Since 2021, public education in the United States has come under renewed attack from the Far Right, which took advantage[1] of the COVID-19 pandemic’s interruption of public education to promote school privatization and push public school alternatives.[2] Far-right political operatives have also fueled “culture war” issues in schools. Groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, funded by ultra wealthy privatizers, have banned books,[3] assailed inclusive policies and curriculum,[4] and demonized teachers.[5]
Such efforts also include attacking curricula and protections for marginalized communities, especially transgender students and Black communities, to bolster White suburban voter turnout.[6] Notably, dark money groups funded by donors like Charles Koch push this agenda by drawing on tools of White supremacy that have been used to attack public schools ever since Brown v. Board of Education ruled against school segregation in 1954.[7] This playbook[8] helped elect and reelect Republican governors in Virginia and Florida[9] in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Although they lost[10] school board races across the country in 2023, public schools remain squarely in the Far Right’s crosshairs.
Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider’s latest book, The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual (The New Press, 2024), explains how public school advocates across the political spectrum can push back on such attacks. The book makes clear that opposition to public schools is not about the slogans trotted out by dark money groups promoting their right-wing billionaire donors’ agenda. Rather, a few loud and well-resourced agitators seek to silence the majority of parents and students who believe in an inclusive and well-funded education system for all.
Berkshire sat down with PRA to discuss how right-wing groups are undermining public education and our democracy, and the importance of highlighting how diverse and equitable schools benefit everyone—regardless of political persuasion.
PRA: You mention in the introduction to The Education Wars that attacks on public schools in this country are as old as public schools themselves. What are some age-old tactics used against public schools?
Berkshire: What is immediately apparent in the history told in the book is that the tactics haven’t changed. We recount a story about Kanawha County, West Virginia, in the 1970s. People will instantly recognize the kind of school board battle that was playing out. The school had recently adopted a new textbook series, and conservative parents were concerned that it was indoctrinating kids into feminism, multiculturalism, and secular humanism. Things got really nasty. Buildings were bombed. Molotov cocktails were thrown. At the time, a brand-new conservative think tank called the Heritage Foundation rushed to the scene because they saw an opportunity to convince conservative parents to pull their kids out of these schools. They used newsletters to warn parents about the “isms” that kids were [supposedly] being taught—atheism, cannibalism—to try to get them out of the schools.
In the short term, it was successful. But in the medium term, they couldn’t convince many people to flee public schools. They’re doing exactly the same thing now. It’s why my email inbox fills up with the direst warnings about things that are supposedly happening: “Oppression Olympics,” boys in girls’ locker rooms. And it’s as if to say: You won’t believe what’s happening. The best thing you can do is pull your kids out and go to a micro school, homeschool, or classical Christian academy.
Press, 2024)
The book touches upon the work of the courts at a time when the corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court by billionaires and special-interest groups is often in the news. What role are the courts playing or what role do far-right interests hope the courts will play in undermining schools?
It’s really interesting what an old story this is as well. We think of this as recent—that there was a steady march of progress and then the bad guys got on the Court. But in the Nixon era [after he filled not one, but four vacancies on the Supreme Court], the brakes were being applied to any vision of public education as a real driver of equality. There were two key cases. The Rodriguez case involved school funding.[11] In the Milliken v. Bradley case about a plan to desegregate public schools, the Court decided against integrating urban communities and the surrounding suburbs.[12] Since then, the courts have steadily eroded policies promoting equity in public schools. More recently, the energy is on an expansive definition of “religious freedom.” In one decision after another, the courts have said that the states must fund religious schools or they’re violating religious freedom. They’re also using this expansive definition of religious freedom to undercut vast swaths of civil rights law and employment protections.
Stories about these court decisions are written in a technical way that makes it hard to understand why the decisions are such a big deal. But they are such an important part of the plan [to undermine and defund public schools].
Your book argues that recent attacks on public education are also unique. Could you talk about what’s new and why it’s of concern?
Many of these policy ideas have been around for a long time and are being repackaged. For example, “education savings accounts” are just newfangled school vouchers. [These privatization schemes have] been around since the 1950s.
But this is the first time that we’ve seen public education in the crosshairs to this extent. If you look at these states—the 11 states that have enacted or expanded sweeping school voucher programs—you can see their budget trajectory.
Take a state like Arizona. Their private school voucher program[13] is already costing taxpayers up to $1 billion.[14] At the same time, Arizona and other states have passed huge tax cuts for their wealthiest residents. In the next few years, the funds that pay for public education will dry up. Since these states are picking up the tab for affluent parents who already send their kids to private schools—usually religious schools—those programs come with a built-in army of lobbyists. The policy elites and legislators who have enacted these programs know that it will be nearly impossible to take away a new entitlement from these parents who will lobby and say “cut the public schools.”
These programs have become so big and expensive that it’s not only public education funding that is imperiled. Arizona had to eliminate more than $300 million of investment in water infrastructure because of [school vouchers] funding the privately-administered education of wealthy students. The same dynamic is playing out in one state after another.
With this book, you’re going on what you described to me as an “organizing tour.” What are some new forms of fighting back against these attacks on our schools?
One example is so recent that it’s not in the book. As of late July, people in Nebraska succeeded in forcing a question about whether they are going to be funding private religious education onto the November ballot. This was amazing because state legislators had gone to almost comical lengths to try to keep people from being able to vote on this. The opponents of school vouchers had already brought one question to the ballot, only to have legislators decide to get rid of the original law and pass a new one to make the ballot question irrelevant. Well, it turns out that people feeling like they were being kept from expressing an opinion may have been an even more powerful motivator than the vouchers. In just 67 days, they collected far more than the number of signatures needed, including from a significant percentage of people living in rural areas. To me, that is the most hopeful part of this. At a time when our rural-urban divide is so deep and is being used to justify and exacerbate backlash politics, there is resistance to school vouchers in rural communities.
How do you see this fight to defend public education intersecting with or diverging from broader efforts to oppose the Far Right?
A growing number of people are involved in both fights, partly because the Far Right’s attention is directed at public schools. As we lay out in the book, this can’t be a partisan fight. We must somehow combat the Far Right’s efforts while going to great lengths to avoid branding public education as the next “blue” cause. Because if that happens, we’re sunk.
Those of us who are public education advocates are desperately trying to understand the Right. But there’s a delicate balance between understanding the Right and quickly feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of money and number of groups. Yesterday, I read a New Yorker profile of some group I had barely heard of, and its whole point is basically: You think Project 2025 is bad, just wait. It’s easy to connect so many dots that you end up feeling overwhelmed. Charting the Right’s attacks without leading us to despair is where the work of groups like PRA can be really helpful.
Endnotes
[1] Alex DiBranco, “Conservative, Christian, Corporate: COVID-19 Opportunism and Betsy DeVos’s Education Agenda,” Political Research Associates, October 27, 2020, https://politicalresearch.org/2020/10/27/conservative-christian-corporate.
[2] Heron Greenesmith, “Homeschooling During COVID-19? Be Aware of Outreach by Evangelical Homeschooling Organizations,” Political Research Associates, April 1, 2020, https://politicalresearch.org/2020/04/01/homeschooling-during-covid-19.
[3] “Spineless Shelves: Two Years of Book Banning,” PEN America, accessed September 4, 2024, https://pen.org/spineless-shelves/.
[4] Lisa Graves and Alyssa Bowen, “Tax Docs Link Right-Wing ‘Parents Group’ to Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Network,” Truthout, February 9, 2023, https://truthout.org/articles/tax-docs-link-right-wing-parents-group-to-leonard-leos-dark-money-network/.
[5] Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, “In a Deep Red Florida County, A Student-Teacher Revolt Shames the Right,” The Washington Post, June 1, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/01/hernando-county-ron-desantis-book-bans-democratic-governors/.
[6] Amelia Nierenberg, “The Conservative School Board Strategy,” The New York Times, October 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/us/the-conservative-school-board-strategy.html.
[7] Jasmine Banks, “Sowing the Seeds of White Supremacy Through Education,” Political Research Associates, October 21, 2024, https://politicalresearch.org/2021/10/21/sowing-seeds-white-supremacy-through-education.
[8] “The Disinformation Playbook Targeting Our Public Schools and Elections,” True North Research, last updated September 14, 2022, https://truenorthresearch.org/2022/09/dark-money-buys-school-board-races-for-gop-2022/.
[9] Alyssa Bowen, “Dark Money School Groups Are Trying to Buy the Midterm Elections for the GOP,” Truthout, September 15, 2022, https://truthout.org/articles/dark-money-school-groups-are-trying-to-buy-the-midterm-elections-for-the-gop/.
[10] Jarod Facundo, “Right-Wing School Board Groups Posted Losses at the Ballot Boxes,” The American Prospect, November 17, 2023, https://prospect.org/education/23-11-17-right-wing-school-board-groups-losses/.
[11] In Rodriguez v San Antonio Independent School District, the U.S. Supreme Court decided against the Rodriguez family who had sued the state of Texas for grossly underfunding a low-income, predominantly Mexican American school district when compared to neighboring, mostly white school districts. This was a major loss for civil rights groups who sought equal funding for schools, not based largely on property taxes, a model disproportionately benefiting the education of whiter and wealthier districts. For more, see Matt Barnum, “The Racist Idea that Changed American Education,” Chalkbeat, February 22, 2023, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23584874/public-school-funding-supreme-court/.
[12] In the Milliken case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state and city officials not be found responsible for racist housing practices that trapped Black families in poor, segregated school districts, and therefore, they could not be forced to help desegregate Detroit. Thurgood Marshall called this “a giant step backwards” from Brown, as it made school district borders a tool for segregation. See Elissa Nadworny and Cory Turner, “This Supreme Court Case Made School District Lines a Tool for Segregation,” NPR, July 25, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/07/25/739493839/this-supreme-court-case-made-school-district-lines-a-tool-for-segregation.
[13]Eli Hager, “School Vouchers Were Supposed to Save Taxpayer Money. Instead They Blew a Massive Hole in Arizona’s Budget,” ProPublica, July 16, 2024, https://www.propublica.org/article/arizona-school-vouchers-budget-meltdown.
[14] Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire, The Education Wars (The New Press, 2024), 109; also refer to Michael Griffith and Dion Burns, Understanding the Cost of Universal School Vouchers: An Analysis of Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account Program, Learning Policy Institute (February 2024), https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/media/4193/download?
inline&file=Universal_School_Vouchers_REPORT.pdf, which estimated the program’s cost for the 2023–24 school year to be $708.5M, based on data available as of December 26, 2023.