by Tamuira Reid
School Boards across the country have become radicalized, energized, weaponized. They have become the new political battleground where extremist right-wing ideologues test the political waters. The plan is to infiltrate the schools, use them as the megaphone to broadcast the GOP’s agenda, with lots of soapboxing and grandstanding thrown in.
Last week, The City news dropped a bomb of a piece, “City Education Council Elections Bring Polarizing National Issues to Local School Districts”, exposing local educational advocacy organization, PLACE NYC’s history of endorsing GOP candidates and racists (George Santos and Lee Zeldin, for instance). Yet, for those of us familiar with PLACE’s history via our relationship with public schools as parents, the reporting didn’t read even close to a hit piece; many of us found it to be gentle-handed, forgiving, kinda vanilla.
What did seem to take the public school old-timers crowd by surprise was that PLACE is far from the only ‘educational advocacy organization of its kind to sprout wings across the country. They are just one of a growing coalition of parent-led organizations who are hellbent on the idea of parental control over our public schools, including everyone and everything inside of them. This national “Parental Rights Movement” – driven by self-proclaimed groups of “mama bears”, of which Moms4Liberty is the star – isn’t about elevating the needs of all students, but controlling exactly how and exactly what they are taught. It’s about banning books and censoring curricula that dare discuss race and gender. It’s about vilifying teachers’ unions and Dr. Fauci and anything with the word “equity” in it. It’s about the privatization of a public good. Our schools are being infiltrated by “mama bears” who are dead-set on gutting the public school system from the inside out. And they’ve got friends. Read more »