Critical race theory and Covid restrictions have turned education into a wedge issue for voters.
During a recent appearance on “The View,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weighed in on the national debate over teaching racial propaganda to schoolchildren. In the process, she made a broader point about the mindset of a previous generation of black people when it came to dealing with racial adversity.
“My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice,” said Ms. Rice, a product of segregated Birmingham, Ala. “But they also told me, ‘That’s somebody else’s problem, not yours. You’re going to overcome it, and you are going to be anything you want to be.’ ” Ms. Rice said that blaming whites today for past racism strikes her as unproductive. You don’t help black kids by making “white kids feel guilty for being white.”
The contrast with the current woke approach to racial inequality is stark. In that earlier era, there was an expectation among blacks that advancement would take place despite racial barriers, that discrimination was no excuse for not trying. The generations that produced such civil-rights luminaries as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. understood that whites had a role to play in changing a fundamentally racist system. Yet they also understood that blacks had a role to play, and they were willing to hold black people accountable for their behavior.
Many of today’s black leaders and activist scholars, by comparison, ask almost nothing of black people themselves. Instead, their focus is on the attitudes and behavior of whites, with blacks treated as helpless victims who are incapable of upward mobility until racism has been eliminated from society. The concept of personal responsibility, once considered a prerequisite for social advancement among black elites, is now almost taboo.
The introduction of progressive dogma into K-12 curricula has understandably produced a backlash among parents nationwide. Elements of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which posits that America is uniquely evil due to its slave past, have been adopted by thousands of school districts. Students and teachers are being segregated by race and ethnicity, and then shown slide presentations that describe “objectivity,” “individualism” and “the written word” as characteristics of white supremacy.
The pandemic has already left millions of families frustrated with the operation of the public schools and wary of mandates to mask and vaccinate kids. Many were surprised to learn that the politicians who kept schools closed by claiming to “follow the science” were really following directives from powerful teachers unions cynically using Covid as leverage to negotiate better pay and benefits for their members. One upshot has been flight from traditional public schools, where enrollment is off by more than a million students this year, and toward education alternatives. More students are attending private schools and religious schools, and home schooling has tripled. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, charter enrollment this year is up 7%, or nearly 240,000 students, the largest increase in half a decade.
What remains to be seen is whether the same parents who are currently agitating at school-board meetings will take their frustrations with them to the voting booth. Virginia will choose a new governor next week, and the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, has been talking nonstop about education. Mr. Youngkin has made parental choice his signature issue ever since his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, let slip in a debate last month that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Mr. McAuliffe’s strategy, like that of other Democrats running this year, has been to turn his GOP opponent into a stand-in for Donald Trump. Given that Virginia hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office in more than a decade, it might work. Still, Mr. Youngkin is wise to highlight an issue that is resonating everywhere, and other Republican candidates would be wise to follow his lead.
If the odd combination of Covid and critical race theory has turned education into a wedge issue for voters, Republicans should welcome the development. Public education is owned and operated by Democrats and the teachers unions that finance their political campaigns. The unions give next to nothing to conservative candidates or causes, so the GOP has zero to lose in declaring war on the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the liberal politicians who carry water for them, even when the union agenda undermines learning.
More parents are wising up to the damage that union control of public education hath wrought, and Republicans ought to embrace the opportunity to explain to voters why the best response—to everything from racial propaganda and incompetent education bureaucrats to mask mandates and learning gaps—is more school choice.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal