The parental-rights movement had a good showing last week, considering the power of the opposition, organizers told NR.
When Tom Payne decided to run for a seat on the school board in Berrien County, Mich., his primary goal was to ensure that the local schools were focused above all else on providing every student in the district with a top-notch education.
Like many conservatives, Payne had grown frustrated that schools across the country were increasingly in the thrall of left-wing social-justice activists who used classrooms to push divisive dogma. Payne wasn’t sure that critical race theory and radical gender ideology had made their way inside the local Brandywine schools, but he wanted to make sure they never did.
Last week, Payne and three other conservatives running together on the We the Parents slate won school-board races in the southwest-Michigan district, knocking off three incumbents and taking control of the Brandywine board. Payne said they want to use their new majority to build up the district’s trades programs, increase parental involvement, review and rethink some parts of the district’s curriculum, establish a new tutoring program, and consider classroom cameras.
“Every decision that we’re going to make, every program we implement, every piece of guidance that we give to the superintendent, the focus is going to be student-centric, what’s in the best interest of the kids,” Payne told National Review.
But while Payne’s slate of candidates swept their races, most other We the Parents candidates running for seats on other local school boards did not. In addition to the four Brandywine winners, the grassroots We the People group ran 21 other candidates for seats on ten other school boards. Only one other We the People candidate, an incumbent, won last week.
Payne, a sales director for an energy company who had no professional experience in schools, said he’s not sure why his slate succeeded while other conservative candidates didn’t, even in a Republican-leaning county that voted for Tudor Dixon for governor.
“I guess that’s yet to be analyzed,” Payne said. “I think the most important thing that we did was just going door to door and trying to talk to as many people as we could.”
As in Michigan, conservative groups attempting to win seats on school boards around the country saw some mixed results last week.
In Florida, where there was a red wave — and where Governor Ron DeSantis endorsed in some school-board races — conservatives won key seats on the school board in St. Petersburg, as well as on school boards in Naples, Fort Myers, and in Volusia, Indian River, and Flagler counties. Earlier this year, conservatives flipped boards in the Miami, Jacksonville, and Sarasota areas.
Candidates endorsed by the conservative Moms for Liberty group flipped several school boards in South Carolina, North Carolina, Indiana, and New Jersey.
But conservatives did not dominate every race. Moms for Liberty endorsed more than 270 candidates last week — and more than 500 over the last year — and about half of them won, said Tiffany Justice, the group’s co-founder. About 50 of the 119 candidates endorsed by the Minnesota Parents Alliance won their races, the group announced. The conservative 1776 Project PAC backed the Brandywine slate that won, but also several other candidates who lost races in Michigan. The group backed a slate of candidates that flipped a school board in Carroll County, Md., but only one of its three endorsed candidates in Frederick, Md., won, and its slate of endorsed candidates in Benton, Ark., all lost. About a third of the 1776 Project’s endorsed candidates won on Tuesday, down from about 75 percent in previous races.
Mainstream media outlets have attempted to paint Tuesday’s results as a step back for the conservative school-board movement. An Associated Press headline on Monday declared, “School board parental rights push falters.” A Washington Post headline last week read, “School culture war campaigns fall flat in some tight races.”
But movement leaders told National Review they were not disappointed by last week’s results.
“For us, when everybody was kind of sad on Wednesday as far as conservative wins were concerned, we were thrilled,” said Moms for Liberty co-founder Justice. She noted that most of the candidates they supported had never run for any political office before, and in many cases they were facing off against incumbents with teachers’-union backing and the money that comes with it. To expect newbie candidates to simply steamroll across the country despite those headwinds was not realistic.
“This is very much David versus Goliath,” said Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, a school watchdog group. “For so many of these parent activists, this is their first rodeo. These are people who were not politically active three years ago. The fact that so many candidates ran for the first time, won, even threw their hat in the arena, I think that’s exciting and cool.”
Cristine Trooien, co-founder of the nonpartisan Minnesota Parents Alliance, said she, too, was “thrilled” with the performance of the candidates they backed. “When you look at the fact that we’ve only been in existence for probably at the time of the election less than nine months, I feel like we’ve accomplished an incredible amount of progress in that time,” she said. The Minnesota teachers’ union, she noted, claims to win up to 90 percent of the races it gets involved in. “We put a significant ding in their ability to get their candidates elected,” she said.
Leaders of the parents’-rights movement said the wins they’ve chalked up to date can serve as building blocks for continued growth. They’re learning on the fly how to pick strong candidates, and how to best train and support them. There have been some hard lessons along the way.
“This infrastructure is kind of being built out before our eyes,” Neily said. “Right now, this is kind of cobbled together with bubble gum and duct tape.”
Tracking the overall success of the conservative school-board movement is hard, in part because there are so many districts — about 13,800 in the country, according to Ballotpedia — and because school board races are typically nonpartisan.
Doug Kronaizl is part of a team analyzing school-board races for Ballotpedia. They’ve been tracking about 1,800 races nationwide where divisive issues around race, sex and gender, and Covid-19 came up. An early analysis of last week’s results, looking at about 20 percent of the races, found that candidates who opposed left-wing culture-war issues won about 36 percent of the time, compared to a win rate of about 28 percent for candidates who clearly supported those issues. The analysts couldn’t identify a candidate’s stance about a third of the time.
“It does look like those candidates in the opposing camp, based on these preliminary results, are doing better than we’ve seen them do in previous election cycles,” Kronaizl said.
But he added, one of the primary findings of their analysis is that candidates are increasingly using language that makes it hard to identify where they stand on hot-button issues.
“That to me is very telling. One thing we’ve seen over the past year are candidates becoming a lot less explicit in what they say,” Kronaizl said. “That’s a deliberate thing that candidates choose to do, to be vague when they’re talking about these things.”
For Justice, one of the key learnings over the last couple of years is the importance of growing their on-the-ground infrastructure. Moms for Liberty has launched local chapters across the country, and those chapters and their leaders play an important role in finding good candidates, and then supporting them during and after their campaigns.
“Without the chapter on the ground, you don’t get the depth of understanding of the candidate and what they stand for,” Justice said. Once in office, she said, conservative school-board members need people paying attention, bringing forward good policies, and backing them. “Once you get elected,” she said, “you need an army behind you. You can’t do this alone.”
Nancy Allen, a conservative candidate who appears to have won a seat on the Frederick County, Md., school board, said she panicked a little when the other two conservatives she ran with lost last week. The group, which started as a slate of four, had hoped to flip the board, but that didn’t happen. It hit Allen over the weekend that “it was me and me alone,” she said. “I’m going to be the little black sheep in the middle of the family reunion.
“Then I recognized, I still have an opportunity to represent parents and teachers who are aligned with our position and our platform,” Allen said. “I want to move forward, and I want to be that representative for them. There needs to be balance. There needs to be a voice. And if I am the continuous ‘No’ vote for things that I feel are not in the best interest of the community, the students, and the teachers, as well what I hear the parents opposing, then so be it. That’s what it will be.”
Over the last couple of years, the conservative school-board movement has been energized by Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates, and by divisive culture-war battles over race, gender ideology, and books with explicit content. Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, said those issues may be salient in more conservative parts of the country but are probably less so in blue and purple areas.
“There is no doubt there are parents out there that are very angry about the gender-identity stuff, or critical race theory, or Covid school shutdowns,” he said. “But I think what we saw the other day, and what we’ve seen in polling, is, once you talk to the more median voter and people more in the middle, independents, it doesn’t resonate the same way.”
Ryan Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, told the AP that in hindsight, parental-rights activists probably should have had a stronger emphasis on academic issues.
“The messaging needs to be more positive,” he said. “Sometimes you lose moderate voters because you’re too hyperbolic, and you’re not speaking truth to something very local to them.”
Trooien, with Minnesota Parents Alliance, said those hot-button issues are often the opening to increase parental involvement, but there can also be a temptation then to make those issues the primary focus of a school-board campaign.
“When you get very narrow in your focus,” Trooien said, “I think that it is reasonable for voters to be concerned that you don’t also have the ability to address what might be budget issues. There are lots of levy-type things that are going to be coming down the pike for a lot of these districts. So, we want to make sure that a lot of these candidates going forward are well-trained on those issues, and well-versed on those issues, so when they are on the campaign trail, they can speak to them.”
Going forward, Moms for Liberty’s two primary focuses will be parental rights and student achievement, Justice said. “We are very focused on the fact that we are paying taxes for horrible outcomes,” she said.
Leaders of the parental-rights movement told National Review that they’ll be spending the coming months identifying and training strong candidates for school-board races in 2023, and then getting them out campaigning and connecting with voters early. To help build a bench, they’re urging parents to show up, and to just get involved.
“Volunteer for committees,” Neily said. “You don’t have to run for school board, but go volunteer to be on your junior high’s library board or something. Get the work experience.”
Justice agreed that parent involvement in local schools is critical.
“I encourage every parent in America, go to your school district and ask them, ‘What committees currently exist that I could be a part of?’” she said. “If there’s an area that you have concerns about, you should go to the district and ask them if they’d consider putting together a work committee to discuss this issue.”
Justice said she is confident the parental-rights movement will continue to grow into a powerful political force, because the focus is more than money and taxes.
“This is a heart issue we’re dealing with,” she said. “We’re talking about people’s children.”