Biden and Harris Work to Crush School Competition
Biden and Harris Work to Crush School Competition
He’s more opposed to charter schools than any previous president, and she’d likely be as bad.
“I am not a charter-school fan,” Joe Biden said when he ran for president in 2020. That was quite an understatement, it turns out. The final school year of this administration has begun, and Mr. Biden is easily the most anticharter president in American history.
Other Democratic presidents have opposed vouchers and other forms of school choice but joined Republicans and education reformers to embrace public charter schools as an alternative to underperforming traditional public schools. Not Mr. Biden. His budget proposal released earlier this year would cut funding for the Charter Schools Program, which has provided federal grants to nearly half of the nation’s charter schools. The program was started under Bill Clinton and expanded under Barack Obama.
Charter schools receive public funds but are given more flexibility in hiring, managing teachers and adapting curricula to the specific needs of the student population. If Democrats in the Biden era have soured on charters, it isn’t because they’re following the lead of constituencies the party claims to champion. Charters have long enjoyed strong support from low-income racial and ethnic minorities, particularly those with school-age children. An opinion poll released in May by Democrats for Education Reform found that 77% of parents, including 80% of blacks and 71% of Hispanics, had a favorable view of charters.
Nor can Democrats plausibly say that charter schools “don’t work,” given all the empirical research over the decades that shows otherwise. In a study released last year, researchers at Stanford University assessed the performance of students at 6,200 charter schools in 29 states between 2014 and 2019 and found that charter-school students on average outperformed their peers in traditional public schools. Moreover, academic growth among low-income minority charter students was strongest.
Recommended by LinkedIn
A growing body of research also demonstrates that school choice helps even those students who don’t exercise it. “The research on charters’ academic spillovers is positive overall, with at least a dozen studies finding that the arrival of new charter schools increases the achievement of students who remain in traditional public schools,” according to an analysis by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-policy think tank. “Consistent with this finding, average test scores for all publicly enrolled students in a geographic region rise when the number of charter schools increases.”
The charter option affects the quality of nearby schools by giving parents the ability to threaten to leave their assigned schools if improvements aren’t made. Fear of losing students can thus force a school district to up its game. The Fordham paper noted that not all studies show surrounding traditional public schools improving academically after a charter school opens, but even the ones that don’t showed other improvements—in student behavior and attendance, for example—that could be linked to competition.
During a recent panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, Christy Wolfe of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools explained that charters had grown by some 300,000 students over the past five years, while traditional public schools are losing population. Even so, she added, the White House decided to “stick it” to the Charter Schools Program by proposing funding cuts and creating more obstacles for charter-school operators. “One of the things we’ve seen since the Biden administration came into office is a desire to layer on more regulations to the program and make it harder to actually get the money and spend the money.”
Another panelist, Derrell Bradford, head of the school-choice advocacy group 50CAN, said it was obvious to him that the administration’s animus toward charters was driven not by what’s best for students but rather what’s best for the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and other powerful unions. Fewer students in traditional public schools means fewer teachers in those schools and ultimately a reduction in union dues, since most charter-school teachers don’t belong to a union.
Mr. Bradford said that we’d never had an administration “whose policy priorities are more intertwined” with those of the nation’s largest teacher unions. “I think we all know that the AFT and the NEA are no friends to charter-school growth. And in places where they’re most powerful, charter schools are growing most slowly, despite enhanced and increased demand.”
Given that the working class stands to benefit most from more school choice, and that those same voters could well determine the outcome in November, it’s unfortunate that education reform hasn’t received more attention from the candidates. During his first term, Donald Trump chose a staunch school-choice advocate in Betsy DeVos to be his education secretary. Kamala Harris hasn’t said whether she’d continue Mr. Biden’s assault on the charter school movement or revert to the Clinton/Obama approach, but the enthusiasm of her endorsement by the teachers unions doesn’t bode well for low-income children stuck in the nation’s worst-performing schools.