George Will’s latest Washington Post column takes aim at President Biden’s new plan to make it nearly impossible for charter schools across the country to operate successfully, a helping hand to teachers’ unions everywhere. As Will points out, nearly 100 percent of the American Federation of Teachers’ campaign contributions pour into Democratic coffers each election cycle, and Biden is poised to repay the favor.
Opponents of charter schools often claim that these institutions divert funding from public schools. This simply isn’t the case. Nevertheless, Will notes, “teachers unions generally oppose them because charters expand parents’ choices, thereby infusing into public education something teachers unions dread: competition.”
He goes on to highlight several of the rules the Biden administration has proposed, most of which would make it more difficult for charter schools to continue obtaining federal funding to support their work:
A charter must serve a “diverse” population. This could disqualify a school that serves, as many charters do, non-diverse — that is, non-White — inner-city populations.
A charter must prepare a “community impact analysis” demonstrating that there is an “unmet demand” for it. Such a demonstration must be evidence of “over-enrollment of existing public schools,” not long waiting lists for admission to charters by parents dismayed by public schools whose dismal performance has produced under-enrollment because of parental flight.
Charters must supply plans for “racially and socio-economically diverse” staff, effectively a mandate for a racial spoils system. Charters must drown themselves in paperwork not required of traditional public schools — detailed reports on purchases of goods and services from for-profit companies.
Biden’s handmaidens of the AFT and other teachers unions say a charter should “collaborate with at least one traditional public school” and provide a letter from each such “partnering” school attesting to each partner’s “commitment” to the “collaboration.” This salad of weasel words requires charters to get permission from schools with which the charters would compete.
In other words, charter schools must do all sorts of things that charter schools intentionally avoid doing as part of their model of education, and the rules evidently obstruct them from operating in a way that allows real competition. In service to its symbiotic relationship with the teachers’ union, the Democratic Party continues to go all-in on its anti–school choice crusade, a recipe for electoral disaster.