Minority Dems dig charter schools far more than white Dems do

This is some very noteworthy data:

There’s a sharp racial divide among Democrats on charter schools, according to national data newly released to Chalkbeat.

A separate poll commissioned by Democrats For Education Reform, an advocacy group that backs charter schools, was the first to illustrate a racial divide among Democrats on the issue. It found that white Democrats are strongly opposed to charters, while black and Hispanic Democrats are modestly in favor.

That gap is backed up by the new data from a poll conducted by Education Next, which has tracked opinion on charter schools for many years. Among black and Hispanic Democrats, support for charter schools held steady from 2016 to 2018. But among white Democrats, approval tanked, dropping from 43 to 27 percent.

Those results may factor into the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, as well as within broader debates about school reform, where all sides claim to champion the interests of students of color. A partisan dividehas emerged on the issue in recent years, with most Republicans favoring charters and a plurality of Democrats opposing them. Nationally, U.S. House Democrats recently moved to cut federal funding for charters.

“It creates a bit of a challenge for Democratic candidates in the presidential primaries,” said Marty West, a Harvard professor and editor in chief of Education Next, which is generally sympathetic to charter schools. “It’s not clear to me that many people will be basing their decisions on education, but voters of color are a substantial segment of the Democratic primary electorate.”

Education Next had not previously broken down the results of its poll by party and race at the same time, but West did so at Chalkbeat’s request. That poll asks a nationally representative group of American adults whether they support or oppose charter schools, described as “publicly funded but … not managed by the local school board.”
In the 2018 data, 47 percent of black Democrats supported charters with 29 percent opposed; similarly, 47 percent of Hispanic Democrats backed charters while 35 percent opposed them. (The remainder neither supported nor opposed charters.) Opposition has held steady among black Democrats since 2016, but ticked up among Hispanics. The biggest jump in opposition has been among white Democrats, though, going from 37 to 50 percent.

The article deep-dives into the internals, which qualify the general conclusion somewhat, but it seems to be of a piece with such a divergence on other issues. Blacks are less likely than whites, for instance, to support same-sex "marriage."