During a recent campaign stop in central Virginia on a sweltering afternoon, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger drew the most energized reaction from the crowd after telling the audience that aside from tackling the high cost of living, her focus as governor would be on ensuring Virginia has “the best public schools in the nation.”
Four years ago, Republican Glenn Youngkin won an upset victory for the state’s highest office by turning his attention to education: Youngkin’s “Parents Matter” rallies stoked frustration at pandemic-era school closures and masking rules, railed against how schools were teaching students about race and LGBTQ+ issues and promised to expand alternatives to traditional public schools. Youngkin lambasted the state’s test scores, and turned the inclusion of transgender kids in schools into a political lightning rod.
Youngkin’s message gave him an edge in Democratic strongholds around Northern Virginia, and while that region remains solidly blue for Democrats, data shows Trump and Republicans have held onto sizable gains there since the 2020 election. It also turbocharged Republicans’ war against diversity, equity and inclusion by putting kids at the center.
Now, as Spanberger campaigns to retake Virginia’s top office for Democrats, her strategy on public education could offer a playbook for a party that political analysts say has struggled to come up with a clear agenda to counter Republicans’ messaging. Her performance will help shape her party’s stance heading into the 2026 midterms, much like Youngkin’s election did for Republicans in 2021.
The Virginia governor’s race between Spanberger and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears is one of the only competitive statewide contests on the calendar this year and will be closely watched as a referendum on President Donald Trump’s second term and a test of Democrats’ path forward following last year’s searing losses.
In speeches, statements and multiple interviews with The 19th, Spanberger said she is focused on making life more affordable for all Virginians and stemming what she described as the “chaos” of the Trump administration. She is also focused on countering Republicans’ efforts to “erode faith in our public schools,” and wants to make sure the state is contending with the challenges of teacher shortages, crumbling school buildings and post-pandemic academic recovery.
With two women at the top of the ballot, Virginia is poised to elect its first woman governor this year. If Spanberger wins, the state will be run by a former lawmaker with a law enforcement and intelligence background, and — for the first time — a mom to school-aged children. Spanberger’s daughters are enrolled in public schools around central Virginia, one each in elementary, middle and high school.
Recently, a whirlwind day of campaigning ended with a busy evening at home prepping a Wicked costume for a school spirit day. She tries to be home for either hair braiding and school drop off in the morning, or by bedtime to tuck them in at night.
Still, Spanberger isn’t dwelling much on the historic potential, but during a recent event with Black ministers, she said a question about how schools should educate students on history and race illustrated how actively parenting shapes her views and helps her connect with voters.
“It matters to other people,” Spanberger said. “One of the gentlemen at the round table came back to me and said, that was the most important thing that you said — how you see it as a mother.”
Earle-Sears campaigned alongside Youngkin in 2021, backing many of his promises on education. “She will prioritize parents’ rights and basic reading and math skills over ideological grandstanding,” Earle-Sears’ website reads. The lieutenant governor is also promising to expand alternatives to traditional public schools in the state — Virginia Republicans have pushed for charter schools and vouchers for private school tuition — and “empower parents to choose the best school for their children.”
Earle-Sears has also said she supports Trump’s policies on transgender students, and will promote policies in Virginia that exclude transgender girls from girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms and sporting teams.
Spanberger unveiled her agenda for the state’s public schools Friday with an event in Portsmouth that marked the launch of a new coalition of supporters called “Parents and Educators for Spanberger.” The group will highlight her support for strengthening the state’s schools and her “focus on academic excellence.”
According to a copy of the plan shared with The 19th, as governor, Spanberger will focus on championing the state’s public schools, lobbying to cover funding gaps for school operations created by the state and the federal government, and oppose efforts to create vouchers for private education. Spanberger also promised to lobby state lawmakers for funding to fix old and dilapidated schools.
The Democrat said she will also prioritize addressing the state’s teacher shortage by boosting recruitment and mentorship, and raising teacher pay, though she did not commit to a specific raise amount.
Citing reports that the state is lagging behind when it comes to reversing the learning losses of the pandemic, Spanberger said she will make sure schools have the resources they need to help students meet learning standards and uphold “academic excellence and rigor.” She’ll also direct the state to update its best practices for school safety.
During the Portsmouth event, Spanberger told the audience about her experience watching one of her daughters struggle with reading. “My little girl was having a little bit of trouble getting where she needed to be,” Spanberger said. It was her public school teacher, Spanberger told the audience, who worked “tirelessly” to turn things around and built a child who is now an eager reader.
“We need to focus on ensuring that we are not playing games, that we are not using teachers or parents or educators as political pawns,” Spanberger said. “We need to focus on the results that matter to our kids.”
A poll published in July out of Virginia Commonwealth University found that education is the top issue for nearly 1 out of every 10 voters.
Spanberger’s event highlighted her efforts to refocus voters on the challenges facing public schools and hurting student learning, and away from the culture-war issues that have dominated the political conversation around education.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
Republicans have increasingly seized on the inclusion of transgender children and teens in public schools, including in the most recent presidential election when GOP ads attacking trans rights dominated the airwaves in the last few weeks of the campaign. It was Youngkin back in 2021 who tested the waters on the issue as part of a broader message on school safety and parents’ rights, and his upset victory in Virginia cemented it in Republicans’ election playbook.
This cycle, Spanberger is hoping to reset the terms of the conversation. Republican policies, she said, are disempowering parents and local communities, and hurting vulnerable children.
“As a parent, my heart goes out to the parents who are just trying to do right by their kids and don’t want to see their kids at the center of a political back and forth, or a political punching bag,” Spanberger said.
“It’s easy to get people kind of confused and scared, and that I find to be the really unfortunate thing.”
Spanberger said Republican members of Congress and Trump are going after “the basic provision of health care that a parent is able to get for their kid.” And federal and state level policies banning transgender students from some sports teams are throwing out a process that “was driven by parents, teachers and coaches” under the purview of the state’s sporting league.
Earle-Sears’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment on her education agenda, but in a recent interview with a local TV station, Earle-Sears said that if Virginia districts don’t willingly create private spaces and sporting teams according to students’ sex at birth, she would sign legislation forcing them to. (Separately, the Trump administration is threatening to take federal funding away from Virginia districts who don’t do away with inclusive policies around transgender students.)
Earle-Sears said squarely that the issue of transgender student inclusion is driving parents away from public schools.
“That’s why parents are saying, you know what, give us our tax money and let us make the decision on where to send our children to school,” Earle-Sears told WJLA, adding that some parents are turning to private schools, parochial schools and to homeschooling. She called schools that refuse to adopt such policies “rogue schools” that some parents feel “pit me against my child.”
Spanberger has not outright opposed charter schools, but is opposed to policies that would “siphon” funding from traditional public schools.
During the 2021 campaign, Republicans in Virginia tapped parent frustrations over school closures and rules mandating masking in schools, creating a gateway for a national cultural critique of teachers and school leaders. It was a time of “extreme, really unprecedented parental frustration,” said Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.
“Especially as more research came out about how schools were opening and it seemed safe, Democrats found themselves on their heels politically. You had a very potent political argument from Republicans saying, ‘these public schools are shut down when you want your kids to be in school — they’re not listening to you. They screwed up their pandemic response. Who do you trust on education?’
“Democrats could not figure out how to navigate that,” Valant added.
For all of the attention on groups like Moms For Liberty, which leaned on the idea of “parents’ rights” to promote conservative beliefs and religion in public schools, Valant said the group is no longer the political powerhouse it appeared to be years ago. Book bans proved unpopular among many voters, and Republican candidates for governor who campaigned with Youngkin and tried to borrow from his education playbook in subsequent election cycles overwhelmingly lost their bids. That includes Derek Schmidt who lost to Gov. Laura Kelly in Kansas and Tudor Dixon who lost to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan.
While Democrats have become more effective at pushing back on Republican attacks, Valant said he doesn’t think “there is a clear Democratic Party agenda on education policy. That is a challenge for the Democratic Party by the 2028 election.”
Spanberger’s race in Virginia offers a trial run.
In an interview, the Democratic nominee said she could personally relate to the uneasiness many parents were feeling the last time Virginians elected a governor. “My youngest daughter was in kindergarten when the schools shut down, and my oldest daughter was in middle school. My middle was in elementary school,” Spanberger said.
“I know what it felt like to be a parent, where your kids just get sent home from school one day,” she added. She described it as a really uneasy, fraught time for herself and many parents. “I’m watching them do school virtually, and it’s very clear that it’s certainly not the same. It’s very clear that they’re missing their friends, and they’re missing that social exposure, and they’re missing just the experience that comes with being in a classroom.”
Spanberger said that landscape created a political opportunity. But four years later, she wants voters to reflect on the challenges that still face public schools and the legacy of an agenda she said created distrust in schools and demoralized teachers.
Spanberger pointed to the results of a recent national standardized test that measures student achievement in math and reading. Virginia fourth graders saw virtually no improvement in reading and slight improvement in math, while eighth graders did worse in both subjects. An analysis of the testing data by Harvard and Stanford universities that tried to measure pandemic academic recovery found that Virginia ranked 41st in reading recovery between 2019 and 2024, and 51st in math recovery.
The Youngkin administration said the scores reflected the “massive learning loss” that continues to persist from the pandemic. “We had big work to do coming out of the pandemic,” Youngkin said when the scores were released.
Spanberger also criticized the governor for a tip line he launched early in his administration that encouraged parents to report “inherently divisive practices” in schools, and that was criticized for creating fear among teachers. The tip line was shut down about a year later. Youngkin signed several teacher pay raises into law totaling $1.6 billion while in office, but last year vetoed a bill that would have brought Virginia teacher salaries to match the national average, arguing that data from a national teachers’ union on the matter was flawed. The union reported that Virginia ranks 26th in teacher pay.
“During this time of recovery, there’s this governor who said he prioritized public education, but what did he actually do? You want to prioritize public education, but you’re going to vilify teachers?” Spanberger said.
“I have three daughters in Virginia public schools, and I know everything that is possible for so many kids is dependent on the education that they do or don’t get in our public schools,” Spanberger said. “And so, education is a priority issue for me, but it’s actually contending with the real issues related to education.”
Early voting in Virginia starts September 19. The general election is November 4.
Great Job Mel Leonor & the Team @ The 19th Source link for sharing this story.
