December 2, 2021 at 10:33 a.m.
The Parent Revolt
The Parent Revolt
"I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."
With that gaffe, McAuliffe galvanized a national movement fed up with the nation's public schools and with the government's monopoly on education.
That monopoly not only forces most children to attend government schools whether their families wish them to be there or not but confers upon the government the infinite wisdom of what is necessary to be taught.
Through the years, the federalization of education, made tangible by Jimmy Carter's creation of the federal education bureaucracy, has translated into a long-term failure of educational advancement and an accompanying slide in our competitiveness in the world.
According to data from the Programme for International Student Assessment, over the past four decades the U.S. plunged from atop world rankings to a dismal middle-of-the-pack performance by 2018: 13th in reading; 37th in math; 18th in science; and 25th overall.
Many have hazarded guesses as to why our relative position has declined, and more than one factor is at work, but we would point out that the decline began just about the time the federal Department of Education was created out of thin air, to pursue one-size-fits-all standards and political agendas.
During that time, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the classroom to administrative overhead, ever evolving curricula rooted in cognitive abstraction, not to mention minimalism in literary assessment, and the outstanding failure but widespread use of Common Core, the quintessential example and education poster child of corporate and government partnership.
Most recent are the deliberate attempt to manipulate young minds about their gender identity - such curriculum as the Gender Unicorn in preschool and kindergarten comes to mind - and, most of all, the aggressive attempt to collapse complex social identity into the singular compartment of race - all whites as oppressors and all people of color as oppressed.
To be sure, parental discontent with such nonsense has been growing for years, particularly in the suburbs, and it was going to become a crystalized force at some point. McAuliffe provided the point.
No doubt it was helped along by virtual learning in the pandemic, a bad experience for students but also for many parents who saw for the first time what many public schools were teaching.
That education bureaucrats and their political allies were not going to allow any input into, or criticism of, this agenda spawned a hurricane in the suburbs, blowing with a fury unmatched in decades.
Of course, that's the progressive vision - policy is made by experts, experts are people who agree with progressives, and everybody else is ignorant.
Even when the experts are wrong, which is often, such difficulties call only for tweaks to the mechanistic prescription, not devolution into the abyss of the pedestrian population and the visions these people have about their own lives.
Democracy is not a virtue in the progressive mind, and the pedestrians are just lab rats to be socially experimented with over and over again, you know, until the experts get it right.
Sooner or later, the lab rats escape and the pedestrian many push back against the elite few, and that is what is happening in America right now.
This parental force is potent and it is part of a broader and ongoing realignment of American politics that has been taking shape for a long time.
On the one side, big business and other cultural and affluent elites are migrating steadily into the Democratic Party, making it more than ever the party of millionaires and billionaires. The fundamental framework is a corporate-government partnership that controls the levers of power.
Such a partnership invariably lends itself to authoritarianism, hence the growing censorship by Big Tech, as they are pushed to censor even more by Democratic Party leaders.
They build their bulk in the electorate with an appeal to identity politics. That's an explicitly special interest politics by definition, the affluent urban dwellers and suburbanites, along with the labor establishment, the education establishment, the feminist establishment, the LGBTQ establishment, the civil rights establishment: establishments generally.
Not the rank-and-file, mind you, but the special-interest structures built to protect the narrow interests of the elite leadership rather than the broader interests of those they are supposed to advocate for.
On the other side, the actual rank-and-file - the working class, parents, minorities, small business owners - are migrating to the GOP. They are people who want to be free to pursue the American Dream, they are advocates for civil liberties, long a mainstay in the Democratic Party but who have been alienated by pandemic Democrats. They are suburbanites who reject the Democratic Party's dream of middle-class extermination, people who desire to control and live their own lives, free to think as they wish, and with an education system for their children that is built around teaching the skills of critical thinking, rather than focusing on indoctrination.
The Democratic Party-special interest-corporate-security state alliance has the money but increasingly we have the people - a slogan Democrats used to use. It is not inconceivable to see old-line party constituencies flipped on their heads sooner rather than later.
For the moment there are urgent battles to be fought and won. Rejecting pandemic authoritarianism is first and foremost. In this edition, to cite just one urgency, we report on the thousands of schools who are now closing not because of Covid infections but because of mental health problems brought about by - you guessed it - earlier school closings and the devastating isolation those closings imposed on our youth.
In our government schools, too, establishment school officials are clamoring, almost drooling, over the prospect of vaccinating every child, and salivating over locking families out of that decision.
Beyond the pandemic policies, there is curricula to be refitted, the jettisoning of critical race theory, as Youngkin will do in Virginia, and the re-implementation of instruction that teaches fact, not fiction, and that embraces critical thinking skills that enable all points of view to be neutrally presented and debated.
Ultimately, we believe, even that is not enough in education. Ultimately, the government monopoly on education must truly be broken, and that means true school choice, as is practiced, by the way, in much of Europe.
In a fair world, the public funding of education should be tied to the student and the family, not to the government-controlled school - enabling them to go where they desire for the children's education.
And ultimately, the parent revolt needs to cease calling government schools "public schools." They should be called what they are: government schools. Allocating money to families instead of to bureaucrats does not make that family's education spending any less public education.
A word of caution for the GOP, though. At the moment, with Joe Biden's approval rating vastly underwater - so underwater even a fish would drown - Republican prospects for 2022 and beyond are bright. The realignment and energy of working class and suburban voters bode well for long-term gains.
But polls can change in a heartbeat, and long-term gains can become but mirages in the distance if the Republican Party does not hold fast to the principles driving this movement, first and foremost the principles of democracy and civil liberties, of free choice and free speech, of economic and cultural and educational freedom, and boldly so.
Most immediate that means a pronounced resistance to authoritarianism in all its forms, and to form coalitions in the cause of civil liberties with those of other political persuasions. Resisting the temptation to censor opposing points of view - which Republicans have attempted to do themselves in the past - is fundamental.
It means boldly pursuing education reform, quite frankly something the Republicans have for too long been too timid to really do. Sure, Republicans have attempted to expand choice here and there, and to condemn critical race theory. But they have not endorsed full school choice and they have not banned the teaching of critical race theory as fact, as Youngkin is about to do.
The truth is, the reform train is being driven by parents, and the GOP so far is only along for the ride. The Republicans need to get to the front of the barricades and co-lead the way.
The time is long past for the GOP to simply offer two cheers for conservatism as they ride along in the coach lounge of the corporate-big government train.
Frankly, those who gave the GOP tickets to that lounge are not friends of conservatism. The national chamber of commerce is not our friend, and neither is the Koch network. Neither is Coca-Cola, Nike, or any of the long list of multinational corporations.
Neither is the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, and all the other deep state agencies. But then, even liberals once knew that before they embraced them in their authoritarian rebranding.
Fortunately, millions of average Americans now know where the lines are drawn, not just in education but on other burning issues, from immigration to the economy.
The revolt is underway, and, right now, the parent revolt is leading the way.
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