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

Voters rejected groups like Moms for Liberty. But conservative activists
don't need a majority to whittle away trust in public education.

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.

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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.

~ JAROD FACUNDO, WRITING FELLOW

Follow Jarod Facundo on Twitter

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