Democrats used to support education. What happened?

There’s a scene in it The War Roomthe 1993 documentary on the Clinton campaign, which is repeated in the new CNN documentary on James Carville. George Stephanopoulos, flushed with victory, begins telling the staff and volunteers around him about the good things that will happen because they won. He mentions healthcare. He mentions jobs. And he says children will have access to better schools.

It’s an inconspicuous line that stands out 30 years later. The reason: Better schools are no longer part of the basic litany of promises Democratic candidates make.

If you scroll to Kamala Harris’s issues page, there are a lot of programmatic details, but look closely at the education section:

Vice President Harris will fight to ensure that parents can afford quality child care and preschool for their children. It will strengthen public education and training as a path to the middle class. And she will continue to work to end the unfair burden of student 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 make the largest investment in public education in American history, providing nearly $170 billion in student debt relief for nearly five million borrowers, and delivering record investments in HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions and other institutions. institutions that serve minorities. She helped more students pay for college by raising the maximum Pell Grant award by $900 — the largest increase in more than a decade — and invested in community colleges. She has implemented policies that have led to the hiring of over a million registered students, and she will do even more to scale programs that create good career paths for non-college graduates.

Almost nothing here is about primary and secondary education. There are details on children under primary and secondary education (expanding access to pre-school education and childcare) and students over primary and secondary education (scholarships, apprenticeships and career opportunities for non-university graduates). But other than a vague promise to “strengthen public education and training as a path to the middle class,” which could apply to both post-secondary and K-12 education, there is nothing here about schools.

Not long ago, education (which everyone understood as “public schools”) was one of the party’s top issues. Bill Clinton invoked it constantly and placed the Democrats on the side of embryonic reform experiments that were emerging at the time. When he fought back against Republican plans to destroy the government, his formula was “Medicare, Medicaid, Education and the Environment,” identifying schools as one of four pillars of government that would strengthen public loyalty to the Democratic Party and make the costs concrete. of the Republican plan.

George W. Bush established a Republican education agenda in 2000 because Republicans understood that they had to reduce the Democratic advantage in this area to have a chance of victory. When Barack Obama certified the primaries, he gave a pep talk to his staff in Chicago, similar to Stephanopoulos’s, and his short list of topics included education.

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

I will not settle for an America where some children don’t have that opportunity. I will invest in early childhood education. I will recruit an army of new teachers and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in return I ask for higher standards and more responsibility.

Obama’s support for education reform did not work perfectly or seamlessly, but in many ways it produced positive results. (Four years ago I wrote a long story about the success of the education reform movement; last year, the main study found that charter school skeptics had previously cited that the sector is now delivering big learning gains for urban students). But internal political backlash from the teachers unions made this position more problematic than Democrats were willing to accept. Obama himself stopped short of defending his own education agenda, despite the anger of the unions whose support he and his party needed.

Beginning with the end of the Obama era, Democrats began to abandon education reform and instead took a more neutral stance, aligned with the teachers unions. Hillary Clinton deviated from Obama’s position in 2016, and Joe Biden went even further in 2020. The pandemic put Democrats’ more union-friendly education position in sharper relief; Democrats defended school closures and in some cases exposed parents to left-wing pedagogy that had become fashionable in recent years.

The most extreme version of the new progressive education position can be found in Chicago. Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former member and staunch ally of the Chicago Teachers Union, has sought to implement her policy vision. The city’s schools are hemorrhaging students, and the temporary COVID funding they had used to shore up the budget is drying up.

Johnson and the CTU are against closing schools, even if there are hardly any students. Three-fifths of the city’s schools have under-enrollment. One school has 27 students in a building intended for 900 students. Johnson’s plan is 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 compared them to defenders of slavery: “The argument was that you can’t free black people because it would be too expensive. They said it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to free black people. And now you have opponents using the same Confederacy argument when it comes to public education in this system.

Johnson’s unyielding attitude may be an outlier. The CTU is radical, even by the standards of the teachers unions, and Chicago is a rare example of a city over which it can actually exercise direct, rather than indirect, control. But the extent to which Johnson has made left-wing, pro-union education policies the centerpiece of his agenda – and seen his popularity plummet – shows how toxic the agenda is even among overwhelmingly Democratic voters.

The pandemic has certainly played a major confusing role. But it only served to expose a change in the party’s position on public schools, where the welfare of schoolchildren was no longer central. The moral ambition to provide every child with a quality public school has proven too controversial to pursue. Trying to maintain the status quo, even a situation where many low-income children have no choice but to fail schools, seems to be the path of least resistance.

Public education used to be one of the strongest reasons Democrats could give people to vote them into power. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a left-wing move on education has more or less directly led to Democrats losing what had once been a major advantage. There are, of course, still compelling reasons to vote for Democrats. But even Democratic candidates don’t seem to consider schools as one of those schools.