This Is the School Choice Moment. Will the GOP Screw It Up? REPUBLICANS ARE IN DANGER OF SQUANDERING A PROMISING OPPORTUNITY FOR EDUCATION REFORM ON CULTURE WAR SQUABBLES.

• Author: Soave, Robby

IN MARCH, SEN. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) surprised many in Washington, D.C., by releasing an 11-point plan for what the GOP would do if the party retakes power in 2022, bucking Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's preferred strategy of bashing the Democratic agenda without offering much in the way of specific alternative policies. Scott's very first priority was education. "Our kids will say the pledge of allegiance, salute the Flag, learn that America is a great country, and choose the school that best fits them," states action item one.

Much of the plan is standard red meat. But it's telling that school choice has risen to the very top of the GOP agenda, even as the surrounding action items--highly specific demands for control over curriculum and classroom culture--betray a Republican approach that is at best selectively committed to the principle of maximizing parental choices.

Regardless, Republicans clearly recall the exact moment-halfway through the gubernatorial debate on September 28, 2021--when Terry McAuliffe uttered the sentence that effectively ended his political career and ushered education to the top of the GOP agenda. "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach," the Virginia Democrat said.

A little over a month later, Republican Glenn Youngkin triumphed, preventing McAuliffe from being elected to a noncon-secutive second term and setting off a frenzied effort among Democrats to understand how they could have possibly lost in Virginia--a state that President Joe Biden had won by 10 points just one year earlier.

First came a kind of denial that Virginia voters' frustrations reflected real problems in the school system. Many progressive pundits accused Republicans of creating an issue--the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in schools--out of whole cloth. CRT, an academic theory about the pervasiveness of racism in society, may hold sway in many graduate programs, but it is hardly taking over middle schools, these pundits insisted. The issue of "education," declared MSNBC host Joy Reid on the night of the election, placing air quotes around the word, "is code for 'White parents don't like the idea of teaching about race.'"

In fact, concerned parents can point to many school curriculum battles where the fight is not whether to "teach about race," but whether to indoctrinate students into a race-totalizing framework. It's not only white parents who dislike this; in one California high school where an "ethnic studies" course was required, half the Hispanic students were failing it. According to their English teacher, the kids hated the class.

Perhaps Virginia voters would have cared less about school curriculums if COVID-19 hadn't forced so many parents into the role of supervising their kids during the virtual school day. The pandemic kept the education system closed far longer than many other institutions, and the publicly exercised political power of the teachers unions meant that most families understood the reason their favorite restaurant was open but their child's kindergarten was not.

By now it is widely acknowledged, even in liberal circles, that the public education system's pandemic-era failures drove many independent voters and moderate Democrats into the arms of the GOP in 2021. And what worked in Virginia could work elsewhere in 2022: Frustration with woke school...