Jennifer Berkshire is on a roll. It seems she writes a great article every other day–or is it every day? She has a new article in The Nation about the New Hampshire school board elections. It is titled “How Progressives Won the School Culture War,” but I doubt that the people who won the school board races call themselves “progressives.” I would say they are sane, rational, intelligent citizens who did not want rightwing extremists in charge of their public schools.
She begins:
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. For months now, Republican Party leaders have trumpeted their intention to run hard on parent grievances en route to routing the Democrats in the midterms. According to this narrative—partially based on the 2021 elections in Virginia, then endlessly echoed by Democratic pundits—parents frustrated over school shutdowns, Covid restrictions and the focus on race and social justice in schools are the new swing voters, poised to flee the Democratic Party.
But in New Hampshire, where bitter debates over school masks and “critical race theory” (CRT) have dominated local politics for more than a year, the season of parent rage ended in a stunning sweep of school board elections last week by progressive public school advocates. “It was a complete repudiation of the GOP’s attempt to drive a wedge between parents and schools,” says Zandra Rice Hawkins, executive director of Granite State Progress. Of 30 candidates designated by the group as “pro–public education,” 29 won their races—many in traditionally “red” regions of New Hampshire. Across the state, culture warriors and advocates of school privatization lost to candidates who pledged to protect and support public education.
Instead of resonating with voters, the right’s efforts to weaponize cultural grievances appears to have alienated them. With the GOP poised to make the education culture wars a central focus of its midterm appeal, New Hampshire offers some clear lessons for Democrats.
Michael Boucher chalks up his decision to run for the school board in the southern New Hampshire town of Atkinson to a single word: extremism. Last year, he watched as the debate over local schools grew steadily more rancorous, first over CRT, then masks. Boucher became a regular presence at board meetings, where he noticed that many of the loudest voices weren’t actually from the district. “Suddenly there were all of these groups coming in—the Government Integrity Project, Moms for Liberty, Americans for Prosperity. I realized that if I didn’t step up, one of their people would,” says Boucher.
Boucher, who works as a data analyst for a government contractor, says that he set a goal of talking to as many people in Atkinson as possible about the rising climate of extremism. He found a receptive audience. While the community has long leaned Republican, many voters remain what Boucher calls “classic” GOP. “They want to see tight budgets—but they also want to see opportunities for all kids and a welcoming culture in the schools. There are actually a lot of people who feel that way,” says Boucher.
He campaigned on the need to teach history honestly against a candidate who ran on opposition to CRT. Boucher won resoundingly, claiming nearly three-quarters of the vote.
And Boucher wasn’t alone. Thirty miles north, in Bow, first-time candidate Angela Brennan, the subject of a Republican mailer calling her “anti-parent” and a “Biden-like progressive,” was the top vote getter in a five-person contest for two seats on the school board.
“All of these attacks on public education really backfired at the local level,” says Molly Cowen, a member of the select board in Exeter, which has also seen acrimonious debates over mask and vaccine mandates and school district diversity policies. In the lead-up to the election, a conservative parents’ PAC spent an estimated $20,000 on mailers making the case that the district’s focus on racial equity had led to a precipitous decline in academic achievement.
Voters in the district, which covers five towns, responded by booting two conservative members off the board and electing a number of pro–public education candidates.
Please open the link and learn how extremism was defeated in New Hampshire.
Well, you won’t find anything about this in the ed reform echo chamber. The entire narrative is how parents are “fleeing” public schools and begging, PLEADING for vouchers.
The echo chamber churns out an article a day about it- all the same. Rah rah for vouchers and charters, boo hiss for public schools.
They’ve conducted this anti public school political campaign through the whole pandemic. Nothing positive or productive for public schools, no practical assistance of any kind, just hundreds of full time, paid ed reformers pushing their vision of privatized systems.
If public schools are paying these folks they’re not serving their students well. They add no value to our schools yet they utterly dominate public education policy.
“weaponize cultural grievances” …just curious, what percentage of Americans think right wing “culture” is totally divorced from conservative religion ( Pat Buchanan’s spin)?
I keep hoping that DeSantis’ culture war in Florida will backfire on him. He has declared this year the “year of the parent” in the state. He has eliminated the salary for school board members, and he is pushing for term limits as well. Every action he takes with regard to education is anti-public education. I hope the sane people in the state will reject his plan to upend public education.
I don’t have a lot of confidence in the Democratic Party to learn from this recent election in New Hampshire that succeeded.
The Democrats have had decades to learn how to counter the simple-minded, easy to manipulate slogans, lies, cherry-picked propaganda, conspiracy theories, and hoaxes generated by the texteme right and seem to have failed repeatedly.
But hope is eternal. Maybe this time, the Democrats in leadership positions across the US will wake up and pay attention to this one overwhelming success and learn from someone that did it right.
Time will tell if a school board of
“progressive public school advocates”
negotiates a contract that functions
as a STUDENT advocate.
Will they place students AHEAD
of institutional compensation?
Will they reduce class sizes?
Will they end sorting the ranks
by the test and punish folly?
Will they “cultivate” students
with “true vision”, to negate
the mind control regime of
marketing and propaganda?
Will they end cultural standing
based on mythology?
Will they promote solidarity
at the expense of titles or
rankism?
Will they “shift” the focus
to solidarity rather than
social divisions?
Will they end the class filters
of classism?
Will they end the salvation by
demonization ploy?
Time will tell…
If anyone thinks I’m exaggerating about the lockstep anti-public school narrative that is baked into ed reform, just read them:
https://smillerk12.medium.com/after-the-pandemic-school-district-strategy-is-more-important-than-ever-51632f45e8ca
It’s all like this. A grim litany of the terrible future of public schools that is packed with assumptions that come directly from ed reform’s Right wing ideology.
Please don’t hire these folks as consultants for public schools. They don’t support public schools.
Would a private or charter school hire a consultant that walks in the door with a huge bias against charter or private schools and a mission to eradicate them and replace them different schools? No, of course not. So why are public schools hiring and paying ed reformers?
If you’re a public school hire people who value public schools. That’s permitted. It’s allowed. You may cast a net outside this echo chamber. Break ranks.
“Center on Reinventing Public Education
CRPE_edu
Survey results from
EdChoice show there is potentially a robust market for learning pods, or similar arrangements such as microschools, hybrid homeschools, and homeschool cooperatives.”
Survey results from one echo chamber org that pushes privatization used by another echo chamber org to push….privatization.
One big closed circle, with one unifying theme and one idea- privatize public schools.
Everyone understands they’re all going to end up at low value vouchers replacing K-12 education, right? They have to. Marching lockstep toward that inevitable conclusion.
The deform crowd keeps coming up with “innovative” ideas that fall flat when implemented. Behind all their ideas is the intention to take away local control and place decisions on education in the hands of corporations. It is all a propaganda campaign to turn a democratic public asset over to wealthy ownership. The public needs to understand that privatization is a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and working class to the wealthy. It is a way to legally steal from working people under the pretense of better education while it generally turns out to be a downgraded corporate education. Privatization is a scam.