By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, October 16, 2021
A single exchange may decide the Virginia governor’s
race. At one point during a September 28 debate, Republican Glenn Youngkin
slammed his opponent, former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe, for vetoing a
2017 bill that would have allowed parents to remove their children from courses
studying sexually explicit material. McAuliffe shrugged off the
criticism. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should
teach,” he said.
If you live in Virginia, as I do, then you have heard
McAuliffe saying those words approximately a gazillion times on television,
where they are replayed ad nauseam in one of Youngkin’s most effective attack
ads. The former Carlyle Group executive and political newcomer clearly believes
that grassroots outrage at the educational system will provide him the winning
margin in what is now a toss-up election. On the banner of Youngkin’s website is
a tab that reads “Parents Matter.” Among the items in his “day one
game plan” is a promise to ban instruction in “critical race theory” (CRT).
“This is no longer a campaign,” Youngkin recently told a crowd in Winchester,
Va., according to the New York Times. “This is a
movement. It’s a movement led by parents.”
It sure is. The question is where the movement is going.
So far, the revolt over politically correct and anti-American curricula has
produced more heat than light. Loudoun County, Va., the epicenter of this
latest populist rebellion, has become a stand-in for national polarization and
tribalism, as the left-leaning school board engages in bitter fights with
well-organized parents. Several states already have banned CRT, including
materials based on the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a factitious
revision of U.S. history whose absurd premise is that the American Revolution
was fought to protect slavery. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s
politicized Justice Department has promised to investigate threats against school boards
and educators. No one seems able to agree on what, exactly, CRT is, but that
doesn’t really matter for either side. What matters is the fight.
If it propels Youngkin to Richmond, then, the debate over
education may end up looking like a wasted opportunity, a moment for serious
thought and policy creativity that was frittered away in exercises of mutual
fear, loathing, and contempt. For example: Even if we can agree on a definition
of CRT that doesn’t inadvertently include fair-minded social studies in
slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil-rights movement, expunging this balkanizing
and corrosive ideology from schools is just a first step. There is more to be
done.
Yet the rest of Youngkin’s education platform is
vague. It includes keeping schools open, “Restoring High Expectations &
Getting Every Student College or Career Ready,” “Rebuilding Crumbling Schools,
Raising Teacher Pay, & Investing in Special Education Programs,” and
“Creating at least 20 New Innovation Charter Schools across the K-12 Spectrum
to Provide Choice.” In a July speech, Youngkin pledged to retain advanced math courses and reimpose
pre-McAuliffe standards.
This small ball is not new. Of the four character-shaping
institutions of family, faith, neighborhood, and school, conservatives have had
the least to say about education. They lament its sorry state. They say it is
not a federal responsibility even though the Department of Education remains
standing after both Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich vowed to eliminate it, and
no one calls for the repeal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of
1965. They rightfully and productively expand homeschooling and school choice,
without paying close enough attention to the 90 percent of students who attend
some 100,000 K–12 public schools across the country. They somewhat reluctantly went
along with George W. Bush’s efforts to impose school standards in the 2000s but
did not know where to turn after the collapse of the test-based accountability
model of education reform.
Former secretary of education William J. Bennett often
speaks of the “three Cs”: choice, content, and character. The Youngkin plan
gestures toward choice, issues vague calls for less politicized, more rigorous
content, and overlooks character entirely. This final omission is a shame
because, in its malign and counterproductive way, CRT or an “anti-racist”
curriculum is itself a form of character education.
Progressives have long treated the public school as the
place where children receive the knowledge, traits, and habits necessary for
life in a modern democracy. Today, in the worldview of the education
establishment — what Bennett calls “the Blob” — that means teaching to the
lowest common denominator and avoiding or downplaying assessments under which
some students fall short. It means inducing feelings, depending on the student,
of shame or self-esteem. It means reducing individuals to physical
characteristics, fostering the idea that these characteristics determine most
if not all life outcomes, and dividing the world between oppressor and
oppressed. Is it any wonder that the institutions premised on such ideas tend
to mold individuals with guilt-ridden, suspicious, agonistic, fragile
characters who can’t read or write or perform basic math?
Ambitious conservatives have to think bigger. Try
improving teacher quality through licensing
reform. Charter schools can be excellent, but what about incentivizing learning pods and investing heavily
in career and technical education? Last year, my American
Enterprise Institute colleague Frederick M. Hess sketched out a fulsome education agenda in the pages of National
Affairs. The ideas are there. Someone needs to pick them up.
And soon. In the absence of leadership that provides alternatives to liberal programs, conservatives assume
a negative attitude and defensive crouch on issue after issue. Education is no
exception. Progressive outrages spawn populist backlashes that may block the
most egregious initiatives and embarrass their most radical proponents, but in
the end not much changes. Why? Because conservatives are unable to agree on
specific and lasting measures to reshape the institutional structure in ways
that improve social conditions and restore civil peace. This isn’t conjecture.
This is the failure to repeal Obamacare in 2017.
“A populist upsurge always points to very real problems
that ought to be on our political agenda,” wrote Irving Kristol in 1972. “But populism itself
usually misperceives these problems, and the solutions it proposes are, more
often than not, illusory.” It would be a partial and ultimately unsatisfactory
outcome if the parental revolt over the high-handedness and lunatic wokism of
the educational system exhausts itself, like the Tea Party movement of the
2010s, in a combination of electoral victory and policy defeat. Time for Glenn
Youngkin to hit the books.
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