The Anti-Culture Warriors: Incubators Training Moderates to Run for School Board
The 74 Million | By Beth Hawkins | October 23, 2024
With 12,000 seats up for grabs nationwide, can a new candidate recruiting effort tame some of the red-hot races at the bottom of the ticket?
In 2021, the sudden emergence of Moms for Liberty, the 1776 Project and other right-wing groups targeting mentions of race and LGBTQ people in education upended school board meetings — and elections — nationwide. Under the broad rallying cry of “parental rights,” the upstarts had overnight success recruiting culture-warrior candidates and helping them win board seats in districts large and small.
Once elected, the new board members were equally effective at advancing their agendas. According to the free speech watchdog group PEN America, over the last two years, 247 school districts have banned books and at least 894 have prohibited “divisive” speech.
Superintendents were fired or pushed out in nine of 17 boards flipped by right-wing candidates in 2022. In the first two hours of its inaugural meeting, a South Carolina school board newly dominated by Moms for Liberty-backed members fired the district’s first Black superintendent and its attorney, banned discussion of critical race theory and started the process of removing books and other materials from schools.
Now, four election cycles after these groups emerged, the culture warriors have competition in hundreds of races from candidates backed by another set of organizations newly focused on school boards — this time, recruiting and training opponents of book bans, restrictions on classroom speech and instruction, rollbacks of LGBTQ student rights and educator censorship.
They’re bringing many of the sophisticated campaign strategies — and money — long common in top-of-the-ticket state and federal races to contests in even small districts. Some are deliberately recruiting young, diverse candidates.
There are an estimated 12,000 school board races on ballots this year, ranging from headline-grabbing contests in huge urban districts like Los Angeles and Chicago to small, rural communities where elections are decided by a handful of votes. The organizations jumping into the fray are just as varied, ranging from national coalitions like the Pipeline Fund — which supports candidates throughout the country — to groups focused on a specific demographic or hyperlocal race.
In Arizona, Instituto organizes Native communities and people of color. RISE Indy is focused on school systems in Marion County, Indiana. Denver Families for Public Schools trains potential board members in both English and Spanish.
Like their right-wing counterparts, these candidate incubators are typically organized as 501(c)4 nonprofits, which can engage in political activity and are required to make limited public disclosures of their spending. Frequently, they have a more traditional nonprofit partner that can’t participate in electoral politics but can educate voters about issues.
Because many of the larger groups previously focused on state and federal elections, they are able to identify districts where Moms for Liberty and other right-wing organizations have won significant victories and to recruit slates of candidates to oppose them.
Once a thankless job, even more so now
Traditionally, school board politics has differed from that of other elections. Mostly nonpartisan — which has been generally perceived as a good thing — the contests can be as bitterly fought as other races, yet they rarely interest people who don’t have a direct connection to their local schools. This translates to low voter turnout, which can give outsized influence to teachers unions, education reform advocates and other special interests that sometimes supply funding and volunteer door-knockers.
School board members are rarely paid more than a stipend — if that — to take on a demanding role that involves making often unpopular decisions involving hundreds of millions of dollars and the well-being of their neighbors’ children.
Historically, particularly in smaller communities, persuading people to campaign for such an undesirable job has been tough. But injecting national, partisan issues into school board races has proven a remarkably effective voter mobilization tool for the GOP — and led to constant harassment of school board members even over seemingly noncontroversial issues. This year in Minnesota, for example, there are 30 districts with more open board seats than candidates.
For those who do run, an increase in the number of “single-issue” board members can grind the process of taking care of a school system’s day-to-day business to a halt. And even though the number of ballot-box wins by Moms for Liberty and similar groups is falling, the attendant acrimony can drive nonpartisan people off boards and flatten interest among prospective moderate replacements.
The goal of the new candidate incubators is to seek community members willing to serve and to train them in the nuts and bolts of campaigning, as well as in how to govern effectively and seek compromise in polarized environments — and to survive the rancor and even physical threats that, at least for the moment, can come with the job.
When board politics is personal
Kyrstin Schuette has first-hand experience with the impact ideological politics can have on students. In 2009, the board of Minnesota’s largest school system, the Anoka-Hennepin School District, adopted what is often called a “don’t say gay” policy, limiting what staff could discuss with students about LGBTQ people and issues. Teachers interpreted the rule as prohibiting them from intervening in in-school victimization.
In the first year the edict was in place, nine students who had been bullied because of their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity committed suicide. “I was almost the 10th,” says Schuette, who was harassed by classmates and a teacher starting in her sophomore year of high school.
In 2011, she became Jane Doe, the lead plaintiff in a federal civil rights suit against the district. As part of a settlement, the Justice Department imposed a consent decree requiring Anoka-Hennepin to make a number of systemic changes that were supposed to protect Schuette and her classmates going forward.
The court order, however, did not sway the board. Even before the end of the legal oversight, a right-wing majority overruled school administrators and illegally ordered them to prohibit a transgender swimmer from using the boys’ locker room. The athlete, “Nick,” sued. In 2021, the case was settled with another order requiring the district to again adopt policies designed to protect LGBTQ students.
In 2022 and 2023, three school board members were elected with the support of the 1776 Project PAC and a similar group founded in 2022, the Minnesota Parents Alliance, creating a 3-3 partisan split. The new conservative bloc demanded the rollback of portions of the 2021 settlement that would bring the district into compliance with the law.
The three also threatened to vote against the budget if administrators did not do away with diversity initiatives and adopted new, state-mandated social studies standards that include ethnic studies. By law, districts must provide instruction that covers the grade-by-grade standards and have to balance each year’s budget by July 31 or shut down.
In July 2023, Schuette launched the School Board Integrity Project, which trained and backed 84 candidates in 27 Minnesota districts in time to run last November. This year, the group is working with more than 200 candidates in 42 Minnesota districts and 14 other states.
Schuette credits her group’s rapid growth to pent-up frustrations with recent years’ education politics, but she’s quick to add that many of the candidates she’s trained needed convincing they could run, win and make a difference.
“There’s definitely some apprehension there,” she says. “Parents, community leaders, former teachers — those are folks who need a little more encouragement.”
Founded in 2017 to train primarily young candidates for a number of offices, Run for Something this year has launched a $3 million pilot program to test adding school boards to the races it will get involved in. The group hopes to be active in all 50 states, with a particular emphasis on the 60% of school board races that are uncontested.
Denise Feriozzi is executive director of the Pipeline Fund, created in 2018 to bring more people of color, women and low-income people into electoral politics. Two years ago, the fund began identifying school districts where ideologically motivated board members have had the biggest impact and organizing its own candidates to counter them.
Like Schuette, Feriozzi says the Pipeline Fund has seen a groundswell of interest — ironically, something she credits in part to the successes of the 1776 Project and Moms for Liberty: “Over the last couple of years, folks have really recognized the potential for school boards to impact the lives of students.”
Strong candidates, Feriozzi says, should “be able to answer the ‘why.’ What is it you want to be able to accomplish?” The rest, she says, can be taught.
‘How do you work with the other side?’
A professor of education politics and policy at Michigan State University, Rebecca Jacobsen has studied the politicization of school boards. She predicts the recruiting and training efforts by moderate groups will translate to higher-caliber board members in many places. But she also harbors concerns.
Candidates backed by the conservative organizations that sprang up in 2021 were often counseled to engage in what she and others call politics of disruption. Traditionally, nonpartisan board members are urged to observe rules designed to ensure civility. They often agree not to surprise one another with sharp questions during public meetings, to make sure comments to reporters and constituents are in accord with board decisions and to not embarrass the district staffers whose job it is to make presentations.
The new members, Jacobsen says, are frequently coached to deviate from the old customs: “You don’t have to speak as a board”; “Maintain your own Twitter, maintain your own social media presence”; “Don’t do it behind the scenes, do it in public.”
“This really changes who runs, why they run and what their role is,” she says. “The point is to sow distrust and chaos.”
Jacobsen was part of a team of researchers who watched 156 board meetings in 15 states from 2019 to 2022. They found a marked increase in shouting, insults and threats — both by board members and people in the audience — particularly in areas where Moms for Liberty and similar groups were active.
Traditionally, school board service involves constant compromise, Jacobsen continues: “But there are no compromises when [you believe] the other side is harming children. How do you work with the other side when you think the other side is fundamentally evil?”
Because of this, beyond the basics of fundraising and door-knocking, the Pipeline Fund works with organizations to equip prospective board members with strategies for campaigning and governing in high-conflict environments. The group works with the Democracy Security Project to help candidates minimize or navigate online and physical threats and harassment, for example.
The fund and numerous local candidate training groups work with School Board Partners, an organization founded by Orleans Parish School Board member Ethan Ashley in 2020. Its goal is to equip candidates — with an emphasis on women of color — and newly elected officials with policy-making skills.
New board members, he says, need training on everything from parliamentary procedure to self-care. And in a contentious environment, that support needs to be ongoing and emphasize using relationship-building skills to try to create a cohesive board culture.
“There are 12,000 school board races on the ballot this year,” says Ashley. “We believe the community knows who the right individuals are to run those races. We’re thinking deeply about how to support them after they are elected.”
