‘Charter schools act as tools for privatizing education and weakening the power of unionized teachers…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., whose platform opposes the Trump administration’s pro-school choice policies, once bragged about getting her goddaughter into a competitive charter school in New York, according to the New York Post.
A video in 2017 shows Ocasio-Cortez, who was not yet in office, telling her Facebook followers, “This area’s like a lot of where my family is from. My goddaughter, I got her into a charter school like maybe a block or two down.”
Among Ocasio-Cortez’s leftist base, school choice is decried as a policy that hurts traditional public schools and teachers.
Even moderate Democrats have fiercely opposed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s efforts to expand school choice into low-income communities, often siding with the teacher’s unions over the minority voters desperate for the chance to send their kids to better schools.
“Charter schools act as tools for privatizing education and weakening the power of unionized teachers,” the Democratic Socialist Party says in its New York City platform, which called for ending “the creation of new charter schools, [banning] the expansion of existing charter schools, and transform[ing] existing charter schools into public schools.”
DeVos pointed out this hypocrisy, arguing that Ocasio-Cortez would “deny that opportunity to every other disadvantaged family in America,” but gladly use it for her own goddaughter.
How nice that @AOC claims to have helped her goddaughter get into a public charter school. It’s a shame she works to deny that opportunity to every other disadvantaged family in America. “Good for me, but not for thee,” indeed. #EducationFreedomhttps://t.co/a2RhOEeU0o
— Secretary Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) February 24, 2020
Ray Domanico, the Manhattan Institute’s director of education policy, said he’s “not surprised” Ocasio-Cortez wants for herself what she’d deny to others.
“Charter schools are incredibly popular with the communities and populations that a lot of these Democratic politicians claim to be representing,” he explained. “People in the Bronx can find a good school for their young ones now as the congresswoman apparently did for her goddaughter.”