Rahm Emanuel, former Obama chief of staff, former Chicago mayor, former U.S. ambassador to Japan, went on HBO's "Real Time" on Friday and delivered a blunt indictment of his own party's education priorities. The Democratic Party, he said, walked away from the classroom and into culture wars it could not win. And the cost is being paid by children who cannot read.
Emanuel's central exhibit: Mississippi. The state climbed from 49th to 9th in reading, a turnaround that should be studied and celebrated across party lines. Instead, as Breitbart reported, Emanuel said "a lot of interest groups don't want to talk about it."
That single line tells you everything about the incentive structure inside the modern Democratic education establishment. When a deep-red Southern state produces the kind of results that blue-state school boards have failed to deliver, the preferred response from the party's allied interest groups is silence, or a change of subject.
Emanuel traced the problem back to at least 2020. Democrats, he argued, "invited a bunch of culture wars into our kids' schools, and we lost that war." He pointed to San Francisco, where officials voted to strip Abraham Lincoln's name from a high school, not because students understood why the school bore that name in the first place, but because renaming buildings had become the priority.
As Emanuel put it on the broadcast:
"Here in California, up in San Francisco, they were arguing and voted to take Abraham Lincoln's name off of a high school, not whether they were worried about whether the kids know why Abraham Lincoln was such an icon and the school was named after him. They lost the plot."
That phrase, "lost the plot", has become something of a recurring theme for Emanuel. He has used it across multiple appearances to describe a party that swapped bread-and-butter concerns for progressive cultural signaling. The Washington Examiner detailed how Emanuel argued Democrats alienated working-class voters by replacing economic populism with left-wing cultural advocacy, drifting on immigration from humane law enforcement to positions voters saw as rewarding illegal border crossings.
On education specifically, Emanuel's Friday remarks went further than a general complaint. He cited a statistic he said he had seen that day: one out of four children are missing 18 percent of the school year. And nobody in his party, he said, is talking about it.
"We messed this up in our party. We used to be really great about education. We've lost it, because we're not focused on the primary thing. I saw something today, 1 out of 4 children are missing 18% of the school year. And we're not talking about it. We're worried about names of schools, bathrooms, locker room access. Get back to what matters."
Mississippi's reading improvement, from 49th to 9th, by Emanuel's account, is the kind of result that education reformers on the right have pointed to for years. The state invested in phonics-based reading instruction, set clear benchmarks, and held schools accountable. It did not rename buildings. It did not debate locker-room policies. It taught children to read.
Emanuel's acknowledgment of that success is notable precisely because of who he is. This is not a Republican governor touting red-state results. This is a CNN senior political and global affairs commentator, a man who served in the Obama White House and ran Chicago for eight years, saying plainly that his party's allied interest groups would rather ignore Mississippi than learn from it.
The reason is not complicated. Mississippi's gains came without the institutional apparatus that Democratic-aligned education groups insist is necessary, more federal spending, more union protections, more administrative overhead. If a poor, majority-rural Southern state can leap forty spots in national reading rankings, it raises uncomfortable questions about what all that money and all those programs in wealthier blue states have actually produced.
Emanuel's Friday appearance was not an isolated moment of candor. Fox News reported that Emanuel has argued Democrats should prioritize declining reading and math scores rather than debates over bathroom and locker-room access. He criticized the party's positions on transgender participation in women's sports, saying Democrats moved "from acceptance to advocacy" in ways that undermine Title IX and reflect how disconnected party leadership has become from mainstream voters.
On another "Real Time" appearance, Emanuel went after Chicago's own leadership. The New York Post reported that he said city government had become "way too permissive" on crime over the past five years. "I don't want to hear another word about the locker room, I don't want to hear another word about the bathroom. You better start focusing on the classroom," he said. CNN's Fareed Zakaria agreed with Emanuel on that broadcast, calling poorly run Democratic cities a "huge Democratic Party problem."
The Washington Examiner noted that Emanuel also criticized Democratic messaging on "defund the police," the term "Latinx," and school culture-war fights as politically damaging and disconnected from mainstream voters. On immigration, Emanuel said Americans "are quite accepting and quite open and receptive to immigrants. But they don't think the law should be broken, and they don't think anybody who breaks the law should be rewarded."
Emanuel's phrase, "a lot of interest groups don't want to talk about it", deserves a closer look. He did not name those groups. But the landscape is not hard to read. Teachers' unions, progressive education nonprofits, and Democratic-aligned advocacy organizations have spent years arguing that the path to better outcomes runs through more funding, smaller class sizes, and equity-focused curricula. Mississippi's results suggest a simpler answer: teach reading properly, measure results, and hold adults accountable.
That message threatens institutional budgets and political alliances. If phonics-based instruction and accountability measures can transform outcomes in one of America's poorest states, then the failure of wealthier, better-funded school systems is harder to explain away. The interest groups Emanuel referenced have every incentive to change the subject, to bathrooms, to building names, to anything other than the reading scores coming out of Jackson.
Emanuel also flagged chronic absenteeism, one in four children missing 18 percent of the school year. That figure, if accurate, represents a crisis that dwarfs any debate over school naming conventions. Children who are not in school cannot learn to read, regardless of what the building is called. Yet by Emanuel's own account, his party is not talking about it.
Democrats once owned the education issue. For decades, the party positioned itself as the champion of public schools, the defender of teachers, the advocate for children in underserved communities. Emanuel said as much on Friday: "We used to be really great about education."
What changed is not mysterious. The party's education coalition shifted its focus from measurable student achievement to ideological projects. School boards debated renaming schools after historical figures failed progressive purity tests. Curricula were redesigned around identity frameworks. Discipline policies were loosened in the name of equity. And through it all, reading scores fell, absenteeism rose, and parents, especially working-class parents, started asking what, exactly, their children were learning.
Emanuel's willingness to say this publicly matters less for what it reveals about him than for what it reveals about the party he is criticizing. When a former chief of staff to Barack Obama has to go on HBO to beg his own side to care about whether children can read, the institutional rot runs deep.
Mississippi figured out how to teach kids to read. The interest groups Emanuel described would rather you not know that, because the answer didn't require their permission, their programs, or their politics.