BASED: Right-Wing School Board Groups Posted Losses at the Ballot Box

A little more than a week ago, right-wing groups such as Moms for Liberty and the 1776 Project suffered losses in school board elections across the country. The American Federation of Teachers, a union representing 1.72 million members, reported that such groups lost approximately 70 percent of their endorsed races. Moms for Liberty and the 1776 Project dispute AFT’s figures, naturally, claiming they won 58 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of the races they endorsed.

Whatever the case, these lackluster results signal that the conservative activist playbook for school board races is running out of steam. Shrouded in culture-war regalia and the rhetoric of "parental rights," the overarching goal for conservative activist groups has been part of a larger project of undermining public education to subsequently funnel public money away from public schools through voucher programs and other so-called school choice options, according to liberal activist groups that spoke to the Prospect.

Jamie Perrapato, executive director of Turn PA Blue, told the Prospect that voter support in 2021 for right-wing school board candidates could best be interpreted as a rejection of perceived government overreach from liberals during the pandemic. Many parents did have legitimate grievances during the time that schools were closed through the later bouts of the pandemic while bars and restaurants remained open, though of course much of that problem was outside the control of school districts.

Disgruntled parents driven to distraction by trying to juggle homeschooling and work created a bind for liberals and moderates in school board elections, and an opportunity for the extreme right to pose as defenders of parental rights. But on November 7, we saw that dynamic reversed.

In the case of right-wing candidates, their credibility was burned as they took the mantle of waging war against critical race theory and demanding book bans, revealing themselves to be guilty of the exact same government control and censorship they accused their opponents of favoring. The result is that after the mask came off, their remaining supporters were mostly die-hards already sold on a socially conservative agenda.

Right-wing activists are thus in a bind. On the one hand, their agenda is rooted in ginning up cultural resentment to channel support for charters and school voucher programs. But that necessitates an inside-outside strategy where the nature of serving on a school board is about ensuring a school district functions. Meanwhile, the sweeping education funding wish lists are a project that can only be executed from outside of school boards.

We see this bind in Pennsylvania, where a once-conservative powerhouse school board in Bucks County lost control overnight. Central Bucks School District, north of Philadelphia, had been a nationally followed case study for what this new iteration of education politics would look like. The conservative-led school district had been mired in controversies over masking, Pride flags, book bans, pronoun usage, and so forth. Fast-forward to the current day: Democrats swept all five open seats.

However, if conservative activists still have one card up their sleeve, it’s how school board meetings themselves have readjusted in recent years. Rebecca Jacobsen, a professor at Michigan State University, has recently studied this issue, focusing on hours of school board meetings in areas where Moms for Liberty found electoral successes in 2022. She told the Prospect about how before the pressure from activists and parents, school board meetings, even as critical as they were, mostly focused on local affairs. Heated discussions were common, but the threat of a lawsuit wasn’t. Today, Jacobsen said, school board officials, feeling like their work is under a microscope wielded by deep-pocketed interest groups, would rather provide minimal answers, following strictly to procedure, avoiding the appearance of a transgression ripe for legal action, protest, or worse.

This dynamic is corrosive and substantiates conservative critiques over unaccountable bureaucracies, even as it is largely caused by right-wing legal harassment. At its most extreme, the National School Boards Association, in September 2021, wrote a letter to President Biden and his Justice Department asking them to investigate protests and threats of violence against school board members under federal domestic terrorism laws. Taken together, it’s unlikely the average voter follows the intersection of activism in school board politics and the overzealous response from administrators, as shown by how they’ve drifted, pulling support from right-wing candidates.

One of the most contentious sites over the future of public schools has been in West Michigan. Becky Olson, a spokesperson for Support Forest Hills Public Schools (FHPS), told the Prospect about how culture-war politics riled the mostly wealthy school district throughout the pandemic. Michigan, she explained, was unique. FHPS, located in Kent County, is the heart of the state’s Republican Party. Former education secretary Betsy DeVos once ran the county’s Republican Party. She was enlisted specifically for her work as an ardent school choice political operative.

But as Olson said, Michigan is proud of its support for public schools. Thus, in a place like the Forest Hills school district, school choice advocates and other right-wing operatives face a difficult landscape. The pitch went like this: "No matter whether these local attack groups are criticizing school boards, books, COVID mask policies, CRT, or even school bus schedules," Olson said, "it all points back to how public schools are failing our students and how we should advocate for more choice." So while conservatives might have suffered a defeat this time, the battle is far from over.

Going forward, privatization advocates and their culture-war soldiers are navigating a landscape where, contrary to their aims, the average person wants to see their public schools succeed. For the integrity of public schools as a public institution, that’s a good thing. Staving off a movement dead set on diverting money away from public schools is a momentary victory, as there remains about $72 billion in pandemic-related assistance money still on the table for schools, which expires next September. The task ahead for liberals and moderates overseeing education policy is immense.