Joe Biden that he will soon release a memoir of his time in office. That volume follows on the heels of Jill Biden’s , which triggered controversy when some Democrats was attempting to gloss her husband’s delayed decision to not to seek reelection. And recent polls have toward the former president, with voters favorably comparing his economic record to his successor’s.

So far, however, only one published retrospective has provided deep insight into the education legacy of the Biden White House. Written by New School Professor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, the account appears as a chapter in , an essay collection featuring contributions from over a dozen historians. 

The author of , Petrzela examines President Biden’s K–12 efforts within the longer context of a political life stretching back to the 1970s. At the outset of that half-century career, the 30-something senator was billed as a different kind of Democrat, and doubtful about the benefits of directing more money to schools. 

That early record stood in contrast with the first few years of his presidency. In early 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, a gargantuan spending bill, while also backing off from the education reform goals of his Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Neither that local schools move away from virtual learning as the COVID pandemic wound down. Perhaps the boldest executive move on education came in the form of a failed bid to cancel billions of dollars of student loan debt. 

After four years, the result was a muddle, Petrzela concludes. The increasingly embattled president advanced some ambitious K–12 priorities, from massive ESSER expenditures to a revision of Title IX around LGBT rights in schools. But his education initiatives largely unfolded far from public attention, and the absence of assertive messaging allowed .

In an interview with 91ɬ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Petrzela spoke about the recurrence of cultural conflicts in schools, the public’s COVID-era frustrations with Biden’s party, and why the president seemed to dart left on education and other issues.

“During Biden’s presidential administration, he wasn’t much of a leader,” she said. “He was a one-term president, very old, and he was following the whims of the party quite a bit.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

91ɬ��: You do a great job examining the Biden administration’s education priorities in the light of Joe Biden’s early political career, which began during the busing controversies of the 1970s. Was there anything about that period that surprised you during your research?

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: I knew something of Joe Biden’s political evolution. But when I went back to the primary sources, I was actually surprised at about Great Society programs, and about this abiding faith — which others in his party had — that Big Government could fix really thorny social issues. 

When you already know that his presidential administration oversaw this huge outlay of money called the American Rescue Plan, and that his whole career was really about expanding federal spending in education, it was really something else to read . I’m paraphrasing, but he was essentially saying that America can’t spend its way out of its problems, and that Democrats shouldn’t see government spending through rose-colored lenses.

Biden’s reputation for being a new kind of Democrat — implicitly contrasted with the Great Society consensus, as you say — is ironic because, once he became president, the predecessor he was most often compared with . So he seems to finally end up in the same place he departed from.

If you think about what happened in both parties across the intervening decades, you really see the lines harden in terms of who’s onboard with expanding government spending and who comes down against it as the root of all evil. 

But early in the 1970s, the jury was still out on how this would fall. You had hardcore right-wingers in the John Birch Society, who thought that the New Deal was one step away from socialism. But it still wasn’t totally clear that the Great Society would establish the political architecture of the Democratic Party until today, or that the Republicans would define themselves against it. For that reason, it would be increasingly untenable for Democrats in the mainstream of the party to resist it in the way that Biden raised those questions early on.

So in the scope of that long political history, his trajectory makes perfect sense. But it’s still jarring to look at the primary sources and see how that shift happened.

Conservatives seemed to acculturate themselves to the New Deal in ways they never did to the liberalism of the ’60s and ’70s. The movement has usually pushed to shrink the government, even if Medicare was here to stay.

And we thought the Department of Education was here to stay! One of the things we teach in the history of education is how Ronald Reagan vowed to get rid of the department, and instead, under his administration, it was expanded. That’s a moment that is often used by political historians to show the enduring power of these agencies, and how they have a kind of permanence to them. But under Trump II, we’re seeing that they’re not so permanent.

But that move isn’t just a Trump-era relic. The era of big Washington-led initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and the commitment to education reform that they embodied, petered out during President Obama’s second term. In retrospect, the Biden administration seems like the first glimpse of a post-reform Democratic Party. 

I agree with that. But the big turning point we’ve got to think about, especially in terms of what my chapter was responding to, was COVID. More than the end of NCLB, COVID redraws the lines of politics and discourse around education. 

Prior to the pandemic, I wouldn’t say education was off to the side — because we’re always fighting about education — but there was a lot of stuff that came into being, largely through Democrats during the Great Society and its aftermath, that people were not fundamentally questioning. Everyone wants their kids to read and write at school, and they want special education to be available at their kids’ schools. 

I’m a cultural historian, so I’m not trying to underplay the conflict that existed, but in 2020 and beyond, you have a series of converging circumstances that really put schools at the center of lots of people’s concerns about what’s going wrong in society. And it’s very easy to point at the Democrats as the villains who created those circumstances.

You point to a handful of major education pillars of the Biden education agenda, all grouped under the general theme of equity: Close to $200 billion in federal funding to states and districts to cope with the pandemic, and an overhaul of Title IX, but no real action on NCLB-style accountability and no immediate pressure on schools to reopen for in-person learning. Would you agree that these pillars largely reflected the growing influence and importance of teachers’ unions in Democratic politics?

That’s very accurate. You see the disappearance of the accountability agenda, which, to be clear, had some major problems. But there was a combination of a long-term push to loosen accountability, often led by the heads of unions, with the move to keep schools closed. And added to that was an emphasis on social justice content that a lot of people would say is both politically biased and irrelevant to fundamental academic skills. 

At the same time, due to the school closures, a lot of parents had a much closer perspective on what their children were learning or not learning. That made it a complete powder keg, and one that seemed to have been created by Democrats — particularly because of the role of unions at the heart of things.

During the 2020 primaries, you might have predicted that a Biden education platform would resemble that of President Obama, to whom he closely tied himself. But right after becoming the nominee, he’s naming an education task force with two teachers’ union heads and no notable figures from the party’s reform wing. I’m wondering whether a decision like that reflects coalitional politics, Biden’s authentic beliefs, or some combination of the two.

Early in his career, Biden really cared about education and made it a big part of his politics. Jill Biden is obviously an educator, which may have contributed to that. So it’s kind of a surprise that he turned away from it in some ways, to the extent that I don’t think there really was a coherent educational agenda under the Biden administration. Democrats, in general, were really struggling with the issue, so who’s going to step in to create a unified agenda? It’s going to be the teachers’ unions, and they make it their agenda. 

In the article, I give the unions credit for some things. In other places, I think they’re totally off-base. There are a lot of different interest groups that find a way into policy conversations through union advocacy, and not all of those union priorities are working to improve education or to make Democrats look particularly good on education. 

And all of this is part of why you saw the Biden administration not really saying much about schools. You could say they were actually doing a lot, especially with the American Rescue Plan, but they’re not saying much. It’s a passive or surreptitious cession of power, and not a lot of control over messaging. If you think about it through the left-right perspective, it did allow the parts of the left that were aligned with unions to have a ton of latitude. But it also allowed the right to paint the Bidens as the vanguard of this radical leftist takeover of America. That’s totally unfair and over the top, but the administration didn’t do much to resist that characterization.

How much do you think these developments were accelerated by the first Trump term? Following the deep resistance to the views and policies of Betsy DeVos, it would have been really hard for President Biden to enter office in 2021 as an unreconstructed advocate for high-quality charter schools, for example.

Just think of how the discourse moved around education policy during that time. It really accelerated throughout the Biden administration because they didn’t do anything to change course. There was such a push-back against standardized tests, accountability, and charter schools, and a determination to attack “white supremacy culture” — with that term used to encapsulate all of these ideas that had been central to the education reform movement, from hard work to punctuality. There was no way Biden could come back and align himself with that agenda.

I think this gets at why Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate after she’d been so critical of his views on school busing. I’m not saying he was insincere in making that selection, but it was an important political move to show, in a very efficient way, how he’d changed his tune on education and race.

The exchange between those two during the Democratic primary debate, on an issue that was last relevant to national politics in the 1970s, seems even more significant in retrospect than it was at the time. Are there themes from that era of liberal politics that dovetail with similar debates today? 

Yeah, it’s bizarre in some ways that policies from 50 years ago can play such a central role in politics today. But and its aftermath — both the boldness of that idea and its unfulfilled legacy — kind of remains the central fulcrum point of educational politics, especially as it relates to race. 

When the LBJ was in office, there was an ongoing debate on the left about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. The Great Society, I would say, still came from the opportunity side of that spectrum. It’s shifting through the ’60s, but you had a lot of mainstream Democrats talking explicitly about opening the doors to opportunity. 

On the other hand, you’re just starting to see commitments to differential funding to achieve equal outcomes. Even though Title I exists by that point, it’s not as much a part of the discourse as today, when there’s so much talk about equity — and not just that, but lots of arguments that equality of opportunity, or meritocracy, or a level playing field, are just fantasies. That’s not how people were talking about these issues at the beginning of Biden’s career, even as they were creating the infrastructure for equity-centric policies.

I’m reminded that, in his Senate career, Biden was a kind of bellwether of the Democratic mainstream, always managing to . Maybe the simplest explanation for his migration on schools is that, rather than any kind of personal conviction, he moved with the party away from what had become an uncomfortable position in the 2010s.

I think so. 

I’m going to sound pretty critical saying this, but during Biden’s presidential administration, he wasn’t much of a leader. He was a one-term president, very old, and he was following the whims of the party quite a bit. Particularly on education, which was at the center of the intense political discord of that moment, he wasn’t really staking a claim to move the discourse in a new direction. 

And that was in spite of the fact that these were big policies: the American Rescue Plan, which was a very big piece of spending, the equity agenda, the focus on racial justice, the willingness to put union leaders front and center. In the article, I highlight the moment when Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle [presidents of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association, respectively] were brought as kids were still learning from home. As a parent, I remember that felt like a huge slap in the face.

You also write a little about the “,” which has seen college-educated voters move left and non-college-educated voters trend rightward. I wonder if that phenomenon has seen both sides polarize against the kind of liberalism Biden represented.

Biden found himself in a difficult position during his presidency. It was the culmination of his political career, but it came at a very awkward moment for someone of his age and background and beliefs. The last 10–15 years have just been a very strange moment in thinking about the Democratic Party’s positions on all these things. Particularly for a lifer like Biden, who cares about party, it’s very hard to navigate all of that.

I’m critical of Biden in this article because I wish he’d done some things quite differently. But I also think he was in a very hard position, and playing it safe on education might have been an understandable move politically. 

Another objection that many parents raised during the COVID period was that schools were slipping political content into classroom lessons, particularly around “culture war” issues. Where did that come from?

Issues like sexuality, morality, and race are not necessarily about schools. But they are often framed through curricular or educational sites, with the school — I use that term generally, but it could be teachers, administrators, or whatever — being the promoter of radical, leftwing, elitist values. Schools and educators are very often characterized as out of touch with everyday people.

That is a remarkable thing. Public schools are a bedrock, free institution that most American kids go through, and it takes a lot of skill to present them as being in the thrall of an elitist project. But Democrats, and the cultural left more broadly, have sometimes made it too easy to paint that picture, and a lot of that has to do with the effect of education schools. There’s a lot of good work that comes out of ed schools, but it’s another institution that is way too easy to caricature as peddling wild, progressive thought about children that is immoral, probably un-American, and taking over U.S. schools. 

This distrust of schools has been a long-running divide in U.S. politics. And sometimes, some of these critics are right! I wrote my first book about culture wars in America, focusing a lot on sex education. And if you’re asking me, I think rightwing people who believe you should never talk about sexuality in school are wrong. It’s actually important to educate kids about these things. 

But they were making pretty good points sometimes, like when they pointed out that a lot of teachers of this newfangled sex education curriculum had no training themselves. It was true; there was no training at that time. People wanted to know what their kids were being taught, and they thought it was inappropriate for a teacher to be able to go off-script about these intimate things. Those are all legitimate questions to raise.

But it was easy to take those legitimate concerns and spin them into much larger, unfounded claims, like the idea that sex education was a Communist plot to turn children into sex slaves. That was something that got national coverage, and it’s not so different today from the “groomer” discourse that we hear about all the time: Radical, leftwing indoctrinators are grooming your kids.

And of course, some of this stuff does exist because the teaching force is massive, and we have a media environment that spreads all this stuff. But the idea that most teachers are like this, or that you should pull your kids out of public school, is crazy.

Does it surprise you that this suspicion of public schools has been such a consistent narrative for President Trump? As you mentioned, there’s nothing necessarily new about this distrust in the history of American politics, but it seems odd that a populist movement would position itself against the schools that 90 percent of American kids attend.

You’re right that it’s not a new thing, but there is something different about this moment of right-left polarization around education.

You could point to a lot of parallels with today’s education politics in the ’60s and ’70s. But what’s different about that time is that both right and left were fighting over public schools. They both want to control this institution that they acknowledge is really important for American society. So there’s a question of who will win and take over.

That’s basically gone right now. You have people on the right — Trump, but also lots of bloggers and podcasters and various other folks in rightwing media — saying that “government schools,” as they call them, are completely ideologically unsound and a systemic overreach of government power. Their view is that you shouldn’t have to pay taxes for these things, and you shouldn’t have to send your kids somewhere where government appointees will have control over them eight hours a day.

The solution that a lot of those folks offer is, yes, under the banner of privatization. But it’s not in the Mitt Romney way, or even the broadly understood way of advocating for private schools. There’s also been a big boom in homeschooling, and there’s a growing sense that education is a family responsibility for people to educate their own kids.

The way that is presented by Trump and other followers, is not to say, “Let’s find a way to get your kids an elite private school education.” It’s more like, “This is a time for the family to take control of raising their kids again, not outsourcing it to government bureaucrats, who are either lazy or scheming and nefarious.”

It’s a clean story. It’s also wrong.

The interests of teachers unions and students are not always aligned. Until Democrats stop pretending otherwise, they will continue to lose credibility with voters — and they will deserve to. 

Teachers unions exist to advocate for the labor interests of their members, not the educational interests of kids and families. That is not a controversial claim; it is the truth. Expecting them to prioritize student outcomes over member interests is like expecting a union to negotiate its own pay cuts. It misunderstands what the organization is for.

The failure is not unions behaving like unions. The failure is Democrats pretending that union priorities and student priorities are the same thing, and building education policy around that fiction.

Union presidents are elected by their members and accountable to them. Like most elected leaders, they are especially responsive to their most engaged constituents. In the case of teachers unions, these are typically tenured educators who are the most likely to vote, attend meetings and shape their organization’s direction. Leadership priorities tend to reflect the interests of those members, not necessarily of teachers as a whole, much less students.

That, in turn, shapes the politics of union leadership. Pledging to always put students first is not what gets officers elected in a union hall. Their real mandate is to increase salaries, strengthen seniority, secure pensions and protect their members’ jobs. That is what they campaign on and what they pursue after they are elected.

Teachers union leaders understand classrooms and schools because many of them are educators — or at least, started their careers that way. But their day-to-day focus is not on education policy; it is on representing their members in disciplinary and grievance matters, arbitration hearings and contract negotiations, as well as engaging in political advocacy. They become experts on labor relations, employment law and politics. That is what their role requires.

That insight matters, because education policy is not the same as labor policy. Yet Democrats have spent years collapsing that distinction and outsourcing their education agenda to groups with a labor agenda.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has repeatedly that what is good for educators is inherently good for students. If that were true, there would not have been prolonged school closures during the pandemic after the costs to children were clear. There would not be continuing opposition to high-performing charter schools or resistance to accountability in chronically failing district schools.

The adults working in America’s schools have legitimate interests. Students do, too. But teachers unions are among the largest donors to Democratic candidates, giving them more leverage than students when their priorities diverge. The role of a healthy party is to navigate those tensions in the public interest, but Democrats have too often steered toward the union interest.

That dynamic has narrowed the party’s policy imagination. Despite a decade-long trend of declining academic outcomes, Democrats have offered little on education policy beyond familiar calls for . Since roughly 2015, they have effectively abandoned K-12 as a domain of serious policymaking. Instead of calling for urgent reform to address an acute crisis, they have defended the existing system and even further with the demands of teachers unions. 

The cost of those choices has fallen disproportionately on the families who can least afford it. Black, Latino and low-income communities who have long formed the base of the Democratic Party stand to benefit the most from reform, but Democrats have stood in the way. The party that claims to fight inequality has kept families locked in a system that entrenches it.

The public has taken notice. As Democrats have stepped back from K-12 as a domain of serious policymaking, education has shifted from a reliable Democratic strength to a . Voters no longer trust the party to deliver for their kids. 

This reflects a larger crisis. The Democrats have come to govern as a coalition of organized interests rather than as a party with a clear mission. In that reluctance to challenge powerful stakeholders, voters see a party that lacks not only the will but the courage to confront hard problems — one that’s more inclined to manage decline than drive change. 

When voters stop believing you will fight for them, they stop trusting you to govern.

Democrats are at an inflection point. The organized interests that have long anchored the Democratic coalition can no longer be the party’s north star. Challenging powerful allies and rethinking an entrenched system is never easy. That’s the point. It’s precisely what leadership requires, and what the moment demands. 

Education is a test of whether Democrats are willing to change course, put students first and lead again. It is a test the party can, and must, pass.

Once the populist force — suspicious of institutions and champions of those too often overlooked and left behind — the party is now widely perceived, and increasingly operating, as the party of elites and institutional insiders. Meanwhile, Republicans, long the party of the establishment and elite-oriented, that once defined the left.

Nowhere is that reversal more glaring or more costly than in America’s K-12 schools. Since the end of the Obama years, Democrats have defended the system despite evidence of mounting failure. Reading and math scores . Achievement gaps . Chronic absenteeism surged. And the Democratic Party’s answer has been to default to a system-protection mindset, rather than question whether that system is working. The party has deferred to administrators, shielded unions and told frustrated families to trust a system that has repeatedly failed their children.

Those families, particularly in working-class Black and Latino communities, don’t want a better defense of broken systems. They want something new. Here’s where to start.

Trust the People

For too long, Democrats have acted as though families must be protected from making bad schooling decisions for their children rather than trusted to make good ones. This paternalistic impulse has led to a . Even as working-class Black and Latino families, the backbone of the Democratic coalition, have they want in their children’s education, the party has remained tethered to teachers unions and district administrators — the adults who run the system — rather than the families the system is supposed to serve. after working-class and favoring more school options. Rebuilding trust begins with trusting the judgment of the people. That means , not as a concession to the right, but as an expression of the Democratic Party’s original commitment to expanding opportunity for all.

Close the Culture Gap

Democrats have compounded this disconnect by Across the country, Democratic-aligned school boards and administrators have pushed curriculum and programming — on race, gender identity and social-emotional frameworks — that moved of where most parents, including most Democratic-leaning parents, actually stood. In the words of polling analyst Ruy Teixeira, the between the cultural views of the party’s leaders and those of the median working-class voter is, “screamingly obvious.” The party’s response has largely been to deny it exists.

On transgender student policies in particular, Democrats allowed themselves to be defined by the maximalist positions of activist organizations rather than staking out a principled, humane middle ground. Pew Research data from early 2025 showed Americans have. Democrats didn’t create the controversy, but they frequently failed to acknowledge legitimate public concern, which ceded the entire issue to Republican framing. As former Chicago mayor and potential 2028 presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel has , “We’ve become so obsessed with bathroom access that we’ve ignored classroom excellence.” Democrats need to move away from politics that trades public consensus for activist approval and back toward liberal principles: the belief that dignity and opportunity belong to everyone, equally, without exception.

Focus on Results

There is a real crisis in American education — what education researcher Timothy Daly calls ” — yet the party has had to say about it. Democrats have defined success by inputs — dollars spent, programs launched, constituencies satisfied — rather than outcomes for students. The question “did this work?” rarely gets asked. Democrats must change their definition of success, focusing not on what they fought for, but on what children actually learned.

Listen to Voters, Not Special Interests

When pressure from organized labor kept schools closed during COVID long after the costs to children had become clear, Democrats mostly stood with the unions. In a healthy political party, special interests know their place: They are welcome at the table, but they don’t . When families and special interests want different things, there should be no doubt about whose side Democrats are on.

Adopt an Abundance Mindset

The biggest constraint on education policy isn’t funding, it’s mindset. Democrats have spent too much energy warning about the risks of reform and too little energy driving it. Too often, education debates get framed as zero-sum: If charter schools grow, district schools suffer; raising the bar sets kids up to fail. That defensive crouch has made the Democrats the party of no. 

Instead, Democrats must think expansively about what is possible. District, charter, private and hybrid schools are not competitors for a single prize. They are complementary contributors to a common goal: an educated public. More good options simply means more kids served. A scarcity mindset looks around and sees danger; an abundance mindset sees opportunity. 

Build a Bigger Tent

America’s system of government is designed to force compromise across divisions, to require that lasting change be built on durable coalitions and broad agreement rather than narrow majorities. Both parties have resisted those structural pressures for a decade, each pursuing its priorities through executive action and party-line votes rather than durable legislative consensus. The result has been policies and executive actions that reverse with every election cycle and leave little lasting impact for the families who need it most. Reformers who moved the needle on education — on charter growth, accountability and family empowerment — did so by and finding common ground across party lines. That is still the path. 

Families who feel abandoned by institutions they were told to trust are looking for a party that will stand up for them. Democrats were once that party — the populist force that challenged entrenched power on behalf of the overlooked and left behind. That changed not because the country stopped needing it, but because the party stopped doing it. The response to Republican grievance and authoritarian impulse cannot be caution or reflexive defense of the status quo. It must be the rediscovery of that North Star. The place to start is America’s schools.

The appeal, published last fall, was unexpected in part because Duncan — who served in the Obama cabinet from 2009 to 2016 after a well-regarded stint as CEO of Chicago Public Schools — spends much less of his time opining on national K–12 politics than he did a decade ago. His daily focus is now directed at reducing gun violence through the work of , a nonprofit he helped found in the city where he was raised.

But even more surprising was the substance of Duncan’s broadside, which pitched the Education Freedom Tax Credit to Democratic officeholders and voters as a “no-brainer” tool to give struggling students a chance to receive a better education. The $1,700 scholarships, available beginning in January, are federally funded through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and can only be accessed in states that opt in. 

Among Democratic governors, only one has given his assent to the program thus far, and Senate Democrats have already introduced legislation before it even takes effect. But while he remains a passionate critic of President Trump, whom he calls a would-be autocrat, Duncan sees potential in the kind of school choice offering that his party has spent decades opposing. He believes the magnitude of post-COVID learning loss, disproportionately borne by children already facing huge disadvantages, necessitates the philosophical shift. 

The argument is part of a broader critique of Democrats’ education stances over the last decade, which have veered significantly from the model of accountability-based education reform that Duncan practiced in both Chicago and Washington. Like fellow Chicagoan and Obama administration veteran , he believes his party has largely conceded the issue of K–12 schools to Republicans and allowed students to suffer in the partisan crossfire. In March, he signed on as a senior fellow at the advocacy group Democrats for Education Reform. 

“We’re adrift, it’s killing us politically, and it’s killing our kids,” he told 91ɬ��’s Kevin Mahnken. “I’m deeply troubled by what’s happening to kids, and by what’s happening to us because we’ve lost any vision for education.”

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

91ɬ��: Your op-ed last fall encouraged Democrats to participate in the Education Freedom Tax Credit. That seemed like your first major intervention on national K–12 issues in a while. What was behind that decision?

Arne Duncan: I don’t actually think it was that dramatic. I’ve been out there — maybe not writing, but doing four or five panels at the ASU+GSV conference every year, and traveling to speak. My day job is gun violence in Chicago, so I’m not doing this all day, every day, but I didn’t see the op-ed in that way.

It was striking that you expressed a view that very few other Democrats hold. I’m only aware of one Democratic governor, Jared Polis of Colorado, who has opted into the program.

Let me try to speak to that by saying a couple of things. 

First, I was personally impacted by ICE here in Chicago. seeing horrific abuses, including things I’ve never seen before. I try to fight gun violence and gang violence every day here — last year, we were lucky to have the safest year here in 60 years — but I’ve never seen a gang in Chicago as well-armed and well-financed and violent as ICE. What they did to innocent people, citizens and non-citizens, was unbelievable.

So if I have a choice between sending a tax dollar to fund ICE to attack our people, or keep it in my state to help a child get more summer school, or tutoring, or whatever it may be, that’s not a close decision for me. That’s as plainly as I can put it: One hundred times out of 100, I would rather help kids struggling in my home state to catch up and have a chance to be successful in life, instead of sending another dollar to D.C. to fund ICE to come attack us.

But in the op-ed, you didn’t just make an argument to keep away as much revenue as possible from the Trump administration. You see a positive good flowing from this federal program providing more money for kids’ educational costs, right?

One hundred percent. There’s no loss of funds from our state’s taxpayers, it’s all additive. I don’t have the math in front of me right now, but hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions of dollars. And that’s if only 20% or 30% of people took advantage of the program, which is a conservative estimate.

Pre-pandemic, we had tens of millions of kids who were way too far behind. Coming out of the pandemic, it’s gotten even more catastrophic. You saw last year’s NAEP results, which were devastating, but I just don’t see the sense of urgency out there. I don’t see people pulling their hair out and asking, ‘What more can we do to help kids catch up?’ If I have a chance to help the kids who are farthest behind, and to do it now, it’s a moral obligation: Let’s help these kids who are so incredibly far behind before we lose them. 

I don’t want to lose that generation of talent, not for our economy and not for our democracy, but that’s what we’re in danger of. I think the chronic absenteeism rate in Chicago is 41%; just think of four out of 10 kids missing a month or more of school every year! What are we going to do, just say that school is optional? 

I’m trying to help you understand how simple this is to me, and what an obvious moral choice it is. To say to all of these kids, ‘I have a chance to give you more money for summer school, or afterschool, but I’m going to send it all to Trump’ — are you fucking kidding me? It’s inconceivable.

What would you say to people who say this policy will inevitably undermine public schools, or who fear that private schools receiving public funding could discriminate against gay or trans kids? These are of these programs.

Of course, you need all kinds of guardrails. There’s no free lunch with public money, and there needs to be accountability. If school admissions are discriminatory, that’s a nonstarter. 

But in every state, 90-plus percent of kids go to public schools, and they’re going to remain in public schools. This is a program to supplement what they get because we’re not giving them enough. I’m trying to give them longer days, Saturday school, summer school. Our dosage of education ain’t working because it’s insufficient for what they need to build a better life. Obviously, governors can and should put parameters on use so that organizations that discriminate against students or families can’t receive the money. It’s not that hard.

Have you personally recommended to Gov. Pritzker that Illinois participate in the program?

He’s been an amazing partner working on violence in Chicago, but I haven’t had that conversation with him. 

I’m happy to talk to current governors, but we have 38 gubernatorial elections this year. With a nonexistent Department of Education, and dysfunction in D.C., all the action is at the state level now. Whether it’s sitting governors, or candidates, or people thinking about running, I’m happy to share my perspective. There are a lot of other perspectives they should hear, but there’s a huge opportunity here.

What’s the downside risk on education for Democratic officeholders and candidates right now? 

There are three reasons I’m concerned. First, overall student performance is devastatingly low, as I’ve mentioned. Second, going into the last election, Republicans were . It’s inconceivable to me, but education was a losing issue for Democrats. And that election was so close, you could argue that our party’s lack of leadership on education helped to give the presidency to Trump. Had we been winning on education in those states, maybe that would have been just enough to tip the election our way. 

Finally, the only bright spots on NAEP are coming from red states. To me, that’s an embarrassment. How is it possible that the states showing the most progress on student results are all red states? We should be deeply ashamed. I’m watching all of this and feeling like we’re lost. 

In education, you need four things: You need goals, you need strategies to achieve your goals, you need metrics to measure them and you need public transparency and accountability. If you asked anyone on our side what our goals are, our strategies or metrics, we don’t have any of those things. We’re adrift, it’s killing us politically, and it’s killing our kids. So if you ask why I’m speaking out more, that’s why. I’m deeply troubled by what’s happening to kids, and by what’s happening to us because we’ve lost any vision for education.

There is good evidence that the polling outlook has improved for Democrats since 2023, when that swing state polling was conducted. How big a disadvantage do you really think education will be for the party? Is this an issue that voters will care about more than, say, the economy?

I’ve been blessed to work for two political leaders, Mayor Daley in Chicago and Barack Obama. I know how lucky that was. Both of them ran on education, both talked about it every day, and both put their time and resources and reputation on the line to improve education. To me, it’s not a coincidence that they were wildly popular politicians.

If the other side is selling fear and culture wars, and we’re selling nothing, we’re conceding the issue. Everyone’s worried about their kids right now, everyone’s worried about the economy, and everyone’s worried about democracy. For me, high-quality education for everybody is the answer to all of that. I look at those two extraordinarily successful politicians, and you couldn’t talk about their legacy without mentioning education. Good policy helped them politically.

So it’s a mistake to not run on education, not lead with it, not learn from those examples of politicians who put their sweat, blood, and tears into the issue. It was the right thing for the city of Chicago and the country, and guess what? It was also good for them politically.

And you don’t see Democrats emulating them?

That’s what I’m telling you! We have no goals. I can’t be more explicit about the fact that we don’t have an education agenda, and that is incredibly troubling to me. You can quote me on that.

We need those four things I just mentioned, and we need to run on education. It’s the right thing for our kids, and it’s the right thing for our communities and local economies to have graduates instead of having dropouts. We need to own this. The fact that we’ve conceded that education leadership to Republicans, who are selling crap and pitting people against each other — that’s just untenable to me.

It seems as though the GOP is pursuing the same goal it’s had for many decades — private school choice — but the Democrats have kind of let go of the rope with respect to questions like academic standards, accountability and forms of public school choice like charter schools.

I’d disagree with you on the Republican side because I think it’s more insidious than that. They’re pushing hate and divisiveness, like attacking trans athletes. This is not neutral territory. They are pitting people against each other because it’s a winning strategy for them to divide and conquer. They’re attacking the most vulnerable by gutting the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department, which fights for the kids who are the most abused and traumatized. 

I hate that that’s a winner politically, but it is. But I don’t want to wrestle in the mud with them and fight those battles. I want to create a plan to help all kids and tell parents that we care desperately about their future, that we want them to have access to education beyond high school. Let’s have these conversations and be honest about it. 

I’m out talking with parents all the time, and it resonates when you’re speaking to them. Parents don’t care about systems. They care about their kid, their school, their classrooms, and that’s what we’ve got to speak to them about.

Do you think it’s possible to swerve around the cultural fights? As you mention, some of these social controversies — the inclusion of trans athletes, but also things like accelerated learning in places like San Francisco — are quite important to people, and they seem to leave Democrats wrong-footed. I don’t think those issues can be ignored.

I’m worried about 100% of kids. The trans athlete issue affects, what, 0.0001% of kids? It’s insignificant, but somehow it becomes a good political issue for Republicans. Which I hate because, again, it’s attacking the most vulnerable. I just want to put out a proactive agenda that says that we care about 100% of kids, we’re not happy with reading scores now, we’re not happy with chronic absenteeism and we’re not doing enough. 

We have to be honest with parents because parents are smart: ‘We want to help every child find their path, and we need to partner better with you because you’re always going to be kids’ first and most important teachers. How can parents and teachers and students come together and do things differently?’ And, to go back to the first issue we talked about: ‘By the way, here’s some additional money to help your students! What would it take for them to learn biology in the summer?’

You think that conversation wouldn’t resonate? You think it wouldn’t get parents to say, ‘These guys actually care about me and my family?’ We can do this. We have to do it.

Do you find it notable that on education right now may well be a fellow Chicagoan, Rahm Emanuel? What do you make of his reemergence as a potential presidential candidate?

We all come at this in different ways. I’ve done a couple things with him, and we agree on some things and disagree on others. But what I appreciate about him — whether he runs for president or not, and I know he’s looking at it — is that he’s . I just want everybody, Republican or Democrat, talking about this. 

Rahm sees there’s a void there, a gap, and he knows how important it is. Like Mayor Daley, he ran Chicago, and they both know that you can’t have a great city without a great public education system — just like you can’t have a great country without a great public education system. He’s lived this, and I appreciate him elevating the issue in ways that many others don’t. 

I’m much less interested in the specific policies in schools because I’ve traveled the country, and what works in Montana might be very different from what works in Mississippi or West Virginia. What I want is for governors, congressmen, senators, and presidential candidates to run saying that education is what they care about, and that they’ll hold themselves accountable to that. That would be nirvana for me.

When President Trump returned to the White House, you expressed serious fears about his plans for the Education Department. A year later, would you say those fears have been realized?

It’s pathetic. It’s so sad.

Last year, I was on a flight going to speak at [the education conference] ASU+GSV. When I got off the plane, my phone is blowing up with messages saying, ‘You’re not going to believe it, but Linda McMahon is talking about steak sauce. She’s talking about A1.’ [In a discussion of innovation in schools, the education secretary the abbreviation for artificial intelligence with the name of the popular condiment.] I had to walk into a session that afternoon thinking about that.

Think about someone leading the Education Department who is so divorced from what’s going on in the world that they literally don’t know what AI is. It was in her notes, and she literally didn’t know. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so revealing about what Trump thinks. Trump aspires to be an autocratic leader. What every autocratic leader needs to do is attack and dismantle education. Whether it’s the assault on higher education or the gutting of the Department of Education, what is most scary to autocratic leaders is to have people who can think critically and discern information from misinformation. There’s nothing he’s done that is of any surprise.

This is much bigger than just dismantling the Department of Education, which is horrible in its own right. It’s part of a strategy of attacking education, and it’s what [outgoing prime minister Viktor] Orban did in Hungary. So it’s important that your readers understand that what’s at stake is not just about this department and that department. The way authoritarian leaders win is by becoming the only source of truth.

Why did slave masters kill slaves that learned how to read? Because they knew that reading is powerful. It’s the same throughline here: Why is Trump going after education? Because he knows knowledge is power.

Given the ongoing series of political controversies in your hometown, are you concerned about school governance in Chicago?

Yes. When I was superintendent, I answered to seven board members who were appointed by the mayor. They now have 21 board members, and I don’t know anyone in life who ever wanted 21 bosses. That’s a few too many.

I worry that it’s been set up for failure. They’re working through it, but I can’t think of a major, high-functioning company with 21 bosses who each have their own constituents. As the district recently went through a CEO search, I talked to some very high-quality people across the country, and none of them were interested because of the governance. So it’s scaring away talent.

In his life before politics, he in his home state. During his time serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, he to expand high-performing charters, citing hundreds of thousands of families on waitlists nationwide. And now, in his last year as Colorado’s chief executive, he has even in the Trump administration’s biggest K–12 policy initiative to date: a tax credit designed to expand school choice across the country. 

The benefit, which will come online next January, on their federal taxes by contributing to organizations that defray students’ educational costs, including private school tuition. Taxpayers from anywhere in the U.S. can give freely and claim the credit, but individual states must opt in for their students to receive the scholarships. To this point, 26 Republican governors they will take steps to do so; only Polis and one other Democrat, North Carolina’s Josh Stein, have done the same.

It’s a choice that can’t help but divide the party. Progressives have as , but those tied to the Democrats’ formerly dominant education reform wing (including former Education Secretary Arne Duncan) to stubbornly low student achievement. Polis himself to Fox News explaining his decision as one that would empower both scholarship donors and recipients.

In an interview with 91ɬ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Polis predicted that his fellow Democrats would eventually reach the same judgment. He also cited his own record as governor — including a huge expansion of free preschool — as an example to state and local leaders weighing how to govern schools as mixed signals emanate from the federal government over the direction of U.S. education policy. Considered a likely future presidential candidate over , he called for his party to adopt a more assertive K–12 agenda.

“Not a lot of change was driven out of Washington over the last few years,” Polis said. “That should change, and Democrats should be the party of change.” 

91ɬ��: So far, you’re one of just two Democratic governors who has indicated that his state will participate in the federal scholarship tax credit. Why do you think that is?

Polis: I think most, if not all, Democratic governors will get there as they learn about the chance to boost charitable contributions in their state. If there are states that don’t, for some reason, people in those states can still give to charities in states like Colorado.

In other words, taxpayers everywhere will be able to get the tax credit. But if a particular state doesn’t opt in, then the donors in that state would be giving out of state. I do believe states will opt in as they see the opportunity for additional donations to help at-risk kids and middle-class kids in their state.

The analogy that’s been used is to included in Obamacare: A few red states still refuse to participate, but most have turned the page and accepted the federal funds. Do you see blue states following a similar path here?

Yeah, I think many of them will choose to do it because it’s free money. 

With the Medicaid expansion, Colorado was totally for it, but that initiative did put some state money on the line as well. It was originally a 90-10 split. I’m proud that Colorado did that — along with all the blue states and most of the red states — but this was an even easier decision because there are zero state resources on the line. It’s all additional resources to nonprofits that help kids. 

Colorado has had a similar thing on the books for a long time, the . If you give to an organization that provides early childhood care, either a religious or secular organization, you get a 50 percent tax credit on your state taxes. So you get $500 off your state taxes if you donate $1,000. We’ve had that in place for decades, and it’s been very popular on both sides of the aisle. The scholarship tax credit is a more generous one because it’s 100 percent, but it’s federal, so we don’t have to pay for it. That’s great from the state’s perspective.

The credit will only become available next January, near the end of your term, but I’m curious what you think of potential issues with implementation. Some warn that money could be channeled to schools that , and more broadly, that it could create an unaccountable private school choice sector. Do you share any of those concerns?

This isn’t government money. It’s not the state investing in anything, it’s individual donors making their decisions. Sure, I’ll be donating my $1,700 to great programs for education and tutoring and after-school care for kids that need it, and others might donate to scholarships or summer programs. It’s really up to the donors, and you can’t expect that you or I would agree with how somebody else donates their money.

The important thing is that in the aggregate, it’ll do a lot for kids.

Colorado is a really interesting case in that a huge number of families already take part in school choice through charters and open enrollment. But voters rejected voucher-type programs twice through referenda in the 1990s, and last year, they to school choice. How could the federal tax credit affect public attitudes?

It’ll help bring more educational services to more kids, and the form of that will be decided by what donors choose and what Coloradans want. For some it’ll be tutoring programs, for others it will be summer learning opportunities, and for others it could be scholarships for school. There are just so many ways for these resources to be used.

In Colorado, we trust the parents. We hope that some great nonprofits are going to be able to participate, and that many Coloradans step up and choose to make this $1,700 donation. Some donors will choose to give their money to organizations that don’t show value-adds for kids, so I do hope there’s transparency. And the more information for parents to take advantage of these programs that nonprofits offer, the better. We ultimately want this to show improvements to student achievement and success.

Does the national Democratic Party have a K–12 agenda right now? The Biden administration used a lot of its education bandwidth on things like student loan forgiveness, and I’m interested in whether you think your party needs to set clearer priorities on schools.

The party doesn’t have one voice, it has many. There are certainly many education leaders in Congress. It was a focus of my service there, when I was the ranking member on the early childhood and K–12 subcommittee. I worked with President Obama and Joe Lieberman and others on the [legislation, never passed, that would have provided competitive grants for the expansion of high-performing charter schools]. 

Democrats stand for opportunity and for making sure — no matter where you live, even in the poorest areas in the inner city or of rural America — that you have every opportunity and advantage, a choice of high-quality options that work and that can help you get the skills you need to live a great life. For me, it’s about opportunity, and I know a lot of Democrats feel the same way. 

But how do those values translate into policy? The period of No Child Left Behind-style education reform ended a while ago, and Republicans have responded with a big embrace of school choice at both the state and federal levels. If Democrats aren’t going along with them, and they’re not returning to the days of NCLB, how do they move forward?

Basically, we need to update the way we look at outcomes in education and make sure we have better transparency and accountability for providers at all levels. It’s not just about making sure kids can read and do math — although they do need to do that — it’s also about making sure they’re prepared with the skills that will help them get a good job. If they’re going to higher education, it’s about making sure they’re exposed to dual- and concurrent-enrollment in high school. How can they get a certificate that means something if they’re not going to a two- or four-year school?

These are the kinds of things we need to do a better job of measuring across all our schools and educational programs — public, private, and charter.

You have not ruled out running for president in 2028. What does the Democrats’ next leader have to do to recover some of the credibility that they’ve lost with voters, at least according to most polls, on education and other issues?

Democrats are the party of education, and we need to reclaim that with a bold agenda. When I ran for governor here in Colorado, we only had half-day kindergarten; parents had to pay for full-day, and they had to pay for preschool. One of the top items we got done is and preschool for every child in our state. We’re already seeing the benefits of that as that first class of kids is now in the second and third grades. We also want to make sure that high school graduates enter the workforce with a skill or credential that allows them to earn a living, or to go on to one of the many kinds of institutions of higher education, or apprenticeships, or skills academies. 

And we want to make sure we embrace choice. I’m a parent of two kids, and every parent knows that what’s good for one kid isn’t necessarily good for the other. Some kids learn from outdoor, experiential learning, some kids thrive in a dual-language immersion setting, and some will want a STEM experience. In Colorado, we have agriculture-focused high schools. We have dual-language immersion in Chinese and French. We have vocational opportunities — and not just in the traditional fields like auto shops or aviation, but also the healthcare workforce. You can get certified, right out of high school, to be a phlebotomist or an EMT.

Your time as governor has played out over parts of two Trump presidential terms, plus the pandemic and learning loss in between. What has your tenure taught you about improving schools and education?

We definitely focused on progress at the state level. There’s some chaos going on now in terms of who administers certain programs, but not a lot of change was driven out of Washington over the last few years. 

That should change, and Democrats should be the party of change. Better education and opportunity is the key to our prosperity as a nation, and for learners at the individual level. 

So the lack of activity certainly hasn’t held states back, and there are lots of examples of what states and school districts have done to innovate. As I mentioned, we’ve had many in Colorado: universal preschool and kindergarten, providing high-quality schools in education deserts, and providing more choices to empower parents to make better choices for their kids.

So is the lesson for Democrats to be as entrepreneurial as possible at the level of state policy, and to be as bold as possible about improving outcomes in the schools around them?

Yeah, don’t just wait out the chaos at the national level. No matter what happens nationally, we need to fight for change at the district level and the state level, so we can better serve every American — no matter where they live or the economic circumstances of their parents.

Who are you rooting for in the Super Bowl, the Patriots or the Seahawks?

Oh, I’m still bemoaning our Broncos. Such a close game, and a tragic ending on a snowy day.

President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race Sunday, he said in , creating an unprecedented vacancy atop the Democratic ticket one month before he was scheduled to officially accept his party’s nomination.

In a followup  less than 30 minutes later, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place as the Democratic nominee.

Biden’s withdrawal came after a weeks-long pressure campaign from party insiders following a  June 27 debate performance against GOP candidate former President Donald Trump.

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The move throws an already-unusual presidential race into further chaos, and it was not immediately clear Sunday how Democrats would choose a replacement for Biden in November’s election, though Harris would have a strong claim to lead the ticket.

Biden praised Harris as “an extraordinary partner” in the administration’s accomplishments.

Biden, who has been fighting a COVID-19 infection at home in Delaware since last week, was not specific about his reasons for stepping aside, but said he believed it was in the country’s best interest.

“It has been the great honor of my life to serve as your President,” he wrote in the one-page letter. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

Biden, 81, appeared frail and confused at several points throughout the debate, leading to worries among elected Democrats and the party’s voters that he was no longer up to the task of governing or contesting Trump’s bid to win back the White House.

As several congressional Democrats called for him to quit the race, others asked that he ramp up his public schedule and include more unrehearsed appearances that could demonstrate his fitness.

But a more robust schedule of news interviews, press conferences and campaign rallies did not sufficiently quiet the Democratic voices saying Biden’s candidacy was likely to throw the presidential race to Trump – whom Biden and others have described as an existential threat to U.S. democracy – and deeply handicap Democrats in other races up and down November’s ballot.

On Friday, Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and  brought the number of senators calling on Biden to drop out to four. A day earlier, Montana Sen. Jon Tester  Biden should drop his reelection campaign and that Democrats should hold an open nomination process at their Chicago convention next month.

In the U.S. House, 29 Democrats had called for Biden to withdraw from the race by the end of the day July 19.

In a post following the announcement to his social media site, Truth Social, Trump said Biden was “never” fit to serve as president.

“Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve – And never was!” Trump wrote. “He only attained the position of President by lies, Fake News, and not leaving his Basement. All those around him, including his Doctor and the Media, knew that he wasn’t capable of being President, and he wasn’t – And now, look what he’s done to our Country.”

More details of announcement

In the letter, Biden praised his administration’s accomplishments over three-and-a-half years, saying he’d worked to make “historic investments” in the country, lowered prescription drug costs, nominated the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court and “passed the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world.”

“Together we overcame a once in a century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Biden wrote. “We’ve protected and preserved our Democracy. And we’ve revitalized and strengthened our alliances around the world.”

Biden said he would “speak to the Nation later this week” about the decision.

He praised Harris and other supporters.

“For now, let me express my deepest gratitude to all those who have worked so hard to see me reelected,” he wrote. “I want to thank Vice President Kamala Harris for being an extraordinary partner in all this work. And let me express my heartfelt appreciation to the American people for the faith and trust you have placed in me.”

In follow-up posts, Biden said he was endorsing Harris and added a fundraising link.

“My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President,” he said. “And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”

Trump gains in polls

The about face in what was to be a 2020 presidential election rematch leaves Democrats searching for a new candidate as Trump, who promises authoritarian-style leadership, has gained support in recent polls.

With just 107 days until Election Day, Biden’s move marks the latest date in modern presidential history that a candidate has withdrawn from the race.

President Lyndon Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection that year, leaving Democratic delegates to decide on a replacement – ultimately Vice President Hubert Humphrey – at the party’s convention that summer in Chicago.

Harris appears to be in a strong position to replace Biden as the party’s standard bearer, though questions remain about how the process will play out and  would become the vice presidential nominee.

Democrats praise decision

Reaction poured in shortly after the Sunday afternoon announcement, with Democrats largely praising Biden’s record and calling his decision courageous.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement that he understood Biden’s decision to step out of the race was “not easy, but he once again put his country, his party, and our future first.”

“Joe Biden has not only been a great president and a great legislative leader but he is a truly amazing human being,” the New York Democrat said.

Several Republicans called for Biden to resign his office.

“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote on X. “He must resign the office immediately. November 5 cannot arrive soon enough.”

A crescendoing chorus to step down

Biden faced calls for him to abandon his reelection bid from congressional Democrats, even as he tried to stabilize the debate aftershock by holding a series of campaign rallies,  for  and holding a press conference at.

Democratic lawmakers   a public front of support for Biden in statements and passing interviews in the U.S. Capitol hallways with reporters.

What began as a trickle of dissent from rank-and-file Democrats —  with Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas and a handful of doubtful senior House Democrats — steadily grew to a torrent by Friday.

50-year career in Washington

Biden’s exit marks the closure of a long, storied career in Washington, including 38 years in the U.S. Senate, featuring stints leading the Foreign Affairs and Judiciary committees, and eight years as vice president under President Barack Obama.

Biden’s presidency was punctuated with major economic wins for Democrats, beginning with nearly $2 trillion to combat the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

His leadership with a Democratic majority in Congress resulted in substantial nationwide infrastructure investments, drove financial incentives to tackle climate change and revive the U.S. global role in semiconductor manufacturing, and strengthened flagging tax enforcement.

However, low approval ratings followed Biden throughout his presidency as Americans aimed their frustrations over inflation at the White House and assigned blame for record numbers of border crossings as a divided Congress – after Democrats lost their House majority in the 2022 midterms – failed to pass immigration restrictions negotiated with the administration.

Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war also hurt his support among young and progressive voters as Israel’s continued offensive against Hamas militants in the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip killed tens of thousands of civilians. Protesters against the U.S. supply of weapons to Israel interrupted dozens of Biden’s reelection campaign events through 2024.

Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report.

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Politicians of have made about the state of inner-city and majority Black schools. As the party that largely controls many large urban centers, and overwhelmingly wins the African American vote, Democrats politically own the outcomes in most of these jurisdictions. 

The Democratic Party has pushed to increase funding for low-income schools, aiming to solve a perceived lack of funding equity. However, the districts with the most income and racial segregation actually on low-income and minority schools than on wealthier, typically white-dominated ones. 

It’s time for Democrats to re-embrace an option that is effective at improving educational outcomes for poor and minority students: . Schools should be able to innovate, and nothing fosters innovation better than a dose of healthy competition.

An evolution in public education is already in motion. During the pandemic, Black parents started homeschooling their children in : 3% of Black students were homeschooled in spring 2020, increasing to 16% in fall 2022. While homeschooling can be a good option for many, it is not accessible to all. Therefore, Democrats need to take the initiative to embrace education reforms that can prepare large numbers of students for the 21st century economy, while maintaining enrollment in public education. Public charter schools fit this bill. 

Charter schools once enjoyed bipartisan support, but Democrats have largely ceded the movement to Republicans. Some of this can be attributed to Trump administration education secretary Betsy DeVos’ vigorous support for charters. But the root of Democrats’ abandonment of public charter schools is the teachers unions, which have always disliked charters because most are not organized. In fact, most charter schools are from union contracts. When put together, the cracks formed between Democrats and charters allowed the teachers unions, which heavily contribute to Democratic candidates, to coerce the party into withdrawing its support of these schools.

This shouldn’t be the case. In Washington, D.C., for example, which is 46% Black and controlled by Democrats, public charter schools have proven to be a major success at improving education outcomes for students. City officials first embraced the model in 2007, and today, nearly half of D.C. students are enrolled in a public charter school. Furthermore, the innovations that D.C.’s charter schools have adopted and the competition they create have caused traditional district schools to .

Because they are public schools, charter schools are still accountable for providing necessary science, math and humanities education. Accountability measures prohibit them from sprinkling in science-denying concepts like creationism or “Lost Cause” mythology in U.S. history. The same can’t be said for homeschooling or that can — — funnel taxpayer dollars into unaccountable private academies. If children are to be prepared for the jobs of the future, they must be provided with an education that prepares them. 

Charters have a among underserved, disproportionately Black students and offer opportunities for these children to have functional schools that provide a strong education. The Democratic Party has created a political conundrum for itself: It prides itself on anti-racism, but also on being friendly to labor unions. When needed education reforms conflict with union interests, Democrats risk losing the massive support of organized labor. But if Democrats want to retain the voter strength of the African American community, they have to get real and stop playing politics with its kids.

Academically rigorous public charter schools have been shown to work, especially for Black children. They allow parents and students to choose the type of education that works best for them. Black voters want their children to succeed in school; if the Democratic Party is to maintain their loyalty, the least it can do is get out of the way of children’s educational opportunities and support the public charter schools that support them.

Jonathan Chait has been writing about the fraught politics of education reform for over a decade.

The veteran political columnist for New York Magazine is a vigorous advocate for the pillars of liberal education reform: high academic standards, school choice, and test-based accountability for schools and teachers who aren’t meeting expectations. It was an outlook that largely fit with Democratic Party orthodoxy in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when Barack Obama and his allies in Congress successfully pushed many states to expand charter schools and adopt the Common Core standards. 

But as the years passed and the Obama era ticked down, his essays on K-12 schools took on a somewhat anxious tone. Resurgent teachers’ unions began exerting more influence at all levels of Democratic politics, including the effort to replace the federal No Child Left Behind Law. Then Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos arrived in Washington, further polarizing a debate around charters that had already begun to split the party. By 2018, Chait was openly to save his “forgotten education legacy.”

That was all before the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of American students suffered severe academic losses over months of prolonged school closures. Now, less than seven months from November’s midterm elections, Chait warns that Democrats around the country may lose the support of voters alienated by a faction that “doesn’t see educational achievement as something important.” 

Those views have earned Chait the enmity of some educators and activists, who have accused him of teachers over COVID-related school closures and intermittently called for him to “disclose” his wife’s career as an education consultant. In response, he has brought to intra-Left disputes that makes him one of the most compelling writers in liberal journalism.

In an interview with Kevin Mahnken, Chait offered a K-12 agenda for Democrats and explained why he believes that “the straightest line to better education reform probably involves running over the teachers’ unions, at minimum.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Education has always been an issue that Democrats have won on, and there’s some polling evidence that they still do. But you’ve expressed the view that it could be a liability for them this fall, in part because parents may not see the party as reflecting their values or priorities. What are the party’s vulnerabilities here?

There are a few potential causes, some of which they have more control over than others. One simple one was that the [American] Rescue Plan gave an enormous amount of money to states, more than they needed to fill their budget holes, and some of them used that money to increase teacher pay. That included [governors] in Florida and other Republican-controlled states, who were able to boost teacher pay and kind of seize the political center without having to pay for it with taxes. So that’s given them a leg up.

Number two would be the pandemic, during which Republicans have had a more aggressive pro-opening stance than Democrats. The Democrats have really caught up, and I can’t think of many places where schools are being closed anymore, so I’m not really sure that will be a big issue. But it’s possible that Democrats have lost some credibility on that issue because they were behind Republicans in calling for reopening in some states. And this is — there are some fears that this has given an opening to the Right to split Democratic constituencies from teachers’ unions and basically say, “Look, the unions had this irrational, harmful position. Maybe you should be questioning some of the other things they say.” Now, some people on the Left are framing this as a kind of diabolical plot on the Right and not as a mistake the unions made, which is how I think we should view it. Regardless, there is that danger that some people who didn’t really question the unions before are questioning them now.

But the biggest ongoing risk factor here is the potential for schools to become laboratories to introduce lefty ideas that don’t have majority support and, in many cases, don’t have strong empirical support. The reason for that is that education schools and unions have both become incubators for a lot of pretty radical ideas that don’t always hold up to evidence or to public opinion. This is a little hard to quantify, but you see it in some places that are scaling back the use of standardized tests, scaling back tracking. It’s exaggerated by the Right to a huge degree, but there are places where — they’re not really teaching “critical race theory,” but they’re teaching historical interpretations that are aligned with certain left-wing challenges to liberalism. That’s happening a lot in elite private schools, but probably a little in public schools too.

Because schools are an area where these policy changes can be implemented without democratic approval, it opens the door to people being exposed to ideology that springs from the far Left. You know, you have pretty left-wing people with ideas for all kinds of areas of American life. would say, “We should abolish the police! We should abolish private insurance!” But they can’t do that because you actually need to pass those proposals through a legislative body; to make changes to schools, you don’t need to do that. That’s the reason why schools are an area where the Left can operationalize policies that can’t really pass democratic muster, and it makes education a danger zone for Democrats.

While these are all areas of exposure for the party, education is one of those issues that really doesn’t have a history of turning national elections. Is 2022 going to be different, or are your warnings here just an example of the ?

Well, we don’t know how widespread these pedagogical changes are. I don’t really know how you’d go about measuring that, and I don’t think anyone has tried. And the second question is, even if they’ve spread widely, how much would that affect voting behaviors? We don’t know that either. That’s why I’d depict this as a risk factor, but how big a risk is really hard to say.

You’ve been writing for close to a decade about the decline in support among Democrats for what has loosely been described as “education reform.” What’s your theory for how the party began its transition?

What’s interesting historically is that the Democrats’ biggest education reform initiative [Race to the Top] happened under very unusual circumstances. It was thrown into the stimulus that was passed just a few weeks into the Obama presidency, in the middle of a massive catastrophe and at the absolute peak of the administration’s political capital. The president threw into this giant measure, as a very small percentage of the overall cost, a grant-based reform to the states to incentivize them to implement education reform measures.

When I went back and looked at the coverage of it in the national press, there were just tiny little details. So there really wasn’t time for opponents to mobilize against it — even though, if this had been a standalone measure that was introduced even a few months later, they would have gone to the mat to defeat it and probably succeeded. I also think that it was much more successful than even its advocates thought at the time. Certainly its critics didn’t realize how effective this would be at leveraging reform at the state level; it drove a lot of changes, and it took a while for those critics to say, “Wait a second, what’s going on here?” 

The problem was that Obama was deeply committed to this agenda, and the [teachers’] unions really didn’t have the leverage to go to war with him. If the unions had gone to their members and said, “The president is killing us — we’re going to support a primary challenger in 2012,” they would have lost more members than they would have hurt him. That was too risky, so the way they played it was , as if Duncan was running around implementing this reform agenda without Obama knowing anything about it. And when Arne Duncan decided to leave and Obama appointed another reformer, they decided they were against him too. The whole time, they had to keep up this pretense that these guys were acting against Obama’s wishes because they recognized that openly opposing Obama would have hurt them with their own members.

But when Obama left the scene, it gave the unions another opportunity to reset the playing field. They were pretty active in the 2020 primaries, trying to nail down all the candidates on commitments to their agenda, and they had somewhat more success there. The candidates who most strongly opposed reform — Warren and Sanders, and to a lesser extent Bill de Blasio, who was sort of making that his lane — didn’t win, but Biden was still much closer to their position than Obama.

I notice that we skipped over the 2016 election there, as well as the Trump presidency. But it really felt like those five years were the major pivot point.

That’s right. As harmful as Obama was to union organizing efforts, Trump was extremely helpful. 

The main goal of reform critics is to bracket together liberal reform with conservative reform — charter schools and vouchers, for example. Even though these are really different policies, they want them to be called the same thing: privatization. They don’t want to distinguish between those two ideas, and it’s their most successful rhetorical gambit. The fact that Obama was for charters but against vouchers was very difficult for them, but Trump allowed them to frame the terms exactly the way they wanted. So they really made a lot of headway during the Trump era, though they’re now in a somewhat different position under Biden.

I was just starting to look at the Biden administration’s new regulations on the Charter Schools Program, but that looks like a win for opponents of reform. It seems like they’re attaching a ton of red tape to make sure it’s as difficult as possible to access those funds. 

We’ve been expanding choice and using standards-based accountability for a few decades now, and there isn’t a great deal of evidence that student learning has dramatically improved since the beginning of the Great Recession. Do you think, even before Trump, there was a sense among Democratic elites that the gains we’ve seen since the ’90s just haven’t been worth the investment made?

It depends on what’s being invested. Federal spending is still such a tiny amount compared with the overall amount spent on education. To the extent that Democratic elites are thinking about a costly investment, it might be the investment they feel they made in reforms that have caused them significant damage with their own allies. From the standpoint of someone in Democratic politics who’s not primarily interested in education, they’re saying, “We’ve put ourselves behind these reforms and taken enormous blowback from within our base, so we need to measure the benefits of this reform against the very high price we’ve paid to do it.” Even if you’re getting some pretty good results for kids, it might not necessarily cost out as a good bet from that perspective. 

I wrote last year, and I focused on charters because I think that’s the area where the research has been most impressive. Initially, education reform really covered a lot of ground, and you’re right that the results have been kind of tepid in some of those areas. It is really hard to steer public education when so much of it is controlled in this fragmented way, and to have a national reform change something at the local level is so difficult. I think charters have been the bright spot. 

Granted, their effects have been really concentrated in one cohort — basically, non-white kids in cities. But that’s the biggest crisis in American education! It’s not the affluent suburban schools, not the middle-class areas, though you want those to be better. The inability to give non-white kids in urban schools anything like a decent education is the real crisis, and that’s where charters have made a big impact. So having a lot of success in that narrow area actually means quite a bit.

I’d like to go into the time machine one more time. Eleven years ago, right after in Wisconsin, arguing against Scott Walker and the whole effort to limit the collective bargaining power of public sector unions.

I’ve completely forgotten this!

It’s basically a defense of the necessity of teachers’ unions, including some hopes that they can be partners for reform in the future. In the kicker, you write that they “can’t hold off reform forever. And, after all the worst aspects of the tenure system disappear, education reformers will discover that teachers are their best allies.” Do you still hold that view? And do you still see teachers’ unions as necessary?

That’s a great question. I certainly expressed an optimistic view of where unions would go politically that has not borne out. They’re probably moving in the opposite direction. I guess you’d chalk it up to misplaced optimism.

Are teachers’ unions necessary? Let me put it this way: If I were designing my ideal world, they would exist. But given their political orientation, and the fact that so many of them are determined to put their efforts into defending the worst aspects of the system rather than pushing for more constructive changes, I would say no, I don’t think they are necessary. 

I’ve started to think of them more like police unions, which I consider the main problem in criminal justice. Police unions have just devoted so much of their efforts to protecting the worst, most abusive cops. You can imagine a world where police unions were on the side of reform, realized that it’s in the interest of police to be trusted by the communities they protect, and weeded out bad actors so that good cops don’t get the blowback that’s caused when abusive and racist officers mistreat people. But that’s not how they behave. 

So I think that busting up the police unions is probably the straightest line to getting to better criminal justice — and the straightest line to better education reform probably involves running over the teachers’ unions, at minimum. I would like to have a world where we can have teachers’ unions and better education reform, but the unions have made that really hard.

I actually wonder if the political influence of police unions can be compared to that of teachers’ unions. As both national and local actors, it seems like the latter are much more influential in election outcomes.

I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve seen plenty of examples where a mayor is trying to reform the police, and the police will just go all-out to sink that candidate. Police unions really put the fear of God into mayors and city council candidates who are trying to rein them in. I’m not sure they have the same power at the state and national level, but for the most part, that’s not where the criminal justice policy they’re most interested in gets decided. So they’ve got a lot of power.

That said, teachers’ unions have a power on the Left to define the way political activists think about the issue. That’s probably a case where there’s not an analogue on the Right. Conservative ideas about criminal justice and racism have their own sources, and you don’t really have police unions steering the Right toward those points of view. Whereas I feel like the role of teachers’ unions in setting the party line — by which I mean the progressive movement rather than the Democratic Party, but to some extent both — is very powerful.

In a on education, you take issue with what you call a “false binary”: the idea that Democrats can either focus on improving schools or on improving the living conditions of students and families. I think many left-leaning critics of education reform would argue that Democrats can do both, but also that mitigating social disadvantage is going to make a much bigger impact on how kids learn than expanding high-quality charter schools, for instance. How do you respond to that?

I think there’s actually a lot of room for school improvement. To characterize it broadly, you’ve got these urban areas whose schools have performed very badly — kids have basically no chance to learn as much as kids in suburban schools — and charters are able to substantially or completely close that gap. They haven’t necessarily found ways to make the suburban schools better, but within the realm of improving education, charters have a significant effect.

I don’t really see anything to this argument, other than that education can only do so much. And that’s true. Education can only do so much, health care can only do so much, anti-poverty can only do so much, lead remediation can only do so much. Nothing is a panacea. But that’s just not a standard that we hold other policies to: Is this a panacea for all our problems? That’s a ridiculous standard. I know you’re trying to steel-man this and turn it into a serious idea, but I don’t think it is a serious idea. That’s not the way we do, or should, measure policy innovations.

Well, to carry the law enforcement comparison a step further, I don’t think advocates for criminal justice reform would argue that we just need to reduce poverty. There’s a definite sense that something affirmative has to change about the way our police operate.

That’s a very good analogy, and I wish I’d thought of that before. The disparities, whether it’s in education outcomes or incarceration, are going to be very hard to dent if you don’t get rid of poverty. But there are still disparities that we can address within the system itself. So we should do that! 

It’s just not a real excuse. No one makes that point about incarceration because they understand that it’s not relevant to the question of what kind of criminal justice system we want. It’s just not relevant.

Do you think there’s something about how the progressive movement views education — as a means of fighting social injustice and cultivating democratic values — that just doesn’t sync up with how most parents see it, and therefore creates a political problem?

I don’t actually think there is disagreement about those aspects of schools. There’s disagreement about the nature of civic values you want to teach: People on the Left want to teach liberal values, and people on the Right want to teach conservative values. People on the Right might have an image of the Pledge of Allegiance and teaching about the greatness of our country, and people on the Left might have ideas of teaching antiracism and creating a space where gay kids can come out if they don’t feel welcome at home.

But everyone really does see schools as a place to inculcate values. The real disagreement is about whether educational achievement is important. That’s where  you have a numerically tiny segment — much less than 10 percent, probably — of the country that doesn’t see educational achievement as something important. The absence of achievement as a priority is what makes them focus on the other stuff as representing the value of schools, because otherwise there’s no rationale for them to exist, and you’re just a straight-out libertarian who thinks we should get rid of public schools.

It certainly does seem like the public K-12 discourse now focuses way more on cultural politics than on academic performance. In particular, the state laws being passed about instruction on controversial subjects have just dominated the news for months. Do you think these bills are a valid response to politicized teaching, or is it more a political play by Republicans?

I genuinely don’t know. I’m almost certain that there’s more quote-unquote CRT in the classrooms now than there was five years ago. But I think it rose from a low level, and it’s really hard to say whether you’re talking about something that’s a serious concern. There are so many schools in this country that you could just cherry pick another new example every single day, and it still wouldn’t prove that there’s a real problem. 

You can see on Twitter that crazy teachers become national news stories now. My daughter had an absolute lunatic as a high school teacher who would use the class as a platform for all sorts of right-wing rants that were extremely racist and sexist. And this was not even a social studies class. This is a big country, and there’s a lot of crazy people out there.

But the legislative solutions just don’t work. I don’t think you can design a law that can effectively rule out bad teaching practices without also ruling out necessary teaching practices. So having state legislatures try to steer this ship is really not going to work.

When I spoke recently with the historian Daryl Scott, he essentially argued that the anti-CRT perspective in these debates wasn’t even especially right-wing — that it was more about explicitly teaching patriotic history in a way that would have been familiar to postwar liberals. I wonder if you’d agree with that.

There are definitely areas where the Left position has moved so far left that it’s opened up space for conservatives to advocate what used to be a center-left position. But I also think there are some aspects of the debate where that is not true. He’s capturing a piece of the reality, but not the whole of it.

What should the Democratic Party’s agenda on education be right now?

They should be encouraging more charter schools in urban areas, because they work. They’ve got an effective policy tool that can help people who need help very badly. They should be expanding that tool rather than scaling it back.

They should also be doing what Michelle Rhee did in D.C. They should say, “We are going to massively increase the base level of teacher pay in this country.” And they should go further than that, doubling or tripling aggregate teacher pay and treating teachers like professionals. Which means subjecting them to assessments that can include quantitative and non-quantitative judgments, and replacing them if they’re ineffective. I can’t really point to evidence that says that would work, but I don’t think it’s really been tried at scale. 

D.C.’s reforms worked, but all you can really do by increasing teacher pay is attract more and better teaching candidates from other cities. What a city can’t do is change the kind of person who goes into teaching in the first place. You can’t make it so that everyone in college knows that if you go into teaching, you’re going to make a really good living. College students know that if you go into teaching, compared with other things you could do, you’re making a financial sacrifice. If that were not the case, you’d have different people entering the profession and a bigger pool of talent. That’s not something I can improve with experimental evidence because it needs to be done at a societal level. But if I were in charge of the world, that’s what I’d do.