Rahm Emanuel's plan for schools and Democrats

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work. Rahm Emanuel — who once said, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” — sees two crises at the moment. One is the well-documented learning decline plaguing American students. The other is the similarly declining favorability of the Democratic Party with voters. Emanuel has an answer to both: Democrats need to embrace reform-minded education policies to boost achievement, while pivoting away from what he sees as an overemphasis on race- and gender-related topics. “We weren’t worried about what was going on in the classroom or the corridor,” Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff, said in an interview. “We were worried about a bunch of ancillary issues.” He was fresh off of a high-profile trip down to Mississippi, where improvements in fourth-grade test scores have drawn national accolade