Kamala Harris must listen to Beyoncé or Jay-Z on school choice
Kamala Harris has to make a big decision on school choice, Beyoncé and husband Jay-Z show the divide on the issue and Democrats haven't been listening to Black voters about it.
Beyoncé 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’ bête noires: school vouchers. It begs the question: where will Harris, the favored candidate of Beyoncé, stand on school choice for urban minority students?
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’s opposition to expanding it? It won’t matter much to Jay-Z and Beyoncé, who can afford to send their children to private school, but few decisions may be more consequential for low-income families in this year’s election.
Despite avoiding the issue to date, Harris’ vice-presidential pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signals that she may continue the Biden administration’s 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.
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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’s 2022 EdNext poll, a staggering 72% of Black Americans support private school vouchers, but just 41% of White Democrats do.
Meanwhile, much of the party establishment opposes school choice. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones blasted Jay-Z’s 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.
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 sponsored a 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.
Like Mainor, Black parents recognize that America already has a system of school choice — it’s 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.
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.
As she put it, "How can you say you’re for civil rights, how can you say you’re for the poor when you’re 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’t send your kids to Sidwell Friends," she said, referring to a private school in Washington, D.C.
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While Obama took steps to support charter schools, and Biden’s 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.
What’s 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’ convention.
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.
If Harris opposes school choice, she risks alienating a significant portion of the minority electorate—perhaps creating more Mesha Mainor types. This could potentially boost Trump support among Black and Hispanic voters — which has been higher in the polls than many expected — and could derail her presidential ambitions.
As the election approaches, Harris can’t 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’s course of kowtowing to the teachers unions.
Daniel DiSalvo is a professor of political science at the City College of New York-CUNY and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
