California parents are frustrated with schools. Could it help Republicans in the midterms?

A focus on education helped Republicans secure victory in Virginia earlier this month, a state that, a year earlier, had swung for Democrat Joe Biden by more than 10 points.

Could the same focus on parents’ rights in schools motivate voters in California? State Republicans are betting on it.

With 2022 midterms fast approaching, California Republicans will look to capitalize on a growing coalition of parents who are resentful of Democratic leaders’ education policies — including the mandates around school shutdowns, masking, and a new law that requires every high school student to take an ethnic studies class.

The discontent has been simmering for months, and was perhaps most obvious during the recall campaign against Gov. Gavin Newsom, when dissenters blamed the state’s top Democrat for the state’s slow school reopenings.

California GOP Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said that coming off a year and a half of school closures and Zoom learning, voters are fired up.

“At every single level, people are talking about the education of our children,” Patterson said.

Days after Youngkin’s win, House Minority Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, vowed to release a “parents’ bill of rights.”

“Every parent, in every county in every corner of this country, has a right to know what their children are being taught,” McCarthy said on Fox News. “They have a right to have a say in that. Republicans respect the parents’ rights in education.”

California is not Virginia. The Golden State has nearly five times the population and is much more geographically and demographically diverse.

California Democrats also hold a super-majority in the state Legislature, control all constitutionally elected positions, and make up half of the electorate.

Still, Patterson said the party will “certainly be using” education as a messaging strategy in the midterms next year. The question is whether the party can harness the frustration of California parents in the same way Youngkin did in Virginia.

“I think that you’re seeing at the school board meetings, people taking issue with what is being taught in the schools,” she said. “I think they’re taking issue with mandates that are being pushed down from the state level without any exemptions.”

The focus on education was sparked by a comment Democrat Terry McAullife made during a September debate in the Virginia governor’s race, when he said parents shouldn’t be “telling schools what they should teach.”

“If California Democrats choose to go in that direction, I think it’ll be a downfall for them,” Patterson said.

Frustration fueled by the pandemic

San Francisco School Board members made headlines earlier this year when they moved to rename dozens of public schools that bore the names of people and events they said were linked to racism and oppression.

The effort to rename the 44 schools, including Abraham Lincoln High School, was ultimately squashed, but parents weren’t satisfied. Now, San Franciscans will vote whether to recall four board members for focusing on the renaming rather than reopening classrooms during the pandemic.

The San Francisco school renaming debate is one example of what some see as a wider problem of misplaced priorities in California schools. Parents and political watchers say they’re concerned schools are more focused on playing politics than providing quality education.

“California schools are failing many students in California. They’re failing, largely, economically less well off students,” said Duane Dichiara, a longtime California Republican consultant who works for Axiom Strategies, the political consulting firm that advised Youngkin to a victory in Virginia.

Per U.S. News and World Report, California’s K-12 education system ranks 40th in the nation.

“I think that the Republicans would be foolish not to use the failure of the education system among less economically well off and even the working class people, ethnic minorities,” he said. “I think they would be foolish not to use that in those seats.”

School choice has long been the face of education reform in California. Some education advocates argue it should be easier for parents to remove their children from low performing schools and send them to high-rated institutions.

But over the past two years, in light of the pandemic, school politics have exploded due to frustrations over masking, distancing, and school closures. School board meetings have become centers of tension for many California communities. In 2021, more than 25 school board members faced recall attempts, according to Ballotpedia, five times the rate of 2020.

Many parents, and some school board members, have pushed back against state’s mandatory mask and vaccine rules for K-12 students. Attendees at a recent Stanislaus County School Board meeting applauded Superintendent Scott Kuykendall for saying he disagreed with the state vaccine mandates for schools.

Republican candidates jumped on the education issue during the Newsom recall, hoping to channel pandemic frustration into a victory over Democrats.

Newsom ultimately remained, defeating the recall by the same margin he won by in 2018. But some Republicans are still riding the momentum of education frustration.

Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin, has been a longtime school choice advocate and used it as part of his own campaign for governor during the recall.

After the election, Kiley continued railing against Newsom for COVID-related mandates, and praised those like the San Francisco parents for forcing a recall against school board members.

The assemblyman says the “parent revolution has begun.”

“I think parents have now gotten a very clear-eyed view into the corruption of our education establishment and how it’s doing a great disservice to students,” Kiley said. “Parents are absolutely fed up with politicians who do not serve kids.”

Critical race theory

In October, Newsom signed a law making California the first state in the nation to require an ethnics studies course for high school graduation. A year earlier, the Democratic governor rejected a similar law after Jewish groups objected, saying the curriculum minimized antisemitism and sided with Palestine over Israel in a lesson on Arab Americans.

Since then, the Instructional Quality Commission, which oversees curriculum development, significantly revised the draft, eliminating much of the most contentious material. Newsom, in a statement after signing the bill, said he felt confident the curriculum has “guardrails to ensure that courses will be free from bias or bigotry and appropriate for all students.”

The curriculum has become the target of conservative groups against critical race theory, or CRT, a broad and complicated college-level academic framework that has become a national political target for those who say such concepts paint America as inherently oppressive and racist.

It’s a hot cultural topic at the moment, especially coming off the Republican victory in Virginia, where local skirmishes over curriculum gained national media attention.

But longtime Republican consultant Matt Rexroad cautioned that voters’ interests could change a year from now, when the general elections are held.

“McAuliffe made that statement in a debate and the Youngkin campaign was really smart in terms of jumping on it. He hit a nerve, and they were able to use that to their political advantage,” Rexroad said. “But to say that’s going to be an issue a year from now with candidates all over California, or even the country, I think it’s way too early to be able to tell.”

Rexroad said critical race theory could continue to play a role in 2022 races, though it’s more likely to gain traction in swing districts than liberal strongholds.

“For a lot of these young parents, who might normally be Democrats or might normally be, you know, not necessarily supporting the Republican Party, this is an issue that’s kind of united them,” he said.

Minority Leader McCarthy last week released his “parents bill of rights,” which included the right to know what’s being taught in schools and to see reading materials, the right to be heard, to see school budgets and spending, to protect their child’s privacy, and to be updated on any violent activity at school.

The parents bill of rights might be a campaign tool for Republicans looking to flip House seats in 2022, but the issue as a whole is more likely to move the needle on down-ballot races than in congressional districts, Rexroad said.

Those looking to run for local school boards, or the state Legislature, should expect to be scrutinized on education, he said.

“If you’re running for office anywhere in a swing part of California right now, and you’ve had a record of wanting to shut down schools and shut down government services, you’re probably vulnerable to some sort of election challenge,” Rexroad said.

This story was originally published November 22, 2021 at 5:00 AM.