It’s not time to turn back the clock.
No, we are not weighing in today on the merits of year-round daylight savings time, but rather characterizing the judgment Vermont and New Hampshire voters rendered earlier this month on insurgent conservative candidacies for local school boards.
“Progressive” candidates largely prevailed over a spate of “conservatives” nursing school-related grievances, real and imagined, from pandemic restrictions to “critical race theory” (whatever that signifies) to perceived denial of parental rights. In New Hampshire, 29 candidates identified by progressive organizers as “pro-public education” won their races, according to the New Hampshire Bulletin news site. The story was much the same in Vermont; right-leaning school board candidates likewise mostly failed, according to VTDigger.
Fran Wendelboe, managing director of the 603 Alliance, a New Hampshire conservative group that sponsored candidate training before the elections, attributed the failure of the candidates the organization supported to “a big-time whisper campaign” and scare tactics used by their opponents.
From what we’ve read, we doubt that any whisper campaign was needed; shouting their positions from the rooftops would have more than sufficed to doom some of them. More likely, voters were shrewd enough to realize that much of the conservative agenda was ginned up nationally and had little to do with what actually goes on in their schools. We also suspect that pandemic precautions, frustrating and tiresome as they became, enjoyed broader support than many conservatives imagined.
In a larger context, polling data indicates that the right-wing critique of public education faces a steep uphill climb to attain widespread acceptance. According to Gallup, even in the pandemic year of 2021, 73% of parents with school-aged children expressed satisfaction with the quality of education their oldest child was getting. And those most dissatisfied with the public schools tend not to have children attending them. This provides food for thought for educators. Very few outsiders have an informed idea of what goes on in today’s classrooms. If the average citizen had a better grasp of that, perhaps some of the more far-fetched notions would be more easily discredited.
Anyway, we suppose we should be gratified at the outcome of these elections, and to a degree we are. School teachers, staff and administrators have performed heroics during the past two years under immense difficulties; the last thing they need is now to be pummeled by ideologically motivated partisans on school boards.
Yes … but.
Despite the outcome, it is dismaying that what has traditionally been a largely nonpartisan arena in Vermont and New Hampshire — local public education — is being nationalized and transformed into yet another battleground where “progressives” and “conservatives” are mobilizing to exert control. That students and educators could suffer collateral damage in that struggle is beyond alarming.
We put quotation marks around “progressives” and “conservatives” for a reason. In the context of education, are “progressives” actually people who favor maintaining the status quo in public schools? In many cases, we suspect so, although others may be seeking to push further in areas such as equity.
And is there a useful distinction to be drawn between “conservatives” who are legitimately concerned about school spending or academic performance and reactionaries whose not-so hidden agenda is undermining the whole public education project (see the budget demolition performed at this year’s Croydon School Meeting)? We think there is, and hope voters will recognize the difference in the future, because the traditional conservative viewpoint is a valuable one in education.
What is not valuable is the assertion of untrammeled parental rights as a way for individual parents to opt out of educational mandates they don’t happen to like. The preferences of a small minority cannot be allowed to dictate to the majority what is taught and how. The result would be chaos and an inferior education. The whole basis of public education is the creation of a common ground of learning, broadly shared across society. Public schools are one of the last institutions in American life where people are shaped by shared experience. We know what the loss of that shared experience in other realms looks like. It is not pretty and is the source of much of what is wrong in this country today.