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Should Parents Have Any Say in What Their Kids Learn in School? Virginia Voters May Soon Decide

Terry McAuliffe's statement about parents and schools has been seen by some as just another political gaffe. But the comment is much more than that.

On November 2, Virginians will head to the polls to vote for their new governor. In the race between Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin, an unexpected issue — schools and education — has taken center stage. I say unexpected because even though education didn’t even make it onto Pew Research’s list of the 12 most important issues to voters ahead of the 2020 election, recent polling shows that, in this race, it has become a top-three priority.


It’s not hard to see why. In the final debate before the election, while discussing parents who have objected to sexually explicit material in Fairfax County schools, McAuliffe made a shocking statement: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

While McAuliffe's statement has been seen by some as just another political gaffe with no deeper meaning, it seems far more likely that it was, in fact, a rare moment of honesty.


Education Extremism Rising

Over the past year, it has become clear that McAuliffe’s statement represents a widely held attitude towards parents’ role in their child’s education. Further, many now believe that the role of government in education is not merely to teach children, but to shape them.


One of the ways this has been done is by implementing what is known as “action civics.” This type of civics is not merely about learning the functions of government, basic history, and the ideas our country was founded on. (In the past, I have written about the serious lack of knowledge many young people have today, and the importance of learning about such topics). Rather, “action civics” is characterized by a focus on, well, action — as in activism. The USC School of Education says that “action civics” aims to “[Meet] Student Interest in Activism.” In practice, this often means campaigning for left-wing causes ranging from gun control to the Green New Deal.


Illinois has taken this idea one step further. The Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR) of the Illinois General Assembly officially enacted “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” earlier this year. These standards mandate that teachers instruct “through an equity lens” while “leverag[ing] asset thinking toward traditionally marginalized populations” and “integrate the wide spectrum and fluidity of identities in the curriculum.”


Most people would be hard-pressed to explain what any of that actually means in practice. However, the ways in which identity-focused curricula have already been implemented in schools across the country may give us a clue. Chris Rufo, who is a contributing editor at City Journal, has done penetrating reporting on this. Here are a few of the things he found: