Honey, we lost the parents

Democrats have become the "party of educators" while parents of school-age children now prefer Republicans, writes Kevin Mahnken on The 74.

Democrats used to have an edge on education issues, but not any more, he writes.

“As a party, we’ve lost the language, the ideas, the policy, and the vision on education, and it needs to be entirely rebuilt,” Jorge Elorza, who runs Democrats for Education Reform, told Mahnken. Republicans are all about school choice, he said. Democrats have no K-12 agenda.

Public schools in large, Democrat-controlled cities stayed closed for much longer in 2020 and 2021, writes Mahnken. "Black and Hispanic families . . . were hesitant to return to in-person schooling." As it turned out, the effects of remote schooling were worse for disadvantaged students, who fell even farther behind.

Swing voters saw Democrats as led by "people who want to control your life," says Michael Mikus, a Democratic political consultant in Pennsylvania. In the the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, Republican Glenn Youngkin's advocacy of parental rights led to an upset victory, he recalls. “Democrats were often portrayed as not caring about what parents think.”

Democrats are seen as good about funding schools and providing free lunch and after-school programs, says Matt Hogan, a Democratic pollster who ran focus groups of parents. But voters don't see Democrats -- or Republicans -- as focused on school quality.

"Since the end of the Obama administration, amid enervating fights over the Common Core academic standards and the rewriting of the No Child Left Behind Act, the party has mostly avoided staking out ambitious positions on K–12 policy," writes Mahnken. "Democrats have gone their own ways, embracing the science of reading in some blue states while eliminating graduation requirements in others."

Democrats' hostility to school choice is alienating voters, writes Cooper Conway on RealClearEducation. That's one reason Hispanics swung right in the 2024 election, he argues. In an EdChoice poll, 83 percent of Hispanics supported Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), which let families fund private-school tuition, tutoring and other school costs.

Support for school choice is strong among Democratic voters as well as among Republicans, the EdChoice poll shows. About three-fourths of voters want educational choice: 70 percent back ESAs.

"Some of the earliest voucher programs, like the one in Milwaukee, were championed by progressives who wanted to address structural barriers in our current one-size-fits-all public school system," Conway writes. The Democratic Party "prides itself on fighting for justice and opportunity," he concludes. "Supporting school choice should be a natural extension of its values."

I think Democrats will swing back to the center on culture-war issues: Most parents don't want former boys on girls' sports' teams or in girls' locker rooms. They don't want drag queens reading books in the school library or graphic books showing oral sex. They don't trust teachers to teach gender lessons in elementary school. A little common sense on these issues would be a political winner.