What do three of the Democratic presidential candidates all have in common? They were all once fervent supporters of school choice.
Elizabeth Warren wrote a detailed section in a book about the promise and benefits of school vouchers, especially for those in struggling schools. Joe Biden spoke movingly on the Senate floor about the life-saving impact school choice could have on children living in the inner-city. Cory Booker was even on the board of the largest school choice organizations in the country alongside now-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
Now that they’re all running for president, these candidates have flip-flopped on the issue while they attack DeVos, an ardent supporter of educational options for low-income families. These candidates are doing this at the behest of teachers’ unions while turning their backs on their own Democratic constituents who support educational choice.
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece this month titled, “When Elizabeth Warren Agreed With Betsy DeVos,” where he quoted passages from Warren’s 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap. Warren wrote, “Fully funded vouchers would relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.”
Brooks concluded, “This is exactly the argument that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos uses to support school choice.” At the time, Warren was a professor at Harvard, a private university which accepts students on federal voucher programs like Pell Grants and the G.I. Bill.
As the Washington Post reported in June 2019, then-Sen. Biden said in 1997, “When you have an area of the country — and most often here we are talking about inner cities — where the public schools are abysmal or dysfunctional or not working and where most of the children have no way out, it is legitimate to ask what would happen to the public schools with increased competition from private schools,” he said. “Is it not possible that giving poor kids a way out will force the public schools to improve and result in more people coming back?”
Biden, who grew up attending private Catholic schools, recently attacked DeVos.
Four years of Betsy DeVos is more than enough.
As president, I’ll name a Secretary of Education who is actually an educator.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 4, 2019
Booker served on the board of my employer’s predecessor organization, the Alliance for School Choice, from 2003-2007. He was a keynote speaker at our annual summit in 2012, and in 2016 as a senator. This was just a few months before his friend and former fellow board member, Betsy DeVos, was nominated to be secretary of Education.
Booker was in Iowa earlier this year attacking state leaders who expanded the successful school choice tax credit scholarship program — a program signed into law by then-Gov. Tom Vilsack (a Democrat) — as just a Republican “scheme” that offends him.
Curiously, Booker was a vocal supporter of the same type of tax credit scholarship “scheme” proposed in New Jersey while he was mayor of Newark.
Booker’s parents were IBM executives and he spoke often about how they bought a house in a school district that better served his needs. Booker wanted the same educational opportunities for all kids, which is why he served on the Alliance for School Choice board with DeVos to support these options for children in lower-income families. Now he avoids questions about this service including at a CNN town hall earlier this year.
So why did these three Democrats flip-flop on school choice? Did DeVos or President Trump shift the headwinds against school choice? Just the opposite. According to polling from Harvard’s Education Next, support for school vouchers and tax-credit scholarships is up 10 percentage points and 12 percentage points since 2016.
According to the poll, Hispanics and African Americans register the highest levels of support for school choice. Vouchers for low-income families gets 66% support from African Americans and 69% support from Hispanics.
This further demonstrates the schism within the Democratic party on this issue, as this newfound opposition to private school choice and even public charter schools is top-heavy in the party. There are many courageous Democrats across the country who stand with their constituents and against the will of the teachers’ unions. Dozens of Democratic state legislators are supporting expanded educational options for families and children.
As more teachers are choosing to flee unions after the Janus Supreme Court ruling, Democrats running for president should stand with their constituents in support of school choice, the civil rights issue of our time, rather than be beholden to teachers’ unions.
Tommy Schultz is the National Communications Director for the American Federation for Children.
