Former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who is running for governor in Arkansas, told the Republican Jewish Coalition leadership meeting Saturday in Las Vegas to replace the term “school choice” with “parental choice.”
Huckabee appeared on a panel with former press secretary Ari Fleischer, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, and former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway. They each reflected on the recent election results, where Republicans swept contests across the country — including school board races — based on parents’ rejection of Democrats’ attempts to impose Critical Race Theory and transgenderism in public schools, as well as mask and vaccine mandates.
But Sanders said that Republicans needed to change their terminology.
“One of the terms that I hear all the time, that frankly I really don’t like, is ‘school choice.’,” she said. “And while I am a huge advocate for parents being able to decide where their kids go, it has nothing to do with the school choosing anything.
She continued:
The term we need to be using is “parental choice,” “parental control.” We need to stop making it about the schools, and start making it about the students, and what is best for those students. And no one can make a better decision on what is best for the students, than the student and the parent. And we have to remember that, and we have to make sure that we are fighting for that control. Not school choice, not school control, not government control, but parental choice and parental control. And I think the awakening could not come at a better or more critical time,,when there are so many things that are being pushed on our students and on our kids. We have to be ready to fight back and stand up for them.
Sanders currently leads the Republican primary for governor. Her father, Mike Huckabee, was once governor of the state as well, and used that position to build a national profile.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.