2022 Battleground: Conservatives Push for Partisan, Political School Board Elections

Conservatives are targeting untapped potential in school board races as 2021 saw districts exposed across the country as left-wing “indoctrination mills,” setting up ripe political battlegrounds in 2022.

In an effort to take back control of school boards in America, Republicans are pushing changes that would turn the typically nonpartisan races in to partisan, political ones with contested primaries.

In October, lawmakers in Tennessee voted to allow listing party affiliation on the ballot for school board candidates, according to Politico, and Arizona and Missouri are looking at similar proposals.

Florida’s proposal, to be considered in their upcoming legislative session, would set up partisan school board elections and create primary elections for candidates.

Florida’s school boards were one of the major entities attempting to thwart Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) coronavirus protocols by charging forward with mask mandates or virtual learning. Every school district that tried to defy DeSantis’s ban on mask mandates has since capitulated after the Sunshine State’s Department of Education voted to withhold funding from districts defying the policy. If Republicans can find a niche in school board elections, Politico warns, “they could break the last holdouts who regularly defy the governor.”

Florida state Sen. Joe Gruters (R) said of the push, “We’re out there trying to elect good conservatives that will follow essentially the governor’s mission as it relates to education.”

Gruters, who chairs the state Senate’s education committee and also leads the state’s GOP, reasoned that “when you have a leader like DeSantis come out and say that there should be no lockdowns, if you have a Republican elected official, you would think they would probably give him the consideration and probably go along with what he asked.”

Similarly, the Republican Party of Texas has vowed to “advance conservative principles on a local level” by “play[ing] a greater role in non-partisan races” like school boards.

Texas GOP vice chair Cat Parks called the initiative “one of the most consequential initiatives our party can undertake,” while the party’s chairman, Matt Rinaldi, said, “It is no coincidence that this initiative comes at the same time President Biden’s Department of Justice is attempting to suppress parental involvement in local elections by threatening to treat parents as terrorists for becoming involved in their children’s education.”

While Politico is apparently worried about Republicans “strip[ping] school board elections of their nonpartisan status and gain[ing] more representation on school boards,” 2021 revealed that school boards have been doing the left’s political footwork for decades.

Indeed, communist writer Howard Zinn’s 1980 pseudo-history, A People’s History of the United States, has been implemented in school districts across the country for source material. When asked in a 1998 interview if, with that book, he was calling for a “quiet revolution,” Zinn responded, “A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions.”

The Zinn Education Project also called for teachers to defy laws banning the teaching of the indoctrination scheme critical race theory — the latest tool in the “decades-old leftist campaign to indoctrinate America’s students.”

While Politico appears to regard critical race theory as “a subject that has emerged as a boogeyman for GOP policymakers in numerous states who are condemning efforts to teach young people about the nation’s history of discrimination,” numerous historians have debunked its chief premise that America was founded to perpetuate racism and a white-dominant society. The common leftist trope that it is about teaching “the nation’s history of discrimination” because it is not otherwise taught is also false.

Breitbart News has reported on countless examples of critical race theory in schools — other tenets of which are resegregation, race essentialism, and the idea that non-white people are somehow generally incapable members of society — that have sparked local controversy, leading to skyrocketing parental involvement in school boards across the country.

School boards have also been implementing the use of the widely debunked New York Times “1619 Project” — the brainchild of non-historian Nikole Hannah-Jones. Indeed, Dr. Mary Grabar, an actual historian, told Breitbart News that the goal of the “1619 Project” is to achieve “Marxist socialist revolution.”

“The ‘1619 Project’ presents all white people as evil. There’s no mention of civil rights workers or activists,” Grabar explained. “So, it presents this false narrative of American history where all white people oppressed all black people — and that is being taught to second graders. And, rightfully, parents who, especially during the pandemic, were seeing what their kids were learning, you know, were shocked.”

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said in September the “1619 Project” is “one of the most significant attempts to propagandize history” he has seen in his lifetime.

Some school officials, like Jim Welch of Tennessee’s Kingsport Board of Education, are wary of the partisan changes in school board elections because they might “create division among the board and shift the focus away from the needs of the students.”

But many parents have lost confidence that schools have students’ best interests in mind, particularly when it comes to sexual health and education.

According to a new Rasmussen survey, Americans overwhelmingly (68 percent) distrust teachers and schools with issues regarding student sexual health and identity — and it appears for good reason.

The Loudoun County, Virginia, school board has been accused of “bury[ing] a rape” of a student after the board there appears to have covered up the fact that a boy dressed in a skirt raped a girl in the girls’ bathroom — seemingly in an attempt to pass a controversial transgender policy that would allow boys to use girls’ bathrooms and play against girls in sports.

As Breitbart News reported, Wisconsin parents sued their school district on behalf of their daughter after the “school began a ‘social transition’ so she could ‘present[] to others as the opposite sex’” because district policy “allows minor students to change their name and gender pronouns at school without parental consent.”

Similarly, Florida parents are suing their school district for “secretly transitioning” their daughter into a “transgender male,” and in California, parents “claimed school staff indoctrinated their daughter into identifying as ‘trans fluid.’”

School districts are also teaching transgender ideology without the knowledge of parents. In Connecticut, a school district is teaching “transgender ideology without an opt-out.” Parents there said their kindergartner was being taught “that the sex you’re assigned at birth is ‘wrong; and you’re actually a boy.”

Moreover, school districts are stocking their libraries with pornographic and pedophilic materials, exposing students to explicit sexual material. Indeed, Virginia’s largest school district, Fairfax County, reintroduced such material after a committee found neither pornographic nor pedophilic material in the contested books, despite clear evidence of drawings and literature to the contrary.

Furthermore, the Biden administration in November decided to stop tracking alleged teacher sex crimes and allow school districts to continue to “pass the trash,” before reversing its decision after public backlash.

As Breitbart News reported, “Republicans across the country gearing up for the midterms are promising a major education reform push focused on parental rights and educational standards.”

Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.