The Education Reform Zombie Loses (Again)

The education reform wing of the Democratic Party is spoiling for a comeback.

This week’s NYC mayoral contest stunner brought a less-covered result that’s worth paying attention to: the crushing defeat of hedge funder Whitney Tilson, the founder of Democrats for Education Reform and a founding member of Teach for America. Now ordinarily, an election performance this poor—Tilson barely outperformed a candidate whose moniker is Paperboy Love Prince—wouldn’t merit the time it will take me to produce this post. But here’s the thing. While you’ve been distracted by, say, the prospect of World War III, or our great national unraveling, influential Democrats have been making the case that to be successful, candidates should run like Tilson: pushing for more charter schools, going hard at teachers unions, and bringing back Obama-era education reform. Which is why it matters that Mr. Tilson received a grand total of .8% of the vote. You read that correctly. Not 8%. POINT EIGHT PERCENT.

Getting the band back together

Lest you happened to miss the cacophony of centrist influencers arguing that Democrats have lost their way on education, I will helpfully sum up the case here. It typically starts with a poll, one showing that Democrats have ceded their historic advantage over the GOP when it comes to which party voters most trust when it comes to public schools. Then it moves on to specific policy issues the Democrats need to adopt in order to recapture said advantage. Here’s Ben Austin, father of the ‘parent trigger,’ in which parents were supposed to seize their local schools in order to charterize them, arguing that Democrats are in a ditch because they’ve failed to talk about learning loss, and because the GOP is offering a “free market smorgasboard of school choice.” Here’s Andy Rotherham, who has been selling the same combo of charter schools and tough teacher talk since Bill Clinton was in office. And here’s Democrats for Education Reform CEO Jorge Elorza making the case that Democrats should just go ahead and embrace private school vouchers.

Before we get into the question of why these arguments are re-rearing their heads again now, I want to pause briefly in order to poke some holes in what’s being said. Let’s start with the polls. While the claim that ‘Dems have lost their edge’ may have launched 1,000 op-eds, two big recent surveys have shown that Democrats now have a substantial lead on education. (Here’s one. Here’s the other.) Which makes sense when you think about 1) the deep unpopularity of the policies being pursued by the Trump Administration and 2) the extreme nature of the GOP education agenda, which is essentially that we shouldn’t have public schools and/or that we have to cut programs at your kid’s school in order to pay the tuition of affluent parents whose kids attend private school.

And just as these old school education reformers rely heavily on an out-of-date poll, they continue to lean into Glenn Youngkin’s surprise win in Virginia in 2022, and the role of parents’ rights and school closures in that contest. If you’re wondering why they fail to cite more recent examples of Republicans repeating the Youngkin recipe for luring disaffected suburban voters away from Dem candidates by leaning into the culture wars or tapping into anger over school closures that’s because there aren’t any. As I’ve chronicled extensively over the past few years, the GOP’s education extremism is not winning over disaffected Democrats but repelling moderate Republicans. Finally, you’ll notice that for all of the talk of the GOP riding school choice to electoral victory, there’s no mention of what happened when actual voters got to actually vote on the issue of school choice. Spoiler: they crossed party lines in order to reject school vouchers just as they have done every single time since (checks notes) 1978.

Meet the abundos

To understand why these Democratic education reformers would be trying to stage a comeback now we need to leave the education ‘space’ momentarily and visit the abundance movement that has taken the land by storm. If you’ve somehow managed to miss the ‘abundos’—no easy task—here is their argument in a nutshell. The failure of Democrats to remedy inequality, not to mention win, can be blamed on the “paralyzing inability of government to deliver tangible outcomes, particularly in blue cities and states: affordable housing, renewable energy, public transit, and infrastructure at scale.” The solution: slash red-tape, eliminate ‘bottle necks, and go hard at the bureaucracy and ‘the groups.’

While the abundance ‘conversation’ can often be reduced to men saying the word ‘abundance’ over and over again, it’s highly relevant to those of us who still believe in public education. That’s because the model for what abundance looks like in action is actually Obama-era education reform, specifically the dramatic expansion of charter schools. The logic goes something like this: Obama was a popular Democrat who did all kinds of things that the teachers unions didn’t like and he won, so let’s do that again. Also, education reform, with its blend of harsh accountability and school privatization, promised to deliver economic mobility without economic redistribution—a vision that its wealthy supporters are very keen on. That it failed utterly to deliver on this promise is of no consequence to the abundos, who prattle on, blissfully ignorant regarding the toxic legacy of education reform.

Cue Obama-era education reformers who have been wandering in the wilderness due to said toxic legacy. Every time someone says ‘abundance’ they hear ‘relevance.’ As Freddie DeBoer observed recently, “the ‘abundance liberal’/pro-charter Venn diagram is not quite a circle but isn’t far from one.” Which is why the wealthy benefactors of the recent abundo gathering known as WelcomeFest included some of the biggest dollar donors to charter school expansion: Michael Bloomberg and six different members of the Walton family. When journalist and recovering Republican Josh Barro appeared to reveal an anti-union sentiment at the heart of the abundance agenda, it left some abundos feeling queasy. Not the education reformers.

A(nother) proxy battle

Several years ago I wrote a long piece trying to make sense of why Democratic power brokers seemed to have such a hard time standing up for public education, even as candidates running on scorched-earth anti-public-school platforms kept being defeated. It was the height of Rufo mania, when states were falling all over themselves to ban CRT and [insert outrage-provoking acronym here.] And yet it was virtually impossible to find influential Democrats who understood that they were being handed an opening. Instead, the education reform wing of the party was intent on using the opportunity to try to limit the influence of teachers unions once and for all.

My reaction upon reading the piece was, ‘wow - I wrote that? Not bad!', followed by a depressing sense of deja vu. That’s because the effort to move the Democratic party away from policy ideas like taxing the rich, and weaken the influence of unions, dates backs to the Clinton era. As Lily Geismer details in her outstanding book Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, this strategic retreat from redistributionist policy agendas was part of a larger bid to redefine the Democrats’ electoral base. Knowledge workers and white suburban dwellers were in, organized labor and the Black working class were out. One key aim of this reorientation campaign was to weaken the grip of “special interests” over the party, what today are referred to as ‘the groups’: organizations pushing for expanded civil and women’s rights, environmentalists, and unions—especially teachers unions. Charter schools, along with welfare reform, would be key to winning over white moderate suburbanites. Sound familiar?

The irony is that this agenda is a far harder sell today than it was back then. The popularity of unions is at an all-time high, and as the results of the NYC mayoral race conclusively demonstrate, the hunger for redistribution is real. Don’t believe me? Here’s how Google AI summarized the election results: “The success of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral primary suggests that a significant portion of his voters support the idea of wealth redistribution.”

As the battle to define the Democrats’ future intensifies, we’ll be hearing loud calls, backed by deep pockets, for the party to return to the good old days of education reform, to embrace school choice, including vouchers, and to run against teachers, while running away from populist demands that the wealthy pay their fare share. Next time you hear someone making this argument, remind them of poor Whitney Tilson, who followed that prescription to a tee, and earned .8 percent of the vote as a result.