“Do schools even teach civics anymore?”

I have fielded that question many times over the years — and it is disheartening for anyone who cares deeply about civic education. 

But I understand.

Civics spent decades relegated to the backseat of American education as schools placed greater emphasis on subjects such as English, science and math. 

But civics is garnering renewed attention now — and with that has come some difficult conversations.

Many teachers and school leaders are struggling to navigate district- and state-level debates about social studies curricula and standards, including how to teach civics and history. How should schools approach lessons about government and politics during these extremely polarizing times? What is the best way to broach contentious current events or historical issues? 

These debates have become increasingly political, with the left and the right accusing each other of trying to force specific political ideologies on classrooms. 

It is time to take a step back. Seeking the fundamental aspects of a quality, 21^st century civics education does not need to be divisive.

Four key principles that should be at the core of a modern civics education. Evidence shows that these principles are educationally sound and enjoy wide support across the political spectrum.

Principle No. 1: Help students develop a foundation of knowledge

The Bill of Rights Institute works with more than 70,000 middle school and high school civics and history teachers nationwide. They understand that students need a firm understanding of their country, their government and their rights and responsibilities as citizens. 

The importance of this basic civic knowledge enjoys wide support that transcends politics. As part of their Understanding America Study, researchers from the University of Southern California surveyed a representative sample of 3,751 American adults in 2022.

Researchers found several areas of broad agreement, and more than 90% of both Democrats and Republicans said they believed high school civics students should study topics such as the U.S. economy, the contributions of America’s founders, how to get involved in local politics and election integrity.

Principle No. 2: Tell America’s whole story

Learning about principles such as liberty and equality requires frank discussion of times when America failed to live up to them. Teaching students about slavery, Jim Crow laws and voting rights restrictions is not an assault on America’s principles. Instead, it teaches students that these principles must be fought for, pursued vigilantly and actively upheld. 

Leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. called for America to live up to its principles as part of the abolition and civil rights movements. 

USC researchers found that more than 90% of surveyed Democrats and Republicans believe high school civics students should learn about slavery and the contributions of women and people of color.

A 2022 study from More in Common, an international nonprofit that studies polarization and social divisions, found that “Republicans and Democrats share common ground about how to teach our national story but hold inaccurate ideas about what the other side believes about teaching U.S. history.”

In other words, there is broad support for teaching America’s whole story, and differences are often more perceived than real. 

Principle No. 3: Build critical thinking

The USC study also found overwhelming support for helping civics students develop critical thinking skills — a powerful antidote for the rampant polarization in America today. 

Curriculum that includes point-counterpoint lessons teaches students to view issues from multiple perspectives and critically analyze their own positions. This can help them learn to appreciate other viewpoints and engage civilly, even with people they may disagree with. 

Civics and history teachers regularly stress viewpoint diversity in their classrooms, and they play a crucial role in helping to develop future generations of critical thinkers. 

Principle No. 4: Help students develop and apply good citizenship skills

Students do not stay in the classroom forever. They need to understand their rights and responsibilities as citizens. 

That requires learning basic civic virtues, such as integrity, responsibility and respect, and developing citizenship skills, like how to engage in civil discourse and work within their communities to solve problems. 

Students should be encouraged to apply their citizenship skills just as they would their math, science or geography skills. This is basic knowledge transfer, a sound educational principle that involves being able to apply learning across different situations.

In 2022, the Bill of Rights Institute launched a nationwide civic engagement contest called MyImpact Challenge that encourages students to develop service projects in their communities and connect them to constitutional principles such as liberty, equality, and justice. Participants applied their citizenship skills to launch food drives, train their peers in disaster preparedness, remove trash from waterways and launch a poetry and art contest where teens could reflect on equality.

Civic education is vital to the future of the country. While disagreement and debate can be healthy, they should not overshadow the broad areas of agreement that exist around core principles of a civic education. Those principles benefit educators, students and communities — and point a path forward for schools. 

Correction: Principle 3 is based on the USC study.

And while a few charter and school choice leaders are quietly supporting the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, seeing it as a watershed moment for religious freedom, others are saying, in so many words: Be careful not to drown.

While public funding would bring unprecedented growth and financial stability to such programs, it could also create a fraught path to the religious freedom they’re seeking, as the burden of complying with court orders and myriad regulations, which even autonomous charters face, could be overwhelming. 

The school and others like it will almost certainly be tied up in litigation for months or years, said Greg Richmond, superintendent of the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic Schools. And that’ll be bad, since it will take precious autonomy away from what should be independent schools’ sole decision-making power.

Richmond said he looked the other day at the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board website and counted more than 150 regulations, including meeting agenda formats, residency requirements, Open Records Acts rules and more. 

“It’s odd to try to fit a religious school into that regulated charter framework,” he said. “The accountability that comes with charter schools, I think, would be a shock to many Catholic schools in terms of the quantity of measures — academically, financially, operationally.”

That said, what happens when a Catholic charter school teacher, for instance, takes to Facebook to advocate for abortion rights? Are the teacher’s free speech rights protected, as in a public school? Or can the charter school dismiss her because she’s advocating against the teachings of the church?

For their part, charter proponents fear that while the new school may be a good political fit in deep-red Oklahoma, the legal precedent it sets could both damage and perhaps even decimate the larger charter sector in coming years. “It will give opponents of charter schools yet another reason to claim charter schools are not public schools,” said Richmond, who formerly led the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. “So that does represent a threat to charter schools.”

Aside from betraying charter schools’ implicit vow to welcome and educate all students, they say it could further erode charters’ tenuous public support, especially in blue states. They’ve vowed to fight what could soon be one of their own.

In the most recent development, Oklahoma’s virtual charter school board last month turned down an application from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City to open the new virtual school, a move that proponents say was largely pro forma. 

But Nina Rees, president and chief executive officer of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the board’s hesitation likely stemmed from “the strong probability of breaking state law if the school is approved. Should a charter school be authorized that falls outside the scope of the law, it will certainly be challenged in court, and we will be on the side of those seeking to uphold the law and affirm the public, non-sectarian nature of charter schools.”

Public or private actors?

While the Oklahoma case plays out, both sides say the coming weeks could also set in motion one of the most consequential federal court decisions ever about the future of charter schools: The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide whether to take up a North Carolina case that could wreak havoc with the bedrock idea that charter schools are public schools, as they’ve maintained since the first one opened more than 30 years ago.

The case, Peltier v. Charter Day School, pits three female students against their “traditional values” school, which has required that they wear skirts. In doing so, they say, the school violated their civil rights — its founder has called female students “fragile vessels” and believes the dress code will preserve chivalry, ensuring that girls are treated “courteously and more gently than boys.”

In court filings, the school argued that even though it enjoys public funding, it is a private entity and not a “state actor,” like district schools. So the Constitution’s 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to it, the school maintained. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond last year rejected that argument, setting up a possible hearing in Washington, D.C., before a high court that has already struck down states’ so-called Blaine amendments, allowing public funds to flow to religious schools in small communities without sufficient school capacity.

“It’s not a new conversation,” said Rees. “What’s new about it is that we have a more conservative Supreme Court.”

For Rees, who served as a top official in George W. Bush’s Education Department, the truth of the matter seems clear: “As public schools, we can’t teach religion.”

They also must open their doors to anyone, both students and staff, she said. That could potentially bump up against schools that, as private operations, can openly reject candidates that don’t uphold their beliefs.

Rees and others say the path forward for funding these schools would more appropriately — and legally — be found in another recent development taking place in statehouses nationwide: taxpayer-funded education savings accounts, or ESAs, vouchers and tax credits, which in a few states offer as much money to families for private schooling as charter schools get per pupil.

“In some respects, if you wanted to promote religious education,” Rees said, “the ESA route will get you to that end goal faster, without rules and regulations that come if you open a religious charter school.”

In January, the charter school network Great Hearts, which operates classical education schools in four states and online, said it was doing just that: It announced it was opening a pair of Christian academies in the Phoenix area. But the schools, the network said, would be private and non-profit, funded by the state’s ESA program. 

Jay Heiler, Great Hearts’ CEO, said Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are worth about $7,000 per student, not quite enough to fund a successful private school, but enough “when supplemented with some philanthropic effort, which we’re out there pushing to try to make ends meet, partner-to-partner, with churches that have some existing classroom infrastructure.”

But Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, which represents the church on public policy issues, said that in most states, ESAs don’t typically provide anything near full per-pupil funding, leaving students a dearth of options, especially in rural areas.

While Rees’ group has vowed to oppose schools like St. Isidore and efforts to reframe charters as private actors, others aren’t so sure. 

Heiler said Great Hearts, which has operated charter schools for more than 20 years, “will continue to follow that pathway,” keeping its religious schools private. But it also filed an amicus brief in the North Carolina case, arguing that the Supreme Court should decide that charter schools “are not presumptive state actors.” Failure to do so, it said, “will wreak havoc” on education systems more broadly and innovative charters specifically. 

Held up in court ‘for a long time’

Farley said the Oklahoma virtual charter board’s rejection last month was largely routine, giving the archdiocese 30 days to revise aspects of the plan that include how they’ll provide rural broadband statewide and special education services to disabled students. He said the board also wanted to know more about how the archdiocese will address the question of whether a religious public school violates state statute.

“We’re confident we’ll be able to answer all three of those questions sufficiently, and then we’ll move on to a vote,” he said. He anticipated that approval would take place in June. 

But in interviews, he has not specified whether the new virtual school would admit LGBTQ students or hire such staff members, saying it would follow state regulations while maintaining its right to operate according to religious beliefs. Asked if gay, lesbian or transgender educators are invited to apply for employment at the school, Farley declined to comment. Like other public schools, charters are prohibited from discriminating based on religious belief, gender identity or similar factors.

He has said he believes that charter schools are non-state actors — Oklahoma’s charter framework, he said, is “very loose.”

M. Karega Rausch, president and CEO of the charter authorizers’ group, said even Oklahoma law is clear: It’s unlawful for a public school, including a charter school, to provide a sectarian education.

Whatever happens with the Oklahoma board, Rausch said, the case will be tied up in litigation “for a long time.”

If the Oklahoma board ultimately rejects the St. Isidore application, the archdiocese can appeal the decision to the state board of education.

Gov. Kevin Stitt has signaled his support for the effort, but new Attorney General Gentner Drummond has slightly complicated the process: In February, he withdrew an opinion from his predecessor that said the state board would be on solid legal ground if it approved a religious charter school. 

His letter to the board said state law is “currently unsettled” as to whether charter schools are so-called “state actors” or private school operators. Like many in the sector, he’s awaiting the decision in the North Carolina case.

‘Proceed with caution’

Kathleen Porter-Magee, superintendent of Partnership Schools, a network of 11 independent Catholic elementary schools in New York City and Cleveland, said high-performing private schools like hers would love the extra per-pupil allotment that comes with being a charter school: It costs her about $11,500 per student to keep the doors open, yet her students bring in just $800 apiece from New York state in the form of reimbursements for mandated services such as required assessments, immunizations and attendance reports. 

Were Partnership’s New York schools to become charters, they’d stand to bring in more than $16,000 per pupil, which the city’s charter schools typically receive, and about half of what they’d get if they were district schools. “We wouldn’t know what to do with that much money,” she said. “It would be just absolutely game-changing for us.”

But it would also complicate matters. “How much freedom do those religious organizations have to live out their faith every day if they are technically running public charter schools?” she asked.

Like many in the school choice world, she’s closely watching what happens in Oklahoma. She’s “deeply conflicted” about the case: Denying public funding to non-profits because of their religious status “feels wrong,” she said, so she supports the archdiocese’s application for charter status.

“From a constitutional standpoint, I think it is the right decision. I think it makes sense. But I just think it’s like, ‘Proceed with caution.’ ”

That was in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, when educators and policymakers were pledging to address longstanding racial inequities. Businesses created equity statements, books about race and racism were flying off the shelves and schools couldn’t get enough cultural sensitivity training. As a former teacher and district administrator now working with schools and organizations on diversity and equity issues, I felt like the wind was at my back. 

How times have changed. 

In 2023, at least 36 states — 36! — have adopted or introduced laws or policies that restrict teaching about race and racism. The nation marked Black History Month this year by removing Black books from school libraries, limiting the Black history being taught in classrooms and even by serving watermelon and fried chicken lunches in a school cafeteria. 

The country went from seeking to understand to re-creating fear, isolation and willful ignorance.

Some politicians believe they’ve a winning strategy in using how race and identity are taught as the wedge issue. Just see how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently exploited the College Board’s African-American Studies course as a political football. 

Educators and their allies must push back. Teachers must not be allowed to feel afraid of teaching Black history, especially when students experience Black culture every single day in mainstream music, fashion and media. As people who believe in public schools and in this country, we cannot allow students to be ignorant of what happened in American history and how that impacts present realities. We cannot reduce Black people’s experiences and humanity to a single story of oppression, nor can we dilute Black identity to a history of enslavement, trauma and crime.

Despite the current landscape, I still have hope. At home, parents can talk about the hard stuff  and bring relevant news headlines about Black book bans to the dinner table. With tough conversations, parents and educators can help young people recognize the importance of building new perspectives through literature and having multiple viewpoints about some of the world’s most vexing issues and how to solve them.

At school, there is still widespread interest among educators in finding ways to incorporate relevant Black experiences into the curriculum, not to stir up shame and blame but to value the ingenuity, beauty and resilience of Black culture. I hear from teachers and principals all the time, and they know that teaching about race — with transparency — is more about cultivating a new vision for the future than it is about staying stuck in the past.

One of schools’ most fundamental responsibilities is to respectfully incorporate different cultures into their learning environments. In my years in schools and districts, I emphasized the importance of teachers understanding students’ cultural differences, bringing those cultures into the classroom and dissolving any disconnect between home and school so every student felt seen, respected and comfortable.

In my work as a coach, I have helped schools take on this subject and shared my own leadership mistakes as examples of how gimmicky responses to social justice issues can further marginalize students. I have helped districts clarify what a more equitable impact looks like in their district versus what it may look like in others, emphasizing that educators cannot, yet again, apply a one-size-fits-all solution to integrating Black culture into their school systems. I have also partnered with individual school teams to prove that it’s possible to increase student enrollment and racial diversity at the same time — and that schools don’t need to pretend to be colorblind to do it. 

Public schools can put in the work to make their learning environments more welcoming to their students of color. They can engage in ongoing professional development to learn how to recognize their biases, incorporate lessons all year round on race and culture, and hire a more diverse staff. School district leadership can support their teachers’ attempts to integrate culturally relevant experiences in their classrooms and prevent the voices of the few from dictating the experiences of the many. Politicians can stop regulating what and how subjects can be taught in schools to the point that teachers are afraid to teach anything. 

Two years later, despite — and because of — everything that has happened since, I will say it again: Black History Month ended, and it shouldn’t. The old visions that students of color should assimilate into white culture must be left in the past, and Black and Brown communities should experience a new vision, where they can bring their full selves to school.

Even as elected officials turn into fearmongers, educators must stand up for students, band together and insist on teaching the fullness of our country, a country that proudly and persistently includes Black people as foundational to America’s greatness — yesterday, today and tomorrow.

And Weingarten largely complied, saying it “made sense to consult with the CDC” as the pandemic progressed in 2021.

But in testimony on Wednesday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Weingarten pushed back forcefully against GOP claims that the union exerted “inappropriate influence” over the guidance or worked behind the scenes to keep U.S. public schools closed for longer than necessary.

She said any allegations of undue influence over prolonged closures are inaccurate, noting that the CDC approved just “one particular edit” to a policy about accommodations for immunocompromised teachers.

Weingarten also noted that neither the CDC nor teachers unions had the authority to open or close schools, despite the AFT’s aggressive moves to ensure members’ workplaces were safe. In one instance in 2020, the union threatened “safety strikes” if school reopening plans didn’t meet their health and safety standards.

The subcommittee’s Republican chairman, U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, last month previewed Wednesday’s hearing, alleging in a March 28 letter to Weingarten that the CDC let the AFT edit its operational strategy for reopening schools prior to its February 2021 release. The guidance, Wenstrup said, advised keeping schools closed in more than 90 percent of U.S. counties, “contrary to the prevailing science.”

He said the AFT and Weingarten got “uncommon” access to the draft plan, even making line-by-line additions that “coincidently shifted the CDC’s guidance to align with AFT’s agenda — keeping schools closed.”

The issue of closures remains contentious more than three years after the pandemic shuttered virtually every public school in America. Researchers are quantifying their human cost in lost learning time, lower school attendance, worsening mental health, deteriorating school behavior and lower childhood vaccination rates, among other indicators.

Studies have shown that widespread reliance on remote and hybrid schooling during the pandemic had “profound consequences” for achievement, with students, especially those in high-poverty areas, losing more ground in math the longer they learned remotely. Learning gaps in math didn’t worsen in places where schools remained in-person.

During the hearing, Weingarten said it was appropriate for public health authorities to consult with education groups — she said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky noted that the agency conferred with more than 50 organizations about the guidance.

“It was not only appropriate for the CDC to confer with educators. It would have been irresponsible for them not to,” Weingarten said.

She told committee members that it was the Biden administration’s idea to approach the AFT about the guidance, not the other way around. But she denied that the AFT provided, in Wenstrup’s words, “suggested revisions to the CDC’s operational strategy regarding school closures or reopenings.”

“What we suggested, sir, was ideas,” she said. 

But Republicans on the committee, trying to make the case that the politically powerful union shouldn’t have a hand in U.S. health policy, pushed to tie Weingarten as closely as possible to the Biden administration. At one point, Rep. Debbie Lesko of Arizona told her, “I’m a member of Congress that sits on two committees that deal with the CDC. I don’t have a direct number to Director Walensky. Do you?”

Weingarten admitted she did.

“Well, hopefully she’ll give it to me too,” Lesko said. 

The hearing was delayed for nearly half an hour as House lawmakers approved legislation to raise the U.S.’s debt ceiling while cutting federal spending, including President Biden’s proposal to forgive student debt.

While Weingarten was Wednesday’s only witness, the subcommittee has also requested documents from other education groups about advice they gave to the CDC. They include the National Education Association the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National PTA, among others.

Midway through the hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, told Wenstrup, “I’ve been to some weird hearings in this Congress, Mr. Chairman, but this one might be the weirdest, because it’s convened in order to accuse a federal agency of the crime of consorting with American citizens.”

The AFT expected a contentious hearing: In preparation, it hired veteran Washington, D.C., attorney Michael Bromwich, a former U.S. Justice Department inspector general, who has already complained of “scapegoating built on false allegations that appear to be the basis for this Subcommittee’s ‘investigation.’ ”

For the hearing, the AFT also released a lengthy letter from Bromwich, who last week told Wenstrup and ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz of California that the union’s role in CDC school closure policies “has been exaggerated and falsified to support pre-conceived conclusions” about closure strategy.

Actually, he said, the AFT’s role was “extremely limited,” amounting to a few sentences in a 38-page document. He noted that the union’s February 2021 proposal of a “trigger” threshold of positive COVID cases that would signal schools to close was actually rejected by the CDC.

Asked during the hearing if she had any regrets about the AFT’s work during the pandemic, Weingarten said, “I regret the fear that was there. And part of the reason we wanted clear information was because we had a role in terms of overcoming fear.”

She noted that proper ventilation and testing, for instance, turned out to be more important than social distancing. “There were things that we really didn’t get right.” 

While Republicans sharply criticized the union’s role in often-disastrous closures, one line of questioning, from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, drew a sharp rebuke from Democrats. Greene asked Weingarten, a lesbian, “Are you a mother?”

Weingarten replied, “I am a mother by marriage.” In 2018, she married Rabbi Sharon Anne Kleinbaum, who came to the relationship with two daughters.

Greene said she questioned Weingarten’s recommendations to the CDC “as not a medical doctor, not a biological mother, and really not a teacher either.” She later added, “Let me tell you: I am a mother, and all three of my children were directly affected by the school closures, by your recommendations, which is something that you really can’t understand.”

Democrats on the committee asked that Greene’s comments be stricken from the record — a request Wenstrup denied.

International data suggests that schools weren’t associated with accelerating community transmission of the disease during the pandemic. While infections affected schools, researchers found, most of the outbreaks were small, with fewer than 10 cases. And they couldn’t be definitively linked to in-school transmission.

Yet evidence from other nations suggests that the U.S. took a much more cautious approach to reopening. Andreas Schleicher of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development told NPR in November 2020 that while schools in Europe were initially closed, “Research has shown that if you put social distancing protocols in place, school is actually quite a safe environment, certainly safer than having children running around outside school.”

Prolonged U.S. public school closures have long been a sore spot for educators and public health officials, who now admit that policies keeping students out of school for months could have been rethought.

In an interview last week with The New York Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recently retired head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “I certainly think things could have been done differently — and better … Anybody who thinks that what we or anybody else did was perfect is not looking at reality.”

The subcommittee has been probing several school-related aspects of the pandemic. Last month, its initial hearing into closures featured testimony from University of California-San Francisco epidemiologist Dr. Tracy Hoeg, who said scientists had evidence before the epidemic that wearing masks was “largely ineffective” at preventing the spread of flu and similar viruses — and that CDC recommendations on distancing six feet apart were “arbitrary” and not based on science.

The stubborn fact is that voters’ opinions and governors’ statements show broad agreement on a collection of practical education issues that offers a common-sense K-12 governing agenda, according to three recent analyses.

The two most prominent issues where there is agreement are expanding career and technical education (CTE) and increasing school funding. Others include boosting child care and early learning, raising teacher pay and providing families and students with more education options.

The first analysis is from a 2022 bipartisan poll of 1,200 midterm voters, plus another 600 from the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It identifies four issues on which voters agree.

Voters overall want more parental control and endorse specific changes. Over 2 in 3 (64%) believe “parents should have more control … right now” over what public schools teach. Republicans (93%), Independents (70%) and parents (70%) agree, though more than 2 in 3 (64%) Democrats disagree.

More than 3 in 4 voters overall, across parties — including in battleground states — say four issues from a list of 12 are “very important”: ensuring every child is on track (86%); hiring and retaining high-quality teachers (81%); offering more career education and real-world learning (75%); and improving school security and safety (74%).

A slim majority (53%) supports increasing existing school budgets if funds follow students to “where they receive their education,” though nearly 7 in 10 (68%) Democrats oppose this approach.

Almost 7 in 10 (69%) voters overall, including a majority (51%) of Democrats, support creating more education options, including charter schools, private schools and homeschooling. 

A second analysis, by the Manhattan Institute’s Andy Smarick, examines the K-12 agendas of 2022 gubernatorial candidates. At least 25% of the candidates agreed on 6 out of 27 issues, with two tied for first place: expanding CTE programs and increasing school funding, both endorsed by 30 of the 72 candidates, or 42%. The other four top issues were school choice (24 candidates; 33%); expanded pre-K (22 candidates; 31%); teacher pay raises (19 candidates; 26%); and curricular reforms (19 candidates; 26%).

Finally, an issue analysis by the Education Commission of the States of 2023 State of the State addresses found that CTE, teaching quality and school finance ranked “among the most popular” K-12 issues the governors mentioned. A majority also voiced support for early learning and child care. Other “hot topics this year” included student health, school choice and safety. ​​An analysis by the National Governors Association reached similar conclusions.

This agreement creates an ideological heartland, a term coined by the American Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Streeter to describe not a physical location, but a state of mind where domestic realists live.

Domestic realists are not given to ideological political extremes. They lean left or right or are part of that group called moderates. Roughly two-thirds of Americans live in this ideological heartland, compared with less than a quarter of staunch progressives or conservatives who live at the edges of the political spectrum, immersed in the culture wars.

With Republicans in 22 states and Democrats in 17 states controlling the governorship and both houses of the state legislature — the trifecta of single-party government — legislative specifics will vary based on party affiliation and voter preferences. This gives policy and civic entrepreneurs the freedom to meet state needs and local circumstances.

For example, more school funding in one state may mean increasing pay for teachers. In another state, it may mean starting new or expanding current child care and early learning programs. A third state may create education savings accounts that parents can use for private school tuition or to purchase tutoring for a child in traditional district public schools.

Or, a state may use more funding for several purposes, as is being suggested in Oklahoma. There, a new legislative proposal would give private-school parents up to $5,000 in annual credits and homeschool parents up to $2,500 for tuition, tutoring and curriculum, while also providing $500 million in additional grants, salary increases and other funding for traditional public schools.

This implementation pluralism follows the American federalist tradition. It allows states and local communities to be laboratories of democracy that test and refine laws and policies over time. In the words of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel societal and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

It’s time to forge a new K-12 political coalition of domestic realists from the ideological heartland who have a practical set of governing ideas based on everyday concerns shared by most Americans.

Disclosure: Walton Family provides financial support to The 74.

Politicians of both parties have made a lot of hay about the state of inner-city and majority Black schools. As the party that largely controls many large urban centers, and overwhelmingly wins the African American vote, Democrats politically own the outcomes in most of these jurisdictions. 

The Democratic Party has pushed to increase funding for low-income schools, aiming to solve a perceived lack of funding equity. However, the districts with the most income and racial segregation actually tend to spend more on low-income and minority schools than on wealthier, typically white-dominated ones. 

It’s time for Democrats to re-embrace an option that is effective at improving educational outcomes for poor and minority students: charter schools. Schools should be able to innovate, and nothing fosters innovation better than a dose of healthy competition.

An evolution in public education is already in motion. During the pandemic, Black parents started homeschooling their children in significant numbers: 3% of Black students were homeschooled in spring 2020, increasing to 16% in fall 2022. While homeschooling can be a good option for many, it is not accessible to all. Therefore, Democrats need to take the initiative to embrace education reforms that can prepare large numbers of students for the 21st century economy, while maintaining enrollment in public education. Public charter schools fit this bill. 

Charter schools once enjoyed bipartisan support, but Democrats have largely ceded the movement to Republicans. Some of this can be attributed to Trump administration education secretary Betsy DeVos’ vigorous support for charters. But the root of Democrats’ abandonment of public charter schools is the teachers unions, which have always disliked charters because most are not organized. In fact, most charter schools are explicitly exempt from union contracts. When put together, the cracks formed between Democrats and charters allowed the teachers unions, which heavily contribute to Democratic candidates, to coerce the party into withdrawing its support of these schools.

This shouldn’t be the case. In Washington, D.C., for example, which is 46% Black and controlled by Democrats, public charter schools have proven to be a major success at improving education outcomes for students. City officials first embraced the model in 2007, and today, nearly half of D.C. students are enrolled in a public charter school. Furthermore, the innovations that D.C.’s charter schools have adopted and the competition they create have caused traditional district schools to improve as well.

Because they are public schools, charter schools are still accountable for providing necessary science, math and humanities education. Accountability measures prohibit them from sprinkling in science-denying concepts like creationism or “Lost Cause” mythology in U.S. history. The same can’t be said for homeschooling or voucher programs that can — and do — funnel taxpayer dollars into unaccountable private academies. If children are to be prepared for the jobs of the future, they must be provided with an education that prepares them. 

Charters have a proven success rate among underserved, disproportionately Black students and offer opportunities for these children to have functional schools that provide a strong education. The Democratic Party has created a political conundrum for itself: It prides itself on anti-racism, but also on being friendly to labor unions. When needed education reforms conflict with union interests, Democrats risk losing the massive support of organized labor. But if Democrats want to retain the voter strength of the African American community, they have to get real and stop playing politics with its kids.

Academically rigorous public charter schools have been shown to work, especially for Black children. They allow parents and students to choose the type of education that works best for them. Black voters want their children to succeed in school; if the Democratic Party is to maintain their loyalty, the least it can do is get out of the way of children’s educational opportunities and support the public charter schools that support them.

In October 2020, for instance, a Pew Research survey found that parents whose kids attended school in-person were far more likely to say they were “very satisfied” with the way school was handling instruction: 54% vs. just 30% whose kids received online instruction only.

But Patricia Brantley, who leads the 15-school network of Friendship Charter Schools in Washington, D.C., said developing and maintaining virtual learning systems will be critical to public schools going forward. Friendship began investing in virtual learning before the pandemic and has actually expanded its virtual offerings since 2021. 

The move is largely driven by parents, she said, who see the value of virtual learning for their kids. She noted one parent who wrote that her child requires a wheelchair to attend “a fair amount of medical appointments.” Online learning works in large part because classes are recorded for later viewing. The woman’s son, once an average student, is “now above grade” level, she wrote. Brantley also said the move has fostered “incredibly strong connections between families and with the faculty.”

Three years after the first pandemic closures, Brantley said virtual learning will also be key to attracting young teachers to the profession as other white-collar industries offer the option to work remotely. She’ll be talking about her experiences this week at South by Southwest Edu, part of a panel that explores the possibilities of online learning. 

The 74’s Greg Toppo, who will be moderating the session, caught up with Brantley by email in advance of the session. 

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

The 74: The panel at South by Southwest Edu asks “Is Virtual Learning the Disruptor Teaching Needs?” What’s your short answer to this question?

Patricia Brantley: Virtual learning is the solution teaching needs. There’s an age-old question: How do we best educate our young and prepare them for the world? Assuming that we can do it in the same way that it’s been done for 100 years or more, when the world has changed, is worse than naive. It is failing generations of students in ways that we may not recover. 

In my opinion, the true disruptor isn’t the availability of virtual learning, it’s the convergence of factors illuminated by the pandemic. Those factors include the rise of parent-driven schooling through pods and micro schools that often rely partially on online delivery; the decline of traditional enrollment and rise in private, homeschool, online and charter options, and the flexibility now being given in other professions that make them more attractive to young college graduates than teaching. I see these factors converging in a way that is ultimately forcing changes in the way we historically have approached schooling, especially in traditional settings. Virtual learning isn’t the disruptor. It is a critical tool to support the way education must adapt to a changing world. 

Friendship is D.C.’s first public, tuition-free online education provider. Can you talk a little about what you’ve built and what your enrollment trends are?

We began investing in online education years before the pandemic, opening Friendship Online Academy in 2015 for grades K to 8 and expanding to high school in 2019. Our original families knew that traditional settings weren’t serving their children well. The truth is we followed them to online learning as the solution. We were proud of our very specialized, small virtual community that featured incredibly strong connections between families and with the faculty.

Then, as many families were hesitant or unable to return to in-person schooling during the 2021-2022 academic year, our enrollment exploded. We went from barely 200 students to 700. Our staff grew from four full-time teachers to a staff of 40, with a faculty that includes master teachers, guidance counselors, social workers, parent liaisons and resident artists that are leading students through deep experiences in the fine arts. Our growth is an indication of the effectiveness and appeal of online learning environments.

Part of our success here is likely due to our intentional approach to design. Since 2015, our priority has been to design an online program with the learner at the center. Interestingly, by centering the learner, we also designed a new experience for the teacher, one that creates flexibility and evolves the profession. By doing this, we saw significant interest from teachers to take on this role and high satisfaction rates from those who did. This experience gives us reason to question the prevailing idea that there is a shortage of people who want to teach. Rather, what we see is that many teachers want the freedom and flexibility to evolve. In that way, virtual learning can be as attractive and impactful for educators as it is for students and families.

What have some of your early successes been?

While our enrollment trends are strong indicators of our program’s success, I’m even more pleased with the academic results we continue to achieve. Ensuring access to effective small learning environments and robust online options for students and families are absolute priorities for us. That’s why we are so proud to see results like those from the spring 2021 study from (educational consultants) EmpowerK12, which found that Friendship Online students previously deemed “at-risk” for academic failure outpaced citywide growth in both English and Math during the pandemic.

I also consider it a success that we haven’t gotten locked into one way to meet families’ needs. As we’ve continued to grow and learn, we’re piloting other learning environments that push the limits on traditional school. Our microschools and hubs, which also emerged as part of the need created by the pandemic, were a game changer for many of our families. When we looked at the data, kids who were in those pods achieved larger academic gains than their peers who were not. Some even progressed faster than they did before the pandemic.  

I understand you’re using an AI system that listens to kids’ reading and reports back to teachers. What other innovations are you able to bring to the table?

We are constantly driven by the question: “What do families, students, and teachers need right now, today?” We are always asking ourselves this question and we push ourselves to remain open-minded about where the answers might lead us. Over the course of the past few years, this has certainly included expanding our online options and microschools, but it’s also included innovations that aren’t necessarily connected to technology.

For example, since the pandemic taught us that learning can happen anywhere, we’ve made investments in more experiential learning for our students. Partnering with Capital Experience Lab at Friendship Blow Pierce Academy has made the entire city part of our students’ learning journey. We’ve also developed a career coaching program for students to help them prepare for the future and discover career paths they never knew existed. In addition to their teachers and peers, our students are also learning from members of their community.

During the pandemic, we heard so much about how online learning was problematic. Yet your work suggests there’s huge interest from families. What does the conventional wisdom miss about online learning in 2023?

The first thing that’s missed is the idea that you can paint family and student needs with a broad brush. Does online learning work for everyone? Certainly not. But for those families and students who gravitate towards online learning, it can be a game changer. The pandemic forced all of us to adopt online learning, so of course there were going to be plenty of situations where that wasn’t the ideal learning environment. Now that we can integrate choice into the equation, you start to see that those families and students who opt in to this kind of learning are usually the ones who have great success with it. The idea here is that families need to be empowered to choose the best learning environment for them and we need to be prepared with diverse options to meet their needs.

The other thing that was missed in the urgency created by the pandemic is that you can’t lose human relationships in the shift to online learning. Despite what some may think, a high-quality online learning environment is still centered on people and relationships, not technology. If you leverage technology — and the flexibility it affords — to allow the student-teacher relationship to thrive, that’s when you see the kind of success we’ve been able to achieve over time.

South by Southwest Edu returns next week to Austin, Texas, running March 6–9. As always, the event offers hundreds of panels, discussions, film screenings and workshops on education policy, politics, innovation, and of course, this being 2023, the rise of artificial intelligence.

One keynote session will feature the renowned architect Frank Gehry chatting with his younger sister, educator Doreen Gehry Nelson, about creativity, critical thinking and collaboration in education. In another, pollster John Della Volpe will share new data from the November 2022 midterm elections and discuss how to engage with rising Gen Z leaders. 

In yet another, filmmakers will screen a new documentary featuring Oakland-based activist Kareem Weaver, who, fed up with bleak reading scores in his home city, filed a petition with the NAACP demanding change in early reading instruction. 

There’s actually too much to see and hear in the span of just four days, so The 74 has streamlined the selection process. We’ve scoured the schedule to highlight a few of the most significant presenters, topics and panels that might be worth your time. 

Here’s a highly subjective list of 23 sessions you shouldn’t miss in 2023:

Monday, March 6:

11:30 a.m. — Are Smartphones the Next Teen Addiction Crisis?: In this session by two educators and a psychologist who treats addiction, panelists will share the neuroscience behind teen brains’ unique susceptibility to tech — and how adults can help students fight it via a science-based digital media curriculum and resources designed to empower teens to develop healthy relationships with their devices. Learn more.

11:30 a.m. — Developing & Assessing Creative Skills with AI: The LEGO Foundation’s Bo Stjerne Thomsen joins experts in early childhood education, critical thinking, and game-based learning to discuss how educators can chart student progress in hard-to-measure areas while kids play. This discussion will explore new ways to engage kids in creative play in a way that develops essential skills and new methods for assessing growth. Learn more.

11:30 a.m. — Beyond School: Designing Education Infrastructure: The lab director of Community & Implementation at Stanford d.school joins two leading philanthropic leaders to explore opportunities for change that happen when we treat our schools as “vital pieces of community infrastructure.” Panelists will discuss what we unlock when educators draw on what students are capable of across physical space, tech innovation and social connection. Learn more.

1 p.m.— Is Virtual Learning the Disruptor Teaching Needs?: The pandemic exposed millions of students to the opportunities and limitations of virtual learning. Three years after the most significant disruption to schooling in recent memory, a panel of educators and advocates ask how virtual learning can reshape how we recruit, train, hire, and deploy teachers and how a virtual education workforce could provide new solutions to ongoing staffing problems. This session is moderated by The 74’s Greg Toppo. Learn more.

1 p.m. — The Race to Secure 1 Million Teachers of Color: The pandemic accelerated a looming teacher shortage, with a twist: Just 20% of teachers are people of color, even as non-white students comprise the majority of U.S students, according to the Education Trust. Yet 40% of public schools do not have a single non-white teacher on record. How can we rethink teacher recruitment and training to ensure that teachers represent the students they serve? This panel explores a national initiative to recruit 1 million teachers of color over the next decade. Learn more.

1:30 p.m. — Building a Bipartisan Path Forward in Education: Polarization in education policy threatens to erode the broad support that schools have long enjoyed. The Aspen Institute and a bipartisan group of state policymakers developed Opportunity to Learn principles to undergird a new, positive bipartisan agenda for improving public education. The panel features Aspen’s Ross Wiener as well as two state lawmakers (one Democrat and one Republican) to explore how this approach can help rebuild support for public education. Learn more.

2:30 p.m. — Educator Teams: Early Results & HR Implications: Mesa Public Schools, Arizona’s largest school district, has committed to building team-based staffing models in half of its schools. It now has 30 schools with innovative staffing models, and early results are promising. This panel features a representative of Mesa schools as well as two scholars from Arizona State University, which is partnering with the district on new ways to address teacher shortages and workforce design. Learn more.

Tuesday, March 7:

10 a.m. — Design-Based Learning Unwrapped: Build Our Future (keynote, livestreamed): In this keynote session, renowned architect Frank Gehry chats with his younger sister, Doreen Gehry Nelson, about their respective careers, sharing their perspectives on the roles that “creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration” play in education. Gehry Nelson created a well-known method of design-based learning, a teaching methodology that has been applied in K-12 classrooms worldwide since 1969. Learn more.

11:30 a.m. — Librarians as VIPs: Scaling Media Literacy: In this session, the National Association for Media Literacy Education will discuss implementing “train-the-trainer” models for scaling media literacy education and instruction in schools, districts and communities. This session is led by Donnell Probst, a NAMLE associate director and former college reference librarian. Learn more.

11:30 a.m. — The Long Game: How We Invest in Education: Adequate school funding is a key to educational attainment, but the benefits don’t stop there. It affects earnings, crime and poverty, research shows. Join a panel of experts from the Learning Policy Institute, the Public Policy Institute of California and the Tennessee Department of Education to hear how funding becomes more equitable to ensure better outcomes, especially as schools tap federal pandemic relief funds. This session is led by The Dallas Morning News’ Eva-Marie Ayala. Learn more.

1 p.m. — K-12 Assessments of the Future: Emerging approaches to demonstrating mastery, as well as advanced computational methods, hold the power to improve assessment while reducing time and administrative costs. Hear leaders across research, government and philanthropy talk about how innovation is creating the assessments of the future. Learn more.

1:30 p.m. — “The Right to Read” Screening & Q&A: This new documentary film features Oakland-based NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, who was fed up with bleak reading scores in his own community and filed a petition with the NAACP demanding change in early reading instruction. The session also features American Public Media’s Emily Hanford, whose breakout podcast “Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong” is shining a light on the Science of Reading. Learn more.

2:30 p.m. — Empowering College Hopefuls Through YouTube: For the first time, Arizona State University is offering its courses for credit through YouTube. The partnership, called Study Hall, aims to help potential college-goers navigate higher education by earning credit for their first year of college online. The session features Study Hall’s Hank Green, a popular YouTuber who has been called “one of America’s most popular science teachers.” His videos have been viewed more than two billion times on YouTube. Learn more.

3:30 p.m. — Bridging Offline Students’ Connectivity Barriers: About 15 million students in the U.S. live with unstable internet access — or no access at all. A $65 billion broadband-for-all plan is in place, but the effort isn’t expected to reach the last mile for all students until 2030. In the meantime, what are low-barrier options for students without internet access to access carefully curated resources of digital content on their devices? Hear Endless OS Foundation’s Bunmi Esho talk about alternatives. Learn more.

Wednesday, March 8:

11:30 a.m. — Gen Z Is Here, Are We Ready?: John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, has been called one of the world’s leading authorities on global sentiment, opinion, and influence, especially among youth in the age of digital and social media. In this discussion hosted by the Walton Family Foundation, he’ll share new data from the November 2022 midterm elections and the panel will explore how to engage with rising Gen Z leaders to bring their unique vision for unity and collaboration to fruition. Learn more. 

11:30 a.m. — The Promises & Perils of Artificial Intelligence: In this 90-minute interactive workshop led by Stanford d.school educators, participants will engage in the fundamental concepts underpinning Artificial Intelligence through symbolic play and hands-on design work. Participants will learn how AI can be used to address societal challenges, explore classroom applications, identify ethical implications and prototype different outcomes for social justice and the education system. Learn more.

1 p.m. — Designing Credentials for Innovative School Models: Experts say K-12 schools must increasingly offer education that’s personalized, skill-based, and interdisciplinary. But traditional school transcripts are ill-suited to capture the richness of these approaches. This panel discussion by representatives of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, the XQ Institute, the Aurora Institute and Big Picture Learning will explore insights and lessons learned from their credential design efforts. Learn more.

1 p.m. — Unlocking the Power of High-Impact Tutoring: Pandemic learning loss has engendered countless tutoring initiatives nationwide. Could tutoring be not just a short-term fix but an enduring feature of the U.S. education system? And what does research show about the benefits of online and hybrid models? This session, featuring former Tennessee Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman and current Tennessee Chief Academic Officer Lisa Coons, will look at new research and on-the-ground implementation of evidence-based tutoring programs that improve outcomes for all students, particularly those historically excluded from such services. Learn more.

2:30 p.m.— The Trouble with the Superintendency: As the pandemic recedes across the U.S., K-12 superintendents are retiring in droves. Top executive-search firms say business is brisk, with departures as high as any in recent memory. The American Association of School Administrators last fall found that about one in four superintendents had left their jobs in the past year, a marked increase from previous years. In their wake they leave a shallower recruiting pool. So is it time to rethink the superintendent pipeline? Should districts be more engaged in succession planning and growing future superintendents from within? This panel explores Texas school districts that were intentional about developing leaders and whose boards picked high-performing successors from within, allowing the district to keep raising the bar without losing momentum. Learn more.

3:30 p.m. — Awe & Wonder: Learning Design Beyond the Classroom: Educators should be intentionally designing the learning experience, say two experiential learning experts from the Minerva Project, an innovative college program that has made waves in higher education. This workshop will show how they design integrated online and offline immersive experiences that connect the curriculum to the real world “using awe and wonder as pedagogically useful tools.” Learn more.

4 p.m. — Drag Story Hour: Fight for Queer Herstories: As drag queen story hours come under fire from conservatives nationwide, advocates say it’s more important than ever to understand their aim: Using drag as a traditional art form to promote literacy, teach about LGBTQ lives and activate children’s imaginations. This session, featuring three drag queens, will discuss the importance of LGBTQ family programming. Learn more.

Thursday, March 9

10 a.m. — ​​How to Prevent School Shootings & Violence: This session features Nicole Hockley of Sandy Hook Promise, who will discuss the group’s “Know the Signs” school shooting and violence prevention programs. The session will bring together leaders who are equipping students with social and emotional skills to spot warning signs in their peers and intervene safely. Learn more.

10 a.m. — Educating Away Hate: In this session, two educators from the Groundswell Project UK will talk about young people and extremism, and how we can best challenge hate narratives in our schools and communities. Groundswell has been working in schools to counter hate narratives from the far-right to Islamism to misogynist extremism and other forms of violence. This session will offer best practices to educate youth on these issues. The session will also include personal testimony and examples of how young people can be misguided into extremist thinking — and how to help support vulnerable young people. Learn more.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation and XQ Institute provide financial support to The 74.

A former public school band teacher, Brooks said she was largely inspired by the grim pandemic realities of her kids’ schooling: Her 7-year-old, born late in the year, was stuck in kindergarten even though she knew the alphabet and could already read. Her 9-year-old was being bullied at a private Christian school, while her oldest, a 16-year-old rising film and TV actress, was simply too busy for typical school calendars.

“At the end of last school year, I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this again,’” Brooks said.

So she quit her job — her husband still teaches music — and began homeschooling all three girls.

Brooks’ experiences sync with those of many parents who have turned to homeschooling since the pandemic. A November survey from the online education platform Outschool found that this group is increasingly concerned about the quality of education their kids are getting in school. They’re also more likely to be politically centrist or liberal and less likely to homeschool for religious reasons.

Other recent research suggests that they’re also more likely to be non-white: The U.S. Census Bureau in 2021 reported that homeschooling among Black families exploded in the school year following the start of the pandemic, from 3.3% in spring 2020 to 16.1% that fall.

In the Outschool survey, which tapped 622 homeschool families in August, Black families comprised 9% of respondents, but the results didn’t probe whether there has been a rise in these families. The survey did find, however, that parents’ concerns around racism in school during the pandemic rose: Among pre-pandemic homeschoolers in the survey, just 2% said racism was their No. 1 reason for leaving school; among newer homeschoolers, the figure was 5%.

And it found that the reasons families began homeschooling in the past year are “shifting away from being a values-driven decision to an environment-driven decision.”

Among other findings:

• 12% of new homeschooling parents said their decision was primarily because their child’s neurodiversity wasn’t supported in traditional schools, up from 7% before the pandemic;

• Just 1% of new homeschooling parents said their No. 1 reason was based on religious beliefs, down from 14% of parents already homeschooling who said the same;

• 47% of new homeschoolers described themselves as “progressive” or “liberal,” up from 32%;

• 6% of new homeschoolers said they had conservative views vs. 27% of pre-Covid homeschoolers.

Significantly, few parents said their decision, either in 2020 or 2022, was based on politically charged issues such as vaccines or schools’ political stances.

Traditional schools’ ‘hot mess’

Outschool co-founder Amir Nathoo said the findings suggest that parents are homeschooling for many reasons, including having children whose learning differences “weren’t being satisfied by the local school.”

Homeschooling families have traditionally valued its flexibility, Nathoo said. “But now what we’re seeing come bubbling up is just: Pure quality is a top concern.”

Alessa Giampaolo Keener, who directs the Maryland Homeschool Association, said the pandemic “changed a lot about homeschooling,” including the number of families willing to give it a try: In March 2020, just before widespread school closures, she counted fewer than 28,000 homeschoolers statewide. That figure now stands at about 45,000.

Keener noted that the recent uptick, especially in Black homeschoolers, stems from many public schools being caught “completely unprepared” in 2020. Educators “absolutely did the best that they could, given the circumstances. But it was a hot mess for a lot of kids.”

Tracking homeschooling is a bit slippery. The National Home Education Research Institute in September said about 6% of school-aged children, or 3.1 million students, homeschooled in the 2021-2022 school year, up from 2.5 million in spring 2019.

The journal Education Next, using Census Bureau data, in February reported that the percentage of U.S. households with at least one child being homeschooled essentially doubled from spring 2020 to fall 2020, from 5.4% to 11.1%.  

Many of these parents said they were finding education at home “to be an exhausting undertaking.” One-fourth said they didn’t plan to continue.

But Alex Spurrier, who studies policy at the consulting firm Bellwether, said recent polling shows the pandemic has helped break a kind of psychological link in parents’ minds between education and a five-day, in-person school week. For many families, learning from home “worked really well and probably opened their eyes to a different way forward.” 

As a result, he said, “it doesn’t look like we’re on a path to heading back” to pre-pandemic ideas about homeschooling.

One-on-one attention, bullying trump religious reasons

Michael McShane, director of national research for the research and advocacy group EdChoice, said the Outschool findings echo research his organization has done recently.

“When we asked people why they homeschool, things like religious reasons or political reasons, those were at the bottom of the list,” he said. At the top: School shootings, bullying, school violence, and wanting more one-on-one attention for their children.

McShane said his school choice work has changed his outlook on things like the socialization that homeschoolers enjoy. His conversations with their parents shine a light on the often “tremendously negative” experiences many students have had in school. “I can’t tell you how many parents were like, ‘Let me tell you about the socialization my kid got: It was getting the crap beaten out of them,’” he said.

Homeschooling researchers have also long noted that a top reason Black families often give for turning to homeschooling is racism in schools — particularly against young boys of color. Black homeschoolers, McShane said, often say they “just didn’t think their schools were respecting them, or respecting their kids, or treating them fairly. And so they wanted to kind of strike out on their own.”

Bellwether’s Spurrier said more families are likely interested in more flexible learning environments like homeschooling or microschools if the barriers to entry are lower. He’s keeping an eye on places like Arizona and West Virginia, which are both experimenting with generous education savings accounts for families. 

Singing, dancing, being kind

In Atlanta, Brooks has discovered an extensive network focused on helping Black homeschoolers thrive — she has even begun posting humorous videos that encourage other Black homeschool moms. “It’s been awesome, just being able to talk to people that look like me, that are probably going through the same thing.”

Like many families find, homeschooling has allowed her kids to focus less on grades and more on interests.

Brooks now posts joyous TikTok and Instagram videos of herself and her kids as they sing, dance, take field trips, and meet people like Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams at public events. They’ve lately been trying out advanced harmonies in an informal family a capella group.

Brooks said she’s also able to focus more on character education, a top priority that she said doesn’t get much love in school.

“We learn how to have conversations with each other,” Brooks said. “And I’ve seen from the beginning of the school year til now that they’ve changed drastically. They’ll catch themselves if they’re not being nice to their sister. They’re like, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell like that.’ Those kinds of things are happening without me telling them. And so I just know for sure it’s working.”

Foremost among them: expanding career and technical education.

Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, scoured the websites of all 72 major-party candidates in 2022’s gubernatorial races. In all, he found 27 education issues supported by at least one candidate.

The data suggest clear partisan divides: Among Democrats, the top two issues mentioned were increasing K-12 funding and expanding Pre-K. Among Republicans, it was school choice and curricular reform.

But one issue rounded out the top three among both Democrats and Republicans: CTE. Along with greater funding, it was mentioned more frequently than any other topic. In all, 30 candidates, or 42%, featured it on their websites.

Higher funding held a distant fourth place for Republicans, far below CTE. An equal percentage of GOP candidates — 22% — expressed support for charter schools and better reading instruction.

Smarick, a member of the University of Maryland System’s Board of Regents who has also served as chair of the state’s Higher Education Commission and president of its State Board of Education, said he wasn’t surprised to find CTE hold such a prominent place.

“So many people have pushed for so long for a ‘college for all’ mentality, which was good and important, that now a lot of elected officials are saying we also have to do something on certificates and certifications and apprenticeships” and other career-driven outcomes.

He also noted that many college-going students don’t end up with a four-year degree. “So state legislators and governors have to think in terms of ‘How do we serve all of these adults?’”

The findings resonate with those of a survey released earlier this month that found Americans now want K-12 education to focus on “practical, tangible skills” such as managing one’s personal finances, preparing meals and making appointments. Such outcomes now rank as Americans’ No. 1 educational priority.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is already signaling that CTE is a priority: Last week he previewed the administration’s “Raise the Bar: Unlocking Career Success” initiative, which seeks to overhaul secondary education with an eye toward granting students the skills and credentials necessary to enter college or the workforce after 12th grade. 

Designed in concert with First Lady Jill Biden as well as the secretaries of commerce and labor, it urges colleges to offer dual-enrollment coursework to high school juniors.

The National Student Clearinghouse has estimated that the number of students with “some college, no credential” in 2020 grew to 39 million, roughly the population of California.

It may be a surprise, then, that while 28% of Democratic candidates in Smarick’s analysis mentioned expanding community college, not a single Republican did.

Big differences between incumbents, challengers

Smarick also broke out mentions between incumbents and challengers, finding that non-incumbent Democrats discussed several issues that no incumbent did: One in four articulated what he called an “anti-school choice position,” and more than one in five argued for less school testing. 

He theorized that perhaps these challengers “believed taking these positions would help them win primaries and garner support of teachers’ unions.”

Likewise, 38% of Republican non-incumbents expressed support for charter schools, while not a single Republican incumbent did. Non-incumbents were about twice as likely as incumbents to say they supported school choice more generally (81% to 40%). Smarick suggested that this is because these non-incumbents, like their Democratic counterparts, were also focused on winning primaries and earning the support of base voters who support more ideological causes.

Incumbents, he said, zeroed in on more practical day-to-day issues like early childhood and funding and, in red states, expanding the number of choices available to families. “It just seems like once you’ve been in office for a while, a lot of these incumbents realize that lots of families like their traditional public schools and they want to make sure that they’re well-funded.”

That may especially be true of schools in the “COVID era,” he said, which need extra funding so students can recover academically. 

More broadly, Smarick said, public opinion polls consistently show that the public “likes the idea of well-funded schools. So it’s not really a surprise that incumbents, including Republicans, put that on their list of things that they want to make sure they accomplish.”

Harvard University education scholar Martin West, a co-author of the annual Education Next public opinion survey on school issues, said the differences between incumbents and non-incumbents are “fascinating” and suggest that “the experience of running a state school system, or perhaps the responsibility of having run one, has a moderating effect on candidates’ views.”

He also noted that the striking differences in positions taken by Democrat and Republican candidates are consistent with the most recent EdNext findings showing greater partisan polarization overall.

Blue state, red state, swing state divides

When it came to the states candidates were vying to lead, Democratic nominees didn’t offer many surprises: Those in blue states supported traditional “higher-dollar” initiatives such as expanding pre-K and community college, and raising K-12 funding levels and teacher pay. And while blue-state Democrats talked about investments in community college and university systems, swing-state Democrats were much more likely to discuss CTE.

As for Republicans, red-state GOP candidates were actually less likely to advocate for more red-meat Republican positions such as a parents’ bill of rights or measures to block so-called critical race theory in the classroom. Just one in five GOP nominees in red states advocated for these policies, fewer than in blue or swing states.

Perhaps most striking: In blue states, more than half of GOP nominees took a pro-charter position, but in red states, not a single GOP nominee did. They were also four times more likely to advocate for more K-12 funding than their blue-state GOP counterparts.

Smarick said that perhaps red-state GOP nominees saw less of a need than their blue-state counterparts to fret about instructional crises in schools — or that perhaps their states’ public schools perform well enough to lessen the need to advocate for school-choice and charter reforms.

But it may also suggest a kind of “remarkable” generational change around charter schools, he said.

“If we go back 10, 15, 20 years ago, lots of Republican candidates were more willing to talk about charter schools than school choice,” Smarick said. “Now it seems to have flipped.”

And since many of those pro-school-choice Republicans won their races, he said, “in red states, we’re going to see the tax credits, more ESA [Education Savings Account] stuff. And this is different than it was, certainly, a generation ago.”

Overall, nearly two-thirds (64%) of Republicans in Smarick’s analysis talked about supporting school choice, while just one Democrat, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, mentioned it.

When it came to how these issues played out, Smarick found a few surprises: Increasing K-12 funding was a “top-five” issue among winners in blue, swing, and red states.

Matt Hogan, a partner at the Democratic polling firm Impact Research, said he wasn’t surprised. He said Impact’s polling has consistently shown that increasing K-12 funding “is very popular and its continued popularity is consistent with voters’ desire a focus on bread-and-butter issues when it comes to education, rather than engaging in culture war fights.” 

For Democrats, Harvard’s West noted, the push for more K-12 funding was paired with expanding Pre-K and community college, two investments “with which K-12 funding will have to compete.” That may help to explain why states that switch from Republican to Democratic control have traditionally spent a bit less on K-12 schools, he said.

In the end, what might be most significant in Smarick’s findings is what’s not mentioned: teacher shortages. They got “minimal attention” from candidates, with just three of 72 even mentioning the issue.

“I kept looking through these websites, expecting half or three-quarters of candidates to talk about it, and they just didn’t,” Smarick said.

Though the issue was all over the news in 2022, “It was the dog that didn’t bark” on candidates’ websites. “Which makes you think maybe we ought to take a look at what’s happening in states as opposed to just following national narratives about education policy.”

Public charter schools may have lost some of the luster they enjoyed with centrist Democrats in Washington, D.C., a decade or two ago, but a top Biden administration education official this week sought to reassure the sector that it enjoys broad support on both sides of the aisle.

“I do not believe that the bottom has fallen out from under the bipartisan coalition for public charter schools,” said Roberto Rodriguez, assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development at the U.S. Department of Education. “I think if that were the case, you would see the funding completely deteriorating from this program. And in fact, you’re not seeing that.”

The Biden administration has faced harsh criticism for its stance on its $440 million Charter Schools Program, a key federal grant that more than half of charter schools rely upon. This comes as centrist Democrats, once the sector’s biggest backers, have sought political support from teachers’ unions, which for decades have forcefully opposed charters.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden admitted, “I’m not a charter school fan.”

But on Wednesday during a panel discussion at Washington, D.C.’s Brookings Institution, Rodriguez adopted a softer posture.

“We support high-quality public schools for all kids, including high-quality public charter schools,” he told Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Doug Harris, the panel’s moderator. “Our budget stands behind that. The work we’re doing stands behind that. The rulemaking that we’ve proposed is not an effort to tear down the charter school sector. In fact, it is an effort to further promote that objective.”

But the administration has warned that more than one in seven charter schools funded by the grant either never opened or shut down before their grant period ended, in effect wasting an estimated $174 million in taxpayer funding. In response, last year it proposed new regulations that critics said amounted to a new “war” on charter schools.

The originally proposed rule for applicants required them to prove their schools met “unmet demand” in existing public schools — a requirement that charter advocates said ignored a bigger problem in district schools: poor quality.

The department also said applicants had to collaborate with “at least one traditional public school or traditional school district,” in effect giving districts a veto over their plans, according to charter advocates.

A third requirement said charter schools had to show they wouldn’t worsen district desegregation efforts or increase racial or socio-economic segregation or isolation in schools.

Taken together, one observer said, the draft requirements were “tailor-made to ensure that the most successful charter schools won’t be replicated or expanded.”

The education department received 26,550 comments on the proposed regulations, and angry charter school parents showed up outside the White House in May to protest Biden’s stance on funding regulations.

Charter school advocates eventually admitted that the final rules, issued in August, were less harmful but “not without impact” on future growth of the sector. Among the concerns: a shortened window for submitting applications.

Two groups sued days later, saying, among other things, that the department lacked authority to impose new criteria on the grants, which Congress approved as part of a massive spending bill in December. It level-funded the charter grant for the fourth year in a row. 

Harris, who has long studied the sector, noted that recent campaign rhetoric “has been different from what the actions have been in the administration,” with more public-facing skepticism from lawmakers about charters than “what’s happening in the nuts and bolts of committee rooms.” He asked the panel if they see the coalition for charters “fracturing” on the ground, especially among centrist Democrats.

Shavar Jeffries, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, which trains educators for the network’s 280 schools, observed that even in the movement’s “halcyon heydays,” charters were simultaneously “contentious among a variety of different constituencies” and the beneficiaries of significant bipartisan support. That continues today, he said.

“I do think there’s a kind of false idea [that] people are moving away from the issue in ways that [are] maybe inconsistent with what we’ve seen in the past,” he said.

But Jeffries said opponents of the Biden regulations had a point about not wanting to collaborate with districts, since some district officials are “not interested in the practices we’re trying to share.” He added, “You can take a horse to water, but you can’t take it much further than that [if] people aren’t interested.”

In a few instances, Jeffries said, opponents “are actually acting aggressively to undermine the capacity for public charter schools to exist.” He recalled local superintendents who were not only opposed to KIPP practices, but “sadly, in some instances…didn’t even want us to be here. So the idea that we’re going to obtain their support is obviously not going to happen.”

He also said the requirement that charter schools not worsen segregation can, in some cases, amount to a requirement that schools serving Black and Latino students essentially find white students in the suburbs.

Charter schools serve more than 3 million students, recent research shows, about two-thirds of them Black or Hispanic and most low-income. 

The Brookings panel also included findings from another panelist, Katrina Bulkley of Montclair State University, who led a team that found charter school authorizers are a key but little-studied aspect of the charter school world.

While some authorizers say equity is key to their mission, they found, others focus on choice or “market logic.” And they found that authorizers that prioritized equity received applications from schools that also prioritized equity. “This really suggests to us that those beliefs and the practices of authorizers are shaping what applicants are submitting,” Bulkley said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story contained an incorrect funding amount for the federal Charter Schools Program.

But that wasn’t the case in Loudoun County where former schools chief Scott Ziegler was indicted last week in a high-profile case in which a teen boy assaulted two female classmates months apart — with no warning to the greater school community after the first attack.

This time, it was Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, elected last year on a pledge to empower parents, who spearheaded the investigation into the district’s handling of the case: Acting on his executive order, state Attorney General Jason Miyares impaneled a special grand jury to investigate the school system’s alleged coverup and mishandling of the assaults. Its findings were released earlier this month in a damning report.

Ziegler was fired after the grand jury found he lied to the public about the first incident, which took place in a girl’s bathroom. 

The location sparked outrage among those who believed the assault was tied to the district’s decision to allow students to use the bathroom of their choosing rather than the one that corresponds with their sex assigned at birth. The attacker was wearing a kilt at the time. Despite early rumors, his mother has said he is not transgender and the bathroom policy did not go into effect until long after the first assault.

Both Ziegler and the district spokesperson were criminally charged with the former superintendent facing multiple misdemeanors, including false publication, and his colleague, Wayde Byard, accused of felony perjury. Ziegler was also charged in connection with a special education teacher who said the district failed to take action after she complained of being repeatedly sexually assaulted by a student and then retaliated against her for speaking out.

Ziegler, in a statement to The Washington Post last week, spoke about the grand jury investigation being politically motivated and said, “I am disappointed that an Attorney General-controlled, secret, and one-sided process — which never once sought my testimony — has made such false and irresponsible accusations. I will vigorously defend myself. I look forward to a time when the truth becomes public.”

Youngkin’s intervention, while unusual, is no surprise. Conservative parents in Loudoun County, riled by the district’s COVID policies, teachings about systemic racism and alleged sexualization of children through LGBTQ literature, have been among the most vocal in the country since the pandemic began. Youngkin capitalized on that during his campaign and came through with his promise to give parents statewide a greater say in the goings-on at their children’s school — starting with Loudoun County.

After the grand jury report was released, Youngkin addressed the backlash to his direct role in setting the investigation into motion.

“I do believe that part of my job as governor is to make the decisions to shine light on circumstances like this,” he told ABC7News. “And at the end of the day, we were going to … make sure that the facts were clear, and that those that had, in fact, violated their duty would be held accountable. And that’s exactly what happened.”

The grand jury’s recounting of the case seemed to shed more light on the disturbing series of events than the political heat they generated.

The offender, just 14 years old at the time of the first attack on May 28, 2021, arranged to meet a classmate in the bathroom for a consensual encounter only to forcibly sodomize her. The victim’s father, who drove to campus soon after, was chastised by school officials for causing a ruckus at the front office. Administrators alerted parents to his behavior that day — not to the sexual assault. 

Even worse, parents said, school officials were warned more than two weeks earlier about the boy’s troubling behavior: A teaching assistant, writing to a superior at Stone Bridge High School about his infractions, ended with, “I wouldn’t want to be held accountable if someone should get hurt,” the grand jury found.

Parents were even more enraged by what came next: The boy was merely transferred to another school — rather than placed in a more secure setting — where he sexually assaulted and nearly asphyxiated another girl at his new campus on October 6, 2021.

The grand jury blamed the district for the second assault, attributing it to a “remarkable lack of curiosity” and “adherence to operating in silos.” Among the more surprising revelations: A special education teaching assistant walked into the bathroom during the first assault, saw two sets of feet in one of the stalls and did nothing about it.

The report also noted a June 22, 2021, school board meeting in which the superintendent said, in response to a question, “to my knowledge, we don’t have any records of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” He was lying, the grand jury found: He and other school staff had already discussed the offense. Ziegler has said he thought he was being asked if they had records of any transgender or gender-fluid students assaulting other students in school bathrooms.

And there was a lead up, too, to the second assault. On Sept. 9, the boy grabbed a girl aggressively, tapped her head with a pencil and asked if she posted nude photos online. He asked another boy in his class “if his grandmothers’ nudes were posted online,” according to the report.

The superintendent, deputy superintendent and chief of staff were alerted to these incidents and knew this was the same boy involved in the earlier assault, the grand jury reported. 

“Despite having a 12-page disciplinary file, wearing an ankle monitor, being closely monitored by the Broad Run principal, knowledge of this incident by the highest administrators in LCPS … the individual received nothing more than a verbal admonishment,” they wrote. 

A juvenile court judge found sufficient evidence to sustain the charges in the first assault in October 2021 and the teen pleaded no contest to the charges in the second assault a month later. The judge sentenced him in January 2022 to receive treatment, counseling and full rehabilitation at a locked residential facility until he turns 18, noting, “This one scares me.”

Erin Poe, who has three sons in the district, said she was devastated upon learning the scope of school administrators’ dishonesty and ineptitude. 

“I cannot imagine what this has done to the girls’ lives,” she said, adding she laments the district’s “unconscionable” decision to hide this news from families and move the offending student to another campus. “The entire situation was handled so poorly, from the victims to the child who committed these acts. All the way around, things need to change.”

Poe, co-founder of Army of Parents, an activist group, told The 74 she’s grateful for the Republican governor’s intervention: She voted for Youngkin and hopes he’ll help expose the district’s wrongdoings. 

“I was happy to see Youngkin was going to make Loudoun County an example,” she said, adding his involvement, “would make it harder for them to do things the way they want — rather than the way it should be handled.”

But Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, said Youngkin’s role has gone “above and beyond.” He said the investigation into the district’s handling of the case could have happened without him. 

“I think it’s just part of his politics to continue to come across as the champion of education in Virginia — and a champion of parents’ rights,” said Domenech, who lives in Virginia and has closely watched Youngkin’s ascent and the scandal plaguing the Loudoun schools.

He said both Youngkin and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who punished schools for mandating masks during the pandemic — are “out of line.” 

He cited DeSantis for removing board members from Broward County schools this summer after a grand jury accused them of deceit and incompetence related to their role in managing a campus security program. DeSantis ordered the grand jury to investigate the district after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in 2018. 

That probe also resulted in the 2021 indictment on felony perjury charges of former Broward County schools Superintendent Robert Runcie, a longtime political target of the hardline governor. Runcie has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

“DeSantis has gotten himself involved in education to a level we have never seen,” Domenech said. “He’s, in a number of school districts, removed board members, appointed board members — which is really a local election process. I’ve been in this business for 55 years and have never seen anything like this.”

In Loudoun County, the parents of the second victim had little use for school leadership across the board, according to a statement they issued after the release of the grand jury’s report.

“The senior leaders at both high schools, along with the Loudoun County Public Schools and the School Board members, should be reminded that our fifteen-year-old daughter displayed more courage and leadership when she reported what happened to her to the Sheriff’s Resource Officer than any of them ever did,” they said. “The ineptitude of all involved is staggering.”

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on The 74’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this story. 

“There were political ripples to these phenomena as well.”

In a recent livestream discussion addressing issues of education, parental choice and the 2022 midterms, a panel of experts considered to what degree the disruptions of the pandemic have altered the dynamics and landscape of education politics. (You can watch the full conversation here) 

The event was sponsored by The 74 and the Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools project, and moderated by PPI’s Tressa Pankovits; panelists included Andy Rotherham, a member of the Virginia State School Board and The 74’s Board of Directors; journalist and author Anya Kamenetz; Michael Hartney of the Hoover Institute; George Parker, former educator, teachers union president and adviser to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; and 74 Senior Writer Kevin Mahnken.

From historic test score declines to fractured learning recovery efforts, a teen mental health emergency, a high school absenteeism crisis and imploding college enrollment, the foundation of our education system has been rocked. Amid these trends, polls show parents more motivated by education to vote — and willing to cross party lines over school issues. 

Over the last several months, we’ve looked ahead to the Nov. 8 midterms and previewed the pivotal races that could reshape schools systems and priorities: New governors that could change course on local policies, new state superintendents that will oversee city and district initiatives, new ballot propositions that will prioritize education funds and potential Congressional shakeups that would affect broader learning recovery and accountability efforts. 

With education driving the political debate in a way it hasn’t for a generation, here are 16 key races we’ll be watching Tuesday night through the lens of how it will affect students: 

Florida Governor — As Kevin Mahnken notes in his race preview: “From Gov. Ron DeSantis’s early battles against mandatory COVID safety measures in schools to this year’s dramatic intervention in local school board races, the pugnacious conservative has embraced fights about what, and where, students learn. If he is known for nothing else in the VFW halls of Iowa and New Hampshire, DeSantis will always be cheered among conservative activists for his efforts to curb what he calls teacher indoctrination on controversial subjects like race, gender, and sexuality. In so doing, he has both locked Democrats into a battle over classroom instruction and redefined what it means to be an education governor in the 2020s.

“If anything, Democrats have been happy to pick up the gauntlet that DeSantis threw this year. Former Gov. Charlie Crist and the state party followed the governor’s lead on school board endorsements, backing a group of their own candidates. The Democratic challenger has also directly attacked the Stop WOKE and Parental Rights in Education laws, unveiling a ‘freedom to learn’ policy platform and vowing to make the state’s commissioner of education an elected office. To top it off, Crist chose as his running mate Karla Hernández-Mats, the head of Miami-Dade’s teacher’s union. The selection distilled an already-polarized debate — between committed education reformers and defenders of traditional public schools — even further. Experts called it an understandable political calculation, though not without potential downsides.” Read the full preview of the race in Florida. 

Texas Governor — Education policies and school choice initiatives have factored prominently into the top Texas contest. As the Texas Tribune’s Patrick Svitek reported earlier this year: “A battle over school vouchers is mounting in the race to be Texas governor, set into motion after Republican incumbent Greg Abbott offered his clearest support yet for the idea in May. His Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke, is hammering Abbott over the issue on the campaign trail, especially seeking an advantage in rural Texas, where Democrats badly know they need to do better and where vouchers split Republicans. O’Rourke’s campaign is also running newspaper ads in at least 17 markets, mostly rural, that urge voters to ‘reject Greg Abbott’s radical plan to defund’ public schools. Abbott, meanwhile, is not shying away from the controversy he ignited when he said in May that he supports giving parents ‘the choice to send their children to any public school, charter school or private school with state funding following the student.’” Read more at the Texas Tribune. 

Georgia Superintendent — As Linda Jacobson reports in her preview: “Among the six candidates the Georgia Association of Educators endorsed for statewide office, all were Democrats, save one: Republican schools Superintendent Richard Woods. The two-term incumbent’s support of a controversial new ‘divisive concepts’ law that restricts what teachers can say about race and diversity in the classroom was apparently less worrisome to the union than the platform of Alisha Thomas Searcy, his Democratic challenger. ‘His opponent, regrettably, has a long history of advocating for taxpayer funding of private schools that we cannot overlook,’ President Lisa Morgan said when announcing the union’s slate of candidates. Searcy was elected to the state House at just 23 and consistently advocated for school choice legislation during her 12 years in office. She co-authored a law that allows students to transfer to other schools within their district, voted in favor of the state’s tax credit scholarship program and championed a constitutional amendment creating the State Charter Schools Commission. Groups seeking to start a new charter school can apply directly to the commission instead of their local district. Woods also supports charter schools, but expanding choice has not been the focus of his campaign.” Read the full preview of the race in Georgia. 

Arizona Governor — As Kevin Mahnken lays out in his race preview: “Amid debates this summer around parental rights, the teaching of controversial subjects, and LGBT issues in schools, Arizona politicians resolved the state’s longest-running education dispute. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and his allies in the state legislature pushed through an expansion of education savings accounts to all of the state’s 1.1 million students. The shift was the latest, and possibly the last, development in a lengthy war over school choice in the state. And as a political event, it may signify more than the hotly contested state elections this fall. Those campaigns are headlined by the gubernatorial bout, viewed as one of the closest in the country. But even though that race will serve as a bellwether on Election Day, delivering a rare battleground verdict on how well Democrats staved off Republicans’ midterm ambitions, its result likely cannot change the trajectory of school policy in Arizona, which will now feature more direct competition between public and private schools. Such sizable growth in ESAs has the potential to reshape the K-12 environment in one of America’s few remaining competitive states. The change was cheered by Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, a charismatic former news anchor who has been dubbed the ‘leading lady of Trumpism’ for her right-wing views and growing national profile. It was reviled by Democratic hopeful Katie Hobbs, who has captured her own national headlines over the last few years as the state’s top elections official. The contest between the two women will decide who leads the way for a newly altered school system.” Read the full preview of the race in Arizona. 

Wisconsin Governor — As Beth Hawkins reports in her preview: “Like many states, Wisconsin is awash in the newly charged politics over teaching about race and LGBTQ student rights. But the issues at the heart of what has become the most expensive gubernatorial race in the country are decidedly old school. A Democratic incumbent with long ties to traditional public education faces a GOP challenger who promises a dramatic expansion of the state’s private school voucher program, the oldest in the country. As of late September, some $55 million had been spent on advertising, with the race between Democrat Tony Evers and Republican Tim Michels a toss-up. If Evers wins, residents can expect him to continue to push for more funding for the state’s traditional schools — and for the Republican-dominated legislature to push back. Those same lawmakers have already signaled support for Michels’ marquee proposal — making vouchers available to all Wisconsin students — even as it is unclear how they would pay for it.” Read the full snapshot of the race in Wisconsin. 

California Superintendent — As Kevin Mahnken reports in his preview: “California’s race for state superintendent is in its final days. But according to some local observers, the outcome has been in hand for most of the year. Incumbent Superintendent Tony Thurmond might have avoided campaigning entirely, in fact, if he’d picked up just a few extra points of support in the June primary. Instead, he settled for 46 percent of the vote — just a few points shy of the majority threshold to avoid a runoff — and the mantle of clear favorite heading into the fall. Thurmond’s opponent in the nonpartisan election, education advocate Lance Christensen, finished 34 points and more than two million votes behind him in the last round.” Thurmond was the slight victor over education reformers’ favored candidate in 2018; Christensen is an obscure former Republican staffer in the state assembly who has attacked the teachers’ union and quixotically pushed to bring private school choice to the deep-blue state. “And while the next superintendent will confront significant educational challenges, from pandemic-related learning loss to curricular reforms around math and English, the debate over the future of education policy has largely remained quiet.” Read the full preview. 

Oklahoma Governor — As Linda Jacobson writes in her preview: “Don Ford, a veteran Oklahoma educator who leads a rural schools network, initially thought state Superintendent Joy Hofmeister didn’t ‘understand the workings’ of schools outside the state’s major cities. But then Hofmeister, a former teacher and onetime owner of a Tulsa tutoring company, put half a million miles on her car traveling throughout the state. She listened as educators spoke of the challenges facing small-town schools. ‘She was willing to listen and learn by getting out into our districts,’ Ford said. Educational options in those communities are now center stage as voters prepare to choose their next governor. Incumbent Gov. Kevin Stitt is campaigning on a statewide ‘fund-students-not-systems’ platform and promises to ‘support any bills … that would give parents and students more freedom to attend the schools that best fit their learning needs.’ A voucher plan that died in the Senate earlier this year would have opened them to children in families that earn roughly three times what it takes to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, with most awards ranging from $5,900 to about $8,100. Senate President Pro Tem Greg Treat, a Republican, has pledged to introduce a similar bill if Stitt wins. But Hofmeister, who switched parties to challenge Stitt as a Democrat, has called the proposal a ‘rural schools killer’ because it would pull funding from traditional districts.” Read the full Oklahoma preview. 

California’s Arts Education Ballot Measure — As Linda Jacobson writes in her preview: “Parading down a busy street in Los Angeles’ San Pedro neighborhood, students waved signs over their heads and urged passing cars to support their cause. ‘Honk for 28!’ they yelled. ‘Say yes on 28.’ The shouting referred to California’s Proposition 28, a ballot initiative that aims to pump at least $800 million into K-12 arts and music programs, and one that comes with a pleasing selling point: It won’t increase taxes. That’s one reason no one is raising money to defeat the measure — a relief to former Los Angeles schools chief Austin Beutner, who led the effort to get the question on the ballot and donated over $4 million to the cause.” Read the full preview.

Colorado’s ‘Healthy Meals’ Ballot Proposition — As Linda Jacobson reports: “The Healthy Schools Meals for All program would fully reimburse districts for offering students free breakfast and lunch, regardless of family income. It would also increase pay for school nutrition staff and offer training and equipment to make meals from scratch. To pay for the program, the initiative would cap income tax deductions for those making $300,000 or more. There is no organized opposition to the measure, but one lawmaker who voted against putting it on the ballot said he had a ‘fundamental problem’ with subsidizing meals for students whose parents can afford to pay.” Read more about the Colorado proposal. 

Senate Education Leadership — As Linda Jacobson reports: Senator Rand Paul would eliminate the Education Department if he could. Senator Bernie Sanders would triple funding for poor students and send them to college for free. Depending on which party controls the Senate after the election, one of these men could be the next leader of the education committee. The other could be the ranking minority leader — setting up a scenario in which some of the most divisive issues in education get frequent airtime. Paul first has to defend his seat in Congress, which he’s expected to do in solidly Republican Kentucky. Sanders would have to give up chairmanship of the budget committee. Both men are next in line to influence legislation that not only governs the nation’s schools, but also health care policy and workforce issues. Read the full story.

Maryland Governor — As Asher Lehrer-Small reports in his preview: “Throughout the Maryland gubernatorial race, GOP candidate Dan Cox has done his best to keep education culture wars issues front and center. The state legislator named a right-wing parent leader as his running mate after her group lobbied to remove a Queen Anne’s County schools superintendent who expressed support for Black Lives Matter. And in his only public debate against Democratic challenger Wes Moore, the Trump-endorsed candidate railed against ‘transgender indoctrination in kindergarten,’ a problem he blamed on books that ‘depict things that I cannot show you on television, it’s so disgusting.’ The approach takes its cue from several recent GOP campaigns, most notably that of Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The Republican’s 2021 win over high-profile Democrat and former governor Terry McAuliffe was propelled largely by controversy over K-12 curricula and COVID school closures … But so far the strategy has not traveled well across state lines. As of late September, Moore led Cox by a 2-to-1 margin with a 32-percentage point advantage, according to a poll of 810 registered voters carried out by the University of Maryland and The Washington Post.

“Democratic candidate Wes Moore is a Rhodes Scholar, combat veteran, anti-poverty advocate and best-selling author. Sporting an endorsement from the state’s largest teachers union, he says he plans to boost educator pay, reduce the number of youth that schools send into the criminal justice system and fund tutoring initiatives to help students recoup learning they missed during COVID.” Read the full preview of the race in Maryland. 

Los Angeles School Board — As Rebecca Katz writes: “LAUSD school board president Kelly Gonez is headed to a runoff against teacher Marvin Rodriguez in district 6 — a surprising outcome for the five year board member who was backed by the powerful Los Angeles teachers union. In the other top board race, Maria Brenes and Rocio Rivas are also heading to a runoff for the district 2 seat on the seven-member board. As an LAUSD teacher, Rodriguez has taken votes from Gonez because he had “credibility as someone who knows the system from the inside. Teachers have a lot of sway with the public right now,” said Pedro Noguera, Dean of USC Rossier’s School of Education. Gonez, the board member for the East Valley and the frontrunner heading into the election; has led the board on crucial decisions, including pandemic recovery and expanding school choice. “I have a track record of successfully fighting for our students and delivering for our community,” she said. “I thoroughly understand what the position entails.” Read more about where the LAUSD races stood after the June primary.

Michigan Governor — As Alina Tugend reports, driving the race between Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and GOP challenger Tudor Dixon is a school choice measure few residents have heard about: A proposal that would create one of the country’s largest voucher-like systems, with the potential to give students more than a half-million dollars in public funds to attend private schools. More than 90% of the electorate in a recent statewide poll said they knew little or nothing about the proposal, which has been enthusiastically backed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her family, who have donated $4 million to the cause. Whitmer and Dixon differ sharply on measure; last year, both houses of the Michigan legislature passed bills that would have created ESAs but Whitmer vetoed them, saying they would “turn private schools into tax shelters for the wealthy.” Read Tugend’s preview of the race in Michigan. 

West Virginia’s Amendment 4 — As Linda Jacobson writes in her preview: “The state legislature would get final say on any rules or policies passed by the Board of Education if voters approve Amendment 4. Republicans in the legislature pushed for the measure, arguing that regulations governing schools should be left to those elected by voters, not an appointed board. But opponents, including former state Superintendent Clayton Burch and Miller Hall, former state board president, argue the proposed amendment would subject education to more partisanship and would lead to inconsistency in learning due to changes in the legislature.” Read our full preview. 

Pennsylvania Governor — As Jo Napolitano writes in her preview: “The Pennsylvania governor’s race — a face-off between a well-funded ambitious young climber already eyed as a future presidential contender and a radical right-wing election denier whose own GOP party leaders refuse to support — is among the most watched in the nation for its 2024 implications. The winner could wield significant power over how votes are counted in the next presidential election, one in which Donald Trump seeks to elevate an ally like Republican Doug Mastriano, in a key battleground state. Education is a leading issue in political contests across the country with Republicans pushing to remove discussions of race and gender from the classroom while leaning into greater parental control. But the script has flipped somewhat in Pennsylvania, with Mastriano’s stance so extreme he’s mobilized school board opponents to take unusual steps to block him while Democrat Josh Shapiro has embraced a school choice avenue usually reserved for conservatives. Both advocate stronger parent influence in schools.” Read the full preview of the race in Pennsylvania. 

New Mexico’s Amendment 1 — As Linda Jacobson notes in her preview: “The amendment would set aside roughly $150 million annually from the state’s Permanent School Fund for early-childhood education and about $100 million for teacher compensation and programs serving students at risk of failure. The fund comes from oil and gas revenues and capital investment returns. The measure seeks to increase the distribution of the fund from 5% to 6.25%. If voters approve it, the measure would need final approval from the U.S. Congress because early-childhood education was not one of the approved uses written into the federal law. There is no organized opposition to the measure, but a Republican lawmaker who voted against placing it on the ballot said withdrawing more from the fund would leave fewer resources for the state’s children.” Read our full preview of the measure. 

Other key reporting and analysis on what awaits education-minded voters this Election Day: 

Florida: DeSantis-Backed Candidates Rack Up School Board Wins Across Florida (Read the full story)

School Boards: There Are Just 90 LGBTQ School Board Members. Half Were Threatened, Harassed (Read the full story) 

Polling: Survey Shows Majority of Parents Would Cross Party Lines to Vote For Candidates Who Share Education Agenda (Read the full story) 

Parent Groups: Moms for Liberty Pays $21,000 to Company Owned by Founding Member’s Husband (Read the full story) 

Future of Education: How Do Americans Truly Feel About Public Education, & What Do They Want to See? (Read the full analysis) 

Campaign Politics: PACs Get Attention, but Teachers Unions Still Dominate School Board Elections (Read the full analysis) 

Civic Engagement: Educator’s View — My Schools Are Helping Parents Become Voters. Yours Should, Too (Read the full essay)

GOP: Heading into Midterms, Republicans Find All School Politics is Local (Read the full article) 

Watch: Video Roundtable — School Leaders Debate How Education Politics Will Shape Midterms (Watch the full conversation) 

Get the Latest Ed Politics Updates: Sign up for The 74’s Newsletter 

Democrat Wes Moore cruised to a 22-point victory over Republican candidate Dan Cox. He will become Maryland’s first Black governor. In an election night interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, the governor-elect touted “big things” in store for Maryland, including “offer[ing] a service year option for every single high school graduate.”

Throughout the Maryland gubernatorial race, GOP candidate Dan Cox has done his best to keep education culture wars issues front and center. 

The state legislator named a right-wing parent leader as his running mate after her group lobbied to remove a Queen Anne’s County schools superintendent who expressed support for Black Lives Matter. And in his only public debate against Democratic challenger Wes Moore, the Trump-endorsed candidate railed against “transgender indoctrination in kindergarten,” a problem he blamed on books that “depict things that I cannot show you on television, it’s so disgusting.”

The approach takes its cue from several recent GOP campaigns, most notably that of Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The Republican’s 2021 win over high-profile Democrat and former governor Terry McAuliffe was propelled largely by controversy over K-12 curricula and COVID school closures, said University of Maryland political science professor Michael Hanmer.

“You don’t have to go too far to see what happened in the Virginia governor’s race. There, education was a really big deal,” the professor said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cox campaign was trying to leverage some of the same themes that the Youngkin campaign was able to.”

But so far the strategy has not traveled well across state lines.

As of late September, Moore led Cox by a 2-to-1 margin with a 32-percentage point advantage, according to a poll of 810 registered voters carried out by the University of Maryland and The Washington Post.

“The times are different, the candidates are different and there’s a lot of differences between Maryland and Virginia,” said Hanmer, whose Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement co-sponsored the poll. “It’s a really steep climb for Cox.”

Democratic candidate Wes Moore is a Rhodes Scholar, combat veteran, anti-poverty advocate and best-selling author. Sporting an endorsement from the state’s largest teachers union, he says he plans to boost educator pay, reduce the number of youth that schools send into the criminal justice system and fund tutoring initiatives to help students recoup learning they missed during COVID.

In their Oct. 12 debate, following Cox’s attack on what he called queer “indoctrination” in schools, Moore locked eyes with the camera and delivered an alternate message.

“I want to say to all of our LGBTQ youth and families, I see you and I hear you and all policies that will be made will be made in partnership,” he said.

On the issues

Nearly a quarter of Republican voters say they plan to cross the aisle and cast their ballot for Moore, which could prove a death blow for Cox in a state where there are already twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans.

Among the Frederick County lawmaker’s GOP opponents is the state’s popular term-limited incumbent Gov. Larry Hogan, who has repeatedly called Cox a “QAnon whack job” and “nut job.”

Cox did not respond to requests for comment, but his running mate Gordana Schifanelli said public opinion surveys do not phase their campaign.

“I am not paying attention to the polls, which are very biased and steered towards narratives some people want to promote,” she said in an email.

In a race that “revolves around people/parents who are very concerned about education,” she said the GOP ticket is advocating a pivot away from “BLM [Black Lives Matter] curriculum and equity outcomes” in schools. Instead, “turning back to basics: logic, foreign languages and, yes, cursive writing.”

sharlimar douglass, leader of the Maryland Alliance for Racial Equity in Education who does not capitalize her name, doubts whether Cox’s and Schifanelli’s “parental rights” agenda includes the rights of Black families like hers.

“This whole piece about the ‘parents’ rights’ to me falls into what we’ve seen nationally, like white parents’ fear and people not wanting children to learn the true history,” she said.

The lieutenant governor candidate dismissed the criticism.

“This is not about Black or white,” she said, explaining she does not oppose kids learning about slavery but rather the “political push to segregate children into oppressors, oppressed and depressed.”

Moore’s education agenda largely steers clear of curricular concerns around race and gender, focusing instead on policy issues like addressing the state’s teacher shortage and expanding access to early childhood education. 

“We are going to … honor the people who fight for our kids — teachers, administrators, custodial workers, cafeteria workers — the people who make our schools places where children can thrive,” Moore said in a statement emailed to The 74.

He also says he plans to reduce the racial wealth gap by creating $3,200 savings bonds for every Maryland baby born on Medicaid, lifting the prospects of children who are disproportionately Black and Latino. He has not said how he plans to pay for the roughly $100 million-a-year program.

The Democratic candidate’s campaign has not been without setbacks. In early October, the Baltimore Brew reported Moore’s Baltimore home had an unpaid water and sewage bill of over $21,000, which was then paid off within hours of the story’s publication. And details regarding his Baltimore roots presented in his 2010 memoir have been called into question.

However, if those issues don’t dissuade voters and Moore cruises to victory, not only will it be his first time in elected office, he also would become the Old Line State’s first governor of color and quite possibly the nation’s only Black governor following the midterms.

Investing in education: Maryland’s Blueprint

Moore has promised to fully fund the Blueprint For Maryland’s Future, landmark legislation that, when fully implemented in 2032, will infuse an additional $4 billion annually to help schools in the state boost achievement and close equity gaps. 

“My opponent is a danger to our state. His plans would certainly defund our schools, and I’m going to do the opposite by ensuring that every Marylander has access to a world-class education,” Moore said.

Robert Ruffins, who has advocated for the Blueprint for years as assistant director of state advocacy at EdTrust, said there are “incredibly high stakes” for education in this gubernatorial election because the implementation of the 10-year plan could hinge on whether it sees support from the state’s top officeholder. In Maryland, he explained, the governor has broad power over funding levels because they put forward the state’s working yearly budget.

“The governor being committed to the Blueprint, and to the funding of the Blueprint, and to being a partner in having it implemented properly is going to be absolutely critical to our success,” added William Kriwan, who chaired the legislative commission that crafted the policy and is now vice president of the board responsible for overseeing its rollout.

As a member of the House of Delegates in 2020, Cox voted against the legislation. Even so, it passed with bipartisan support.

But while the Maryland policymakers orchestrating the Blueprint’s implementation have their eyes on plans a decade or more out, the Democratic governor hopeful said he’s focused on what happens between now and Nov. 8.

“We’re not taking anything for granted and will continue to run as if we’re 10 points behind,” Moore said.

The 74 and the Progressive Policy Institute recently convened an expert panel discussion about the upcoming election, particularly as it applies to the question of education priorities and parent voice. 

Curtis Valentine of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools project tossed questions to T. Willard Fair of the National Urban League of Miami; Alisha Thomas Searcy, Democratic nominee for Georgia state superintendent; Christy Moreno of the National Parents Union; and PPI President Will Marshall.

Explore recent coverage of the intersection of education and politics from The 74: 

• ‘Like a Gut Punch’: Advocates Reel as Manchin Compromise Abandons Pre-K

• Rash of New Polls Raises Red Flags for Democrats on Education

• Ed Dept. Launches ‘Unprecedented’ Parent Council

• Young Republicans, Old Democrats: Poll Points to Stark Generation Gaps on School Choice, Teachers’ Unions

In a recent breakdown, 74 Senior Writer Kevin Mahnken notes the polls “were released by interest groups representing opposite ends of the center-left public policy spectrum … but both point to an electorate that is increasingly skeptical of the Democratic education brand and open to Republican counter-proposals.” 

In particular, Mahnken observes, “Forty-seven percent [of respondents] said they trusted Republicans to handle public education today, compared with just 43 percent who trusted Democrats. And the numbers grew worse among parents, who favored Republicans by nine points.” 

Watch Mahnken’s video explainer of the findings — and click here to read his full coverage.

As critics pounce, advocates for greater pre-K investments grumble, “Look, the study showed that pre-K was solidly effective at preparing kids for kindergarten. Why are we measuring its value in terms of metrics that come way later? By that logic, we shouldn’t just end pre-K investments … we should also cancel 2nd grade (and maybe the rest of early elementary school).”

To be sure, there’s a huge research base showing that early education programs are effective. They’re among the most efficient educational investments we can make! But that doesn’t stop us replaying the aforementioned pattern. 

It’s a weird tendency in education debates: we blame good, tested, and effective ideas for not solving the full extent of U.S. inequities. Even the best ideas — the ones that help students succeed, the ones that close divisions in schools and society — rarely get credit for their efficacy. So pre-K debates have less to do with whether pre-K works at preparing kids for kindergarten, and more with whether it “works” on some other array of distant metrics. 

Folks in education do this all the time. Take charter schools, for example. Over the past several decades, a bevy of studies have shown that when charters are opened and overseen by rigorous authorizers, they can significantly improve academic achievement, particularly for students from historically marginalized communities. In the 2010s, researchers at Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) released several studies showing that well-regulated charters tend to be particularly effective for raising the test scores of English learners, students from low-income families, and African-American students. A 2021 analysis of charter schools’ academic performance found similarly encouraging results across the country. 

But as a policy idea, charter schools are besieged with criticism for “failing” to fully close achievement gaps in all places and at all times. It’s not that there’s no room for criticism of charter schools; indeed, studies have shown that charter schools with weak quality and oversight provisions tend to generally be less effective than comparable public schools. It’s just that, too often, even successful charter school sectors are regularly blamed for not yet having defeated the full breadth of systemic racism and economic inequality in American life. 

Why is this? The blame cuts in two directions, but both have to do with how we define effectiveness of particular programs. First: advocates for certain education reforms often set up their ideas for failure. Pre-K advocates spent many years promising that universal pre-K could close achievement gaps before they begin to widen, obviate the need for controversial K-12 reforms by raising academic achievement, increase participants’ future incomes and lower their chances of incarceration as adults, and etc, etc, etc. Against that backdrop, is it any wonder that pre-K programs that simply prepare kids to succeed in kindergarten feel like flops? 

This kind of overpromising can be useful for drawing attention to a policy idea, but advocates ought to recognize that inflated rhetoric comes with the cost of raising expectations well beyond what they can likely deliver. (Note: there is some evidence that pre-K programs with modest short-term academic impacts may still improve participants’ long-term life outcomes.)

Second: policy critiques are almost always driven more by prior political preferences than the facts on the ground. Sure, when new ideas arrive in public education, critics justifiably warn against “experimenting on schools and kids.” But as the evidentiary base gets better for a particular idea over time, critics shift to less honest work—muddying the measurement waters. If pre-K seems to be really effective at improving children’s school readiness and long-term outcomes, critics who loathe public investment in education and pine for traditional one-income households with stay-at-home mothers caring for kids … find it easy to redefine successful pre-K as something else (e.g. elementary school test scores). 

If, with sufficient public oversight, charter schools produce strong academic outcomes for historically marginalized children, critics who worry that charter schools divert resources and attention from traditional school districts … find it easy to frame those successes out of the picture by measuring charters against other benchmarks (even those that also also elude traditional public schools). For instance, it’s frustrating to see charter schools attacked for allegedly refusing to enroll hard-to-serve students who might be at risk of failing to graduate on time, absent evidence that this is systemically happening (and in the presence of evidence that such “creaming” also occurs in traditional public schools).

To be sure, the design, implementation, and defense of new education policies are always going to be plagued by politics. That’s a basic element of living in a democracy. But we really need to stop blaming good-faith efforts to improve schools for failing to solve American racism, economic inequality, etc. 

Instead, we ought to think of education reforms as stackable. Nearly every study shows that developmentally appropriate, well-funded pre-K is good for kids—but it’s not enough to eliminate all American social inequities. Indeed, a system of high-quality pre-K that feeds into an equitably funded system of effective K-12 schools…is also likely to fall short. (Add in paid family leave, affordable high-quality child care, and a monthly child allowance, though, and we might really be getting somewhere.) 

But that’s no excuse for doing nothing. The roots of racist inequities against communities of color are centuries deep and systemically wide; undoing them requires sustained reforms at all levels.

District 2

District 2 encompasses Downtown and East LA, including Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, Los Feliz, Highland Park, El Sereno, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Montecito Heights and Cypress Park. The three candidates running in this district are vying for the spot of longtime, outgoing board member Monica Garcia.

Maria Brenes

As the director of Inner City Struggle, a nonprofit in Boyle Heights, Bernes has worked on improving education and helping youth in East L.A. 

Brenes, who is supported by Local 99 of Service Employees International Union and by charter school advocates, said she will focus on “replacing punitive measures with trauma informed approaches.” On covid learning loss, she supports “enrichment and tutoring during and after school,” and adding more “arts, music, and mental health programming.”

Brenes backs the Student Equity Needs Index (SENI) model, which distributes funding to the “highest need” schools first. 

Rocio Rivas

Rivas is the research and policy deputy to district 5 board member, Jackie Goldberg and holds a phD in education.

Rivas, who is backed by the teachers union, is passionate about expanding the community school model, where schools work with community groups providing students with health and social services. She spoke about “greening” schools, by including more open space on campuses.

On learning loss, Rivas said that she would employ peer-to-peer tutoring and partnering with overlooked resources such as retired teachers.

Miguel Ángel Segura

Segura is a substitute teacher who said he “understands the issues on a personal level.” 

Mental health is a “top priority,” he said, adding he would expand services by partnering with community nonprofits, creating a board of students, and infusing social-emotional learning into the classroom.

Segura is particularly concerned with helping immigrant students adjust to school, adding he will make sure all schools have a “newcomer center” where students can connect and get to know the school culture. 

Erica Vilardi Espinosa 

Erica Vilardi Espinosa is a community activist and a mom in Los Feliz. 

She said mental health is “absolutely the most critical issue of our time.” She said she would incorporate more “mental health activities” into the curriculum such as physical activities, and arts.

Vilardi Espinosa, who has never run for public office, is known for leading a large girl scout troop in East LA and is endorsed by unions representing public safety officers. “As one of the newest people running for office I will have to work hardest to prove myself.” she said. 

District 4

District 4 covers the westside and parts of the San Fernando Valley, encompassing some of the . the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, such as the Pacific Palisades and Hancock Park; as well as low-income areas with high immigrant populations, like Reseda and Burbank.

Nick Melvoin

Melvoin, the incumbent in district 4, has been on the board since 2017. Previously, he was a teacher and an attorney. 

On mental health, he said he wants to lean more on “community partners and… telehealth services.” On the digital divide, he said “the district must work to make sure there is long-term investment in internet access in underserved areas.”

Melvoin said he wants to cut down on the “bureaucracy and red tape” so it is easier for schools to partner with outside organizations.

Tracey Schroeder

Schroeder is a third grade teacher. Her platform is centered around being a “boots on the ground educator” and putting “teachers, parents, and students first.”

On mental health, she said  “we must start in the classroom first.” Schroeder concentrated most of her responses on the importance of reading, saying “reading is where it all starts … we need to focus back on the basics.” She also chided the current school board for its lack of “accountability and transparency.”

Schroeder is also passionate about teacher retention and “making sure students are back in the classroom.” 

District 6

District 6 covers the East Valley, including North Hollywood, Panorama City, and Sun Valley.

Kelly Gonez

Gonez, who is president of the school board and is backed by the teacher’s union, said  “this generation of students is the first to fight a serious stigma against mental health …,” and that she wants to create a “proactive” mental health culture in schools. 

She said “equity needs to be the driving force when it comes to hiring;” and that she wants to focus on providing a  “rigorous education” for Black students at high needs schools.

Gonez also spoke about adding safety protocols to schools after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Marvin Rodriguez

Rodriguez is a teacher and parent in LAUSD. He is focused on more support for special education students and providing a “culturally responsible curriculum.”

On mental health, Rodriguez said the district needs to  “address our teachers who are struggling too …” He also wants more of an emphasis on mental health and wants to implement social-emotional learning at a young age.

He also wants to “expand community schools” and “engage parents and families,” and allow non-citizens to vote for local office.

Gentille Barkhordarian running for a seat in district 4; and Jess Arana running for a seat in district 6 did not attend the forums. Miho Murai, a write-in candidate in district 2 also was not in attendance.

If this video isn’t playing, click here to watch.

— Edited by James Fields

Advocacy groups formed on all sides of the political spectrum with some designed to address long-standing inequities and others meant to push back against what members considered a liberal agenda.

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Right-leaning parents who oppose COVID restrictions in schools and the teaching of systemic racism are seen as key to Republican Glen Youngkin’s rise in the Virginia governor’s race and are already being counted as a potentially potent political force in the 2022 midterms. 

Tina Descovich is the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a high-profile and fast-growing parents’ rights organization founded in January. The group boasts 140 chapters in 32 states with roughly 60,000 active members, up from 65 chapters in 24 states with 24,000 members in July. 

While Descovich pushes back at descriptions of Moms for Liberty as being solely conservative, many of its members have publicly railed against mask mandates, vaccine requirements and the teaching of critical race theory.

Descovich, who served four years on the Brevard Public Schools Board of Education in Florida before losing her seat in 2020, said she was prompted to start the organization after observing how poorly some members of her community — and others throughout the country — were treated by school administrators when they tried to address hot-button issues surrounding COVID.

ATTENTION School Boards, City Officials, State Legislators, Governors, Congressmen, and every single unelected bureaucrat in between, this message is for YOU. #moms4liberty #FearlessMoms #fearless4liberty pic.twitter.com/JGvt9l3GfX

— Moms for Liberty (@Moms4Liberty) July 27, 2021

Moms for Liberty members, wearing shirts emblazoned with the group’s logo in white lettering and its increasingly recognizable catchphrase, have been attending school board meetings in force across the country, repudiating not only pandemic-related restrictions but many schools’ efforts around equity and inclusion. 

Descovich believes their viewpoints are valuable and the discourse long overdue.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Why do you think Moms for Liberty has had such success in such a short timeframe?

Descovich: We filled a need, just like any other organization or business or anyone that has success when they … create a way to help people with the problem that they have. And so again, we saw parents kind of floundering not knowing what to do to stand up for their children. We kind of gave them a model and a little background information from experiences that we had had over the previous four years and people are finding that to be helpful.

What are some of the unifying principles among your members?

Our mission is to empower parents to stand up and reclaim their parental rights at all levels of government. Right now, that seems to be really focused on public education because of the things that families have faced over the last two years. The principle that ties us all together is that we love our children, we care for our children and we believe that we are the best decision-makers for our children.

Of course, some people believe it is their fundamental right to send their child to a school with vaccine and face mask mandates. They also love their children and want to protect them.

Yeah, I agree with what you’re saying. And I think everybody deserves a voice in the conversation. What we were seeing was that as COVID was unfolding and 2020 was happening, those that disagreed with what you just said were being silenced. I was watching it happening in my own school board. I remember one specific mom getting up and talking about concerns she had about her child and literally getting heckled from the back of the room. I watched her walk out of our school boardroom in tears. And so they felt, you know, marginalized and like their voices shouldn’t be heard.

Is there a “happy medium” in terms of vaccines or mask mandates? People look at these issues as absolute.

I do believe we can live in a world where people get to choose what is best for them. Those that want to continue to mask because they’re more vulnerable, that is their right. And there’s different quality of masks. They could be in an N-95 mask … They can be six feet away from those that choose not to mask or have been vaccinated and feel like they don’t need to mask anymore or have had COVID. Every person needs to make the decision that is best for them.

Much of what you said about the founding of your organization — how it sprang up in response to parents not being heard — is actually in line with other parent groups on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Yet your group has a conservative political bent. How did that happen?

I think because of the issues of today … but to assume we’re conservative, I know that’s how we’ve been branded, locally and nationally. I did an unscientific survey of our chapter chairs a couple of weeks ago … and we have quite a few that are independents, one Democrat. So, the idea that … only conservative parents should be part of our organization … it’s just false. We want better educational outcomes for all children. And if there’s a segment of our organization that wants to fight for, you know, our Title I schools to get more services, we will gladly support them. We welcome them. We want to help with that fight.

But if a parent wanted the right to stand up and say, “We need a mask mandate,” or “We need mandatory vaccines,” they could not be part of your organization, correct?

So, I think that we would diverge when it came down to the issues of individual liberty. I mean, our title is Moms for Liberty. So … once a parent wants to make decisions for other children, and force things on them, I think that’s where it would divert and our values would separate. If they want to go in and fight for … a better curriculum that targets a certain demographic, you know, we would support that all day long.

What if you had a mom who wanted their child to learn about Ruby Bridges and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Is that something Moms for Liberty would appreciate?

One hundred percent. Yes.

Even though you have members within your organization fighting to take those same materials out of children’s hands?

Yeah, I think you’re just looking at headlines. You’re probably talking about the chapter in Tennessee. They went through every book, every piece of curriculum for English language arts, from K-6, and they made a huge spreadsheet. They put, I think, 1,000 hours into that and they logged all of their concerns. As a parent, they have the right to do that. What I have seen from that chapter is they have legitimate concerns about the grade level that some of the stuff is introduced … Nobody that I know of in our group wants to not teach about Martin Luther King or Ruby Bridges for that matter … I think all parents and community members should have open minds, open hearts, open conversations. If you can’t have that and people just want to label somebody a racist or a bigot or these names because they don’t want to hear anybody else’s input, I think that’s unfortunate — and it will not move us forward.

Does your organization take a stance on critical race theory?

Nationally, we have not officially taken a stance on any issue. We try to support our local chapters and things that they’re fighting for, helping them get exposure and uncover issues that they want to bring to light.

What are you most proud of in terms of your membership? Is there anything you’re seeing from some of your members and their approach to school board officials that you would discourage?

So, we…use the term “joyful warriors” when we talk about Moms for Liberty. We want that word to resonate with all of our members. We want them to feel confident to stand up for their children and what they’re seeing and what they believe. But we want to be … the most kind, most joyful protesters out there by any stretch of the imagination. We get a lot of flak for other organizations and other parents and what they’re doing. But what I see our chapter chairs doing — and what I’ve been trying to share a little bit more of on social media — is doing drives for school supplies … I’ve seen them do things to try to support the schools and the administrators … that are really working hard to educate our children … We have chapters that are engaging with their school boards in a very productive way. They have built relationships with them. They’re doing meetings with them, one on one, showing them their concerns and … things are being handled. That’s not the stuff that makes the news and makes the limelight. And that’s the ultimate goal. A lot of the stuff that’s been catchy and flashy these days, is where the relationship starts breaking down and people have to come to the meetings and things are getting a little bit more heated.

Some school board meetings have become particularly vitriolic. The National School Boards Association recently walked back remarks about domestic terrorism, but I think we would both agree that the threats against school staff are really frightening. I would imagine that is not something you would support.

We absolutely do not support that in any way, shape, or form. If any of our members act in that manner, they will be removed from our organization. But to add to that, this isn’t anything new. Tiffany [Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice] and I both served for four years on our school boards, and we could (share) all of the things that we went through: the threats, the constant harassment … I’m shocked at maybe the level of exposure it’s getting right now. Maybe it’s more widespread than it ever has been. But here in Florida and Brevard County and in Indian River County … Tiffany and myself can attest to threats that have been happening for a lot of years.

Have you ever felt truly frightened by someone who you felt was going to go after your life, your job or your family?

I can show you … messages from strangers that say, “I hope to inject your family with COVID. I’m going to make sure your kids get sick.” This was back in 2020. We (the school board) were having open public discussions about opening schools and things of that nature. If you want to go back a couple of years prior to that when I was on the school board right after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre … and we were debating publicly here if we wanted to have guardians armed in our schools and the threats that I received during that time. Yes, it was scary. Just like school board members now, I had to have a police escort in and out of … a town hall that we had here. So, to me, this is nothing new. We’ve experienced it firsthand. It’s unacceptable. It’s inappropriate behavior. It is never good. We do not support it. We speak out against it. And we will remove any member … that acts in that manner.

Regarding the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, what sparked those threats against you?

I was supporting arming employees. I need to say this very carefully because I got branded as someone that wanted to arm teachers. That was not the case. At the time, the state legislature here in Florida had made a provision that allowed, because we did not have enough school security officers … and the sheriff and the local municipalities did not have enough employees to give our schools … and there was a state mandate that we had to have an armed person in each school … they made a provision that you could train someone through your local sheriff’s department that was former law enforcement or former military that worked currently in the school. They could voluntarily go through the six-week training, and then be able to conceal carry in the schools to protect the school in case of an active shooter. I was very interested in that program … and that’s what brought on that vitriol.

And then there was another instance during the pandemic that your family was being threatened?

Yeah, I believe those started when I was pushing to open schools.

And were you the only board member pushing to open at that time?

I don’t remember off the top of my head … This was the summer of 2020. Schools around the country were still closed. This is before the governor said we were going to open schools here. So, we as the school board felt like it was our decision if we were going to open or not…We all moved all over the spectrum during these discussions and debates.

Some people might look at groups like yours and say, “I’m uncomfortable with parents, many of whom have no background in education, making decisions that impact all children in the district, with their wishes supplanting people who have devoted their entire lives to education.” What makes parents qualified to do what they are doing now across the country?

So, there’s no one that knows my child better than I. When it comes to all these decisions, not just curriculum, but in anything, you know, I have been blessed with my children. And it is not only my right, but my responsibility to make sure that the best is provided for them in every fashion. And, you know, I think it’s important to look at all sides. I think it’s important to listen to the experts that have done these studies. But the ultimate and final decision on my child should be made by the parents.

One of your Moms for Liberty organizers recently wished for a mass exodus from the public schools and a turn toward homeschooling. Has that come up throughout your chapters?

That is not our national stance at all. As an organization, we, Tiffany and I, have been very clear from Day One, we want to fix public education. We think it is vital that America has, you know, an excellent, best-in-the-world public education system. And we think that will be attained by parents being awake, involved, engaged. I mean, we know every study shows, when parents are involved in their children’s education, scores, grades, the outcomes are … always better.

What is your goal politically? Do you have political aspirations for your members beyond the school board?

The places where we have good relationships with our school board members, I think, you know, that’s wonderful. That’s the ultimate goal. But when you have school board members that will not listen, that are trying to silence parents, silence the public and go against a parent’s right to have input on what their child is learning and how they’re being raised, then yes, I hope our members will decide and choose to go run and fill that seat.

So much of the Virginia governor’s race is focused on education. What is Moms for Liberty’s role in this critical race? Is your group becoming politically active or trying to get out the vote?

No, we have no involvement in that race whatsoever. We will continue to just advocate for parents and candidates that align with standing up for parental rights.

As an organization, Moms for Liberty has not come out for a particular gubernatorial candidate?

We’ve given counsel and direction to all of our chapters that they are allowed to endorse candidates — but only in school board races.

Is there any way for your group to become a political organization?

We are a registered nonprofit 501(c)(4). So, we cannot get all in for political activism in that way. We are allowed to be issue based … parental rights focus at all times. Now, we are considering maybe branching out … with maybe a more political arm forming in that area in the future.

How is your organization funded? And what’s your budget?

We are still funded by mostly just small donors.

You don’t have a big donor, right, like the Koch brothers or some other major conservative group?

We’e seen all the national stuff that says, you know, we’re part of this conservative affiliation with Koch brothers behind us. And that’s completely untrue. I don’t know the Koch brothers. I actually Googled them for the first time the other day. We do sell a lot of T-shirts. [The group sells merchandise on its website from $10 to $75]. That’s our biggest funding source right now. Our annual budget … just broke $150,000.

And what will that money be used for?

A lot of it goes back into buying more products. But we’re using it to fund the national organization, web development, data management, things of that nature … We just opened a little tiny office here in Brevard County … People have just been very generous with everything from their money to supporting our products to just giving us things that we need to be able to move forward.

Through the pandemic, schools in Republican states offered in-person learning at nearly twice the rate of those in Democratic states, according to new data, amounting to an estimated 66 additional days — or 432 hours — of face-to-face instruction for those students.

The numbers, provided to The 74 by the school calendar tracking website Burbio, deliver a cumulative view of schooling decisions throughout COVID-19 and reinforce evidence of a partisan divide long highlighted by researchers.

Averaged from September through May, states that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election gave students the chance to learn in the classroom 74.5 percent of the time, compared to 37.6 percent of the time in states that voted for Joe Biden. Red states account for over 22 million K-12 learners and blue states account for over 28 million.

The full impact of that disparity remains largely unmeasured, says Chad Aldeman, policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. But he suspects the effects on students could be vast.

“Time is a rough proxy for learning,” he told The 74. “So lost instructional time is likely to lead to lost learning.”

Virtual learning schemes, says Aldeman, rarely offered as much live instruction as traditional schooling models, instead trading asynchronous opportunities like worksheets and practice problems for real-time teaching. He calculated that his first-grade son, a student in Fairfax, Virginia public schools, was scheduled to receive less than half a typical school year’s worth of face time with educators in 2020-21. Other districts provided even fewer hours of real-time teaching.

“This means a lot of kids are missing out on a lot of live instruction with teachers and live interactions with their peers as well,” said Aldeman.

Using Burbio’s data, The 74 calculated the average days and hours of in-person learning in each state based on a 180-day school year and a 6.5-hour school day. Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche, with help from his data team, has been mapping out learning models across America’s top 460 districts over the past year. Very quickly, partisan trends in reopening became clear to Roche. An outsider to education policy, he opted to present Burbio’s information on a map shaded purple to avoid association with one political party or the other. Regardless, the patterns were obvious, he said.

“It started to look like an electoral map pretty intensely by the mid- to late fall,” he told The 74.

Deeper purple, representing a higher share of in-person learning, swept through the middle of the country and the Southeast, while near-white shades, meaning mostly virtual or hybrid learning, occupied the West Coast and Northeast. There were even light purple “swing state” regions, Roche noted, that had in-between rates of classroom instruction.

Burbio’s numbers reinforced academic findings, which since last summer had pointed to strong links between local support for then-President Donald Trump and the choice last fall to return students to classrooms. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Jon Valant published much-discussed findings that counties’ partisan lean was more far more predictive of its school reopening decision than were coronavirus case rates in the surrounding community — a trend he says mirrored other responses to the pandemic, beyond just education.

“This whole pandemic has broken on political lines in lots of different places, and schools are just one of them,” Valant told The 74.

Differences in reopening across Republican and Democratic states were most pronounced in late fall and early winter, also coinciding with the most deadly surge in coronavirus cases. In February through the end of the current school year, the gap began to tighten, with near-universal progress toward higher rates of in-person learning. Democratic states, which had more ground to make up, saw accelerated gains.

Valant attributes much of the break toward reopening starting in February to having a new president in the White House.

“The Biden administration signaled very early on that … it wanted to get students back into schools in person as quickly as it was safe to do so,” he said. “It turned down the temperature a little bit on the politics of school reopening.”

Growing availability of coronavirus vaccines also undoubtedly played into returning students to classrooms, the Brookings researcher noted. “I think [COVID-19 shots] put a lot of minds at ease.”

Toward the end of winter and into the spring, Roche, who scrupulously reads updates from superintendents across the country, noticed a trend. Districts were announcing plans to return in person, spurred by mandates from state governors, education commissioners and directors of health.

“It was almost immediate,” Roche remembers. New Mexico was a prime example, he said, switching from almost entirely virtual to almost entirely in person in a span of about two weeks in response to state officials changing their stance.

In many cases, however, the rhetoric could be hard to decode. Nearly every district nationwide maintained that it was committed to face-to-face learning as soon as it was safe to do so, said Roche, but the definitions of safety varied.

In Oregon, Marc Siegel, communications director for the Oregon Department of Education, said community transmission rates were the determining factor in school reopenings. “In areas with little or no spread, schools could operate very close to pre-[pandemic] conditions. In areas where that was not possible, we made sure the guidance covered best practices for distance learning,” he wrote to The 74 in an email. Oregon, however, ranked among the lowest nationwide both in rates of in-person learning and per capita rates of COVID-19 infection.

Florida, on the other hand, took “bold steps” to reopen schools in the fall, spokeswoman Cheryl Etters told The 74. Schools enforced precautions to maintain student safety, she noted, and many offered virtual options. Yet some schools never enforced mask mandates, despite statewide infection rates more than twice those of Oregon.

Thanks to the superheated climate surrounding reopening, “districts, it could be argued, were making wrong decisions in both directions,” observed Georgetown’s Aldeman.

Bucking the trend, Rhode Island, a Biden-voting state with a Democratic governor, made a strong push to reopen schools.

“It was very clear from early on that the question was not if we reopened our schools but how,” Rhode Island Department of Education spokeswoman Emily Crowell wrote to The 74, attributing much of that effort to guidance from state leadership, such as then-Gov. Gina Raimondo, who was an outspoken advocate for in-person learning from the outset of the academic year and now serves as Biden’s commerce secretary.

In Georgia, a Biden-voting state with Republican leadership that returned students to classrooms more quickly than many others, moves toward in-person learning reflected community priorities, said education department spokeswoman Meghan Frick.

“Our focus was not on politics but on listening to constituents — parents, educators, students, communities,” she explained over email.

Ryan Brown, chief communications officer for the South Carolina Department of Education, was candid about the role politics played in his state’s reopening plans.

“It’s a very Republican state, that certainly played into it,” Brown told The 74. But while the push for in-person learning was most prominent among conservative lawmakers, many Democratic officials also voiced support.

“Everyone saw the benefit [of in-person school],” he said. “The majority of students learn well when they are face-to-face with a high-quality teacher.”

But in South Carolina, like practically every other state in the nation, reopening classrooms didn’t guarantee that students actually returned. School leaders made calls and knocked on doors, Brown said, “almost begging [students] to come back.”

According to the most recent federal data, which dates back to March, over 1 in 3 elementary students continued to learn remotely full time, with elevated rates for Black, Hispanic and Asian youth. The share of middle schoolers sticking in online options was even higher, at 40 percent overall. Many families, especially families of color, have expressed interest in continuing remote learning even into the 2021-2022 school year.

The nuance of family decision making is not reflected in the Burbio data, which communicates the percentage of students whose schools offer them the opportunity to opt into in-person models. The Burbio numbers also reflect certain assumptions, such as that hybrid learning models represent half as much classroom learning as traditional models, though some schemes offered more and others offered less. In addition, some districts cut their “traditional” learning schedule to just four days, but were still counted as fully in-person.

With millions of students nationwide having not stepped foot inside a classroom since the dawn of the pandemic, Aldeman, who has studied past learning disruptions and recovery from events like natural disasters, says the onus now falls on school districts to help get young people back to speed.

“A lot of kids are going to need some additional time than normal going forward,” he said. It’s about “identifying which students are struggling and targeting resources for that.”