The parental rights movement faces setbacks in school board elections
Conservative activists for parental rights in education suffered several high-profile losses in state and school board elections on Tuesday.
The results suggest limits on what Republicans hoped would be a powerful issue for them ahead of the 2024 presidential race — how public schools handle gender, sexuality and race.
The Campaign for Our Shared Future, a progressive group formed in 2021 to push back against conservative education activism, said Wednesday that 19 of 23 endorsed school board candidates had won in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia.
The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest education union and a major Democratic power player, said that in 250 elections it had tracked — a mix of state, local and school board elections — 80 percent of its preferred candidates had won .
On the right, Moms for Liberty, the leading parenting rights group, said 44 percent of its candidates were elected.
The modest results for Conservatives show that, after several years of the right trying to capitalize on anger over the way schools handled the Covid-19 pandemic and issues of race and gender in the curriculum, “parents are comfortable returning to to be somewhat normal,” said Jeanne Allen, director of the Center for Education Reform, a right-wing group in Washington.
She suggested that Republicans would have performed better if they had talked more about expanding access to school choices such as vouchers and charter schools, noting that academic performance remains subpar.
In the Philadelphia suburbs, a key swing region, Democrats captured new school board majorities in several closely watched districts.
In the Pennridge School District, Democrats won five seats on the school board. The previous Republican majority did asked teachers for consultation a social studies curriculum created by Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian institution. The board too restricted access to library books with LGBTQ themes and forbidden preventing transgender students from using bathrooms or playing on sports teams that match their gender identity.
Democrats in nearby Bucks Central School District also won all five open seats. That neighborhood had been that convulsing through debates over Republican policies that restrict books and ban pride flags.
The region has been a hotbed of education activism during the pandemic, as many suburban parents organized to fight school closures, often coming together across partisan divisions to resist the influence of teachers unions.
But that era of education politics is increasingly in the rearview mirror.
Outside Pennsylvania, unions and other progressive groups celebrated school board victories Iowa, Connecticut And Virginiaas well as the new Democratic control of the Virginia state legislature.
That state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has been a standard-bearer for parental rights, pushing for open schools during the pandemic and restricting the way race is discussed in the classroom.
School voucher advocates had hoped that a Republican victory in the state would allow progress on that issue.
There were scattered bright spots for the parenting rights movement. Moms for Liberty candidates found success in Colorado, Alaska and several Pennsylvania counties.
Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the group, said she was undeterred by Tuesday’s results. She rejected calls for conservatives not to talk about divisive gender and race issues in education.
The progressive ideology in this area, she said, was “destroying the lives of children and families.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the culture war had diverted attention from post-pandemic recovery efforts in literacy and mental health.
Notably, both the AFT and Moms for Liberty have advocated for more effective reading instruction for young children, including a focus on foundational phonics skills.
But the conservative push to limit books and shape the history curriculum ideologically is a “strategy to sow fear and division,” Ms. Weingarten said. The winning message, she added, was one of “freedom of expression and freedom to learn,” and of returning local schools to their core business of promoting “consistency and stability” for children.