The Democrats' Education Lunacies Will Bring Back Trump
Terry McAuliffe lost the Virginia governor's race by saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach." If that was no gaffe, Democrats have a lot more significant losing ahead
Education Secretary Miguel CardonaOn Meet the Press Daily last week, Chuck Todd featured a small item about the 23 Democrats not planning on running for re-reelection to congress next year. Todd guessed such a high number expressed a lack of confidence in next year’s midterms, and his guest, University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato, agreed. “This is just another indicator that Democrats will probably have a bad year in 2022,” said Sabato, adding, “They only have a majority of five. It’s pretty tough to see how they hold on.”
On the full Meet the Press Sunday, Todd in an ostensibly unrelated segment interviewed 1619 Project author and New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about Republican efforts in some states to ban teaching of her work. He detoured to ask about the Virginia governor’s race, which seemingly was decided on the question, “How influential should parents be about curriculum?” Given that Democrats lost Virginia after candidate Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Todd asked her, “How do we do this?”
Hannah-Jones’s first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he’d just said, but because of a “right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated.” This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science.”
I’m against bills like the proposed Oklahoma measure that would ban the teaching of Jones’s work at all state-sponsored educational institutions. I think bans are counter-productive and politically a terrible move by Republicans, who undercut their own arguments against authoritarianism and in favor of “local control” with such sweeping statewide measures. Still, it was pretty rich hearing the author of The 1619 Project say she lacked the expertise to teach, given that a) many historians agree with her there, yet b) she’s been advocating for schools to teach her dubious work to students all over the country.
Even odder were her next comments, regarding McAuliffe’s infamous line about parents. About this, Hannah-Jones said:
We send our kids to school because we want our kids to be taught by people with expertise in the subject area… When the governor, or the candidate, said he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that, but that’s just a fact.
In the wake of McAuliffe’s loss, the “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach” line was universally tabbed a “gaffe” by media. I described it in the recent “Loudoun County: A Culture War in Four Acts” series in TK as the political equivalent of using a toe to shoot your face off with a shotgun, but this was actually behind the news cycle. Yahoo! said the “gaffe precipitated the Democrat’s slide in the polls,” while the Daily Beast’s blunter headline was, “Terry McAuliffe’s White-Guy Confidence Just Fucked the Dems.”
However, much like the Hillary Clinton quote about “deplorables,” conventional wisdom after the “gaffe” soon hardened around the idea that what McAuliffe said wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, people like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range of other issues in the Trump years, telling voters that they should get over themselves and learn to defer to “experts” and “expertise.”
This was a bad enough error in 2016 when neither Democrats nor traditional Republicans realized how furious the public was with “experts” on Wall Street who designed horrifically unequal bailouts, or “experts” on trade who promised technical retraining that never arrived to make up for NAFTA job josses, or Pentagon “experts” who promised we’d find WMDs in Iraq and be greeted as liberators there, and so on, and so on. Ignoring that drumbeat, and advising Hillary Clinton to run on her 25 years of “experience” as the ultimate Washington insider, won the Democratic Party leaders four years of Donald Trump.
It was at least understandable how national pols could once believe the public valued their “professional” governance on foreign policy, trade, the economy, etc. Many of these matters probably shouldn’t be left to amateurs (although as has been revealed over and over of late, the lofty reputations of experts often turn out to be based mainly upon their fluidity with gibberish occupational jargon), and disaster probably would ensue if your average neophyte was suddenly asked to revamp, say, the laws governing securities clearing.
But parenting? For good reason, there’s no parent anywhere who believes that any “expert” knows what’s better for their kids than they do. Parents of course will rush to seek out a medical expert when a child is sick, or has a learning disability, or is depressed, or mired in a hundred other dilemmas. Even through these inevitable terrifying crises of child rearing, however, all parents are alike in being animated by the absolute certainty — and they’re virtually always right in this — that no one loves their children more than they do, or worries about them more, or agonizes even a fraction as much over how best to shepherd them to adulthood happy and in one piece.
Implying the opposite is a political error of almost mathematically inexpressible enormity. This is being done as part of a poisonous rhetorical two-step. First, Democrats across the country have instituted radical policy changes, mainly in an effort to address socioeconomic and racial disparities. These included eliminating standardized testing to the University of California system, doing away with gifted programs (and rejecting the concept of gifted children in general), replacing courses like calculus with data science or statistics to make advancement easier, and pushing a series of near-parodical ideas with the aid of hundreds of millions of dollars from groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that include things like denouncing emphasis on “getting the right answer” or “independent practice over teamwork” as white supremacy.
When criticism ensued, pundits first denied as myth all rumors of radical change, then denounced complaining parents as belligerent racists unfit to decide what should be taught to their children, all while reaffirming the justice of leaving such matters to the education “experts” who’d spent the last decade-plus doing things like legislating grades out of existence. This “parents should leave ruining education to us” approach cost McAuliffe Virginia, because it dovetailed with what parents had long been seeing and hearing on the ground.
The complaints of most Loudoun parents I spoke with about curriculum were usually double-edged. The first thing that drove many crazy was the recognition that whatever their kids were learning in school, it was less and less the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Kids were coming home showing weird deficiencies in obvious areas of need, forcing parents, and especially working mothers, to devote long evening hours to catching their kids up on things like spelling and multiplication tables. “I grew up laughing at the idea of homeschooling. I thought that was an idea for religious kooks,” one mother told me. “But after a while, I caught myself thinking, ‘I’m doing all the teaching anyway, why not just cut out the middleman?’”
Parents talked incessantly about the lowering of standards in Loudoun, whether it was the dropping of midterms and finals in 2015, or the school’s new “Retake Policy,” which not only set an arbitrary floor of 50% on all “summative assessments” (the word “test” has been mostly out of use for at least a decade there, apparently because it puts too much pressure on students), but automatically allowed students to retake tests if they scored below 80%. The rule also required teachers to accept a humorous euphemism called “late-work.”
School bureaucrats are motivated in almost every case to not only avoid giving bad grades, but to pre-empt efforts to track children as ahead or behind by slotting them in certain classes. In a phenomenon replicated in other parts of the country, kids in Loudoun take the same math classes all the way through their junior years in high school, when they’re finally allowed to take advanced courses. As a result, students who are ready for calculus sit in the same classrooms as students still struggling with pre-algebra, putting teachers in a nearly impossible bind — how do you design “summatives” for kids on such different levels? — and all but guaranteeing that the bulk of kids don’t learn much, or near enough.
Some version of this dysfunction story is going on in districts all over the country. If you drill down into reasons, they usually come down to local bureaucrats discovering that lowering standards and eliminating measurable forms of achievement works as a short-term political solution on a variety of fronts, from equity politics to dealing with parent groups, teachers’ unions, and public and private funding sources.
Given these pressures, some policy moves are understandable, but even though most school systems get dealt impossible political hands, they routinely screw things up far worse than they need to. The usual pattern involves taking the easiest way out over and over, building bureaucracies full of institutionalized cop-outs and do-overs that mass-produce undereducated kids, angry parents, frustrated teachers, and too many prospering “STEM camps” and and private consultanciesthat offer (and usually fail, after collecting a fee) to pick up the slack.
In Loudoun, a lot of these issues would have hovered below emergency levels, were it not for two developments: pandemic closures that allowed parents to see what their kids were and were not being taught, and an outside “Equity Assessment” that gave parents a look into both their schools’ bizarre finances (a $500,000 no-bid consulting contract?) and the slew of wild plans about to be implemented in the name of “equity.” As noted in the “Culture War” series, these latter ideas included everything from the elimination of standardized testing to a proposed ban on criticism of school policy (at work or at home), to the formation of an anonymous nonwhite-only kid snitch network. In a crowning insult, the horrified reaction to these new plans was billed in papers like the Washington Post as parental resistance to “forcing students to learn about race.”
Historically, both parties have cranked out unsuccessful education reforms, from George Bush’s No Child Left Behind to Barack Obama’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” (which EdWeek just quietly noted showed “no positive impact”). Only the current iteration of Democrats, however, is dumb enough to campaign on the idea that parents should step aside and let the same “experts” who’ve spent the last fifty years turning the American education system into a global punchline take full charge of their kids’ upbringing.
The arrogance of this position is breathtaking. There is a debate to be had over whether public education, as New York put it after McAuliffe’s loss, is “a public good in which the citizenry at large is the essential stakeholder, or a publicly provided private benefit for children and their parents.” But the strategy of the educational establishment has been to put off the debate by denouncing as conspiracy theory the very idea that a discussion is even needed.
Worse, the rhetorical stall usually involves this argument that parents lack the moral and intellectual standing to be part of the conversation. Even the Indian and Asian families whose lives often revolve around their kids, and whose children made up over 70% of gifted programs in Loudoun before recent changes phased out the old race-blind admissions process, are being told by blue-checks and cable pundits that their concerns are imaginary, a manufactured Fox News invention.
These attitudes aren’t merely unpopular, they’re repellent to the point of making people want to sprint in a rage to the nearest ballot center to vote against them. People will certainly do that next year, and if nothing changes, in 2024 as well, even if Donald Trump is on the ticket — that’s how repugnant these concepts look up close, no matter how many pundits try to deny it. The Biden administration seems to understand this, recently unveiling a plan to boost parent “engagement” when a new poll showed Democrats’ lead on the education issue shrinking from 20 to 7 points. “Parents’ voices are critical to the success of our education system,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in the voice of a man reading a hostage note, adding, “They are our children’s first, and most influential teachers.”
This half-baked piece of P.R. writing, a pale copy of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s “Parents Matter” slogan, won’t work at all unless the administration follows up by sending a thousand of their party’s most dedicated educational cultists on a long fact-finding trip to Greenland. You can sell voters on a lot of policies, but “We know how to raise your kids better than you,” will never be one of them. Even a competent government wouldn’t survive making this claim, let alone this one.