Steven Monacelli wrote this article for The Texas Observer about the network of rightwing groups flooding local school board elections with big money. He also supplied the photographs.
As the article points out, about 75% of local school board candidates spend less than $1,000 to run for office. In districts targeted for takeover, such modest spending is no longer a path to success.
Monacelli writes:
Over the last three years, an interconnectednetwork of political action committees (PACs), largely funded by billionaires who support school privatization, has begun to transform the nature of local school board elections across Texas. They’ve done this with the help of consultants whose efforts have largely gone unnoticed.
On August 15, 2022, members of the Carroll Independent School District (CISD) board of trustees, all dressed in Southlake Dragons’ green, posed for a photo with representatives of Patriot Mobile, a Christian Nationalist phone company that spent big last spring to help secure the victories of three trustees. The occasion honored the company’s donation of posters that read “In God We Trust.”
The trustee’s acceptance of the red, white, and blue star-spangled posters immediately drew opposition from critics who see those words not just as a motto that appears on dollar bills, but also as a declaration of allegiance to conservative causes. One disapproving parent attempted to donate signs with the same words in Arabic and on a rainbow background but was rejected; the board president said they already had enough.
Other school districts got the posters around the same time. And not all parents who spoke out were critical.
Erik Leist, who resides in the neighboring Keller ISD area, spoke to multiple news outlets about the posters after they were donated. He approved of the state law passed in 2021 that requires schools to display donated signs bearing the national motto in a “conspicuous place.”
“If it’s important to communities, the community will come behind it,” Leist said, according to accounts published in Fox News and the Texas Tribune that identified him only as the father of a kindergartener.
Leist, however, is much more than a concerned dad: He’s a conservative political consultant who at the time had already been paid tens of thousands of dollars by multiple PACs to support the campaigns of new ultraconservative school board members in Carroll and neighboring school districts, trustees who were eager to accept those posters and who later passed policies restricting students’ access to library books and rolling back accommodations for LGBTQ+ students.
Leist is just one well-connected node in a sprawling, hydra-like network of PACs and consulting firms that increasingly are targeting Texas school board races and politicizing those formerly low-budget, nonpartisan campaigns, an investigation by the Texas Observer reveals.
The Observer’s examination of campaign finance records shows that dozens of ultraconservative school board candidates around the state have been backed by PACs that collectively employ a handful of conservative political consulting firms.
Viewed together, the connections among these individuals and organizations reveal a network of major funders and political operatives focused on winning control of the state’s local school boards. The strategy this network employs has been trumpeted in the right-wing press as a blueprint for school board takeovers: Create a PAC, endorse candidates willing to run on politicized issues, hire a consulting firm with ties to the Republican Party, raise enough to outspend opponents, and if victory is secured, pass policies that align with statewide party priorities. The biggest known backers of this network are conservative billionaires who generally don’t live in the districts being targeted but all of whom support school privatization efforts.
The timing of the network’s activities corresponds to revived efforts by Governor Greg Abbott and Republican lawmakers to support vouchers for private schools in the 2021 and 2023 legislative sessions.
To understand how this network developed over time, it’s best to begin in CISD—a district located in Southlake, a wealthy suburb of Fort Worth that is over 70 percent white. It’s where Leist got his start as a school board campaign consultant, supporting an effort praised by the conservative press as a model for other school districts.
In August 2020, the seven-member CISD board held a hearing on something called a Cultural Competence Action Plan, a proposal created in response to a 2018 viral video of Carroll high school students shouting the N-word.
Less than two weeks later, Tim O’Hare, the former chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party and current Tarrant County judge, teamed up with Leigh Wambsganss, a conservative activist and the wife of a former Southlake mayor, to create Southlake Families PAC.
In November 2020, Southlake Families PAC—which describes itself as “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values”—paid a Keller-based marketing company called 221b Ingenuity, of which Leist was a managing partner, to help set up a website to promote two conservative CISD school board candidates. They ran in opposition to the Cultural Competence Action Plan in the spring 2021 race that featured PAC-funded mailers accusing opponents of pushing “radical socialism.” Both PAC-backed candidates won.
In June 2021, the right-leaning National Review lauded Southlake Families’ victory as a “model for conservative parents confronted by similar situations around the country.” When Southlake Families helped a third candidate win a special election for a vacant CISD seat that fall, the three joined with a fourth PAC-endorsed incumbent to form a conservative majority on the board.
Since then, seven federal civil rights investigations have been opened into allegations of discrimination against Carroll students based on race, disability, and gender or sexual harassment. The most recent began in January 2023, one month after the board removed references to religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity from the district’s nondiscrimination statement, stoking further controversy and making news.
What has drawn less press attention is that the situation in Carroll has inspired a network of copycat PACs supporting conservative candidates in other historically low-budget nonpartisan school board races across the state, in which PACs and the candidates they endorsed hired from the same handful of consulting firms to help with campaigns.
Tentacles of this big-spending network have already reached more than two dozen Texas school districts. The Observer has identified 20 PACs formed since late 2020 that, through early September, have collectively spent more than $1.5 million to support the campaigns of 105 conservative candidates in 35 districts.
Most of the time, that investment has paid off: 65 PAC-supported candidates—or 62 percent—won their elections from 2021 to 2023.
The majority of those PACs are focused on only one school district each. The ultraconservative committees have typically spent tens of thousands of dollars per election, with less than $100,000 in total expenses since they were formed. A handful of PACs have spent more than six figures in total, including Southlake Families, which has spent more than $239,000 since late 2020.
Campaign finance records show that these seemingly grassroots groups often use the same consulting firms like Leist’s Edgerton Strategies, which has worked on behalf of PACs and candidates in at least 14 school districts. Other consulting firms that have made over six figures working on school board campaigns include Axiom Strategies and CAZ Consulting—and both companies’ subsidiaries. They’re the same consultants used by big-spending conservative political PACs like Patriot Mobile Action and Texans for Educational Freedom, which have respectively spent more than $500,000 and $330,000 on school board races and together have endorsed 66 candidates across at least 23 districts.
At least one federal-level super PAC, the 1776 Project, has also invested in 28 school board candidates across eight Texas school districts that were also endorsed by either Patriot Mobile Action, Texans for Educational Freedom, or one of the Southlake Families-style PACs.
This level of outside spending is highly unusual in school board races. The results of a 2018 survey conducted by the National School Board Association showed that 75 percent of all candidates reported spending less than $1,000 per race, with only 9 percent spending more than $5,000.
Analysis of campaign expenses by the nonprofit OpenSecrets shows that spending more money doesn’t always ensure victory—but often does. Given the relatively low cost of school board races, the influx of even a few thousand dollars of outside funding can transform the nature of such elections at a time of high turnover: According to a 2022 survey from School Board Partners, a national organization focused on recruiting and training anti-racist school board members, nearly two-thirds of school board members nationwide said they planned not to seek reelection…
In the southeast Texas city of Humble, another 2021 school board race became a quieter testing ground for a new conservative PAC. Unlike in Carroll ISD, there was no dramatic national coverage or clash over diversity and inclusion. The district, in one of Houston’s sprawling and forested northern suburbs, was the first foray into school board races for Texans for Educational Freedom, a PAC with a mission of “fighting against Critical Race Theory and other anti-American agendas and curriculums.”
Funded primarily by a coterie of conservative billionaires, Texans for Educational Freedom—originally known as the Freedom Foundation of Texas—was founded in early 2021 by Christopher Zook Jr., a former field director for the Harris County Republican Party and senior fellow at Texans For Lawsuit Reform.
In the May 2021 election, the PAC spent more than $10,000 to help three candidates—a significant investment from one source, given that Humble school board candidates tended to spend only about $3,300 from all contributors in contested races. The PAC money was spent on a national political consulting firm called Axiom Strategies. All three of the PAC’s candidates won.
Unlike in majority-white Southlake, the school board election in Humble—where white students are a minority—didn’t feature inflammatory, politicized rhetoric. That helped Texans for Educational Freedom keep a low profile.
“I wasn’t aware there was outside PAC spending,” said Brian Baker, a father of two students in Humble ISD. “I had been paying attention to stories in other parts of the state and I was looking out for candidates and mailers using certain buzzwords like ‘woke,’ but I didn’t really notice any.”
After the initial victory in Humble, Texans for Educational Freedom targeted two more districts near Houston, Cypress-Fairbanks and Klein, in 2021. This time, messaging around critical race theory came to the fore. All three PAC-backed candidates in Cypress-Fairbanks ran against the ostensible inclusion of critical race theory in school curriculum and teacher training, as did one PAC-backed candidate in Klein. Six of the seven candidates won.
By the end of 2021, candidates backed by Texans for Educational Freedom had established near or outright majorities in all three districts—and all three would later rank on a list of book-banning districts put together by PEN America, a nonprofit organization focused on the protection of free expression.
Texans for Educational Freedom has intervened in races across the greater Houston area, including Houston, Conroe, Katy, and Spring Branch. The PAC has also backed candidates in the wooded Austin suburb of Leander, in the oil-rich flats of Midland, in several suburbs of Fort Worth, and in the Panhandle’s Canyon ISD. The PAC backed 12 candidates in 2021, 10 in 2022, and 20 in 2023, covering a total of 17 school districts. Out of all those candidates, 76 percent won their elections.
“Things like this have happened before but not in such a coordinated way,” said Ruth Kravetz, a retired public school administrator and teacher who co-founded Community Voices for Public Education, an advocacy group that seeks to strengthen Houston’s public school system. “In the past it was to promote charter expansion. And now it seems like it’s about promoting the destruction of public education.”
Candidates backed by Texans for Educational Freedom have regularly run on hot-button issues that tie in with state-level Republican policy and rhetoric, such as notions that children are being “indoctrinated” into radical ideologies or “sexually alternative lifestyles.”
In Conroe ISD, three candidates backed by Texans for Educational Freedom ran as the “Mama Bear” slate and won their November 2022 elections after being involved in a push by a group known as Mama Bears Rising to restrict student access to certain books.
“The PACs were able to support a massive printing of voter guides and distribution of mailers,” said Evan Berlin, a resident who lost to one of the Mama Bears. Berlin, a first-time school board candidate who has a conservative voting record, told the Observer he wanted to run on providing education in a non-politicized manner. “I think with PAC money coming from out-of-district donors, just by nature of that we could assume that it’s part of a larger, more strategic effort,” he said.
Last year, while Texans for Educational Freedom was concentrating on Houston area races, Patriot Mobile Action and another 17 PACs were backing candidates in 22 districts across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Those candidates largely ran on issues that have become a common refrain: allegations of ideological indoctrination, critical race theory, pornography in schools, and the sexualization of children.
Fifteen of the 18 PACs targeting North Texas school districts tapped either Axiom Strategies, Edgerton Strategies, or CAZ Consulting for campaign consulting—as did many school board candidates in the area. The outliers were: McKinney First PAC, which endorsed candidates that worked with those consulting firms; Metroplex Citizens for a Better Tomorrow and Decatur ISD Parents Unite, two groups primarily funded by a Republican mega donor who has contributed to Texans for Educational Freedom; and Collin Conservatives United, a self-described PAC that does not appear in the state PAC registry, whose endorsed candidates received donations from the same megadonor.
As this larger cluster of PACs and consulting firms has grown, its strategy has proved potent. Fourteen of its 17 candidates won in 2021. Another 42 candidates ran in 2022 and 27 won. And so far in 2023, 48 more candidates ran and 26 won.
Open the link to finish the article. I hope it’s not behind a paywall.
If you open the link, you can then see the diagram that displays the intricate interconnections among the rightwing groups and their funders.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What is happening Texas and elsewhere is the direct result of Citizens United which allows unlimited amounts of cash to sway school board elections. PACs, funded by dark money outside the local community, are weaponizing their wealth to undermine local rule. Lack of regulation and copious amounts of dark money undermine democracy, and there is little hope for change as long as it is legal for wealthy PACs to funnel politically backed money into elections.
The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, was a Christian social activist. He greatly influenced William Wilberforce, the British opponent of chattel slavery who was so influential in starting the anti-slave trade movement. Wesley warned that Christianity had the natural result in his 18th century Britain of regulating personal behavior in such a way as to bring wealth to the person so influenced. He inveighed strongly against being unaware of the wealth you were amassing, and pointing out that this destroyed the empathy necessary to practice Christianity. George W Bush is a Methodist.
Wesley was right, and correctly predicted modern Christian Nationalism. He was, however, a failure in America, where his message, not yet refined at that time in his life, was left with George Whitefield, the preacher who would become the great American symbol of the Second Great Awakening that immediately preceded the revolutionary period. When Benedict Arnold led the colonial assault on Montreal through the swampy frozen winter, his soldiers stopped off at the tomb of Whitefield and took bits of clothing as good luck charms in anticipation of their arduous (and ultimately failed) task.
The funneling of money into conservative causes as described in this piece shows how right Wesley was. Modern Christianity is ruining itself by coming down solidly on the side of tyranny, just as Jefferson warned us. Modern Christians, stripped of their empathy by centuries of financial success, are funneling their money into causes like this that rob citizens of civil liberties under the guise of religion. The wealthiest of these are perhaps doing so cynically: perhaps they know they are not Christians, but are using the rhetoric to persuade the flock. Wesley could have never anticipated the degree to which massive sums of money would corrupt his own movement.
But I return to George Bush. Many will look positively at W in light of his recent disdain of Trump, but it was Bush that moved so many of the forces in place that gave rise to the modern American paradigm of a total absence of empathy. Alito and Company, the massive rollback of taxes on the wealthy that removed any motivation to raise wages as inflation crept up over the years, and the constant reaching out to evangelicals over the abortion issue are not Trump originals, but are Republican standards that went to extremes under Bush and Cheney. If Liz Cheney, whom I support for opposing Trump, did not recognize this years ago, she is profoundly missing Intelect. Wesley, who warned in sermons that wealth robbed a person of empathy, must be spinning in his grave.
Roy, you nailed it. The “new” GOP has no empathy. They are not Christian.
Roy
Thank you for the lesson. It was informative and insightful.
As a point of clarification, Christian is a designation for a person’s religion indicating protestant as in the designation Christian for a politician’s listed sect vs. Catholic as the designation for a sect of
other politicians. The same understanding is made clear with the terminology Christian universities vs. schools like Notre Dame and Georgetown which describe as Catholic.
Because the White Catholic majority votes Republican
and their Bishops and Conferences are highly engaged in politics, it is important to inform the public by using the inclusive term Christian AND Catholic when talking about what theocrats have done to the U.S.
People like Alito strongly identified as Catholic as did Paul Weyrich and Leonard Leo.
At the blog of Wondering Eagle, research is cited that indicates 2 in 10 White Catholics support political violence.
The percentage is somewhat higher for evangelicals, which are a subset of protestants.
Linda.
Catholicism is Christian. The Catholic Church is a Christian Church. It’s not Hindu or Buddhist or New Age. It’s CHRISTIAN. It worships a triune God consisting of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And the Son is Jesus Christ. From its founding to roughly 1517, the Catholic Church was practically the ONLY Christian Church. This Christian church, which dominated Europe for centuries, effectively drove out the competition.
Only extremely ignorant rural Americans who know nothing of history are confused about this and use the terms Christian and Catholic as though they referred to different entities.
“ignorant rural Americans”
Uh, so, all of those people, including those at this blog, who refer to schools as either Christian or Catholic, because they mistakenly perceive there’s a difference, are rural know-nothings?
Those people who refer to Mike Johnson as Christian and Joe Biden as Catholic, are know-nothings?
The apocalyptic, seven mountains sect should be indistinguishable from a sect that disagrees greatly with that view, indistinguishable from LDS, etc? Having no distinction enhances understanding about the intersection of religionists and politics?
Who knew there were so many geographically diverse researchers, historians, national bloggers, journalists, professors, clergy, etc. who are ignorant rural Americans?
It is difficult to overlook G.W’s blunders, even if he scores a few points for criticizing Trump. After 9/11 our country was stunned and hurt. It was Bush that, in a moment of rash emotion, took us into the Iraq War, even though the actual perpetrators were Saudis, a nation with deep financial connections to the Bush family and our military contractors. That ill-fated war left over two hundred thousand civilians dead. It is hard for the US to condemn the Israelis when we are guilty of the same disastrous actions, and even worse, because we invaded the wrong offenders.
I would not minimize what George Bush, Jr., did by using the term blunders. George Bush, Jr., is a war criminal. He is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. If there were any justice in the world, he and those in his administration responsible for the illegal invasion of Iraq in the Second Iraq War and for the massacre of its people and destruction of its cultural institutions would be in the dock at the International Court of Criminal Justice charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
OF course, the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, was a virulent antisemite who advocated, AT LENGTH, burning down synagogues and Jewish homes, as well as pogroms:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/martin-luther-quot-the-jews-and-their-lies-quot
AT-LARGE ELECTIONS MAKE SCHOOL DISTRICTS SITTING DUCKS
School districts are sitting ducks for right-wing takeovers because most school board elections are at-large elections.
Few voters even understand what an at-large election is, let alone how at-large elections invite right-wing takeovers.
HOW IT WORKS:
Most school districts are divided into “Representative Areas” so that — at least in theory — the people who live in each Representative Area can elect a person to the school board who represents their interests.
Election rules typically require that any person who runs to represent a Representative Area must live within the boundaries of that area.
Sounds good — but…most school districts allow at-large voting to elect representatives. That means that people from all other Representative Areas can vote for representatives outside their own area. What that leads to is making it possible, even easy, for a relatively small, dedicated cadre of voters to elect all the representatives on the school board.
Here’s an example: All Representative Areas in a given district have to have the same total number of voters. Let’s say, the school district has five Representative Areas, Areas, U, V, X, Y, and Z, each having 4000 voters.
The people who live in Representative Area X favor Kathy Jones as their candidate. But a dedicated, lock-step right-wing cadre of voters in Representative Areas Y and Z recruit a right-wing candidate, Kyle Smith, who also lives in Representative Area X.
In the election, 3000 of the 4000 voters who live in Representative Area X vote overwhelmingly for their candidate, Kathy Jones, and a total of 3000 voters from Areas U and V also vote for Kathy Jones, giving her a total of 6000 votes — but 7000 of the right-wing voters in Areas Y and Z vote for right-winger Kyle Smith.
The result is that even though the vast majority of voters who actually live in Area X voted for their candidate, Kathy Jones, the voters from outside the Area easily elect their right-wing candidate, Kyle Smith.
After just two or perhaps three election cycles, the right-wing voters in Areas Y and Z will have elected all the school board members.
The only way that school districts can prevent such takeovers is to end at-large elections by requiring that only people who actually live in a given Representative Area can vote for the representative for their Area.
And changing from at-large elections is hard to do, because it is the school board that sets the policy for the election process, and if the board is already under the control of a right-wing majority, the board won’t change from at-large elections.
Thanks for your explanation.
To counter the sophisticated Catholic Church voter mobilization efforts and the selective candidate information provided by the Church’s organizations, the opposition will need to develop and implement a similar system.
The voters guide at the Colorado Catholic Conference provides an example. The executive director of the Conference was formerly with the Koch network and EdChoice.
To beat dark money, grassroots candidates, that are not bribed by that dark money, flowing from extremist billionaires, must repeat with AOC did to win the primary that led to her being elected to the US Congress.
They have to organize grassroots volunteers in their communities and join nonprofits like the Network for Public Education.
To find candidates willing to work that hard, maybe the Network for Public Education has to reach out and find them first.
In CCISD Clear Creek Independent School District we beat back the billionaires in 3 elections! Even the last one where Defend Texas Liberty was invited to donate and meddle in our elections. They donated only to ONE district in 2022 out of over 1250 districts in tExas. And we beat them.
Wonderful news, John! It should encourage other districts in Texas. And everywhere.