"There is no circumstance under which I would vote for a Democrat (over school closures and mask mandates)," Beth Ann Rosica told Fox News earlier this week in a panel analyzing Democratic politicians' policies during Covid-19 and how those policies impacted children.
Pennsylvania mom: “There is no circumstance under which I would vote for a Democrat” after the lockdowns and forced masking. pic.twitter.com/gH9QEKDGyX
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 7, 2022
The segment is a great example of some other key indications that suggest that after decades of near dominance as the party Americans trust with education-related issues, Democrats are now scrambling to separate themselves from the union thugs running the teachers' unions and the blue state governors who insisted on keeping kids out of school or suffocated in masks in class over the past two years.
Even the always-late-to-the-party-because-they-never-hear-anything-outside-of-DC-conventional-wisdom Washington Post sees how Republicans have wrestled education away from Democrats as a winning issue.
For decades, voters overwhelmingly trusted Democrats to make education policy. But that changed during the covid-19 pandemic as the party squandered an advantage that had been as large as 20 points. Blue states and districts generally kept students in Zoom school far longer than red states. Some education leaders glossed over the disaster this created for learning and equity, and even shamed supporters who pointed out those impacts.
Anya Kamenetz is quite right in this op-ed, except that she insists on framing this issue using the past tense. The insistence on stagnating our children's development and education continues even today.
It took Washington, DC, suburb Prince George's County, Maryland, until this very week to finally rescind its mask mandates in state-run schools. In Northern Virginia, schools actually tried to resist newly-elected Governor Glenn Youngkin's Executive Order ending mask mandates by taking the governor to state court... using school district funds for legal expenses, naturally.
Even The New York Times is figuring things out. They point out that although mask mandates seem to finally be a thing of the unscientific, hysterical past, pre-K and daycare facilities in Democrat bastions that rely on federal Head Start funding still require face diapers for children younger than five-years-old.
The Biden administration has taken credit for a relative return to normalcy in schools over the last year of the coronavirus pandemic. But in one of the few education programs the federal government directly oversees — Head Start preschools and child care centers for low-income families — mandatory masking rules are still on the books for teachers and children as young as 2-years-old.
That requirement is out of line with current guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released last month, which recommend universal masking only if there is a high community transmission rate. The vast majority of schools and day care centers have made masks optional, even in the most virus-cautious regions on the country.
Parents who happen to live in a state not dominated by Biden's anti-science party are in the same pickle with regard to federal Head Start funding, but in most of those red states, the stance of the state government and their governor has been to flout those draconian guidelines and literally dare Biden and his Justice Department to do something about it.
And voters are telling pollsters that their disenchantment with Democrats' handling of the state-run education systems goes well beyond their frustrations over the Covid lockdowns.
A recent poll by Democrats For Education Reform shows that in key battleground districts and states, voters now prefer Republicans over Democrats on the issue of education (emphasis added):
The poll, which was conducted by Impact Research, found that on education, voters want a focus on helping students make up lost ground from the pandemic, but think both parties—and especially Democrats—are more focused on how race and gender issues are taught in schools (R 47%, D 54%) than on helping students get back on track (R 33%, D 26%). Voters believe Democrats are also more focused on student debt relief (60%) than on catching students up (20%) from COVID-related interruptions.
By a 22-point margin, voters also said they would rather schools focus on preparing students for jobs in the future (56%) than getting back to teaching the way they were before the pandemic (34%).
Now, to be clear, we wouldn't handily concede that Democrats ever held a legitimate monopoly on the education issue in the first place. Oh, sure, the perception was that they supported public education, but in reality, they only really supported the teachers' unions.
They'd constantly give lip service to increased education funding, but that was just code for raises and benefits for the big labor bosses who controlled the unions who then, in turn, gave enormous campaign support to the very Democrats who promised to feather their union nests right back.
It was a circle-jerk of tax money-to-unions-to-politicians that had little if anything to do with our children's education or well-being.
Voters are wise to it, and they're still angry about it. Republicans have a chance now to own the education issue and to own it not just for one election cycle but for a generation. If they're smart enough to take it.
Big if.
