Peter Greene notes the terrible pickle that the “reformers” are in. They were trying so hard to prove their bona fides as leaders of the “civil rights movement of our time,” trying so hard to claim that they really were pushing school choice “for the kids,” trying so hard to call themselves progressives…and Donald Trump, the arch reactionary, has embraced their cause. The hedge fund managers, the billionaires, and the corporate titans pushed charters and school choice, and Donald Trump wants charters and school choice too! He goes a step further, and he wants vouchers too.

Peter Greene calls the current state of affairs the “Faux Progressive Polka.”

Their dilemma is laid bare: Real progressives support public schools, not school choice. School choice was the battle cry of the segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s, and today school choice is promoting greater resegregation and at the same time, defunding public schools that serve all children. The voters in Massachusetts saw through the facade. The NAACP saw through it too.

Now Trump’s embrace makes it harder for the Wall Street crowd and the billionaires to pretend to be progressives. They aren’t and they never were.

To understand Greene’s argument, you must first read Rick Hess’s post-election article, in which he claimed that education is so far to the left that it can’t begin to understand the right. He had an audacious analysis of what he calls the split among Democrats about education:

Hess writes:

One of the reasons that right-left differences get ignored is that people in and around education think they have the whole spectrum covered: there is, after all, the fierce conflict between the “reform” camp and the union-establishment. What usually gets missed, however, is that for the past decade, this clash has primarily existed between two wings of the Democratic Party. The “reformers” have mostly been passionate, Great Society liberals who believe in closing “achievement gaps” and pursuing “equity” via charter schooling, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and test-based accountability. And their opponents have been the Democratic Party’s more traditional, New Deal wing.

Greene writes:

If reformsters are Great Society Liberals, I am the Queen of Rumania. He is not the Queen of Rumania.

Some of us, like Greene and me, have called out the “reform” movement as a mighty hoax, a pretense of liberalism powered by billionaires, financiers, and rightwing think tanks. The same phony lingo about “closing achievement gaps” and “equity” has been used by rightwing governors, as they replace public schools with charter schools and vouchers. Ideologically, it is hard to decipher the “sides,” but one thing I can say with certainty is that the effort to privatize public education and eliminate teacher unions is not a project of Great Society liberals.

Greene continues:

But now everybody has to confront a grim reality– Donald J. Trump thinks charters and choice are awesome and the Common Core sucks (though he doesn’t really understand it). What’s a DFER to do? On the one hand, they are trying to look like Democrats. On the other hand, they agree with every dot and tittle of Trump’s likely ed policy.

What they face is a unique and striking dilemma. Under Trump, they can have every policy they ever wanted, save Common Core. But they can only have the policies bare and stripped of any pretense. DFER and Jeanne Allen’s Center for Education Reform can have almost everything they want, but they can only have it in a Trump-tied bow. They can only have their policies by admitting that their policies are not progressive at all (and by admitting they’re totally okay with Trumpian awfulness as long as they get choice and charters). They can only oppose Herr Trump by disowning their own policies. Or they can dance around in a faux progressive polka, doing their best to respond to the music they never asked for, but which is everything they want. For grifters like She Who Will Not Be Named (formerly of DC schools) this is just a practical problem of angling for success; for sincere reformsters (yes, I believe such things exist), it’s a real moral dilemma.