Image Credit: Bryan Giardinelli

As a co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, I am proud to fight every day for a leader who has put forward — by far — the most progressive social and economic agenda of any candidate in modern American history. Among all the groundbreaking policy proposals we have released, the one that is particularly near and dear to my heart is the Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education — because it so forcefully represents my longstanding commitment to our public school students and teachers.

The Nation calls this plan “the most progressive education platform in modern American history.” AFT president Randi Weingarten said it is “vitally important” and former Assistant Education Secretary Diane Ravitch said “no president or presidential candidate has offered a proposal so bold and sweeping.”

My entire family and I are the proud products of public education — and as an elected official in Ohio, I worked every day to protect and strengthen public education. In light of that history, I can honestly say that having the opportunity to contribute to Senator Sanders’ plan — and then promote it all over America — has been one of the highest honors of my life.

With Senator Sanders’ political opponents unable to indict the policy merits of the Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education, critics have suddenly tried to vilify me — specifically, they have told The Intercept that I am an enemy of the same public education system that I have been defending for decades.

This tactic is not merely a cheap guilt-by-association attempt to smear Senator Sanders’ campaign — it is also a deliberately dishonest attempt to mischaracterize my record and smear my efforts to protect Cleveland’s children, parents and teachers.

Seven years ago, Cleveland faced two emergencies. First and foremost, our public education system was being gutted by budget cuts, and we had not passed a local levy to increase revenue for the Cleveland Municipal School District in 16 years. At the same time, our local school district was on the verge of being taken over by Republican state lawmakers, who would impose their right-wing agenda on our city.

As a state senator from Cleveland, I joined with our city’s mayor, organized labor, civic leaders and other elected officials to forge a two-pronged plan to end these crises.

The first was a blueprint to change the way our local schools operated — as part of the compromise to get the plan approved in the GOP-controlled legislature, the initiative did allow the continued operation of charter schools in the district, but it imposed much stricter oversight standards on their operation and expansion.

That initiative — which was supported by our city’s teachers union — laid the necessary groundwork for us to go to the citizens of Cleveland and ask them to invest their tax dollars in our children. The voters believed in the overall vision and we passed a levy increase — one that I proudly campaigned for, and pay property taxes into as a resident of the city of Cleveland.

While the Cleveland Plan has delivered solid results, it was not exactly what I wanted. However, critics citing imperfections to try to impugn my overall commitment to public education, public school teachers and the labor movement are counting on a selective reading of history that discounts the political context in which we were operating.

Specifically, they are counting on observers not knowing that as pro-union, pro-public-education Democrats, we were negotiating against a GOP-dominated legislature at a moment when the school privatization movement was dominating American politics. Despite facing these difficult odds, my fellow Democratic lawmakers and teachers union members nonetheless passed a compromise plan that both warded off the state takeover of our schools, which would have the GOP’s extremist agenda, and increased our city’s public education budget.

You can certainly argue that the Cleveland Plan was not perfect — I am the first to acknowledge that it was not. However, I categorically reject attempts to cast the plan as some sort of betrayal of the movement to protect public education. Omitting the local and historical context is disingenuous and it purposely overlooks my history of fighting against anti-worker legislation in my home state of Ohio.

Casting my current work as some sort of scandalous departure from my past record is just wrong. In the battle over the Cleveland Plan, I was proud to fight hard for public education — and I believe that made the final compromise better. Now, I am proud to fight for the Thurgood Marshall Plan — a more far-reaching and pure embodiment of the same pro-public-education values that I have been fighting for my entire life.

The guiding principle of my public service will always be to do the most good for those who are least able to fight for themselves. That is what I have done as an Ohio State Senator, and that is what I will continue doing as a National Co-Chair for the Bernie Sanders Presidential Campaign.