Red Parent, Blue Parent
Education is supposed to be the great equalizer, but it’s become more like the great divider. Throughout the pandemic, Republican and Democratic parents have expressed wildly different ideas about how public schools should work.
Parents’ political ideology now influences not only whom they vote for but also how they feel about mask mandates in classrooms, vaccine mandates for students, and discussions of racism and sexuality in school. These disagreements tend to revolve around a single question: Should parents alone decide what kids learn and how they live, or do government institutions have a role to play too?
[Read: COVID parenting has passed the point of absurdity]
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to want parents to be the only decision makers when it comes to protecting their kids from both the coronavirus and controversial ideas. In polls, they are more inclined to say that is more important than in schools; and that parents should get a say in . “I feel like, as a parent, we know what’s best for our children,” Erica, a Virginia mother whom I agreed to identify by only her first name because she’s concerned for her job, told me. “If you want to wear a mask, please do. But please don’t force me to have my child wear a mask.”
