Election security advocate Jennifer Cohn caught my attention with this brief video and Twitter thread. She sees the the aggressive tactics on display from angry conservatives at school board meetings as driven by a national agenda.
In a maneuver we’ve seen before with T-party, the school board protests, Cohn alleges, are driven by a national agenda. Cohn cites a piece from Right Wing Watch:
An email promoting an online presentation about the Leadership Institute’s new training sessions, which begin on Aug. 9, declares that “conservatives are preparing a school board takeover and you can get involved.” The presentation was made by the Leadership Institute’s director of international trainings Ron Nehring, a protégé of anti-tax activist Grover Norquist who ran as a Republican candidate for Lt. Gov. of California in 2014 and served as a spokesman for Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“The left has spent many years and vast funding to stack local school boards,” the Leadership Institute’s website claims. “America’s children suffer the effects of this liberal domination every day.” The group adds, “Patriotic Americans must take back the schools.”
This pattern dates back decades:
Religious-right activists and other right-wing groups have long viewed public schools and colleges as culture-war battlegrounds. This year’s campaign to mobilize school board takeovers is reminiscent of school board wars that raged during the 1990s, when religious-right groups made a determined effort to take over school boards across the country to combat what they claimed was liberal indoctrination in schools.
Cohn also cites a blog post by public-education-advocate Diane Ravitch from June. Ravitch warns parents to beware of astroturf education groups funded by right-wing billionaires. Jeanne Melvin of Ohio’s Parent Education Partners offers a guide to spotting these groups:
Melvin names names. She calls out “Parents Defending Education,” “Freedom Works,” “Parents Rights in Education,” and “Moms for Liberty,” among others. Some of they may be at work in your state, representing themselves as ordinary parents who want “change.” The change they want is privatization, not better public schools. Before you get involved in any parent group, find out what their budget is and who pays the salaries and how many leaders have salaries.
It is probably a mistake to assume all those showing up at recent protests are astroturf groups there on direct orders from “national,” whatever that may be. Like T-party members, they’ve been sent signals via Fox News, conservative talk radio, or social media that all right-thinking Americans need to show up at school board meetings to beat back the commie-socialist-globalist-masker threat. They then organize locally.
For all their patriotic-y bluster, they no longer believe in American traditions like public education if they do not include White Christian political and social dominance.