Facing a presidential primary against Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has been working to co-opt his support base by pandering vigorously to her party’s left-wing.
The most glaring example of this came in last month, when she suddenly abandoned her full-throated support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In her own memoir, she had hailed the free trade agreement as “the economic pillar of our strategy in Asia” when she was secretary of state, and referred to it as the “gold standard in trade agreements.”
More recently, on the heels of winning the endorsement of the National Education Association, Clinton has begun to mouth that teachers union’s negative propaganda about charter schools. This is a significant reversal of her position because Clinton had supported charter schools throughout her career, endorsing them in her book It Takes a Village, and because both her husband and President Obama supported policies generally favorable to charter schools.
“Most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them,” Clinton said in a recent appearance, clearly changing her tune. She was voicing a common falsehood created by teachers’ unions to defeat an open-and-shut statistical case for charter schools’ benefits.
In reality, charter schools must take all comers, usually through a random lottery, and cannot choose only the best and brightest. In most jurisdictions they serve a greater share of disadvantaged populations than the average public school.
Charters are government-funded but not government-run. The idea behind them is to free educators and students from the bureaucratic one-size-fits-all model of schooling that has especially failed to serve inner-city students, and let them experiment with better ways of learning. The charter model offers more flexibility in curriculum and allows poorly performing schools to be replaced quickly, so that children are not stuck in failing schools for years on end. Most importantly, they end the practice of treating schools as if they were a jobs program for teachers union members, in which their jobs are guaranteed no matter how poorly they perform.
The District of Columbia, which was long been (and in some parts still is) one of America’s worst and most expensive education basket-cases, has in recent years provided an excellent example of how charter schools can improve education for the most vulnerable. Charters have brought into D.C. a variety of curriculum models about which parents are enthusiastic, including (for example) Montessori schools, classical education schools, and Chinese and Spanish language immersion programs, among others. Not only are charters outperforming the District’s regular public schools, but they have also been pushing them to catch up or die out.
After a decade of rapid growth driven by overwhelming parental demand, D.C. charter schools now educate 44 percent of the District’s public schoolchildren. Overall, students in charter schools have modestly (more than 10 percent) higher proficiency rates in both math and reading than those in the traditional public system.
But the benefits are more pronounced for black students and students from poorer backgrounds, who form the majority in both systems. In 2014, black children in D.C. charter schools had a 41 percent higher math and a 31 percent higher reading proficiency rate than those in traditional D.C. public schools. Economically disadvantaged students in charters enjoyed proficiency rates 37 percent higher in math and 35 percent higher in reading.
Another apples-to-apples way of looking at the success of in D.C. charters is by comparing them to schools in the neighborhoods where they operate. They were created to serve students stuck in areas where schools were perennially failing. Thus, there are no charter schools in Ward Three, an overwhelmingly white (78 percent) and wealthy (average family income $247,000) enclave in the nation’s capital. Traditional public schools in Ward Three were already serving students well, with an 83 percent proficiency rate in reading and 84 percent in math, compared to 41 and 43 percent in the rest of Washington’s traditional public schools.
When you exclude Ward Three and look only at traditional public schools in the seven D.C. wards where charters operate, charter proficiency rates are 32 percent higher in math and 29 percent higher in reading. It is therefore obvious why the mostly black and Hispanic parents of the District’s other seven wards are overwhelming the charter system with more applications than there are openings. The regular public schools that their children would otherwise attend remain markedly inferior, despite significant attempts to improve them in the last ten years.
Charter schools are already producing a more literate and better-educated generation, primarily benefiting racial minorities and the poor. This is true not only in Washington but in many other cities as well.
That Clinton would suddenly turn on a dime and stab this growing movement in the back just to win a union endorsement should come as a wake-up call about her sincerity and her candidacy for president. She seems willing to say almost anything — no matter how obviously false, inconsistent with her past positions, or contrary to the common good — in order to secure power for herself.
