The casual observer can be forgiven if it looks like both the left and the right are doing their best to lose the debate over the future of American education.
On the left, public officials and self-righteous advocates practically fall over themselves working to subsidize and supersize bloated bureaucracies, hollowed-out urban school systems, and campus craziness. They’ve mutely watched shutter schools and insisted that “true history” requires the U.S. to be depicted as a cesspool of racism and oppression.
Meanwhile, on the right, bleating outrage impresarios have done their best to undercut the easy-to-make case for educational choice by weaving it into angry tirades against well-liked local schools. They’ve taken Taylor Swift, a strait-laced pop star beloved by middle school and high school girls, and demonized her as part of some bizarre Biden Administration PSYOP. Heck, they’ve even decided to try to “cancel” Martin Luther King, Jr., a Civil Rights icon honored for his legacy of justice, equality, and nonviolence.
What gives?
The left has a problem. Democrats have long benefited from alliances with teacher unions, campus radicals, and the bureaucrats who run the college cartel. This played well with a public that tended to trust its teachers, schools, and colleges. But declining trust, learning loss, and a massive teacher exodus have upended the status quo.
This has created an extraordinary opportunity for the right—free of ties with unions, public bureaucracies, and academe—to defend shared values, empower students and families, and rethink outdated arrangements. The right is uniquely positioned to lead on education because it’s not hindered by the left’s entanglements, and is thus much freer to rethink the way that early childhood, K-12, and higher education are organized and delivered.
The right also needs to demonstrate that it cares as much (or more) about the kitchen table issues that affect American families as the culture war issues that animate social media. Affordability, access, rigor, convenience, appropriateness, are the things that parents care about, and the right needs something to offer them.
The question is whether the right will choose to meet the moment at a time when too many public officials seem more interested in social media exposure than solving problems.
We’re optimists. We think the right can rise to the challenge.
It starts with a commitment to principle, shared values, and real world solutions. This is easier than it sounds. After all, the public generally agrees with conservatives on hot-button disputes around race, gender, and American history by lopsided margins. Americans broadly believe that students should learn both the good and bad about American history, oppose race-based college admissions, that student-athletes should play on teams that match their biological sex, and are skeptical about teachers should be discussing gender in K–3 classrooms.
And, while some thoughtful conservatives recoil from accusations of wading into “culture wars,” it’s vital for to talk forthrightly about shared values. Wall Street Journal-NORC polling, for instance, reports that, when asked to identify values important to them, 94 percent of Americans identified hard work, 90 percent said tolerance for others, 80 percent said community involvement, 73 percent said patriotism, 65 percent said belief in God, and 65 percent said having children. Schools should valorize hard work, teach tolerance, connect students to their community, promote patriotism, and be open minded towards faith and family.
At the same time, of course, educational outcomes matter mightily, for students and the economy. A commitment to rigor, excellence, and merit is a value that conservatives should unabashedly champion. And talk about an easy sell! More than 80 percent of Americans say standardized tests like the SAT are a good way to measure academic achievement. Meanwhile, California’s Democratic officials recently adopted new math standards that would end advanced math in elementary and middle school and Oregon’s
