As the Democratic Party gears up for the 2020 election, Bernie Sanders has pushed the primary to focus on ambitious, progressive policy proposals: universal health care, the Green New Deal, debt-free college, a millionaire’s tax, and more. Conspicuously absent from the conversation, however, has been the issue of K-12 public education. Apart from Kamala Harris’s promise to increase teacher pay and Bernie Sanders’s recent proposal to ban for-profit charter schools and pause funding of new nonprofit charters awaiting an accountability review, Democrats have shied away from formulating substantive K-12 education policies.

Sanders’s K-12 proposal is the most in line with the mood among educators. Pushback to charter schools is growing, and teacher-led protests and student walkouts are spreading across the country. A central demand of the Los Angeles teachers’ strike in January of 2019, for example, was to impose a cap on charter schools. Many of their other demands addressed the wide-ranging consequences of neoliberal education reform: collective bargaining rights, a salary increase, a cap on class sizes, less standardized testing, and improved social services at the city’s public schools. Yet the strike also revealed how Democratic candidates have avoided formulating a substantive position on charter schools. While many of the candidates expressed support for Los Angeles teachers during the week-long strike, none of them acknowledged the anti-charter stance underlying the teachers’ demands.

Until Sanders’s recent announcement, no national figure on the American left had taken a stand against education privatization, even as presidential candidates are vying to be seen as the most “progressive.”