Earlier this month, the astroturfed right-wing war on intellectual freedom in public schools met its Waterloo as the forces of censorship and harassment of teachers, librarians, and students were routed in school board election after school board election around the country. And make no mistake—the reactionaries earned this defeat with their years-long moral panic, offering a mostly fictional narrative that bears almost no relationship to what actually goes on in our schools. The American people had seen enough.
There is one big problem with Moms for Liberty-style bomb throwing around schools—the landscape of public opinion is precisely the opposite of what the culture warriors think it is. The typical reactionary bromide against public education features seething hostility to teachers' unions, contempt for teachers themselves and cherry-picked stories about something one loopy teacher out of 3.8 million public school educators in the United States did or some random edict issued by one outlier among the country's more than 13,000 school districts and 98,000 schools.
Unfortunately for those consumed with unhinged loathing of public schools and the people who work in them, they are very much on the wrong side of public opinion. Polling from Gallup in 2022 showed that 80 percent of Americans are somewhat or completely satisfied with their own child's education. Very few people are walking around all the time thrumming with anger at their kids' second grade teacher or plotting ways to get more deeply involved in their local school's curriculum.
Of the minority of Americans generally unhappy with K-12 education in that poll, just 4 percent listed "Too much transgender/gender issues/sex education agenda" and 3 percent picked the "Critical Race Theory Agenda" as reasons. Far from viewing teachers as lazy ciphers for radicalism, overwhelming majorities of Americans believe that educators are underpaid, and 71 percent of respondents in a June NPR/Ipsos poll approve of their children's teachers.
Nor are most people clamoring to elevate "parental rights" as the single most important issue in education. Only 27 percent of adults in that same survey believe that parents should be "primarily responsible" for the content of their kids' education. Seventy-nine percent support teaching the history of slavery and racism in the United States. Overwhelming majorities oppose banning books. Teachers' unions might be somewhat more divisive, but they are hardly the albatross for Democrats that Republican operatives seem to think they are. An August 2023 poll from Navigator Research showed that 55 percent of respondents view teachers unions favorably. Most parents are justifiably much more concerned about their children getting gunned down by mass murderers in their classrooms than they are about what the American Federation of Teachers is up to.
The long and the short of it is that the right-wing culture warriors simply do not have the juice on public schools. They are obsessed with issues that are marginal to most voters and to most parents, and the way they speak about teachers is deeply alienating to normal people. And it doesn't take long before voters figure out that the real agenda behind all this is the destruction of public education and the funneling of shared resources to private schools.
This is not to say that there aren't heaps of problems with public education in America. There is no reason to be complacent, but spending five minutes perusing public opinion data should be a reminder that wedging partisan politics into elementary education has backfired spectacularly for the GOP and will continue to do so. As Binghamton University historian Adam Laats recently told Slate News, "School politics are actually like a heavily ballasted ship. They tend to center themselves about things that we can all agree on."
One thing that this extremely loud minority of political extremists has achieved, though, is making life a living hell for teachers and other school staff in the places unfortunate enough to have elected Republicans into statewide office. Republicans are targeting dedicated educators like Florida'sTania Galiñanes, a librarian who recently resigned when she couldn't take any more of the mass hysteria ginned up by Republican opportunists, as well as threats of literal jail time if she stocked the "wrong" books in her school's library, as detailed in this horrific Washington Post story.
Unsurprisingly, total employment in the K-12 sector had declined nearly 10 percent since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Brown University researchers Joshua Bleiberg and Matthew Kraft in a 2022 working paper. It might not constitute a mass exodus, but clearly many educators have had enough of being both underpaid, constantly screamed at by hopped-up ideologues who think they know how to do their jobs for them and now threatened with felonies in places like Florida and Texas for committing thoughtcrimes in their classrooms. This is not what voters or parents want.
Do well-intentioned administrators and teachers sometimes go too far? Sure. But most parents only want to know that their kids are learning what they need to learn, are cared for in a safe and supportive environment and that their teachers and schools have the resources they need to help them succeed. For all their problems, the reality is that most public schools in the United States are doing the best they can with what they have. And it's not surprising that when the issue was put directly in front of them, voters told the Moms for Liberty crowd to stuff it so that they could get back to packing their kids' lunches rather than facing down brain-wormed right-wing activists at unbearable school board meetings.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
The Far Right's Losing War on Schools
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01.12.2023
Earlier this month, the astroturfed right-wing war on intellectual freedom in public schools met its Waterloo as the forces of censorship and harassment of teachers, librarians, and students were routed in school board election after school board election around the country. And make no mistake—the reactionaries earned this defeat with their years-long moral panic, offering a mostly fictional narrative that bears almost no relationship to what actually goes on in our schools. The American people had seen enough.
There is one big problem with Moms for Liberty-style bomb throwing around schools—the landscape of public opinion is precisely the opposite of what the culture warriors think it is. The typical reactionary bromide against public education features seething hostility to teachers' unions, contempt for teachers themselves and cherry-picked stories about something one loopy teacher out of 3.8 million public school educators in the United States did or some random edict issued by one outlier among the country's more than 13,000 school districts and 98,000 schools.
Unfortunately for those consumed with unhinged loathing of public schools and the people who work in them, they are very much on the wrong side of public opinion. Polling from Gallup in 2022 showed that 80 percent of Americans are somewhat or completely satisfied with their own child's education. Very few people are walking around all the time thrumming with anger at their kids' second grade teacher or plotting ways to get more deeply involved in their local school's curriculum.
Of the minority of Americans generally........
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