Schools Aren’t the Republicans’ Ticket to Victory

Schools may not be the ticket to victory that a lot of Republicans hope they will be, despite what the top-line results of last night’s election seem to suggest. For the past several months, Glenn Youngkin has blanketed Virginia cable networks, mailboxes, and radio airwaves with advertisements about dysfunction in the state’s public schools. His Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, did not believe parents should have any say in what their children learned, Youngkin would declare. Meanwhile, he argued that Virginia students were being indoctrinated by what he and other Republicans described as “,” or CRT—a term for an area of legal academic study that has for a range of conservative concerns about how schools teach history and literature. Over and over again, Youngkin played on