Bernie Sanders’ reactionary education plan

Central to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ cantankerous mystique is his anti-establishment stance and uncompromising vision for radical economic change. When it comes to public schools, however, Sanders is no revolutionary. On the contrary, he sides with the education establishment in defending a status quo that is failing poor and minority students.

The democratic socialist from Vermont recently unveiled an education “reform” plan that can only be described as reactionary. It calls for rolling back federal support for public charter schools, which are providing millions of black and brown children access to educational opportunity in a growing number of large U.S. cities.

This sets Sanders at odds with the last two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, as well as progressive state lawmakers and governors who launched the charter school movement a generation ago to give poor and minority families something more mobile and affluent suburbanites take for granted: the ability to choose better public schools for their kids.

Although charter sectors vary in quality significantly from state to state, in places with strong charter laws and wellregulated

sectors (like New York), charter schools produce significantly better outcomes for low-income urban children than traditional public schools educating demographically similar students. That’s why tens of thousands of minority families are on charter school wait lists nationwide. Emerging from these high achieving charter sectors is a whole new way of organizing K-12 public schools in America. The four core features of this 21st-century model are school-level autonomy, parent/student choice, a variety of school types and real accountability for results.

Rather than embrace this evolution, which is at last making our public schools work for disadvantaged kids, Sanders wants to return to the centuryold, highly centralized, one-size-fits-all model that has so often failed them.

Sanders can’t have had much firsthand experience with charters or the minority students they serve. Vermont is a largely rural and white state and only one of five without a charter law. In the 2012-2013 school year, at a time when just over half of U.S. public school students were white, 92% of Vermont’s public schools students were white.

But if Sanders is woefully out of touch with urban education realities, he seems perfectly in tune with the sentiments of big teachers’ unions, which feel threatened by the growth of a largely nonunionized charter sector.

His plan duly echoes the unions’ litany of self-serving and bogus complaints about charters: that they drain money from public schools (not possible, because charter schools public schools); that they increase public school segregation (a real problem, but charters are hardly to blame); and that they represent an insidious bid to “privatize” public schools (also false, because charters are accountable to public institutions and must accept all students, just like traditional public schools).

The Sanders plan would force charter schools to comply with a series of federal requirements designed to dilute their autonomy, which has been crucial to their success. To compel charters to unionize, he would require that they abide by the same collective bargaining agreements that handcuff educators at district-operated schools.

Sanders also calls for a ban on forprofit charter schools, which probably already are on their way out. With a few exceptions, for-profit charter schools have performed significantly worse than their nonprofit counterparts. States with strong charter laws and oversight have already cracked down on for-profit charters. A recent poll from Democrats for Education Reform shows that over half of both black and Hispanic Democratic voters view charters favorably. Among white Democratic voters, however, that number was just 26%. Charters tend to open in underserved urban areas where they have had a real and positive effect on the lives of minority voters while many white Americans have no firsthand experience with charter schools, because their mortgages purchased a strong suburban school along with a house.

Democratic presidential candidates must decide whom to put first: the students in our public schools or the adults who run the system. By putting the interests of teachers’ unions over those of disadvantaged students, Bernie Sanders has flunked that test.