Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on Real Clear Education on May 01, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Early in my tenure at the education policy organization I founded, we barely had any money. No money meant no lobbyist, which left me, a complete stranger to the legislative process, to figure out how to pass meaningful policy.
A conversation I had with a Democratic legislator seen as an up-and-coming leader stands out among the blur of memories. He agreed to meet me at a local sandwich shop in downtown Jackson after I kept showing up at the Capitol, bright-eyed and brimming with optimism that Mississippi could, in fact, improve its public schools. I admit to feeling a little defeated that day after yet another uninspiring and unproductive education committee meeting, and I complained about it to him.
“Why don’t the Democrats seem to have any vision for education?” I asked in frustration. “Saying ‘no’ to everything the Republicans pose isn’t an agenda.”
“We’re the minority party,” he shot back. “It’s not our job to have a vision.”
I sat back in the chair, stunned, and thought to myself, “And that is exactly why you’ll always be the minority party.”
Sixteen years later, I have to wonder if the Democratic Party nationally is heading for the same fate. Increasingly, the Democrats are less the party of education and more the party of education insiders, not children and families. Much like my own state party, Democrats nationally don’t have a coherent and compelling vision for American public education. As Senator Bennet of Colorado said recently at the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Directions for Democrats convening in Denver, “We are running a 17th-century system of education in America, and the American people deserve to have a 21st-century system of education so their kids can compete in this world, and they can’t with the system that we have. The Democratic Party has no education policy. … Where is our agenda to reform the education system for the American people? We have none.”
[Related: Public Universities Should Serve Citizens—The In-State Enrollment Act Enforces It]
Senator Bennet is right on point. Despite being a seasoned education policy expert, I had to go find the Democrats’ party platform to know what is in it—long on recent federal investments and “wraparound” supports, short on teaching and learning. What’s perhaps more telling is what wasn’t in it: no acknowledgment that America’s schools are in trouble, and no clear through-line about what kind of education all these investments ultimately yield. What are families who feel let down by the education their children are getting supposed to make of this?
Aside from some very unpredictable capitalization, I knew exactly what would be in the Republicans’ platform before I read it. True, there is even less about teaching and learning in their emphatic prose, but it nonetheless sets a goal for education—jobs—and articulates problems and solutions—woke = bad, federal role in education = worse, private school choice = The Answer. A ground-breaking or inspiring vision, it is not, but it is a simple one—if you’re unhappy with what educational opportunities your community offers—Woke! Violence! Heathens!—you can choose something different. While it promises families an escape, it also excuses the party from any responsibility of making sure every child has access to great public schools. Its strength as a talking point is also its greatest weakness.
And herein lies the problem. The Republican platform stinks, and yet the Democrats can’t seem to fill the void with all their wordy paragraphs in a document that very few people read, and no one is talking about.
[Related: Think Twice Before Attacking the Department of Education]
The Democrats need a new vision for education that speaks to the world our children must navigate to become successful adults. That vision needs to be rooted in the business of schools—learning—and be flexible enough that every family can see their place in it. When a child graduates high school from public school in the United States of America, what does their education promise them? For the last two decades, I have fought to ensure that a Mississippi high school diploma means that students will know how to read and do math at a level that prepares them for their next step in life and that they have enough knowledge of American history to become voting citizens of this country. If their local high school is a bad fit for their child or unable to offer enough opportunities, the public system should provide families with choice, whether through a charter school or magnet school, dual enrollment or dual credit with local colleges, or virtual course choice statewide. These expectations may seem basic, but right now, too many American families cannot know with any certainty that their public schools will fulfill these promises, and Democrats are not speaking to that problem.
Certainly, there are Democrats who speak passionately and knowledgeably about how to improve public education, and it comes as no surprise that, by and large, these Democrats hold or have held positions of leadership in states where the majority of education policymaking takes place. Take Senator Bennet, for example, who served as Superintendent of Denver Public Schools during an era of progress before he became a U.S. Senator. Colorado also boasts another leading light in Governor Jared Polis, who stated at the PPI convening, “Our goal is that every student graduates, not just with a diploma, but with a meaningful certification and a skill that helps them get a job or go to college.”
Both of these Democratic leaders understand what should be a guiding principle: fundamentally, education policy is about hope for the future of our children, ourselves, and our country. It affects nearly 50 million children annually, and they live in every corner of the nation. If Democrats are not talking about education, they’re not talking to America’s families, and that’s something the Republicans figured out in the last decade. Democrats, how much longer are you going to sit on the sidelines?
Cover designed by Jared Gould using “Symbols of Democrat and Republican parties cut out of paper” by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
“When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”
— Al Shanker, American Federation of Teachers (AFT)
The problem is the influence that the AFT and NEA have with the Dems….