Bad Political Education Advice

Okay, here's a puzzler for you. Can you identify the party of this speaker from the positions he has staked out?

The teachers' union is a bad special interest and should be ignored. Parents should have more power. There should be way more taxpayer-funded school choice.

One might reasonably guess GOP, but nope--that's Ben Austin, who has worked in everything from President Bill Clinton's staff to Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign. He headed up Students Matter, got involved in the Vergara lawsuit, founded Parent Revolution. These days he's running Education Civil Rights Now.  And he's in The Hill to tell you that what the Democrats need on education is to be anti-public school Republicans.

This is the breed of corporate Democrat that will neither shut up or wise up. 

"Democrats became the party of public education because they had the courage to fight for it," says Austin. Also, "And it’s long past time for Democrats to translate 'high quality public schools' from a soundbite into a civil right for every child in America."

Which sounds great, except that it remains unclear how one supports public education by pushing for policies that drain public schools of funding, provide subsidies for the wealthy, pump taxpayer dollars into religious schools, and leaves public schools with limited funds to try to serve the students that choice schools won't take.  

Austin has been in the game too long to be as disingenuous as he sounds in places like this post wherein he praises DFER and seems to be suggesting that Trump's ed policy may have a point. 

Listening to teachers union leaders like Weingarten and her allies, you’d think charter schools were created in an underground right-wing laboratory as part of a secret plot to “privatize” public education. In fact charter schools were originally proposed in 1988 by her own American Federation of Teachers predecessor Al Shanker.

I worked in the White House for President Bill Clinton, who proudly ran on charter schools when only one existed in America. President Barack Obama later scaled high-quality charters as part of his bold Race to the Top agenda.

Charters are public schools, which means they are free and secular, cannot have admission requirements, and have strict regulatory controls on educational quality. That doesn’t sound like a Republican plot to destroy public education to me.

Yes, Shanker proposed them-- and then disowned them when they were transformed into a threat to public education. Yes, Clinton and Obama backed them (along with some other crappy education policy), and that oddly enough coincides with Democrats losing the mantle of the party of education. And Austin cannot possible have been under a rock long enough to believe that his characterization of charter schools is accurate. 

He earlier writes

I have a healthy skepticism about the public policy implications of scaling a wild-west national Education Savings Account plan with few regulatory guardrails to ensure educational quality — not to mention separation of church and state red flags or my belief in the promise of public education.

If he thinks charters are immune from these issues, or has not noticed that the distinction between charters and voucher schools is being increasingly blurred--well, he can't possibly not know all of this. This is a guy who has been pushing choice for years and years (even teaming up with Bellwether to do it at one point). 

In his post, he tries to thread the needle that corporate Dems have been trying to navigate since 2016-- on the one hand, Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos and Linda McMahon are odious leaders, but on the other hand, there's not a thing that these corporate Dems love that the Trump regime does not. 

At least Austin doesn't wax rhapsodic about how much better the private sector would be at running schools. I guess that's something. (Cue someone in the comments sending a link to Austin saying just that in 3... 2... 1...).

Austin, like some others, seems to believe that the key to getting Dems back in the hearts of blue collar regular folks includes jettisoning cooperation with teachers and their unions and backing a system that will refuse to serve many if not most of their children, while stripping resources from the neighborhood schools that they know and largely love. Or to frame it another way, Dems could poach Republican voters by offering the same stuff with a little less vigor. Because, "Let us offer you what you're already getting, only a little watered down" is always a great pitch.

Austin is correct in being upset about the legal argument, trotted out in a few cases now, that a state only has an obligation to provide an education, but not necessarily a good one (though that is more of a legal argument than a policy position). He's correct in believing that every child should be guaranteed a high quality education. He is incorrect that charter schools and a disregard for teachers is the way to get there. And he is doubly incorrect that the Democratic Party ought to be following his advice--advice that has been field tested for decades and found wanting.