Republican candidates vying for the top spot in state government gave their plans to transform education on all levels for Iowa students during a gubernatorial debate Tuesday evening, claiming leftist indoctrination starts with teacher education before making its way into classrooms and parents need more control.

Hosted by conservative organization Moms for Liberty and moderated by the organization’s CEO Tina Descovich and WHO NewsRadio Host Simon Conway, the debate also touched on topics like Iowans’ health, the absence of one of the candidates, U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra, and more.

Candidates agreed that both education and higher education in Iowa need to be reformed, with eastern Iowa farmer and businessman saying the issue needs to be framed as a “generational fight for the institutions in our society.” He and other candidates pointed at “the left” as targeting education to indoctrinate children, something Lahn said they have been “tremendously successful” at.

Lahn is running on an “Iowa first” agenda, with a focus on education, border security and supporting farms. The Republican candidate has not held political office but worked previously for a Colorado state senator, Republican campaigns in Iowa and conservative political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity.

“Public school is to promote civic virtue, to understand the principles of faith in our country and our culture, and that’s what it will be when I am governor,” Lahn said.

Brad Sherman, a Republican state representative from 2023-2025, businessman and faith leader, said the “concept of God” needs to be put back in schools, and putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms is a good place to start. God gave children to their parents and not the state, Sherman said, and parents should have complete control.

Sherman states on his campaign he is committed to “restoring adherence to the Constitution and restoring the foundational principles that made America a great nation and Iowa a great state.”

Parental rights were a focus for both Moms for Liberty and the candidates, with each candidate offering their support of parents deciding where and what their students learn. Rep. Eddie Andrews, R-Johnston, touted his authorship of parental rights legislation, which includes rights he said everyone agreed on until “three seconds ago.” Parents have the “fundamental right to raise their children in education,” he said.

Andrews also suggested doing away with the current common core education rules and restoring state-specific education standards, including adding phonics, where the association between spoken and written sounds is taught, to classrooms.

The five priorities listed on Andrews’s website include eliminating property taxes and combating inflation, parental rights in education, defending landowners and private property, championing mental health and health care freedom and protecting “life, liberty and traditional values.”

Former Iowa Department of Administrative Services director Adam Steen said during the debate funding of public schools isn’t the problem but ideology is, as well as the “downright evil” requirements being pushed on students.

“The line” for Steen was when his son’s teacher asked them to purchase a book titled “Jacob’s New Dress,” about a boy who begins to wear a dress to school. Teachers are sometimes forced to incorporate materials like these into classrooms, he said, adding he believes schools should instead teach real-world skills, vocational studies and industrial arts.

“I believe that this isn’t on the backs of teachers, it’s on the backs of those that are putting these standards upon our teachers and forcing it down our children’s throats,” Steen said.

Steen described himself at the launch for his gubernatorial run as “the faith guy,” as well as a “Make America Great Again guy.” The Republican resigned from his position in August in order to enter the race and states on his campaign he is pro-life, pro-Iowa, pro-property rights and pro-family.

Branching off from school choice for parents, Steen said schools should have a say in how teachers are trained. Universities should offer degree tracks in “classical education” for students, he said, and universities should not promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

Sherman suggested that teachers be given some form of test to ensure they can “do the job” while not needing to go through traditional university training.

Lahn said the value proposition of a college education is “decreasing precipitously,” with schools talking to students about postsecondary options other than attending a university.

Universities are “digging their own grave” while getting a lot of money from the state, and Lahn proposed overturning the Iowa Board of Regents and pulling funding from universities that refuse to stop teaching “woke indoctrination.” He said he would give the money instead to veteran support programs he pitched during the debate, such as trade schools and farm programs.

Iowa’s medical needs

Moderators also asked lawmakers about the medical issues facing Iowans, from to vaccine concerns.

Lahn, Sherman and Andrews all stated the need for additional, independent research on the causes of Iowa’s growing cancer rates in order to understand the problem fully and begin to identify solutions. Andrews mentioned $1 million in state funding provided to the University of Iowa for cancer research but said that didn’t include pediatric cancers, and said one suggestion to address that was to put in another $3 million.

Lahn laid the blame on agriculture companies who aren’t truthful about what their chemicals are doing to Iowans, and said he wouldn’t allow them to operate in Iowa unless they can show through research that their products are not harmful.

“It is the generational issue of our time, and we have to confront it head on,” Lahn said.

Steen refused to lay the blame on farmers, citing radon, plane deicer and golf courses as other areas that could be impacting cancer rates. He said this is a years-long issue to solve, and he wants to bring the experts to the table to solve it, no matter their political affiliation.

When asked about mRNA vaccines, Lahn, Sherman and Andrews all committed to banning them in the state, pointing back to issues during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Steen, who said his father got diabetes and cancer after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and later died, said he would consider a ban.

Feenstra criticized for skipping debate

Feenstra was invited to the debate but did not join, indicated by the empty podium Moms for Liberty placed on stage. Each of the candidates criticized his absence.

Billy Fuerst, campaign spokesman for Feenstra, said in an email the candidate flew into and out of  Iowa with President Trump on Air Force One, where they spoke about “how they can work together to take Iowa to new heights and keep Iowa red.”

“Congressman Feenstra is proud of his track record working with President Trump to pass the largest tax cuts for working families in U.S. history, get Sarah’s Law signed into law, and lower gas prices to their lowest levels in years,” Fuerst said in his email.

Steen said if Feenstra is the Republican nominee, Iowa would end up with Democrat Rob Sand as a governor and Iowa would be “toast.” Feenstra was in Iowa Tuesday, Andrews said, and the fact that he didn’t show up felt like he was disregarding Iowans.

“I’m not trying to cuss, but it’s like throwing a middle finger at all of you,” Andrews said. “He doesn’t care.”

Lahn said he doesn’t believe that Feenstra was too intimidated to come to the debate stage Tuesday — he’s instead following a method that says if you get enough establishment money, you get to skip everything else.

“Randy Feenstra has a lot of money, he has a lot of people behind him, but in Iowa, it doesn’t take that much money if you’re willing to work hard,” Sherman said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com.

According to multiple studies, anywhere between and of citizens show up to cast their ballot for school board candidates. This low turnout has made it easy for political actors to use these seats in ways that often .��

Take, for example, the Virginia Beach City school board. In May, the board voted 6-5 to to that districts roll back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programming and initiatives — a decision that can impact everything from diverse teacher recruitment programs to what is taught in American history. Students of color make up in the district. Four of the six board members voting for the rollback, all of them white, were elected in an off-cycle election that saw just .��

School board seats carry a lot of weight. Members don’t just hire superintendents and approve budgets, they also work closely with district leaders to make and approve interpretations of state and federal policy. They decide on critical , and work closely with district experts to approve curriculum and content and determine policies on things like school assignment plans, discipline and how to address performance gaps — all of which can have a big impact on Black and Brown students.

There are more than across roughly 14,000 districts who hold these responsibilities. They have the agency to affect change more than most any other governing body. And, with the near dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, their responsibilities have become even greater at the same time that state and federal oversight has lessened.��

Do we really want to rely on such a small portion of the population to elect these leaders?

We have to get more people out to vote, and we must demand our school leaders do what is best for the children who live in their district. Yet, serious barriers keep invested families and stakeholders from fully participating.

Students of color make up of the enrollment in public schools, yet school boards are ��overwhelmingly white and than the families they serve. This is despite evidence that diverse boards tend to facilitate .��

Inequitable access to the ballot has people of color from participating in elections. This favors the who is white, affluent and doesn’t have children enrolled in the district. These voters tend to elect incumbents leading districts .

Even if we put aside representation, the fact remains that most candidates are often for the of this local office and have proven themselves toward increasing student outcomes.

Increasing opportunities for all citizens to civilly engage and ensuring a pool of higher quality candidates are recruited and trained on the basics of school governance and policy must happen in lockstep if we are to see increased, and representative turnout.

In 2020, the culture wars shifted voters’ attention to our classrooms. Critical race theory (CRT) became the hot-button issue. My assumption was that the added attention and the absurdity of the anti-CRT craze would inspire champions of equitable education to oppose this movement.

Nope. In one calendar year, acting individually and at the behest of eliminated CRT across all programming and curriculum. , and critical programs were defunded.

At a moment where historical media attention might have helped better inform the voters and get them out to vote, there was still a disconnect at the ballot box. 

Maybe it’s civic illiteracy or a lack of awareness combined with the refrain, “I don’t have kids, I don’t care.” Regardless, , often Democrats, when they vote — meaning they skip over the municipal level races.��

Far-right political actors are taking advantage of this, putting forth candidates for seats who often and throwing toward challenging candidates.

Moms for Liberty, which was founded in 2021, has become known for leveraging low turnout elections. According to data from local government and news sources analyzed by The Brookings Institution, of their endorsed candidates won school board elections in 2022 and 33% won in 2023.

Project 1776, which says its mission is to elect , is embracing a similar tactic. In 2022, three of Project 1776’s endorsed candidates were elected to the Olathe School Board in Kansas in a race that saw In New Jersey’s Ocean City School District, three endorsed candidates won with .

When we consider who votes for school board, the increased turnout in elections like these implies the messaging used by a PAC like Project 1776 is resonating with voters and galvanizing them to the polls.

There is like Moms for Liberty are losing their sway. Nonetheless, who run for reelection win, so we can expect the hundreds of candidates endorsed by these groups and elected based on their regressive platforms to be around for a while until more voters turnout and say otherwise.

Public education is a cornerstone of democracy — and it is clearly being chipped away. America’s 80,000-plus public school board seats are essential for holding together , and they need our attention.

The list of challenges is long, and the work to eliminate them continues. At this moment, though, turning out to vote for your district’s school board members is more important than ever. 

The candidates might not always be perfect, and the for barriers are significant — but protecting education, and therefore our democratic values, begins with exercising our right to vote. 

The White House on Wednesday said it had “” $175 million in federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania after a transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas, in 2022 won several medals in Division I women’s swimming.

Also on Wednesday, the U.S. Education Department said its Office of Civil Rights had that the state of Maine violated federal Title IX anti-discrimination law after Katie Spencer, a young transgender pole vaulter, won a state championship last month. The department said Maine could jeopardize federal funding if it doesn’t “swiftly and completely” reverse its policies.��

Protests followed after Thomas and Spencer��began competing in women’s competitions and fared better than they previously had in men’s��events.

The moves follow through on a promise Trump made 16 days after his second inauguration, when he issued an threatening to rescind federal funding from schools that let transgender women play on women’s sports teams

As with other aspects of Trump’s presidency, it leaves institutions in the unenviable position of caving before an increasingly aggressive White House — or fighting back in federal court, where many of the legal issues remain unsettled and, in a few cases, have actually favored trans students.

The order’s practical effect: confusion, especially in the roughly half of states that allow transgender athletes to compete in sports consistent with their gender identity. These state laws and policies now face a powerful conservative backlash that sees trans athletes’ participation at every level as patently unfair and itself, and seeks to remove them — and their accomplishments — altogether.

Leading the charge: the education department’s Office of Civil Rights, which has opened more than half a dozen investigations in two months. Along with probes of anti-semitism, trans athletic policies now dominate OCR’s investigative portfolio, despite to the office by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Jackie Gharapour Wernz, a former OCR attorney who now consults for educational institutions, called the new administration’s approach “unprecedented — but it’s not even just unprecedented. It’s so much further beyond precedent that it just feels like we’re in a completely different world at this point.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

‘Fairness and safety’

Penn, Trump’s alma mater, late Wednesday said it had not received any notification or details of the action. But a spokesperson told the that the university “has always followed NCAA and Ivy League policies regarding student participation on athletic teams.”

A spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

As with Maine, several states are finding that adhering to their own laws can invite a federal investigation — and an abrupt cut in aid — from an administration that is comfortable calling out educators who they see as failing to protect young women in sports. 

The complexity in many ways mirrors public perception. Recent , for instance, find that while 56% of Americans support policies that protect trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces, 66% favor laws and policies that require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth. 

“As a parent, I’m concerned about fairness and safety for my girls in sports,” said Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and a mother of four. Allowing “biological males” to compete in women’s events, she said, “undermines the level playing field” that federal regulations were meant to protect, “given the inherent physical advantages men have.”

In 2025, the issue no longer falls entirely along ideological lines. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said transgender athletes playing in women’s sports is “” to female athletes. 

States evenly divided

Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding, but whether that applies to trans students and athletics remains an open question. President Biden in 2022 put forth a sweeping set of changes protecting students against discrimination based not just on sex but on sexual orientation and gender identity, in effect making transgender students a protected class. But the proposal sidestepped the question of athletics, with administration officials at the time saying those regulations would come soon. 

They never came, and the Title IX protections for LGBTQ students have been repeatedly struck down by the courts. Biden put forth a draft rule to protect transgender athletes that acknowledged fairness issues but suggested they could be solved on a case-by-case basis. He last December in advance of Trump’s second term.��

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a transgender ban on women’s and girls’ sports, but the Senate a bid to consider it earlier this month, leaving educators in many states to figure it out on their own.

Add to that in federal courts that have upheld the rights of trans athletes, said Wernz, and schools are in “an incredibly tough position,” especially considering Trump’s order. 

State laws are on the subject: 23 states and the District of Columbia allow transgender students to play on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

Five days after Trump’s executive order, , which oversees sports in public and private schools, that it was banning trans athletes from participating in girls’ sports, saying schools needed “clear and consistent direction” on the issue. For more than a decade, the group had allowed trans athletes to play via a waiver if they undertook sex reassignment before puberty or if they did hormone therapy, among other requirements.

The league, which oversees 318 schools and about 177,000 students, said just five students applied for waivers last year.

In addition to Maine and Penn, OCR is investigating state athletic associations in California and Minnesota, where officials have said they’ll continue allowing trans athletes to compete on teams that match their gender identity. On March 3, it announced an into a school district in Washington State that allowed a trans player to compete in basketball last month.

It’s also San Jose State University and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for what it says are violations of Title IX.

Wernz, the former OCR attorney, who worked in both the Obama and Trump administrations, said schools and districts must now decide, “‘Do we comply with the federal courts, or do we comply with the Department of Education?’ Frankly it’s a pretty new situation.” 

‘We’ll see you in court.’

To many, the case of Thomas, the Penn swimmer, has come to epitomize the current complications. In 2022, Thomas, who’d on the men’s team before transitioning in 2019, rose from 554th-ranked in the 200-yard freestyle to fifth. In the 500-yard freestyle, she rose from 65th as a male athlete to first in women’s competition.

While Penn and several teammates supported her during the process, three former Penn swimmers to remove Thomas’ achievements from the record books.

Pennsylvania’s interscholastic athletics governing body recently its policy to recognize Trump’s executive order, but the Philadelphia School District said it’ll ignore the change in favor of its own policy, adopted in 2016, which allows trans athletes to play in sports that match their gender identity. 

While a few experts say that could jeopardize an estimated $216 million in Title I funding, Philadelphia civil rights attorney noted that Trump’s executive order doesn’t carry the weight of law — or supersede Title IX, state law or multiple court decisions that have sided with trans students.

She said Trump “has been purposely sowing a lot of chaos and confusion,” with schools fearful of losing federal funds.

The push to ban trans athletes comes despite the fact that vanishingly small numbers of these students are pushing to play. Shortly after Trump issued the executive order, NCAA President Charlie Baker said the organization would to restrict female athletic competitions solely to student athletes “assigned female at birth.” Several sports associations followed suit, even though Baker last year told Congress that of the more than 500,000 students it represents, fewer than 10 are transgender.

Chris Young, the principal of , a 720-student regional school in Newport, Vt., near the Canadian border, rarely thinks about the topic. He knows that if trans female athletes in Vermont want to play girl’s sports teams, they can. Though he has no trans athletes on his roster, Vermont says treating students differently is illegal. 

In an interview, he recalled several conversations with students asking whether it’s fair that a young person who’s transitioning from male to female could gain a competitive advantage in sports. 

“My response is, ‘No one does this as a choice. It’s who they are, and it’s an incredibly difficult road to go down if you are a transgender athlete,’” he said. “‘No one chooses that because it’s easy, and no one chooses that because they want to win a state championship or set a record. That’s just not how it works.’”

But when trans athletes like Thomas win at nearly any competition, the backlash is often outsized. In Maine, Spencer, the transgender pole vaulter, in mid-February won the Class B state championship in pole vaulting with a jump of 10 feet, 6 inches — more than six inches higher than the next competitor. That led state Rep. Laurel Libby, a Republican, to post on X that in a previous season, as a male athlete, Spencer had in the event.

The issue a few days later, when President Trump got into a televised spat with Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, during a meeting of governors at the White House. With Mills’ colleagues looking on, Trump called her out, asking if she’d comply with his executive order.

Mills said she’s “complying with state and federal laws.” Maine bars discrimination based on gender identity.

Trump responded, “We are the federal law,” and threatened to pull Maine’s federal funding. 

“We’ll see you in court,” she replied.

Later that day, the education department . Days later, the administration released a that all but foretold the outcome, saying it’s “shameful” that Mills “refuses to stand with women and girls.” 

For her part, Mills says no president can withhold funding authorized by Congress “in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will.” 

In a , she added, “Maine may be one of the first states to undergo an investigation by his Administration, but we won’t be the last.”

The 12-11 vote fell along party lines, with the Republican chairman of the committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, calling McMahon “the partner this committee needs to improve the nation’s education system.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an Independent who is the committee’s ranking member, said he liked McMahon personally. “I respect the work she has done in building a large and successful business.” But he said no matter who the education secretary is, “he or she will not have the power” to make consequential decisions. A small group of people in The White House, he said, will be “calling the shots.”

Sanders was referring to massive cuts at the department by auditors deputized by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Along with other Democrats, Sanders criticized White House plans to dismantle the U.S. Education Department, which he said “provides vital resources for 26 million kids who live in high-poverty school districts. These are the kids who most need our help.”

During her confirmation hearing last week, McMahon said she supported dismantling the department, but admitted that the administration needs congressional support to do it. 

“We’d like to do this right,” she told the committee. “We’d like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with.”

Sanders on Thursday said that was misguided. “Is it a perfect entity?” he said. “No. Is it bureaucratic? Yes. Can we reform it? Yes. Should we abolish it? No.”

Likewise, Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, said he’d vote no on McMahon’s nomination for that reason. “I can’t vote for somebody who will willfully engage in the destruction of the very agency she wants to lead. That is disqualifying.”

McMahon’s nomination proceeds as the administration sends decidedly mixed signals on its education agenda. President Trump has nominated two experienced, well-regarded educators — North Dakota state Superintendent Kirsten Baesler and former Tennessee education chief Penny Schwinn — as top lieutenants to McMahon, even as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency decimates the department’s research arm, slashing millions of dollars in contracts in search of waste, fraud and abuse. At a press conference last week, Trump called the department “a con job.” 

McMahon, for her part, has said she supports DOGE’s work, saying, “It is worthwhile to take a look at the programs before money goes out the door.” 

While she’s expected to easily earn confirmation in the Republican-controlled Senate, with support among conservative groups, McMahon faces opposition from education and civil rights groups that more broadly oppose the White House education cuts. 

The conservative group last week said Trump was smart to nominate McMahon to lead the department “in what we hope is a short tenure” as she works to shutter it.

Conservative commentator Rick Hess McMahon’s WWE experience gives her the right background for the top job: “Considering that it’s an agency that’s long been plagued by low morale and accused of being too chummy with the unions and the college cartel,” he wrote, “there’s a strong case that what’s needed is an outsider with a strong managerial track record.”

By contrast, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights on Wednesday urged lawmakers to reject her nomination, saying in a co-signed by more than 240 groups that she’s “unprepared and unqualified” to lead the agency. Her confirmation would be “disastrous for students, their families, and educators,” the group said. 

Worth more than $3 billion

One of 13 billionaires tapped to lead Trump’s administration, McMahon has held tightly to Trump’s key education priorities: advancing private school choice, preventing trans students from competing in sports consistent with their gender identity and fighting antisemitism. 

McMahon’s confirmation has taken longer to schedule than those of most other cabinet nominees as the education committee waited for her to complete ethics paperwork detailing vast financial assets and ties to far-right organizations. Her net worth totals more than $3 billion.

As a board member of Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs the president’s Truth Social platform, she earns $18,400 quarterly. Politico reported that she also received stock in the company worth more than $800,000 in late January. McMahon is also on the advisory council for the Daily Caller, a conservative media outlet that has given her favorable coverage. 

If confirmed, McMahon has promised to step down from her board positions, forfeit any shares in Truth Social that she doesn’t yet fully own and divest from those that she does within three months. She also earns interest income from education-related municipal bonds that fund school construction across the country and has pledged to divest from those as well.

A vote before the full Senate has yet to be scheduled.

“We can’t exit this decade with students, in particular low-income students, performing worse than they were performing when they entered the decade,” said Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, a nonprofit funding academic recovery efforts. “My biggest fear is just that people will use the Department of Education as a battering ram for other issues and not use it as a force to take on academic outcomes for kids.”

The Republican nominee, declaring this the “golden age of America,” in battleground states, like Georgia and Florida, than he did in 2020. As expected, Republicans flipped the Senate and will hold at least a 52-seat majority, with a few races left to call. Control of the House remains undecided. 

Observers expect Trump to immediately nullify the Biden administration’s Title IX rule that extends protections against discrimination to LGBTQ students. 

Those who campaigned for Trump, and agree with his promises to end in schools, celebrated his comeback.

“American parents voted for their children’s future,” Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the conservative Moms for Liberty advocacy group, . Her name is already among those being tossed around as a possible . She told ����Ӱ�� that she “would be honored to serve the next president of the United States of America.”

Most clues about Trump’s early priorities come from the conservative Heritage Foundation’s , or Project 2025. In addition to eliminating Title I funding for low-income students and Head Start for preschoolers from poor families, the plan would remove references to LGBTQ people throughout federal policy.

But even if Washington ends up with a GOP trifecta and federal appointees handpicked by Heritage, the president-elect might not be able to deliver on some of his more bold promises to dismantle the education department and of illegal immigrants.

“Some of this rhetoric will be tempered with reality once the administration changes,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. “This is a president that we are very accustomed to. I understand people are nervous; they’re very concerned. But when it comes down to it, there’s also the reality of governing.”

Eliminating the education department, for example, would require 60 votes in the Senate and would likely be unpopular in the House as well, even if Republicans are still in control, said David Cleary, a former Republican Senate education staffer now working for a left-leaning lobbying firm.

“The votes wouldn’t materialize,” he said.

Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, added that “draconian cuts” in spending would also be difficult to pass. That’s why Trump is expected to accomplish some of his conservative agenda through executive orders.

“Let’s assume that there is no grand reawakening to the problems that America faces and people stay in their partisan foxholes,” Cleary said. “Trump will have to take a page out of [President Joe Biden’s] playbook and do a lot by executive action and regulatory plans.”

That would include halting enforcement of Biden’s Title IX rule — which, because of litigation from Republican-led governors, currently applies to only 24 states. Officials would likely restart the process of restoring the 2020 regulation completed under former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, which narrowed the definition of sexual assault and expanded due process rights for the accused.

One LGBTQ advocacy organization called Trump’s victory “an immediate threat.”

“Today, many in our community feel a profound sense of loss and concern for the future,” Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, said in a statement, pointing to Heritage’s Project 2025 as the blueprint for how Trump would roll back policies that allow trans students to play on sports teams or use restrooms that match their gender identity. “With these changes, our young people could face increased discrimination, reduced access to safe spaces and diminished legal recognition.”

Trump, a and, at 78, the oldest candidate ever elected president, is also expected to push for private school choice, perhaps along the lines of the $5,000 that passed a House committee in September. But despite the GOP’s enthusiasm for vouchers and education savings accounts, which allow parents to use public funds for private school tuition and homeschooling expenses, some advocates would like to see greater support for the charter sector.

Petrilli, a self-described “never-Trumper,” said he’s worried about returning to “the political dynamics” of Trump’s first term, which didn’t benefit charter schools.

“Reform-oriented Democrats were sidelined or silenced,” he said. “Given that there are a lot of kids in blue states like California, New York, and Illinois who desperately need high-quality educational options, this would be a terrible development.”

But Rodrigues sees some bright spots in Republicans’ focus on parental rights and school choice. “Those things can be positive when not taken to the extreme,” she said.

She’s encouraged by the prospect of Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana becoming chair of the Senate education committee, where he has already highlighted the importance of improving . 

While the National Parents Union has had close interaction with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and the White House, she said leaders have had ongoing “deep conversations” with those on both sides of the aisle.

“Progress will be made for children in any and all conditions, regardless of what happens in the House and the change up in the Senate,” she said. “I think the depth of our relationships are not confined to one particular party.”

Over the last several months, ����Ӱ�� has taken a look at some of the biggest education issues at play during the 2024 election cycle. Here’s an overview of the federal, state and local races and ballot measures that are poised to impact students, teachers and families the most. 

The White House 

In the first presidential debate of this election season between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, the candidates were asked a question that was top of mind for parents and child advocates:

“In your second term, what would you do to make child care more affordable?” asked Trump during that June debate. 

But rather than focus on children, many critics said the two candidates behaved like them.

Even after Biden dropped out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris stepped in as the Democratic party’s presidential nominee and tapped Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former public high school teacher, as her pick for the vice presidential candidate – education and child care still did not make it to the center stage of election season conversations.

Instead, most clues about Trump’s education policy have come from The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, an ambitious Republican agenda to transform the federal bureaucracy under a second Trump presidency. While Trump has denied any involvement in the creation of Project 2025, experts say the plan reflects many of the ideologies held by the former president and, if enacted, would have considerable fallout in the world of education. 

Project 2025’s chapter on education, for example, offers prescriptions for eliminating Title I grants to high-poverty schools, revising accreditation requirements under the Higher Education Act and dismantling the Department of Education, among other things. Overall, the plan seeks to reimagine the US government as a guardian of parents’ rights and supports school choice. 

Publicly, Trump has also said that he would pull funding from any schools that teach critical race theory or support transgender rights. 

Meanwhile, Harris has not offered much in terms of her education policy. She has made it clear that she thinks Trump’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education would be a terrible idea and has criticized his attacks on curricula taught in schools.

One item that could be on the table during a Harris presidency is a pay hike for teachers. Few may remember it now, but Harris took the biggest swing on education policy of any Democrat in the 2020 presidential primary: a $315 billion to raise teacher pay and overhaul the profession. The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union, was the first group to voice their support of Harris as a presidential candidate this summer. 

While the two candidates have vastly different aims when it comes to education, there is one area both camps seem to (mostly) agree on: Expanding the Child Tax Credit. Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have embraced proposals to expand the program, which offers relief to parents of kids under 17 years old. Depending on the election outcome, neither party may hold enough power to enact its vision, however. 

National Issues

Bible teachings in public schools: Republicans have spent a lot of energy getting the Bible into public schools. Much of the spotlight has been on Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters, who mandated that schools stock classrooms with Bibles. Louisiana passed a law requiring schools to post the 10 Commandments in classrooms, the subject of , while the Texas Education Agency has proposed a Bible-infused reading curriculum that includes stories from the Old and New testaments. 

Whether those ideas will resonate with Christian voters is harder to answer. One recent poll suggests it won’t. On a long list of concerns influencing churchgoers’ views in this election, public schools ranked near the bottom as a reason why they would pick a presidential candidate. Instead, the economy and border security topped the list. 

School boards: Moms for Liberty, the conservative advocacy group, hasn’t been able to repeat its success at the polls since 2022, when its school board candidates were scoring victories across the country. Some say voters are clearly tired of what one researcher called the “politics of disruption.” Others believe the group’s leaders are more focused on adding members and mobilizing voters for Trump than winning local races. There have also been efforts to recruit moderates to run against conservative candidates like those from Moms for Liberty. 

A good indicator of who will win school board seats is whether the candidate has the endorsement of a teachers’ union. According to research out of Ohio State University and Boston College, a union endorsement increases support for candidates by as much as 20 percentage points among various voting blocs, with the effects particularly concentrated among Democrats and those who favor organized labor. Almost no group, including Republicans, responds negatively to the endorsements, the authors found.

School choice: A high-stakes political battle is brewing around school choice. GOP groups are funneling millions of dollars into state races to defeat critics of education savings accounts. In Texas, observers say, the victories by pro-ESA candidates could lead to a more conservative legislature or a potential Democratic backlash. 

It’s worth noting that voters have a history of rejecting private school choice measures at the ballot box. Recent voucher proposals garnered less than a . But advocates in three states are hoping to break that trend on Election Day. In , voters will decide whether to preserve or overturn 2023 legislation that created a private school scholarship program. Initiatives in and , if approved, could pave the way for lawmakers to create vouchers or education savings accounts in the future.

State and local races and ballot measures 

Arizona: The outcome of Arizona’s legislative races could upend what has been one of America’s most welcoming environments for school choice. Democrats, who already hold the governorship, could take control of both legislative chambers by flipping just four seats, which would make Arizona voters the first in the nation to hand over governance of an ESA program to its opponents. 

California: A single, heated school board race in Los Angeles could help decide the fate of the nation’s largest charter school sector and the LA Unified School District. Upstart vows to bring a pro-charter voice to LA Unified’s board, but faces stiff opposition from union-backed incumbent . 

Delaware: With at least eight high-level reports over the last 25 years calling for a wholesale overhaul of a Jim Crow-era school funding formula that gives more state aid to wealthy districts and shortchanges disadvantaged kids, whoever wins Delaware’s governor race will have their work cut out for them. 

Illinois: October was already destined to be a tumultuous chapter in Chicago politics, as voters prepared for the first school board elections in the city’s history. But the abrupt resignation of the city’s existing school board, and the related crisis of governance over the country’s fourth-largest school system, has magnified local divisions over finance and the role of the powerhouse Chicago Teachers Union. Now locals are wondering if the mayor can keep the district solvent — and his own administration afloat. 

Indiana: In Indiana’s governor race, GOP U.S. Senator Mike Braun, who’s been endorsed by Donald Trump, wants to expand the state’s school choice voucher program. If elected, Braun and his running mate, far-right , have pledged universal school choice for every Indiana family while focusing on parental rights and school safety. His opponent, former state schools chief Jennifer McCormick, who has the backing of the state teachers union, seeks to expand affordable child care, fight what she believes is excessive state-mandated testing and call for an equitable school funding formula. 

Massachusetts: In Massachusetts, Ballot Question 2 asks voters to decide if the MCAS exam should remain a high school graduation requirement. If it passes, Massachusetts would have no statewide graduation requirements, making it an outlier nationally. Instead, its some 300 districts would determine requirements locally. Those in favor of repealing the requirement — largely backed by the state teachers union — argue it narrows curriculum and harms students with disabilities and English language learners. Those who want to keep the test, including Gov. Maura Healey, say it’s an important accountability measure. 

Minnesota: If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are elected in November, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan, will become the first Indigenous woman governor in U.S. history. The daughter of a Hubert H. Humphrey campaign strategist and an Ojibwe land-rights activist — Flanagan was the youngest person elected to the Minneapolis School Board. She has promoted free school lunch and Indigenous curriculum.

North Carolina: North Carolina’s race for governor has been marked by scandal. In September, that Republican nominee Mark Robinson called himself a “Black Nazi” and posted “slavery is not bad” anonymously on a porn site. Beyond the controversies, Robinson has kept education debates centered on eradicating the presence of “politics” and “indoctrination” in schools, and . His challenger, Democratic candidate Josh Stein, told that his top priority as governor would be to improve public education. He has also supported to address the youth mental health crisis, and wants to expand access to community colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Whoever is elected as the state’s leader will appoint individuals for , subject to confirmation by the assembly. 

Another pivotal race in North Carolina will be for superintendent. Republican candidate Michele Morrow, a homeschooler who rallied outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6, has a history of disparaging public schools with choice words like “indoctrination centers.” She faces Democrat Maurice “Mo” Green, a lawyer and former district superintendent. Whoever wins will be responsible for more than 2,700 schools and a $13 billion education budget. 

Rhode Island: Providence, Rhode Island’s school board has been appointed by the mayor for decades, but voters will be able to pick board members again this election. The catch is that state control of the district was just extended to 2027, limiting what the new board can do. New members will still have to navigate their way out of state control as well as handle challenges with low test scores, falling enrollments, school closures and demand for more charter schools. 

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Once elected, the new board members were equally effective at advancing their agendas. According to the free speech watchdog group PEN America, over the last two years, 247 school districts have banned books and at least 894 have prohibited “divisive” speech. 

Superintendents were fired or pushed out in nine of 17 boards flipped by right-wing candidates in 2022. In the first two hours of its inaugural meeting, newly dominated by Moms for Liberty-backed members fired the district’s first Black superintendent and its attorney, banned discussion of critical race theory and started the process of removing books and other materials from schools. 

Now, four election cycles after these groups emerged, the culture warriors have competition in hundreds of races from candidates backed by another set of organizations newly focused on school boards — this time, recruiting and training opponents of book bans, restrictions on classroom speech and instruction, rollbacks of LGBTQ student rights and educator censorship. 

They’re bringing many of the sophisticated campaign strategies — and money — long common in top-of-the-ticket state and federal races to contests in even small districts. Some are deliberately recruiting young, diverse candidates. 

There are an estimated 12,000 school board races on ballots this year, ranging from headline-grabbing contests in huge urban districts like Los Angeles and Chicago to small, rural communities where elections are decided by a handful of votes. The organizations jumping into the fray are just as varied, ranging from national coalitions like the — which supports candidates throughout the country — to groups focused on a specific demographic or hyperlocal race. 

In Arizona, organizes Native communities and people of color. is focused on school systems in Marion County, Indiana. trains potential board members in both English and Spanish.

Like their right-wing counterparts, these candidate incubators are typically organized as 501(c)4 nonprofits, which can engage in political activity and are required to make of their spending. Frequently, they have a more traditional nonprofit partner that can’t participate in electoral politics but can educate voters about issues.       

Because many of the larger groups previously focused on state and federal elections, they are where Moms for Liberty and other right-wing organizations have won significant victories and to recruit slates of candidates to oppose them.  

Once a thankless job, even more so now   

Traditionally, school board politics has differed from that of other elections. Mostly nonpartisan — which has been generally perceived as a good thing — the contests can be as bitterly fought as other races, yet they rarely interest people who don’t have a direct connection to their local schools. This translates to low voter turnout, which can give outsized influence to teachers unions, education reform advocates and other special interests that sometimes supply funding and volunteer door-knockers. 

School board members are rarely paid more than a stipend — if that — to take on a demanding role that involves making often unpopular decisions involving hundreds of millions of dollars and the well-being of their neighbors’ children. 

Historically, particularly in smaller communities, persuading people to campaign for such an undesirable job has been tough. But injecting national, partisan issues into school board races has proven a remarkably effective for the GOP — and led to constant harassment of school board members even over seemingly noncontroversial issues. This year in Minnesota, for example, there are with more open board seats than candidates.

For those who do run, an increase in the number of “single-issue” board members can grind the process of taking care of a school system’s day-to-day business to a halt. And even though the number of ballot-box wins by Moms for Liberty and similar groups is falling, the attendant acrimony can drive nonpartisan people off boards and flatten interest among prospective moderate replacements.

The goal of the new candidate incubators is to seek community members willing to serve and to train them in the nuts and bolts of campaigning, as well as in how to govern effectively and seek compromise in polarized environments — and to survive the rancor and even physical threats that, at least for the moment, can come with the job.   

When board politics is personal

Kyrstin Schuette has first-hand experience with the impact ideological politics can have on students. In 2009, the board of Minnesota’s largest school system, the Anoka-Hennepin School District, adopted what is often called a “don’t say gay” policy, limiting what staff could discuss with students about LGBTQ people and issues. Teachers interpreted the rule as prohibiting them from intervening in in-school victimization. 

In the first year the edict was in place, nine students who had been bullied because of their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity committed suicide. “I was almost the 10^th,” says Schuette, who was harassed by classmates and a teacher starting in her sophomore year of high school.   

In 2011, she became Jane Doe, the lead plaintiff in a against the district. As part of a settlement, the Justice Department imposed a consent decree requiring Anoka-Hennepin to make a number of systemic changes that were supposed to protect Schuette and her classmates going forward. 

The court order, however, did not sway the board. Even before the end of the legal oversight, a right-wing majority overruled school administrators and illegally ordered them to prohibit a transgender swimmer from using the boys’ locker room. The athlete, “Nick,” sued. In 2021, the case was settled with another order requiring the district to again adopt policies designed to protect LGBTQ students. 

In 2022 and 2023, three school board members were elected with the support of the 1776 Project PAC and a similar group founded in 2022, the Minnesota Parents Alliance, creating a 3-3 partisan split. The new conservative bloc demanded the rollback of portions of the 2021 settlement that would bring the district into compliance with the law. 

The three also threatened to if administrators did not do away with diversity initiatives and adopted new, state-mandated social studies standards that include ethnic studies. By law, districts must provide instruction that covers the grade-by-grade standards and have to balance each year’s budget by July 31 or shut down. 

In July 2023, Schuette launched the , which trained and backed 84 candidates in 27 Minnesota districts in time to run last November. This year, the group is working with more than 200 candidates in 42 Minnesota districts and 14 other states.

Schuette credits her group’s rapid growth to pent-up frustrations with recent years’ education politics, but she’s quick to add that many of the candidates she’s trained needed convincing they could run, win and make a difference.  

“There’s definitely some apprehension there,” she says. “Parents, community leaders, former teachers — those are folks who need a little more encouragement.”

Founded in 2017 to train primarily young candidates for a number of offices, this year has launched a $3 million pilot program to test to the races it will get involved in. The group hopes to be active in all 50 states, with a particular emphasis on the 60% of school board races that are uncontested. 

Denise Feriozzi is executive director of the Pipeline Fund, created in 2018 to bring more people of color, women and low-income people into electoral politics. Two years ago, the fund began identifying school districts where have had the biggest impact and organizing its own candidates to counter them. 

Like Schuette, Feriozzi says the Pipeline Fund has seen a groundswell of interest — ironically, something she credits in part to the successes of the 1776 Project and Moms for Liberty: “Over the last couple of years, folks have really recognized the potential for school boards to impact the lives of students.” 

Strong candidates, Feriozzi says, should “be able to answer the ‘why.’ What is it you want to be able to accomplish?” The rest, she says, can be taught.   

‘How do you work with the other side?’

A professor of education politics and policy at Michigan State University, Rebecca Jacobsen has studied the politicization of school boards. She predicts the recruiting and training efforts by moderate groups will translate to higher-caliber board members in many places. But she also harbors concerns. 

Candidates backed by the conservative organizations that sprang up in 2021 were often counseled to engage in what she and others call politics of disruption. Traditionally, nonpartisan board members are urged to observe rules designed to ensure civility. They often agree not to surprise one another with sharp questions during public meetings, to make sure comments to reporters and constituents are in accord with board decisions and to not embarrass the district staffers whose job it is to make presentations.

The new members, Jacobsen says, are frequently coached to deviate from the old customs: “You don’t have to speak as a board”; “Maintain your own Twitter, maintain your own social media presence”; “Don’t do it behind the scenes, do it in public.”  

“This really changes who runs, why they run and what their role is,” she says. “The point is to sow distrust and chaos.”

Jacobsen was part of a team of researchers who watched 156 board meetings in 15 states from 2019 to 2022. They found a marked increase in shouting, insults and threats — both by board members and people in the audience — particularly in areas where Moms for Liberty and similar groups were active. 

Traditionally, school board service involves constant compromise, Jacobsen continues: “But there are no compromises when [you believe] the other side is harming children. How do you work with the other side when you think the other side is fundamentally evil?”

Because of this, beyond the basics of fundraising and door-knocking, the Pipeline Fund works with organizations to equip prospective board members with strategies for campaigning and governing in high-conflict environments. The group works with the to help candidates minimize or navigate online and physical threats and harassment, for example.

The fund and numerous local candidate training groups work with , an organization founded by Orleans Parish School Board member Ethan Ashley in 2020. Its goal is to — with an emphasis on women of color — and newly elected officials with policy-making skills.

New board members, he says, need training on everything from parliamentary procedure to self-care. And in a contentious environment, that support needs to be ongoing and emphasize using relationship-building skills to try to create a cohesive board culture.

“There are 12,000 school board races on the ballot this year,” says Ashley. “We believe the community knows who the right individuals are to run those races. We’re thinking deeply about how to support them after they are elected.” 

After expressing opposition to the pro-voucher movement he embodied, she added, “Side note — Corey A. DeAngelis, the face of school choice, was a model that catered to the gay community” and included a black-and-white photo of what appeared to be a shirtless DeAngelis in a suggestive pose. 

At the time, the revelation didn’t cause a stir or interfere with DeAngelis’s hectic schedule as a leading lobbyist for “funding students, not systems.” He his book, “The Parent Revolution,” which earned from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. And and other conservative outlets continued to feature him and that schools focus too much on the “LGBT’s as opposed to the ABC’s.”

But that abruptly ended Friday when , a far-right fringe account on Substack, reported that DeAngelis had a gay adult film career under the pseudonym “Seth Rose” and appeared in a 2015 film set in a college. The Betsy DeVos-backed American Federation for Children, where DeAngelis has been a senior fellow pushing school choice bills since 2021, quickly erased him from its website. 

“We have placed the employee on leave as we investigate this matter further,” a spokeswoman for the pro-school choice group said.

Has anyone heard from Corey DeAngelis in the last few days? He normally tweets at me incessantly- he’s been very silent. Hope he’s ok.

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten)

Known for aggressive online rhetoric aimed at school districts, unions, and particularly American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, DeAngelis has been uncharacteristically silent on social media since the news broke and didn’t return texts or a phone call from ����Ӱ��. His on Thursday referenced a video of Vice President Kamala Harris talking about children being “of the community.”

“They think they own your kids,” he wrote.

Online and in person, DeAngelis has been an avid culture warrior and perhaps the most visible face of a brand of school choice that paints traditional districts as failing institutions that are forcing left-wing ideas on students. “School choice defeats the woke mind virus,” he commented in response to from House Speaker Mike Johnson featuring a “lesson plan” parody that included “drag queen story hours” and transgender students’ participation in school sports.��

He frequently browbeat Democratic opponents to and trolled them when they blocked him.

But the news of DeAngelis’s alleged past ultimately came not from his many critics on the left, but rather has its origins in an intra-MAGA dispute involving right-wing Texas groups that trade in conspiracy theories and oppose Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan for school vouchers.

The Texas Freedom Coalition, which is run by Fields, calls itself a network of “patriots” who opposed COVID lockdowns. They view vouchers as another form of government overreach.

Fields gave Current Revolt, a far-right site that has , credit for digging into gay porn sites to find the film and other photos. But she told ����Ӱ��, “My post is what caused several people to start asking questions about his past.”

A screenshot of what appeared to be a policy expert for DeAngelis with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization raised red flags for her and other conservative parents who view talk of “global” partnerships as a threat to U.S. independence. One of UNESCO’s is “inclusive and equitable quality education.”

“School choice isn’t merely a lucrative scam; it’s a cunning ploy to enable government oversight of all educational avenues through a web of regulations and accountability tied to public funding,” Fields wrote in her July post about DeAngelis. 

DeAngelis any connections to the U.N. group.

Mary Lowe, a conservative activist who split from Moms for Liberty — another — over the issue of school choice, was also skeptical. She said she never understood why conservatives flocked toward DeAngelis after in 2020, “I didn’t vote for Trump — and I’m not a Republican.”

But Gov. Greg Abbott and pro-voucher advocates like the Texas Public Policy Foundation — who have for years to pass a school choice law — embraced DeAngelis’s take-no-prisoners style of advocacy. Following other states with similar laws, they want Texas to give parents roughly $10,000 a year to spend on private school tuition or homeschooling. At Republican lawmakers’ invitation, he testified before the Texas House education committee on the topic of “parent empowerment” in 2022, despite the fact that he was single with no children at the time.

“Our moms’ intuition was like ‘There is something missing to this story,’” said Lowe, who founded a new group, Families Engaged for Effective Education, after leaving Moms for Liberty. ‘There is something not right here.’ ”

DeAngelis a “slick salesman” for the school choice movement.

It wasn’t until last week, however, that news linking DeAngelis to porn films spread like wildfire on social media.

Immediate reaction to the graphic images spread on porn-related websites and among who saw the scoop as “” for one of their bitterest foes. , an Oklahoma City attorney, asked how Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and state Superintendent Ryan Walters “who are so anxious to privatize Oklahoma public education never vetted Corey DeAngelis?” DeAngelis supported their campaigns in 2022, and Walters similarly accuses public schools of spreading “woke gender ideology” in schools and frequently posts examples of what he considers left-wing indoctrination.

The school choice grifters at the American Federation for Children deleted Corey DeAngelis off their site

— Jess Piper (@piper4missouri)

The Hoover Institution, a Stanford University think tank where DeAngelis has been a visiting fellow for the past year, no longer lists him as an expert, but retains his articles on the site. There have been no changes to his profiles on the sites of two libertarian organizations where he’s been a contributor, the and the .

On his Eduwonk blog, Andy Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether, a think tank, “a little grace” toward someone he described as a “deeply troubled person.” But he argued that , which include about drag shows and Pride festivals, are “going to be hard for his allies to defend.”

Other school choice advocates were already pointing fingers back at traditional public schools.

“What’s better? A person with a sinful past trying to do a virtuous thing?” , a conservative Latino broadcaster and political analyst asked on X. “Or those claiming virtue, like defenders of gov-ed’s debauchery, who knowingly push evil today?” 

But others said the episode serves as a warning to education activists who place too much faith in one polarizing individual to carry their message.

“Oftentimes these character traits go hand in hand. Being a very outstanding speaker and charismatic leader … comes with a degree of narcissism,” Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor, who is gay, told ����Ӱ��. “The feeling that you’re above reproach can lead to questionable judgment.”

Disclosure: Corey DeAngelis wrote several opinion pieces for ����Ӱ�� between 2018 and 2023. The Hoover Institution, where DeAngelis served as a visiting fellow until this month, provides financial support to ����Ӱ��. Andy Rotherham sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors.

But in mid-2021, dismayed by screaming matches over COVID protocols that often broke out at school board meetings, she decided to meet individually with the board members to discuss her concerns. She found them kind and professional, so she encouraged leaders of her local chapter to do the same thing. 

“I said ‘I think you’d like them,’ and they said ‘Nope, we don’t want to do that,’ ” Christian recalled. “All of a sudden, I was the bad guy. It was very polarized.”

After initially attending some of their meetings and supporting their cause, Christian cut ties with Moms for Liberty. To her, the moment demonstrated the uncompromising way the conservative group became a force in today’s Republican party. Keeping divisive issues like sexually explicit books and lessons on racial discrimination in the spotlight was a in 2022 as Moms for Liberty-endorsed school board candidates scored victories across the country, especially in Florida where the organization originated. 

Since then, the group hasn’t been able to repeat its success at the polls. But there are signs that taking control of school boards isn’t Moms for Liberty’s top concern right now. They’re spending money to mobilize voters for like-minded GOP candidates and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, an “anti-parent radical candidate.” Max Eden, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, suggested the group is focused on preparing “for the two alternative futures they stand to face.”

“If Trump wins, I expect that whomever he picks for [education] secretary will be tasked with a strong emphasis on the issues that they care about,” he said. “If he loses, there’s an expectation that Harris will double down hard on social issues from the left.”

Eden described Moms for Liberty’s recent strategy to join four Republican-led states in over the new Title IX rule as a “coup” from both an organizational and membership perspective. The revised regulation extends protections against sexual discrimination to LGBTQ students and gives transgender students the right to use restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. Moms for Liberty’s legal move spurred a federal court to issue an injunction, blocking hundreds of schools across the country from enforcing the new Title IX regulations. Moms for Liberty also used the ruling as an opportunity to so they could block the new provisions in more schools. 

‘Outraged over something’

The success of Moms for Liberty’s endorsed candidates, however, is still a way to measure the future of a “parental rights” movement that seeks more control over curriculum and opposes attention to race and social-emotional issues in school.

Former Florida school board members Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich founded the organization in 2021. At the time, their primary cause was battling mask mandates. But their approach quickly resonated with many disillusioned parents in the wake of COVID school closures and the intense reactions to school equity efforts often labeled as critical race theory.

“It’s hard to think of another education advocacy organization that has grown to such national prominence so quickly,” Brookings Institution in March.

In the 2022 election cycle, the group took in , and of its endorsed candidates were elected. But in 2023, the percentage of Moms for Liberty candidates winning school board seats dropped to , in part because other organizations to endorse their own candidates and slow down the group’s progress. This year’s results seem on track to mirror last year’s, but the group is not completely out of the running. 

Sue Woltanski, a school board member in Monroe County, Florida, has monitored and Moms for Liberty’s influence across the state, where it has joined forces with Gov. Ron DeSantis to endorse conservative candidates. A critic of their approach, she called Moms for Liberty members “people who have been outraged over something scary at their kid’s school.”

This year, the group targeted 14 school board races in Florida. Its candidates won just three of the open seats in the August primary. Another five are headed to November runoffs. In a statement, Justice and Descovich counted those candidates who advanced among their victories, saying they were “thrilled that Moms for Liberty saw a 60% win rate.” 

But the group’s tactics — like reading aloud the most salacious passages from sexually explicit library books at — often are aimed at making “people question whether it’s safe for their kids to go to public schools,” said Woltanski, who defeated one of their endorsed candidates two years ago. Moms for Liberty also embraces private , which continues to in Florida, causing public school enrollment in several districts to decline. 

“In my little vacation community, if we don’t have high-quality public schools we’re going to just be a resort,” she said. A lot of school boards have conservative members, she added, “but they are still in favor of public education.”

‘Us-versus-them mentality’ 

Examining Moms for Liberty’s win-loss record is just one way to measure its impact. Researchers at Michigan State University watched hours of school board meetings to better understand the overall effect of the group’s presence on rhetoric and behavior during the convenings. 

If Moms for Liberty-backed candidates took the majority of seats following the 2022 elections, they often acted quickly to fire superintendents, place restrictions on books and issue bans on critical race theory or lessons on sex and gender. Members of the public “turned out in high volume” to both support and oppose their policies, the researchers said.

“Successfully winning a majority of seats on the board seemed to deeply entrench the us-versus-them mentality, leading to increased and divided engagement at meetings in the post-election period,” they wrote. 

But even in districts where Moms for Liberty didn’t “flip” the board, the researchers found an overall increase in insults, threats and disorder, like outbursts from the audience, compared to the period between late 2019 and early 2020. 

“I don’t really think they have any true plans to govern,” said researcher Rebecca Jacobsen. She called their style the “politics of disruption.”

There were more displays of anger — a speaker banging their first on the podium, for example — and an increase in incidents in which police intervened and removed protesters. Before the pandemic, they found that police only got involved once. But in 2021 and 2022, as Moms for Liberty chapters were spreading across the country, they identified nine board meetings across five school districts where the police intervened.

The Moms for Liberty website urges chapters to push for policy changes, but some critics, like Christian in Florida, say members are more focused on national issues than local concerns, like school safety, bullying and curriculum.

“I thought they were going to educate moms and dads how to stand up for their children,” she said.

‘Close ties to powerful individuals’

At Moms for Liberty’s Washington, D.C., summit in late August — which featured a lengthy conversation between Justice and Trump — there was no evidence that the group had lost its edge. Despite a poor showing at the polls in Florida, members had other victories to celebrate. 

Three of their leaders, from Naples, from Palm Beach and from Brevard County, had won primary races for Florida House seats and made it onto the ballot in the general election.

“This is huge for us because it represents the momentum of change we are making across the country as we take our schools back from the union bosses,” the statement from Justice and Descovich said. Justice and Descovich declined ����Ӱ��’s requests for an interview.

As the November election approaches, Moms for Liberty has further turned its attention to increasing membership and mobilizing more voters, spending $3 million in , like Arizona and Georgia. With chapters in 48 states, the Brookings researchers said Moms for Liberty still carries a lot of influence.

“[Moms for Liberty] is a well-financed group with close ties to powerful individuals and institutions in conservative politics,” they wrote. The organization “represents a voting bloc that Republican political operatives are actively trying to court in the 2024 elections and beyond.”

A federal district court judge in Missouri has blocked implementation of the Biden administration’s new Title IX rule in six additional states — Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

The , ordered late Wednesday, brings to 21 the total number of states where the U.S. Department of Education can’t enforce the rule on Aug. 1.

Judge Rodney W. Sippel, a Clinton nominee, said the plaintiffs have a “fair chance” of demonstrating that the department “exceeded its statutory authority” by using the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County to expand Title IX protections to LGBTQ students. 

Ravina Nath, a recent graduate of Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, originally included Rice University in Houston on her short list of colleges to attend this fall. With an interest in neuroscience, she was drawn to its top-ranked biomedical engineering program. 

That was before Texas became one of to sue the U.S. Department of Education  over its new Title IX rule. The regulation extends protections against discrimination and harassment to LGBTQ students and requires prompt investigations into students’ complaints.

Instead, she’ll attend Barnard College in New York City.

“I need to be in a place where I would feel like my school supported me,” said Nath, who became a in high school. At Rice, some students to how officials handled complaints of sexual misconduct. And she ruled out the University of Georgia, a “potential safety school,” because it to make data on such investigations public. Several of her friends made similar calculations when narrowing down school choices. 

“My friends who are survivors and who are LGBTQ+ students applied to schools on the West Coast or the Northeast,” she said. “I don’t think any of my friends applied to school in .”

With the new rule set to go into effect Aug. 1 — just seven days away — a flurry of lawsuits has once again turned the map of the United States into a familiar patchwork of red and blue.

District courts have blocked the regulation in 15 Republican-led states. In the most recent development, the on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow all but related to gender identity issues to go into effect in 10 of those states after two appellate courts denied earlier requests. 

Complicating the legal math further, in an earlier action, a federal judge in Kansas the rule just at serving children of current and future members of the conservative Moms for Liberty and students involved in , another advocacy organization opposed to trans girls competing on teams consistent with their gender identity. Moms for Liberty sees the ruling as an expansion opportunity: On Tuesday, the group tied to Title IX.

With the legal landscape changing daily, some experts think the Education Department should take a step back and delay the rule.

“For schools, universities and students, it’ll calm things down,” said Sandra Hodgin, who runs a Title IX consulting firm in Los Angeles. “What are we talking about, 75% of the country not implementing Title IX and only 25% of the country implementing it?”

A spokesperson said the department has no plans to skirt the Aug. 1 deadline. On Tuesday, it sent schools a list of “” and a on how to draft policies to comply.   

For now, the Supreme Court is considering whether to lift the temporary pause on the rule in the affected states.

The far larger question is what the justices might decide if and when they consider the substance of the rule itself. In addition to expanding protections to LGBTQ students, the new rule largely replaced one issued under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. That regulation narrowed the definition of sexual misconduct and required live hearings so male students could face their accusers. 

W. Scott Lewis, managing partner with TNG Consulting, which trains districts across the country on Title IX, has advised red states covered by an injunction, like Wyoming and Idaho, that they’re currently bound by the 2020 regulation.

But that could change quickly. 

“It’s a race to the Supreme Court right now,” he said.

‘Bigger than sports’

Some families with LGBTQ students aren’t waiting for the legal drama to run its course. They’ve already to escape laws that bar trans students from using bathrooms or playing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity. Several have moved to the Denver metro area, where Lewis lives, to attend schools in a state that is not challenging the rule.

“We have more than a handful of students at my kid’s high school who moved here from Wyoming, from Kansas, from Iowa,” he said. 

Most of the controversy surrounding Title IX focuses on trans students’ participation in sports, a part of the rule that the U.S. Department of Education has delayed addressing until after the election. But in Lewis’s estimation, that issue is “bigger than sports.” 

“If I’m in a state that won’t let me compete, I’m probably not in a state that’s very friendly to LGBTQ students on the whole,” he said. “I’m far more likely to just move on.”

In blue states set to implement the new rule, many conservative parents say their children’s rights are also at stake. 

They’re concerned students would be disciplined for not using LGBTQ kids’ preferred pronouns, forced to censor their speech or share bathrooms and locker rooms with trans students.

Hillary Hickland, a mother of four in central Texas, moved her children out of the Belton Independent School District partly because she felt there was too much emphasis on students’ gender identity. Her sixth grade daughter told her that teachers encouraged a friend to identify as a boy and use a boy’s name without the parents’ knowledge. 

“Don’t do it behind the backs of the parents. That’s a huge violation of trust,” she said. As a Republican running for the Texas House, she’s concerned about sexual orientation and gender identity becoming part of Title IX. “We have the federal government dictating what goes on in our local public schools. It really undermines the neighborhood school and that culture that we’re trying to preserve.”

‘Nine months behind’

Lewis predicts the Supreme Court will eventually follow its precedent in , which said that at least in the workplace, LGBTQ employees are protected from discrimination. The Biden administration’s new rule rests on that decision.

, who wrote that majority opinion, “can’t undo Bostock. He said sex means LGBTQ rights,” Lewis said. In red states where the rule is on hold, districts “better be ready to implement very quickly because [they’re] going to be nine months behind everyone else.”

If the court also decides to address sports participation — an expected part of the regulation the administration has yet to issue — Lewis said it’s possible the justices would rule similar to the way they handled , leaving it to the states to determine when trans students can compete on teams consistent with their gender identity. 

He called that a “nightmare scenario” because it would “create a world where athletes could compete in some states but not others.” And at the college, NCAA level, “there will be all sorts of questions that can’t be limited to state borders,” said Joshua Dunn, executive director of the Institute of American Civics at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “They’ll have to address that, too.”

Dunn also suggested the conservative court might not follow Bostock and could treat LGBTQ issues differently at school than they do in the workplace. He noted cases, like , where the court put limits on students’ First Amendment rights in schools “that it would never allow outside of K-12 education.” 

Overturning ‘Chevron’

Another recent Supreme Court decision, unrelated to education, adds an additional layer of uncertainty to the debate over Title IX’s future — one that could affect both sides. 

In , the court overturned what was known as “Chevron deference,” which gave federal agencies broad authority to interpret ambiguous laws through guidance and regulations. The decision gives federal courts more power to explain the law when it’s unclear, and experts say, should end “.”

The Obama administration first issued a in 2011 stating schools’ obligations to protect students from sexual violence and harassment, which the Trump administration largely reversed in 2020, followed by yet another 180 in the spring by Biden’s education department.

Republicans have Education Secretary Miguel Cardona that they will review the department’s rules since President Joe Biden took office,  including Title IX. GOP leaders call the rule “overreach.” 

The conservative Heritage Foundation’s , largely assumed to be a legislative blueprint for a second Trump term,would remove the terms sexual orientation and gender identity from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation and piece of legislation that exists.”

But if Trump tries to reinstate the DeVos rule, Democrats could use Loper Bright to bring the same challenge, Lewis said.

“If you … say the department does not have the authority, then the 2020 regulations don’t count either,” he said. “It was exactly the same procedure.” 

Since their creation three years ago, the conservative parental rights organization Moms for Liberty has emerged as a major player in national education politics in the U.S., and certainly in Florida, where the group began in 2021.

“We started with two chapters, Brevard and Indian River. And in three years, we are now at 310 chapters in 48 states with 130,000 members and I think that’s remarkable. It’s because of the work that you started here in Florida,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich said on Friday while speaking in front of a crowd in Florida’s Capitol courtyard in Tallahassee.

Moms for Liberty emerged in the wake of schools shutting down during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, with parents feeling in some cases that local school boards weren’t listening to their concerns over remote learning and mask mandates.

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And they had a receptive audience in Tallahassee under Gov. Ron DeSantis and the GOP-controlled Legislature, resulting in legislation such as the (the “Don’t say gay” bill) and in the 2022 legislative session.

The group is still considered controversial: It’s been labeled as an and a “far-right” organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

SPLC writes: “Moms for Liberty and its nationwide chapters combat what they consider the ‘woke indoctrination’ of children by advocating for book bans in school libraries and endorsing candidates for public office that align with the group’s views. They also use their multiple social media platforms to target teachers and school officials, advocate for the abolition of the Department of Education, advance a conspiracy propaganda, and spread hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community.”

Co-founder Tiffany Justice rejected that assertion, that “we are a group of moms and dads and grandparents and aunts and uncles, community members that are very concerned about the direction of the country,” according to Fox News Tonight, in June 2023.

Justice, Descovich and Sarasota’s Bridget Ziegler were the three original co-founders of Moms for Liberty, though Ziegler, a Sarasota School Board member, left the organization shortly after its creation. Ziegler has been in the spotlight recently after it was reported that she and her husband had a consensual with another woman, among other concerns.

Descovich said that while Moms for Liberty originally focused on turning around members of school boards, the group learned quickly that they needed to invest energy in state legislatures to change laws, she said on Friday in Tallahassee.

“Florida started forming organically a legislative committee, and that was the model that is now being used in 18 states of Moms for Liberty with legislative committees,” she said.

Meanwhile, Brevard County School Board member Jennifer Jenkins says that the culture wars of the past few years, pushed by DeSantis, appear to be losing some of its steam.

But she also says that Moms for Liberty’s impact isn’t going away in Florida.

“What’s scary though is that the reason (Moms for Liberty) rose and were viable in Florida still exists,” Jenkins says. “That infrastructure didn’t fall apart, right? I think that they’re going to continue to thrive here and create this façade that they’re the driving force and the moving force. I don’t know if that will die down. Perhaps someone will try to conquer that.”

Organizers at Friday’s event didn’t speak much about the future, but they are expected to again get involved in local elections later this year.

The Florida chapter that they say, “stand with parents.” The list includes both of Florida’s two U.S. GOP senators, Rick Scott and Marco Rubio.

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Elena Chin, a former school counselor at a Department of Education elementary school in Queens for 23 years, founded the group after feeling increasingly alarmed by COVID closures, LGBTQ+ inclusion, and required diversity and equity workshops which she felt framed staff as “white supremacists.” 

“What we hope to accomplish is minimize it before it even starts and is full blown into the schools,” Chin said. “Raise awareness. Get a parent at every school board meeting to watchdog. We can’t normalize this stuff.”

Meeting by Zoom for about six months, the new Queens, New York chapter is following the same agenda as the organization, hoping to accomplish what some of the 285 other chapters already have: Limit or remove books and content featuring LGBTQ+ identities, racism and sex, which they believe can harm children. 

Some education experts were doubtful the New York City chapter will find much support in the overwhelmingly blue metropolis, but acknowledged people have always been in the city. Other parent groups with similarly conservative ideals have already gained a foothold locally.

Across the country, Moms for Liberty — making the Queens launch unsurprising to Michigan State researcher Rebecca Jacobsen, who’s been tracking the groups’ presence at school board meetings nationwide. 

“Their explicit mission says to represent voices that feel unheard. So in some ways, a really strong liberal location might lead to a small group of parents feeling like they don’t have a voice,” Jacobsen said. “Moms for Liberty has stepped in and said, ‘we’re here to represent you.’ And that’s a powerful feeling.” 

Chin was particularly concerned by the use of preferred pronouns, the number of children who told her they were gay, and the fact that she . 

“We’re telling children, you can tell me [you’re gay], and not your parents. That sounds like grooming to me,” Chin said. 

As a term, “grooming” has often been appropriated by conservatives to describe LGBTQ+ inclusion — a trend experts say minimizes real threats of child sexual abuse and vilifies queer people. 

Chin believes the number of children claiming they were gay and posters celebrating diversity was a “social contagion” at P.S. 64, for kids she said were just looking for more acceptance or to fit in with friends. 

Gender Queer was the only title Chin referenced in an interview with ����Ӱ��. The memoir, which won two American Library Association awards, the Alex for young readers and the Stonewall for nonfiction, has become a around the country for parents and politicians looking to ban school discussions about gender identity. 

In setting up the New York chapter, Chin has met roadblocks when attempting to open a bank account and finding a venue for in-person meetings. Two major banks declined her request. Only a third accepted, a smaller, local one which she declined to name. 

About 20 adults have “joined the movement” since April, Chin said. Outside of Queens, four members of the new Moms for Liberty chapter are from Brooklyn and one is from the Bronx. Every major racial group is represented. 

Yet not all are parents: Many are retirees, grandparents who “can have a voice without fear,” said Chin, who believes more parents with children in the city’s schools are staying away. 

“Many people are fearing for their jobs, fearing the association,” she said, “… and they fear retaliation against their kids.”

She is currently searching for a local location to screen an anti-trans documentary. The chapter plans to organize to oppose . While New York City goes beyond current state requirements to offer sex ed to its middle and high schoolers, the expansion would bring modified lessons to K-6 graders.

The group will also challenge curricula with an “anti-American message,” she said, that might make some children believe they are “victims” and others “oppressors.” 

Because the city’s schools are not governed by traditional school boards, where other chapters have exercised power to oust superintendents, the Queens chapter will advocate through media, political connections and gaining membership.

“That’s really my goal. To get people motivated everywhere,” Chin said. “I would love to see a chapter in every borough, minimally.” 

Moms for Liberty has been characterized , which Chin said is, “not a bad thing at all.” 

Even after the characterization, more members have joined nationally, Chin claimed. “So just twirl away,” she said. A spokesperson for Moms for Liberty’s national arm confirmed the group “saw a bump in membership and chapter openings,” after the SPLC’s hate group distinction in June 2023.

Maya Henson Carey, a research analyst with SPLC, said the organization’s rhetoric and work disproportionately hurts Black, brown and LGBTQ+ students, already some of the nation’s most vulnerable student populations. 

“By taking out books and parts of history that reflect who they are, they’re really seeking to erase their identities from public spaces and the classroom,” Henson Carey said. 

Though about 76% of New York City voted for President Joe Biden in the last election, have always thrived, particularly in parts of Queens, Staten Island and southern Brooklyn. It’s those pockets where Chin has already found support.

But some experts doubt the group’s conservative agenda will find much of a home in the city at large.

“When they get into the issue of book banning and attitudes towards gay and trans people, it’ll resonate with some folks, but I think the outcry against them will be very strong,” said Joseph Viteritti, public policy and education scholar at Hunter College. 

“If they’re going to lead with that kind of stuff, they’re going to realize very soon that we’re not Florida here,” added Viteritti, who served as a senior advisor to schools chiefs in New York City, Boston and San Francisco.

Yet already this year, parents of all races preferring more conservative education policies have made waves in the city, including in lower , a historically liberal block of neighborhoods. 

Via , conservative have found more power — 40% of candidates endorsed by Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education were elected this cycle. Only 2% of public school parents voted in the election, according to . 

PLACE, while not affiliated with the Queens Moms for Liberty chapter, shares some similar values. Particularly in wanting to preserve and expand merit-based admissions policies to the city’s most coveted schools — a practice research suggests reinforces racial imbalances. 

“I know that the things [Moms for Liberty] are talking about are things that I hear parents here in New York talking about all the time,” said Maud Maron, co-president of PLACE and community education council member in lower Manhattan’s District 2. 

In a dramatic reversal, the district, where seven of 10 community council members were PLACE-endorsed, has just announced it . 

Parents often say, ‘I’m 100% there, I just can’t tweet under my own name,’ or ‘I just can’t say it, because of work ramifications,’ Maron said.

For scholars who track Moms for Liberty’s work, despite hesitance or fear parents may feel in aligning with the organization, it’s clear small networks of parents are effective and organized at making their voices heard, sharing strategies via social media from coast to coast. 

As a result, New Yorkers may soon see the same language and challenges levied in Florida once the Queens chapter begins to act on its agenda.

“We would have thought, wow, those are really different,” Jacobsen said, referencing the Queens launch and other regions that would have seemed unlikely. 

“… That’s really what’s different today,” she said, “the ability to very quickly move the same message to really disparate places.”

Since then, superintendents in nine of those districts — stretching from Florida’s Atlantic coast to central California — have resigned or been fired, often after a period of conflict with board members.

“Six new board members clean house first night on the job,” on Facebook Nov. 16, the day after its slate of candidates took office in Berkeley County, South Carolina. Before a confused crowd, they , who had spent his entire career, over 20 years, in the district.

Moms for Liberty founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich told ����Ӱ�� that their endorsed board members don’t always take office with plans to replace superintendents, but that sometimes it’s “necessary.”

Six of those nine districts hired permanent replacements; three still have interim chiefs.

Forcing out district leaders is one of the most obvious ways Moms for Liberty has made its mark over the past two years. As they over library books with sexually explicit content and LGBTQ-inclusive policies, members tend to portray these removals as victories for parental rights. Others say the group has unfairly targeted effective leaders and failed to address pressing issues like teacher shortages.

“The one thing that districts can point to that will demonstrate change is a new superintendent,” said Andrea Messina, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association, which conducts superintendent searches. “It’s an immediate message to the community.”

ILO Group, an organization focused on women leaders in education, analyzed superintendent turnover in those 17 districts for ����Ӱ�� as part of to track leadership changes since the pandemic. 

The Laramie County district in Wyoming — where Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates tipped an already conservative board further to the right last fall — is among those that have seen recent superintendent turnover. Margaret Crespo stepped down in August after serving as chief for two years. She who wanted to restrict books with sexually explicit content from children unless their parents gave permission. 

Crespo said she recognized what she was up against.

“They’re highly organized,” said Crespo, now a superintendent-in-residence with ILO Group. She said the organization knows how to mobilize quickly. “They have taken that skillset and moved it into this very dynamic political arena.”

Florida wins

Moms for Liberty’s goal is to “recruit moms to serve as watchdogs over all 13,000 school districts,” according to its website. combats what they view as government overreach and seeks to give parents more control over what their children learn, particularly as it relates to race, sex and LGBTQ issues. According to their tally, more than half of their first-time candidates won in the 2022 elections. 

The group’s impact is particularly noticeable in Florida, where Justice and Descovich served as school board members.

Their candidates flipped seven Florida school boards last November, four of which have had superintendent turnover — , and counties.

Justice and Descovich say they’re giving parents a voice in the political process. 

“We are focused on empowering parents who are seeing problems in their school districts to stand up and fight for their children and make real change by running for school board,” they said in a statement to ����Ӱ��.

Last month, they released a new “” with ready-made design templates, that they say should jump start the process for those seeking election in 2024.

As it looks ahead, the group’s fortunes may be shifting. it endorsed this past April for seats in Illinois, Oklahoma and Wisconsin haven’t fared too well. Of 32 endorsements in 15 races, just eight candidates won.

The groups advises winning candidates to reject training from their state’s school board association because many “foster the same woke propaganda Moms for Liberty is fighting against,” according to their site.

Because it’s a nonprofit, it’s unclear how financially successful the group has been. A 2021 put their revenue at $370,000, but membership has grown since then. There are now 285 chapters nationwide.

Other organizations such as and are working to counteract Moms for Liberty’s momentum. But experts say they are not nearly as well-funded and lack a national infrastructure.

“They’re out there, but they do need some connecting,” said Heather Harding, executive director of Campaign for Our Shared Future, a nonprofit advocating for attention to inclusion and equity in schools.

Moms for Liberty’s “network structure,” on the other hand, has given them considerable reach, said Rebecca Jacobsen, an education policy researcher at Michigan State University.

Some education advocates say once elected, however, the group’s members don’t always act with the same efficiency to address complex challenges in their districts.

“For all the power that they say they have, they haven’t really done much,” said Kathleen Low, president of the Berkeley County Education Association, which represents teachers in the district where Jackson was fired. 

The district is currently responding to a challenge over that include material one parent considers inappropriate for students. Among the titles are those targeted by Moms for Liberty members elsewhere in the state, including “The Kite Runner,” the story of an Afghan boy during the rise of the Taliban, which features a rape scene. In another, “Gabi: A Girl in Pieces,” a Latina teen chronicles her feelings about a friend’s pregnancy, another friend who comes out as gay and her father’s drug use.

Low called the issues a distraction at a time when schools in her district are short . include counselors, elementary teachers, and middle and high school teachers in core subjects and special education.

Book controversies are “like trying to discuss the feng shui of the furniture in a house that is on fire,” she said. “That’s how serious our situation is with staffing.”

Mac McQuillan, the Moms-endorsed chair of the board, didn’t return calls or emails seeking comment. 

Others note that solving such problems may not be part of the plan.

Members of Jacobsen’s research team have been watching hours of school board meetings in districts where Moms for Liberty won a majority last year. Compared to board meetings from 2019, they’ve noticed a shift in the “demeanor” of members, including new rules that limit public comments, less engagement and eye contact with parents or others who address the board and a more “hostile” atmosphere during meetings.

Moms for Liberty members, she added, have been successful at getting citizens without children in the local public schools to attend meetings and share their concerns about books and curriculum.

“You don’t have to have any agenda if your agenda is to disrupt,” Jacobsen said.

Hundreds of are pending in 44 states, and laws or executive actions have been passed in 18 states that are intended to restrict or ban teaching about race, racism, gender and sexuality. Virulent attacks have targeted districts, school boards, schools, libraries and individual administrators, teachers and librarians. They are often led by non-parents and outside agitators working for political groups such as Moms for Liberty.

Whether these efforts are understood as the ,  or  targeting supposed woke education, the  on teachers and school leaders is real. Educators are confused about whether their state has passed laws that restrict teaching, what those laws say and how they might be affected by them. They are getting mixed messages as restrictions on teaching contradict the charge to strengthen the teaching of ,  and .

How can educators navigate often unanticipated attacks and strengthen curriculum, teaching and safe spaces that truly benefit all students and a democratic society? 

We recommend an approach called . This involves working toward democratic aims in education while managing the risks of controversy. Teachers and school leaders promote about significant issues so students learn how to examine, think critically about and discuss these issues with open minds. The curriculum teaches honest history that includes the experiences of traditionally excluded groups. At the same time, educators use strategies, such as selecting and framing for classroom inquiry and discussion, carefully choosing resources and pedagogical methods, and guiding discussion, to manage the risks that accompany teaching in this political climate. 

This , derived from a on preparing teachers for controversial issues, embodies contained risk taking and encapsulates these strategies. The research examined how four educators at universities in Northern Ireland, England and the Midwestern U.S. prepared teacher candidates for controversy in history, social studies and citizenship classes, and what those student teachers learned and put into practice. The framework is now used by K-12 teachers, school leaders and teacher educators. Here is specific guidance for educators based on five of its elements.

1. Prepare Thoroughly: If your state, local government or school district has relevant laws or policies, make sure you read them completely. Also know your state standards and be able to cite them as a guiding document. If your teaching or curriculum is ever challenged, you’ll have the standards, legal text and/or local policies to show that what you are teaching is justifiable. Know your students and school community. Anticipate potential challenges and rehearse your responses to them.
2. Communicate Proactively: Keeping open lines of communication with stakeholders, including students, parents and administrators, can head off many potential challenges before they begin. Be transparent about your goals, their educational purposes and the standards they align to, and respond to any concerns before teaching. Collaborate with colleagues and enlist support from school leaders. Turn potential challenges into active parental engagement and address misunderstandings and mischaracterizations of your curriculum directly.
3. Choose Resources and Teaching Methods: Use sources and approaches to inquiry and discussion that foster an exchange of ideas among students and develop their . Discussion formats such as seminars or , which provide models for exploration of texts and deliberation on issues, are effective at cultivating student voice and evaluation of different perspectives. Be sensitive to which formats are best for different kinds of issues, especially those connected to student identities. Clear goals for the discussion and procedures that keep students focused on those goals help develop vital skills and knowledge while limiting derailing comments from students. 
4. Cultivate a Supportive Environment: Safe and supportive classrooms and schools make students more open to learning how to engage in civil discourse across differences on significant issues. Take time to develop expectations (with student input), relationships and community. Creating room for students’ opinions and emotions, and pausing if rhetoric becomes potentially harmful or offensive, makes students feel heard and welcome. An in which students feel they can express themselves and discuss concerns with educators demonstrates caring helps to ward off complaints from students and families and contributes to development of young people’s civic participation.
5. Think Through Teacher Stance: Given accusations of indoctrination, educators must reflect on their own perspectives and consciously decide when and how to express them. As moral leaders, they must stand up for human and civil rights. But on specific issues requires ethical and practical judgment about the purpose and how those opinions will be received. Individuals react toward information that aligns with their own beliefs, and educators are no different. Knowing your own perspectives and understanding other viewpoints can help you respond to comments you disagree with in ways that educate and seek common ground rather than alienate people. 

We understand the confusion, anxiety and outrage educators are experiencing. We hope these steps will help teachers and school leaders be especially thoughtful, strategic and mutually supportive while they continue to serve the best interests of all young people and a diverse democratic society.

The summit will be held at a downtown Marriott from June 29 through July 2, despite from LGBTQ rights advocates and others who object to the group’s stance on social and education issues. 

The American Historical Association sent to the Museum of the American Revolution on June 26, urging its president to reconsider the decision to let Moms for Liberty hold a portion of the summit there.

“Moms for Liberty is an organization that has vigorously advocated censorship and harassment of history teachers, banning history books from libraries and classrooms, and legislation that renders it impossible for historians to teach with professional integrity without risking job loss and other penalties,” the letter read.

Neither Moms for Liberty nor the Museum of the American Revolution responded to a request for comment about the letter. 

The summit is a must for Republican leaders, a reflection of the organization’s influence. Some high-profile speakers, including DeSantis, are returning for a second round: The governor spoke at last summer’s event alongside Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and former secretary of housing and urban development Ben Carson. 

This year’s event has proven an even bigger draw for conservative politicians and their followers. Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice said the 650-ticket summit has already sold out. 

The vocal, right-wing parent organization was formed in Florida in 2021 by school board members Tina Descovich and Justice and by , who is married to the of the Florida Republican Party. 

Moms for Liberty members originally targeted COVID protocols but have since focused on critical race theory, diversity and inclusion, social-emotional learning and LGBTQ issues, among other topics. The group claims 285 chapters and 120,000 members across 44 states.

The organization gained national recognition after members disrupted school board meetings across the country, with of those who oppose their views. Local chapters have mounted highly successful efforts targeting materials related to racism, slavery and gender. 

Moms for Liberty was recently labeled an by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

Justice called the characterization shocking and absurd. 

“I think they’ve really shot themselves in the foot,” she said. 

Her group’s mission is to empower parents and support their fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, she said. 

“That includes their education, their medical care and their morality and their religion,” she told ����Ӱ��. “And it seems like we’re in a tug-of-war with the federal government in our nation’s schools.”

President Joe Biden also was invited to the summit, but his office did not respond, Justice said. The Biden campaign did not answer emails requesting comment.

Moms for Liberty has endorsed across the nation, many of whom have gone on to win. 

Despite its ability to attract high-profile politicians and zealous parent advocates, some experts question whether education will be a key issue in the 2024 presidential race.

Jeffrey Henig, professor of political science and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said he thinks it will likely take a backseat. 

“Education is one of those issues that is tempting politically because it gets a fervent response for a subset of voters, particularly parents,” he said. “And that can be attractive because it lets you mobilize people who don’t always like to turn out — or are on the fence. But … it can backfire.”

School politics, he said, “can take sharp twists and turns” that leave politicians exposed.

“Today’s cheers for a strong stand against so-called ‘smut’ in texts can morph into indignation at book banning and perceived attacks on treasured schools and teachers,” he said. 

Frederick M. Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said politicians once used education to appeal to voters in the middle. Now, he said, they use it to court their base. 

“If Trump is the nominee and you don’t like him, it’s not likely that his stance on Title IX or school choice will change that,” he said. “And if you’re concerned about Biden, wokeness or federal spending, it’s tough to imagine that a proposal for universal pre-K or student loan forgiveness is going to win you over.”

Michael J. Petrilli, president of the , a research fellow at Stanford University’s and executive editor of , said that if Trump gets the nomination, his views on education or other issues won’t really matter. Nothing will distract from the candidate himself, he said. 

The embattled former president, whose divisive rhetoric has continued well beyond his time in office, is facing a host of legal troubles, including a recent indictment over alleged . 

“If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, the election will be about Donald Trump,” Petrilli said. “End of sentence. Policy issues will play an exceedingly minor role.”

But if another candidate wins the party’s nomination, Petrilli said, he or she might use the issue of school choice to entice working-class Hispanic and Black voters.

“And it might work,” he said. 

DeSantis has banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity . His Parental Rights in Education Act — often called the Don’t Say Gay Bill — has been replicated .

Haley, a former , has referred to transgender girls participating in girls’ sports as “the women’s issue of our time” on the campaign trail. Placing herself to the right of DeSantis, she has said his legislation isn’t stringent enough. 

Henig said the Florida governor’s overall stance is too extreme to succeed with a national electorate.

“Americans still have a lot of trust and allegiance to their local school communities,” he said, adding that Democrats might frame DeSantis’s efforts as an attack on teachers.

As this event shows, parents are extremely interested in shaping the educational experiences of their children and those in their communities. The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the role of parents in their children’s learning and challenged the traditional model of how educators and families interact. It was a shift no one was prepared for, yet a late 2021 found that over 90% of parents surveyed planned to be as or more involved in their children’s education than during the 2020-21 school year, when the effects of the pandemic on at-home learning were still being felt deeply. 

At the same time, an increasing number of parent-based advocacy groups, such as The Oakland Reach, PAVE, Atlanta Thrive, Moms for Liberty and the National Parents Union, have been with the education system. These parent advocates are helping families select high-quality schools, providing leadership training, examining district policies, sharing information about key education issues and investigating what is being taught in classrooms. 

As a result, educators are realizing the need to strengthen relationships with parents. 

Parent power is a core pillar of Rocketship’s model. Organizing committees of 10 to 15 parent volunteers each lead advocacy work at each of the network’s schools with the support of full-time school staff dedicated to building parent leaders. These committees have led campaigns on issues ranging from school-specific concerns to those that impact families across the country. Along with hosting mayoral forums, Rocketship families have pushed for better traffic safety measures, raised awareness about the importance of voting, participated in marches and rallies, and advocated for policies that are supportive of charter schools. For many parents, these experiences have led to increased self-confidence, lasting friendships and, in some cases, jobs in advocacy and government. And, as a recent shows, by participating in these activities, Rocketship parents are learning to use their voices to influence local and state policies that impact their families and communities.

Rocketship’s approach points to several key strategies for building and supporting parent leadership and advocacy. 

• Create a strong family engagement culture. Developing an environment where parents feel welcome, contribute to decision-making and have opportunities to get involved sets the foundation for later participation in advocacy efforts. Rocketship engages parents by asking them to complete “parent partner” hours, which they log for activities such as hosting school staff for home visits, reading with their children at home and attending community events. Through these interactions, parents build relationships at the school, which are critical for developing trust and making them feel comfortable transitioning into advocacy activities. Education organizers meet with parents for one-on-one meetings where they learn more about the advocacy program. Parents also decide on the advocacy issues they address, leading to buy-in and sustained efforts over time.  
• Commit to prioritizing parent leadership and advocacy across the organization. Advocacy is most effective when leaders at all levels understand and champion the work and provide the necessary structures and resources. Principals connect with families and encourage parents to participate in organizing initiatives (for example, by sharing information and providing food, child care and translation services). Network or district leaders allocate critical resources, such as funding for full-time staff positions like education organizers and ongoing professional training. Building school-level support requires parent advocates and education organizers to clearly communicate with school leaders about the purpose of the advocacy and provide opportunities for school staff to observe these activities in action. 
• Tailor advocacy efforts to meet the needs of the local community. The ability to respond to local needs and engage community members and organizations is a critical component of advocacy. Parents need the opportunity to learn about local concerns, and education organizers need to be familiar with cultural traditions, the local political landscape and other specifics so they can effectively assist with researching issues and organizing campaigns. Rocketship uses the model to structure its work with families and has found this model effective because it provides a common framework across the organization, yet is flexible enough to account for local needs. Additionally, collaborating with other organizations engaged in similar work affords access to more resources and connections, and expands reach of advocacy efforts.      

These strategies form the basis for how Rocketship school staff engage with families and encourage them to participate in advocacy efforts. As parents’ interest and involvement in their children’s education continues to increase, schools can leverage these strategies to build stronger family-school partnerships and robust, meaningful opportunities for parent leadership.

All six of his endorsed candidates, who advanced from an August primary to runoffs in the general election, won their races, according to unofficial results. That means that of the 30 candidates the governor supported this year, 25 won.

Three of the candidates are incumbents who won re-election— Stephanie Busin in Hendry County, Jacqueline Rosario in Indian River County and Jamie Haynes in Volusia County. Three more captured open seats — Sam Fisher in Lee County, Cindy Spray in Manatee County and Al Hernandez in Pasco County.

Hernandez was from the ballot when a circuit court judge ruled that he didn’t live in the region he sought to represent when he qualified. But his appeal to a district court was successful, with a three-judge panel ruling that he had . 

DeSantis has held considerable sway over school board politics this year, not just endorsing candidates but also members. Those concerned about the direction conservative board members are taking schools oppose his involvement, while others who want greater say in their children’s education support the shift.

“That is our mission and the reason we endorse,” said Tina Descovich, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a conservative advocacy group. Ballots, she said, should identify the party affiliation of board candidates. “It gives voters more information to work with. A more informed voter makes better decisions.”

But critics say the movement benefits parties more than students. 

“The only letters that a school board member should have after their name is EE — for education and equity,” said Joaquin Guerra, political director for the Campaign for Our Shared Future Action Fund, which organized to counteract efforts by groups such as Moms for Liberty. “We have enough politics in our lives.”

Alicia Farrant, who won election to the Orange County school board, was among the candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed. Her victory over Michael Daniels, a college administrator whose wife teaches in the Orange County schools, “means that we need to do a better job of engaging families in Florida and educating them about the importance of school board elections,” Guerra said.

Some experts say it’s a matter of time before the offices become officially partisan, not just in Florida, but other states as well. Moms for Liberty endorsed 270 candidates nationally, including 45 in California and 50 in South Carolina. Another group that works to elect conservative school board members, 1776 Project PAC, also endorsed candidates in multiple states. But ultimately, the results .

For years now, elections for judges, school board members and city council members have been nonpartisan “in name only,” said Susan MacManus, a politician science professor at the University of South Florida. “The partisan affiliation of the candidates has been laid bare for all to see.”

Moms for Liberty, one of the fastest-growing and most recognized conservative parent advocacy groups in the nation, paid $21,357 to a company owned by the husband of one of its founding members, campaign finance records show. 

The group to Microtargeted Media, founded by Christian Ziegler, a current Sarasota County commissioner and vice chairman of the Florida GOP, in late August. 

Moms for Liberty was founded by three people, Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice and , Christian’s wife, who served as its director through February 2021. Bridget Ziegler joined the Sarasota County School Board in 2014 and this summer. 

 She was not named by the two other founders in numerous , an omission some was meant to distance the group from Florida’s GOP power structure. Descovich said Ziegler stepped away to pursue other interests. Moms for Liberty contributed $250 to her school board campaign in mid-July, records show. 

Bridget Ziegler could not be reached for comment. Her husband, who responded to ����Ӱ�� through Twitter Thursday evening, would not discuss his company’s work for Moms for Liberty.

“I don’t share information about my clients as I do not speak for them,” Christian Ziegler wrote. “You can contact Tina directly for any additional insight.”

Descovich said they hired Microtargeted Media — whose motto is “we do digital & go after people on their phones” — based on its track record.

“I chose to work with Mr. Ziegler’s company because we required digital media services and they are the best at what they do,” she wrote. 

She also acknowledged the group’s support for his wife’s run for office. 

“The Florida Political Committee supported candidates that the Moms for Liberty chapters endorsed,” she said. “The Sarasota chapter voted to endorse Mrs. Ziegler.”

, which specializes in targeted text messaging and digital advertising, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars from right-wing political campaigns. Its recent clients also include Florida state Sen. Joe Gruters, chairman of the Florida GOP and an ardent Trump supporter. His campaign paid the company . 

Florida Conservatives United, a PAC, has paid Microtargeted Media . 

The revelation that Moms for Liberty used a sizable chunk of its political contributions to benefit the company of its co-founder’s husband provides at least some insight into how the conservative juggernaut used what appears to be its modest campaign finances. 

The Federal Elections Commissions lists three committees associated with the group, which claims 240 chapters in 42 states: Moms for Liberty PAC, Moms for Liberty Inc. Political Victory Fund and Moms for Liberty Action. All three reported zero dollars in contributions or expenditures with the exception of a single to Moms for Liberty PAC on Aug. 29 from Ohio resident Matthew Palumbo, whose long political career includes working for former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Descovich, the group’s executive director, told ����Ӱ�� it has not raised or spent any money from its national PACs, though it hopes to use them in the future to support school board candidates around the country. She said Moms for Liberty has one state-level political committee, Moms for Liberty Florida.

Almost all of the money donated to Moms for Liberty Florida came from a $50,000 donation from Publix heiress Julie Fancelli in late June and nearly half of it went to Microtargeted Media. The contribution from Fancelli, of the Jan. 6 rally that led to the attack on the Capitol, accounted for all but $837 of the cash raised by Moms for Liberty Florida. Almost all the rest of the committee’s funds went in $250 donations to dozens of politically aligned Florida school board candidates.

Descovich said to date, Moms for Liberty has endorsed 65 candidates in Florida with 43 either declared a winner or advancing to a runoff; 72 candidates statewide in New York, with 40 victorious; three school board candidates in Kenosha, Wisconsin, two of whom won; two candidates in Bedford County, Virginia, both of them successful and seven endorsed in North Carolina, with five winning seats. Most school board elections will be Nov. 8, she said, and the group is working to get endorsement tallies from its chapters. 

Moms for Liberty’s 2021 federal tax filing shows the 501(c)4 nonprofit with $370,029 in total revenue and $163,647 in expenses, with most of that money — $102,486 — going to conferences, conventions and meetings. It lists Descovich as spending an average of 40 hours a week working for the organization and receiving $5,000 in compensation; program development director Marie Rogerson also working on average 40 hours a week and receiving $1,800 while Justice, whose title is director, spent 40 hours a week but received no compensation. Ziegler, the former director, spent an average of one hour a week, according to the filing, and received zero compensation. Descovich said Moms for Liberty has 10 full- and two part-time staffers.

Moms for Liberty Foundation, the group’s 501(c)3 charitable arm which is prohibited from engaging in political activities, claimed gross receipts of less than $50,000 in 2021 and filed an abbreviated 990 form with the Internal Revenue Service that includes no details about its funders, expenditures or top officers’ salaries.

The group, which has ,  has been successful in curbing classroom discussion of race, sex and gender — while also from school curriculum and libraries, though some schools have brought such texts back. 

Moms for Liberty’s leaders have said in the past they’ve raised most of their money through T-shirt sales and have grown through free publicity. celebrates its leaders — they’ve appeared on Steve Bannon’s talk show — while mainstream press have also kept them in the spotlight, if at times offering less flattering coverage of them deriding school board members.

Despite their high-wattage name recognition, some and staying power. Campbell F. Scribner, assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland at College Park, said they could soon flounder as members might not have the time or capacity to devote themselves to activism in the long term. 

Campbell called Moms for Liberty and another highly watched group, The 1776 Project Political Action Committee, which has raised $3 million to advocate for conservative school board candidates nationally this year, “a weird combination of single-issue organizing,” in this case around the topic of education, “and a fairly diffuse set of goals — either focused on a hot-topic issue that will fade quickly, like CRT [critical race theory] — or on goals that are too amorphous to actually be accomplished, like ‘patriotism.’’’ 

Scribner doesn’t consider either to be solely “grassroots.” Both have a top-down and bottom-up structure, he said. 

“It would be dangerous to put them in one camp or another,” he said. “To ignore their grassroots element is to ignore their appeal and power. But they do need to align with public sentiment and when they don’t, their support withers pretty quickly.”

The speaker is a mother of five in Wichita, and the is Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly. A Democrat, Kelly was America’s first governor to order K-12 buildings closed in the spring of 2020. After winning a surprise victory in 2018, she is now one of the most endangered incumbents this fall, and — if the commercial is any indication — her record on schools will be the primary focus for her Republican opponent, state Attorney General Derek Schmidt. 

The newly aired attack is typical of battleground elections nationally. With a little over a month to go before the midterms, the issue of K-12 education has come to inhabit an unusual role: a rare point of intersection between national and local politics, as well as a deep faultline in competitive races. 

Both attention and acrimony have mounted continuously since the last national election, with angry cleavages over COVID-related school closures giving way to debates over curriculum, instruction and the rights of parents. And while the public focus has also been redirected by abortion and persistent inflation over the past few months, multiple surveys have shown growing dissatisfaction with schools and surprising parity between the parties on an issue that Democrats have traditionally dominated. 

Republicans have grabbed the initiative by directly addressing parents — both in campaign materials and policy prescriptions — and casting themselves as the defenders of families’ interests. In and , vulnerable Democratic governors stand accused of presiding over ideological indoctrination in classrooms and inept recovery from pandemic learning loss. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who stands to become House Speaker if his caucus enjoys a good night on November 8, a campaign agenda that includes a “parents bill of rights.’ Even campaigns for state superintendent, a position so obscure and technocratic that most states , the support of President Donald Trump and other conservative idols.

But the truly unexpected turn is only apparent further down the ballot. After decades flying under the radar of all except the most attentive voters, school board elections are suddenly attracting more attention and resources than at any time in recent political memory. New advocacy groups have materialized, left and right, to promote candidates and push more parents to get involved in school governance. And their efforts have been noticed by the fastest-rising politician in America: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who made his own foray into local politics this summer by endorsing dozens of school board hopefuls around his state. The of his slate has only hastened DeSantis’s ascent as a potential challenger to Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. Increasingly, the small-bore powers affecting individual schools and districts are playing out on a national stage.

Rebecca Jacobsen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University, chronicled some of these trends about the growing influence of national politics on low-level elections. But that analysis, she noted, couldn’t foresee the post-COVID flowering of organizations devoted almost solely to capturing boards and changing policies from the ground up.

“As someone who has studied local education politics, what’s remarkable is the way that education is getting drawn into a highly polarized, partisan debate,” Jacobsen said. “Even debates that were more left/right before were not nearly as stark as they are now.”

But Tiffany Justice said that the explosion of interest in local campaigns was, if anything, inevitable in light of the repeated crises and consternation surrounding schools since 2020. A co-founder of the Florida-based conservative group Moms for Liberty — perhaps the most notable new entrant in this midterm cycle — Justice said that K-12 would be a point of emphasis in elections up and down the ballot this November.

“There’s nothing more important in a parent’s life than their children, and nobody’s going to fight for anything like a parent is going to fight for their child,” Justice argued. “If I was running for office, and I wanted to win, having parents in your corner is a pretty smart move.”

Education in the culture wars

While school boards are the primary governing entity for virtually every school district in the United States, they have seldom been thrust into the national political discussion. The staid content of the average board meeting, generally ranging from budgetary goals to facilities management, wouldn’t quicken the pulse of most activists.

The most recent exception came in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when Christian conservatives amid debates about issues like school prayer and American history standards. In suburban areas like Loudoun County, Virginia, right-leaning members to end its mandate on sex education. , a prominent evangelical leader and GOP consultant, declared a preference for one thousand school board members over winning the presidency.

After notching some wins, the wave dissipated. It wasn’t until the early Biden area that Loudoun County — much more socially progressive after decades of demographic transformation — again saw a serious bout of public engagement in school governance, this time directed against the board’s policies on COVID, gifted education and school bathrooms. The perception of liberalism behind the district’s equity agenda figured heavily in last year’s race for governor, ultimately won by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. 

Jon Valant, director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, called the Youngkin win a proof point that statewide campaigns could turn on education issues. In the intervening period, however, action could only be taken at the local level, where thousands of board races across the nation offer a plethora of opportunities. The sheer number of seats being contested makes it difficult to follow trends in school board races (Valant called data collection on the subject “a nightmare”), but turnout in some districts 10 percent in past elections. , 40 percent of board members said they hadn’t faced any competition in their last election.

“These are, relative to just about every other election we have, extremely low-information and low-turnout races,” Valant said. “That means that they’re relatively easy to flip.”

Activists have tested that theory over the last two years by forming political action committees and financing challengers; in some districts, as candidates this year than over the last two elections combined. And shake-ups have followed , where, among other organizations, a PAC sponsored largely by a Christian cellphone company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to capture board seats in multiple counties. 

Ryan Girdusky, an author and former Republican staffer, formed the group 1776 Project PAC in 2021 out of what he said was frustration over prolonged school closures during the pandemic and politically tinged lessons that he contends were common during the period of virtual instruction. While his initial hopes for the project were modest — its staff still consists of just four people, two working part-time — he said he was shocked by the response he has received from over 30,000 small-dollar donors. According to the campaign finance tracker , the PAC has raised over $2.5 million since last year. 

About 95 candidates backed by the 1776 Project have won their races out of , Girdusky said, arguing that its success on a relatively small budget was proof of education’s potency as a campaign issue.

“The thing is that the Right just gave up after a while and focused solely on school choice, and that was a mistake. I think education is a much more prevalent ‘culture war’ issue than a lot of other things that are talked about much more.”

Parents and the pandemic

It will be difficult to measure the ultimate success of groups like the 1776 Project or Moms for Liberty (or even , a progressive organization that has sought to mobilize women in suburban districts to protest laws that ban the teaching of “divisive concepts”). Presuming they make a noticeable dent in the races they target, fast-forming political movements are often just as quick to run out of oxygen and dissolve.

But at least for this cycle, state-level politics is fixated by the question of what happens inside schools.

The call for a national “parents’ bill of rights” — first introduced in Congress , and written to mandate transparency around curriculum and safety in schools — has now been , a former Republican governor of Maine who is now running to win back his old job. Republicans in the state also aired an ad this spring criticizing the Maine Department of Education for promulgating lessons intended for kindergarten classrooms that included material on gender and sexual identities (the lessons were ).

In Wisconsin, where school board elections are officially non-partisan and campaign costs have typically run into the hundreds of dollars, the state GOP has to its county offices in a bid to grab more seats — more than three times as much as Democrats spent. Republicans in California have called “Parent Revolt,” attempting to recruit more candidates to run in the roughly 2,500 board races this year. Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose reelection prospects look fairly secure in public polls, has nevertheless to advise lawmakers on education policy after her Republican opponent . 

But the figure who has most unmistakably bound himself to education politics this year has been DeSantis. After dominating national headlines earlier this year by fulminating against the teaching of critical race theory and gender identity, the Florida governor into school board races, endorsing 30 candidates for a variety of boards this summer. The move provoked an immediate reaction, as DeSantis’s Democratic rival, Charlie Crist, his own group of “pro-parent” aspirants.

The dueling endorsements could hardly have worked out better for the Republican, as 24 of his favored candidates or performed well enough to proceed to later run-off ballots. In addition to boosting party enthusiasm and interest ahead of his November reelection bid (which political observers expect him to win handily), DeSantis demonstrated strong coattails in a crucial 2024 swing state. 

Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida, said that the political coup was made possible by the explosion of parental anger and suspicion over the last few years. Before COVID, she argued, there was “no payoff” to becoming involved with unpredictable, down-ballot races.

“Obviously, if a race is very low-profile with voters, what’s the point of getting in the middle of it? But what the pandemic did was to focus voters’ attention on school board races,” MacManus observed. “All of a sudden, it became relevant politically to get engaged in endorsing.”

Michigan State’s Jacobsen said that the shift in focus toward state- and local-level education politics represents more than just a political opportunity; it also follows the recognition that, following years of an expanding federal role in overseeing K-12, most influence still resides in school communities themselves.

“These national groups seem to be aware that you can’t just mandate from the top anymore. We tried that with No Child Left Behind, tried turning our attention to the national level and saying, ‘Let’s push a law through, and everybody will have to [reform schools].’ But the local level still has a great amount of power.”

Unofficial results show 19 of the 30 candidates he endorsed won their races. Six others are headed to runoffs in the general election on Nov. 8 and five were defeated.

“Women with kids are the swing vote in Florida,” said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. DeSantis, she added, was “brilliant” in waiting until early voting was over Sunday to on behalf of his candidates. “He knows that the majority of Republicans are going to vote on Election Day.”

The majority of the governor’s favored candidates won in counties that voted for former President Trump in 2020, but some also picked up seats in Democratic strongholds. 

“We’re excited about the boards we flipped that now have a majority of parents’ rights members,” said Tina Descovich, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a growing conservative organization that, like DeSantis, is opposed to schools’ attention to LGBTQ rights and social justice issues. “Parents know their children the best.”

In Miami-Dade, the state’s largest district, DeSantis-backed Monica Colucci, an educator who worked in the governor’s administration, defeated longtime incumbent Marta Perez. And Roberto Alonso, who founded an ed tech company and owns an adult day care, beat two other candidates, including Maribel Balbin, who was endorsed by the teachers union.

Balbin said she didn’t want Alonso to “walk into a seat without at least having a challenge of some sort.”

In Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, April Carney — who was part of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — beat incumbent Elizabeth Andersen, a licensed mental health therapist. Carney, one of DeSantis’s candidates, has not confirmed whether she was at the Capitol that day.

“I’m concerned for our teachers and students,” Andersen told ����Ӱ��. She rejected political endorsements because she didn’t want the race to be partisan. “This level of political involvement by the governor in a local race is unprecedented and un-American.” 

The primary was a chance to gauge how voters would respond to DeSantis’s anti-”woke” education agenda. 

DeSantis has made a cornerstone of his re-election campaign. In November, he’ll face U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist, a Democrat and former governor who released his of school board preferences. But some education advocates viewed the endorsements from both candidates as unwelcome intrusion into nonpartisan races.

“Parents don’t like it,” said Melissa Erickson, executive director of the Alliance for Public Schools — an advocacy organization focusing on districts along the I-4 corridor, from Tampa (Hillsborough County) to Daytona Beach (Volusia County). “They want school board meetings to be boring again.”

In Hillsborough County, where Crist’s and DeSantis’s candidates went head-to-head, Erickson saw less of an impact. Incumbent Stacy Hahn, endorsed by DeSantis, was reelected, as was incumbent Karen Perez, who picked up Crist’s endorsement. Another DeSantis candidate, Patricia Rendon won an open seat. 

“Two incumbents are going back to the school board. People are voting for who they know,” Erickson said. “Nobody massively outperformed their demographic.” 

‘A one-size-fits-all’ agenda

DeSantis unveiled his initial in June. After Crist announced his preferred candidates in July, DeSantis expanded his list to cover 18 districts. 

To earn the governor’s support, candidates had to complete a survey and commit to furthering his 10-point , which includes keeping “woke gender ideology out of schools” and rejecting critical race theory in the curriculum.

Andersen, in Duval, said the pledge runs counter to the principle of local control in education. 

“To me that’s a one-size-fit-all education agenda,” she said. “We are not the same as Hillsborough or Miami. We want to make decisions that work for our schools and our kids.”

But she represents a more conservative, mostly white part of the county. Carney won 53% of the vote.

With the Florida governor expected to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024, the question is whether his education platform translates outside of Florida as well. He recently took his message to Arizona, Pennsylvania and Ohio, for Republican candidates. Republican Doug Mastriano, running for Pennsylvania governor, said he wanted to make his state the

“Many people have moved to Florida because of what we’ve done,” said Alysha Legge, who lost to incumbent Perez in Hillsborough. She pointed to above-average and keeping schools open during the pandemic as reasons contributing to the state’s growth. “I honestly would love for him to stay in Florida. We need him a little longer.”

and changing demographics have shifted the state in a . Part of that growth includes an influx of Cubans. While they tend to lean more Republican, , some experts on Florida politics said that doesn’t mean they are as far to the right as DeSantis and former President Donald Trump. 

​​”Hispanics are more in the center. They’re trying to figure out what U.S. politics are all about,” said Marcos Vilar, executive director of , a nonprofit that has worked to get Hispanic candidates elected to school boards. 

Vilar was more focused on races in Orange County, which has a large Hispanic population. DeSantis didn’t endorse anyone in those races, but there were still contests between conservative and more liberal candidates. 

, incumbents Teresa Jacobs and Angie Gallo fended off conservative challengers, but Alicia Farrant, part of Moms for Liberty, will face Michael Daniels in a runoff. Many of DeSantis’s picks also received backing from the , a conservative group focused on removing any influence of critical race theory over K-12 curriculum.

In Manatee County, just south of the Tampa area, Sean Conley challenged DeSantis-backed incumbent Chad Choate. Although he’s a Republican — supporting for-profit charter schools, tighter security and fiscal responsibility — Conley said he knew it would be difficult to win. Even the chairman of the local Republican party got involved in the race. urging members in an Aug.18 email to be “laser-focused” on winning the seats for DeSantis’s candidates. 

Rev. James Golden, another Manatee County board member who ran for re-election is a local leader in the Democratic party. But he said he has “scrupulously” avoided partisanship in his role as a board member. 

With voters last fall renewing a for the school district, Golden thought that was a good sign they would vote him in for another term. But challenger Richard Tatem earned just enough votes to avoid a runoff.

The governor, Golden said, is “tearing down the fundamental premise behind public education.” Teachers, he added, shouldn’t have to worry about “whose mama is a Democrat and whose daddy is a Republican.”

TAMPA — Claiming that Florida schools are undergoing “leftist indoctrination,” a “leftist agenda,” and “sexualization of children,” Gov. Ron DeSantis called on hundreds of members of “Moms For Liberty,” gathered in Tampa Friday, to fight.

“You’ve got to stand up and you’ve got to fight,” DeSantis said in a keynote speech to the conservative, nearly all-white audience, estimated at 500, in a Tampa hotel. “You’re going to take fire. They’re going to shoot arrows at you.”

The governor, running for reelection, won repeated cheers and standing ovations from the members, wearing badges identifying them as being from states as distant as Hawaii and New York.

“They cannot wait to vote for him for president,” said Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, introducing DeSantis at the Friday morning keynote. The audience stood, cheered, and waved “DeSantis” signs and “Mamas For DeSantis” signs — the latter referring to a group recently founded by First Lady Casey DeSantis.

DeSantis focused on “the free state of Florida,” where he largely has blocked COVID protocols recommended by federal health authorities and pushed new laws empowering parental authority over school boards.

“Our school systems are for educating kids, not indoctrinating them,” DeSantis said, citing his administration’s rejection of “woke” math textbooks and its ban on teachers “forcing sexuality and gender ideology in elementary schools.”

Florida Democrats, assembled in an adjacent hotel for their annual leadership conference, countered that DeSantis is lying about educational achievement in Florida to recruit conservative parents behind his political ambitions, which include an anticipated run for the presidency in 2024.

Harassment

Brevard County School Board member Jennifer Jenkins, a teacher and Democrat who says she was harassed and threatened for her pro-mask position at the height of the pandemic, said Florida schools are 9,000 instructors short as the fall term approaches.

And they rank 43rd nationally in education funding and 48th in average teacher salaries — not because of masks, critical race theory, or gender issues touted by conservatives, she said. (National Education Association research shows Florida’s average teacher pay at $51,009, ranking 48th in the nation, based on 2020-21 data. For per-student spending, the NEA data show $10,703, ranking 44th in the nation.)

“Our teacher shortage is a DeSantis decision,” Jenkins said, arguing that Florida schools have fallen behind during 20 years of leadership mostly by Republicans. Jenkins said she based her support for temporary masking in Brevard schools on local evidence, including the COVID deaths of 10 staff members.

Notably, Jenkins defeated her Republican incumbent opponent, Tina Descovich, who soon after joined with two other school board members to found Moms For Liberty. Jenkins said voters chose her over Descovich because she supported masking in schools, as they did.

“It’s not about kids. It’s about an obsession with power,” said Democratic Party Chairman Manny Diaz, who argued DeSantis and other top Republicans are, like former President Trump, fueling conspiracy theories that erode public trust in science, the judiciary, and professional news media.

Scott Hottenstein, public education chair for the Florida Democratic Party and a former civics teacher, said conservative opposition to “critical race theory” is based on such a conspiracy.

“We don’t teach critical race theory in Florida,” Hottenstein flatly stated. “Parents want all of history to be taught … without being censored by politicians.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

Gov. Ron DeSantis named Esther Byrd, a former Marine who lives in Neptune Beach, to the state board earlier this month. Because her appointment came on the last day of this year’s legislative session, her Senate approval will not take place until 2023, the governor’s press office told ����Ӱ��. 

“I am excited for the opportunity to serve the students and families of Florida on the Board of Education,” Byrd said in a March 14 statement released by Moms for Liberty, a conservative parent group that started in Florida in 2021 and now has chapters in 34 states. “Parents are extremely frustrated with being cut off from the decision-making process on issues impacting their children. I will work to amplify their voices, address their concerns, and fight to put children first.”

Byrd is the wife of Republican state Rep. Cord Byrd and works as a legal assistant in his office. According to his website, he’s a firearms law expert who handles many Second Amendment cases. 

Esther Byrd could not be reached for comment. Her appointment has sparked controversy because of her support for extremist views. 

“ANTIFA and BLM can burn and loot buildings and violently attack police and citizens,” Byrd wrote on her personal Facebook page. “But when Trump supporters peacefully protest, suddenly ‘Law and Order’ is all they can talk about! I can’t even listen to these idiots bellyaching about solving our differences without violence.”

. has appointed widely acknowledged believer Esther Byrd to Florida’s state Board of Education.

Background:

— Peter Schorsch ?? (@PeterSchorschFL)

Byrd, who served in the military from 2002 to 2010 and is president of the of Duval Federated, has also talked about an approaching ideological showdown.

“In the coming civil wars (We the People vs the Radical Left and We the People cleaning up the Republican Party), team rosters are being filled,” Byrd wrote. “Every elected official in DC will pick one. There are only 2 teams… With Us [or] Against Us.”

She’s announced her support for the state’s��, often called the “ bill. The Board of Education, according to the Florida Times Union, would for violations of the law.��

DeSantis Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie, a Miami radiologist, to the six-member board. Christie is currently the senior policy advisor for The Catholic Association and the treasurer of the Catholic Association Foundation.

Placards were banned and attendees were warned at the start not to use vulgar language, single out board members or otherwise disrupt the proceedings lest they be hauled off by deputies. 

At issue this dank February night was another target of the right: , the school district’s K-5 English Language Arts curriculum. 

Conservative parent group Moms for Liberty, which spent 1,200 hours dissecting its contents last year, called for the removal of 31 books, including those about Ruby Bridges and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., arguing the texts about the civil rights icons were too “dark” and “disturbing” for young readers. 

In response, the 41,500-student district, located some 30 minutes south of Nashville, formed a committee of parents, educators and community members to evaluate the material. Its , were a major blow to the blustery parent group and its vocal supporters.

Just one book, , a Newbery Medal-winner about a 13-year-old Native American girl who lost her mother, was recommended for removal: Committee members said it was too emotionally fraught for young students. Six other texts would be slightly modified or taught differently. 

More than 70 people attended the Monday night meeting: Roughly two-thirds of those who addressed the board came out in favor of keeping Wit & Wisdom, including 17-year-old Franklin High School junior Mira Scannapieco.

“From an early age, I was introduced to real world concepts including those surrounding diversity, mental health, human rights, science and politics,” she said, barely taking a breath to stay within her allotted time. “Learning about these topics in school gave me a broader perspective, as well as the ability to formulate my own views and opinions. Sheltering today’s youth from these important issues doesn’t make them disappear.”

In the end, after a lengthy discussion, the board voted 8 to 2, with two members absent, in favor of keeping the curriculum.

Saying their concerns were not being taken seriously, many Moms for Liberty members boycotted the meeting. Most notably absent from the critical moment of reckoning was their chapter president, Robin Steenman.

“A lot of people have written it off as not particularly worth their time because we go and we speak before a board and we let them know our concerns — some parents really have poured their hearts out, some parents have just spoken in a common sense way — and it’s just a brick wall,” she told ����Ӱ�� hours earlier.

Steenman has three young children, none of whom are enrolled in district schools: She kept her eldest from attending kindergarten in the Williamson County system because of the mask mandate. The little girl attends private school. Her younger brother is in preschool. Steenman’s youngest is just 17 months old.

Whether the Wit & Wisdom defeat was a temporary setback or a sign that Moms for Liberty’s agenda has failed to gain real traction in Williamson County will soon be tried on a larger stage: the upcoming school board election. 

Some 20 candidates are vying for six seats on the 12-member board. Parent groups of all stripes are busy vetting the contenders and deciding who among the . 

The crowded field faces a May primary and August general election, but the battle for control of the school board is bigger than the race itself. 

In a county that is solidly Republican with a strong Evangelical Christian base, it will be a test of whether the region’s conservatism aligns with Moms for Liberty’s values — or veers away from it. In that sense, it’s emblematic of similar showdowns being waged across the country where schools have become the flashpoint for larger ideological and political power struggles.

Jennifer Cortez, co-founder of One WillCo, a nonpartisan charity formed in 2019 to push for racial and ethnic equity in the Williamson County Schools, believes Steenman has made a miscalculation. The county is conservative, but not radically so, she said.��

“We’ve been here before Moms for Liberty and will be here after Moms for Liberty,” she said. “One of the things Williamson County has going for it is that we are smart. That works in favor of my cause.”  

Next option: elect someone else

Moms for Liberty Williamson County, a tax-exempt nonprofit that can engage in a certain level of political activity, grew at an astounding pace, with 3,200 members to date. 

It’s a local chapter of a national organization that boasts nearly 80,000 members across 34 states: Based out of Florida, it recently announced that was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to the state Board of Education, pending Senate confirmation. She’ll likely be seated. 

The national group has strong far right ties: Members have regularly appeared on ’s podcast discussing the nation’s current culture wars and what they see as the unchecked power of teachers unions. Bannon, chief strategist in the Trump White House until August 2017, is a leader among the alt-right. 

He said last year school boards were ripe for takeover by , calling the battle “trench warfare” in an early March podcast with Moms for Liberty co-founders Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice. 

The national organization has had some success in this arena: 56 candidates it endorsed joined school boards nationwide in fall 2021, Descovich told ����Ӱ��, adding she’s thrilled to support leadership that understands parents’ “inherent right to direct the upbringing, education and medical care of their children.”

Steenman is perhaps the national group’s most high-profile chapter leader. She too is a darling of while often being lambasted by the left on Twitter. 

Dear Robin Steenman and M4L,
Feel free to homeschool or leave WCS. We are tired of your antics. Yours truly, The Majority

— Teacher mom using her voice (@CandiceColson)

She chose to become involved with the local school system after she heard the district was hiring a diversity and inclusion consultant, which she said “rots an organization from the inside out” and leads to quotas.

And her chapter boasts big-name connections: Former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson headlined a two-day “American Dream Conference,” hosted by another, conservative organization, Be the People, in conjunction with Moms for Liberty. 

The event, sponsored in part by the local and national Moms for Liberty, for the alleged misuse of his name and image, was otherwise a success, with some 400 attendees. 

While Steenman’s group has managed to attract and keep the nation’s attention, it hadn’t been tested at home until the February curriculum vote. The Williamson County chapter, which prided itself on its size, reach and influence, had spent more than a year targeting the English Language Arts curriculum only to be largely rebuked. 

“I was not surprised by the vote because of my past dealings with them,” Steenman said. “It was completely as expected.”

Earlier, on the day of the vote, sitting on her back porch, wrapped in a cream-colored sweater, arms folded in an attempt to stave off the cold, the 43-year-old Air Force veteran looked unsettled about what was to come. 

Steenman considered the board’s decision a missed opportunity to do better for children, but she was already setting her sights on the election, a different, perhaps longer-lasting victory. 

“We exhausted every civil avenue for change and when we came up dry… the next option was to elect someone else,” she said. 

Steenman launched a PAC called late last year to promote candidates who support its traditional, conservative, Judeo-Christian values. A March event for that group drew hundreds. 

She’s been interviewing candidates for months, ferreting out those entrants she sees as Republican in name only. Steenman’s ideal contender should support individual rights, including “medical freedom,” which she said would allow parents to decide whether their children wear masks in school or receive vaccinations. 

They should also work to curb “the sexualization agenda in schools,” which she said refers to the introduction of sexual concepts at an early age, combined, soon after, with LGBTQ clubs — alongside books that address, explain or support these notions. 

Parents, she said, believe a book about seahorses, which notes that males carry and release the offspring, is “a soft intro to gender fluidity.” The book and the teacher’s manual focus too much on this fact, she said, noting that a 2019 documentary about a man giving birth to a baby called is more than a coincidence.

The seahorse thing? Yeah it’s thing for the Queer theory crowd. They want to force their ideas about gender onto your kids. They know what they’re doing. Make no mistake.

— Moms For Liberty Williamson County TN (@Moms4LibertyWC)

“It’s just planting the seed…of possibly transgenderism,” she said. “The parents want the choice and the right to introduce these things to their child when they are ready. Having those talks, parents feel that’s their territory.” 

She also disapproves of how certain words are taught, including “injustice,” “unequal,” “inequality,” “protest,” “marching” and “segregation.”  It’s not that the words themselves are bad, she told ����Ӱ��, but that their use in a second grade grammar lesson forces students to “marinate in racism.” 

In the end, Williamson Families endorsed , including Jamie Lima, who also does not have children in the district. Like Steenman, he pulled his eldest because he didn’t want her to start kindergarten wearing a mask. 

Asked his main concern about the district one rainy February night, he read off a list of prepared remarks about the Wit & Wisdom curriculum. The first-time candidate and motorcycle shop owner said he wanted it removed, but did not offer a replacement. 

He said, too, he’s not seeking long-term involvement in running the district.

“I’m not looking to make a career out of this,” he said. 

Another of the men who won Steenman’s endorsement, incumbent board member Dan Cash, refused to accept the accolade. Cash, a conservative who has shown support for Moms for Liberty’s causes in the past, did not reply to multiple interview requests. It’s not clear if he believes he’ll fare better at the polls without Moms for Liberty’s backing. Steenman declined to comment.

Nevertheless, she hopes by keeping Cash on the board and adding other like-minded members, the district will be more amenable to her supporters’ wishes. Educators might have the training, she said, but parents know best.  

“Nobody loves that child like we do,” she said.

The future of Williamson County Schools 

Williamson County is slowly diversifying with a small but growing Black and Hispanic community. And, like the rest of the nation, it’s beginning to acknowledge its racialized past: It recently erected a statue of a Black soldier in the Franklin town square meant to honor the 180,000 Black people who joined the Union Army.  

The popular new addition — a response to the August 2017 white supremecist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — was placed directly across the street from that has stood in front of the county courthouse since 1899.

The fact that residents decided to erect a statue honoring Black Union Army soldiers but leave their Confederate monument intact may indicate a certain tricky balance: embracing a more inclusive historical narrative while refusing to tear down the traditionally dominant one. 

Sitting less than a mile away at The Factory at Franklin, an upscale shopping, dining and performance venue built inside a former stove factory, Cortez wondered if the move went far enough. 

“I think the statue is significant,” she said. “But in my mind, as long as the Confederate soldier stands in that square lifted to the sky and we still have the Confederate flag on our county seal, we are glorifying the South’s attempt to preserve slavery and to break the U.S. apart. It grieves me.”

So, she said, does Steenman’s attack on the school district’s curriculum. Cortez, 48 and a freelance writer, moved to Williamson County in 2004. She has four children, ranging in age from 7 to 21. Two already graduated from Williamson County Schools. Her third has autism and was put in a small, private school and her youngest is in the second grade.

Though the Moms for Liberty members are vocal, Cortez and others say they are small in number and that few parents share their convictions: Of the 37 people who filed complaints about the Wit & Wisdom curriculum with the reviewing committee, 14 lived within the school system’s boundaries but did not have students in the district. 

Centrist parents in Williamson County see Moms for Liberty as an outside entity — not only because some members have no children in the district — but because the organization itself originated in another state. 

Some worry about the group’s next target and see the upcoming election as a place to stop the much-publicized local chapter in its tracks.

“We already bent over backward for them,” said Jeff Bourque, a data analyst with three children in the district. “We don’t need to do this anymore.”

The district, he said, is solid, educationally, which is why so many people are attracted to the area. Kenneth Chilton, who is running for school board, has a 7th grader in the district. An associate professor of public administration at Tennessee State University, he said he asked his son about one of the books Moms for Liberty flagged. The boy barely remembered it and certainly wasn’t upset by its contents.

“It’s not broken,” Chilton said of the district and curriculum. “It doesn’t need to be fixed.”

Revida Rahman, co-founder of One WillCo, says its members trust teachers to guide their children through complex topics, including race, without outside interference.

“You have to have a different perspective,” Rahman said. “You can’t go to school and learn everything you and your family agree with. The world is bigger than you and your family.” 

To that end, other groups, including a PAC called Williamson Strong, are searching for their own candidates, preparing them for what could be a nasty, partisan brawl in a race that only recently required entrants to. 

Led by former Williamson County school board member Anne McGraw, Williamson Strong will soon announce its own endorsements. McGraw said it is searching for public school advocates who have a direct, vested interest in the school system and who care about the success of all students and their teachers.  

“The August 4th election is going to determine the future of Williamson County public schools,” McGraw said. “It’s that dramatic. Either our community shows up to use their voice and their vote to elect public school advocates who aren’t interested in partisan politics, or disruptive extremists win the seats. We’ll only have ourselves — as a community who supposedly greatly values our school system and our teachers — to blame if the former happens.”

Lead art: A newly erected statue of a soldier in Franklin, Tennessee’s town square, honoring the 180,000 Black people who joined the Union Army.  (Jo Napolitano)

The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan national education nonprofit that provides programs and resources to help people of all ages become smart, active news consumers, released a for teachers today to aid in their ongoing battle against disinformation: The framework was unveiled as part of the , an event presented by the Project and the E.W. Scripps Company.  

The effort has five main goals. It was designed to help students distinguish news from other types of information and recognize the importance of the First Amendment in American democracy, including the value of a free press in shaping a well-informed citizenry. 

It also seeks to help children understand the standards of quality journalism, use them to identify credible sources and sharpen their verification skills. Lastly, it aims to help students take responsibility for the information they put out into the world, a campaign called “Care Before You Share” that is being promoted through a public service announcement.

“News and media literacy is a critical skill impacting students’ academic, personal, professional and civic lives,” said Shaelynn Farnsworth, the Project’s director of educator network expansion. “Yet, unfortunately, our students are inheriting the most complicated information landscape in history and are often duped by what they consume online.”

Farnsworth said misinformation threatens not only our democracy, but our very lives, especially as it concerns baseless conspiracy theories around the pandemic. 

“Instead of developing healthy skepticism, students read with a cynical eye instead of a critical one, often not believing any information they consume online,” she said. “To combat this, educators hone skills, so students know what to believe, who to trust and what to share.”

The organization is encouraged by its growing reach: More than 165,000 students used its platform between July 2020 and January 2022, totaling more active young users in 18 months than in the prior four years.

The Project’s recommendations were unveiled during the same week that the American Federation of Teachers announced its new partnership with the anti-misinformation group, , an organization run by Steve Brill, who founded The American Lawyer, Court TV and the Yale Journalism Initiative and Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal. 

According to the AFT, its 1.7 million members — and, by extension, the tens of millions of children they teach plus their families — can now receive a free, online tool that will provide real-time news ratings via a licensed copy of NewsGuard’s browser extension. Educators are invited to sign up  

The need for such tools and programs has only grown in recent years as former President Donald Trump and his supporters ­— — flooded social media with on myriad topics. Trump himself was by the company days after the Jan. 6 insurrection “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”.

At least one social media company, already to reign in false claims, was called out this week by a conservative parents’ group that said it was unfairly targeted for removal from the platform. 

Moms for Liberty, started by two former school board members out of Florida, has grown tremendously since its inception in January 2021. Co-founders Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice attribute much of its success to social media, which allowed members to connect and spread their message without in-person meetings.

But the platform treated them unfairly for ideological reasons, the women told Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg in an open letter dated Jan. 24. In the past few weeks, they said, 22 of their national chapter groups were sent “notifications of community violation” and were disabled for posting what they called “basic information about local government operations such as school board meeting times, or questions about student textbooks.”

“Our groups have been shut down repeatedly,” they wrote, adding their administrative accounts had been suspended and their national page restricted from posting for “security reasons”, though they are unclear as to why. “This severely impacts our ability to pursue our core mission of helping American parents organize to participate in the education of their children. One Moms for Liberty group page, from Fort Bend, Texas, was disabled the same day it launched! It did not even have the opportunity to violate whatever vague standards are being enforced against our moms.”

Facebook, now run by a company called Meta, objected to the characterization late Tuesday night. 

“Meta doesn’t target any group because of their politics,” a company spokeswoman said. “After reviewing the content associated with this organization, we determined that some was removed correctly for violating our misinformation policies.”

Other content was removed by mistake and has since been restored, the spokeswoman said. Descovich said Wednesday afternoon that her administrative privileges had been reinstated and that many chapter’s Facebook pages are back up and running. 

The dispute between Moms for Liberty and Facebook over misinformation charges and freedom of speech claims might be one students could dissect using the Project’s new tool. 

Pamela Brunskill, the Project’s senior manager of education and content, said the new framework will help teachers manage what feels like unlimited information.

“The idea of educating the next generation to be news-literate is daunting, particularly because we’re faced with the most dynamic and complex information environment in history,” she said. “For many educators, it’s hard to know what to teach and where to begin.”

The Project’s new tool will make that Herculean task much easier, Brunskill said, and pay long-term dividends.

“Imagine if our entire society could distinguish news from other types of information, could recognize the role a free press plays to an informed citizenry, could understand the standards of quality journalism, could detect misinformation and faulty evidence, and could express a sense of responsibility for the information they share!,” she said in an email. “What kind of democracy would that look like?”

Disclosure: Campbell Brown is the head of news partnerships at Facebook. Brown co-founded ����Ӱ�� and sits on its board of directors. She plays no role in the reporting or editing of ����Ӱ��’s content.

First they were confused. Then they got angry.

The parents expected a focus on core subjects like math and science, Lowe said, but found their children were learning about race, sexuality and LBGTQ issues. Not only were their children too young for that, she added, but the schools betrayed their trust. 

“Honestly, it’s disgusting,” said Lowe, chair of the Tarrant County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national right-leaning organization founded in January that has quickly grown to 60,000 active members focused on the “survival of America” by . 

Lowe’s chapter in the Fort Worth-area, formed in June, boasts . They’ve been showing up at school board meetings to make sure their concerns are heard. 

“What this is all about is a socialist ideology being indoctrinated to the American student young enough that it would conflict with the parent or the family of origin’s ideology,” she said. “The government needs to back up. They are way out of their lane.” 

Lowe and her neighbors aren’t alone in their beliefs. Conservative parent alarm over critical race theory helped for Republican Glenn Youngkin in the bellwether race for governor in distant Virginia.  

Emboldened by one of the nation’s most far-reaching anti-critical race theory laws , suburban parents have attacked school boards and districts for teaching about sexuality and racial discrimination, topics that were added amid criticism schools whitewashed history. 

Their demands, sometimes through intimidation and threats, are getting attention and results. 

Tension in the suburbs

Since the law passed, Texas educators have struggled to comply. In one case, a school administrator outside Fort Worth instructed teachers to offer in their classroom libraries.

The list goes on. A suburban Dallas principal —  accused of promoting critical race theory —  was put on leave with an eye toward not bringing him back.

Another school district outside of Dallas considered .

At least one North Austin teacher packed away her classroom library all together to avoid  controversy. 

These clashes in Texas are centered in the suburbs, where population growth is booming, diversity is expanding and political influence flourishes. More than Republican versus Democrat, the suburbs are the root of broader “us versus them” politics, particularly in areas with a large economic or racial divide, said University of Houston political science professor  Brandon Rottinghaus.

“These rapid demographic changes mean tension in traditional suburban Texas that is suspicious of change and is skeptical of real or imagined threats,” he said. “People believe (critical race theory) to be the threat to the traditional suburban way of life.”

‘Discomfort,’ ‘guilt’ and ‘anguish’

Texas was one of banning educators from teaching critical race theory, a new buzzword in the American education lexicon used as an all-purpose tag referring to race. Only to restrict the teaching of discrimination based on race or sex, although Texas passed two.

The laws target teaching concepts of discrimination. Specifically, students in a course to feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on the account of the individual’s race or sex,” according to the law. While there are no fines for non-compliance against districts, educators could lose their jobs. 

Educators argue they do not teach CRT, a university-level study examining how racism is baked into policies and the legal system, but instead focus on inclusivity and race’s context in America.

‘Their thing is I’m racist against white people’

The best way Gloria Gonzales-Dholakia can explain what it’s like to be a school board member over the last year in Texas is to liken the intensity to the growing brightness of a light controlled by a dimmer switch.

Beginning in the 2020 school year, passion over issues of race lit up slowly at meetings of the Leander Independent School District north of Austin. Parents opposed a recommended diversity policy and objected to books like “Red at the Bone” by Jacqueline Woodson, about a Black teenage couple getting pregnant, and “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas about a Black teen who witnesses a police officer fatally shoot her best friend. 

By February, a parent brought with her to a school board meeting to protest “In the Dream House,” a memoir by Carmen Maria Machado about an abusive relationship with an ex-girlfriend. 

This school year, meetings grew rowdy. Parents argued the district was breaking the law, and would crowd school board meetings carrying large signs with board members’ faces on them, calling on them to resign. 

“As I walk through those front doors, it’s terrifying,” recalled Gonzales-Dholakia, a Latina board member. “There are people there with utility knives on their belts, they’ll shout at me, scream at me that I’m a racist. Their thing is I’m racist against white people. They’ll call me a communist, I’m a ‘Marxist,’ I’m a ‘traitor to the country,’ I’m an ‘enemy of the state.’ That’s the newest.”

Legislative probe of library catalogues 

Last week, Texas House Committee Chairman Matt Krause, one of the most conservative Republicans at the state Capitol and a founding member of the tea party-minded House Freedom Caucus, went a step further.

Krause, of the General Investigating Committee and a state representative from Fort Worth asked for in several school districts, including novels like “Thumbelina,” alphabet picture books, and memoirs, many about the LGBTQ and African American experience, and a book about .

Krause wanted to know how much money the districts spend on those books and how many copies are in school libraries and classrooms. He also asked for other titles absent from the list that include sexuality, HIV, AIDS, sexually explicit images or other material that would cause students discomfort.

Battles in Texas  

Pressure to oust critical race theory from Texas schools have taken a variety of forms this year, from removing books and second-guessing ethinic studies courses to disciplining educators.

Just outside of Houston, more than 400 parents in Katy signed a petition to dump a set of award-winning graphic novels about a modern-day at his new mostly-white private school. Parents in September alleged “New Kid” and “Class Act,” by Jerry Craft, are for teaching students “that their white privilege inherently comes with microaggressions which must be kept in check.” After a review, the district reinstated the books.

A Black high school principal near Dallas was placed on leave in August from Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District after he was after the murder of George Floyd. The school board has put in motion a plan to not renew his contract for the 2022-23 school year. The principal has appealed.

At Little Elm ISD, about 45 minutes outside of Dallas, the school board considered , arguing CRT would sow division, until the sponsor dropped the proposal during debate. In nearby McKinney, the school district in a nationwide youth and government program, citing a provision in the law restricting political activism and policy advocacy.

But no case compared to Southlake, a suburb 30 minutes outside of Dallas where one teacher at Carroll ISD was disciplined for having “This Book Is Anti-Racist” in her classroom after a parent complained the book violated her family’s “morals and faith.” Days after the school board voted to discipline the teacher, a school official explaining the law told educators if they have a book in their library about the Holocaust, for example, they also need a book of an  

The law’s sponsor has said Carroll ISD’s and school officials have since backtracked on that recommendation. 

Parents there have also railed against a proposed diversity plan that included training and an anti-racist curriculum, ultimately delaying the proposal and who saw the plan as promoting with a far-left ideology that discriminates against white children and those with Christian values.