The Daily Signal - Parental Say in Children’s Education Is Key Concern Among Virginia Voters

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

“Things Take Time” The Mirriam Webster Dictionary defines the word ‘campaign’ as: a connected series of operations designed to bring about a particular result. There is no definition of how many of those operations it might take to achieve a goal. Such is the case of school choice in Virginia.  In 2012, after years of trying to convince legislators to follow the lead of states like Florida, Arizona and Nevada to offer ‘money-follows-the-child’ voucher programs (Nevada has since reversed their voucher program), Virginia created the Education Improvement Scholarship Tax Credit to help generate tax-advantaged contributions to a state managed program where approved students could use the scholarship to pay to attend a school of their choice. Not the same, but a step in the campaign. In 2021 with the election of Winsome Earle-Sears as lieutenant Governor, the school choice movement had a vocal proponent who teamed up with the Virginia Education Opportunity Alliance to bring real choice to the legislators with the political upside of Conservative Republicans being the heroes in the low-income inner-city neighborhoods. That effort was done in by rural representatives whose constituents didn’t have many choices in their sparsely populated counties. Now, with the advent of Micro-Schools and Co-operative schools as we detailed in a previous column, perhaps now is the time. The Heritage Foundation partnered with Fabrizio and Lee to conduct a focus group of likely voters to see their feelings on education, choice and the role of the parents. We talked with Jonathan Butcher of the Heritage Foundation about the results. Keep Up With The Daily Signal   Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:    The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939⁠ The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. I'm your host, Joe Thomas, Virginia correspondent for The Daily Signal. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to thank you for tuning in today. If you're a first-time listener, The Daily Signal, brings you fact-based reporting and conservative commentary on politics, policy, and culture. And I hope you join our band of regular listeners to our podcast. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and also take it. Take a moment to rate and review us wherever you get your podcast.

You can find additional content at DailySignal.com. Now, let's get started with today's conversation right after this. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do. business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact

Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. Focus group. It's similar and it may come out sounding like we're discussing a poll, but it's really to get a sketch of what the zeitgeist is regarding issues. When you do a focus group, you're trying to find out what your customers are looking for. Fabrizio and Lee helped the Heritage Foundation do a focus group, four separate ones on unaffiliated Virginians. And they were defined as respondents who were probably or definitely going to vote in the 2025 general election. And that early voting begins in just a month now, September 19th. And what they were looking for is the attitudes regarding education. and parental rights in Virginia.

Now here we are four years later from the famous midnight gaffe of Terry McCullough, where he admitted so much of the attitude that, to be fair, many Virginians felt was already the feeling of the authoritarian in Virginia government, but he gave it voice and gave Glenn Yonkin the platform on which to win the gubernatorial battle. Joining us to take us through the focus group is Jonathan Butcher. Jonathan, welcome. And thanks for taking some time out with us to go through these results. How are you doing today?

Good. Great to be with you. So talk about first the reasons behind this focus group, this group effort with Fabrizio and Lee, to get a sketch as to what Virginia's parents and voters were featured. feeling four years later? Is that what it was? Well, yes, and education remains an important topic for Virginia parents. I mean, even as we've seen the Yonken administration, you know, adopt important changes to the way in which the state handles, the way that schools will treat fairly both boys and girls, males and females in terms of policies around field trips, around athletics, around locker rooms.

The Yonkin administration has already begun to make some important shifts there. I also think that there are school districts like, you know, Loudoun County and Fairfax, where there, you know, remains to be some pretty clear opposition to what I would consider sound education policy about focusing on the core subjects of math and reading. And as this focus group asked, many of the parents, parents, giving parents a say in what is taught to their students. And this isn't a technical question. I mean, this is a question of whether or not the community's values are actually being reflected in what is taught in these different school districts. And I think in many cases,

parents feel like they're being left out and they're being replaced by a pretty left-leading, radical, I would even argue, ideology in some of these districts. Now, you mentioned left-leaning. When you put together, Fabrizio and Lee put together these focus groups, it is remarkably balanced. Often I'll see polls done by different colleges and institutions where there will be maybe 30% of the respondents, Republican, almost 40% Democrat, and then the other 30% are independents. This one is split pretty well down the middle ideologically. 13% lean Democrat, 13% leaned Republican, and 14% identified themselves as independent. So this isn't really ideologically all that different from the way Virginia tends to vote, is it? That's right.

And it shows that, you know, regardless of what party you associate with, parents really care, right? about what's going on in their child school and they want the best for their kid. I think as we've, you know, as heritage has found in talking to parents whose children have experimented with, you know, claiming they were born in the wrong body or as they've talked to people who are in school districts that are teaching material from, say, the 1619 project, or, you know, the pretty aggressively racially prejudicial material from critical race theory.

You know, it really doesn't matter where you're coming oftentimes right or left. I mean, I think a lot of parents here we find in surveys, they don't want their child taught that their skin color is the most important thing about them.

They don't want their children to be socially affirmed, right? That it's okay to say you were born in the wrong body and then have access to the locker room of the opposite sex, right? So these things really do span political parties. So when you look at the results, 60% of the respondents were in favor of a statement. That's how they gave the question to them, the statement, give parents a greater say in their children's curriculum if they attend a public school in Virginia.

How is that not a bipartisan issue amongst those who count on those people to vote for them? Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, other surveys that have asked similar questions nationally, I think we find that parents really do have pretty clear opinions about wanting things like character and virtue taught in public schools, right? These ideas that kind of well-up conceptions of honesty and integrity and civility, right? Parents really do want these reflected in schools. And I don't think that there is enough attention to the fact that, you know, there is this transmission of essential values that takes place in the classroom that has been lost as we've kind of ventured off into SEO and social emotional learning. and ventured off into some of the more radical conception of teaching gender to young children. And parents want to get this, want to get, I think, their values, their understanding of what it means to be American, made a part of the school curriculum.

I know there was some editorial columns read in Virginia papers over the last week or so and circulated that. said Virginia lags behind some of the other states in the union when it comes to COVID recovery, and that's statistically driven grades and that kind of thing. When you have, as you mentioned, school divisions like Fairfax and Loudon, who have been content to run out the clock in courts and with filings ignoring Governor Yonkins and the Department of Education's requests to change their policy. regarding how children are taught in their schools, they seem to be looking at a period where they've successfully dodged it by running out the clock, even though, you know, it's been to the detriment of the children who aren't getting the education that they need to get out into the world. Is that reflected in this research done by the Heritage Foundation in Fabrizio and Lee?

Well, I think that this focus group really found that parents are keeping an eye on things like the Supreme Court ruling recently in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which reaffirmed parents' rights to remove their children when a school teaches something that is contrary to their values, contrary to their religious beliefs. You know, I think that it's important to remember that one of the values of school choice is that when parents have an option to go somewhere else, it really does help to keep the assigned schools honest about their relationships with parents and honest about reflecting what parents' values are. I think Virginia has, you know, it really could use to, especially on the private school choice side, it's tried for many years. Some have tried for many years to improve the private school choice options through scholarships in the state or education savings accounts. I think that should still be on the horizon for Virginia families. They need to understand that you're not only giving hope and opportunity to students who are either struggling or unhappy in their assigned school, but you're also making the assigned school system more responsive and more, I think, reflective. of the communities in which they're placed, right,

in the communities in which they exist because they have to be. Otherwise, parents will go somewhere else. So I think that's key. We've seen this over decades now. And finally, I feel like it's getting some traction. Jonathan Butcher is talking with us from the Heritage Foundation

about the focus group on education attitudes in the Commonwealth. Jonathan, do you think enough people that seek elected office are taking this seriously. I know that Lieutenant Governor Winsom Sears spearheaded some movements with the Virginia Education Opportunity Alliance at the beginning of their four-year term, and it seemed to have some traction. But at that point, the micro-school movement had not really taken hold, and a lot of rural communities railed feeling that there weren't a lot of choices there, and now there are. Is this a different world?

than it was even just four years ago? I really think it is because of what we're seeing happen in Washington. I mean, normally when we talk about education policy, we should focus on what's going on in the states because that is where the focus of education policy really should be where it should develop. Washington is usually causing more harm than good when it comes to education policy.

I would say, you know, the recent policies, though, in this year, since the Trump administration took office, there's something to keep an eye on. I mean, I think the Trump administration is they're writing letters to state superintendents reminding them of the private school options that are already available in federal law. They're writing letters asking for state superintendents to request waivers to federal law so that they can enact policies that are unique and good fit for their states. right? I mean, this is this is exactly what you want from Washington. You want them reminding state officials that, hey, look, under federal law, there's flexibility that you

either request or already take advantage of. That puts us in a very different place than we were, I mean, certainly a year ago, right? Yeah, agree. And I think as the Trump administration, yeah, as the administration tries to downsize and hopefully ultimately close the U.S. Department of Education, that is going to put more power back in the hands of state officials. And so they're going to have to pay attention. to focus groups like this because, you know, it's going to be on them, even more so to create the policies that fit, you know, fit their constituents. People can download this report if they go to heritage.org, Jonathan.

You can find more information about this and our other research at heritage.org. That's right. Well, I appreciate you putting this together and making it available and go to heritage.org to get the report and share it. Share it with many people. As I said, we begin our early voting window in just one month from today as we talked with Jonathan. So I appreciate it, sir. You have a wonderful remainder of the day, and we'll talk to you again very soon. Great. Thank you. That'll do it for today's show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new episodes from The Daily Signal.

Every weekday you can catch top news in 10 to keep up with the day's top headlines in just 10 minutes. and every weekday afternoon catch Victor Davis Hanson's thoughtful analysis for the Daily Signal. If you like what you hear on this show, would you take a minute and leave us comment? We love hearing your feedback. Thanks again for being with us today.