Moms for quote-unquote "Liberty" (with Laura Pappano)

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Introduction – 0:00

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes, the podcast where we map the stories and ideas that shape our identities and connect us with each other as we try to build a better world. I'm journalist Blair Hodges, and our guide in this episode is education journalist Laura Pappano.

LAURA PAPPANO: I was completely baffled by what I was hearing. That your children are facing existential danger and harm from the very people who are supposed to be protecting and educating them. And it's your job as a parent to stand up, speak out, and fight.

BLAIR HODGES: As a journalist working the education beat, Laura Pappano had seen a lot. But even she was stunned by what she witnessed at the conference of a group called Moms for Liberty in Florida. They were sounding the alarm about Marxism, social and emotional learning, critical race theory, and pornographic books in school libraries.

And these moms weren't there just to complain. They were organizing and training to help take over local school boards across the country. As a longtime advocate for effective public education, Pappano knew she needed to do something more than just publish a news article to explain this rising extremism. She joins us now to talk about her new book, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education.

 

What Is the Purpose of Public School – 01:45

 

BLAIR HODGES: Laura Pappano, welcome to Relationscapes.

LAURA PAPPANO: Glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: You begin this book, School Moms, by saying that you didn't plan to write this book. You didn't necessarily even want to write this book because there's a ton of stuff you could write about when it comes to schools. And maybe I thought at the very outset, give us an idea of what some of those other things you would rather write about are.

LAURA PAPPANO: Oh man, there's just—there's so many. I love writing about low-income, first-gen kids. I love my newspaper kids, grades three through eight. I love kids’ curiosity. I love questions about inequality in school. I love clever ways of teaching math. There's so many things that need our attention in schools. Absolutely.

BLAIR HODGES: And yet here we are. The book School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education is the book you did write. So tell me, what was the tipping point? Why did you finally decide to do this book?

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, I've covered education—K–12 and higher ed—for over 30 years, and I was seeing so much happening in public schools that did not have to do with education. In fact, what I was seeing was getting in the way of the big questions we have about education.

I mean, the deep questions about education are: how do we optimize for every child their opportunity to learn? Learning doesn't happen to you; you are motivated to connect and learn. And how do we do that? I'm enormously interested in that. But this stuff was getting in the way of it.

And when I say “stuff,” what I'm talking about is the far-right political attack on public schools, which is taking these really communal community spaces and turning them into a political platform to gain far-right power.

I mean, Steve Bannon has said as much. At CPAC in early 2022, he said school boards are the key that “picks the lock.” I find it unconscionable because, as a public school student myself, and as a parent in PTOs with kids in school, I never knew what anyone's politics were. I didn't care, and it simply didn't matter because it was about the community we were forging.

To see that deep trust, that role, fractured really made me feel compelled. Plus, having covered schools for so long, I was hearing a lot of stuff that didn't make any sense—just flat-out made-up stuff. So I felt, as a journalist, that it was my job to correct the record.

BLAIR HODGES: Some of those big claims I hear are that schools are these places of indoctrination where the leftist agenda is being programmed into kids, who are being brainwashed into Marxism and all these kinds of things. You take a step back from that and say, “Okay, let's hold on a second and take a look at what schools are generally supposed to be for.”

So talk about why public schooling matters and why you're such an advocate for it.

LAURA PAPPANO: Absolutely. I mean, I know that we get caught up in test scores, NAEP scores, and performance—and that certainly does matter—but we forget that one of the big functions of public school is that it brings together people from different backgrounds, and you learn to negotiate and get along. You might like some things about somebody and dislike other things, but you figure out how to make it work.

And it's that fundamental role. John Dewey made the point that it's the experience of school. His point was that we're not going to raise citizens by teaching civics classes. We're going to educate our citizens through the experience of going to public school together.

BLAIR HODGES: I like this vision of school as a microcosm of community, that this is a place where kids can get socialized into how to interact with people who have different backgrounds, who have different beliefs, and where diversity is celebrated—not just for its own sake, but because diversity is a reality in the world.

And so, like you said, John Dewey's point was: we're going to learn facts and skills, math, and these kinds of things. And that's great. We also want to help train citizens who can participate in a pluralistic society. That's why there have long been tensions about the role of schools, right?

So take us back to the '60s and '70s, when we see some big changes happening with the Department of Education and with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. You give us some of this history to set up the context for what's happening today.

LAURA PAPPANO: For sure. I mean, if we go way back to the turn of the last century—the century before the one we're in now—the creation of common schools was really a recognition that everybody needed some education and schooling. I think it was World War I when a vast percentage of the people signing up were illiterate.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, people couldn't read.

LAURA PAPPANO: People could not read. And we forget that now, but the motivation was to educate, to train—think Industrial Revolution. Everyone wasn't working on a farm anymore, and we needed people who had the ability to acquire skills. At the same time, schools played this really important role of gathering people to learn.

And there are moms who were—if we look at some of the basis of the child labor laws, the mandatory school attendance—a lot of the things we take for granted now grew out of our first experiences with public education.

If you continue this through every era, I mean, you could look at 1957, the Sputnik era. Suddenly, the federal government felt, “Oh my gosh, the best way to advance our country and our citizens is to really infuse science education into our public schools.”

At a moment when we seem to lack a consistent and whole culture, public schools are the closest we come. I mean, 90% of children in America attend public schools. We can have all the fights and battles we want about so-called educational freedom or parent choice, and we can talk about what all those things are and the rhetoric around them.

But the bottom line is that it has been our collective role to educate the next generation. The federal government plays a role in that—the federal contribution to a local school budget is about 9%. The rest is state and local. Which is why you see so much action right now in state legislatures and on local school boards, because that's where the money is coming from.

But to the point about how schools have evolved, there's long been this kind of battle with the religious right. You know, back in the '70s, there was the push for prayer in schools. A number of them met with President Carter, who was a born-again Christian, and he said, “Absolutely not.”

What's interesting about this evolution—the relationship between religion and school—is that when it didn't work to say, “We want to put God into school, we want to put religion into school,” the religious right changed their approach. Jerry Falwell was very clever in changing the kind of language. He started using secular language, saying it’s students’ rights to pray, parental rights to control what’s taught, the freedom to pray—all of that kind of liberal language around rights and what one is allowed, owed, or permitted was flipped.

We saw that starting to happen with the religious right in the 1970s. I saw it as an education columnist for The Boston Globe when I started covering a battle around sex education in the 1990s.

You had the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s, and that changed what needed to be taught in sex ed classes. Suddenly, we had to use the words “condom” and “homosexuality.” That spurred a real uprising and backlash, attacks by the Christian Coalition and other organizations.

So this moment that we're in is not brand new. We've seen iterations of it before.

 

The Federal Government's Role – 10:39

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's right. And people might be wondering—give us the 30-second version of what the federal government is supposed to be doing with education. You gave us an idea of the money they contribute, the percentage of the budget. But what is the federal government controlling, and what are state governments controlling?

LAURA PAPPANO: Absolutely. So, initially, there was a lot of resistance to having a U.S. Department of Education, and there is still opposition to that. In fact, when I was at the first Moms for Liberty Summit, when Betsy DeVos called for its abolition, she got a standing ovation. She was put in charge of the Department of Education.

LAURA PAPPANO: Exactly. But what the federal government's role in education is, I often think of it as guardrails: special education laws, Title IX regulations, Title I money for schools that have high percentages of students in poverty, school lunch programs—the things that really provide a baseline.

BLAIR HODGES: And Title IX, you spoke to, has to do with gender discrimination, right?

LAURA PAPPANO: Yes, gender discrimination. Race would fall under the Civil Rights Act. The point being that the federal government—think of Johnson, when he spoke to Congress about the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—was very aspirational. It was like, it didn't matter what zip code you were in, how wealthy your parents were, or what disabilities you might have. Everyone was going to get access to a wonderful public education.

And it's that role I think of as a guardrail or policing role. That’s why you're seeing record numbers of civil rights complaints being filed with the Department of Education right now.

Who is looking at that? Well, even after Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case in 1954, there was massive resistance in Virginia. It took five years before those schools were integrated. Then you had the rise of segregation academies—the predecessors of charter schools—where white families sought ways to avoid having their children attend schools with Black students.

And we're seeing a replay of that now. Look at the voucher movement. We're seeing the exact same thing: people using public money to avoid sending their children to school with kids who are not like them.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. So we see this local resistance to federal involvement. And as far as states are concerned, they're providing most of the budget, and they're also overseeing a lot of the curriculum, with some input from the federal government—usually in how they tie funding to certain standards. Is that right?

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, it's gone back and forth. I haven't covered the whole gamut over the years. No Child Left Behind was a pretty powerful federal foray into control of education.

BLAIR HODGES: The early 2000s.

LAURA PAPPANO: Yes, exactly. I was struck by it because education had been very much a local and state affair, but the federal government was playing a prominent role under a Republican administration.

I remember going to a middle school—I believe it was in Lynn, Massachusetts—and talking with the principal. I asked, “What do you think of this? These curriculums, these demands?” And he said, “Well, at least now we know what to teach. Before, if you liked long division, you taught long division. If you liked dinosaurs, you taught dinosaurs.”

I think that has been a longstanding battle in education: the role of the teacher to be in control of the classroom versus outside government requirements for what should be taught.

I think we need some of both. We need teachers to feel empowered and creative to be their most wonderful selves, but we also need to make sure that everyone is learning and having access to a good, quality education.

 

The Rise of School Moms – 14:57

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, that's a perfect segue, because in addition to those two things, then there are also parents, right? You say that women, especially, have played a large role in the shape of public education. Women were extending their domestic leadership into school spaces. It became sort of a women's role to be concerned about what the kids were up to.

For a long time, women have usually been the ones on PTAs and in the classroom. And now we see this rise of the “school moms” that you write about in this book, who really want to start having a big say in what the curriculum is. So you had the federal government talking about curriculum, you had local control over curriculum, and now we get this third component: parents coming in and saying, actually, we should control the curriculum.

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, I mean, there are a couple of things there when you bring up women's roles. What we're also talking about is that women were involved because women were allowed to have, quote-unquote, authority over children. Right? Because it was considered natural. If you go back to the Victorian era, in the “separate spheres,” men had the public sphere, and women were experts of the home.

It was very natural for women to gain power by asserting that province over the home. This is where you saw women even saying, “We should make the whole world our home.” Some of it, when you read it, the original documents are kind of humorous—the old magazines.

But the point about parental rights is that it's actually trickier than it looks from the outside. Parents do have rights; they always have. I also think, most profoundly, as a parent of three children who are now grown, you have influence. To me, that is the most powerful thing of all.

What we're seeing now, with quote-unquote “parental rights,” is really just a language game to take control over things that professionals were in charge of—whether librarians, who are very well educated and curate collections of books, or teachers and curriculum specialists. These are professionals trained to understand, if you’re teaching this kind of math this year, what you should do next year or next week. There’s a logic flow to it.

I used to teach my children a lot of stuff, but it was mostly whatever I happened to be interested in—back to that old teacher model. And you know what? It was a lot of fun, but I would hate to have those be the cornerstones of their education.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, let's meet some of these moms in particular that you cover in the book. Your first chapter takes us to the Tampa Convention Center in 2022. There's a group called Moms for Liberty that's rallying, and you're in attendance as a reporter, but you're a little bit incognito. You could blend in there.

Tell us a little bit about who this group is and what started Moms for Liberty.

LAURA PAPPANO: Yes. So I registered under my name. I did, though, dress to fit in. I wasn't trying to hide, but I didn't want to draw too much attention to myself.

BLAIR HODGES: So you didn't wear, like, a fedora with a note card sticking out of it that said “press”?

LAURA PAPPANO: No. But I can tell you, having covered education for years, if I'm doing a story, I try to wear the right outfit. You're dressing to fit in. I wasn't trying to hide. Most importantly, I went in there focused on my job as a journalist: does this make sense? What am I hearing? What's the logic unfolding in front of me?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

LAURA PAPPANO: I guess the thing that was most surprising to me was that I expected to be confused. I expected to hear some things and think, “Huh, I hadn't thought of it that way before.” But I was stunned at how absurd and outlandish it was from the start.

The absurdity was compounded by the fact that, at the very same time, kitty-corner to the Moms for Liberty Summit at the Tampa Convention Center, there was MetroCon—the largest anime gathering in Florida. So there I was in the hotel lobby and on the streets, with people in wings, horns, glitter, and colonial garb. It was surreal.

Inside the Moms for Liberty Summit, what struck me immediately was hearing things that were outlandish: sending your child to public schools for 30 to 35 hours a week was like sending them to a Maoist reform prison camp. Social-emotional learning, which I had written about 20 years earlier when it was first being organized in schools, was being framed as Marxist indoctrination. Teachers and educators were being accused of trying to change the gender of your child.

Having been in hundreds, if not thousands, of classrooms, and having a daughter who is an educator, I was completely baffled by what I was hearing—until I realized this was not about revealing some deep truth. This was about frightening this group of 500 parents, mostly moms, into fearing that their children were in danger. And we heard that repeatedly over four days: your children are facing existential danger and harm from the very people who are supposed to be protecting and educating them. And it's your job as a parent to stand up, speak out, and fight.

That was really stunning to me because, for decades, the rhetoric had been schools and parents working together for the good of children. Suddenly, you had the language of these “bombs” being about: we are warriors, we are war moms, and all that.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, all the militant metaphors.

LAURA PAPPANO: Right. And just to pick up on what you just mentioned, the language of violence and the invocation of violence that we are hearing and seeing around this issue is really, really concerning.

What also struck me was that, at the same time, one of the board members of Moms for Liberty, a lawyer, stood up and was talking about the “Don't Say Gay” law. He was saying, you know, it’s done a lot of good, but we have to do more. The law is just—it’s not enough.

He then said, “Well, it’s like if you have an AK-47, you need a finder, you need a laser.” This was just a handful of weeks after Uvalde.

BLAIR HODGES: Whoa.

LAURA PAPPANO: I was disgusted.

BLAIR HODGES: The tragic school shooting in Texas.

LAURA PAPPANO: Yes, the tragic school shooting. And he's using an AK-47 as a metaphor to talk about a law. What was even more upsetting was that nobody in the room reacted. It was just accepted.

That’s when I realized that there was something else going on here. This was not really about: how do we make things better for all kids? How do we educate them better? How do we have better schools? This was about an agenda and a plan—a political plan. I find that to be a wrongful use of public education.

BLAIR HODGES: We'll lay some of that plan out as we go. But I also wanted to point out that the Moms for Liberty group was kind of sparked by the pandemic. One of their biggest early concerns was masking, distance learning, and things like that, where people who were anti-vax or skeptical of science and the pandemic took this as an opportunity to put education on trial and claim that schools were hurting kids.

LAURA PAPPANO: Certainly. What it allowed was people who were upset anyhow. Let's be honest—everybody was upset. Nobody was happy. There were a lot of pent-up and frustrated emotions, especially from parents at home trying to school their children while schools were closed.

I also remember that we didn't know a lot at the time. My daughter had classmates whose family members had died as a result of COVID. So we have to remember where we were, and then it could easily connect with other ideas.

 

Social and Emotional Learning – 23:45

 

BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned social and emotional learning. So it goes from masks to this idea of indoctrination through social-emotional learning. Maybe take 60 seconds to lay out the basics of SEL—what it is—so people who don’t know about it can understand.

LAURA PAPPANO: Social-emotional learning is, you know, a really simple idea. There’s a psychologist I read about, and I did a session with her. She said kids often come into school “on fire” emotionally, and it’s really hard to learn when you’re on fire. The point of social-emotional learning is to get everybody gathered and grounded.

When I was writing about it in a Boston Globe column many years ago, I interviewed Pam Siegel, who in 1987 was one of the early pioneers of SEL. She was a teacher and said, “My lessons were going out the window because someone was upset about who stole a glitter pen and blamed it on somebody else.”

Anyone with contact with children knows that something like that can disrupt everything. The idea of social-emotional learning is: let’s come together, talk it out, gather ourselves, and move on. Because when you’re present, you can learn.

What I find so absurd is that people on the far right complain about social-emotional learning. They say, “We should get rid of SEL and focus on reading, writing, and math.” But SEL allows you to do reading, writing, and math because everybody is in the same collective place.

It goes back to what we were talking about before, with schools as communities. Schools are communities; classrooms are communities. If you hate your teacher, hate the culture in your classroom, or feel like your teacher hates you, you’re not going to learn. The opposite is true: if you’re in a fluid, relational space that the teacher is an expert at creating, you’re going to learn—and you’ll be eager to learn more than if you were just sitting there doing worksheets.

BLAIR HODGES: And so if people are wondering how anyone could become freaked out about that—because all it really is is establishing behavioral norms, some ways that kids can emotionally regulate themselves, how a classroom can run effectively, mindfulness, growth mindset, which is this kind of positive thinking and believing in yourself—how could anyone think that could be evil?

Well, it also connects with ideas of tolerance and acceptance of others, and that can connect to LGBTQ issues and to looking at racism as a problem. I think that’s where some of these moms start freaking out, saying, “Wait a minute. This is part of some agenda to make everybody think that being gay is okay.”

Of course, me personally—and many people—believe being gay is okay. So that’s not a problem. But for people who have a problem with that, it’s easy to take something like social-emotional learning and turn it into a boogeyman.

So you’re witnessing this at the convention: people talking about SEL, framing it in strange ways, comparing it to “cultural Marxism” and other frightening ideas. They’re also really tactical. They’re trying to generate local candidates to take over school boards. They’re talking to lobbyists who can contact lawmakers. They want to create model legislation that can be passed in one state and then shared with other states.

They’re also distributing talking points for everyday people on the street. This is very well organized, very politically minded, very politically engaged, and very politically sophisticated. And this is going to start popping up. I remember during the pandemic, seeing school board meetings being disrupted.

 

Local School Boards Under Siege – 27:41

 

BLAIR HODGES: You have a chapter on school boards. Let’s talk about school boards and what Moms for Liberty and other groups are trying to do with them.

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, I think you’ve set it up really nicely: there’s a whole far-right ecosystem—ALEC, the Goldwater Institute—that have model conservative legislation we are now seeing pop up in state legislatures. There is a whole far-right agenda.

In a way, Moms for Liberty, the school boards, and the people showing up and yelling about masking were a revelatory moment for these far-right organizations, who for decades had been looking for an entry into this world. And what they alighted on was the power of moms.

When I was at that first summit, I was walking outside, talking to people at the tables. One of the conservative institutes pointed out, “We just started doing school board training, and 600 people have signed up already.” This was July 2022.

In August, the Leadership Institute, another conservative organization, started online school board training. School boards had been overlooked, but now they recognized that school boards were not only useful—they could be won. And as we learned through research, with very low turnout, sometimes 8 or 10%, you can actually flip a board with just a few votes.

BLAIR HODGES: You can flip a board with a couple dozen people and some money.

LAURA PAPPANO: Exactly. And that’s what we’ve seen. Moms for Liberty framed the language and talking points very effectively, and the far-right groups were waiting for this opportunity.

If you look back to spring 2022, there’s a company called Patriot Mobile, a Christian cell phone company in Texas, which donates 5% of its profits to far-right groups, like the NRA. They’re not hiding it. In January 2022, they started the Patriot Mobile Action PAC—a super PAC. They can’t donate directly to local candidates, but they can donate to local PACs, which were then created to receive their money.

BLAIR HODGES: And what they did was help with advertising and boosting candidates, and so on and so forth.

LAURA PAPPANO: Absolutely. So yes, they have money, connections, strategists. What they were able to do was take in about $400,000, which on a national level is not that much. But they could distribute it across 11 school board races in North Texas, which is a lot of money in a school board race.

Right. You take in four districts, and suddenly I started seeing circulars that looked awfully professional and box trucks circling neighborhoods. When I looked into it, started following the money, I noticed that a lot of the printing and strategy were coming from Axiom Strategies in Kansas City, Missouri, which, as it turns out, is a major political outfit that works for Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, Ted Cruz. So you’ve got these national political strategists now being involved in local school board races. And what happens? Those four school boards flipped—with really serious consequences.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, the biggest irony to me is that it’s under the guise of local control. But what’s happening is these elections are being taken over by national party interests that don’t map well onto local conditions. So you get local school boards doing all these weird rules and regulations that the local communities don’t want, because they’re coming from national party priorities under the guise of local control.

LAURA PAPPANO: You’re 1000% right. That’s the travesty. I also saw this last fall in Idaho. I was in North Idaho doing a story for Heckinger Report and Vanity Fair, where I spent six months following school board races. What had happened in West Bonner County is that some far-right candidates took over the school district. The levy didn’t pass, a third of the budget was cut, and they sent back the English Language Arts curriculum because it contained social-emotional learning—which it did.

Suddenly, you had very angry Republican, conservative, religious moms seeing their local public schools attacked by extremists. They organized a recall of two of the candidates. I was again on the ground for election day, because there were three seats open. What were the issues in the election? I was looking at the circulars. The issues were “transgenderism”—which is a made-up idea and a slur.

BLAIR HODGES: Just to point out, instead of “transgender people,” they say “transgenderism.” This is to dismiss it as though it’s some sort of ideology, not real, just a pathology, basically.

LAURA PAPPANO: Right, exactly. They’re trying to pathologize something. I stood outside a voting place listening to one of these far-right candidate representatives telling people to vote for her candidate because he was going to keep boys out of girls’ bathrooms. I can tell you—that is not the issue in that local district.

The issue was that they were worried they weren’t able to clean the schools. Their principal was talking at a school board meeting about mice running over children’s feet. They had no English Language Arts curriculum for the second year in a row.

BLAIR HODGES: But Laura, were the mice transgender? That’s the question.

LAURA PAPPANO: That’s the question. But that is a perfect example of national-level rhetoric being mapped onto a local election, which had nothing to do with the issues at hand. It was merely being used as a scare tactic.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

That’s Laura Pappano, and we’re talking about her book School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education. Laura is an award-winning journalist and author who’s covered K–12 and higher education for over 30 years. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, The Washington Post, and other publications.

 

Book Banning – 34:52

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Laura, I could spend a lot of time on that. I have to move it along just so people can get a sense for what else is covered here. The next part is just as interesting, really—it’s about librarians. Let’s talk about books. You say that battles over reading material have been fought down through the decades.

This isn’t necessarily a new thing, but we are seeing a big revival of book-banning fervor. It’s a pendulum, and we’re swinging back to the side of the pendulum that’s about banning books. You introduced us to a Texas state representative, Matt Kraus, who made a list of books that has now started spreading around the country.

Talk about the book bans—where they’re coming from, and Kraus’s role.

LAURA PAPPANO: Yeah. He was running for office, and it turns out, not very effectively. He’s still running now, although he’s moved down a bunch of rungs. I think he’s running for county commissioner in Tarrant County. But what he did is issue a list of 850 books that he said were problematic.

In his power as a state legislator, he sent a kind of demand letter to all the school districts, asking them to list whether they had the book, how much they spent on it, and where it was located. It was just exhaustive amounts of work. That was incredibly frightening for all the librarians receiving it.

What was interesting, though, is that he would never reveal how he came up with the list. A lot of local media in Texas had a field day with this because, you know, there’s a book of inventions—some of the stuff was completely nonsensical. And yet on Twitter, Chris Tackett, who is a great person to follow, posted a photo of a box of books being rolled out of the Granbury ISD library. It just said on the outside of the carton, “Kraus’s books.”

BLAIR HODGES: Someone just labeled it that way.

LAURA PAPPANO: Exactly. You could not have scripted a more effective fear tactic. And what did it do? It got him a lot of attention. It also spurred a similar phenomenon around the country, where people started standing up at school board readings and reading portions of books aloud.

And we all know this: the nature of reading is often very private. There’s a huge difference between reading something aloud in a public meeting, reading it privately to yourself, or having it assigned and discussed in a class. There are so many ways that we interact with books, and we seem to have completely forgotten that. Children learn a lot about themselves and others through reading.

BLAIR HODGES: That’s why they’re scared of it.

LAURA PAPPANO: One librarian said to me, “People think that if you read a book where the character is doing something, then kids will go do it.” She said, “That is not how books work.”

BLAIR HODGES: No. Teachers probably wish it were that simple—just read this book, problem solved.

LAURA PAPPANO: Truly. I think we’re having a really alarming misunderstanding. Probably because we don’t read enough as a society, we don’t engage enough with books, ideas, and thinking. It’s created this grand, crazy attack on books.

I thought when I was writing about it two years ago it would kind of chill out, but it’s done anything but. I was on a panel in Tennessee recently with a librarian—Lindsey Kimmery, who leads off one of the chapters. She was testifying against a bill, I think House Bill 1944 in Tennessee, about holding librarians criminally liable for books deemed obscene. The bill did die, but she told me just a couple of weeks ago that, because everyone has been so focused on vouchers, there are other attempts to reintroduce similar legislation.

The idea that we should legislate what librarians do is completely ridiculous. For example, in Keller ISD, one of those flipped school boards decided that instead of letting librarians curate books, the school board would have to approve the purchase of every single book.

I watched a five-and-a-half-hour school board meeting where a librarian stood up and made the point that this new curation process was lengthy and detailed. The school board had to approve everything. She said she couldn’t get books on camels, squirrels, or football in a timely manner. She couldn’t get the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid or the latest Guinness Book of World Records until it was approved by the school board. Kids were walking up to her asking, “Where are the new books?”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Where’s the new Dog Man?

LAURA PAPPANO: She said, “I don’t tell them that it’s political.” And yet we see this obfuscation, which is an absolute affront to the professionalism of librarians. For what? We need our kids to—don’t we want them to read books?

BLAIR HODGES: Two things I want to ask you about here. You point out that a lot of the books that end up on these lists pertain to race or LGBTQ characters. If there’s even any mention or suggestion that a character might be LGBTQ+, those books wind up on these lists. If a book addresses racism, it winds up there too.

This is really about erasing minority students and minority representation in public libraries. Libraries need to be representative of all the people who might use them. That includes content that not everyone agrees with. It also has to cover different age levels and levels of maturity.

So we shouldn’t expect every book to be appropriate for a kindergartner, sixth grader, seventh, eighth, ninth, and so on. There’s erasure of LGBTQ folks and, at the same time, an expectation that every book must be “okay for everybody.”

With that in mind, what recourse do we have? How is this not bumping up against First Amendment issues? Can we rely on courts to strike down these laws?

LAURA PAPPANO: First of all, yes—they do run into First Amendment issues, and that has been one of the arguments. In Escambia County, Florida, there’s a lawsuit with PEN America and a group of local educators and parents, because that county has one of the highest numbers of banned books.

It’s clearly an affront to First Amendment rights. But there’s another dimension. Not every book is appropriate for every child at every age. That’s where librarians’ expertise comes in—they know reading tastes and can find books that a particular child will likely enjoy. That’s a powerful role.

There’s a big difference between having books available for anyone who wants to check them out and forcing a narrow, censored view. If a parent doesn’t want their child to read a certain book, librarians are happy to accommodate that. For example, we are not seeing genderqueer content in elementary school libraries—it simply isn’t true.

BLAIR HODGES: And you learned from it.

LAURA PAPPANO: I did. I read Gender Queer and realized I hadn’t fully understood gender fluidity before. It wasn’t even a particularly “sexy” book, frankly. But it’s important to understand what other people are going through, because everyone is not “us.” That’s the power of books.

I’ve also given classroom sets of books, like The Hate U Give, to kids in Texas. These experiences are powerful—they help children relate to lives other than their own. That’s why a narrow, whitewashed, “acceptable” list of books is an affront to American democracy and to parents. We want our children to have different experiences and to develop empathy for others.

 

The Chilling Effect – 44:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: And as you said, legal challenges can succeed. But you also point out in your book that sometimes the chilling effect is what matters most.

A state passes a law banning certain books, and the visibility alone can be enough. LGBTQ+ kids may see books on those lists and feel ostracized. Teachers may become wary about the books they put in their classrooms, simply to avoid controversy.

Sometimes, the law’s mere presence is enough—mission accomplished. Even unsuccessful bills can have a chilling effect that’s just as powerful.

LAURA PAPPANO: I’ve heard this from people within. For example, I spoke with a Black man whose mom is a schoolteacher in Florida. She was getting ready to retire and wanted to give away her collection of books, but she was afraid. She worried that just giving away her books would draw attention to herself.

People self-censor, and they do it simply because they’re afraid of controversy or being targeted. And they’re not wrong—there are real consequences. Matthew Hahn, for instance, lost his job, and he’s someone I still stay in touch with. It’s heartbreaking.

There was also a teacher in Georgia who was fired along political lines for reading a book aloud to her fifth-grade class—a book she had purchased at the school book fair.

We are living in a very worrisome time when it comes to how we treat professionals, books, and education itself. Consider this: 90% of students in America attend public schools. In 1986, 70% of them were white. In 2023, 46% were white. By 2030, that number will be 43%.

Demographics are changing. And this is why I’m baffled that inclusion is even considered a political issue. Everyone needs to be included, to feel that they belong. Social-emotional learning shows us that when students feel they belong, they perform better. Feeling part of a multicultural fabric benefits everyone.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. I love that you include those studies. It’s not just morally right to be inclusive—it’s pragmatic. Kids do better statistically when they feel they belong, when they aren’t worried about bullying or ostracization, and when they see themselves represented in the school. That could be in a Pride flag, a Black Lives Matter sign, an American flag, or books featuring characters who reflect their experiences—or ones that show people very different from them.

Educational outcomes improve when diversity is encouraged in schools.

LAURA PAPPANO: Absolutely. This isn’t just intuition. If people walk into a room and feel welcomed, they do better at any task than if they feel on guard or disrespected. Jeffrey Cohen at Stanford has a book called Belonging—I interviewed him for a Boston Globe column about ten years ago. His research connects grades and performance to a sense of belonging.

There’s also research on low-income, first-generation students: if schools help them feel they belong from day one, it changes performance. Feeling like “I don’t belong” can sabotage learning. This ties into growth mindset: failing at something initially doesn’t mean you can’t improve. You go back, try again, and grow.

These are tools developed by American educational psychology since James Comer in the 1960s. They help schools and students perform better. And yet, these positive approaches are often mischaracterized or ignored.

BLAIR HODGES: Sounds a lot like Marxism to me, Laura. [laughter]

LAURA PAPPANO: [laughter] I don’t know how they get there. I really don’t. I think it’s just picking scary words.

 

DEI is the New CRT – 49:29

 

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. Speaking of scary words, let’s pivot to critical race theory. During COVID, parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty were on the rise, and this coincided with the killing of George Floyd. America was again confronting systemic racism on a national level.

CRT became a focus for conservatives—strangely so, because it’s a fairly arcane legal and philosophical theory, not something taught in elementary schools. Yet suddenly, critics were treating it as a boogeyman, and it became a flashpoint.

This is symptomatic of groups like Moms for Liberty: they can take something like CRT, turn it into a fear tactic, and then leverage it politically. Laura, I’m interested in your thoughts on how CRT has been used this way.

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, actually, it's Chris Ruffo—we're going to be specific. So Chris Ruffo was the one who, you know, he said it right on Twitter on his feed, "I'm going to take this and we're going to change the meaning of this brand."

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

LAURA PAPPANO: And he was talking—he called it a brand. And we are going to make it so that when somebody sees this word, this CRT phrase, they will just think everything bad and crazy. So he took something with a… the only thing that it has to do with actual critical race theory is…

And, you know, the bottom line is that nobody really even knows what the modern iteration we're talking about here is of a CRT. What is CRT? Nobody knows. You just ask people, right?

BLAIR HODGES: The people who are afraid of it don’t know.

LAURA PAPPANO: And they're just like, you know, "it's just bad." It… we just know that it's bad. And I, you know, in Idaho…

BLAIR HODGES: “It’s racist against white people,” is what they would say.

LAURA PAPPANO: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: And you'd say, how so? “I don't know.”

LAURA PAPPANO: And there's no depth to it. It's just become this kind of abbreviated handle. And you now are seeing DEI being the new CRT.

BLAIR HODGES: That’s the new thing, exactly.

LAURA PAPPANO: And again, Chris Rufo laid it out, and he said, we're gonna do for DEI what we did basically for CRT. He made it clear in one—like, one of his year-end newsletters.

So this is one of these things where we can look at this at every single level. The vagueness of language and meaning allows people to attach a lot of unclear, fearful ideas to something that nobody can really define. As a result, you have legislatures with anti-CRT laws that are so vague, they don't even know what they can't.

And now anti… I actually just finished reporting a story on anti-DEI laws in higher education. I spent a lot of time in Florida.

BLAIR HODGES: Yep. And Utah just passed a bill, and the governor signed it.

LAURA PAPPANO: And Utah—I mean, there are 12 or 13 states that have passed these laws. What do they really mean? How do you actually enforce them? All you do is see, you know, offices being shut down. You see people afraid to say certain words.

BLAIR HODGES: Money taken or redirected.

LAURA PAPPANO: You see people changing the names of classes, taking certain books off lists.

I mean, what you have is just people… again, going back to your earlier point about self-censorship. This is what we see. There have been teachers who are like, "I'm afraid I'm going to lose my job, so I'm just going to… I'm just not going to discuss this."

Well, that's a real harm to a lot of… I mean, if we look at the demographics of students in America, they need to know that their history exists and matters, and they need to understand the truth of that history—not just some kind of made-up, brief version of it. So I think it's incredibly… the CRT thing.

And I've heard people argue—and this was during my reporting in Idaho—that SEL is a Trojan horse for getting to CRT. And when you hear that exact phrase over and over again, it's like, what in the heck does that mean?

BLAIR HODGES: All I know is Trojan horses are bad, and I don't like them.

LAURA PAPPANO: Yeah, they're bad. They're tricky. I was interviewing a campaign manager for one of the far-right candidates in Idaho, and I kept asking, "Well, what is SEL? What are these things?" And he finally said, "You know, I don't know, but we don't like them."

And that's where we are. So the bigger issue is that we're talking about teams, we're talking about some people who want a very narrow vision of who counts and who matters in America and who doesn't. I am puzzled. I understand why certain people want that power, but I don't understand what the end game is for that.

Because we need everybody. We need everyone's intelligence. We need everyone's contributions. We cannot decide that certain people don't count.

BLAIR HODGES: I would suggest your own research gives you clues to answer your question there, which is—follow the money. A lot of these groups are connected with charter school and voucher programs. To the extent that they can discredit the public school system, they can help redirect public school money to private interests, private schools.

And there's money to be made here, frankly. I'm not saying that all charter schools are bad, or that private schools themselves are necessarily bad, but there's a lot less regulation there. There are problems that need to be reckoned with. I think a lot of these groups, a lot of the panic over CRT, over racism, over LGBTQ folks, is really about trying to dismantle public education in general and trying to privatize it.

That's my kinda working theory.

LAURA PAPPANO: So when I was doing the research, I was like, that's what I'm seeing happen. This looks pretty clear to me. And now, two years later, it is abundantly clear. Everybody's saying it out loud—even the far right is saying it out loud. I mean, it is very much an effort to dismantle public education, to have people feel like, "What's the point? Let's just all go our own way."

And what we're seeing with vouchers is exactly that. I was covering education in Massachusetts when the very first charter schools were starting, and there were a lot of rules and regulations around the charter schools. They were supposed to be laboratories of innovation. I used to cover a lot of charter schools in my column, and there were some fabulous, fabulous charter schools.

But here's what I think has flipped. The difference is that back then, people who were starting charter schools were thinking, "You know what? I think I've got an idea for doing it better. I think we can reach this group of kids in… in Mission Hill, in Roxbury." That was the birth of Roxbury Prep.

We could follow them, teach them, coach them into college and through college. There was a purposeful effort to improve opportunities for different groups of children.

What we see now, when we say charter school, is something very, very different. If we look at charter schools in Florida, many of them don't last more than a few years.

When I was looking at the voucher schools—when Florida just expanded their vouchers last year—I did a story for Hechinger Report and USA Today, and I was looking at the data in Florida at that time. Even before this most recent expansion, only 4% of voucher schools were accredited, nonreligious, and nonprofit.

So there is a lot of money to be made with this operation. We spend a lot of money on public education. One of my concerns is that, as we've seen with this voucher legislation—also sometimes called education savings accounts, ESAs—they've lifted the kind of ceiling.

So previously, you had to have a particular income to qualify. Now they're lifting that. So anybody, in some states, can get a voucher for $7,000 or $8,000 per pupil, depending. And they can not only get that, they can spend it on anything they want. In some states, they're literally just given a debit card.

This is where we've also seen the rise of homeschooling. Homeschooling can be effective, useful, and good. I would never deign to homeschool my children, but certain people have, and it has been effective.

But we also have this situation where I'm not sure anyone's watching to make sure these kids are all okay. There are a number of states with very little oversight, and that is deeply, deeply concerning to me—for the welfare of the children, not only educationally, but physically as well.

BLAIR HODGES: And it really is through the looking glass on this, because it's like they're saying, “Think of the children!” And I'm saying, think of the children! We're both saying, think of the children. Right? There's a definite upside-down world happening in all of these debates.

There's so much more we could talk about. But for people listening to the episode who might check out the book, what are a few takeaways? What are some suggestions you have for people who are concerned about anti-LGBTQ stuff in schools, racism in schools, anti-DEI and CRT panic, and all this? What are some practical things people can do to help bring the conversation back to sanity?

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, I think we know we've spent a lot of time here talking about Moms for Liberty. But the counter to that is that there are a lot of mom groups, parent groups on the ground who are organizing to protect public schools in local districts. Being involved with those groups ensures that you're electing people to your school board who are not going to decide they're in charge of choosing all the library books or the curriculum.

I mean, getting out and voting. We need to pay attention. We can't leave it up to somebody else, because if we do, it can become very, very problematic. There are so many examples of people leaving it up to someone else and then being horrified at the results. This is why, if you want something to do—get involved, pay attention. It matters. It actually, actually matters.

BLAIR HODGES: Write a note to a librarian that tells them you care about them.

LAURA PAPPANO: And that, too. That too.

BLAIR HODGES: I agree. Getting involved with local groups, organization—that's what matters. This is why Moms for Liberty and other groups have been successful: because they are organizing. Looking for ways to organize really matters.

That's Laura Pappano. We're talking about her book, School Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:01:10

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Laura. Every episode ends with a segment called Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. This is a moment where you can speak to any of these things or all of them. Is there anything you regret about the book now that it's out, something you would change about it, or what was most challenging in this particular book?

And then was there anything surprising? Any new revelations for yourself as you did the research?

LAURA PAPPANO: Well, what I'd say is the hard thing is that I did the book early, right? I did a lot of the reporting in early 2022. I went to the hotspots—Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Eastern Pennsylvania, New Hampshire.

By definition, those hotspots were very white suburbs. Not all, but predominantly. So the people captured— not all of them, of course, because the book has a variety of people in it— but it is a very white group. What I would say is that since I turned in the manuscript, we've seen that this issue has spread to all different communities, and parents in many different places are organizing around very similar issues.

So, I mean, that's one of the things that, if I had been able to report for longer, and if the publishing process were quicker, I would have tried to capture some of that. Certainly, my reporting throughout my career has really tried to capture a span of people and experiences.

And I guess the other revelation to me—part of me was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to these places, I'm reporting this, it's all going to be over by the time the book gets out.

BLAIR HODGES: And, oh, I wish.

LAURA PAPPANO: No. And I was kind of like, you know what? I just want to connect the dots. Maybe it'll all be over, but that's okay because… that's it. But it's been anything but that. I can tell you that on a regular basis, I get emails from people: "Can you come here? I'm going outside of Baltimore next Friday. I'm going to Detroit. I am going to a suburb of Detroit. Can you do a Zoom with us?"

All kinds of communities are experiencing this kind of challenge. No place seems to be safe from it. And it's not that there's turmoil everywhere—I certainly don't want to suggest that. But this is a moment where we all have to pay attention. Some people feel like, well, let's just get back to regular old education reporting. My sense is that we can't do that as long as this stuff keeps getting in the way.

It's really important for us to pay attention and hopefully get to the other side of this. One of the positive things I've seen from my reporting and conversations is that I've asked people in different places, "I know you're exhausted—Moms are exhausted, parents are exhausted—but do you feel a sense of purpose and connection with people around you?" And they said, absolutely. So I think that's been a really positive outcome.

BLAIR HODGES: That's terrific. I hope people can take a page from the school moms in terms of getting organized, being energized, letting their passion help them get involved, and helping other parents get involved. And we need more than parents—we need everybody in communities to think about schools, vote, and help push back against the extremism that's overtaking local schools.

Your book is a great way to learn about what those tactics are, the reasons behind them, the beliefs we need to be familiar with, so that when we meet in the political arena, we're prepared. We're prepared with answers. We're prepared to represent our values and our desires.

LAURA PAPPANO: And I think, Blair, one of the important things to remember is that the problem we have is with extremism, and that's what's hurting our institutions and our democracy.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. It speaks again to what you say in the beginning of your book, which is a school’s supposed to be a place where everybody in the community can go. There is a certain kind of extremism that would say, actually, no, everyone does need to be this thing. That’s the idea you really want to push against—the school does need to embrace everyone.

LAURA PAPPANO: Absolutely. We need them. We need everybody.

BLAIR HODGES: We do. Well, thank you. Thank you, Laura. Thanks for taking the time to talk about this work with us, and keep doing the good work that you're doing.

LAURA PAPPANO: You too. Thank you.

 

Outro – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes, the podcast where we're mapping the stories and ideas that shape who we are and connect us with each other while angry, conservative school moms are trying to destroy the world.

If you're joining us for the first time, welcome. I hope you'll check out some other episodes. There are a lot to choose from. I would also appreciate it if you took a moment to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, or rate the show on Spotify. Recommending the show to friends is also a really great way to grow the audience. So recommend it to a friend—or, well, you could recommend it to an enemy, exact your subtle revenge and tell them to listen to this one if you don't think they'd like it.

Mates of State, as always, provides our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, signing off. Until we meet again.