People don’t like wearing masks. Or they don’t want to get vaccinated against COVID-19. They’re mad about being holed up at home with their kids, and they’re nervous about the national discussion of race relations.
Those are conflicts that affect policy discussions and campaigns at the national and state level. But mostly conservative activists are now taking the effort way down the ticket, targeting school board members and trying to replace the largely volunteer panels with people more sympathetic to their views, experts say.
Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan site that tracks elections and campaigns, reports that recall efforts to oust local school board members have spiked dramatically, going from 29 efforts to 54 this year so far. The current tally affects 135 officials, by Ballotpedia’s count.
“I’ve been a school board member for 21 years. It’s nothing like we’ve ever seen before,” says Frank Bednard, targeted for recall in the Chippewa Valley school district in suburban Detroit. The effort – which faltered as activists found it hard to collect signatures – was a “drive-by” attack coordinated, Bednard says, by “professional” protesters who didn’t even have kids in the Chippewa Valley schools.
It started with parents upset over the discussion to have students learn from home or in a hybrid plan, Bednard says, but now the board members are getting heat from “anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers” as schools prepare for full reopening. The battle over critical race theory “has already started,” he said, and it’s very stressful for the unpaid school board members who just want to make sure kids have safe schools and good educations.
“None of us ever signed up for any of this stuff,” Bednard adds.
School boards are typically nonpartisan, hyper-local elections that deal very specifically with education issues and school budgets. But activists – overwhelmingly on the right – have started targeting school boards in an effort to take a mask- and vaccine-skeptical agenda down to a very local level.
Recall efforts – nearly two-thirds of which were rooted in pandemic-related issues – were started this year in a wide swath of states, Ballotpedia reports, with efforts underway or resolved in Maine, Virginia, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Washington state and California. The Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas this weekend hosted a panel discussion entitled “Activism Applied: How to Save Your School Board.”
The panelists decried critical race theory, which one of the group, Chinese-born Virginia parent Xi Van Fleet, compared to the Maoist Cultural Revolution. Van Fleet and others urged CPAC attendees to organize against local school boards they said were indeed pushing for curricula on race.
“We’re going to take our army of ‘Minute Moms,’ and we’re going to go across the country and fight these battles,” Ian Prior, founder of the group Fight for Schools, said. Prior is seeking to recall Loudoun County, Virginia school board members he said were engaged in a “secret” Facebook page to promote critical race theory in the county’s schools.
Panelists recommended that people do open records requests to see if school boards were paying consultants for critical race theory or diversity, equity and inclusion training, and to speak against such training at school board meetings. “All of these are buzzwords that have roots in critical race theory,” said Hannah Smith, a lawyer who won a Texas school board seat in May by running on an “anti-woke” platform.
Not only are school board members being targeted for recall, but many are being harassed in person and online or even threatened, says Chip Slaven, chief advocacy officer for the National School Boards Association. The pushback comes as districts struggle with how to reopen schools safely and how to deal with complaints – based on reality or not – that children are being taught about racial discrimination in a way that upsets some white parents.
“You have to take a step back (and ask), what are we doing here?” Slaven says. “At a time when we need to be coming together, why are we arguing about practical things (such as masking) in some cases, and not practical things, like critical race theory.” The latter, he says, “is not even happening in most of schools” but is being used by people with a political agenda.
The uptick in school board recalls comes after a tumultuous year in K-12 education, which saw the country’s entire public education system shutter at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Only in the last four months did the majority of students return to in-person learning, and most students closed out the 2020-21 school year with at least some virtual learning.
The school reopening debate was one of the most politically toxic to spill out of the pandemic, with a school’s ability to return to in-person learning dependent on COVID-19 transmission rates in the local community, the ventilation and facilities of school houses themselves, the space available for social distancing, the resources available to purchase masks, hand sanitizer and other personal protective equipment, and the ability to hire additional staff and reconfigure bus routes.
Without a centralized plan for how to safely reopen and when, as well as a lack of a universal data system for tracking cases and reopening efforts, each state and school district was forced to go it alone – meaning whether schools remained closed or reopened often had more to do with the flavor of politics in the community than the science.
In fact, schools in Republican-led states offered in-person learning at nearly twice the rate as those in Democratic-held states, according to an analysis of reopening data by the nonprofit education news website The 74, amounting to 66 additional days of school.
Meanwhile, conservatives have taken national social issues – transgender rights and racial justice – to the local school board level. Parents and residents have been swarming into once-sleepy school board meetings, holding signs, yelling through loudspeakers and breaking into impromptu renditions of the national anthem.
Editorial Cartoons on Education
A new political action committee, the 1776 Project PAC, was founded last month to support local school board candidates who oppose critical race theory. It’s raised more than $135,000 in a month.
Those efforts are a way to win back some of the suburban voters former President Donald Trump lost to President Joe Biden last year, a trend that proved critical in securing Biden’s win.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, blasted that strategy in a recent speech.
“Culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as critical race theory, to try to make it toxic. They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history,” Weingarten said in a speech at the union’s biennial professional development conference in Washington.
“This harms students. These culture warriors want to deprive students of a robust understanding of our common history. This will put students at a disadvantage in life by knocking a big hole in their understanding of this country and the world.”
Slaven notes that the school board recalls actually represent a tiny portion of the nation’s thousands of school districts and adds that the historically high-pressure situation in American now is to blame.
“It’s the pandemic, it’s the heated political climate, and it’s the general tough situation we’re in,” Slaven says. “People are taking advantage of that. But we need a change agent. We don’t need a chaos agent.”
