The pivotal moment of the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election came when Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe, the heavy favorite former governor of the increasingly blue commonwealth, let the following sentence slip during a televised debate with his rival, Republican Glenn Youngkin: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
The comment galvanized a multiethnic and working-class coalition of Virginia parents who’d had enough of being told that their concerns about their children’s education didn’t matter. The polls immediately began to tighten, and eventually, Youngkin, who’d campaigned on greater transparency in the education system and increased parental input, soared to victory.
WHY WOMEN ARE FLEEING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
In Westerly, Rhode Island, where the community is embroiled in its own education-related controversy, conservative candidates for Town Council and School Committee are hoping to follow Youngkin’s example and capitalize this November on a backlash against progressive overreach in Westerly Public Schools.
Westerly’s families have discovered what people across the country have realized over the past few years: The education system sees children as future activists to be molded and fashioned and parents as obstacles to bulldoze. As I wrote earlier, in just the past year, parents learned that Westerly Public Schools made available graphic novels that feature illustrated sex scenes in the school library and voted to award a Boston-based firm the contract to perform an “equity audit,” which will cost the district $65,000.
It remains difficult to imagine a political resolution to this crisis. Indeed, with so many school districts across the country experiencing the same kind of turmoil, it is difficult to perceive public education in America as anything but conquered.
The wholesale adoption of concepts like “equity,” which Vice President Kamala Harris famously defined as the desire “that we all end up at the same place,” as an unassailable good has been breathtaking to witness. The word just appeared one day out of thin air (because that’s how it feels when academic theories finally trickle down into real life).
Before long, “equity” appeared in the mission statements of every school district in America. Entire departments were founded, funded, and staffed in pursuit of its aims. Westerly is even spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to determine whether its schools are equitable enough.
“Equity” replaced “excellence” as the lodestar of education without even a single school board meeting’s worth of discussion. Students can’t even apply to college without producing an essay that pledges allegiance to it. Teachers can’t secure a job interview without doing the same.
Had the concept ever been introduced as a topic for debate in communities around America, it would have been repudiated immediately. After all, Americans believe in rewarding great competence with great compensation, however imperfectly we do so. It is the process through which we identify the most capable among us so that we might collectively benefit from their gifts.
If a parent should suddenly require open heart surgery, who would want anything less than the very best heart surgeon to perform the procedure? Similarly, who would want to purchase tickets to see anyone less than a great guitar player?
A world in which “we all end up at the same place” is a freak show of mediocrity and tragedy. None of us wants a world governed by the concept of “equity.” We want a world in which everyone is valued equally, and every effort must be made to achieve this end. But to promote “equity” instead is a bizarre and ominous turn.
At the center of the madness are working-class parents, baffled and betrayed by a cultural institution they can’t avoid and desperately need to work. They don’t have the time or energy to keep track of the ever-growing list of bizarre classroom incidents. They are wearisome of abstract theorizing, as well as self-righteous grandstanding. Our children can’t read, write, or do math at grade level. Can’t we save the battle over Western civilization until we’ve taken care of that?
Unfortunately, we can’t. I wish we could, but we can’t. Western civilization can’t simply be allowed to wither under continued assault. The right of parents to be the primary moral instructor of their children is nonnegotiable. It must be defended.
But that doesn’t change the fact that working-class parents need to get through this school year and the next in order to secure the best possible outcomes for their children. Not everyone is able to transfer their children to private schools, nor are they prepared for the rigors of homeschooling. Many families are simply stuck.
So the question then becomes, how best to proceed?
To begin, conservative culture warriors would be wise to acknowledge the limits of hostile, public confrontation. The frantic scenes we’ve witnessed at school board meetings nationwide offer precious satisfaction for a disempowered and frustrated majority but little in the way of substantive progress. If anything, they serve to entrench an already intractable dilemma more deeply. They also increase the potential for negative media attention. Mainstream news outlets salivate at the thought of overwrought conservative parents behaving badly at school board meetings.
Boorish behavior benefits the opposition. Period. Respectable behavior is essential for anyone serious about defending the rights of the family — in person or online. Conservative culture warriors should ask themselves which would be more helpful in a given situation: an expletive-laden screed on social media, or 20 minutes spent in prayer?
Next, parents would do well to speak with teachers about these issues face-to-face behind closed doors. Rank-and-file teachers are overwhelmingly good people who’ve simply been trained to promulgate bad ideas. It’s possible that many have never heard an articulate objection to the ideological content of their social-emotional learning curriculum, which is the primary pipeline for Leftist ideology in the classroom. Their college classrooms didn’t allow for dissent.
This is an opportunity to speak from the heart about the desire to raise children in a pornography-free environment. The literature on the negative effects of pornography for children is irrefutable, and there’s a good chance the teacher will agree. An op-ed in the Westerly Sun written by a collection of local clergy, for example, issues a master class on this approach. Maintaining the high ground is essential. And doing so might even win a few converts.
Parents should also remember that teaching is an enormously difficult and underappreciated profession. Teachers make mistakes, just like everyone. (I certainly made my share in the classroom). Teachers themselves are not the enemy.
It may be impossible to bridge the ideological gap in the education wars, but it is never impossible to bridge the gap between two hearts. We should ask Christ for assistance and be confident that He will provide it.
The task before us requires a heightened level of commitment and discipline. Our children deserve our very best.
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Peter Laffin is a writer in New England. Follow him on Twitter at @Laffin_Out_Loud.
