Democrats Used to Run on Education. What Happened?

There’s a scene in The War Room, the 1993 documentary about the Clinton campaign, that is replayed in the new CNN documentary about James Carville. George Stephanopoulos, flush with victory, starts telling the staff and volunteers crowded around him about the good things that will happen because they won. He mentions health care. He mentions jobs. And he says kids will get access to better schools.

It’s an unobtrusive line that stands out 30 years later. The reason: Better schools are no longer part of the basic litany of promises Democratic candidates make.

If you scroll over to Kamala Harris’s issues page, there’s plenty of programmatic detail, but look closely at the education section:

Vice President Harris will fight to ensure parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children. She will strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class. And she’ll continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable, so that college can be a ticket to the middle class. To date, Vice President Harris has helped deliver the largest investment in public education in American history, provide nearly $170 billion in student debt relief for almost five million borrowers, and deliver record investments in HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and other minority-serving institutions. She helped more students afford college by increasing the maximum Pell Grant award by $900 — the largest increase in more than a decade — and invested in community colleges. She has implemented policies that have led to over one million registered apprentices being hired, and she will do even more to scale up programs that create good career pathways for non-college graduates.

Almost nothing here addresses K–12 education. There are details about kids younger than K–12 (expanding access to pre-K and child care) and students older than K–12 (college grants, apprenticeships, and career options for noncollege graduates). But other than a vague promise to “strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class,” which could apply to postsecondary education as well as primary, there’s nothing here about schools.

It wasn’t long ago that education (which everybody understood as “public schools”) was one of the party’s best issues. Bill Clinton invoked it constantly and positioned Democrats on the side of embryonic reform experiments then sprouting up. When he fought back against Republican plans to slash government, his formula was “Medicare, Medicaid, Education, and the Environment,” identifying schools as one of the four pillars of government that would cement public loyalty to the Democratic Party and make concrete the costs of the Republican plan.

George W. Bush fashioned a Republican education agenda in 2000 because Republicans understood they needed to cut down the Democratic advantage on the issue to have a chance to win. When Barack Obama cemented the primary, he gave a pep talk to his staff in Chicago similar to the Stephanopoulos one, and his short list of issues also included education.

Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention prominently included a promise to reform and improve public schools:

I will not settle for an America where some kids don’t have that chance. I’ll invest in early-childhood education. I’ll recruit an army of new teachers and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability.

Obama’s support for education reform did not work perfectly or seamlessly, but it did yield positive results in many ways. (I wrote a long story about the success of the education-reform movement four years ago; last year, the main study that charter-school skeptics had previously cited found the sector is now delivering large learning gains to urban students). But the internal political blowback from teachers unions made the position more of a hassle than Democrats were willing to accept. Obama himself stopped defending his own education agenda in the face of anger from unions whose support he and his party needed.

From the end of the Obama era, Democrats started to abandon education reform and instead adopted a more neutral position aligned with teachers unions. Hillary Clinton edged away from Obama’s stance in 2016, and Joe Biden edged even further in 2020. The pandemic cast Democrats’ more union-friendly education stance in a harsher light; Democrats defended school closings and, in some instances, exposed parents to left-wing pedagogy that had become fashionable in recent years.

The most extreme version of the new progressive-education stance can be found in Chicago. Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former member and staunch ally of the Chicago Teachers Union, has attempted to implement its policy vision. The city’s schools are hemorrhaging students, and the temporary COVID funding it had used to sustain its budget is drying up.

Johnson and the CTU oppose closing any schools, even those with barely any students. Three-fifths of the city’s schools are underenrolled. One school has 27 students in a building meant to serve 900. Johnson’s plan is to take out a short-term loan to finance the gap and worry about the cost later. When critics questioned the sustainability of this plan, he likened them to defenders of slavery: “The argument was you can’t free Black people because it would be too expensive. They said that it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate Black people. And now, you have detractors making the same argument of the Confederacy when it comes to public education in this system.”

Johnson’s unyielding stance may be an outlier. The CTU is radical even by teachers-union standards, and Chicago is a rare example of a city over which it can exert essentially direct, rather than indirect, control. But the degree to which Johnson has made left-wing pro-union education policy the centerpiece of his agenda — and seen his popularity plummet — indicates how toxic the agenda is even among overwhelmingly Democratic voters.

The pandemic certainly played an important confounding role. But it merely served to expose a change in the party’s stance on public schools that no longer placed the well-being of schoolchildren at its center. The moral ambition of providing a quality public school for every child has proven too controversial to pursue. Trying to maintain the status quo, even one in which many low-income children have no option other than failing schools, appears to be the path of least resistance.

Public education used to be one of the strongest reasons Democrats could give for people to vote them into power. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that moving left on education has led more or less directly to Democrats’ forfeiting what had once been a major advantage. There are still, of course, compelling reasons to vote for the Democrats. But not even Democratic candidates seem to consider schools one of them.