DeSantis and Trump See Schools as the Path to 2024 Nomination

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(Bloomberg) -- The minute details of a third-grader’s daily lessons are becoming a new battleground in Republican intra-party politics, with potential challenger Ron DeSantis touting his efforts to transform education in Florida and Donald Trump rushing to catch up.

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The two top-polling 2024 GOP presidential hopefuls are competing over issues like sex- and health-education classes, gender identity in team sports and how far to go in striking diversity programs and controversial books from K-12 schools and even state colleges and universities.

Trump is trying to follow the successful playbook that former Carlyle Group Inc Co-CEO Glenn Youngkin used to win the Virginia governor’s mansion and helped give DeSantis a huge landslide reelection victory. In his 2021 race, Youngkin rode a wave of frustration among parents of both parties who watched their children’s video-conferenced classes during Covid lockdowns and fanned outrage when parents were kicked out of school board meetings for passionate complaints about the curricula.

The fight over education has morphed into one the Republican Party’s many talking points over culture and social issues, which have come to dominate the party’s platform since Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016.

Youngkin proved the education issue was potent with independents and suburban voters in a general election, the voters presidential candidates need after winning their primaries. Heading into the 2024 cycle, Republican candidates are making education policy a priority. A recent poll from the Pew Research Center showed the share of GOP voters who consider education a top priority jumped by 8 percentage points since 2021 from 43% to 51%.

The former president plans to hold an education event in Iowa on Wednesday, while DeSantis has made his fights with public schools and universities and teacher’s unions a cornerstone of the state’s upcoming legislative session. This week, the GOP-controlled Florida legislature opened with plans to pass DeSantis-backed legislation that will expand school voucher programs, ban universities from using diversity, equity and inclusion hiring criteria, and allow tenured college faculty to undergo performance reviews.

And he is beginning to harness like-minded parents for 2024.

In late February, DeSantis gathered the founders of the conservative education advocacy group Moms for Liberty and other allies in Tallahassee to reveal plans to replace school board members in 14 counties in 2024. It’s a strategy DeSantis used last year to elect two dozen hand-picked supporters to boards and secure a corps of advocates to rally parents to vote.

“You know, all of these things are important, and they should be important to all parents,” said Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty. “I think that’s why Governor DeSantis resonates with so many people across the country.”

Democrats argue GOP candidates risk overreaching, turning voters’ sense that Republicans want to improve education into a fear that they are imposing a national conservative narrative on what has always been a local issue. DeSantis has claimed that school libraries offer pornography and educators are trying to push “inappropriate” lessons on kids, without providing evidence that such practices are widespread. He’s repeatedly called for his conservative school policies to be a “blueprint” for the rest of the country.

Youngkin “started out with the less controversial idea that parents ought to be heard and that has now blown out into a full-scale culture war attack on public education,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who has conducted surveys for the American Federation of Teachers. “This is an another example of Republicans playing to their base in a way that has the likelihood of turning off voters in the middle of the electorate.”

One in five parents say their kids’ schools do not spend enough time on subjects like math, reading, science and social studies, according to the October 2022 Pew poll. In the same survey, a majority of parents said it was very important for schools to teach kids social and emotional skills, but there was no consensus on how schools should teach gender identity or the history of US slavery, two areas Republicans have honed in on.

Republicans see a clear path to gaining the upper hand on an issue Democrats have long dominated.

“Parents are neither Republican or Democratic. They are parents. It makes it a rare opportunity for an issue to transcend partisan politics,” said GOP pollster and messaging guru Frank Luntz. “Republicans will not forget what happened in Virginia and how education turned an entire gubernatorial election.”

The Florida governor has spent a large part of his second term on education — he replaced the board of trustees at a progressive public college, clamped down on teacher unions and enforced laws he wrote that ban instruction of sexual orientation or gender identity through the 3rd grade. He’s also required districts to review every book for “inappropriate” content, mainly regarding race, gender and sexuality, like LGBTQ themes. So far, 175 books have been “removed,” according to the governor’s office. Teachers face getting their certificate or license revoked, or even criminal prosecution, if they don’t comply with the mandates.

“Our schools must deliver a good education, not a political indoctrination,” DeSantis said in his State of the State speech last week.

And on Monday, he held a roundtable on higher education issues and declared, “We are not going to back down to the woke mob, and we will expose the scams they are trying to push on to students across the country.”

Teachers are reacting by leaving their jobs. As of August, Florida schools had openings for 6,006 teachers and 4,765 support staff — like teacher aides — a four-fold increase since 2016, according to a tally by Florida’s teachers union.

Trump has suggested ending teacher tenure, electing school principals, keeping transgender kids out of girls’ sports and cutting federal funding for any school that promotes “critical race theory.” Critical race theory is a college-level framework but has become a catchphrase for conservatives who believe much race-focused education teaches children that all White people are racist.

“There is a long tradition of really fearsome and fractious fights over schools, affirmative action, school prayer, school segregation and teaching evolution. It’s not new that we are fighting over schools,” said David Houston, an assistant professor of education policy at George Mason University. “What is new is that the fault lines are falling so neatly along party identifications than the fights that happened generations ago.”

The outcome may be that a child’s education will look radically different if he or she grew up in a Republican-led state like Iowa than, say, Maryland, Houston said — effectively influencing a whole new generation of voters.

(updates with new DeSantis quote in 17th paragraph)

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