GOP Candidates See Education as Winning Issue in 2024

In the 2024 Republican primary, education has already become a hot-button issue with every candidate touching on the topic in some form.

You don’t have to look far to find reasons why free-thinking political leaders are latching on to parental disgust and finding a winning coalition around improving schools and loosening the grip of the public education monopoly altogether.

Case and point, the State of New York has now decided that test scores in recent years have gotten so bad, they’re just going to lower the standard permanently rather than focus on why students are no longer fluent in reading, writing, and arithmetic:

New York State is set to lower the level required for students to be classified as ‘proficient’ in math and English tests.

The change, which will affect students in grades three through eight, is a response to the reality that academic standards have slipped since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Last year in New York students performed terribly compared with 2019. In Schenectady, not one eighth grader was considered to be proficient in math.

The change will see the proficiency threshold in tests, known as the ‘cut score’, reduced to ensure more students appear to be in good academic form.

‘Yes, there’s learning loss between 2019 and 2022, but in some ways we don’t want to keep going backwards,’ Perie told the Times Union. ‘We’re at this new normal. So for New York we are saying the new baseline is 2022.’

The “new normal” they’re calling it. In other words, expect less from your education dollars despite the ever-increasing budgets and expenditures gobbled up by school districts year after year.

It’s not just New York, of course, as scores have fallen across the country:

Across the US, math scores saw their biggest decreases ever due to the pandemic, and reading scores fell to levels not seen since the early 1990s, according to National Assessment of Educational Progress – known as the ‘nation’s report card’.

The collected scores of hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders found that nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. [Emphasis added]

If 40% of eighth graders are failing to grasp basic math concepts, how are they expected to succeed in high school and beyond? Don’t worry, it’s not like they’re going to fail, the standards will just be lowered to pass them along.

Democrats have been so busy in the past few years anointing Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, as their spokesperson on the topic of education, that they’ve forgotten public schooling is meant to exist for the exclusive benefit of the children in the desks, not the national teachers’ unions wielding power.

In short, a vacuum has been created by the left in this country on a topic that used to exclusively be considered a “Democrat” issue in the voting booth. Over the years, Republicans have consistently polled worse on the topic of education compared to Democrats in most generic settings.

Education today, however, is no longer a generic setting. After the Covid-19 school shutdowns, many parents came to realize that their child’s education was actually at the bottom of the priority list for many schools which insisted on staying closed for as long as possible.

As the top 2024 Republican contenders hit the campaign trail, there seems to be one playbook they’re operating from when it comes to education:

The minute details of a third-grader’s daily lessons are becoming a new battleground in Republican intra-party politics, with potential challenger Ron DeSantis touting his efforts to transform education in Florida and Donald Trump rushing to catch up.

The two top-polling 2024 GOP presidential hopefuls are competing over issues like sex- and health-education classes, gender identity in team sports and how far to go in striking diversity programs and controversial books from K-12 schools and even state colleges and universities.

Trump is trying to follow the successful playbook that former Carlyle Group Inc Co-CEO Glenn Youngkin used to win the Virginia governor’s mansion and helped give DeSantis a huge landslide reelection victory. In his 2021 race, Youngkin rode a wave of frustration among parents of both parties who watched their children’s video-conferenced classes during Covid lockdowns and fanned outrage when parents were kicked out of school board meetings for passionate complaints about the curricula.

The overriding issue at stake is centered around parental rights. Essentially the question boils down to whether parents and taxpayers are in charge of setting education and decency standards within public schools, or are the rogue and often loud left-wing activists posing as school board members, administrators, and teachers setting the agenda?

It’s not just Trump and DeSantis as the entire field is touching on the subject as well:

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is salting a back-to-basics education mantra with brimstone, targeting school lessons on race and sexuality. Former Vice President Mike Pence has put a small Iowa school system’s gender identity policy in the national spotlight. And Former President Donald Trump is stirring up concerns about “pink-haired communists teaching our kids.”

Haley’s campaign launch last week offered a sign of the heightened role the education wars are about to play in the GOP primary.

“They’re talking about critical race theory, where if you send a five year old kindergartner into school — if she’s white, you’re telling her she’s bad, and if she’s brown or Black you’re telling her she’s never going to be good enough and she’s always going to be a victim,” Haley said of the academic practice to a New Hampshire crowd last week. “That’s abusive.”

You could argue that issues like transgender bathroom policies and teaching critical race theory principles are unrelated to lowering educational standards, and you’d be wrong for thinking that.

Many schools have drifted so far to the left in the past decade that the emphasis is no longer on learning proper math or spending time improving essay-writing skills but on social left-wing social activism and emotion.

In this context, many red states have begun taking great leaps forward in school choice and school vouchers, or a mix of the two. The ultimate goal is to give parents and students more options to improve their education experience by forcing more competition in a space that has been dominated for decades by government-run schools.

There are wonderful teachers and administrators in public schools but they are caught in a system that is crumbling around them. The depth of the problem varies by region and in many cases district to district.

Overall, however, as parental involvement has been pushed out of the classroom in favor of activist educational policies, the grades have gone downhill and now the standards are following them.