Education reporters Erica L. Green and Eliza Shapiro may have wanted to ignite a small Internet blaze regarding Democratic minority voters and charter schools, but their recent article in The New York Times was more like a jar of gasoline tossed onto an already-burning fire.
The conflagration over the “narrative” of minority voters has been smoldering for some time. Are minority parents seeking better schools for their kids supporters of charter schools, or leading figures in the resistance to a choice-based education reform movement that threatens local control and neighborhood vitality? The answer puts the wind in the sails of the favored ship.
Under the Obama Administration, which was pro-charter, this polarized narrative was far less hot. In fact, a coalition formed between reformers on the right (supporting the idea of a school ecology ruled by market forces and competition) and activists on the left (supporting the idea of access to better schools for non-wealthy, non-white underserved communities).
But the election of Donald Trump disrupted this coalition. For one thing, his appointment of education reform advocate Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary made it toxic for any Democrat to have a friendly working relationship with her department.
In addition, prominent ed reform voices began to complain, around the time of the election, that liberal social justice reformers were pushing conservative voices out of the movement to improve schools. Just last week, charter school advocates Rick Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, and Chester Finn, president emeritus of the Fordham Institute, an education reform think tank, complained that a “tidal wave of wokeness” was threatening the reform movement.
Reformers have seemingly worked to bring progressive Democrats back to the fold. One tactic has been to produce material to suggest that “real” Democrats—those who listen to minority voters—support charter schools.
For example, Hess, along with Jay Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, produced research supposedly revealing that ed reform organizations are filled with Democratic voters. The political action group, Democrats for Education Reform, has released two polls claiming that minority voters heavily favor charter schools.
The first poll was conducted by a trio of researchers all with ties to the reform groups 50CAN, Fordham, and Teach for America. The second poll was done by the Benenson Strategy Group, an organization whose goal, according to its website, is to “help leaders connect with, persuade, and activate the audiences you need to win.” To make all this even more fishy, the Democrats for Education Reform polls have large margins for error and serious methodological questions, more closely resembling marketing message tests than actual polls.
One tactic has been to produce material to suggest that “real” Democrats—those who listen to minority voters—support charter schools.
Somewhat more sound polling has come from Education Next, an organization solidly on the side of charter school advancement. It found while support for charter schools held steady from 2016 to 2018 among black and Hispanic Democrats, it dropped significantly among white Democrats, from 43 to 27 percent.
All of these polls push the narrative that black and Hispanic families are big fans of charter schools, and Democratic politicians oppose charters at their peril.
The pro-charter pitch has only intensified during the Democratic primary, as major candidates like Warren and Sanders have come down in hard defense of public education against charter advancement. Black parents publicly confronted Warren at a rally, in a demonstration that charter advocates have seized as evidence of minority support for education reform. Cory Booker took to The New York Times op-ed page to announce his return to the charter fold.
Green and Shapiro’s volatile article, titled “Minority Voters Chafe as Democratic Candidates Abandon Charter Schools,” is not inaccurate so much as incomplete.
Some criticisms of charter schools are mentioned, as is the NAACP’s call for a charter moratorium and the fact that some link charters to increased segregation. But the voices it represented are overwhelmingly those of minority charter supporters.
Diane Ravitch wrote a blistering response in Jacobin, listing minority voices that have opposed the charter school movement, including those of black parents in Little Rock, Arkansas, who are fighting a plan to resegregate and privatize their schools; Jitu Brown and the Journey for Justice Alliance; and activists speaking out against the all-charter city of New Orleans, including Progressive Education Fellow Ashana Bigard.
Ravitch criticized the long-since-debunked claim, made by Shapiro and Green, that hundreds of thousands of people are on charter waiting lists. (In fact, schools in Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington state have closed charters due to lack of enrollment.) And she pointed out the large-scale failure of charters in states like Ohio.
There are other omissions in the piece. Mayor Pete Buttigieg is counted among the charter deserters, though there is no real reason to believe that is so, and several reasons to believe it is not. Booker is mentioned in passing as a charter supporter, but Michael Bloomberg, a strong charter advocate, is not mentioned at all.
It’s difficult to even discuss an article like this one (though plenty of Twitter characters have been burned up in the attempt) because the battle for control of the narrative casts every action or word as a contribution to one side or the other. In such an atmosphere, the least we can do is fact-check.
What should have been the lede is buried deep in the piece: “There is no consensus on charter schools among families of color.” This is perhaps the only thing we know for certain. The available polling is sparse and of questionable quality, and all camps have active and vocal members.
We don’t know how strong the Democratic minority support for charters is, but we do know that a lot of money and power has gone into amplifying those voices—money and power that is not balanced on the public education side. It would have been nice if Green and Shapiro had reflected that in their reporting.