Previously, Democrats were engaged in education. What happened?

There is a scene War rooma 1993 documentary about the Clinton campaign that is being revisited in a new CNN documentary about James Carville. George Stephanopoulos, overcome with victory, begins to tell the staff and volunteers who have gathered around him about the good things that will happen because of their victory. He mentions health care. He mentions work. And he says that children will have access to better schools.

This is an unobtrusive line that stands out after 30 years. The reason: Better schools are no longer part of the core promises of Democratic candidates.

If you go to Kamala Harris page problemsthere are many programmatic details, but take a close look at the education section:

Vice President Harris will fight to ensure that parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children. It will strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class. And she will continue to work to end the undue burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable so that college can be the ticket to the middle class. To date, Vice President Harris has helped deliver the largest investment in public education in American history, providing nearly $170 billion in student debt relief for nearly five million borrowers, and making record investments in HBCUs, tribal colleges, Hispanic institutions, and others institutions serving minorities. She helped more students afford college by increasing the maximum Pell Grant award by $900 — the largest increase in more than a decade — and investing in community colleges. She has implemented policies that have resulted in the hiring of more than a million enrolled students, and she will do more to expand programs that create good career paths for non-college graduates.

Almost nothing here is about K–12 education. There are details on children younger than K–12 (expanding access to preschool and child care) and students older than K–12 (college grants, apprenticeships, and career options for non-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 higher and elementary education, there’s nothing about schools.

Not so long ago, education (which everyone understood as “public schools”) was one of the main issues of the party. Bill Clinton constantly referred to it and positioned the Democrats on the side of the embryonic reform experiments that were then sprouting. When he opposed Republican plans to cut government, his formula was “Healthcare, Health Care, Education, and the Environment,” identifying schools as one of the four pillars of government that would strengthen public loyalty to the Democratic Party and make the Republican plan’s spending concrete.

In 2000, George W. Bush laid out the Republican education agenda because Republicans knew they needed to close the Democrats’ lead on the issue to have a chance to win. When Barack Obama secured the primaries, he gave an “a.” pep talk to his staff in Chicago, similar to Stephanopoulos, and his short list of issues also included education.

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

I will not accept an America where some children will not have such a chance. I invest in early childhood education. I will hire an army of new teachers, pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I will demand higher standards and greater responsibility.

Obama’s push for education reform hasn’t worked perfectly or smoothly, but it has produced many positive results. (I wrote a long story about the success of the education reform movement four years ago; last year, a major study previously cited by charter school skeptics found this sector now provides significant gains in the education of urban students). But the internal political backlash from the teachers unions made the situation more difficult than Democrats wanted to accept. Obama himself stopped short of defending his own education program in the face of anger from the unions whose support he and his party needed.

Since the end of the Obama era, Democrats have begun to back away from education reform and have instead taken a more neutral stance on teacher unions. Hillary Clinton moved away from Obama’s position in 2016, and Joe Biden moved even further in 2020. The pandemic has cast Democrats’ more union-friendly stance on education in a harsher light; Democrats have defended school closures and, in some cases, exposed parents to the left-wing pedagogy that has become fashionable in recent years.

The most extreme version of the new position of progressive education can be found in Chicago. Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former member and staunch ally of the Chicago Teachers Union, tried to implement her political vision. The city’s schools are overcrowded and the temporary COVID funding it used to prop up its budget is drying up.

Johnson and the CTU oppose closing any schools, even those with almost no students. Three fifths of the city’s schools undercounted. One school has 27 students in a building designed to serve 900. Johnson’s plan is to take out a short-term loan to finance the gap and worry about the cost later. When critics questioned the plan’s viability, he likened to their defenders of slavery: “The argument was that you couldn’t free black people because it would be too expensive. They said it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to release black people. And now you have detractors making the same argument as the Confederacy when it comes to public education in that system.”

Johnson’s steadfast stance may be an exception. The CTU is radical even by teachers’ union standards, 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 made left-wing trade union education policy central to his agenda—and saw his popularity fall sharply — indicates how toxic the agenda is even among the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters.

The pandemic certainly played an important role. But this only revealed a change in the party’s position on public schools, which no longer placed the welfare of schoolchildren at the center of attention. The moral ambition to provide every child with a quality public school proved too controversial to be realized. Trying to maintain the status quo, even when many low-income children have no other option than a failing school, seems like the path of least resistance.

Public education used to be one of the most compelling reasons Democrats could give to get people to vote them into power. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the leftward movement on education has more or less directly resulted in Democrats losing what was once a major advantage. Of course, there are still good reasons to vote Democrat. But even Democratic candidates don’t seem to think of schools as one of them.