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Right-wing “Parents’ Rights” Groups: A Recent History

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

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1Since President Joseph R. Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, right-wing parent organizations have emerged across the United States to protest what they describe as Leftist indoctrination in American classrooms. These troupes purport to be grassroots, independent collections of concerned parents; however, they are funded by powerful conservatives and billionaire donors who have given millions of dollars to create and sustain them (Swenson, 2023). They were conceived in protest of an array of school-related grievances ranging from Covid-19 mask and vaccine mandates to objections over books that represent LGBTQ people and transgender bathroom policies. In these pursuits, the various organizations have drawn national attention for their bombastic tactics, including public mask burnings, threats to school officials and demands for administrative recalls. Ongoing harassment of teachers, principals, and school board members have led to multiple arrests (Feuer, 2021; Mervosh and Heyward, 2021; Sawchuk, 2021).

2This essay will familiarize readers with both the recent and longer history of conservative parent activism surrounding public schools and school boards. It begins with a description of the two ideological strands comprising American conservatism, explains the goals of each as they pertain to public education, and concludes with commentary on the Biden administration’s neutral response to right-wing activism directed at schools.

Conservative Goals to Privatize Public Education

3Following a wave of post-1945 anticommunism, two major ideological camps of the Rightsocial conservatives and free marketeersenjoined to form the modern American conservative movement. Since this time, the two strands have worked closely on their shared goals, including the privatization of public schools. Traditionalist social conservatives have aimed to control curricular content, especially on the topics of history, race, and sex education, in order that those subjects reflect Christian values and promote American exceptionalism. Free market conservatives have a political mission to abolish all forms of public services and redirect them to the private sector. Preference for private schools is thus beneficial to both camps, as private schools offer traditionalists control over curricula and free marketeers access to the multibillion-dollar education market.

4The fusion of the two strands is reflected in the dual strategies the Right employs in its recent crusade against public education (as well as other public sectors). The first approach is separatist, to create and expand private schools, Christian academies, and homeschools. This vision has long been the preference of traditionalist conservatives. It first emerged as a backlash to the teaching of evolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, and then as part of massive resistance to racial integration in the mid-twentieth century through the creation of private segregated academies (Laats, 2015; Weinberg, 2021). Recently, private schools and homeschool cooperatives that did not abide by Covid-19 public safety policies garnered popularity in the wake of pandemic school closures.

5The second prong of the dual strategy is destructionist, to completely abolish public education or to strip it entirely of resources. In doing so, the free marketeers who promote this approach envision that poorly funded public schools will be less attractive to parents than private options (Blakely, 2017). The idea is to offer parents several “choices” in an imaginary “open market” of public and private schools. One way that capitalist conservatives engineer this resource stripping is through vouchers, state tuition coupons that divert public funds into private schools when parents withdraw their children from the public option. Together, the traditionalists’ separatist approach and the free marketeers’ deconstructionist approach work in tandem to villainize and delegitimize public schools. Local school board meetings have historically been the battleground for these partisan struggles.

School Board Battles

6School board meetings have been the usual site of political clashes over education because of their accessibility and proximity to local stakeholders. Meetings are open to the public and are usually held in local town halls, school cafeterias, auditoriums, or other public locations. Quickly organizing a local cadre of demonstrators is a relatively easy task in the age of instant communication and social media-based forums for interest groups to share grievances and ideas. The vast amount of media coverage these protests garner is advantageous, as it is disproportionate to the minimal effort involved in orchestrating them.

7Gaining representation on the school board is also a task achieved with low difficulty. School board memberships are typically won through poorly attended and little publicized elections. Members hardly ever have a background in education or any prior political experience. Campaign expenses can simply be the cost of a filing fee. Board members’ own children may attend private schools rather than the public schools the members regulate (Milbank, 2022). For social conservatives seeking to wrest the nation from progressive cultural advances, protesting at or taking over local school boards sends a clear social message. Their rhetorical strategy has been to claim “parents’ rights” to determine the “appropriateness” of what is taught to children, including children who are not their own.

Parents’ Rights Groups

8Many parents’ rights activists are politically conservative mothers who have campaigned for school board membership representing “all parents”, though their views are inherently a rejection of mainstream politics. As Adam Laats has explained, the politics of conservative fights for parental control are never isolated to one topichistory, race, sex education, or Christianitybut about all these issues at once. By assuming the language of “parents’ rights”, they advocate only for similarly aggrieved parents who perceive that their values have been usurped by mainstream culture (Laats, 2015).

9The most visual of these parents’ rights organizations include No Left Turn in Education, Parents Against Critical Theory, and the nation’s largest organization, Moms for Liberty, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an extremist hate group (SPLC, 2024). Moms for Liberty debuted in January 2021 immediately following President Biden’s inauguration. Because it is strategically organized as a 501(c)4 nonprofit, it is exempt under US tax law from disclosing its fundersthough investigative reporters have tied major donations of $100,000 and greater to right-wing billionaires such as the Publix grocery chain heiress, Julie Fancelli, who has funded other conservative efforts including the January 6, 2021 Stop the Steal Rally. It has also received major gifts from right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Leadership Institute (Swenson, 2023). Regardless of organization, parents’ rights groups generally seek to have an outsized voice in their districts when it comes to matters of curricular control in the form of banning books and courses of study, especially on the topics of race and gender.

10A chief curricular focus of parents’ rights groups has been critical race theory (CRT), an academic legal concept that is not taught in K-12 schools. Right-wing influencer Christopher Rufo was nonetheless able to deliberately incite a moral panic surrounding the phrase in 2021. Rufo’s objective, which he articulated in several public Twitter (now X) posts, was to create a “perfect villain” expression to replace the outdated term “political correctness” (Wallace-Wells, 2021). CRT has since been used by parents’ rights groups as a catch-all accusation condemning honest discussions of race and inequality in America’s past. The history of slavery and other lessons the Right misattributes to the original legal concept are characterized as divisive, anti-American, and racist against whites. CRT is thus a “bogeyman,” which conservatives wield to condemn any teachings that challenge their preferred curricula of American exceptionalism and white benevolence (Waxman, 2021).

11Gender and sexuality are other primary concerns of parents’ rights crusaders. These groups have voiced dissent over students’ ability to be called by their preferred names and pronouns in the classroom, students’ access to restrooms where they feel the safest, and especially transgender students’ rights to participate in school sports. Regarding classroom instruction, they aim to ban books that they describe as pornographic, deviant, and harmful to students; though many parents confess to have not read the children’s literature they seek to ban (Feuer, 2021; Mervosh and Heyward, 2021; Movement Advancement Project, 2024). Parents’ rights groups villainize teachers and administrators as “predators” and “groomers” for supporting inclusive policies that acknowledge and protect LGBTQ students (Natanson and Balingit, 2022).

The Biden Administration’s Approach to Education Policy

12To international observers, it may seem a curiosity that the Biden administration refuses to fight the culture wars that the Right is waging. Indeed, the President has been reserved on the matter of public schools, which are governed at the state and local levels per the 10th Amendment. Long regarded as those of an institutionalist, Biden’s preferences regarding education policy have instead been stated through Congressional addresses. In his annual State of the Union speeches, he has urged legislators to focus on measures that will support student learning: increasing attendance, bolstering tutoring services, expanding wraparound learning programs beyond the school day and into the summer, and passing gun violence prevention legislation.

13Matters of education are beyond the Constitutional authority of the executive branch, and the President has not elected to take them through other means, such as executive orders, which his administration has used sparingly. Nonetheless, ambitious education programs have featured prominently in every presidential administration for the last thirty years, spanning the administrations of Donald Trump (1776 Project), Barack Obama (Race to the Top and Every Student Succeeds Act), George W. Bush (No Child Left Behind), and Bill Clinton (Goals 2000 and GEAR UP). Even President George H. W. Bush, who preceded the four, was known as the Education President for his efforts to create national education standards for public schools (Walsh, 2018). Because Biden had recent experience implementing nationwide education policy as Vice President during the Obama administration (2009-2017), his refusal to take assertive measures is striking in this context.

14As the Biden administration elects not to emphatically protect students’ rights to learn the past, read diverse literature, play sports, and feel safe from violence at school, right-wing billionaires such as Fancelli continue to use their purse strings to influence state legislators and, especially, place conservative activists in strategic local school board positions (Mayer, 2017). The Right’s goals today, as they have been for over a century, are to delegitimize public schools, cast doubt on America’s historic and ongoing racism, and deny full civil rights to LGBTQ people. Both the Right’s agenda and the Democratic Party’s failure to protect students out of a perceived duty to show restraint in governing seem to indicate the fate of American institutions in the very near future.

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Bibliographie

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Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, « Right-wing “Parents’ Rights” Groups: A Recent History »IdeAs [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2024, consulté le 19 février 2025. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/ideas/18078 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/12hs3

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Auteur

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, PhD, is a historian of American education. She is an instructor at the University of New Orleans and an IUPUI-Society for US Intellectual History community scholar. Her recent book is Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
llassabe[at]uno.edu

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