Democratic presidential hopefuls heading to Pittsburgh for education forum

Pittsburgh will play host Saturday to a nationally televised event spotlighting where eight Democratic presidential candidates stand on a variety of hot-button education issues.

National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García, who was an elementary school teacher, said she and fellow educators couldn’t be more excited about the chance to delve into the challenges confronting public schools and grill candidates for their solutions on a national stage. MSBNC will moderate the forum, broadcast portions on TV and livestream the full event online.

The event takes place at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Downtown Pittsburgh. The confirmed candidates are former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer, Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Michael Bennet.

“Teachers all around the country are doing the happy dance right now,” García said by phone Friday afternoon as she prepared to board a plane from Washington. “The fact that they are spending a full day in Pittsburgh talking about education is huge.”

Too often the political conversation neglects the importance of education-related problems and their impacts, she said.

“Education touches every person in the community, from student loans to early childhood programs to special ed,” García said.

The event, called “Public Education Forum 2020: Equity and Justice for All,” was organized by a group of nearly a dozen teachers unions, education advocates and community groups and will include a little more than 1,000 invited attendees.

“We’ve been listening, and we think a lot of them have good ideas,” said Rich Askey, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. “But this is going to be our first opportunity to dig deep.”

Askey, who taught music for more than 30 years in the Harrisburg School District, plans to attend Saturday’s forum. He said that educators want to know what the candidates are going to do to make sure every student is excelling in the classroom, including by making sure that schools in urban and rural areas have the tools, resources and funding they need.

Charter schools decry ‘unfounded attacks’

Meanwhile, a group of charter school leaders and advocates from Pennsylvania and around the country are dismissing Saturday’s forum as fueled by “the nation’s most powerful interest groups” and a platform for “unfounded attacks” on the school choice movement.

“It is a disheartening irony that the tagline of this weekend’s forum is ‘equity and justice for all,’ when parents, the most important constituency, are excluded from the conversation,” the coalition of charter school leaders said in a statement.

Several noninvited charter school officials plan to show up — or at least wait outside — at the forum.

“We call on the candidates to remember those who won’t be there: thousands of parents who want a high-quality school and choose a public charter school in lieu of their underperforming assigned neighborhood school,” the charter school statement said. “As student performance lags and opportunity gaps widen, the candidates should aim their fury at the systems enabling this disparity, not the schools that parents are choosing.”

Sharif El-Mekki of Mastery Charter Schools said that test score data show that “Pittsburgh’s school system is a heartbreaking disaster that is only getting worse.”

García — who views charter schools as “a disaster for public schools” — balked at the criticism.

“This is about public education, not about privately managed charter schools,” she said. “The only thing public about them is that they take public tax dollars away from public schools.”

When it comes to school equity, García said she wants federal policymakers to take accountability for ensuring all children have access, opportunity and the right not to be discriminated against because of factors such as their race, disability or family’s income level.

“Explain to us why some kids have everything they need while other kids do not,” she said. “Every student should have what the most affluent, blessed student has.”

Lenny McAllister, Western Pennsylvania director of the Commonwealth Foundation, a free-market think tank based in Harrisburg, said he’ll be listening for what candidates have to say about “empowering the parents and the students who are actually going through primary and secondary education right now.”

Under U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration has helped to usher in “some momentum in the right direction to having kids find more choice,” McAllister said.

García argues that DeVos knew “absolutely nothing” about education when Trump appointed her to the nation’s highest education post.

Organizers laud non-debate format

The event will not be a debate in which the candidates share a stage.

One by one, each candidate will get about 20 minutes — 10 minutes answering questions from the moderators, then 10 more minutes on questions from pre-selected members of the audience.

MSNBC Live host Ali Velshi and NBC News education correspondent Rehema Ellis will moderate.

“It’s an excellent format; it is not a ‘gotcha’ format or a deer-in-the-headlights, try-and-startle-you format that gets the candidates to interrupt each other,” García said. “We wanted something of substance — not just for the over 1,000 people in the audience, but to the millions who will be listening to this.”

Members of the Pennsylvania Federation of Teachers, the teachers union representing Pittsburgh Public Schools, will greet candidates and have some members prepared to ask questions. Nina Esposito-Visgitis, the union’s president, referenced major teacher strikes around the nation in the past year and said she hopes the presidential hopefuls are listening to teachers’ calls for more support.

“I think now more than ever that people are really interested in the issues in public education,” Esposito-Visgitis said. “People want to know, where is public school going?”