Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited Harvard University’s Institute of Politics to discuss her school choice agenda. Students in the audience interrupted her several times; some even held up a sign accusing her of being a “white supremacist.”
The irony, of course, is twofold. One, the subject of DeVos’s Harvard address—school choice—is a policy that offers low-income students of color a respite from the hopelessness of the failing traditional public school systems in many cities. Two, DeVos’s recent major policy accomplishment was rescinding the Obama administration’s infamous Title IX “dear colleague” letter, a move that will restore a modicum of fairness to campus sexual harassment trials—trials that disproportionately disadvantage male students of color.
This makes DeVos a “white supremacist”? Please.
Regardless of what liberal activist groups like the NAACP think of them, school choice reforms have a proven track record of providing opportunities for poor and minority children that are often—not always, mind you, but often—better than the alternative. Charter schools are despised by the left because they threaten one of the Democratic Party’s most influential bases of power: teachers unions.