Black and Hispanic parents are may be switching from Biden to Trump, predicts Andrew Rotherham on Eduwonk.
President Biden's education policy is "skewed toward white progressives," whose votes he's already got. "Cutting the public charter school budget . . . tickles the teachers’ union, sure, but you already had their endorsement."
Democrats care about education equality, but not so much about quality, say voters in a Democrats for Education Reform poll. "Voters no longer view Democrats as the party that will deliver results and educationally prepare kids for future economic success."
As one parent noted, “Democrats give a participation trophy instead of rewarding people for knowledge.”
People care most about education issues on which they trust Democrats the least, researchers concluded.
The Democratic Party is a "disaster," when it comes to improving urban schools, says Adrian Fenty, on Pioneer Institute's Learning Curve. "If you’re down with the special interests, whose number one priority is to make life better for adults in the school system, and you give second priority to the education of the kids, then you’re not part of the solution," says Fenty, who was mayor of Washington D.C. in the Michelle Rhee era. He is, of course, a Democrat.
While two-thirds in the DEFER poll back expanding public school choice, including charters, magnets and career academies, support for vouchers and Education Savings Accounts (ESA) is much weaker.
Republicans are in love with ESAs, and are passing big statewide universal voucher plans, writes Rotherham.
Charter "performance continues to get better and is in some cases simply outstanding," but they're not the hot new thing, he writes. "Charters enjoy support among base Democratic voters, but not among elites and powerbrokers." Or teachers' unions.
Parents tend to be pragmatists, writes Rotherham. "They just want good safe schools and are less interested in discipline reform, DEI, culture wars, and so forth than your median education non-profit employee and certainly less than the activists."
Charters have embraced a social-justice approach to play up to Democrats, who won't embrace them because of the teachers' unions, he writes. In the process, "they've started to dilute and blur the crispness of their brand and differentiation."
One of the generally unmentioned issues in education is what can be done to close the "Achievement Gap" between Asian and whites students versus black and Hispanic students. Progressives have decided that the way to deal with the achievement gap is to stop measuring it and to use other markers of achievement to hide it. Conservatives seem to either want to just accept it; blame blacks and Hispanics for it; or to claim a gimmick such as more discipline, charter schools, or vouchers will make it go away.
The issue is that both sides refuse to face the issue head one.
Charters won't save their states from Democrats like Biden and Newsom; instead, teachers should leave their declining status quo and join the vouchers, which need more discipline in how they are being used, at least in some regions.
Brown vs Board of Education was 70 years ago, yesterday, May 17. Democrats have been struggling ever since on how to erode education for blacks and other minorities. They used force busing in the early 1970s to get rid of thousands of black educators. They've used their social justice/DEI ideas evolving over the last 50 years to erode standards.
The evilest thing ever done was to convince parents, and by ignorance the kids, that what was taught in government schools was what was needed to be successful in life. In the last 50 or so years, nothing has been further from the truth, especially for non-white students.
"Social justice is an actual impediment to acquiring human capital"
--Thomas Sowell
Issue activists supplant necessary academics and hinder education? Who could foresee that (:rolleyes:).
Can you say "lowest common denominator?"