Republicans spent big this year to elect scores of candidates who vowed to remake the American public education system — an effort that's inspiring conservatives to do more in 2023.
Some of the GOP's investments paid off quickly: Newly-elected school board officials in charge of South Carolina’s fourth-largest school system voted to fire their superintendent, replace the board’s chair and approve a resolution barring the teaching of critical race theory to more than 37,000 students.
Superintendents in two Florida counties were ousted after conservative-backed candidates were sworn into office. Board members in the Dallas-area suburb of Keller, Texas, approved bids to allow for armed school staff and ban school library books that discuss gender fluidity. It's enough change to keep conservative organizations focused on these local races going into next year.
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia held state school board or education superintendent elections this year. Roughly 1,800 local board seats across some 560 districts in 26 states were also up for grabs on Nov. 8, according to the nonpartisan nonprofit Ballotpedia, plus scores of gubernatorial and legislative posts that influence classroom life.
But neither education activists on the left nor the right swept last month’s elections. While conservatives found success in Republican-dominated territory, Democrats held firm in battlegrounds and moderate voters were split on far-right candidates in red states.
“My concern is that we can’t have two countries,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in an interview. “This is one United States of America, and we have an obligation to help kids — regardless of whether they’re in South Carolina, Tennessee, New York or California — to learn how to critically think. And we have an obligation to create a safe and welcoming environment.”
The mixed results have led supporters of both parties and education advocacy groups to start preparing for next year’s school board elections, the battle for the White House and contentious state legislative sessions — all while recent polling has found voters pessimistic about the trajectory of the nation’s schools.
“The education results tended to play out a lot like the national results: Everybody lost,” said Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Republicans managed to do abysmally despite really favorable conditions. But even within that, I’ve seen no evidence there was much enthusiasm for what Democrats were offering.”
Democrats take solace in battleground victories for governor, successful education-related ballot measures and local school board races where moderate incumbents defeated far-right challengers in Louisville, Ky., the suburbs of Austin, Texas, and other places. Candidates endorsed by two upstart GOP-aligned political committees also won less than half of their November elections.
Yet conservative school officials are making their presence known in Republican-voting states, as the party tests the limits of a culture war-centered education agenda.
“People must care,” Ryan Girdusky, founder of the conservative 1776 Project political action committee, said of his organization’s performance after its endorsed candidates won dozens of races this year.
Three Nebraska conservatives, each endorsed by a PAC opposed to a sex education proposal, won state board seats. Kansas conservatives who campaigned to restrict curriculum on gender identity and race won seats too, though Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly kept her job. Texas Republicans flipped one seat on their board as the state legislature prepares to convene in January facing GOP demands to enshrine several conservative causes, including parental rights and banning lessons about “sexual choice or identity.”
Republicans also won state education chief elections in Idaho, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming. And though Arizona voters elected Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Sen. Mark Kelly, while agreeing to grant in-state college tuition to undocumented high schoolers, Republican Tom Horne recaptured his former post as the state’s education chief over Democratic incumbent Kathy Hoffman.
In South Carolina, six of eight school board candidates endorsed by the conservative Moms for Liberty organization in the Berkeley County School Board’s nonpartisan election won on Nov. 8 — enough to seize control of the panel. The group’s candidates also won board seats in three other South Carolina counties, plus more across Florida, Indiana, Minnesota and New Jersey.
Berkeley County’s new school board chair stated a combination of academic declines, a lack of district cooperation with a sexual misconduct investigation and a frayed relationship with the state’s social services agency led board members to lose confidence in the district’s ousted superintendent.
“Decisive action was needed,” Stafford J. “Mac” McQuillin said in a statement. “And we were elected to take it.”
Candidates who supported having race and sex-related curricula or Covid-19 safety requirements in schools won about 40 percent of the roughly 1,800 local board elections tallied by Ballotpedia this year, the organization concluded. Candidates with opposing views won about 30 percent of their elections, while hundreds of other races featured candidates with unclear views on the hot-button topics. Nearly one-third of incumbents also lost to their challengers on Nov. 8.
No state school boards with elections this year flipped partisan control, according to the National Association of State Boards of Education. But majority parties expanded their control on boards in Colorado, Kansas and Utah while conservative incumbents often lost primary challenges.
Moms for Liberty-endorsed board candidates across the country have so far won less than half of their 2022 elections, according to the organization.
And the 1776 Project PAC saw a similar win-loss ratio. Its endorsed candidates won 20 out of their 52 races in November and 76 out of 124 for the entire year, its founder said.
“Part of what’s going on here was a cultural war won in places where the other side had no real wherewithal to fight back, felt really chilled about fighting back, didn’t have the funding to fight back, and got called a lot of names,” Weingarten said. “But even with all of those advantages, you saw a lot more pro-public education folks win and a lot more referendums win.”
Challenging curriculum that included race played better in some areas than others.
Girdusky’s group spent more than $589,000 on advertising to boost conservatives this election cycle and endorsed more than 100 school board candidates in states such as Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
In Florida, 1776 PAC-endorsed candidates won 30 of 49 races, including 19 who also had the support of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. DeSantis won his reelection in a landslide and made education — including the opposition of critical race theory — a priority issue.
But the PAC suffered losses in Michigan and found it more difficult to win over voters in some pockets of the South, where Girdusky, a New Yorker, said he was viewed as an outsider.
“It’s definitely a disappointment, but you live and you learn,” Girdusky said in an interview about the PAC’s performance this election cycle. “We’ve done enough to prove that we are a worthwhile organization who can win.”
Critical race theory is an academic framework originally developed by legal scholars examining how race and racism have become ingrained in American law and institutions since slavery and Jim Crow. The term is often used as a catchall phrase among conservatives critical of how race and social issues are being taught in the K-12 education system. Most public school officials across the country say they do not teach the theory, even in districts where lawmakers are seeking to ban it.
Yet Girdusky argued the 2022 elections showed critical race theory can be a successful rallying cry for Republicans eager to reform education. He pointed to Arizona, where GOP candidates for governor and secretary of state lost, yet Horne won after placing his opposition to the concept at the center of his campaign.
The 1776 Project is eyeing expansion ahead of next year’s school board elections, when 29 states will have education posts on the ballot, Girdusky said. He wants the group to recruit the support of elected leaders and work alongside parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty.
“You’re not going to defy the political gravity forever — you’re not going to win everywhere all the time,” Girdusky said. “If we lost everywhere, all the time, you’d think maybe we’d pack it in.”
GOP polling and union-commissioned voter research earlier this fall concluded conservative attacks over history lessons and library books would not connect with most likely general election voters — and potentially alienate persuadable moderates and independents.
Neither party now has an advantage in being trusted to handle K-12 education issues, according to bipartisan polling of 1,200 midterm voters conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Impact Research on behalf of the Walton Family Foundation.
“These candidates are frequently putting their finger on real problems,” Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, said of new conservative school officials. “The challenge will be when they have to do something about this in a hurry. School boards are lousy legislative bodies. It’s a very difficult forum in which to find common ground and promote sensible solutions. It tends to lend itself more to heated, high-profile efforts to change the direction of a school district.”
Forty-five percent of voters said they either trust Republicans or Democrats on K-12 education, while nearly one-third of independent voters said they trust “neither” political party on education issues. Majorities of voters and parent voters meanwhile believe public schools in their state are “off on the wrong track.”
“The fight is far from over, and we don't feel like we can let our guard down,” said Heather Harding, executive director of the Campaign for Our Shared Future, an education group whose political advocacy branch endorsed 38 candidates on the ballot this November.
“We need people to pay attention to school board meetings and school board elections,” Harding told reporters last month. “What we are seeing is a political culture war being pushed into historically nonpartisan spaces.”
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By: Juan Perez Jr. and Andrew Atterbury
Title: 'We can’t have 2 countries': 2022's elections foreshadow new divides in education
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/2022/12/14/education-critical-race-theory-schools-00072983
Published Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 04:30:00 EST
