The blowback to the woke regime that dominates America’s schools is in full swing, and November’s midterm elections are shaping up to be a turning point in the fight to take back America’s children. Florida’s erroneously-nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, which is now being replicated in states from Ohio to Texas, is only the latest manifestation of the growing movement to end leftist political indoctrination and give power back to parents.
The landslide recall earlier this year of three uber-leftist school board members in San Francisco, where Republicans make up only six percent of the electorate, proved that parental anger crosses partisan lines. Similar recalls are now underway in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia and New Jersey. The first three months of 2022 have seen a total of 28 school board recall efforts nationwide, putting this year on track to top last year’s record-setting 92 recall campaigns — more than triple the average from the previous 12 years.
Sexualized instruction, curriculum content and the anti-Semitic and racist critical race theory (CRT) are featuring prominently in congressional and gubernatorial campaigns as well. A poll from liberal CNN found education to be a top priority of voters headed into the midterms, with curriculum and CRT as key concerns.
November’s races for state and local education offices are also heating up. The race for the Texas board of education produced a record number of candidates this year, and the primaries last month saw the advancement of candidates who made opposition to CRT the cornerstone of their campaigns.
Meanwhile, polls show that Democratic politicians are losing voter trust on education. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found Republicans and Democrats near-even on the issue, which marks a dramatic shift since the mid-2000s, when Democrats were favored by 20 points.
It doesn’t take a conservative to be outraged by the smug disdain for American first principles being forced into our school textbooks. In publisher McGraw-Hill’s 2019 “American Democracy Now” advanced placement textbook, the authors write that the U.S. Constitution “implicitly endorsed the unequal and discriminatory treatment of African Americans”—never mind, of course, that the U.S. system of government was the first to acknowledge the equality of all people under law.
The indoctrination is backfiring on the progressive left. On the handling of race in textbooks, one prominent pollster found that parents in both parties are “alarmed over anything that seems to be deterministic about race, such as telling children their skin color will shape their future.” They are also increasingly “uncomfortable with anything that feels like it is separating children by race.”
Schools aren’t stopping with curriculum. They are maligning gifted education programs as racist. They are focused on renaming schools after woke icons instead of reopening them, even in the face of mounting evidence that children are paying a terrible price — academically, socially and emotionally — for prolonged closures.
As the midterms ramp up, many Democrats are nervous about the signals voters are sending. As Democratic strategist James Carville said on PBS, “This ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this ‘take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools,’ . . . People see that” and it is having a “suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something.”
For conservatives like me who have been fighting for our school children for years, the stakes in November are high. While it may be tempting to dismiss the wokeism that has gripped our schools as a temporary trend, even temporary trends can have lasting effects when they play out in the minds of our next generation. As our children go, so goes our future. Or as Abraham Lincoln said, “The philosophy of one generation will be the government of the next.”
As recalls mount and November nears, politicians and local officials who peddle disinformation in our schools and pander to the woke mob should be on notice: Parents are coming for your seats. State-by-state, community-by-community, school board-by-school board, they are working to turn around the future of our children and take back our education system. For these concerned parents, the midterms can’t come soon enough.
Laurie Cardoza-Moore is the founder and president of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations (PJTN), an organization dedicated to advocating for America’s schoolchildren and combatting anti-American and ant-Semitic ideologies wherever they arise.