The media focused its attention on Virginia, where the gubernatorial race was centered on education issues, especially whether parents had a right to control what their children read. A parent led a crusade against Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved for years. The Republican winner, Glenn Youngkin, featured Mrs. Murphy’s decade-old campaign against Beloved in a TV ad. So, many journalists see the Virginia election as a repudiation of “critical race theory” or teaching the horrible facts about human enslavement.
But the North Carolina-based News & Observer published a story that went national via the Associated Press with a different slant. And according to some of the readers here, the anti-CRT, anti-masking folks lost in their districts.
Groups that oppose face masks and vaccines frequently lost. No clear national trend has emerged so far, but parents who want safe schools without censorship of high-quality literature have to organize to keep their schools boards free of extremism and bigotry.
Here is an excerpt:
In Wisconsin, four members of the Mequon-Thiensville School Board held off a recall challenge that cost anti-critical race theory backers nearly $50,000.
In Minnesota, three conservative candidates failed to win a seat on the board in Wayzata. They ran on a “Vote for Three!” platform that denounces “harmful ideologies like CRT,” political indoctrination and “controversial medical mandates.”
In Connecticut, a slate of five five candidates opposed to critical race theory lost the board of education race in the Guilford school system, where a racial reckoning began years ago, first with an episode in which a student wore blackface to a home football game, followed by a fraught debate over the elimination of its mascot, the Indians. Parents for Guilford Students, which backed the losing candidates, posted on Facebook: “Our five republican candidates lost the BOE election.” But, the post said, “those that lost the most are the dear children of Guilford.”
In Colorado, early results showed anti-mask candidate Schumé Navarro trailing in her bid for a seat on the Cherry Creek School District. The mother of three went to court last month to win the right to attend a district candidate event without a face mask, arguing that she cannot wear one because of abuse she suffered as a child. “The environment and the culture that it’s creating is just stealing from our kids,” she said of masks.
However, the fight against diversity education resonated in the school board race in the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas, where Andrew Yeager won on Tuesday night. He was backed by a political action committee that opposes a diversity and equality plan created after a video of students chanting a racial slur began circulating online three years ago. A temporary restraining order has blocked the plan.
1776 Action, a group inspired by former President Donald Trump’s now-disbanded 1776 Commission that played down America’s role in slavery, urged candidates to sign a pledge calling for the restoration of “honest, patriotic education.” At least 300 candidates and elected officials did so, said Adam Waldeck, the group’s president. Waldeck said his group also sent out mailers and targeted text messages in races in Johnston, Iowa, where three candidates have signed the pledge, and in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where law enforcement was called to investigate threats against school board President Chris McCune. The backlash stems from his ordering the removal from a July meeting of a parent who kept demanding information about critical race theory after her two-minute time limit had ended. McCune, who is on track to retain his seat, wrote in a letter to the Daily Local News newspaper in Pennsylvania that it is his duty to “maintain order” and insisted that the district doesn’t even teach critical race theory.
Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/article255471366.html#storylink=cpy
I think “our guys” won in Denver … still trying to figure it out . Randi has twitter chain re parent/teacher collaboration and school board elections
Sent from my iPhone Peter Goodman Ed in the Apple
We also had a “vote for three” slate of candidates for the local school board. On the ballot their names were enclosed in brackets. They were running on an anti-masking anti vaccine mandate platform. They were defeated.
Robert, where are you located?
Here in my neck of the woods in NE Ohio, the paper reported that almost all anti-maskers lost.
it is a question now being discussed on some news outlets: should those running for school board have their political affiliation listed beside their names?
Just to quibble on the first sentence to add to what I wrote on other post, in my view, the race was not “centered on education issues, especially whether parents had a right to control what their children read.” These issues were a proxies for race and entitlement. I feel comfortable in asserting that anyone who claims that they voted because they understood CRT and it’s real world implications is lying. Virginia’s results should sober us up as to what the majority of white voters will do, whether they identify publicly as liberal, moderate or conservative.
The race was centered on race.
With the winners starting on the 70 yard line of the 100 yard dash.
🥇
The excellent journalism of the News and Observer is an interesting story in and of itself. The newspaper was started in the late part of the Nineteenth Century by Josephus Daniels, a white supremacist who used his paper to fan the flames of racial hatred in North Carolina. His paper went a long way toward causing the Willmington race war that drove successful African-American businessmen out of that town in the early part of the Twentieth Century.
Some would have us believe that the ugly history of the News and Observer might discredit its present-day reporting. This type of logic is often used to silence critics or proponents of various ideas. It should be rejected where possible. My grandfather was probably a racist (I never knew him). My mother, his daughter, was not. Attitudes may be acquired by family or association, but it does not always happen that way.
It is just so funny that the “ed reform movement”, who seek to abolish school boards and denigrate them as not representative are (now) such huge fans of school boards but only when they can control them.
You’re either in favor of democratically elected school governance or you’re not. Ed reform is not. Unless they succeed in taking one over, I guess- then school boards are wonderful.
If ed reformers had had their way there wouldn’t have been any school board meetins to protest, because there wouldn’t have been a school board or public meetings. They’re only able to make their views known at these board meetings because that’s how public school governance operates. Do they support democratic governance of public schools now? Is this yet another completely incoherent and inconsistent ed reform position?
School boards run by liberals – bad and not representative of the public
School boards run by conservatives- good and an example of the “will of the people”
Ed reformers need to decide where they are on democratic governance of public schools. They can’t oppose it when they lose and support it when they win.
I live in a conservative area, and my school board is (unsuprisingly) quite conservative.
I still support democratically elected public school governance, although I am not a conservative. That’s a consistent position.
What’s ed reform’s position? School boards are only legitimate when we elect ed reformers?
Yes, that is the position of ed reform and right wing conservatives.
Policing is good, unless white people want to storm the Capitol, in which case police must stand down.
The GOP, the know nothing (and the party of no) Christo-fascist party. However, the GOP version of Christianity is a bastardized, skewed and arse-backwards transmogrification of the original dogma.
In Las Cruces, NM the voters voted against candidates for the Board of Education who were opposed to wear masks and the teaching of Critical Racial Theory. The vote was overwhelming. The anti-mask, anti-CRT, pro-school reformers spent a lot of money on this election but the voters told them to take hike. Their kind are not welcome on the local BoE.
Moeone2015: great news from New Mexico!
From what I’ve been reading about election results outside of Virginia, maybe Trump’s BIG LIE of election fraud came true in Virginia, but that alleged fraud has little or nothing to do with Democrats and everything to do with dictator-loving Trumpists.
When the traitor repeats that Democrats cheat, he’s really talking about himself and his MAGA Trumpists. Accusing the opposition of cheating allegedly motivates his people to cheat even if he is lying and the MAGA mob knows it.
Finding justification for doing just about anything seems to be an alleged human trait, even when someone has to lie to manufacture that justification.
“If You Didn’t Vote for Trump, Your Vote is Fraudulent” really means, “If you voted for Trump, do it again, and again, and again as many times as you can get away with it and the accuse the Demcorats of cheating.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/voter-fraud/617354/
YADDA, YADDA, YADDA around the big elephant
in the room…
For all the eulogiums, exortations, spent
energy and money, declared aims, or mission
statements, the cognitive capture of
PROPAGANDA remains.
Scapegoating the “others”, has yet to
turn on their light of discernment.
Demonizing the “cretins” bamboozled by
propaganda doesn’t “cure” them.
Mind reading
(I just know what they’re thinking
or what they know, or don’t know)
doesn’t “fix” them.
Predicting the future
(show ’em this and they’ll do that,
’cause once I saw that I did this)
doesn’t make their future brighter.
Reducing the “conflict” to what
they are learning or failing to
learn, or what lessons are “right”
or what lessons are “wrong”, smacks
of endless debate, a bourgeois
trap, that gets us NOWHERE.
If “education” doesn’t counteract
the mind-control regime of marketing
or propaganda, how does blaming the
short-sightedness of the voters
resolve the issue?
Axios, 11-4-2021, reported that, “A new PAC (Ryan Girdinsky founded the 1776 PAC) focused on electing conservative candidates to public school boards, by raising fears about how racism is taught, won three-fourths of its 58 races across 7 states.” Pa.-13, Cols.- 11, Ks.- 9, N.J. 4, Va. -3 and 2 each in Ohio and Minn.
A fawning interview with Ryan Girdinsky posted at Catholic Vote enables readers to see the intersection of GOP voting with conservative religion and the packaging of CRT to create opposition.