Copublished with Convergence magazine
From the 1990s to the mid-2010s, the dominant forces within the Democratic Party helped create, shape, and drive bipartisan neoliberalism in public education. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, a variety of billionaires, and others promoted a model based on austerity, market-based carrots and sticks, attacks on teachers’ unions, and unregulated growth of charter schools that undermined traditional public schools. These policies reinforced historic racial and class-based inequities in schools and demonized educators themselves.
Fast forward to 2019, when House Democrats proposed cuts to federal funding for charter schools, and the party began constructing a 2020 platform that would, for the first time, call for guardrails, accountability, and transparency for charters. At United Teachers Los Angeles’s (UTLA) leadership conference following its historic 99.9…