Teachers unions flunked their midterms: Column

Hidden in the news coverage of the midterm elections looms a bigger problem for my fellow Democrats than just a bad night at the polls: the voters' wholesale rejection of the party's most powerful backers: teachers' unions. Led by the NEA and AFT, the national teachers' unions boasted of spending $80 million in this election to defeat candidates who support vouchers, teacher accountability and other promising education reforms. They lost. And they lost big.

The aftermath offers a lesson to the Democratic Party — and Hillary Clinton — as they prepare for 2016.

The number one target for school choice opponents was Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, an unapologetic supporter of vouchers for kids in the struggling underperforming schools. The unions spent millions to defeat Walker – three times – and they lost all three times.

In North Carolina, Republican Thom Tillis made educational choice a centerpiece of his campaign platform against Senator Kay Hagan. In Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder, fended off wave after wave of attacks by teachers' unions. And in Florida, Governor Rick Scott, under fire for his support of school choice, won his seat against a vigorous challenge by Charlie Crist who flip-flopped on the state's highly popular tax credit scholarship program.

But that isn't the biggest story here. What has long been known among education reformers — but ignored by much of the national media — is the quiet, gradual movement of Democratic state legislators toward school choice. In Florida, nearly half the Democratic caucus has supported the state's tax credit scholarship; the same is true in Louisiana. In Iowa a Democrat-led House of Representatives expanded the state's tax credit scholarship program with unanimous support. In North Carolina, the state's new voucher program was strongly supported by a bipartisan coalition.

While progress on educational choice remains slower on the national level, there are some exceptions. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Cory Booker, a former board member of the Alliance for School Choice, have been among them. They may feel lonely right now, but it's only a matter of time before more Democrats realize the importance of having options to help the millions of kids who remain trapped in schools that do not work for them.

The real danger for my party is that school choice might well be the issue to wrest minorities away from a party they have called home for four decades.

We Democrats need to move beyond the teachers' union agenda. Look at what's happening in Florida. A popular tax credit scholarship program for low-income students championed by Rick Scott serves 70,000 students, more than two-thirds of them black and Hispanic. The teachers' unions and school boards association filed a lawsuit to dismantle the program. In October, Reverend H. K. Matthews, who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, publicly pleaded with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist to denounce the effort.

There will be more movements like this. Already there is an effort in Chicago to promote school choice to save children trapped in the underperforming public school system.

What a great irony it would be in 2016 if the Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton, suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a major civil rights issue.

The teacher's unions know they are on the losing side of this fight, even if they desperately hope that national Democrats aren't paying attention. For months Randi Weingarten, the current president of the American Federation of Teachers, has been a fixture on TV screens vowing to stop candidates challenging the status quo education establishment. After the election, she canceled a scheduled press call . There was little good news to report.

Kevin P. Chavous is executive counsel for the American Federation for Children and board chair emeritus for Democrats for Education Reform.

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