the case that school closures will hurt Dems in the midterm is weak

And a look at educators organizing against "anti-CRT" laws

Happy 2022.

I have two stories to share with you this week, and a podcast.

The first is a dive in The New Republic about a theory that has cropped up several times over the 18 months, and is back in the news again with Omicron-induced school disruptions. The theory essentially says that parents were furious over the slow pace of school re-openings in the 2020–21 school year, that such anger still represents a significant political liability for Democrats, and that it could could grow even worse as some school districts close temporarily this month due to Covid-19, imperiling their midterm chances. Blaming teachers’ unions and Democrats who ally with those unions is also part of this cautionary tale. The theory got a boost after Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial election in November, because education was a top-cited issue for voters, and one polling firm released a widely circulated memo that said school closures were what really motivated those voters in particular.

I’d been watching the discourse with some frustration for a while, noticing major disconnects with how prominent members of the media were characterizing voter and parent sentiment from during the pandemic. (Typically it read something to the effect of “parents were furious at the pace of school openings last year” with no qualification or citation.) But parents broadly weren’t furious with the pace of school openings last year. In fact parent preference for virtual leaning is one of the key factors that made school reopening during 2020-21 so politically complex.

In my piece I go into a lot more detail about what public opinion showed, but for the sake of this newsletter I think I’ll lift up a point that gets lost so often. Parents prefer in-person learning in the abstract. No question. And they worried about the emotional, social, and academic toll virtual learning had on their kids. And studies have shown that yes, kids learned less last year than they likely would have under regular conditions in-person, particularly low-income Black and Latino students. That said, poll after poll showed that most parents did not want to send their kids back to school full-time before the elderly and teachers were vaccinated. This was especially true for low-income, Black and Latino families, many of whom kept their children home last spring even after schools fully reopened. It’s not hard to reconcile these things. It’s not hard so hard to understand how one can desire in-person learning in the abstract, and still prefer remote during a deadly pandemic.

Kids returned back to school this fall, and polling showed parent concerns about their kids’ progress rebounded. One national survey of public school parents registered to vote last month found 78 percent of parents expressed satisfaction with their school’s overall handling of the pandemic. Just 22 percent of parents said they felt their school waited too long to resume in-person instruction, while three-fourths felt their school struck a good balance between safety and learning (48 percent) or actually moved too quickly to reopen (26 percent).

This all brings us to Virginia, with Glenn Youngkin. People rightly wanted to understand the political dynamics behind his win. Was it just higher turnout? How much did vote switching play a role? Will Republicans in other states be able to replicate his campaign model? What’s going on with critical race theory? Everyone, including me, wanted more information.

This one memo, based on an online focus group of 18 suburban VA voters and released publicly in mid-November, offered people something of an explanation that many felt credible enough. Yes education was an issue, but it was mostly due to school closures, the memo reported. And school closures were a bigger deal than critical race theory, they said.

I had an open mind about this, but I was also skeptical. Glenn Youngkin didn’t campaign much on school closures at all, and in fact leaned heavily on the CRT stuff in the final stretch of the race. Plus, I noticed, this memo was getting an awful lot of traction in the media, despite other high-quality surveys released post-election that found conflicting or complicating results. Why was no one covering those? Why was this being framed as so dispositive?

I’m paying a lot of attention these days to how critical race theory wars battles are melding with “parents rights” stuff. We could use a lot better public opinion research in that area in particular. That said, I think the case is quite strong that while there are some awfully compelling reasons Democrats should be feeling nervous about the upcoming midterms—and I mention those in the story—school closures, from last year or this month with Omicron, is not one of those compelling reasons.

You can read the story here.
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The second story I published earlier this month for Rethinking Schools, and it looks at how K-12 educators have been fighting back against the new laws restricting their discussions of racism. It also looks at what kinds of challenges they face to organizing, and there are some real ones. One thing I do not think has totally registered with folks is that even in the states that passed anti-CRT laws last year, many of them are coming back this year to pass more. Texas, for example, had its second anti-CRT law go into effect in December, following its first one that Texas’s governor signed into law over the summer. Over the last three weeks, according to a tracker at PEN America, dozens of new bills have been introduced or pre-filed in state legislatures across the country.

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I was invited onto Vox’s The Weeds podcast this week to talk about the role of teacher unions in the labor movement and Democratic politics. The other guest on this labor-focused episode was historian Gabe Winant, who is just so smart. You can listen to that here.


Thanks as always for reading and supporting this work,