Years after his presidency, I got a chance to thank Bill Clinton for championing education reform as a Democratic president. I had worked on his campaign and in his White House as a young staffer, and I was in the process of reminding him that he ran for president as a charter school supporter when he interrupted to steal the punch line: “In 1992 when there was only one charter school in America!”
He was proud of that fact, holding up his index finger for emphasis.
Clinton’s education record is a quaint memory in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ losing presidential campaign. She talked about “choice” and “freedom” in every speech, but never as it pertained to schools.
Presidents Clinton and Barack Obama not only ran as “education reformers,” they ran broadly as outsiders and change agents. Both challenged Democratic Party orthodoxies, which was a feature — not a bug — of their success.
On the other side, Harris, along with every other Democratic nominee who lost a general election since Walter Mondale, effectively ran as a champion of Democratic Party special interests, including teachers’ unions.
As Chuck Todd noted in the aftermath of the election, that meant Harris didn’t have much to say to working-class public school parents trying to dig out of the massive learning-loss hole caused by pandemic-related school closures.
I have worked in education reform for two decades. I also have deep roots in national Democratic Party politics. In addition to working in the Clinton White House, I was a paid staffer on five Democratic presidential campaigns, including Harris’s. I traveled mostly across Wisconsin towns planning events for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), her running-mate.
The only Harris education policy I heard about from Wisconsin voters was that of transgender kids playing sports, on which Trump was attacking her relentlessly. Politics abhors a vacuum. With Harris silent on education, Trump filled the void.
Because I care about other issues such as climate change, Ukraine and democracy, I dutifully worked on Harris’ campaign despite having sued her when she was California attorney general. She was the defendant in Vergara v. California, a case where I helped nine students sue California, claiming that their quality of education was so poor, it violated their constitutional rights.
Our victory created a constitutional right to high-quality public education that California children would still enjoy today, had Harris not appealed that decision up to the Supreme Court as a favor to the teachers’ unions. In court, Harris’s lawyers conceded that we had proven the system was harming children, but they argued that because there was no explicit right in the Constitution to quality public education, children effectively had no right not to be harmed.
The court sided with Harris by one vote, overturning the ruling.
It was a constitutional right that could have could have mitigated the impact of the pandemic school shutdowns, as blue-state Democrats with Biden administration support, robbed millions of students, including my daughters, of 18 months of learning — and a piece of their childhood.
Eventually, frustrated Los Angeles Unified School District parents sued to reopen all schools for all kids. In its legal reply, the school district cited Harris’ arguments in the Vergara case to say the quiet part out loud, claiming that because students had no right to quality education, the Los Angeles Unified School District had no legal obligation to deliver quality instruction, and parents had no right to demand they reopen schools, or do anything else.
That was the status quo for children and parents in the Biden-Harris’ administration’s America.
The same crowd that covered up President Biden’s cognitive decline crafted his education policy. If we don’t change course, we’re going to lose the next generation of kids — along with the next election, and maybe our democracy along with it. That is why the time is now for a new generation of Democratic Party change agents to lead and win.
That means acknowledging that the Biden-Harris school closures represented a tragic policy failure that demands hair-on-fire action.
It also means moving beyond defending status quo institutions to driving an abundant education agenda focused on results, not scarcity. For example, it is politically untenable for Democrats to oppose all forms of school choice when Republicans are offering a free market smorgasbord of choice with loosely regulated vouchers.
Democrats need a visionary answer to the question of how American education must evolve to meet the needs of the 21st century. Translating “high-quality public schools” from a soundbite into a civil right should be the North Star of any populist progressive education agenda.
The good news is that Democrats have an exciting bench of 2028 kids-first contenders, including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, former Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, among others. Many of these candidates have strong records expanding high quality public charter schools, with the scars to prove it.
If Democrats want to reclaim our identity as the party of progressive change, we must reclaim the mantle as the party of public education. Not “just” for kids — but because the future of American democracy might depend on it.
Ben Austin is a former staffer for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign and founding director of Education Civil Rights Now.
