Democrats Tout Ed Reform While Trapping Kids In Failing Schools

On Monday night, delegates of the 2024 Democratic National Convention voted to approve the Democrat Party’s 2024 national platform, with a stand-alone section dedicated to education policy: “Providing a World-Class Education in Every Zip Code.”

The title is ironic given that the platform opposes school choice, the one policy that allows students regardless of ZIP code to get the education they deserve. Opposition to school choice is not an isolated policy, however; the platform conflates public schools with all education and assumes that the only way to improve education in this country is to throw more funding at public schools rather than find different avenues that allow students, teachers, and communities to thrive.

“For too long,” the platform states, “we have short-changed our children by underinvesting in our nation’s public schools and in our higher education system.” One problem: There is no evidence suggesting that U.S. schools are in any way underfunded, despite the persistence of the myth that they are.

As of July 2024, per the Education Data Initiative, American schools spend an average of $17,280 per student per year, which amounts to $857.2 billion a year in total spending. For context, the average U.S. private school tuition in 2024 was just $12,832 per year.

If public schools are spending far more per student than private schools are, how can they be underfunded? If more funding were the answer, why would test scores have stayed flat or even dropped over the last two decades as inflation-adjusted spending has doubled? Democrat vice presidential candidate Tim Walz knows something about this; in his state of Minnesota, elementary test scores dropped below the national average for the first time in decades in 2022 despite the Walz administration having thrown more state funding at public schools.

Voucher programs don’t reduce education spending. Instead, they reallocate the funds taxpayers contribute to a child’s education so that it follows the student, rather than the school system. Yet the Democrat platform opposes this solution, claiming that “private school vouchers and other policies … divert taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system” without acknowledging that the student retains the funds and is just using them in a way her parents decide is best for her education.

According to the Democrat platform, it is public school systems that deserve taxpayer funding rather than students. Indeed, Democrats and teachers unions often seem to see the primary purpose of our K-12 public school system as a jobs program for unionized workers, rather than as serving students and families. 

The platform also specifically mentions opposing “the program at issue in the recent Espinoza decision.” The reference is to Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue (2020), a landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled publicly funded school voucher programs could not discriminate against private religious schools.

I should note that the Montana voucher program up for debate in the case was designed for low-income students. This means, effectively, that in the name of protecting public education, the Democrat platform seeks to rob the most vulnerable families of choosing where to send their children to school — and of the religious freedom the Espinoza decision protects — all while wealthier families can send their children wherever they wish. This clearly contradicts the platform’s supposed opposition to “inequitable treatment for students in low-income school districts.”

For Democrats, more money, not reforming our obviously failing approach to K-12 education, is always the answer. And it’s not just to public school systems that the Democrat Party wants to give even more money. The federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is also on the Democrats’ list of bureaucracies that ostensibly need more funding. This is the same Office of Civil Rights that oversees the enforcement of Title IX, a law that was designed to protect students and staff in educational institutions from sex-based discrimination.

Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has unlawfully rewritten Title IX to repurpose this act to equate “gender identity” with sex — therefore undermining the very concept of girls as a distinct category — and to gut due process protections from sexual harassment adjudication. Although the Biden-Harris rewrite faces many legal challenges and injunctions, it is telling that the Democrat Party wants to direct funding toward the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in the name of promoting so-called equity when, in reality, that federal funding would most likely go to increase the left-wing politicization of U.S. educational bureaucracies.

All of this goes to show that the Democrat Party’s education agenda, as approved in their party platform, is ultimately incoherent and works against what it claims to care about most. In theory, the Democrat platform supports students getting a solid education independent of their ZIP code and for low-income students receiving equal treatment. But in practice, by opposing school choice and promoting mindless, unaccountable funding to already failing school systems, the platform values systems over students and kills educational freedom.

Neeraja Deshpande is the Education Freedom Center engagement coordinator at Independent Women’s Forum (iwf.org).