Never Mind The Presidency

Look, it's not that I don't think the Presidential race isn't critical. It is. But when it comes to education, A) if you don't have enough information to make up your mind yet, I don't know how you even dress yourself in the morning and B) there are other races that public education supporters need to pay attention to.  

The Presidency matters for education, mostly to the degree that the White House can muck things up. That includes, as we have seen, installing judges who would like to turn the wall between church and state into dust. But again-- if you don't already know that the race for President is a critical choice between a catastrophic mess of a candidate and someone who wants the country to work well, nothing I can type will help (and if you think voting for Jill Stein is a great move, you are truly beyond rational help).

Congress? Also critical, as they control a lot of what can actually happen. We need more people in DC who are interested in actually governing rather than throwing ideologue hissy fits. 

But I want to encourage everyone to pay attention to the state and local contests. 

It is at the state level that the real crazypants regulations happen. It's legislators who drive the pushes for vouchers in states, and they do it largely with impunity because rarely do the voters punish legislators for trying to kneecap public schools, thanks to gerrymandering, doing the damage in the dark, and the electorate's short memory. Anti-LGBTQ, anti-diversity, anti-reading-- that stuff happens at the state level.

However, when it doesn't happen at the state level, it happens at the local level. Take Pennsylvania, where the legislature has been Democratic enough to forestall the worst ideas. Instead, right wingers have adopted a district-by-district strategy.  The Independence Law Center is the legal shop for the Pennsylvania Family Institute, whose goal is "for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished."

Though they try to keep their religious motivations quiet, these are Christian fundamentalists trying to impose their view on districts. They offer free counsel to any school board that wants some help with creating some culture panic regulations, and one at a time, they have been providing school districts to be just as repressive as state legislatures in Oklahoma or Florida.

Nor has Moms for Liberty given up and gone home yet. In fact, if you think you don't have a local chapter, you might want to check again. Anti-LGBTQ folks found they could block the new Title IX simply by having a Moms for Liberty member with students in the school, and lo and behold, there are suddenly M4L chapters well beyond those listed on the national group's map. 

People are used to sleepwalking through local elections. Heck, in most years, school districts in my region can barely get enough people to run to fill empty seats. But as someone who follows this stuff, I can't tell you how many times I've come across a story of voters in a local school district declaring, "What!??!! Dang, but I should have paid closer attention to that last school board election!"

Pay attention. Educate yourself, and then educate the people around you. The Presidential election is noisy as hell and will only get noisier, but you are going to feel the effects of those local elections for years. Vote. Come for the Presidential race, stay for the local officials.