Holly Kuzmich currently serves as the Executive Director of the George W. Bush Institute. She oversees the strategy and management of the Institute, an action-oriented policy organization that strives to create opportunity and strengthen our democracy. Holly has over 20 years of public policy experience serving in senior positions in the government, private and nonprofit sectors. She is a veteran of the White House, the US Department of Education in Capitol Hill, where she has developed her expertise in education policy. She has served in President Bush’s administration for seven years, first on the staff of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and then as Deputy Chief of Staff and Assistant Secretary for legislative legislation and Congressional Affairs at the US Department of Education.
This interview, conducted by Aidan Scully and Caroline Yun, has been edited for clarity.
Harvard Political Review: Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself, your work, your focus, and your goals as the head of the Bush Institute?
Holly Kuzmich: The Bush Institute is the 501(c)(3) nonpartisan policy organization that President and Mrs. Bush started after their time in office. We really get to think broadly about the issues that match the values that they have as people but that also are current pressing issues in this country, and figure out how we leverage the assets we have as an organization to attend to those. So eleven years ago, when the organization was started, we picked a certain set of issues to work on at that time that still remain today.
We’re in the middle of thinking about what are the issues over the next ten years that we want to focus on. Those include everything from education and economic growth to veterans, global health, human freedom, democracy, and women. We’ve started to do a lot of work over the past several years on leadership, and developing our own leadership programs, and thinking about how we can uniquely work with individuals across the country and around the world on developing their leadership skills on issues that we work on. But it’s a really fun platform to think through the issues of today and think about how former presidents can use their platforms, not necessarily politically, but to be involved in issues and move the needle.
Part of my job is building an organization that lives long after President and Mrs. Bush, and sort of builds its own expertise on issues that are important and leverages the networks that we have to do that.
HPR: First, we want to focus on education policy. Over the past 20 years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, charter school enrollment has steadily increased while private school enrollment has slightly declined. What do you believe the role of private schools and especially charter schools to be in an education system driven by state and national policy? And what do you believe is the government’s role in providing and implementing public education, school choice policies, and vocational school programs?
Kuzmich: That data you talked about also was really interesting to look at over the past year and a half in terms of COVID, in terms of how people have thought about educational options and what COVID has prospered in terms of choices people are making about where people send their kids to school. But here’s the thing people need to know, is that while charter school enrollment has grown and private school enrollment has probably declined over that time (but probably grown in the past year and a half under COVID), it’s still a small percentage. We educate most kids in our country in public schools. I tend to be one of those people who views less the issue of “is it public, is it a public charter school, or is it a private school,” and more “are we providing good choices for kids, and how do we do that?”
So, I don’t view this as sort of an either/or thing about choice and options. I’m for giving good options to kids and families. And I tend to think about the kid and the family as being the center of how we should think about our public policy in this country related to education. Too much we think about it like “which system gets money.” I would rather think about it as how do we support kids and put kids in the middle of it, and then figure out how you can wrap around that. And I think sometimes we have false debates in this country about its public versus public charter school versus private, and they should all be functioning and flourishing. And we need them all to be functioning and flourishing to educate kids successfully in this country.
A lot of what I think about the role of government in all of this is providing, [and] leveling playing fields, providing opportunity to kids, providing data and transparency around outcomes, and then letting schools meet certain outcomes, and if they’re not meeting certain outcomes, figuring out ways to get them to change and improve how well they’re doing. That’s how I definitely viewed my role when I was in the government in terms of how we thought about the public and public charter schools that we obviously had sort of direct ability to move funds to. And it’s the way that I thought about opportunity in the world of private schools.
When I worked for President Bush at the White House, we actually created the very first federally-funded private school choice program in the District of Columbia. But when we did it, the way we did it was we provided more resources for D.C. public schools, we provided more resources for D.C. public charter schools, and then we created a private school choice program for low-income parents. So to that vein of how I think about it, you need to support all three, you can’t just pick one over the other. Because not every school is right for every kid, and you need to empower parents and families to figure out what’s best for their children.
HPR: We want to talk about the media and dealing with controversy in society. This is more about your position at the head of the Bush Institute, and about the level of policy independence that your institution has. When the institute is taking a bold stance on a policy, what factors are being taken into account? What stakeholders are being taken into account?
Kuzmich: I mean, we have pretty broad authority to do and say what we think is the best thing to do based on data and research and what we’ve seen work and consultation we might have with anybody in this country, or even outside this country, if we’re talking about global issues. I’m not naive in the fact that we’re called the Bush Institute, so we’re affiliated with President Bush, and he’s still alive. We have a political philosophy and a set of values that we live under.
And we’re aware of what he did in office, it doesn’t mean we can’t change our mind ten years later, but if we’re going to change our mind, we have a reason for changing our minds. Evidence has proven something we thought 10 years ago would be different, or, you know, we’ve just kind of evolved in our learning on a particular topic. But in terms of our independence in general, we have pretty wide latitude to be able to be out there and be thoughtful and speak how we want to in terms of issues.
HPR: You mentioned instances where you might change your policy stance based on new evidence or new understanding. Do you have an example of a policy where that has happened?
Kuzmich: I mean, this one’s probably pretty weedy, but I’ll give you an example just in terms of my work on No Child Left Behind, which is obviously President Bush’s kind of signature work in education. There are several things from that law that still stand in place, like annual assessment and desegregation of data, which people have found important, even if they don’t love them. They give us good information, they helped us understand how we’re doing over time. However, at the time, we got pretty prescriptive. And one of the things that were put on the table at the time, was when kids attend a low-performing school for several years, we’re going to send them to a private tutor and allow them to use federal funding to do that, go to an after school tutor.
The way we set that up and the way we required these pretty rigid interventions, and the federal law that then trickled down to the state and local level, was too much. We just got too direct in terms of it. And the reason was at that time, we saw too many low-performance goals, and we wanted them to do something. So our answer was to probably get a little more prescriptive than we should have been. Twenty years later, we can look back at that and say you know what, we didn’t do that well. We overstepped our bounds. It created some unintended consequences. That’s not what we would have done today. And so he feels very comfortable, and I feel very comfortable; we’ve got to be able to reflect on what we learned, what we thought we did well, what didn’t work out and be able to change our tune when we find that that wasn’t effective.
HPR: One last question about the nature of media and the Institute itself. You’ve talked about how the Institute certainly prides itself on being nonpartisan and reaching across the aisle to get things done. But for the general population of America, the way they get their news is through mass media, which is increasingly polarized, and increasingly caters to homogenous audiences. What do you believe is the role of the media in producing the polarization that we’re seeing, and what do you believe is the way to combat it?
Kuzmich: Well, I do believe strongly in this dying realm of local journalism, because they tend to be a little less politically polarizing than a lot of our national outlets. And I also just believe in, as much as possible, a diversity of new sources, that people themselves need to be empowered and need to think critically, that you shouldn’t get your news from only one source. Even if they’re not partisan news outlets, it’s smart not to get all your news from one source. So we need to do a better job. And I think kids these days are pretty savvy at this, about using so many different channels and not just traditional media to gain information and get perspective.
I, myself, don’t watch TV news, I find it just too politically polarizing. I do most of my news through reading, whether instantaneous things that you get through newsletters and on your phone or reading the news over a 24-hour cycle. And I personally read probably five different outlets in the morning. And that helps round out the perspective that you know, when you read one thing over here and get a slightly different point of view here, it helps you.
This goes back to teaching kids critical thinking skills, which we don’t do well. And it’s not about teaching them a point of view. It’s about teaching them to be critical thinkers and how to dissect information and be able to understand where there might be an opinion over here and you’re able to [notice] that opinion, that’s not a factual reporting of the story. And that’s okay, but you have to know it when you see it. In too many people, I don’t think they know it when they see it these days.
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