Education: The Democratic Party’s Working-Class Issue

If the Statue of Liberty opened the gateway to this country, public education opened the door to attainment here. Schools like my sister’s Buffalo State Teachers College and CCNY have served as the Harvards and Princetons of the poor. And they served us well. I am, consequently, a champion of public secondary and higher education. I will speak out for them and support them for as long as I have the good sense to remember where I came from.

~former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell

On this Thanksgiving and as Democrats think about 2028, they should work to reclaim the greatness of a democratic public education for all, including working-class families who desperately want their children to succeed and who need these schools for this to happen.

Since the devastating election for Democrats, many pundits and lawmakers have searched for what went wrong. Sen. Bernie Sanders stated It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.

One of the best working-class issues involves public schools and giving all children a chance to have a bright future and achieve their goals. However, for years, public schools have been run into the ground for a privatized system that neither Republican nor Democratic parents want.

We saw this during the election when parents voted against vouchers on the ballot in several states, including Republican strongholds for Trump.

For years, Americans have watched as their public schools have been whittled down to high-stakes, one-size-fits-all standardized tests, condemnation of professional teachers, unproven technology-driven classrooms that collect harmful data on children, and a lack of well-rounded curriculums that lift students, especially those in working-class and poor households.

Most people recognize the lunacy in Linda McMahon’s selection as education secretary, as they did with the choice of billionaire Betsy DeVos. This demonstrates that Trump has no reverence for America’s public schools and the working-class parents whose children freely rely on those schools.

As Kevin Welner, a professor of education policy and law and the director of the National Education Policy Center, notes here, eliminating the U.S. Department of Education would end many services for America’s students.

Ending the DOE is another ploy to end public education altogether. Americans have been tricked into getting rid of public education. Since the Reagan administration’s damning and unjustified report A Nation at Risk, politicians have sided with the business roundtable, pushing educators out of the public school conversation.

Derek Seidman’s recent Truthout report describes a long list of billionaires behind corporate school reform, quoting Kenneth Saltman, who has written books and reports about this topic for years:

These billionaire-driven “reform” efforts ultimately work to “redistribute control over decision making away from the public and concentrate it with tech corporations and superrich individuals atop these supposed philanthropic institutions.”

It’s not that billionaires shouldn’t give back to the country that helped them become successful, to public education, and to America’s students. They should pay fair taxes, care for the needs of children in their public schools, and support them. Some corporations and foundations generously support universities in science and other areas.

But select billionaires and wealthy politicians have, for years, torn down the people’s schools, breaking them into a dueling system of unaccountable charters and vouchers to profit from the public good and casting teachers, those who do the actual work of teaching students, as failures. Today, many of these reformers on both sides want business-run cyber schools.

Americans from both parties care deeply about education. Public schools have historically opened doors for the working class, and they must recapture their greatness if America is to survive.

Politicians and billionaires have reshaped public education for too long, letting the cold starkness of business interests replace the compassionate voices of educational experts, especially classroom teachers.

If Democrats want to reclaim the country, they need to assess the problems with public education and recapture the American spirit that created it. They must also help schools evolve so that education, including higher education, is within reach for all children.

On this Thanksgiving, let’s be thankful for this country’s free public education system, fight for it, and begin the vital work to rebuild it to greatness for all Americans, especially the working class.

 

 

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