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Democrats used education. What happened?

Democrats used education. What happened?

There is a stage War Rooma 1993 documentary about the Clinton campaign that was recreated in a new CNN documentary about James Carville. George Stephanopoulos, overjoyed by his victory, begins telling the staff and volunteers gathered around him about the good things that will happen if they win. He mentions health care. He mentions work. He also says children will have access to better schools.

It’s a discreet line that stands out 30 years later. The reason: better schools are no longer part of the core litany of promises made by Democratic candidates.

If you scroll down to Kamala Harris problems pagethere are plenty of program details, but take a closer look at the education section:

Vice President Harris will fight to ensure that parents can afford high-quality care and preschool for their children. It will strengthen public education and training as a path to the middle class. She will also continue to work to end the unjust burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable so that college can be a ticket to the middle class. To date, Vice President Harris has helped deliver the largest investment in public education in American history, provided nearly $170 billion in student debt relief to nearly five million borrowers, and made record investments in HBCUs, tribal colleges, Latino-serving institutions, and other minority-serving institutions. She helped more students afford college by increasing the maximum Pell Grant amount by $900 – the largest increase in over a decade – and invested in local colleges. It has implemented policies that have led to the employment of over one million registered apprentices, and will do even more to scale up programs that create good careers for university graduates.

Almost nothing here concerns primary and secondary education. There is detailed information on children under K-12 (increasing access to preschool and child care) and students over K-12 (college scholarships, internships and career opportunities for college graduates). But apart from a vague promise to “strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class,” which could apply to both post-secondary and primary education, there is nothing about schools here.

Not so long ago, education (understood by everyone as “public schools”) was one of the party’s most important issues. Bill Clinton constantly called for this and positioned Democrats on the side of embryonic reform experiments that then germinated. When he fought Republican plans to cut the government, his formula was “Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment,” identifying schools as one of the four pillars of government that cemented the public’s loyalty to the Democratic Party and concretized the costs of the Republican plan.

George W. Bush created the Republican education agenda in 2000 because Republicans realized they needed to reduce Democrats’ advantage on the issue to have a chance of winning. When Barack Obama cemented the primaries, he gave motivational conversation to his employees in Chicago, following the example of Stephanopoulos, and education was also on his short list of issues.

Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention prominently included a promise to reform and improve public schools:

I will not accept an America where some children do not have this opportunity. I will invest in early school education. I will recruit an army of new teachers, pay them higher salaries and provide them with more support. In return, I will ask for higher standards and greater responsibility.

Obama’s support for education reform did not work perfectly or smoothly, but in many respects it produced positive results. (I wrote a long story about the success of the education reform movement four years ago; from last year’s main study, which was previously cited by skeptics of charter schools found this sector currently provides major learning benefits for urban students). However, domestic political backlash from teachers unions made this position more troublesome than Democrats were willing to accept. Obama he himself stopped defending his own educational program in the face of the anger of the trade unions whose support he and his party needed.

Since the end of the Obama era, Democrats have begun to move away from education reform and instead adopt a more neutral position in line with teachers unions. Hillary Clinton in 2016 he moved away from Obama’s position, and in 2020 Joe Biden moved even further. The pandemic has put Democrats’ more union-friendly stance on education in a harsher light; Democrats defended closing schools and, in some cases, exposed parents to the leftist pedagogy that has become fashionable in recent years.

The most extreme version of the new progressive educational stance can be found in Chicago. Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former member and staunch ally of the Chicago Teachers Union, attempted to implement his political vision. The city’s schools are missing students and the temporary pandemic funds the school used to maintain its budget are running out.

Johnson and CTU oppose closing any schools, even those attended by almost no one. Three-fifths of the city’s schools are schools insufficiently recorded. One school has 27 students in a building with a capacity of 900 students. Johnson plans to take out a short-term loan to finance the gap and worry about the costs later. When critics questioned the sustainability of this plan, he similar them to the defenders of slavery: “The argument was that blacks could not be freed because it would be too expensive. They said it would be financially irresponsible for this country to emancipate black people. And now you have opponents making the same argument against the Confederacy when it comes to public education in this system.

Johnson’s unyielding attitude may be the exception. The CTU is radical even by teachers union standards, and Chicago is a rare example of a city over which it can exercise substantially direct rather than indirect control. But the extent to which Johnson made left-wing, pro-EU education policy central to his agenda – and what was the impact of his popularity vertical — indicates how toxic the program is even among predominantly Democratic voters.

The pandemic has certainly played an important, disruptive role. But this only served to show the party’s changing stance on public schools, which no longer placed the well-being of students at the center. The moral ambition to provide every child with a high-quality public school has proven too controversial to pursue. Trying to maintain the status quo, even one in which many low-income children have no choice but to leave school, seems to be the path of least resistance.

Public education was once one of the strongest reasons for Democrats to get people to vote them into power. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the leftward shift in education led more or less directly to Democrats losing what was once their major advantage. Of course, there are still compelling reasons to vote Democrat. But even Democratic candidates don’t seem to consider schools one of them.