Editor’s note: This was first published by the Manhattan Institute.
For most of modern American history, education has been a winning issue for progressives. The Democratic Party, after all, is the traditional ally of teachers’ unions and is associated with public schooling in the public mind. Most academics call the party home.
But the tide has shifted in recent years. During the Covid-19 pandemic, school closures and online learning revealed to parents the radicalism and ineptitude plaguing our classrooms. The increasing popularity of school choice, and Democrats’ implacable opposition to voucher programs, have made education a potential winner for Republicans.
During the pandemic, conservatives capitalized on progressives’ unpopular education policies. Parents’ rights groups mobilized and swayed elections, even as they were accused of “domestic terrorism.” They proved pivotal in the election of Virginia’s popular governor, Glenn Youngkin, and helped flip many once-progressive school boards in districts across the country. These groups succeeded by emphasizing transparency, accountability, and most critically, choice.
Today, partially as a response to conservatives’ efforts, states across the country are embracing “education freedom.” They are lowering charter schools’ barriers to entry, making homeschooling more accessible, and adopting statewide voucher programs. School choice has become so popular that some Democrats, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro have endorsed the policy.
Given their past success, you would think that GOP candidates would place education at the center of their campaigns. This election cycle, however, Republicans, including Donald Trump, seem to have forgotten about the issue.
It’s not as though progressives have changed course in the last few years. For all their talk of “weirdness,” Democrats have spearheaded education reforms that at best should be called strange. Consider amendments that Tim Walz signed into law in 2023 to one of Minnesota’s education statutes. One provision amended the statutory definition of what is necessary to achieve the “world’s best workforce,” which, at the time, was the standard by which the state evaluated schools’ performance. The legislature, with Walz’s approval, removed the aspiration that “all third-grade students achieve grade level literacy.”
Having nixed that goal, Minnesota legislators added to the statute the definitions of several left-wing buzzwords—“Ethnic studies,” “Antiracist,” “Culturally sustaining,” and “Institutional racism”—that appear throughout the amendments. The bill employs these in the context of standards that must be met by the school district advisory committee on curriculum, learning environments, and teacher hiring recommendations. Rather than examining merit, rigor, and quality, districts must instead weigh their decisions based on their ability to deliver on left-wing political objectives.
The law asserts that “People of Color...continue to be harmed and erased through the education system.” Introducing such ideological concepts into the state’s curricular-review process fails to improve outcomes for any students, especially the minority students whom the legislature presumably intended to help.
Minnesota is not alone in pursuing these types of changes. In 2021, California’s department of education adopted the “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” which its authors claimed was intended to “rectify” past injustices and “address institutionalized systems of advantage and address the causes of racism and other forms of bigotry.” Some of these sample lesson plans include those based on the widely disputed 1619 Project, well known for its tendentious revisionism. Clarence Jones, Martin Luther King’s former speechwriter, opposed the reforms, calling the curriculum a “perversion of history” that would “inflict great harm on millions of students” if approved.
Even those less troubled by the ideological tilt of California and Minnesota’s education reforms should be alarmed by the declining quality of the states’ schools. Between 2014 and 2024, Minnesota fell thirteen spots in the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s ranking of state K–12 education in the country. California, for its part, is home to the United States’ lowest literacy rate.
As long as politicians and not parents are the ones making decisions about what is best for children, these problems will persist. The antidote to classroom activism and poor educational outcomes is clear: Give parents the right to send their kids to better schools. Americans know this, which is why 71 percent of them, including 66 percent of Democrats, now support school choice, per 2023 polling. The issue of parental rights has other implications beyond schooling. Walz and California governor Gavin Newsom have both signed into law similar legislation permitting courts to consider parents’ unwillingness to transition their children when determining custody. In practice, this means that the state can break up a family if it takes issue with a parent’s position on these matters.
It would seem, then, that parental rights and K–12 education should be at the center of every Republican’s platform. Yet Republican candidates this year have generally refrained from discussing school choice and have failed to spotlight Democrats’ educational radicalism. This lets Democrats focus on issues such as abortion and gun control, where they enjoy more public support.
As we approach November, both parties will continue arguing about immigration, the economy, and foreign policy. Those issues are vital, but so is education, which helps shape our national future. The GOP needs to bring education to the forefront of the campaign—not only for its electoral prospects but also for the countless children who could benefit from school choice.
