Joe Biden is Not a Friend of Public Schools- but, he is not as bad as Trump
With Joe Biden one of only two leading candidates remaining in the Democratic primary, voters deserve to know the truth about his record on public education. Years of thwarting desegregation efforts, pushing privatization, and imposing high-stakes testing make it clear that Joe Biden cannot be trusted to defend our public schools.
As Delaware’s senator, Biden helped Republicans passGeorge W. Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which ushered in the punitive testing regime that so many teachers, parents, and students oppose today. Instead of addressing the glaring racial and economic barriers to educational achievement, NCLB made educators “accountable” for poor testing outcomes by laying them off and closing their schools.
As vice president, Biden spoke in favor of the so-called school reform agenda, which doubled down on NCLB’s draconian testing mandates and made federal funding contingent on states supporting charter schools — nearlydoubling charter enrollment from 2008 to 2016. Linking teachers’ pay and job stability to student test scores proved so destructive that the National Education Association called for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to resign, and parents, students, and teachers formed a movement to opt out of high-stakes testing.
When it comes to school privatization, Biden has been inconsistent at best. Though he has voted against vouchers for private schools, he did speak of them favorably in a 1997 floor speech. Under pressure from the growing nationwide Red for Ed movement, he acknowledged that charter schools take resources away from public schools. But unlike the plan being pushed by Senator Sanders — who was one of the few lawmakers to cast a courageous vote against NCLB — Biden’s education platform makes no mention of halting charter school expansion or curbing their excesses.
Biden’s record on school desegregation is particularly problematic. A leading anti-busing crusader, Biden said in a 1975interview that “[t]he real problem with busing is that you take [white] people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school.”
When Senator Kamala Harris at the July 2019 presidential debate called out Biden’s efforts to thwart desegregation, he refused to apologize — instead specifying that he just opposed “forced busing” (a term used by conservatives) by the Department of Education, an agency that has played a historic role in protecting students’ civil rights.
