The New York Times published an article by Dana Goldstein asserting that Democrats are divided about vouchers. Her evidence: Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the organization created by hedge fund managers to advocate for charter schools, for evaluation of teachers by their students’ test scores, for Teach for America, and for every other failed corporate reform idea, now, unsurprisingly, supports vouchers.
This is no surprise. DFER never represented parents, teachers, or students. They gained notoriety because they raised big dollars on Wall Street to persuade key politicians to join their campaign to undermine public schools. In D.C. and in state capitols, money rules.
Goldstein tells us that the teachers’ unions, the usual suspect, woo Democrats to support public schools, but that’s not entirely true.
Most people don’t want their public schools to be privatized. Most people don’t want public money to subsidize religious schools. The proof is there. Voucher referenda have been on state ballots numerous times since 1967, and the public has voted against them every time.
In the 2024 elections, vouchers were on the ballot in three states, and lost in all three states.
Now that a number of states have voucher programs that are well established, we know three things about them.
- Most students who get vouchers are already in private schools. Their parents are already paying private school tuition.
- As Josh Cowen demonstrates in his book “The Privateers,” the academic results of children who leave public schools to attend private schools are abysmal.
- Vouchers diminish the funding available for public schools, since the state takes on the responsibility of subsidizing tuition for students whose parents currently pay the bills.
DFER still has money but it has no constituency. The Democratic Party is not split. Its leaders know that the vast majority of students attend public schools, and those schools need help, not a diversion of funds to religious schools, private schools, and homeschools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Of course, “The NYT” would take this bait and act as though there is a rift in the democratic party. Democratic voucher supporters are more like a ripple than a rift. It is a handful of democrats that follow the money over the interests of their constituents. While there remains a political divide between corporate democrats and progressives, most democrats understand that expensive, unaccountable vouchers provide little public benefit, and they are largely a scheme to undermine and privatize public education, which is generally an unpopular position among democratic voters.
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I can think of many reasons for Democrats to oppose vouchers.
The only reason I can think of for Democrats to support vouchers would be if they got big campaign contributions to do so.
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Thank you for this well informed analysis of the problems in Goldstein’s article. And special thanks for mentioning that support for public schooling is broad and deep and not merely promoted by teachers’ unions. I am grateful myself for teachers’ faithful support of the institutions where they devote enormous energy to form our children.
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It’s dumb and lazy reporting that reverts to the trope that an education policy hasn’t been adopted solely b/c its opposed by the union. Moreover, DFER has been shrinking and barely registers in NY where it was first started by Wall St. investor Whitney Tilson who said he created it as an “Inside Game” on the Democrats. See his quote in the documentary about this: “A Right Denied” https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/03/who-put-d-in-dfer.html and http://www.arightdenied.org/
“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”
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Sorry the documentary about DFER called “A Right Denied” with that quote from Tilson is posted here: https://vimeo.com/45331195
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That article by Goldstein is typical of how Democrats are self-delusional, ignoring the evidence that many prominent Democratic politicians favor charter schools.
And the most prominent Democratic champion of charter schools is Barack Obama.
Remember: DFER poured money into Obama’s Senate campaign, and then after they had him hooked, they reeled him in. Obama even served as the keynote speaker at DFER’s founding dinner.
The billionaire hedge fund managers behind DFER poured much more money into Obama’s presidential campaign because he was “their man” who would deliver for them. And Obama certainly “delivered” when he won the presidency: First thing, he installed DFER’s Arne Duncan as his Secretary of Education.
Duncan set about presiding over the greatest expansion ever of charter schools throughout our nation, with Obama’s blessing and to DFER’s glee.
One of DFER’s clearly-stated goals is “to end the strangle-hold that teachers unions have over education”, and Obama, who had pledged during his campaign to promote unions, spit out his pledge and began undermining unions as soon as he took office. In February 2010, shortly after Obama moved into the White House, when Central Falls School District in Providence announced the firing of all 74 teachers from Central Falls High School, the Central Falls Teachers Union turned to President Obama for help.
But instead of helping the teachers, Obama joined the attack on teachers, saying: “If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability.” Obama went on to compare the “failure” of Central Falls to the “success” of the Met Charter School in Providence — but Obama somehow conveniently “forgot” to mention that the Met’s test scores were actually lower than those of Central Falls on the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) tests.
Obama made a faustian deal long ago with DFER — and Obama’s soul remains today in DFER’s pocket when it comes to public versus charter schools.
And — can you believe it? — the Democratic Party is today looking at charter school champion Arne Duncan as a possible Democratic Party presidential candidate.
So, not only are Obama and Obama’s supporters still as pro-charter school as ever, the Democratic Party leadership is perfectly willing to make pro-charter school champion Arne Duncan the Party’s next presidential candidate.
BOTTOM LINE: Any Democrat who thinks that the Democratic Party isn’t perfectly willing to sell out public schools is delusional.
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Like Cuomo, Obama was dependent on Wall Street fat cats. No one can take Arne seriously except a NY times reporter.
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https://mailchi.mp/7f038637c369/shocking
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I read Dana Goldstein’s article 3 times searching for the reason she felt so certain that Democrats were “fighting viciously among themselves” about vouchers.
But she didn’t bother to provide any credible evidence to support a totally suspect narrative that she presents as if it was indisputable fact. Not one single Democratic leader – not one single Democratic politician who is barely known! – actually says they support vouchers or DFER. Even Josh Shapiro, who is less pro-voucher than he was in the past, is non-committal. So instead we have…Arne Duncan?? A man who was equally hated by both Dems and Republican voters and has been irrelevant since 2017?? And a former Mayor of Providence who is paid to be the DFER shill? Where are all the Dems “fighting viciously” that Dana Goldstein informs us is happening? I guess we will have to take her word for it.
There did seem to be a news story in the article Dana Goldstein wrote but she missed it and instead wrote a text book journalism case study of what happens when a reporter accepts without question the narrative that a rich or powerful person hands them, instead of acting like a journalist and investigating whether the reality and the evidence supports the narrative. The entire article is a manufactured narrative with quotes from people who repeat the narrative and a single quote from a “union leader” so the reporter can tell themselves they are being “fair and balanced”. The entire “Dems fighting viciously among themselves” premise of the article is absurdly unsupported by any facts in the article!
What the article does suggest is an entirely different reality – that the “vicious fighting” is only happening in the right wing billionaire funded pro-privatization/anti-public school DFER movement! With one side entirely embracing an anti-public school voucher movement that even Republican voters don’t like, and the other side still wanting the right wing anti-public school billionaires’ money but now worried about how toxic the pro-voucher movement is with both Dems and Republicans – so toxic that they don’t want to be associated with DFER anymore.
DFER in disarray!!!
DFER viciously fighting amongst itself because their anti-public school brand is now so toxic.
But that story doesn’t fit the narrative that hurts Dems, so it’s not newsworthy. Instead the NYT publishes articles like this one.
What makes this kind of reporting so loathsome to me is that it works. It works to get Democrats angry at their own leaders for supposedly abandoning public education because they supposedly listen to their right wing billionaire overlords and want vouchers and will abandon public schools. And it blatantly legitimizes the narrative that Republican voters believe – that Democrats do not care about public schools and do not care about the students in them and they support public schools only because they are a jobs program for the teachers union whose marching orders they follow. Dems can’t win because whatever they support is suspect. Only DFER folks take positions “for the kids”.
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NYCPSP, an excellent critical analysis of a fake article.
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