Conservatives have long known that a radical far-left elite has seized control of many of the country’s most powerful institutions: the universities, the media, and, more recently, global corporations that toe the leftist line on everything from voter identification to the latest fads in diversity, equity, and inclusion training.
Taking some of these institutions back from the Left is an impossible task. Harvard will never be a place where conservative faculty feel free to speak their minds. The New York Times will never tolerate conservative views in its paper outside of a few token voices in the op-ed pages. Liberal billionaires and millionaires have too much money for conservatives to push back successfully against shareholder activism.
But conservatives can still win elections, just as they did in Virginia this year after Glenn Youngkin made parent control over public schools the defining issue of his campaign.
Public schools are still governed by democratically elected school boards. Public schools are one institution conservatives can take back from the far-left elite.
So it is encouraging to see that Republican state parties nationwide are moving to add partisan affiliations to local school board elections. National conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Manhattan Institute are also involved, as well as many state think tanks such as Ohio’s Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
“Including party labels in school board elections seems like a commonsense reform that would give voters more information, while also potentially increasing participation and enhancing local accountability,” Fordham Research Director Aaron Churchill wrote earlier this year.
Republican school board candidates can make their Democratic counterparts defend Nikole Hannah-Jones’s insistence that parents shouldn’t decide what is taught in schools.
They can make Democrats explain to Hispanic and Asian voters why all of U.S. history should be viewed through the lens of African slavery.
They can make Democrats defend United Teachers Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cruz’s claim that “there is no such thing as learning loss” and that “it’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience … They know the words insurrection and coup.”
School choice is an important and worthy goal. Parents should have the ability to send their child to a public or private school. But conservatives can’t just run away and create their own smaller parallel institutions all the time. We have to stand our ground and fight back. Thanks to their local and democratic nature, public schools are a perfect opportunity to begin that fight.
