Democrats are on their heels when it comes to education. There is an emerging narrative that school reopening issues during the COVID-19 pandemic hurt Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe in his reelection bid and may do further damage to Democrats down the road. The argument goes that blue states—including Virginia—were too cautious in keeping schools closed for in-person learning over the course of the 2020-21 school year, and that this has angered parents who had to deal with the fallout from those closures
There is no question that school closures during the pandemic were incredibly disruptive to families. The science also suggests that in-person schooling, especially with masking policies that are widely supported , has not had much of an effect on COVID transmission. And of course the number of children who have been hospitalized or died of COVID-19, while not zero, is extremely low by any reasonable standard ( lower than a typical annual flu, for instance). So I agree with proponents who say that schools i
But the reality is that this narrative falls apart because parents are simply not dissatisfied with the performance of educational institutions. If anything, parents are more satisfied than I think they should be given what happened last year. Survey after survey finds strong parent support for how schools handled COVID-19 and are handling the ongoing recovery. The most recent nationally-representative data finds that about 80 to 90% of parents are satisfied with how schools are handling education issues du