Democrats must own up to this failure to win back Americas parents

A few prominent Democrats are waking up to a fact that parents have known for years: When it comes to education, their party is on a path to nowhere.Obama-era Education Secretary Arne Duncan sounded the alarm this month, warning that Democrats are “adrift” on schools and losing ground with voters.And don’t think Republicans haven’t noticed.In recent years Duncan’s party has watched a 20-plus-point advantage on the issue of education collapse.Between 2020 and 2024, parents of school-aged children shifted seven percentage points to the right.To anyone with their ear to the K-12 education ground, it’s been obvious that parents of every political stripe had reached their limit regarding the ideological capture and non-academic focus of their kids’ schools.Anyone who failed to see it was simply ignoring the bright-red warning signs. Student enrollment decline, a national phenomenon, has been steepest in large, urban, blue-governed systems.Parents with school-aged children are moving out of blue states, families are fleeing big cities — and ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, homeschooling and private schools have been on the rise.Teachers’ unions, which contribute over 99% of their political donations to Democrats, are making the status quo ever harder to defend.Last month, for example, the Chicago Teachers Union pushed to cancel school altogether on May 1 as part of a blatantly socialist May Day protest. “No school, no work, no shopping,” was the intended theme.The public backlash was so intense that schools remained open — but the union, undeterred, turned the day into a “civic action” event, encouraging students to attend rallies, protests and marches during school hours.Many parents saw that for what it was: A vivid example of a system more comfortable mobilizing students as political foot soldiers than actually teaching them in the classroom.In the face of unprecedented chronic absenteeism — it’s 41% in Chicago — teachers’ union ...