Jorge Elorza is chief executive of Democrats for Education Reform. He served as the Democratic mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, from 2015 to 2023. Ben Austin worked in the Office of Presidential Advance for the Clinton administration and is executive director of Education Civil Rights Now.
Not too long ago, Democrats were the party of change. Today, they have become small-c conservatives, more intent on defending the past than building the future.
Over the last decade, Republicans have transformed their party. They abandoned long-standing orthodoxies, embraced populism and aligned themselves with the country’s anti-institutional mood. The shift has been chaotic, destructive and often cruel. But they recognized the moment and changed.
Democrats, meanwhile, have remained tethered to institutions, frameworks and assumptions from a political era that is disappearing. If they don’t adapt, they risk becoming the minority party in a political order they had little role in shaping.
K-12 education might not be the first issue that comes to mind when diagnosing Democratic drift, but if you want to understand how Democrats went from the party of reform to defenders of the status quo, start with public schools.
Since the Obama presidency, Democrats have offered little on education policy beyond calls for more funding — even as evidence of failure mounted. Reading and math scores have fallen sharply. Achievement gaps have widened, and chronic absenteeism has surged. Yet the party has defaulted to defending an increasingly indefensible status quo.
Democrats talk about equity while protecting a system that produces profound inequality. They tout empowerment yet resist giving families meaningful choices. They invoke justice but rarely hold schools accountable. And they claim to want innovation while outsourcing their agenda to special interests that have no incentive to change.
They assume institutions are mostly working and just need to be defended more vigorously. But the public is no longer buying it.
Responding to this reality requires a rethink, not a rebrand — not just of the party’s policies, but of the worldview that has produced them. It starts with a simple question: Do we trust the people we serve?
Democrats have too often acted as though families must be protected from making “bad” choices rather than be empowered to make good ones. The result has been reflexive opposition to school choice and defense of a bureaucratic system that disempowers families. But working-class families, including many Black and Latino parents who form the backbone of the Democratic coalition, consistently say they want more options and a stronger voice in their children’s education. Rebuilding trust begins with actually trusting them.
Too often, Democrats have focused on cultural fights that energize activists but alienate families. When parents express discomfort with how topics such as race, gender and sexual orientation are treated in schools, they are quickly dismissed as unenlightened, or even bigoted. The party has become more attuned to the mores of elite institutions than the sensibilities of everyday Americans. Democrats need to move away from a politics that sorts people by identity and back toward principles that apply universally: the belief that dignity and opportunity belong to everyone, equally, without ranking.
The party must also become more honest about results. The nation faces an education depression, yet Democrats have done little about it. They pass bills, announce initiatives and spend more money, but rarely ask whether any of it worked.
Rebuilding credibility with voters will require the political courage to challenge allies when their interests clash with the public interest, something Democratic leaders have done before. Today, they have grown too comfortable with taking cues from powerful stakeholders, teachers unions key among them, whose priorities do not always align with those of families.
This was most evident during the pandemic, when union pressure kept schools closed long after the costs to students had become clear. In a healthy political party, special interests are welcome at the table, but they don’t set the menu. When families and special interests want different things, there should be no doubt about whose side to be on.
Finally, Democrats must start thinking like a party of abundance and rediscover the spirit of ambition. Too often, education debates are treated as zero-sum and framed in terms of scarcity: If charter schools grow, district schools suffer; if we raise the bar, we’re setting kids up to fail. Democrats have spent too much energy warning about the risks of reform and too little energy fighting for it. That defensive crouch has made them the party of saying no: to reform, to ambition and to undeniable evidence.
Democrats must let go of the mindset that treats people as fragile and institutions as sacred. Let go of the purity tests that shrink our coalition and silence dissent. Let go of the instinct to appease special interests. And above all, let go of a politics so timid that it has forgotten what it stands for.
Republicans are increasingly defined by grievance and authoritarian impulses. The response cannot be caution. It must be a Democratic Party that rediscovers its purpose: to be an agent of change, not a guardian of the past. The places to start are America’s schools.
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