Will 2022 Be the ‘Greatest Year for Education Reform in a Generation’? By Nate Hochman
The resistance to critical race theory, building on traditional priorities like school choice, is driving a revitalized conservative education movement.
T he conservative education-reform movement has long evaluated itself in quantitative terms. Right-leaning educrats calculate their successes and failures as one would assess a tax cut or an infrastructure bill, measuring the effects of their reforms in terms of proficiency rates in math and reading, graduation and dropout numbers, and cost efficiency. That, in turn, has shaped the way that conservative policy-makers think about education: Workforce preparation, test scores, and other utilitarian concerns are often prioritized over character formation and civic virtue, while the question of what we are teaching our children has taken a backseat to the content-neutral language of school choice and decentralization. This framework, Yuval Levin writes, has “made American education policy awfully clinical and technocratic, at times blinding some of those involved in education debates to the deepest human questions at stake — social, moral, cultural, and political questions that cannot be separated from how we think about teaching and learning.”
All of that is beginning to change. A backlash to critical race theory (CRT) at the grassroots level, with help from activists like Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, has forced the radicalization of the American public-school curriculum to the forefront of the national political conversation. The debates over CRT have also opened up broader questions of what (and how) we teach American students about their country, initiating a serious conservative counteroffensive against the Left’s monopolistic control of American politics and history curricula, with states like Florida and Texas pairing anti-CRT laws with new programs aimed at renewing civic literacy in public education. What began with local, parent-led organizing has grown into a national movement with enormous political momentum.
The anti-CRT backlash “crystallized this feeling that we have an agenda that we can cohere around,” Rufo told National Review. “All of the various threads on conservative education reform can now unite around the framework of critical race theory to make real change and actually get bills passed through state legislatures.” To date, eleven states have enacted bans or restrictions on CRT, and Rufo thinks “we’re going to get another five to ten states passing them in the coming year.”
The Right’s commanding heights have begun to notice, too. The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation have thrown their considerable weight behind the anti-CRT project, with Manhattan Institute scholars writing comprehensive model legislation for tackling the ideology — aimed not just at banning CRT itself but also at increasing curriculum transparency, revitalizing civic-literacy standards, and expanding school choice. Conservative scholars have testified before state legislatures to advocate for anti-CRT legislation. At the same time, new think tanks and advocacy groups like the Center for Renewing America have coalesced around fighting CRT as a core organizing principle of their mission. “You have think tanks who don’t necessarily agree on every issue, and there’s inter–think tank drama sometimes,” said Rufo. “But on education, we are all on the same page.”
A New Conservative Education Agenda
The most consequential articulation to date of the newly forged unity agenda was released earlier this month, published as a coalition statement on the Heritage Foundation’s website. The statement’s signatories are a who’s who of heavy hitters in the world of conservative education policy, including Rufo, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, AEI’s Max Eden, Goldwater Institute education-policy director Matt Beienberg, Inez Feltscher Stepman of the Independent Women’s Forum, numerous Trump Department of Education alumni, and Arthur Milikh, the executive director of the Claremont Institute’s D.C.-based Center for the American Way of Life, among others.
The coalition statement is the institutional conservative movement’s response to the “huge voter and public discontent about public-school curriculum, bureaucracy, and structure,” which represents “an opportunity for a unified and coherent conservative agenda on education,” according to Rufo. “A lot of this is using critical race theory as the entry point. . . . What we’ve tried to do is take this parent revolt that we’ve seen in school-board meetings and local communities and give it a coherent expression in public policy.”
The coalition’s seven-point platform, intended as a framework for policies that can be adopted at the state level, is as follows:
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No teacher or student should be compelled to affirm, believe, profess, or adhere to any idea that violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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No course of instruction or unit of study may direct or otherwise compel students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to any idea that violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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No school shall contract for teacher professional development with providers who promote racially essentialist doctrines and practices that have been held to violate the Civil Rights Act.
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A private individual may bring a right of action against any public institution engaged in racial discrimination.
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Public school officials should give all members of the public comprehensive access in-person and online to school curricular materials including syllabi, lists of textbooks, and teacher-created assignments and books, worksheets, along with content that educators use for teacher professional development training sessions. Parents should be able to see, at-a-glance online, what their children are being taught. State officials should bolster their sunshine laws to stop school districts from stonewalling parents’ public records requests.
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Public school board elections should be held on-cycle — in the same years and at the same time as the election for the highest office in a given state. When school board elections are held with general elections, school board members more closely reflect the preferences of their constituents.
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Provide every K–12 student and their family with the ability to choose how and where a child learns. Policymakers should empower families with the ability to choose a new public or private school for their child or to customize their child’s education with an education savings account.
This platform shapes the three core legislative priorities that should define the new conservative education agenda: The first is anti-CRT bills, which have already taken red America by storm — and caught left-wing activists and teachers’ unions on the back foot. Such bills offer parents protection from an education bureaucracy run amok. The second is curriculum transparency, a “major innovation” that Rufo says is based on “the very simple moral claim that parents have the right to know what’s being taught to their kids.” The third is school choice — not a new idea in conservative circles, but now reinvigorated. As Rufo notes, when “public-school bureaucracies get captured by critical race theory, more and more parents want an exit strategy — they want a way out of these failing public schools that have replaced excellence with indoctrination. ”
Theory and Practice
The new anti-CRT agenda is not so much a departure from the traditional conservative education movement as it is a renewal, providing new political capital for advancing those more traditional conservative policies. “All three of these core policies — anti-CRT bills, curriculum-transparency bills, and school-choice bills — work in harmony, using the substance of critical race theory as their justification,” says Rufo.
As the Heritage-backed coalition statement indicates, the institutional conservative movement recognizes the enormous political potential of the anti-CRT movement’s grassroots energy. The last year has shown that the public’s intense focus on education “is a real path to victory” for conservatives, Rufo says. “It demonstrated that you can run a campaign on these issues, and not only win, but actually, I think for the first time, dominate on these culture issues.”
There’s real merit to this point. The string of victories against CRT at the state level came to a head most recently in Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in the Virginia governor’s race, a watershed moment for the political legitimacy of the anti-CRT movement. Pollsters and pundits, left and right alike, attributed the Republican’s win to a surge of dissatisfaction with the state’s public-education system. CRT is certainly not the only cause of public ire, with issues like school masking policies and gender ideology playing a big role. What Youngkin managed to do was tap into powerful cultural debates about education on top of the normal “pocketbook” issues like taxes and jobs that have traditionally defined the blue-state GOP playbook.
It also revealed a Democratic Party establishment that was woefully unprepared to respond to Republican messaging on the subject: Institutional pressures from left-wing activist groups, teachers’ unions, and an ideologically aligned legacy media continue to make it difficult for even the most moderate Democrats to distance themselves from CRT. In lieu of a serious counter-strategy, the party has continued to echo the unconvincing line that the ideology is “not taught” in the nation’s public schools — and that the entire issue, in the words of Youngkin’s Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe, is a “racist dog-whistle.”
The first signs of the anti-CRT groundswell appeared back in May, when candidates running on opposing new “diversity and inclusion” training programs swept the school board, city council, and mayor’s elections in Southlake, Texas, by a two-to-one margin. This “remarkable victory” gave conservatives “a working template for fights to come,” as Rich Lowry wrote in June, and sure enough the anti-CRT movement worked its way through school-board race after school-board race across the country.
One of the people leading this charge is Ryan Girdusky, a conservative activist whose 1776 Project PAC recruited and funded anti-CRT school-board candidates in 58 races across seven states in the November 2021 election cycle. Girdusky’s project was a resounding success, carrying 41 of the 58 school-board elections it contested — 13 in Pennsylvania, eleven in Colorado, nine in Kansas, four in New Jersey, three in Virginia, and two each in Ohio and Minnesota.
School-board races are arguably even more important than anti-CRT laws, Girdusky argues. But they’ve been entirely neglected by the campaign arm of the Republican Party — there’s no real institutional infrastructure for the issue on the right. “We literally went on Facebook and had to search for candidates on there,” Girdusky told National Review.
“For decades, conservatives have come to the conclusion that public schools don’t matter when they do,” Girdusky says. “So much conservative energy on education was either directed toward school choice or colleges indoctrinating kids. And both of those are important, but conservatives haven’t really done anything on the latter, and while they’ve gotten some movement on the former, the majority of kids are still in public schools.”
Red America Fights Back
Of course, one viable way to combat left-wing indoctrination in public education is to continue to push for school choice as a long-term goal. As Rufo himself said in a recent speech, CRT bans are a “temporary fix.” What’s needed “in a system that is failing so many kids is to provide every American family with the right to exit.” The Heritage coalition statement encodes that “right to exit” government schools into its broader vision of a new conservative education agenda.
But an effective conservative counteroffensive also requires taking the fight to the public-school bureaucracy, working within and outside the system to advance the Right’s vision of education. As a result of its blind spot on public schools, the GOP has unnecessarily ceded an enormous amount of ground on education to progressive interests. In practice, that has handed the Left control of school boards and education systems in many of the deepest-red corners of the country.
Amy Cawvey, a mother of three in Lansing, Kan., whom Girdusky recruited to run for school board, understands the problem only too well. She and her husband would have to “re-educate our daughter when she came home from school every day,” she told National Review. Lansing, a city of 11,000, is in Leavenworth County, which went for Trump by 21 points in 2020 and has backed the Republican candidate by double digits in every presidential election since 2000. But despite its staunchly conservative population, Lansing’s schools were teaching the New York Times’ notorious 1619 Project and implementing CRT-based training for faculty and staff.
“It’s gotten worse and worse,” said Cawvey. That didn’t sit well with Lansing’s conservative population: “When I would knock on doors, I would ask them first, what are your concerns? Because I knew I was concerned about CRT, but I also needed to find out what was going on in the community. And I would say over 80 percent of the responses were CRT. So it is a huge concern.”
That’s when Cawvey decided to run. “I didn’t consider myself educated enough to run for office before,” she says. “But I was sitting there and listening to all the school-board meetings, and thought, I cannot do any worse than these people. You know, I may not have the degrees — and I got questioned on that sometimes — but I have common sense. I have life experience and my values.”
Cawvey won, as did the two other candidates for the Lansing school board backed by the 1776 Project PAC. But not before the parent-led insurgency endured an extraordinarily ugly response from the entrenched left-wing school authorities in the district. “They just went after us,” Cawvey said. “We were called puppets, we were called racists, they said that we have a white-supremacist agenda, that we were bringing in dark money from the outside. A retired principal who was head of middle school here for like 30 years wrote a big Facebook post about how people can’t vote for us because we’re right-wing extremists, and God help the schools if we win, they’ll never be the same again.”
One of the three candidates, Mary Wood, lost her job in the process. “They made a Facebook hate page and posted where she worked, and encouraged everyone to call her work and complain,” Cawvey said. Wood’s niece, a left-wing activist in Portland, Ore., leaked texts that Wood had sent her during an argument about Black Lives Matter to the Facebook group in an effort to help sabotage her aunt’s campaign. Members of the Facebook group proceeded to send the texts to Hannah Orthodontics, where Wood had worked for 42 years. The company fired the 62-year-old the next morning.
Cawvey said all of this serves to highlight the power that progressives often wield in local bureaucracies — even in red states. “Our schools have gone to crap, our city councils are going to crap, and we’re not doing anything. I think Republicans are finally waking up — but before that, . . . I think they had their heads in the sand. Because we’ve all known that they’ve been indoctrinating our kids for years, and I’ve seen it get worse and worse for the last 20 to 25 years. So I don’t know why they waited so long.”
That frustration is far from unique and points to the urgent necessity of the new conservative education movement. But it also represents a new world of political possibility: The anti-CRT energy is a historic opportunity to go on the offensive against the Left’s control of the education system, advancing traditional conservative priorities alongside newer policy ideas and issue sets. It’s also an opportunity to close the gap between national D.C.-based conservative institutions and the conservative grassroots, with parent-led anti-CRT movements across the country working in coordination with policy wonks at think tanks.
Rufo is optimistic: “It’s going to be the greatest year for education reform in a generation.” All conservatives have to do now is stay the course.
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