We have been following the activities of various rightwing groups that purport to represent parents. Many if not all are funded by Dark Money, meaning their funders are anonymous. “Parents Defending Education” is now active in Massachusetts, suing districts for events related to race, gender, and sexual orientation. As the article notes, PDE has a staff of 13, some with a Koch background, and is represented by a Trump-connected lawyer. The goal of such groups is to undermine public confidence in public schools and in the judgment of professional educators. The ultimate goal is to heighten the teacher shortage and encourage privatization of schools.
The Boston Globe story begins:
An increasingly active right-leaning non-profit called Parents Defending Education filed a federal civil rights complaint against Newton North High School last month, alleging that a student-led theater production broke the law by limiting auditions to people of color only.
The same group sued Wellesley Public Schools last year for alleged illegal discrimination when Wellesley High School hosted a forum for Asian students and students of color to discuss a mass shooting at an Asian massage parlor in Atlanta. The teacher who organized the session wrote that it was “not for students who identify only as White.”
So far, the national group has identified 43 “incidents” in which they say Massachusetts schools inappropriately – or even illegally – taught students about race, sexual orientation or gender, setting school districts across the Commonwealth on edge that they might be sued next.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before in all my years here,” said Wellesley School Superintendent David Lussier, who settled the lawsuit with the organization in February. “They try to go after superintendents and get people fired.”
Parents Defending Education did not return repeated requests for comment, but supporters say the group offers a vital counterweight to an education system steeped in liberal values.
“I think it’s good because, for a long time, education has been very one-sided,” said Jennifer McWilliams, a consultant to Parents Defending Education who runs her own advocacy group in Indiana. “Schools have decided that they need to teach children morals, values, attitude and worldview over academics.”
The two-year-old organization, based in Washington D.C., urges parents across the country to report incidents in which they believe schools are dividing students on racial lines or inappropriately teaching students about sex or gender roles. The group states on its website that education must be based on “scholarship and facts” and says ethnic studies divides “children into oppressor and ‘oppressed’ groups,” while teaching white students “guilt and shame.”
And the organization has a sizable, well-connected staff to promote their agenda. Parents Defending Education’s website lists 13 staff members including Nicole Neily, former president of an organization affiliated with the Koch Brothers called Speech First and Aimee Viana, a former Trump Administration appointee.
Schools have long been battlegrounds in the nation’s culture wars, but experts say Parents Defending Education marks something new: an attempt to nationalize the agenda. The group has been promoting conservative values across the country, enlisting local groups with names like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education along the way.
“We see increased coordination, national coordination among groups of all political stripes and partisan stripes, thanks to social media,” said Meira Levinson, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “The right more than the left seems to have mastered techniques of developing language that then can be replicated in legislation, or policy across different municipalities and state governments.”
For Massachusetts educators facing criticism from Parents Defending Education, it suddenly feels like the group is everywhere. The group criticized Brookline schools in April after teachers organized a walkout to protest a Florida measure opponents have characterized as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
In June, the organization condemned Milton for teaching a lesson about the country’s first openly gay politician Harvey Milk and the importance of the letters LGBTQ.
“Who the hell wants to go into this profession anymore if this is going to be the type of community that we’re serving and the type of pressure that we’re going to experience,” Wellesley Educators Association President Kyle Gekopi said. “It’s really been forcing a lot of people to question their choices.”
Most recently, Parents Defending Education filed a federal civil rights complaint on Oct. 4 against Newton North High School.
The group alleged to the United States Department of Education that the school violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Both are meant to protect people from discrimination based on race, color or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. That protection extends to white students, they say.
Parents Defending Education claims the school’s student-led production, “Lost and Found: Stories of People of Color by People of Color,” restricted auditions to only students of color. The show, which organizers described as “a no-cut, cabaret-style show for students of color,” was meant to “provide a safe community space for students of color to express themselves through the performing arts.”
But Newton Public Schools put out a statement stressing that “no one is turned away or excluded from participating” in the play.
Educators far beyond Newton are nervously watching the case unfold. Brian Fitzgerald, president of the Plymouth County Education Association, said Parents Defending Education remind him of activists in past decades who have fought to curtail sex education, making it difficult to teach students about health.
“My fear is that they’re going to impact the ability of a student to learn,” Fitzgerald said.
Hello Diane: I hope it’s alright that I post this from a different thread from this morning:
First this from the Huffington Post this morning:
“CORPORATE AMERICA GOES BIG ON ELECTION DENIERS Large U.S.-based companies plowed millions into the congressional campaigns of Republican election deniers, HuffPost’s Molly Redden reports. Big benefactors included Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the ultraconservative Koch family; Home Depot; UPS; and top military contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Here’s a look at what Corporate America said after Jan. 6 vs. what they did. [HuffPost]”
Second, the election was still close, and many election deniers made it into Congress. How better to reveal the long term import of degenerate forces on PUBLIC EDUCATION, e.g., the reduction-to-absence of teaching history, civics/politics (by whatever name), and the burgeoning insights from the social sciences on last generation of voters, and now on the next.
I didn’t do a poll, but most of the people interviewed that were on the “right” revealed in their interview a lack of knowledge of history and how the government is structured and works. (I found it really cringeworthy.)
The Koch family (as above) is just one example of the power of corporate money to promote and fund the loss of democracy. For education, this means private, charter/etc. schools where the very curriculum can be influenced by the political leanings of powerful people . . . instead of by public schools that are funded by “the people” and are charged to teach directly about the experiment that is democracy and about our founding principles, not to mention the histories of kingships, autocracies, fascism, and a host of other forms of political systems. STEM-ONLY won’t do it.
People who live in a democracy cannot make intelligent and thoughtful choices without that kind of knowledge. Without a full and qualified education, we open a vacuum between “the people” and THEIR democratic government. Oligarchs and fascists, authoritarians and capitalist-entrepreneur brains of every stripe will strive to fill that vacuum and even do whatever it takes to make sure it remains.
We did dodge a very big bullet, but it’s not over. CBK
ALEC is a toxic, anti-democratic political entity that continues to enjoy tax exempt status. Why? The US should challenge its tax exempt status. Why should a group that is wholly political, that sends out boilerplate legislation to states to upend the common good, enjoy a 501 (c)(3) designation?
Am I right-leaning (and therefore unreasonable and/or awful) for thinking that maybe auditions shouldn’t be limited to certain races or ethnicities?
I agree with you, FLERP. But this organization, along with a bunch of others, is seeking grievances. If it had not been the play, it would have been something else. I didn’t notice the name of any local parents mentioned.
In the early 90s, a German comedian did a sketch on UFOs that I still remember to this day. I laughed so hard at the delivery, but now the profundity of the point of the act is hitting me as I consider stories like the one posted above. In the bit, a man goes out late at night on his penthouse porch to get a last bit of fresh air before turning in for the night. A UFO hovers over him with a spotlight and proceeds to get him to undress and do all sorts of humiliating things before they shoot off again, but not before he faintly hears them snicker before they leave. And then it dawns on him. UFOs don’t make contact to learn, conquer, or do anything with us other than to mess with us for their amusement. “Die wollen uns nur verarschen!” (“The just want to f#@k with us!.”) Nothing more, nothing less.
I think we, in the same way, have to quit inferring a story line or perception in political discourse today. We cannot assume our political opposition has the same long-term goals of justice, equality, or fairness we have sort of been taught and generally agree about the outlines, if not the details. And we are fooled by an opposition that seems to want to play by constitutional rules as they have been commonly understood and evolved our our history, on left and right. The media is still covering today’s politics as if two normal sides are engaging in a normal debate. We are not. One side will undermine progress if it is linked to pluralism and broad appeal. It will grasp as much power when opportunities avail themselves. Intellectual consistency will be immediately discarded if it gets in the way of consolidating power.
They realize that in order to arrest the changing world and create a reality they have imagined to be true, they will not succeed by traditional means. Indeed whatever rules and norms existed in the past to get us to this mess and are still with us are a major part of the problem. So much like all reactionary insurgencies in history of which I am aware, they must use the rules and norms they hate in order to accomplish what they want—which includes getting rid of those norms and rules, quietly if it gets “us” in power while reinterpreting and enforcing the existing ones, triumphantly public if “we” either change the system or are confident with an enduring majority.
In this post, we have a case study to see this argument taking shape right before our eyes. Kind of like January 6.
“The just want to f#@k with us!.”
They don’t call them UFOs for nothing.
UFO: Unidentified Effing Objects
“Many if not all are funded by Dark Money, meaning their funders are
anonymousbillionaires.”Fixed.
and if we took the moment necessary to think: Now why would BILLIONAIRES be involved in this enterprise…
Fixing the fixed 💩?: “All are funded by Dark Money billionaires who are spending even more to remain anonymous.”
These Koch/ALEC/Walton/DeVos libertarian, theofascist, autocratic loving thugs have been impacting the ability of teachers to teach and students to learn for decades and it started in 1983 when President Ronald Reagan, released the misleading and lying “A Nation at Risk” report.
Then when the 2nd Bush president signed “No Child Left Behind”, the war being waged against OUR schools and OUR children and all teachers escalated. Obama is also guilty of escalating that war again with his “Race to the Top” BS!
Teaching children and children learning is not a race and there is no way we or any nation on this planet is going to be successful teaching every child equally. Humans are way too diverse and complicated to all learn at the same pace, the same way, and succeed equally.
Children are not Fords on an assembly line. And teachers must be flexible, supported, and free to adjust their teaching without interference, pressure, or fear from tyrants.
“Schools have decided that they need to teach children morals, values, attitude and worldview over academics.”
Shows how little they know about the history of public schooling in America, eh! Schools have always taught those things.
Correctio:
“The right more than the left HAS, NO DOUBT, mastered techniques of developing language (PROPAGANDA) that then can be replicated in legislation, or policy across different municipalities and state governments.”
Wow. This group must be working very hard to find subjects for their lawsuits (surprised they can get by with just 13 staff members). A post about casting for a student-led play in Newton. Gah! Inspired, hard-working kids organize a student play only to have their school slapped with a lawsuit.
And this really takes gall: a student walkout in Brookline last March “organized by teachers,” yeah right. Per NBC Boston Channel 10: “New anti-queer legislation passed by lawmakers in Florida and Texas has sparked outrage across the country, including in Brookline, Massachusetts, where hundreds of students walked out of class Friday… Students in Massachusetts and across the country walked out of class Friday…” Teachers choice: shut it down, or get out there and keep it peaceful.
43 lawsuits in MA alone! I suggest the Globe investigate school districts’ legal defense costs and any settlements pursuant to these lawsuits, and publish a nice fat story totting up how much MA taxpayers are coughing up thanks to “Parents” Defending “Education.”
“That protection extends to white students, they say.”
Yes, it does.
“Parents Defending Education claims the school’s student-led production, ‘Lost and Found: Stories of People of Color by People of Color,” restricted auditions to only students of color. The show, which organizers described as “a no-cut, cabaret-style show for students of color,” was meant to “provide a safe community space for students of color to express themselves through the performing arts.’
But Newton Public Schools put out a statement stressing that ‘no one is turned away or excluded from participating’” in the play.”
Newton Public Schools statement sounds like adminimal speak to me. Weasel words.
And not just in suburban Boston.
https://ehrens.substack.com/p/matter-of-time
Some of these are GOP-sponsored.
I know Brookline and Newton pretty well growing up in the Boston area.
Loons like this group don’t make much headway there.