A few prominent Democrats are waking up to a fact that parents have known for years: When it comes to education, their party is on a path to nowhere.
Obama-era Education Secretary Arne Duncan sounded the alarm this month, warning that Democrats are “adrift” on schools and losing ground with voters.
And don’t think Republicans haven’t noticed.
In recent years Duncan’s party has watched a 20-plus-point advantage on the issue of education collapse.
Between 2020 and 2024, parents of school-aged children shifted seven percentage points to the right.
To anyone with their ear to the K-12 education ground, it’s been obvious that parents of every political stripe had reached their limit regarding the ideological capture and non-academic focus of their kids’ schools.
Anyone who failed to see it was simply ignoring the bright-red warning signs.
Student enrollment decline, a national phenomenon, has been steepest in large, urban, blue-governed systems.
Parents with school-aged children are moving out of blue states, families are fleeing big cities — and ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, homeschooling and private schools have been on the rise.
Teachers’ unions, which contribute over 99% of their political donations to Democrats, are making the status quo ever harder to defend.
Last month, for example, the Chicago Teachers Union pushed to cancel school altogether on May 1 as part of a blatantly socialist May Day protest.
“No school, no work, no shopping,” was the intended theme.
The public backlash was so intense that schools remained open — but the union, undeterred, turned the day into a “civic action” event, encouraging students to attend rallies, protests and marches during school hours.
Many parents saw that for what it was: A vivid example of a system more comfortable mobilizing students as political foot soldiers than actually teaching them in the classroom.
In the face of unprecedented chronic absenteeism — it’s 41% in Chicago — teachers’ union leaders urged kids to boycott school.
In stark contrast, red states are showing extraordinary progress on student outcomes in reading and math.
Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama, once dismissed as educational backwaters, are now leading the pack, delivering the strongest gains of the past five years — while blue states fall behind.
Democrat education operatives Jorge Elorza and Ben Austin joined Duncan this month in calling for a party rebrand.
The Democratic Party, they scolded, “has deferred to administrators, shielded unions and told frustrated families to trust a system that has repeatedly failed their children.”
Their column in The74, an education news site, called on blue-state governors to opt in to the Education Freedom Tax Credit, a federal school-choice program funded through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That’s a significant shift: Democrats, including Duncan, Elorza and Austin, have passionately opposed this kind of educational freedom program for decades.
As has Gov. Kathy Hochul, who — one week after Duncan’s public red flag — tentatively agreed to let New York students enjoy the tax credit’s benefits.
Now that their party is sinking on education, they’ve done an about-face.
Why? Because they know that support for more school choice is overwhelming among parents in both parties, with the glaring exception of white progressives.
They know they need to start standing up for the basic things that parents from every demographic actually want in their schools: academic rigor, order and physical safety.
But for Democrats to earn back trust on the issue of education, they’d be wise to stop accusing disillusioned parents that they are responsible for stoking the culture wars in America’s schools.
Race-based school assemblies, sexually inappropriate school-library books and lessons instructing 2nd graders they may have been born in the wrong body didn’t originate in campaign ads or partisan media.
They are real-life leftist trends that took hold in institutions — our schools — that once commanded broad approval.
Ordinary parents who were called “white supremacists” for saying that schools should open during COVID are not enflaming a culture war.
Parents who object to males competing against their daughters in athletics are not hateful.
Parents who voice concerns when schools compel their biracial children to participate in race-based affinity groups are not bigots.
If Democrats truly want to fix their education problem, they must fully acknowledge the damage they and their allies have done to our schools — and promise to stand in the breach until it stops.
If not, expect Republicans to press their newfound advantage in the coming midterms.
Erika Sanzi is director of communications at Defending Education.
