By FP1 Strategies
Education is empowerment. Whether it’s vocational or traditional, a quality education provides students with the tools they need to succeed in the classroom and the workforce. Education opens the door to opportunity and enables people to achieve their life’s ambitions.
Unfortunately, Joe Biden and the Democrats are injecting their liberal agenda into classrooms across America, instead of helping our children catch up after a year of lost learning due to the pandemic. The liberal elites inside the Democratic Party are on a mission to infect the public school curricula with critical race theory (CRT), which teaches children that America’s systems and institutions are intrinsically racist, and pits groups against each other on the basis of race.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t education, it’s indoctrination.
So far, the U.S. Department of Education, led by CRT activist Miguel Cardona, has tried pushing this woke curriculum by favoring schools for federal grants that teach CRT in their classrooms. This attempt failed thanks to significant backlash during the public comment period. The Biden administration also tried to promote CRT in their COVID-19 school reopening guidelines this summer, but this effort was met with such an uproar, the administration actually claimed it was all a mistake. Even worse, Attorney General Merrick Garland threatened to unleash the FBI on parents who dared to speak out against CRT at school board meetings.
But the Democrats greatest political blunder to date occurred just a few weeks before the gubernatorial election in Virginia. During a debate in September, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the former governor and front-runner in the race, announced on stage, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Finally, a Democrat said the quiet part out loud.
CRT isn’t about education. it’s about control.
And just like that, the tables turned in the Virginia governor’s race. In a state that President Biden won by 10 points only one year ago and that Terry McAuliffe had the advantage in until late in October, voters elected a Republican governor based in large part on the education issue.
Polling released just before election day showed that by a margin of 50% to 39% Virginia voters said that parents should have more of a say than school boards on what is taught in school, and among voters who saw education and jobs as the most pressing issue, Republican Glenn Youngkin who is strongly anti-CRT, led by a 13% margin. On election night, many voters cited education as their primary motivation for heading to the polls and casting their vote for Youngkin – even those who had originally planned to vote for McAuliffe.
Youngkin ended up dominating among parents with children in school, a key voter group that helped erase McAuliffe’s inherent advantages in the highly educated suburbs in Northern Virginia and in the Richmond media market.
Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign in Virginia has created a road map for the Republican Party to reconnect with suburban voters who are fed up with woke agendas like CRT and the Democrats’ willingness to put the interests of the teacher’s unions ahead of school children.
FP1 candidate Jane Timken, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, is running on a strong parents’ rights agenda and is taking the fight to the unions and the woke liberals who are trying to make school children feel ashamed of America.
Watch our Jane Timken ad on the CRT issue:
At FP1, we’ll continue to encourage our conservative candidates to be aggressive in putting parents and students first. Taking back control of Congress in 2022 is essential to ensuring that our children receive a world-class education instead of being indoctrinated with divisive liberal agendas like CRT.