On Education, Democrats Are Losing Voter Support

By Frederick M. Hess

Thursday, May 12, 2022

 

As the party of government, school spending, and teachers’ unions, Democrats have long had a leg up with a public that likes its local schools and schoolteachers. Going back a half century or more, they’ve generally led Republicans by double digits in polling on education. It’s a lead that has, at times, stretched to truly laughable proportions, touching 40 points during the Clinton–Dole presidential contest in 1996 and topping 30 in Obama’s first year. 

 

But after two years of debates over pandemic school closures, school mask mandates, critical race theory, gender radicalism, student-loan forgiveness, and campus assaults on free speech, the Democrats have lost their mojo. A Morning Consult poll had the Democrats’ lead on education down from 20 points in January 2021 to seven last November, and a Wall Street Journal poll from nine points last fall to five this March. They’re paying the price for being the party of school closures, CRT, and campus craziness.

 

We saw some of the fallout in Virginia’s gubernatorial contest last year and in the San Francisco school-board recall in February, but just how much trouble are Democrats really in? Well, since 2003, the New Models and Winning the Issues surveys, using the same pollster, have regularly asked voters, “Which party do you have more confidence in to handle the issue of education, the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” Between 2003 and 2022, the average Democratic lead in public confidence was 15 points (51–36), with Republicans never once leading. 

 

From 2003 to 2013, Democratic support usually registered at 55 percent or higher. In the last few years, though, Democratic support has steadily declined. The Democrats’ worst five years have all come since 2014. In 2021 and 2022, the Democratic lead narrowed to single digits, and 2022 is the only year in the last 20 in which confidence in Democrats on education has fallen below 45 percent. The bottom line: Democrats are in big trouble.

 

But Democratic losses haven’t yet turned into commensurate Republican gains. Voter confidence in the GOP on education sat in the mid 30s for pretty much the whole of 2003–19, and it remains firmly planted in that same range now (though it has recovered from the Trump-era low end of the range). In short, when it comes to education, a lot of voters say they’ve lost confidence in Democrats but haven’t gained it in Republicans. If the GOP could win over just half these voters, they’d lead on education for the first time in decades. 

 

That presents an extraordinary opportunity, especially because education, more than other issues, seems to have a symbolic resonance. It was the issue that George W. Bush used to show his compassion and the one that Clinton and Obama used to make the case for their centrism. Claiming the high ground on education could help the Right win back suburbanites, contend for the Latino vote, and reach out to socially conservative black voters.

 

When it comes to seizing the moment, though, conservatives seem challenged. For decades, they have struggled to offer practical solutions. The list of things they advocate seems to do little more than recycle the phrases “school choice,” “free speech,” and “keeping Washington out.” “More choice, less Washington” is a sensible mantra, but a mantra isn’t enough. 

 

Unburdened by ties with unions, public bureaucracies, and the academy, the Right can reimagine institutions and arrangements in ways the Left cannot. As the party of the campus crazies and the paymaster for the education establishment, the Democrats have little choice but to placate the base and subsidize the status quo. This sets up principled conservatives to take the high ground on a sheaf of 70–30 kitchen-table issues. 

 

The Right’s policy agenda should be rooted in five principles.

 

Extend educational choice. The case for parental choice has never been timelier. Yet the traditional case for school choice is limited by the fact that at least 70 percent of parents like their child’s school and grade it an A or a B. What even “satisfied” parents want, however, especially given pandemic dislocations, is more learning options. That may mean phonics-based reading instruction, more-rigorous math, better vocational programs, a blend of home-based and in-school learning, or much else. 

 

Options such as education savings accounts, course choice, New Hampshire’s “Learn Anywhere” model (in which nonschool entities can get approved to provide specific high-school classes), and microschools (tiny nontraditional schools that offer intimate environments augmented by online instruction) also fit the bill. With over half of parents now saying they’d like to have their child enrolled in school but also learning at home at least one weekday per week, there’s great interest in “hybrid” schools, with over 1,000 now operating across the nation. 

 

Empower parents. Parental empowerment requires equipping parents with choices but also transparency. State reading and math tests are revealing the devastating consequences of school closures, with students across the land having lost a half year or more of academic achievement (and the most vulnerable kids faring the worst). Meanwhile, unions are fighting to eliminate those tests. Conservatives should champion them as a crucial resource for parents. Today, it can be difficult for parents to find out what their child is being taught in school (and the simple act of trying to do so can make them subject to harassment or vilification). One remedy is academic-transparency legislation that directs public schools to share materials online. 

 

Schools can do so without burdening teachers, by sharing online the lesson plans that teachers are already required to file. Notification requirements can ensure that parents aren’t blindsided when school-administered surveys, intended to evaluate school environments or support “social and emotional learning,” ask students intrusive (or leading) questions. Opt-in requirements can ensure that parents are able to decide whether their child participates in such surveys or is exposed to content that the parents deem age- inappropriate. 

 

Defend shared values. Resist over-the-top theatrics. While the Left must kowtow to its woke “America is a slavocracy” wing, conservatives can straightforwardly insist that schools talk honestly about America’s sins as well as its remarkable virtues. After all, more than four in five Americans say that schools should of course teach about Jim Crow and slavery even as three in four voters, black and white alike, say that schools should teach the “traditional values of Western civilization.”

 

As for anti-CRT legislation, it should be designed not to truncate the teaching of history but to take clear aim at ideologically motivated instruction and racially separatist activities introduced in school (such as having kids take “privilege walks” or form race-based “affinity groups,” and telling students that habits such as “timeliness” or “hard work” are legacies of “white supremacy culture”). Because there are inevitable gray areas in all of this, policy-makers should promote and schools should embrace an enforceable code of professional conduct enshrining the norm that teachers should use their position not to proselytize but to expose students to a variety of historical sources and scholarly perspectives.

 

Promote excellence. The Left has declared war on educational excellence in the name of “equity.” Progressives are attacking advanced math instruction, gifted programs, graduation requirements, merit-based admission to magnet high schools, standardized tests, and even the use of letter grades in K–12. But the public believes in merit. Ninety percent of adults think grades are important, and three in four Republicans and Democrats say tests such as the SAT and the ACT should factor into college admissions. 

 

It’s time to insist that admissions to public colleges and magnet schools be based on merit; to both defend gifted programs and ensure that their admissions processes are fair and inclusive; and to expand access to advanced instruction by having states contract with virtual schools to ensure that all students (no matter what school they attend) have such opportunities. Meanwhile, easing teacher-certification requirements and allowing more flexibility in pay can make it easier to attract qualified teachers in math and science. 

 

Bust the college cartel. Concerns about college costs are bipartisan. And, with the Biden administration considering a move to make taxpayers assume hundreds of billions of dollars in student-loan debt, even those who didn’t go to college are newly conscious of the economic consequences of tuition costs driven by bloated campus bureaucracies and their out-of-control outlays. All of this, of course, is propped up by employers who treat college degrees as an all-purpose hiring credential, a state of affairs fueled by legal restrictions on the use of more tailored hiring tests. For instance, employers can be reluctant to give tests in which applicants complete job-related tasks because there’s legal vulnerability if the applicant alleges the test is biased. (Indeed, the courts have even ruled against strength tests for delivery jobs because they give an advantage to men.) There’s a need for measures that allow more employers to use cheap, easy, job-specific hiring criteria without fear of legal peril. Meanwhile, the college cartel has long been subsidized by policies that encourage reliance on college degrees as a hiring shortcut, even when those credentials bear little obvious relationship to the work.

 

State officials should follow the lead of Maryland governor Larry Hogan and direct state agencies to hire on the basis of expertise and experience, not degrees. State leaders should turbocharge career and technical education (as with the new Fast Forward program in Louisiana) and increase the number of apprenticeships, so that college doesn’t seem like the only route to remunerative employment. And public colleges should make an accelerated, three-year degree a standard option, while federal lawmakers should ensure that such programs are eligible for federal funds. 

 

This list is just a start, of course. There are plenty of other areas — from school safety to college accreditation to teacher pay to child care — where a hobbled Left has given conservatives the opportunity to lead. We’ve published a few dozen such proposals at the American Enterprise Institute’s Conservative Education Reform Network. While the particulars will vary from place to place, this kind of agenda enables the Right to promote core values and offer a raft of practical solutions that align with majority — and frequently supermajority — sentiment. Whether or not the Democrats continue their freefall as the pandemic recedes, the Right can tip the scales on education this fall and beyond.