Op-Ed: Biden would be nowhere without black voters. Will he accommodate black charter school parents?

March 17, 2020
Tressa Pankovits

The National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers’ union, endorsed Joe Biden for president over the weekend. Earlier the smaller American Federation of Teachers (AFT) hedged its bets by encouraging its members and affiliates to support and help Biden as well as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

The NEA’s endorsement comes on the heels of last week’s “Big Tuesday” primaries in Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, North Dakota and Washington. For Biden, those felt like the grand finale to his Super Tuesday smash hit with African American voters, even outside the South. According to exit polls, 66 percent of black voters in all-important Michigan turned out for Biden. It confirms the intense loyalty to the Democratic Party that was on display the previous week, when more than 50 percent of black Democrats chose Biden in every southern state — and close to 40 percent did so in California and Massachusetts.

Collectively, black voters saved the Democrats from what previously seemed inevitable: Bernie Sanders’s nomination and a potential November blowout, not only against Trump but also down ballot.

It is high time, then, for Democrats to stop disrespecting millions of black voters on an issue important to them: Charter schools.

Read the full piece here.