The Education Wars

While the rebuke of conservative school board candidates was the big local election story, the attempted comeback by education reform candidates–pro charter school, anti teachers union, pro accountability–deserves some attention too. Take Denver, for example, where 11 candidates were vying for four seats on the seven-member school board. The contest had a decided throwback air to it, with the same dark money groups that have devoted millions to the cause of ‘portfolioizing’ urban school districts, making another run. But as voters seemed to have noticed, it’s not 2015 anymore, or even 2023. Dark money, particularly the kind linked to billionaires, is a growing turn off for voters, and at a time when the Trump Administration is gunning for public schools, including those in Denver, the sales pitch for education reform is falling flat. As one of the winning candidates explained to Chalkbeat, the election results reflected the ‘state of the world.’ “People don’t have food right now. They’ve seen so much on a global and federal level and they’re worried about their kids. They know they can trust teachers.”

As for the smart kid chorus that Dems must embrace school choice in order to be competitive at the polls, we got a real-life test of that claim too, as GOP candidates in both Virginia and New Jersey ran as supporters of vouchers. Jack Ciatterelli’s plan to fix New Jersey’s education system included making it more like Mississippi and Florida. In fact, all sorts of claims that we’ve heard repeatedly over the last few years came up short at the polls. Barely had Ezra Klein put the finishing touches on his latest 25K word column for the NYT, pronouncing that Democrats had moved left on education and lost ground with Asian American voters as a result when Asian American voters turned out to be Mamdani’s single largest block of voters.