The Far Right Has Used Culture War Politics to Open the Gate to a Vast Expansion of School Vouchers

In Merchants of Deception: Parent Props and their Funders, a new report just out from the Network for Public Education, Massachusetts political scientist, Maurice Cunningham explores what appeared a couple of years ago to be the spontaneous emergence of angry parents’ groups protesting teaching about racism, sex and gender.

“In truth,” he begins, “political interests use crises to turn politics and policy their way. This has happened during the COVID pandemic as right-wing ‘parent’ groups came out of nowhere to protest health measures such as masking and vaccine requirements in schools, then moved on to Critical Race Theory, then LGBT issues, book banning, and an endless stream of other ginned up culture war issues.  In truth the Right has been massing its forces for years to undermine public education, but the sudden proliferation of ‘parents’ and ‘moms’ groups has signaled a new and more virulent turn… Conservative groups have exploded since 2021 and include operations like Parents Defending Education (PDE) and Moms for Liberty (M4L). They draw on white backlash politics and resentment.”

Teachers and school librarians are under attack, and local school boards have become sites of screaming and name-calling. In his new report, Cunningham demonstrates that the eruption of far-right trouble making is, in fact, not spontaneous. The new wave of parents’ groups is funded by the same far-right donors who are using the attacks to discredit public schools and public school teachers and promote an explosion of vouchers across state legislatures.

How does Cunningham know that the parents’ groups screaming at local school board members and pressing for laws like Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E.” bill are really fake grassroots—Astroturf—organizations sponsored and funded by the far-right? He explains that the far-right groups supporting the attack on public schooling “rely on a network of dark money donors and their front organizations, and it can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to identify the true sources of funding.” But there are other clues. First we should watch for groups that have “grown at a pace that only a corporation’s monetary resources could manage.” Then we should identify the group’s allies to “get a better idea of the real powers behind” the organization.  Additionally: “We’ll use another tool to draw telling inferences about these fronts: identification of their key vendors, such as law firms, pollsters, and public relations firms, which we’ll see are often instruments of conservative… networks… Another recurring clue… is the ‘creation story.’ A new non-profit group bursts forth with some version of claiming that two or three moms began talking over what they see as problems in schools and resolve to start a nonprofit to take on the teachers’ unions, administration, or school board. By some form of miracle, they almost immediately receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in funding from billionaires. Next, they find themselves gaining favorable coverage on right-wing media—Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox News…. ”

Employing these strategies, Cunningham discovers: “What we see is not just that Parents Defending Education, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn in Education are tied in together, but they are all incorporated into a right-wing network that includes Charles Koch, organizational and individual members of the right-wing Council for National Policy, and other extremist funders, including Julie Fancelli, who helped to underwrite the January 6, 2021, Washington D.C. Stop the Steal rally.”

Cunningham explores three organizations in detail: Parents Defending Education, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn in Education. Here, for example is what he discovered about Parents Defending Education (PDE), which emerged two years ago in Virginia.  Its board members include five members affiliated with the far-right.  Nicole Neily, a board member and the organization’s president, “is an established political operative with Koch-affiliated non-profit interest groups. According to Sourcewatch, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, Neily has previously worked with Koch affiliates, the Franklin News Foundation, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights, and the independent Women’s Forum. She has also served on the boards of Young Voices and Young Voices for Liberty. She is a ‘volunteer instructor’ at the Leadership Institute (which handles trainings and conference activities for Moms for Liberty). Neily has a background in public relations and communications work; many of the supposed grassroots education reform leaders have extensive backgrounds in communications. She was also the initial president of Speech First, a Koch-connected legal interest that files lawsuits against universities’ affirmative action and bias response policies… For PDE major vendors, Neily immediately turned to contractors who had worked for Speech First: the Republican law firm Consovoy McCarthy, paid $950,000 by Free Speech in 2018, and the communications firm Creative Response Concepts, paid $106,000 in 2018. From the start, PDE was promoting itself as a grassroots volunteer organization. Affording such contractors right away belies that. ‘We just all work from home,’ Neily told the Columbus (OH) Dispatch. ‘We’re all working moms.'”

Here is some of what Cunningham calls Parents Defending Education’s creation story: “PDE announced its launch via Twitter on March 30, 2021, and immediately took up Christopher Rufo’s anti-Critial Race Theory campaign. The very next day, its emergence was reported by Fox News. PDE’s announcement quickly reverberated through the right-wing media echo chamber with coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Examiner, and the Federalist. By May 3, the moms working from home were getting coverage in the Washington Post. In June 2021, Neily explained to the conservative Daily Caller how PDE thrusts (usually anonymous) parent complaints into right-wing media: ‘Maybe they don’t know how to get it in the right hands, but we do. We know a lot of reporters, and we’re happy to share those things.'”Cunningham adds: Real grassroots groups often struggle to get space in their community newspapers.” And he adds further: “Neily’s compensation for her ‘work from home’ job was $195,688.”

In the rest of the report, Cunningham dissects the funding and allies and communications firms of Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. The overall story is of Astroturf parents’ organizations playing the race card to frighten legislators about the public schools.

It is an old story.  In Let Them Eat Tweets, a book published in 2020, two other political scientists, Yale’s Jacob Hacker and Berkeley’s Paul Pierson, remind readers that, “Long before the ascent of Donald Trump… a Republican president tried to realign the electorate through appeals to white workers discomfited by racial and cultural change.” (Let Them Eat Tweets, p. 42) This was Nixon’s Southern Strategy, used by subsequent politicians to agitate voters who could be made fearful through racist appeals. When Hacker and Pierson published Let Them Eat Tweets, the Astroturf parents’ groups spreading alarm about so-called “critical race theory” had not yet emerged, but Trump and the far-right had been accelerating the politics of hate because it worked for them.  Hacker and Pierson add: “The false narratives boosted by right-wing media generally have two characteristics: they incite tribalism and they escalate a sense of threat.”  (Let Them Eat Tweets, p. 103

So… what does this have to do with the politics of public schooling in February, 2023? A week ago, this blog traced a history of the plutocratic attempt to privatize education.  Now we are watching as that strategy comes to fruition.  Already at the beginning of their legislative sessions, two states, Iowa and Utah, have fast-tracked huge, Education Savings Account voucher bills through their legislatures. The Astroturf parents’ groups operating—with money from Koch and other far-right funders—have provided a path to an unusually large expansion of vouchers.

Education Week‘s Libby Stanford outlines the politics: “Emboldened by frustrations with pandemic-era policies and battles over what schools are teaching, conservative parents and politicians have accelerated a push for school choice policies that would funnel public funds into private schools. Though school choice has been debated for decades, the movement is in a unique moment as advocates use parent concerns over COVID-era mask requirements, curriculum addressing race, gender, and sexuality, and library book content to bolster their argument that families should have more options outside of traditional public schools. And the school choice proposals states are considering—and in some cases, have already passed—are more sweeping than previous iterations.”

Stanford catches us up on what is happening across the states as legislative sessions get underway: “Already this year, lawmakers in at least 11 states—Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia—have introduced and in some cases (Iowa and Utah), passed school choice bills… (M)any of the bills would establish or expand private school voucher and education savings account programs that give families public funds to pay for tuition at private schools, cover the costs of homeschooling, or pay for other schooling expenses… Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have some sort of policy on the books supporting school choice, including tax credits for parents who switch to different schools, private school scholarship programs, and education savings accounts…. Of those states, eight have education savings accounts in which the state gives eligible families a set amount of public funds to cover school-related costs including private school, online learning, tutoring, community college, and college expenses.  Sixteen states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have voucher programs, which are often branded as scholarships, giving students all or part of their public per-pupil funding to pay for private school….”

Stanford adds: “Until now, school choice programs have mostly been too small to have much of an impact on traditional public schools, but as states pass more sweeping school choice policies, there is a concern that lawmakers are starting down (what Tulane University’s Douglas Harris calls) ‘a slippery slope.'”

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson warn that heated culture war politics turn the political debate away from the merits of specific policies to address serious issues and instead toward a clash of identities—away from “‘this policy versus that policy’ to ‘us versus them.'” (Let Them Eat Tweets, p. 109). Driven by the emotions of the culture war, the political battle about vouchers avoids practical policy concerns: How will public schools survive if states fund vouchers without increasing the taxes that would pay for them? How can our legislators propose to cut taxes and at the same time increase the number of students taking vouchers out of the state public education budget?

The expansion of private school tuition vouchers and Education Savings Accounts is an attack on the funding of public schooling, an attack which will ultimately undermine what is good for us all—a system of democratically governed public schools designed to serve the needs of each particular student and protect by law the rights of all students.

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How Is Far-Right Propaganda about Critical Race Theory Undermining Society and Our Children’s Education?

The news is flooded with hysteria about something called “critical race theory.” I am being told that the anti-bias and anti-racism programs I participated in at work were terrifying experiences that threatened who I am and undermined my patriotism—even though I don’t remember those workshops as threatening my identity at all. Legislatures across the country are passing laws to punish educators who teach honestly about slavery, the abuses of Jim Crow, and boarding schools that tried to force American Indian children to deny their culture. This post will address three simple and related questions: What did the term “critical race theory” mean in the past? What is it that fear-mongering extremists have folded together to change the original meaning of “critical race theory” into something supposedly terrifying? How is today’s hysteria about critical race theory undermining our children’s education?

What did “critical race theory” used to mean before extremists manipulated it this year in the right-wing press? 

Many people have thought about racism basically as personal bias or prejudice. But critical race theory is an academic concept that addresses much more systemic institutional and structural racism. The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss explains: “Critical race theory is a decades-old academic framework that holds that racism is systemic, embedded in government policies and laws that are evident in any serious examination of American history. Critics say that racism is the work of individual bad actors, and, they say, teachers are improperly injecting race in the classroom.”

National Education Policy Center Fellow Shaun Harper at the University of Southern California provides a more technical definition of “critical race theory”: “Individual actions (both intentional and unconscious) that engender marginalization and inflict varying degrees of harm on minoritized persons; structures that determine and cyclically remanufacture racial inequity; and institutional norms that sustain white privilege and permit the ongoing subordination of minoritized persons.”

In  Education Week, Janel George adds: “Like many academic theories, Critical Race Theory is complex and constantly evolving. However, it can be characterized by a few tenets which challenge many traditional understandings of race and racial inequality. The Human Genome Project found that humans share 99.9 percent of the same genetic makeup, despite our different appearances. Critical race theory recognizes that our ideas of racial difference—which run counter to this scientific evidence—have been socially constructed. It acknowledges how that social construction of race has shaped America and how systems and institutions can do the bulk of replicating racial inequality.”

Emeritus education professor at the University of Wisconsin, former president of the American Educational Research Association, and author of the widely respected textbook, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children, Gloria Ladson-Billings, responds to the current hysteria by emphasizing the importance of addressing institutional racism that affects children at school: “Curricula that largely exclude the history and lived experiences of Americans of color are the norm. Deficit-oriented instruction often characterizes students of color as failures if a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for them. Standardized-test scores from assessments detached from what students learn in the classroom are widely used to confirm narratives about the ineducability of children of color.”

Here are just two examples of structural racism.  In his book, The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein traces government policies and laws that have perpetuated racially segregated housing—zoning for segregation, the choice of sites for public housing, legally protected mortgage and insurance redlining, and racial bias in the approval of Veterans Administration and FHA loans. In Schoolhouse Burning, Derek Black examines the explicit efforts of the post-Reconstruction state legislatures across the former Confederacy to segregate and underfund schools for Black children.  Later he describes the decades of legal work by the NAACP’s Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall to undo structural school segregation by race. What then followed after Brown v. Board of Education were efforts to stop school integration in court cases like Milliken v. Bradley that blocked school busing across suburban jurisdictional boundaries.

How Have Extremists Transformed and Politicized the Meaning of “Critical Race Theory”?

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler and Josh Dawsey identify Christopher Rufo, a 36-year-old documentary filmmaker and media opportunist from Seattle: “Rufo has played a key role in the national debate, defining diversity trainings and other programs as critical race theory, putting out examples that legislators and others then cite…. He continues to appear regularly on Fox News to discuss the issue and often offers strategic advice over how to win the political fight. In March, he wrote on Twitter that his goal was to conflate any number of topics into a new bucket called critical race theory. ‘We have successfully frozen their brand—critical race theory—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.'”

The New Yorker‘s Benjamin Wallace-Wells describes Rufo’s strategy to redefine critical race theory:  “He thought that the phrase was a better description of what conservatives were opposing, but it also seemed like a promising political weapon.”  Wallace-Wells quotes Rufo: “Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’  Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.”

Finally NBC News has identified No Right Turn in Education, a radical-right parents group whose mission is to undermine honest teaching about American history at school: “When the Gladwyne Elementary School in the suburbs of Philadelphia decided to teach students about the concepts of racism, privilege and justice during the last week of classes, Elana Yaron Fishbein, a mother of two students in the school, sprang into action. Fishbein, a former social worker, sent a letter to the superintendent calling the lessons a ‘plan to indoctrinate the children into the ‘woke’ culture’  She said the superintendent never responded, though the district later said that the lesson plans were age-appropriate and did not shame students and that parents were allowed to opt out. Fishbein said other white parents in the district attacked her on Facebook when she shared the letter. So Fishbein moved her children to private school and started a group to advocate against anti-racist teaching. She called it No Left Turn in Education… Fishbein’s endeavor received a significant boost in September, when she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox News show. By the next day, No Left Turn‘s Facebook page had shot up from fewer than 200 followers to over 30,000. The group now has 30 chapters in 23 states, a rapid expansion Fishbein credits to Carlson’s show.”

How Have America’s Educators Been Responding to the Current Hysteria?

The editors of Rethinking Schools magazine worry about the rash of laws coming from far-right state legislatures, laws intended to prevent teaching about today’s injustices and their history beginning in slavery and threading through American history: “Lawmakers in a growing number of states are attempting to pass legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about the past and present… To put it another way, in 2021, when children look around at the vast inequalities apparent in every corner of their daily lives—where the wealth of a typical white family is 10 times that of a typical Black family, where a Black person is three times as likely to die in childbirth as a white person, and where African Americans are five times as likely to be in prison as their white counterparts—and ask, ‘Why? Why is it like this?’ that child’s teacher would be prohibited from answering their student’s earnest and urgent question. These laws peddle in bait-and-switch tactics, using the language of anti-discrimination to mask their perpetuation of a discriminatory and unjust status quo… By banning educators from teaching about these realities, lawmakers seek to deny young people the right to understand—and so effectively act upon—the world they’ve been bequeathed.”

David Blight, the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, looks for hard work to focus on teaching the truth without blaming: “Once again, Americans find themselves at war over their history—what it is, who owns it, how it should be interpreted and taught… History wars follow patterns. The subjects at their core usually carry visceral meaning for large swaths of the public. The disputes quickly invoke curricula, creeping into school boards and state legislatures with increasing stakes… History is politics by other means, and we who care about it have to fight this war better and more strategically ourselves… We need to teach the history of slavery and racism every day, but not through a forest of white guilt or by thrusting the idea of ‘white privilege’ onto working-class people who have very little privilege. Instead, we need to tell more precise stories, stories that do not feed right-wing conspiracists a language that they are waiting to seize, remix and inject back into the body politic as a poison… Historians must write and speak up in the clearest language, in prose our grandmothers can read. We need history that can get us marching but also render us awed by how much there is to learn. Slavery, as personal experience and national trial, is a harrowing human tragedy, and like all great tragedies it leaves us chastened by knowledge, not locked within sin or redemption alone.”

This post intentionally quotes current coverage of this issue from several sources and perspectives.  I hope you will follow the links and read some of the source material.