On Fox News a couple of weeks ago, Tucker Carlson and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance were holding forth animatedly about public schools and the values they transmit to children. President Joe Biden, Carlson claimed, “wants to determine what your kids learn about the deepest and most important issues there are.” Not unreasonably, he expressed the opinion that schools are seeking to assert “control over your family and your values and your beliefs.”
These are legitimate concerns worthy of public debate. But there is also a bridge too far, and Carlson crossed it. “I don’t understand where the men are. Like, where are the dads?” he asked. “You know, some teacher is pushing sex values on your third grader. Why don’t you go in and thrash the teacher? Like, this is an agent of the government pushing someone else’s values on your kid about sex — like, where’s the pushback?”
The greatest gift the Biden administration has given to parent activists who are indeed pushing back was a directive last fall to federal law enforcement agencies to probe and possibly prosecute parents. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued the order in response to a letter from the National School Boards Association asking for federal assistance in response to alleged threats and violence from angry parents aimed at school board members that the letter likened to “domestic terrorism.” Americans know the difference between righteous anger and rhetorical overreach, and the NSBA has paid a steep price for demonizing parents, losing nearly half of its member states over the letter and the attorney general’s response. Imagine if a father, even one, had taken Carlson’s intemperate advice to heart, marched into a school, and thrashed his child’s teacher in frustration over a lesson on race or gender ideology. It would change at a stroke the nature and direction of the most critical debate we face at present over the role of our schools in shaping the values, ideals, and beliefs of our children. Even one such act would be an incalculable setback in a fight we are currently winning. Parental rights initiatives, measures to “ban” critical race theory, and efforts to impose curriculum transparency, however imperfectly proposed or drafted, are best understood as attempts by various stakeholders to reassert legitimate authority over insular public school systems that are resistant to accountability, or in which individual educators have gone beyond their remit, imposing a political or social agenda on a captive audience of children. Efforts to rein in those excesses are a worthwhile and overdue corrective.
So-called “blue check” Twitter and other cultural elites might wring their hands about schools finding themselves on the front lines of our forever culture war, but schools have never been noncombatants. What is a school if not an institution designed for the transmission of values and ideals, where children go to gain access to our history, scientific discoveries, and the works of literature and art that are worth studying? At the end of the day, “culture war” is a tendentious name for the essential process that Grant Addison
described in these pages
as asking, “What do we want the next generations of Americans to think about America?” You don’t like the rough and intemperate way in which we’re adjudicating these questions? A little indecorous for you? Well, tough. Self-government ain’t beanbag. The culture war in our schools is serious business, a critical clash of ideas, and too important to lose: It is, at its core, a fight over who we are, our national values and character, and whether parents have a right to raise up their children as they see fit.
But we mustn’t forget that this is a battle to win hearts and minds. If this is what it means to be a culture warrior — shaping the psychic landscape our children inhabit, drawing clear boundaries between the role of the state (schools) and parents, or other institutions such as churches, preserving some measure of childhood innocence — it’s a fight worth having and prosecuting vigorously. If it means declaring war on institutions whole-cloth, indiscriminately discrediting everyone associated with them, hurling baseless smears or accusations, or, worse, threatening violence, then you’re not a culture warrior at all. You’re a bomb-thrower. Moreover, there’s a good chance you’ll lose.
* * *
The rise and fall of the education reform movement’s moral authority is an instructive case study in how to overspend moral capital and exhaust public goodwill. As incredible as it might now seem in our deeply divided times, 20 years ago, “ed reform” enjoyed bipartisan political support and a halo effect as a media darling. Wendy Kopp turned her senior thesis at Princeton into Teach for America. She lured boxcar numbers of elite college graduates to failing schools, determined to close America’s achievement gap and raising hundreds of millions of philanthropic support in the process. KIPP charter school founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg were celebrated on 60 Minutes by Mike Wallace, the toughest reporter of his era, for having pioneered “a public school unlike any you’ve seen before.”
But by the time the first decade of the new century was over, the face of ed reform was D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on the cover of Time, scowling and wielding a broom to signal her determination to sweep away anything in her way. The warm and aspirational “one day, all children” (the title of Kopp’s book about the founding of TFA) turned dark and prosecutorial as reformers won prominent roles in states and school districts. A Newsweek cover story insisted that the key to improving schools was simply “fire bad teachers.” It took less than a decade for reform’s gee-whiz kids to morph into sour-pussed technocrats imposing a joyless “standards and accountability” regime on schools that landed with parents merely as a relentless fetishization of standardized testing. This haughty and hectoring technocracy was personified by Barack Obama’s first education secretary, Arne Duncan, who arrogantly dismissed resistance to Common Core as the product of “white, suburban moms” who were dismayed to learn their children and schools weren’t “as brilliant or quite as good as they thought they were.”
Today, the ed reform “brand” is so tarnished that the term is seldom heard except as an epithet. Applications to Teach for America are less than half what they once were. There’s no warm, aspirational equivalent to the early days of ed reform in our steely, inflexible age, but there’s an echo of its popular support in Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” law, intentionally and unfairly mischaracterized by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Despite the best attempts of elite opinion leaders and tastemakers in media and entertainment to torpedo it, the measure is popular among Floridians. It is simply, and sensibly, lost upon ordinary people why elementary school students should receive instruction in gender ideology. Similar measures are being floated in over a dozen states. Lawmakers in 28 states have introduced bills to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. There’s been a concomitant rise in initiatives aimed at ensuring “curriculum transparency.” This is powerful evidence that conservatives have the upper hand in fights over school curricula and culture.
Despite this clear momentum, contentious voices on the Right seem unwilling or unable to take the “W” or even recognize when the political winds are at their backs. Just as once-popular ed reformers of charter schools and common-sense reforms squandered their public goodwill and moral capital through performative grandstanding and overzealous mission creep, some conservative culture warriors and parental rights advocates have begun to lean a bit too far out over their skis. Take the recent discourse over “groomers,” for instance.
David French, the target of numerous conservative circular firing squads (some deserved, many others not), wrote quite sensibly about the “groomer smear,” the tendency to paint opponents of the Florida law as either inclined to target and sexually manipulate children (the commonly understood meaning of “groomer”) or in league with groomers. “Where once it was ‘vile’ or ‘evil’ to make frivolous claims of grotesque sexual misconduct, it is now considered ‘weakness’ or ‘surrender’ in some quarters not to ‘fight’ with the most inflammatory language and the most inflammatory charges.” Rather than tap the brakes on the groomer and pedophile talk, the response has been dismissal and outright derision. Writing at Townhall, Kurt Schlichter mocked that we should “call groomers ‘groomers’ because of their grooming and because it annoys David French.” “If there’s anything the failurecons, who constitute a concentric circle with the Never Trump sissies, hate is winning. And we are winning the world’s easiest argument by taking the position that molesters and those excusing and facilitating them are bad,” Schlichter
wrote
.
Other prominent voices on the Right have justified or excused the indiscriminate use of “grooming” as payback for years of the Left painting any and all opposition to the social justice agenda as racist or transphobic. On Twitter, Karol Markowicz said, “I don’t call people ‘groomers’ but I would love some of the pearl-clutchers over the term to notice the other side casually calls people on the right ‘fascists’ on TV and that’s no big deal.”
Actually, I have noticed. Like most other public-facing conservatives, I’ve been called that and worse. And some of this frustration is completely understandable. But rhetorical extremism repels more than it attracts. As David Harsanyi correctly noted in National Review, indiscriminately brandishing the charge of “groomer” is counterproductive: Not only is it largely untrue, but “turning it to eleven on every issue has diminishing returns. … ‘Groomer’ is a distraction that allows progressives to stop defending the idea that kindergartners should be taught that there are 72 genders, and instead, make it about how Republicans think every teacher is a would-be pedophile.”
The Right knows exactly the effects of mischaracterizing, hyperbolic social campaigns. You can earnestly be concerned with police violence against black citizens, but once that becomes a radical rallying cry of “defund the police” and a defense of looting and violence, you lose the hearts and minds of ordinary people, including people of color who mostly trust the police or fear disorder when they withdraw. When legitimate concerns for poor educational outcomes among students of color morph into racial essentialism, affinity groups, “privilege walks,” and efforts to make children feel guilty and atone for “whiteness,” sensible people respond, quite reasonably, with horror.
In the aftermath of Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Terry McAuliffe in the race to become governor of Virginia, Inez Stepman of the Independent Women’s Forum observed, correctly in my view, that the election demonstrated that the culture war is the big tent. “Running against critical race theory, gender ideology, indoctrination in schools and other cultural hot button issues actually brings in moderates and even Democrats who may disagree on other issues, like government health care or taxes,” she wrote at the Federalist.
Florida has proven Stepman’s prescience. Sixty-one percent of Floridians supported the parental rights measure; only 26% were opposed, according to a Public Opinion Strategies poll, which showed strong majority support among parents, suburbanites, and respondents who “know someone LGBTQ.” Even a majority of Florida Democrats support the law, 55% to 29%. This strongly suggests that traditional, majoritarian notions about gender issues have the wind at their backs.
Rhetorical extremism may earn likes and retweets, but you don’t fight crazy with crazy. You fight it with firmness and common sense. Trust in American institutions may be in decline, but this should not be mistaken for Jacobin zeal or an appetite for destruction.
School curricula, culture, and even individual teachers who exceed their authority are legitimate targets and are by no means off-limits or immune to criticism, even loud and pointed criticism. But the indiscriminate use of terms such as “groomer” is more likely to create sympathy than rage. Painting the profession with too broad a brush was precisely the misstep that was the beginning of the end of ed reform’s favorable run in the court of public opinion.
Gallup’s annual rating of the honesty and ethics of various professions shows grade school teachers at historically low levels of trust. But that “low” is still quite high: A mere 11% of those surveyed consider them untrustworthy. The only professionals held in higher regard are nurses and doctors. Teachers — not unions, but rank-and-file teachers — have proven to be deeply influential in shaping public perception on school-related matters, from standardized testing to Common Core. The daily parade of teachers caught spouting nonsense on Libs of TikTok might leave the impression of a field that has lost its way (which is true, to an extent), but beating up on teachers, who in the main are viewed favorably, is a good way to be perceived as a bully and abandon the moral high ground.
With 3.7 million of them in American classrooms, it’s a fair bet their views on gender ideology aren’t much more radical than the public at large (remember, even Democrats support Florida’s parental rights law). What they need is the permission to express their misgivings without paying a professional price.
Yes, there is a culture war, and it matters enormously. Schools are and will always be participants in this battlefield, which means that while we must fight to ensure our students are taught our values and culture and not radical identitarian dogma or pathologies of oppression, we must fight smartly, strategically. The culture war is an effort to win hearts and minds, not just of parents and would-be swing voters, but of teachers themselves. For decades, polls have shown Americans hold public education in low regard, while paradoxically thinking their own child’s school and teachers are the exception. This suggests there is considerable downside risk in painting teachers as groomers, pedophiles, or their dupes and enablers. As we have seen in Virginia, Florida, and elsewhere, when “ordinary” people feel one side in the culture war has gone too crazy, they are more than happy to join those on the other side who are more reasonable. To this point, we have been winning the fight for parental rights in schools by being clear-eyed, stiff-backed, direct in our complaints, and reasonable in our methods. Let’s not throw our victory away.
Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on K-12 education, curricula, teaching, school choice, and charter schooling.
