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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some nuances I'm not seeing reflected here - as the working parent of a young child, I definitely was told that by wanting in-person school, I "just wanted free daycare"...but usually that sentiment was expressed by people of conservative political persuasions who probably thought women should be SAHMs anyway ("if you can't/don't want to take care of your own kids you shouldn't have had them!"). From teachers/teacher advocacy groups, I mostly heard a lot of "not [reopening] until it's safe", which seemed to be unclear at best and a constantly moving goalpost at worst.  I was incensed by teachers who took full advantage of priority vaccination and then still refused to return to in-person teaching.

All that said...the majority of APS and FCPS parents chose remote learning in the fall of 2020 (not sure about other counties). You can split hairs and say it's because the proposed in-person offerings weren't workable (staggered starts, alternate days), but looking back 15 months ago, we didn't know what we do now, and most people erred on the side of keeping kids home.

The "OpenFCPS" crowd was an uneasy alliance of Covid deniers, parents who wanted/needed their kids out of the house, and people with serious concerns about their children's educational needs being met (or not)...while they were loud, they were never able to formulate a cogent "Plan B" that included CDC-compliant risk mitigation measures.

I can understand being mad at local school boards, at teachers, at teachers unions. Some of the stuff that was done (remote school from within school facilities, for a fee?!) was the antithesis of equity. And the fact that working parents got the rawest deal of the pandemic has been broadly documented. All fair points.

[B]But to go from there to...voting in the party that opposes paid family and medical leave, dispenses with public health mitigation measures like masks and vaccinations, and siphons off public school money to private schools and corporate-helmed charters (while simultaneously decreasing overall incoming tax revenue) seems to me to be textbook cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.  I won't go so far as to say flipping one's vote to Youngkin was racist, but I absolutely believe that the people who did so en masse (college-educated white women) acted in an effort to preserve their own privilege in shaping public schools to best serve their own interests. Just because Youngkin was smart enough to largely keep his mouth shut during the campaign doesn't mean he's not the policy equivalent of Trump et al.[/B][/quote]

I disagree with you on some of the specifics here, but I think the key point you are missing isn't that Democrats who care about education voted for Youngkin but instead that Democrats who care about education couldn't bring themselves to vote for McAuliffe. You are framing this as "flipping" to Youngkin, but McAuliffe's bigger problem was the low voter turnout. And that had a lot to do with the positions of the Democratic party on education over the past two years. Meanwhile, the Republican base was energized, probably because Youngkin is an objectively better candidate and possibly because moderate Republicans and independents saw a potential path away from Trumpism through Youngkin. But more significantly for McAuliffe, Democrats stayed away in large numbers and did not vote.

Therefore, I think you are abjectly wrong about the bolded. McAuliffe's problem wasn't really large numbers of voters who switched. Yes, some did. But by far the bigger problem for McAuliffe were the large numbers of Democrats who used to believe in the Democrats as the party of education, and who used to see the Democrats as essentially being a general force for good, but who have become deeply disillusioned because of the school closures and other Democratic actions on education. Those folks aren't voting Republican, but they aren't willing to vote for McAuliffe either. They stayed home. And that's what cost McAuliffe the election.[/quote]

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