President Joe Biden’s proposed regulatory change to restrict charter schools is now receiving even more well-deserved pushback — not just from conservatives but from the prominent center-left of the political spectrum.
Biden should start heeding the warnings, which now include a forceful one from former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
In earlier articles, this paper editorialized and I opined that the Biden proposal would hurt the neediest children. A week after that, Democratic former U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who featured prominently in both those pieces, joined an essay with Republican former U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida to make the bipartisan case against Biden’s suggested rules change.
“The changes put the financial interests of school districts above students’ needs,” they wrote, “and ignore the demand from families to create more pathways for public education.”
The new entry in the pro-charter conversation, though, comes from Bloomberg, the former three-term mayor with the clout of a $70 billion net worth plus the massive forum of the eponymous Bloomberg News. His contentions, calling Biden’s proposal “bad politics and even worse policy,” are worth close attention.
“The draft rule would reverse the progress of the $440 million federal charter-school program — championed by President Barack Obama — that helped so many children and educators succeed,” Bloomberg wrote late last week. “This is especially disturbing given the impressive track record of urban charter schools in low-income communities.”
Then, Bloomberg got to specifics.
“The draft rule would [reverse the progress], in part, by requiring educators and communities to essentially prove that local public schools are over-enrolled, regardless of whether those schools are failing, or whether parents and children are demanding other options,” he wrote. “It’s akin to the federal government refusing to fund affordable housing in communities with dilapidated and derelict apartment buildings, simply because vacancies exist in those buildings. Children should not be shoved into failing schools any more than people should be shoved into unsafe housing.”
Bloomberg noted that parents love charter schools, which are publicly funded but operated apart from many of the centralized, bureaucratic strictures of ordinary public school systems.
“During the first year of the pandemic, charter-school enrollment rose by 7% — around 240,000 new students — while enrollment in traditional district schools fell,” he wrote. “The message couldn’t be clearer: Parents want better options for their kids. There simply isn’t enough supply to meet demand — and the new regulations will worsen the imbalance.”
And, he said, this comes on top of the federal government already underfunding charter schools, with Congress recently appropriating about the same amount of raw dollars for charters as it did four years ago — even though inflation has devalued those dollars and as charter school enrollment rose by 13% during that interim.
Together, the Biden proposal and the underfunding likely will create what Bloomberg calls “a tragedy.” So, he writes, the administration “should move swiftly” to reverse its plans and thus “prevent [the tragedy] from happening.”
For good reason, parents nationwide already are revolting against left-wing mandates, left-wing indoctrination, and left-wing attempts to shut down their voices about their own children’s educations. The last thing Biden should do is restrict parental choice even further, thus rightly enraging them all the more.
