From High School to the Halls of Congress

Representative Kevin Kiley ‘07 (R-CA) represents California's Third District in the House of Representatives. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Contributed by Declan I. M. Deady.

SALIENT: Can you tell us about the speech and debate team that you founded when you were a teacher, and how that relates to the harm done to students by low expectations?

REP. KILEY: I taught English at a high school in inner-city L.A. through Teach for America. TFA’s mission is to close the achievement gap that exists in our public education system, which still persists to this day in really alarming ways. One way in which I think that unequal access really manifests itself in different types of school districts is in opportunities like being part of the debate team, which I had access to as a high school student myself, but that didn't exist at this school of several thousand kids. So, it was something that I started up soon after I got to the school. We got dozens of kids involved in it; they got to compete against other students from schools all throughout California, and a lot of those students went on to great schools after they graduated. I felt it was a very small, concrete way to try to close the opportunity gap that existed for my students.

SALIENT: Where do we go from there? What do you think the next step is towards ensuring opportunities and freedom of education?

KILEY: I think that we should be looking at the success stories of those who have used the tools of school choice, accountability, and other types of education reform that have really succeeded in propelling student achievement. One of the success stories is New Orleans, which made itself a 100% charter school district after Hurricane Katrina. Every district in New Orleans became a charter school, and they saw historic gains in terms of closing achievement gaps.

I think that the instrument with the greatest potential for systemic change is the charter school movement. Charters are incredibly effective as education reform because they combine competition and accountability. The basic idea is that charters are public schools that are open to all; if they're oversubscribed, they have a blind lottery to determine who gets the seats. But in order to succeed as a school, they have to attract students, because they don't get assigned anybody like a traditional public school would. They're subject to review every few years, so there's that accountability mechanism as well. In return for that level of accountability, which doesn't exist in the traditional public school system, there are a lot of mandates and policies that apply to traditional public schools but that don't apply to charter schools. This gives the flexibility to create a different educational model.

The model that has prevailed in traditional public education is to regulate the inputs: we micromanage schools with regulations and mandates, and then we just don't care how the schools are performing. I think the fundamental shift that's needed is to hold schools accountable for their results, and then to allow freedom for the schools to operate as they like and parents to choose the school they'd like.

SALIENT: Your school choice amendment seems to be a step in the right direction. Do you think it can be implemented under the current administration?

KILEY: Well, the school choice amendment is part of a parent's rights bill,¹ which the Senate refused to take up.² That legislation, at least, does not seem to have much life in the Senate at this point. It's actually a pretty modest proposal. The federal government should not have an overreaching role in local education. However, the school choice amendment is actually a very limited form of school choice; it deals only with school choice within the public education system. It doesn't even make more options available, in and of itself, because that's not really something that we could do at the federal level. What it does instead is simply say that every parent should have the right to know what their options are, wherever they might reside. It can take a lot of time and energy and resources and know-how to navigate the school-choice process. So, some districts have a central clearinghouse that will tell you exactly what your options are. My amendment was intended to make that available in all districts, at least those under Title I³ that are heavily reliant on federal funding so that parents understand the full breadth of options they have.

SALIENT: Do you have any examples of overbearing regulations that are harming public schools?

KILEY: One very clear example is tenure policy. I'll take my state as an example. In the traditional public schools, every teacher is automatically part of the union. Under the Supreme Court's recent decision, there's now an ability to opt-out, but they've made that very difficult in California.⁴ With charters, they can decide whether to form a union or not, but it's not an automatic process. When it comes to tenure, we have one of the shortest probationary periods in the entire country. It's about two years, and then they have to make a decision whether or not to grant tenure. In reality, that means they have to make the decision at basically the year-and-a-half mark, and once the teacher is granted tenure, they're there for a while. So, there's very limited ability to give teachers the sort of professional development they need. This sometimes makes the administration risk-averse, because they don’t want to be stuck with a bad teacher. So, someone who might have been a successful teacher if they'd had gotten a couple years of professional development ends up leaving the profession entirely. These are harmful laws; they don't serve students.

SALIENT: Do you think there's still a place in the world of education for conservatives?

KILEY: Our education system should really not be tilted in one direction or another. That's one of the problems; people see higher ed especially, but increasingly K-12, as so ideologically monolithic. People should have a problem with that, whatever their ideology might be. I'm conservative and Republican; I went to an institution where most of my classmates had a different point of view. I appreciated the ability to be challenged in my points of view, to be forced to give scrutiny to my own beliefs, to defend them, and to think differently about things when someone made a persuasive point. If you have educational environments where it's so monolithic that that doesn't happen for most people, that's a bad thing, and it's not in keeping with the purposes of the academy. It's gotten to the point where conservatives are fighting for things that ought not to be partisan, like freedom of speech, academic freedom, institutional neutrality, and academic excellence. I absolutely don't think that we should buy into the mentality that this is the way things need to be. Now that a lot of these problems have come into focus, there is an opportunity to restore some balance.

SALIENT: Do you think that the government should start cutting funding from universities, especially the universities that have egregious problems like we’ve seen with Harvard recently?

KILEY: Well, we need to look at that funding for sure. If it's being used in service of truly terrible things like DEI bureaucracies that fail to address, and even promote, antisemitism on campus, that's a huge problem. These private universities are getting a huge amount of funding from the federal government. That gives us not only the right but the obligation to do oversight as to how taxpayer dollars are being used.

SALIENT: Do you think that the Department of Education has been anything but an unmitigated failure?

KILEY: Well, it's become huge, and it’s upended some foundational principles in our country. Education ought to be controlled locally. That's where citizens have the greatest access to influence policy. Education policy shouldn't look the same all across the country; different communities have different needs. It's also turned a lot of state education departments into compliance entities. If you look at the California Department of Education, a huge portion of what they do is just compliance work. We have this vast education infrastructure that has built itself up over time, and there's a lot of opportunity not only to streamline some of what it does but to assure that to the extent that it continues to operate, it does so in a way that is directed in support of good educational principles.

SALIENT: Do you see a way for the federal government to try and help make higher education more affordable?

KILEY: Yes, we just passed a bill into the Committee on Education and Workforce last week called the College Cost Reductions Act.⁵ It gets at exactly that—it looks at the levers we have at the federal level to try to get the continually-rising cost of a college education under control. There's provisions intended to make sure that students know what the overall cost is going to be. There's provisions that give universities a stake in the economic value of their degrees by holding them accountable for students that default on debt or that remain mired in debt for years. Universities should have some stake in that if they're producing graduates with tons of debt and few marketable skills, and the federal government is subsidizing that. It reforms the PLUS program through which the federal government makes these loans available, which is really what has driven the inflation of college education costs.

It also looks at reforming how some of this money is being spent. We have so much money that's going into administration these days. We see this in California, even with the public schools: the number of faculty has remained fairly level, at least relative to the student population, whereas the number of administrators relative to the student population has exploded. The DEI phenomenon has contributed to that, and that's raised costs as well. I think that bill definitely embodies a lot of the tools that we have at our disposal.

It's an exciting time right now across the whole landscape of education from K-12 to higher ed. There's an unprecedented level of public awareness with respect to the failures that have been allowed to grow and grow over time. I think that we now need to focus on channeling that in the right direction, to reform our K-12 system, to catch up with other countries that do education better, and to close achievement gaps so that every child in this country has access to quality education.

This interview originally appeared in The Right Tomorrow, the April 2024 print issue of the Salient.

1. H.R. 5 — Parents Bill of Rights Act

2. As of March 27, 2023, H.R. 5 was received in the Senate and referred to committee. It has seen no further action since.

3. Title I is a federal education program which provides financial assistance to schools in poor districts.

4. Janus v. AFSCME

5. The College Cost Reductions Act, H.R. 6951, is currently under review by the House Education and Workforce Committee.