Earlier this month,
Iowa
Gov. Kim Reynolds took a risk and came out against four members of her party, each of whom was running for reelection to the state legislature. She endorsed their primary opponents, and when asked why, Reynolds said the decision was rather simple: They refused to get on board with her push for
school choice.
“Just because of the gut-wrenching stories I hear from parents and what their kids are being subjected to,” Reynolds
said.
“And they really just want a quality education.”
Reynolds made a bet that parents would side with her and vote against the four incumbents. That bet paid off. Two-term state Rep. Jon Thorup, two-term state Rep. Dustin Hite, one-term state Rep. Dennis Bush, and two-term state Rep. Dave Maxwell all lost their bids to candidates who agreed with Reynolds that parents deserve the right to decide what their children learn and from whom.
The same thing happened in Kentucky and Texas.
Across the board
, candidates who chose to side with the education establishment over families lost.
The lesson in all of this is clear: Parents are fed up with an education system that abandoned their children for two years but had been failing them long before that. Test scores and academic achievement were dropping well before
the COVID-19 pandemic began,
in part because educators focused more on indoctrinating students with woke concepts, such as critical race theory and gender ideology, than on teaching them to read and write.
Parents want out, and they’ll vote for just about anyone who promises to help them leave the public school system. Indeed, a recent poll found that
82% of parents
said they’d be willing to support a candidate from another political party if that candidate’s education platform was aligned with their own. This finding was consistent across the political spectrum: Eighty-eight percent of independents, 81% of Democrats, and 79% of Republicans agreed that the well-being of their children was more important than party affiliation.
Lawmakers who, for whatever reason, are reluctant to break the education monopoly should take this as a warning: What happened in Iowa will happen to you if parents believe you’ll stand in the way of what’s best for their children. Parents have finally found their voice, and they’re not afraid to make you start listening.
