Hypocrisy from Warren on charters
Her shift reflects Democratic Party’s lurch leftward
This week, the Bay State Banner, which describes itself as the newspaper of record for the African-American community in Boston, enthusiastically threw its support behind November’s Question 2 on charter schools.
In an editorial headlined, “Vote ‘yes’ for better educational opportunities,” the Banner called the initiative a “vote for academic innovation” that should be passed “for the children’s sake.”
This glowing endorsement raises the question: how could U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren oppose something like that?
But that’s precisely what Warren did on Monday while a record setting 84 million Americans were focused on the fireworks of the first presidential debate. Warren quietly cleared the decks on how she intends to vote on Question 2, a thorny issue that had been dogging her for weeks.
The issue had placed Warren directly between two of the Democratic Party’s most reliable constituencies: labor unions and minority voters.
When push came to shove, Warren sided with the powerful special interests, ironic given her constant complaints about the system being “rigged.”
Warren’s opposition to school choice in 2016 would surely come as a surprise to the Elizabeth Warren of 2003. Long before entering politics Warren championed the same principles used by advocates of charter schools today, in her book, “The Two Income Trap.”
Specifically, she embraced school vouchers because, as she wrote, “zip codes should not act as barbed-wire fences to keep out children whose parents cannot afford homes in that district.”
As Commonwealth Magazine noted recently, Warren was a “school choice champion.” Vouchers are viewed as more far-reaching and bold than charter schools, making Warren’s current position even more curious.
Education reform didn’t used to be a partisan issue. Prominent Democrats including President Obama, John Kerry and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker are all leading proponents of charter schools. Even U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, a former ironworker and hero to Big Labor, is a Question 2 supporter.
So what’s driving Warren’s change of heart? For one thing, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, a group that endorsed and spent more than $100,000 on the former Harvard professor’s 2012 Senate campaign, is leading the charge against Question 2 and actively mobilizing its members against it.
Warren is fond of accusing others of being corrupted by big money in politics. In this case, it’s more of the hypocritical “do as I say, not as I do” that people have come to associate with Ivy League professors.
But there are other factors at play here, and that’s the seismic shift of the Democratic Party. Long gone are the centrist policies of the 1990s of the Bill Clinton administration that included balanced budgets, welfare reform and yes, millions of dollars for charter schools. Today’s Democratic Party is more closely aligned with socialism, governmenthealth care and heavyhanded control over public education. The center has lurched leftward, enabling a 74-year old socialist from Vermont to start a revolution that won the hearts of more than 12 million primary voters. Warren isn’t the only high profile Democratic politician grappling with this new dynamic. Last summer, Hillary Clinton’s praise of charter schools during a speech to the National Education Association drew loud jeers.
In typical Clinton fashion, she immediately changed her tune and walked away from her previous support of charter schools, falsely claiming they “don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids.”
Both the misinformation and the obvious pandering drew the ire of editorial boards, with the Wall Street Journal declaring the “losers will be the poor parents and children who Democrats claim to represent.”
That brings us back to Warren’s current dilemma.
Elizabeth Warren had a chance to stand up for kids in failing schools, but it required crossing the powerful unions. Similar to her decision to back Clinton despite being much closer ideologically to Sanders, Warren took the easy way out.
In both examples, it appears political opportunism trumped principled policy. In the case of education reform, it’s kids in the inner cities who pay the price, and that’s a shame.
Colin Reed was Scott Brown’s campaign manager and is now the executive director of America Rising, a Republican communications Super PAC .