"A lot of Americans have kids in public schools," writes Eduwonk Andrew Rotherham. "They want normal." They don't want sexualized lessons or material in elementary school.
If the Democrats can’t parse out the genuinely censorious or racist (eg banning books about the struggle for civil rights) from parents who don’t want their kids seeing pictures of blowjobs at school they are playing with fire and will continue to struggle.
Most American aren't transphobes, he writes, but they don't think transgender girls (that is persons with penises who feel female) should play on girls' teams. If you tell them there is no physical difference between a teen-age male body and a female body, they feel "gaslit." For good reason.
Schools hiding a child's new gender identity from parents is wildly unpopular, Rotherham writes. The secrecy is also bad for trans kids.
I'll add: In most communities, most parents do not want their young children encouraged to believe that girls who aren't stereotypically girly might really be boys or that boys who aren't stereotypically masculine might really be girls. And they don't want drag queens performing at school.
Democrats also are alienating parents -- especially Hispanics -- with their opposition to school choice, writes Rotherham. "Democrats don’t need to go full ESA, but they need more to say and do on choice."
Teachers' unions defeated choice measures in Colorado and Kentucky, he writes, choice is winning in legislatures. There's lots of public support.
The college-educated class has fashioned public policy in its own image, writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. "Our education policy pushed people toward the course we followed — four-year colleges," while "vocational training withered."
Boys are failing in school, he writes. "In high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys." Lectures on "toxic masculinity" don't help.
The issue with boys is not the lectures of toxic masculinity. It is girls academically accelerate ahead of the boys in sixth and seventh grade and the boys never catch up again. As Richard Reeves points out, there are a lot of non-cognitive skills in being a good student. Boys develop those non-cognitive skills at a later age and not to the same level as girls.