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Jessica Grose

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

When it comes to education, I consider myself a normie parent. What I want is for my children to have a strong foundation in the core subjects: reading, math, science and history. I want my kids to be challenged to the best of their abilities and be prepared for the future. I want to be guaranteed that they will be physically safe. I don’t want monthslong school board fights over book bans or school renaming. I just want my children to read books and go to school.

People disagree about how best to meet these goals. (Roughly, liberals think the worst public schools should be made better, and conservatives think parents should be given more choices outside the public system, though there are some heterodox advocates.) But the depressing fact is that neither party has delivered on the basics. As I argued last month, neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris had a plan for increasing test scores, fixing Covid learning loss, working on the student absentee crisis or addressing the fact that the teacher pipeline is drying up.

Though education is not a top-five issue for voters, I don’t think Democrats on the city and state levels have done a good job as leaders on K-12 schools under President Biden. On the federal level, he also has struggled. For example, there’s the ongoing FAFSA debacle: The federal student aid application form was delayed for a second year after last year’s disastrous rollout of a new form.

A lot of students are still suffering from the prolonged school closings of 2020 and ’21, and schools in blue cities and suburbs were closed the longest. While the Biden-Harris administration isn’t responsible for these decisions made on the local level, I don’t think it did enough to push back on the districts that were completely closed for in-person learning after........

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