycoons. They successfully killed it.

The following year, to avoid a repeat of 2016, Democratic lawmakers introduced more modest streamlining bills, which notably included a huge shift in the state’s housing policies: Several proposed expanding requirements for prevailing wage from public works projects to also include some private-sector housing development. One of the bills — SB 35 — came from newly elected YIMBY state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco.

In short, Wiener wanted to streamline not only 100 percent affordable housing but some market-rate housing too. If he could promise unions well-paid jobs on both, he reasoned, then labor would hopefully relinquish its fight to preserve CEQA lawsuits as a negotiating tool.

To get it across the finish line, however, unions bargained one more request. For any housing project of 50 units or more that was not 100 percent affordable (meaning not entirely subsidized), developers would not only need to pay prevailing wage but also recruit a “skilled and trained” workforce to build. This “skilled and trained” language refers to workers who graduated from state-approved apprenticeship programs, which are mostly free for students, and are almost entirely union-run. Nearly every apprenticeship graduate later joins a construction union, so requiring workers to be “skilled and trained” is effectively requiring the hiring of more unionized workers.

The Trades still had general qualms about streamlining the housing approval process, and in particular about how eliminating CEQA lawsuits could more easily enable private-sector greed. Rudy Gonzalez, the secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, told Vox his members opposed past housing bills because they weren’t focused enough on dedicated affordable housing. “Who actually benefits from streamlining?” he asked. “I think developers benefit.”

But ultimately the “skilled and trained” language was enough for the unions to back SB 35 in 2017. Developers, meanwhile, didn’t love the idea of paying prevailing wage, but they agreed it was worth it if projects could move through the pipeline faster. SB 35 became law.

But it soon ran into another issue: a worker shortage.

The Trades acknowledges there’s a shortage of workers for California’s needed residential construction, and they know their existing unionized workforce is getting older. A union-backed study from 2019 stipulated that to meet the state’s affordable housing goals, California would need to recruit at least 200,000 new workers.

But the Trades insist things are not so dire yet that leaders need to abandon “skilled and trained” requirements, and they say more people will be incentivized to become “skilled and trained” only if lawmakers guarantee good union jobs waiting on the other end of an apprenticeship. About 70,500 people have graduated from these apprenticeships between 2010 and 2022, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations.

In the half-decade since SB 35 took effect, it’s become clear that the law has helped significantly increase affordable housing construction in California (a recent analysis found it streamlined over 18,000 new housing units between 2018 and 2021), but it’s been far less helpful in accelerating any market-rate construction. This has been partly due to a shortage of available “skilled and trained” workers developers need to hire.

How the Carpenters changed the story

Battles over whether additional California housing bills would require “skilled and trained” labor continued over the next several years, ultimately killing a slew of pro-housing bills in the legislature.

The California Conference of Carpenters — a labor organization representing about 80,000 unionized workers who install and repair wood structures — was more open to bills that included language only for prevailing wage. But leaders from both the Carpenters’ northern and southern councils dared not cross the powerful then-president of the Trades, who said unions would accept “skilled and trained” or nothing.

Change finally came in August 2021, when Jay Bradshaw, a longtime union organizer, successfully unseated a 20-year incumbent to take control of the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council, the Carpenters’ northern affiliate.

“While the labor story has ebbed and flowed and can get really complicated, it really can be simplified to say that one person made a gigantic difference in changing the conversation and that’s Jay Bradshaw,” said Todd David, who led the California YIMBY-aligned Housing Action Coalition between 2016 and 2022.

At the same time that Bradshaw ascended to power, the Carpenters’ Southwest Mountain States Regional Council — which represents workers in Southern California — elected its own new leader, Pete Rodriguez. Historically the two California Carpenters’ councils have not been closely aligned on policy, but Bradshaw and Rodriguez saw eye-to-eye not only on organizing new members, but also on making it easier to build housing — even if that meant stirring the pot with the rest of the Trades.

This first real test came in 2022. An Oakland Democratic Assemblymember, Buffy Wicks, worked closely with the Carpenters’ new leadership to hash out language the union could endorse. Wicks ultimately introduced AB 2011, a bill that would fast-track affordable housing development of old office buildings, strip malls, and parking lots in exchange for paying workers the prevailing wage. On larger projects (meaning at least 50 units) developers would have to provide health care and new tools to guard against wage theft. Larger projects would also require developers to see if “skilled and trained” workers were available, but if they weren’t, the project could proceed without them.

The Trades, along with the powerful and larger California Labor Federation, fought hard against Wicks’s AB 2011, arguing it had too many loopholes and would fail to protect workers in practice. AB 2011 had other opponents besides just organized labor, including some environmental groups and groups that advocate for local control.

But joining forces with the Carpenters on Wicks’s bill were two other dissenting unions: the 250,000-member strong California School Employees Association, which represents janitors, cafeteria workers, and other school support staff, and the influential SEIU, which represents more than 700,000 mostly low-wage service and health care workers across the state.

David Huerta, the president of California SEIU State Council, said after surveying members on issues they’re dealing with, it became clear SEIU needed to stand up more on housing. “Regardless of if you’re a janitor or a nurse or a health care worker or a home care worker, everyone overwhelmingly said the number one issue was housing affordability,” he told Vox. “We have members sleeping in their cars, who have big families sleeping in one-bedrooms, who are traveling hours and hours to get to work because they can’t afford to live near their jobs.”

Bradshaw, of the Carpenters, argued creating more high-paying jobs for all construction workers was more important than having guaranteed union jobs — and that unions could then aim to organize those workers. “For the elected officials we framed it as they do have a real choice,” Bradshaw told Vox.

In the end, California lawmakers didn’t really have to make a choice, and ended up passing Wicks’s bill, along with another similar bill that included the Trades’ preferred “skilled and trained” language. For now, developers basically can choose which law they want to follow if they want to convert strip malls to housing. (Yes, really.)

“AB 2011 was a huge victory, but they allowed the building trades to save face by passing both bills,” said David, the YIMBY activist.

Scott Wiener, author of the 2017 law that has successfully streamlined affordable housing projects but less successfully produced mixed-income and market-rate development, decided this year to run with the labor compromise language Wicks pushed in AB 2011. In a new bill — SB 423 — winding its way now through the legislature, Wiener is aiming to strip the “skilled and trained” requirement from his 2017 law, and add in the other labor protections from AB 2011, like for wage theft and health care.

The new president of the California Trades, Andrew Meredith, declared strong opposition to Wiener’s new bill when it was introduced in February, arguing it would hurt safety standards and housing affordability. The California Labor Federation backed the Trades up, too. “More profits for developers, less benefits for workers,” the labor federation’s leader said. “That makes zero sense from folks who claim to be pro-labor.”

In the winter and early spring, it looked increasingly like Wiener’s SB 423 would be one of the most contentious bills in the California legislature this year — a new proxy fight over who was more sufficiently for affordable housing and workers’ rights.

But in April a major twist happened: two more construction unions — the California Council of Laborers and the state Conference of Operating Engineers — broke with the Trades to publicly support Wiener’s housing bill. “We believe the balance that this legislation strikes will result in more available housing and ultimately lead to more affordable housing that could be utilized by our membership and those in need,” said the Operating Engineers in a public letter.

Corey Smith, the new head of the YIMBY-aligned Housing Action Coalition, told Vox he thinks the leadership from the Carpenters, and bringing in the other unions, “is perhaps the single most positive shift in California housing discourse, conversations, fights, and politics in the last 40 years.” It’s “such a big deal,” Smith continued, “because the single largest individual problem for homebuilding in California has been local discretion and CEQA and the Carpenters’ union basically said, ‘Hey, we’ll provide a political path to tackle this.’”

In June, two months after the Laborers and Operating Engineers joined the Carpenters in supporting SB 423, Meredith, the president of the California building trades, resigned from his post.

In another big political twist, the Trades have recently announced they are no longer opposing SB 423. They’re currently “neutral” on the legislation, and neutral on another bill to develop affordable housing on land owned by religious groups, which failed in 2020 and 2022 largely due to labor’s opposition.

“We’re still working with the bill author and we would love to be able to support,” the Trades’ new leader, Chris Hannan, told Vox. “We’re trying to get the labor standards right for workers.” Whether or not the Trades ends up supporting the housing bills, however, won’t really matter as much in Sacramento as the fact that they’re not actively fighting them anymore. Passage for both bills in September looks likely.

Two different visions for growing union membership

One important factor shaping the politics in California is that not all labor groups see rapid membership growth as inherently positive.

Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, recalls one of her earliest memories of advocating to expand California’s housing supply. “I was just starting to map out who would be pro-housing, and anyone who built housing seemed like a natural ally,” she told Vox. Foote met with a San Francisco planning commissioner who was also a member of the electrical trades.

“I had a one-on-one with him like, ‘Okay, all the construction industry trades are going to be on board? Let’s build a lot of housing!’ And he was very blunt that no we do not want to unleash production … For him, there was a problem that if we unleashed housing production and grew our labor force, then when there’s a downturn all of his guys would be banging down the door at the union hall when times are low and out of work.”

The concern of maintaining union strength in a downturn is a real one. More than 365,000 construction jobs were eliminated in California during the last recession, between 2006 and 2011. “The point for them is not higher wages, the point is steady union jobs,” Foote argued. (The commissioner did not return Vox’s request for comment.)

Hannan, the new president of the Trades, told Vox his members want to build more housing at all income levels and pointed to the Trades’ support for growing their apprenticeship programs as proof they also want to add to their ranks.

“I don’t believe that to be true,” he said, when asked about certain guilds not supporting membership growth. “People are entitled to draw their own conclusions and come up with their own opinions but the building trade unions that I represent want to grow opportunities for their members and new members. The Trades has been a wonderful career for me and I want that for more people.”

Still, it’s true that membership growth may present a more uncomplicated opportunity for the Carpenters compared to other construction unions, making it easier for them to back YIMBY bills. It could help that the Carpenters offers its members 401(k) plans in addition to traditional pensions, and is organized in ways that might make an influx of new members less threatening to incumbent leaders controlling smaller geographic turfs. Over the last few years, the Carpenters have embraced an aggressive organizing strategy, growing its membership by 8 percent between fiscal years 2019 and 2022, according to the union.

Will the pro-labor compromise actually work?

An outstanding question is whether these union-backed streamlining bills will generate enough new private-sector housing in California, and there are skeptics.

Making it harder to file CEQA lawsuits should certainly help, advocates say, but the constant debate in housing policy circles is whether a market-rate project “pencils out” — meaning whether the developers’ projected earnings outweigh their building costs. Prevailing wage and other labor benefits raises the cost of a project.

Jennifer Hernandez, an environmental and land-use lawyer who has studied how CEQA lawsuits get abused by housing opponents, told Vox she thinks whether SB 423 works as intended is “a real bet.”

She pointed to Los Angeles, where a 2016 ballot measure that required paying prevailing wage failed to produce as much mixed-income housing as some LA leaders hoped to see. “It’s been too expensive and there’s not enough workers,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez thinks SB 423 will work best in the most expensive markets where developers can afford to charge tenants higher rents to recoup their costs.

No one could say exactly how much more a project might cost if prevailing wage is required, and different estimates abound. Ben Metcalf, the managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, told Vox his organization believes it increases prices in the 10-20 percent range, but can vary a lot by region. Some estimates have it lower than that, and some others have it higher.

Some YIMBY advocates say the higher wages for workers will “pencil out” if state lawmakers move next year to tackle the high “impact” fees that cities often attach to new housing in exchange for development approval.

Brian Hanlon, the president of California YIMBY, said he’s optimistic about the prevailing wage requirement, but only if these fees and other costly regulations like inclusionary zoning requirements are later addressed. “SB 423 is an important law to get rid of a lot of these CEQA lawsuits, but we need to get the math to work right,” he said.

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Smith, of Housing Action Coalition, said it’s not clear yet how much will be saved by streamlining, but developers wouldn’t really care if they paid more for labor if they saved money elsewhere. The Carpenters and other unions have a vested interest in these projects penciling, too.

Ultimately policymakers and advocates of all persuasions recognize California is embarking on a major new chapter for housing politics — one where individuals will have less power to block housing production in court, and where the Trades have less power to block bills they don’t like in Sacramento.

“For years the way union politics worked in California is that each union would let the workers in that union lead on that policy, so you wouldn’t see the plumbers having a position on education, or SEIU getting in on housing,” said Foote, of YIMBY Action. “Now it’s like all bets are off.”

The new “science of reading” movement, explained

Originally published at Vox on August 15, 2023.
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For over a century, a pendulum has swung back and forth on the best way to teach kids to read. On one side are advocates of phonics, an instructional approach focused on the relationships between sounds and letters; on the other, various methods, championed by educators, that emphasize word recognition and context clues.

This fight has occasionally grown so vicious it’s been dubbed the Reading Wars.

But in the last five years, one camp has scored a victory that, if not permanent, is at least decisive.

Since 2019, 45 states and Washington, DC, have passed at least one bill related to reforming reading instruction. The new rules apply to areas like school curriculum, professional development for teachers, screenings for dyslexic students, and requirements for testing. New York City — the largest public school system in the nation — has also ordered change for its 700 elementary schools.

These new policies — met with a mix of excitement and skepticism — are typically accompanied by bold promises. “These changes to our education system will actually educate our kids better in the future than we did before the pandemic,” Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee declared. “This is the beginning of a massive turnaround,” said the New York City Schools chancellor.

A life with poor literacy skills is a hard life. Not being able to read means countless social, economic, and physical challenges, making the stakes of these new reading reforms tremendously high. Coming out of the pandemic, as students still struggle with learning loss, policymakers are especially aware of the need to get these new literacy interventions right. Though some critics have claimed we have no national reading crisis at all, for the millions of kids and adults who struggle to read in America, there is no question that each day brings about new isolating, draining, and avoidable challenges.

Momentum for these reading laws traces its roots to four main factors.

The first came five years ago, when a journalist named Emily Hanford released an influential radio series that looked critically at reading instruction, and specifically how popular strategies employed by American teachers conflicted with decades-old research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology about how kids best learn to read. Hanford’s reporting helped launch a movement dedicated to advancing the “science of reading” — a shorthand for applying these brain-focused studies to instruction.

The second factor came a year later, when Mississippi, a high-poverty state that overhauled its own reading policies back in 2013, soared in national test score rankings. Mississippi fourth graders went from being 49th in the nation for reading on a major exam known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), to 29th, and one of the reforms Mississippi had embraced in 2013 was a focus on the “science of reading.”

The third factor was the emergence in the 2010s of national grassroots networks of parents of children with dyslexia, who have more recently brought their organizing prowess to bear for new state policies they felt could better serve their children’s needs.

And lastly, but no less important, was the pandemic, which fueled a major drop in student achievement and sparked an infusion of new federal funds for schools.

This is not the first or even second time our country has quickly moved to revamp literacy instruction, and some worry that history is about to repeat itself with failed or misguided policy changes.

“I’ve been doing this for more than 50 years and I’ve been through three of these,” said Tim Shanahan, who once served as president of the International Literacy Association and on a federal study into the scientific evidence behind reading instruction.

Reading Wars veterans like Shanahan say this wave of reform has some new elements. Still, some problems that have undermined past waves threaten these new laws too, like a lack of funding and the challenge of maintaining political support if (and likely when) some standardized test scores go down.

Indeed, not all teachers and school administrators are on board. Many have resented the pendulum that has swung back and forth over decades, with competing rules and ideas and sometimes teacher-bashing to boot. Some educators reject the idea that they’ve been teaching reading incorrectly and note that the new materials they’re being told to use now lack a strong track record, too.

One of the most prominent cognitive scientists studying how kids learn to read has emerged as a vocal critic of many of the curriculum guides now being marketed as adhering to the “science of reading.”

Even the more enthusiastic champions of the new reading reforms recognize that passing laws is only the first step, and there’s a long road ahead to making these changes lasting and successful, as schools deal with other intense challenges including chronic absenteeism, a student mental health crisis, and unusually high staff turnover.

The science behind the science of reading

The definition of “science of reading” — a term first used in reading instruction in the 1830s — has evolved over the decades. Today, it primarily refers to cognitive research that pertains to what happens in the brains of strong and poor readers, and is frequently a shorthand for deploying more classroom time on phonics, with its emphasis on learning to sound out words. Past research has found that most kids need systematic phonics instruction when they’re young to ultimately read well.

Sometimes this phonics research gets overstated by proponents. The best studies have shown that teaching phonics is moderately better than other approaches — translating to about a few months of extra school instruction. Experts caution against forgetting that at its core, phonics is a means to an end: “Programs that focus too much on the teaching of letter-sounds relations and not enough on putting them to use are unlikely to be very effective,” stated the National Reading Panel report in 2000, a seminal federally funded investigation into science-based reading instruction.

And not everyone needs explicit phonics instruction at school to read well; indeed tens of millions of children have acquired strong literacy skills without it for generations, either learning through osmosis at home or through other classroom approaches that have waxed and waned in popularity like “whole language” and “balanced literacy.”

But what reading experts generally agree on is that most students — roughly 60 percent of children — will benefit from more systematic phonics instruction, especially in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. A school’s average reading performance will likely go up, and it could be especially helpful for students from disadvantaged backgrounds or those struggling with dyslexia.

Sometimes “the science of reading” is invoked as a way to signal what’s not considered scientific. The most prominent example of that today is a popular reading instruction strategy known as “three-cueing” or MSV, an acronym for meaning, syntax, and visual information. Popularized in the 1960s and ’70s, these methods encourage students to look at context clues to guess the meaning of unknown words; for example, a picture of a house in a story about the country might help a struggling reader guess the word “cottage.”

But studies have shown that these sorts of predictive approaches are ineffective in helping students actually learn to read specific words. Strong readers, rather than guessing a word’s meaning based on adjacent clues, will work to decode letters in the unfamiliar word itself. Have students who rely on cueing generally understood the meaning of a passage? Yes. But they haven’t read the passage well.

These debates around phonics instruction can grow contentious, especially over the last few years. Many academics argue there should be a broader, more inclusive definition of “science of reading” that encompasses research fields beyond just the brain.

“There isn’t shared language with thinking and talking about this with any precision,” said Rachael Gabriel, a professor of literacy education at the University of Connecticut. “A lot of the language is dog whistle-y, and everyone gets really deep in the weeds and then confuses each other.”

For example, though some reading experts defend context-based strategies like cueing, pointing to experimental studies showing they could be complementary to phonics, others believe it’s a mistake to encourage teaching the strategies of poor readers at all.

“Being a reader isn’t like being pregnant where you either are or you aren’t,” said Shanahan, who supports the move away from cueing. “We care how good a reader are you, and we know that strong readers don’t try and guess the meaning.”

In 2019, a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey found 75 percent of K–2 teachers said they teach students to read using the three-cueing method, and 65 percent of postsecondary instructors who teach courses on reading instruction said they did too. As the “science of reading” movement has picked up steam, popular school curriculum providers who endorse these strategies have come under intense scrutiny, blasted for teaching young children strategies that could delay or derail their reading.

The tide is seemingly turning. Three states — Indiana, Arkansas, and Louisiana have recently gone so far as to ban “three-cueing” in legislation, and ExcelInEd, a national advocacy group founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, holds eliminating three-cueing as essential for any model reading policy. Last year Lucy Calkins, a longtime proponent of the “balanced literacy” approach to reading instruction, revamped her popular school curriculum program to include class-wide daily phonics lessons. “All of us are imperfect,” Calkins told the New York Times. “The last two or three years, what I’ve learned from the science of reading work has been transformational.”

The problem is we don’t know how to teach the “science of reading” well yet, either

Though states have moved to replace poorly rated curricula or ban weak instructional approaches, figuring out exactly what schools should do instead is harder. Politicians have falsely declared that experts know what science-backed alternatives teachers should use, and education companies have rushed to meet the demand for new materials, selling school districts their own questionable curricula and teacher trainings.

“We think we have some sort of tentative answers, that various kinds of instructional approaches work better than others, but that evidence is definitely far from ironclad,” said Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California and an expert in K–12 curriculum standards. “Generally speaking there is not a lot of good research on the effectiveness of core curriculum materials, and that’s true both in reading and for other subjects.”

For example, LETRS, an acronym for Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, has become one of the most popular training courses claiming to adhere to the “science of reading.” Mississippi embraced it beginning in 2014 as part of its statewide reading reforms, and following Mississippi’s impressive gains on the 2019 NAEP exam, other states rushed to follow. (It’s a pricey professional development course that can take teachers up to 160 hours over two years to complete.)

Despite its close associations with the “science of reading” — LETRS has its own middling track record of effectiveness. One experimental study found teachers who were trained by LETRS did improve in their knowledge of reading science, but their students did not have statistically higher differences in achievement than teachers in the control group. (A spokesperson for LETRS told Vox, “we know it has been proven to drive positive student outcomes when coupled with other educational interventions.”)

Likewise, studies of reading interventions known as Orton-Gillingham, which have been promoted by many literacy reform advocates, have yielded mixed results so far. One 2021 meta-analysis found the approach did not generate statistically significant improvements in foundational skill areas like phonics. Even for students with some forms of reading disability, Orton-Gillingham wasn’t found to significantly boost comprehension or vocabulary.

Generally reading experts say the policies included in the new state reading laws are a “real mixed bag.” Some laws incorporate more research-backed ideas like coaching, while other endorsed approaches are more suspect. There is no clear amount of time that research shows should be spent daily on phonics, no established curriculum for the “science of reading” and studies on so-called decodable books — strongly endorsed by some phonics advocates to help young students practice letter-sound combinations — have their own mixed research track record.

“Often phonics advocates promote the use of research since research supports phonics instruction … but when it comes to specific prescriptions about how phonics should be taught, they make all kinds of claims that come down to: do it my way, I know best, don’t worry about what the science has to say,” said Shanahan. “There are features of effective phonics instruction suggested by the research and there are aspects on which there is either no research or the research rejects the advocate’s prescription.”

Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of Language at the Speed of Sight, has emerged as a critic of some of the new materials being promoted under the banner of the “science of reading.” He’s blasted “influencers” leading the movement whose own background in cognitive science is limited. (Seidenberg’s book on reading research heavily shaped Hanford’s reporting.)

In an interview with Vox, Seidenberg expounded on his criticism: “It’s a difficult situation because people want to adopt better practices, they understand the idea that what was done before was not really based on solid ideas … but now you have a huge demand for science-based practices pursued by advocacy groups and people who don’t have a great understanding of the science.”

Seidenberg believes that moving away from strategies like three-cueing is important. But he warned that a simplistic reliance on some of the foundational reading science research can lead to some misinformed instructional conclusions, like the idea that children should learn units of sound (or “phonemes” ) before letters, and letters before syllables and words.

“That’s a basic misunderstanding,” said Seidenberg. “Phonemes are abstract units that are results of being exposed to an alphabet, they’re not a precursor.” He also lamented that some leaders have incorrectly cited his research to suggest there’s no downside to teaching kids phonics in the early grades for too long. “There are big opportunity costs and the clock to fourth grade is ticking,” he said. “You only want to do a lot of instruction on these components enough to get off the ground.”

The UK offers a cautionary tale. Last year reading researchers published a major study that concluded England’s present emphasis on phonics instruction came at the expense of other needed literacy skills. They attributed the country’s heavy prioritization in part to a national phonics screening test introduced by the government in 2012, which incentivized in some cases up to three years of daily hour-long phonics lessons.

“There’s no question that phonics instruction is important,” Dominic Wyse, the study’s lead author and an education professor at the University College London, told Vox. “But let’s be clear, there are risks to overdoing it. You’re wasting their time and damaging their time to develop reading comprehension.”

Getting implementation right

The success of the new reading instruction laws will depend primarily on how well they’re implemented on the ground in schools and individual classrooms.

This past spring researchers from Michigan State presented a study assessing the impact of the new reading reform laws on test scores. The research, which has not been peer-reviewed, found students in states with more “comprehensive” supports — like coaching for teachers, adequate funding, and summer tutoring — had larger gains on test scores and on the NAEP than students in states with less comprehensive reading laws.

One concern for advocates is the great variability in how states might hold schools accountable to the new laws. Some worry that without more proactive transparency and enforcement provisions, the reforms could wither on the vine. Others worry about unfunded mandates in a year or two once Covid-19 aid dries up.

Still, others point to the fact that many colleges of education are still teaching methods to prospective teachers like three-cueing, and the New York Times quoted Lucy Calkins at a conference in March telling educators they can join other school leaders in rejecting these new approaches. “You can say no,” Calkins had said. “And people all over the country are doing so.”

To encourage more successful implementation, Gabriel of the University of Connecticut and Sarah Woulfin, a professor of education policy at UT Austin, have been encouraging more focus on school systems, structures, and leadership, rather than a narrow focus on what individual teachers know about reading. “It is not enough to deliver new materials that may sit in boxes in a closet without strong leadership for their integration,” they write. “It is not enough to press teachers to use new tools, without providing high-quality opportunities.”

In some states, such as North Carolina, lawmakers have rolled out new policies but provided little support for educators to incorporate the new mandates into their existing workflow, fueling backlash.

Ginny Sharpless and Amanda Harrison, co-founders of Literacy Moms NC, a group for parents of students with reading disabilities, told Vox they’ve been deeply disappointed by the lack of investment lawmakers have made in building teacher buy-in for the new policies.

“If you’re already working crazy hours, already not getting paid enough, and then someone says, ‘Oh, we want you to do 200 hours of extra training on your own time,’ well, you’re going to be pissing off people who are already burnt out,” said Harrison.

“State lawmakers did absolutely nothing to try to change [educators’] views, you can’t just show people the data and expect them to be converted,” added Sharpless. “Leaders should have gone out there and had meeting after meeting to talk to teachers to bring them on board.”

Polikoff, of the University of Southern California, said the history of US education policy reform suggests that building teacher buy-in and avoiding overly punitive mandates will be important to helping the new “science of reading” laws actually stick. He also warned against hinging hopes to specific state test score gains. When scores trended down following the introduction of the Common Core standards, opponents used those declining results to then water down the policies.

“There’s the risk of setting yourself with unrealistic expectations, and states that go up in test scores also go down,” he said. “One of the states that could go down is Mississippi, which has a lot of conditions that make it likely to have educational difficulty.”

As teachers embark on the 2023–24 academic year, eager to educate students using the best reading materials available, they’ll have to wade through this morass of information, hoping to do the best job possible but waiting for more clarity on exactly how. And in the meantime, there are real disagreements over what instructional strategies to use in schools, what emphasis each should get, what counts as evidence, and who gets to decide.

“Policymakers don’t necessarily want to hear that the science is more complex and less certain than we thought,” said Amanda Goodwin, the co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly and a professor of literacy at Vanderbilt University. “It’s much easier to get public support for a handful of ‘proven’ practices.”

What the Ohio special election results mean for abortion rights

Originally published in Vox on August 8, 2023.
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On Tuesday, Ohio voters rejected a Republican proposal known as Issue 1 that would have made it harder for citizens to put issues on the ballot or for a constitutional amendment to pass in the state.

The decision has big implications for this fall’s election: In November, Ohio voters will decide on a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights. And political analysts say the ramifications could extend into 2024 — when Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is up for reelection in Ohio and when Democrats hope to win big nationally by motivating voters on issues of protecting abortion rights and democracy.

The amendment would have raised the state’s threshold for passing constitutional amendments from a simple majority of votes, as has been the case for over 100 years, to 60 percent, which its GOP sponsors hoped would be too high a bar for abortion rights supporters to clear.

But the measure backfired, with analysts calling the election for the “no” side shortly after polls closed Tuesday night. Still, passage of the abortion rights amendment in November is no foregone conclusion; while polling so far bodes well for supporters, most citizen-led ballot measures in Ohio historically have failed.

Kelly Hall, the executive director of the progressive ballot measure group Fairness Project, hailed the victory as an “incredibly profound and inspiring day for our democracy.” She said her national organization looks forward “to an aggressive campaign in the coming months” to protect Ohio abortion rights in November.

Rhiannon Carnes, spokeswoman for Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, released a statement Tuesday night laying out the stakes for the future of abortion access following Issue 1’s defeat. “Ohioans know that if we don’t succeed,” she said, referring to the November referendum, “the government will have the power to ban abortion completely, even in cases of rape, incest, or when someone’s life is in danger.”

How Issue 1 lost

In November, voters in Ohio will weigh in on a proposed amendment for reproductive freedom that would restore the right to an abortion up to the point of fetal viability — or the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb. The amendment would also permit abortions beyond that point in cases when “the pregnant patient’s treating physician” deems it necessary to protect their life or health.

Though abortion is currently legal in Ohio through 22 weeks of pregnancy, a state law barring abortion after 6 weeks, with no exceptions for rape, is currently tied up in the courts. Pro-choice Ohio doctors led the push for the abortion rights measure on the upcoming November ballot, stressing that their ability to provide proper medical care is at urgent stake.

Restricting abortion rights was the primary reason Republicans placed Issue 1 on the ballot for the August special election. GOP officials recognized they could make it harder for any constitutional amendment to pass in November by changing the rules in advance. A poll from June found nearly 60 percent of Ohioans support the idea of a proposed amendment for reproductive freedom, but nearly 60 percent would not be enough to pass under the parameters of Issue 1. And while abortion rights ballot measures won in red and purple states last year, they all received between 52 and 59 percent of votes, making a 60 percent threshold seem sufficiently insurmountable.

In addition to raising the threshold to 60 percent, Republicans also sought to make it harder to get initiatives on the ballot in the first place. This was necessary to earn the support of the powerful Ohio Chamber of Commerce, which wanted to limit the number of ballot campaigns it potentially had to help fund.

Just last year, Republican lawmakers had voted to repeal August special elections in Ohio, calling them low-turnout wastes of money.

For months Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose denied he had switched positions on August special elections because of abortion rights. But in June, video footage reported by News 5 Cleveland and the Ohio Capital Journal showed LaRose admitting abortion was motivating his stance. “Some people say this is all about abortion. Well, you know what?” he was recorded saying. “It’s 100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution — the left wants to jam it in there this coming November.” (LaRose announced last month that he is running for US Senate.)

While Republicans and anti-abortion groups claimed that making it harder to pass ballot measures was necessary to protect the integrity of Ohio’s constitution from interference by out-of-state groups, 82 percent of the funding for the pro-Issue 1 political action committee came from an Illinois-based Republican megadonor named Richard Uihlein.

Opponents, meanwhile, raised much more money to defeat Issue 1 — at least $14.8 million according to the latest filings. Opponents framed Issue 1 as a threat to average citizens, as it would have significantly raised the costs of the signature-gathering process by requiring organizers to canvass in all 88 counties. Considerable funds for the opposition campaign also came from outside Ohio, including a national progressive dark money group known as the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the California-based Tides Foundation, and the National Education Association.

The opposition campaign comprised not only reproductive rights supporters but also public school proponents who wanted to preserve a tool for addressing educational inequality, democracy activists who want to tackle redistricting, environmental groups that want to push for climate action, and workers’ rights advocates who want to push more labor reforms. A coalition known as One Fair Wage, for example, has been collecting signatures for a potential 2024 ballot measure to raise Ohio’s minimum wage, and union organizers joined forces with the anti-Issue 1 campaign to raise awareness about how all future progressive measures could be affected.

Together, the broad coalition worked to focus voters’ attention on the anti-democratic implications of Issue 1, which was aimed at stripping away not only the principle of majority rule on Ohio ballot measures, but also one of the last remaining ways voters can shape politics in the heavily gerrymandered state.

What this means for abortion rights

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released in late July found that 58 percent of likely Ohio voters support the measure to codify abortion rights, including one-third of Republicans and 85 percent of independent women. Because Issue 1 failed, abortion rights supporters will only need to win a simple majority of votes — rather than 60 percent.

The outcome of Ohio’s abortion referendum will likely shape the political narrative headed into 2024, as it’s the only abortion rights battle voters will weigh in on this fall. Last election cycle, abortion rights won in all six states with ballot measures, but anti-abortion leaders also spun the midterms as good for them because Democrats failed to unseat incumbent governors and didn’t win enough seats in Congress to pass any federal legislation restoring abortion rights. Ohio’s results should help clarify where the energy really is.

Other abortion ballot measures are expected next year in states like Florida, South Dakota, and Arizona, and both opponents and supporters of abortion rights are bracing to spend tens of millions more dollars on such referendums than they did in 2022.

Ohio’s proposed amendment would affirm that “every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.” Opponents claim the language is so broad that it would create a new right to gender-affirming surgery, and therefore invalidate the state’s current requirement for parental consent.

Opponents organizing under the banner of “Protect Women Ohio” have made the trans youth health care argument central to their strategy, spending over $5 million on TV and digital advertising this past spring. They are regularly referring to the measure as an “anti-parent” amendment.

Coalition leaders pushing for the abortion rights amendment say the focus on transgender health care is a desperate attempt to distract from the unpopularity of abortion bans, and that Ohio case law generally requires parental consent for youth medical care. Moreover, the amendment could only affect parental consent laws if someone were to successfully challenge the rules in court as unconstitutional, and given that Ohio’s state Supreme Court is controlled by Republicans, legal experts think a more sweeping interpretation of the abortion rights measure is unlikely.

What the Ohio results mean for democracy

The defeat of Issue 1 has implications not only for Ohio democracy but also for other states looking to push measures to restrict citizen ballot measure initiatives.

Supporters tried to claim that the restrictions they were pushing were because they truly deeply cared about Ohio democracy. Issue 1 proponents argued that efforts to change the state’s founding documents should be difficult, and that too much direct democracy could even undermine their system of representative government. “If a constitutional issue is significant enough to impact all 11.8 million Ohioans, then it should have to garner and demonstrate broad statewide backing for consideration,” said the heads of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the Ohio Restaurant Association, and the National Federation of Independent Business in a joint statement in May.

However, the idea that Ohio voters can easily amend their state constitution is not true. In the last 111 years, only 19 citizen-led ballot measures have been approved, and 52 failed. What Issue 1 supporters were really objecting to is that there was a viable way to check anti-abortion lawmakers’ power at all.

As of late June, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a progressive group that supports state referendum campaigns, 14 states were considering a total of 50 pending measures that would raise new hurdles for ballot measures.

The defeat in Ohio is not the first time in recent memory that Republican lawmakers have failed in their efforts to restrict ballot measures. Last summer South Dakota voters rejected a bid by state GOP officials to raise the threshold for ballot measures to 60 percent — a bid that one Republican official admitted was designed to cripple a ballot measure for Medicaid expansion. (Medicaid expansion in South Dakota ultimately passed.) Arizona voters also rejected a measure last fall that would have allowed lawmakers to amend or repeal ballot initiatives approved by voters.

But Republicans have certainly been notching wins too. Lawmakers in both Florida and Arkansas recently raised the signature requirements for qualifying for the ballot, and last year Arizona voters did approve two measures that restricted citizen initiatives.