In the four years since schools were closed in an attempt to protect students from the onset of COVID-19, public education has been put under the microscope and turned into a major political talking point.
Conservatives, led by political figures like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and groups like Mothers for Freedom, have embraced the mantle of parental rights and claimed — in part because of the window opened into classrooms by distance learning — that public school education has become more accessible. It's been hijacked by inappropriate curricula on LGBTQ topics, race, discrimination, and more.
Opponents like the progressive group Red, Wine and Blue and leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom have pushed back on what they call efforts to reduce the focus on minority groups and social issues through controversial changes like Florida teaching middle school students sometimes taught slaves useful skills, as well as banning books and more. So.
The classroom culture wars are still raging in various states, but education advocates and parents across the ideological spectrum who spoke with ABC News for this story worry about the need for a pivot away from those battles, some of which were first sparked by these groups, and back to education. .
“Parents want to see our kids reading. It's not a question of banning a book if they can't read it,” said mother Jay Artis Wright, a critic of what she calls the Republican-led culture wars and former leader of the Parents' Revolution. , a parent empowerment nonprofit based in Los Angeles, told ABC News.
The slogans and school board shouting have exaggerated and overshadowed more pressing issues, according to Artis Wright and other activists on both sides of the issue.
“Teaching children to read in school should not be a political issue,” said Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the now widely recognized and polarizing organization Mothers for Freedom. “It's not a partisan issue and I actually think it's the greatest national security risk we have as Americans: a nation of illiterate people.”
Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021, generally says its mission is about “educating and empowering parents” and includes several chapters that describe themselves as “oversight bodies” on the school board. But the group has also come under criticism, with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) saying they are spreading “hateful images and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community,” which Mothers for Freedom leaders previously confirmed to ABC News is “nonsense.”
Politics aside, concerns about student education are well-founded, according to national data and recent expert analysis.
More than a third of the nation's fourth graders were below proficient reading level in 2022, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the “Nation's Report Card.”
NAEP math, history, and civics scores sank in 2022 as well. Fourth- and eighth-graders saw the largest declines ever in math, and eighth-graders had the lowest history scores since 1994, when the history assessment was first administered.
In February, Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, issued a stark warning to parents.
Despite Keane's Education Recovery Scorecard identifying one-year gains made in the past school year, the study, based on statewide and NAEP scores, found the average district is still “an additional year away from catching up in math and “Two More Years of Catching Up” “Catching up on reading.”
“If we allow these achievement losses to become permanent, students will pay the price of the pandemic for the rest of their lives, as in lower college enrollment rates.” [and] “People who have less income once they graduate from college,” Kane, who co-authored the scorecard with the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, told ABC News.
Liberal leaders say they're tired of culture war critics who sometimes focus less on interrupted education and more on debates about race and sexual ideology. A new study by the Pew Research Center found that most of the American public believes that parents should be able to opt out of their children learning about LGBTQ issues if the way these topics are taught conflicts with the parents' personal views or beliefs, but only about a third believe they should. Parents are able to pick their children out of similar discussions about race.
Pew also found that nearly 70% of teachers said that the topics of sexual orientation and gender ideology rarely or never came up in the classroom in the past school year.
National Parents Union (NPU) President Kerry Rodriguez said the conversation should instead focus on the problem of illiteracy in America.
“Every child in America deserves the right to read proficiently by third grade,” Rodriguez told ABC News, adding, “If we can solve this problem, there are a whole bunch of things that will fall down the line.”
Justice, along with Mothers for Freedom, said there was no doubt that learning loss affected “every student” and was a topic that “raises concern for children's futures”.
Artis-Wright also said schools should focus on issues beyond culture war topics, such as book bans and other hot-button issues that a group of advocates and parents have been pushing since the beginning of the pandemic.
“There has to be this comprehensive view of how to reimagine what school looks like after the pandemic is over — from every perspective,” she said.
Republican Rep. Lisa McClain, who chaired a congressional hearing on oversight of K-12 education at the beginning of the year, said this should not be a partisan issue. Parents like Rep. McClain and Artis Wright hope to shift the focus to children catching up in school, especially in math and reading.
“Unfortunately, K-12 education headlines this year are likely to focus on claims of funny book bans or assertions of near-hysterical mass layoffs due to the long-scheduled termination of federal funding,” director of the Center for Educational Freedom, a parent rights group at Women's Independent. Forum member Jenny Gentles said during a hearing of Maclean's Healthcare and Financial Services Subcommittee in January.
“Choose instead to focus on students’ academic recovery needs,” Gentles added.
NPU's Rodriguez was more blunt.
“We were screaming and screaming about it [learning loss] “Now for years,” she told ABC News. “If we don't start addressing these matters urgently by having radical transparency about where our kids are, where we're trying to get them so that we can all be all hands on deck to get them there, then “We'll continue to see more of the same.”
Struggling students should take advantage of summer programs, tutoring and after-school contracts, according to Kane. He said it is imperative that school districts use the remaining Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) dollars in the American Rescue Plan before it is too late. (The deadline for regions to benefit from this funding is September)
“We have to make sure parents are well informed about whether or not their child is below grade level,” Kane said, adding, “They can't wait for state tests to come back to tell them. Schools need that.” Tell them this spring so they can sign up in the summer.”
Rep. McClain, a conservative mother of four, said America's public schools could do “much better” as these issues persist across the country.
“As parents, we must stand up for our children,” she said, adding: “We must take these issues seriously: Our nation’s children — the so-called ‘pandemic cohort’ — do not deserve to be left behind.”
Both sides say, despite cultural differences, they agree on this.
“Parents are really looking for high-quality educational options,” Curtis Valentine, co-director of the Progressive Policy Institute's Reinventing American Schools Project, told ABC News.
“All parents want good schools, good teachers, and good choices.”
