Right-leaning national advocacy groups are uniting to fight what they say is rising liberal political influence on youth education at the local level. The groups have sprung up as a counterweight to teachers’ unions and the influence of liberal academics over the operation of schools shuttered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Free to Learn Coalition launched on Thursday with plans to spend more than $1 million on a national ad campaign about removing partisan political influence from classrooms. The ads include a national ad and others tailored to local markets in Arizona, New York and Virginia.
“While our students fall behind the world in reading, writing, math, and science, New York City’s Grace Church School is employing a curriculum that demonizes children based on skin color,” says a narrator in one 30-second ad. “Fairfax County, Virginia, is turning the best school in the country into a casualty of political activism, and in Peoria, Arizona, officials are blocking parents from even seeing the controversial curriculum they teach. Enough with schools using partisan politics to shape students, our kids deserve better.”
Free to Learn President Alleigh Marre has worked at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the National Republican Congressional Committee, as well as in the federal government.
Ms. Marre’s group is hardly alone. In March, Nicole Neily founded “Parents Defending Education,” a national grassroots organization founded to “reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas.”
Ms. Neily also leads “Speech First,” an organization that says it is defending free speech on college campuses through advocacy, education, and litigation. Parents Defending Education has adopted a similar strategy to challenge the rise of allegedly radical politics in the classroom.
The Parents Defending Education group utilizes Freedom of Information Act filings, complaints with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, litigation, and other tools to expose what it sees as incidents of radicalization in classrooms.
Last week, the group helped organize 24 different organizations in a joint statement against the teaching of critical race theory, which the groups define as a thesis viewing all societal issues, economics, and politics through the prism of race and that uses race-centric solutions to fix societal problems.
Alongside the burgeoning groups fixated on radicalism in youth education, groups with a broader portfolio are increasingly adding cancel culture and radicalism in youth education to their work.
Earlier this week, the conservative group Judicial Watch published an investigation featuring records from a Massachusetts public schools system focused on race and inclusion. Last month, when conservative activists started “Unsilenced Majority” to focus on combating cancel culture, particularly the perception of intolerance infiltrating K-12 schools.
Republicans see potential political gains as well. Earlier this week, the NRSC and the Republican Governors Association (RGA) published new polls that found independent voters rejecting ideas related to critical race theory in large numbers ahead of 2022 Senate and gubernatorial races.
The poll found that 76% of independent voters disagreed with the statement that, “The United States was founded on the practice of slavery and white supremacy which continues to this day.” By contrast, 67% of Democrats surveyed agreed with that statement.
The Republican polling surveyed 1,200 likely voters in 26 battleground states from June 1-3, with a 2.82% margin of error.
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