It is hard to overstate just how much public education in the United States was permanently changed by extended school closures of 2020 and 2021.
For an entire year, millions of students across the country were forced to attend classes via Zoom, wear masks that affected their cognitive abilities, and were generally socially isolated. At the same time, decision-makers in school districts from Virginia to California were pushing a political agenda that blatantly sought to shut parents out of the education of their own children.
The swift and intense backlash from parents changed the politics of education forever. And documenting it all with glee was Corey DeAngelis, an expert in education policy who recognized early on that the public education system in the U.S. would be changed forever by the pandemic actions of school district officials and teachers unions.
Mockingly dedicated to Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union for “doing more to advance freedom in education than anyone could have ever imagined,” DeAngelis’s new book The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools recounts how the failures of the public education system were laid bare by the pandemic in remarkable detail.
DeAngelis is a self-described “school-choice evangelist” who has been at the forefront of turning anger at the public education system into tangible policy victories at the state level. In the past three years, several states have passed some form of universal school choice amid a surge in public support for the policy initiative.
The Parent Revolution‘s greatest strength is in its retelling of the political awakening that took place in and around public schools in 2020 and 2021. From the school closures of 2020, the parent activism of 2021, and the attempts by teachers unions to gaslight the public about what was really happening, DeAngelis weaves a riveting narrative of righteous anger that birthed the most significant conservative grassroots political movement since the Tea Party.
The biggest villain in this story is the teachers unions, whose misdeeds during the pandemic are numerous and astonishing. In Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, California; and Cambridge, Massachusetts, DeAngelis reminds readers that teachers unions used the charge of racism and white supremacy to smear families who begged for school districts to return to in-person classes.
Predictably, parents who lived in districts without in-person classes turned to private options for schooling. But even then, DeAngelis recounts how union-backed politicians blocked private schools from opening their doors to students on the grounds that allowing private schools to open while public schools remained closed would exacerbate existing inequalities between public and private school students.
As these fights over school availability gave way to battles over pornography, critical race theory, gender ideology, and parental rights in schools, the winner in it all was the cause to which DeAngelis has dedicated his life: school choice.
First West Virginia and then Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Arkansas, and several other states quickly made universal school choice a reality. This policy goal had failed to gain traction for years except in very limited circumstances until the political headwinds shifted in the wake of the education system’s failures during the pandemic.
But as much as DeAngelis recounts how the education industrial complex overplayed its hand and empowered the school choice movement to come roaring back, The Parent Revolution is a reminder that too many children are still trapped in failing government schools.
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School choice is one of the Republican Party’s most popular policy goals, but it is rarely mentioned as a major campaign issue, in part because at the state level, the GOP still suffers from union-backed politicians who are stubbornly devoted to the public school system despite its many institutional failings.
As DeAngelis convincingly described in the final pages of his book, the antidote to these failings is new accountability that begins with school choice but does not end with it. From holding on-cycle partisan elections for school boards to passing legislation that ensures that parents decide how their child is educated and treated by school officials, the policy agenda of The Parent Revolution is clearly spelled out. Politicians who claim to stand for parents and families would do well to heed it.