CURMUDGUCATION: The Biden Education Red Flags

CURMUDGUCATION: The Biden Education Red Flags

The Biden Education Red Flags

Before I get started here, let me be clear about one thing--it is almost impossible to imagine a candidate worse for public education than Donald Trump. His "polan" for education has only two items-- school choice (via vouchers) for everyone, and make every school teach American exceptionalism, which, given his recent assaults on the 1619 project and diversity training, appears to mean getting back to the white-centric education that gramps enjoyed as a boy. Plus you've got Betsy DeVos, who is twelve kinds of awful when it comes to public education, which she seems to pretty much hate and wants to get rid of.

So just to be clear-- there's no universe in which Donald Trump is a better choice for public education.

Now, let's look at what we've been hearing from the Biden campaign.

First of all, you may remember that something called the Unity Committee drafted up some platformy ideas by smushing the Biden and Sanders campaigns together. That resulted in an education platform that repudiated the private profit motive in education and called for tighter charter controls. They also promised to "end the use of high stakes tests"--well, they promised to "work" to do that, and then blah blah blah multiple and holistic measures. It was weak sauce, but it was something.

That language has disappeared entirely from the Biden platform on K-12 education. The words "charter" and "profit" don't even appear on the page.

Then there's this piece from yesterday's the74, profiling "Biden's most important staffer you've never CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The Biden Education Red Flags