The Patriot Post® · The Battle for the School Boards

The parental rebellion against woke ideology in schools has long been building. It started with the COVID-19 lockdowns that gave parents an eye-opening view of what exactly their children were being taught (and not taught) each day. This midterm, though, was a reckoning. State and local candidates who ran on common sense and parental rights found success at the ballot box. This was especially true for school board races in blue strongholds.

The education of our children should be unifying. It should be something that we all agree on. And for the most part, parents do agree on what they want for their children educationally. It is the teachers unions and the left-wing activists (but we repeat ourselves) that have turned this into a battleground.

Instead of debating whether students should read Romeo and Juliet or The Canterbury Tales, parents are having to fight for pornographic books to be kept out of their children’s hands. Instead of history that is honest and that paints America as an imperfect country worthy of loving and cherishing, parents are faced with having to address critical race theory and gender ideology that activists are using to justify total institutional destruction.

The second that parents began raising a ruckus — see Loudoun County, Virginia — the Democrats did what they always do: chastise them for noticing and interfering. Instead of calming fears, this fanned the flames of resentment amongst parents. The nail in Terry McAuliffe’s campaign coffin in his gubernatorial race against Glenn Youngkin was when he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Youngkin read the tea leaves correctly and took the opposite approach, saying, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.” The parental coalition was born, and the stance that Youngkin took carried him into the governor’s mansion.

McAuliffe’s remark is the position of the teachers unions and of many of the radicals in the Democrat Party. That sentiment was echoed again recently by the National Education Association (NEA), which said, “Educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and to thrive.”

The ticklish thing about this statement is that there is a kernel of truth to it. There are some parents who evidently couldn’t care less about what their children are learning or even if they’re learning. There are parents who are so disengaged and/or dysfunctional that school is the only place of stability for their child. There are also parents who are well meaning but who are completely wrong in their approach to helping their child. This is particularly challenging for teachers. This faction of parents is, thankfully, the minority, but the teachers unions are utilizing this small portion of the parental population to justify their takeover of educational responsibility.

What conservatives like Youngkin and some school board hopefuls are recognizing is the very flawed premise that teachers are the only source of knowing what is best for a child. As capable and as wonderful as a teacher may be, there are several impediments to this statement being a reality for most students. Here’s some inside baseball from this writer’s years of experience as a classroom teacher. Let’s start with class sizes. It is simply a fact that the larger the class, the less personal and invested in each student a teacher is able to be. Many children get lost in the shuffle. That’s one way children can go through years and years of school and not read competently, write well, or understand mathematic computation.

There is also the fact that an individual teacher is only part of a child’s educational life for a year or two at most. That child is then moved on to another teacher, where the experience may be profoundly different and completely discourage that child’s will to learn.

Then there is that niggling issue of activist teachers, school administrators, and teachers unions whose only goal is to train up the next generation of Democrat voters (it’s a bonus if they are mindlessly repeating left-wing slogans and are incapable of critical thinking). As political pundit Allie Beth Stuckey often remarks, children are the non-consenting victims of the Left’s social experiments. As a nation, we are seeing this play out in real time. One needn’t look any further than the devastating number of children who have been duped into the gender ideology cult.

These agendas are antithetical to a thriving America. Going back to the previous point about teachers only investing in a child’s life for a limited amount of time, when these activists put poisonous ideas in children’s heads, and that child’s life is torn to pieces as a result, it’s the parents who are left to pick up the pieces.

Parents who are invested and interested in their child’s learning will see what teachers miss. The parents’ biggest job is to advocate for their child. They are the constant, they are the consistent, and they are the first teacher a child ever has. That is why their rights are paramount and should be supported. It’s a good, commonsense notion that does work for the majority of families. It’s also a bipartisan position that found some success during the 2022 midterms. Higher-level Republicans should take note because this is a winnable issue.