Two weeks later, after a hectic Election Day in which McAuliffe was denied his bid for a second gubernatorial term and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy barely survived his own brush with an unheralded Republican challenger, the poll’s findings offer one explanation of what went wrong for Democrats in their first electoral test of the Biden era.

David Paleologos, Suffolk’s chief pollster, noted that Democrats have traditionally been the party entrusted by voters to oversee K-12 schools. Healthcare and education have been “the two issue pillars” for the party in the minds of the public, countering Republicans’ traditional edge on taxes and national security. But in Virginia, at least, one of their supports had given way; while 75 percent of healthcare-focused respondents in Suffolk’s poll approved of Joe Biden’s performance as president, just 38 percent of education-focused respondents did.

“There’s a broader potential problem for Democrats when Republican candidates can even be competitive — forget leading — among those primarily concerned with education,” said Paleolgos. “I think that is something that should give Democrats pause.”

The results of the 2021 election cycle will take more than a few weeks to parse, as county-level returns are dissected by number-crunchers in both parties. And the importance of education must also be weighed against structural challenges that couldn’t have been avoided; dating back to the 1970s, the party holding the White House almost never wins the Virginia governorship, while no Democrat has been reelected as New Jersey’s governor under any circumstances. 

But two things have become clear in light of the Democrats’ dismal results. The first is that losing their advantage on a signature issue can cost them dearly, even in blue-trending states where they have nominated popular candidates. The second is that both sides now have an incentive to make education a major priority in 2022, when control over the U.S. House, the Senate, and 36 governorships will be at stake.

And the public’s discontent with school systems, ranging from their performance during COVID to their handling of controversial subjects like race and gender, shows no sign of abating. Joanne Weiss, an education consultant who served as chief of staff to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the Obama White House, said that parents’ fear and anger had first been triggered by the disruptions of the pandemic. But the gradual decline in COVID cases and deaths won’t necessarily bring an end to their outrage, she added.

“COVID response required nimbleness and creativity that the education system was incapable of giving,” Weiss said in an email. “So while COVID was the spark that ignited it, that pile of kindling has been sitting there, unattended, for years. Even if COVID were to magically disappear tomorrow, the smoldering would continue.” 

McAulliffe’s political miscue

Virginia Republicans were talking about education throughout their gubernatorial primary and into the general election. But it took a Democrat to bring the issue to national attention.

McAuliffe, a longtime Democratic campaign operative who first served as the state’s governor from 2014 to 2018, infamously said in a September debate that he didn’t believe “parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The tossed-off remark, made in response to several high-profile cases of Virginia parents objecting to the inclusion of controversial materials in classrooms and school libraries, quickly proved to be the decisive political miscue of 2021.

In a stroke, McAuliffe’s words helped consolidate multiple strands of public disapproval (in a , two senior Youngkin campaign strategists pointed to the moment as “the piece that tied it all together”). Many parents objected to Virginia’s generally deliberate pace of reopening schools to in-person instruction; others — instigated as much by local curricular debates as national messaging campaigns by Fox News and other conservative outlets — sought to ban instruction of race issues that has been grouped under the label of critical race theory. Both were invigorated by the former governor’s apparent dismissal of family concerns. 

Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., said that while McAuliffe’s campaign eventually attempted to clarify his meaning, the efforts were “too little, too late.” 

“It really became the core of the Youngkin campaign,” Farnsworth said. “The campaign almost entirely morphed into a conversation about parents’ rights in education once McAuliffe made his misstatement.”

Keri Rodrigues, a Massachusetts Democrat and former labor organizer who leads the National Parents Union, said the defeat that followed was proof that Democrats had “taken their legacy as champions of public education for granted.” Though of activists attempting to curb the influence of critical race theory, Rodrigues has also pilloried Democrats for their relationships with teacher’s unions (McAuliffe campaigned with American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten during the race’s final days) and argued that the party had failed to hold educational systems accountable during the pandemic.

“We saw the catastrophic failure of our nation’s public education system happen in our living rooms, and we were left to fend for ourselves,” Rodrigues said in an email. “Since that point, Democrats have outright rejected any criticism of the performance of these systems or recovery efforts — while parents and families have continued to be left struggling with their concerns unheard.”

Democrats running in both state-level and congressional races next year will benefit from the example of McAuliffe’s gaffe, and Farnsworth theorized that they could avoid similar missteps by calling for school governance to be led by a “partnership” between parents and education professionals. Moreover, the party will still have the opportunity to pass a host of family- and school-related initiatives through its Build Back Better legislation, including universal preschool, paid family leave, and a permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Given a year to advertise those achievements and watch COVID’s threat to public health slowly diminish, Democrats could once again seize the initiative on a policy area they have historically dominated.

According to polling data provided by Gallup, Inc., the public has trusted Democrats more on education almost continuously for the last three decades. Election-year polls from 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2016 all found respondents favoring Democratic presidential candidates to manage schools, usually by double-digit margins. (Then-president George W. Bush took a late lead on the issue in his 2004 contest with John Kerry, and no data could be found for the 2012 presidential election at the time of publication.)

But Paleologos said that Democrats’ failure in Virginia had already consigned next year’s crop of candidates to answering press questions about whether parents should have input in how schools are run. Pointing to past Republican successes with pre-election platforms like 1994’s Contract with America, he predicted the GOP would seek to use education as a wedge to split liberal Democrats from the center.

“Even if you pass some really progressive education legislation, Republican candidates are going to force Democrats to” make some commitment to parental control over K-12 schools, Paleologos said. “Now, a smart Democratic candidate would say, ‘Yeah, I’ll sign a Contract with Parents,’ but then they’re going to be at odds with their progressive base.”

Push for a ‘red wave’

Youngkin’s victory served as a proof of concept for the notion that a deft Republican could win votes by crafting his closing argument around schools. But it also cast doubt on Democrats’ own campaign strategy of tying opponents to Donald Trump at every opportunity.

Paleologos observed that the first-time candidate’s template — one that could be exported next year to battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Maine, where Democratic governors will be running for reelection — was to win back middle-class voters in the suburbs while “one-upping Trump in rural areas, even without having Trump next to him.” It’s unknown how much Trump, who has supercharged Republican turnout in two national races, intends to campaign with GOP hopefuls next year, and that he remains a deeply divisive figure. But Youngkin enjoyed a surge in downstate support even in Trump’s absence, riding the former president’s endorsement to nearly half a million more votes than the Republican gubernatorial nominee received in 2017.

Republicans’ hopes for a red wave will rest on the enthusiasm of their base, which has shown itself to be extremely animated by K-12 issues. A released in August found that 73 percent of American parents were either somewhat or completely satisfied with the quality of their children’s education, roughly in line with previous years. But a detailed breakdown of the results provided by the organization found that 34 percent of Republicans described themselves as “completely dissatisfied” with schools, by far the highest level for that group since 2001. Twenty-five percent of independents said the same, representing a seven-point jump since before the pandemic began.

If the stage is set for a national push, the party seems ready to make one. In the immediate aftermath of last week’s elections, at the same time Democrats took steps to finalize the framework of their Build Back Better legislation, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that Republicans would soon introduce a “parents’ bill of rights” to promote transparency in curricular content and protect the participation of parents in school governance.

The question is whether such initiatives are the stuff that majorities are made on. The last midterm wave favoring Republicans came in 2010, when right-wing activists incensed over deficits, government spending, and Obamacare coalesced in an amorphous movement known as the Tea Party. A revival of that feat will require coordination and skilled messaging, Farnsworth said, but education could offer a useful conduit for conservative energies that exist already.

“In many ways, the critical race theory debate of 2021 is just the latest version of the death panel conversation from Obamacare, or the Willie Horton story of 1988. The question isn’t whether this is an accurate portrayal of what’s going on, the question is whether this can be weaponized to benefit Republicans. In 2021, as in 2010, as in 1988, the answer is yes.”

So how was it that popular former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, widely seen as the Democrats’ strongest contender when he won the party’s gubernatorial nomination in June, lost his bid for reelection on Tuesday night? And how did his opponent, Republican businessman and political neophyte Glenn Youngkin, harness a wave of public outrage about education issues to become the state’s next leader?

It’s a question that holds national implications for U.S. politics next year. In 2022, 36 governorships and thousands of state legislative seats will be up for grabs in the midterm elections, to say nothing of the countless school board races that will also be contested. If the GOP can replicate Youngkin’s pitch to parents infuriated over the pandemic’s disruptions to student learning — and the perceived incursions of progressive orthodoxy on race, gender, and sexuality — Tuesday’s results may only be a taste of what’s to come.

For insight into the election and its consequences, we spoke with education commentator Andrew Rotherham, a former member of the Virginia state board of education and co-founder of the consultancy Bellwether Partners. 

​​����Ӱ��: How much do you think the Virginia election result had to do with education versus what we could broadly call “fundamentals”: the Delta surge, Biden’s sinking approval, voters ready for a change after picking Democrats all these years? 

Andrew Rotherham: It is a tough environment for Democrats in general, and to some extent this was an election about the fundamentals reasserting themselves with Trump not on the ballot — the return of college-educated men to Republicans in Virginia, for instance. The role that education seems to have played is reinforcing those atmospherics and that frame, that the Democrats are an out-of-touch party of elites that is not responsive to the concerns of parents. 

Granting that K-12 controversies drove this result to some extent, there’s some controversy over whether COVID mitigation or concerns about “critical race theory” was more to blame. Your thoughts?

It’s still early, but looking around the country at CRT vs. masks, all of it didn’t seem to break cleanly one way in school board races. So that gives credence to the idea it was a bundle of things and generalized frustration more than any particular issue. That said, Democrats did not do a good job staking out a clear position. It’s not that hard for a candidate to tell parents, “We’re going to teach an unsparing history curriculum here in this state that is honest about race and racism, but we’re also not going to tell your kindergartener they are complicit in white supremacy or have your second grader doing a privilege walk.” Instead, Democrats set themselves up to own any ridiculous thing that happened in a school anywhere. 

The suggestion you make seems to dovetail with what you recommended in : “Either Biden or Secretary of Education Cardona are well situated to give a speech or two seizing the 70 percent position in this ‘debate.'” But there’s a complication there: Federal and state officials just don’t have much real power in terms of dictating what happens in classrooms, and there’s now a cottage industry devoted to “exposing” teachers and administrators for political bias. I’m not sure how statewide candidates get around that problem, and it seems like the only solution is for education to become less salient as a campaign issue.

Teachers need three things here. First is a better background in history and contentious issues themselves (as you may have heard, we don’t do a fantastic job of teacher preparation now). Second: high-quality curriculum around these issues. And third: good and sustained professional development. Right now there is enormous demand but little quality control in the DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] industry, and teachers are freelancing. That’s a bad mix. This is complicated, and you don’t want teachers using whatever they found on Pintrest last night or just learned at a one-hour workshop. 

It’s interesting that these videos of teachers doing dumb things richocet around social media — you know, the mock slave auction or the teacher who����around her classroom in an inappropriate way. But then, no one stops to think that maybe telling that exact same teaching force to just do whatever they want on complicated questions around race and class might lead to some problems of different kinds. Secretary Cardona said we should��. That’s the wrong frame. It’s not about trust; like everything else in education, it’s about training and support. Even just using the bully pulpit to call for those things — and acknowleding that not every critic wants schools to stop teaching about slavery — would do a lot of good.

How much contingency was there in this race? Do you see McAuliffe’s as a turning point here? It kind of seems like that was the point when a lot of controversial issues around schools — closures, masking, competitive admissions, Loudoun’s equity push over the last few years — seemed to merge into one central argument over what kind of input parents could have. 

He shouldn’t have said it because it’s an easy point to take out of context. But he’s not wrong, you can’t run schools or classrooms as direct democracies where everyone gets a veto. If you really want to control every little thing that happens educationally for your child, you have to make other arrangements, and we should preserve freedom for people to do things like homeschool. 

But the remark added to this frame that Democrats are the party of unaccountable systems, and as we’ve seen a lot the last few years, people don’t like systems they feel are distant from them. You also had proposals to limit advanced course-taking in math in the name of “equity” and change admissions to competitive magnet schools around Virginia. And I suspect that a bigger contingency adding to that frame may have been what looks like covering up a rape that happened on one of its campuses. And then, of course, frustration with school reopening. There was a lot going on this year and last, so this was building. 

COVID’s not exactly going to disappear as an issue, and there are limits to the political lessons Democrats can take going forward about their strategies there. But it seems like the center-left’s discourse on race, particularly with respect to K-12, may now be seen as a political liability. How true do you think that is, and can you see it being addressed between now and the midterms?

A year in politics is an eternity. But if you look around the country, voters clearly don’t want “woke” or “successor ideology” politics. You saw that in election after election last night in all kinds of circumstances. Americans are pragmatic. Just ask Eric Adams, or voters in Tucson who approved a minimum wage increase last night. Democrats would do well to heed that lesson and respond to that pragmatism. If I were a Democrat running for office, I wouldn’t talk about what’s wrong with America without also talking about what’s right with America — and we should talk honestly about both. But people want good schools, safe neighborhoods, and an opportunity for a better life for themselves and those they care about most. Real life is not Twitter or MSNBC. Democrats seem to be forgetting that.

Whether or not it assuages parents’ concerns about indoctrination in schools, is there something that would-be governors of either party — there are 36 seats up for grabs next year — can do to impact how teachers approach “divisive subjects” going forward? The laws passed this year in several states regulating classroom speech are certainly one approach.

We should unflinchingly call out political leaders who shy from teaching an honest view of American history that includes both this country’s signal achievements as well as it’s darker history and ongoing problems. At a time when our very social and political cohesion is under enormous pressure, we simply cannot shy from both dimensions of that, and schools are a venue where the action is going to be. 

In my view, these laws are not helpful. At best, they lead to stupid confusion like we recently saw ; at worst, they make it even harder for teachers to teach. But you don’t wake up in the morning knowing how to effectively teach about contentious contemporary issues. Again, that takes training and support. There are no shortcuts here, and attempts to find one, whether through these laws or poor-quality trainings, are making the problem worse. 

One interesting facet to the nationwide education debate is that, by and large, the explosion in recall attempts against school board members hasn’t succeeded in ousting many — including two more efforts that failed last night. Recall is obviously a mechanism with huge difficulties baked in, but I’m wondering what you make of the fact that Glenn Youngkin can win a blue state in part due to outrage about school governance even as  can’t get rid of a few board members.

This is an important point. It doesn’t seem like there was a unidirectional wave around the country where it all went one way in board races. Parents are frustrated, people disagree, but in general, people don’t gamble with their schools. There is a real chance the Republicans will misread this and overreach. 

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors.

The result did not come as a shock to local political observers, who noted Youngkin’s bid gathering steam in the final months of the campaign as attention shifted to K-12 issues. showed McAuliffe’s advantage dissipating, particularly with parents of school-aged children, at the same time that voters as the most important issue on their minds.

But the defeat of a broadly popular former governor — along with the GOP apparently seizing control of the state’s House of Delegates and prevailing in races for lieutenant governor and attorney general — marks a reversal in Virginia’s long march leftward in recent years. Democrats had won four of the last five gubernatorial elections and finally seized unified control over the state legislature in 2019. Just last year, President Biden carried the formerly deep-red stronghold by more than 10 points, the biggest win for a Democratic presidential candidate in Virginia since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

But the state’s governor’s race from the party occupying the White House. In fact, since 1977, Virginia voters have elected governors from the party out of power in every race except one: 2013, when McAuliffe won his first term. A host of obstacles, from the lingering ennui of the pandemic to Biden’s sinking approval numbers, stood in the way of McAuliffe’s reelection.

But the last challenge, and perhaps the most significant, was the outrage around issues of K-12 education that steadily built as summer turned to fall. While the Republican primary was still ongoing, Youngkin and his rivals in favor of reopening public schools for in-person instruction. Once Youngkin secured the nomination, to ban the teaching of critical race theory as governor.

His adoption of the issue dovetailed with several high-profile controversies around diversity and equity initiatives in school districts. In both Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, two suburban enclaves outside of Washington, D.C., that have been among the most Democratic-leaning in the state during its blue transformation, angry parents have moved to recall school board members over dissatisfaction with local COVID mitigation strategies and schools’ approaches to teaching controversial subjects of race, gender, and sexuality. 

The dispute gained more airtime as the race headed into its final months, with Youngkin calling on the Loudoun County school board to resign and McAuliffe declaring, at a public debate, that he didn’t believe “parents should be telling schools what to teach.” Ultimately, Fairfax and Loudoun both gave majorities to the Democrat — but they also swung rightward by seven and nine percentage points, respectively, compared with the 2017 governor’s race.

Tom Loveless, an education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, noted that Democratic candidates like McAuliffe have become increasingly dependent on suburban, college-educated voters during the Trump era. Their positioning on K-12 issues during the pandemic helped cost them the seat, Loveless told ����Ӱ��.

“Schools are important to parents in the suburbs,” he wrote in an email. “McAuliffe put himself on the wrong side of the education issue when he said what he said about parents and schools during the debate. It was a fatal blunder, appearing both tone-deaf and condescending.”

Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners and a former member of the Virginia state board of education, argued that Democrats around the country “did not do a good job staking out a clear position” on controversial topics in education, allowing their opponents to paint them as hostages to “unaccountable systems.”

“It’s not that hard for a candidate to tell parents, we’re going to teach an unsparing history curriculum here in this state that is honest about race and racism, but we’re also not going to tell your kindergartener they are complicit in white supremacy or have your second grader doing a privilege walk,” Rotherham said. “Instead, Democrats set themselves up to own any ridiculous thing that happened in a school anywhere.”

New York City schools are reeling from COVID-19 and have yet to fully assess the damage wrought by three academic years of disrupted instruction. Adams will take charge amid concern for missed learning and disenrollment, in addition to issues that pre-date the pandemic, including and .

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With mayoral control, Adams has wide discretion over the Department of Education, though how deeply he will seek to leave his imprint on the city’s roughly 1,600 schools over the next four years is unclear. Though mayoral control is technically set to expire in 2022, Adams is to request an extension from the state.

Multiple Adams to tap his close advisor David Banks, founder of the Eagle Academy for Young Men, as the next schools chancellor. But the Brooklyn native may also maintain current Chancellor Meisha Porter, a longtime NYC public school teacher and administrator who is a friend and former employee of Banks.

The mayor-elect is a retired police captain known for his within the department, and will be only the second Black New Yorker elected to run City Hall. His commitment to education is closely tied to his experiences with the criminal justice system.

“If we don’t educate, we will incarcerate,” he said in a recent mayoral debate.

Adams also shared that, as a young person, he struggled with a learning disability that went undiagnosed until college.��

“I overcame a learning disability and went to college and was able to obtain my degrees. And now I will be the mayor in charge of the entire Department of Education,” he joked in his Tuesday night.

Adams plans to expand screening for dyslexia in city schools, and has articulated his intent to reconceptualize the education system as “birth to career” rather than K-12, including an emphasis on career and technical education.

But even as he prepares to take office, few specifics of the incoming mayor’s education agenda are known.��

Here are three key issues that will demand his attention:

1 Gifted & talented education

In October, Mayor Bill de Blasio made headlines for announcing that he planned to overhaul the city’s gifted and talented education program, long criticized for its stark failure to include Black, Hispanic and other students.��

The program, which uses a single test administered to 4-year olds to determine admission, serves about 2,500 of the city’s roughly 65,000 kindergarten students each year. De Blasio announced that he sought to scrap the test and implement “” for all youngsters through second grade, with screening for subject-specific advanced coursework not coming until the start of third grade.

Adams, however, said that he plans to keep and expand the city’s gifted program. In a debate, he noted that he intended to make the tests opt-out, rather than opt-in, so that more families have access.

“This way, we would catch all the children who are capable of being gifted and talented,” said Adams.

But the mayor-elect has also signaled that he harbors misgivings over the program’s admission process.

“I don’t believe a 4-year old taking an exam should determine the rest of their school experience,” he said during an Oct. 20 debate.

For older students, Adams entrance tests to the city’s selective high schools, which have infamously let in of Black students. Teen activists calling for integration of the city’s schools have also demanded their overhaul and have a federal civil rights complaint pending against the use of all NYC school screening practices.

2 Student vaccine mandates

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed coronavirus vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 on Tuesday, meaning virtually all K-12 students are now eligible for shots.��

Naturally, questions swirl over whether the nation’s largest school system will require children to be inoculated. De Blasio enforced the city’s vaccine mandate for school staff, which took effect in early October and of teachers to receive their shots, but he has taken a softer approach on student vaccinations. The outgoing mayor has supported schools to set up clinics, but has not gone as far as to require shots. On Wednesday, he announced that every school serving students aged 5 through 11 will host vaccination sites starting Monday.

Adams, however, is mulling student vaccine mandates, and has said he is “open to having the remote options of education” for unvaccinated learners.

K-12 vaccine mandates for students remain relatively rare, with a handful of California school systems, including Los Angeles and Oakland, as well as Hoboken, New Jersey among the only districts with such policies.

3 Disenrollment

Enrollment in New York City schools dropped 1.9 percent this year, with 938,000 students now in traditional public schools, down from 955,000 last year and slightly over 1 million in the 2019-20 school year.

Though the relative drop is less than other major cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, the continued bleeding of students provides further evidence of the profound disruption that the pandemic has had on NYC public education. The Department of Education has yet to release figures on the share of students missing so much school that they may be academically at risk, and some officials fear that wide swaths of students, especially in under-resourced communities, may be disengaged from school.

Re-engaging disconnected students will be a chief challenge of the mayor-elect’s effort to bounce back from pandemic schooling.

​​As district schools lost students, enrollment in independently run city charter schools rose 3.2 percent this year, to 143,000, following national trends. Adams has said that he intends to keep the current cap on charter schools, while also adding that successful models should be duplicated and failing ones shut down. De Blasio was known for his battles with the city’s charter sector.

“We look forward to working closely with [Mayor-elect Eric Adams] and his administration to create a partnership that will benefit all NYC public school students, including the 143,000 attending charter schools,” said James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center in a statement.

The proposal’s defeat by a 12-point margin is likely to carry national implications for the debate over policing and racial justice, including in schools. After a Minneapolis cop killed Floyd in 2020, the city school district ended its longstanding contract with the police department and replaced campus officers with non-sworn “public safety support specialists.” Dozens of school districts nationally took similar action in the aftermath of nationwide protests. Yet, in a whiplash move as students resumed in-person learning, education leaders in and have since voted to bring back the police.

Minneapolis Question 2 — voted down by 56 percent of those who turned out in an — would have amended the city charter to replace the police department with a Department of Public Safety focused on a “comprehensive public health approach,” including an emphasis on mental health — reforms that shared similarities with efforts in the city’s schools. The ballot measure would have removed from the city charter a minimum required number of police officers and the new agency “could include” cops “if necessary.” How the new department would have looked in practice, and the number of police officers it would employ, remained uncertain as voters headed to the polls.

Local parent advocate Khulia Pringle has long fought to remove police from schools but opposed the ballot question, which she noted was divisive among the city’s Black community. A found that white voters were more likely than Black residents to support the ballot question.

Floyd’s murder made police reform politically safe, Pringle said, but reform efforts were led primarily by white progressives who didn’t seek sufficient input from the African-American community before saying, “Hey, we’ve got this great plan for Black folks.”

“A lot of Black folks are pretty woke to when the wool is being pulled over their eyes,” said Pringle, the Minnesota-based representative of the National Parents Union. “They got caught up in the moment and threw something out there that had no plan, no nothing. It was inevitable to fail from the beginning.”

About 44 percent of Minneapolis voters sought to replace its police department, an unprecedented shift that highlights in recent years in support of criminal justice reforms. , Yes 4 Minneapolis communications director JaNaé Bates said her group, which campaigned to get the question on the ballot, has no plans of giving up. 

“We took a lesson today that we need to knock even more doors, that we need to talk to even more neighbors, that we need to bust through the disinformation campaign and the big money that says ‘No’ when we say ‘Yes,’” Bates said.

More measured police reform efforts found success elsewhere during an election cycle generally seen as a win for conservative causes. Voters in Cleveland, Ohio, for example, that gives citizens greater oversight over police misconduct. In Austin, Texas, a proposal to bolster the city’s police force. 

Had Minneapolis residents voted to terminate the police department, the school board may have been more likely to form an alliance with the new public safety agency, Pringle said. But without substantive reforms, board members are not expected to resume the police department contract anytime soon, she said. 

“If it’s the same agency and there’s been no major overhaul,” she said. “I don’t think that Minneapolis Public Schools is going to go back.”

In a recent interview, former Minneapolis school resource officer Charles Adams III said he opposed the ballot question because the city lacked a firm plan for the future. Adams, who left the police department last year after the school district ended its policing contact, was among former school-based officers included in a recent investigation by ����Ӱ�� exposing how many had faced disciplinary actions and allegations of civil rights violations, including police brutality, racial discrimination and domestic violence.

As Minnesota residents reckon with this year, the public safety support specialists who replaced school resource officers are “stretched thin,” said Adams, who remains the football coach at North High School. The school board took a “social political stand” when it ended its policing contract but “jeopardized the safety and the lives of kids in North Minneapolis,” Adams told ����Ӱ��. 

“Black lives matter 100 percent,” said Adams, who is Black. “But right now what we’re doing, the crime is destroying our community.”

The Minneapolis school district didn’t respond to a request for comment. Minneapolis Police Department spokesman Garrett Parten said his agency would support future efforts to resume the $1.1 million-a-year school resource officers program. 

The police department “would eagerly continue the program should the opportunity be granted and the resources be available,” Parten said in an email, adding that the former contract offered “a vibrant, vital program that embodied the essence of community-based policing.” 

But closely contested races were playing out down the ballot as well. At the local level, school board members in both suburban Milwaukee and northern Kansas survived attempts to recall them from office. The campaigns were part of one of 2021’s biggest trends in education politics: a surge in recall efforts aimed at board members around the country, with over 200 officials targeted. That number is roughly quadruple the figure in an average year, according to the nonprofit elections site Ballotpedia, while the 84 total recall attempts so far this year total more than triple the usual rate.

The most prominent efforts have already generated national headlines and seen some success; in San Francisco, over 50,000 signatures were gathered to force a recall election of three board members in February, while in Loudoun County, Virginia, one targeted member has already resigned rather than see her removal proceedings go to a circuit court trial. 

But more notable has been a pattern of recalls either not generating enough support to make it to the ballot or failing once they get there. Both of Tuesday’s results met with failure.

In the Mequon-Thiensville School District, which enrolls nearly 4,000 students in Wisconsin’s suburban Ozaukee County, a to oust four members fell short by significant margins. With over 11,600 ballots cast — close to double the number in the last board race there — each of the four incumbents won of the vote on Tuesday. 

Recall proponents had raised nearly $50,000 for the effort, with donations and support coming from local conservative donors and nonprofit organizations. The stated reasons for the recall included parents’ frustrations with the board’s COVID mitigation strategies and suspicions that the district leaders were attempting to introduce aspects of “critical race theory” into K-12 curriculum. The election marks the 16th failed recall attempt in Wisconsin since the pandemic began; the state has seen the second-most attempts in that time, behind only California.

In the smaller Nemaha Central Unified School District in Kansas, board member Amy Sudbeck a recall attempt, launched this spring after she voted to continue the district’s mask mandate in school buildings. Only 25 percent of voters supported the recall.

In Tuesday’s runoff to fill two remaining seats on the Atlanta school board, unofficial results show incumbent Aretta Baldon, who has the backing of organizations advocating for the city’s Black and low-income students, barely held on to her seat representing District 2. She received 50.7 percent of the vote, while businesswoman and former Atlanta Public Schools student Keisha Carey earned 49.3 percent.

Meanwhile, with over two-thirds of the vote, newcomer Tamara Jones, an urban planner, defeated opponent KaCey Venning in a race for the at-large District 7 seat. The incumbent did not seek re-election. 

All nine seats on the board were up for a vote in this election cycle. But because of a new state law staggering the terms, Jones, and the others holding odd-numbered seats, will serve two years before running again in 2023 for full four-year terms.

Responding to questions from a civic organization,����emphasized her work to reduce the racial achievement gap, distribute resources more equitably across the district and open remote learning centers during school closures.����said she will prioritize improving literacy instruction and said it’s important for the district to work closely with city and county officials to increase wraparound services for students and lower student mobility rates.��

Five incumbents, including one who ran unopposed, appear poised to continue their terms on Atlanta’s school board following Tuesday’s election. Unofficial results show two newcomers — Katie Howard and Jennifer McDonald — will join them, but two other remaining races will be decided later this month in a Nov. 30 runoff.��

In that election, incumbent Aretta Baldon, who was leading with 48 percent of the vote, will face challenger Keisha Carey. Tamara Jones, an urban planner, and KaCey Venning, an education and mental health advocate, are also headed to a runoff.

The election comes at a time when Atlanta’s population is growing more white and affluent, spurred in part by growth of the city’s tech sector. Overall, student achievement has improved in recent years, but advocacy organizations seized upon the election to raise awareness that many Black and Hispanic students aren’t sharing in that success. 

Unofficial results show incumbents Cynthina Briscoe Brown, Eshé Collins, current Chair Jason Esteves, Erika Mitchell and Michelle Olympiadis will hold on to their seats — a clear sign that voters are mostly satisfied with who’s running the district, said Anthony Wilson, executive director of Equity in Education, an advocacy organization that trained over 20 candidates for the board.The district’s all-time high of 80.3 percent likely has something to do with that, Wilson said. While he said he’s proud of the district’s progress, “I’m also concerned about the deep inequities that persist across our city’s schools.”

The group endorsed candidates for seven of the nine seats on the board, including Baldon, Collins, Esteves, Howard, Mitchell and Venning. They also backed Keedar Whittle, who runs an education staffing agency, but was unsuccessful in his effort to oust incumbent Brown for an at-large seat on the board. Brown, an attorney, was leading with over 70 percent of the vote.

Regardless of the outcome in the two runoff races, the board leading the majority Black and Hispanic district will have at least three new members. Some candidates saw significant overlap between issues facing the city and the district. Venning, for example, mentors young Black boys, many of whom support their families by selling water at intersections and freeway off-ramps. She leads a nonprofit to connect them with members of the business community and other youth employment programs. Across the city, some of the “water boys,” as they have become known, have been involved in violent incidents, contributing to concerns about rising crime — a major issue in the mayor’s race.

The election has energized groups focused on holding the 51,000-student district accountable for schools where most students score well below grade level. Equity in Education wants to see more wraparound services for students, integration efforts, and alternatives to suspensions and expulsions. 

The Latino Association for Parents of Public Schools is another group calling on the district to spread successful practices and programs from high-achieving schools to those that haven’t improved. Ricardo Miguel Martinez, president of the organization, said he’s focused on “every race, every policy, every day” and wants Latino parents not to be afraid to speak up about their children’s schools

“We look forward to working with all current, new and future elected officials to make sure Atlanta Public Schools and the city of Atlanta is equitable for all,” he said.

Over the past month, we’ve published a special series of off-year EDlection previews, spotlighting the names and votes to watch this week. As we prepare for the polls to open, here’s a quick recap of what our newsroom will be watching on Election Day — and of course subscribe to ����Ӱ��’s newsletter to learn more about the victors:��

1 Governor of Virginia

Two of the top-tier elections being contested on Tuesday are the governor’s races in both New Jersey and Virginia. Incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy looks like the surefire winner in the Garden State, where he’s benefitted from of the powerhouse local teacher’s union. In Virginia, however, things look much closer. Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe looked like the favorite after cruising to a Democratic primary win in June, but businessman and first-time candidate Glenn Youngkin has narrowed the race considerably with a combination of lavish spending . Pledging to ban the teaching of critical race theory, the Republican has successfully tapped into public anger with school boards even in blue-trending counties in the northern part of the state. If he succeeds in turning the Democrats out of the governor’s mansion for the first time in eight years, Youngkin will have shown the national GOP how to ride K-12 politics to a midterm triumph.

2 Atlanta School Board

Atlanta voters will choose from 22 candidates for all nine school board seats Tuesday in a race that some say will determine the future of education for Black and Hispanic students in the city’s school district. Pre-pandemic test scores showed that only about a third of Hispanic and a quarter of Black students scored proficient or higher in math and English language arts, compared with over 80 percent of white students. “This election is where we start to say no more,” said Ricardo Miguel Martinez, president of Latino Association for Parents of Public Schools. The election takes place as the city draws in more white, affluent residents and many Black and Hispanic families are fleeing the city for more affordable housing in the suburbs. Candidates for the board represent a wide cross section of the city, from those who prioritize the most marginalized students to others well-connected to the city’s power structure. With voters also choosing the mayor and city council Nov. 2 — elections in which crime and housing have dominated campaigns — school board Chair Jason Esteves says the city is at a “pivot point.” “The issues we have with poverty are manifested in the things we’re seeing related to crime,” he said. “How we tackle those issues directly impacts the school system.” (Linda Jacobson published an extensive profile of the race and its implications in October; read the full preview)

3 Mayor of New York City��

New York City voters will decide their next mayor Tuesday in a contest where Democrat Eric Adams is heavily favored over Republican Curtis Sliwa. The pandemic’s ongoing disruptions have placed K-12 education issues front and center in the race. Three leading ones , student vaccine mandates and disenrollment. Outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced plans to phase out the gifted and talented program, which has long been criticized for deepening segregation in the nation’s largest school system, but is highly prized by many parents. The question will almost certainly fall to Adams, who shares de Blasio’s dislike for testing 4-year-olds, but has said he will keep the program without specifying in what form while also highlighting the needs of�� students with learning disabilities. The city is grappling with a loss of students that totaled 4 percent last year as families fled classrooms during COVID. This year, NYC Department of Education officials say the city suffered only a 1 percent enrollment drop compared to the previous fall, but some school leaders have raised alarms over disastrously low attendance, despite a reported citywide rate just under 90 percent. Also looming are student vaccines with shots for children ages 5 to 11 authorized Friday by the Food and Drug Administration and now awaiting go-ahead from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. De Blasio announced last week he had already ordered 231,000 doses for that age group, but does not favor mandating shots for students. Sliwa adamantly opposes any mandate while Adams supports an immunization requirement and is mulling remote learning for those who resist vaccination, an option the city currently does not offer. (����Ӱ�� published two essays about the race leading up to Election Day, one about the need for city students to have a clearer path to college and career success, and the other about the urgent need for the next mayor to re-engage the families of students of color, English learners and students with disabilities hit hardest by the pandemic)

4 School Board Member Recalls

Two Midwestern races will put a spotlight on one of the most unusual electoral trends this year: an explosion in the number of recall attempts against school board members. Typically employed to settle small-bore controversies at the municipal or county level — think unpopular tax levies or school mergers — efforts to recall board members have more than tripled so far this year. Amy Sudbeck, a board member in the tiny Nemaha Central USD in northern Kansas, is facing a recall for voting in favor of continuing a school mask mandate this spring. Meanwhile, parents in suburban Milwaukee are trying to unseat four board members of the Mequon-Thiensville School District over a , including COVID mitigation measures and payments made to a diversity consultant. The effort has from local conservative donors and nonprofits, with one national group holding the effort up as an example to activists around the country. (Kevin Mahnken published an in-depth look at school board recalls across the country; read the full feature, and scan our searchable database, right here.)

5 Police and School Cops in Minneapolis

After a Minneapolis cop murdered George Floyd, the city’s school district cut ties with the police department and replaced sworn officers with “public safety support specialists” designed to promote positive campus climates, but lack the authority to make arrests. A similar strategy could soon go citywide. If voters approve Ballot Question 2, the Minneapolis Police Department would be replaced by a Department of Public Safety that will center community security around public health. Though sworn officers would likely be included in the approach, the question would amend the city charter to scrap a minimum staffing level and many questions about how the new agency would function remain unresolved. A recent suggests a close contest. (Mark Keierleber recently published an investigation of the city’s school resource officers, revealing several instances where school cops had histories of discipline or civil rights complaints)

—With reporting by Linda Jacobson, Mark Keierleber, Asher Lehrer-Small and Kevin Mahnken��

The campaign had been gaining momentum all summer, with green-shirted activists circulating a petition at local concerts and farmer’s markets to remove four members, including Holden. Their complaints stretched back to 2020, when some parents pushed back against the board’s commitment to virtual instruction during the pandemic. Two days before the deadline, at a public meeting in late August, they announced they’d met the legal threshold to trigger a recall election.

Afterwards, feeling “a little disheartened,” Holden went in search of diversion. A contractor by trade, he found it in a late-night remodeling project.

“Sometimes painting is very therapeutic, so I went to work after the meeting and just painted all night,” he recalled. “I grabbed a pan and a roller and a couple of beers, turned my tunes on, and went to town.”

Holden was still a newcomer to public service, winning election just after the first COVID wave largely passed over North Dakota. When he’d voted to of the local Woodrow Wilson High School last December over the 27th president’s racist misdeeds, he expected it would be “the peak of the political nature” of the job. Now, scarcely more than a year into his term, he considered the possibility that it might end much sooner than anyone had thought.

“Never in a million years did I imagine it would happen,” he said.

Holden isn’t the only one taken by surprise this year. According to the nonpartisan political site Ballotpedia, 2021 84 recall efforts targeting over 200 school board members. Those numbers are triple and quadruple, respectively, the average rates measured over the last 15 years, with attempts launched in large and nationally prominent districts like San Francisco and Loudoun County, Virginia.

Compared with better-known recalls, such as the unsuccessful attempt to unseat California Gov. Gavin Newsom, efforts directed at education officials have mostly stayed under-the-radar. The recall process is also a limited mechanism for political change due to its unwieldy nature: Unhappy constituents usually have to collect a large number of signatures; have those signatures be independently verified; and, if they manage those steps, prevail once an election is held. As a consequence, only one board member in the country has been successfully recalled from office this year.

But the increased willingness to trigger an unorthodox and rarely used process is a reflection of the unprecedented scrutiny directed at school boards this year, and parents’ outrage over COVID mitigation measures and the teaching of controversial subjects — a far cry from the miniature tempests that usually draw parents to board meetings — demonstrate how the themes of national politics have trickled down even to the local level. 

Joshua Spivak, a researcher at New York’s Wagner College , said that the “explosion” in attempts this year are the direct result of COVID-19. While state and municipal politicians of different types have faced public opposition to their pandemic response, the fundamental and long-lasting disruption to K-12 schools has made board members a particular target.

“The school board is maybe the most obvious candidate for a recall in this situation because their impact is very clear: The schools are shut down, or there are masking requirements, so the [effect] is right there,” he said. “And there are parents who are ready to be organized in a very real way.”

A 74 analysis of Ballotpedia’s recall data shows that over half of the would-be recalls are related to either the pace at which districts returned to hosting in-person classes or boards’ willingness to mandate mask-wearing in schools. A smaller percentage spring from allegations that districts are teaching “critical race theory.” The rest pertain to an array of local concerns ranging from financial mismanagement to board members’ trouble with the law.

Caught in the middle are the everyday people sitting on boards, who largely serve in a part-time capacity while juggling other personal and professional commitments. Tom Gentzel, an education consultant who served as the CEO of the National School Boards Association until 2020, said that the tough decisions typically facing board members might center on merging elementary schools or firing a football coach — not national debates about public health or civil rights.

“They’re not part of some larger agenda at work, and they’re not politicians. I’ve often teased school board members that if they’re planning a political career, school board is probably not a great place to start.”

Progressive outrage in San Francisco

San Francisco, where critics of the local school board election to be held in February, is one of a few places in the country that contradicts Gentzel’s characterization. It’s also located in California, the perennial leader in recalls around the country because of around the practice. Twenty-five recall attempts against school board members have been initiated in California this year. (Wisconsin took second place with 11 attempts so far, while Arizona has seen 10.)

Crucially, the city is home to a large district where K-12 politics can take center stage and education officials frequently climb the ladder to higher office. Two former commissioners of the San Francisco Board of Education now sit on the city’s Board of Supervisors, itself a springboard into state and national politics whose alumni include longtime Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Newsom.

Politics in San Francisco, a national byword for left-wing organizing, are also substantially influenced by national conversations within the progressive movement. In February, the board competitive admissions criteria at the prestigious Lowell High School, arguing that its entrance exam unfairly advantaged white and Asian-American students at the expense of their Hispanic and African American peers. For over two years, a majority of commissioners have also waged a controversial fight to either destroy or cover a set of murals commemorating the life of George Washington in a high school named after the first president. 

Rachel Norton, a three-term board member who declined to run for re-election in 2020, said that during the Trump presidency, “the national political climate really did spill into” local races to an extent that surprised her. Public anger directed at Washington , culminating in a further leftward swing in a city where Democrats already dominated the political scene.

“Voters in San Francisco wanted to send a message, and in a place where your politics are basically ‘blue versus bluer,’ it’s hard to send a message by punishing the red team,” Norton said. “So I think we ended up with an electorate that was willing to vote much further left, and much less moderate — by San Francisco standards — than we’d seen in the past.”

The increasingly activist bent of the new board became apparent in due course. Gabriela Lopez and Alison Collins, two members elected in the “blue wave” year of 2018, were chosen as the board’s president and vice president at the beginning of this year. A few weeks later, as the culmination of a process begun in 2018, to rename 44 schools throughout the district, including buildings named after Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln.

The announcement generated local and national uproar, particularly after that the panel charged with leading the renaming process had committed historical errors after using Wikipedia to research school namesakes. Even Mayor London Breed excoriated the board for prioritizing the renaming process over developing a plan to reopen schools during the 2020-21 school year. By April, a vote was held to .

But the reversal to stop an attempt led by parents to initiate a recall election against three commissioners, including Lopez and Collins. Over six months into the campaign, the causes cited by its organizers extend past the renaming decisions. In March, Collins was discovered to have derogatory claims about Asian Americans, and after being stripped of her vice-presidency by the rest of the board, she opted to file an $87 million lawsuit to force the school district into state receivership. 

The medley of distractions represented “a testament to [the board’s] failure to prioritize and center students in their governance,” said Cyn Wang, a board member of the San Francisco Parents Coalition. Formed last year to advocate for safe reopening of city schools, the group has not been involved in organizing for the recall, but recently for causing “harm to our students and public schools.”

Wang said the coalition was composed of “San Francisco families with San Francisco values,” and that they believed in masking and following the recommendations of public health experts. But she added that the commissioners’ lengthy delays in allowing children to return to in-person classes — from hiring a reopening consultant last spring — had taken an academic and emotional toll on her daughter, who spent half of kindergarten and all of her first-grade year learning from home.

“I saw her plummet into depression,” Wang said. “I saw her staying in her room for long periods of time. I saw the impact personally, and we’re very lucky compared with some other families. That really propelled me to get involved in this issue, and it woke me up to the general dereliction of duty of this board.”

Earlier this month, that the petitioners had cleared a huge hurdle by submitting over 50,000 verified signatures of city residents in favor of holding a recall election; that automatically triggered a vote that will be held on February 15. Spivak said that the procedural challenges surmounted by the board’s detractors, along with the national political relevance of the campaign, made San Francisco perhaps “the most notable” school board recall in over 60 years.

The next test will be whether voters will actually cast enough ballots to remove board members elected just three years ago. The same three members facing the recall are scheduled for regular re-election bids next November, and Norton said the February vote will change education politics in the city no matter its outcome.

“I do think there’s a scenario that, even if all three of them or some number of them survive, there will be a big conversation in the city about who should be on the school board,” she argued. “Candidates that otherwise would have had trouble breaking through might get more attention because of the recall.”

‘Critical race theory’ erupts in VA

In Loudoun County, Virginia, the nationally publicized quest to remove five members of the local school board will not hinge on how the voters respond; state law holds that such fights are adjudicated by a circuit court once sufficient signatures have been submitted. But that quirk has done nothing to calm the local political waters. 

One of the members in question, Beth Barts, earlier this month after a judge ruled that her proposed removal could move to a full trial. Fight for Schools, the political action committee spearheading the attempt, it has gathered enough signatures to file removal petitions against two other members. 

The stated reason for the campaign is that the members in question participated in of “anti-racist parents” that strategized about how to combat racial inequity in Loundoun County Public Schools, the third-largest district in the state and one of the wealthiest in the country. The board’s detractors argue that without an announcement and the chance for public comment, that action violates the state’s open meetings laws and is grounds for removal. But the substance of their complaint reaches back to last summer, when many parents began to agitate for the 2020-21 school year to begin with a return to full-time, in-person learning.

Ian Serotkin, who is among the members targeted for removal, said that the public’s frustrations began to “bubble over” in late 2020. In a normal board meeting, he said, the public comment portion would attract 10-20 speakers. As the reopening debate wore on, that number swelled to the hundreds, with meetings stretching late into the night. Soon, viral videos began to circulate depicting enraged community members pleading with the board to bring kids back to school; raucous scenes from the proceedings became a reference point in media coverage of the anger and occasional intimidation being directed against school officials throughout the country.

Observers also noticed the volume of emails and speeches devoted to the controversy around how schools in Loudoun County addressed controversial subjects like race, gender, and sexuality. A dawning fixation on “critical race theory,” amplified by President Trump during last fall’s presidential race and repeated in conservative media, began to take over the conversation.

Serotkin said that critical race theory is not taught in Loudoun County, and the district’s recent initiatives to address racial disparities in discipline and academic achievement — including paying to the California-based consultancy Equity Collaborative to help guide its efforts —  were being “intentionally conflated” with indoctrination in the classroom. Nevertheless, he said, critics had succeeded in harnessing the community’s existing anger.

“The conversation took a turn away from just being about COVID, and the organizers of these political efforts started capitalizing on that with a captive group of parents who were very engaged in school issues about COVID,” Serotkin said.

Whether or not the analytical discipline of critical race theory is literally being taught in the classroom, some members of the community have raised concerns about the district’s actions over the last few years. After the board to change the admissions process of the district’s esteemed STEM magnet programs with the intent of accepting more Hispanic and African American students, , claiming that the revision discriminated against Asian students. This April, a county teacher in the conservative Federalist website calling the district’s equity trainings “leftist institutional racism.”

The effort to remove the board members began in March, after the existence of the private Facebook group became public. In a short-lived project that drew widespread condemnation and later from the county sheriff’s office, a few members of the group began to assemble a list of local parents who were part of an “anti-CRT movement”; that steps be taken to hack or otherwise infiltrate those parents’ websites.

Ian Prior, a former Trump administration official and Fight for Schools’ executive director, said that he objected to some aspects of the district’s focus on social justice, but that his group’s real grievance was against what he described as bungled and biased leadership from the board. The prolonged closure of schools due to the pandemic, along with the close-up view that parents received once learning went online, had engaged many parents in local politics for the first time.

“The big picture, as I see it, is that this pandemic served to awaken parents to the need to be more engaged at the local level — certainly in elections but also in making sure their voices are heard and their elected officials are held accountable. For too long, we’ve seen people focus at the national level, on these big issues being debated on the national stage, and neglecting local issues.”

But what started as a clash among parents at the county level is now playing an outsized role in state politics. Virginia will elect its next governor tomorrow, and while Democratic former Gov. Terry McAuliffe has been considered the front-runner for much of the race, polls have tightened over the last month as his Republican rival Glenn Youngkin has focused more closely on K-12 issues. A successful businessman and first-time candidate, months ago to ban the teaching of critical race theory in Virginia classrooms on his first day in office. More recently, of both the Loudoun board and interim Superintendent Scott Ziegler over their handling of an alleged rape of a girl in a high school bathroom.

On Thursday, gave Youngkin an eight-point lead among likely voters. Among respondents who identified as parents, the Republican enjoyed a 14-point advantage. , released on Friday by the Washington Post, found McAuliffe one point ahead. Twenty-four percent of respondents said that education was the most important issue in the race — the largest share of any single issue, and a nine-point jump since September. The state of the high-profile contest, one of just two major statewide elections being held this fall, President Biden to campaign for McAuliffe personally. Another national figure, former Trump administration advisor Steve Bannon, on school board races as the opening skirmish in next year’s midterm fight for control of Congress.

Barts, whose resignation was welcomed by Prior, did not respond to a request for comment. In resigning, she joined of around the country who chose to quit in the face of possible removal. Their departure suggests that recall attempts, whether or not they succeed in their aims, can alter the focus of school boards and serve as a warning even to members who aren’t themselves targeted.

“I think that is absolutely something that happens: They might think, ‘Okay, I don’t want this to happen to me,’” Spivak said. “It could inhibit behavior.”

A return to normalcy in Fargo?

Both the San Francisco and Loudoun County recall efforts remain ongoing after months of work and thousands of signatures collected, which is somewhat remarkable in itself: Even in a normal year, the majority of recalls fall short of the ballot due to the considerable organizing demands of recruiting volunteers and activating ordinary citizens who often pay little attention to local politics.

Despite the “enormous amount” of attempts this year, Spivak noted that just one board member has been ousted so far, in a small district in southwestern Colorado. The source of the public’s disapproval came not from the man’s position on mask mandates or critical race theory, but rather .

Most would-be recalls instead follow the pattern that ultimately played out in Fargo. Less than a month after Seth Holden soothed his nerves with a night of home improvement, found that there were not enough valid signatures to bring a question to the ballot. North Dakota law stipulates that Holden and his colleagues cannot be subject to another recall effort for the remainder of their terms.

Jim Johnson, another member targeted in the campaign, said he wasn’t particularly concerned about the recall campaign. A vice president of business development at a Minnesota-based insurance brokerage, he won his seat in 2000 and has prevailed in five successive reelection bids. The current debates over COVID mitigation and cultural politics are the most contentious he can remember during that time, burning even hotter than past disputes over Common Core or No Child Left Behind.

Still, he added, while the emotional tenor both inside and outside of board meetings has been heightened over the last year, it has been more in the spirit of “North Dakota Nice”; generally cordial, with a few exceptions.

“There were a couple of board members in particular that I think had some false accusations hurled at them on social media, which is unfortunate,” Johnson lamented. “I reached out to them and said, ‘This is the nature of politics, just let it roll off your back.’ But the vast majority of the people, even those involved in the recall effort, were being pretty civil the entire time. It was just a handful of people who let their emotions carry them away.”

Some degree of public concern has abated over the last month, with the recall scuttled and students having long since returned to classrooms. The North Dakota legislature strictly limiting requirements around facial coverings — but since it only applies to state officials, it has not affected Fargo’s mask mandate, recently voted to keep in place.

For the moment, Johnson looks forward to turning to more prosaic issues. Enrollment at Fargo Public Schools is up slightly this year, and the board needs to consider whether to build a new facility to house the former Woodrow Wilson High School. Other decisions, related to staff salaries and the supervision of recess periods, await as well.

“We’re a growing school district, and we’ve got to figure out where to buy land for future buildings, figure out where we’re going to hire our next set of teachers, make sure we have a teacher contract we can get ratified every two years,” Johnson said. “That’s really my game plan. Eleven thousand kids came to school today in Fargo, and they need to be educated.”

Lead Image: People protesting against critical race theory being taught in schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, on June 12. (Getty Images)

But Ricardo Miguel Martinez, president of the Latino Association for Parents of Public Schools, an advocacy group to persistent achievement gaps, wasn’t buying it. “We’ve got to stop saying Atlanta is Wakanda,” he told ����Ӱ��. “In Wakanda, Black and brown kids know how to read.”

Martinez is among those looking to next Tuesday’s school board election in Atlanta — where all nine seats are up for grabs — as an opportunity to address long-standing inequities in the 51,000-student, majority Black district. Pre-pandemic test scores showed that only about a third of Hispanic and a quarter of Black students scored proficient or higher in math and English language arts, compared with over 80 percent of white students.

“This election is where we start to say no more,” Martinez said.

In a district experiencing seismic demographic shifts, candidates represent a wide cross section of residents, from some who prioritize the most marginalized students to those who are well-connected to the city’s power structure. Atlanta is an emerging , where projects like are driving up local real estate costs. Lower-income families are increasingly fleeing the city for more affordable housing in the suburbs, leaving some advocates to wonder if their voices are being heard.

“It really feels like our families are being forced out,” said Kimberly Dukes, the executive director of , which helps parents track the quality of their children’s schools. “A lot of people look to Altanta as a dream. If you have money, you may be all right.” 

This is the last time all seats will be at once. A new state law, passed last year, will stagger the terms of board members. That means five of the winners will run again in two years, and four will serve a full four years. 

Four incumbents, including board Chairman Jason Esteves, are running for re-election, along with 18 challengers. Only one incumbent, Michelle Olympiadis, is running unopposed. The board manages a $1.4 billion budget, roughly twice that of the Atlanta City Council. But in a year when voters are also choosing the mayor and council members — and when crime rates and a lack of affordable housing have dominated the news — Esteves wonders if education is getting the attention it deserves.

“We’re at a pivot point as a school system and as a city. We have the opportunity to tackle generational issues,” he said. “The issues we have with poverty are manifested in the things we’re seeing related to crime. How we tackle those issues directly impacts the school system.”

A September showed a staggering 62 percent increase in homicides between 2019 and 2020. in July of a woman and her dog in the city’s Piedmont Park is among the senseless crimes leaving the city on edge and calling for solutions.

Crime has also become a central issue in the mayor’s race, with some candidates drawing connections between the role of education and improving the quality of life for residents. With Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms not running for re-election, the slate includes former mayor , who has promoted increased use of recreation centers to deter youth crime. Meanwhile, Courtney English, a former school board chairman, is running for . He’s currently director of community development for a nonprofit providing afterschool programs in apartment complexes near low-performing schools. 

City leaders don’t have any authority over the district, but a platform that includes coordination between the board, the council and the mayor’s office can “carry a lot of weight,” said Greg Clay, who served on a task force that wrote the district’s equity and social justice in 2019. He added that council and mayoral candidates who say, “That’s not my responsibility” when asked about education won’t be well-received.

‘A change in the demographics’

With more white and affluent residents drawn to Atlanta’s tech and financial sectors, the city is considered to have the widest in the nation. 

Those population shifts are fueling a threatened secession by the high-priced Buckhead neighborhood, where rising crime — including a 40 percent increase in this year — is the top concern. A separate Buckhead City would be a financial blow to the district’s tax base. estimated the district would lose $232 million — about a quarter of its local tax revenue. The legislature would still have to pass a bill to bring the question before voters in November 2022.

“The status of nearly 5,500 APS students who live within the boundaries of the proposed city would be in limbo,” according to a statement from the district. 

For now, parents in Buckhead and other north Atlanta neighborhoods have more immediate concerns — traffic gridlock, underfunding of International Baccalaureate and dual language immersion programs, and a splitting of some elementary schools that has put an added strain on parents. They say they fight the perception that they’re spoiled and always get their way. “There is commentary at times about how North Atlanta gets everything at the cost or sake of other clusters,” board candidate Jennifer McDonald said at a September candidate forum. “Frankly, I don’t feel like that’s accurate or fair.”

Black families, meanwhile, are increasingly moving to the suburbs, where housing is more affordable. Between 2010 and 2020, the growth of the white population in Atlanta was almost five times that of Black residents, compiled by the Atlanta Regional Commission.

“We’re going to have a lot of voters who know very little about what is going on in the schools,” said Esteves, adding that those who put their children in schools in the city’s wealthier neighborhoods, north of downtown, might not understand why a school on the south side receives more funding per student. “We have been … focused on equity and distributing resources based on need. A change in the demographics of the city requires us to continually talk about how Atlanta Public Schools does things and why.” 

But Martinez said higher per-student funding hasn’t changed the culture of low-income schools. His organization’s argues that the district needs to do a better job learning what makes a team of teachers successful at one school and replicate those practices at schools that haven’t seen academic growth in years. 

The fate of stagnating schools is another issue facing the new board. Earlier this month, members approved that directs Superintendent Lisa Herring to implement a “high-impact intervention” if a school doesn’t improve after three years. Those actions can range from merging under-enrolled schools to allowing charter school organizations to run them. Olympiadis was the only one on the board to oppose the policy, arguing that charter schools drain resources from the district.

According to a 2021 budget , 17 percent of district funds go toward charters, a share that’s still growing as charter schools add more grade levels. “All that money goes out the door before we figure out how we’re going to disperse funds across the rest of our schools,” Olympiadis said in an interview.

While school choice hasn’t been a major point of debate in the campaign, , a nonprofit that trained 23 potential candidates for this year’s election, has endorsed those who support “expanding school options,” said founding executive director Anthony Wilson. The organization’s platform is for students to have a “high-quality school within walking distance of their home,” he said.

Whether Herring can ensure more families have access to those high-quality schools is one issue the newly elected board will consider when it decides whether to renew her contract in 2023. Several candidates that she could not have stepped into the role at a worse time, and has done her best considering the challenges of the pandemic and remote learning. As with urban districts nationally, educators and parents worry the pandemic has only worsened achievement gaps. , the percentage of elementary school students scoring in the lowest level in reading increased from 34 percent in 2019 to 46 percent this year.��

In fact, yawning achievement gaps played an important role in the decision to hire Herring in the first place. Under former superintendent Meria Carstarphen — who helped the district move past a — there was overall growth in the percentage of students scoring proficient on state tests. The graduation rate has reached 80 percent, up from 51 percent in 2012.

But board members who voted to replace Carstarphen, and advocates for Black and Hispanic students, said those gains haven’t been spread evenly across the district. Seventy-seven percent of Black students graduate, compared to almost 97 percent of white students.

‘Struggling in the system’

Other candidates have reservations about Herring, saying she needs to seek more parent and community input before making decisions. During the September forum, some candidates noted that the district often blindsides parents by sending important messages on Friday afternoons. A plan to change high school schedules to accommodate longer school days for elementary students drew widespread opposition.

The district has since hired a marketing and communications firm to improve its relationships with parents, incumbent Erika Mitchell said during the forum. 

Royce Carter Mann, a 19-year-old candidate who graduated from the district last year, is among those calling for greater transparency. Though young, Mann grew up in a politically active family with a grandmother who worked in the Carter administration. Named for the former president, Mann campaigned for Sens. John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in a January special election that gave Democrats control of the U.S. Senate.

Mann nurtured his interest in education policy while interning for the Atlanta school board. He pushed for the district’s new and wants students to have more say in their education.

“When students are included, it’s almost as a reward for being a high-achieving student,” he said. “It’s the students who are struggling in the system that we need to listen to the most.”

Mann supported a campaign to Midtown High last year, dropping the name of Henry W. Grady, a Civil War-era journalist who didn’t support equality for freed slaves. Last week, another school was renamed for Atlanta baseball legend , replacing that of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Forrest Hill.

While the symbolism is important, parents in the city’s predominantly Black southside neighborhoods want more than just school name changes. At the September candidate forum, board member Mitchell, whose constituents include those families, said, “We need to have equitable options in our schools so we can retain our students in our area, so they can be proud of the schools they’re attending.” 

Lead Image: Atlanta Public Schools board members and officials celebrate the opening of the district’s new Center for Equity and Social Justice. (Atlanta Public Schools)

Stories like these exist all over New York City. We’ve heard them time and again from the parents we work with at the and . And there is no question the pandemic has disproportionately impacted students of color, English learners and students with disabilities. Across New York State, more than 4,000 children lost a parent or guardian to COVID-19, with Black and Latino children experiencing the death of a caregiver at twice the rate of white and Asian children. These life-altering events affect students’ cognitive development, academic outcomes and mental health, not just now, but over time. 

As districts continue to navigate ongoing changes in health and education guidance and policies as classes resume, schools need to bolster their methods for reaching disconnected families, particularly those who are undocumented and mixed-status and historically have been afraid to reach out for support. Starting in March 2020, when schools closed to in-person instruction, these families did not receive information regarding how to access online learning, special education services and devices, as well as critical school health and safety guidelines in their home language in a timely manner.

It is imperative that the next mayoral administration and its education leaders leverage new resources coming from the American Rescue Plan Act to identify ways to address these critical equity issues in the coming school year.

The pandemic highlighted the need for communication in families’ native languages and greater digital literacy. According to a from the New York Immigration Coalition Education Collaborative, nearly 40 percent of New York City public school English learners and immigrant families did not receive information or assignments in their home language when school closures started in March 2020. As a result, many families were excluded from understanding and meaningfully participating in their child’s learning at school and at home — and may not fully understand their rights. Until now, schools and their staff, rather than the city Department of Education, have been responsible for individual translation requests from parents who speak a language other than English.

We commend the city’s recent decision to further invest in the department’s Translation and Interpretation Unit. Families can now request interpretation at special education meetings and translations of children’s individualized education plans, assessments and notices. This is a first step toward building greater trust and strengthening communication between parents and schools. Although this is a great investment, more efforts should be made to ensure parents receive information on how to make these requests.

There is also no doubt that the digital divide has affected many families of color. School districts have made some efforts to create tools to help families become involved in their children’s schooling, like the department’s launch of — on demand, pre-recorded courses that cover topics such as Google Classroom and learning supports for multilingual children. Schools should utilize their federal funding to create similar culturally relevant and linguistically appropriate training on remote instruction and digital literacy for parents.

Culturally responsive communication requires culturally responsive educators. The city’s recent commits to a culturally responsive curriculum for all children and youth, in which students with disabilities and English learners see themselves represented in what they are learning. Similar standards should apply to teacher recruitment. From what we have heard directly from our families, districts need to recruit more bilingual teachers in general and special education who have received high-quality training and can adequately address barriers to family engagement. Districts must track and report on teacher retention and create strategies to ensure the longevity of a diverse workforce equipped to serve English learners and students with disabilities.

Students are also still coping with a significant loss of instruction during remote learning, and the American Rescue Plan allocates federal dollars to address this. Districts need to create plans to provide compensatory services for students with disabilities who missed instruction and related interventions, including physical, speech and occupational therapy, as well as counseling. About 30 percent of students with bilingual speech services on their IEPs are not receiving any or all of their mandated services. Students should be able to receive these missed services without being required to provide documentation of lost remote instruction or demonstrate lost skills.  

At this pivotal time, schools have the opportunity to reimagine education by creating an equitable and just education system to ensure the next generation thrives in a post-COVID world.  

Barbara A. Glassman is executive director at INCLUDEnyc. Frankie Miranda is president and CEO at Hispanic Federation. Hispanic Federation is conducting a survey of Latino families across New York State to help understand their experiences through the pandemic and their needs as students return to in-person learning. The survey is available in and . 

As a talent show came to a close in the winter of 2007, hundreds of children and parents poured out of a Minneapolis high school only to be met by the piercing blast of gunfire. 

North High School students and their parents rushed back inside and police raced to investigate the commotion. But the guns and bullet shells were nowhere to be found. A campus security guard who helped in the search, they’d soon learn, had already stashed them in his pockets and, later, his wife’s purse. 

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The weapons turned up that evening outside a gas station a few blocks from the school where the security guard, Kelly Woods, got into a heated altercation with his ex-girlfriend. Police, who observed witnesses screaming “They’ve got a gun,” arrested Woods at gunpoint.

For Woods, the arrest added to a lengthy criminal record, including drug trafficking, auto theft, armed robbery and a federal firearms conviction, which didn’t stop him from becoming a security guard in charge of protecting students. For police officer Charles Adams III, the security guard’s colleague at North High, the ordeal became part of his internal disciplinary record. When officials pursued fresh criminal charges against Woods, Adams pressed them to “go easy” on a man he described as a “good guy,” according to police records obtained by ����Ӱ��. The move infuriated the lead prosecutor on the case. Assistant County Attorney Diane Krenz said it was the first time in her decades-long career an officer had pressured her to go lenient on a suspect, according to the records. The last thing the community needed, she said, were “more guns on the North Side.” 

The incident linked to Adams — the and now-former cop — is included among dozens of allegations and disciplinary findings against campus police officers recently stationed inside Minneapolis public schools that include claims of police brutality, racial discrimination and domestic violence. 

In one incident, officers were accused of beating and arresting a man for carrying a handgun despite having a concealed carry permit. In another, police were accused of pounding in a man’s face because he littered the crust from a slice of pizza. Both incidents ended with court settlements, against Minneapolis officers that has cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The city after a man said at least six officers punched, kicked and tasered him during a traffic stop. One of the accused officers became a school-based cop, a position he held until last year.

After George Floyd was murdered in 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis officer, the city school board was quick to end its longstanding contract with the police department for campus cops, a move that some critics said was politically motivated. Floyd’s death put a national spotlight on police brutality and excessive force. ����Ӱ�� obtained public officer misconduct records and court files to explore whether similar interactions between police and students had transpired in Minneapolis classrooms — and if such incidents may have contributed to the school board’s decision to cut ties with the department. Ultimately, few of the records involved on-campus incidents or youth, but the lengthy list of allegations and disciplinary findings — many alleging violence on the part of police — raised separate questions about how the officers wound up inside schools in the first place. They also offer new context for an ongoing national debate about the role police should play in schools and whether they’re best equipped to ensure students are safe. 

Ben Fisher, an assistant criminal justice professor at Florida State University whose research focuses on the efficacy of school-based police, said the Minneapolis officers’ disciplinary and court records “seemed quite problematic.”

“Schools contain some of our most vulnerable people in society,” Fisher said. “If we are putting officers in there who have abused their power in some way outside of the school, it’s a very scary proposition to imagine that track record following them into schools.”

Minneapolis Police Department spokesman Garrett Parten said officers’ disciplinary records were considered before they were stationed inside schools, but he declined to comment on specific allegations or findings against officers. School resource officers took the job to build trust between youth and police, serve as positive role models and ensure children could learn in a safe environment, he said in an email. Effects of the school board’s decision to end the school resource officer program, he said, “will become evident over time.”

Dozens of school districts across the country severed their ties with police after Floyd’s murder, but broader police reform efforts have so far faltered. In Washington, legislation that sought to improve transparency around officer misconduct and make it easier to prosecute bad cops, among other changes, failed as bipartisan negotiations broke down. 

Locally, Minneapolis voters will consider a ballot question next week that could remove from the city charter a police department that’s long been . As the school district navigates its first year without a full-time police presence in classrooms, the ballot measure would create instead a city Department of Public Safety that would use a “comprehensive public health approach” and employ police officers only “if necessary.”

National industry recommend collaboration between police and education leaders when stationing officers inside schools, but researchers who study the efficacy of school resource officers said that little evidence exists about how such selection processes actually work. Anecdotally, the job is highly regarded in some districts and officers compete for the position, Fisher said. In other places, being stationed in schools is “a punishment where police are put there if they can’t cut it on the streets.”

‘Completely out of control’

����Ӱ�� obtained Minneapolis Police Department misconduct records for the 24 officers assigned to public schools for the five years prior to Floyd’s murder. Of those, 21 officers faced 105 internal complaints, 11 of which resulted in discipline of varying severity. Those records span the duration of officers’ employment with the department. Separately, the officers stationed in schools were named in federal lawsuits on at least two dozen occasions, according to an analysis of court records. 

The police disciplinary issues range in seriousness. One officer who worked in the schools was cited in 2019 for unintentionally firing his service rifle while responding to a call about a man with a gun, and another was given a letter of reprimand after getting arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. In two of the 11 cases which resulted in official department action, officers were disciplined for using excessive force. 

About half of the Minneapolis officers who were sued or disciplined remain on the force, according to a department spokesperson. 

Among them is Mukhtar Abdulkadir, who has faced 11 internal complaints — two that resulted in discipline — and two federal lawsuits. He reported to work as a school resource officer as recently as 2017, district records show. Records suggest the officer has a tendency to respond violently when under stress. 

In 2010, a young Ethiopian immigrant accused Abdulkadir of choking and punching him and calling him a racial slur after he was pulled over and cited for riding a bike at night without a light, a citation the man called “stupid.” A federal lawsuit following the incident . Abdulkadir and his attorneys couldn’t be reached for comment. 

In 2011, Abdulkadir was arrested on assault and terroristic threat charges after his then-wife accused him of punching her in the ribs, smothering her face with a pillow and hitting her in the face with the butt of his service pistol. Abdulkadir was but was rehired with back pay after his former wife retracted her allegations. Yet according to his disciplinary file, internal investigators believed her decision to recant was obvious: “Only if he is reinstated will she obtain child support when they divorce.” Additionally, internal records note that domestic abuse victims often “take the blame” because their abusers maintain control over them. 

Abdulkadir was also accused of repeatedly punching a man outside a car wash in 2013. The man honked at the officer because he was next in line at the automatic car wash but hadn’t moved forward, according to a complaint in a federal lawsuit. In response, Abdulkadir was accused of punching the man repeatedly before charging him with disorderly conduct, according to the lawsuit that also . 

Then, in 2014, Abdulkadir was reprimanded for becoming irate after he failed firearms training. Officers who witnessed the outburst reported feeling afraid because he “was completely out of control” and had easy access to a gun. 

“That night I truly believed that at any time he could grab his weapon, load it and use it against officers,” a police sergeant told internal investigators. In a less controlled environment, the sergeant said he could see a situation where Abdulkadir would “completely lose control of everything and harm himself, other officers or the public.” 

District records show Abdulkadir was assigned to Minneapolis campuses a year later, including Andersen United Middle School and Seward Montessori School. 

When officers protect their own

The disciplinary findings against Adams put the storied coach and second-generation Minneapolis cop on defense, a position he isn’t used to playing. After the school board voted to break with the police department, some students at North High School, the predominantly Black school where Adams worked as a school resource officer, So did the school’s principal. 

On after reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement, The New York Times examined how his roles as a football coach and a Black police officer placed him on both ends of the debate on policing in America. As Adams , “I wear blue, but I’m Black.”

The records suggest that Adams, who left the police department last year and is now head of team security for the Minnesota Twins, was willing to go to great lengths for a colleague accused of a serious crime, a reality he acknowledged in an interview with ����Ӱ��. Woods, the North High School security guard, and his attorney couldn’t be reached for comment. 

“I stood up for him as a character,” Adams said. “I never said that it was OK for what he did.”

North High School Principal Mauri Friestleben, who has been outspoken against the school board’s decision to cut ties with the police, similarly stood behind Adams. With officers in schools, she said she witnessed a “healthy discourse about what real protecting and serving looked like,” including situations where campus cops helped students avoid arrests. “I have no reservations about my public support” of Adams, she wrote in an email, and called the officer “a protector” who came to the job “with multiple dimensions and this may be just one of them.” 

Adams sought to downplay his own disciplinary record, arguing that police leaders and prosecutors overreacted to his intervening in Woods’s criminal case. Prior to becoming a school security guard, Woods was convicted of armed robbery in 1992 and became ineligible to possess a firearm. Six years later, police arrested Woods with a gun outside a Minneapolis Greyhound bus station. Woods, who is Black, unsuccessfully accused the officers of racial discrimination when they stopped him while investigating drug and gun trafficking, according to court records. 

Adams said that Woods was a positive force in the community and shouldn’t be defined by the years he spent in prison. After the shooting outside North High, Woods wasn’t trying to keep the guns for himself, Adams maintained. Instead, Woods knew the students involved in the shooting and didn’t want them to get arrested. Woods recognized them as gang members, according to court documents.

“I took it as him looking out for those two kids,” said Adams, who added that he didn’t observe the shooting himself. “He took [the guns] from them and said ‘Get out of here,’ one of those types of deals because that’s just the type of person that he is.” 

Adams scoffed at the suggestion from Krenz, the prosecutor, that his defense of Woods conflicted with his role in keeping the community safe. Krenz declined to comment for this article. Adams said she wouldn’t know where North High was if it “smacked her in her face.” 

“I don’t want to hear that,” Adams said. “I hear so many people talk about what should be good for our community. They have never stepped one foot inside of it.” 

‘Good ol’ boy network’

Internal police records obtained by ����Ӱ�� likely offer a significant undercount of officer misconduct. Just 2.7 percent of complaints resulted in discipline between 2013 and 2019, according to a nonprofit news outlet. After lengthy investigations, disciplined officers often received letters of reprimand or brief suspensions. 

A pattern of officers protecting their peers allowed abuses to remain under the radar until it went to court, the investigation found. Three years before he murdered Floyd, for example, Derek Chauvin and pinned him to the ground for 17 minutes. The incident, which could be seen as a precursor to Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, from his public records. 

����Ӱ�� sought comments from Minneapolis officers previously stationed inside schools, school board members, the city and state police unions, an attorney who represents many officers in misconduct litigation, the city and the county attorney’s office. Each declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests. 

Among the lawsuits against officers placed in schools, civil rights attorney Zorislav Leyderman represented the plaintiffs in six. Police misconduct incidents that occur outside schools, he said, should influence whether those involved are assigned as school resource officers. Leyderman cited the allegations as contributing to a larger culture in the city where many Minneapolis residents fear the police. 

“They don’t want to interact with law enforcement because they’re worried that if they do, they’re going to get injured,” he said. The allegations against the officers stationed in schools “should have been looked into, both the lawsuits and these internal complaints.” 

Oftentimes, he said police misconduct remains outside the public eye because officers are “coached” following incidents, a practice the department has maintained isn’t a form of official discipline. The department was sued and , including in cases of serious wrongdoing. In , investigators found that Minneapolis police used coaching to resolve more than a quarter of complaints over a six-year period.

Local parent advocate Khulia Pringle, who helped the school district hire security staff to replace sworn police last year, said that officers’ disciplinary records should be a major factor when placing them inside schools. However, that history only reinforced her belief that police have no place walking hallways. 

“In any other situation, when we need the cops, we call them,” said Pringle, a Minnesota-based representative of the . If they’re going to be there, there “should have been more protocols in place as to which officers are in schools,” she said. 

Adams said he was surprised to see the allegations against other police officers who worked in the schools, and although negative interactions between cops and youth have occurred, he couldn’t recall any recent instances that could’ve motivated the school board’s decision to end its police contract. Yet Adams, who said he can “speak freely” now because he’s no longer a cop, portrayed his former department as one where officer misconduct is routine. 

“It’s the good ol’ boy network,” he said. “You’ve got guys who are in the police department that treat people wrong on purpose and you can see it.” 

‘Part of the game’

As communities across the country grapple with the role police play in schools, new research serves to highlight the issue’s complexities. On one hand, the officers reduce some forms of violent crimes like fights, according to the research. At the same time, their presence prompts a dramatic uptick in suspensions and arrests — especially for students who are Black. Little academic research explores the types of officers who are more effective than others in schools.

But being named in a federal lawsuit shouldn’t be automatically disqualifying, said school safety consultant Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland. Filing civil rights lawsuits against an arresting officer is all “part of the game,” he said. Police misconduct suits often end in settlements, yet Trump said the final results should become part of the equation when making school resource officer assignments.

“If you’re a police officer and you’re doing your job on the streets, there’s a really good chance you’re going to get sued somewhere in your career,” said Trump, a proponent of school-based policing. “But there should be some sort of baseline criteria and screening set by your police administration before that pool of officers is ever presented at that next step to your school people.”

Parten, the Minneapolis police spokesman, said that all officers were eligible to apply for the school resource officer program and were interviewed by a panel of police department and school district officials. The police chief had the final say in hiring decisions. Parten said he collaborated with education officials when crafting a statement for this article, but Minneapolis school district spokeswoman Julie Schultz Brown didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. 

“Candidates were presented with scenario-based questions designed to evaluate critical thinking skills necessary for a school setting and further examined each individual’s understanding of the challenges and rewards associated with the position,” he said. 

Policing in Minneapolis remains contentious in the larger community, and voters will soon decide whether to go in a completely new direction. Ahead of next week’s election, suggests the question of whether to dismantle the traditional police department will be close. Black voters were less likely than white voters to support the idea. 

A similar course change — to remove cops from Minneapolis schools and replace them with district security staff — was ultimately detrimental, Adams maintains. “Crime is outrageous” at North High School, he said, and the security team hired to replace sworn officers is “stretched thin.” 

And even though he defended a security guard who he said sought to keep kids out of the criminal justice system, the former cop said stationing police in schools was an effective strategy to catch suspected criminals.

“A lot of kids would obviously show up to school and investigators and a lot of police knew the kid would be there,” Adams said. “That was a good way to get bad guys.” 

Lead Image: Former police officer Charles Adams III’s actions to intervene on behalf of a school security guard arrested on gun charges are among dozens of disciplinary findings and misconduct allegations involving campus police officers recently stationed inside Minneapolis public schools. (Andrea Ellen Reed / The New York Times / Redux)

To cast a ballot in person, voters must wear a mask or face covering and keep a 6-foot distance from others. However, vaccination cards are not called for, even as the city and, more broadly, for .

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Many NYC parents are unhappy with this turn of events.

Elena Khasanova rages, “Vaccinated parents can’t even walk their child into the classroom under the excuse of COVID theater. We have to submit meaningless morning screening every day; do the voters have to do it?”

“Many high schools claim they can’t hold in-person open house sessions to fully vaccinated parents and their children because it’s ‘unsafe,’ but people with varying vax status can come into school buildings and vote?” puzzles Majiya Chai. 

Katie N. concurs. “I’m incredibly angry about the hypocrisy. Parents are not allowed inside school buildings. Kids are being denied access to take sips of water in class. They must eat lunch in silence and 6 feet apart. If not, they can eat lunch outside on the concrete, quietly and in 15 minutes or less. They have to wear masks outside. Families cannot go inside school gyms to watch their kids play sports. BUT STRANGERS CAN GO INSIDE SCHOOLS TO VOTE? Which is it? Are adults all superspreaders and no parent can be allowed inside for fear of spreading COVID? But then we’ll let strangers inside and risk infecting our �쾱���?”

A parent who wanted to be identified only by the initials JS adds, “I think it’s ridiculous. My daughter was unwell at school and I couldn’t even go inside to collect her from the nurse’s office. She threw up in the hallway on her way to the front door, and they put her mask back on her face immediately after and brought her outside. The poor girl had to smell her own vomit in case she gave anyone COVID (which she didn’t have) in the 10 steps to the front door, yet any Tom, Dick or Harry is going to be allowed into their building to vote. Absolutely nonsensical!”

Some parents, such as this one, going by the initials SS, suggested a compromise: “Polling locations within schools should be limited to high school buildings this year. With young children unable to even receive the vaccine at this point, this brings a level of unnecessary risk. I’m all for making it easy to vote and have enough places to go to, but I worry about random adults in our children’s schools where we are not allowed. It seems a bit tone deaf for the current situation in our city.”

Other parents had questions, such as MK, who asked, “Who will be responsible for sanitizing after polling? School custodians are already working tirelessly to clean daily. This creates more work in a smaller time frame for sanitizing, especially considering the time polls close and the arrival of students. This also means that voters will simultaneously be in the building with afterschool students.”

Still others were less concerned about potential infection and more about the online learning that is planned for Election Day. Prior to the pandemic, Election Day was simply a full day off from school and instruction.

“The thing that is super annoying is the remote school,” said a mother of elementary school students. “It’s inconvenient enough that there is no school and many parents have to scramble for child care or figure out how to do all their work plus watch their kids. Just give us all a break. Let the teachers, school administrators, kids and parents not have to mentally swing from one dimension to another and make it a day off, same for snow days.”

A dad shares her concerns: “I have issues with days that were traditionally days off now being remote. It was hard doing that during lockdown but necessary. I do not feel it is rational to expect parents who work to pay for help because small children will need assistance with online remote learning. Even worse, the new snow days will be remote days. Since those are not days we can schedule, it will be difficult if not impossible for many parents to both work and to also monitor children to ensure they are participating.”

Diana Brogan spoke for many when she summarized, “This is all performative bull%&*$ they are putting our kids through.”

Alina Adams is a New York Times best-selling romance and mystery writer, the author of Getting Into NYC Kindergarten and Getting Into NYC High School, a blogger at and mother of three. She believes you can’t have true school choice until all parents know all their school choices — and how to get them. Visit her website, .

The current moment provides an opportunity for change, as school districts are already receiving significant increases in federal funding through the American Rescue Plan Act. It is crucial that New York City’s new mayor invest these dollars in programs that address the significant and widening opportunity gaps that disadvantage students and threaten their futures — particularly kids of color and those from low-income backgrounds.

More than ever, the next mayoral administration must make equity a priority and ensure that every child beginning as early as sixth grade has an opportunity to engage with rigorous coursework, explore a variety of interesting careers, earn college credits, gain work experience beginning in high school and have opportunities to connect with professionals in various fields. 

In the years leading up to the pandemic, an increased emphasis on college attainment led to higher rates of college enrollment, with notable gains for Black and Latino students. But these increased graduation rates have not led to corresponding postsecondary retention, higher attainment of associate or bachelor’s degrees, or more opportunity to acquire family-sustaining wages. That is especially true for first-generation college students.

Instead, students are left without a clear pathway to a career or an understanding of how going to college will prepare them for the future they desire. As a result, they leave college ill-prepared, with record amounts of student loan debt and unfilled promises of economic stability and upward mobility — whether or not they graduate. 

The impact on communities is evident in a of over 8,300 companies by the that revealed 48 percent could not get qualified candidates for posted positions. The most common barrier, cited by 56 percent, was a lack of experience.

When businesses have relationships with schools in their communities, they can offer students opportunities for better understanding their college and workforce options. But a mere 7 percent of companies in the survey reported having a strong relationship with high schools, and only 2 percent have strong relationships with middle schools.

School systems must do a better job of helping students understand their options and develop plans for their future after they leave high school. Affluent families and resourced schools already do just that, but Black and Latino students, and those from low-income backgrounds, often lack this vital information when making postsecondary choices. When — an organization that enhances pathways to careers for young people by uniting employers, educators and community-based organizations — explored the disparities among high school students from varying racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, it found for what schools are supposed to do. Its found that those who attend New York City schools that serve students from low-income backgrounds said the goal of their high school is to see them graduate. But students at high- or mixed-income schools believe that their school is also focused on helping them discover their unique skills and interests; build a resume that allows them to showcase those talents to colleges and employers; and ensure they leave high school prepared for the postsecondary pathway of choice.

The shift to ensuring all students leave high school prepared for college and the workforce starts with access to rigorous coursework, and it is crucial that the next mayoral administration invest in making opportunities for advanced coursework available to all students. 

The found that in 2018-19, high school students across New York State who were white and not from low-income backgrounds were approximately twice as likely to be enrolled in a range of key advanced courses like physics, calculus, computer science, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate, music and advanced foreign languages than their low-income and Black and Latinx peers.

The next mayoral administration must also expand experiences that can act as a complement to and provide knowledge that can empower students to make informed choices about postsecondary paths while engaging in real-world, paid work.

Work-based opportunities make it more likely that students enroll in postsecondary programming that is most aligned to skills and interests they developed in middle and high school. These experiences also make academic coursework more engaging and relevant and allow students to practice what they learn in traditional classrooms while cultivating a professional network.

Now is the time for New York City to invest in students’ futures.

Dr. Dia Bryant is executive director of The Education Trust–New York. Lazar Treschan is vice president of .

In Boston’s mayoral primary, city councilors Michelle Wu and Annissa Essaibi George , respectively winning 33.3 percent and 22.5 percent of the vote. Acting Mayor Kim Janey, the first woman and first African American to serve as the city’s mayor, finished in fourth place. Wu and Essaibi George will proceed to the general election November 2.

On September 9, public schools in Boston will open for the 2021-22 academic year — the first since last March, locals hope, not to be irreversibly damaged by the COVID-19 pandemic. Five days later, the city will hold the first round of a two-step election process to decide its next mayor, whose time in office may come to be defined by the performance of a school district that has struggled in recent years.

Those two deadlines are clearly connected in the minds of the electorate. According to conducted by Suffolk University and the Boston Globe, schools were rated the most important issue by about 18 percent of likely voters across the city, ahead of the economy, crime, and police reform and practically identical to the top-ranking items of housing (20 percent) and racial justice (19 percent). In areas of the city that have historically posted some of the highest levels of voter turnout, K-12 was ranked the most important issue by far.

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David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, observed that the public is drawing connections between the disparate K-12 issues, from police officers in schools to COVID remediation, in a way that could make education “the issue of the year.”

“You’ve got a constant thread where people are recognizing how important education is, and I think you’re going to see it continue to bubble up through the school reopening and even beyond,” Paleologos said.

Seven candidates have emerged to replace former Mayor Marty Walsh, who was appointed U.S. Secretary of Labor in March. That group, which will be winnowed to two finalists after the preliminary election on September 14, is striking for its representative diversity. Among the favorites to compete in November are three city councillors who would each be the first woman and first person of color elected to lead Boston. (A fourth, Acting Mayor Kim Janey, already set both precedents when she was elevated to the position this spring and is seeking her first elected term).

Whoever wins will face the significant challenge of turning around schools in the birthplace of American public education. Boston Public Schools, once considered something of an exemplar among major urban districts, was widely seen as regressing even before the emergence of the coronavirus. While local experts generally acknowledge the need for improvement, much of the public’s attention has been directed at an acrimonious debate over the admissions practices of the city’s three competitive-admissions schools. But the comprehensive improvements needed to lift the performance of the rest of the system, and arrest its persistent decline in enrollment, haven’t led the discussion.

Most of the bandwidth among parents is also consumed by concerns about the pandemic, says Paul Reville, Massachusetts’s former education secretary. The increased salience of K-12 schools measured in the Suffolk poll results from a desperate desire to return to the pre-COVID state of existence, when families, schools, and employers could take the school day for granted, he said; but the next mayor will need to accomplish a great deal more than negotiating a return to the status quo ante.

“We’re not debating strategy so much right now as we’re debating survival issues,” Reville said. “Are we going to open or not? Will we have enough room for all the students? Will they have to wear masks? What happens if the current spike in numbers keeps going? It’s hard to concentrate on the strategic when the day-to-day is so challenging.”

Critical audit

March 13, 2020, was the most significant day in the recent history of Boston Public Schools. That Friday, then-Mayor Walsh and Boston schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius announced that the district would close all buildings to in-person learning for six weeks. In fact, the initial reopening date would come and go, with most students stuck at home for the better part of a year.

But another crucial development had been announced just hours earlier, when local officials signalled that the district would be entering a unique governing partnership with the state of Massachusetts to improve learning outcomes for students. The announcement followed the release of of Boston’s academic performance, which found that one-third of its students attended schools ranking in the bottom 10 percent statewide. State authorities would provide support to the system going forward, but also hold it responsible for meeting specific performance goals.

The new arrangement was especially startling given Boston’s reputation as a comparatively high-flying district among its large, urban peers. Beginning in the 1990s and early 2000s, national observers the steady growth in student test scores, which was widely attributed to then-Superintendent Tom Payzant’s efforts to restructure curricula and focus on literacy instruction. While large gaps still separated the city’s underprivileged children from their peers in nearby suburbs, the arrow was definitively pointing upwards.

The progress about a decade ago, according to a report by the research organization Bellwether Education Partners, as the district cycled rapidly through a sequence of short-lived and interim superintendents before landing on Cassellius in 2019. The 2020 “memorandum of understanding” — which created a substantial role for state oversight while stopping short of a takeover — might have offered an opportunity to reclaim momentum. But according to John Portz, a political scientist at Northeastern University, it was instantaneously overshadowed by COVID.

“That would have been a key jumping-off point, if you will, for where education was going to go,” Portz said. “But it just got totally swallowed up by the pandemic. Thinking back, no one has talked about it, and I wonder whether it’s simply a dead letter at this point.”

Exam school admissions

The prolonged closure of the city’s 125 schools pushed systemic recovery far down the agenda, with a proposed as Walsh and Cassellius attempted to chart a course to safe reopening. The process became bitterly political at times, as when the Boston Teachers Union passed in Cassellius last December, citing unequal access to ventilation, testing, and protective gear.

Once K-8 schools returned, attention shifted again to the city’s public “exam schools”; of the three, the best known is Boston Latin, whose lofty alumni roll extends from Ben Franklin and John Hancock to many present-day elites in media, politics, and business. A decades-old debate over the school’s rigorous admissions test was first reignited in 2017, when that just one-quarter of Latin’s students were African American or Hispanic — compared with roughly three-quarters of Boston students overall.

Hearings held on the subject last fall by the Boston School Committee — a seven-member body appointed by the mayor — quickly became heated, with many parents arguing in favor of the existing admissions requirements and others calling for the introduction of criteria that might increase the odds of disadvantaged students winning seats. The debate grew so charged that three members after it was discovered that they had mocked and insulted Asian American parents and those living in the predominantly white neighborhood of West Roxbury. Still, the committee to approve a new admissions system that will decrease the importance of exam scores relative to school grades and reserve more seats for students living in low-income areas of Boston.

The controversy has attracted enormous coverage in local media. The changes are supported by three leading candidates in the September preliminary, including Acting Mayor Janey, Councilor Michelle Wu, and Councilor Andrea Campbell. Only Annissa Essaibi George, another city council member who previously worked as a teacher in East Boston, the new system and the process that led to its adoption.

That position may position her favorably with families living in the largely middle-class West Roxbury and Hyde Park neighborhoods, who typically make up as much of a quarter of the city’s electorate. Attorney Larry DiCara, a former city councillor and longtime observer of city politics, said that the issue’s outsized importance could swing more votes than one might expect.

“In some neighborhoods, the Latin issue is the most important issue,” DiCara said. “There are parents who, if their kids don’t get into Latin, they move.”

But Will Austin, a former teacher who founded the nonprofit , said he was dismayed by the race’s persistent focus on what he called “click-bait-y” issues at the expense of a more substantive conversation of the district’s stagnant academic results.

“You can’t lead systematic reform by changing which kids go to three of your 125 schools, which is essentially what we spent a couple of months doing,” Austin argued.

No ‘education candidate’?

There is still little clarity on which two candidates will advance in the preliminary election round. The most recent polls, conducted in and , put Wu in the lead, with Janey, Essaibi George, and several lower-ranked candidates further behind. But around one-fifth of respondents were undecided, and any configuration of the top-four candidates is generally viewed as plausible.

All four can broadly be defined as progressive, with Essaibi George venturing somewhat toward the center in her attitudes on exam schools and public safety. But Northeastern’s Portz said that the lack of more ideological differentiation made it difficult for the candidates to build more distinct brands.

“It’s tough to some degree because they’re driven by events in the news, the exam schools or the school committee resignations,” he said. “Those things are capturing more attention, and it’s hard for them to strike out and distinguish themselves.”

The race is notably different in this respect from the recent primary held in New York City, in which leading candidates sorted into camps of progressives and moderates. The moderates — including the eventual Democratic nominee, Eric Adams — generally supported the city’s charter school sector and advocated for more modest changes to admissions criteria for the city’s own exam schools.

DiCara served on the city council in the 1970s, when the district still enrolled over 100,000 students and a robust network of parochial schools served tens of thousands more. In , he argued that runaway housing costs had made Boston less friendly to families and the working class, while the disappearance of children rendered public education a less relevant concern to the city’s newer, more affluent residents.

“The dramatic changes to the population, where we have so many single people in Boston or married people without children, make Boston very different from New York City,” DiCara said. “Once you get out of Manhattan, [New York is] really a city with a lot of families.”

The city’s thought leaders have taken note of the short shrift given to schools during the campaign, with an August op-ed in the Boston Globe why no “education candidate” had yet emerged. and (a former BPS teacher) have each released lengthy proposals concerning education and childcare; Janey, the acting mayor, can even boast of as an advocate for children and families. But so far, none of it has produced a sustained conversation about what it would take to put Boston schools on the road to improvement.

Austin said that Boston municipal races are often dominated less by policy debates than personal experience.

“Every candidate in Boston is going to talk about how housing is unaffordable. Every single candidate will talk about how we need to reform the police. Every one will say that racial equity is core to their work. They don’t have really significant policy differences, so they differentiate themselves through how they campaign and their biographies.”

Reville said that the lack of greater variation within the field has held back the kind of boundary-breaking proposals that would address the key issue plaguing education in Boston: “too many longstanding, ongoing, chronically underperforming schools.”

“Nobody’s coming along to propose radical change,” he said. “You’re not hearing someone saying, for instance, ‘Let’s make summer learning an entitlement for every child in the Boston Public Schools.’ Or, ‘Should we be doing something radically different, given the changing population within the Boston Public Schools?’ We don’t have a lot of outlier proposals to make a radical shift in the status quo. It’s hard to change, and there’s an enormous amount of inertia.”

New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang likely knew heading into Wednesday’s that he’d have to face the elephant in the room: a comment he made in mid-March bashing its members.

“I will confess to being a parent that has been frustrated by how slow our schools have been to open, and I do believe that the UFT has been a significant reason why our schools have been slow to open,” he had said, during an interview with .

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew cut to the chase on Wednesday, asking the former presidential candidate and about the remark less than 20 minutes into the panel.

“I expressed my frustration as a public school parent about the pace of school reopening, and I think that’s a sentiment that many, many parents share,” Yang said, before pivoting to a recent conversation he said he had with Mulgrew, during which the two agreed to lay the blame for the bungled reopening on the mayor.

“I thought that conversation was very informative,” Yang said. “And I agree that the mayor has failed the teachers and public school parents like me in providing the leadership we needed to get our schools reopened more quickly.”

The UFT invited its top four picks for mayor — Yang, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, City Comptroller Scott Stringer and former advisor to Mayor Bill de Blasio Maya Wiley — to its endorsement forum.

Yang’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment by Wednesday afternoon, but followed up Thursday with an internal email campaign co-manager Sasha Ahuja sent to staff with her post-mortem on Yang’s performance.

“If you read the daily clips … you know that there has been ‘some’ chatter about Andrew’s relationship with the UFT, a critically important institution in our city,” she said, concluding that their candidate showed he’s “deeply committed to having hard conversations” and “authentically and unapologetically himself.”

While Yang’s candor may end up alienating him from one of the most city’s most powerful political organizations, it’s won him a fan base among some parents, including Daniela Jampel, a Washington Heights-based attorney who cofounded the KeepNYCSchoolsOpen movement. The group’s Facebook page has about 2,300 followers, she said, and one of its recent protests drew about 150 participants.

“Andrew Yang came out and put the blame on the teachers union,” Jampel said. “I think that resonated with a lot of parents. They’ve been on the brink since last May … It’s true you need to work with your labor partners, but if there was ever a year to go against the UFT, this is the year.”

Other aspects of Yang’s education platform have made him popular among some of the same parent groups. In January, after the city’s Panel for Education Policy narrowly voted to end the Department of Education’s contract with the company that tests 4-year-olds for admission to the city’s gifted and talented program, Yang, who used to lead a NYC-based test prep enterprise himself, said that ending it —��something rival Scott Stringer has promised to do —��would drive parents from New York.

“We should face the reality that these programs, in many cases, are what is keeping many families in the city,” he said. “I think getting rid of these programs without some kind of real replacement is making some people think that the city might not be right for them and their families.”

The G&T program is disproportionately white and Asian-American. Abolishing the controversial test is part of a to integrate the city’s highly segregated schools and ensure fairer representation in its most sought-after programs for Black and Hispanic students, who make up nearly 70 percent of enrollment. A longstanding, if now less openly acknowledged, barrier to doing so has been the argument that it would cause more affluent, white families to flee the system.

On what might be considered the more progressive end of Yang’s political philosophy is the support he voiced during his presidential bid for , which makes Educators for Excellence Executive Director Paula White hopeful about what he could do for city schools.

“UBI is really a proxy for saying that far too many folks don’t have a living wage … and that is a problem that needs to be solved,” she said. “I think that, for a long time in education, we looked at these issues in isolation: over here, we need to educate students well, over here, we need to think about social services. And maybe the twain shall meet but not necessarily. But I do think that’s a springboard from which we can think about, what does that mean within the context of teaching and learning?”

Yang also drew attention to autism and the challenges faced by special needs families on the campaign trail. His older son, Christopher, is on the autism spectrum, and his younger son receives learning supports under an individualized education program.

“To me, special needs is the new normal in this country,” he said during the last presidential debate of 2019, pointing later to the critical role that early intervention played in Christopher’s life.

It’s not clear to what extent that experience could influence Yang’s approach to New York City’s troubled special education program, which is the subject of multiple lawsuits and saying that it failed to provide required services. As for essential early intervention, NYC toddlers with special needs faced a projected shortage of 1,000 to 2,000 preschool seats pre-pandemic, and special education advocates have sued over the hours of mounting missed services both preschoolers and older students experienced during remote learning.

As a presidential candidate, Yang also aligned himself with the charter school movement, characterizing himself as “pro-charter” and saying, “There are excellent charter schools and terrible charter schools. We should just be pro-excellent school, and [stop] saying that this entire category of school is somehow problematic.” Teachers unions generally oppose charter schools because their teachers are mostly non-union, and they compete with district schools for student enrollment and funding. Democratic support for the publicly funded, independently run schools has waned recently.

Dan Weisberg, who went head-to-head with the UFT during the Bloomberg era when he was the DOE’s chief executive of labor policy and implementation, said that Yang’s relationship with charters��has yet to play out, but he did note that none of the candidates, Yang included, have placed themselves in opposition to the charter movement the way de Blasio did during his first run.

“Even beyond that 2013 campaign, he characterized charters as being a negative force that he was going to contain or eliminate,” said Weisberg, now the CEO at TNTP, a nonprofit focused on teaching. “His policies particularly early on reflected that. I haven’t heard those sorts of messages from any of the candidates.”

Weisberg also noted how Yang’s background could translate on the ground in NYC education: “I think that tech, as we’ve seen over the last year, is an increasingly essential piece of K12 ed. To the extent that he can improve the way we use tech to engage students —��whether it’s remotely or in the classroom —��that’s a positive thing.”

Jampel, the parent leader of the reopening movement, said that while she personally identifies as politically progressive, the last year has changed how she views the candidates and their policies.

“I know so many other parents that may have voted for a very progressive mayor, if COVID hadn’t happened,” she said. “Now, they’re furious that their children are being deprived of a year of education. I’m not saying whether it’s fair to blame the union, but they are blaming the union, and Andrew Yang really spoke to that.”

Jampel’s daughters, ages 7 and 3, have lived two different versions of the pandemic. The elder goes to a Department of Education school in Upper Manhattan, and the younger one goes to 3K in a non-DOE building that wasn’t subject to the much-maligned “two-case rule,” which required a school to close for 10 days if administrators found two unrelated COVID-19 cases there.

Watching her kids’ contrasting experiences unfold has been frustrating for Jampel, especially as she’s seen a very different reopening process play out in nearby Westchester County. Her toddler is, according to Jampel, “happy as a clam,” while her first -grader only saw the inside of a classroom for a handful of days in January and March.

“It’s really hard for my 7-year-old, frankly, because she doesn’t understand why her sister goes to school every single day,” Jampel said. “It’s very difficult.”

On Thursday morning, de Blasio announced that the city had reached agreement with the UFT to enact major changes to the policy. Starting Monday, NYC public schools only have to close for 10 days if at least four COVID cases are confirmed in separate classrooms across a seven-day period and only if the city’s contact tracers confirm the infections have come from within the school. Individual classrooms will continue to immediately close when an infection is discovered and COVID testing will double from 20 percent to 40 percent of students and staff if two or more classrooms are affected.

Prior to Thursday’s announcement, Weisberg noted that the UFT continued “to not just advocate for [the two-case rule], but insist upon it. That [was] creating a barrier to having a consistent in-person option for parents, and so I think Yang was representing a point of view of lots of parents in the city … There is no doubt there’s a significant amount of parent frustration.”

One test of how many more NYC parents are keen on in-person learning is playing out right now with the second opt-in period. The mayor extended the deadline to Friday for families to give up fully remote instruction, saying more may want to send their kids back into schools now that the have been eliminated.

How Yang fared with the UFT will be clear next week when the delegate assembly announces its mayoral endorsement on April 14. Dermot Smyth, a political action coordinator for the teachers union, said it chose Yang as a finalist based on a number of factors — including his performance in a closed-session, members-only panel earlier this year, during which he “talked about the heroic job [teachers] had done during the pandemic,” and because of his polling numbers.

Following the Politico interview, Smyth said, Yang’s team reached out to the union multiple times.

“They’ve done everything they can to talk to us, to let us know he didn’t mean what he said,” he explained. “Of course,” he added, “We’re not saying we believe he didn’t mean what he said.”

A found that Yang enjoyed the highest name recognition among the eight leading candidates, but that half of likely voters remained undecided three months before the critical June primary.

Jampel considers herself among those undecided voters, but views school reopening as the all-important factor for her and a number of other parents in her network.

“I’ve seen schools becoming more and more of an issue,” she said. “I think people are very disappointed in how schools have been reopened … There are a lot of parents saying publicly and privately this is the issue I think about, and I’m going to vote for the person that speaks to me most on it.”