The 2024 choice on education: Trump sides with families, Harris with the teacher unions

Of all the policy issues where the choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is stark, perhaps the most surprising is education: He’s all-in for parental choice; she’s committed to serving the interests of the teachers unions.

And polling shows a majority of Americans are on his side, after decades when the Democratic had a strong edge on education.

But the pandemic was a huge eye-opener for millions of us: Not only did we see the unions and their office-holding pawns vociferously demand to keep schools closed as fully and as long as possible — long after all the science showed that it posed zero risk of spreading COVID — the “remote learning” offered in the place of real schooling gave us a window on what our public schools were teaching.

Strong supporters of public education in the abstract saw how badly it served their own children, as so many teachers didn’t even try to actually teach online.

The bitter result: US kids lag their peers around the world.

On the 2022 math exams by the Program for International Student Assessment, for example, American 15-year-olds ranked 28th out of 37 industrialized (OECD) nations, even though we spend far more per-pupil than peer countries.

To be clear: Public schools still host lots of dedicated educators — but also far too many who are only in it for the paycheck and the benefits. Thanks to union power, it’s near-impossible to fire even terrible teachers.

Their eyes opened, hundreds of thousands of families did what was best for their kids, and chose something else — a public charter school, a private school (including Catholic and other faith-based institutions) or even home-schooling.

From the 2019-20 school year to 2021-2, US public-school enrollment fell from 50.8 million to 49.4 million — even though that includes public charter schools, which saw an increase.

Meanwhile, private school enrollment rose from 4.65 million to 4.73 million.

NY Post composite

The exodus would be far larger, but many families lack the means to flee the “free” public system.

And in states like New York, teacher-union power stops charter schools from growing to meet the demand for public schools that work because the unions don’t control them. 

It doesn’t help that the unions are firmly allied with progressives who push extremist Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies — racially divisive nonsense that treats traits like “showing up on time” as tools of White Supremacy.

Nor that this alliance despises standardized testing — the chief measure for parents to know how well their children are really learning.

It’s also how we all know that pandemic school shutdowns cost the nation’s children years of progress in math and English — and that’s on average.

But for the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the only things that matter are their union members’ pay and perks: For all their claims to care about the kids, AFT chief Randi Weingarten proved otherwise during COVID by using her pull with the Biden-Harris administration to overrule health officials and issue absurdly stringent guidelines for “safely” reopening schools.

Even as most schools across the Western world never closed, or reopened after just a few months — with zero health impact. (And don’t get us started on the mad masking mandates.)

Of course, it wasn’t just the feds: Teacher unions are also a huge political force in many states and cities — and union power was the main factor determining how long public schools stayed closed all across America.

Trump, to be clear, is a longtime school-choice fan: That’s why he chose Betsy DeVos, a huge choice backer, as his first-term secretary of education.

And Harris, a devoted California progressive, is a lockstep teacher-union ally: Weingarten is out campaigning furiously for her even now; the NEA and her AFT have supported and donated to Democrats overwhelmingly (more than 10-1) for decades now.

This year’s Democratic platform firmly opposes school choice.

That’s a shift for the worse, incidentally: To his great credit, President Barack Obama supported choice in the form of public charter schools, despite bitter union opposition.

And here’s a note for those self-declared “true conservatives” who pooh-pooh Trump: He’s the first presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan to say he means to shut down the federal Department of Education, which has been a force for union power (and little else) ever since President Jimmy Carter created it in 1980 to repay the AFT and NEA for their support.

Not that Trump means to end federal support for education: Indeed, he’s come out for the Educational Choice for Children Act, a bill to set up a nationwide school-choice plan that would be neither run nor regulated by the federal DOE.

(Ensuring that bill makes it to his desk, by the way, is another reason to vote Republican in congressional races.)

The unions and their allies insist school choice will destroy public education, but the reverse is true: It’s the best hope to save the public schools, by forcing them to up their game to compete with other options.  

Consider Florida, which launched its school-choice tax-credit scholarship program back in 2001: Nearly half a million kids have benefited since, even as the state as added other school-choice options.

Over those decades, Florida’s education system has climbed to the top of the national rankings — despite spending 27% below the national per-student average.

New York state spends more than twice the national average, yet lingers in mediocrity.

Schools, especially public schools, shouldn’t be a jobs program for adults, but that’s how the unions and the Democrats see them.

For decades, that alliance has gotten away with pretending to care about the children — but now the mask is off.

Voters’ choice on education is clear: Trump wants change for the better; Harris is just a tool of the failed status quo.