By Jonathan Chait @ NYMag.com, Dec. 6, with Warren video

The National Education Association, the most implacably anti-reform of the two major national teachers’ unions, has released a series of candidate interviews. Senator Elizabeth Warren, making her case for NEA support, notes her role in opposing a 2016 ballot initiative to expand charter schools in Boston.

In one sense, Warren is correct. The fact that she opposed the Massachusetts initiative does prove how far she is willing to go to maintain teachers’-union support. But what it says about her willingness to follow evidence, and to value the needs of low-income parents, is deeply worrisome.

Boston has probably the most effective public charter schools in America, producing enormous learning gains for the most disadvantaged children. “Charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes,” reported a Brookings study. “The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores.” Researchers have asked and answered every possible objection: Boston’s charters are not “skimming” the best students, they do scale up, and they do not harm students left behind in traditional public schools. (Indeed, “charter expansion has a small positive effect on non-charter students' [....]