Right-Wing Candidates Are Coming For Public Schools

Over the last few years, elections for public education officials have gone from overlooked and low-profile to heated and politicized affairs, a shift that’s due in large part to conservatives increasingly eyeing schools as places where they can wield significant influence and enact a specific agenda.

Moms for Liberty, a far-right group that popped up in Florida during the COVID pandemic and has since campaigned nationwide for a variety of conservative causes, is a significant driver of this shift. The so-called “parental rights” organization has thrown its support behind school board candidates across the country who have gone on to ban books, pass policies that hurt LGBTQ+ kids, and limit what teachers can do and say in their classrooms.

In 2022, more than half of the candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won their races, with those in Florida seeing particular success. But the following year, the group’s high-profile attempts in Pennsylvania were largely a dud.

This year, the group said it has identified 77 candidates for endorsements but has not publicly released the list.

“We continue to strive to have all voters across the country engage in their local school board elections and get to know the candidates because we know that change happens at the local level,” Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich said in an emailed statement to HuffPost. “We have seen an incredible win rate the past two years that shows the power of our grassroots organization and we are excited to see that same kind of win rate this year.”

But even as the group keeps a lower public profile than it has during previous elections, its impact is clear. Across the country, far-right extremists are looking to get on school boards and reshape public schooling.

The blueprint for a right-wing, Moms for Liberty-style candidate has been made, and conservatives are following it. These candidates typically rail against “critical race theory,” a college-level academic framework for understanding structural racism that has been co-opted by conservatives to mean talking about race at all and making white people feel uncomfortable. They falsely claim books about gender or sexual identity are inherently pornographic. They may smear teachers as groomers, and make sure transgender children are targeted and ostracized at school.

Parental rights and fighting to keep trans kids from playing sports are now Republican talking points at all levels of…