MINI EPISODE: Is Moms for Liberty Beginning to Fade? (with Laura Pappano)

Introduction – 0:00

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to another mini episode of Relationscapes. I'm journalist Blair Hodges joining you from Salt Lake City, and before we get to today's guest, I want to take a second to talk about a podcast that I think you might enjoy. I'm always on the lookout for podcasts that would resonate, especially diamond in the rough shows, ones that you might not have seen on the top 10 lists. Maybe they don't have the hugest audiences, but they're high quality, they're excellent shows. They're definitely worth our time.

Today's recommended show that I'm going to tell you about is called We Are North Nashville. Here's the pitch.

When people think about highways, we tend to think about possibilities. Where might these faster roads take us?

Who will they connect us with? But it's also important to stop and think about how highways don't merely offer possibilities, they can also divide and even hurt the communities that they're routed through. It's a common story in this country. For all its benefits, the federal highway system was usually routed directly and often purposefully through black and brown neighborhoods.

We Are North Nashville is a podcast that tells the story of how that played out in one particular community. On the heels of the civil rights movement, Tennessee started tearing up ground. They were using eminent domain to take homes from North Nashville families and demolish them to make space for the highway. Families fled and crime filled the void. But pieces of the community persisted, and these communities are still facing tremendous pressure as gentrification threatens to destroy what little is left of North Nashville rich history.

Simone Boyd is a neighborhood resident there, and she teamed up with journalist Andrea Tudhope to tell the story of nine neighborhood elders who managed to persist through all the change. I've enjoyed spending time with these elders on the podcast.

There's Barbara Jean Watson. She was the first black person to enroll at the previously all white Jones School in North Nashville, and she can tell us all about how integration reshaped that neighborhood. There's Dr. Patricia Streeter Jackson, whose father was one of two African American photographers in all of Nashville in the 50s and 60s, documenting the streets as the highways begin to cut through them.

You'll meet these and other people who have stories to tell that'll have you thinking more closely about your own neighborhood. You can listen to We Are North Nashville wherever you get your podcasts, wherever you're listening to this podcast. Stick around, because in a little bit. I'll play the trailer for We Are North Nashville.

But first I'm happy to introduce today's mini episode guest. It's Laura Pappano. She's an education reporter who joined us a while back to talk about the state of our nation's schools. She's back with some updates and words of encouragement about how to navigate the current attacks on American education.

Whether you have kids or not, the education system impacts everybody because that's the place that so many citizens and immigrants are not only educated but also socialized. In other words, American schools are a major American culture factory. And this factory is in dire need of some safety inspections and upgrades.

Dismantling the DOE – 02:56

BLAIR HODGES: Laura Pappano, welcome back to Relationscapes.

LAURA PAPPANO: Oh, thank you so much, Blair. Happy to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, it's good to talk to you again. Last time we spoke, we talked about your book School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education. And that battle continues. Trump has been reelected and he has been getting involved with the Department of Education. So let's start there. What changes have you seen under a second Trump administration that's affecting the Department of Education?

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, I think there are two pieces here. One is the actual Department of Education, which has been essentially gutted and also its priorities switched up and changed. It’s no longer guardians of students with special needs, students who need other support. Title IX has completely been interpreted in a different manner.

And I think on the practical level, the Department of Education is not operating the way it once operated.

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, that sounds like the main functions are just done. Because the Department of Education is supposed to help students with disabilities. It's supposed to help with funding in schools to help students with disabilities.

LAURA PAPPANO: Title I. Yeah, yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: It's supposed to protect students’ rights, especially marginalized students, civil rights issues in schools. So you're saying, like, both of those things are just kind of donezo?

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, there have been certain programs that have been, you know, not funded or cut. And we're hearing about this across the board in the government. It's no surprise that this is happening in education as well. I mean, the impact is that overall, the federal government only supplies on average about 8% of school budgets.

So dollar-wise, it's not the biggest chunk. But what it is, as I said just a moment ago, is that if they are the guardians, they are the backstops. Two years ago, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights was handling record numbers of cases and doing investigations because students were not being protected or treated well in certain places. They were the ones who were digging in and approaching this issue. Now it is completely flipped. So I think that’s one thing.

The second thing is that this affects the whole tone and tenor of how schools operate. And one thing I've always been concerned about is when you have places that just kind of preemptively don't want to get in trouble.

When I was at the Moms for Liberty summit in Orlando—and I wrote about this for the Hechinger Report and for Slate—one of my big observations was that there’s still a push to run for school board, but there’s also a new push to file lawsuits. And in one of the sessions, one of the very conservative, far-right lawyers was pointing out the power that even one suit can have to get people in other places to change policies just to avoid being named in a suit. So there's a kind of chill that comes with this kind of changed administration. When we're talking about education and protecting students, that’s what we’re really talking about.

BLAIR HODGES: They want to sue over what? So they’re saying, let’s initiate a bunch of lawsuits rather than run for school boards. What are they suing over?

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, all kinds of things. So one suit—a Supreme Court case decided in June—was based in Maryland. And the premise was that parents have the right to opt their students out of particular lessons and materials, typically around LGBTQ topics.

Moms for Liberty worked very hard to create opt-out forms, which they have on their website. What they effectively try to do is get lots of people to file these opt-out requests so that school districts are then in the position of having to keep track of loads and loads of opt-outs.

Well, what happens is, in this particular case, the district said, “This is too many, we can’t do it.” And it was that refusal to allow the opt-outs that got the Supreme Court decision. And that has a big effect. There are also suits around access to surveys—a lot of the Youth Risk Survey, for example, which is anonymous, but students take it, and it gives schools and the government information about what we should be looking at and focusing on.

Now, that’s something we may start seeing suits over too, because some parents want access to every single survey, or to opt themselves out of the survey, or to get access to the survey data.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, they want—wait, so they want access to the individual surveys? Because are the broad survey results available right now? Those are the ones screening kids for mental and behavioral health things in schools?

LAURA PAPPANO: I mean, that’s the Youth Risk Survey. That’s still there. But I think this is an effort to just muck up the system—to file suits. The suit I’m thinking of is still in process, so we don’t know what the outcome will be. It’s often kind of framed as “data”—data about our students.

BLAIR HODGES: That seems reasonable.

LAURA PAPPANO: Students are asked about their mental health and their family relationships. And I think the larger piece of this is this question of—well, I think of it as students’ rights. When do students have the ability to think for themselves, to have space that is their own, without intense parental oversight?

I mean, I believe—and I raised my kids this way—that I had tremendous influence over them, and I like to think I still do. But I saw my job as sending them out into the world to negotiate it as best as they see fit.

BLAIR HODGES: And you’re a supporter of them, not a controller of them.

LAURA PAPPANO: Exactly. I don’t want the job of every moment being on their shoulder. And that’s kind of what we’re seeing now. We’re seeing a debate in this country over how much oversight, how much control, and for how long parents have that control. And I think that’s really—I mean, I think it’s a destructive kind of friction to have, because we want our kids to be able to grow up and become themselves, perhaps taking some scraps of what we try to teach them along the way.

But we want them to be their own people, because the challenges they’ll have to negotiate in the world are different than the ones we had to negotiate. And I do worry that some of these lawsuits and laws and efforts are really focused on undermining that kind of developmental growth.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. People that want to hear more about that and more about children’s rights can check out my episode with Adam Benforado, where we talk about his book about children’s rights. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

Moms for Liberty Wants to Stay Relevant – 10:18

BLAIR HODGES: Let’s talk about you at Moms for Liberty again. So when you wrote the book, you had attended Moms for Liberty's conference, and then you just recently attended another conference there in Florida in the past month or so. What differences did you see between the meeting you went to a couple of years ago versus the meeting you saw now? Does the group seem to be growing? Is it shrinking? Are the ideas the same? What’s happening with Moms for Liberty?

LAURA PAPPANO: So I’ve had the benefit of attending each one of the four. Lucky me. And what I can tell you is that, as I wrote about in the book, the first time it was a revelation to the 500 moms who were there that these teachers they could once trust and rely on were, in fact, the enemy.

I mean, this is what we were hearing—that the teachers were a source of danger and schools were threatening places, which is just doesn’t jibe with reality.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, they’ve all gone woke, Laura. I don’t know what you mean. [laughs]

LAURA PAPPANO: And so it was one of these situations where parents were gasping. I mean, I sat behind somebody who was grabbing her head in disbelief. By the time I was at the one in Philadelphia, there were so many protesters that people were told not to wear their Moms for Liberty lanyards on the streets.

BLAIR HODGES: Because someone might yell at them or something?

LAURA PAPPANO: Yeah. I mean, and there were police barricades everywhere. But people had bought in. They were there to kind of receive the next marching orders. And we saw last year in Washington, D.C., where Trump spoke—that’s where he uttered his famous phrase that, you know, “You send your kids to school and they come home two days later with an operation.”

It was very much a party atmosphere. There was a cash bar, a lot of sequins—it was just a jubilant and packed place. This year, though, they did it at a resort in Orlando instead of a city hotel. It had a much bigger ballroom—they could have fit maybe 800 people—but I think they got the same number, around four or five hundred. So it wasn’t this giant spurt of growth as they’d hoped.

We’ve seen their influence wane a little bit, even if their connections to conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation remain strong. One of their leaders is now with Heritage Action, so she’s no longer involved on a daily basis with Moms for Liberty.

But what I saw there—of course, everyone had bought in. This was the army. A lot more men, a lot of children. The Leadership Institute, another conservative group founded in the 1970s, was holding what kind of seemed like a camp for youth leadership. So you had kids there, you had homeschooled families, and there was a really concerted effort by Moms for Liberty to appeal to men and to include children.

What was interesting about the appeal to men is that there was a whole panel about the role of the father in the family—this whole trope that the father is the defender of the family, which we’re hearing more and more in conservative circles, and about the push to return to traditional roles.

And of course, the whole “trad wife” thing—you had Benny Johnson from the stage saying how right-wing moms are happier and asking, “How many trad wife moms do we have out there?” So there was a real push. There was also an interesting panel I went to that featured all young influencers. There’s a real effort to get these young conservatives—very religious, often male, but also “trad wife” women—brought into the fold of Moms for Liberty.

BLAIR HODGES: Does it seem to be successful? I mean, you said the numbers are about the same, so it seems like there might have been fewer women than before, kind of filled in with some extra people?

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, what I read it as is that Moms for Liberty is not the hot, sizzly thing that it was a couple years ago. What they’re trying to do now is hang out with the cool kids. There’s a lot of this very right-wing, very Christian, very conservative, traditional family kind of vibe.

There’s nothing wrong with traditional families. There’s nothing wrong with Christianity. There’s nothing wrong with any of this. But it’s a particular political dog whistle of standing for certain things. In some cases, it even flows over into anti-Semitism and racism. Extremists—you were seeing that with Nicolas Fuentes and the whole movement—are creating friction for the Republican Party and even for people in Moms for Liberty.

There was a panel in which two very conservative allies of Moms for Liberty were debating whether white supremacists and Nazi sympathizers belonged in their party. I think that’s something we’re going to see more of, and it has impacts in schools and in people’s lives.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. So it sounds to me like enthusiasm is kind of shrinking. They’re trying to find ways to evolve so they can stay relevant, and the jury is still out about how effective they will be. They’re changing tactics from focusing on getting people elected to school boards—which I should say, by the way, I think all, if not almost all, of the Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates nationwide lost their school board elections.

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, some of them won.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, in uncontested races I should say. The contested races they lost, right?

LAURA PAPPANO: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: So we’re not seeing success where they’re being contested. I see that as on the wane. It’s still an issue, still a problem.

LAURA PAPPANO: It’s a problem. That’s exactly right, Blair.

Things to Keep Our Eyes On – 17:15

BLAIR HODGES: And I don’t want to get too optimistic, but we’re coming off the tail-end of a pretty impressive election where Democrats saw successes across the board. There was definitely a blue shift in different places in the country. So where is your attention shifting as a reporter, and what do you hope more people are looking at? If Moms for Liberty is still humming along but maybe isn’t the biggest concern, what are the front-burner issues when it comes to schools that you think people ought to be talking about right now?

LAURA PAPPANO: Sure. A couple of things. One is, I do think their particular power is waning, but there’s a real battle right now. I just spent election day in Idaho in Kootenai County, and what you’re seeing there is a model that they’re sharing with other places. There’s apparently somebody who came in from Texas. People from other states are coming to observe a tool for—it’s just an electoral tool. It’s a rating and vetting system.

BLAIR HODGES: Like what the NRA does, where they endorse you based on whether you fit their criteria?

LAURA PAPPANO: Exactly. That’s what I saw. What was surprising to me is that in a year when there’s a lot of questions about, frankly, the far-right agenda in public schools—it’s been extremely disruptive.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, yeah.

LAURA PAPPANO: Extremely disruptive. And you can see it in Oklahoma. Ryan Walters is out.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, Ryan Walters was in. He was the state superintendent of schools, right? The one who wanted to require people to read the Bible in schools?

LAURA PAPPANO: Bible in classroom lessons.

BLAIR HODGES: Ten Commandments everywhere, basically.

LAURA PAPPANO: Their state was going to require “woke teachers”—I put that in quotes—from places like New York and California to take a loyalty test, created by PragerU.

BLAIR HODGES: And he’s out.

LAURA PAPPANO: Right now, all of that stuff is being reviewed by the new temporary superintendent of instruction. He said he will not run for that post this spring, so it will be very interesting to see what happens.

BLAIR HODGES: But what a waste of time, though. They’re not talking about improving math scores, getting kids more interested in reading, or developing internet literacy. I know that’s happening in schools—there are teachers still persisting in doing their jobs—

LAURA PAPPANO: Yes, of course.

BLAIR HODGES: —but the leadership is wasting time on these fake issues about being woke and, like, caring about other people, which really comes down to classroom management and trying to have students get along so they can learn.

LAURA PAPPANO: Exactly. I mean, I was raising the question with one far-right candidate’s campaign manager, and I said, “Well, what do you think SEL is?”

BLAIR HODGES: We talk about social-emotional learning in our previous episode. People should go back and check our last interview.

LAURA PAPPANO: Yes, exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: So what did he say when you asked him?

LAURA PAPPANO: He kind of went around the question. I said, “You were in the army. Isn’t this kind of like the military, where you get everyone on the same page so they can work together?” He said, “Well, we don’t know what it is, but we don’t like it.” That’s the sort of thing we’re dealing with.

One place of concern—and I’ll get back to the rating and vetting in just a second—but to stick with Ryan Walters in Oklahoma for a minute: he was at Moms for Liberty on a panel where they created their Teacher Freedom Alliance. He’s the one trying to destroy public teacher unions and offer an alternative. One of the things I don’t know how it’s going to go, but one of my concerns is that just as they have divided parents and school boards, are we now seeing a push to divide teachers?

BLAIR HODGES: Like setting up competing factions of teachers.

LAURA PAPPANO: Yes. I don’t know what will come of that, or if it will even be effective, but I’m paying attention. The rating and vetting thing is interesting to me because in one particular race in the Lakeland Joint School District, outside of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, I saw a fantastic mom of two kids—very involved in the schools, volunteers. She and her husband own two pizza restaurants and are big boosters for the school system.

They donate and employ kids at the pizza place. She was running against someone the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, this kind of extremist group, which is the official Republican party group, had picked: a retiree who had just moved from Washington into Idaho with no connection to schools.

I met him on election day outside the Hayden Lake Fire Department polling station, under a tent, with a concealed handgun at his waist.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, good.

LAURA PAPPANO: I asked him how he got into the race, and he conceded that he’d never thought of running until someone approached him. I asked what his goals were. One was that he wanted to see creationism taught because evolution is “just a theory.”

BLAIR HODGES: So he believes the earth is only 6,000 years old, sure.

LAURA PAPPANO: One of his main jobs, he said, is to protect children from atheism and “satanic forces.”

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so this is just a Christian fundamentalist. Did he reference the Scopes Monkey Trial?

LAURA PAPPANO: He won!

BLAIR HODGES: Oh good. Did he win decisively, or was it close?

LAURA PAPPANO: It was close-ish.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you think people are paying attention? How do we stop this from happening? To me, all those things are non-starters. And I think if you required every parent of kids in schools to vote, I don’t think that guy wins.

LAURA PAPPANO: I agree with you. I’m not sure he wins. But I was out there on a cold, rainy, bone-chilling day, watching how organized the KCRCC were with their people and their cards. I saw people walking in and out of the polls with their cards for the rated-and-vetted candidates.

BLAIR HODGES: We should do something like that. We need volunteer groups to get it going, or just make it a red badge of shame like, if they’re endorsed by Moms for Liberty or whatever, that’s the wrong person.

LAURA PAPPANO: I think some people do take those cards to the polls and vote for the opposite candidates.

What it tells you is that these are all conservative Republicans who are Christian. It’s not as if they’re ideologically in completely different universes—they just have a different way of expressing and practicing their beliefs. I was kind of surprised that they rated and vetted school board candidates. Last spring, they also rated and vetted library board people. We’re seeing a pattern of battle on every front.

BLAIR HODGES: So it’s not that they’re giving up totally on school boards. They’re still pursuing that, but they’re adding an arm of lawsuits as well.

LAURA PAPPANO: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: And they have a friendly Supreme Court, so that’s not great.

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, that’s one of their points—that it’s a very friendly environment for them. All I’m saying is that it feels hopeful when, down in Houston, some extremist school board candidates lose to moderate people who don’t want to do book banning or curriculum reviews. But these things have consequences.

I was at a college coffee shop on election day, talking with a teacher who had quit. I asked about the impacts of these extreme policies in her classroom. She said there’s a curriculum review policy: every single book and any video longer than five minutes has to be reviewed by the committee and the school board. They take forever to get back to the teachers.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that makes teaching impossible.

LAURA PAPPANO: And she said—she was a drama teacher, and she was doing a Grimm’s Fairy Tale extravaganza play, and it got shut down. For five weeks, she said, they had study hall.

BLAIR HODGES: Fun.

LAURA PAPPANO: She could not teach. Then teachers and students came to her separately and said, “We really want to have a knitting club.” So she started filling out paperwork. This was after school or at recess. They put up so many barriers that she just threw up her hands.

BLAIR HODGES: It’s not worth it.

LAURA PAPPANO: Exactly. What we’re describing changes the experience of school for students.

Is There Reason For Hope? – 27:14

BLAIR HODGES: Well, what is making you hopeful right now? Where are you putting your energy? Where do you think people should be putting their energy in this moment? We'll end with that.

LAURA PAPPANO: Okay, well, where do I feel hopeful? I feel hopeful that people are paying attention and that there are organized moms and people. I was there on election day with a mom who had at one time homeschooled seven children and now is a public school advocate. She had worked really hard to organize people and get a levy passed when it looked threatened more than a year ago, and she’s gotten very, very involved and has a whole network of people who are involved.

I also take hope from the fact that there are a lot of moderate Republicans in this area banding together, saying, “We’re going to take this party back from the extremists.” Let’s see if they’re successful. Good luck to them. That’s where I see hope—people saying, “Wait a second. This is not okay.” When I reflect on what we saw on election day, there’s been enough harm done that people are just throwing up their arms and saying, “Enough.” It’s not like the frog in boiling water—it’s too much. Way too much.

BLAIR HODGES: Too much, too soon. Too fast. Yeah. I would also ask then, and I know you’re a reporter, so you’re really focusing on what is happening and not trying to be a prognosticator—but do you see the Department of Education coming back? If Democrats come back into power, do you see a reform, a restructuring, and a rebuilding there to make it back to what it was and possibly even better?

LAURA PAPPANO: I mean, before it was created, if you go way, way, way back, its role was data collection and sharing so people could understand what was happening in other places. I think that is incredibly valuable as we try to double down and actually improve student performance.

Do I think the Department of Education is going to come back? I think it has become enough of a political issue that I would not be surprised if, with a Democratic administration, there were an effort to make it a useful support tool. That’s what it is—a support organization, part of government. But it has really important functions for underserved, low-income, and special-needs students—people who need to make sure that their local districts and schools are serving them. They deserve to be educated as much as anyone else.

BLAIR HODGES: See? And if we build it back, we need to do it in such a way that restores confidence so people will even want to work there, knowing a president can’t just come in and unilaterally destroy congressionally built agencies. There’s a lot of work ahead if progressives and liberals want to make a dent in it.

All right, well, I encourage people to follow your work. Laura, you’ve been reporting at Slate and other places. Your recent article about Moms for Liberty, your great article about school vouchers—people should check those out. And, of course, your book is School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education.

Laura, thanks for checking back in with us and giving us a lay of the land. I appreciate it.

LAURA PAPPANO: Great. Thank you so much, Blair.

Outro – 30:56

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another mini episode of Relationscapes. Thanks to Laura Pappano for joining us again. I linked her recent articles in the show notes, if you want to check those out. And as promised, here is the trailer for the podcast I recommend in this episode. It's called We Are North Nashville. We'll see you again on Relationscapes.