Today, Explained - School board brawl

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

It's Election Day in the USA. This time around, the nasty political fights and insurrections are going local. NPR's Anya Kamenetz explains. Today’s show was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. It's election day in the USA, but it's not a presidential election year. It's not even the midterm. So things are going to be totally chill, right? These are our kids, not yours.

We're our doors. Right? Maybe not. Turns out voters, especially parents, have found much smaller local races to get riled up about in 2021. We're talking almost as small and local as you can get. We're talking school boards. School board meetings in many states around the country and many districts have become hugely confrontational.

We will not consent. We will not comply. We will not consent. We will not comply. We will not consent. We will not comply. Very combative parents showing up. Public comment is now ended. Not just yelling, but even some threats. There's been some arrests. This is an unlawful arrest. I am a First Amendment lawyer. over a vast range of issues. So there's anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers. There are people excited about something that they call critical race theory.

If you have materials that you're providing where it says if you were born a white male, you were born an oppressor, you are abusing our children. What do you mean teaching race? What is there to teach about race? We're all humans. There is no systemic racism. Also some old favorites like LGBTQ rights.

I'm retired Senator Dick Black of Ashburn, Virginia. It's absurd and immoral for teachers to call boys girls and girls boys. Anya Kamenetz, you've been covering these extremely vitriolic school board fights for NPR. What's going on and why? I mean, I think the best description that I've heard is from Melissa Ryan, who tracks right wing kind of organizing. And she said, you know, school board meetings are kind of the new tea party. A vast range of activists are really choosing to confront various things that they see as being winning culture war issues. And though these fights and races are small and local, there are bigger implications?

Well, absolutely. I mean, I think most prominently in the governor's race in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican, has chosen to make a version of these school board confrontations basically his closing issue in the race. The same moment where Terry McAuliffe says parents don't have any role in their kids' education. The same moment where parents stand up and say, oh, yes, we do. But there's also a number of, a record number of school board recalls that have gone through in the last year and people running to replace school board members that they see as being, you know, on the wrong side of these types of issues. And why now? Why is this happening this year? Should we blame the pandemic? Nobody likes the pandemic.

You know, obviously, parents everywhere have been completely overwhelmed and frustrated by the path that their schools have taken at some point in the past year and a half. But the other thing that happened, of course, is that school board meetings themselves went virtual because of the pandemic. And that really lowered the bar for participation for better and for worse. So school board meeting used to be a thing you needed to like get in your car and like cancel your plans and go to and wait around for. But now it's just something you can do in your living room while you like have the computer on mute. And that kind of opened up the floodgates. I think so.

Yeah. We know who you are. And I'm going to come for everybody that comes at my kid with this stupid, ridiculous mandate. So as you can see, fists are now flying all of this on live television. You are allowing child abuse. You are allowing child abuse. You, with your snotty little face, you're allowing it as well. And also what opened up the floodgates is that parents were really upset. You know, there were so many contradictory messages going forward. There were conflicts with unions in some places, conflicts over hybrid models. And so, yeah, parents got upset. They got active. They got

vocal about either reopening schools or it's not safe to reopen schools. So you see really more involvement happening and more unhappy parents. So how does this evolve over the course of the pandemic? How does this go from just being like people sounding off from like on a Zoom meeting or something from their homes to whatever it is now? School reopening itself, as well as masking, were both very polarized. You're packing 300 kids, almost 300 kids into a school. How is that following the guidelines that everyone has put out? They became very polarized issues under the last president.

They think it's going to be good for them politically, so they keep the schools closed. No way. So we're very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools. Trump also championed the notion of critical race theory being a thing. I ended it because it's racist. I ended it because a lot of people were complaining that they were asked to do things that were absolutely insane, that it was a radical revolution that was taking legal theory that's taught in law schools and undergraduate seminars and not in K-12 schools, but it's shorthand for, you know, what's sometimes

called like woke education or just really attempting to teach kids about history and racism as a structural issue. Where are these culture wars happening? Everywhere? Florida? Yeah, I would say that these school board fights are not ubiquitous by any means, and they're not seen notably in a lot of big cities, which tend to be more blue cities. The places that I've seen them a lot have been more kind of medium sized, suburban school districts, sometimes a little bit larger, but in purple states. So Washington State in Michigan and Pennsylvania, Ohio, and this notable one in San Diego County. Can you give me some examples of the sort of more extraordinary things you've seen? In Gwinnett County, Georgia, there is a school board member named Karen Watkins. And when she was elected last fall, she flipped the school board.

She and another fellow candidate, they flipped the school board to be majority people of color and majority Democratic. And this is in a suburban Atlanta county that's become very diverse over the last couple of decades. And she was targeted off the bat by a policy group that is an offshoot of an offshoot of Focus on the Family. And they produced this attack ad. A ticket of radical liberalism is running for school board.

Their platform, radical sex indoctrination, removing safety officers from school and teaching our children a false version of American history. The result, more teen pregnancy. And so this rhetoric from this video ad was parroted in messages to her, on hundreds of messages she got on Facebook. One of them she read to me was, Karen, here's some news for you.

The Democratic Communist Baby Killer Party doesn't have any values. Yikes. You know, I had a parent call me, call me and told me that, you know, they're coming for me. How am I supposed to take that? It's intense, you know. And so when these people showed up at the school board meeting, she and her colleague felt so threatened that they had to leave the room. We ask everyone wear a mask as that is the policy.

If you are unable to comply, please leave the premises. And so it's like a pretty effective protest because they're posing a threat basically by standing there, at least in the eyes of the folks that are at these meetings. It got a little testy in there. People saying, stand your ground. They can't remove all of us. Literally, stand your ground. That's enough for me.

When you're saying things like that, they trigger things in my brain. So it feels very scary. And she's not the only one who's been threatened in a way that feels personal. It just feels like watching these videos and hearing these clips. People are so, so angry. And if you're like disconnected from this world, you're just kind of like, these are like your neighbors. Why are you so mad at your neighbors? You know, not just angry, but the disconnection from a normal frame of reference or normal modes of behavior.

And I think what happened in Poway, California, to me, is kind of the most extreme example of this. You're not going to hold a meeting? I'm not sure. We're not sure. And I think what happened in Poway, California, to me, is kind of the most extreme example of this. You're not going to hold a meeting? I'm not sure. We're not sure. The school board members were meeting, but in a closed session, they were live streaming the public comments. But the protesters made their way inside. And the school board members felt like the best way to de-escalate would be to leave. And so the protesters who were anti-mask protesters came into a public meeting room,

and then they declared themselves the new school board. They held a vote. No, they need to vacate because they actually have lost their jobs. So this is the new board. They need to leave. Was it like some sort of, I mean, the word I want to use here is like insurrection. Was it some sort of revolt? The clerk of the Poway school board called it a mini insurrection. She said like January 6th is our September 9th. Because basically, like, you know, on the one hand, of course, there was no legal consequence to this.

Well, in two ways. First of all, the police didn't arrest anyone. No one was detained and no one was kicked out. They were allowed to go freely. But also, too, I mean, they didn't become the school board because they held a vote. They're kind of just inhabiting their own reality. We gotta take a break, but this isn't just a reality some angry parents created out of thin air. There's a lot of thinking behind it. More on that in a minute. Support for today explained comes from Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

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Some of the issues these parents are angry about directly relate to the pandemic and the politics of our former president. Who's been carrying the torch for him since he got voted out of office this time last year? A very wide range of Republican-leaning organizations are in support of this school board movement in various ways at various levels. So, you know, like the Heritage Foundation is issuing supportive press releases, as is the Cato Institute. The Manhattan Institute also put out like a guide to woke schooling for parents. A guide to woke schooling? Like how to know if your teacher's woke or something? That's basically it, yeah. How to know if your teacher's woke. Something peculiar is spreading throughout America's schools.

If you're reading this guide, perhaps something similar is happening in your child's school. Perhaps your children have come home talking about how their whiteness, or blackness, or Asian-ness, or Hispanic-ness really defines who they are, not their individual personality, hopes, and dreams. It's actually not as good as another one that comes from an organization that was founded by Trump's former budget director.

And he issued a 34-page activist guide for critical race theory. One of the most important things it says is that If CRT is being used in your schools, there's no time to waste. It's time to get to work. If CRT is not being used in your schools, now would be a good time to get involved

in your local school board and community. Before radical CRT activists take it over and you have a real mess on your hands. They know that it's a winning issue that they can kind of demagogue without needing to have the facts potentially on their side. And, you know, it has a lot of basic information there

about, you know, how to become an activist and how to recruit your friends and your buddies and hold a barbecue and have a Facebook group. They're giving aid and comfort. They're giving information, connections to legal help, template legislation, template letters. What's like the larger political strategy at play here? Like keep people engaged, keep people angry, keep people fighting, and then that'll feed bigger elections down the road? I mean, yeah, it seems to be evident that this is a Republican-based culture war play, right? It's culture war on various levels. I mean, when you talk about the critical race theory stuff, that is white identity culture war stuff,

there's still plenty of LGBTQ stuff. So in Virginia, in Loudoun County, some of the upheaval was over transgender bathroom rules. And then the anti-mask and vaccine stuff is also connecting to, you know, basic liberty. So kind of like libertarian. There's interesting crossover. There's support from very hardcore Second Amendment groups for anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown activism. And then the anti-mask and anti-vaccine stuff also bleeds into, you know, the anti-vaccination movement has been around for a while.

It's not all explicitly political, but it does connect to other conspiracy theories, QAnon and that type of thing. So it's a beautiful garden full of different kinds of blooms. And it's like further reinforced by conservative media, right? Where you're constantly hearing about these issues, like vaccine mandates,

like mask wearing, and critical race theories, surely. Oh, absolutely. I mean, none of this would be possible without the sort of ecosystem of right-wing media going from kind of alt-tech at the bottom. So a lot of these groups are producing their own media, social media, videos, live streams, and they're trying to go viral, right? So they succeed when they go viral. They succeed when they're parodied on Saturday Night Live. Hi, I'm so mad I'm literally shaking right now. Forget COVID. The real threat is critical race theory being taught in our schools. My question is, what is it? And why am I mad about it?

And also, they're getting interviewed on Fox. They're getting interviewed on One America Network. So you are a teacher, St. Tammany Parish. You decided to become involved, and you went to school board meetings, and then what happened? I started getting scrutinized. I started getting targeted. I would be called into the— Targeted by whom?

By my principal, who I work for. I'm a former teacher, so I'm certified. I know, you're fired. Were you fired? Yeah, I was officially terminated. And you're currently unemployed. So there's television hits that come out of it, and then there's right-wing websites,

news media websites that are amplifying. So a good example of that would be the cycle of what happened with the National School Board Association. So the National School Board Association put out this letter, which brought this issue, I think, to national attention. It was an open letter to Joe Biden asking him to bring in federal law enforcement to help with all of these disruptions because school board members and educators, frankly,

didn't feel safe. These are real threats and they're occurring with greater frequency. So our letter to the White House really is indicative of the seriousness of the situation for school board members, but more especially for students in our public schools. That letter was jumped on by Parents Defending Education, which is yet another one of these groups, one of the most successful that we haven't talked as much about. And they went around and they called the state school boards

to see if they agreed with the National School Board Association letter. The Ohio School Board Association has decided to terminate membership with the National School Boards Association. This comes after a letter sent out by the NSBA to the Biden administration calling parents domestic terrorists. And about half of them have said, no, we don't agree with this language, especially the language about terrorism, right? Domestic terrorism, which was used in the letter. And that really put the National Association on their back foot. And then after right-wing media coverage...

It's obvious that the White House was following the NSBA's lead and the DOJ was following the White House's lead. National School Board Association apologized for the letter, specifically for that language. And then, you know, meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland had responded to the letter and said, yes, we are going to help. We're going to get the FBI involved. Nothing in this memorandum or any memorandum is about parents expressing disagreements with their school boards. The memorandum makes clear that parents are entitled and protected by

the First Amendment to have vigorous debates. We don't, the Justice Department is not interested in that question at all. And create a strategy for enforcement and look into these threats and look into this harassment. And he was hauled in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. You're the Attorney General of the United States. You think that a parent who shows up at a school board meeting who has a complaint, who wants to voice that complaint, and maybe she doesn't use exactly the right grammar, you think they're akin to criminal rioters? Do you agree with that? Where instead of just spending their time asking about,

you know, what happened on January 6th, several different Republican senators took turns haranguing him for calling ordinary parents terrorists. Are any of these groups successfully taking over school boards? Has that actually happened? I mean, it's been a short cycle. So I think we might see some elections happening today, right? There's been school board recall efforts. And a few of those have been successful. So people getting removed and then presumably replaced with people that are more congenial to this this this contingent.

And is that sort of like the end game here to to flip as many school boards as you can and then and what reshape education policy? It's a gateway to other kinds of involvement. This is drawing so much heat and interest because it's a way of motivating people to get active in politics in general. And so if you, you know, school board might be the venue, it's a venue for the activity for the protest, but it helps people identify with these groups and with these issues and draws them closer to getting involved politically. You know, obviously, there's democratic control of the branches of government at the federal level. And so how do you get people active? If you're on the other side, will you get them active on the local level? And we saw that with the Tea Party during Obama, we saw it with the resistance, quote unquote, during Trump. And now we're seeing it to some extent with these school board related movements. And the other thing I should mention, Sean,

is that since George Floyd, since the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020, there has been an imperfect but sincere attempt on behalf of most public school related organizations in this country to try to reckon with the fact of structural racism, to try to take a strong look at how they teach history and actually teach what actually happened in America

and what kind of country we are. And it's imperfect, it's under-resourced, but it's an attempt. And the problem with this kind of activism, which is also resulted, by the way, in state laws, so state laws about the teaching of race and history, that basically amount to, in many cases that so state laws about the teaching of race and history, that basically amount to, in many cases that I've heard about, a chilling effect for teachers. Teachers are worried that

if they bring up race in the classroom, that they're going to bring a firestorm onto their heads. And so the safer thing to do is not to bring it up at all. Do you think it's occurred to anyone that maybe having all of this vitriol in like school board meetings and all this fighting going on with school administrators and policymakers is just not great for kids? Has that just not, has that escaped this whole? I mean, the interesting thing about these kinds of conflicts is everybody will say that they're in it for the kids, right? They're in it for their kids' best interests. They want to protect the kids. And so that ends up meaning kind of whatever people want it to mean.

Kids have lost so much learning. They are still struggling to deal with mask policies. They're worrying now about how they're going to get the kids vaccinated. Can they get the staff vaccinated? I mean, there's issues with finding school bus drivers. There's supply chain issues. There's so many kids that have been traumatized that they're trying to get them social and emotional help. Schools have a lot on their plates. And when they have to deal with this kind of opposition,

it just makes it so much harder for them to do their basic jobs. Anya Kamenetz, she covers education for NPR and she's working on a book about kids and COVID. Today's episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlain. I'm Sean Ramos for a Mids-Election Day Explained. Thank you.