Bill de Blasio, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, bills himself as a champion of progressive causes. Throughout his campaign for mayor, he has advocated for a variety of progressive issues such as fighting inequality through taxing rich citizens and ending stop and frisk. But when it comes to education, de Blasio has not been progressive at all.
New York City's charter school network has been successful in providing low-incomne students with a quality education that would otherwise have had no choice but to attend a failing public school. De Blasio, as an opinion writer in the Harvard Political Review notes, wants to dismantle everything that has made these schools successful:
There is simply no way that a candidate primarily interested in the best outcomes for poor children would be fighting the expansion of high quality schools. As a progressive, I find it incomprehensible that every Democrat in the city is not focused on how to expand this success to other schools.
