Bringing sanity back to public education

If last week’s election of Glenn Youngkin as governor of Virginia—a state that hadn’t elected a Republican to statewide office in over a decade—was a political earthquake, well, then I was sitting at the epicenter.

It’s not just that I’m a political reporter who happens to live in the state. I’m also on the board of a private school in Northern Virginia. I have spent several years talking to families desperate to flee the state’s rapidly disintegrating public schools. As someone with skin in the game, let me go ahead and unpack what happened, since the media appear obdurately determined to misunderstand and outright lie about what’s happening to education in this country.

A dominant narrative has emerged that the GOP made up this issue of “critical race theory” in schools out of whole cloth. We’re in bizzarre territory here. During a recent interview on CNN, host Brianna Keilar kept talking over U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., to insist CRT is “not in the curriculum in Virginia,” even as Scott was quoting documents from the Virginia department of education and specifically referencing “critical race theory.” And Virginia is not alone.

The CRT argument is one big shell game. Perhaps it’s debatable whether kids are directly being taught CRT in its theoretical form, but it’s undeniable that CRT is heavily influencing the administration and pedagogy of public schools across the country. Even if you acknowledge this distinction, the argument seems to be: CRT is not taught in schools, but since CRT is all about racial justice and equity, why don’t you want it taught in schools, you racist?

This, of course, raises the issue of Critical Race Theory and why we don’t want it taught in schools. If you’ve spent any time trying to unpack what “critical theory” is, you quickly learn that the entire point of this exercise is to frame everything as a slippery semantic game that forces you to accept their premises before you debate them.

But before we go down that rabbit hole, it’s worth noting that the media have given short shrift to a bigger local issue with education in Virginia—the state had one of the worst public school responses to the pandemic of anywhere in the country. Public schools were completely shut down for a year and a half, while private schools operated without much difficulty. Public school parents were rightly enraged.

The school closures got less play than they should have, as much because the media couldn’t resist the opportunity CRT gave them to call Republicans racist, and this issue was ignored at their peril. However, the closure of schools isn’t entirely separable from the CRT angle because the closures caused people to lose confidence in the system overall, right at the same time kids were taking Zoom classes at home and forcing parents to pay more attention to what was being taught.

What’s inescapable for any parent paying attention is that our educational institutions are trying to back away from Martin Luther King Jr.’s colorblind society approach to these issues in favor of teaching kids racial essentialism that denigrates achieving equality of opportunity. Suppose you read the original academics, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, who first applied race to critical theory. In that case, they make it explicit CRT started as a push back to the MLK arguments that triumphed during the civil rights movement. They were deemed insufficient for producing societal change that was as politically radical as they wanted. So to some extent, anything that gets away from the “content of their character” argument is at least CRT-adjacent.

And that’s a critical point that people bleating “CRT isn’t being taught” don’t want to confront. This is a new and radical charge, and CRT’s defenders consistently respond to this concern with semantic distinctions and hand waving, even though voters are clearly alarmed by what schools are now teaching.

And the concern over CRT doesn’t address other issues in VA schools. The Loudoun County bathroom rape scandal, which was denied by the school board while the Justice Department cited the arrest of the victim’s anguished father at a school board meeting to crackdown on parent protests, was certainly eye-opening. And believe it or not, parents aren’t crazy about the largest county in the state asking 12 year-olds detailed questions about their sex lives.

In general, Democrats can’t seem to make any distinctions among their voters right now. My Northern Virginia neighbors are pretty liberal—and multiracial—but they're also meritocratic strivers who are not to be confused with urban progressives or campus radicals. Their ideology stops at the water’s edge. If you mess with their property values or their kids’ ability to get into a top-tier college, the political winds are going to start shifting. The Democrats’ current strategy of calling concerned parents racist isn’t just an affront to logic and decency—it’s a recipe for political disaster.