Harris thrills teachers' union, sticks to progressive orthodoxy

"God knows, we don't pay you enough," Kamala Harris told teachers at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston. That went over well.

Vice President Kamala Harris has been endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers.

The vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee for president focused her speech on "student loan forgiveness, protecting schools from gun violence and  resisting Republican attempts to restrict curriculums," write Dana Goldstein and Nicholas Nehamas in the New York Times. “While you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history,” Harris said to the "ecstatic" crowd.

Harris did not mention the academic and mental-health effects of "pandemic-era school closures, which local teachers’ unions pushed to extend," they write. She didn't mention school choice.

Harris has been very pro-union, they note. In 2019, she broke with other Democrats to support the Los Angeles teacher strike in Los Angeles, In her failed 2020 primary run, she proposed a huge increase in teacher pay, "thrilling the unions."

Earlier in her political career, as San Francisco DA and California attorney general, Harris supported fining or jailing parents of truant students, Goldstein and Nehamas write. She now rejects that policy.

Fordham's Michael Petrilli suggested Harris could use the speech to "show she's willing to buck progressive orthodoxy" and move to the center on education. That didn't happen, but it's not impossible.

Harris could talk about the challenges of out-of-control classrooms and call for greater order and discipline and "greater respect for teachers," Petrilli writes. Lots of teachers -- and parents -- would like that.

She "needs to create some distance between herself and the most unreasonable social justice warriors, who have been arguing that any form of traditional discipline is furthering the 'school-to-prison pipeline',” he writes.

Petrilli also dreams that Harris might support public charter schools as a fairer alternative to vouchers for private and religious schools. School choice is very popular with parents, especially Blacks and Hispanics, he writes. Furthermore, urban charters are boosting student learning and raising college graduation rates. Why oppose an alternative that could narrow achievement gaps and help students recover from pandemic learning loss?

Finally, Petrilli thinks Harris could link her call for higher teacher pay with more accountability for improving student learning. Democratic education reformers took that line in the past. I don't expect to hear it from Harris this year -- or ever. Not will winged pigs are flying over the White House.