Phil Roeder
U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks to a crowd of students at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, IA in 2016.
In May, Bernie Sanders unveiled his Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education, a bold plan that called for a dramatic increase in federal support for public education. Within a week, Joe Biden announced his own plan that, in part, was similar to the Sanders’s plan.
Both called for a tripling of federal aid for impoverished children, known as Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; both called for a dramatic increase in federal aid to pay for disabilities; and both plans supported big pay hikes for teachers.
The days when Democratic candidates called for school sanctions, tougher tests, and the evaluation of teachers by test scores appear to be gone, thank goodness. Candidates with neoliberal, pro-reform histories like Cory Booker and Michael Bennett are going nowhere in the polls and are regularly panned on Twitter and Facebook by advocates of public schools.
Meanwhile, the teacher strikes of the past year have received popular sympathy and support. That support has been noticed by the candidates, who now jostle each other to prove that they are teachers’ true best friend. Support for universal preschool, significant subsidy of public college tuition, and calls for higher teacher pay are positions nearly universally adopted by the candidates.
Teacher strikes and the #RedForEd movement have protested both low salaries as well as insufficient supports of students. Striking teachers in Los Angeles made it clear that the expansion of charter schools has impacted the district’s finances, thus hurting the district’s ability to fund essential services for kids. The teachers’ #RedForEd movement joined the parent-led Arizona Save Our Schools organization to halt the expansion of vouchers in that state.
This year’s teacher walkout in West Virginia protested the legislature’s plan to establish charter schools and vouchers—a struggle that continues. In addition, Education Secretary Betsy De Vos’s and Donald Trump’s full embrace of the “public schools are government schools” mantra has made even Booker squeamish when it comes to “school choice.”
Charter schools, once supported by nearly all Democrats, have become the elephant in the room. During a CNN Town Hall, Kirsten Gillibrand was asked if she supports charter schools like Success Academy and the expansion of funding for charters. Gillibrand visibly grimaced. She responded by skirting the question and saying that she favors more effective policies like smaller class sizes, support services, and enriched curriculum for all students.
Charter schools, once supported by nearly all Democrats, have become the elephant in the room.
At an AFT Votes town hall, hosted by the union American Federation of Teachers, Amy Klobuchar was asked several charter school-related questions, including whether she would support the NAACP moratorium on charters or “put a halt to the privatization of public education.” She danced around the issue a bit but concluded by saying, “my record shows I have not supported charter schools.”
Newcomer Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana, has a long history of fighting school privatization in his state. Its two charter schools are true public schools—authorized by school boards and operated not by a private board, but by the elected school board. Bullock is on record saying he opposes any charter school that is not run by a school district. He also vetoed an ESA voucher program in 2015.
During his own AFT Votes event in Houston, Biden was adamant in his opposition to for-profit charter schools—which is ironic because his brother Frank is in the Florida for-profit charter business.
Elizabeth Warren strongly opposed a referendum to raise Massachusetts’ charter school spending cap. But her introduction at an Oakland rally by a former charter school teacher associated with a charter lobbying organization was seen by some as a calculated signal that she is more supportive of charter schools than her progressive rival, Bernie Sanders.
Without a doubt, Sanders has been the most outspoken and assertive in his opposition to charters. Not only does he oppose for-profit charter schools, he supports the NAACP moratorium that seeks to at least temporarily pause all charter school expansion. Sanders gets that charters have exacerbated racial segregation and have been more responsive to the whims of their private boards than to the communities they purport to serve.
In his platform, Sanders exposes the inordinate influence of billionaires on the charter school industry, poking them in the eye with his proposal that at least half of the members of charter boards be parents and teachers.
Sanders gets that charters have been more responsive to the whims of their private boards than to the communities they purport to serve.
Sanders’s support for the NAACP moratorium is largely symbolic. No President can ban new charter schools, including for-profit charter schools. Only states can do that. His list of charter reforms, all desperately needed, are also under the purview of the states.
However, there is one proposal in Sanders’s education plan that is within the President’s ability to change. And that is the ability, along with Congress, to end funding to the U.S Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program.
That program, created by the Clinton Administration in 1994 to fund charter growth, has become a source of Congressional scrutiny since the publication of the Network for Public Education’s report “Asleep at the Wheel,” which documents bipartisan waste, fraud, and abuse. Recently, fourteen members of Congress, the majority of whom are black or Latino, sent a letter to DeVos expressing their concerns about the program and requesting written responses to ten questions.
Under De Vos, the program has turned into little more than a slush fund for bad schools. Sanders’s plan would shut it down—at least on a temporary basis.
Sanders’s educational proposals evoked an immediate reaction from the charter industry. What appears to have outraged charter advocates is not what Sanders could actually accomplish if elected, but the fact that a serious presidential contender was willing to stand up and question their privileged status.
Ironically, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which issued a blistering racialized attack on Sanders, never acknowledged the huge benefit that African American, Latino, and Native American students both in public schools and charter schools would realize from the funding increases to programs for disadvantaged students that Sanders proposed. Nor has it joined his calls for racial justice in matters of discipline or his proposals to incentivize school desegregation.
There are more than twenty Democratic candidates who believe they are the best choice for President. Bernie Sanders’s comprehensive plan for public education has raised the bar. It is now time for the rest of the candidates to tell the millions of public school teachers and parents where they stand on charters and vouchers, school integration, federal funding of charters, and their support for true public schools.