Seven of 12 proposed science textbooks for Texas 8th graders were rejected Friday by the Republican-controlled state Board of Education because they propose solutions to the climate emergency or were published by a company with an environmental, social, and governance policy. The Texas Tribune reported that the 15-member board, which for the first time was required to include climate education for…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In recent years, conservative parents (and dark money-funded “parents’” groups) have attacked school boards as a political target and increasingly pursued book bans. PEN America reported “1,477 instances of individual books banned, affecting 874 unique titles” during the first half of the 2022-23 school year. These bans restrict students’ and local residents’ access to important knowledge about…
As the Florida primary election results rolled in, in late August, Gov. Ron DeSantis publicly celebrated big wins in posts that traditionally have flown well-below the radar of governors: those of local school boards.
This year’s school board races in Florida have received national attention, as dozens of political action committees (PACs) linked to leaders of the Florida GOP, including DeSantis, funneled money to right-wing candidates. And they didn’t do it alone.
Also celebrating the school board victories and claiming them as their own were anti-public education groups like Moms for Liberty, a 501(c)(4) group that worked closely with DeSantis in the months leading up to the election. Many of the DeSantis-backed candidates were funded by Moms for Liberty’s state PAC, which drew almost exclusively on a $50,000 contribution from Publix heiress Julie Fancelli, who helped fund the January 6 rally that led to the Capitol insurrection.
Although Fancelli’s donations to Moms for Liberty’s PAC were disclosed, major funders of Moms for Liberty itself are not, allowing that dark money group to exert power and influence politics to their funders’ liking without transparency. The success of the right-wing school board candidates in Florida followed — and built on — a playbook employed by such groups in the 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia.
In Virginia (as with Florida) dark money groups demonized public schools by appealing to white grievances against inclusive teaching content and inciting hate against marginalized groups, especially the transgender community. After Trump ally and GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin won his bid for governor in Virginia, these groups attributed the victory to their disingenuous rallying cry of “parental rights.”
The massive amounts of GOP and dark money-tied funding for right-wing school board candidates, however, is a relatively new development (although Koch money was deployed to target school boards in Colorado a few years back, before being repelled by voters).
If Florida and Virginia are any indication, Moms for Liberty and other anti-public education groups are gearing up to play a key role in the GOP strategy to dominate the elections in November and beyond. After all, bolstering turnout for right-wing school board candidates will also likely inflate support for GOP candidates on the up-ballot. In what follows, drawing on information unearthed by True North Research, the investigative research watchdog organization at which I work, I will outline how these groups may use their deep pockets to attack schools and subvert the will of the people.
If the GOP wins big in the November midterm elections, the party’s success will likely serve as another case study in how anonymous ultra-wealthy donors can use dark money groups to buy an election.
Dark money groups are vehicles through which the uber-rich can use their vast disposable income to distort public policy and amplify their voices. As the saying goes, “In politics, money doesn’t talk. It screams!”
By anonymously funding influence operations that call themselves “think tanks” and “action arms,” right-wing elites have pushed extremist free-market and Christian nationalist ideologies on the public with little to no accountability.
Supporting these anti-taxation groups can pay big dividends for their donors in the form of huge tax breaks, which the GOP has consistently fought for on behalf of the richest few.
This corrupt system leaves those with fewer financial resources at a stark disadvantage in influencing public policy. It can also limit everyday Americans’ ability to affect change at the ballot box. For example, vast anonymous donations have recently funded efforts to redraw state congressional maps that disenfranchise Democratic voters, especially communities of color.
After Florida’s August primary elections, dark money groups openly boasted about the right-wing candidates they helped elect. Moms for Liberty claimed it helped elect 43 candidates outright and advanced 14 to the general election. FreedomWorks, the spawn of Charles Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy, bragged that five of the candidates they trained won their seats, with six others advancing to the November election.
Despite their professed impact, 501(c) operations are forced to disclose pitifully little about the ultra-wealthy donors that fund their attacks and have clear sway on the direction of elections in our country. This is in large part a result of a decades-long assault on public disclosure laws by these same groups and individuals. The Citizens United decision issued by the Roberts Supreme Court over a decade ago exemplifies the effect of allowing dark money groups to play such an unchecked role in judicial appointments, too.
Dark money donors and the groups they fund also use their vast resources to find tax and disclosure loopholes. We saw this in August, when The New York Times and ProPublica reported that the Chicago-based industrialist Barre Seid used a loophole in tax laws to transfer $1.6 billion to the far right lawyer and Federalist Society fundraiser Leonard Leo, who is the architect of the right-wing court capture network set on turning back our rights, as with the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
In its 2021 IRS filings, Moms for Liberty disclosed it had registered 76 county-level chapters in addition to its national chapter, making it difficult to track funding and spending by location.
Despite this growth, it claimed to have raised less than $50,000 in 2021 per its IRS filings, so it is not clear how its national staff was compensated or if they acted as consultants whose pay did not pass through the organization or were paid by another entity.
Moms for Liberty certainly doesn’t seem to lack funding in 2022. Its lavish July summit, where Ron DeSantis and right-wing billionaire and former Trump Secretary of Education Betsy Devos spoke, was sponsored by a plethora of right-wing groups. The Leadership Institute, Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA, all groups tied closely to billionaire Libertarian Charles Koch who has long worked to defund public education, were sponsors of the event to the tune of $50,000, $10,000 and $5,000 respectively.
Right-wing groups have assailed public schools for decades, as with opposition to racial integration of schools in the decades following the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of 1954. (Plenty of Democratic elites, too, have pushed for school privatization.)
But the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity for public school enemies to follow the “shock doctrine” as described by Naomi Klein, wherein “disaster capitalists” take advantage of disruptive climate or public health events to privatize public goods and redistribute wealth upwards.
Beginning in mid-2020, established school privatization groups and new ones –formed by experienced dark money operatives — took advantage of parents’ genuine concerns about their children’s well-being in a global pandemic to further attack public education.
When COVID precautions waned, these groups shifted their focus — from forcing schools to reopen and eliminating masking and other hygienic requirements that would keep students and school staff safe, to “culture war” issues.
In Virginia, Youngkin’s campaign benefited substantially from the outrage manufactured around schools by groups tied to the Koch network and Betsy DeVos.
The Koch and DeVos-funded sister groups called the “Independent Women’s Voice” (IWV) and “Independent Women’s Forum” (IWF) were heavily involved in propping up Youngkin during his campaign and attacking his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe. This included the inaccurate promotion of a last-minute scandal before the election about a sexual assault in a girl’s bathroom. The story blew up and right-wing media outlets peddled it as a cautionary tale about trans-inclusive policies, falsely alleging that the student who committed the assault was trans, even though it turned out the perpetrator was not transgender.
In the weeks before the election, IWV also spent big on Facebook advertisements and launched a pop-up website attacking McAuliffe called “ToxicSchools.org,” which used misleading text and graphics to claim that Virginia’s public schools were giving students access to pornographic materials. IWV also ran Facebook ads attacking McAuliffe by featuring a Washington Post headline that McAuliffe “vetoe[d] a bill permitting parents to block sexually explicit books in school.” But the content of that story, which IWV left out, explains that Virginia would have been the first state in the country to allow parents to censor books, like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, because of a single sexual scene despite the book’s overall educational value.
IWV’s attacks centered on several elements of the dark money playbook we have seen amplified since the Virginia election: attacking books (especially about Black and queer histories and experiences), demonizing any depiction of sex as constituting “pornography,” and claiming GOP politicians stand for “parental rights.” Meanwhile, IWV and IWF have long opposed comprehensive federal programs that would support parents, like paid family and medical leave.
Asra Nomani, a Fairfax County-based parent who now works for IWV after a stint at another dark money organization called “Parents Defending Education” (PDE), took credit for Youngkin’s victory. Nomani helped launch a right-wing group at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology called “Coalition for TJ.” The group attacked the school’s new admission policy, which incorporated a more holistic evaluation process to increase racial diversity in the student body. After its formation in March 2021, PDE hired members of and helped platform Nomani’s coalition, as Youngkin later did.
Also aiding this dark money effort was a Virginia-based political action committee called “Fight for Schools” (FFS), a Trump and GOP-linked PAC purporting to support “common sense” candidates who oppose critical race theory in schools. FFS is run by Ian Prior, who has worked in Trump’s Department of Justice and as top communications official for the National Republican Congressional Committee. He is also senior counsel for Article III Project, a group launched with funding from Leonard Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network that attacks Democratic judicial nominees, and America First Legal, which was launched by former senior Trump White House aide Stephen Miller.
FFS rebranded as “Fight for Schools and Parents” with the Virginia State Board of Elections in June 2022, listing Staci Goede, longtime former CFO of the Republican State Leadership Committee, as treasurer. Goede used an email address from the Crosby-Ottenhoff Group, founded by former GOP administration employees who have run numerous super PACs for Republican candidates.
Leading up to the 2021 election, FFS spent over $46,000 on mailers and $7,000 on texting, and Prior appeared over a dozen times on Fox News, where he was presented not as a right-wing political operative, but merely as a “parent.” FFS also held a fundraiser and “rally” for Youngkin and, according to the Associated Press, was asked to help build crowds for Youngkin’s campaign events.
Because FFS is a 527 PAC that can campaign directly to urge people to vote for specific candidates, it is required to report its contributors. Those disclosures reveal that FFS raised more than $400,000 from April 2021 to June 2022, including $10,000 from Ben Carson’s 1776 Action, another group whitewashing American history.
Since November 2021, attacks of the kind directed toward schools in Virginia have only increased.
Members of Moms for Liberty and other groups have built on IWV’s attacks on books in Virginia by targeting books by Black and queer authors across the country. One Moms for Liberty chapter in New Hampshire even offered a “bounty” for tips about teachers who discussed systemic racism.
The Florida primary example is indicative of an increasing level of coordination between these dark money groups and GOP politicians with major fundraising capabilities that seems to be playing out across the country.
Beyond local and state-based PACs linked to Moms for Liberty, like those in Williamson County, Tennessee, and Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, new federal “concerned parents” PACs appear poised to pour money into campaigns for right-wing candidates.
Moms for Liberty also registered three federal PACs in late 2021 listing Chris Marston, general counsel for the Republican Party of Virginia, as treasurer. According to Axios, 1776 Project PAC, which is also focused on opposing anything it deems “critical race theory,” has promised to “[campaign] on behalf of school board candidates.” The PAC has spent $400,000 around the Florida races this year and will likely spend more during the midterms.
The GOP school board victories in Florida do not necessarily portend doom for Democrats in the midterms. In fact, Virginia and Florida may have been outliers, given the relative presence of these dark money actors and their networks in the wealthy Virginia suburbs of D.C. and in Florida, where Moms for Liberty and its founders are based.
Plus, a number of races so far have shown an increased number of women registering to vote after Leonard Leo’s donors got what they wanted in the reversal of constitutional protections for abortion.
But these examples shine light on the new front targeted by GOP operatives.
Along with the anti-democratic efforts of the Republican Party to limit Americans’ freedom to vote and have our votes counted, leading politicians in the party seem to be working closely with right-wing groups funded by secret (and likely ultra-wealthy) donors to try to capture offices from school boards to Congress in 2022 and beyond.
Note: True North Research Executive Director Lisa Graves, Senior Fellow Evan Vorpahl and Fellow Ansev Demirhan contributed to this report.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Schools have never been havens from the threat of policing. But recent narratives created by politicians and police departments falsify school violence as astronomically high and inaccurately suggest more police on campus as the only remedy, even as campaigns have pushed over the past two years to remove police from schools. The narratives cite anecdotal reports of violence in schools following students’ return to physical classrooms after the quarantine but fail to contextualize the violence or its causes and rarely mention that crime levels in schools are far below levels in the 1990s and 2000s. Instead of assuming more police are necessary, decision makers should be consulting students and educators — especially those of us in heavily policed schools — about solutions.
I saw my friend slammed on a cop car in middle school. In high school, I witnessed students get pepper-sprayed by police in common areas between classes. When I was a freshman, there were one or two police officers on campus; today, four or five officers with security dogs patrol us. Their presence creates an intense atmosphere in which students wonder what caused the school to hire them.
Arrested Learning, a national survey published in April 2021, asked students what makes them feel safe when physically attending school. Eighty-four percent referenced their friends; 63 percent answered teachers; 16 percent said police. Additionally, one-third of respondents felt police targeted them because of their identities.
Students need investments in programs and resources that help us focus while learning, not more police. The real question: How can students voice their concerns and pressure school districts to make these changes? Local organizing around school board elections has proven the answer.
Currently, school boards play a key role in deciding whether schools have a police presence. We’ve seen police officer associations fund pro-police school board candidates in Nassau and Suffolk counties in New York. In El Paso, Texas, the El Paso Municipal Police Officers Association and Sheriff’s Officers Association helped elect a former police officer.
School boards rank among the best avenues to challenging on-campus police presence. Yet a 2020 National School Boards Association report revealed “discouragingly low” school board election turnout numbers (between 5 to 10 percent). That year in my home district (the fifth-largest school in the U.S. — Clark County, Nevada), only 33 percent of the electorate participated in school board elections; the winning margin was just 4,500 votes.
Students can impact the presence of police in their schools by organizing through school boards effectively. The Center for Popular Democracy Action’s new toolkit analyzes how school boards affect students’ lives and how to use them to challenge injustices like school policing.
School boards wield immense power. Far right conservatives and police interests understand this, but they aren’t alone. Community activists have challenged racist and classist policies through public school boards for decades. Recently, effective organizing examples have played out in places like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where actions by Leaders Igniting Transformation led the Milwaukee Board of School Directors to unanimously pass a resolution ending their contract with Milwaukee’s police department.
As a fellow at Make the Road Nevada, my classmates and I pressured our school board to create a student section at meetings to ensure a dedicated platform for elevating our voices. We’re pushing hard to remove police from our schools, add more counselors and support candidates who back our priorities. It isn’t easy, but we’ve won some victories, including helping elect our endorsed candidate to the school board this summer, and keep building a solid foundation to win more.
Nationally, students have spent the past two years dealing with a pandemic that has compounded the existing troubles in our private lives. We need more social workers, counselors and teachers who care about us in order to get through such a turbulent period. My high school had a social worker before Las Vegas began its COVID lockdown. Post-lockdown, I haven’t seen them around, and it appears additional police officers took their place. That’s a tradeoff that has benefited no one but the police.
Make the Road Nevada Action also helped create “Youth Mandate for Education and Liberation: A Mandate to Guide Us From Crisis to Liberation,” which details how police and security in schools don’t make students feel safe and instead, often lead to harmful interactions. It also shows that students overwhelmingly prefer that school districts focus on providing more student resources and support over police and security. In the Youth Mandate, youth groups within the Center for Popular Democracy Network demanded that schools divest from police to fund services and education programs that prioritize restorative practices over harsh discipline.
Here’s the root problem with the police: They can’t prevent violence but can only respond to it, often with more violence. Our schools should foster creativity, healing, and joy — and work to prevent harm. That’s impossible with hardline disciplinary actions and on-campus police militarization. We need resources that focus on students and position us to succeed. Obtaining those resources requires students, parents and everyone who cares about our well-being to organize around school boards.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
When Sarah Markey ran for the school board in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, in 2018, the area’s right wing paid little attention. That changed when she and three other progressive women won seats on the board. Among their first acts was declaring that the school system would not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They also put a moratorium on school suspensions to address the system’s disproportionate impact on Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) students and instituted Indigenous People’s Day to replace Columbus Day.
The response was swift. “The right created a Facebook page to attack us,” Markey told Truthout. “They came at us all day, every day.”
Markey, who also works at the National Education Association, was called a “union thug” on the Parents United Against Indoctrination Facebook page (at different points, the group has called itself Rhode Island Parents Against Indoctrination and Parents Against Indoctrination), and was accused of pushing “critical race theory” (CRT) — the examination of the racist and genocidal foundation on which the U.S. was built — into South Kingstown schools, something that was never done. One anonymous poster called Markey an “America Hating Lowlife DemoRat Vermin Communist Scum.” Another prayed for her demise and the demise of her supporters: “May each and every one of you white liberal Karen racists catch COVID and drop dead before rotting in the fiery depths of Hell,” it read.
Eventually, the barrage of messages got to Markey and took a physical and emotional toll. “I had a fight or flight response every single day,” she says. “My sons saw the messages and noticed that to these critics, I am not a human being who lives in their town. The opposition sees me as a monster.”
Markey resigned from the board in June 2021 after serving for two and a half years. Another progressive board member, Emily Cummiskey, also resigned that month. “They drove out two people who wanted to do what was best for kids, and it didn’t matter to them how hard we’d worked. We were replaced by people I consider Democrat-lite, folks who say things like, ‘I’m a Democrat, but … I hate unions.’ They don’t rock the boat. They avoid conflict,” Markey told Truthout.
In nearby North Kingstown, Rhode Island, anti-racist school board member Jennifer Lima, elected in 2020, has also been subjected to a slew of attacks. Although a recall petition to unseat her in the fall of 2021 was unsuccessful, Parents United Against Indoctrination, joined by the Gaspee Project — named for the 1772 dynamiting of a British ship called the Gaspee by Rhode Island settlers — has continued to lambaste her as “un-American.”
“Anything that is good is twisted into something that is bad,” Lima says. “There is a deliberate, ongoing misrepresentation of our district-wide diversity, equity and inclusion work in an effort to undermine it.”
Both Lima and Markey stress that what is happening in their state is happening throughout the country and note that in 2021, similar efforts to unseat or replace progressive school board members took place in 76 districts in 22 states.
And it’s about to get worse.
Election watchers from a host of government groups, Lima and Markey say, are looking at 2021 as a trial run; they expect a groundswell of conservative school board campaigns to kick into high gear this summer, several months before the November 2022 elections.
There are many reasons for this.
By all accounts, the right wing is fired up about mask and vaccination mandates, as well as curricula that stress racial and gender inclusivity — which they refer to as “CRT.” They’re also worried about anticipated demographic changes that will eventually make white people a minority in the U.S., a change the far right calls the “Great Replacement.”
Denisha Jones, a member of the organizing committee of Uniting to Save Our Schools and co-editor of Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice, told Truthout that we cannot lose sight of this context. “We have to remember what was happening in the summer of 2020,” she says. “In addition to a global pandemic, the murder of George Floyd led to demonstrations in every major city in the U.S., with progressives pushing back against systems of police oppression. In response, Trump launched the 1776 Commission and attacked diversity, equity and inclusion training in schools. This, in turn, led his supporters to react to attempts to address the foundational racism at the heart of U.S. history.”
A massive backlash movement resulted.
Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist under Trump — a man who advocated many overtly racist policies and practices — saw right-wing anger at anti-racist efforts as a potent opportunity and urged those who feared a racial reckoning to get involved at the local level. “The path to save the nation is very simple,” he told the 74 million people who voted for Trump. “It’s going to go through school boards.”
The idea quickly caught fire on the right, with several national groups — the Family Research Council and the Leadership Institute among the most prominent — offering training, funding and technical assistance to candidates wishing to campaign for local office.
Frederick Clarkson is a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a 40-year-old Somerville, Massachusetts-based think tank that monitors the religious and secular right wing. He told Truthout that while the current attempt to control public education has to be taken seriously, it is not unprecedented. Furthermore, he says that what is unfolding essentially puts a new spin on an old agenda. “These efforts have deep roots,” Clarkson says. “MAGA goals and ideology go back to the Barry Goldwater for president campaign of 1964. Then, in the 1980s, the Christian Coalition worked to elect people to school boards. What’s new here is the overt alliance between Christian right groups and groups that are part of the ‘patriot’ or militia movements. What’s new is the scale of the mobilization that is happening and the fact that the threat to public education is ramping up.”
Indeed, the recruitment and training of right-wing candidates is being orchestrated by several large, well-funded national entities. The Leadership Institute, for example, has created a 20-hour online course to teach conservatives how to run for their local school board — even if they don’t have children enrolled in the public schools — in order “to stop the teaching of CRT before it destroys the fabric of our nation.”
Not to be outdone, the Family Research Council coordinated a four-hour School Board Boot Camp in June 2021. The curriculum? Everything “you need to know about running for school board or supporting the people who answer the call to public service.” Speakers from the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council slammed CRT, Planned Parenthood, the Southern Poverty Law Center and teachers’ unions throughout the training.
Supplementing this effort, Citizens for Renewing America, founded by Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, created a 34-page “A-Z Guide to Combat Critical Race Theory and Reclaim Your Local School Board.” Citizens for Renewing America’s mission is “to renew an American consensus of a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending.” The guide — which begins with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. — includes commentary meant to swell conservative outrage: “According to Critical Social Justice, straight white people (especially men) are the oppressors and have systematically rigged society for their own benefit…. [They believe] everything that makes up American society is racist. This includes Christianity, free markets, traditional marriage, rule of law, traditional family structures, and a representative form of government.”
Other conservative outlets, such as the Truth and Liberty Coalition run by pastor Andrew Wommack, compiled a Christian Voter Guide in 2021 that was published by WallBuilders, a Christian dominionist group that seeks to win Christian domination over every aspect of human life and eliminate church-state separation.
(The Leadership Institute, WallBuilders and Citizens for Renewing America did not respond to Truthout’s request for an interview.)
In addition to these national organizations, a spate of additional groups has popped up to carry the electoral work forward. Most purport to be grassroots efforts organized by parents concerned about what children are learning about U.S. history and social policy: Moms for Liberty; Parents Defending Education; No Left Turn in Education; and Intercessors for America, among them. (They, too, failed to respond to Truthout’s request for an interview.)
But not everyone buys the claim that these groups reflect an outpouring of spontaneous outrage. “The moral panic we are seeing over ‘CRT’ was created by a group of think tanks that are funded by Koch Industries,” Jasmine Banks, executive director of UnKoch my Campus, told Truthout. “The Koch network has always made undercutting public education part of their plan. During the Obama administration, they opposed social and emotional learning programs, and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.”
Now, she says, the focus is CRT, or what the right mistakenly believes to be CRT. UnKoch analyzed the output of just 28 of the many think tanks the Koch network funds and saw that their echo chamber made CRT a household phrase. “Between June 2020 and June 2021, Banks says, “these organizations produced 79 articles, podcasts, reports and videos critical of ‘CRT.’ The Manhattan Institute alone published 43 articles on the topic.” Add in the scads of denunciations on Fox News, One America News Network, Newsmax and smaller right-wing media outlets, and the impact is obvious.
So, how to respond?
Political Research Associates staffers Steven Gardiner and Tarso Luís Ramos, in a January 2022 report entitled, “Capitol Offenses: January 6, 2021 and the Ongoing Insurrection,” conclude that, “the Left, broadly speaking, has to recognize that the fight against far-right authoritarians and ultra-nationalists cannot be won without a broad coalition.” They call for the formation of an inclusive, diverse, united front against the right wing that is threatening to topple democracy by destroying public education while simultaneously smashing unions, denying history, curtailing voting rights, overturning protections for LGBTQIA+ people, ending legal abortion and sidestepping efforts to protect the environment.
Both Gardiner and Ramos know that this is a tall order. But they also argue that it is the only way forward. Anti-racism, they write, is but one element of the fight “for structural reforms in the current system” that will create “a more fundamental social transformation,” and they urge this as yet unformed assembly to “reject neoliberalism, militarism, and compromise with ethno-nationalists.”
Denisha Jones of Uniting to Save Our Schools, agrees, but adds that this progressive coalition has to be flexible and operate at the local, national and international levels. This, she says, is imperative if we want to both transform schools and shift the social and economic milieu to make society more equitable.
“We need to keep our eyes on the ground,” Jones says, “and listen and observe to leverage up.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A few years ago, I took my kids on the Hemings Family Tour of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. We came to learn about people enslaved by our third president.
At the start of the tour, the guide asked the group to guess the most valuable slave on a plantation. I knew the answer immediately, but as part of the only Black family on the tour, I wanted to know who the white people valued.
After all the other guests gave incorrect answers. I spoke up.
“The most valuable slave on a plantation is someone like me,” I said. “A woman of childbearing age, because I can produce more slaves for free.”
It was the right answer. All I could do was grab my children and hold them tight.
I didn’t read that answer in a book somewhere. I knew it in my bones, because I’ve lived in this country for four decades and have taken in enough information to know that bodies like mine, particularly during the founding of this country, were and are valued only if we are profitable. Too often, Black students are forced to conform to white culture and be subjected to repeated incidents of anti-Blackness in order to receive an education.
Last month, just 40 minutes away from our home in Portland, Oregon, high school students participated in a virtual slave trade, where students joked about how much they’d pay for their Black classmates.
They even said things like “All Blacks should die” and “They can run but they can’t hide.”
I’m horrified that the Black students had to find out literally how much — or how little — their bodies are valued by their white classmates.
Then, just a few days later, a teacher’s aide in the same district was placed on leave after she came to school in blackface. She said she was dressing up as the civil rights activist Rosa Parks and was protesting Oregon’s educator vaccination requirements.
I wanted so badly to be shocked by this news. But I know that these incidents are ripple effects from a troubling recent policy decision by the Newberg School Board, which voted to ban teachers from hanging “Black Lives Matter” flags in their classrooms because the board sees them as political symbols.
What that board fails to realize is that such symbols tell Black students that they are seen, protected and loved. And that matters in a place like Newberg: According to the most recent public data, Black students make up just one percent of the student population.
The data also show that there is not a single Black teacher in the district. These facts make the flags even more imperative as they provide an easy way for kids to know who is on their side.
“Students need to know who their allies are when they feel the need to talk or a safe space just to be themselves,” MaryJane Bachmeier testified at a school board meeting on behalf of the Newberg Education Association Executive Board against the ban on hanging Black Lives Matter flags.
She’s right. Newberg’s school board members also failed to recognize that by rejecting symbols of inclusivity and antiracism, they are normalizing hateful behavior. That one vote has left kids unprotected and exposed to an increasingly racist environment at school.
What’s happening in Newberg, Oregon, isn’t an anomaly. School boards across the nation are voting against historically accurate and culturally responsive curriculums. Students and teachers are being censored from saying “Black Lives Matter.”
It’s time we recognize that these actions by public officials who seem to wish to keep systems of oppression in place are the first push of a chain of dominoes that can lead to the kinds of racially insensitive actions we’ve seen in Newberg.
Black kids will go on to internalize the values displayed by the adults around them.
Someday, they too will know in their bones what I knew that day on the plantation.
Fortunately, many people across the country are working to prevent this from happening. I am the executive director of an education advocacy organization in Oregon, and we’ve seen educators, parents, students and school board members step up to advocate for students’ rights to learn from history and feel seen in school.
This past year, we worked to elect more than 50 leaders to school boards across the state because we see how dangerous it is to have closed-minded people in charge.
Schools are the first place where we see the humanity — or inhumanity — of people not in our families. As such, all school leaders — from teachers to local elected officials — must take responsibility for the ripple effect of their disregard for communities of color.
If they don’t, we all should worry about what kind of trauma Black kids will carry around by the time they’re my age, based on the harrowing experiences they’re having today.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On Monday, United States Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that federal officials, including authorities in the FBI, would soon meet with leaders in school districts across the country to address “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against educators and school board members.
A number of violent incidents toward school personnel have been documented over the past several weeks, mostly perpetrated by parents with conservative viewpoints who oppose measures like mask mandates and the purported teaching of critical race theory in classrooms. These occurrences have become so widespread that they were even parodied in a sketch on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” Garland said in a memo detailing his order. “Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.”
Garland added that the Department of Justice would be announcing additional measures in the near future to “address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”
Garland’s order comes after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter last week to President Joe Biden requesting help addressing violence against school officials. Describing the situation as an “immediate threat,” the organization noted that some parents are acting out over perceived changes that aren’t even happening.
“Coupled with attacks against school board members and educators for approving policies for masks to protect the health and safety of students and school employees, many public school officials are also facing physical threats because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula,” the NSBA letter read.
“This propaganda continues despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class,” the letter continued.
As the threats are becoming more prevalent, the organization explained, the “NSBA respectfully asks that a joint collaboration among federal law enforcement agencies, state and local law enforcement, and with public school officials be undertaken to focus on these threats.”
These threats have occurred in a number of places across the U.S. In Austin, Texas, for example, a parent upset with masking rules being implemented in his child’s school physically assaulted a teacher that attempted to have his child adhere to the policy. Late last month, a school board meeting in Carver County, Minnesota also turned violent when unmasked parents started a fight after a member of the community spoke favorably of the school district’s decision to keep masking rules in place.