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Commentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceFeaturedParent EmpowermentParental ChoicePrivate School ScholarshipsSchool ChoiceUnionism

Randi Weingarten, welcome to the education choice movement

Ron Matus
Ron Matus

The rainbow coalition that is the education choice movement would like to welcome its newest member: Randi Weingarten!

Yes, that Randi Weingarten. President of the American Federation for Teachers.

In a fresh interview with The New York Times, Weingarten sounded like Betsy DeVos. She noted she has friends and family who have, according to the Times’s paraphrasing, “pulled their own children out of public schools because remote learning was not working for them.”

“They have a right,” she said in a direct quote, “to look out for their individual children.”

Yes, they do!

And don’t they all?

Choice enthusiasts of all stripes have been saying that for a half century. They’ve also been working to ensure all parents, particularly those whose children are disadvantaged by poverty or disability, have the power to do what Ms. Weingarten’s friends and family just did. That is, to choose the learning options they know are best for their children, instead of being stuck with what the state assigns. Like Ms. Weingarten’s friends and family, they need those options now more than ever.

Teachers unions, of course, have been the big roadblock on the drive to equity. But in her moment of candor, Ms. Weingarten got sucked into the zeitgeist. Poll after poll shows the pandemic has boosted school choice support to new heights, in part because of teachers union resistance to re-opening schools. That growing support includes white, left-leaning, suburban parents who, in terms of choice opposition, are one of the few dominos left to fall.

I appreciate Ms. Weingarten’s timing. Lawmakers in at least 14 states are considering bills to start or expand vouchers, tax credit scholarships and/or education savings accounts. Florida is among them.

SB 48 would simplify the Sunshine State’s patchwork of choice scholarships, merging five into two, and converting four into education savings accounts. (The fifth, the Gardiner Scholarship for students with special needs, is already an ESA. And full disclosure: four of those programs are administered by Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that hosts this blog.) The bottom line is even more parents would have the flexibility they need “to look out for their individual children.”

I never thought I’d see the day when Randi Weingarten would be on the same page, even rhetorically, with choice folks. But truth be told, the choice movement has always had a big tent. I suspect that politically, she’d feel at home with many of the hundreds of thousands of parents, most of them black and Hispanic, whose children use the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship. Or the 1,400+ among them who are school district employees, including teachers like this one.

For what it’s worth, Ms. Weingarten wouldn’t be the first labor leader to embrace choice, either. Cesar Chavez, the legendary founder of the American Farm Workers, was a strong supporter of a Chicano freedom school that bloomed in the California desert in the 1970s – and, more broadly, for alternatives to district schools. Dozens of local union leaders in New York backed a school choice scholarship proposal in that state just a few years ago.

Closer to home, our president here at Step Up, Doug Tuthill, is a liberal Democrat and former president of two local teachers unions. Ms. Weingarten, if you’d ever like to chat about choice and equity and the future of teachers unions, I’m sure Doug would be game. 😊

In the meantime, thanks for what you told The New York Times. It’s spot on.

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Education and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceFeaturedParental ChoiceSchool ChoiceUnionismVirtual Education

Teachers unions are keeping kids out of the classroom; school choice can ensure they learn anyway

Special to redefinED
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: This commentary from Jude Schwallbach, research associate and project coordinator at The Heritage Foundation, originally appeared in The Daily Signal.

National School Choice Week has taken on renewed importance this year, as too many families are approaching the one-year mark of crisis online learning provided by their public school district.

Last March, the coronavirus pandemic shuttered schools nationwide, forcing teachers, parents, and students to transition to virtual classrooms and grapple with the various effects of lockdowns. Ten months later, parents report that 53% of K-12 students are still learning in their virtual classrooms.

Public schools have remained largely closed to in-person instruction.

Recent research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated that in-person learning is rarely a source of large outbreak. Even though in-person learning is one of the safest activities for children, proposals to reopen district schools for face-to-face learning have met with staunch opposition from teachers’ unions.

Inexplicably, teachers unions have also rejected measures which would require teachers to be more available to students throughout the day via live video.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s director, Robin Lake, told the New York Times that the teachers unions’ vacillating responses feel “like we are treating kids as pawns in this game.”

Adding to parents’ frustrations, teachers unions have also taken the opportunity to push for a whole host of concessions that have nothing to do with health safety.

For instance, the American Federation of Teachers has a long list of demands, including: additional food programs, guidance counselors, smaller classes, tutors to assist teachers, and “culturally responsive practices.”

Similarly, The United Teachers of Los Angeles has demanded a moratorium on charter schools, higher taxes for the wealthy, and “Medicare for All.”

The blatant, non-pandemic-related demands of many teachers unions have illustrated what Stanford University professor Terry Moe noted a decade ago: “This is a school system organized for the benefit of the people who work in it, not for the kids they are expected to teach.”

The inflexibility of teachers unions has increasingly become a source of escalating tension with local officials. For example, Chicago Public Schools, the third largest school district in the nation, locked teachers out of their virtual classrooms after they refused to return to in-person instruction with classrooms at less than 20% capacity. 

Such unbending posture has provoked the ire of parents and left many children frustrated, both academically and socially. As Tim Carne wrote in the Washington Examiner, “The very people who have most loudly declared the importance of public schools now are deliberately destroying public schools.”

Many parents are tired of being strong-armed by teachers unions and have pursued alternative education options for their children.

For instance, the learning pod phenomenon, wherein parents work together to pool resources and hire their own tutors and materials is popular. This allows students to return to in-person lessons, even if school districts refuse to reopen.

Last September, a national poll by the pro-school choice nonprofit EdChoice indicated that 18% of surveyed parents were looking to join one. At the same time, 70% of surveyed teachers reported interest in teaching in a pod.

A recent report by education scholars Michael B. Henderson, Paul Peterson, and Martin West found that approximately 3 million students—nearly 6% of K-12 students—currently participate in a learning pod.

Notably, pod participants are more likely to be “from families in the bottom quartile of the income distribution.” The authors wrote, “Parent reports suggest that 9% of all students from low-income families and 5% of all students from high-income families are participating in pods.”

Families have embraced private school options, too. A survey last November of 160 schools in 15 states and Washington, D.C., showed that half of the surveyed private schools experienced higher enrollment this academic year than they had the previous year pre-pandemic.

Moreover, more than 75% of surveyed private schools were open for in-person instruction. The remaining schools offered hybrid education, which is a combination of in-person and virtual learning.

Children could have greater access to private education if more states made education dollars student-centered. For instance, parent controlled education savings accounts allow parents to spend their funds on approved education costs, like private tutoring, books, or tuition. These accounts already exist in five states.

National School Choice Week is an important reminder that “public education” means education available to the public, regardless of the type of school it takes place in. It is the perfect time to remember that parents, not teachers unions, are best positioned to determine the education needs of children.  

School choice options like education savings accounts can bring education consistency to families across the country during a most uncertain time. National School Choice Week is an important reminder of that.

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Education and Public PolicyFeaturedParental ChoiceUnionismVirtual Education

The only thing we have to fear is … complacency

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

With the nation at the peak of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address in 1933. The 1,883-word, 20-minute speech is best known for Roosevelt’s famously pointed reference to “fear itself” in one of its first lines.

With benefit of hindsight, it’s now clear that the decision to close schools in the spring of 2020 was unwise, especially in the elementary grades.

We now know that young children are more likely to die from the flu than from COVID-19. At this point, not only have schools around the world managed to safely reopen using a variety of precautions, but many school systems never closed at all.

The dangers of COVID-19 in schools are real and potentially deadly but can be successfully mitigated. The costs of lockdowns, however, have only begun to be measured, and we have no plan to reverse them.

Students in kindergarten through third grade are especially vulnerable to long-term harm from COVID disruption. This is the developmental stage at which students learn to read, and the neurology of this process is similar to that of learning a foreign language: You either do it early or else struggle to do it more than poorly. Formative assessment data from the fall 2020 has begun to trickle in, and the news is predictably bad, with students who were already struggling suffering the most.

Then there are the mental health implications to consider. A recent study of young adults by Harvard Medical School researchers and others found an alarming increase in depression and anxiety in young adults:

For example, an analysis of an epidemiologic study from 2013 and 2014 found 3.4% of adults reported these (suicidal) thoughts. The rates seen in May were especially high among young adults, at 32.2% — that is, nearly ten-fold greater than estimates from the older study. (Results from a smaller survey in June of 18- through 24-year-olds were similar, reporting a rate of roughly 26%.) In subsequent study waves, this prevalence has increased modestly, reaching 36.9% in October.

“It is amazing that eight months into this pandemic that we are still prioritizing bars and restaurants and gyms and shutting down schools,” Kathleen Porter-Magee stated in a recent interview, noting the demonstrated ability of schools to reopen safely. More amazing still to see groups like the Florida Education Association’s ultimately unsuccessful legal effort to deny families in-person education as an option.

Public schools have always received approximately the same level of resources whether they actually teach students crucial academic knowledge or not. Powerful special interests want to keep things this way, and not coincidentally oppose parental choice policies allowing unhappy parents to seek satisfaction elsewhere.

The effort to keep schools closed follows the same trajectory: Teacher unions apparently feel entitled to your tax dollars whether they provide either education or custodial care. In some places, the unions not only want to mandate virtual instruction; they also have limited the amount of it.

So, parents, the good news is that the pandemic has been clarifying. The priorities of the system stand revealed. You should make your plans accordingly, because those priorities were in place before COVID-19 and will remain long after a vaccine arrives.

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CourtsEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceFeaturedNewsSchool ChoiceUnionism

Appeals court sides with state in school reopening fight

Special to redefinED
Special to redefinED

News Service Florida

TALLAHASSEE – Saying that “nothing in the emergency order requires any teacher or any student to return to the classroom,” a state appeals court Friday overturned a ruling that said Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran violated the Florida Constitution when he issued a July order aimed at reopening schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

A three-judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal, in a 31-page decision, flatly rejected the conclusions of Leon County Circuit Judge Charles Dodson, who in August sided with teachers unions that challenged Corcoran’s order. The unions argued, at least in part, that the order violated a constitutional guarantee of “safe” and “secure” public education.

The appeals court said the plaintiffs in the case lacked legal standing and were asking courts to decide “non-justiciable political questions.” Also, the panel said the union’s arguments would require courts to violate the constitutional separation of powers and that they failed to show Corcoran’s order was “arbitrary and capricious.”

In addressing the standing issue, the appeals court said the plaintiffs “have not shown a causal connection between their alleged injury and implementation of the emergency order.”

“Their alleged injury — being forced to return to the classroom — stems from decisions made by school districts,” Judge Lori Rowe wrote in a decision joined by Judges Thomas Winokur and Harvey Jay. “School districts decide whether to reopen schools for in-person instruction. School districts assign teachers to classrooms and approve or deny their requested accommodations. And school districts decide whether to offer students the choice of online instruction.”

Rowe also wrote that Dodson’s ruling “reveals the perils of judicial decision-making in this policy-laden arena.”

“To measure whether the public school system is ‘safe’ and ‘secure,’ the trial court would need to identify standards to make that measurement — beginning by evaluating the risks posed by COVID-19,” Friday’s decision said.

“And even if the trial court were qualified to isolate and weigh the safety risks posed by the virus, whether it is safe enough to reopen schools is not a binary question answered with a simple yes or no based on the latest public health metrics on COVID-19. The court would still need to consider many other factors to determine whether the state met its obligation to provide for safe and secure schools.”

Corcoran issued the order as he and Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed for schools to reopen after being shuttered in March because of the pandemic. Students in the spring were shifted to online learning, but Corcoran and DeSantis argued that students and families should have a choice of in-person or online learning during the 2020-2021 school year.

The Florida Education Association statewide union and other plaintiffs, however, argued that teachers could be placed in unsafe situations if required to return to classrooms. Plaintiffs filed two lawsuits, which were subsequently consolidated, that challenged the constitutionality of the order.

A key issue in the dispute involved part of the order that dealt with the way public schools are funded. The order effectively conditioned a portion of money on school districts submitting reopening plans that included the use of brick-and-mortar classrooms, in addition to offering online alternatives.

In his Aug. 24 ruling granting a temporary injunction, Dodson said the order left school districts with “no meaningful alternative” about reopening classrooms.

“An injunction in this case will allow local school boards to make safety determinations for the reopening of schools without financial penalty,” Dodson wrote. “This is what the local school boards were elected to do. Every witness testified that any decision to reopen schools should be based on local conditions.

Reasoned and data-driven decisions based on local conditions will minimize further community spread of COVID-19, severe illness, and possible death of children, teachers and school staff, their families, and the community at large. Such local decisions unequivocally serve the public interest.”

But Rowe in Friday’s decision wrote that the state “presented multiple rational reasons for reopening schools, including evidence that many students would suffer educational, mental, and physical harms if they were unable to return to the classroom.” Also, the decision backed Corcoran on the financing issue.

“The offer to provide increased state funding to school districts that reopen for in-person instruction is also rational,” Rowe wrote. “Without action by the Legislature or statutory waivers under an executive order, school districts would receive funding under existing statutes and rules that tie funding to student enrollment and offer lower reimbursement for online classes. But because the commissioner exercised his discretion to provide waivers from the funding statutes and rules, school districts were eligible to receive increased funding. Even if student enrollment decreased and the number of students enrolling in online classes increased.”

Amid the legal battle, classrooms have opened at schools throughout the state, while many families have opted to have their children learn online because of the pandemic. The appeals court decision said Corcoran’s order gave school districts discretion about how to handle the situation.

“Nothing in the emergency order disturbs a school district’s discretion to determine when to reopen schools and whether to offer in-person instruction,” Rowe wrote. “In fact, the emergency order does not require school districts to do anything. Rather, school districts retain the discretion to continue to offer students the choice of in-person instruction, to require teachers to report for duty under their contracts, and to determine teaching assignments. And so, whether a school district assigns them to in-person or online instruction is a matter between those teachers and their employing school districts.”

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Blog GuestCharter SchoolsCommentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsSchool Choice

Give them our tired and our poor

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

The leader of our teachers unions, national and local, appear to live in dread of our states subsidizing choice of school for the low-income parent. These mighty monopolies of the children of our have-not families seem convinced of their own schools’ vulnerability to competition; the liberated mother appears all too likely to execute a quick bail-out for her child.

Here in California, we get to watch the union function in constant paranoia; ever protecting the status quo, it has nourished a rare cordiality with Sacramento, where its influence has kept charter schools very limited in numbers far below the evident parental demand. Family choice threatens their sovereignty over the poor; hence, the charter gets labeled a bad influence, a threat to our otherwise ideal system.

Maybe some charters are, in fact, not so good; their teachers can be sloppy, their facilities second rate, the atmosphere gloomy, and test scores a point or two below average. Just because most of them are popular, who needs such disasters becoming available to all parents?

We all do.

Markets, in due course, can dispose of the inferior few that will always exist; we can happily risk the short-lived, third-rate charter in order to secure the only mechanism – choice – that works to clear the system of failures. Competition among institutions allows customers to decide which school should live. If Happy Hollow Elementary disappoints, mothers and fathers can choose again in hope of getting it right this time.

All of us make mistakes (or so I hear). But these inevitable errors can be part of a valuable learning experience for both parent and child. Mother and father may come to realize that Joey was better off back at his underrated assigned public school. Or, more likely, their empowerment will move them to try a second charter (or private) school, one that appears free of the faults of both schools they have decided to abandon.

Learning from our mistakes can have happy consequences for us humans; in our school domain, there are four such outcomes that seem quite obvious:

·       The public school that loses students by parental choice just might awaken to its own failures and mend them, hopefully making itself competitive for the future.

·       The parent will, at last, experience the stimulus of real authority, power, and sheer dignity – hence of responsibility.

·       The child will begin to appreciate the parent as sovereign and caring, hence of family, as a blessing.

·       The society will have given its citizens the chance to become responsible actors in the human story.

Unless our civic aim were to maintain our historical regime of servitude, there is no real downside.

The securing of school choice for the impoverished family can take a wide variety of practical legislative forms. The design of state systems that will truly protect that family from discrimination in the private sector and that will do this without threatening the scholastic identity of the school itself is a challenge.

Over the years, Stephen Sugarman and I designed a half-dozen or more diverse models, all aiming to protect the uniqueness of both seller and buyer; none is perfect, but all, I can hope, would be workable and politically prudent. Of course, the form adopted would very likely vary from state to state in their structure.

Reform in pursuit of choice for the poor may, in many states, entail political earthquake in order to become reality. However, that reality excuses none of us from rejecting this nation’s indefensible and degrading treatment of families lacking the resources that the rest of us carefully display in the parental hope to realize the latent capacities and vision of our descendants.

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ArchivEDEducation and Public PolicyEducation PoliticsKnow Your HistoryProgressives and ed reformSchool Choice

archivED: For school choice foes, a more complete history of vouchers and race

Travis Pillow
Travis Pillow

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in October, redefinED is reviving a post from our archives that speaks to the rich and sometimes surprising history of education choice in the United States. Today’s post, which first appeared in July 2017, chronicles several chapters from the movement’s rich past.

In the 1900’s, Mary McLeod Bethune founded a private vocational school as an alternative for black students Florida had relegated to separate-and-unequal public schools. In the 1910’s, a group of Catholic nuns clashed with segregationist politicians. Their crime? Educating black children. In the 1960’s, civil rights activists sought to protest schools that systematically shortchanged black students. So they created their own.

Fast forward to 2017. Politicians can no longer segregate public schools by law. State constitutions in Florida and elsewhere mandate public school systems that provides for all students according to “uniform” funding standards. Educators who, like their predecessors of the last century, want to create alternatives that better serve their communities, no longer face prosecution. And they have new options that didn’t exist a century ago. They can start new private schools. 

In Florida, if they comply with state regulations, their students can turn to one of the nation’s four largest private school choice programs* to help pay tuition.

A long, winding road brought us here. It includes some dark passages that, recently, became fodder for scurrilous attacks on the school choice movement. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called scholarship programs like Florida’s “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”

Her charge rests on a short-lived, but real, chapter of history. Just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern politicians began devising a “massive resistance.” In some communities, they even shut down public schools. In their place, they let students take tuition tax credits to attend private “segregation academies.”

The Center for American Progress chronicled that episode in a recent (and flawed) report. It unveiled the research at an event hosted by Weingarten’s group. The report focuses on Virginia’s Prince Edward County, where segregation academies flourished. Courts put the kibosh on those efforts by the end of the 1960s, and definitively outlawed them in the ’70s.

Still, as they responded to some pushback on their report, the CAP authors argued the school choice movement has failed to reckon with this history. That’s not quite right.

In fact, a group of progressive school choice thinkers confronted that history while it was unfolding. The authors of a 1970 report looked with concern at attempts to evade court-ordered desegregation through so-called freedom of choice. They concluded:

It would be perfectly possible to create a competitive market and then regulate it in such a way as to prevent segregation, ensure an equitable allocation of resources, and give every family a truly equal chance of getting what it wants from the system.

That group was led by Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, liberal academics with an eye toward equity also began crafting visions for vouchers that would still be timely today.

The intellectuals of the Voucher Left sometimes crossed swords with the likes of free-market economist Milton Friedman. He launched the “Voucher Right” with a seminal essay calling for vouchers — coincidentally around the same time southern racists were hatching plans to resist segregation. As Rick Hess and Matt Barnum note, Friedman drew not on segregationist impulses, but on the ideas of 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill.

In 1990, John Chubb and Terry Moe pushed Friedman’s ideas further in their influential book Politics, Markets and America’s Schools. They argued, in brief, that education bureaucrats had sapped schools of their vitality. The solution, in their view, was to create a new public education system that encompassed all schools — including those considered private — and give students the means to choose among them.

That same year, the voucher left and voucher right found a way to work together. Urban progressives like Wisconsin state Sen. Polly Williams joined forces with Friedman acolytes in the Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson’s administration to create the first modern voucher program.

That wouldn’t be the last time they joined forces. Last year in Florida, school choice advocates led by Martin Luther King III rallied to protect the nation’s largest private school choice program, which this year will serve more than 100,000 low-income and working class students — 70 percent of them children of color.

That program was created under Jeb Bush, a Republican governor, and expanded through multiple pieces of bipartisan legislation. The protest challenged a lawsuit led by the president the American Federation for Teachers’ Florida affiliate. And that lawsuit ultimately failed.

This brings us back to the Center for American Progress.

Randi Weingarten leads a national organization that has battled private school choice at every turn, and repeatedly lost. When some Voucher Left ideas first gained traction in Washington (albeit in milder forms, like private school tuition tax credits), nationwide teachers unions began wielding their newfound influence in the Democratic Party to stamp out support.

It’s hardly out of character for the unions to attempt to cast voucher advocates as racists, amp up their calls the slow down charter schools, or attempt to tie every diverse corner of the school choice movement to President Donald Trump.

The question is why a center-left think tank, long known for its reasonable positions on education reform, would work so hard to help them, resting its attacks on such a thinly constructed factual foundation.

Note: See also this article by Andrew Rotherham, which traces a similar historical arc.

*The four scholarship programs are Tax credit scholarships, McKay and Gardiner Scholarships for children with special needs, and Voluntary Pre-K scholarships.

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Education PoliticsJack CoonsProgressives and ed reformSchool ChoiceUnionismVoucher LeftVouchers

Happy Labor Day!

Ron Matus
Ron Matus

Editor’s note: On this Labor Day, we reach into the redefinED archives to reprise a post authored by Step Up For Students’ director of policy and public affairs, Ron Matus. This post, which originally appeared in April 2016, ran as part of our occasional series on the center-left roots of school choice and links labor leader Cesar Chavez to the school choice movement.

More than 30 years ago, liberal activists working to get a revolutionary plan for school vouchers on the California ballot approached labor leader Cesar Chavez, according to one of those activists, Berkeley law professor Jack Coons.

The co-founder of the United Farm Workers (Si Se Puede!) told Coons he liked school choice, but as far as supporting it publicly, No se puede. Doing so would put the teacher union’s generous financial support for his union at risk, he said.

Other evidence suggests Chavez wasn’t just politely telling a fellow traveler no. More on that in a sec. In the meantime, it’s worth noting the Chavez anecdote isn’t the only example of labor unions occasionally backing school choice or, in a few cases, outright distancing themselves from their teacher union brethren.

Consider:

  • In the 1990s, Pennsylvania Teamsters went whole hog for a voucher proposal from Republican Gov. Tom Ridge, even sending busloads of members to pro-school-choice rallies. Union leaders wanted vouchers because “first, it would help all Pennsylvania school children to a better education, and second, our members want it,” said a 1995 Teamsters newsletter. It continued, “Working-class parents who want to send their children to parochial or any other private school now face a double hit – tuition costs and high property taxes. Our members should have the option of using some of their state tax money to have their children education at the school of their choice.”
  • In 2011, two other, albeit smaller Pennsylvania unions backed another choice proposal, this one to create vouchers and expand that state’s tax credit scholarship program. The bill was co-sponsored by state Sen. Anthony Williams, a pro-school-choice Democrat. School choice scholarships “will rescue thousands of kids currently trapped in failing schools. This is not a partisan issue,” one union leader said. The bill “provides school choice to lower income families in a fiscally responsible way, without hurting public schools … ,” said another.

To be sure, I’m not suggesting union alliances against choice are about to crumble, and I can’t pretend to know if extenuating circumstances led these unions to make a break. But I think it is fair to say these examples shed more light on the myth that only conservatives and libertarians see the value of having more educational options for kids. The Netherlands, a union-friendly nation, and a pretty liberal one at that, embraced one of the planet’s most complete systems of school choice a long time ago.

I also think it’s fair to suggest from these examples that teacher unions, like the NAACP, risk becoming increasingly isolated from traditional allies because of head-scratching positions that leave those allies on the outs with their kids.

In our back yard, more than 800 parents of students using tax credit scholarships in Florida work for public school districts, according to data from Step Up For Students.* Some of those parents are public school teachers. Some, in fact, are teacher union members. But because of the income eligibility requirements, I’d guess the majority are custodians, bus drivers and other blue-collar workers – workers represented by the likes of AFSCME and the SEIU.

If the Florida teacher union succeeds in its lawsuit to kill the scholarship program, some of its members may rejoice. But tens of thousands of parents, including hundreds in other labor unions, will be heartbroken. I can’t imagine how that would be good for solidarity.

Back to Cesar Chavez.

In the early 1970s, farm workers in Blythe, Calif. started their own on-a-shoestring private school because they were fed up with conditions in public schools. Parents met at the local United Farm Workers hall to get the ball rolling, as longtime choice advocate Alan Bonsteel notes in the 1997 book he co-authored, “A Choice for Our Children.” The father of the woman who would become the school’s director, Carmela Garnica, was a UFW organizer.

The Escuela de la Raza Unida became a community gem. Garnica, a Democrat, became a voucher proponent. Chavez became a frequent visitor.

Si se puede? For vouchers?

It’s not as farfetched as people think.

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Charter SchoolsEducation PoliticsSchool Choice

On Democrats and charter schools

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

A recent Education Week article noted that former vice president Al Gore called for a tripling in the number of charter schools when he ran for president in 2000. Two decades later, those seeking the Democratic presidential nomination span the gamut from shying away from the topic of charter schools to calling for a national moratorium on them.

In the meantime, the charter school count grew from 1,990 to 7,010 by 2016, with an enrollment growth from 0.4 million to 3 million.

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), “Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey,” 2000–01 through 2016–17.

How to win friends and influence people: Teacher unions brought $36.1 million to the table during the 2016 election cycle and another $30.3 million in the 2018 cycle. About 95 percent went to Democrats.

The teacher unions have pushed for charter school moratoriums in several states including California, Nevada and Texas. They were even successful in Massachusetts, despite – or perhaps because of – the high-achieving status of the schools.

What’s at stake: Charter schools are free public schools that are privately managed and operated. They tend to work best for low-income and minority students and those in urban settings. Charters employ more racial minorities as teachers than traditional public schools. Perhaps not surprisingly, black and Hispanic voters are far more likely to have a favorable few of charter schools than white Democrats.

Watch out for the swing vote:  The Iowa Caucus may see loud opposition as the state has just two charter schools, but that could prove detrimental in the long-run. Democrats may have to come back to the middle for the general election as swing states Florida, Michigan and Arizona have large charter school populations. A perceived anti-school choice platform (real or not) may have been just enough to cost Andrew Gillum the gubernatorial election in Florida in 2018.

Too cool for school: The article includes a great info graphic of political party platforms on charter schools and school choice going back to 1992. That alone is enough reason to click the link.

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