Hillary Clinton wades into the internal Democratic battle over public schools
By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post
November 11, 2015
Hillary Clinton long skirted the internal Democratic Party conflict over the best way to improve public schools. She avoided the fight between teachers unions, which want heavier investment and less blame for educators, and those who believe non-unionized charter schools should be expanded and teachers held accountable for student achievement.
But Clinton’s neutrality has started to fray.
By early October, she had pocketed presidential endorsements from both major teachers unions. Before she got the nod from the National Education Association, Clinton told a private gathering of NEA leaders she wanted the country’s largest union to be “at the table, literally and figuratively” as she formulates policy, according to excerpts published in an NEA publication.
At a town hall meeting in South Carolina on Sunday, Clinton was critical of public charter schools, saying “most” intentionally exclude or expel children who are difficult to educate.
“Most charter schools — I don’t want to say every one — but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them,” Clinton said in response to questions at an event hosted by the South Carolina Legislative Black Caucus.
By contrast, she said, traditional public schools do “thankfully, take everybody, and then they don’t get the resources or the help and support that they need to be able to take care of every child’s education.”
The remarks lit up the world of K-12 education policy, prompting outrage from organizations that have been fighting to expand charter schools as an alternative to traditional schools. Some alleged that the presidential hopeful is out of touch.
“That is absolutely false,” Jeanne Allen, the founder of the Center for Education Reform, said of Clinton’s claims about charters. “She sounds like an aloof, elite candidate from a bygone era, before ed reform was a reality.”
