“You have your old guard teachers’ union members who have been longtime supporters of the Democratic Party, and then you have a new generation of education reformers coming out of a lot of big cities and coming up from the states that have real world on the ground experience,” said Michael McShane, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“There is definitely a struggle within the Democratic Party, and it’s not entirely clear at this moment who is going to win.”…

But one of the most prominent school choice advocates in the country is in fact another Democrat: Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington, D.C. schools. Rhee has thrown her support behind programs that give parents more choice over their children’s schooling, such as charter school vouchers and teacher accountability reforms.

“I think that the vast majority of Democrats out there understand that this country is not going to be able to regain its position in the global marketplace until we fix our public education system,” said Rhee, in an interview with Public Radio International. “They have to be willing to challenge the teachers’ unions on the things that are not working.”