Elizabeth Warren Tells Little Girl She Will Help Learning-Disabled Kids by Taxing Billionaires

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Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren badly biffed a question from a little girl who asked her about helping schools care for kids with learning disabilities, responding with a diatribe about taxing billionaires and an irrelevant aside about testing.

During a town hall in Reno this week, a young girl name Clarabelle asked Warren “what you would do to help schools like mine to be better for kids with learning disabilities?”

“So I have a couple of ideas,” Warren said, then dove into a lengthy answer about funding for general education that centered around her signature wealth tax.

“Let’s just be blunt, we need to put some real taxes on billionaires,” Warren told the elementary school-age child. “Right now the top 1/10 of 1% compared with the 99%, they are paying about half as much relative to their total wealth in taxes as the 99%.”

“And a state can’t tax the billionaires all by themselves because the billionaires are slippery, they’ll move out of state, right?” Warren quipped. “It’s easy to move from state to state. Not so easy to decide to give up your U.S. citizenship and leave the country.”

“So I think it is important as a country, a statement not only about money but a statement about our values, that a president of the United States stands up and says I’m going to take on the millionaires and billionaires and I’m going to say they’ve got to pitch in a little more so that every single one of our children gets a first rate education here in America,” Warren said.

She then told Clarabelle “I really want to stop all the high stakes testing… Because this notion that there’s not enough money to go around and we’re only going to give it to schools that get their kids to perform on high stakes testing, it’s not fair to our kids and it’s not fair to our teachers.”

Neither part of Warren’s answer was specific to helping schools educate children with learning disabilities. Taxing billionaires certainly might raise more money for schools, but does nothing to allocate it to the kids Clarabelle asked about, and standardized testing doesn’t determine the amount of federal funding for special education, which is based on a population formula.

What’s mystifying, at first blush, is the fact that Warren’s K-12 education plan actually does contain policy relevant to Clarabelle’s question, calling for more than double the funding for special ed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (from its current level of 15 percent of the cost per student to 40 percent) and an expansion of IDEA funding for infants and toddlers.

Even more seemingly mystifying is that Warren wouldn’t know what was in her own plan for special ed, when she routinely brags about her time as a “special needs teacher,” and claims she’d still be doing it today if she could (because becoming a Harvard law professor and bankruptcy researcher is a much easier fallback).

As it turns out, although Warren frequently uses her relinquished “lifelong dream” to be a public school teacher as an applause line, she was several days late and dollars short with her public education plan, especially where children with learning disabilities are concerned.

Other Democratic presidential candidates rolled out K-12 plans months ago, including Vice President Joe Biden, who introduced his plan — which includes the same increase in IDEA funding that Warren would eventually propose — in May.

Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders released his plan in September, and it included an even larger increase in IDEA funding. Former candidate Senator Kamala Harris was among the first candidates to introduce a K-12 plan, which included the IDEA funding pledge.

While all these plans were being released, Warren and her campaign spent months turning down requests for comment from journalists. Her plan was finally released in late October, and in addition to the IDEA funding, included a promise to protect students with disabilities.

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is another late entry in the K-12 plan department, but his is by far the most comprehensive and impressive with regard to children with learning disabilities. Released in December, weeks after a separate plan for all people with disabilities, Mayor Pete’s plan addresses a list of issues too long to list, and in ways that demonstrate a detailed understanding of the community.

For example, his plan kicks off with a promise to support policies that encourage inclusion of kids with learning disabilities in general education classrooms, and his autism policy focuses on services and self-advocacy for autistic people.

Parents — and siblings — of children with learning disabilities are a huge voting bloc, and if those voters were to decide this election on these policies alone, Mayor Pete would win by a mile. But policy alone isn’t the only test.

It’s a good start, because while Elizabeth Warren says “you don’t get what you don’t fight for,” you definitely don’t get what you won’t even ask for. But having the best plan doesn’t always equal votes, as Buttigieg and his Douglass Plan demonstrate thus far. You have to start with a plan, but as Mayor Pete says, voters also want to know what’s in your heart. A great plan means nothing if the candidate doesn’t care. It’s just a good term paper.

On that score, this race is harder to judge, because aside from Warren’s “blunt” talk about taxing billionaires, you don’t hear the candidates talk much about these issues. That makes it tough to tell if they’ve really internalized the importance of these issues, or have just pulled together some good research.

But these candidates will all have an opportunity to answer that question on Saturday when MSNBC hosts an education forum on Saturday. We’ll be watching.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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