A recent poll by Fox News shows that public school curriculum is one of the main concerns of parents heading into the midterm elections. According to the poll, what is being taught in schools ranks 5th out of 12 issues voters are concerned about.

There has also been a lot of discussion about how school shutdowns during the pandemic affected children. While Alabama fared better than other states during the pandemic, many schools across the country showed a drop in rankings and student test scores as a result of students not being in the classroom.

Monday on WVNN’s “The Dale Jackson Show,” Alabama’s Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, Katie Britt, said parents are fed up.

“Obviously nobody would want to go through this pandemic and particularly the way that the government chose to handle the pandemic,” Britt said, “but if you look back, having a window into what are children are taught and how they were taught, I think it’s going to make us infinitely better moving forward. People are sick of it. They want their children educated and not indoctrinated.”

Britt said the effects of school shutdowns and bad government policies are obvious to voters right now.

“And if you look at the erosion of our society throughout these two years, it’s real,” she said. “I mean, looking in the classroom, it’s obvious across the nation, when they said we were down 8 points in math and 5 points in reading, you and I know that stuff matters because if a kid is not reading at a third grade level by third grade there chance of graduating high school goes down.”

Britt believes this problem could negatively affect American society for decades.

“You look at that and what that means for them long term, but what that means for society long term as well,” she said. “Losing those educational building blocks, we are going to be dealing with the repercussions of this for generations upon generation upon generation, and people need to be doing everything they can do close the gap.”

Britt also thinks forcing young students into masks during the pandemic harmed their ability to learn.

“Look at masking,” she said. “You have a child that’s trying to learn to speak, or a child with a speech impediment, or a child that has some type of respiratory issue, and then you throw a mask on them? You let them try to figure all that stuff out? When I was talking with my children about trying to learn another language in class with a teacher with a mask on, you have to be able to watch those things to be able to do them.”

Britt said the far left in this country abandoned American children at exactly the wrong time.

“(You) also talk about the far left,” she said, “you look at anything from abuse that’s happening in the home, hunger that’s happening with the home, (they) turned a blind eye to that all in the name of the pandemic knowing these kids needed the resources and needed someone to be their advocate.”

Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee