With Joe Biden one of only two leading candidates remaining in the Democratic primary, voters deserve to know the truth about his record on public education. Years of thwarting desegregation efforts, pushing privatization, and imposing high-stakes testing make it clear that Joe Biden cannot be trusted to defend our public schools.

As Delaware’s senator, Biden helped Republicans pass George W. Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which ushered in the punitive testing regime that so many teachers, parents, and students oppose today. Instead of addressing the glaring racial and economic barriers to educational achievement, NCLB made educators “accountable” for poor testing outcomes by laying them off and closing their schools.

As vice president, Biden spoke in favor of the so-called school reform agenda, which doubled down on NCLB’s draconian testing mandates and made federal funding contingent on states supporting charter schools — nearly doubling charter enrollment from 2008 to 2016. Linking teachers’ pay and job stability to student test scores proved so destructive that the National Education Association called for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to resign, and parents, students, and teachers formed a movement to opt out of high-stakes testing.