No Vouching for Sen. Warren

Senate Democrats were loaded for bear when President Trump’s nominee for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, sat down for her confirmation hearing last week — yet one of them used to share DeVos’ central goal.

DeVos has spent her life advocating for children and for parental choice in education to ensure opportunity for all, regardless of race, class, gender or ZIP code.

Such dedication is irrelevant to defenders of our nation’s dysfunctional public-school systems. Yet at least one Senate Democrat wasn’t always a defender of dysfunction.

Yes: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, progressive icon, once supported school vouchers.

In her 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap” (coauthored with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi), Warren endorsed a school-voucher system to free children from the tyranny of educrats assigning them to schools based on where their parents can afford to live.

Warren wrote: “With fully funded vouchers, parents of all income levels could send their children — and the accompanying financial support — to the schools of their choice.”

Moreover, she argued that framing the issue as a “public versus private competition” misses the key issue: “The problem is not vouchers; the problem is parental choice.”

Warren pointed out that most public-school placement is based on ZIP code. The only way parents can exercise any choice is to buy a home in the school district they want — but poor families lack that option.

The solution, she asserted, is to break up the “ironclad relationship” between ZIP code and school with a well-designed voucher system.

Yet ahead of the confirmation hearings, Warren charged that DeVos’ support for vouchers and privately run schools was disqualifying.

One might say that Sen. Warren’s hypocrisy disqualifies her from sitting in judgment of DeVos.