Beyonc\u00e9 is planning to donate millions of dollars to presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris, who has already used her song “Freedom” in a splashy ad. But meanwhile, in the most important battleground state of the race, Pennsylvania, her husband Jay-Z is quietly supporting one of Democrats\u2019 b\u00eate noires: school vouchers. It begs the question: where will Harris, the favored candidate of Beyonc\u00e9, stand on school choice for urban minority students?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Will Harris side with parents of color, who want more school choice, as President Barack Obama did, or will she double down on the union-friendly Biden administration\u2019s opposition to expanding it? It won\u2019t matter much to Jay-Z and Beyonc\u00e9, who can afford to send their children to private school, but few decisions may be more consequential for low-income families in this year\u2019s election.<\/p>\n Despite avoiding the issue to date, Harris\u2019 vice-presidential pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signals that she may continue the Biden administration\u2019s hostility to the issue. Walz, a former high school teacher, has not supported school choice reforms, despite their broad public support in Minnesota, and is a staunch ally of organized labor.<\/p>\n LOUISIANA GOVERNOR DEFIANT AGAINST CRITICS OF TEN COMMANDMENTS BEING IN SCHOOL CLASSROOMS<\/strong><\/p>\n This could spell trouble for the ticket. School choice strikes at the heart of a deep divide within the Democratic Party and one of its core constituencies, the Black community. According to Harvard University\u2019s 2022\u00a0EdNext\u00a0poll, a staggering 72% of Black Americans\u00a0support\u00a0private school vouchers, but just 41% of\u00a0White\u00a0Democrats\u00a0do.<\/p>\n Beyonc\u00e9 and Jay-Z might put Vice President Kamala Harris in a difficult spot on school choice. FILE: They attend the 66th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 04, 2024, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Mazur\/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Meanwhile, much of the party establishment opposes school choice. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones blasted Jay-Z\u2019s work in the City of Brotherly Love as a boon to private schools. And the NAACP and teachers unions have gone to great lengths to defeat school-choice proposals and slow the growth of charter schools.<\/p>\n The case of Mesha Mainor exemplifies the tension. Mainor, a Black Georgia legislator, defected to the Republican Party after being excoriated by her fellow Democrats for supporting a school choice bill. Hardly a conservative, Mainor once\u00a0sponsored\u00a0a bill to establish an annual Kamala Harris Day in the Peach State. But her experience of changing parties over school-choice issues underscores a growing frustration among minority communities with the post-Obama Democratic Party’s stance on education.<\/p>\n Like Mainor, Black parents recognize that America already has a system of school choice \u2014 it\u2019s just one that requires higher income. Families with sufficient means move to the suburbs, where high property taxes finance good public schools. Wealthy parents send their kids to private school. Both are forms of choice. Meanwhile, poor kids get stuck in poor-performing urban public schools.<\/p>\n Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gets it. She highlighted this hypocrisy during a recent fireside chat in California, asking bluntly, “Are you for school choice or not?” She went on to question how so many politicians can claim to champion civil rights while opposing measures that expand educational opportunity for poor children of color.<\/p>\n As she put it, “How can you say you\u2019re for civil rights, how can you say you\u2019re for the poor when you\u2019re condemning those children to not be able to read [by keeping them in failing schools]? So, if you want to say that school choice and vouchers and charter schools are destroying the public schools, fine, you write that editorial in the Washington Post. But then don\u2019t send your kids to Sidwell Friends,” she said, referring to a private school in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n While Obama took steps to support charter schools, and Biden\u2019s administration actively suppressed them, Harris has largely sidestepped the issue. Her silence is becoming increasingly untenable as the 2024 election looms. To date, she has avoided taking a position on charters, vouchers, or other aspects of school choice. Little was asked about them in her California run for the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, Harris said almost nothing about them in her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign. And she avoided mentioning these topics altogether in her speech to the American Federation of Teachers\u2019 convention.<\/p>\n By picking a union-favored former teacher in Walz for VP, Harris now avoids the debate over school choice in Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state, where Governor Josh Shapiro and Jay-Z have both signaled strong support for expanding parental choice.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, much of the party establishment opposes school choice. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones blasted Jay-Z\u2019s work in the City of Brotherly Love as a boon to private schools. And the NAACP and teachers unions have gone to great lengths to defeat school-choice proposals and slow the growth of charter schools.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n If Harris opposes school choice, she risks alienating a significant portion of the minority electorate\u2014perhaps creating more Mesha Mainor types. This could potentially boost Trump support among Black and Hispanic voters \u2014 which has been higher in the polls than many expected \u2014 and could derail her presidential ambitions.<\/p>\n As the election approaches, Harris can\u2019t evade this issue forever. Her stance on school choice could well be a deciding factor in her political future. She can either authentically represent Black families and their sincere priorities or pursue narrow political self-interest by continuing the Biden administration\u2019s course of kowtowing to the teachers unions.<\/p>\n Daniel DiSalvo is a professor of political science at the City College of New York-CUNY and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n BY MICHAEL HARTNEY<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n [ad_2]<\/p>\n Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [ad_1] Beyonc\u00e9 is planning to donate millions of dollars to presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris, who has already used her song “Freedom” in a splashy ad. But meanwhile, in the most important battleground state of the race, Pennsylvania, her husband Jay-Z is quietly supporting one of Democrats\u2019 b\u00eate noires: school vouchers. It begs […] More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"adace-sponsor":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-opinion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2145,"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100\/revisions\/2145"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2100"},{"taxonomy":"adace-sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clickmen.us\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/adace-sponsor?post=2100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Beyonce](\"https:\/\/a57.foxnews.com\/static.foxnews.com\/foxnews.com\/content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/343\/192\/BEYONCE-COWBOY-HAT.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
<\/picture><\/div>\n\n