jeff Bryant describes the battle among Democrats over the future of education, a split well known to readers of this blog.

“The “big economic fight” in the Democratic Party that news outlets are reporting isn’t confined to economics.”

At this moment, the populist wing of the party is in the ascendancy. The party has moved left, both because of the failure of the centrist policies and the challenge from Bernie Sanders.

The policies of the New Democrats of 1992 don’t sound new anymore. And centrist Democrats sound “panicky.”

The centrist New Democrats faction of the party pushed the corporation- and billionaire-friendly bipartisan agenda that embraced “the magic of the market”, outsourced jobs through corporate giveaways like “free trade”, promoted fiscal austerity, pledged to be tough-on-crime, and vowed to make any recipients of government funds more accountable (“welfare reform”). Followers of this philosophy scorned labor unions and heralded the end of the “era of big government.”

“But New Democrat bipartisanship has not been confined to economics. The same big money, Wall Street-connected actors behind this bipartisan agenda for the economy have dominated education policy since the 1990s too.

The Disastrous Bipartisan Education Agenda

With a bipartisan agenda in charge of education, devotion to “the market” unleashed more charter schools, and corporate- friendly outsourcing increasingly sent education jobs and services to private contractors such as Teach for America. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s term for financial austerity in our schools was “the new normal”. Tough-on-crime policies in the streets were translated to “no excuse” and “zero tolerance” policies in classrooms. And “welfare reform” for the poor became “education reform” for public schools that demanded those institutions prove their “accountability” with a never-ending avalanche of standardized tests.

But just as corporate-friendly policies for the economy [faltered,] they were a bust on all fronts for education too….

Now, the conventional wisdom supporting the market competition of charter schools is being questioned as well, this time from the most unlikely source – presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

What Hillary Said

At a town hall held in South Carolina, broadcast by C-Span, Clinton responded to a question about charter schools by saying:

‘I have for many years now, about thirty years, supported the idea of charter schools, but not as a substitute for the public schools, but as a supplement for the public schools. … The original idea behind the charter schools was to learn what worked and then apply them in the public schools. And here’s a couple of problems. 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. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation, because they 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….’

Nevertheless, what’s telling about the incident is how it has sent New Democrat charter proponents into fits of handwringing.

When Democrats Sound Like Republicans

That same Ed Week post quotes the leader of Democrats for Education Reform – a New Democrat organization if there ever was one – calling “Clinton’s comments ‘highly disappointing’” He worries her remarks bolstered “fears about how her endorsements from both major teachers unions would affect her K-12 platform….”

“We’re very troubled and concerned,” the Post reporter quotes another Democrats for Education Reform official saying. “We don’t want any sort of slowdown on the Obama legacy of expanding high-quality charter seats.”

These reactions to Clinton’s comments from supposed Democrats are strikingly similar to the response of the ultra-conservative Republican-leaning Wall Street Journal. The editors of that news outlet say Clinton’s remark about charter schools “suggests her Education Department would be a wholly owned union subsidiary.” The editors opine, ” If Mrs. Clinton had looked at the evidence, she’d have seen a different story about charters.”

We know, however, that politics in America rarely revolves around evidence. If the argument for charters were based purely on evidence, the spread of these institutions would have been questioned a long time ago instead of promoted as quick cures for struggling schools….

Regardless of how you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with one side or the other in the debate over the alleged superiority of charter schools, two definitive conclusions seem pretty certain: If there are benefits to expanding charter schools, they are torturously complicated to prove, likely not all that much, and mostly discernable through a very poor and narrow-minded measure – scores on standardized tests.

We also know that expansions of charter schools come with very certain costs to existing public schools. As Weber explains in part six of the exchange, “High quality research shows that charter schools have a negative effect on the budgets of their hosting [district] schools. This makes sense, as charters are redundant systems of school administration, and do not allow districts to fully leverage economies of scale. In other words: When every charter school has its own high-paid superintendent and administrative staff, that’s inefficient. And we have more and more evidence that is the price to be paid for ‘choice’. I’d rather see money go into the classroom.”

Yet, very few politicians will wade this deeply into the swamp of the charter school debate. Anecdotes from the New York Times that show charter schools gain their advantages by skimming the cream of the very best students in a given population will always be more politically impactful than research proving they do.

Also, accusing Clinton of selling out to teachers’ unions is laughable. Wall Street and the wealthy foundations that back the education reform agenda have way more money than poorly paid teachers have.

What’s far more likely instead is that the fading promises the New Democrats made for education are coming face to face with the reality of a new and different Democratic Party with much more populist-driven ideas about education policy. And right now, it looks like the populist side is winning.