Abigail Spanberger: ‘It’s time to get culture wars out of our schools and let teachers teach’

Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, has a message for all Virginia parents like herself: She will be focused on giving kids a great education, not on stoking culture wars.

Spanberger promises that she will not fan the flames of division in schools like outgoing Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

Youngkin entered into office in 2022 with a mission to put “parents’ rights” over public school curriculums. That translated into obsessing over critical race theory, which had never been taught in Virginia’s schools, supporting book bans, and making transgender students the target of controversy in public schools.

Youngkin additionally set up a tip line for parents to report on teachers who, in the parents’ opinions, introduced “divisive” topics in the classroom, such as teaching the history of systemic racism in the US.

Spanberger pledges to end Youngkin’s war on teachers and public schools.

“We have to stop trying to pit parents against teachers or parents against educators for political reasons,” she told Dogwood in an exclusive interview.

Instead, Spanberger—a former three-term congresswoman for the 7th district—insists that she’ll focus on the very real—not “manufactured”—challenges in Virginia’s public schools, while working to elevate the many strong characteristics of a school system that has ranked among the best in the nation in recent decades. It’s a school system, she says, that’s been a critical part of her own life.

Education “is an issue that is deeply personal to me,” she tells Dogwood. “I’m a product of Virginia public schools. My husband’s a product of Virginia public schools. My mother-in-law was a career teacher in Virginia public schools and I have a daughter in elementary school, a daughter in middle school and a daughter in high school.”

Invest in—don’t starve—public education

It’s no surprise then that with three children in Virginia’s public schools, Spanberger is committed to strengthening public education. Meanwhile, her Republican opponent for governor—Winsome Earle-Sears, who serves as Youngkin’s lieutenant governor—champions siphoning state tax dollars out of the public schools to be given to private schools.

“School choice” is a policy long-endorsed by Republicans in states like Wisconsin and Arizona, and the result has been to drastically drain funds from public schools, which the majority of the state’s students still attend.

Read more: Arizona public schools are $200 million short this month. Here’s why

That’s not a road that Spanberger and fellow Democrats say they want to go down in Virginia. The former CIA officer, who grew up outside of Richmond, promises to concentrate on strengthening public schools by hiring teachers, not providing wealthy residents with taxpayer money to spend on their private school tuition.

“I understand the difficulties in recruiting and retaining teachers into our school districts and into our classrooms. This impacts the ability of our educators to support our kids to the best of their ability every single day,” she says.

At the start of the 2024-25 school year 3.4% of teaching positions were unfilled in Virginia—with vacancies higher in elementary and pre-K classrooms at 4.3%, in special education classes at 5.7%, and for schools serving low income students, at 6%.

One of the key reasons for the teacher shortage is low pay. The commonwealth ranks 26th in the nation for teacher pay, with the average teacher’s salary $66,327—$5,703 below the national average of $72,030, according to the National Education Association. That’s despite an average increase of $3,000 last year.

Spanberger asserts that Virginia needs a governor “who is focused on recruiting teachers and understanding that we have to pay our teachers the wages they deserve through their extraordinary work.”

Spanberger supports teaching a factual history—Earle-Sears has tried to suppress the history of racism

Spanberger says she is not afraid of Virginia’s children learning the full history of their state.

“Virginia is the place where our country was founded. We’re a place of great history. We’re also the place where the first enslaved Africans arrived,” she says. 

“We have the greatest elements of our foundation in our country. We also have the darkest moments in our country’s history. And that history is important for us to learn from, for our kids to be proud of the progress we’ve made. Efforts to try and deny that history, to change the conversation, to be dishonest about how difficult our history has been…understanding the complex and often difficult nature of our history is also the way we celebrate the extraordinary progress we have made.”

Earle-Sears, on the other hand, has supported policies and rhetoric that align with efforts to restrict certain teachings about racism in Virginia public schools. She’s also expressed concern over policies that address racial disparities, and has signed onto legal briefs urging the US Supreme Court to end race-conscious college admissions. Fact checks regarding Earle-Sears’ claims about public school districts spending a “going-to-jail” level of money to bring critical race theory to their curriculum have found her statements to be exaggerated, misleading, and false. 

The bus driver shortage is compounding the problem

Virginia students have also suffered from a seemingly basic problem that persists under the Youngkin-Earle-Sears administration: bus driver shortages across the state. 

Spanberger notes that it’s a topic many might not consider as a classroom issue, but it is: “Kids are arriving late to school and the disruptions are significant to the classroom.”

“Once you couple that with disruptions in the classroom with active shooter drills and efforts to try and keep our kids safe, legislators in Washington and Richmond need to do more,” she said.

Attacks on LGBTQ+ kids must stop

After four years of a governor who used educators and LGBTQ+ students as a way to fear-monger, Spanberger says she wants to make Virginia schools a place where teachers aren’t afraid to teach and where all students are welcome, not “bullied.”

“Efforts to try and hurt or vilify or use kids as political pawns, particularly LGBTQ kids as political pawns—it’s unacceptable. We need to set an example for kids,” she says.

Her opponent, on the other hand, has supported parental notification requirements in public schools that would force schools to out transgender students to their parents—even when such disclosure could put students at risk. This aligns with a broader pattern of opposition to LGBTQ+ rights, including a handwritten note that Earle-Sears penned on a bill passed by the state assembly, in which she expressed moral opposition to marriage equality legislation. She has a notable history of associations with anti-LGBTQ+ extremists, and has called for a constitutional amendment stating that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Meanwhile, Spanberger has been a vocal advocate for school environments that honor every student’s dignity and identity, and in Congress she co-sponsored the Equality Act, which would guarantee federal nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Americans in education, housing, employment, and more. The ACLU awarded Spanberger a perfect 100% rating for her civil rights voting record, and she’s been endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign, who highlighted her leadership in defending LGBTQ+ students and families. 

Spanberger supported and helped pass the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying protections for same-sex and interracial couples. 

Parents want their kids to be safe from gun violence

“As a member of Congress…I have talked to parents who have lost their children to gun violence,” Spanberger says, relating also that whenever she visits a school or speaks at a Boys or Girls Club, children speak out about their fears.

“I had a seventh grader ask me about gun violence and what I think about it—and the lockdown drills and the worry, the trauma, the hurt that we are inflicting on our children,” she says.

“Every time there is a lockdown drill or every time there is a scenario with their school that might be real and they don’t know, we are harming our children. It is our responsibility as adults to protect them.”  

Virginia has a history of high profile school shootings. In 2023, two people were killed in a shooting in Richmond following a high school commencement ceremony—including an 18-year-old graduate.

Three members of the University of Virginia football team were murdered in a 2022 shooting by a fellow student. And the well-remembered Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 left 33 dead and 17 wounded.

Spanberger, whose father was a police officer, wants to end the carnage and the culture of fear at schools. She supports safe storage laws, limits on magazine capacity, waiting periods before the purchase of a firearm, production stoppage on assault weapons, and she’d like to see the age to purchase assault weapons raised to 21.  

Her opponent, Republican Earle-Sears, has appeared in campaign ads with an assault-style weapon strapped across her dress, and she was a speaker at the 2022 NRA convention in Texas just days after the slaughter of 19 elementary school children and 2 teachers in Uvalde.

She blamed “fatherless families” and “taking prayer out of schools” for mass shootings at schools. 

Spanberger is sure that Virginia’s parents want a governor who will work to keep the state’s schools safe and places where their kids can get a quality education. “Every community member should want to have schools that are so strong that when any child in that district goes through that school and goes on to graduate, that they are set up for success, whatever that might look like for that child.”

She tells Dogwood that she deliberately moved back to Virginia after earning an MBA at Purdue University because she wanted to raise her family in the commonwealth. She believes that investing in public education is an investment in the state’s future.