Education has been the calling card of the Democratic Party when it comes to “kitchen table” matters for decades. Yet, four years after destructive COVID-19 lockdowns showed that Democrats couldn’t be trusted with the K-12 education system, it’s a concern that has been largely abandoned by the party, and when candidates do engage on it, they do so poorly.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign issues page notably included almost no mention of K-12 education, jumping from talks about preschool affordability to a variety of promises regarding universities, from eliminating student loan debt to Pell Grant reforms and funding for historically black colleges and universities. The K-12 system was an afterthought in her messaging.
You do not need to look far to see why these stark reminders about how terribly Democrats managed K-12 education before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic still persist. In California, public K-12 enrollment has declined every year from the 2017-18 school year to the 2022-23 school year, according to state data, and the decrease is projected to continue all the way to at least 2032. Despite spending more than the national average per student on education, California’s math and reading scores are below the national average, with math scores tanking since the pandemic.
California’s misplaced educational priorities are partly to blame. The most prominent individual example of this is Tony Thurmond, the California state superintendent of public instruction. Thurmond is a lifelong political ladder climber, having run for seven different political offices over the last 20 years. He is now on to his eighth race, this time hoping to become the next governor of California in the 2026 election.
Thurmond personifies the toxic left-wing turn of education and why it is an untenable campaign position for most Democrats now. In 2023, Thurmond was still defending the COVID-19 lockdowns that kept children out of school in much of California for two years. Those lockdowns were the product of antiscience fearmongering primarily pushed by teachers unions that placed their own demands above the needs of students, who predictably struggled after being locked out of classrooms for two years.
However, Thurmond went even further than that, using his position as the top education official in the state to threaten school districts that do not toe the Democratic Party’s transgender line. Thurmond wants school districts to hide information about students’ mental health from their parents to the point that he obnoxiously crashed a Chino Valley school board meeting to shame the school board for thinking parents should be made aware if their children try to adopt different identities when they are at school.
This view extended to the California Teachers Association, which held a conference in 2021 at which teachers admitted to looking at students’ search histories to see if they should recruit them into school transgender clubs. The teachers even admitted to purposely neglecting to keep club records so parents couldn’t find out their children were members, with one teacher saying they told students, “What happens in this room, stays in this room.”
From demanding that parents be cut out of their children’s lives, schoolwork, and mental health to fighting tooth and nail to keep schools closed and keep children in failing virtual classes, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed teachers unions to the public as the partisan, antichild institutions that they are. As a result, the Democratic Party’s dutiful commitment to those teachers unions as the core message of its position on K-12 education has made the matter politically toxic for most Democrats, especially when voters can look to the few remaining enthusiastic teachers union allies, such as Thurmond.
Another prime example is Brandon Johnson, the current mayor of Chicago and a former organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. Johnson has made overhauling Chicago’s education system a top priority, which would be welcome news in a woebegone Chicago if Johnson was not in charge. To make up the billion-dollar gap in the Chicago Public School district’s budget, Johnson proposed taking out a high-interest $300 million loan, which would go toward pay increases for teachers union members, among other things.
Pedro Martinez, the district’s chief executive, opposed this move, as did the board of education. Johnson has been trying to force Martinez out, leading the entire board to resign in protest, all so Johnson could solidify the strength of the CTU. Johnson has since been able to handpick members of the board to replace the departing ones, with his goal being to force Martinez’s ouster.
Johnson’s new board includes a former CTU member, an “environmental task force executive,” and a former hate crimes investigator. Most notable, though, was Johnson’s pick for the board’s new president: Rev. Mitchell Johnson. Either Brandon Johnson didn’t do a good job vetting or simply didn’t care because the reverend he put in charge of the board defended the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks that killed 1,200 Israeli civilians, posted conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and said women who earn money are antifamily, all in posts on his own social media accounts.
It took pressure from dozens of city aldermen and even the Democratic governor of Illinois for Mitchell Johnson to resign. Even Democratic officials are finding themselves mobilizing against their fellow Democrats who are making K-12 education their focus, as Brandon Johnson has. If the mayor’s reckless rush to strengthen and enrich the city’s teachers union led him not to even bother to check the social media posts of his school board nominees, how much planning do you think went into the high-interest loan to which he wants to hook the city?
Just as in California, Chicago students are the ones left behind. Math proficiency for elementary students (grades 3-8) has dropped from 24% in 2019 before the pandemic lockdowns to 19% in 2024. Reading proficiency is up over the same time frame, which seems like a win until you consider that the increase was only from 28% to 31% and that those numbers mean only 31% of elementary students in Chicago can read at a proficient level.
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These few Democrats continuing to trudge forward with K-12 education as a top concern are simply reinforcing the takeaway most parents had during the pandemic, which is that the Democratic commitment to this matter only applies to teachers unions and activist ideology and not to the students who have become political pawns and afterthoughts in the education system that is meant to help them. The Tony Thurmonds and Brandon Johnsons of politics either don’t see that Democrats have lost ground on these matters or don’t care, and students are still paying the price for it.
Those students will continue to pay the price. Though most Democrats are quieter on this matter than Thurmond and Brandon Johnson have been, they still have the same priorities that place teachers unions first and students last. The only difference now is the silence where Democrats were once proud to boast about their policies on education because just about everyone, except for Chicago and California voters, recognized what a thorough failure those policies have been.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
