Education Protection Program
Stupid is as stupid does
It is tough to be a teacher right now. Between lessons on Critical Race Theory, reading books about gay penguins, and physically forcing masks onto students, there’s just not enough time for all of the gender theory you had planned for the day. Never fear though, as each passing day brings new opportunities to indoctrinate the children into your Marxist-Lenninist worldview in an effort to raise an army of Bolsheviks for the coup of President Barron Trump in 2056. By infiltrating the minds of students, you can configure the very foundation of our educational institutions for years to come. It is from here that true global domination arises, and visions of a Communist utopia come to pass. All of the student teaching hours, certification tests, and insurmountable student debt will certainly be worth it in the end. Schools are where the future is created. And the future is bright, comrade.
All of this drivel has been the basis of right-wing agitation towards todays educators and institutions for years now. If only it were true! But seriously, post-COVID, Republicans have come to dominate culture war narratives surrounding education through the demonization of teachers, schools, and higher education institutions. On the ground, this movement has evolved into groups like Moms For Liberty, which exists today as a direct result of the relentless woke fearmongering and anti-masking sentiment. By infiltrating school boards and altering public school curriculum, Republicans know they can work from the bottom up to establish a platform for Conservative worldview. Nationwide book banning, Florida’s anti-woke legislation, and Texas’ Senate Bill 17 are recent, prominent examples of what this type of provocation looks like on a practical level. This is all in addition to the continued promotion (and continued public rejection) of voucher systems and privatization of public education. None of this alleviates the real issues of overflowing classrooms, overworked teachers, and underperforming students.
Therein lies the problem. Republicans have been able to successfully cultivate a media and social environment of distraction and misdirection. Whether it’s vaccine efficacy, woke superheroes, or a Marxist takeover of education, the oppositional conversation presented by Republicans aims to agitate instead of solve. It has completely upended the way Republicans in government go about education reform, and it ignores critical shortcomings of the American education system. In a hearing held back in June, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions examined the country’s current state of educational affairs. There was a lot of ground covered here, but the primary focus was on gauging the environment for setting a teacher minimum wage nationwide. As agreeable as that is, it was the arguments themselves, made by Senator Bill Cassidy and his witnesses, that were of the most intrigue. Entrenched in their concerns about inefficient spending and low test scores are criticisms that woke curricula and administrators are the catalysts for these issues. One of Senator Cassidy’s witnesses was Nicole Neily, a Federalist Society contributor and founder of yet another parentally themed advocacy group: Parents Defending Education. Neily and her testimony embody the shift in rhetoric on American education over the last 5 years.
Let’s look at some of the conversation around American education, how that conversation has affected real legislation, and how the issues with America’s declining education standing go deeper than just education reform on its own. While this particular newsletter is going to focus on the rhetorical and legislative agenda put forward by Republicans (of utmost importance considering the incoming administration), the bigger picture presents a failure of both Democratic and Republican leadership in helping working class people. The growing lack of institutional trust Americans have in their government has made its way into public schools, and because of it the synonymous relationship between schools and the communities they reside in is continually eroding. At the end of the line, everyone bears the brunt of it.
Mom’s Mad
Born out of the anti-masking campaign of the COVID pandemic, Moms For Liberty was founded in 2021 by 3 former Florida school board members. They have since come to adopt the same kind of anti-woke, social purity belief system as any of your favorite Evangelicals. In addition to opposing LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms, they are arbiters of alternative history that is sympathetic to America’s brutal past of slavery and genocide. And, of course, what would any Conservative advocacy group be without a sex scandal regarding a founder? Nevertheless, their fight for “parental rights” and “truth” has garnered the group national recognition from top Republicans, including Donald Trump. Groups like them revel in a line of advocacy that The Guardian calls “housewife populism”, and hide their vitriol behind the facade of protecting children. It’s one thing to spew hate in a vacuum, but another thing entirely to become a pillar of a national ideological movement. Especially when it pertains to schooling. If children begin to question things when they’re young, they’ll only continue to do so in the future. Ultimately, Moms For Liberty is afraid that children will come to the correct conclusions about our society writ large.
That’s what the crux of their movement, and the larger conservative social agenda, is about. This idea that if your teacher is gay, they should not have pictures of their spouse on their desk. They should not talk about their partner, nor should they normalize any sort of romantic affinity for someone of the same sex. Discussions of gender will cause students to question their realities, sending them into a spiral of derealization and shame. Any exposure to the existence of LGBTQ+ people is enough to alter the brain chemistry of a child, transforming them into the most adamant Troye Sivan and Chappell Roan fans. Or worse, turn them gay completely. It is a denial of human existence and, pardon the pun, a textbook example of oppression. Further, Moms For Liberty continues to perpetuate inflammatory “groomer” rhetoric, pushing the narrative that anything surrounding the LGBTQ+ community is inherently sexual and without humanity. The lack of compassion and empathy ingrained into this worldview is directly antithetical to the processes of learning and understanding that are the basis for any sort of intellectual society. This same state of denial extends to American history as well.
Moms For Liberty and their movement were a catalyst for the surge of discussion surrounding Critical Race Theory. Much like their stance on gender and sexuality, there is a black hole where nuance and critical thinking should be. To the right, Critical Race Theory exists solely to oppress white people and fill them with guilt for the acts of their ancestors. Or more classically, it’s reverse racism. This grievance isn’t new. It’s the same complaints riddled towards Affirmative Action and any myriad of reforms that force people to take an honest look at America’s history and its systems of governing. Most damning, though, are efforts from Moms For Liberty, PragerU, and Conservative commentators like Charlie Kirk to palliate slavery and the broader reality of systemic racism and oppression. Honest analysis of history is the best way to determine and explain how and why systems exist as they do today. To say that the United States is a country built on the backs of slavery and genocide, while rhetorically salient, can also just be stated as a simple matter of fact on its face. This is another instance of making sure that children never come to question the American institution as it exists. It must be free of criticism.
National adoption of the Moms For Liberty platform is sprawling. They have roughly 300 chapters in cities across the country and are directly associated with prominent Republicans, including Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley. All 3 spoke at the 2023 Moms For Liberty conference, and with the upcoming administration, the moms now have a direct line to the White House. With this comes the normalization and potential implementation of their beliefs and worldview. Moms For Liberty doesn’t write the legislation for these people, but they do make it happen. While a national-level implementation of these reforms remains to be seen, the state of Florida, and many others, have done just that.
Sunshine State of Mind
Watching Ron DeSantis flail around for several months on the primary campaign trail was truly a highlight of this last election cycle. Despite being touted as an early favorite and potentially transformational figure within the party, his absolute charisma vacuum was too much to overcome. If DeSantis was to be against pudding and ICEE’s, he was unfit to be our leader. His anti-woke platform was not enough to propel him to the nomination despite a very public fight with Disney and enacting comprehensive conservative education reform across the state of Florida. In 2022, DeSantis signed into law statewide education reform that covered everything from LGBTQ+ discussion to how black history should be taught in classrooms. It also allowed for the use of PragerU Kids videos to be shown in schools. Videos featuring sanitizing, innacurate narratives that slavery was a compromise, and American land was not stolen. Shortly after, states all over the country followed suit and enacted similar reforms of their own. The links above covers this in detail, but it seems almost equally important to question why a bill like this needed to exist in the first place.
Coincidentally, Florida actually ranks quite high in education by many metrics. #1 overall (an aggregate of #10 in K-12 & #1 in Higher-Ed), in fact, with their best K-12 metric being the college readiness of their students. If any sort of reform needed to exist, the immediate assumption is it would address areas of need in an otherwise stable machine. The existence of the legislation passed in Florida and other states is merely a means of drawing hard lines on what kind of speech and thought can be said or discussed. It doesn’t get any more obvious than all of the book banning, which should come across as kind of the baseline entry point for fascism. Thousands of books on gender and race banned across these states over the last few years in the continued effort to shield children from the realities of the world around them. There is no practical purpose for this legislation to exist. It is not looking to increase test scores, improve graduation rates, or help those who may need it most. In fact, the rigid approach to discussions of race and gender only hinders broader understandings of history and human health.
There’s an obvious irony that the freedom party is responsible for some of the most sweeping restrictions on speech and expression in recent years. Legislation like this is a successful win for the likes of Moms For Liberty, Evangelicals, White Nationalists, and anyone looking to suppress the existence of an already marginalized group. It’s not like they just attempted to do all this stuff. It is enacted. It is now the standard in many places all over the country. As an issue, Democrats have completely failed to adequately oppose this rhetoric. With the fallout of the election came a flurry of Democratic analysis that saw mainstream Democrats, and even leftists, begin to cede ground to Republicans on these issues. The lack of backbone is appalling. Instead of fighting for teachers and the rights of others, or creating any sort of compelling counter narrative, they’ve decided that popularism and getting elected is what’s most important. While a small part of a larger issue, it’s important to note because it has allowed what may be coming over the next 4 years to happen.
Trickle Down Stupidity
In just over a month from now, Donald Trump will take office again, and if we’re to take him at his word for all of the things he campaigned on, then one of the first things to be affected is the U.S. Department of Education. More accurately, the U.S. Department of Education is going to be eliminated entirely. The consequences of this are beyond the scope of being adequately covered here, but the assertion alone is enough to work off of. It plays into the larger Conservative belief system of smaller government, states’ rights, and privatization, while also satisfying the base’s moral advocacy bloc. By attributing the DOE with the supposed expansion of social Marxism in schools and institutions, as people like Jordan Peterson talk about, the Trump administration creates a tangible villain that needs to be defeated. The irony here being that the DOE doesn’t set any kind of federal curriculum that states must follow. Its functions boil down to the distribution of funds, research and data collection, and ensuring equal access to education nationwide. It doesn’t matter, though. The reality distortion field that the right has created surrounding public education has made combatting both prejudice and misinformation increasingly difficult.
In addition to the anti-woke aspects of the DOE’s dismantling, the fiscal repercussions are also troubling. Project 2025’s section on education makes clear what some of these priorities are. Before even being fully rid of the DOE, the Trump administration aims to block grant federal funding to states from the Department (page 325). Money that is dedicated to states specifically for things like Title 1 funding for low-income school districts or special education programs would now be given to states with no strings attached under the belief that they’ll do what’s right without being made to do so. Once that dries up, though, and the DOE is completely done away with, it’s up to the states themselves to figure it out. Some states may be fine, but it’s practically immoral to let states like Mississippi or West Virginia fend for themselves financially. With less and less money to pay teachers, they will not only flee the poorest states, but any incentive to become a teacher at all in those states becomes virtually non-existent. This is all by design. It is an intentional effort to erode educational institutions because a less educated populous is a weaker populous. And, as usual, communities that will be hit hardest by reforms like these are already in the most precarious circumstances.
You don’t need a polysci doctorate to see the math behind the “diploma divide” in this last election. It’s not new either. College educated voters swinging for Democrats has been trending that way for decades. Hearkening back to the HELP hearing from earlier, Senator Cassidy concedes that teachers are important. That they deserve to be paid adequately even. Yet he argues that despite increases in education spending, test scores have fallen. Very suspect, so let’s dive into that. Next time around we’ll look at the money that is of much concern to Senator Cassidy (ask him if he has that same energy for the Department of Defense) and see what’s really going on with it. In the eyes of some, that money is being so misallocated that it may be worth getting rid of it altogether.