The red-state governors argue their Covid records compare favorably with that of blue-state leaders who shut down schools for months.
As the nation’s children suffer from academic stagnation caused by school shutdowns and radical ideologies continue to emerge in K-12 curricula, seven GOP governors are making the case that the students and parents in their states fared much better during the pandemic than their blue-state counterparts.
Covid ushered in a vibrant parental-rights movement across the country, but especially in Republican-dominated states. Thousands of parents, used to deferring to education professionals, mobilized to demand transparency in the classroom, an end to mask restrictions and remote learning, and an overall higher quality of education from their school districts.
Governors Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, Doug Ducey of Arizona, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Eric Holcomb of Indiana, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, and Brian Kemp of Georgia testified to their Covid-19 education records in a Wednesday video released by the Republican Governors Association.
“COVID really shined a spotlight on parents’ rights and what was being taught in our school system,” Stitt said.
Youngkin, who gave a voice to parents in Virginia amid scandals in Loudoun and Fairfax Counties, made parental rights a cornerstone of his gubernatorial campaign, and won.
“But at the end of the day, parents became the leaders of this movement. We listened to parents and we’re going to include parents in our decision making on a go-forward basis and give them a voice,” he said in the video.
As for critical race theory and gender ideology seeping into schools, Noem suggested these require a hard-line strategy of prohibiting certain materials and concepts, which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, not featured in the video, and the Florida state legislature deploy regularly.
“In South Dakota, we have been very aggressive at opening up the transparency in our schools and what is going on in our districts, but also making sure that we’re banning the training and teaching of Critical Race Theory. Not only in our K-12 system, but also in our universities,” she said.
The last two years have seen enrollment numbers in public schools plummet, with parents sending their kids to private schools, charter schools, or homeschool. The Covid-19 crisis highlighted the importance of school choice, Sununu noted, to give parents the financial mobility to find the best school for their children.
“New Hampshire was talking about school choice for 40 years, and one of the things I am proudest of in my three terms as Governor is that we got school choice done,” he said.
“And so in Oklahoma, we believe that God gave kids to parents not the government and we should be funding students not systems,” Stitt echoed. “And so, we passed an open transfer to allow parents to move their kid anywhere they want.”
Now that many children across the country are struggling to meet educational benchmarks, due to the disruption caused by Covid-19, states that shutdown schools for prolonged periods have come under intense scrutiny. Most of the Republican states, however, re-opened their schools’ much sooner than their Democratic counterparts.
Stitt added: “99% of our schools were open the entire time in Oklahoma, but we had a couple of the large school districts that were shut down. One in particular, was 355 days they were shut down and the parents would call me and were just, ‘Governor it is not fair. My first grader is not learning how to read via zoom.’”
Looking to Youngkin’s victory in Virginia, education seems to be a winning issue for the Republican Party.
For instance, voters have more confidence in the GOP than the Democratic Party when it comes to education, according to a July poll from the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest and most progressive teachers’ unions in the country.
“Let the states be laboratories of democracy and you’ll see the red states winning,” Ducey said.