Bernie Should Oppose Nonprofit Charter Schools, Too
MATHILDE LIND GUSTAVUSSEN
By calling for a ban on for-profit charter schools, Bernie Sanders has gone further than any other candidate to confront the privatization of our schools. But we can’t fully defend public schools if we let nonprofit charters off the hook.
As the Democratic Party gears up for the 2020 election, Bernie Sanders has pushed the primary to focus on ambitious, progressive policy proposals: universal health care, the Green New Deal, debt-free college, a millionaire’s tax, and more. Conspicuously absent from the conversation, however, has been the issue of K-12 public education. Apart from Kamala Harris’s promise to increase teacher pay and Bernie Sanders’s recent proposal to ban for-profit charter schools and pause funding of new nonprofit charters awaiting an accountability review, Democrats have shied away from formulating substantive K-12 education policies.
Sanders’s K-12 proposal is the most in line with the mood among educators. Pushback to charter schools is growing, and teacher-led protests and student walkouts are spreading across the country. A central demand of the Los Angeles teachers’ strike in January of 2019, for example, was to impose a cap on charter schools. Many of their other demands addressed the wide-ranging consequences of neoliberal education reform: collective bargaining rights, a salary increase, a cap on class sizes, less standardized testing, and improved social services at the city’s public schools. Yet the strike also revealed how Democratic candidates have avoided formulating a substantive position on charter schools. While many of the candidates expressed support for Los Angeles teachers during the week-long strike, none of them acknowledged the anti-charter stance underlying the teachers’ demands.
Until Sanders’s recent announcement, no national figure on the American left had taken a stand against education privatization, even as presidential candidates are vying to be seen as the most “progressive.”
Yet by limiting his critique to for-profit charter schools, Sanders’s policy fails to get to the root of the issue. The mere existence of publicly funded, privately administered charter schools — be they nonprofit or for-profit — is incompatible with the idea of a healthy public education system and with education equity. To remedy the sustained damage caused by decades of charter-school reform, the Left needs to CONTINUE READING: Bernie Should Oppose Nonprofit Charter Schools, Too