“There were political ripples to these phenomena as well.”

In a recent livestream discussion addressing issues of education, parental choice and the 2022 midterms, a panel of experts considered to what degree the disruptions of the pandemic have altered the dynamics and landscape of education politics. (You can watch the full conversation here) 

The event was sponsored by ����Ӱ�� and the Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools project, and moderated by PPI’s Tressa Pankovits; panelists included Andy Rotherham, a member of the Virginia State School Board and ����Ӱ��’s Board of Directors; journalist and author Anya Kamenetz; Michael Hartney of the Hoover Institute; George Parker, former educator, teachers union president and adviser to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; and 74 Senior Writer Kevin Mahnken.

In the closing stages of Florida’s gubernatorial race, opinion polling has generally offered happy news to Ron DeSantis. One recent survey showed the incumbent governor trouncing his rival by eight points, an impressive lead in a state that has become famous for its close finishes on Election Day.

There’s an odd catch, however: The poll didn’t test Gov. DeSantis against his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist. Instead, in a hypothetical Republican primary in Florida, both men’s home state. 

Those findings, released in late September and trumpeted in , offer a remarkable statement on DeSantis’s prospects for a second term, as well as the state of conservative politics in the Biden era. Even as the governor cruises to a likely reelection victory, his reception in the Republican presidential discussion has been warmer than the waters off Key West. 

DeSantis is ascending to rare altitudes for a first-term governor, akin to the sudden highs achieved by former Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan early in their tenures — or by less successful predecessors, such as Chris Christie and Scott Walker. And whatever his fate in future contests, one of the hallmarks of his ascent over the last two years has been a nonstop focus on the politics and policy of K-12 education.

From his early battles against mandatory COVID safety measures in schools to this year’s dramatic intervention in local school board races, the pugnacious conservative has embraced fights about what, and where, students learn. If he is known for nothing else in the VFW halls of Iowa and New Hampshire, DeSantis will always be cheered among conservative activists for his efforts to curb what he calls teacher indoctrination on controversial subjects like race, gender, and sexuality. In so doing, he has both locked Democrats into a battle over classroom instruction and redefined what it means to be an education governor in the 2020s.

Susan MacManus, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of South Florida, said that DeSantis had road-tested a political strategy — foregrounding K-12 schools as the preeminent front in the culture wars — that is already being emulated by Republican officeholders and candidates in deep-red territory. 

“He is an astute observer of what captures people’s attention,” MacManus noted. “But the fact that he was able to pull it off in a state that has always been extremely competitive was instructive to Republican governors across the country.”

The governor’s closing argument to voters relies heavily on his education record, with campaign ads specifically referencing his fight to reopen schools during the pandemic, prevent trans athletes from participating in girls’ athletic competitions, and even lift teacher pay. The package, said Democratic political consultant Matthew Isbell, seems designed to endear DeSantis to conservatives in a future contest with Trump while simultaneously charting a more temperate course for his upcoming contest back home. The path can be a tricky one to navigate.

“He is playing the game of, ‘How far to the right can I go?’” Isbell said. “With every degree to the right he goes, he might lose a couple percentage points for reelection. He wants to tilt right enough to do well in a primary in 2024, but at the same time not cost himself his reelection.”

Going ‘all the way to the bottom of the ballot’

For more than two decades, Florida has been home to perhaps the most ambitious education reforms in the nation. 

The process began under Gov. Jeb Bush, who precipitated changes to public schooling at the state level that were no less bold than those championed by his older brother in the No Child Left Behind Act. Implementing a program that has the “Florida Formula,” Gov. Bush first established an A–F grading system for schools based on performance on state standardized tests. Third-graders who couldn’t demonstrate proficiency on a reading exam were to be retained for another year of literacy instruction. High schoolers were required to pass tests in English and math to gain a diploma.

Those changes were accompanied by a dizzying expansion of school choice options. Charter schools, first approved in 1996 under Bush’s Democratic predecessor, , or roughly 13 percent of all Florida K-12 students. And a sprawling system of both private school vouchers and “opportunity scholarships” provided to families has consistently grown as well, drawing yet more families from traditional public schools.

Under Bush and his Republican successors in office (no Democrat has won the governor’s mansion since 1994) new reforms have been proposed, enacted, defended, and expanded. Only irregularly have their progress been checked, as when then-Gov. Charlie Crist — who served one term as a Republican before leaving office, switching parties, and running for his old job as a Democrat — that would have tied teacher salaries to student performance. Multiple indicators of academic achievement, from standardized test scores to graduation rates to advanced course-taking, have all from the swath of changes to state education policy. According to , a data tool that adjusts NAEP scores according to student demographics, fourth graders in Florida achieve the best results in the country on both math and reading. Historically disadvantaged subgroups, such as Hispanic and low-income students, have routinely posted better scores than in other states.

DeSantis has not significantly wavered from the Florida Formula, but he has added a few ingredients of his own. Many Americans first encountered the outspoken governor through to reopen his state’s schools for in-person instruction early in the 2020-21 academic year. Later, while inveighing against a variety of pandemic-related restrictions on public activity, he . Such is his hostility toward COVID precautions that to remove their masks at a press conference earlier this year.

DeSantis also quickly gained a following on the Right for his eagerness to leap into the national debate over identity issues, including when he prohibiting trans women from competing in girls’ sporting events. But it was only later, after Republicans campaigned victoriously on education in that fall’s Virginia elections, that he truly found his voice in the education culture wars. By this March, he approved two new laws, the and the , that narrowed discussions of race and sexuality in K-12 settings. The subsequent rush of media attention, amid a nationwide furore over the alleged teaching of critical race theory, made DeSantis the man to watch in 2022 — an echo of the coverage that made Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker a conservative darling in the wake of his 2011 clampdown on teachers’ rights to collectively bargain.

Isbell argued that the persistent focus on social controversies, which has sometimes cast teachers as a kind of fifth column inside classrooms, is changing the tenor of Florida’s education discourse. School choice and accountability remain high on the policy docket, as is demonstrated by the passage of recent legislation to and program; but where these innovations were once predicated on arguments about school quality, now they appealed to parents’ anxieties.

“The school choice issue has gone from, ‘The public schools are failing you,’ to, ‘The public schools are indoctrinating your children, and you need to get away from that,’” Isbell remarked.

DeSantis’s detractors argue that the change in political winds, and particularly the new laws on instruction, have led . So many job vacancies exist in the state that the legislature to allow military veterans to step into teaching roles with no professional credentials. That upheaval exists even in spite of multiple raises to teacher salaries greenlit by the governor and his Republican allies. 

If the role of “education governor” was once a technocratic fixation, its successes measured in NAEP bumps and climbing statewide pre-K enrollments, DeSantis has embodied something different: a willingness to put schools at the heart of his political advocacy. The success of that strategy was made evident by the governor’s unusual decision to issue endorsements in 30 Florida school board races, which are nonpartisan. In elections this August, the majority of his preferred slate . 

Tiffany Justice, a Florida mother and co-founder of the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty, invited DeSantis to speak at her group’s national summit in July, to direct their children’s education. In an interview, she called his decision to wade into local politics “risky”; still, the success of the candidates he endorsed only burnished the governor’s influence 

“It’s not something that a governor has traditionally done, to go all the way to the bottom of the ballot,” Justice said. “But he, more than anyone else, knows the power that school boards hold. And he saw that, even as he tried to protect constitutional freedoms in his state, these school board members were abdicating their authority to bureaucrats.”

The cost of the culture war

The contentious character of the statewide education debate comes as a disappointment to Norín Dollard, an education policy analyst at the Florida Policy Institute. 

A longtime specialist in family policy, Dollard said she regretted that this fall’s gubernatorial race hadn’t led to more discussion of the plight of poor students, particularly in a state where nearly they couldn’t put enough food on the table. On conservative-friendly grounds of workforce preparation and economic development, she added, the circumstances call for more state assistance to school districts. But K-12 funding mechanisms and early childhood education haven’t yet had their time in the sun.

“The business case can be made for investing in schools and young children — if you do that, you get more employed people who contribute to the economy,” said Dollard. “That story isn’t told when you get into these vitriolic arguments over which is the best way to educate kids about gender and sexuality.”

If anything, Democrats have been happy to pick up the gauntlet that DeSantis threw this year. Crist and the state party followed the governor’s lead on school board endorsements, of their own candidates. The Democratic nominee has also directly attacked the Stop WOKE and Parental Rights in Education laws, unveiling a “freedom to learn” policy platform and vowing to make the state’s commissioner of education an elected office.

To top it off, Crist Karla Hernández-Mats, the head of Miami-Dade’s teacher’s union. The selection distilled an already-polarized debate — between committed education reformers and defenders of traditional public schools — even further. Isbell called it an understandable political calculation, though not without potential downsides.

“Sometimes politicians fall into thinking that if they’re losing on an issue, they need to steer away from it — not talk about it, or adopt the right talking points,” Isbell observed. “Crist and the Democrats have made the opposite decision, that they’re going to take a definitive stance and try to win the public argument on education. That’s a gamble, no doubt about it.”

DeSantis and his supporters seem to welcome the clear battle lines. Combining poll results and expert race forecasts, the political site FiveThirtyEight has projected the incumbent as on November 8. A more partisan race, and particularly one in which DeSantis’s education agenda is pitted against a unionized teacher, could hold down his reelection margin somewhat. But veering toward the center would do little to bolster his national momentum.

And that momentum grows by the day, Justice said. 

“I’ve had moms in Washington, in Oregon, in Michigan, in Illinois, in California say, ‘I wish Ron DeSantis was our governor.’ These are two-time Obama voters, people who voted for Newsom and Whitmer. Some of them have told me, ‘I cannot wait to vote to vote for Ron DeSantis for president.’ ”

Correction: The text has been corrected to accurately reflect the opinion of Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice that school boards are shirking their responsibility to hold schools accountable.

The speaker is a mother of five in Wichita, and the is Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly. A Democrat, Kelly was America’s first governor to order K-12 buildings closed in the spring of 2020. After winning a surprise victory in 2018, she is now one of the most endangered incumbents this fall, and — if the commercial is any indication — her record on schools will be the primary focus for her Republican opponent, state Attorney General Derek Schmidt. 

The newly aired attack is typical of battleground elections nationally. With a little over a month to go before the midterms, the issue of K-12 education has come to inhabit an unusual role: a rare point of intersection between national and local politics, as well as a deep faultline in competitive races. 

Both attention and acrimony have mounted continuously since the last national election, with angry cleavages over COVID-related school closures giving way to debates over curriculum, instruction and the rights of parents. And while the public focus has also been redirected by abortion and persistent inflation over the past few months, multiple surveys have shown growing dissatisfaction with schools and surprising parity between the parties on an issue that Democrats have traditionally dominated. 

Republicans have grabbed the initiative by directly addressing parents — both in campaign materials and policy prescriptions — and casting themselves as the defenders of families’ interests. In and , vulnerable Democratic governors stand accused of presiding over ideological indoctrination in classrooms and inept recovery from pandemic learning loss. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who stands to become House Speaker if his caucus enjoys a good night on November 8, a campaign agenda that includes a “parents bill of rights.’ Even campaigns for state superintendent, a position so obscure and technocratic that most states , the support of President Donald Trump and other conservative idols.

But the truly unexpected turn is only apparent further down the ballot. After decades flying under the radar of all except the most attentive voters, school board elections are suddenly attracting more attention and resources than at any time in recent political memory. New advocacy groups have materialized, left and right, to promote candidates and push more parents to get involved in school governance. And their efforts have been noticed by the fastest-rising politician in America: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who made his own foray into local politics this summer by endorsing dozens of school board hopefuls around his state. The of his slate has only hastened DeSantis’s ascent as a potential challenger to Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. Increasingly, the small-bore powers affecting individual schools and districts are playing out on a national stage.

Rebecca Jacobsen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University, chronicled some of these trends about the growing influence of national politics on low-level elections. But that analysis, she noted, couldn’t foresee the post-COVID flowering of organizations devoted almost solely to capturing boards and changing policies from the ground up.

“As someone who has studied local education politics, what’s remarkable is the way that education is getting drawn into a highly polarized, partisan debate,” Jacobsen said. “Even debates that were more left/right before were not nearly as stark as they are now.”

But Tiffany Justice said that the explosion of interest in local campaigns was, if anything, inevitable in light of the repeated crises and consternation surrounding schools since 2020. A co-founder of the Florida-based conservative group Moms for Liberty — perhaps the most notable new entrant in this midterm cycle — Justice said that K-12 would be a point of emphasis in elections up and down the ballot this November.

“There’s nothing more important in a parent’s life than their children, and nobody’s going to fight for anything like a parent is going to fight for their child,” Justice argued. “If I was running for office, and I wanted to win, having parents in your corner is a pretty smart move.”

Education in the culture wars

While school boards are the primary governing entity for virtually every school district in the United States, they have seldom been thrust into the national political discussion. The staid content of the average board meeting, generally ranging from budgetary goals to facilities management, wouldn’t quicken the pulse of most activists.

The most recent exception came in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when Christian conservatives amid debates about issues like school prayer and American history standards. In suburban areas like Loudoun County, Virginia, right-leaning members to end its mandate on sex education. , a prominent evangelical leader and GOP consultant, declared a preference for one thousand school board members over winning the presidency.

After notching some wins, the wave dissipated. It wasn’t until the early Biden area that Loudoun County — much more socially progressive after decades of demographic transformation — again saw a serious bout of public engagement in school governance, this time directed against the board’s policies on COVID, gifted education and school bathrooms. The perception of liberalism behind the district’s equity agenda figured heavily in last year’s race for governor, ultimately won by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. 

Jon Valant, director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, called the Youngkin win a proof point that statewide campaigns could turn on education issues. In the intervening period, however, action could only be taken at the local level, where thousands of board races across the nation offer a plethora of opportunities. The sheer number of seats being contested makes it difficult to follow trends in school board races (Valant called data collection on the subject “a nightmare”), but turnout in some districts 10 percent in past elections. , 40 percent of board members said they hadn’t faced any competition in their last election.

“These are, relative to just about every other election we have, extremely low-information and low-turnout races,” Valant said. “That means that they’re relatively easy to flip.”

Activists have tested that theory over the last two years by forming political action committees and financing challengers; in some districts, as candidates this year than over the last two elections combined. And shake-ups have followed , where, among other organizations, a PAC sponsored largely by a Christian cellphone company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to capture board seats in multiple counties. 

Ryan Girdusky, an author and former Republican staffer, formed the group 1776 Project PAC in 2021 out of what he said was frustration over prolonged school closures during the pandemic and politically tinged lessons that he contends were common during the period of virtual instruction. While his initial hopes for the project were modest — its staff still consists of just four people, two working part-time — he said he was shocked by the response he has received from over 30,000 small-dollar donors. According to the campaign finance tracker , the PAC has raised over $2.5 million since last year. 

About 95 candidates backed by the 1776 Project have won their races out of , Girdusky said, arguing that its success on a relatively small budget was proof of education’s potency as a campaign issue.

“The thing is that the Right just gave up after a while and focused solely on school choice, and that was a mistake. I think education is a much more prevalent ‘culture war’ issue than a lot of other things that are talked about much more.”

Parents and the pandemic

It will be difficult to measure the ultimate success of groups like the 1776 Project or Moms for Liberty (or even , a progressive organization that has sought to mobilize women in suburban districts to protest laws that ban the teaching of “divisive concepts”). Presuming they make a noticeable dent in the races they target, fast-forming political movements are often just as quick to run out of oxygen and dissolve.

But at least for this cycle, state-level politics is fixated by the question of what happens inside schools.

The call for a national “parents’ bill of rights” — first introduced in Congress , and written to mandate transparency around curriculum and safety in schools — has now been , a former Republican governor of Maine who is now running to win back his old job. Republicans in the state also aired an ad this spring criticizing the Maine Department of Education for promulgating lessons intended for kindergarten classrooms that included material on gender and sexual identities (the lessons were ).

In Wisconsin, where school board elections are officially non-partisan and campaign costs have typically run into the hundreds of dollars, the state GOP has to its county offices in a bid to grab more seats — more than three times as much as Democrats spent. Republicans in California have called “Parent Revolt,” attempting to recruit more candidates to run in the roughly 2,500 board races this year. Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose reelection prospects look fairly secure in public polls, has nevertheless to advise lawmakers on education policy after her Republican opponent . 

But the figure who has most unmistakably bound himself to education politics this year has been DeSantis. After dominating national headlines earlier this year by fulminating against the teaching of critical race theory and gender identity, the Florida governor into school board races, endorsing 30 candidates for a variety of boards this summer. The move provoked an immediate reaction, as DeSantis’s Democratic rival, Charlie Crist, his own group of “pro-parent” aspirants.

The dueling endorsements could hardly have worked out better for the Republican, as 24 of his favored candidates or performed well enough to proceed to later run-off ballots. In addition to boosting party enthusiasm and interest ahead of his November reelection bid (which political observers expect him to win handily), DeSantis demonstrated strong coattails in a crucial 2024 swing state. 

Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida, said that the political coup was made possible by the explosion of parental anger and suspicion over the last few years. Before COVID, she argued, there was “no payoff” to becoming involved with unpredictable, down-ballot races.

“Obviously, if a race is very low-profile with voters, what’s the point of getting in the middle of it? But what the pandemic did was to focus voters’ attention on school board races,” MacManus observed. “All of a sudden, it became relevant politically to get engaged in endorsing.”

Michigan State’s Jacobsen said that the shift in focus toward state- and local-level education politics represents more than just a political opportunity; it also follows the recognition that, following years of an expanding federal role in overseeing K-12, most influence still resides in school communities themselves.

“These national groups seem to be aware that you can’t just mandate from the top anymore. We tried that with No Child Left Behind, tried turning our attention to the national level and saying, ‘Let’s push a law through, and everybody will have to [reform schools].’ But the local level still has a great amount of power.”

But according to public opinion data released Monday, Democrats and Republicans are actually internally divided by significant generation gaps in their attitudes toward certain aspects of education. Younger Democrats are much more likely to favor school choice than their older counterparts, pollsters found, while Millennial and Generation Z Republicans look more favorably on teachers’ unions than Baby Boomers.

The polling was administered in March by the research group SocialSphere on behalf of Murmuration, a reform-oriented nonprofit. Roughly seven months ahead of a midterm election cycle that could shake up control of Congress and state governments, its findings strongly suggest that voters of all backgrounds see public education as a crucial issue after two years of COVID-related tumult. 

SocialSphere founder John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy Institute of Politics and a former advisor to the Biden presidential campaign, said that he and his colleagues had detected significant, generational cleavages within the parties across a host of focus groups conducted with respondents from around the country.

“The new generations of voters, who have already played a significant role in the 2018 and 2020 elections, leave their partisanship at home when they go to vote and engage with schools,” Della Volpe said. “The old framework that has governed education politics really is not relevant in 2022.”

With a sample of nearly 7,000 registered voters, the research combines and weights a single national poll with additional surveys in nine states and Washington, D.C. Several — California, Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, and Georgia — are holding gubernatorial elections this fall, while the nation’s capital will choose its mayor. 

shows President Biden’s party facing tough odds in November, with discontentment around the economy and foreign affairs driving voters toward a typical midterm flip; those trends were crystallized in last year’s surprising breakthrough by Republican Glenn Youngkin, who won the Virginia governor’s race after focusing intensely on pandemic school closures and the backlash against equity politics in schools. 

But when asked which party’s education values aligned most closely with their own, just 34 percent of SocialSphere respondents chose the GOP, compared with 44 percent who sided with Democrats. Another 22 percent said they were unsure. In state-level polls, Democrats were favored on education among voters in California (where they led on the issue by a 19-point margin), Colorado (17 points), Georgia (seven points), New Jersey (26 points), Texas (10 points), and Washington, D.C. (66 points); Republicans held an advantage in Louisiana and Missouri (both by five-point margins), while responses were within the margin of error in both Indiana and Tennessee.

Perhaps more notable than the clash between the parties are the fissures within each. The controversy over critical race theory in K-12 classrooms has acted as the main dividing line between left and right during the Biden era, with outraged parents in multiple states launching dozens of recall efforts against school board members over the teaching of controversial topics like race, gender, and sexuality. Some political experts see the emergence of anti-CRT activist groups like Moms for Liberty as reflecting a populist wave that could both deliver Republican victories this fall and change curricula in classrooms going forward.

Surprisingly, the issue may split Republicans more on the basis of age than it unites them in ideology. Asked whether school districts should teach “all aspects of American history,” including the legacy of slavery and racism, 59 percent of Millennial and Gen Z Republicans said yes, while 28 percent favored banning such lessons. Among Republicans in the Baby Boom and Silent Generations, just 44 percent supported teaching about these subjects, while 46 percent said the practice should be banned if it made white students uncomfortable. The resulting gap between the party’s oldest and youngest voters stands at 33 percentage points. 

Those findings jibe with those of other national polls, which have generally shown widespread support for teaching about the persistence of racism throughout U.S. history. , however, that responses to the issue can vary greatly depending on how questions are phrased.

Teachers’ unions, typically viewed with suspicion on the right, engendered similarly disparate responses. Millennial and Gen Z Republicans gave local unions a favorability rating of plus-15 percent (44 percent favorable versus 29 percent unfavorable), while members of Generation X rated them minus-10 (32 percent favorable versus 42 percent unfavorable.) But those over the age of 57, falling into the Baby Boom and Silent Generations, were much more hostile (25 percent favorable versus 55 percent unfavorable.) While political perceptions can change as young people come to be more aligned with the positions of their favored political party, Della Volpe argued that “nothing in this data” suggests that the views of younger Republican voters will come to resemble those of their parents and grandparents.

Age gaps were apparent on the left as well. The idea of school choice — defined for respondents by SocialSphere as “​​the freedom to choose the educational environment that serves [one’s] children best, regardless of financial ability or home address” — received support from 61 percent of the youngest Democratic voters, but just 38 percent of the oldest. Overall, Democrats above the age of 57 viewed school choice slightly unfavorably (38 percent support versus 44 percent opposition). By contrast, the national Democratic Party has spent much of the last decade distancing itself from alternatives to traditional public schools, which it largely embraced under Presidents Clinton and Obama. Democratic officials at the state and local levels have attempted to curb the growth of charter schools, while the party’s 2020 platform called for “measures to increase accountability” from the sector.

Della Volpe, who recently about the political emergence of Generation Z, said that his past surveys of people in their 20s revealed a cohort that prizes choice and agency above all.

“We see a group that is less supportive of school choice, and they’re aging out of the electorate,” he said. “They’re being replaced by others who value choice, specifically when it comes to their children.”

Pandemic fallout

More broadly, the SocialSphere data indicates that voters across partisan, racial, and gender demographics count public education among the most important political issues of the day. Fifty-two percent of all respondents rated K-12 schools as “very important,” with majorities in all but three state-level surveys saying likewise. That represents a larger share than those rating immigration, climate change, and the protection of traditional values very important, though somewhat lower than inflation (73 percent), the economy (73 percent), health care (67 percent), crime (61 percent), and foreign policy (56 percent). 

Somewhat larger shares of African Americans and Hispanics characterized education as very important (60 percent and 58 percent, respectively) than whites (49 percent). But when asked whether Americans “need to do more as a nation” to ensure that all children receive a high-quality education, the margins among members of different racial groups were virtually identical. Some 60 percent of Republicans agreed with that sentiment, along with 72 percent of Democrats.

The poll’s results also indicate significant, though possibly divergent, support for changes to the U.S. education system. Fifty-three percent of voters, and 55 percent of parents of school-aged children, agreed that the post-COVID recovery was “the time to begin working on the big ideas and changes necessary to improve education,” while 38 percent of voters said they’d prefer to “get back to normal.” But while Democrats agreed on the need for new reforms by a 60-31 split, only a slight plurality of Republicans did (49-43). 

Emma Bloomberg, the founder of Murmuration, said in an interview that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were likely behind the public’s willingness to embrace new approaches. Dissatisfaction with schools’ performance, especially with regard to lengthy closures, may have convinced parents that extensive new measures would need to be taken to help their children catch up from two years of lost learning.

“I can’t think what else it could have been, other than this pandemic offering a window into those classrooms — there’s nothing like actually seeing how your kids are or aren’t learning — and then the bungled reopening by so many districts…has just left families feeling like the school system didn’t prioritize their children,” said Bloomberg.

Bloomberg said she was heartened to see bipartisan willingness to expend greater national resources in pursuit of a better K-12 system, adding that she hoped younger partisans would vote their beliefs in the coming months. The eldest daughter of one of America’s most prominent advocates for school choice, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, she said that Millennials’ relative detachment from political orthodoxy could make them “more reasonable and attuned to the impacts of policies on communities” — if they actually made it to the ballot box.

“Young voters get a lot of hype, and it’s always ‘Will they or won’t they turn out?’ This moment really does feel like…an opportunity to engage younger generations. If they believe deeply in the importance of a high-functioning public education system, that gives me hope not only for this cycle, but certainly for the cycles ahead.”