AIDEN BUZZETTI: Conservatives Need To Run For School Boards To Change Education

Gov. Tim Walz ruined education for Minnesota students — and not just because he flooded the classrooms with woke indoctrination.

Since he took office in 2018 Minnesota’s test scores have plummeted below the national average. The percentage of fourth graders proficient in reading fell from 38 percent to 32 percent, and the percentage of eighth graders’ proficient in math decreased from 44% to 32%. Scores have gotten so bad that even Mississippi’s minority students performed better than Minnesota’s minority students, and this is after years of liberals painting Mississippi as an illiterate hellscape.

Walz’s so-called “Minnesota Miracle” is actually a Minnesota Disaster.

Walz and other Democrats threaten our students’ futures. This is why we need more conservatives getting involved in education and running for school boards. Since 2020, our group, the 1776 Project PAC, has endorsed over 200 winning conservative school board members. We are building the NRA of education, making schools as conservative an issue as the First Amendment and gun rights. But the biggest obstacle to conservatives fixing education is a dearth of conservatives running for school board.

The public presumes we have enough candidates because, after COVID-19, conservatives began waking up to the issues in education. Thanks to school closures, parents saw the horrible curriculums for the first time. They also saw steep learning losses from young children learning via Zoom. Some conservatives rushed to run for school board. Groups like ours helped them get elected.

But Covid-19 has passed. People forget the horrors of 2020 – the lockdowns and mask mandates — but Democrats are still instilling their backward agenda in hundreds of school districts nationwide. When has the left ever ceased trying to control Americans’ lives? Never.

Naturally, Democrats still dominate school board races. The clearest example in 2024 was Wisconsin, where the Democratic Party spent about 230,000 on school board races alone, while the Republican Party spent only $17,000. Only the 1776 Project PAC was able to make up the vast difference in spending.

More conservatives are running for school board now than ever, but we need more conservative candidates — especially people who want to bring some benefit to their communities and want to apply their political or management skills.

One obstacle to recruitment is, whereas every liberal believes they know what everyone needs, conservatives are, well, conservative. They err on the side of caution. So many presume a school board candidate must hail from an educational background.

This is false, and conservatives need to awaken fellow Republicans to the fact that you don’t need to be a teacher to run for school board. You don’t need a doctorate in education, experience as a principal, or hundreds of hours in teaching programs. That “experience” is an illusion; it has almost nothing to do with the day-to-day duties of the school board. That argument serves as a deterrent to new candidates and as a benefit to teachers’ unions and local Democratic organizers. School boards serve as an experience opportunity. A dedicated grandmother, a small business manager or any other community member could be an excellent candidate.

Here’s why: School board members don’t teach. School board members oversee budgets, manage administrators and respond to parents and students while actively participating in their communities. They have just as much responsibility to review educational trends and development as their superintendents and administrators, but that doesn’t require an advanced degree of any sort — and the education industry itself has cycled through ineffective fads with the “experts” plenty of times before.

Many of our winning candidates are regular parents and grandparents with various backgrounds. Some operate small businesses. Others are stay-at-home moms. Backgrounds vary. What brings them all together is they recognize the problems in schools, and they are working to fix them. Their unique backgrounds also instill them with different knowledge sets, allowing them to collaborate with other school-board members and oversee the operation of the school system.

Conservatives know schools need fixing. We just need to be brave enough to fix them.

Aiden Buzzetti is the President of the 1776 Project Foundation. He was previously the Director of Coalitions for the 1776 Project PAC and can be found on X at @AidenBuzzetti.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/MSNBC)