Reflections on the elections and what comes next
Plus brief thoughts on building new institutions, and destroying old ones
Parents matter.
If there is one takeaway from the recent elections on November 2, it’s that. The results, in Virginia most prominently, confirmed what pretty much everyone in this country not affiliated with the Democratic Party and the left-oriented media understood. Parents are finally standing up against a corrupt public education system that is run by the teachers unions, for the teachers unions.
As I wrote in my last newsletter, parents aren’t just upset over their kids being judged by the color of their skin, by their being categorized as victims or oppressors, or by the revisionist history with which they are being indoctrinated. Parents are enraged at being told that hard work no longer matters, and that merit is evil. They are frustrated with schools being closed (Virginia had the seventh-fewest days of in-person learning last year among all 50 states) and with mask and vaccine mandates for children who are at nearly zero risk of serious illness from Covid. They are mad over their kids being exposed to pornography and being questioned about their sexual orientations in school. And more than anything else, parents are furious about being told to shut up and let the state raise their children.
Let’s be clear about a few things. The rise of parents and the battle over education represents just one front of the broader culture war that has engulfed our country. November 2nd wasn’t just about Virginia and it wasn’t just about education.
In solid blue New Jersey, a state that Joe Biden won by a 16% margin over Donald Trump, Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy barely beat Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli in a race that nobody expected would be anywhere near close. In uber- liberal Seattle, voters resoundingly rejected the progressive mayoral candidate who had vowed to cut the city’s police department budget in half. Voters in Minneapolis, home to George Floyd, easily rejected a ballot initiative that would have replaced the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety. And in Buffalo, a write-in candidate for Mayor trounced the Democratic Socialist candidate who had promised to defund the Buffalo Police Department and stop new charter school formations.
Regrettably, we are living in a hyper-polarized environment where our media are presenting two entirely different worldviews. To most commentators of leftist persuasion, the Democratic bloodbath on November 2nd was the result of either 1) typical and expected sentiment against the incumbent party in power, or 2) Joe Manchin’s refusal to help pass the President’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill, or 3) President Biden’s low approval rating (a whopping 38% last I checked).
The election, we are told, was most certainly not about everyday moms and dads fed up with school closures, masks, and woke curricula, unless those angry moms and dads were either all Republican operatives or all white supremacists. Sure, white supremacy could theoretically explain the victory of Glenn Youngkin. But it’s a bit harder to use it to justify how Virginians elected Winsome Sears to be their next lieutenant governor. Sears, a black woman, will be the first woman of color to be elected to statewide office in Virginia’s 400-year history. “Racist dog whistles” indeed.
Democrats, and the vast mainstream media which represents them, are making the exact same mistake they made in 2016, except now the mistake is even bigger. From their elite coastal perches, they continue to look down with scorn upon the vast majority of Americans. Whereas previously their contempt was limited mostly to white males without college degrees, now their list of deplorables is much broader. But these groups are waking up, and they are in revolt.
Highly educated suburban moms and dads are well aware that they are being called liars and racists for rightfully objecting to what is being taught in their children’s schools. Equally insulting are the outright untruths, repeated ad nauseum in the media, that critical race theory is only taught in law schools and that parents are objecting to the teaching of slavery. These parents know now that masking children for 8 hours a day has nothing to do with public health, and have wised up to the longstanding truth that the teachers unions don’t give a damn about their kids.
Asian Americans realize that, more than any other ethnic group, they are being discriminated against in matters of education. They begrudge being stereotyped as white-adjacent oppressors lacking in personality, especially for purposes of college admissions. They are furious over the lowering of school standards, the war against meritocracy, and the elimination of tracking, gifted and talented programs, and selective public schools.
African Americans are well aware that progressive ideas like “defund the police” hurt black neighborhoods and communities more than any other. Many resent being labeled as victims, forever subservient to white, and other oppressor groups. Moreover, they object to being told that the only opinion they are allowed to hold is the progressive, “authentically black” one, and that holding any other viewpoint is a betrayal of their race.
Hispanic Americans, and many other immigrant groups, object to being categorized as people of color. In fact, they prefer not to be labeled at all. They understand that solid education and hard work have always held the keys to the American Dream. Now they are seeing education degraded, hard work derided, and those keys discarded.
Lastly are the classical liberals. They resent being called selfish for standing up for core American values like free speech and personal liberty. They object to being called racist for quoting Martin Luther King or Thomas Jefferson or for advocating critical thinking or viewpoint diversity in education. They reject being regarded as conspiracy theorists or disciples of QAnon for possessing a better understanding of Covid data than do our politicians, censorious media, and public health officials, and for having the temerity to share that knowledge publicly.
These are the new deplorables, mocked and belittled by the elitist media and a tone-deaf Democratic party that has been captured by the extreme left. They are being driven right into the arms of the Republican party.
To be fair, at least a handful of Democratic pundits do get it. Most notably is strategist James Carville, who said the day after the election, “What went wrong is stupid wokeness…I mean this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools- people see that, and it really has a suppressive effect…all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something.”
Well said.
November 2nd was indeed a big victory. Certainly for Republicans. But much more importantly, it was a victory for parents fighting for the education of their children, and for all Americans tired of Covid tyranny, and discontented with the divisiveness, illiberalness and lawlessness that is woke progressivism. Hopefully, the recent elections will be seen as a turning point in the culture war that has divided our country, and a repudiation of the Marxist ideologies that threaten to destroy it. But while there is much reason for optimism, we must remain sober in our outlook. We are still at the very beginning of this fight and we are facing off against entrenched interests with enormous funding, including from our own tax dollars. Like the ragtag colonists against the powerful British, we have surprised and triumphed at Trenton. But we are a long way from Yorktown.
So what now?
With midterm elections a year away, the momentum must be maintained. The efforts of parents in places like Loudoun County, Virginia were heroic, with mama and papa bears showing up week after week at board of education meetings, writing op-eds, attending rallies, and doing media appearances. Of course, not every school district around the country will garner the national attention of Northern Virginia, but we must use the efforts of Loudoun as a model and replicate them as best we can everywhere.
Even with all of the media attention brought to these school issues over the past six months, there are still many parents unaware of what their children are learning in school, or not learning. We must continue to educate parents and give them the courage to speak up. Courage begets courage and the army of parents must grow. Teachers are in the best position to expose the dogma that is woke curricula, especially as schools become even less transparent, but they risk their jobs to do so. We must encourage and support teacher whistleblowers.
Parents and teachers need to continue to expose the toxic identity-focused and race-, gender- and sex-obsessed teaching materials and curricula that have infiltrated so many of our public schools. We need to keep shedding light on the intrusive and inappropriate questionnaires that our kids are required or pressured to fill out. We need to further unmask how social emotional learning (SEL) acts as a mechanism to groom our children for ever more cultish and damaging ideologies. And we need to continue to document the millions (billions?) of tax-payer dollars being shelled out to rent-seeking diversity consultants and exploitive edtech companies.
We need to continue supporting, with money and volunteers, organizations such as No Left Turn in Education, Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education and the many local parent groups around the country that are working to educate, organize, and rally parents, and are supporting candidates for local school boards. These groups are also working with legislators to pass local, state and federal legislation (including parents bill of rights), to support and protect whistleblower teachers, and to litigate civil rights violations.
Beyond fighting CRT and woke ideologies in our schools, we need to accelerate our efforts, especially in blue states, to give parents alternatives to the public school system. We must focus on legislative efforts that promote school choice and mechanisms to fund children, not schools. Moreover, we have to find ways to make it easier for parents to homeschool and help them band together to form homeschooling pods. Beyond K-12 education, we need to expose and push back against critical race theory and related ideologies in our workplaces and in our government. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to rally against tyrannical covid policies completely unjustified by quality science, and to strip the power of the elected (or unelected) officials who mandate them.
Together, covid and CRT have exposed the rot and corruption that is our public school system. The recent elections have demonstrated that Americans, parents especially, are willing to come together, and to speak up and fight for their children and for their country. The work has just begun.
Build Back Better
In more good news, there was a big announcement last week on Bari Weiss’s Common Sense Substack of the formation of a brand new university, “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.” A large group of prominent scholars, writers, former university administrators, cancelled professors and philanthropists have banded to together to create the University of Austin (UATX). Their plan is to start with a summer program for college students in 2022 and several MA programs in the fall of 2022, and to inaugurate an undergraduate college in the fall of 2024.
I share the views of UATX’s founders that our university system is broken, even more broken than our K-12 system. Free speech in the classroom and on campus is virtually nonexistent. Professors are terrified of being cancelled. Administrators cower to the loudest and most illiberal student mobs. Grade inflation is out of control. Bureaucrats outnumber professors. Political and viewpoint diversity are nonexistent. Western civilization requirements have been eradicated and classics departments are under attack. And these cancers, once confined to the social sciences and humanities, have now metastasized to the departments of math and science and engineering.
Given the incredibly high cost of tuition, and the low educational value of universities, we need to begin a national conversation on the true utility of higher education, and consider whether the university model needs to be torn down. In the meantime, however, we need new institutions. The launch of UATX looks like a terrific step in that direction. I wish them enormous success, and sincerely hope that this is truly an effort to disrupt the broken university system and not just a vanity project. If they achieve the goals of their vision, I hope to have the opportunity to enroll my own daughter at UATX in a few years.
East Meets West
One last news item caught my eye recently that I want to share. The New York Times ran a story about China’s dictator for life, Xi Jinping, and his fixation with history. In the piece, a particular sentence stuck out. “To destroy a country, you must first eradicate its history.” According to the article, Xi himself said this, quoting a 19th century Confucian scholar.
Anyone else think that’s pretty much what the woke-captured establishment is doing to the United States? Revising America’s date of inception. Attacking our fundamental principles. Cancelling the founding fathers. Tearing down statues. Gutting history and social studies curriculums. Censoring classic American literature.
It’s hard not to wonder if, behind these disastrous trends, is simply the sheer stupidity and ignorance of the far left, or perhaps a foreign influence far more nefarious, and far more wise to history. Just a thought.
My new podcast: Take Back Our Schools
I’d like to bring your attention to something that has taken a little longer than expected to come to fruition: my own podcast entitled “Take Back Our Schools.” The podcast, co-hosted with journalist, conservative commentator and homeschooling mom, Bethany Mandel, is produced and hosted by the Ricochet Audio Network, a conservative leaning podcast network. We’ve released our first two episodes and every other week we will air new episodes with guests covering the issues affecting our education system and beyond.
Please have a listen and let me know what you think. The podcast is also available on all major podcast directories, including Apple, Google, Spotify and Stitcher.
A very short personal update
I received a lot of very kind feedback from my last newsletter about the Virginia gubernatorial election (sent out before any results were known). Many of you contacted me to ask if I would write more often. So here it is. I am going to try (try!) to write at least every other week. For those of you that signed up for only occasional updates, I beg your forgiveness.
As always, I love to hear from you with any ideas or suggestions. Please feel free to contact me through the website: speakupforeducation.org or email me at andrew@speakupforeducation.org. You can also follow me on Twitter @AndrewGutmann.