Biden’s persecution of charter schools petty

There is honor, of a sordid sort, in the Biden administration’s showing more gratitude to a major donor than concern for the needs of millions of children, disproportionately minorities. The administration prefers the donor, a government-employees union, over the children, even though this tawdry fidelity to a funder will exacerbate Democrats’ growing problems with Black and Hispanic voters. This is the significance of the number 97.9.

From 1990 on, that is the lowest percentage of the American Federation of Teachers’ campaign contributions that went to Democrats. It explains the administration’s contemptible pettiness in persecuting charter schools with punitive regulations intended to be crippling.

Charter schools are tuitionfree public schools authorized to exercise wider discretion in educational practices than most public schools that are tightly enveloped in union rules. Teachers unions generally oppose them because charters expand parents’ choices, thereby infusing into public education something teachers unions dread: competition.

Last month, President Joe Biden’s Education Department released 13 pages of pettifogging rules patently written to discourage and impede charter schools from accessing a $440 million federal program of support for charters. The rules include:

A charter must serve a “diverse” population. This could disqualify a school that serves, as many charters do, non-diverse — that is, non-white — inner-city populations.

A charter must prepare a “community impact analysis” demonstrating that there is an “unmet demand” for it. Such a demonstration must be evidence of “over-enrollment of existing public schools,” not long waiting lists for admission to charters by parents dismayed by public schools whose dismal performance has produced under-enrollment because of parental flight.

Charters must supply plans for “racially and socio-economically diverse” staff, effectively a mandate for a racial spoils system. Charters must drown themselves in paperwork not required of traditional public schools — detailed reports on purchases of goods and services from for-profit companies.

Biden’s handmaidens of the AFT and other teachers unions say a charter should “collaborate with at least one traditional public school” and provide a letter from each such “partnering” school attesting to each partner’s “commitment” to the “collaboration.” This salad of weasel words requires charters to get permission from schools with which the charters would compete.

Biden’s tapestry of obstructions will not halt the proliferation of charters. Despite the Democratic Party’s increasingly frantic opposition, more than 7,000 charters with 205,000 teachers now serve more than 3 million students. Furthermore, Frederick M. Hess and Hayley Sanon of the American Enterprise Institute say, “In some communities, tens of thousands of families who came up empty in charter admissions lotteries are on waitlists.” This large cohort of parents is opposed by progressives who are, to say no more, selectively “pro-choice.”

In 1994, President Bill Clinton, celebrating Senate passage of the first federal support for charter schools, said the legislation “puts the Federal Government squarely on the side of public school choice” and “innovative charter schools.” In 1995, at a San Diego charter, he said the school was “freed of a lot of the rules and regulations that keep some of our schools all across America from designing their own ways of educating children.” He criticized congressional Republicans for proposing a budget that “would cut back on our ability to promote charter schools.”

This expressed the Clinton centrism that enabled him to become the first Democratic president reelected since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Today, a Democratic president’s dismal poll numbers reflect somewhat declining support among Black people, and hemorrhaging support among Hispanics. A 2019 poll of Democratic voters showed Blacks supporting charters 58-to-31, and Hispanic support at 52-to-30. Charters’ current enrollments are 24.9 percent Black and 35.2 percent Hispanic, far above each cohort’s portion of the nation’s population.

President Barack Obama said charters “serve as incubators of innovation” and “give educators the freedom to cultivate new teaching models and develop creative methods to meet students’ needs.” Biden is waging aggression against charters because they are the most accountable public schools: Parents choose them and if dissatisfied can change their minds.

If the Republican Party adopted a policy comparably hostile to minorities, progressives’ cries of “Racism!” would be deafening. Is there today another such clear connection between a party’s policy and its cupidity?