I started writing this post last week when professional and amateur pundits were tossing election hot takes into the air like handfuls of confetti. The first paragraph of my draft was a sample of the theories about the VA and NJ results I was hearing at the time:
It’s Manchinema’s fault for dragging out BBB negotiations. People, especially parents, are just angry about the pandemic and lashing out at the party in power. The House progressive caucus is to blame for holding the infrastructure bill hostage to BBB.* It’s because white people suck.** Republicans are successfully breaking up with Trump. It’s VA Dems’ fault for running a retread candidate. Biden went too far left. Fleece vests are magical. Maybe Biden didn’t go far left enough.
Then I offered my take:
I’m not sure there is an explanation nor necessarily convinced one is needed. But the angry parents theory makes the most sense to me. Not the kooks who are riled up about the imaginary scourge of CRT; parents who have been frustrated and angry about how schools handled instruction during the pandemic.
I’d intended to cite some articles that explored that theory, but I’m glad I got sidetracked by other matters because Michelle Goldberg*** of the NYT wrote a column that summarizes the issue well.
Christopher Rufo, the conservative crank who manufactured the CRT panic, contacted Goldberg to crow about his accomplishment. But Goldberg says Democrats need to take a larger threat to public schools seriously, i.e., a loss of faith in people who aren’t racist cranks:
The school choice movement is old — it’s often dated back to a 1955 essay by Milton Friedman. But Covid has created fertile ground for a renewed push.
As many have pointed out, the reason education was such an incendiary issue in the Virginia governor’s race likely had less to do with critical race theory than with parent fury over the drawn-out nightmare of online school. Because America’s response to Covid was so politically polarized, school shutdowns were longest in blue states, and Virginia’s was especially severe; only six states had fewer in-person days last year.
The column goes on to note that enrollment in public schools is down, and there are shortages of teachers, administrators, workers and school bus drivers. There are worker shortages across the board, but who can blame public school employees for heading to the exits? They’ve gotten the short end of the stick for decades, and now they’re caught up in an unprecedented public health crisis AND in some cases being targeted by screaming mobs ginned up by people like Rufo.
The COVID crisis has been nightmarish for parents, students and schools. Learning loss is a real thing. Parents, especially mothers, have suffered professionally because of school instability. It’s repulsive that Republican opportunists are rushing to kick over our public education system as it’s struggling to pick itself up and deal with a second year of a nonstop shit storm, but this is who they are. They’ve always hated public education, and now they smell blood. Goldberg’s column ends with a warning:
Rufo readily admits that school closures prepared the ground for the drive against critical race theory. “You have a multiracial group of parents that felt like the public school bureaucracies were putting their children through a policy regime of chaos, with Covid and shutdowns, and then pumping them full of left-wing racialist ideologies,” he said. He’s right about the first part, even if the second is a fantasy.
Now Democrats have a choice. They can repair the public schools, or watch people like Rufo destroy them.
I think she’s right. But it’s not a doom and gloom thing, or it least it doesn’t have to be. Public schools received a massive infusion of federal aid thanks to the Biden administration and Democratic Congress, and that’s an opportunity to, well, build back better. The recent approval of vaccines for kids is also a huge opportunity to turn a corner.
It will take action on a local level to fix public schools. But the good news is people want them fixed and have a vested interest in their success. Republicans are trying to destroy public schools, but that’s not what most people want. So there’s still time to stop them. Open thread.
*This take is particularly dumb, IMO, because the House progressives have been team players throughout the debate over the two bills, and the president specifically endorsed the tandem bill strategy months ago.
**Lots do, but waiting for them to stop sucking isn’t a strategy.
***I glom onto someone else’s Times subscription for work-related reasons, but Goldberg is so good she almost balances the combined awfulness of Dowd, Stephens and Brooks. (Of course, no one could balance the combined awfulness of the NYT political team, not even if every author [living or dead] who ever contributed to the planetary literary canon were included.)
Baud
Seems like a fair analysis, but I think the corollary is that we have to accept that the general public will not hold the GOP collectively accountable for their behavior in prolonging the pandemic or, by extension, causing all sorts of other problems, at least not where there’s a Democrat to blame. If we acknowledge that, what’s our strategy look like?
Eunicecycle
How parents think turning public education over to the party that is trying to destroy it will help is beyond me. And it was because of the Republican administration at the top that downplayed the pandemic, refused to ramp up testing, etc that it became so bad. I understand the desire for change but you have to think about what you are changing to
ETA: or what Baud said.
Jerzy Russian
With stupidity on the rise, I suppose the natural thing to do is to shut down more schools. One might hope that even stupid people would realize we need some proportion of non-stupid people to keep things going (e.g. someone has to maintain the internet so that people can post stupid shit on twitter and stream stupid shows), but given how stupid things are now, that is probably not the case.
Cameron
I’m somewhat confused. I try (hit or miss) to follow Diane Ravitch’s blog, and I thought I saw something recently saying that funding for public school repairs had been dumped from the infrastructure bill. Is there other funding out there, maybe in BBB?
Geminid
The bad takes from the Virginia election have really been flying! This is one of the reasons why I dreaded a Youngkin victory.
Miss Bianca
@Jerzy Russian: If there were a vaccine against stupidity, you know that the people who needed it the most would be the least likely to get it.
Baud
@Cameron:
What is in the infrastructure bill was set months ago when the Senate passed it. I don’t know what it has for school repairs, but nothing was “dumped” from it.
Miss Bianca
@Geminid: And I’m wondering what is going to be happening in your fair state now that Trumpkin has been elected, particularly with education. (And it is a fair state, my goodness…the beauty of rural Virginia in her fall colors was just staggering to me when I was there last week. I say that as a resident of rural Colorado, which also has some fairly nice scenery.)
Another Scott
Dunno.
One of the things that Terry Mac campaigned hard on was raising teacher pay in Virginia. VPM:
Virginia is not a low-cost state, especially in the DC suburbs. Lack of investment in education has been a huge problem for a long time (in DC too).
Youngkin, of course, is going to cut education. :-/
But I don’t think that one can point “education is why Terry and Team D lost”. The election was close (2%). Democratic votes apparently collapsed in most of the state (outside NoVA and the biggish coastal areas), and schools aren’t what one thinks of in rural Virginia… Close elections aren’t won or lost because of one thing.
My guess it was a lot of things – 1) lack of a good strategy outside of the high-population Democratic strongholds; 2) perhaps appearing too liberal (I didn’t like Northam shooting down sensible proposals when he was campaigning against Perriello for the nomination, but it worked); 3) perhaps Team D spending a little too much time campaigning against TFG and not enough always giving a counterpoint about what they were going to do; perhaps not doing enough feel-good stuff and perhaps spending too much time on the details of policies; perhaps not doing enough to show what a disaster letting “non-politician” plutocrats do when they’re elected…
Dunno.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
Agreed. I don’t think Democrats paid enough attention to how there were real tradeoffs for closing schools, and families and kids lost a lot. You can argue that it was necessary. You can’t argue it didn’t matter. It was huge.
It worries me, because I don’t know how they missed it. Public schools are absolute anchors in communities. They are what parents and students lives revolve around. I feel like they need to plug in more- that missing this is a warning sign – they’re poorly advised or not talking to constituents enough.
You can’t both argue that public schools are essential (my view) and also argue that it doesn’t matter if they close for 18 months. Of course it mattered. My kid was in high school so he handled most of the covid chaos without help, but even he was sadder and out of sorts and it went on for months. 75% of what he does disappeared. Imagine having an 7, 11 and 13 year old and a job when the schools close. That’s tough.
Geminid
@Cameron: There is a lot of money for upgrading school HVAC systems in the American Rescue Act that was passed in February. At least, there was enough for Virginia’s state government to direct $500 million to this end.
Cameron
@Baud: I went back to Ravitch’s blog – this is where I read it.
https://dianeravitch.net/2021/11/07/democrats-quietly-drop-100-billion-for-school-capital-improvements-from-infrastructure-bill/
Omnes Omnibus
I am not going knock the importance of education nor say that investment and attention are needed, but I hesitate to draw broad conclusions from an election where the margin of victory was 2% and the result match historical patterns.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Good points. Goldberg says we need to get schools back to normal as soon as possible to neutralize the issue, which duh, but it’s starting to seem possible now with the vaccines and most schools open and caseloads dropping.
It sure looks like it, but I’m also not certain we can conclusively know from Tuesday’s results that the GOP won’t pay a price for its feckless and deadly politicization of the pandemic. The margins of what the media is framing as a towering GOP triumph in VA and a harrowing near-loss for Dems in NJ were almost identical, and both seats were held by Dems in a crisis that has left people angry and frustrated as hell.
We also don’t know yet whether red state governors who meddled with pandemic mitigation efforts will be held accountable. I suspect not for the usual reasons, but I don’t think we know yet.
Cameron
@Geminid: Thanks. I know Biden and Democrats generally really support public schools and wouldn’t leave them empty-handed.
Marmot
This seems obvious to me, but assigning blame seems like an end in itself to plenty of people. It’s just demoralizing doom-posting.
Can’t we give them reasons to avoid being sucky? I mean, aside from the risk of being blamed by people they already don’t care about (or actually hate)? Patriotism, community pride, personal honesty, etc. I guess this is all very abstract.
Baud
@Cameron:
Thanks. I checked the links and it seems like their conflating the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill, but it’s very confusing.
Cameron
@Betty Cracker: You wouldn’t happen to have any particular red state governor in mind, would you?
Geminid
@Miss Bianca: Youngkin can and will do some damage through his impending control of the state Department of Education. I am not sure how much damage he will do legislatively, at least as long as Democrats have a majority in the State Senate. And I’m hoping that Democrats will regain control of the House of Delegates in the 2023 election, when the State Senate is also up for election.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
The fact that we’re the party that builds things and tries to solve problems, and they’re the party that breaks things and tears them down, should be a major Dem theme.
The examples are legion (Covid, climate change, the insurrection, voting laws, public schools, national parks, forests, etc.), all they’d have to do is decide which are the two or three they should mention in the space of a 30-second spot.
UncleEbeneezer
The problem with this explanation is that CA also has been very careful with school openings, erring on the side of caution compared to many other states. And yet, the Recall (only a month and a half earlier) was an absolute blowout of people voting Dem. I think the answer to what happened in VA is complex and involved many factors. There usually isn’t one single reason why an election turns one way or the other because voters are not a monolith and vote for all kinds of silly reasons including- this guy seems cool or I wasn’t really impressed with this guy last time around so I’ll vote for the other one. We love to say: it was racism, it was messaging, it was policy x (or lack of), but it is always a combination of all of them.
One thing is for certain though: the VA election shows that the “give them progressive and anti-racist policies, and Dems will always win” assumption is no guarantee. Northam (and the Dem trifecta) did just about everything that progressive activists asked him to in the past couple years and yet the voters did not reward the Democratic Party for it.
Kay
Open the schools and tell parents and students that you know closing schools for a year mattered and harmed them. What possible sense does it make for the Party of public schools to wave off closing them for a year as unimportant? Are they valuable? Yes? Then closing them for a year is bad. It may be neccesary! But it’s still bad. They weren’t “fine” in the Zoom classes. That wasn’t good for the vast majority of them. I mean, if they’re “just fine” in the Zoom classes why have public schools at all? We’ll just give them a Chromebook and send them home.
Even if you don’t have children all of you went to school. You wake up one day and your school is closed and it stays closed for a year. Big change for you? What do your parents do in this situation? Did they work? Who watches you and helped with the Zoom classes? What if you’re seven and can’t be home alone?
Cameron
@Baud: I get confused putting my shoes on in the morning, so I often misinterpret what I read (one of the perils of “doing my own research”).
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Yes, reading the articles, it appears that the funding was proposed and then cut from the BBB framework in August. To go slightly Silverberg here, that money was never really on the table as the bill has not as yet been finalized.
Baud
@Cameron: In this case, I don’t think it’s you. The underlying US News article is opaque.
schrodingers_cat
The margin of victory in VA was less than 2% that is within the margin of error for an evenly divided electorate. I would hesitate to draw broad and sweeping conclusions from this loss. Besides NoVa has a lot of defense contractors and members of the so-called deep state so the Afghanistan withdrawal probably had an effect. Many of the never T Republicans are neocons who did not like the decision and returned to the fold.
The hard left may rail against forever wars but they don’t reward Ds with vote for ending one of the said components of the war
Many anti-CRT folks lost their school board races across the country. A lot of Republican municipal seats were flipped in Georgia. The focus is on bashing Ds all the time in the media and also what passes for the liberal left social media.
Geminid
@Cameron: There are also a some Department of Defense school projects that will now proceed. Projects like a new middle school at Fort Campbell, Kentucky were delayed when trump stole the money to build that stupid fu#king Wall.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
One thing I’ve noticed is that, while some people propose that Dems make a big initial offer rather than compromise with themselves, other people (or perhaps the same people being disingenuous) attack Dems for cutting things from their initial offer to get a bill passed.
UncleEbeneezer
@schrodingers_cat: This. Purple states are Purple for a reason. And we can expect them to swing back and forth to some extent, for awhile.
Matt McIrvin
@Eunicecycle:
I think some voters have this almost deontological idea that if things are bad, you hold the “in” party responsible and have a duty to give the “out” party a chance. It doesn’t matter what they actually advocate or who caused the trouble.
Betty
I only saw it mentioned once and don’t know how much it mattered, but someone commented that the VA administration had done a poor job with providing guidance on school closure, leading to a lot of confusion. The other comments here are all part of the picture as well.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: Right. That’s the whole point of aiming high with your opening bid, because you KNOW you won’t get it.
lowtechcyclist
[Nevermind, looks like others have addressed this while I was writing]
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
It’s happening anyway. If Democrats just rhetorically acknowlege the harm and cheerlead the opening they don’t have to even DO much of anything and they’ll benefit.
But we should stop dismissing closing public schools for a year as important. Even if VA didn’t happen it was important. They missed a year of school and it is showing up in their scores. They have mor emental health problems. They are PHYSICALLY less well- they moved around less. Biden’s Sec of Ed acknowleges it. When Biden came in his first priority was re-opening schools. D candidates don’t even have to reinvent the wheel. They can just follow the lead of six-months-ago Joe Biden.
It’s a cost of covid. Parents and students paid the price. At least admit the truth of that.
A lot of people lost with covid! It’s not just parents and students. But they are among the losers.
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist: The proposed funding wasn’t in the BIF, but rather it was a part of the BBB negotiations.
Eunicecycle
@Kay: A friend of my daughter’s has 4 children in school. They did not have Chrome books in their school and she had one computer and one IPad. Friends lent her enough ipads that each child did have one eventually but it was a problem at first. And she had to work so it was up to her 15 year old to supervise. Just one data point but I’m sure not unusual.
Helen
@Miss Bianca: Colorado ‘fairly nice scenery’ ?
Kay
@Betty:
It’s partly how schools are governed, which people don’t understand or pretend they don’t understand. It’s deliberately designed to be mostly governed at the district level. There are advantages to it, but one of the disadvantages is it’s hard to impliment something consistently.
Soprano2
I just listened to “On Point” where Ruy Texira talked for an hour about the Fox News stereotype of the average Democrat (he called it “the Left” and finally when pushed by the host characterized it as AOC and those kind of people) although he didn’t acknowledge that it was the Fox News stereotype; instead, he acted like it was really most Democrats who are like that! The only solution he seems to have is that Democrats should repudiate their current voters in favor of trying to get white working class people to vote for them again. The only useful thing I heard was the last 10 minutes, when the host played some tape from Heather McGee talking about how Democrats could message on issues in a more inclusive way. Ruy said that was ineffective, but when the host pointed out that Youngkin did exactly what McGee said and won with it, all he could say was “but Democrats didn’t agree with him, all they said was race race race”. I swear, Democrats need to evaluate why they lost the races they lost, but they can’t get anything useful from people like Ruy IMHO because he mostly wants to get rid of all the people who already vote for Democrats.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay:
Maybe I am not seeing the same new reports you are, but where are the Democrats dismissing the importance of having closed schools? Perhaps WI having a governor who was previously state superintendent of school is a factor, but I am not seeing that here.
Ksmiami
@Baud: it’s not like Dems actually come Rt out and say the GOP offers nothing but fake outrage, treason and death…. I mean we could be a lot more forceful about telling the truth while saying that our party wants all Americans to thrive and prosper.
Kay
@Eunicecycle:
Right. Can we admit the 15 year old supervising the Zoom classes is not ideal and was probably not great for any of them?
People have to work. What were they supposed to do? I mean, they can patch this together for a coupla months and it probably won’t do big damage, but a year and a half? It’s huge. Again, no one is asking that Joe Biden issue a decree that applies to 14,000 school districts, but if you’re running for governor as a Democrat? Half your campaign is education. Explain it. Tell them you see the harm and you’ll address it.
Marmot
@lowtechcyclist: yes. I love this. I can’t remember why I was mad at you now.
JMG
@Kay: Has any public figure or commentator really dismissed closing schools as unimportant? It was presented here in Mass. as a necessary public health measure acknowledged as disruptive and aimed to be ended as quickly as possible. That’s a lot different. Schools are still masked here by Dept. of Education order until January at the earliest, too.
Ksmiami
@lowtechcyclist: point it out often and early- and the GOP only cares about the unborn not living Americans. Get mean and act like Democracy is on the line. Because it is.
UncleEbeneezer
@Soprano2: I think McGhee is absolutely right, but obviously there are limitations to how effective it will be. The Right has a HUGE advantage at message dissemination with FoxNews, Facebook and the MSM etc., all promoting their messages/framings far more than ours.
Baud
@Soprano2:
When Dems lose, centrists say the Dem message was too left, and leftists say the Dems message was too corporate.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Maybe. Because Wisconsin was actually a bright spot. They flat out rejected the CRT nonsense.
But he IS strong on public education. That’s what he ran on. He came in with that credibility. It matters.
I said at the time that they had to get schools open as fast as possible and that was the minority position among Dems. Schools are either essential or they’re not. If you’re imparting to people that they’re not then don’t be suprised when the anti-public school Party steps into the hole you left.
Get them into school and back to normal as fast as possible. It harms them when we don’t.
The dirty little secret about kids, and especially young kids, is they fucking LOVE routines. They hate chaos. It scares them. They don’t want to be “free”. They want to eat lunch at 11:30 in the lunchroom. That’s what makes them feel secure.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
This. We closed the schools because the alternative was kids spreading Covid to each other, bringing it home with them, and having parents die as a result. Effectively missing a year of school wasn’t good; we only did it because the alternative was even worse.
Back in the summer of 2020, I’d occasionally suggest treating the 2020-2021 school year as basically a lost year: during that year, keep them in the same grade they’d been in in 2019-2020, cover what they missed in March through June of 2020, and try to firm up what they learned in that year, so they could be in decent shape in fall 2021 to start the grade that, absent the pandemic, they’d have started in the fall of 2020.
Simply accept that in the fall of 2021, everybody was going to be a grade behind where they otherwise would have been. But if everyone was a grade behind, then nobody was behind anyone else.
I wonder what this fall has been like for the teachers. Surely it must be really problematic, as some kids probably did well with a year of virtual learning, but a lot of kids surely didn’t, and they didn’t really come out of that year ready to face the next grade.
randy khan
I don’t want to discount this theory too much, but I might as well share my pet theory: Any theory about the results in Virginia has to account for McAuliffe receiving more votes in the election that Northam received four years ago; in other words, Dem turnout was consistent with the previous highest turnout gubernatorial election in the last, oh, 30 years, but Republican turnout was more like a Presidential year. So, more or less, the Republicans remained white hot in their enthusiasm, while the Dems were *merely* red hot.
I still want to dig a bit into the underlying data to see what the numbers look like at the local level, but if this is right, the issue is how to motivate Dem voters, not that people shifted much. (I am, as always, suspicious of interviews with “Dem to Republican” voters who supposedly switched parties, given how often it turns out that they actually are Republican activists, but that’s just decades of experience speaking.)
On the education question, I totally get the frustration of parents with remote learning, as it obviously is not as good as in person and turns every parent into tech support, which I suspect nobody has time to do. But the great irony in the Virginia elections is that McAuliffe had nothing to do with any of that, since he was not governor (thanks to Virginia’s one-term limitation). Meanwhile, the current governor is still pretty popular.
Soprano2
I think you can say this about small businesses, too. It was all “close to save lives”, and little about what the consequences of that for people might be, or how there was actually not much real help for small businesses in the Covid relief bills. Only making the PPP loans refundable if you paid most of the money to employees was kind of dumb when people were making expanded unemployment. We needed money to pay the bills that don’t stop when you’re closed, not to pay workers who are already collecting relatively generous unemployment. In fact, the structure of that loan encouraged businesses to open back up!
Ksmiami
@Kay: I think there hasn’t been great messaging around acknowledging that collectively we have gone through a once in a century trauma and we all need to breathe and understand that it’ll have far reaching implications and impacts on the country going forward. Tie this into the supply chain issues etc and that yo be great again we have to have recognition of where things went wrong (gop/Fox/Trump)
Kay
@JMG:
I only say it because it can be fixed and it can be fixed immediately. Democrats can do this. They can shift gears a little (doesn’t have to a lot) and change the focus from covid mitigation to “how do we get back to the most normal in schools?” It’s time to shift it anyway. They don’t have to move far, and most of the change can be in rhetoric. Schools are doing it anyway.
Old Man Shadow
They’re trying to both get their hands on all that public school money and recreate the old segregated system, but via the “free” market this time instead of direct government fiat.
Villago Delenda Est
Milton Friedman. Glibertarian shit.
UncleEbeneezer
@JMG: Also, alot of parents wanted schools to be cautious with a deadly disease that could easily spread in schools (still a major concern). I’m guessing Youngkin is a hard ReOpen and No Precautions guy. Thinking that voters would suddenly flock to that extreme because of frustration with schools not opening fast enough seems like a very unlikely thing that Dems were supposed to somehow anticipate.
Villago Delenda Est
@Old Man Shadow:
Everything the GQp claims the Democrats are doing to the public schools is pure projection of what they’d like to do. Turn them into indoctrination centers for a new feudal corporate state.
AliceBlue
@schrodingers_cat: Georgia Dems had a good night. We flipped a number of mayorships in towns and cities in pretty Trumpy counties. City council seats as well.
Zelma
There was an article in New York that suggested the a key reason Murphy did more poorly in NJ than expected was because suburban parents felt he was too deferential to the teachers’ unions and didn’t get the schools open quickly enough. I’m not sure if it was determinative, but it could have been significant.
Villago Delenda Est
The Vichy Times political team would fit right in at the Völkischer Beobachter or Pravda. Every last one of them partisan hacks. Not journalists. PR for the GQp.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I agree for restaurants (as you know) but I think for a lot of small businesses employee retention was a really good investment. The idea behind PPP wasn’t so much to pay them- unemployment can do that- it was to keep them. I wanted to keep mine, and I did. Then when it came time to reopen you had a full staff to just pull off the shelf. It worked beautifully for that, but I agree it wasn’t that much use for restaurants.
I did a combo of stuff for my clients. We did PPP and shared work (an unemployment program where the employee works reduced hours) and unemployment as a backstop. But the focus was keeping the employees. I have a body shop client, for example. He cannot lose skilled workers. He won’t be able to find new ones, and he wants them to stay with him.
bluegirlfromwyo
@Soprano2: I agree that the PPP loans didn’t fit the need for small businesses in a lot of respects. I also would have liked to see landlords get some of the money that big business got. Most landlords aren’t big pocketed companies. I’m thankful that we inherited property in my MIL’s will. I’m also thankful that we sold it in 2019. We would have had a tough time with the landlord moratorium, even though it was needed.
Kay
Schools have the same employee shortages as everyone else, too, so that makes it harder. We can’t find bus drivers. There’s been a shortage for years but it’s acute now. When you close you lose people. Unemployment helped some with that, but they look for other work or they retire early. If they’re valuable (and a good school bus driver is) they’re hard to replace.
Matt McIrvin
@randy khan: VA’s extreme term limit law has the effect that the party can’t ever coast on the governor’s personal popularity–it probably does have the effect of making the elections more nationalized and ideological.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Slamming of the infra bill from the left has already begun
Always on Camera
Votes against Infra
Spins like a top On Insta
While stans sing Brava
daveNYC
It was a tight election, so there’s a lot that could have made a difference. The one thing I heard from Virginians was that McAuliffe went all in on Youngkin == Trump, which obviously wasn’t the sure fire winner they must have thought it was. Whether that’s because Trump isn’t in office and is no longer able to remind everyone how horrible he is via Twitter, or just that voters disliked Trump far more than they disliked Trump’s policies is unknown.
The other thing I’ve heard is that the debate gaff where McAuliffe said something that was spun (though I’ve heard that spin didn’t take a lot of effort) as ‘Parent’s shouldn’t have a say in their childrens’ education.’ had a big impact. Dunno.
Until there’s a detailed post-mortem, the only thing I’d really consider is that tying Republican candidates to Trump might not work as well as we’d like to hope.
Fair Economist
@schrodingers_cat: In addition, the Dems split the VA House of Delegates nearly 50-50 on a map gerrymandered for the Republicans. We didn’t do that badly, other than in the two headline Governor races.
Given that we did fairly well in municipal elections, I’m wondering whether this isn’t a right-wing media effect, where the Republicans get their base fired up with crazy propaganda, but the effect is mostly limited to the particular races they aim the bullshit firehose at.
Jeffro
@Old Man Shadow:
Rich Lowry said as much a month or two ago, in National Review. “The whole point of the CRT fight is to take over the public schools.”
Starfish
Thank you, Betty, for doing this one. I feel seen. I am a parent of a child who is just now old enough to get the vaccine. I have not been inside restaurants or stores for very long in forever. There was not that sense of relief from getting the vaccine because the child was too young to open up many new possibilities in what we could or could not do.
He goes to school with a mask, and I am not confident that the district is being transparent with us about COVID cases.
The substitute and bus driver shortage is real, and they are giving the children a surprise day off on Friday because there are not enough substitutes to cover either the four-day weekend, or the teacher training day that Friday was supposed to be.
Substitute and bus driver pay needs to be increased. However, these workers do not have a union so their pay is low.
Geminid
@randy khan: One thing I consider when comparing the turnout figures for this election with those of last year’s Presidential election is that some of that 200,000 decline in Democratic turnout were Biden voters who came out but voted for Youngkin. There are not a lot of true swing voters these days, but they do exist and many swung to Youngkin this time ’round.
I couldn’t say what the composition of this swing voter cohort is in general, but some of my upper-middle class customers are the type of college educated professionals people used to call “Volvo Republicans.” I guess you could call them Range Rover Republicans now. They were repelled by Donald Trump, but they could see the smooth Youngkin as one of their own. Virginia is a prosperous state and has a relatively large amount of these folks, and middle class people who think like them.
Fair Economist
@daveNYC: There was a focus group analysis of Biden-Youngkin voters that indicated that, for them at least, McAuliffe’s attacks on Trump *did* fail, because Youngkin successfully pretended to be reasonable. There’s also a potential backfire with that strategy in that it will tend to bring out pro-Trump voters. So maybe one lesson is that we should only try the anti-Trump strategy when the Republican is openly pro-Trump or at least openly crazy. That may be why the strategy worked in CA but not VA because Elder *did* openly embrace the crazy.
For those pretending not to be crazy, perhaps a better approach would be to try to wedge them with questions about whether they’d uphold the vote of the American people if ReGermAgain legislators are trying to negate the vote to put Trump in.
Starfish
@Eunicecycle: Parents think that choices will give them more agency in the process. That is true.
They don’t think about how parents are not any better at choosing schools than they are at choosing COVID cures. They also don’t think about the accountability measures that would be lost.
There is a lady who writes well in opposition of school choice. I think that she was involved in education policy in a bush administration. I will go look for her name and link her blog.
Fair Economist
@schrodingers_cat: What’s wrong with that assessment? It’s pretty accurate. Is your criticism that’s AOC isn’t all rah-rah for an imperfect bill?
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I think the wealthy conservatives who called the shots in Virginia created the one term rule so that no Governor would ever be strong enough to rock the boat.
Jeffro
This is essentially what Youngkin’s campaign team said in that Politico interview: they didn’t have to fire up their base, because McAuliffe was so effectively vouching for Youngkin’s right-wing ‘credentials’. They were able to focus strictly on appearing moderate to everyone else.
Starfish
@Starfish: The person I was thinking of is Diane Ravitch. Her blog is dianeravitch.net
Another Scott
@randy khan: +1
Also, too, the biggest school systems in the state (Farifax, Arlington) were the strongest Democratic areas and the vote was around 66:33 for Team D.
I walk through several different subdivisions in NoVA on our daily walks (taking different routes). There is one house with a Brandon flag, one with a Brandon sign, one with a “follow the science, no masks for kids in school” sign, one (months ago) with a “kids back in school” sign. Out of hundreds of houses. I really don’t see evidence that anger at Democrats about schools is a thing around here.
Let’s see more data!!
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: Apparently people can be governor with non-consecutive terms, but this has only ever happened twice (one, Mills Godwin, was a Democrat the first time and a Republican the second–not hard to figure out what happened there).
schrodingers_cat
@Fair Economist: Her job as a legislator is to vote for legislation that benefits her constituents. Write legislation to enact her vision and get her colleagues on board and pass laws.
Not be a pundit or a social media influencer who enhances her personal brand by undermining the Democratic party. Obviously YMMV.
superdestroyer
The push to eliminate gifted programs, magnet high schools, AP/IP programs, and tracking was one of the less covered stories. The same Loudoun County School board that has been attacked on trans students and for CRT also talked about ending AP/IP class and ability classes until 11th grade. Such a policy was influence by CRT since the school district hate reporting how much better white and Asian students are doing in academic subjects compared to black and Latino students.
Another Scott
@Geminid: BlueVirginia.US has maps of governor’s races going back several cycles:
Lowkell (local, get it??) is a left-leaning guy, but his biggest mission is to win elections. He was early on the bandwagon to draft Webb, for instance. He generally has a sensible take on what’s going on in VA politics.
I agree there are structural issues, but there isn’t an easy fix for them. We need to clone Stacy Abrams and get people to turn out like Presidential elections every single time.
We are going to suffer setbacks, but we can minimize them.
Forward!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Another Scott:
But are kids harmed by not being in school longer than is absolutely neccesary? Why die on this cross? What’s the point? Just take it out of politics- kids, schools. In better or out better?
I think we should act as if there’s some urgency to get them back in school. That shouldn’t be controversial, whether it’s politically potent or not. The length of time they’re out matters – to THEM.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott:
Stacey Abrams started organizing her vision of Georgia in 2010. We either need to clone Stacey Abrams 10 years ago or we need a time machine.
Kay
The studies of fathers and paternrity leave are neat. It’s this whole way of thinking that turns “caring for people” on its head. What is suggests is that you aren’t attached to people so therefore care for them- you care for people so then become attached to them. It’s a process that doesn’t take place unless you’re actually with them, caring for them. The doing is the thing. If fathers don’t have time to do it the process doesn’t take place.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Mills Godwin’s terms bookended the realignment of Virginia voters of the 1970s, when the conservative Byrd machine Democrats shifted to the Republican party.
Major Major Major Major
Thank you for writing this! I agree completely and it saved me from having to write it myself :D
I would add though that Dems should take the most egregious examples of bad cultural education happening in schools (there are plenty to go around, it’s a big country) and denounce them. Easy enough to find them, the cons scream about every single one, just pick some legit ones that are obviously ridiculous. It’s free!
Soprano2
@Kay: I think it worked pretty well for businesses who wanted or needed to be open, because the employees couldn’t collect unemployment, so yeah it helped people retain employees and have money to pay other bills. I wish they had made it more flexible so that more small businesses could have benefited. I’m sure it helped some restaurants, but not that many, and being open at only 25% isn’t that great anyway!
Betty Cracker
@Major Major Major Major: Denouncing examples of bad cultural education is an interesting idea. Tbh, I’ve seen lots more cringey stuff in corporate diversity training material than K-12.
Tazj
Money was actually set aside in the American Rescue Act passed by Democrats to fund programs for learning loss and helping kids readjust to school after the pandemic. One of the programs was touted on of all places NPR, a couple of weeks ago. Maybe McAuliffe should have talked about that during his campaign I don’t know.
Schools I’m my area got back in session before Virginia but there were definitely starts and stops. People were mad at the Buffalo Teacher’s Union for keeping the schools closed longer because they had concerns about COVID safety measures in the older schools in the city and the positivity rate being higher there. I can’t really blame them because when my kid’s school opened up it had to shut down a few times because there were too many teachers who got sick, one ended up in the ICU on a ventilator. Did they get sick at school or in the community? I don’t know but I don’t blame teachers for being hesitant to return to school.
randy khan
@Geminid:
This is a real question, and when I actually look at more granular data there are some ways I hope to test it.
Youngkin is a particularly perfect example of the Republican who looks and sounds like someone reasonable but really isn’t. And his campaign was one lie after another, not just about McAuliffe but about his own positions. (His ads on education were particularly awful, as his actual plan will siphon money away from public education, not add to it, and he also fails to acknowledge that his tax cuts will reduce the money available for all the things he says he wants to fund.) I said elsewhere (probably on LGM) that I am fairly immune to people who talk in calm tones and affect down vests that make them look a bit chunky, but not everyone is. Meanwhile, in my experience the fairly common opinion that Terry Mac isn’t genuine actually is completely wrong – having seen him in big groups and small, in more or less public situations and pretty private ones, what you see is what you get.
Major Major Major Major
@Betty Cracker: for sure but that’s leaking into schools, here and there, and if you look at eg San Francisco you’ll see that the anti-closure people (who just ousted some school board members) are also concerned with some of the cultural changes, which have been more pronounced in places like that. It’s rare, but it’s real, and saying “oh this is an obscure legal concept not taught in schools”
1. Ignores that we don’t get to define the term
2. Not that it matters, but it ignores that critical pedagogy is a foundational concept in modern curriculum design
3. Sounds bad! Life isn’t fair, this is politics, deal with it.
Kay
@Soprano2:
It wasn’t just “good” for a lot of small businesses- it was great. I was really thrilled with the response. You could mix n match the programs to the business, like, for example, you could set up “shared work” (state) with the federal bump in unemployment plus PPP and not actually lay anyone off. They were working half time, which for parents meant they could do the Zoom school. If we had seen a similiar response to the financial crash we could have avoided a lot of pain and suffering.
Sole practice small businesses did quite well too- one owner/employee – they could pay themselves, pay some overhead with PPP and just wait it out. It was just so nice to see the US choosing to NOT push people off a cliff. As it turns out, pushing people off a cliff just kills them and doesn’t do anything for the economy :)
Kay
@Major Major Major Major:
But some of these debates have been going on for decades- tracking, gifted education, selective public schools – and some of the anti-cancel culture people are just now becoming aware of them and attributing everything they don’t like in education to “wokeness”. It isn’t their area. They don’t understand the issues.
There have been debates over when and if kids should be tracked since I was in school. Our local public school dropped tracking in middle school in the early 1990’s – they delayed it until 9th grade because they were missing too many kids. It’s not new. Because the anti-cancel culture people are (now) poring over public school policy looking for CRT they’re just jumping in to an existing debate, which they refuse to recognize. There’s context. There’s a history.
Soprano2
@Kay: I’m glad it helped. The one thing we’ve taken advantage of is the Restaurant Revitalization money. The application process was pretty easy, and the amount of money was your gross receipts in 2019 minus your gross receipts in 2020. We’ve been able to make some significant improvements with that money. You can use it for almost anything for your restaurant except to open another location or build onto your existing building (except if you want to add an outdoor seating area, but we already have a nice covered patio). It’s a grant, too, so we don’t have to pay it back. All we have to do is keep track of what we spend the money on. I have to report at the end of the year how much we’ve spent so far. I wish there had been something like this at the beginning of the pandemic.
Kay
@Major Major Major Major:
One of the anti-cancel culture people was looking back to the (alleged) golden age of education, which for him was the 1980’s and the 1990’s. All of this was discussed then too. There was a whole boring debate over “political correctness”. There’s a long, long debate about standardized test scores in school. It’s a real debate. There’s pros and cons. They can’t jump into the middle of it with no context and insist it’s anti-merit and brand new. That’s not true. There are Lefties who are pro testing (an unbiased score is better than discretion) and Righties who are anti. Florida is moving away from test scores- DeSantis- it’s coming from the Right. This shit is complicated.
For Common Core- liberals were pro and conservatives were anti. Conservatives were on the anti-standard side that time and that was during Obama.
Major Major Major Major
@Kay: Tracking and such are definitely longstanding issues, for sure, but I haven’t seen people talk about that lately. Test-based magnets in NYC were an issue last spring, but it sort of got drowned out by the social education stuff. And this is like… really low hanging fruit.
Just like… even if you think it’s fake controversy… or want to dismiss it because these are teacher-facing resources… say it’s bad. If you want to defend the intent, define the intent, and then say the document is bad. If Obama could deal with Reverend Wright with a single speech I’m confident that less talented politicians could at least manage a few sentences and diminish the impact here.
Kay
@Soprano2:
There was one PPP lender we ran into who was a mess- they couldn’t get the loans forgiven- but the SBA opened up a generic portal to go that route so that took care of it. They started with a failry complicated forgiveness app but they simplified it twice and got it down taking about 2 hours for a 4 employee business. It probably doesn’t get better than that.
The owner-operated restaurants closing were a real tragedy to me. I don’t think people are aware how much the owners put into them- what it means to them. It’s a tough business any time but they just got creamed. They’re good for places. They bring people out. They make places alive.
Kay
@Major Major Major Major:
There’s a FOCUS that gives a distorted view. The superintendent of Chicago schools was fired (and almost prosecuted) for selling her shitty “development” program to the school system a decade ago. A lot of it is junk. A lot of “professional development”, period, is junk.
I don’t think all of it bad faith and I would be willing to “denounce” whatever, I loathe grifters, but they’re going to have to get some background in this stuff and recognize the context. They don’t have to study it or go back to school- they have to read it.
I was on a public school council and when new and engaged parents come in they think these long running “education wars” are new. But they’re not. There’s a kind of exhausted patience among people who are familiar with it “oh, that’s the phonics fight we’ve been having for 40 years, we’ll end up somewhere in the middle” but to the parents it’s new and an emergency.
I would just urge everyone to take a deep breath and not throw the equity baby out with the CRT bathwater. Equity in public schools is a real issue. People work on it. They try things. It’s important. It shouldn’t be turned into a substack caricature. That’s not fair.
Major Major Major Major
@Kay: sure, and there was important context to the reverend Wright videos too, but you can rarely put the toothpaste back in the tube when you’re a high-level target of the conservative noise machine. All I’m suggesting is some lip service
Kay
@Major Major Major Major:
Education journalists talk about it- they refer to it as the “education wars”. The fights are really hot- there’s sides. There’s an entire “anti-grade” contingent. People who think there should be no letter grades. It’s at least 20 years old. I saw one of them had an article in Newsweek and I immediately thought “oh, THIS is going into the CRT basket”, but it isn’t about race at all. It’s about “deeper learning” (supposedly- I don’t know the merits).
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I’ve been following battles over math education since forever and it strikes me how identical the rhetoric over Common Core is to the complaints about the New Math from 50-60 years ago. Even though Common Core was in many ways less radical.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I liked Common Core because the idea that Ohio has a some kind of state-specific “education” is fucking ludicrous. None of my kids stayed here anyway. Are they stumped by “NY math”? No, they are not.
My youngest had the math instruction because they had one loved math teacher who took the training in Singapore and brought it back. I thought his method for multiplication was cool- he flew with it.
Massachusetts has the best public schools in the country, for white kids, for black kids, for all kids. Why not make this easier? Everyone do what they do. Call it Common Core if you like. Don’t tell anyone in Ohio or Indiana that’s the plan and just do exactly what Massachusetts does. Call it The Buckeye Plan, but really it came out of Boston :)
Quiltingfool
@Kay: Most teacher training is junk. I know, I sat in many teacher training sessions that were garbage. The worst ones cost the most, too. Some nincompoop in administration would choose a program that purported to be that “one weird trick” that, if teachers used it, would magically raise reading scores/math scores, writing ability, blah, blah blah. All those programs did was give the impression that raising test scores was easy-peasy and put a shitload of tax dollars in some grifter’s pocket.
The best science teacher training I had was through the Missouri Dept. of Secondary and Elementary Education-it was great. However, it didn’t work so well for teachers looking for that “one weird trick.” You had to look at your teaching and assessment with a very critical eye and THINK about it. Sadly, there were more teachers than I care to admit who cannot do that.
Quiltingfool
@Kay: My mother was a teacher. When I started in the profession, I would tell her about a new program. She would laugh and say she saw that same program, but with a different name, 20 years earlier.
If I had no morals nor ethics, I think I could have made a fortune selling training programs to schools. Once the fad wore off, you could dust off yet another program, change a few words, and presto! Let the grift continue!
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
I am delighted to say that school bus drivers in my part of Maryland (Anne Arundel, Calvert, and Charles counties that I know of) used the power of that shortage to go on strike for higher wages a week or so ago. I gather they were successful.
Bill Arnold
@Fair Economist:
AOC voted with the Republicans on that bill.
Her assessment is not wrong, and personally I go much stronger on the global heating aspects, but voting against it was voting with the Republicans.
For this vote at least, she was a horseshoe Republican.