The Fairfax and Arlington school districts in Virginia sued Education Secretary Linda McMahon Friday over her move to classify them as “high-risk” over their transgender policies.

Their complaint noted that the additional oversight of spending came just two days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in a , reaffirmed its ruling in Grimm v. Gloucester County Board of Education, which gives trans students the right to use restrooms that align with their gender identity.��

That decision “remains the law in Northern Virginia as well as the rest of the Circuit,” they wrote.����

In a statement, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michele Reid called the lawsuit a step toward ensuring “that hungry children are fed and that student access to multilingual, special education, and other essential services is not compromised.”

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has tried since 2022 to get the suburban D.C. school districts in his state to end their policies accommodating transgender students.

Last week, the Trump administration offered considerable firepower to his cause when it announced it would require the five districts to justify every dollar they spend in order to receive federal funding. In a stern , Education Secretary Linda McMahon said Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William — the five northernmost districts closest to the nation’s capital  — are “choosing to abide by woke gender ideology in place of federal law.”&�Բ�����;

But even as McMahon placed them on “high-risk” status, their leaders policies that allow students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity, meaning the Republican governor might leave office in January without accomplishing his goal.

Grace Turner Creasy, president of the Virginia Board of Education, said it’s “anyone’s guess” whether the department’s move will change the outcome. District leaders say they are following state law and the most current federal court opinion on the issue. 

The state’s position on the matter might also shift in the next few months with Youngkin ineligible to run again in November. Democrat Abigail Spanberger, who is , hasn’t addressed the controversy, while  Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has , much as Youngkin did in 2021 when he appealed to parents angry over pandemic school closures and “critical race theory.”&�Բ�����;

The department’s action against the Virginia districts is part of an effort by President Donald Trump to force states and districts to comply with his stating that the federal government only recognizes two sexes. Following that move in January, the Education Department said it wouldn’t enforce the Biden-era Title IX rule, which expanded protections for transgender students.

On Thursday, Trump to pull all federal funding from “any California school district that doesn’t adhere to our Transgender policies.” The administration is already suing and on trans students’ participation in women’s sports. 

The conflict with the Virginia districts has been building since February when the department launched a probe into their policies. In July, officials found them in and gave them 10 days to change their rules and “adopt biology-based definitions of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ in all practices and policies relating to Title IX.”

They refused, and with roughly $50 million for low-income students, special education and other programs at risk, last week’s move escalated the dispute to a new level.  

“You’re going to continue to see the Trump administration put … pressure in a variety of ways that affect funding. It feels like all options are on the table,” said W. Scott Lewis, managing partner with TNG Consulting, which trains districts across the country on Title IX. He added that where the Education Department directs its enforcement “may vary by state, depending on gubernatorial and state house control.”

‘Totally atypical’

The penalty is severe, experts said. The high-risk label is usually reserved for districts or states in serious financial trouble. 

In 2006, the Education Department slapped that designation on the for mismanaging money, including federal grants and charter school funds.

In another example, the Michigan Department of Education placed the in high-risk status after a found the district misused over $53 million. The district spent Title I funds, for example, on equipment and building improvements the state didn’t approve, paid vendors more than the amount of their contracts and couldn’t produce invoices and receipts for multiple transactions. The district remained under federal oversight for five years. 

In this case, the added layer of scrutiny isn’t because of suspected mismanagement of the grant funds themselves; it’s an ideological disagreement. David DeSchryver, senior vice president of Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting firm, called the action “totally atypical in terms of scale.”

With the school year just starting, the question is whether any “new hurdles” might slow down the reimbursement process, said Dan Adams, spokesman for the Loudoun County Public Schools. In a statement, the Virginia Department of Education said it “will closely scrutinize any future requests” for funding. 

At least one of the five superintendents, Arlington’s Francisco Durán, told the public at a that he’s prepared to take legal action if the district’s funding is challenged. 

But conservatives view McMahon’s approach as accountability for districts that are defying the president. 

“By refusing to reverse your reckless policies, you are failing our daughters and risking losing millions of dollars in funding,” Earle-Sears said at Arlington’s board meeting. “As governor, I will not stand by while political correctness tramples over science, fairness and safety.”

The district has faced criticism over in which a registered sex offender identifying as a transgender woman used a women’s locker room at Washington Liberty High School. The school’s indoor pool is open to the public after school hours, and Durán said officials were unaware the person was a registered offender. 

Ginny Gentiles, an Arlington parent and a school choice expert at the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute, said the districts are “clinging to activist-drafted policies that allow males to self-ID into female spaces,” but that she hopes officials will listen to those concerned about women’s and girls’ safety.

She urged community members to closely monitor expenditures.

“School board leaders clearly intend to spend taxpayer dollars on inevitable court cases and likely expensive legal fees,” she said. 

Earle-Sears also joined on Wednesday, where district officials threatened to suspend two boys for sexual harassment and sex discrimination. They complained last spring when a student identifying as a trans boy used the locker room to change and videotaped them.

‘Federal overreach’

Some observers say the battle between Washington and its neighboring districts is more than a culture war. Kristen Amundson, a former Democratic state lawmaker and Fairfax County school board member, said the administration is trying to exert control over blue cities. 

“This is not about trans kids; this is about federal overreach,” she said. She cited patrolling Washington and of the Kennedy Center Honors as further examples. “Do you see the pattern here?”

The impasse also comes at a difficult time for the state’s Republicans, which tend to elect governors from the party that’s . Northern Virginia already votes predominantly blue, and residents, Amundson said, are especially angry at Washington. 

“They have seen thousands of parents lose their jobs” because of and “parents snatched off the streets” in , she said. 

For Earle-Sears, a , the debate over trans students is a key campaign issue. In contrast, Spanberger, who has three school-age daughters, has an focused on improving instruction in public schools and addressing teacher shortages. 

Anne Holton, former secretary of education under Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, called the issue a distraction “from the issues that parents really care about,” like employing high-quality teachers and preparing kids well for college or a career. 

For now, districts say they are complying with the . Enacted in 2020, it allows anyone to use facilities that align with their gender identity.  In addition, the Trump administration’s policies, they say, conflict with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s opinion in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board. 

That’s been their position since 2022, when Youngkin issued stating that students must use bathrooms and locker rooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth. A year later, Jason Miyares, the state’s attorney general, that the governor’s rules didn’t violate state or federal anti-discrimination laws. Yet district policies remain unchanged.

In Grimm, the court ruled that the district’s transgender bathroom ban was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 in that case. In its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will hear lawsuits from West Virginia and Idaho that test whether states can ban transgender girls from competing in female sports.

Those cases “will further clarify Title IX’s application,” Arlington’s Durán said at last week’s board meeting. “But in the meantime, our policy will remain in place in alignment with state and federal law, and we are prepared to defend it and our federal funding if challenged.”&�Բ�����;

Virginia students may soon face tougher academic benchmarks as the state aligns its performance levels with the higher standards of a national assessment.

Starting next month, the Virginia Board of Education will begin adjusting its cut scores — used to determine whether K-12 students are meeting proficiency levels — to better match the rigor of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Student performance is typically categorized as “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient” or“advanced,” reflecting their knowledge and skills in core subjects.

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Since 1998, Virginia has relied on its Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments to gauge proficiency in areas like reading and math. However, NAEP, a widely recognized national organization, has often been used to assess smaller student groups, such as fourth and eighth graders.

“The NAEP assessment provides a common benchmark that states can then use to look at the relative rigor of their own assessment cut scores,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, during a work session Wednesday.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration has frequently pointed to NAEP data to highlight what it calls the “honesty gap” — the disparity between state-level proficiency standards and the more stringent NAEP benchmarks.

Between 2017-2022, Virginia’s fourth-grade reading and math results showed a staggering 40-percentage-point gap between the state’s SOL and NAEP assessments. That disparity does not provide an “accurate picture of student performance,” said Em Cooper, deputy superintendent of teaching and learning, during Wednesday’s work session.

In response, the board has begun discussing plans to revise the cut scores — the threshold for determining student proficiency — in key subjects. The effort is a cornerstone of Youngkin’s broader push to “restore excellence in education,” which includes raising standards in core subjects, increasing transparency and accountability, and overhauling the state’s assessment system.

Youngkin has argued that Virginia’s current proficiency standards are the result of the previous Board of Education lowering cut scores and altering school accreditation standards.

However, Anne Holton, a former state education secretary and an appointee of former Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, defended the previous board’s approach. She noted that Virginia’s pass rates aligned with the NAEP’s “basic” achievement level, which reflects “partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at a given grade,” according to NAEP.

The Youngkin administration, however, is pushing for Virginia to meet NAEP’s “proficient” standard — defined as a student demonstrating a deeper understanding of complex topics and the ability to apply them in real-world situations.

Board member Amber Northern, a Youngkin appointee, argued that achieving NAEP proficiency is linked to better long-term outcomes, including higher graduation rates and increased job earnings compared to students who score at the NAEP “basic” level.

“NAEP proficiency matters in terms of long-term outcomes for kids [and] I know this because I study it,” Northern said.

She dismissed political finger-pointing over the state’s current standards, urging the board to focus on the benefits of higher expectations.

“I don’t care about the politics, I don’t care about ‘well we did this, and we did this,’ … nobody knows why we are in the situation we’re in, we just know that we’re in it and we’re not about pointing fingers. What we’re about saying is, okay, this is what NAEP proficiency does for our kids, and we should actually have that as our goal to do right by them.”

But Holton pushed back, questioning whether realigning Virginia’s SOL to match NAEP would lead to actual student improvement. While she acknowledged that strong SOL and NAEP scores correlate with better outcomes, she argued that no research supports the idea that adjusting cut scores alone drives success.

“The research shows there’s no impact of realigning our cut scores,” Holton said. “We need our students to do well on the test, but where the line is is irrelevant.”

The process

Previously, cut score adjustments went through a multi-step review involving a standard-setting committee, an articulation committee, and the state superintendent before final recommendations were presented to the Board of Education.

On Wednesday, the Virginia Department of Education staff outlined the board’s new approach, which includes selecting and training committee members, assessment date, and ultimately making recommendations on cut scores.

Under the process proposal, committees will primarily consist of education experts, including teachers and instructional specialists, while the remainder will include community stakeholders such as parents and business leaders.

Educators applying to serve must complete an application demonstrating their understanding of grade level content and assessments. Community members will undergo a selection process led by the board and the governor’s office.

The committees are set to convene in late May once enough assessment data from the 2025 assessment cycle is available. Their proposed cut scores will go before the board for an initial review in June, with a final decision expected in July.

On Thursday, the board will on the proposed review process. If approved, the updated performance standards will not take effect until spring 2026.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com.

While it looked like the number of students scoring at the lowest level dropped by over 12%, the reality was more complicated. 

“Comparing 2023 to 2024 is challenging,” David Johns, an associate superintendent, . In conjunction with the unveiling of new standards last year, the state for proficiency and performance levels. Below basic became “developing” and basic, “approaching.”&�Բ�����;

“It’s not exactly apples to oranges, but it’s like apples to apple juice,” he said.

Wisconsin isn’t the only state that recently instituted changes that effectively boost proficiency rates. Oklahoma and recently made similar adjustments. lowered passing or “cut” scores in reading and math last year, while and are considering such revisions.

Changing standards and proficiency targets is a routine process for states that some say offers a reflection of what students know. But given the cataclysmic effects of COVID on student learning, experts say now is not the time to tweak how we measure performance. 

“Many parents are already underestimating the degree to which their children are ,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard researcher who has been tracking students’ recovery from COVID learning loss. “Lowering the proficiency cuts now will mislead them further.”&�Բ�����; 

Even Jill Underly, Wisconsins’s education chief, confessed to some bewilderment about the process last year.

“The crummy thing is, I am an educator and I don’t understand it — so how are parents supposed to understand this too?” she wrote in a June 2023 email. “For example, what does Proficient mean vs. Advanced? That they are at grade level vs. the next grade level? I just hate this stuff so much.”

The conservative Institute for Reforming Government, which obtained the email through a public records request and shared it with �鶹��Ʒ, is pushing the state to level with parents about poor student performance in the aftermath of COVID. 

Shifting the goal posts “sends a message that we are accepting post-pandemic levels for student performance and shows a lack of belief in every student,” said Quinton Klabon, the think tank’s senior research director.

Chris Bucher, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, said Underly’s comments show she was “doing her job” by asking the department’s experts tough questions in an effort to make the complex calculations more transparent. To help explain the changes, the department released a of how it altered standards and cut scores. 

‘An outlier’

The scoring changes in Wisconsin and other states are likely to fuel fresh criticism of the “honesty gap” — the chasm between the disparate, conflicting measures states use to determine student progress and the , uniform standard for proficiency set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

Known as the Nation’s Report Card, NAEP defines proficiency as “solid academic performance” and “competency over challenging subject matter.” It’s a higher bar than merely being on grade level and one that has long triggered debate. Education researcher Tom Loveless, formerly with the Brookings Institution, calls it “,” and one of international tests showed that many students in high-performing countries couldn’t reach it.

But it’s a goal many states were striving toward just prior to the pandemic, when several commentators first about the “honesty gap,” and one some experts think states shouldn’t abandon. 

“It is the only common yardstick that is available to compare student achievement across states and across the large urban districts,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP. “From the board’s perspective, standards are not going to be lower for [kids] when they enter college or the world of work.”

Frustrated with test standards in New York, Ashara Baker, a Rochester mother and state director of the National Parents Union, created her on student outcomes. While she included state data, broken down by race, she also cited NAEP proficiency rates as a comparison.

“When you’re lowering these cut scores, clearly the goal is to show some sort of growth,” she said. “But I think we’re getting away from the actual goal of why we do assessments. They should really demonstrate where kids are struggling or where there is a gap.”&�Բ�����;

Christy Hovanetz, a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd, a think tank, added that unlike grades on assignments and homework, state assessments should provide parents “objective” information on how their children are doing. Schools also use them to determine which students are eligible for extra help. Lowering the bar, she said, means some students who need aid might not get it.  

“These assessments are how we help identify students for extra support and assistance,” she said. “Now there will be a lot of kids that aren’t going to be getting those high-dosage tutoring sessions or who aren’t going to be getting that additional support in math that they might need.”

As with most states, New York’s threshold for proficiency lines up with NAEP’s basic level, defined as “partial mastery” of fundamental knowledge and skills, according to a from the National Center for Education Statistics. The report showed that at the time, Wisconsin had some of the toughest standards for reading and math in the country, which meant that a higher percentage of students fell short compared with other states.

That made Wisconsin “an outlier” Bucher said. 

“Our previous test scores made it appear kids were performing worse on standardized assessments than they actually were,” he said. “We listened to a group of experts — educators who are in the classroom each day teaching kids — who recommended we use cuts that align to our standards and take us closer to grade-level expectations.”

Next month, NCES is expected to update its 2021 report with a new comparison of states’ proficiency cut scores and NAEP, one that is likely to renew criticism of the way states measure student performance. 

“States that have been more ambitious are now sticking out like sore thumbs,” Klabon said. “It’s kind of a race to the bare minimum, rather than a race to the top.”

‘A sense of urgency’

One state that is choosing to stick out is Virginia. Rather than calling it unrealistic, the state, under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, is hoping to reach the ambitious NAEP standard.

The governor to the honesty gap in 2022, announcing sweeping changes to the state’s testing regimen that include stricter standards, assessments and cut scores. A new , which takes effect in 2025-26, is expected to label a majority of schools off track or in need of “intensive support.”&�Բ�����;

“We are not telling parents, students, teachers, policymakers and citizens the truth about where our children really are on mastering content,” state education Secretary Aimee Guidera told �鶹��Ʒ. “Why isn’t there a sense of urgency?”

The 2021 NCES report showed that Virginia had the lowest standards for proficiency in reading. Virginia education officials pin its poor showing on decisions made by previous Democratic governors. In 2014, under former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the state passed a law requiring students to . And under former Gov. Ralph Northam, the State Board of Education in reading and math.

accuse the Youngkin administration of fueling a negative perception of schools in order to  private school choice, including education savings accounts, which in the state legislature last year. 

Virginia saw the largest decline in the nation in fourth grade reading on the 2022 NAEP test, dropping from an average score of 224 to 214. But 32% of students were proficient — same as the national average. On several other , including the SAT and exam, Virginia students have historically ranked near the top.

Advancing school choice was a “mandate for Youngkin and he has pursued it with dogged determination,” said Cheryl Binkley, president of 4PublicEducation, a Virginia advocacy group. He has appointed school choice advocates to the state board, she said, and pledged to increase the number of .

But Guidera points to increases in and over $400 million the state provided to as evidence that leaders aren’t trying to “tear down” public schools.

Under a different Republican administration in Oklahoma, the opposite scenario is playing out. As �鶹��Ʒ reported last month, the state education department, led by Superintendent Ryan Walters, made its state tests less challenging, especially in reading. In third grade, for example, 51% of students scored proficient or better, compared to 29% last year. 

Richard Cobb, superintendent of the Mid-Del district, near Oklahoma City, said district leaders know student performance has improved, but the department’s changes had the effect of artificially inflating the magnitude of the gains.

The move represented a break from work led by Walters’s predecessor, Joy Hofmeister, to align the state with NAEP’s stronger proficiency targets. In 2017, over 70% of students on average were performing at the proficient level through elementary and middle school on state tests, but only a quarter went on to earn a competitive score on the ACT test in 11th grade.

“The whole idea was trying to get an honest indicator of student readiness as early as third grade when kids start testing,” said Maria D’Brot, a former deputy superintendent in Oklahoma who traveled across the state with Hofmeister to explain the honesty gap to local superintendents. 

Their message wasn’t well received.

“Joy’s adjustment to the cut scores was wildly unpopular and demoralizing,” said Cobb, who has led the district since 2015. “NAEP should not be our target, and many superintendents told her that.”

But in the summer of 2017, 121 educators met at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City to determine tougher cut points for each performance level. Just as the public, plummeted. The in third grade reading, for example, dropped from 72% to 39%.

Hofmeister, who was reelected in 2018, remains proud of that work, which she said would make students better prepared for college and a competitive job market.

“I remember feeling like this is worth it if it means I’m a one termer,” she said. 

Virginia is moving closer to restricting cell phone use in schools after the Virginia Department of Education published a draft of its “cell phone-free” on Thursday after a series of public input events.

The draft defines “cell phone-free” education as “bell-to-bell,” meaning phones should be turned off and stored away from the first school bell until dismissal. This includes lunchtime and breaks between class periods.

On July 9, Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued Executive Order 33, directing his administration to create guidelines to limit students’ time in front of “addictive” cell phones and eliminate “clear distractions” in the classroom.

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The education department said over 600 community members, parents, teachers and school officials attended public events to provide input on the guidelines as well as other community events to understand concerns about cell phones and personal electronic devices.

“The extensive input we received from Virginians was clear and direct,” said Superintendent of Public Instruction Lisa Coons. “They asked for cell phones and personal electronic communication devices to be removed from our children’s public schools during the school day at every level — elementary, middle and high school. By refocusing our students’ attention back into learning and away from their phones and social media, all our children will have a better opportunity to learn and succeed academically.”

Studies have shown that students use cell phones to browse the internet and social media apps, and message people during instructional time. Students have also used the devices to record events at schools and post them on various platforms.

The draft guidance includes age-appropriate cell phone restrictions in Virginia’s elementary and secondary public schools.

According to the draft, if a parent determines an elementary student needs to bring a cell phone or personal electronic communication device to school, it must be stored, off, and away from the student during the school day. Students should not use cell phones in the school building or on the school grounds before or after school.

In middle and high school, students should not have a readily available cell phone or personal electronic communication device during the bell-to-bell school day.

Middle schools should establish local policies that determine cell phone and personal electronic communication device use within the school building or on school grounds outside of bell-to-bell, including before and after school.

Cell phones and personal electronic communication devices may be used on a high school campus before or after school.

Exemptions will be permitted for students with disabilities and EL students with a documented language barrier.

on the draft guidelines closes Sept. 15. School boards must adopt the final guidance by Jan. 1.

Some of Virginia’s school boards have already banned or restricted cell phone use in schools.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

Virginia will soon establish guidance to restrict or eliminate student cell phone use during instructional time at school.

On Tuesday, Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued Executive Order 33, which directs his administration to “heed the call” of parents, public health professionals, educators and others by establishing cell phone-free policies and procedures for school divisions, in light of growing concerns over children’s health and declines in academic performance.

The Virginia Department of Education, in collaboration with the Departments of Health and Health and Human Services, must clearly define what “cell phone-free education” means, and publish model plans and draft guidance on implementing in Virginia’s K-12 schools on its website by Aug. 15, according to the governor’s directive.

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The directive will establish “the clear goal to protect the health and safety of our students by limiting the amount of time they are exposed to “addictive” cell phones and social media and eliminating “clear distractions” in the classroom, Youngkin said in a statement.

The governor added that $500,000 in existing funds allocated to the Departments of Education and Behavioral Health and Development Services will be made available to implement the initiative.

According to the governor’s office, the funds will support state and local efforts to facilitate family nights and community engagement events to combat youth mental health challenges, and provide microgrants for school divisions to help implement cell phone best practices in their communities.

As part of the policies’ development, the departments will be required to hold listening sessions seeking public input on “age-appropriate cell phone-free education policies and procedures, gather feedback on best practices currently underway in Virginia public schools, and receive input for the draft guidance,” the governor’s executive order reads.

The departments are slated to release the final guidance by Sept. 16 of this year. The order directs school boards to adopt the policies by Jan. 1, 2025, or before.

Youngkin’s order cites American Psychological Association that suggests adolescents who spend over three hours on social media daily have double the risk of poor mental health. The order also references studies showing that children spend about 4.8 hours a day on social media, and that students who use their phones during class learn less and earn lower grades.

“Therefore, creating a cell phone-free education environment in public schools is not only a prudent measure but an essential one to promote a healthier and more focused educational environment where every child is free to learn,” Youngkin directive states.

Some of Virginia’s school boards have already begun banning or restricting cell phone use in schools. empowering local boards to institute such prohibitions on cellphones and other “handheld communication devices” during regular school hours died last session.

James Fedderman, president of the Virginia Education Association, said in a statement that the organization recognizes the mounting worries over how cell phones impact students in classrooms and thinks it’s “essential” to approach the issue with “a nuanced perspective that considers the real-world needs of our students and teachers.”

Fedderman, whose organization is the largest educator advocacy group in the state, went on to urge the Virginia Department of Education to engage with educators to develop balanced guidelines “that support effective teaching and learning while also addressing legitimate concerns about distractions.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

Legislation banning Virginia’s public colleges and universities from providing special treatment in admissions decisions to students related to alumni and donors is on track to head to Gov. Glenn Youngkin later this session.

On Tuesday, the Virginia House joined the Senate in passing on a unanimous vote. Both bills, which are identical, must now pass in the opposite chambers before they are sent to the governor for his approval.

Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez has signaled the governor is likely to sign the measures.

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“The governor will review any legislation that comes to his desk, but believes admission to Virginia’s universities and colleges should be based on merit,” he said.

The proposed ban comes after the U.S. Supreme Court ended affirmative action at higher education institutions nationwide in June. Since the court’s ruling that race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina were unconstitutional, schools in the commonwealth have begun changing their admissions policies.

by think tank Education Reform Now found “most beneficiaries of legacy preferences are white.” It also identified Virginia as one of five states where a majority of public colleges and universities offer admissions advantages to the children of alumni.

“All that House Bill 48 says is that in considering admissions to college and our public universities here in the commonwealth of Virginia, whether your parents went there or whether your parents are donors to the institution will play no role in deciding who is accepted to the college,” said Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax, who is carrying the House bill, during a subcommittee meeting earlier this month.

Both Democrats and Republicans have supported the change.

“I think it’s absolutely discriminatory to grant special privileges to people based on what their parents did, what they gave, where they went to college,” said Del. Thomas Garrett, R-Goochland, at the same meeting.

Garrett said he’s supporting the proposal to “address discrimination and create a level playing field for all Virginians.”

Last week, the Senate version of the , patroned by Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Richmond, also passed with unanimous support.

Education Reform Now says more than 100 colleges and universities have ended legacy admissions since 2015, but 787 still used the practice as of 2020.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

As federal relief funds dry up, Virginia policymakers are increasingly looking for solutions to residents’ problems in securing affordable child care.

Jess Mullins Fullen, a mother of two children in Southwest Virginia, said she and her husband work full-time to pay for their most expensive cost: child care.

“There are bigger issues in the world, but workforce support and child care is one of those things where if I’m feeling the impacts — and I can admit that I have certain privileges because of my job and because I’m able to stay at home — I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who don’t have that same kind [of] fluidity when it comes to their workspace,” said Mullins Fullen.

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Now, legislators and Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration have put forward more than a dozen bills and budget proposals that focus on increasing the flow of funding to early childhood education and child care, expanding program eligibility and bolstering the provider pool by removing certain requirements and offering incentives.

“There are a host of legislative priorities that we’re all working on in a bipartisan fashion … to make sure that every individual who is seeking child care will have access,” said Del. Briana Sewell, D-Prince William, who sits on the House Early Education Subcommittee. “While we have made significant strides, I think we will all recognize that there’s still quite a way to go.“

The problems facing Virginia families were highlighted this summer in a report by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, which conducts analysis and provides oversight of state agencies on behalf of the General Assembly, which found , especially those with low incomes.

According to JLARC, the cost of full-time child care in Virginia ranges between $100 and $440 per week per child, or $5,200 to $22,880 annually for one child.

Nationally, the , a progressive think tank, has found that the average annual cost of child care is currently $10,000 for one child, and in some states, it’s as much as $15,000 to $20,000.

Rising inflation has exacerbated the situation. And researchers note cost estimates may actually be less than what parents are paying, since many providers charge fees on top of base tuition.

Del. Nick Freitas, R-Culpeper, said he’s concerned that lawmakers seeking to fix problems with the current situation have made subsidizing child care the only answer instead of looking at the economic conditions making child care expensive.

“I think sometimes we need to be careful about assuming that the automatic answer to all of this is ‘more government spending’ and ‘more government policy,’ because quite frankly, I think when we look at our economic situations, some of that is as a result of excess government intervention into the economy,” Freitas said.

Increasing the flow of funding to child care and early childhood education

Youngkin’s budget proposal for the next two years, however, calls for major spending on child care and early childhood education to help fill gaps left as federal pandemic-era programs that expanded child care subsidy and grant programs expire.

This December, the governor proposed $448 million in spending on Virginia early learning and child care programs in each of the next two years, including $25 million to develop public-private partnerships in areas with child care shortages.

Christian Martinez, a spokesman for Youngkin, said roughly $173 million in fiscal year 2025 and $238 million in fiscal year 2026 would go toward the state’s Child Care Subsidy Program. Martinez said those dollars are “new money that would not have been spent on child care otherwise.”

In the General Assembly, lawmakers are also considering two bills that would help meet longer-term state child care needs by creating a funding formula that would determine the minimum amount of funding and number of slots Virginia would need to serve its children every biennium.

and , being carried by Del. David Bulova, D-Fairfax, and Sen. Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, would also create a nonreverting Early Childhood Care and Education Fund that would capture any funds allocated by the state “for the provision of services to families at early childhood care and education sites” that are left unspent at the end of the year. The money in the fund would then be directed into the state’s existing early childhood care and education system.

“Virginia has come a long way in building a unified equitable early childhood education system,” Locke said during a recent Senate Education subcommittee hearing. “SB 54 continues to work by establishing a transparent, predictable formula for funding early childhood slots based on parent demand and a nonreverting fund to enable rollover of unspent funds to serve more children based on family demand and preference.”

Expanding program eligibility

Other legislation this session focuses on increasing the number of families who can qualify for state assistance for child care.

from Del. Phil Hernandez, D-Norfolk, would make any families receiving government support through programs like Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC, automatically qualify for the Child Care Subsidy Program through a policy called categorical eligibility. The House passed the bill on Thursday.

“They’re not starting from scratch,” Hernandez told an education panel earlier this month. “If you’ve already gone to these other programs and you’ve determined your eligibility, you’ve already sort of had a step forward in the process.”

The idea isn’t new, he said: The last state budget included language piloting the use of categorical eligibility for the subsidy program for families already enrolled in Medicaid or WIC.

“This bill would simply make the policy permanent by giving it a home in the code rather than letting it sunset in the budget,” Hernandez said.

In the same vein, from Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, D-Alexandria, would let employees of licensed child care providers participate in the Child Care Subsidy Program at no cost and with no copayment. And from Del. Kathy Tran, D-Fairfax, would create a work group to study the possibility of expanding the availability of Head Start programs, which provide health, nutrition and education services to children under age 5 from low-income families, at community colleges.

“There is a critical need for additional child care options that are affordable and high quality for Virginia’s families,” Tran said during a Jan. 24 House Education subcommittee hearing. “Knowing we are having more working adults and many of them are parents, I think it’s a prime opportunity for us to explore how we could help support the success of those students, as well as current parent-students, by establishing Head Start centers across our community college system.”

Bolstering the provider pool by removing certain requirements and offering incentives

Another set of bills focuses on increasing child care availability by removing certain requirements for providers and offering them incentives to provide their services.

According to data from the , a left-leaning think tank, 47% of people in Virginia, many of them low income, live in a child care desert.

House Bills and , carried by Dels. Anne Tata, R-Virginia Beach, and Sewell, would exempt child care providers who serve on a military installation or provide care to service members from state licensure requirements in an effort to reduce what the lawmakers described as unnecessarily duplicative rules.

Both Sewell and Tata represent significant military populations in Northern Virginia and Virginia Beach. Sewell said many service members struggle to find quality, affordable child care that is compatible with their work schedules.

She noted that providers affected by the bill already “have to go through the military certification to get authorization of approval to serve as a child care provider.”

“And their standards are actually significantly higher than that of the commonwealth,” she added.

from Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield, would allow volunteers who pass a fingerprint-based background check through the Central Criminal Records Exchange or Federal Bureau of Investigation and have supervision to work in certain child care centers before their full background check is complete.

Coyner said the bill aims to fix delays in the full background check process that prevent volunteers from immediately being employed.

“Therefore they end up working somewhere else rather than staying in child care,” she said.

To relax some training measures, Del. Tony Wilt, R-Harrisonburg, proposed , which minimizes any pre-service training for child care employees to only what’s relevant to their roles and responsibilities.

Another carried by Del. Bobby Orrock, R-Spotsylvania, to exempt religious institutions from having to obtain a state license to run a child day center failed in a House education subcommittee over concerns it would set a dangerous precedent.

During a Wednesday meeting, Orrock said the bill’s intent was not to make child care less safe, but instead to address shortages of child care providers. Religious institutions would still be required to submit background checks and meet health and safety standards, he noted.

However, Del. Laura Cohen, D-Fairfax, said she was “incredibly concerned that the idea would be to lessen regulation and accountability in order to open up spaces in child care, even if somebody … had a hard time finding child care.”

The Senate is considering a .

Other measures try to make it easier for providers to find space for child care centers. , which passed the Senate unanimously, and would let office buildings be used for child care.

Finally, some proposals are offering providers money: The funding formula bills carried by Bulova and Locke would create a new incentive program known as RecognizeB5 for early childhood teachers who work directly with children for at least 30 hours per week.

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Virginia Democrats were primarily celebrating being able to now block the governor’s plan in the state, but the outcome of Tuesday’s races — both at the state and local school board level — raise questions about the political viability of other Youngkin mandates, such as adopting state policies seen as hostile to LGBTQ+ students and giving parents far greater control over classroom materials. 

These volatile issues have roiled national politics for the last several years and were at play in school board and statewide elections in multiple places Tuesday. But voters , as seen in Democratic and progressive-leaning teachers unions quickly heralding the results and foes of Moms for Liberty, a high-profile, hard-right parent group whose candidates did not fare well, . 

“Voters across the country rejected extremist politicians and school board candidates running on divisive “culture war” issues in yesterday’s elections, as mainstream parents rallied instead behind those championing investments in safe and welcoming public schools that kids need to recover and thrive,” the American Federation of Teachers said Wednesday.

Citing its own analysis of 250 races nationally, the union said AFT-supported candidates won in over 80% of them and that “extremist school board candidates” were defeated in Bucks County, Pennsylvania; Wichita, Kansas; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Aldine, Texas; and throughout Ohio and Minnesota.

On the other side of the aisle, the conservative Center for Education Reform was hoping for an opportunity to extend school choice funding measures that did not materialize: “If [Youngkin’s] party wins the votes necessary to take the majority in both chambers, there is potential for this state to provide parents with Education Savings Accounts.”

Here are five places where the school culture wars were pivotal in the 2023 elections:

Pennsylvania: Two school board contests in particular, in Pembridge and Central Bucks in suburban Philadelphia, were being watched nationally as a showdown between Republican incumbents, who had adopted a range of anti-LGBTQ+ and ultra-conservative curriculum measures, and Democratic challengers who pledged to change course. The contests also drew outsized political contributions, most notably in Central Bucks where Democrats and Republicans . The of the Central Bucks races and appeared to go to candidates opposed to the Moms for Liberty-aligned incumbents.

Virginia: In Spotsylvania County, where a conservative board was among the first to implement Youngkin’s education platforms, all four GOP-endorsed candidates lost to more liberal opponents. One who went on to defeat, Kirk Twigg, suggested that books pulled by the board from school libraries should be burned. He lost by almost 25 points, . In Loudoun County, which became ground zero for a host of culture war issues, particularly during Virginia’s prolonged school closures, all nine board members will be new in this upcoming term. “It was chaos for the last four years and I’m glad the election is finally over, and we can get to work,” said Deana Griffiths, .

Ohio: The state, where former President Trump won 53% of the vote in 2020, became a leading story out of the 2023 elections when voters and reproductive health care in the state constitution. It’s difficult to say how those voters may have gone down ballot in their local school board races, but in central Ohio, either supported or aligned with Moms for Liberty or the right-leaning 1776 Project won their races. In the Lakota and Forest Hills districts outside Cincinnati, including painting over a mural celebrating different races, carried the day.

Minnesota: Five of the largest suburbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities this year saw an unprecedented wave of spending by two political action committees backing candidates running on parental rights agendas. As of last week, the Minnesota Parents Alliance and a local affiliate spent a combined $80,000 — the lion’s share donated by one person — on 44 school board candidates. Just nine of their candidates clinched their election, according to unofficial results. Three races were as of Wednesday afternoon. Two of the PAC-supported candidates won board seats in the state’s largest school system, the Anoka-Hennepin School District, which has a long history of local elections centering on culture war issues. In the southern city of Hastings, where in the 2021 election cycle activists outed the now-former school board chair’s 8-year-old child as transgender, three Minnesota Parents Alliance candidates captured seats on a seven-member board. 

New Jersey: Parental rights and gender issues have taken center stage at school board meetings, with the results from Tuesday’s election being mixed on whose agenda resonated more with voters. In Morris County, where school boards have fought over parental notification and LGBTQ+-themed reading materials, conservative candidates did well. In Sussex and Bergen County, however, incumbents lost seats after blocking pride signs on school grounds, seeking to remove books from the library or altering policies on transgender students, .

A key issue underlying the 2023 Virginia election first drew statewide – and national – attention in a debate two years ago.

During a 2021 Virginia gubernatorial debate, Democratic candidate made a critical mistake that led to his defeat by GOP challenger Glenn Youngkin.

Instead of acknowledging concerns that parents were having over school curriculum, McAuliffe dismissed them.

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“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision,” McAuliffe said during the debate. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

McAuliffe’s remarks sparked a backlash among white conservatives who were incensed that their children were being forced to read books that touched on contentious topics such as racism and sexuality.

In fact, one of Youngkin’s showed a white mother who was nearly brought to tears by her son’s anguish after reading about the horrors of slavery in Toni Morrison’s “.” She said the book should not have been required high school reading.

But while Youngkin and other campaigning for offices from to in the 2023 cycle have hitched their political success to parental rights and banning books deemed offensive, they do not own those issues.

In fact, the very thing that parental rights advocates are fighting to exclude is the very thing that parental rights groups of the 1960s fought to have included: an accurate reflection of the role that Black people played in the shaping of American history and culture.

I know this because a great deal of time studying one of the seminal parental rights movements in American public education for my book, “.”

In that book, I detailed the 1968 struggle over community control of public schools in the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. There, as in Virginia, by the public education system demanded to have their voices heard in determining school curricula.

But at Ocean Hill-Brownsville, it was Black and Latino parents who demanded their right to have a say in the education of their children.

Inside the classrooms

For decades, Black history had been a neglected topic in New York City schools.

In the 1960s, only a handful of textbooks on the Board of Education-approved list discussed the history of African Americans in significant detail. The lack of such material was widely blamed for the disappointing academic performance of Black and Latino students.

In an effort to help those students and improve test scores, New York City school officials launched an experiment to give the mostly minority parents more say in school matters by appointing them to school governing boards. As I note in , the new governing boards immediately set out to move the history of Black Americans from the margins of the American experience to its epicenter.

Not everyone supported the changes to what was being taught in the classrooms. When the newly formed board composed of fired 13 teachers and six administrators for trying to block the changes, the United Federation of Teachers union organized several strikes to shut down the schools in a dispute over control of personnel, finances and curricula.

The strikes lasted for 36 school days and affected about 47,000 teachers and nearly 1 million students. The strike ended on Nov. 17 when the state took control of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district.

Most of the jobs left vacant by striking union members were filled by a group of nonunionized “replacement” teachers sympathetic to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville parents.

In this racially charged atmosphere, local parents enjoyed an unprecedented opportunity to assert their rights. In the words of one school board representative, they sought to “supply the missing pieces of Black culture,” which would be “the well-spring from which all areas will flow, and counter the total focus in today’s curriculum on the European Anglo-Saxon experience.”

During , Ocean Hill-Brownsville parents worked with the teachers who had defied the union and staffed the schools to help implement an ambitious Black history curriculum. It included lessons on Black revolutionary leaders , and .

Their recommendations would eventually influence the direction of curricula in the New York City public school system as a whole.

A constant struggle

This example of parental rights serves as a reminder to those who assume that white conservatives are the only active and involved parents trying to assert their rights.

Indeed, in Virginia itself, Black parents are still having an effect on what is taught in public schools. In one example, the proposed a set of revisions to the state’s Standards of Learning in history and social sciences that failed to mention Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Black politicians and parents as “white-washing,” and the changes were later .

In a further blow to conservatives, parental activists helped shepherd standards that were approved in April 2023.

The standards state unequivocally that “the institution of slavery was the cause of the Civil War.” In addition, they recognize “the indelible stain of slavery, segregation, and racism in the United States and around the world” and emphasize “the development of African American culture in America.”

Most important, at least to those who agree that parents should have an active role in the education of their children, the standards state that “parents should have access to all instructional materials utilized in any Virginia public school.”

The parental rights movement, then, in Virginia and elsewhere, is not solely the province of the right. As history has shown – and today’s debates over school curricula show – “parental rights” are for all parents.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Four Southern states schedule off-cycle races the year before a presidential campaign. Two, and , are deep-red bastions where incumbent governors are considered mild favorites to win reelection. In a third, Louisiana, the Republican favorite already in an October “jungle primary,” automatically advancing to the governorship.

But Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin still has two years left in his term, offers something different: a true battleground whose outcome could serve as a bellwether for the national mood. And in few other states have education debates played such a prominent role in recent political history.

Youngkin’s victory in 2021, snapping his party’s long losing streak in statewide contests, was widely attributed to over their children’s experiences in school, combined with lingering anger over pandemic-related health measures. It also served notice that Democrats, long favored by the public as stewards of schools, take their advantage on education for granted.

Local authorities, too, have awoken to the reality of abysmal post-COVID academic achievement. Results from standardized tests show that Virginia children by the prolonged closure of K–12 schools and transition to virtual learning, and reports of have only heightened concerns further. Following the release of another round of poor student scores, Youngkin recently laid out for learning recovery centered on tutoring and literacy reforms. 

How that recovery will be carried out, and whether conservatives may venture into the bolder experiments with school choice that have been attempted in other Southern states, hinges significantly on the outcome of Tuesday’s elections. 

Control over the State Assembly will be decided by just a handful of swing seats, but the range of possibilities for governance is huge. If Democrats maintain their 22-18 lead in the state Senate — and perhaps win a majority in the House of Delegates, where Republicans currently hold a four-seat edge — they will retain the ability to check Youngkin’s ambitions and escape the rightward thrust that has brought expanded school choice and anti-critical race theory legislation to states like Florida. But if the governor’s party is able to capture both chambers, he could ride his conservative record and electoral victories to an enviable perch in the Republican presidential primary. 

Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., said public polling revealed a Virginia electorate that is generally contented with the state of public schools. Still, he added, a successful agenda of school improvement could make a national figure of Youngkin, already by Republicans seeking alternatives to a third Trump nomination.

“I think more people are going to be voting on the hot-button social issues than on the specifics of the governor’s plan for learning recovery,” Farnsworth said. “But if the governor is able to proceed along the lines he’s outlined, and if that reverses test score declines, it would be a very powerful message for his political future.”&�Բ�����;

‘Such a meltdown’

Such a reversal could be a tall order given the depth of Virginia’s Virginia’s academic crash during the pandemic. 

Signs of the decline mounted over several years, but last fall, results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal exam commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card) provided the starkest evidence yet. 11 points in math and 10 points in reading between 2019 and 2022 — substantially more than the national average. In both subjects, the state’s average score fell from the ranks of the national leaders to the middle of the pack.

As researchers gathered more detailed information, they revealed even uglier findings. Shortly after the calamitous NAEP release, Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon and Harvard economist Tom Kane released the , a database using the federal scores to quantify learning loss at the district level across 29 states. The tool showed that five of the 10 districts that experienced the worst reading setbacks were located in Virginia; even worse, the state accounted for an astonishing nine out of the 10 districts that fell the most in math. Students in two of the state’s biggest cities, Richmond and Newport News, lost well over 1.5 grade levels during their time in remote instruction. Those districts, along with many others nationwide where learning loss was especially acute, were already afflicted with high rates of poverty and academic underperformance when COVID hit.

The damage cannot be attributed to a single factor, though the prior research of both Kane and Brown University economist Emily Oster found strong links between meaningful drops in achievement and the length of time that students spent away from brick-and-mortar schools. According to co-authored by Oster, the average Virginia district spent just 9.2 percent of the 2020–21 school year in full-time, in-person instruction.

The apparently pernicious effects of Zoom classrooms don’t explain how other states, such as California, also endured lengthy school closures without their students’ performance tumbling as far as those in Virginia. But state Sen. Chap Petersen is convinced of the connection, complaining in an interview that schools “were shut down for so long, and with so little scientific basis.”

A centrist Democrat representing Fairfax, just a few miles south of Washington, D.C., Petersen to reopen schools in 2021 and later to end school mask mandates. Petersen lost his primary in June , an upset some observers have attributed to his stance on pandemic-era policies. He stands by the position nonetheless.

“The COVID-19 situation was such a meltdown that it kind of stood everything on its head,” Petersen said. “It was a violation of the Virginia Constitution because we’re required to make a public school system available to kids. For a year, we had no actual school system.”

Yet the public is still not clamoring for wholesale changes to K–12 policy. Polls show that while most Virginians rate education in the upcoming elections, they generally give high marks to their local schools. Rather than looking to state officials for emergency intervention, a sizable plurality in a recent survey said that Youngkin over schools. 

For his own part, the governor argues that parents are kept in the dark about the true state of school quality. Citing research from the reform-oriented Collaborative for Student Success, he has complained of an “honesty gap” resulting from the for proficiency on Virginia’s state exams, along with for school accreditation. 

The Virginia Board of Education is now of its accreditation process, which measures students’ test scores, attendance and college readiness with an aim toward placing failing schools on a path to improvement. In spite of the huge dip in student achievement during the pandemic, the overwhelming majority of schools received full accreditation in 2022, leading the board’s president to observe in a recent meeting that the system “does not seem to be measuring schools well relative to student performance.”

Christopher Gareis, an education professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in classroom assessment, said that more transparency was needed in how the state communicated with the public about school quality. Likening Virginia’s approach to school accountability to that of U.S. News & World Report, he said state authorities had historically found it “all too easy to tinker with the system” without making their work legible to voters.

“It’s a really sophisticated methodology that sometimes changes,” Gareis said. “By and large, the public’s not saying, ‘What changed here? I’ll go become a psychometrician so I can figure it out.’ All they know is that a given school is scored 50 or 25 or 225. That’s a real challenge.”

The Youngkin trajectory

Though not on the ballot himself, Youngkin has worked to keep schools at the center of the legislative campaign, hosting around the state this summer. Tacking away somewhat from the disputes over social issues that the open discussions largely focused on protecting kids from exposure to drugs and social media.

In September, the governor unveiled his , which incentivizes Virginia’s 132 school districts to spur learning growth by establishing tutoring programs, hiring specialized reading instructors and addressing chronic absenteeism. Financial support for the strategy comes from a recently enacted two-year budget, which includes in new school funding. But that the state is exceeding its budgetary authority in requiring districts to submit spending plans to the Virginia Department of Education before money can be dispersed, suggesting that a legal fight could be in the offing. 

Thus far, learning recovery hasn’t featured heavily in either of the parties’ campaign themes. Democratic candidates have made education-based appeals around select issues — incumbent Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg, running for a Republican-held Senate seat in suburban Richmond, showing a high school class conducting an active shooter drill — but are mostly attacking the GOP on its post-Roe efforts to . 

Petersen, whose Northern Virginia senate district has taken on a socially liberal bent in recent years, said his party’s supporters have become less animated by education as the region and more single people. In previous decades, he argued, the school closures of 2020–21 would have triggered a bigger backlash. 

“I was the guy who fought to reopen schools, and I considered that my strength,” Petersen said. “I ran on those issues, and they didn’t motivate Democratic voters.”

Chris Saxman, a Republican who served in the House of Delegates between 2002 and 2010, said the nature of the cycle made it difficult for schools to receive their share of the spotlight. Unlike in 2021, when school-related controversies acted as an “accelerant” to Youngkin’s rise in the gubernatorial race, this fall’s elections only feature legislative candidates. What’s more, in a polarized environment with swing seats (out of 140 being contested), most competitive races were unfolding in areas where voters might be leery of promises of education reform.

“This year, only a few of the districts are in play, and they’re swing districts,” Saxman said. “You can’t go heavy against public education in swing, suburban districts, where people pay high taxes for what they see as good schools.”

Much will depend on whether voter turnout resembles the electorate of 2020, when President Biden handily captured the state’s presidential vote, or that of 2021, when Youngkin won an upset as an outsider candidate. According to from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, Democrats could fall well short of the president’s 10-point victory margin while still preventing Republicans from winning a Richmond “trifecta” (control over the governorship and both chambers of the House of Delegates). 

Another stint of divided government, with Democrats maintaining control of the Senate and/or erasing the Republicans’ narrow House majority, would ensure that the governor would “accomplish very little over the next two years,” the University of Mary Washington’s Farnsworth observed. Aside from pushing forward with ALL IN VA (most communities failed to offer their spending plans before the state’s recommended Oct. 16 deadline, with some and challenges in staffing tutoring initiatives), the administration to make districts comply with its guidance on the treatment of transgender students in school. A newly formed Chronic Absenteeism Task Force has .

On the other hand, a Republican breakthrough — the party would need to hold the House and flip two Senate seats to notch a 20-20 split, with Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears serving as tiebreaker — would open up entirely different possibilities. Over his first two years in office, Youngkin has sought to broaden access to school choice and innovation through an expansion of “lab schools” (somewhat akin to university-sponsored charter schools), only to see funding for the idea in the upper chamber. In a state with , a renewed push next year could change circumstances on the ground quickly, though a separate campaign to would still face an uphill climb.

More than policy victories, unified GOP control in Virginia would send a chill through Democrats just 12 months from a presidential election. The state has gone blue in every such race since 2008, but Youngkin has managed a successful balancing act halfway through his governorship. showed him enjoying a 54-38 approval rating, trouncing President Biden’s rating in what should be a redoubt of the Democrats’ victory coalition. 

Jumping into the presidential race this deep into the cycle would daunt most contenders. But Youngkin, among conservative donors, could easily manage the start-up costs of a campaign, leaving many to speculate that a strong showing on Election Day could set the stage for the governor’s late entry.

“Everything I see indicates that he’s going to make some foray,” into the Republican primary, Saxman said. “Whether they gain a functioning majority in the Senate and do something about school choice, which would make him more nationally vibrant to compete for the presidency, is [a big] question.”&�Բ�����;

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on �鶹��Ʒ’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this story. 

According to the Stanford researchers, when tutoring follows that blueprint to the letter, elementary students gain more than four months worth of learning in reading and high school students gain more than 10 months of learning — an entire additional school year — in math. 

It is in this environment that Virginia is launching a statewide high-dosage tutoring effort called , part of a $418 million package of academic recovery measures. The Virginia Department of Education recommends that districts put 70% of those funds toward tutoring and plans to to Ignite Reading and Zearn to provide tutoring in reading and math, respectively. Districts are expected to launch these services by Oct. 16. 

All districts are expected to offer tutoring to students in grades 3-8 who have failed or are in danger of failing their Standards of Learning exams. There’s flexibility for districts to decide who gets the tutoring within that group of students.

Virginia is joining the ranks of states like and that have already invested money in tutoring. But it’s not always easy for educators to follow researchers’ tutoring guidelines. Many districts have struggled to hire tutors, shift mindsets away from tutoring as a voluntary, before- or after-school supplement and toward integrating it within the school day, and find enough money to pay for the time, training and materials that high-quality tutoring demands. As a result, Virginia would do well to study the lessons policymakers in other states have learned through launching their own tutoring initiatives. Here are three big ones. 

First, without clear communication from the state to districts to principals that spells out how to do high-dosage tutoring, why it works and how it connects to classroom learning, principals and teachers may get the recipe wrong, weakening tutoring’s effectiveness. 

The common, outdated image of tutoring can prevent districts from following the research-backed recipe for success, and retooling school schedules to make time for tutoring can be complicated. Teachers can be and reluctant to give up time with them unless they understand how it will help them succeed back in their regular classroom.

Contracts with virtual tutoring vendors, while a fast way to hire many tutors at once, may be ineffective without a solid plan to connect vendors with schools. Over the summer, Ohio for math tutoring. Although the state spent more than $7.5 million in COVID relief money on the program, teachers aren’t required to use it, and as of early September, some didn’t even know it was available. Communication is key. 

Second, when state education officers sit down to write contracts with vendors, they should link pay to student performance. Richmond Public Schools, one of the largest school systems in the state, is doing just that after taking part in the to help districts write outcomes-based contracts. This ensures that schools and taxpayers are getting their money’s worth from tutoring investments. The approach has worked in Duval County, Florida, which also participated in the foundation’s training. There, a contract with FEV Tutor helped nearly 225 eighth graders get back on track to take algebra in ninth grade.

Third, for the many students who were struggling even before the pandemic, a quick jump-start from a semester of intensive tutoring will not be enough. Those deep learning gaps will take more time to address. For these students, and for those with a combination of academic and social-emotional issues, on-site rather than virtual tutoring would be a much better long-haul strategy. Chicago Public Schools offers lessons that could prove useful to Virginia’s many small and rural schools. For one thing, most of the district’s tutors are retired teachers, parents and other community members who have received special training, a model that many Virginia communities could use. 

Principals say connecting with local people fosters strong student-tutor relationships and helps build a hiring pipeline for office staff and teacher assistants. 

Chicago Public Schools has also established a productive division of labor with its outside tutoring partners. Vendors Amplify and Saga Education provide curriculum and tutor training, but the district does all hiring in house. That allows the district to combine part-time tutors at a reasonable price — $20 to $22 per hour — with curriculum and tutor training from proven providers.

Virginia, like all states investing in tutoring with federal pandemic relief funds, will soon face a fiscal dilemma: whether to cut elsewhere to sustain tutoring or stop tutoring when the funds run out next year. Most will likely be looking for ways to sustain their investment.

How can schools keep tutoring going when the COVID relief funds run dry? Other federal sources are one strategy. School districts can well-established funding streams like Title I for low-income students, Title II for training and professional development, and IDEA early intervention funds. It adds up to a lot of money for a proven strategy to help students succeed in the classroom and beyond.

As LGBTQ students head back to school throughout Virginia, they return to a patchwork of contradictory rules dictating who may use what bathroom, play on which sports team and ask their teachers to address them by new pronouns. At issue is whether new state policies outlining the treatment of transgender students contradict state and federal law — and whether the commonwealth has the ability to enforce them.

In recent weeks, several of Virginia’s largest school systems have said they will not adopt the state’s new model policies, finalized in July. These require districts to use the pronouns and name a child was assigned at birth, exclude gender-nonconforming children from locker rooms and other facilities that match their identities and, critics say, risk the forced outing of transgender kids. 

On Aug. 15, the state’s largest school system, Fairfax County Public Schools, joined the Arlington and Prince William County districts in that, after reviewing the guidelines, they would keep their existing rules, which leaders believe comply with the law. Last year, when a draft of the policies was first released, leaders in Falls Church, Alexandria and Richmond said they didn’t plan to adopt them. 

Roanoke County Public Schools and a number of rural districts have begun using the new policies, titled “.” The new rules assert that “All students have the right to attend school in an environment free from discrimination, harassment or bullying,” but also say numerous LGBTQ protections must be reversed.

Many districts have yet to take up the question.

The disputes could end up in court, but attorneys tracking the seesawing debates predict the issue will become a central fixture of this fall’s campaign season. Every seat in the Virginia General Assembly is up for election in November, as are numerous school boards. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin — who cruised to office in 2021 on a “parents’ rights” platform — has suggested that board members who don’t adopt the guidelines may not be “.”

Civil rights advocates agree with district leaders who say the new policies contradict a number of state and federal anti-discrimination laws. They don’t believe the state Department of Education has the authority to enforce their adoption.

On Aug. 23, the commonwealth’s attorney general issued an advisory opinion saying the guidelines comply with state and federal law. is silent on what action state officials may take against districts that disagree. The day before, Youngkin held a press conference where he . Asked what the state could do to enforce the guidelines, he said, “I just ask you to stand by. Just stay by.”

Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter told �鶹��Ʒ, “The law requires the Virginia Department of Education to provide model policies and requires school boards to adopt policies consistent with those provided by the department. Virginia school divisions that reject and diverge from … model policy guidance are perpetuating a false notion that they know what’s better for a child than a child’s parent. School boards are expected to follow the law.”

Contacted by �鶹��Ʒ, Victoria LaCivita, spokeswoman for Attorney General Jason Miyares, said school boards “are now on notice of their legal obligation to adopt policies consistent with the model policies. 

“If a school board voted not to adopt policies consistent with the model policies, parents can sue under current state law,” she added. “Our office will be monitoring all litigation and will be prepared to participate where doing so is appropriate and parents have valid claims.”

But Carl Tobias, Williams Chair at the University of Richmond School of Law, says it’s “in dispute” whether the policies — which he called “diametrically opposed” to the thrust of the underlying legislation — conform to the law or whether the state has the authority to act if they are not adopted. 

The purpose of the underlying 2020 statute is clear, he says: “The intent was to do whatever was necessary and evidence-based to help transgender students. That’s what the legislature wanted to do.”

The question now, he adds, is “who’s going to sue whom.”&�Բ�����;  

The state Department of Education did not reply to questions from �鶹��Ʒ about whether it will take action against the districts.

So far, districts are reacting to the new guidance much in the way they did to policies issued two years ago by Youngkin’s Democratic predecessor regarding the same law, with many small or rural districts sidestepping the question or adopting less detailed policies written by the Virginia School Board Association. State officials took no action against school leaders who did not adopt the first set of policies.

Fairfax is following the law, says Wyatt Rolla, senior transgender rights attorney at the ACLU of Virginia: “It’s really important for folks to understand that … this guidance document, these model policies, cannot and does not change the obligations of school boards under existing federal and state law. In Virginia, as well as under federal law, students are protected from discrimination on the basis of gender identity.”

Adopting the policies could leave districts open to lawsuits and federal civil rights complaints from families, Rolla says: “They really threw school districts under the bus.”��

There are 1.2 million public school students in Virginia. Researchers estimate some 4,000 are transgender. Their rights have been considered settled law since 2020, when the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of a transgender former Gloucester County student named Gavin Grimm to use the boys’ bathroom. 

In March 2020, in the runup to that court decision and with a Democratic trifecta in power, assembly members spelling out a series of protections for LGBTQ students, which are also detailed in the . The new law specified that “the Department of Education shall develop and make available to each school board model policies concerning the treatment of transgender students in public elementary and secondary schools.”&�Բ�����;

The legislation spelled out a number of protections and required the policies to be based on “evidence-based best practices.” Then-Gov. Ralph Northam’s education department issued the first set of guidelines in 2021.

Simultaneously, Virginia had become the epicenter of protests over LGBTQ rights, curriculum involving race and history, book bans and other culture war issues. Campaigning on a platform that promised to ensure parents’ right to shield their children from these topics, Youngkin was elected governor.

A year ago, he released new proposed guidelines, triggering a wave of and drawing more than 70,000 public comments, the vast majority in opposition, says Tobias. The final rules were published in July. 

“The 2021 Model Policies promoted a specific viewpoint aimed at achieving cultural and social transformation in schools,” the new document explains. “The 2021 Model Policies also disregarded the rights of parents and ignored other legal and constitutional principles that significantly impact how schools educate students, including transgender students.”&�Բ�����;

Rolla is critical of the way Youngkins’s policies are organized, noting that they are likely difficult for the public — including many school board members — to understand. For example, one paragraph states, “Students shall use bathrooms that correspond to his or her sex, except to the extent that federal law otherwise requires. See Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, 972 F.3d 586 (4th Cir. 2020).”

But far from outlining exceptions, the Grimm decision is unequivocal: Students may use the restroom that matches their gender identity. The ruling goes to pains to reject the legal validity of trying to distinguish between biological sex and gender identity in matters involving sex-segregated school facilities. 

An expert in education and the constitution, Bob Jarvis is a professor at Nova Southeastern University College of Law in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has directed a number of state agencies and education officials to adopt policies and rules that critics say often are not backed by law. District leaders, Jarvis says, need help from the legal system.

“I’m surprised that no school board or school district has gone to court and said, ‘So, judge, we have a problem. On the one hand, we’re looking at Grimm; on the other hand, we’re looking at these new standards. And we are not sure if we can legally follow the new standards.’ ”

A district refusing to comply with the guidelines — even if confident they are illegal — is taking a risk, says Jarvis. “Because you don’t have the power to decide that the new guidelines are contrary to state law, you have to go to court,” he says. “It would be very interesting if the school boards’ attorneys would tell you their calculations. 

“I assume that they would say, ‘Because we are between this rock and a hard place. We think, with Grimm and the way the state law is written, that we are on safer ground … if we follow this course than if we follow the other course.’ ”

Also at issue: The model policies go beyond existing legal precedents. Even if parents sign off on a student’s request to change their name or pronouns, the rules say staff and classmates are not required to recognize them if they believe doing so violates their religious or ideological freedoms. 

“Practices such as compelling others to use preferred pronouns is premised on the ideological belief that gender is a matter of personal choice or subjective experience, not sex,” the model policies state. “Many Virginians reject this belief.”

Courts are sometimes quick to decide administrative disputes, say Jarvis and Rolla. But even if legal challenges are filed, it’s unlikely they would prevent the districts’ refusal to implement the policies from becoming a political wedge. Every lawmaker in the commonwealth and lots of school board seats are up for election in a few weeks in a state that has drawn national attention galvanizing voters by challenging schools’ LGBTQ policies. 

“It drives the base on both sides,” says Jarvis. “On the Republican side, it drives the base by showing that we really have to get tough, because look at what these crazy districts are doing, thumbing their nose at the guidance. And on the Democratic side, of course, it drives the base because it shows if you don’t turn out, there will be more of this to come.”

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on �鶹��Ʒ’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this story. 

RICHMOND, Va. — Although a new Virginia law requires schools to inform parents when sexually explicit materials are used in the classroom, some districts are using that law as the basis to go further and remove certain books from schools altogether.

Book ban requests across the state often have cited the Virginia , which was signed last year by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The law requires schools to ensure parents are notified of any instructional material that includes sexually explicit content and allows them to request alternative materials for their children.

But Virginia Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, who introduced the bill last year, said the law was never intended to be a pretext for book bans in school libraries and on classroom shelves.

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“This is not about books,” Dunnavant said. “This is not about censoring. This is about collaboration and what’s in the best interest of a child. And so, I was sorry to hear … that in some cases someone is using this bill in the wrong way.”

Legislatures in other states, including Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah, have likewise passed laws aimed at giving parents control over or banning explicit sexual materials from classrooms. But school districts in many of the states with new laws are still figuring out whether that includes library books, books used in the classroom or both.

Kasey Meehan, who directs PEN America’s Freedom to Read project, said vague legislation and loose guidance in some states have a chilling effect on school decision-makers, who become overly cautious.

“This is where we see legislation empowering local actors — or giving local actors — something to point to when they look to censor certain books,” Meehan said.

Virginia’s law required the state Department of Education to create model policies for ensuring local school districts notify parents via email or in-person meetings when students may be using library books with sexual content to complete an assignment or during extracurricular academic programs. Parents also have the right to review the material and make decisions on what their students can and can’t read.

But some Virginia school boards, like that of Hanover County Public Schools, are still nailing down the specifics of their own policies amid calls for bans.

At its May 9 meeting, the Hanover County School Board heard more than an hour and a half of public comments, many regarding its , with new rules determining how requests for book bans will be handled.

Within a few weeks following the meeting, one organization sent the board a list of more than 100 books it wanted removed from shelves. The list, provided to Stateline by Hanover County Public Schools, includes notes on sexual content, profanity, violence, drug use and more.

On June 13, the school board voted in favor of the new policy. Under it, material challenged for having “pervasive vulgarity” or sexually explicit content will be removed if the school librarian and principal agree. If not, the matter will be forwarded to the school board office, where a committee or designated officials will review it. The board also may at its sole discretion vote to remove “any and all materials of its choosing from the library, classroom, school building(s) and or division.”

The board voted to remove 17 titles that same night.

Less than an hour away in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, officials 14 titles from schools for sexually explicit after a parent complained, in order to comply with the parental notification law, according to a memo from Superintendent Mark B. Taylor.

Taylor, who became superintendent last year, earlier this year had suggested as a cost-reduction measure. He also ruled that the 14 books challenged by the parent as inappropriate be removed from school libraries.

The removed books will be kept in storage, according to the county. Spotsylvania County Public Schools teachers can also use these materials in the classroom with parental consent.

“Our public school libraries contain roughly 390,000 books,” Taylor wrote in a statement to Stateline. “Books have apparently been added to our libraries for years based only on short summary reviews. This practice has left us with limited awareness of the contents of our public school libraries. Our lack of awareness of the sexually explicit content present in our libraries disables us from giving parents the advance notice and the choice to avoid such content that they are entitled to under the law.”

The Spotsylvania County School Board voted 4-3 in May in favor of removing books it deemed sexually explicit. In response, the ACLU of Virginia issued a saying the county had misinterpreted Virginia law.

“Unfortunately, the way Virginia code is written is so open-ended as to allow this kind of dangerous mission creep,” Ashna Khanna, the ACLU of Virginia’s policy director, wrote. “Until this poorly written code is repealed, other overzealous school boards may try to ban books that simply make them uncomfortable.”

And last year in Virginia Beach, then-state Del. Tim Anderson, a Republican, filed suit with former GOP congressional candidate Tommy Altman to restrict two titles from being sold out of bookstores to minors on the grounds of a state law. A threw out the case after finding the law itself to be unconstitutional. (Anderson resigned his seat in April to run for the state Senate.)

While book bans have increased nationwide in the past few years, they have been a controversial issue for centuries, said Trisha Tucker, an associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

“Knowing more about and sharing more about the actual changing narratives about children — about how they read, about what’s dangerous for them — can help us realize that none of this is natural or universal,” she said.

Last year, the American Library Association documented 1,269 to censor over 2,500 unique library books and resources. Of these, 90% were part of requests to censor multiple titles at once.

Officials banned books last year in 138 school districts across 32 states, PEN America.

In the latest ban attempt that drew nationwide attention, a Miami-Dade County, Florida, school responding to one parent’s complaint restricted the poem “The Hill We Climb,” by Amanda Gorman, a Black poet who had read it at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The Republican-controlled Florida legislature passed a number of laws regarding books in schools, including one defining “” in K-12 schools.

The Florida laws have created confusion around book bans, causing some districts to keep books from shelves and critics to complain about decisions being made behind the scenes, the .

Addressing book bans in a news conference this June, Biden the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights will appoint a new coordinator to “address the growing threat that book bans pose for the civil rights of students.” Efforts to ban books disproportionally titles about LGBTQ+ communities and communities of color.

In Connecticut, two Republican members of the Newtown Board of Education in May after the board deadlocked in a 3-3 vote over whether to ban two books. Democratic lawmakers in the state recently proposed a bill that would allow municipalities to designate “” for banned or censored books.

Illinois this week became the first state to pass legislation effectively ending book bans in the state. The signed into law by Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker will block state funding for public schools and libraries that ban books. It takes effect in January 2024.

In Virginia, Eden Heilman, the legal director of the state chapter of the ACLU, said the legislation there remains “problematic.”

“I think what’s happening is — for example, in Spotsylvania — they’re misinterpreting Virginia code to empower themselves to take these bold, broad measures that aren’t authorized in the law,” Heilman said.

Books taken off school shelves

Spotsylvania County, Virginia, officials removed 14 titles from schools for sexually explicit content after a parent complained, in order to comply with a recently passed law.

“All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson

“Like a Love Story” by Abdi Nazemian“Dime” by E.R. Frank

“America” by E.R. Frank

“Sold” by Patricia McCormick

“Out of Darkness” by Ashley Hope Perez

“Beloved” by Toni Morrison

“The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison

“Looking for Alaska” by John Green

“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky

“Water for Elephants” by Sara Gruen

“Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe” by Preston Norton

“More Happy Than Not” by Adam Silvera

“Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult

This article was first published by , part of States Newsroom network of news bureaus that includes the Louisiana Illuminator. It’s supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .

Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced a large-scale effort Wednesday to address learning loss among Virginia students due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The plan includes launching a grant program for qualifying families to cover extra educational expenses and a web tool to provide comprehensive data on student learning for parents and teachers.

Youngkin’s announcement follows the release last year of state and national data revealing wide achievement gaps and among Virginia students during the pandemic.

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“Virginia’s students and children across the country experienced catastrophic learning loss throughout the COVID-19 pandemic from the loss of in-person instruction and in-school support services,” said Youngkin in a statement. “These targeted resources for parents will ensure that many children in Virginia have access to the tutoring, summer enrichment programs and other specialized services they need in order to reach their full potential and combat the severe learning losses.”

Youngkin is slated to take part in a CNN Town Hall on education Thursday night.

New grant program for parents

Although the pandemic impacted all Virginia students, not all families will be eligible to receive a grant from the new Learning Recovery Grants program.

According to the governor’s office, qualifying students whose family income does not exceed 300% of the will receive a $3,000 K-12 Learning Recovery Grant. All other qualifying students will receive a $1,500 grant. The office did not provide details on when the grant application process would begin.

Secretary of Education Aimee Rogstad Guidera said last October that National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, results showed that Virginia is failing students, including fourth graders, who showed the nationwide in math and reading scores between 2017 and 2022.

“We are on the cusp of losing an entire generation of students,” Guidera said in a statement. “Parents deserve actionable information and financial support to determine and access the tools for their child to combat their learning losses.”

Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, proposed a similar program through a this session to provide matching grants to school divisions.

Under the request, Virginia would appropriate $268 million in fiscal year 2024 from the general fund for the Virginia Accelerating Literacy and Learning Corps, which would provide matching grants to school divisions to “implement or strengthen high dosage, small group tutoring supports for students struggling in English and mathematics.”

“If we’re actually trying to bring up NAEP scores, if we’re actually trying to bring up our literacy rates, if we’re actually trying to bring up our learning loss across the commonwealth, doing it through this model is more of an effective use of resources and time whereas the governor’s plan is essentially vouchers for tutoring,” VanValkenburg said.

The General Assembly is expected to return to Richmond this spring to finalize changes to the biennial budget.

Student learning data platform

On Wednesday, the governor also announced the unveiling of , an online platform intended to give parents and teachers data to help them address individual student learning loss.

The governor’s office said nearly half of Virginia school divisions already have access to the online platform. The platform will be available to the remaining school divisions in two months.

The Virginia Department of Education is also training over 800 school division staff members to use the information to “meet student needs, target remediation efforts, and strategically use division resources,” and William & Mary has partnered with to provide additional training.

that cleared the General Assembly this session also aims to provide comprehensive data to parents and teachers by requiring the Virginia Board of Education to create and maintain the Virginia Parent Data Portal, which will contain individualized student assessment data on all state-supported evaluations, by July 1, 2025.

The legislation would also require the board and Department of Education to provide guidance and technical assistance to school divisions on using the data.

Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield, Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, and former state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, carried the bills now headed to the governor’s desk.

“I’m all in favor of focusing on education,” Petersen told the Mercury Thursday, adding that the pandemic shutdown and the lack of in-person learning have impacted student learning.

Providing parents with in-depth data on students “was the idea,” Petersen said. “And yeah, I think that’s part of the solution. So if the governor’s supporting that, then more power to him.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed on Thursday that aims to address teacher shortages in Virginia through strategies that include hiring retired educators and targeting recruitment and retention efforts toward communities most in need.

His directive comes as the nation and due to such possible causes as highly charged political battles over education, the pandemic and dissatisfaction with wages. 

“I’m frustrated that we have a shortage right now,” said Youngkin. “It’s been a persistent shortage over many years, and it hasn’t been closed, and that’s why today’s executive directive is focused on the near-term challenges, but also getting at some of these long-term solutions.”

Data from school divisions, which report their unfilled positions annually on Oct. 1, showed that Virginia’s teacher vacancies more than doubled from 1,063 in 2019 to 2,563 in 2021.

The Virginia Department of Education said the are in elementary education followed by special education and middle school education.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow and Secretary of Education Aimee Rogstad Guidera joined the governor along with Republican Dels. Tara Durant and Phil Scott, who represent parts of Stafford County, on Thursday at Colonial Forge High School for the announcement of the new executive directive. The group joined community leaders, teachers and students to discuss plans for addressing .

Under the directive, Balow will be permitted to issue teaching and renewal licenses to out-of-state and retired teachers whose licenses may have lapsed. Guidera and others from the administration will be charged with developing legislative proposals to loosen regulations for teacher licensure and policies to support the provision of child care inside schools.

Department of Labor and Industry Commissioner Gary Pan and Balow will also establish an apprenticeship program with school divisions to train and license new teachers, including paraprofessional educators. 

Additionally, Youngkin directed education officials to establish a statewide model policy to create an apprenticeship program to train high school students to become child care providers and asked officials to raise teachers’ awareness of the state’s , which assists families with child care costs.

Officials are directed to target grants for recruitment and retention bonuses to school divisions with the greatest teacher turnover.

Funds will also be targeted to improve teacher benefits under the directive. 

On Thursday, Youngkin touted lawmakers’ inclusion in the state budget of 10% raises for teachers over the next two years, as well as funding for lab schools and school construction and renovations.

However, teacher advocates raised concerns over teacher pay and highly politicized working environments. 

James Fedderman, president of the Virginia Education Association, an organization that represents more than 40,000 teachers and school support professionals, said the governor’s directive has ideas the membership can support but doesn’t offer serious investments to address the teacher shortage.

Fedderman said educators have been seeking competitive salaries and additional aid to high-poverty schools through the at-risk add-on — a funding tool that allocates additional dollars to low-income students.

Additionally, he said educators recommend lifting the “support cap,” which limits state aid for critical school positions, investing in community school models to break down barriers to education faced by many students and fully funding the Standards of Quality set by the Virginia Board of Education.

“Our current budget surplus could be used effectively to solve this problem, which affects all Virginia’s citizens,” Fedderman said. “By what he decides to do with those funds, our governor will show us if he truly values education and solving our teacher shortages.”

Democratic Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg, who is a teacher and represents Henrico, said the directive makes sense and he supports the efforts by the governor’s administration, but there needs to be more.

“I think anything we can do is doing right by kids,” said VanValkenburg. “I like that pay is moving in the right direction and I hope that he continues forward like Gov. [Ralph] Northam did in making us more competitive with teacher pay, but he’s also got to stop politicizing the classroom because the constant politicization of curriculum, teachers and public schools is dragging down morale and people don’t like working in a work environment that’s toxic.”

Other challenges potentially linked to recruitment and retention problems include inadequate funding for schools that are not fully accredited.

Schools without full accreditation have a higher concentration of inexperienced teachers compared to fully accredited schools, found one VEA .

Additionally, schools without full accreditation had twice the teacher vacancy rates in October 2021 than fully accredited schools.

The Department of Education will not have data on unfilled teacher positions for 2022-23 until next fall. Data on unfilled teacher vacancies for 2021-22 are expected in the fall.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on���鶹��Ʒ’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this story.

Monday’s vote sends the bill, which , to Gov. Glenn Youngkin for a signature. Youngkin listed the legislation as part of his “day one game plan” and has made parental input into public curriculum a central part of his political platform. One of his campaign ads featured a Fairfax County mother who to remove Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved” from her son’s high school Advanced Placement English course.

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The language of the bill, sponsored by Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico, is to legislation that passed the General Assembly with bipartisan support in 2016. If signed into law, it would require the Virginia Department of Education to draft model policies on notifying parents of any sexually explicit materials assigned in class.

Parents would also be permitted to review the material and request alternative assignments. Every local school district would be required to adopt a policy consistent or more comprehensive with the statewide model. 

Once a bipartisan issue in Virginia, the push to give parents greater control over potentially controversial curriculum has become politically contentious since the gubernatorial race between Youngkin and former Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin criticized McAuliffe for vetoing the 2016 bill on the campaign trail while pledging to ban other “divisive concepts,” including critical race theory, from public schools.

The idea of banning books has also sparked fierce local debate, both in Virginia and nationwide. Multiple school districts, including and , temporarily removed multiple texts from school library shelves after parents complained about explicit scenes. attracted national attention after banning the graphic novel “Maus” — a visual retelling of the Holocaust from the perspective of the author’s father — from being taught in classrooms.

Dunnavant’s legislation wouldn’t apply to library books, but Democrats have argued the bill amounts to classroom censorship.

“The consequences of this bill are clear,” said Del. Alfonso Lopez, D-Arlington, before Monday’s vote. “Teachers who are already overworked are not going to create two lesson plans. So what they’re not going to do is, they’re not going to teach the most controversial or dynamic or insightful ideas.”&�Բ�����;

The bill’s definition of “sexually explicit” comes from a that limits what content state employees can access on government-provided computers. Republicans have consistently argued the legislation gives parents a reasonable level of control over what their children are exposed to in school.

“To steal Del. Kilgore’s phrase, let’s all calm down for a minute,” Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield, responded.

“It’s not an overly broad definition,” she added. “It’s something we don’t let adults in the Commonwealth access if they’re state employees.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Robert Zullo for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

Off-year elections function as political weathervanes, offering the first concrete data on the electorate’s ever-changing moods.��

Last November, Democrats watched nervously as the indicators began pointing conspicuously rightward. Closing his campaign with a determined focus on education, businessman Glenn Youngkin led a slate of Republicans to victory in Virginia, where Democrats triumphed for much of the last decade and President Biden won a 10-point victory in 2020. Local activists and national political observers agreed that the state’s record of lengthy school closures during the pandemic — along with more recent controversies over equity politics in schools — helped carry the day for the GOP.

One political expert who took notice was David Paleologos. The director of — a well-regarded polling organization that fields surveys both in Massachusetts and around the country — has examining attitudes about education and other issues in cities like Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Oklahoma City. In a conversation with �鶹��Ʒ conducted in the immediate aftermath of last fall’s elections, Paleologos noted the huge electoral challenge facing Democrats if their rivals “can even be competitive — forget leading — among those primarily concerned with education.”

With the 2022 midterm elections less than a year away and the Omicron variant bringing a new wave of school closures, �鶹��Ʒ’s Kevin Mahnken spoke again with the Massachusetts pollster to discuss the public salience of K-12 issues and the Democrats’ options to steady the ship. To win the swing voters who will likely decide election outcomes this November, he says, the party will need to rediscover the art of political branding and counter Republicans’ efforts to use schools as a wedge.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s been a few months since the startling results in Virginia. What changes, if any, have you perceived in how voters are responding to education issues?

My sense is that it’s dissipated somewhat, that voters are now more concerned about inflation, the economy, and COVID more specifically. What Democrats have to do is grab back the issue of education on its face. What Republicans have to do is say, “There’s a disconnect between Democrats and swing voters,” and last fall was just an indication of that. Maybe they’ll pick a different issue next fall, or maybe when we have fall enrollment again, the same issues will resurface — the teaching of CRT [critical race theory] and so on.��

On the one hand, Democrats are poised to take back the issue, which has always been strong for Democrats. But Republicans can yield the issue while still preserving the narrative that Democrats are disconnected. They don’t necessarily need the K-12 issue as it stood prominently in the Virginia race and in New Jersey, but it could be one they try to press with swing voters.

Education was a kind of meta-issue last year, encompassing several controversies about public health, curriculum, and even transgender rights. Perhaps this was because COVID disrupted a social service that people had long taken for granted, but I wouldn’t have predicted that schools would command so much attention for an entire year.

Terry McAuliffe didn’t help the Democratic Party with . From his lips to the swing voters’ ears, they had a problem. But it’s true that there were multiple levels within education that Republicans kept exploiting, and make no mistake, they’re looking at the polling data. They’re looking at parents in the suburbs, especially women, who are key to the swing vote.��

And what does a suburban parent care about? Health care and education. When you have one of those issues, and you can point the finger at Democrats and say, “They’re not your party, they don’t want you involved in the process” — that can be a very effective message with moms, who are very territorial about their children’s education. Republicans were painting Democrats as the anti-suburban-mom party, and Democrats really didn’t have the time or the research to counter that message [in Virginia]. They have the time now, and the research to retool. The question is whether their counterargument is enough to stick with those same voters.��

Either way, I think the Democrats’ m.o. of trying to make Trump the bogeyman in the midterms didn’t work in Virginia or New Jersey because they were swinging at nothing. Trump wasn’t in Virginia except when Democrats introduced his name, so it just wasn’t as acute as it was when he was on the ballot. Democrats need to reshape their messaging there.

The major change in educational conditions since last November has definitely been the rise of Omicron, and the combination of school closures and staff shortages that have resulted. A found respondents opposing a return to virtual instruction by a 36-point margin. Do you think Nate Silver is right that further closures could be a “huge political liability” for Democrats?

Yeah. And you can couple what Nate said with the fact that colleges have , in back-to-back years, of over 6 percent — it’s like the lowest rate in 50 years. That means students don’t want to learn remotely, and some students can’t.

I’ve got two boys in college. My oldest thrives in both environments, and my youngest hates online instruction. He’s a technology whiz, but he hates Zoom learning, and he likes the eyeball-to-eyeball interaction. Both of them took gap years during COVID, which we hadn’t planned on, and it was tough for them to get back in the swing of things this year. So you have that struggle going on with everybody — that poll question you cited includes young people, parents, grandparents.��

When you look at the totality of it, Democrats have to reconcile that poll finding with teachers’ unions, which may be positioning themselves against some Democrats. We may need to see some polls of teachers themselves: What does the rank-and-file teacher want to do? Do they feel safe? And do they totally align with their unions’ positions? It’s a problem, but there’s really no way to say whether or not the education issue and the coronavirus question will be relevant next fall.��

It is right now, and that poll finding was powerful. People are throwing down the gauntlet, like, “Enough is enough, we’re done with this.” Think about that, if you’re a Democratic candidate in a swing district next fall. Obviously, you’re going to poll [remote learning] in your district, and there are good arguments on both sides. But if you’re trying to win the middle, the middle on that question is “no.”

It seems like there are figures within the Democratic orbit who are hearing that message. Pollster Brian Stryker, for example, has been about public opinion for months. Do you think the party is starting to respond to what they’re seeing from their constituents?

More and more, yes, and it goes back to the point I made about Virginia. Republicans painted this disconnect, and any time you have a hot-button issue like CRT or school closures, you can use that as a prop to get at the larger point: Democrats are disconnected. That’s what they did [last fall], and anyone who was truly on the fence — those precious people who actually swing elections — they’d had enough. Especially people who saw their children or grandchildren struggle with remote learning.��

This isn’t as related to education, but the other issue is that the number of people reporting mental health problems is skyrocketing. Domestic violence is up as well. So for people who had kids trying to learn at home, where chaos is up and the quality of the learning experience is down, of course that’s going to be unattractive to the people who swing elections.

But there is some countervailing evidence. Since the pandemic began, surveys have shown that many parents — particularly from low-income and non-white families — actually favor online instruction as a means of suppressing COVID. What do we do with the apparent contradictions here, including majorities that seemingly fear their kids catching COVID and don’t want to close schools? Is this about different pollsters asking different questions?

In part, we are asking different questions. But you’ve also got to ask, who matters next November? What party affiliation, what income level, what race, what matters next November? It’s not the people who are registered Democrats, low-income persons of color; they’re voting Democrat all the way down. And it’s not the other side; you can put anyone on the ballot, and they’re going to vote Republican. It’s the people in the middle that are key here. For Democrats to be competitive in Congress, they have to win the people in the middle.��

This is why Biden has had such a big problem passing legislation with Senators Sinema and Manchin. They’ve positioned themselves as the ultimate defenders of swing voters, and both happen to be Democrats. I think the reason why Biden is getting hit so hard is that he sold himself as a person who would reach across the aisle. When he was campaigning, his schtick was, “I’ve been in the Senate so long, I have relationships that go back years, I’ll pull a couple Republicans here and there and get the job done.” And just the opposite has happened — not only hasn’t he pulled any Republicans in for any significant legislation, he’s lost a Democrat in the process.��

When you sell yourself like Biden did, that becomes a problem. My youngest son doesn’t know much about AOC [Alexandria Ocasio Cortez], but he likes her because she’s on his media, and there’s something cool about liking AOC. So you’ve got Biden trying to reach across the aisle with one hand, hold Democrats in line with the other hand, and protect the party from losing the middle.��

Through Suffolk’s with USA Today, you’ve surveyed a diverse array of urban areas over the last few months: Milwaukee, Detroit, Los Angeles, Louisville, and Oklahoma City. Is K-12 education still a leading issue in these places, as it was last fall?

It is, and in areas where there are high Hispanic populations, education is even more important. The issue of education is a good one if you’re trying to appeal to Hispanic voters.

More generally, we found in those five cities that there were two branding issues for Democrats that were costly. One was about police funding. In Question One, people overwhelmingly oppose “defunding the police”; in Question Two, if you ask them whether they’d rotate money from police budgets to social services and homelessness, they’re all for that — which is what defunding the police is! So that was one branding issue.

The other was CRT. If you ask people in a poll, “Do you support or oppose CRT in classrooms?,” they oppose it. But if you ask, “Do you support or oppose teaching the history of slavery and its current impact in society?,” people support that, even in places like Oklahoma City. I think the lesson is that Democrats have to get better at branding. People can say what they want about someone like Bill Clinton, but he was a very good brander. That’s a place where Democrats can certainly improve.��

I’m sure that Republicans are going to have a way to nationalize this. [In 1994], ; now it’ll be the “Contract with Parents.” In debates, every Democrat will be asked, “Do you support the Contract with Parents?” That’s a box that immediately closes around candidates. If they say yes, they’re agreeing to a lot of stuff that might be counter to the Democratic Party’s official position. But if they say, “No, it’s a bogus contract,” then all you’ll see in TV ads is the candidate saying no.��

Maybe there’s a bit of a void in terms of young, strategic talent on the Democratic side. I don’t know, but I do know that their branding hasn’t been the best, and there’s polling data everywhere to back that up.

You’re identifying what sound like structural problems in Democratic political messaging. You’re non-partisan, but what would your advice be to them to address some of the problems we’ve talked about?

The party is equipped — it has the resources and the organizational structure — to manage this. Implementation will be tough because there are a few wings to the Democratic Party. But these are all lessons, and we’ve got another election coming up in 11 months. A lot more research needs to be done, and it has to be done carefully.

But [strategy] comes from higher-ups in the party; you have to have good people in those positions who don’t make blunders, because there’s so much on the line this fall.

This narrative that outraged suburban parents will punish Democrats has certainly gotten some traction in early 2022. There have already been some to accompany the polling. But for now, it’s still conjectural. Can you shine any light on how and when we’ll know if backlash to Democratic positions on education will actually translate to election results?

I think we’ll know before the summer because we’re going to have a trajectory for the Omicron cases. We’re going to have a very good scientific forecast, and we’ll know by then whether there’s another variant in play. If there isn’t, the narratives change.

The reason why is because it’s hot right now. There are school committee elections that are happening this spring, and elections for all the town committee members and selectmen. They’re trying to use this issue to seed bigger candidates down the line by getting them elected at the local level. It makes total sense to me because if they wait until this fall, and the issue goes away, they’re going to be scrambling to put together an effective political strategy.��

So the Republicans will ride the tide through this spring. But come mid-June, I think we’ll have a clearer picture on COVID. And we’ll certainly have a clearer picture of the economy and whether interest rate hikes have created a problem there. That’s my best guess at the timeline.

Right now, though, representatives from groups are united on one front: opposition to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s on masks in school. On Monday, teachers from the Richmond, Chesterfield and Henrico chapters of the Virginia Education Association gathered to oppose the directive, which gives parents the right to opt out of universal masking requirements in local school districts. The same day, the director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom wrote a criticizing the executive order after confirming with the state Department of Education that it also applies to Virginia private schools. 

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“The governor is basically saying that parents should not be able to choose a school with a universal mask mandate,” director Neal McCluskey said in a phone call on Monday. “That’s a huge thing to do, especially during a pandemic.” And while his chief concern was how the directive affected private schools, McCluskey also pointed out that it presented serious challenges for public divisions.

“Schools across the state have kind of been whipsawed,” he said. “You go back one week and the state is saying you must have mask mandates in place. Then you get to Monday and the state is saying, no, you actually may not have mask mandates. And it’s generally not good policy to impose drastic policies on schools in the middle of the year.”

It’s a view that’s shared by many parents and school divisions amid ongoing confusion over the executive order, which went into effect Monday despite legal challenges and sometimes open defiance. Seven local school boards and a group of parents in Chesapeake have now filed two separate lawsuits against the administration, claiming Youngkin lacks the authority to override local masking policies. And while some divisions have , more than a dozen others are keeping their mandates as the order is challenged in court. The Virginia Supreme Court is expected to take up the case this week,

There is legitimate uncertainty about whether Youngkin, as governor, has the ability to overturn local policies. In 2021, the General Assembly passed a law requiring public schools to stay open for in-person instruction. Signed by Gov. Ralph Northam, the language of the law directs divisions to follow mitigation guidance from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention “to the maximum extent practicable. Currently, explicitly recommends universal masking for all students, staff and visitors regardless of vaccination status.

It’s still unclear if the governor can override state law with an executive order. And under the Virginia Constitution, school policy largely falls to the state Board of Education, with day-to-day supervision largely left to local school boards. While Youngkin has how he plans to enforce the executive order, it’s not certain that he has any authority to take action against noncompliant districts.

For many educators and administrators, though — as well as students and their families — frustration with the order is more about the practical impacts. In divisions keeping their universal masking policies, teachers are now largely tasked with enforcement if children show up to school without face coverings. 

“For Richmond, we have communication to encourage students to put their masks back on,” said Katina Harris, president of the Richmond Education Association. “Some educators are creating rewards programs, as well, for students who come in with their masks on.”

Confrontation, though, is still a concern. In Fairfax County, students who refuse to comply with the district’s masking mandate won’t be allowed to attend in-person instruction, according to a staff-wide webinar held on Monday. As other districts mull similar policies, parents worry that students may get caught in the crosshairs.

Last week, a Page County mother made when she threatened to bring loaded guns to school if the division kept its mask mandate. With similarly contentious debates playing out all over the state, it’s hard to keep students from worrying that their district won’t experience something similar, said Alsúin Creighton-Preis, a parent in Henrico County.

“These kids have already had to walk the gauntlet of these seemingly normal parents shouting nonsense during school board meetings,” she said. “And they’re all super-connected, so the rumor mill is flying.” Her own daughter, a senior in high school, was nervous that an armed parent might come to school on Monday to protest the district’s masking policy.

Not every family, though, opposes the order. Alexis Gearhart and John Cantello, parents in Prince William County, sent their three oldest children to school without face coverings on Monday despite the district’s universal masking policy. Cantello said he’s worried that continued masking is hurting his children’s social-emotional development, especially in the case of his six-year-old daughter, who’s never experienced a typical pre-pandemic school year.

“You’re talking about a whole generation where masks are becoming the new normal,” Cantello said. “But for me, they’re not normal, and I don’t want a new normal.”&�Բ�����;

Ultimately, both parents said their children did put masks back on when their teachers asked them to do so, though Gearhart said her 10-year-old daughter was initially instructed to sit in the back of the classroom. With the masking order still tied up in court, though, some parents and students are worried the debate will only grow more contentious. The divide is especially visible in counties where masks were made optional.

“I’d say probably 80 percent of students in Powhatan County were not wearing masks,” said Alexander Campbell, a junior who still opted to return to school in a KN95. Some teachers in the district also left their faces uncovered, which he said spurred both gossip and debate among students.

“COVID has been really difficult in terms of school feeling more awkward, more tense,” he said. “And so I’m wondering, are we going to spiral back to normalcy, or is this tension going to continue to build up to the point where we’re seeing altercations and social media debate over masks?”

He’s equally worried that the sudden transition away from face coverings will increase the spread of COVID-19, especially if maskless students don’t quarantine after close exposures. But on a statewide level, Campbell said he’s frustrated to see autonomy taken away from local school boards.

“I found the order ironic because for decades conservatives have been advocating for local control,” he said. “And now local officials can’t make decisions about health when they were elected to make those decisions.”

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In 2019, the Arizona mother of two sent her older daughter off to kindergarten in Scottsdale, Ariz.’s Cave Creek Unified School District.

But after Mac Ban saw the district’s tepid response to the pandemic, she started home-schooling her at taxpayer expense. Arizona’s publicly funded now underwrites her kids’ education.��

Similar scholarship accounts could soon do the same for millions of other students nationwide as a new raft of proposed laws makes its way through state legislative sessions this month, buoyed by parent anger at district policies. 

Mac Ban balked at homeschooling at first, envisioning herself isolated and sitting at home with her kids for most of the week. But the more she learned, the more attractive it seemed. After she disenrolled her daughter from a district school and applied for the ESA, the child began learning lessons from the “classical Christian” . Her total bill comes to about $200 per month. 

School choice advocates see hope in stories like these. As the omicron variant continues to wreak havoc on schools’ normal procedures and parents lose patience with lockdowns, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates — as well as curricula that some view as politically charged — advocates hope that more parents like Mac Ban will insist that taxpayers help pay for their kids’ educations outside of neighborhood public schools. 

School choice has always relied on a fragile left-right coalition, mostly between Black and Latino activists and centrist-to-conservative legislators pushing to rebalance the power structure of public schooling. That coalition has weakened over the past few years. But scholars such as Paul Peterson, who directs Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, now see an opening. 

“A couple of years ago, there was a feeling in the country that opposition to school choice was on the rise,” he told attendees at a at Harvard. “Some of the coalition and backing for school choice was eroding and the movement, perhaps, was breaking down. But in light of the pandemic, there is a contrary feeling emerging in the country today: We are finding the passage of new school choice legislation in states across the country, new tax credit programs, new education savings accounts programs, expanded charter school programs. There’s a lot of interest in opening up to parents opportunities that haven’t existed in the past.”��

While culture war issues like critical race theory could upend that coalition once again, the mood at Harvard was one of optimism. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who now chairs the nonprofit reform group , pointed to recent legislative successes in Missouri, West Virginia and Kentucky. “The legislatures are on fire right now for these kinds of things, so it’s all good. And I don’t see it going away. I really don’t.”&�Բ�����;

Choice advocates got an unexpected boost in November when Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in increasingly purple Virginia, beating establishment Democrat Terry McAuliffe by . Youngkin pulled off the surprisingly solid victory in part by tapping into parents’ anger about public education, giving a voice to thousands who felt schools haven’t risen to the challenge of basic education during the pandemic. McAuliffe, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, didn’t help his case during the campaign when, discussing over anti-racist education, said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”&�Բ�����;

Derrell Bradford, president of the education advocacy group , told attendees at the Harvard conference that McAuliffe’s mistake was displaying “just a complete and utter tone-deafness” to parents’ experiences. “After a year-and-a-half, almost two years, of incredibly disrupted institutional experience that was visited on almost every family in the country, you probably shouldn’t say something like ‘Parents don’t matter.’ You can make it a school choice lesson, but there’s a lesson there about treating people poorly who’ve been treated poorly.”

Republican strategists such as Christopher Rufo, who last year the raucous campaign to fight critical race theory, now talks of families’  public schools that don’t sync with their beliefs. 

As the omicron variant dominates and infection rates , vaccine requirements for even the youngest children could anger parents further. And while many parents have fought for a return to , others are clamoring for remote options amid the recent surge: Recent polls find that about six in 10 parents of school-aged children favor virtual learning.

For the past year or more, parents have been voting with their feet: Public schools have shed millions of students, recent data show. In New York City, the nation’s largest system, 50,000 fewer students attended last fall than two years earlier, The New York Times — a 4.5 percent decline. 

Chicago Public Schools in October had lost about 10,000 students over the past school year, a 3 percent drop. Overall enrollment was students over two years. 

Across California, the nation’s most populous state, educators are awaiting updated figures, but estimated enrollment has dropped since 2018-19 by about nearly 184,000 students, or about 3 percent, CalMatters earlier this month.

A Tyton Partners issued in July found that since the beginning of the pandemic, an estimated 17.5 percent of children have switched schools at least once, 75 percent more than in average years. And nearly 80 percent of parents said they’d be “more active in shaping their child’s education” in the future. 

At the Harvard conference, Bradford said school closures during the pandemic in 2020 suddenly brought the system’s failures into “high and broad relief” for 60 million families — especially families of color and low-income families.

“If you are a Black kid in New York City, you were the least important person in America for the last two years,” he said. “And if you were a teacher in that system, you were the most important person in America during that time. And we made it very clear and explicit that that was the case. We have a system that is built upon that foundation, with those priorities. And it couldn’t get the majority of kids reading proficiently before the pandemic.”

Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, said she actually expected “a far higher percentage of families” to opt out of their neighborhood schools, given fears about COVID and “the volatile debates about safety protocols” over the past two years. 

That a mass exodus didn’t happen, she added, “says to me that families are valuing public schools and what a good public school is for: academics, of course, but [also] as centers of communities, where kids eat healthy meals, access health care, and find social and emotional supports.”

For her part, Weingarten has pushed to “have a different conversation” about school choice, one focused on what has worked in private settings during the pandemic — but that also treats public schools less as a commodity that families can buy than as a public good.

“We’re experiencing a crisis in our democracy in which our public schools have a really important role,” she said. “Why not try to figure out how to make this year, regardless of where we are, a year of recovery and revival for our kids and not have a year of winners and losers?”

As 2022 progresses, that seems unlikely.

EdChoice’s director of national research, Michael McShane, that since the beginning of 2021, more than a dozen states have created or expanded school choice programs. The group now says enacted seven new choice programs and expanded 21 existing ones. Robert Enlow, the group’s CEO, called 2021 “without a doubt” for school choice since EdChoice has been tracking it. 

In an interview, McShane said that until recently he was expecting upcoming state legislative sessions in 2022 to be “pretty quiet” on topics like school choice. “I think now that there is going to be a lot going on.”&�Բ�����;

Part of the reason may be the billions in COVID relief funds that school districts have received to keep them afloat, he said: “In politics, things happen easier when there’s a bunch of money sloshing around.”

On the one hand, the money softens the blow of all of the student departures — but it also makes it harder for school districts to complain to state lawmakers about the effects of often small choice programs that draw students out of the public system. “This program that’s spending $25 million across the entire state, how can you possibly have a problem with it when you just got $2 billion from the feds?” he said.

As legislative sessions begin in several states, choice is on lawmakers’ minds. In Kentucky last week, lawmakers an expanded school choice bill that would give families tuition assistance for private education.

In Missouri, lawmakers last year approved a tax credit to fund a private-school tuition education savings account, and lawmakers are now pushing to the program before it even takes effect. They’ve proposed lifting a $25 million funding cap and dropping requirements that families who participate live in a city with at least 30,000 residents.

Youngkin, just a few days into his term in Virginia, backed a GOP-led effort in the narrowly divided state legislature that would the number of charter schools from fewer than 10 to about 200. The bill would allow the state Board of Education to create regional charter school “divisions” with the power to approve new charter schools, despite opposition from localities. 

Higher graduation rates … or winning the culture war?

Concerns about parents’ role in their kids’ education played a “huge role” in Youngkin’s Virginia election victory, McShane said, but more broadly, parents “want to be back to normal now. And the fact that things aren’t back to normal is leading to a lot of discontent.”

Whether from rolling quarantines, mask or vaccine mandates, he said, “I think all of this stuff is just going to continue to roil schools, and you’re going to have people that just want out — they don’t want their school’s vaccine policy to be set by 51 percent of their neighbors. They’re going to want to have the option to go to a school where it’s decided at the school level.”&�Բ�����;

Whether the current push for school choice plays out in both blue and red states, however, remains an open question. 

Most of the recent legislation has prevailed in reliably Republican-controlled legislatures, even if a few of the with the endorsement of a Democratic governors, as in West Virginia — or despite a governor’s veto, as in Kentucky.

In reliably blue Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who was elected in 2018, campaigned on a promise to slash funding for a . But once he was elected, “he actually signed a bill to strengthen it modestly,” said Greg Richmond, a longtime school choice advocate who now leads the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic Schools.

“It seems to be one these classic cases where it’s easy to say anything when you’re running for office, but when you get into office, you find out voters have an interest in the program you want to eliminate — you start to change your mind about it a little bit,” he said. “So he backed off.”&�Բ�����;

But these days, Richmond said, even private Catholic school parents are talking about exercising their right to leave schools over concerns about so-called critical race theory or enforcing mask and vaccine mandates — the latter two are required by an executive order signed by Pritzker, and also apply to private school students. 

“Some people got very mad and wrote to me: ‘We should be fighting this [mandate]. This is tyranny. This is against God — this is Satan. If you don’t change it, I’m going to pull my kids out of your school and send them to public schools,’” Richmond recalled. “I was like, ‘What? That makes no sense.’”

But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that these parents “were paying tuition in order to avoid that stuff.”

The trend toward ideological reasons for opting out is worrying for the larger school choice community, said Richmond, who from 2005 to 2019 was CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. He was also the founding chairman of the Illinois State Charter School Commission.

A decade ago, he said, “you could get bipartisan support for statements like, ‘Parents ought to be able to choose from a range of options that best meet the needs of their kids.’ Now conservatives aren’t saying stuff like that anymore. It’s like, ‘We’ve got to do this to save America from the Satanic clutch of CRT.’”

The new rhetoric, he said, is “not in pursuit of higher graduation rates and test scores,” he said. It’s “choice in pursuit of winning the culture war.”

That risks alienating politically moderate or left-leaning teachers and parents who would otherwise support choice. If the only politicians who support school choice also happen to be hard-right culture warriors, “,” or Trump supporters, “that might be an Achilles heel of all this,” he said.

‘Every kid is unique’

Mac Ban, the Phoenix mother, said part of her decision to homeschool actually revolved around what she saw as a social justice sensibility creeping into the district — she has heard examples of math word problems that included references to white subjects stealing from Black subjects. Mac Ban said such ideas are “not appropriate for an elementary school student.”

Young children, she said, “need to learn the basics. They need to learn the fundamental things, and they need to learn to think on their own, to think critically, not be told that they are an oppressor.”

Mac Ban, a first-generation American — her family came to the U.S. from Communist-controlled Poland in the 1970s — said she was able to qualify for Arizona’s ESA because her younger daughter had an individualized education plan due to a diagnosed speech delay. Simply being in the same family qualified her older sister, the kindergartner, for ESA funds as well.

Her initial concern that she and her kids would be isolated quickly passed when they joined the Highlands Latin community. “By homeschooling, I don’t mean that I’m just sitting here with my daughters every day and we don’t see anyone …We do all kinds of group lessons, activities. I’m never home. We’re always out and about, doing different things,” she said.

Mac Ban likes having the ability to choose what lessons and subjects her daughter — now a second-grader — pursues.

“Every kid is unique, and the parents know what’s best for their child, ultimately,” she said.

Two weeks later, after a hectic Election Day in which McAuliffe was denied his bid for a second gubernatorial term and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy barely survived his own brush with an unheralded Republican challenger, the poll’s findings offer one explanation of what went wrong for Democrats in their first electoral test of the Biden era.

David Paleologos, Suffolk’s chief pollster, noted that Democrats have traditionally been the party entrusted by voters to oversee K-12 schools. Healthcare and education have been “the two issue pillars” for the party in the minds of the public, countering Republicans’ traditional edge on taxes and national security. But in Virginia, at least, one of their supports had given way; while 75 percent of healthcare-focused respondents in Suffolk’s poll approved of Joe Biden’s performance as president, just 38 percent of education-focused respondents did.

“There’s a broader potential problem for Democrats when Republican candidates can even be competitive — forget leading — among those primarily concerned with education,” said Paleolgos. “I think that is something that should give Democrats pause.”

The results of the 2021 election cycle will take more than a few weeks to parse, as county-level returns are dissected by number-crunchers in both parties. And the importance of education must also be weighed against structural challenges that couldn’t have been avoided; dating back to the 1970s, the party holding the White House almost never wins the Virginia governorship, while no Democrat has been reelected as New Jersey’s governor under any circumstances. 

But two things have become clear in light of the Democrats’ dismal results. The first is that losing their advantage on a signature issue can cost them dearly, even in blue-trending states where they have nominated popular candidates. The second is that both sides now have an incentive to make education a major priority in 2022, when control over the U.S. House, the Senate, and 36 governorships will be at stake.

And the public’s discontent with school systems, ranging from their performance during COVID to their handling of controversial subjects like race and gender, shows no sign of abating. Joanne Weiss, an education consultant who served as chief of staff to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the Obama White House, said that parents’ fear and anger had first been triggered by the disruptions of the pandemic. But the gradual decline in COVID cases and deaths won’t necessarily bring an end to their outrage, she added.

“COVID response required nimbleness and creativity that the education system was incapable of giving,” Weiss said in an email. “So while COVID was the spark that ignited it, that pile of kindling has been sitting there, unattended, for years. Even if COVID were to magically disappear tomorrow, the smoldering would continue.”&�Բ�����;

McAulliffe’s political miscue

Virginia Republicans were talking about education throughout their gubernatorial primary and into the general election. But it took a Democrat to bring the issue to national attention.

McAuliffe, a longtime Democratic campaign operative who first served as the state’s governor from 2014 to 2018, infamously said in a September debate that he didn’t believe “parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The tossed-off remark, made in response to several high-profile cases of Virginia parents objecting to the inclusion of controversial materials in classrooms and school libraries, quickly proved to be the decisive political miscue of 2021.

In a stroke, McAuliffe’s words helped consolidate multiple strands of public disapproval (in a , two senior Youngkin campaign strategists pointed to the moment as “the piece that tied it all together”). Many parents objected to Virginia’s generally deliberate pace of reopening schools to in-person instruction; others — instigated as much by local curricular debates as national messaging campaigns by Fox News and other conservative outlets — sought to ban instruction of race issues that has been grouped under the label of critical race theory. Both were invigorated by the former governor’s apparent dismissal of family concerns. 

Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., said that while McAuliffe’s campaign eventually attempted to clarify his meaning, the efforts were “too little, too late.”&�Բ�����;

“It really became the core of the Youngkin campaign,” Farnsworth said. “The campaign almost entirely morphed into a conversation about parents’ rights in education once McAuliffe made his misstatement.”

Keri Rodrigues, a Massachusetts Democrat and former labor organizer who leads the National Parents Union, said the defeat that followed was proof that Democrats had “taken their legacy as champions of public education for granted.” Though of activists attempting to curb the influence of critical race theory, Rodrigues has also pilloried Democrats for their relationships with teacher’s unions (McAuliffe campaigned with American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten during the race’s final days) and argued that the party had failed to hold educational systems accountable during the pandemic.

“We saw the catastrophic failure of our nation’s public education system happen in our living rooms, and we were left to fend for ourselves,” Rodrigues said in an email. “Since that point, Democrats have outright rejected any criticism of the performance of these systems or recovery efforts — while parents and families have continued to be left struggling with their concerns unheard.”

Democrats running in both state-level and congressional races next year will benefit from the example of McAuliffe’s gaffe, and Farnsworth theorized that they could avoid similar missteps by calling for school governance to be led by a “partnership” between parents and education professionals. Moreover, the party will still have the opportunity to pass a host of family- and school-related initiatives through its Build Back Better legislation, including universal preschool, paid family leave, and a permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Given a year to advertise those achievements and watch COVID’s threat to public health slowly diminish, Democrats could once again seize the initiative on a policy area they have historically dominated.

According to polling data provided by Gallup, Inc., the public has trusted Democrats more on education almost continuously for the last three decades. Election-year polls from 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2016 all found respondents favoring Democratic presidential candidates to manage schools, usually by double-digit margins. (Then-president George W. Bush took a late lead on the issue in his 2004 contest with John Kerry, and no data could be found for the 2012 presidential election at the time of publication.)

But Paleologos said that Democrats’ failure in Virginia had already consigned next year’s crop of candidates to answering press questions about whether parents should have input in how schools are run. Pointing to past Republican successes with pre-election platforms like 1994’s Contract with America, he predicted the GOP would seek to use education as a wedge to split liberal Democrats from the center.

“Even if you pass some really progressive education legislation, Republican candidates are going to force Democrats to” make some commitment to parental control over K-12 schools, Paleologos said. “Now, a smart Democratic candidate would say, ‘Yeah, I’ll sign a Contract with Parents,’ but then they’re going to be at odds with their progressive base.”

Push for a ‘red wave’

Youngkin’s victory served as a proof of concept for the notion that a deft Republican could win votes by crafting his closing argument around schools. But it also cast doubt on Democrats’ own campaign strategy of tying opponents to Donald Trump at every opportunity.

Paleologos observed that the first-time candidate’s template — one that could be exported next year to battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Maine, where Democratic governors will be running for reelection — was to win back middle-class voters in the suburbs while “one-upping Trump in rural areas, even without having Trump next to him.” It’s unknown how much Trump, who has supercharged Republican turnout in two national races, intends to campaign with GOP hopefuls next year, and that he remains a deeply divisive figure. But Youngkin enjoyed a surge in downstate support even in Trump’s absence, riding the former president’s endorsement to nearly half a million more votes than the Republican gubernatorial nominee received in 2017.

Republicans’ hopes for a red wave will rest on the enthusiasm of their base, which has shown itself to be extremely animated by K-12 issues. A released in August found that 73 percent of American parents were either somewhat or completely satisfied with the quality of their children’s education, roughly in line with previous years. But a detailed breakdown of the results provided by the organization found that 34 percent of Republicans described themselves as “completely dissatisfied” with schools, by far the highest level for that group since 2001. Twenty-five percent of independents said the same, representing a seven-point jump since before the pandemic began.

If the stage is set for a national push, the party seems ready to make one. In the immediate aftermath of last week’s elections, at the same time Democrats took steps to finalize the framework of their Build Back Better legislation, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that Republicans would soon introduce a “parents’ bill of rights” to promote transparency in curricular content and protect the participation of parents in school governance.

The question is whether such initiatives are the stuff that majorities are made on. The last midterm wave favoring Republicans came in 2010, when right-wing activists incensed over deficits, government spending, and Obamacare coalesced in an amorphous movement known as the Tea Party. A revival of that feat will require coordination and skilled messaging, Farnsworth said, but education could offer a useful conduit for conservative energies that exist already.

“In many ways, the critical race theory debate of 2021 is just the latest version of the death panel conversation from Obamacare, or the Willie Horton story of 1988. The question isn’t whether this is an accurate portrayal of what’s going on, the question is whether this can be weaponized to benefit Republicans. In 2021, as in 2010, as in 1988, the answer is yes.”

So how was it that popular former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, widely seen as the Democrats’ strongest contender when he won the party’s gubernatorial nomination in June, lost his bid for reelection on Tuesday night? And how did his opponent, Republican businessman and political neophyte Glenn Youngkin, harness a wave of public outrage about education issues to become the state’s next leader?

It’s a question that holds national implications for U.S. politics next year. In 2022, 36 governorships and thousands of state legislative seats will be up for grabs in the midterm elections, to say nothing of the countless school board races that will also be contested. If the GOP can replicate Youngkin’s pitch to parents infuriated over the pandemic’s disruptions to student learning — and the perceived incursions of progressive orthodoxy on race, gender, and sexuality — Tuesday’s results may only be a taste of what’s to come.

For insight into the election and its consequences, we spoke with education commentator Andrew Rotherham, a former member of the Virginia state board of education and co-founder of the consultancy Bellwether Partners. 

​​�鶹��Ʒ: How much do you think the Virginia election result had to do with education versus what we could broadly call “fundamentals”: the Delta surge, Biden’s sinking approval, voters ready for a change after picking Democrats all these years? 

Andrew Rotherham: It is a tough environment for Democrats in general, and to some extent this was an election about the fundamentals reasserting themselves with Trump not on the ballot — the return of college-educated men to Republicans in Virginia, for instance. The role that education seems to have played is reinforcing those atmospherics and that frame, that the Democrats are an out-of-touch party of elites that is not responsive to the concerns of parents. 

Granting that K-12 controversies drove this result to some extent, there’s some controversy over whether COVID mitigation or concerns about “critical race theory” was more to blame. Your thoughts?

It’s still early, but looking around the country at CRT vs. masks, all of it didn’t seem to break cleanly one way in school board races. So that gives credence to the idea it was a bundle of things and generalized frustration more than any particular issue. That said, Democrats did not do a good job staking out a clear position. It’s not that hard for a candidate to tell parents, “We’re going to teach an unsparing history curriculum here in this state that is honest about race and racism, but we’re also not going to tell your kindergartener they are complicit in white supremacy or have your second grader doing a privilege walk.” Instead, Democrats set themselves up to own any ridiculous thing that happened in a school anywhere. 

The suggestion you make seems to dovetail with what you recommended in : “Either Biden or Secretary of Education Cardona are well situated to give a speech or two seizing the 70 percent position in this ‘debate.'” But there’s a complication there: Federal and state officials just don’t have much real power in terms of dictating what happens in classrooms, and there’s now a cottage industry devoted to “exposing” teachers and administrators for political bias. I’m not sure how statewide candidates get around that problem, and it seems like the only solution is for education to become less salient as a campaign issue.

Teachers need three things here. First is a better background in history and contentious issues themselves (as you may have heard, we don’t do a fantastic job of teacher preparation now). Second: high-quality curriculum around these issues. And third: good and sustained professional development. Right now there is enormous demand but little quality control in the DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] industry, and teachers are freelancing. That’s a bad mix. This is complicated, and you don’t want teachers using whatever they found on Pintrest last night or just learned at a one-hour workshop. 

It’s interesting that these videos of teachers doing dumb things richocet around social media — you know, the mock slave auction or the teacher who����around her classroom in an inappropriate way. But then, no one stops to think that maybe telling that exact same teaching force to just do whatever they want on complicated questions around race and class might lead to some problems of different kinds. Secretary Cardona said we should��. That’s the wrong frame. It’s not about trust; like everything else in education, it’s about training and support. Even just using the bully pulpit to call for those things — and acknowleding that not every critic wants schools to stop teaching about slavery — would do a lot of good.

How much contingency was there in this race? Do you see McAuliffe’s as a turning point here? It kind of seems like that was the point when a lot of controversial issues around schools — closures, masking, competitive admissions, Loudoun’s equity push over the last few years — seemed to merge into one central argument over what kind of input parents could have. 

He shouldn’t have said it because it’s an easy point to take out of context. But he’s not wrong, you can’t run schools or classrooms as direct democracies where everyone gets a veto. If you really want to control every little thing that happens educationally for your child, you have to make other arrangements, and we should preserve freedom for people to do things like homeschool. 

But the remark added to this frame that Democrats are the party of unaccountable systems, and as we’ve seen a lot the last few years, people don’t like systems they feel are distant from them. You also had proposals to limit advanced course-taking in math in the name of “equity” and change admissions to competitive magnet schools around Virginia. And I suspect that a bigger contingency adding to that frame may have been what looks like covering up a rape that happened on one of its campuses. And then, of course, frustration with school reopening. There was a lot going on this year and last, so this was building. 

COVID’s not exactly going to disappear as an issue, and there are limits to the political lessons Democrats can take going forward about their strategies there. But it seems like the center-left’s discourse on race, particularly with respect to K-12, may now be seen as a political liability. How true do you think that is, and can you see it being addressed between now and the midterms?

A year in politics is an eternity. But if you look around the country, voters clearly don’t want “woke” or “successor ideology” politics. You saw that in election after election last night in all kinds of circumstances. Americans are pragmatic. Just ask Eric Adams, or voters in Tucson who approved a minimum wage increase last night. Democrats would do well to heed that lesson and respond to that pragmatism. If I were a Democrat running for office, I wouldn’t talk about what’s wrong with America without also talking about what’s right with America — and we should talk honestly about both. But people want good schools, safe neighborhoods, and an opportunity for a better life for themselves and those they care about most. Real life is not Twitter or MSNBC. Democrats seem to be forgetting that.

Whether or not it assuages parents’ concerns about indoctrination in schools, is there something that would-be governors of either party — there are 36 seats up for grabs next year — can do to impact how teachers approach “divisive subjects” going forward? The laws passed this year in several states regulating classroom speech are certainly one approach.

We should unflinchingly call out political leaders who shy from teaching an honest view of American history that includes both this country’s signal achievements as well as it’s darker history and ongoing problems. At a time when our very social and political cohesion is under enormous pressure, we simply cannot shy from both dimensions of that, and schools are a venue where the action is going to be. 

In my view, these laws are not helpful. At best, they lead to stupid confusion like we recently saw ; at worst, they make it even harder for teachers to teach. But you don’t wake up in the morning knowing how to effectively teach about contentious contemporary issues. Again, that takes training and support. There are no shortcuts here, and attempts to find one, whether through these laws or poor-quality trainings, are making the problem worse. 

One interesting facet to the nationwide education debate is that, by and large, the explosion in recall attempts against school board members hasn’t succeeded in ousting many — including two more efforts that failed last night. Recall is obviously a mechanism with huge difficulties baked in, but I’m wondering what you make of the fact that Glenn Youngkin can win a blue state in part due to outrage about school governance even as  can’t get rid of a few board members.

This is an important point. It doesn’t seem like there was a unidirectional wave around the country where it all went one way in board races. Parents are frustrated, people disagree, but in general, people don’t gamble with their schools. There is a real chance the Republicans will misread this and overreach. 

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on �鶹��Ʒ’s board of directors.

The result did not come as a shock to local political observers, who noted Youngkin’s bid gathering steam in the final months of the campaign as attention shifted to K-12 issues. showed McAuliffe’s advantage dissipating, particularly with parents of school-aged children, at the same time that voters as the most important issue on their minds.

But the defeat of a broadly popular former governor — along with the GOP apparently seizing control of the state’s House of Delegates and prevailing in races for lieutenant governor and attorney general — marks a reversal in Virginia’s long march leftward in recent years. Democrats had won four of the last five gubernatorial elections and finally seized unified control over the state legislature in 2019. Just last year, President Biden carried the formerly deep-red stronghold by more than 10 points, the biggest win for a Democratic presidential candidate in Virginia since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

But the state’s governor’s race from the party occupying the White House. In fact, since 1977, Virginia voters have elected governors from the party out of power in every race except one: 2013, when McAuliffe won his first term. A host of obstacles, from the lingering ennui of the pandemic to Biden’s sinking approval numbers, stood in the way of McAuliffe’s reelection.

But the last challenge, and perhaps the most significant, was the outrage around issues of K-12 education that steadily built as summer turned to fall. While the Republican primary was still ongoing, Youngkin and his rivals in favor of reopening public schools for in-person instruction. Once Youngkin secured the nomination, to ban the teaching of critical race theory as governor.

His adoption of the issue dovetailed with several high-profile controversies around diversity and equity initiatives in school districts. In both Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, two suburban enclaves outside of Washington, D.C., that have been among the most Democratic-leaning in the state during its blue transformation, angry parents have moved to recall school board members over dissatisfaction with local COVID mitigation strategies and schools’ approaches to teaching controversial subjects of race, gender, and sexuality. 

The dispute gained more airtime as the race headed into its final months, with Youngkin calling on the Loudoun County school board to resign and McAuliffe declaring, at a public debate, that he didn’t believe “parents should be telling schools what to teach.” Ultimately, Fairfax and Loudoun both gave majorities to the Democrat — but they also swung rightward by seven and nine percentage points, respectively, compared with the 2017 governor’s race.

Tom Loveless, an education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, noted that Democratic candidates like McAuliffe have become increasingly dependent on suburban, college-educated voters during the Trump era. Their positioning on K-12 issues during the pandemic helped cost them the seat, Loveless told �鶹��Ʒ.

“Schools are important to parents in the suburbs,” he wrote in an email. “McAuliffe put himself on the wrong side of the education issue when he said what he said about parents and schools during the debate. It was a fatal blunder, appearing both tone-deaf and condescending.”

Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners and a former member of the Virginia state board of education, argued that Democrats around the country “did not do a good job staking out a clear position” on controversial topics in education, allowing their opponents to paint them as hostages to “unaccountable systems.”

“It’s not that hard for a candidate to tell parents, we’re going to teach an unsparing history curriculum here in this state that is honest about race and racism, but we’re also not going to tell your kindergartener they are complicit in white supremacy or have your second grader doing a privilege walk,” Rotherham said. “Instead, Democrats set themselves up to own any ridiculous thing that happened in a school anywhere.”