McAuliffe said he doesn’t ‘think parents should be telling schools what they should teach’ during last week’s debate.
Although Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe proudly proclaimed during a debate last week that he doesn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” his personal choices suggest he places a premium on his having such a say.
Not only did McAuliffe send at least four of his children to the D.C. area Potomac School in the 2000s and 2010s — where the annual $30,000 tuition exceeds that of most in-state public universities — but he and his wife invested heavily in shaping their experience there.
As Spencer Brown at Townhall has observed, McAuliffe’s wife Dorothy served as chairman of the board of trustees at the institution — thus heading the group responsible for “establishing broad policy goals that align the operation of the school with its mission, providing fiduciary oversight of the school’s operations, and supporting long-range strategic planning.”
Moreover, parental involvement is an emphasis of the school’s philosophy. Indeed, its Parents’ Association (PA) boasts 17 distinct committees and exists in large part to “facilitate open communication and serve as liaisons between the parents and the school’s administration.” This includes committees on parent forums, cultural competence and ironically, libraries; McAuliffe’s comments at the debate came in the context of a discussion about a recent controversy in which parents in Fairfax County demanded that sexually explicit books be removed from a local public school’s library.
“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions,” McAuliffe said during his second debate against Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin on Tuesday.
There would seem to be little doubt that the Potomac School — which provides so many avenues for parental input and has so much to lose from parental dissatisfaction — does consider parents’ wants in designing its curriculum and shaping other facets of the student experience.
However, even if Potomac School parents are not handpicking lesson plans, they are actively opting-in to the curriculum by sending their kids to the institution. This marks an important distinction between the McAuliffes and the parents of public school students, who are legally bound to send their children to school and oftentimes lack the resources to pay private school tuition, or run for a public school board position equivalent to that which McAuliffe’s wife obtained.
McAuliffe’s defenders might contend that he was speaking narrowly about specific cases in which parents demand the right to ban individual books from school libraries. But McAuliffe’s actions during his last term as governor (2013-2017) would seem to suggest that his debate night declaration should be interpreted much more broadly.
In 2016, McAuliffe vetoed three school choice bills: one bill would have let parents of students in poorly performing schools transfer, another provided parents of disabled children with the funds to send them to private school or defray other educational costs, and a third established a statewide virtual school that any parent could opt-in to. All three were rejected by McAuliffe, who argued that they would send the “wrong signal” about the state of the public education system in Virginia.
Polls continue to show McAuliffe with a slight, though steady lead over Youngkin, but they also demonstrate that a far larger proportion of Virginians prefer Youngkin’s approach to education policy to McAuliffe’s.
While McAuliffe is up three points on Youngkin in the FiveThirtyEight polling average, a survey conducted in January showed that 61 percent of Virginians — including 53 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of African-Americans — would support funneling some amount of public education funding directly to parents. This data comes in the context of a number of a number of education-related issues blowing up in Old Dominion, from transgender students’ accommodations to the handling of COVID-19 to curriculum to how schools memorialize certain founding fathers.