The most memorable words from last week's State of the Union hoedown arguably didn't come from an energized President Joe Biden but from his GOP rebutter, Arkansas' new governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She provided an unforgettable frame for the in-its-infancy 2024 president race — albeit maybe not in the way she intended.
"The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left," said Sanders, whose integrity was forever tarnished by her stint as Donald Trump's press secretary. "The choice is between normal or crazy."
Just a few seconds later, Sanders revealed to the nation where "crazy" is actually coming from, when she laid out her vision of what she and apparently millions of Republican voters believe happens when your schoolkid arrives for homeroom every morning. That, presumably, is when the leftists she blames for starting her culture war tell God-fearing Americans "we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols."
So I guess those massive golden calves are why my school property taxes are so high out here in Delaware County, although I'm a little bewildered over which flag she thinks I'm pledging allegiance to. Indeed, the real significance of a more eventful State of the Union night than usual was that everyday citizens got to compare two separate versions of American reality: 113 minutes of what is actually happening, followed by a Fox News magical mystery tour of a fake United States that often sounded like it was ripped from a satanic panic.
But Sanders' rebuttal address also hinted at something else that will be hugely significant over the next 21 months: that educational policy, and to what extent an authoritarian-minded government can control what happens in your child's classroom, will matter in the 2024 presidential election in an unprecedented fashion.
Fueled by the right-wing panic inspired by the massive youth participation in Black Lives Matter marches after George Floyd's murder by police in 2020, the ultra-conservative take on U.S. K-12 education — that learning the basics has been subsumed by "woke indoctrination" and that liberal teachers are undermining their children's values — is morphing into policy proposals from the two Republican front-runners: Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
It's fitting to recall that Barack Obama billed his (deeply flawed) federal education policy as the Race to the Top, because Trump and DeSantis have launched a bidding war for the hearts and minds of Fox-fried GOP primary voters that is fast becoming a race to the bottom. They are using "parental rights" as a rallying cry for sustaining traditional hierarchies that would keep the promotion of tolerance, and factual information about race or LGBTQ issues, out of schools while punishing transgender youth.
Indeed, the current low point of this race has been established by Trump, the only announced 2024 candidate so far, who wants to give parents the power to elect their schools' principals — what could go wrong? He also called for a new body that would "certify patriotic teachers" and a policy that would end federal education dollars for schools that teach "critical race theory" — the right's misnomer for anti-racism education — or other discussion of race, gender, or sexuality that an empowered Washington would deem "inappropriate."
Trump has made no mention of the false idols, but he did say that "at the end of the day if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids we have a major problem." His proposal was central to his new scheme of mounting a more traditional campaign than his 2016 rally-driven crusade in an effort — not very successful so far — to grab the spotlight back from DeSantis, who hasn't announced for 2024 yet but who nonetheless is rolling out Fox-friendly, school "culture war" salvos on an almost daily basis.
DeSantis, whose own mantra is that "Florida is where woke goes to die," has made headlines with his war against what he claims is classroom indoctrination. It has included blocking the College Board's new advanced curriculum on African American history from taking root in the Sunshine State, a school library policy that has literally emptied some shelves, and bans on talking in class about race or LGBTQ issues that teachers say have already had a chilling effect on academic freedom.
And this is with roughly a year to go before the first 2024 primary ballots are cast.
"Part of it is to change attitudes and beliefs and part of it is to intimidate and part of it is to create apathy, because apathy is the tool of the authoritarian," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union, told me in a phone interview last week. She said the efforts of DeSantis, Trump and their allies to find isolated classroom incidents and gin up a culture war are meant to demoralize everyday parents from getting involved. "There's nothing random about what they are doing."
What Trump is proposing and what DeSantis — through his track record in Florida — is implying would be an unprecedented effort by a coercive federal government to control speech and even thought inside America's schools, where local control, aided by state dollars, has long ruled. That said, presidential candidates arguably should be talking up the importance of education in a United States, given that we increasingly lag behind other developed nations in key measures of student performance, such as math scores.
But do parents see what's happening in schools, and how government can help them, in same way as Trump or DeSantis? Overwhelmingly, no.
In December, the American Federation of Teachers — not an impartial player in this debate, obviously — released the results of a nationwide poll of 1,500 voters, including 558 parents, which found a strong distaste for waging culture wars around the classroom. Some of the key findings were that just 1 in 5 parents saw their teachers as promoting "wokeness," while three-quarters said they support difficult but factual conversations around matters such as U.S. history.
"Parents' goals are not the culture war," Weingarten told me. "Their goals are a safe and welcoming environment for their children, making sure that kids have funding for programs like reading, math, and science, and solving problems like the teacher shortage." She added that their survey shows "most parents don't think the culture wars are happening."
In fact, a separate poll last fall found that voter support for higher teacher salaries is at its highest level in 15 years — a far cry from the "pink-haired communist" trope that Trump is promoting. No wonder that Biden — who didn't dwell long on education in last Tuesday's speech — did repeat his call for giving teachers a raise, backed by federal legislation (presumably dead in the GOP-led House) setting a $60,000-a-year floor.
Indeed, most parents, and many voters, see schools not as needing high-handed state censorship but rather more support to buy newer textbooks or beef up services like nurses and guidance counselors. That would be very much in line with last week's landmark Commonwealth Court ruling here in Pennsylvania that found gross disparities in state funding for school districts as unconstitutional — a decision that Democrats hailed and Republicans criticized.
No wonder that state and local GOP candidates in the 2022 midterms who tried to mimic the classroom culture-war strategy of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin were often unsuccessful. The question going into 2024 is whether Democrats will have the gumption to put a more affirming education agenda out on the front burner.
In a column last week, Greg Sargent of The Washington Post noted that this has started to happen in Midwestern states that tilted blue in last November's midterms. He wrote that in Michigan, where Democrats took back the state legislature and hope to forge a new agenda with a governor from their party, Gretchen Whitmer, lawmakers are studying ways to end teacher demonization while boosting recruitment. Nearby in the Land of Lincoln, fellow Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker is actively blasting DeSantis while planning to declare: "Illinois doesn't ban books."
That sounds like an election winner to me. And there are signs that even some Republicans understand that schools need more than "anti-wokeism." Sanders followed her speech with an education plan that does ban "CRT" and terms like "Latinx" but which also calls for raising the minimum annual teacher salary in Arkansas to $50,000. Unfortunately, such nuance will likely get obliterated in a White House race to the bottom — even if the reality is that the only false idols in American life are the graven images of our two competing autocrats.
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