Schools Should Serve Humans, Not “The Economy”
Bernie Sanders’s education policies are the most progressive of any 2020 candidate. But his platform must reject the pro-business language of “competitiveness” to truly transform the education system.
It’s no stretch to say that Bernie Sanders’s platform is by far “the most progressive” and equitable public education agenda we’ve seen from any nationally known politician, including all the other Democrats vying for their party’s presidential nomination.
Sanders’s agenda stands out for its repudiation of the bipartisan neoliberal agenda, advanced by successive Republican and Democratic administrations since George W. Bush. It contains a comprehensive list of elements needed to create a system of quality public education: halting funding to for-profit charter schools; supporting desegregation measures; imposing a moratorium on new charter schools and regulating those that exist; equalizing and increasing federal funding for schools, including scrutinizing the use of the property tax (which reinforces segregation of schools by race and class); making school meals free and universal; investing in community schools and after-school and summer programs; and supporting increased special education funding.
With a nod to a key demand in the teacher walkouts and strikes in what is known as the #RedForEd movement, Sanders now has a plan, as did Kamala Harris (who beat him to the finish line on this issue), for increasing teacher salaries (and wooing teachers unions, perhaps?).
While Sanders hasn’t supported the movement for reparations, his decision to name his education platform the “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education” signals its intent to address this country’s failure to address systemic racism: what researcher Gloria Ladson Billings has called the “education debt” to African Americans, the historic, economic, social, political, and moral imperatives to correct the legacy of slavery.
With these policies Sanders has broken with the legislation adopted by Democrats and the GOP in the past thirty years. However, the platform accepts, indeed frames the proposals, with the same economic CONTINUE READING: Schools Should Serve Humans, Not “The Economy”
