The NPR Politics Podcast - GOP Candidates Light On Education Policy

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

When it comes to the future of America's youth, Republican presidential candidates are less focused on the academics and more on the culture. Candidates are campaigning on changing the way race & sexuality are taught in schools, and what should be left to parents. This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, and political correspondents Danielle Kurtzleben & Sarah McCammon.This episode was edited by Erica Morrison. It was produced by Jeongyoon Han and Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello, this is Charlene from Portland, Oregon, and I am sitting backstage in a theater I grew up performing ballet in. And now, many, many years later, my company and school will be premiering our contemporary version of The Nutcracker. This podcast was recorded at 1241 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, December 18th, 2023. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will still be pinching myself in happiness that dance streams continue to come true even after you're done performing. What's new about it? I'm curious. I want to see this now. Also, I want to take lessons for her on dramatic delivery because there were some pauses in there. I was I was just in suspense. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.

I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Sarah McCammon. I also cover the presidential campaign. And today on the show, how Republican presidential candidates and GOP voters are thinking and talking about education. We've been keeping track of major issues in the lead up to the primaries. And when it comes to education, the politics seem to matter just as much, if not more, than the policy. There have been assertions to shrink or even entirely abolish the Department of Education. But the main education issue on the campaign trail is not about academics. It's about culture. And Danielle, you have been diving deep into all of this. So I want to begin the conversation with you. Can you just give us a general rundown of what you have been hearing from candidates. Sure, yes. And this is definitely the sort of the starting point of my reporting on this is what you mentioned about the difference between culture wars and educational policy. We've been

running issue trackers here at NPR, which many of our listeners may have looked at, showing the differences between the Republican candidates on immigration or abortion, that sort of thing. And so when I attempted to get into education, I realized that educational policy isn't something the candidates go terribly deep on. Now, in part, that has to do with the fact that the president doesn't set the particulars of education policy, but presidential candidates have run on this before. We look back to 2000 when George W. Bush ran very heavily on what would become No Child Left Behind. And Al Gore also ran on education back then. So fast forward to today.

What are they saying? Our listeners have probably heard candidates talking a lot about culture wars. Here is a representative line from Donald Trump in one of his stump speeches from this fall. When day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children. These culture war issues are very much something that Donald Trump leans into, as well as Ron DeSantis, the current Florida governor. Here's what he said at a rally also this fall in Iowa. We enacted a parents' bill of rights. We protected women's sports in Florida. We banned the transgender surgeries for the minor kids in Florida.

So Ron DeSantis also leans into talking about race, about gender, transgender kids. He brings up critical race theory. Really, what we're getting at here is that candidates use education, if not policy, they use schools as a way of telling voters not exactly what they plan to do, but of who they are. It is a way of trying to differentiate yourself to voters on a topic that is sensitive to a lot of people, which is kids. Final candidate that I'm going to hit here is Nikki Haley. In her stump speech, she tries to give a picture of herself as a no-nonsense type leader, giving voters sort of tough love, tough facts. Here's one segment of her speech. Only 31 percent of eighth graders are proficient in reading. Only 27% of eighth graders are proficient in math. If we don't do something about this, we're going to be in a world of hurt 10 years from now. Now that said, she does lean into the culture war as well because she especially

talks about transgender girls playing girls sports. And she calls that the women's issue of our time. Here's what she says. Strong girls become strong women. Strong women become strong leaders. None of that happens if you have biological boys playing in women's sports. We've got to cut that out. You can see her using this not only to talk about the culture wars, but also as a way of highlighting her own gender, of painting a picture of herself as a strong woman leader, and of emphasizing that she is the only woman in the Republican primary race at this point.

You know, I was struck by what we just heard from Nikki Haley, pointing out the proficiency numbers in math, right? Because I just did this story about semiconductors. And one of the singular things you hear from every major chip company right now that I talked to is that there are not enough kids in K through 12 education, they say, who are focused on science and math. And so it's striking to hear so much of the conversation not be focused on what, you know, employers say they need, but rather on, I guess, some of the concerns that Republican parents have. You know, I think that's right, Asma. And I want to go back to something Danielle said earlier,

which is that one of the things that's going on here is that in reality, a president only has so much power to control education policy. This is something that Nikki Haley has pointed out. She did a town hall at a charter school in Manchester, New Hampshire in September that I attended. And, you know, some of the parents had questions about transgender rights and transgender issues in public schools, and also about funding for the Department of Education. She was asked, I think, in essence, if she would abolish it. And she said, look, I can't abolish the Department of Education as the president. What I can do is redirect funds to the states. And really that, you know, the state and local level, of course, is where a lot of these policy decisions get made. So as Danielle said, this is an opportunity, most importantly, for candidates to tell people

something about themselves, if not so much what they actually would do or even could do as president. So I want to ask you both about voters, because you both have spent time, of course, interviewing Republican voters. Are they receptive to this kind of messaging that they've been hearing? And I recognize there's a degree of nuance between what Nikki Haley is saying and what Ron DeSantis is saying. Oh, in my experience, absolutely. Now, I'm talking purely about Iowa voters. That is where I have been traveling thus far this cycle. But yes, they have been receptive. But this is a really important also nuance to my reporting, which is talking about schools, if not always education, on the campaign trail. It's a reliable

applause line. It gets people fired up. But also, it is the rare voter that I talk to where schools or education is their number one issue. Often it's the economy. Some will say the price of fuel. Immigration is something people will bring up. Schools don't come up quite as much. But once you talk to people, they do have strong feelings. And those feelings, in my experience, reflect kind of the candidate that they have lined up behind. For example, here is a farmer named Dave Meggers. I met him at a Trump rally in Davenport, Iowa. Here's what he had to say about the kind of influence he's trying to wield on his school district. We're tough on our school board down there on different situations. One thing was, you know, the books in school and stuff like that.

And we were one of the first ones down there to get our kids out of mass during COVID and stuff. So that language of, you know, being tough on their school and also of just like parents wielding this kind of influence, sort of trying to take the school back for themselves, it very much fits with how Donald Trump talks about education. Now, going to a different candidate, let's talk about Nikki Haley. Here's a woman named Stacey Dawn, who I met at a Nikki Haley Clear Lake Town Hall. And Stacey Dawn is the president of the local Chamber of Commerce. And I asked her what she thinks about how candidates are talking about schools. I think that when you take it down to race and gender, you're really missing the point. So whatever we need to do to make it so our kids are able to go to school,

to enjoy going to school, and to learn what they need to learn to be competitive in an international market today is what's really important. So even while education wasn't exactly top of mind for these voters when I first asked them, hey, what's most important to you? Not coinc doesn't tend to be, at least anecdotally, the first issue that voters bring to mind. I also hear a lot about things like border security, immigration, and certainly foreign policy. But I think, to Danielle's point, again, this is something that's on voters' minds, and they want to know, more or less, that the candidates that they're considering voting for are the kind of people that they feel comfortable with. And so a lot of the messaging we're hearing around this is about that. All right. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. We're back and we're talking about Republicans and education in the upcoming election.

You know, I was recently in Arizona and I was struck by the fact that a pollster told me that the number two issue behind immigration that they often see is education. Because to your point, Sarah, it's not something that I heard a lot about from voters, but apparently it is quite a top of mind issue from voters. And I got the sense there that it's quite a generational divide because in a state like Arizona, you have an older population that is more likely to be white, more likely to vote Republican. And then you've got a significantly sizable younger population that is demographically more likely to be brown, more likely to be Democrat. And so there are, you know, tensions over issues of funding and local resources. And I guess I bring this all up to point out the fact that even though these candidates are talking at a real, you know, large national level, ultimately education feels like it looks different endorsed Ron DeSantis in the Iowa caucus. And education is very much one issue where Ron DeSantis tries to align himself with Kim Reynolds because she is pretty popular in Iowa, particularly, of course, among Republicans.

So Republican voters in Iowa like her in part because of the way she handled schools during COVID. So when she gets up and says, hey, Ron DeSantis is great on education, that allows Iowa voters to say, oh, well, I like Kim Reynolds. I might like him as well. So he has very much used education in that way to sort of latch on to Iowa's concerns about education. Sarah, the Republican Party has seen quite a bit of a demographic shift in terms of white college educated voters leaving the party and joining Democrats. Do you think that that demographic shift plays a role in what the current base of Republican voters want and think about education? Well, sure. You know, we're talking higher education versus

K-12 education, and I would be careful to not necessarily conflate those two ideas. But Republican voters have for decades talked about local control and prioritizing parental rights. And that's a theme that we're seeing, you know, sort of escalating the last couple of years. You know, 20, 30, 50 years ago, sometimes those conversations about local control were really code for segregation or a discomfort with integration. And we saw the rise of private Christian education in many ways as a way to avoid having to integrate schools. Today, you know, the dynamics are similar. The issues are a little bit different. As we've been discussing, there are things like transgender rights and even questions like how to set policy around COVID, for example,

which is something that Ron DeSantis got a lot of momentum from a couple of years ago. I'm not sure how much that's still on voters' minds today. But yeah, as we've seen that shift, we've seen, I think, an intensification of some of the polarization around the way that voters think about education and what they want from their education system, what they want the schools to do versus not do. And we hear a lot of Republican voters say things like, don't talk to my kids about sex, don't talk to my kids about gender, that's my job. Whereas Democrats feel that's an important part of educating children and helping them to understand the diverse society that they live in. So Danielle, what we've been talking about so far are Republican candidates,

largely speaking, to a Republican base of voters. But, you know, as we look to the November 2024 elections, there's an assumption that whoever the Republican nominee is, you know, may have to appeal to a larger audience. And do you get a sense that candidates need to alter or adjust their message on education or their policy on education? And I should point out, it's not like I have a clear sense of what Joe Biden or the Democratic Party's education platform is. What I most routinely hear from the Biden White House is kind of a

denunciation of some Republican efforts to ban books or some of the culture wars that we see from Republican governors. You know, the Biden White House has certainly invested in community colleges, and they've talked about addressing mental health needs. But I say that there will likely be an expectation that a Republican nominee needs to talk to a larger base of voters come November? Sure, yeah. And I mean, this is sort of a cliche. It's a thing that we say many election cycles about all sorts of topics is that candidates often have to or feel they have to move toward the center, appeal to more moderates in a general election than in a primary election. So it is reasonable to think that perhaps a Republican candidate,

especially if it's Donald Trump or perhaps Ron DeSantis, two guys who talk a lot about these culture war issues, that they might at the very least want to back off of the topic come a general election if they were the nominee. This is something that I talked with Republican strategist Frank Luntz about. He is convinced after having done a lot of focus groups with the Republican voters that education, education, that talking about student achievement more and about race and gender less very much could be a winning issue if candidates talked more about that. Well, we would have to see if a candidate would actually do that. That's what I'm going to be watching next year for sure. So final question for you, and that is that for many election cycles, it was assumed that Democrats had an electoral advantage on the issue of education. In fact, I was looking at a couple of recent ABC, NBC polls, and it showed that Democrats do maintain an advantage when it comes to which

party voters trust more on this issue of education. But that being said, Republicans have been trying to make inroads, you know, whether that's on achievement issues or focusing on parents' rights. And I think in some instances, they have made inroads, right? I mean, I'm thinking back to how Glenn Youngkin, who's now the governor of Virginia, was really able to effectively catalyze on this issue of education to court voters when he became governor. And I'm curious, Sarah, do you see that as a model? You mentioned Nikki Haley talks about achievement. Do you see this as a sign that Republicans are making inroads with some voters? I do think we're hearing candidates kind of focus on the nuts and bolts more and more. And

this is something that, you know, to the point Danielle made a moment ago about candidates needing to speak to the middle and a larger, potentially general election audience. This is something that Haley has done really well. She talks about the culture war issues, but then she quickly pivots to the more nuts and bolts issues that I think have much broader appeal. I want our kids learning reading, math, science, and history, not all of these other things. So you hear that applause there from the crowd. And this is something that I think Haley seems to be saying and other candidates as well. Let's take back control of our schools. Let's give authority back to parents. Let's stop talking about these culture war issues, which they are talking about, let's be clear. But this is the rhetoric. And let's focus on these

basics. So I think that is a really interesting strategy to watch and see, one, how well Republicans can implement it and then how voters respond. All right. Well, we will be keeping our eyes and ears on this issue. That is it for today. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Sarah McCammon. I also cover the presidential campaign. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.