A movement that erupted in response to culture-war provocation is maturing into one focused on general academic excellence.
Monica Colucci is hopeful that starting next summer, parents in Miami will have a new school to choose for their kids: a traditional public school with a classical curriculum.
Colucci, a Miami-Dade school-board member, sees the proposed school as a way to improve the district’s academics while also meeting the demand of her constituents, many of whom have been impressed with a high-performing classical charter school nearby.
Florida is a national leader in school choice, Colucci said, “and if traditional public schools want to compete, they have to offer choices.”
Colucci, a veteran teacher, was elected with the backing of Republican governor Ron DeSantis and is part of the 5–4 conservative majority that flipped the board back in 2022.
In addition to paving the way for the classical school, which opponents deemed “Eurocentric” and “too rigorous,” Miami’s conservative board has also voted to review the district’s social-emotional-learning materials to weed out political agendas and has shown support for allowing volunteer chaplains to work with students in local schools. In September, the board rejected a resolution to make October LGBTQ history month.
“Parents don’t want these culture wars in schools. They just don’t,” Colucci said.
The conservative takeover of Miami’s school board was one of the most prominent victories for the parental-rights and conservative school-board movement that emerged a few years back in response to Covid school closures and what many saw as often blatant attempts to inject far-left race and gender politics into local classrooms.
Energized by frustrated parents, the movement had some early wins, but recent headlines have painted a grimmer picture. A Washington Post headline in November read “Voters drub Moms for Liberty ‘parental rights’ candidates at the ballot.” Others reported that conservatives were licking their wounds after a string of losses in November, which could “mark the end of the anti-woke ‘parents’ rights’ movement.”
“The fever is breaking,” read an Associated Press headline in August after some DeSantis-backed school-board candidates lost their elections in Florida.
But Colucci and other prominent voices in the conservative school-board movement deny that it is running out of gas. “I’d have to disagree with that,” Colucci said.
While there have been some missteps and a couple of frustrating political scandals — a Moms for Liberty co-founder was embroiled last year in a sex scandal, and the head of a Pennsylvania-based parental-rights group was arrested after hosting an underage drinking party and tussling with teens at her home — leaders of the broader movement say that parents are still engaged even if some of the culture-war issues that propelled the movement in its early days have fallen from the headlines in a presidential year.
If anything, they say, their movement is still growing, while also evolving and maturing, with a greater focus now on improving academics.
They’re building infrastructure to help sustain the movement. Some state-based groups have emerged to help counsel conservative school-board members.
Nationally, School Boards for Academic Excellence, an umbrella organization for state-based parental-rights and education groups, launched late last year to help with policy writing, policy analysis, legal help, and training for new school-board members — resources that have historically been provided by left-of-center state school-board associations.
“State school-board associations are absolutely part of the problem,” said David Hoyt, the organization’s executive director.
The SBAE nonprofit, which has 41 member organizations in 37 states, works in two primary policy areas, parental rights and academic excellence, with slightly more emphasis on academics, Hoyt said. He pointed to phonics and what is known as the “science of reading” as an example of the pro-student education ideas that conservatives have embraced.
“The mainstream media is very interested in promoting the narrative that the Right’s engagement in education was a complete failure — everything they tried to do was a disaster,” he said. “There is a ton of success all across the country. But, of course, the mainstream media, you’re never going to hear about that stuff.”
Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-policy think tank, said that in some cases there were unrealistic expectations placed on the conservative school-board movement. The movement isn’t operating in a vacuum. Instead, he said, it’s taking on a long-entrenched left-wing education establishment, including politically powerful teachers’ unions that “absolutely dominate this space when it comes to running candidates for school board and getting them elected.”
“I think you have to expect that when you’re starting this effort . . . the success rate is not going to be super high,” Petrilli said. “But any success is better than nothing.”
When Cristine Trooien formed the Minnesota Parents Alliance in 2022, she didn’t expect to immediately turn the tables on the entrenched Education Minnesota union. She sought instead to play the long game, building and making incremental changes along the way.
About half of the candidates they endorsed that first year won, but only a quarter of their 44 endorsed candidates won in 2023. Trooien said that was due, in part, to most of those races being in the blue Twin Cities metro area, a difficult political environment.
Still, she said she is proud to have helped to establish an ideological split on the Anoka-Hennepin school board, the state’s largest district. Minnesota Parents Alliance candidates also established a majority last year on the school board in Hastings, a Twin Cities exurb.
“When you look at the behemoth that we’re up against,” Trooien said of the union, “it’s remarkable that we’ve made the progress we have over just two-plus years.”
Trooien, who calls herself a “walkaway Democrat,” doesn’t consider the Minnesota Parents Alliance to be explicitly conservative. Rather, she says, it’s a nonpartisan, centrist group focused more on student achievement than on fighting culture wars.
As the parental-rights movement has evolved, the candidates stepping forward to run are stronger and better informed, Trooien said. There are fewer single-issue candidates just looking to, say, root out critical race theory, which proved to be harder than many suspected.
The Minnesota Parents Alliance has endorsed more than 100 candidates this year.
“They know what they’re getting into, and they’re doing it for the right reasons, in the sense that they’re not just there to pick a fight about one issue,” Trooien said. “They’re there to actually drive long-term change.”
Petrilli said that in part because of conservative pushback, school districts don’t seem to be “trying to get away with as much crazy stuff as they were a few years ago.” But making lasting change within massive local organizations like school districts is “really hard.”
Most school-board members are “not going to be dealing with controversial books and topics all that much,” he said. “You’re mostly dealing with budgets and staffing and school closures, and which curriculum to adopt for early reading; important issues, but not necessarily these same hot-button social issues that drew some of these folks in.”
The 1776 Project, a political-action committee that backs conservative school-board candidates in states across the country, highlights those hot-button social issues only in races where they apply, founder Ryan Girdusky said. “I never want to tell a voter that they have an issue with gender or pronouns being changed without their knowledge in a school district if it is not true,” he said.
And, he noted, “if we got every culture-war fight out of the schools, we would still be left with really crappy public schools in most parts of the country.”
In addition to improving math and reading scores, Girdusky said his organization is focused on boosting candidates focused on other chronic issues in schools that parents are concerned about, including social media, cellphones, bullying, and violence.
Girdusky launched the 1776 Project in 2021. The group got involved in 58 races that year, followed by more than 100 races in 2022 and more than 200 last year.
The 1776 Project has backed candidates in only 96 races this year, but it’s not because they’re retreating, Girdusky said. With the presidential race and many key congressional races being contested this year, voters are being inundated with political messaging.
The 1776 Project is holding some of its fire until 2025 “when we are the only players in town,” Girdusky said. “At a certain point, voters are going to get their 700th mailer, their 10,000th text message. What we’re spending, which is significant for a school-board race, is far insignificant compared to the U.S. Senate race or the presidential race. So, the bang for your buck just doesn’t go as far.”
Patriot Mobile Action, the political arm of a Texas-based Christian cellphone company, also aims to re-engage on school-board races next year, said Leigh Wambsganss, the group’s executive director.
Wambsganss helped to launch the parental-rights movement in 2021 as a leader in the conservative school-board movement in Southlake, Texas, near Dallas-Fort Worth. Conservatives fought back after the previous board attempted to inject CRT-inspired racial politics into the district. In 2022, eleven candidates backed by Patriot Mobile Action swept their races and won control of four school boards in Republican-heavy Tarrant County.
Patriot Mobile Action endorsed four candidates in two districts earlier this year and has now turned its attention to helping Republicans win statewide races in November.
“We’re fighting on all fronts to keep Texas red, and that’s from the schoolhouse to the governor’s mansion,” Wambsganss said. She added that “we can never stop focusing on the school-board races. The second we do, even in conservative areas, the Left takes over. They never stop, so we can never stop.”
While some in the conservative school-board movement have attempted to de-emphasize culture-war fights, Patriot Mobile Action has not. Wambsganss maintains that “CRT is alive and well in Texas” and the Black Lives Matter movement, “while they’ve been outed for the fakes that they are, they’re still very active behind the scenes.”
Tiffany Justice, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, said that suggestions that support for her organization is collapsing is “wishful thinking on the part of the mainstream media,” that believe “they can will our demise into existence.”
She said Moms for Liberty is “persevering through all of the noise” around the organization. Moms for Liberty chapters have endorsed more than 50 candidates in upcoming races in at least ten states. Justice said their mission is to build the capacity of their local chapters.
“We’re going to continue to fight to make education great again in America,” she said.
Rather than collapsing, Justice said Moms for Liberty’s membership numbers have “exploded” since a federal court recently issued a preliminary injunction in the group’s favor. In that case, a federal judge in Kansas barred the Department of Education from enforcing the Biden administration’s new Title IX rewrite in schools attended by children from families aligned with Moms for Liberty and two other conservative organizations.
The judge allowed Moms for Liberty to recruit new members to add to the list of schools.
“We’re expanding, and new people are joining every day,” Justice said.
Craig DiSesa, president of the Virginia-based Middle Resolution, which backs free-market-oriented candidates up and down the ballot, said he believes the conservative school-board movement has evolved into a more mature and more serious effort. While the temperature has been turned down in many school-board meetings, parents are still energized and engaged on school issues, he said.
Middle Resolution launched in 2009, focused initially on state house and senate races. The group first got involved in school-board races in 2022, as the parental-rights movement was gaining steam, DiSesa said. The group has served as proxy campaign managers and consultants for newbie school-board candidates who are often lacking in resources.
“One of the things we focus on when we interview candidates is what are your ideas for improving the performance of the kids in the schools? What are your ideas for helping kids that live in marginalized communities? We talk a lot about school choice in our interviews, because that’s a huge focus of ours,” he said.
Leaders of other parental-rights groups who spoke with National Review also said they were supportive of school choice, a longtime priority for conservatives. But they said it’s important for conservatives to also seek to improve the traditional public-school system, which will likely continue to educate the vast majority of American students.
“I think every parent should have a big menu of options to pick from. I think that makes everybody better,” said Trooien with the Minnesota Parents Alliance. “But in states where universal choice has been enacted, you still have like 85 percent of families that access public education.”
“We can’t give up on that,” she said. “It’s almost too big to fail. I don’t want it to fail.”