There’s a scene in the 1993 documentary about the Clinton campaign, The War Room, that is recreated in a new CNN documentary about James Carville. George Stephanopoulos was ecstatic with his victory and began talking to the staff and volunteers gathered around him about the good things that would come from winning. He’s referring to health care. He mentions work. And children will have access to better schools, he says.
It’s an inconspicuous line that doesn’t stand out even after 30 years. Why: Better schools are no longer part of the fundamental promises of Democratic candidates.
If you scroll down to the Kamala Harris issue page, there are lots of details about the program, but take a closer look at the education section.
Vice President Harris will fight to ensure parents have access to quality child care and preschool for their children. She intends to strengthen public education and training as a path to the middle class. And she will continue to fight to end the unjust burden of student loan debt and make higher education more affordable, so that college is a ticket to the middle class. To date, Vice President Harris has delivered the largest investment in public education in American history, providing nearly $170 billion in student debt relief to nearly 5 million borrowers, including HBCUs, tribal colleges, and Hispanic-serving institutions. has achieved record-breaking investments. institutions serving minorities; She helped more students attend college by increasing the maximum Pell Grant amount by $900 (the largest increase in more than a decade) and invested in community colleges. She has implemented policies that have led to the employment of more than 1 million registered apprentices and will do more to expand programs that create positive career paths for non-college graduates.
There is almost no mention of K-12 education here. Includes details for children under K-12 (expanded access to preschool and childcare services) and students above K-12 (university grants, apprenticeships, and career options outside of college). I am. But other than a vague promise to “strengthen public education and training as a path to the middle class,” which could apply not only to primary education but also to postsecondary education, there is no mention of schools here. there is nothing.
It wasn’t that long ago that education (which everyone understood as “public schools”) was one of the party’s biggest issues. Bill Clinton invoked this constantly, positioning the Democratic Party on the side of early reform experiments that have since sprouted. When he hit back at Republicans’ plans to cut government, his formula was “Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment,” solidifying the public’s loyalty to the Democratic Party and embodying costs as one of the four pillars of government. I mentioned the school. of the Republican plan.
George W. Bush created Republican education policy in 2000 because he understood that to have any chance of winning, Republicans needed to reduce the Democratic lead on this issue. As Barack Obama consolidated his primary campaign, he, like Stephanopoulos, gave a pep talk to his Chicago staff, and his short list of issues included education.
President Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention prominently included promises to reform and improve public schools.
I’m not going to be satisfied with an America where there are kids who don’t have that opportunity. We will invest in early childhood education. Hire new teachers in droves, pay them higher salaries, and provide them with more support. Instead, we demand higher standards and more accountability.
Although President Obama’s support for education reform did not work perfectly or seamlessly, it had positive results in many ways. (I wrote a long article four years ago about the successes of the education reform movement. Last year, a major study previously cited by charter school skeptics found that charter schools have significant learning benefits for urban students. ). But internal political pushback from teachers unions made this position more troublesome than Democrats were willing to accept. Obama himself stopped defending his education policies in the face of the ire of the labor unions that needed his and his party’s support.
Starting at the end of the Obama administration, Democrats began abandoning education reform, instead adopting a more neutral position aligned with teachers’ unions. Hillary Clinton gradually distanced herself from Obama’s position in 2016, and Joe Biden further distanced himself in 2020. The pandemic has shined an even harsher light on Democrats’ pro-union education stance. Democrats defended school closures and, in some cases, exposed parents to left-wing pedagogy that had become popular in recent years.
The most extreme version of the new progressive education stance can be seen in Chicago. Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former member and staunch ally of the Chicago Teachers Union, is attempting to implement that policy vision. The city’s schools are losing more students, and temporary coronavirus funding used to keep budgets afloat is running dry.
Mr Johnson and CTU oppose closing all schools, even those with few students. Three-fifths of the city’s schools are under-enrolled. One school has 27 students studying in a building intended to accommodate 900 students. Johnson’s plan is to take out a short-term loan to cover the shortfall and worry about the costs later. When critics questioned the plan’s sustainability, he likened them to defenders of slavery, saying: They said it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate black people. And now we have detractors making the same claims as the Confederacy regarding public education in this system. ”
Prime Minister Johnson’s unyielding attitude may be an outlier. The CTU is radical even by teachers’ union standards, and Chicago is a rare example of a city where the CTU can exert essentially direct rather than indirect control. But the plummeting popularity of Mr. Johnson, who has made left-wing, pro-union education policies the centerpiece of his platform, shows just how harmful this policy is even among overwhelmingly Democratic voters. It shows that.
The pandemic certainly played a significant role of disruption. But it only exposed the party’s changing attitude towards public schools, which no longer focused on the welfare of schoolchildren. The moral goal of providing quality public schools for all children proved too controversial to pursue. Maintaining the status quo appears to be the path of least resistance, even when many low-income children have no choice but to stay out of school.
Public education was once one of the strongest reasons for Democrats to vote people into power. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the shift to the left on education has led more or less directly to the Democratic Party losing what was once a major advantage. Of course, there are still compelling reasons to vote Democratic. But even Democratic candidates don’t seem to consider schools one of them.
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