Good day, CharterFolk.
The nation’s attention turns to who Kamala Harris will select as her running mate. Often at moments like this, I find myself reminding Folk that the broader political world doesn’t always revolve around us, so don’t read too much into the situation as it relates to charter schools’ standing in the political order. But this moment feels different. Who Harris chooses will reveal a great deal about where charter schools stand in the Democratic Party pecking order, and that will have ripple through effect across the entire political spectrum. So it’s worth taking a closer look, which I’ll make the topic of this post.
First, I’ll recap my starting point on these issues.
I have previously written that, for more than two decades after the inception of the charter school movement, many prominent Dems maintained a kind of detente with the public education establishment on charter school matters. Leaders like Clinton, Obama, Brown and Romer struck a compromise with the NEA/AFT and other status quo interests by agreeing to support them on virtually all other matters, but to agree to disagree on charter schools. That positioning remained viable until the summer of 2017 when the NEA approved a new charter school policy making the stopping of charter schools the union’s number one priority. It was the union officially letting it be known that the days of Dems being able to both support teacher unions and charter schools were behind them. Dem candidates were either going to be with the unions or against them on their new priority to halt the growth of charter schools. Gavin Newsom, a former supporter of charter schools, was the first prominent Dem who had the gauntlet thrown down, and he buckled. Biden, another who had historically supported charter schools, did the same thing. It led to a wholesale recasting of the relationship between Democrats and charter schools. It was a development significant enough, I called it “the end of the charter school beginning.”
Now we are in a period beyond the beginning when we are finding out whether the NEA/AFT can hold Dems in that new “with us or against us” framework, or whether the rigid dichotomy will prove not viable such that they have to pivot. Clearly, the unions would have preferred that this whole topic not resurface at all during the 2024 cycle. It would have given them another four years during which they could have further calcified Democratic positioning on charter schools. But Biden’s sudden departure brought the issue very much back into play again.
And as the fates would have it, Harris’s VP decision will have considerable impact on strategy regarding what many consider to be the Dems most pressing priority for the national election – assembling the force needed to hold the “Blue Wall” across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Many see reason to believe that Harris needs to do more to build her Blue Wall strength by choosing a male candidate with strong regional affiliations.
The leader who many believe would be the strongest to help Harris in Blue Wall states is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. He is certainly the one that Republicans seem to most worry about.
The problem, though, for Democrats is Shapiro’s strong support for charter schools and private school choice.
It has led to a coalition of status quo protectors …
… issuing a letter (which is worth reading in its entirety) …
… excoriating Shapiro.
Even Ravitch has gotten in on the “anyone but Shapiro” act.
It sets up a fascinating moment.
Harris made one of her first appearances as the presumed Democratic nominee a speech at AFT. The union was quick to attempt to portray the speech as a throwing down of the gauntlet.
But in terms of gauntlet-throwing similar to the one that was thrown by the unions at Newsom in 2018 and Biden in 2020, Harris’s speech was conspicuously absent of detail. It failed to even mention allegiance to the union’s positions on charter schools and school choice. Perhaps that was born of an intuition Harris and her team share with Republicans that excessive kowtowing to teacher unions would not help her in November.
Prospects for Dems holding the Blue Wall appear most suspect in Pennsylvania as new swing state polling showed this weekend …
… but count me among those who will be surprised if Harris bucks NEA/AFT to go with Shapiro, even if such a choice would diminish Harris’s chances of winning. Such is the NEA/AFT stranglehold on Dems at the moment.
That would leave two other categories of VP candidates.
The first would consist of people like North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, who has attempted to forge something of a middle ground. That has included going apoplectic on all forms of private school choice …
… while carving out something of a compromise position on charter schools, vetoing legislation …
… that was ultimately overridden …
… allowing charter school growth in the state to accelerate, all while maintaining an overall posture of support for charter schools, including issuing a Charter Schools Week proclamation with as strong a set of of “whereas” statements we have seen come out from a Democrat in quite a long time.
The second category would consist of those expressing dye-in-the-wool opposition to all forms of school choice including charter schools coming from the likes of Governor Andy Beshear in Kentucky, who has used every lever at his disposal …
… to thwart charter schools establishing a presence in his state.
Of all the people who are mentioned as possible running mates right now, none has staked out positions as opposed to charter schools as Beshear has, but his lack of connection to the Blue Wall, or to any swing state, leaves the NEA and AFT in an awkward spot right now. Do they go all in on a candidate who is great on their issues but less likely to result in the Dems prevailing in November? How does that solidify their standing among Dems as a force that improves the party’s chances of winning?
Aside from Beshear, their best hope is a candidate like Senator Kelly from Arizona who has attempted to maintain utter ambivalence and/or incoherence about charter schools …
… stating that he “supports charter schools but not at the expense of funding public schools.” It’s a kind of babbling reminiscent of Biden’s incoherence on our issues in the 2020 campaign.
But do we really think that a senator from a state where charter schools serve a higher percentage of public school students than any other in the country is going to settle into a long-term hostile orientation toward charter schools?
I for one don’t.
Now, granted, there are many other names that are being mentioned as running mates right now, and it’s certainly a strong possibility that someone other than the people I’ve mentioned above could ultimately be chosen. But the four provide a fascinating tableau against which to consider the other likely candidates, all of whom would fit somewhere on the spectrum between Cooper and Beshear in terms of support for charter schools and choice, with Shapiro remaining the outlier.
The big news is that, really, only Beshear would represent a choice reflecting that Dems remain in lock-step with the new position that the NEA staked out in 2017. And if Harris goes in the lock-step direction, she would open up the whole choice and charters policy area for the Republicans to seize upon.
Next best for the NEA/AFT crowd, it would seem, is a selection like Governor Pritzker from Illinois or Walz from Minnesota who, like Kelly, have worked hard to avoid taking any strong positions on charter schools at all and would thus pose less risk to the new anti-charter-school orthodoxy. But neither Walz nor Pritzker, like Beshear, would help directly in a Blue Wall state, or any battleground state for that matter.
And if Shapiro is not chosen, and if the Dems do not hold the Blue Wall, and if it is understood that Shapiro’s standing on charter schools and choice had been the policy that prevented the Dems from having made their best VP selection, the party’s positioning on charter schools and choice would seem to be open for a full-scale reconsideration.
Perhaps most telling is the language found in the coalition’s letter opposing Shapiro. Nowhere in the letter does the word “charter” even appear. All enmity is directed against private school choice. And Roy Cooper is explicitly endorsed as an alternative candidate who would be acceptable to the coalition even though he has clearly staked out a position on charter schools that strays from NEA/AFT orthodoxy.
It makes for fascinating dynamics.
For years now I have been saying that the Dems’ new positioning on charter schools was not built to last. Parents and the general public want something new and better and different in public education. And the challenges that many district schools are having today and are sure to have even more of in the future make it not viable for Dems to simply embrace and defend the way things are. It has made it inevitable that the Dems would ultimately have to pivot back to a positioning on charter schools reminiscent of what it maintained during the Clinton and Obama eras. The question was just a matter of when and how the line in the sand would be redrawn.
We still don’t have all the answers yet by any means. But the dynamics at play as Harris continues her deliberations over a VP selection are beginning to reveal the contours of a new lay of the charter school land.