Editor’s Note: The following submission comes from Blair Peach, a rank and file union member of the Delaware Education Association issuing the following response to Chris Townsend’s article “Virginia Labor History Controversy”
We have used the summer break as an opportunity to make some sorely belated comments in reply to Chris Townsend’s “Virginia Labor History Controversy”. We hold Townsend’s labor organizing and writing in esteem. However he makes a few errors in his analysis of the VEA’s protestation of Youngkin’s 2023 revision to the K-12 History and Social Science Standards of Learning, (SOLs) errors which we hope to politely correct in the spirit of camaraderie and constructive dialogue among principled labor organizations.
Firstly, Townsend solely refers to the SOLs as a “public school curriculum”. We do not say this in the spirit of semantic pedantry, but we believe a more accurate description of the SOLs would be a high-stakes standardized testing regime. When Republican former Virginia governor George Allen introduced the SOLs in 1995 (in lockstep with Bill Clinton’s broader federal austerity regime, and itself a beta launch of what would later become of W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act.
He said “if Virginia youngsters can’t make the grade, then neither should their schools”. [“Champion School Commission Adopts Many Choice Proposals”, Richmond Times Dispatch, December 9, 1995, “Making the Grade”, Richmond Times Dispatch, Feb 26, 1997]. The intended purpose is to dismantle public schools as part of the broader capitalist assault on the public social wage of the proletariat, and of course blame is always placed on teacher performance, which serves the dual function of terrorizing teachers into a labor discipline that further deteriorates the quality of instructional education. This alongside punitive budget cuts helps to make “failing schools” a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But in regards to its character as a curriculum, from its inception, the History and Social Studies SOL has worn its political ideology on its sleeve. The 1995 standards view history’s worth as “enabl[ing] students to see how people in other times and places have grappled with the fundamental question […of] personal responsibility” and emphasizes that “events are shaped … by individuals”. In regard to economics, the 1995 standards remark that the “United States is recognized as a leader among the nations of the world in large part because of its economic strength” and that “[i]n order to maintain that strength, American citizens must understand the basic economic principles that underlie the market economy”, and that the function of K-12 education in the subject of economics is so students can make “wise economic decisions about their own lives [as] workers”. And the function of civics instruction is of course to prepare students to “fulfill their responsibilities” as “good citizen[s]” in accordance with the “values and principles of American constitutional democracy”.
Suffice it to say, Gramsci’s statement that “the individual consciousness of the overwhelming majority of children reflects social and cultural relations which are different from and antagonistic to those which are represented in the school curricula” would be an obscene understatement in regards to public school students in the USA and their relationship to the political-ideological overtones of 1995 History and Social Studies SOLs.
Thus we are in full agreement with Townsend that the bourgeois public school system, as it exists, is an “unreliable agent” imparting a pedagogical instruction of history and social sciences that includes a proletarian perspective to K-12 public school students. However, this is precisely because of (or at least exasperated in great part due to) the existing standardized high-stakes testing regime’s chilling effect on the intellectual freedom of teachers to instruct their students as they see fit within the bounds of more reasonable professional expectations.
The high-stakes testing regime instead transforms the subject of K-12 history and social studies into an assembly line of didactic and dogmatic bourgeois ideological indoctrination, which is the ideal state of the public education system from the perspective of the bourgeoisie. We are of course not scandalized that the public school as a bourgeois institution would have a default hegemonic position of promoting, for example, civics as the art of good citizenship in keeping with the principles of American constitutional democracy. The issue with the high-stakes standardized testing regime is that it functionally constrains the ability of the politically dissident teacher to offer alternative political perspectives for the student’s consideration even within the context of free exchange of intellectual ideas inside the educational institutions of bourgeois liberal democracy.
Youngkin and the “History Wars”
It will scandalize no one for us to say we are not fans of Youngkin’s changes to the so-called standards of learning. This piece is not an editorial against Youngkin, (the VEA bureaucracy has already provided us with plenty of those) but it is fair to generally characterize him as a garden-variety Carlyle Group Republican somewhat in the mold of John McCain or Mitt Romney. In many ways he is indistinguishable from the upper echelons of the Virginia Democratic Party, who he surely hob-knobs with in elite Northern Virginia golf clubs. (This symmetry can be observed in the united front between Youngkin and the Virginia Democrats to try to outbid the Maryland government in an attempt to persuade the federal government to build FBI offices in Virginia.
However, he has pursued a similar strategy as the more nationally prominent purple state Republican governor Ron DeSantis, of indulging the Trumpist GOP voter base by stoking ephemeral hot button “culture war” grievances that, unlike Trump’s past disingenuous economic protectionist and racial nationalist rhetorical demagoguery, which culminated in the riotous events of January 6th, results in no negative impact on the smooth operation of the bipartisan bourgeois state. Unfortunately, in Virginia as in Florida, the public school system is frequently caught in the crossfire of this “culture war”, (Youngkin himself won his gubernatorial election by pandering to the anxieties about the public-school system of the typically Democrat-voting Northern Virginia Asian-American upper petit-bourgeoisie and the subject of history in particular is of particular interest in this “culture war”, as it was in “history wars” of the recent past.
In this context, Youngkin’s 2023 changes do not represent a coherent attempt to forge a new historical narrative, but often manifest as arbitrary and incoherent tinkering in accordance with a mind for the clickbaity nature of this history culture war. Thus we oppose Youngkin’s capricious alterations to the high-stakes standardized testing regime within the context of opposing the high-stakes standardized testing regime itself, because having to keep pace with these rapidly shifting absurdities within the “standards”, dictated by political football divorced from the concrete task of educating pupils, is yet another headache to add to the daily indignities and frustrations of being a public school teacher.
However, for those public history teachers who wish to offer a revolutionary, proletarian, and scientific socialist perspective for their students’ consideration, we, if we are intellectually rigorous and true to our principles, exist presently within a third camp at a critical distance (until the time comes where our strength of forces are enough to contend with the other two camps) within the “history war” debate, opposed to the both the conservative nationalist (or soft white Christian nationalist) and left-liberal (multiculturalist civic nationalist) positions as equally bourgeois perspectives. To give an example from “standardized” Virginia history, the Democrat-approved 2015 SOLs mandated that teachers exemplify Maggie Walker and Douglas Wilder in their instruction of African-American history to elementary school students.
Did Youngkin Delete Unions from the K-12 History and Social Studies SOLs?
Although Townsend is critical of the NEA bureaucracy, he inadvertently repeats their erroneous assertions when he claims that with Youngkin’s 2023 change, “even the tiny reference to the positive aspects of unions and labor in Virginia’s history has presumably been eliminated and expunged”.
In March of 2023, the VEA bureaucracy launched a campaign to encourage VEA rank-and-file to participate in Virginia Department of Education public comment hearings voicing their opposition to Youngkin’s SOL changes. They characterized Youngkin as an “anti-worker extremist” who seeks to “remove the American labor movement” by “remov[ing] teachings of impact of the industrial revolution on working families, including women and children”, “remov[ing] the rise of organized labor entirely from Virginia lesson plans” and “undermin[ing] how the New Deal — which included important labor wins like the 40-hour work week — is being taught.”
To which we must respond off the bat, were New Deal Democrat governors such as Floyd B. Olson, Ibra Charles Blackwood, T.F. Green, Clarence Martin, etc. “anti-worker extremists” when they ordered the national guard to massacre striking workers and raid their union offices? Similarly, the “teachings of impact of the industrial revolution on working families, including women and children” of which Youngkin is accused of adulterated don’t center the labor movement as the motor of historical change, but rather the noblesse oblige of the bourgeoisie in the form of the “Progressive movement,” a long-standing tradition of bourgeois ideological historical revisionism within the Democratic Party.
But are the VEA bureaucracy’s claims even true? The irony is that an early draft of the Youngkin revision (the draft that was the subject of the VEA campaign) actually added a reference to the growth of public sector unions during the Nixon era that was previously not present. We can’t speculate the specific details, as we are not a fly on the wall of the meeting rooms of the VDOE bureaucrats, but it’s easy to point to O’Brien’s speech at the 2024 RNC to illustrate that there is a faction of the labor bureaucracy that is willing to play ball with the Republican Party, and a faction of the Republican Party that is at least willing to make half-hearted gestures of paying lip service. While it’s highly unlikely that the NEA bureaucracy will budge from their embedded place in the machinery of the Democratic Party, it seems obvious to speculate why a hypothetical “labor Republican” would want to credit Nixon (erroneously or not) with the growth of public sector unions.
In this context, the “labor history” angle in regards to this specific campaign was a gimmick by the VEA bureaucracy, as an appendage of the Virginia Democratic Party, to get the bureaucracy of other mainline unions on board for what amounted to a tug of war between Democratic and Republican DOE bureaucrats over the details of an anti-worker policy that any labor militant should oppose wholecloth. (And in fact opposition to high-stakes standardized testing regimes is the official policy position of the NEA.) In light of Harris’ high-profile decision to select NEA bureaucrat Tim Walz as her running-mate, the borderline absentionist attitude proposed by Townsend is suicide in terms of building a proletarian political consciousness among the labor movement. This is because K-12 teachers as poorly paid college-educated professionals represent a potential proletarian intelligentsia who also play a central frontline role in the ideological reproduction of the proletariat. This speaks to the broader weakness of an economistic independent unionism which correctly advocates for political independence from the two capitalist parties but neglects the role of struggle against the representatives of those political parties within the labor movement; the bureaucracy.
The Virginia Worker 
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