long and varied history in the United States, but today's guest says, "The challenges it faces now from parent activists and partisan politics is unlike anything America's schools have ever seen."

She's Laura Pappano, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week has been writing about education for more than 30 years.

Laura Pappano is the author of a new book "School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education."

Laura, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thank you for having me.

- We've been having a lovely conversation here before we started taping.

Hopefully, we'll try to do justice to some of it, but you write, you know, sort of a little bit humorously at the beginning of the book that you didn't really wanna write this book.

Why not?

- That's right, I mean, I did not plan to write this book.

It wasn't on my list of things to do, but I've covered education, as you mentioned, for over 30 years, and I started seeing, hearing a lot about schools that was not about education.

And some of what I was hearing was absolutely patently absurd, and I knew to be false.

So in a kind of like fact-check kind of way, I dove into this project.

- What are some of those examples?

- Well, I mean, one of the early experiences I had was going to the Moms for Liberty Summit, the first summit in Tampa, Florida, July 2022.

And I'd registered under my name.

I wasn't trying to hide, but I did dress to fit in.

I got myself a red blazer with an American flag pin pinched into the lapel.

And I went to this summit.

And as a journalist, I'm not going there thinking like, do I agree or disagree?

I am thinking to myself, does this make sense?

What's the logic?

What's the argument?

Within half an hour, I was greeted with, I was hearing from the stage that sending your child to public schools for 30 to 35 hours a week was like sending them to a Maoist reform prison camp.

I was hearing that social emotional learning, which I had written about, you know, years earlier, was a form of Marxist indoctrination.

I was hearing so many things that were patently untrue and tinged in the language of fear.

So it was really an emotional, that pitch at the Moms for Liberty Summit was an emotional appeal.

- So what's going on?

- So what is going on is I saw a room, or a ballroom of about 500 mostly moms and it was, you know, I was a theater board chair of Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, and it was like a production.

From the beginning to the end of the four days I was hearing over and over the same language, and the language, we can talk about the Red Scare, but the language was, moms, your children are in existential danger.

They are being harmed in public schools, and they're being harmed by teachers, librarians, you know, principals.

As moms, you might be most comfortable being at home, being in your domestic spheres, but what do moms do when their children face danger?

They step up and they act.

They run for school board.

They speak out at school board meetings.

So it was a very emotional appeal, and what struck me is that nobody was running through their head, does this make sense?

And I think the pinnacle of this was when they were talking about the don't say gay law that had recently passed.

One of the board members for Moms for Liberty compared it.

He said, "Well, we have some work to do on this."

He said, "It's like an AK-47.

You might need a finder and a pointer, or laser flashlight."

Uvalde had happened a handful of weeks earlier.

And I was absolutely stunned that someone would use that as a metaphor.

And what I was even more stunned by was that there wasn't a peep in this big ballroom about it.

So I realized pretty early on that this wasn't about facts and reality.

This was about pitching an emotional story to people to get them to buy-in to an idea and a platform.

- So what were these perceived dangers that you heard at this Moms for Liberty event?

- Well, I mean, the dangers are your children are being brainwashed, right?

In schools.

That teachers are trying to change the gender of your child right beneath your nose.

That schools are collecting pornography.

I mean, these kinds of patent falsehoods were pitched as, you know, this is what's happening.

We're telling you about it, so pay attention.

What was very interesting to me was that I also went to the Moms for Liberty Summit in Philadelphia last July.

And by the time I was in that ballroom, there was no explanation needed.

Everyone had bought in.

So in one year's time, the moms who needed to kind of hear this pitch, I mean, were already on board.

- What's behind it?

I mean, is this as simple as people attacking institutions, public institutions in particular?

Is it a political agenda?

What's at the root of all of this?

- Well, I think you're hitting a couple of the things.

I mean, what we're seeing, and we can go to Steve Bannon for a moment and CPAC, is that public schools, just to start, I attended public schools.

I never knew what anyone's politics were.

I didn't care.

It did not matter.

Public schools gather everyone.

I mean, John Dewey made that point.

It's the experience of school that's valuable to our civic life, but what we are seeing is that the recognition that public schools offer a platform to far-right activists to try to take power, and Steve Bannon at CPAC in 2022, he made the point.

He said, "School boards are the key that picks the lock.

This is how we're gonna take over district by district, city by city, town by town."

So very, yes.

- So that transformed this movement schools into a political battleground.

- [Laura] Right, absolutely.

- And talk about that in the context of this presidential election year, 2024.

- Absolutely, I mean, that's why this matters so very much.

I mean, what we're seeing is that on the ground, and I'll give you a great example.

I was at the first summit in Tampa, and at that very early on, Ron DeSantis, who was presidential hopeful at that point, stood up and he announced, he said, "For the first time ever, I am going to endorse 30 people for school board."

Now a governor endorsing school board candidates, we haven't seen that before.

And I can tell you that throughout that summit, people were asked to stand if they were running for school board.

They were clearly flattered that Ron DeSantis was endorsing them, but the very moment that I was hearing that, I was thinking, oh, no, no, you guys have this backwards.

What Ron DeSantis is doing is he is seeding a ground army of activists for his cause.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- And that's what Steve Bannon is talking about.

And that's what we're seeing.

And we can look around the country and there are real consequences to this flipping of the school boards.

- Well, I think that's one of my questions, right?

Is this geographically concentrated, right?

Is this something that we're seeing is this a national phenomena, or is it different in New England as it is from the Midwest as it is from, you know, Texas?

- Well, I think, that is such a great question because when I was doing the reporting for this book, starting about two years ago, I went to the hotspots, right?

I went to Texas, I went to Tennessee, I went to Florida, I went to Eastern Pennsylvania, I went to New Hampshire, and where, you know, mostly red places.

What we're seeing now is that it is popping up all over and what's striking to me is that what Moms for Liberty and people like Steve Bannon have done, is they have given a kind of national far-right language to people everywhere, that people are just grafting onto their local issues.

And I'll give you an example.

I did a story for "The Hechinger Report" in "Vanity Fair" that was out in December where I spent six months in North Idaho where the school board was taken over by some far-right activists.

There was a whole lot of damage that was done to the districts.

Republican conservative moms worked to take it back, but when I was on the ground on election day, on a dirt road in North Idaho, I was hearing the people who were the far-right candidates saying that they were going to keep girls out of boys' bathrooms.

They claimed that one of the big issues in the race was quote, unquote, and this is, you know, a slur, transgenderism.

Well, the issue was not that.

The issue was that they hadn't had a English language arts curriculum for two years, that they didn't pass a levy, and it cut a third of their budget.

That they weren't cleaning the schools, and as a principal said at a school board meeting, there are mice running over children's feet, but what you saw was this national kind of talking point grafted on to the local community where it really wasn't relevant at all.

- Yeah.

We've sort of seen this play out a little bit, right?

In the stories about furries, right?

And that there were litter boxes in elementary school classes.

- [Laura] All made up.

- Right, right.

It's all made up.

Why do people buy into it?

And I'm gonna ask a little bit of a leading question here.

I grew up in a town that had three local newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s.

- Yeah.

- I don't think it has any anymore.

- Yeah.

- Does the collapse of local journalism contribute to these rumors, lies, stories taking root?

- Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I am a product of local journalism.

- [G. Wayne] God bless you, so am I.

- Yeah, yeah, I mean, the internet has brought speed and spread, right?

So it doesn't take very long for folks in Idaho, or wherever to kind of glom on to some ridiculous belief.

And, you know, we can't trust what we see with our eyes, you know, with AI and everything.

So yes, our trusted sources are at risk, which is why moms are so critical, right?

- Right.

- Because as moms are the people in the community on the sidelines of soccer games who know firsthand what's going on in schools.

So there's a kind of interesting thing happening in terms of we can't always, we're countering these kind of big, massive national, you know, conspiracies and language that's spreading on the internet, but we do have opportunities on the ground.

- So you've said earlier, this is popping up everywhere, and before we began taping, we were talking about how it's popping up even in Massachusetts, even as we speak.

And Massachusetts is not what you would consider a diehard conservative state, to put it mildly.

Talk about what's happening in Massachusetts, and why it would get traction in a state like Massachusetts?

And in a progressive community, too, no less.

- Yeah, so, I mean, Massachusetts, Connecticut, you know, Guilford, Massachusetts.

I got a tweet somebody the other day about Natick parents' rights.

I mean, that's the language that we're often seeing.

It's parents' rights.

And why is it popping up everywhere?

Because people are angry, they're frustrated, they're unhappy, and they're looking for somebody to blame.

And I think that what we're seeing with the parental rights bit is people, I mean, this allowed, COVID allowed people who are upset to find one another, and they operate in an echo chamber.

It isn't brand new to Massachusetts, though, because I can tell you, when I was covering the sex ed debates and issues back in the early 1990s, Newton was like, you know, I don't wanna say ground zero, but pretty close to ground zero for a lot of the battles.

And the reason why the sex ed thing became an issue is because you had AIDS and then suddenly you need to revise sex ed curricula, and then needed to use the words condom and homosexuality.

And what we saw there was that pushback from the far-right around parental rights.

And we can talk more about the whole parental rights use.

And that's what we're seeing in Natick and elsewhere.

- Let's get into that a little bit, because it's a shibboleth, right?

It's a term that carries a lot of meaning beyond what it might appear 'cause, like, on face value, you'd say, well, parents should have rights, shouldn't they?

- [Laura] And they do.

- Yeah, right.

And so what does that term really mean?

And where does it come from?

- Absolutely.

The modern kind of iteration of parental rights was really a recognition by Jerry Falwell in the late 1970s when, you know, they weren't getting the religious right, which is what we called it then, wasn't getting a lot of traction around the idea of putting God back in school.

And I even met with Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian.

He said, "Absolutely not."

They were very angry.

They changed some tacts about how they were approaching this and started adopting the secular language of kind of liberal America, which is people, you know, rights.

So suddenly, instead of we want God and prayer in school, it's like, we need childrens' rights to pray in school.

We need parents' rights to be in charge of curriculum, to make sure that it's teaching our children the things that we want them to learn.

So we saw that whole kind of shift in the way the language was used.

Interestingly, when I was asked last month to meet with the House Democratic Caucus at the Capitol, one of the chief things, one of their chief questions was, well, what about parental rights?

Because nobody wants to look like they're not standing up for parental rights, but parental rights, parents already had rights and more powerful than that, parents have influence, but parental rights, we saw this every legislative session around the country we see a theme.

This year's theme, I think will be vouchers, but also parental rights.

And the parental rights is really just a stand-in for taking control over what teachers can say in classrooms over what curricula can contain, and what can hang on the walls.

It's really an effort to control what had previously been a really, you know, domain of professionals, professional educators.

So it's really become a kind of a tool.

And it looks, and it sounds scary to some people to object to parental rights, but we have to understand what we're objecting to.

- So you bring in historical perspective to school moms, and it's really well done.

Talk about one of those comparisons you make to the McCarthy era, the Red Scare or the Second Red Scare.

Tell us what McCarthyism was, you know, in sort of a nutshell, and what are the similarities between that and what we're seeing now with the school board movement?

- Absolutely, so what really struck me was when I was hearing all of this language about indoctrination, about, you know, children being brainwashed and controlled.

And, you know, I spent time up at the Harvard Libraries, and I had a great librarian helper, and I was looking at pamphlets back from the 1950s during the McCarthy era.

We think of the McCarthy era, most notably around Hollywood and film.

- [Jim] Blacklists.

- Blacklists, exactly, but the tail end of it was focused on educators.

And what you saw was that educators were then being called either before the House on American Committee, or we were seeing them even just called by their local school boards.

And that often led to them losing their jobs.

And there was one that I dug into in.

I looked at a lot of newspaper archives.

And there was a woman, a teacher in Wayland, Massachusetts, who was accused of being a communist.

And I read a local historian's kind of monograph about this incident, and she's objective.

She said our democracy, you know, is about ideas, is about, you know, this is undemocratic what you are doing.

And the era was so troublesome that in this monograph, the author writes that people were thinking that if you painted your house red, that it was a signal that you were a communist.

So this teacher found herself losing her job, and she couldn't get other work.

She ended up working cleaning animal cages at an animal hospital.

Her brother was a lawyer, government lawyer, who lost his job because they were both put onto lists of subversives.

It was this very scary time in which, I mean, people were not stopping to say, does this make sense?

Does it matter?

Is this real?

And I worry that we're repeating that same thing now.

- We've seen evidence though of this, haven't we?

In schools where particularly where critical race theory has been demonized, that teachers are reluctant to talk about some sensitive issues around race and just what I would call American history because of their fear of persecution.

- [Laura] Absolutely.

- And retribution.

- And now we have DEI, which is the new CRT, right?

- Right.

- But yes, teachers avoid subjects, absolutely, they do.

I was down at South by Southwest with a Black principal, first Black principal of Colleyville Heritage High School in Texas.

And he found himself basically accused in a public meeting of implementing critical race theory.

I mean, he was an incredibly popular principal who had been elevated and promoted multiple times in a space of two to three years.

He found himself kind of being attacked.

And even though people came to his defense, he ended up having to settle and leave his post.

And what was striking to me, 'cause I watched all of these meetings, was at the meeting where he left, one of the school board people apologized and said, "Our children are watching, and I failed to speak up when I should have when he was being attacked."

And that, to me, I mean, is a real kind of sign of what we're dealing with.

People are running with things without thinking about what the meaning and consequences are.

- I think, I wanna, this is where I wanna zero in a little bit.

What is this doing to our schools?

What is this doing to American public education?

And what is this doing to our students?

- Yeah, I mean, that is something that I am deeply concerned about.

I've interviewed students for the book.

When a school board decides that they're going to promote anti LBGTQ policies, and you then have students who are LBGTQ students who find themselves walking down the hallway and they say they are shouted and harassed at every passing period.

I don't know how you learn in that setting.

I don't know how students are learning with all of this happening above their heads.

And one of the things that I worry about is one of the themes that we're seeing is control, right?

We wanna control every little input that a student has.

Well, I think that the beauty of public schools are that kids get to figure out who they are in the freedom and safety of a school environment where they can talk to a teacher about something, and that teacher doesn't have to fear the consequences of a conversation, but we are losing the ability of kids to develop their own sense.

I mean, kids should one week be able to be a goth, the next week be a prep.

And then figure out, you know, where am I really?

We're taking that developmental tool away from them.

- [G. Wayne] Another target has been librarians, public school librarians, and librarians in public libraries.

- [Laura] Yes.

- [G. Wayne] Big target.

Talk about that.

It's closely related to this why, and give us a breakdown of what's going on there.

I mean, I know from personal experience some people that I've written about who've experienced that.

- Yes, I mean, I interviewed librarians for the book who one of them who was testifying before the Tennessee legislature against a bill that would have made it a felony for a librarian to have obscene materials, or what someone deemed obscene in a library.

I mean, I interviewed librarians who left their jobs because of the attacks.

And one of the ways that librarians were being attacked was that parents would come in.

Far-right parents would come in, be taking pictures.

Librarians are really well educated, sweet people, and would be saying, we are gonna call the police.

We're gonna have you arrested.

One of the big consequences of this, speaking of the libraries is that in Texas one of these school boards was taken over by far-right candidates.

One of the things that this school committee decided to do was that they were going to be in charge of all the book purchases.

Typically, librarians are incredibly well trained.

They curate the collection.

They're the ones who know what everybody likes.

- [G. Wayne] Yeah, that's their job, they're educated to do it.

- That's their job.

- [G. Wayne] That's their job, hello.

- So, in Keller, Texas, they changed the policy so that every book purchase had to be approved by the school board.

And I was watching one 5-1/2 hour meeting at which a librarian stood up and she said, "I cannot get books on squirrels or football or camels.

I cannot get the latest "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" or the new "Guinness Book of World Records" in a timely manner because you all must approve every purchase."

And she said, "Kids are coming to me saying, where are the new books?"

And she said, "What I don't tell them is that it's political."

- So let me play a little devil's advocate.

So, if a community objects, let's say to Huck Finn, right?

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" because of its use of racist language, right?

Is that any different than the folks who are objecting to, well, "The Diary of a Woman" or "Maus" for example, the graphic novel, right?

How is that different?

- Well, I think one of the things that's getting lost in this whole debate is how the books are used.

It is one thing to have a book that is available in the library for someone who is curious and interested in reading it.

And another thing to make it, like the whole class is going to read gender queer.

That doesn't happen.

There's this idea that those sorts of things are happening.

- [G. Wayne] Yeah, not every book is on open shelves, hello.

- Not every book is on open shelves, and not every book is part of the curriculum, or the class discussion, but the very point here is that books are often private experiences that individuals have with the text.

And there are a lot of children and young adults for whom these books, which may not be suitable as a class, you know, reading project are critical to people feeling that they're not alone.

- And there have been threats against librarians too.

- [Laura] Oh, yeah.

I interviewed a librarian who was threatened, yes.

- Wow.

- Yes.

- Well, it's a hugely important issue.

And the book "School Moms" is outstanding.

Laura Pappano, thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square" you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(soft bright music) (upbeat music)