It's a standard Hollywood script. Spur your protagonist to action by threatening their kids. Poke their lizard brain paternal instinct and watch them go full Liam Neeson in
Taken. Now take that protective predisposition and weaponise it for political purposes, stoking fear that your child is being discriminated against, disrespected, brainwashed and shamed. Welcome to American politics in 2022, where the new frontlines in the culture wars are elementary school classrooms and local school board meetings.
My Scottish schooling in the 1970s and 80s was all standardised curricula and conveyor belt progression through O-Grades and Highers. In contrast, American education has always been far more localised, with only a light overlay of standardised testing for college admissions. High-quality public education was a key reason my family moved to the Connecticut suburbs nearly 20 years ago. Rather than a centralised educational bureaucracy, we liked the autonomous school districts funded by local property taxes that were responsive to local needs and accountable to locally elected and apolitical boards of education. Most of that preceding sentence is still true, apart from the apolitical part.
For more than a decade, Republicans have executed a bottom-up electoral strategy focused on winning state legislatures so that they then control congressional redistricting. Since Trump's defeat in 2020, that hyper-local strategy has broadened to include local election officials to ensure that 'Big Lie' loyalists are in positions of power when ballots are counted. Pre-pandemic, school boards were a political backwater, but Covid changed all that, as reopening plans, mask mandates and vaccination policy caused town hall meetings to increasingly mirror the polarised national debate.
Seeing an opportunity, Republicans have doubled down on education as a national issue for the first time in decades. The ideological shock troops of this movement are groups like Moms for Liberty (MfL), founded by three Florida Republicans in January 2021, which now boasts over 70,000 members in 33 states. It claims to be a grassroots movement of concerned parents aiming to shape local education policy and hold elected officials accountable.
However, MfL also has three Federal super PAC political fundraising entities attached to it. As a non-profit, it doesn't need to disclose its backers, but the rapid growth of the movement appears to have been funded, at least in part, by big money national donors rather than Saturday morning bake sales. As one of the founders made clear on conservative talk radio, while the official non-partisan mission of the group is 'educating and uniting moms', the real agenda is to push back against the 'leftist, liberal social agenda' being foisted on their kids.
While Covid restrictions have been a catalyst, MfL's 'educating and uniting' agenda includes a laundry list of standard right-wing causes, from pushing back on transgender rights to advocating for armed teachers in response to school shootings. It surely isn't a coincidence that outside of Florida the highest concentrations of chapters are in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina that will be critical in the 2024 Presidential race.
A clear harbinger of the nationalisation of the education debate was last autumn's gubernatorial race in Virginia. Republican Glenn Youngkin won easily, despite Biden carrying Virginia by 10% only a year earlier. Youngkin majored on education, hammering away not only at Covid restrictions but also continually invoking the mythical bogeyman of 'Critical Race Theory' and the fear that white kids are being taught to be ashamed of their privilege and forced to understand the world through a lens of enduring structural racism.
Youngkin also helped demonise the
New York Times '1619 Project' – an effort to reframe America's founding through the lens of slavery – making it a right-wing cause célèbre and getting it banned in schools in many Republican-controlled states before it was even published.
The Democratic candidate for Governor, Terry McAuliffe, helpfully self-immolated by saying in a debate: 'I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach'. A position that might still be relatively uncontroversial in Scotland, but which was incendiary in Virginia, playing squarely into the narrative that socialist teachers are going to brainwash your kids with left-wing propaganda.
Democratic apologists blamed the Virginia loss on Youngkin dog-whistling white nationalists and resurrecting the state's divisive racist past. The author of the 1619 Project claimed that Youngkin ran a 'right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated'. Did Youngkin get support from some white nationalists? I'm sure he did, but they were always going to vote Republican and certainly didn't swing the election his way. If you get beyond the alarmist hyperbole, a far subtler and more dangerous story emerges not only for American Democrats, but also for any other progressive government looking to shape and execute education policy.
Traditional conservatism is the belief that problems are best solved bottom-up through cautious and consensual change, not through top-down paternalism. Conservatives believe that the atomic units of society are families, community groups, parish councils and schools boards, and that these groups are far better placed to make local decisions than a centralised state working from some utopian template. When you combine that strain of conservatism with parents' natural aversion to having their kids' education sacrificed for some higher societal goal, it's not surprising that education becomes a powerful right-wing issue.
Mirroring much of Biden's agenda in his first year in office, progressives in education have tended to swing for the fences, trying to enact change through home runs rather than hitting incremental singles and doubles. The real story of education in Virginia is not white nationalism, but instead how many well-intentioned progressive initiatives have backfired in spectacular fashion, turning natural Democrats into Republicans. The poster child for these self-inflicted political wounds is affluent Loudon County in the Washington DC suburbs.
Youngkin won Loudon County with a 15-point increase over Trump's 2020 vote, and a key reason was the slow-moving train wreck that was the Loudon County school board's
Action Plan to Eliminate Systemic Racism. Loudon County certainly has a long history of racism, including a decade-long battle to resist school de-segregation in the 1950s, but the school board's commendable commitment to address educational inequality quickly escalated into an orgy of self-flagellation and ultimately a case study in how not to tackle racism in schools.
The Loudon County plan reinforced nearly every Fox News caricature of these types of 'equality diversity and inclusion' initiatives, including calling for students of colour to become Stasi-like informants on teachers and classmates. It also proposed the complete elimination of all testing – both standardised and locally administered – on the basis that all testing is racially biased. Anticipating pushback, the plan tried to limit 1st Amendment protected free speech by prohibiting school employees from making 'comments that are not in alignment with action-oriented equity practices'. A PE teacher who was 'misaligned' was promptly suspended for questioning a directive to use only non-gendered pronouns, although he was later re-instated by the Virginia Supreme Court.
To further emphasise the Soviet-style nature of a plan that brooked no dissent, members of the school board nomenklatura started a closed Facebook group in which they identified problematic parents whose views needed to be suppressed. One post suggested keeping a particular parent on the 'enemies list' for the sin of being 'very carefully neutral' and hence inherently suspect on racial issues.
The
Action Plan focused almost exclusively on issues affecting black and Hispanic students and completely ignored the substantial minority in the county schools who were the kids of Asian immigrants; kids who consistently did far better academically than the 'privileged' white kids. When soft spoken Indian software engineers in pressed shirts and pocket protectors went to the podium at school board meetings to complain, these mild-mannered concerned parents found themselves being denounced as enablers of systemic racism.
On election day it wasn't 'white rage' that made the difference in Loudon County, but instead broader 'parental rage'. Exit polls showed that droves of Asian-American parents voted Republican because they had watched Democrats gut a successful 'gifted and talented' programme because it was deemed discriminatory, even although 70% of the enrolled kids were minority Asians. These parents watched in horror as their kids' education was treated as collateral damage in a holy war to expunge Loudon's stain of slavery. Just as we were attracted to Connecticut by the quality of the public schools, many Asian immigrants viewed getting their kids educated in Loudon and neighbouring Fairfax county as a big leg up. Instead, they found themselves with a front row seat to what many considered gross educational malpractice in the name of greater equality.
While Loudon is an extreme example, well-intentioned efforts to address discrimination in America's schools are now electoral catnip for Republicans. We're currently watching the same movie play out in my hometown of Darien. While the quality of the public education system is exceptional, Darien has a well-documented history of anti-Semitism and is overwhelmingly white, so raising awareness of diversity and inclusion shouldn't be a controversial topic. But in a spectacular own goal, the Darien school administrators have engaged a consultant who is laughably easy to characterise as a left-wing kook given that he published a blog post with the title
Grading is Capitalist, Racist, and Exploitative. In a town full of high-achieving Wall Street bankers, that's a big red rag to a bunch of meritocratic bulls.
The danger for Democrats in America – and possibly the SNP in Scotland – is that when it comes to education most parents are inherently conservative. They believe in meritocracy and are broadly sympathetic to the idea of levelling the playing field, but they don't want their children being treated as pawns in a political movement. Most of the 'troublemakers' at the school board meetings in Loudon County weren't Trumpian deplorables, but instead college-educated, affluent, and genuinely concerned parents with a legitimate difference of opinion about how their kids should be educated. Striving to have their kids live the American Dream and get into elite universities, they were more than a little shocked to see their commitment to academic excellence being equated to eugenics. Not surprisingly, they also took it personally when their unwillingness to genuflect before a truly radical EDI agenda got them labelled as neo-Confederate segregationists.
That type of overreach is why MfL is thriving and the broader Republican Party is focused on education as a winning national theme. Whether it is Chicago teachers defying the advice of the city's own scientists and refusing to return to in-person teaching, or anti-racism efforts morphing into 'burn the witch' inquisitions, the next electoral cycle could see the Virginia story writ large across America as Republicans make the case that your child's education is no longer safe in the hands of Democrats.
Alan McIntyre is a Trustee and Patron of the Institute of Contemporary Scotland
