The New Yorker laments pro-parent candidates in education-related races doing 'depressingly well'

Sarah D | 11:21 AM on November 10, 2022

The Republican Party had a rather disappointing showing in what many expected to be a “red wave” this week. But it wasn’t all bad news. There were some areas in which Republicans pretty consistently excelled. One of them is when it came to races concerning education.

And that makes The New Yorker downright depressed:

Candidates who railed against teachers’ unions and critical-race theory fared depressingly well in yesterday’s superintendent and school-board races, Jessica Winter writes.https://t.co/t3q5WRJNcB

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) November 10, 2022

“Depressingly well.” More from Jessica Winter:

The ghost chasers bagged plenty of votes on Tuesday. A clown-car school-board race in Charleston, South Carolina, ended with five out of nine seats going to Moms for Liberty-backed candidates. Governor Ron DeSantis—the maestro of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation and a home-state hero to Moms for Liberty—endorsed six school-board candidates, all of whom won their races; Moms for Liberty endorsed a total of twelve in Florida, winning nine. In Texas, ten out of fifteen spots on the state school board appeared to be going to Republicans, including three seats in which G.O.P. incumbents either lost or dropped out of their primary when facing opponents who took a harder line against C.R.T.

…

The precise logical relation between the conservative-libertarian axis of billionaires who wish to privatize public education—notably among them Betsy DeVos, who was Secretary of Education under Trump—and the rank-and-file right-wing moms who back “Don’t Say Gay” is as yet unclear. For the moment, at least, their desires match—as Tuesday night’s election results have demonstrated—and nowhere is their bond stronger than in their shared antipathy for teachers’ unions, even in states where much of the meaningful work that unions do has been outlawed. On the eve of Election Day, one of Moms for Liberty’s founders, Tina Descovich, tweeted, “Teachers unions do not care about kids. Period.” The vision of “educational freedom” espoused by Ellen Weaver [South Carolina’s newly elected Superintendent of Education] and her ideological comrades is one in which teachers are servants of parents and public money pours into private pockets, where any space can be a school and anybody can lead a classroom, and where whatever compact remains between parents and teachers—whatever sense of a community collaborating in a public good—dissolves.