McAuliffe’s culture warriors won’t be dictated to by ‘boonie’ dwellers

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe said during his campaign to regain the governorship this month. This statement, and his repeated restatement of this position, won him the enthusiastic support of the national teachers’ unions.

It’s not just about curriculum, of course. It’s about closing schools for a year, it’s about requiring masks for young children, it’s about requiring masks for vaccinated children. It’s also about pushing curricula grounded in racial essentialism and gender ideology. It’s about putting into school libraries literal pornography that cannot be read out loud at school board meetings.

McAuliffe supporters thought too much was being made of his comments, but also that he was right. Specifically, they thought conservative or rural parents needed to be quiet.

“That’s an off-the-cuff comment,” explained one former Fairfax County public school teacher on Tuesday morning. Republicans are merely “looking for something to blame him for. I taught in Fairfax County Schools. There is no way parents were not involved in the curriculum. The PTA is very strong, and you thought that was good. I thought it was fine.”

This former teacher, who didn’t give her name (“It will end up in the newspaper!” she exclaimed, trying to dissuade her husband from giving his name) made it clear she valued the views of Fairfax County parents, explicitly. But “the people who live in the boonies can’t dictate to the people who live in the close-in, big counties.”

So should the “close-in, big counties” be able to dictate to “the boonies” what they teach? What if a conservative county in rural Virginia imposes a conservative curriculum on its county. “You can’t do that,” the former teacher responded. “That’s against the Constitution.”

“I think he’s right,” said another voter in McLean of McAuliffe. “As a parent of a future student,” she said, pointing to her 3-month-old child, “I grew up in a much more rural area of the commonwealth, and thinking back to it, I don’t want those parents making decisions for my kids in school. I don’t think there really was anything wrong with his comments. … In general, the point that he was trying to make is that parents’ opinions vary, and they can’t be the ones making the ultimate decisions about what kids are learning in school. Kids need to be exposed to things parents don’t necessarily agree with. That’s the point of education: to broaden horizons, to give kids more perspective than just what they’re getting at home.”

Irene, a McAuliffe voter in Falls Church, named education as her top issue.

“I like his stance on education,” she told me. “I work in education policy.”

She elaborated. “When we want to change education and improve education, there’s obviously a role for parents, but I also think that a lot of what we need to take into account is research- and evidence-based practices, and that’s what Terry and his team are trying to do. … What I don’t appreciate from the other side is the sense that parents should just go in and take over the curriculum.”

“I grew up in Southwest Virginia, and I’m amazed at the things I was taught,” a McAuliffe voter named Virginia told me in Falls Church. “I think there’s a lot of fear. People are motivated by fear, and they vote because they are afraid they are going to get pushed out of some sort of prominence.”

Local politician David Snyder said this about school parents: “I mean, it’s their kids, so they obviously have a key role to play. But the interaction with educators and people who have made that as a career needs to be ongoing and constructive.”