Education

Our Youth and Our Workforce

A future-focused agenda for Congress must center on our youth. Yet any honest set of election-year proposals, however, must also acknowledge the limits of federal influence. Education budgets, administration, curriculum, and pedagogy remain matters largely controlled by states and local districts, not Congress.

As Mayor of San José, I didn’t have any control over our schools; instead, 19 independent school districts managed public education. Yet I knew that our community’s future depended enormously on my focus on our kids and their education, and we had innovative leadership in our Library Department, headed by Jill Bourne, willing to take on new challenges. During my tenure, we worked with many community partners to launch an unprecedented set of education initiatives, including:

• Building out wireless infrastructure needed to provide more than 200,000 students and residents in our highest-poverty neighborhoods with free broadband, in partnership with East Side Union High School District;^[1]

• Launching City-funded after-school and summer reading and math programs in 16 of our highest-poverty elementary schools;^[2]

• Creating coding and computer science workshops in our libraries for more than 7,000 students;^[3]

• Connecting more than 6,000 teens in high-need neighborhoods to their first summer job, along with financial literacy classes and mentoring;^[4]

• Raising more than $9 million from tech employers to launch an online platform to help 1,700 first-generation high school students identify their best path to college—and reward them with “scholar dollars” after they graduate to offset the postsecondary tuition.^[5]

In short, we filled gaps. Our strapped schools can’t do it alone. Congress similarly cannot allow its lack of formal authority to justify an abdication of its responsibility to the future of our children. Here are a few of the areas where Congress can make a difference:

1. Child Care

As I’ve noted earlier, I urge the restoration of the enhanced Child Tax Credit, increasing limits on dependent care spending accounts, and investing in expanding spaces and training for child care providers. Please turn to the “Cost of Living” chapter, Section 5, for the full discussion.

2. Boosting Public Education

Reversing the Teacher Exodus

Since the pandemic, we’ve experienced a new epidemic: a critical shortage of teachers, exacerbated by strained school district budgets and inflation’s disproportionate impacts on workers with limited incomes. Teacher scarcity emerged as a problem even prior to the pandemic, though, as systemwide recruitment to teacher training programs declined sharply over the last decade.^[6] The National Center for Education Statistics reported that nearly half of all U.S. schools were experiencing teacher shortages in 2023.^[7] In 2020–21, more than one-third (34%) of newly entering teachers lacked certification for their assignments. Many schools have added duties to overburdened teachers, increased class sizes, and canceled offerings, all to the detriment of student learning.

Why the exodus? Many reasons have been cited across several surveys, including the lack of support and preparation for younger teachers, growing workloads, poor administrative and accountability systems, lack of opportunities for professional development and collaboration, and challenging working conditions.^[8]

The most frequently cited reason, however, is poor pay.^[9] In the U.S., teachers earn 60% to 70% of the average salaries of similarly educated full-time professionals—which places American teachers last in relative earnings among all the world’s developed nations.^[10] It’s not getting better, either: inflation-adjusted salaries for American teachers have declined 1% over the last four decades.^[11] And yes, money matters: one survey of departing public school teachers found that two-thirds of those willing to consider a return would view a salary increase as “extremely important” or “very important” to returning to teach.^[12]

Several prominent national leaders—most prominently, President Biden in his 2024 State of the Union Address—emphasize the importance of increasing teacher pay to help reverse the great exodus. However, the federal government does not control teacher salaries, or school district expenditures. How can Congress help?

A common approach for Congress and more than forty state legislatures^[13] lies in educational debt forgiveness for teachers, and those programs can help schools attract and retain teachers, at least where they offer sufficient debt relief.^[14] The burdens on young teachers are real, as more than two-thirds of aspiring teachers rely on loans to pay for their education,^[15] resulting in an average debt of $20,000 for those first-year teachers with a bachelor’s degree and $50,000 for those with a master’s degree.^[16]

While student debt relief programs appear helpful, something more comprehensive and ongoing seems imperative, however. For example, we should want to encourage retention of experienced teachers who may have already paid off their loans, but still struggle to pay rent or a mortgage. In particular, we need a tool for teacher attraction and retention where it appears most challenged: for those teaching in schools serving the highest share of children living in poverty.^[17]

A Federal Teacher Tax Credit—and Paying for It

Congress can more directly support the incomes of teachers through the federal tax code. The Center for American Progress and education experts such as California Board of Education President Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond have suggested a refundable tax credit for teachers willing to teach in high-need communities, and where costs of living make them the hardest to attract.^[18]

Refreshingly, this doesn’t appear to be a wholly partisan idea. In 2021, Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed a bill to introduce a 5-year, $3,000 tax credit in Georgia for teacher recruitment and retention in 100 rural or low-performing schools.^[19] Democratic Senator Cory Booker has proposed a larger credit at the federal level for teachers in high-poverty schools.^[20]

A $12,000 tax credit could meaningfully attract and retain teachers in schools that struggle to serve kids struggling in poverty. Congress might target a full tax credit for teachers in schools where at least 75 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL), and then phase out the credit by $500 in schools for every percentage point below that 75% FRPL ratio. The legislation might require districts to commit to “no wage clawback” requirements to avoid pay cuts that exploit the tax credit windfall.

Would such a program really improve student outcomes? Studies show, unsurprisingly, that pay does affect teacher attraction and retention. In schools serving the highest poverty students, boosting pay by only $10,000 per year for two years has a substantial impact on teacher attraction and retention.^[21] Econometric analyses also show that high teacher turnover adversely affects student performance, even among students within the same schools.^[22] Accordingly, we shouldn’t be surprised to see data that suggests that increasing pay for teachers can improve outcomes for students. Stanford researchers found, for example, that boosting teacher wages by 10% reduces high school dropout rates by 3–4%.^[23]

The “how” of this program is important as well. A tax credit program provides more certainty to teachers. Unlike discretionary federal spending programs—such as grants provided under Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—teachers assessing their career decisions won’t need to depend on the uncertain outcomes of annual federal budget negotiations to know whether they can pay their rent.

As with every election-year proposal, a threshold question every voter should ask is, “How will we pay for it?” Projecting from estimates from the American Center for Progress, Congress could enact a $12,000 credit described above at a “tax expenditure” (that is, foregone tax revenue), of roughly $16 billion.^[24] Obviously, the precise cost depends on the precise depth and breadth of the subsidy. While some may quibble about its cost, the teacher tax credit roughly matches the magnitude of federal spending—about $15 billion—to support training of doctors and other medical professionals.

Regardless, the cost is considerable. If we’re investing in our teachers because we feel morally obligated to the next generation, we undermine that objective by saddling our kids with more debt. How do we pay for it?

Some members of my party suggest that we should implement a “wealth tax,” but it’s a bad idea. I have not read a clear articulation of how the Treasury Department would implement such a tax, given the speculative valuations of such assets as private equity, art, or intellectual property. Instead, I suggest we consider any of several avenues for reversing the most regressive elements of Congress’ last major tax legislation, the 2017 Trump-championed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Those changes burdened our budget with $1.9 trillion in tax expenditures over a decade, which overwhelmingly flowed to the benefit of very high-income individuals.^[25]

In 2025, several of those TCJA provisions will expire, but they will not be given up easily; powerful groups will fight mightily to preserve every tax exemption and deduction. We must overcome the “entitlement mentality” that infects our tax code, by allowing provisions to expire where they provide little economic benefit to our nation.

One example of an exemption worthy of expiration: the very large TCJA exemption—nearly $13.6 million per estate—from the estate tax. Nothing about this exemption uniquely stimulates job creation nor economic growth. Its benefits flow overwhelmingly to about one-tenth of 1% of the wealthiest taxpayers.^[26] Yes, the top marginal estate tax rate is 40%, but loopholes and exemptions make the effective tax less than half as high.^[27] By rolling that exemption back to pre-2017 levels, more than $16 billion could be generated annually by 2028, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).^[28]

This reallocation doesn’t increase the aggregate burden borne by U.S. taxpayers, but it does make it more equitable. That is, the tax expenditure no longer benefits the adult children of wealthy parents, but rather the school children of low-income parents.

Fulfilling Congress’ Promise to Children in Special Education

A repeated frustration I hear from education experts and school board members focuses on special education. Public school districts have a legal (and moral, in my view) obligation to provide the resources necessary to support the learning needs of children with disabilities. When school districts lack the human and physical infrastructure to support those needs, they are often required to pay for private schools that can—at a very steep expense. In California, educating a child with special needs costs public schools almost three times what it costs to educate a “general education” student.^[29] The scale of this need and its impact on budgets has grown massively; autism diagnoses in California, for example, have increased twelvefold in two decades.^[30] Today, approximately 7.6 million American children with disabilities—or about 15% of all public school students—receive special education and related services.^[31]

In 1975, Congress articulated a clear commitment to special education with legislation that mandated minimum standards and authorized federal resources to address the educational needs of our special needs children. Under that legislation and its successor, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Congress proposed to fund 40% of the cost of special education for children with learning disabilities, speech impediments, autism, physical disabilities, and other challenges.^[32]

Yet Congress has never met its budgetary commitment to our most vulnerable kids. Rather than funding 40% of the cost for serving those students, IDEA funding in 2023 delivered less than 13% of the cost to local school districts.^[33] The difference of more than $24 billion falls upon state and local school budgets, many of which face growing shortfalls today.^[34]

There is hope. Last year, Congress appropriated a 20% boost in IDEA funding.^[35] One bipartisan (but admittedly overwhelmingly Democratic) proposal, the IDEA Full Funding Act of 2023, would direct funding for a 10-year ramp up to the full 40% of promised funding.^[36] While identifying funding will be a challenge, it would relieve burdened school districts that pull from general education resources that affect all of our children.

Where should Congress start? First, we could better use the dollars we do spend. Today, California public school districts pick up the cost of private tuition—which may exceed $100,000 for some students with behavioral problems—for 2,300 students to attend private schools where public schools fail to meet the needs of a student with an individualized education plan (IEP).^[37] Incentivizing public school districts to work together to build facilities and faculties that address the special education needs of a larger share of their students could reduce spending on costly private tuition.

Second, we could adjust the antiquated funding formula to better allocate existing IDEA dollars. A 1997 revision in the law produced dramatic disparities in IDEA funding.^[38] This leaves special education students in states with higher percentages of high poverty, high-need students with $1,500 fewer federal dollars per student.

Finally, we must find more funding. As above, Congress could look to the TCJA, and continue to roll back 2017’s generous $13.6 million exemption of estate taxes all the way to 2011 levels, thereby generating substantial revenue. Even those high-value estates exceeding $5 million—despite having an ostensibly high marginal tax rate of 40%—would actually face an effective tax of less than 20%.^[39] Alternatively, Congress could tighten the leash on excessive usage of grantor retained annuity trusts (GRAT) that savvy estate attorneys have used to avoid more than $100 billion in estate taxes since 2000.^[40] In either case, relatively modest pain could be incurred for substantial, widespread gain.

Congress must finally begin to keep its word to millions of our most vulnerable children. They deserve better.

Boosting Tutoring After the Pandemic Funding Expires

For the millions of children who struggle to keep up academically, one external intervention has proven more effective than any other: tutoring. Since the days that Ben Bloom first announced a “two sigma” improvement from tutoring that propelled average students to perform at the 98 percentile, dozens of studies have affirmed that frequent, individualized tutoring can substantially boost a child’s learning.^[41]

Many families can’t afford tutoring, of course, but wealthy families can. Educational disparities beget economic disparities. School districts already struggle financially, and many cannot sustain tutoring programs. During the pandemic, many districts used the windfall of $189.5 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding to enable hundreds of thousands of children to access “high-impact tutoring,” featuring small groups, highly trained tutors, and high weekly frequency. Those districts that leveraged tutoring saw a marked rebound in student performance from the pandemic learning loss.^[42] With the exhaustion and expiration of that ESSR funding for many schools this fall—in September 2024—schools nationally face the prospect of losing access to this critical intervention for struggling kids.

One of the most prominent of those experts, Stanford education economist Dr. Susanna Loeb, founded the National Student Support Accelerator to help millions of families gain access to tutoring. In June, she co-authored an article with Alan Safron urging the continuation of the pandemic-era emphasis on tutoring, particularly for kids from low-income families who would never have the means otherwise to do so.^[43]

While the ESSR spigot has run dry, Loeb and Safron point to existing programs from which Congress could repurpose federal funding to sustain more tutoring. Congress could, for example, include conditions that would incentivize districts to use Hawkins Fund grant dollars to not merely pay for teacher training from HBCUs and other diverse universities, but to employ those college students in active tutoring that can provide a “hands on” learning pathway for a teaching career. Similarly, Congress could attach conditions to its appropriation of U.S. Labor Department-funded teacher apprenticeship programs—filled with 7,450 registered apprentices—to encourage districts to transform apprenticeship hours spent in static observation to small-group tutoring.^[44] Some 600,000 college students today participate in work-study as part of their federal financial aid packages; a larger share of those college students might satisfy their work-study obligations by tutoring nearby high-need kids, with university-subsidized wages.^[45]

Technology—particularly the use of artificial intelligence in educational software that enables individualized learning and teacher feedback—could help supplement (but not replace) the human intervention of tutoring and in-class instruction. Combining these tools with caring adults can accelerate student success.

3. Post-Secondary Education: the Imperative of Innovation

Beyond our kids, the education of our adults will take an increasing importance in the years ahead. The economic disruption of technological innovation on global trade will only accelerate, and in particular, the displacement impacts of artificial intelligence will grow. The well-being of tens of millions of families—and of our entire economy—will depend on having an adult workforce that can nimbly adjust its sails to the changing economic winds. A typical career will see many more job shifts, and the quality of the new job will depend wholly on one’s ability to upskill. The now-common refrain: “AI won’t replace your job, but someone who understands AI will.”

To get to that future, we need disruption in the existing education system. Disruption has been overdue. It’s not as though the traditional approach of relying upon four-year degrees at universities was working for most families, anyway. Less than 40% of U.S. adults today have a four-year college degree, and only 22% of U.S. adults believe that a four-year degree is worth the burden of taking on educational debt.^[46] That educational journey will only become more steep as tuition at nonpublic universities exceeds $70,000 per year.

Of course, the perceptions may vary widely from the reality in many corners of our country; here in the Bay Area, a college degree constitutes the table stakes for economic survival for many. We should expect the university degree to continue to be relevant as a qualification in many fields in the years ahead. Yet for most American adults, the four-year degree isn’t accessible, and even where it is, it may not deliver on its promise to help its graduates navigate a turbulent economy.

Educating the Future Workforce More Nimbly: Colleges and Universities

While the federal government should not meddle in questions of university pedagogy or governance, it should prod institutions of higher learning to deliver greater value and to broaden access to young adults—and a national economy—that need both.

There are tools at Congress’ disposal to incentivize change. Those tools traditionally consist of conditions that can be attached to the tens of billions in annual federal funding to postsecondary education, through such programs as the Fund for Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to Pell grants and federal assistance to veteran students, and to a much more attenuated extent, research funding.

Educational innovators have long identified several reforms and off-the-beaten-path approaches to reducing costs and expanding access to college. Congress can double down on these efforts by incentivizing federally funded institutions to embrace them. For example, despite the efforts of the textbook publishing lobby, U.S. colleges might be prodded to utilize high-quality open educational resources for learning. Hal Plotkin’s pioneering work at De Anza Community College has blossomed in the work of several foundations and universities that have championed free access to textbooks, including OpenStax and the OER Commons. Purdue University reduced the time and cost burden on its students by launching its “Degree in 3,” as have Cal State Monterey Bay and Hartnell College with their joint 3-year computer science degree program.^[47]

More students can also graduate sooner with the increased use of AI-enabled educational software that can allow for a more individualized and self-directed pace of learning, for example, for a first-year student needing remedial math before advancing toward a major degree. In this way, technology can serve as a useful supplement to in-class instruction, to help more students learn better, faster, and ultimately graduate on time. Conditions on federal grants can spur these innovations and others to accelerate and expand access to a four-year degree.

Outside the University: Expanding Access to Upskilling, Credentials and Badging

We should not chain ourselves to the college degree as the educational solution for every career. Most of the upskilling for our workforce occurs—and will increasingly occur—outside of they university gates. For decades, the building trades have offered training programs that can result in steady construction work, particularly in electrical, HVAC, plumbing, and other high-paying trades. So too in the digital economy; much has been written about promising programs that have empowered displaced adults to seek better technology-enabled careers. In Dignity in a Digital Age, for example, U.S. Representative Ro Khanna writes glowingly of Interapt’s success in helping unemployed Kentucky coal miners learn to become software developers.^[48]

Digital badging has become increasingly valued by employers to identify prospective workers with the requisite skills like IT network management and coding. Instead of a cookie-cutter degree, digital credentialing increasingly allows employers to “see the work” in a portfolio presented by the applicant, and independently assess its quality. These and other innovative approaches to upskilling deserve federal support, to satisfy a rapidly-growing need for credible pathways to job-readiness.

The Community College Partnership Tax Credit

Congress could also do far more to partner with a nearly ubiquitous, but too-often overlooked institution of learning: the community college. Community colleges comprise the most accessible catalyst for upward mobility for nine millions adults every year. Yet community colleges—and even top universities—don’t always have a firm grasp of the specific skill set demanded most by employers, particularly in the fast-changing tech economy. Employers do.

I saw this clearly as Mayor of San José. My team and I partnered with several employers to try to address their HR challenges as we sought to improve access to well-paying careers for more of our residents who lacked college degrees. Alaska Airlines, for example, sought to find training opportunities for engine mechanics, who could earn six figures for a starting salary—without needing a four-year degree. Alaska ultimately invested its own resources in expanding a community college program that would serve its own future employees—and others.

That experience opened my eyes to new possibilities: Congress could expand opportunity for millions by connecting the experts in hiring—employers—with the experts in adult learning.

I would propose a program that incentivizes employers to both (a) identify the critical skills and specific curriculum appropriate for a training program for a designated career path, and (b) invest in the human (e.g., salaries) and capital infrastructure (e.g., laboratories or training facilities) that community colleges need to educate those students. The incentive could come in the form of a tax credit the employers could secure by hiring students from the program, with assurances that the community college’s curriculum would be aligned to the private sector’s needs. Alternatively or additionally, Congress might mandate a minimum investment to secure the credit.

Here’s the win-win. The company develops an educational pathway for hard-to-find talent, and it can even choose the best students for future hiring through paid internships. The community college develops the capacity to train many more students for similar jobs for other employers—and does so knowing that they’re training for skills that will be in demand.

This is not a new idea. President Barack Obama proposed something similar in his final budget in 2016, a proposed $2.5 billion Community College Partnership Tax Credit. The idea did not take hold in Congress in 2016, but it is the right idea for today—and the future.^[49] Certainly, these partnerships do exist already; we simply don’t have enough of them, serving enough people. We need to strengthen the links between the private sector and the educational sector, and plant a seed for the development of programs that can benefit many more students and future workers than the investing company can possibly employ. That’s an investment in human capital that is worth every foregone tax dollar.