The parental-rights movement that emerged in the wake of Covid faces a big test on Tuesday.
It was a social-studies book that helped push Cindy Rose into local school-board politics.
More than a decade ago, Rose’s daughter was home sick from her Frederick, Md., school, and she brought the book — Social Studies Alive! Our Community and Beyond — home with her. Rose paged through it and grew concerned. In her estimation, the book had a clear left-wing slant; it promoted global activism, talked up other countries while disparaging the United States, and led kids to support government-funded health care and child care.
“I didn’t think that was a national issue at the time. I thought it was a poor choice of a textbook,” said Rose, who was also an educational advocate for her son, Ben, who has cerebral palsy. “I didn’t know then what I obviously know now, that there is some larger push to get other people’s agendas inside the classroom.”
In 2012, Rose made her first run for a seat on the Frederick Board of Education. She lost in the primary. She tried again in 2016 and 2018, but fell short in the general election both years.
After that 2018 defeat, Rose continued speaking out against what she saw as a continued leftward drift in public education — a drift that she believed included less attention on academics, more time incubating leftwing activism, and treating kids not as individuals but as members of collective identity groups. But she had no intention of ever running for office again, she said.
“I was at a Frederick County Conservative Club meeting talking about critical race theory, and someone in the audience said, ‘Cindy, please run again.’ And I’m like, ‘No,’” she recalled. But then, she said, she offered a challenge. “I said, ‘If you can find me three other like-minded people who are willing to go in there and turn over the tables and do what needs to be done to fix public education, then I will run.’ And God said, ‘Challenge accepted.’”
This year, Rose, 59, is taking another swing at a school-board seat, but this time she’s not alone. She is running as part of a slate of conservative candidates — the so-called Education Not Indoctrination slate — who are working together to move the board to the right. They are advocating for more parental involvement in district decisions, and a renewed focus on civics and the development of cognitive skills. They want to ban materials that promote revisionist history and divisive concepts like CRT and so-called “anti-racism.” They’ve also advocated for classroom cameras, parental opt-ins before children are exposed to controversial materials, and restoring the terms Christmas and Easter to the school calendar.
Three of the four conservatives advanced to Tuesday’s general election, where they are facing a slate of four candidates endorsed by the teachers’ union.
The Frederick County conservatives are part of the continued effort by right-leaning candidates across the country to have a greater voice on local school boards, and in some cases to win control of the boards, which are often run — even in generally conservative communities — by left-of-center members of the education establishment.
The movement has roots in the Covid-19 school closures and virtual-learning efforts, when parents got a behind-the-scenes look at what their kids were learning in schools. In the wake of racial-justice protests that erupted after George Floyd’s death in 2020, concerned parents found schools in the thrall of left-wing social-justice activists pushing divisive dogma. Parents grew frustrated with mask mandates and concerned about plummeting standardized test scores. They’ve also pushed back on school systems that have tried to keep kids’ gender transitions hidden from parents, and they’ve expressed concerns about books with explicit content in school libraries and classrooms.
Last year, conservatives were able to flip seats in states like Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Texas. Earlier this year, conservatives flipped several boards in Florida, Ohio, and New Jersey.
The movement is being aided by a growing network of conservative organizations, which have injected millions of dollars into local races to help counter liberal teachers’ union efforts. Groups like the 1776 Project and various chapters of Moms for Liberty have endorsed and aided conservative school-board candidates with the goal of helping them across the finish line. There are also some state-level groups like the Minnesota Parents Alliance that have formed to help candidates who do not toe the teachers’ union and Big Education line. In Texas, a political action committee affiliated with the Christian cell phone company Patriot Mobile has spent about $800,000 this election cycle to boost conservative school-board candidates in that state, and the Texas Republican Party announced last December that it would be investing more in local races to influence municipal and school-board elections.
The Frederick, Md., conservatives are endorsed by the 1776 Project, and have signed the Moms for Liberty pledge to secure parental rights, increase transparency, and defend against government overreach. Rose said she believes her slate has a good chance to win on Tuesday. “Parents got to see inside the circus tent. They got to see what actually happens in there, and they didn’t like what they saw,” she said. “So, I’m very optimistic that people are awake now.”
Ryan Girdusky, a 35-year-old New York-based political consultant and writer, launched the 1776 Project political action committee in May 2021. The group endorses school-board candidates in select races nationwide, and then helps to promote them in their communities through independent expenditures — direct mail, digital ads, social media, streaming platform ads, and text messages. The 1776 Project has raised just over $3 million since April 2021, and spent about $2.8 million, according to Federal Election Commission data.
It’s a small organization — Girdusky, one other full-time employee, and a few contractors. But, he said, they can make a big difference. In most school-district races nationwide, candidates spend $1,000 or less on their campaigns, according to a 2018 National School Board Association survey. So, an endorsement and a little promotional help from a group like the 1776 Project can go a long way.
“We’re the only game in town in most of these places. There is no white knight coming to save conservative school-board candidates,” Girdusky said.
The 1776 Project’s website focuses on the group’s opposition to CRT, though the issues they are engaged in are broader than that. Girdusky is also concerned about the promotion of transgender ideology in schools, progressive efforts to eliminate meritocracy, equitable punishment efforts that treat students differently by race, and the increasing use of online educational programs that often have a left-wing bias. Girdusky said his overarching concern is the politicization of education.
He said he never expected the effort to take off like it did.
“I just figured, ‘Oh, no one is going to care. I’ll give it a shot and maybe it will be a little thing, and that will be that,’” he said. “I never fundraised a dollar in my life. I never thought a year from now I’ll raise $2.5 million and we’ll be off to the races.”
Earlier this year, the 1776 Project endorsed dozens of candidates in Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, and Oklahoma. Those candidates won most of their races. They’re now endorsing candidates in races in Michigan, Arkansas, and Maryland, in addition to Florida and Texas.
Girdusky said they intentionally picked races in smaller and medium-sized districts. That’s where they thought they could make a difference this year, when most of the political attention is focused on high profile races for Congress and governorships.
“We’re competing [for attention] with John Fetterman’s stroke,” Girdusky said. “Next year is different. It’s an off-off-year. There’s no other game in town.”
The 1776 Project’s involvement in what are usually small, local races hasn’t come without controversy. There has been local backlash, for example, in Bentonville, Ark., where the 1776 Project has endorsed five school-board candidates — what it calls a “pro-parent” ticket. It has also released a flyer claiming that “Progressive activists in Bentonville School District want to indoctrinate your children.” Girdusky pointed to a Walmart-affiliated racial-equity training the district sent some employees to in 2020 as evidence.
Now, Girdusky said, “The local press is after us. The school put out a statement, we are trying to cause problems in their town.”
At a recent school-board meeting, about 20 parents, teachers, and elementary-school principals denounced the group’s efforts, claiming that CRT is not part of the district’s curriculum and questioning why a New York-based group is getting involved in local matters, according to a report in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. A column in the Arkansas Times warned Bentonville voters that “Your school board is up for a far-right takeover.” The school district accused the group of making “baseless accusations against our teachers and staff.”
“The current political rhetoric is rooted in fear, deceit and lies,” the district said in a prepared statement. “The teachers in Bentonville Schools are second to none, and we will not allow them to be attacked by outsiders that know nothing of our day-to-day work.”
Candidates who didn’t get the 1776 Project’s endorsement complained to the local Fox affiliate about “dark money” and “national special interest groups . . . pushing their extreme agenda.” Some of those candidates also claimed the conservative mantle and said they oppose CRT, too.
Tim Rosenau, one of the candidates who received the 1776 Project’s endorsement, said he doesn’t believe Bentonville schools are brimming with woke content, though he suspects a little has inevitably seeped in. “It’s not like a rampant, raging problem like you might have in some areas. But it is something that if you’re not proactive about it now, then it will be here,” said Rosenau, whose daughter teaches in the district.
There are five seats open on the seven-member board, and only one incumbent running.
Gail Pianalto, another Bentonville school-board candidate endorsed by the 1776 Project, said the board now is more of a rubber stamp for the current administration, and she wants to change that. Pianalto, a former volunteer advocate for foster kids, said the candidates who received the 1776 endorsement are the “true conservatives” in the race, but she noted they’re not getting any money from the group and insisted they operate independently.
Critics of conservative school-board candidates often accuse them of focusing on national topics manufactured to generate outrage rather than on more parochial, but vital, issues like managing the district’s budget and making personnel decisions. Pianalto said her focus is eliminating distractions — CRT, DEI, gender ideology, explicit books — so the district can focus on academics.
She said opponents of the 1776-endorsed candidates are trying to twist their position to make it look like they’re accusing teachers of indoctrinating students. But that’s not true, she said. Their beef is with the district’s administration, not teachers. “We’re trying to stop the administration from just letting this tide of critical race theory take the schools over,” she said.
While the 1776 Project endorses candidates and helps promote their candidacies, the Minnesota Parents Alliance is taking a slightly different tack. Cristine Trooien helped launch the group this past spring. Her group’s mission is not to run ads for candidates, but to help teach pro-parent candidates how to raise money and run their own campaigns effectively.
Trooien said parents in and around her community — Mound, Minn., just west of Minneapolis — were fired up last year over Covid issues, and several filed to run for the school board to make a change. But there was little coordination and little knowledge of how to run a campaign. They struggled to get their names out, and they struggled to communicate their message. Most of those candidates ended up losing to candidates backed by the teachers’ union.
“The teachers’ union is super organized,” Trooien said, adding that the union’s candidates “had slick signs, and they were doing Facebook ads. It was a very clear distinction.”
Trooien, a stay-at-home mother of young school-aged children, helped launch a political action committee in October 2021 to raise money and provide her preferred candidates some last-minute help. The model worked, she said, so they looked to scale it up. She went to a post-election meeting arranged by the national group Parents Defending Education and then worked with the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank, to launch the nonprofit Minnesota Parents Alliance earlier this year.
“What we really want to focus on is educating candidates on how to do this right and do it themselves,” Trooien said. “They’ve been doing an astonishingly good job. If fundraising is any indicator of the appetite that people have for change this year, these school-board candidates are raising unprecedented levels of money.”
The nonpartisan group’s priorities are strong academics, equal treatment for all students, and parental rights. They’ve endorsed about 125 school-board candidates around Minnesota this year, Trooien said. In addition to training prospective candidates, the group has also published and is promoting a guide to help educate voters across the state about local candidates. Trooien believes the Minnesota Parents Alliance could be a model for groups in other states that want a bigger say in how local schools are run.
While many of their supporters are conservatives, not all are, said Trooien, who voted for Barack Obama. “We have people that really span both sides of the political spectrum,” she said, “because they just have sensed this mission creep that is happening in our schools, and regardless of the political persuasion, they’re not for it.”
Trooien believes part of the problem is generally a radical and homogenous group of superintendents and administrators who lead school districts. Trooien is optimistic that if school boards get flipped all over the country, and if parents continue demanding change, that demand will spur a supply of school leaders who respect and support their values.
“I’m a free-market person. I really believe that if the demand is there, it will be met in some way,” Trooien said. “That change may be pretty quick to come, because I think parents are short on patience with this. And there’s an urgency because kids are in the schools right now, and they don’t get a do-over. Fix it, and fix it fast. This isn’t a ten-year plan for parents.”