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    The Culture Wars Came to a California Suburb. A Leader Has Been Ousted.

    Voters recalled a Southern California school board president after his conservative majority approved policies on critical race theory and transgender issues.From the start, the three conservative board members of the Temecula Valley Unified School District made clear where they stood. On the same night in December 2022 that they were sworn in as a majority, they passed a resolution banning critical race theory from classrooms in their Southern California district.Months later, they abruptly fired the superintendent, saying they believed the district needed someone with new ideas. After that, they passed a rule requiring that parents be notified whenever a student requests to be identified as a different gender at school.The moves were applauded by conservatives, many of them Christian churchgoers who had helped to install the new board members, hoping that Temecula Valley could remain an island of traditional values in a liberal state.But this once rural area, about 60 miles northeast of San Diego, had transformed in recent decades into a diverse bedroom community, and many other families grew frustrated by what they considered to be the unwelcome incursion of national culture wars into their prized public schools.That backlash came to a head this month when voters recalled Joseph Komrosky, a military veteran and community college professor who had been the school board president since that December night. Mr. Komrosky’s ouster was made official on Thursday evening.“People are moving here so they can put their kids in the school district,” said Jeff Pack, whose One Temecula Valley PAC led the recall effort. “They don’t want all this partisan political warfare, this culture war stuff getting in the way.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Florida Sex Scandal Shakes Moms for Liberty, as Group’s Influence Wanes

    The conservative group led the charge on the Covid-era education battles. But scandals and losses are threatening its power.Moms for Liberty, a national right-wing advocacy group, was born in Florida as a response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates. But it quickly became just as well known for pushing policies branded as anti-L.G.B.T.Q. by opponents.So when one of its founders, Bridget Ziegler, recently told the police that she and her husband, who is under criminal investigation for sexual assault, had a consensual sexual encounter with another woman, the perceived disconnect between her public stances and private life fueled intense pressure for her to resign from the Sarasota County School Board.“Most of our community could not care less what you do in the privacy of your own home, but your hypocrisy takes center stage,” said Sally Sells, a Sarasota resident and the mother of a fifth-grader, told Ms. Ziegler during a tense school board meeting this week. Ms. Ziegler, whose husband has denied wrongdoing, said little and did not resign.Ms. Sells was one of dozens of speakers who criticized Ms. Ziegler — and Moms for Liberty — at the meeting, an outcry that underscored the group’s prominence in the most contentious debates of the pandemic era.Perhaps no group gained so much influence so quickly, transforming education issues from a sleepy political backwater to a rallying cry for Republican politicians. The organization quickly became a conservative powerhouse, a coveted endorsement and a mandatory stop on the G.O.P. presidential primary campaign trail.Yet, as Moms for Liberty reels from the scandal surrounding the Zieglers, the group’s power seems to be fading. Candidates endorsed by the group lost a series of key school board races in 2023. The losses have prompted questions about the future of education issues as an animating force in Republican politics.Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner for the party’s nomination, makes only passing reference in his stump speeches to preserving “parental rights” — the catchphrase of the group’s cause. Issues like school curriculums, transgender students’ rights and teaching about race were far less prominent in the three Republican primary debates than abortion rights, foreign policy and the economy. And the most prominent champion of conservative views on education — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — has yet to unite conservatives behind his struggling presidential bid.John Fredericks, a Trump ally in Virginia, said the causes that Moms for Liberty became most known for supporting — policies banning books it deemed pornographic, curtailing the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues and policing how race is taught in schools — had fallen far from many voters’ top concerns.“You closed schools, and people were upset about that. Schools are open now,” he said. “The Moms for Liberty really have to aim their fire on math and science and reading, versus focusing on critical race theory and drag queen story hours.”He added: “It’s nonsense, all of it.”The two other founders of Moms for Liberty, Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, have distanced themselves from Ms. Ziegler, saying she has not been an officer in the national organization since early 2021. Ms. Ziegler did not respond to a request for comment.In a statement, Ms. Descovich and Ms. Justice dismissed criticism that the group was hypocritical. They argue that it is not opposed to racial justice or L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but that it wants to restore control to parents over their children’s education.“To our opponents who have spewed hateful vitriol over the last several days: We reject your attacks,” Ms. Descovich and Ms. Justice said. “We are laser-focused on fundamental parental rights, and that mission is and always will be bigger than one person.”Ms. Justice declined to answer questions about the continued influence of their organization or their electoral losses.Tina Descovich, left, and Tiffany Justice, the two other founders of Moms for Liberty, distanced themselves from Ms. Ziegler.Matt Rourke/Associated PressNearly 60 percent of the 198 school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty in contested races across 10 states were defeated in 2023, according to an analysis by the website Ballotpedia, which tracks elections.The organization claims to operate 300 chapters in 48 states and to have about 130,000 members.Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank, found in a recent study that the group had an outsize presence in battleground and liberal counties. Yet in those areas, the policies championed by Moms For Liberty are broadly unpopular.“The politics have flipped on the Moms for Liberty, and they’re turning more people to vote against them than for them,” Mr. Valant said.In November, the group announced that it had removed the chairwomen of two Kentucky chapters after they had posed in photos with members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence. That came several months after a chapter of Moms for Liberty in Indiana quoted Adolf Hitler in its inaugural newsletter. The year before, Ms. Ziegler publicly denied links to the Proud Boys after she had posed for a photo with a member of the group at her election night victory party.The episodes have transformed the group’s image and alienated it from the voters it once claimed to represent. The group was at one time particularly strong in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where education issues helped spur Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, to victory in the 2021 governor’s race. (This year, Mr. Youngkin failed in his high-profile attempt at a Republican takeover of the Virginia Statehouse.)Anne Pogue Donohue, who ran for a school board seat in Loudoun County, Va., against a candidate endorsed by the group, said she saw a disconnect between the cause of Moms for Liberty and the current concerns of voters.On social media, Ms. Donohue, a former government lawyer and mother of two young children, faced a barrage of personal insults, death threats and accusations that she was trying to “groom” children to become transgender, she said. But during her in-person interactions with voters, she added, a vast majority of parents seemed more concerned with practical issues like math and reading scores, support for special education and expanding vocational and technical programs.Ms. Donohue won her seat by nearly seven percentage points.“There is a pushback now,” she said. “Moms for Liberty focuses heavily on culture-war-type issues, and I think most voters see that, to the extent that we have problems in our educational system that we have to fix, the focus on culture-war issues isn’t doing that.”One place where Moms for Liberty maintains a stronger hold is the state where the group has had perhaps the most influence: Florida.Since forming in 2020, the group has aligned itself with Mr. DeSantis, backing his parental-rights-in-education law that critics nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay.” The law prohibits classroom instruction on L.G.B.T.Q. topics.Mr. DeSantis then campaigned for conservative candidates for local school boards, turning nonpartisan races into ones heavily influenced by politics. Several school boards with newly conservative majorities ousted their superintendents.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has been aligned with Moms for Liberty, with the group backing his controversial parental-rights-in-education law.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesIn Brevard County, the school board is now entirely conservative except for Jennifer Jenkins, whom Mr. DeSantis has already listed as someone he would like to help defeat in 2024.Ms. Jenkins, an outspoken Moms for Liberty critic who wrested Ms. Descovich’s school board seat from her in 2020, said the organization, while small, had remained a vocal fixture in school board meetings, with about 10 regulars who sometimes bring along people from Indian River and other nearby counties.“Their members are definitely more extreme than they ever were before,” said Ms. Jenkins, who has been a frequent target of the group. They have picketed outside her house, sent her threatening mail and, she said, taken photos of her in the grocery store as recently as a couple of weeks ago.On Tuesday, some Moms for Liberty members from Brevard and Indian River Counties attended a Brevard County School Board meeting to protest books that they say should be pulled from schools. Most of the books they named had already been formally challenged.Still, one by one, group members stood behind the lectern and read explicit scenes from the books until the board’s chairwoman — whom Moms for Liberty and Mr. DeSantis endorsed last year — warned them to stop.It was what the speakers wanted: Under a Florida law enacted this year, if a school board denies a parent the right to read passages deemed “pornographic,” then the school district “shall discontinue the use of the material.” In other words, cutting off the reading would effectively result in pulling the book from schools, board members said.“I highly encourage all of you to look at this statute,” Julie Bywater, a member of the Brevard County chapter of Moms for Liberty, told the school board.Such tactics have become typical for Moms for Liberty members. In response, opponents have started showing up to school board meetings in force, trying to counter the group’s message — including in Sarasota, where Ms. Ziegler’s critics turned out to try to push her out.The school board, which includes several conservatives who have aligned with Ms. Ziegler before, voted 4 to 1 on Tuesday for a nonbinding resolution urging her to resign; Ms. Ziegler was the only one on the board to vote against it. More

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    In School Board Elections, Parental Rights Movement Is Dealt Setbacks

    Culture battles on gender and race did not seem to move many voters.Conservative activists for parental rights in education were dealt several high-profile losses in state and school board elections on Tuesday.The results suggest limits to what Republicans have hoped would be a potent issue for them leading into the 2024 presidential race — how public schools address gender, sexuality and race.The Campaign for Our Shared Future, a progressive group founded in 2021 to push back on conservative education activism, said on Wednesday that 19 of its 23 endorsed school board candidates in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia had won.The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest educators’ union and a key Democratic power player, said that in 250 races it had tracked — a mix of state, local and school board elections — 80 percent of its preferred candidates won.On the right, Moms for Liberty, the leading parental-rights group, said 44 percent of its candidates were elected.The modest results for conservatives show that after several years in which the right tried to leverage anger over how schools handled the Covid-19 pandemic and issues of race and gender in the curriculum, “parents like being back to some sense of normalcy,” said Jeanne Allen, chief executive of the Center for Education Reform, a right-leaning group in Washington.She suggested Republicans might have performed better if they had talked more about expanding access to school choice, such as vouchers and charter schools, noting that academic achievement remains depressed.In the suburbs of Philadelphia, an important swing region, Democrats won new school board majorities in several closely watched districts.In the Pennridge School District, Democrats swept five school board seats. The previous Republican majority had asked teachers to consult a social studies curriculum created by Hillsdale College, a conservative, Christian institution. The board also restricted access to library books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes and banned transgender students from using bathrooms or playing on sports teams that correspond to their gender identity.Democrats in nearby Bucks Central School District also won all five open seats. That district had been convulsed by debates over Republican policies restricting books and banning pride flags.The region was a hotbed of education activism during the pandemic, when many suburban parents organized to fight school closures, often coming together across partisan divides to resist the influence of teachers’ unions.But that era of education politics is, increasingly, in the rearview mirror.Beyond Pennsylvania, the unions and other progressive groups celebrated school board wins in Iowa, Connecticut and Virginia, as well as the new Democratic control of the Virginia state legislature.That state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has been a standard-bearer for parental rights, pushing for open schools during the pandemic and restricting how race is discussed in classrooms.Supporters of school vouchers had hoped that a Republican sweep in the state would allow for progress on that issue.For the parental rights movement, there were some scattered bright spots. Moms for Liberty candidates found success in Colorado, Alaska and several Pennsylvania counties.Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the group, said she was not deterred by Tuesday’s results. She rejected calls for conservatives to back away from talking about divisive gender and race issues in education.Progressive ideology on those issues, she said, was “destroying the lives of children and families.”Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said culture battles had distracted from post-pandemic recovery efforts on literacy and mental health.Notably, both the A.F.T. and Moms for Liberty have argued for more effective early reading instruction, including a focus on foundational phonics skills.But the conservative push to restrict books and to ideologically shape the history curriculum is a “strategy to create fear and division,” Ms. Weingarten said. The winning message, she added, was one of “freedom of speech and freedom to learn,” as well as returning local schools to their core business of fostering “consistency and stability” for children. More

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    Moms for Liberty’s School Board Antagonism Draws G.O.P. Heavyweights

    Five presidential candidates will appear at the group’s national convention in Philadelphia this week, after a local group provoked outrage for quoting Hitler.Before the Hamilton County, Ind., chapter of Moms for Liberty achieved national notoriety this month for quoting Adolf Hitler in its newsletter, it was already at war over education in the schools of Indianapolis’s suburbs.School board meetings blew up over “critical race theory” and “social emotional learning.” A slate of conservative school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty faced off last year against a slate opposed to the group’s efforts to commandeer the school system. The diversity, equity and inclusion coordinator of Carmel Clay Schools was under attack. Transgender students, or the theoretical threat such students could pose, were suddenly front and center.“It was bad,” said Carmella Sparrow, the principal at a charter school in Indianapolis who had moved to suburban Carmel for the public schools but found herself doing battle with Moms for Liberty and its supporters at local school board meetings. “They were screaming and yelling at the top of their lungs. You could not conduct any meaningful business.”The group’s reputation for confrontation and controversy is very much intact, but as Moms for Liberty convenes on Thursday in Philadelphia, it is doing so not as a small fringe of far-right suburban mothers but as a national conservative powerhouse — precisely because of chapters like Hamilton County’s and their energized members.The Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning human rights organization, deemed Moms for Liberty an anti-government “extremist group” this year. But five Republican presidential candidates, including former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, will be addressing its Joyful Warriors National Summit.“Looking forward to seeing all my fellow moms on a mission this Friday at the @Moms4Liberty’s Joyful Warriors summit,” Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and current presidential candidate, wrote on Twitter this week. “Nothing will stop us from using the power of our voices to shake up Washington!”Tiffany Justice, left, and Tina Descovich, two of the founders of Moms for Liberty, gave opening remarks before Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida spoke at the group’s first summit meeting in 2022.Octavio Jones/Getty ImagesThe group draws power from its diffusion — 275 chapters in 45 states with nearly 115,000 members, it claims — and the social issues that animate it. These include the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues, critical race theory, and school books that it considers pornographic — all of which have captivated the base of the Republican Party.“The vote of the American parent is important,” said Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and former school board member from Indian River County, Fla. Moms for Liberty almost certainly would not have been formed in January 2021, by three Florida mothers, were it not for the coronavirus pandemic. Disparate parents’ groups on the right had for years tried to cajole, harangue or even take over school boards, but the pandemic galvanized parental rage — first over school shutdowns, then over mask mandates and finally over curriculums that parents could see firsthand through the computer screens their children were glued to.“What Covid did was fast-tracked and expedited the concern about the materials in our children’s education,” said Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, whose wife, Bridget Ziegler, was a Moms for Liberty co-founder. “It forced parents to basically become assistant teachers. We all became teacher aides.”Conservatives who flocked to school board meetings in places like Carmel, Ind., and Franklin, Tenn., either on their own or under the auspices of local groups like Unify Carmel, soon formed chapters of Moms for Liberty, whose funding sources remain mysterious but seemingly plentiful. As the pandemic receded, issues of race, gender and sexuality rose to the fore among these parents, just as they did in the Republican Party.Critics of these groups saw their activism as demagogy, violence and opposition to public education masquerading as parental concern. At one meeting of the Carmel Clay Schools board in Indiana, a conservative protester was arrested after a handgun fell out of his pocket.Diane Hannah, a Rutgers religion professor and a parent in the school district battling the Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty, said many of the members showing up at school board meetings were not parents of children in the public schools.“The problem is they have an audience of people who watch Fox News, who read the sensationalist reporting and who don’t have kids in the schools,” she said, “so they believe there are litter boxes for students who identify as cats. They believe that gay kids are bullying straight kids to be gay.”Moms for Liberty held a protest outside the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia in early June.Hannah Beier/ReutersMs. Justice pushed back on that hard, denying any violent intent from her group and accusing opponents of trying to silence conservatives.Parents “came to the schools to express their concern and to try to see what could be done,” she said, “and instead of the schools listening to the primary caregiver of that child, the person that is responsible for directing the upbringing of the child, they shut them down.”Beyond Mr. Ziegler and the Florida G.O.P., the ties that bind Moms for Liberty, which is ostensibly nonpartisan, to the Republican Party, are tight. Mr. DeSantis has long been a supporter of the group hatched from his home state, but more moderate Republican voices like Ms. Haley and Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, will also be in Philadelphia to lend their support.Vivek Ramaswamy, the self-funded entrepreneur in the race, already addressed a chapter in New Hampshire this month. He will speak to the national conference on Saturday.The speaking schedule included one Democrat, the anti-vaccine gadfly Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but he backed out on Tuesday, citing a “family holiday obligation.”The candidates who are going were undeterred by the negative attention the group received when its Hamilton County chapter published a quotation from Hitler in its newsletter: “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”After initially defending the quote, the chapter was forced to apologize.“We condemn Adolf Hitler’s actions and his dark place in human history,” Paige Miller, the chapter’s chairwoman, said in a statement. “We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and express our deepest apology.”Ms. Miller did not respond to interview requests, but Ms. Justice said the swarm of attention only proved how the news media, teachers’ unions and the liberal establishment were trying to stifle parental voices.“Never in a million years did this mom think she supported Hitler,” Ms. Justice said. “That was maybe naïve, but the death threats we’re getting now — you should see the things people send me. They want to put a bullet in my children’s head because I’m a Nazi.”But, she said, the quote pointed to the efforts by the “genocidal monsters of history,” like Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, to control their nations’ youth. She added: “This is like a slippery slope here, people. You’ve got Joe Biden saying they’re not your children. They’re all of our children.” More

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    How Randi Weingarten Landed at the Heart of America’s Political Fights

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmWhen the former secretary of state and C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo, a man who had dealt firsthand with autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, described Randi Weingarten as “the most dangerous person in the world” last November, it seemed as though he couldn’t possibly be serious.Weingarten is 65 and just over five feet tall. She is Jewish and openly gay — she’s married to a rabbi — and lives in Upper Manhattan. She is the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is not even the country’s biggest union of public-school educators. (The A.F.T. has 1.7 million members; the National Education Association has three million.) The A.F.T. did give in excess of $26 million to Democratic candidates and causes in the 2022 election cycle, but the Carpenters and Joiners union gave more than twice as much.Pompeo, whose remarks appeared in a widely quoted interview with the online news site Semafor, had nevertheless put his finger on something: The pandemic and the ongoing culture wars over race and gender had shifted America’s educational landscape, and with it the political landscape. “It’s not a close call,” Pompeo elaborated. “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.”Other Republicans quickly piled on. Pompeo had set the bar high, and they needed to invoke equally hot rhetoric and florid imagery to ensure headlines of their own. “Big labor unions have taken over public education,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told Fox News in late January. “That’s bad for parents, bad for kids, bad for America.” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida mounted his attack in The American Conservative magazine: “Our schools are a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination. Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children.” Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had already garnered national attention with his book bans, Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” and its so-called Don’t Say Gay legislation, unveiled a new proposal designed to rein in “overreaching teachers’ unions,” which a column on the Fox website enthusiastically embraced as “a blueprint to dominate union bosses.” Donald Trump, declaring that public schools “have been taken over by the radical left maniacs” and “pink-haired communists,” released his own plan to Save American Education. It was clear that Weingarten had come to stand for something much larger than herself.Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who has been described as “the most dangerous person in the world” by former C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo.Michal Chelbin for The New York TimesThe last few years have been historically convulsive ones for education in America. Some 1.3 million children left the public schools during the pandemic. The results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the nation’s report card — revealed the largest average score decline in reading since 1990 and the first average score decline in math since 1969. Schools have reported major increases in rates of student depression, anxiety and trauma. School districts around the country are experiencing severe teacher shortages. Last fall, a Gallup poll found that the percentage of adults who are satisfied with the nation’s public schools had fallen to 42 percent, a 20-year low.This crisis has political consequences. The pandemic closures and classroom culture wars have fueled the revival of the dormant school-choice movement, with Republican-led states around the country passing an array of far-reaching school-voucher bills. These bills come in different forms but share a common goal: to enable parents to move their children out of America’s government-run education system en masse. All of the prospective Republican presidential candidates for 2024 have committed to building on this growing movement, whose roots can be traced back more than 50 years, to the battle over desegregation. The same pandemic closures that demonstrated how central public schools are to the communities they serve also became the inciting event for an unprecedented effort to dismantle them.The public-education system may not be very popular right now, but both Democrats and Republicans tend to like their local schools and their children’s teachers. The unions that represent those teachers, however, are more polarizing. One reason for this is that they are actively involved in partisan politics, and, more specifically, are closely aligned with the Democrats, a reality powerfully driven home during the pandemic. A study by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute found that Democratic districts, with correspondingly strong teachers’ unions, returned to in-person learning more slowly and gradually than Republican districts with weaker unions. In some ways, Randi Weingarten and the A.F.T. — the union “boss” and “big labor” — are a logical, even inevitable target for the G.O.P.It’s no longer possible to separate education from politics, and public schools are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been.A frequent knock on the A.F.T. is that it puts teachers before students, a framing neatly encapsulated by a quote attributed to the union’s former president Al Shanker: “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” Shanker’s biographer, Richard Kahlenberg, found no record of Shanker’s ever saying this and doesn’t think he ever did, but that hasn’t stopped the union’s critics from citing it. Weingarten has a rebuttal: Good working conditions for teachers make good learning conditions for students. But Weingarten does in fact represent teachers, not students. Often, such as when it comes to issues like classroom size or school budgets, their interests align. Sometimes they don’t. For a period during the pandemic, the two groups’ apparent interests diverged, and a series of fault lines started opening across the country, separating not only Republicans from Democrats but also parents from teachers, centrist Democrats from progressives and urban Black parents from suburban white parents, and even dividing the teachers’ union itself. These fault lines widened as the reopening debates merged into fights over how schools should deal with the teaching of the country’s racial history as well as sexuality and gender identity.What became increasingly clear to me over the last several months, as I spoke to dozens of politicians, political consultants, union leaders, parent activists and education scholars about the convulsions in American education, is that it’s no longer possible to separate education from politics, and that public schools are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been. How did Randi Weingarten wind up at the center of the 2024 Republican primary? The only way to answer that question is to re-examine America’s education wars and the competing political agendas that are driving them. “Oh, goodness, no! Not at all!” Pompeo answered when I asked if he was, perhaps, being hyperbolic in his remarks about Weingarten. “It’s not just about Ms. Weingarten, but she has been the most visible face of the destruction of American education.”In the chaotic early months of the pandemic, teachers were celebrated as essential workers, heroically continuing to serve America’s children from their homes, often with limited resources and inadequate technology. But during the summer of 2020, things started to shift. There was already early research showing that students were suffering academically from remote learning. Schools across Europe had begun reopening without any major outbreaks, and many of America’s private and parochial schools were making plans to resume in-person learning at the start of the new school year. A lot of public-school parents wanted their children to be back in the classroom, too. But many teachers seemed resistant to the idea.Because of the decentralized structure of America’s public-education system, which has some 14,000 different school districts, the federal government could not order schools to reopen for in-person learning, but in July 2020, President Trump threatened to withhold federal funds from those that didn’t. His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, echoed his sentiments, demanding that the nation’s schools be “fully operational” by the fall without providing a specific plan for doing so.Protesters carrying a makeshift coffin in New York City in 2020.Associated PressMany members of the A.F.T. remained worried about putting themselves, their families and their communities at risk. The A.F.T. had issued its own reopening plan in late April, calling for adequate personal protective equipment, a temporary suspension of formal teacher performance evaluations, a limit on student testing, a cancellation of student-loan debt and a $750 billion federal aid package to help schools prepare to reopen safely and facilitate “a real recovery for all our communities.” Weingarten did not believe the Trump administration was giving schools what teachers needed to return to work safely. She publicly denounced Trump and DeVos’s call to reopen as “reckless,” “callous” and “cruel,” and the A.F.T. passed a resolution supporting local strikes if schools were forced to reopen in areas where a variety of safety conditions hadn’t been met. As if to underscore the point, some teachers took to the streets in protest with mock coffins.Florida became a test case. Even as the state’s Covid death rate was surging in July, its Department of Education issued an emergency order requiring schools to fully reopen in August. The state’s largest teachers’ union, the Florida Education Association, affiliated with both the A.F.T. and the N.E.A., sued DeSantis and his education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, among others, to block the reopenings, arguing that the order violated the state’s Constitution, which guarantees Florida residents the right to “safe” and “secure” public schools. At a virtual news conference announcing the lawsuit, Weingarten accused DeSantis of being in “intense denial.” After some Florida schools started reopening, an A.F.T. political action committee produced a TV ad attacking Trump, citing claims that schools were becoming superspreader sites and that children were being used as “guinea pigs.” As the lawsuit was working its way through the legal system — the union won in the lower court but lost on appeal — Florida was holding its biannual school-board elections, and the prospective return to in-person learning became the defining issue in many races. In Brevard County, Tina Descovich, the incumbent, was in favor of an immediate return to the classroom and opposed mask mandates. She was challenged by a public-school speech-language pathologist, Jennifer Jenkins, who called for a more cautious approach, including a mask mandate for all but the youngest children. Jenkins easily won the late-August election, but Descovich was just getting started. She called Tiffany Justice, a fellow school-board member in nearby Indian River County, to suggest that they create their own parents’ rights group, Moms for Liberty. “We’ve got to do something here,” Justice recalled Descovich’s telling her. “We have to help these parents because they’re trying to step up and speak out, and the schools are just slamming them at every turn.”Tina Descovich, right, who was on the Brevard County school board and opposed mask mandates, started the parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty with a fellow former school-board member, Tiffany Justice.Octavio Jones/Getty ImagesOther parents across the political spectrum started organizing, too. Many public schools hadn’t fully reopened for the start of the new school year, and they were frustrated. They wrote op-eds, held rallies or met via Zoom with school-board members and other elected officials, often finding themselves at odds with local teachers’ unions and union-backed school-board members. The first fault lines had started to open.By the fall of 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement had prompted a national reckoning over race, as well as an ensuing backlash. The politics of the pandemic had begun to merge with the culture wars, and both were playing out most vividly in the American classroom. An esoteric academic term — critical race theory, or C.R.T. — had improbably become the rallying cry for a conservative campaign focused on the teaching of the nation’s racial history. President Trump, running for re-election, eagerly took up the cause, blaming “decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools” for the Black Lives Matter protests and urging America’s parents to fight back against efforts to teach their children “hateful lies about this country.”The A.F.T. championed the new movement for racial equity, committing publicly to the fight to end “systemic racism in America.” Some of the A.F.T.’s locals went further. The Chicago Teachers Union took to the streets to demand that the city’s board of education cancel a $33 million contract between Chicago’s public schools and its Police Department for the safety officers who staff the city’s public schools. United Teachers Los Angeles helped lead a successful fight to press its school district to slash its police budget by $25 million and use the money instead to hire more counselors, psychologists and social workers.That October, Weingarten embarked on a cross-country bus tour to get out the vote for Joe Biden. His Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, had not always been in sync with the A.F.T.; the union opposed elements of Obama’s Race to the Top program, which sent money to states that reformed their public-education systems by, among other things, weakening teacher tenure, introducing data-driven accountability measures and adding more nonunionized charter schools. Biden, by contrast, vowed to focus on neighborhood public schools rather than charters and criticized the standardized-testing regimes and teacher evaluations that were a hallmark of Race to the Top. Weingarten’s name was even floated as a candidate for secretary of education. She didn’t get the job, but she and the head of the N.E.A., Becky Pringle, were invited to the White House on the day after Biden’s inauguration. The teachers’ unions finally had a true ally in the Oval Office. The first lady, Jill Biden, taught at a public community college herself. (“I sleep with an N.E.A. member every night,” President Biden would later quip.) The new administration gave teachers preferential access to the Covid vaccine, behind some other essential workers but ahead of the general population. Biden had pledged to quickly reopen America’s schools, and the A.F.T. was communicating with top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about its guidelines for doing so, suggesting that the agency add a provision allowing for its recommendations to be revisited if a highly contagious Covid variant emerged. But the anger that had been unleashed by the pandemic closures and the culture wars had not abated.Justice and Descovich, the former Florida school-board members, incorporated Moms for Liberty in early 2021 with a far more ambitious and political agenda than simply advocating a return to maskless, in-person classes. As the group’s mission statement explained, it was “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” The group built its brand with bumper magnets and T-shirts emblazoned with the motto “We Do NOT Co-Parent With the Government.” It was embraced by the right-wing media and then by donors eager to turn it into a national movement, while nurturing its grass-roots image, mirroring the model created by the Tea Party, the quasi-populist uprising fueled by conservative billionaires and Fox News. The former Fox host Megyn Kelly headlined a fund-raising event in Florida, speaking about, as Justice recalled, “the woke ideology” coming out of America’s classrooms. Moms for Liberty soon expanded beyond Florida. That summer, a chapter in Tennessee presented an 11-page letter of complaint to the state’s Department of Education, objecting to a curriculum that it said “focuses repeatedly and daily on very dark and divisive slivers of American history” and works to “sow feelings of resentment, shame of one’s skin color and/or fear.” After several Republican states passed laws limiting the teaching of race-related subjects and banning C.R.T., Weingarten gave a speech citing a historian who had compared their efforts to the censorship of the Soviet regime. A clip of the speech spent days in heavy rotation on Fox News, and it inspired an editorial in The Wall Street Journal: “The Teachers Unions Go Woke.”It was not Glenn Youngkin’s plan to turn Virginia’s 2021 governor’s race into a referendum on America’s battles over education. Initially, he was just hoping to prevent his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, from owning an issue that historically favored Democrats. “We couldn’t afford to let them take the fight to us,” Jeff Roe, one of Youngkin’s chief strategists, told me.By almost every measure, Youngkin, a former private-equity executive with no political experience, was the underdog. McAuliffe, a Democratic stalwart dating back to the Clinton presidency, served as Virginia’s governor between 2014 and 2018. (A state law barring governors from serving consecutive terms prevented him from running for re-election.)Biden had beaten Trump by 10 points in Virginia, and McAuliffe led in the early polls. But Virginia’s schools had been among the last on the East Coast to fully reopen, and the lingering bitterness from these pandemic closures had formed a politically combustible mix with the rising culture wars. Amid the national racial reckoning of 2020, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County — one of the top public high schools in the nation — had jettisoned its admissions exam, prompting a lawsuit by 17 families, many of them Asian American, who viewed the change as a form of discrimination against their children.Glenn Youngkin, Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, at a campaign event in Leesburg in 2021.Al Drago, via Getty ImagesSome of the most bitter fights were unfolding in suburban Loudoun County, where a proposal to allow transgender children to choose which bathrooms and pronouns they wished to use had sparked an angry backlash among conservative parents. The tensions were later exacerbated by news of a sexual assault in a high school girls’ bathroom perpetrated by a boy who was wearing a skirt at the time. Loudoun’s increasingly contentious school-board meetings became spectator events, attracting the sustained attention of right-wing media outlets like Fox News and The New York Post.Youngkin held “Save Our Schools” rallies and pledged to ban C.R.T. from the state’s schools. But his campaign’s internal education polls revealed a wide range of voter priorities across the state. The race and gender issues that resonated with his base — Trump voters — weren’t going to be enough to win. He microtargeted other education voters with different ads; it was a scattershot approach, though, at least until a gubernatorial debate in late September.During his tenure as governor, McAuliffe had vetoed a bill — prompted by a mother who objected to her high school senior son’s reading Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” in an A.P. English class — that would have enabled parents to prevent their children from studying material they deemed sexually explicit. When Youngkin criticized that decision on the debate stage, McAuliffe shot back, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”Recognizing that they had just been handed a political gift, Youngkin’s staff cobbled together a digital and TV ad that very night, hoping to take advantage of the apparent gaffe before McAuliffe tried to clarify it. “I was sure he was going to walk it back on ‘Morning Joe,’” Roe told me. Instead, McAuliffe stood by his comment, saying that states and local school boards should have authority over what’s taught in schools.Youngkin unified his diffuse education campaign under a new phrase, “Parents Matter,” printing up T-shirts and bumper stickers and holding Parents Matter rallies in suburban and exurban counties that supported Biden in 2020. McAuliffe’s quote became the centerpiece of a rolling series of ads accusing him of going “on the attack against parents.” A longtime critic of organized labor, Youngkin also sought to drive a wedge between teachers and their unions, promising to devote at least $100 million to raise teacher salaries while at the same time saying that McAuliffe would bow to his special-interest allies rather than doing what’s best for children.A vast majority of Virginia’s teachers belong to the N.E.A., which tends to cover more rural areas, not the A.F.T., whose members are generally concentrated in big cities. But Weingarten was friendly with McAuliffe from the Clinton days and was supporting his candidacy on Twitter and cable news, and the A.F.T. was helping him develop his education platform. Weingarten told me that she called McAuliffe after the debate to tell him that he was wrong — that parents should have a role in their children’s education. “Terry made a very bad mistake, which Youngkin capitalized on,” she said. (Through a spokesman, McAuliffe said that he talked to Weingarten regularly during the campaign but has no recollection of her criticizing his remark.)By the fall of 2021, America’s public schools were fully open, but mask mandates were still being hotly contested. Weingarten had been working to try to rebuild trust between some families and their schools. In late September, just a couple of days after the McAuliffe debate, she held a virtual town hall on mask mandates with Open Schools USA, an anti-masking right-wing parents’ rights group that was rallying families to pull their children out of public schools, in an effort to foster open dialogue with the union’s critics.Under Weingarten, who was elected president of the A.F.T. in 2008, the national union has gone all in on electoral politics, significantly increasing its political spending in the belief that the best way to serve its rank and file is by electing Democrats. The A.F.T. gave more than $1 million to McAuliffe, and Weingarten even knocked on doors for him in Alexandria. But Youngkin had the momentum in the final weeks of the race. His candidacy received another boost in October when Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the F.B.I. to help address the rising threats of violence toward some school-board members. The order stemmed from a letter written to the Biden administration by the National School Boards Association, asking that federal law enforcement address threats against public school officials that “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.” But Republican lawmakers and the right-wing media seized on the language in the letter to falsely accuse Garland of labeling parents “domestic terrorists.” Youngkin quickly exploited the opportunity, releasing an ad claiming that the F.B.I. was trying to “silence parents.”On the night before the election, Weingarten headed down to Virginia to warm up the crowd at McAuliffe’s closing rally in Fairfax County. She was eager to be on hand for the final push, and her staff asked for her to be given a speaking role at the rally. Because she had been such a generous and loyal supporter of McAuliffe’s, the campaign didn’t want to say no, even though some Democrats worried that they could be handing Youngkin another gift.Politically speaking, Weingarten played perfectly into Youngkin’s Parents Matter campaign. That spring, a right-wing watchdog group, Americans for Public Trust, had gotten hold of email communications between top officials at the A.F.T. and the C.D.C. about the agency’s school-reopening guidelines through the Freedom of Information Act and had passed them on to The New York Post. The tabloid, which had been gleefully attacking Weingarten for years — dubbing her Whine-garten — trumpeted the story: “Powerful Teachers Union Influenced C.D.C. on School Reopenings, Documents Show.” The rest of the right-wing media and numerous Republican officials instantly jumped on the narrative. Senator Susan Collins of Maine grilled the C.D.C.’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, at a committee hearing over what she called the C.D.C.’s “secret negotiations” with the teachers’ union. Weingarten told me that the C.D.C. had solicited the A.F.T.’s input and that the union hadn’t suggested anything that the agency wasn’t already considering incorporating into its guidelines. But the appearance of a partisan union leader who had privately discussed the future of the nation’s schools with a government agency could be counterproductive in Virginia’s charged political climate.Weingarten at a strike by faculty members and their supporters at the University of Illinois Chicago in January. Associated PressYoungkin’s staff was giddy at the prospect. “I wanted to send them a gift basket,” Kristin Davison, another senior Youngkin strategist, told me. “It was almost as good as when Stacey Abrams came.” Republican elected officials around the country took potshots at their emerging villain. “The union boss responsible for shutting down schools is the final surrogate for Terry McAuliffe’s failing campaign,” Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote on Twitter. “Virginians should vote accordingly!”Youngkin won narrowly, motivating the G.O.P. base and making critical inroads in Loudoun, which had voted overwhelmingly for Biden. “For a closer for a campaign, you would think you would bring in a showstopper,” Betsy DeVos gloated on Fox News on election night. “I guess, in this case, he did bring in a showstopper in Randi Weingarten, because she definitely stopped the show for kids across the country.”To Republicans, Weingarten may be too progressive, but to some members of her own union, she is not progressive enough. As the pandemic dragged on, she found herself caught between the wishes of the Democratic establishment she did not want to alienate and the left-leaning rank and file she represented. In Chicago, this tension came down, in early 2022, to the most elemental question for unions: whether or not to strike.At the time, the new Omicron variant was surging, and Illinois was experiencing a record number of Covid cases and hospitalizations. The A.F.T.’s left-wing local, the Chicago Teachers Union, was concerned about sending its 25,000 members back to the classroom after winter break. The union was hearing similar worries from the Black families whose children make up a large percentage of the 320,000 students in Chicago’s public schools. Many white suburban and exurban parents had been desperate to see their children return to the classroom and were now committed to keeping them there; but many urban Black parents — who tended to live in smaller homes with more family members, had generally lower vaccination rates and had lost more loved ones to the pandemic — had been and remained wary, especially with a new variant spiking.The union demanded mandatory testing for all teachers and students or a temporary return to remote learning. Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat, balked. President Biden and other prominent Democrats had been unambiguous about their desire for the nation’s schools to remain open. And the recent governor’s election in Virginia had underscored the political danger of introducing more disruptions to in-person learning, especially with the 2022 midterms just around the corner. For Weingarten and the national union, a strike in the country’s third-largest school system would obviously be politically costly.The insurgent group that leads the C.T.U. first came together in 2008, when the bipartisan education-reform movement was sweeping across the country, dividing the Democratic Party. Centrist billionaires and centrist Democrats joined forces to lead the effort to introduce more testing, accountability and free-market competition to the public schools. But the more progressive wing of the party viewed these measures as an attack on the very institution of public education, unleashing the forces of capitalism on what is supposed to be a public good.In Chicago, the reform efforts were led by Arne Duncan, the chief executive of the city’s public-school district and President Obama’s future education secretary. “Neoliberal education reform hit Chicago like a ton of bricks,” Jesse Sharkey, a high school history teacher, told me. Sharkey was a leader of this insurgency and would go on to become president of the C.T.U. from 2018 to 2022. “You’d flip on the TV or pick up a newspaper, and you couldn’t avoid hearing our so-called leaders trashing our schools, talking about their culture of failure,” he says. “It was an environment that was downright hostile to public education.”Sharkey and his fellow insurgents didn’t believe the national union was fighting aggressively enough against these Democratic reformers. Tapping into Chicago’s long history of community-based organizing, they built their own grass-roots movement within the union called the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE. Led by Karen Lewis, a chemistry teacher and union activist, CORE challenged the C.T.U.’s incumbent leadership in 2010 and won control of the Chicago union. Two years later, after the city’s new Democratic mayor, President Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, embarked on an ambitious program to close public schools and replace them with charters, the C.T.U. called Chicago’s first teachers’ strike in 25 years. While the C.T.U. was voting on the strike authorization, Weingarten arrived in Chicago to appear on a panel with Emanuel at a conference hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative. It was a stunning turn of events that spoke to the tension between the A.F.T. and its left wing. For the political health of the union, Weingarten felt she needed to preserve her relationships with the country’s most powerful Democratic leaders, many of whom, like Emanuel, were centrist reformers.As the 2012 strike wore on, Emanuel tried to turn the city against the teachers, accusing them of using Chicago’s children as “pawns,” and unsuccessfully sought a court order to force them to return to work. After seven days, the city backed down; the union won major concessions, including a 16 percent raise over four years and the right for teachers who were laid off as part of Emanuel’s ongoing school closures to be given priority for positions at other schools. The strike instantly became a galvanizing event for the union’s more progressive members. Not only does CORE still control the C.T.U., but like-minded left-wing slates have since taken control of A.F.T. locals in several other cities, too, including Los Angeles and Baltimore.These insurgent caucuses are unified by what they call “social justice unionism.” They see public schools’ ongoing struggles to educate their students as inseparable from the larger societal and economic issues facing their working-class members and the poor communities whose children dominate their classrooms. “We are trying to promote a brand of unionism that goes all out in its fight for educational justice and is brave about taking on conflicts,” Sharkey says. “In some ways, we’re less careful about who we piss off nationally.”There is a natural tension between these insurgent movements and the more establishment-oriented national union. In 2015, some rank-and-file members protested the A.F.T.’s decision to issue an early endorsement of Hillary Clinton, to whom Weingarten is close, who was running against the pro-labor Bernie Sanders. But the tension is about more than just politics; it also goes to the heart of the A.F.T.’s identity. To these caucuses, the union’s power comes from the collective strength of its members — from the bottom up — which can conflict with the top-down leadership style of Weingarten, who has cultivated a distinct public profile, sometimes characterized by her own tendency toward political hyperbole. An impulsive user of Twitter, she has been known to send out the occasional overheated message. During the pandemic, when DeSantis supporters were selling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merchandise, including beer koozies, on the G.O.P.’s WinRed website, she wrote: “Disgusting. Millions of Floridians are going to die from Ron DeSantis’ ignorance.” She later apologized for the tweet. Two days after returning from winter break in January 2022, with their demands still unmet, the C.T.U. called a strike. “The union isn’t stupid,” Sharkey, who was president at the time, told me. “We knew people were sick of the pandemic.” But, he went on, “for better or for worse we’re a union that strikes. We didn’t think it would be an easy or strategically wise thing, but there was a principle around it. It was something we had to do.”The union already had a contentious relationship with Lightfoot, dating back to an 11-day strike over wages and class sizes in 2019 that ended with the city making major concessions. This time, though, the mayor had public opinion on her side, and she leveraged it in a flurry of media interviews, accusing the C.T.U. of holding Chicago’s children “hostage.” Lightfoot had long seen the A.F.T.’s local as a “political movement” whose ambitions extended well beyond protecting the rights of its workers. “I think, ultimately, they’d like to take over not only Chicago Public Schools, but take over running the city government,” she told The Times in 2021.The 2022 strike quickly became a political nightmare for national Democrats: A Democratic mayor was at war with a Democratic union, shutting down Chicago’s schools at a moment when children were finally back in the classroom and the country was just beginning to confront the learning loss and emotional trauma caused by the pandemic. Splinter groups of teachers in Northern California were also planning sickouts in the face of the Omicron surge. The Chicago strike put Weingarten in a difficult position. Publicly, she supported the C.T.U., while also saying that children needed to be in the classroom. Behind the scenes, she was calling and texting Sharkey constantly, offering to do anything she could — even arrange a call with people at the White House — to help press Lightfoot and end the strike. After a few days, under intensifying public pressure, the C.T.U.’s members voted to return to work. They had lost this battle, but they already had their sights on a bigger one: the city’s upcoming mayoral election.In late October, just before the 2022 midterms, the results from the first full National Assessment of Educational Progress since the start of the pandemic were released, revealing that 40 percent of the country’s eighth-grade public-school students were not proficient in math, and 32 percent were not proficient in reading. The strikingly low scores instantly became a G.O.P. talking point: The culprit wasn’t the pandemic, schools or teachers but the unions and Democratic politicians beholden to them. “We cannot let the nation forget how teachers’ unions tried to hold our children’s futures for ransom,” said Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, then the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “These union bosses, and the politicians who enabled them, must be held accountable.” Republicans up and down the ballot accused their Democratic opponents of carrying water for the teachers’ unions. A week before the election, Fox News ran a segment headlined “Have the Teachers Unions Sold Out Your Kids to the Democrats?”Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist who manufactured the obsession with C.R.T. two years earlier, was now on Fox News railing against another crisis — the “academic queer theory” that he charged was being “mainlined” into America’s public schools — while Republican candidates condemned the “grooming” of children to identify as different genders in the nation’s classrooms. Many Republican candidates pledged their allegiance to a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” requiring schools to provide information on reading lists, curriculums and whether a family’s child used another name or pronoun in school.The A.F.T. spent in excess of $20 million in the 2022 midterms, more than it ever had in an off-year election, and Weingarten campaigned tirelessly with high-profile Democrats around the country, her arrival on the stump invariably inspiring glee among local Republican leaders. When she appeared in Michigan with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, one G.O.P. pundit, Kaylee McGhee White, described her on Fox Business Network as “the kiss of death.” Whitmer won easily, as did many other Democrats whose opponents had railed against drag-queen shows for children or L.G.B.T.Q.-themed books in school libraries. But Republican candidates who campaigned on another education issue — school choice — fared much better.As a political matter, all the education battles that had erupted since the start of the pandemic — over school closures, over how the country’s racial history should be taught, over what sort of role parents ought to have in the classroom — were really about the same thing: whether America’s children should continue to be educated in government-run public schools. Did the pandemic and the culture wars reveal the indispensability of these schools to their communities and to the broader fabric of the nation, or did they only underscore their inherent limitations — in effect, making the case for school choice?It was the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman who first proposed the modern concept of school vouchers in a paper in 1955. Friedman was a champion of free markets, and his idea was to leverage the transformative power of capitalism to prod schools to compete for families’ dollars. But vouchers served another purpose too. The Supreme Court had just ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, and many white Americans were worried about the looming prospect of being forced to send their children to desegregated schools. Friedman saw an opening for his proposal, writing, “Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools and mixed schools.”Thirty years later, with Friedman serving as an economic adviser, President Reagan tried repeatedly to introduce federal school-voucher legislation. One of his most vocal opponents was Al Shanker, then the A.F.T.’s president, who argued that choice might be the point of “shopping malls,” but it was not the point of education, nor was it the reason taxpayers were expected to fund the nation’s public schools: “We do so not to satisfy the individual wants of parents and students but because of the public interest in producing an educated citizenry capable of exercising the rights of liberty and being productive members of society.”Even Congress, where Republicans held the Senate majority, considered Reagan’s voucher proposals too radical. But the concept endured. In the 1990s, vouchers were championed by Christian conservatives like Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation and mentor to Justice Clarence Thomas. Weyrich believed that the nation’s public schools had become “morally decadent institutions” and argued that the only answer was for Christians to educate their children themselves, ideally with government money. Over the years, some states experimented with limited voucher programs, typically designed to target discrete populations like children with special needs. But the pandemic created an opening for voucher advocates to think more ambitiously and move more aggressively. In fact, this had been the plan almost from the very beginning. Two months into the school closures, in the spring of 2020, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic archbishop of New York, asked DeVos — then the education secretary and a longtime supporter of school choice — in an interview on SiriusXM radio if she intended to “utilize this particular crisis to ensure that justice is finally done to our kids and the parents who choose to send them to faith-based schools.” DeVos answered unequivocally: “Yes, absolutely.”In 2021, at least 18 states created new school-choice programs or expanded existing ones, and more followed suit in 2022. Some of these new programs represent a significant departure from those of the past. Known collectively as universal voucher programs, they are available to everyone and can be applied toward any kind of school. The goal is not merely to disrupt public education but to defund and dismantle it. For years, the country’s lower courts largely agreed that spending taxpayer money on religious schools was unconstitutional. But last summer, the Supreme Court created a new precedent, ruling that it was in fact unconstitutional for voucher programs — in this case, one in rural Maine — to exclude religious schools.Secretary of Education in an indoor seeting, at a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing at the U.S. Department of Education in 2020.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesDeVos, now back in the private sector, is one of the leading funders of this new national voucher campaign, primarily through an organization that she helped found called the American Federation for Children. The group and its affiliates spent $9 million on school-choice campaigns in 2022, at least $2.5 million of which came directly from DeVos and her husband. They spent much of this money in the primaries, turning support for school choice into a litmus test and targeting Republican incumbents opposed to it. Three-quarters of the candidates they supported won. “There wasn’t a red wave or a blue wave in the midterms, but there was a school-choice wave,” Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, wrote to me in an email. Echoing Weyrich’s sentiments about the moral decadence of American public education, DeAngelis quoted Voddie Baucham, a Christian home-schooling advocate: “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”DeAngelis identified Weingarten as a useful political foil long before Mike Pompeo. He has been trolling her relentlessly on Twitter since 2021, ostentatiously thanking her for starting “the school choice revolution.” In March, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in suburban Washington, he posed with a life-size cardboard cutout of her clutching an award labeled “Threat to America’s Children,” his left thumb raised in approval.Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, was right about the local teachers’ union’s political ambitions. In February, Brandon Johnson, a former middle-school teacher and paid union organizer, challenged her in the city’s mayoral election. It was a long shot — one early poll put his support at 3 percent — but for the C.T.U., the Johnson campaign was a natural progression. To pursue their broader agenda, which reaches beyond education into areas like housing and policing, they needed the kind of power that can come only from winning partisan political elections. And they had both a powerful grass-roots movement and a source of campaign funds, in the form of members’ dues, that could be leveraged to support Johnson’s candidacy.Johnson’s campaign was underwritten largely by the teachers’ unions. Though the A.F.T. and the C.T.U. had their differences in the past, they have become more closely aligned in recent years. While there are still some divisions within the Democratic Party over education policy, the bipartisan education-reform movement that once posed such a formidable existential threat to the A.F.T. is a shadow of its former self. The threat to the A.F.T. is now partisan, which means that Weingarten is no longer facing as much pressure from centrist Democrats. Backed by the financial and organizational muscle of the national and local teachers’ unions, Johnson knocked Lightfoot out of the two-person runoff, making her the first incumbent mayor in Chicago to be unseated after a single term in 40 years.The Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson at a rally at the Chicago Teachers Union Foundation in March.John J. Kim, via Getty ImagesBy now, Pompeo, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican Party were busy elevating education to a central plank in its 2024 platform and in the process transforming Weingarten into the new Hillary — a G.O.P. stand-in for everything that was wrong with America. The Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic was continuing to build its case that Weingarten and the A.F.T. exerted undue influence over the C.D.C.’s school-reopening guidelines, summoning Weingarten to appear in Washington on April 26 at a hearing titled “The Consequences of School Closures.”But Weingarten was building her own case. Public education was now itself a hyperpartisan issue, and she addressed it in hyperpartisan terms in a fiery speech at the National Press Club. Calling out by name some of the people who had demonized her since the pandemic, including Betsy DeVos, she described the ongoing effort to defund public schools as nothing less than a threat to “cornerstones of community, of our democracy, our economy and our nation.” She pointed to studies that have shown that vouchers don’t improve student achievement, characterizing them as a back door into private and parochial schools that are not subject to the same federal civil rights laws as public institutions and can therefore promote discrimination. “Our public schools shouldn’t be pawns for politicians’ ambitions!” she thundered, moving toward her emotional conclusion. “They shouldn’t be defunded or destroyed by ideologues.”Like the Virginia’s governor’s race one and a half years earlier, Chicago’s mayoral runoff became, at least in part, a referendum on education. The effects of the pandemic on Chicago’s public schools have been profound. More than 33,000 students have left the school system since the fall of 2020, and the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress scores showed steep declines in math and a widening achievement gap between white and Black students.Brandon Johnson’s opponent, Paul Vallas, ran Chicago’s public schools in the late 1990s. Chicago has no Republican Party to speak of, but Vallas, a vocal proponent of charter schools and vouchers, was the conservative candidate. In 2009, he said he was “more of a Republican than a Democrat.” He was supported by the local business community and endorsed by the city’s police union. A group affiliated with the American Federation for Children spent $60,285 on a pro-Vallas digital media effort. But Arne Duncan and a number of other centrist Democrats endorsed Vallas, too.On the eve of the April runoff election, Weingarten headed to Chicago to speak at a Johnson political rally headlined by Bernie Sanders. Both the A.F.T. and the C.T.U. continued to funnel money into Johnson’s campaign as the election approached, their combined contributions totaling $4.6 million. “All of this stuff is about power,” observed a local community activist, Ja’Mal Green, who had run in the first round of the election but didn’t make the runoff and was now supporting Vallas.When Johnson narrowly won, it was a stunning upset, not just for the candidate but for the left. Even as the Republicans were ramping up their attacks on Weingarten and on the institution of public education, the teachers’ unions had effectively elected the mayor of America’s third-largest city, who was himself an avowedly progressive union organizer promising to raise taxes on the rich, reform the police and increase funding for the city’s schools. Maybe Pompeo hadn’t been wrong, at least as far as his own party was concerned. It was those who had underestimated the political power of the unions who were mistaken. “They said this would never happen,” Johnson said in his victory speech. “If they didn’t know, now they know!”Jonathan Mahler is a staff writer for the magazine. He has written about Donald Trump’s legal accountability, the post-pandemic future of New York City and the state of politics in Wisconsin. More

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    In Affluent Greenwich, It’s Republicans vs. ‘Trumplicans’

    Over the summer, the Greenwich Country Day School sent out an invitation for its annual Cider and Donuts event. To emphasize its commitment to diversity, the school noted that the autumn gathering was open to families “who identify as Black, Asian, Latinx, multiracial, indigenous, Middle Eastern, and/or people of color.”But to the alarm of the local Republican Town Committee, the invitation left out a demographic not often thought of as marginalized in this affluent community.“You listed nearly every group but white people … was that on purpose?” the committee asked in an Instagram post. “Is that how you bring people together? Inclusion …?”Stunned, the private school’s administrator graciously said the letter could have more clearly conveyed that all were welcome for cider, after which the Republican committee congratulated itself for striking a blow for civil rights: “Glad the RTC has helped our community become more inclusive.”The culture wars were destined to spill someday into the rarefied precincts of Greenwich. But who in the name of George Bush would have expected the charge to be led by a band of Trump acolytes who have taken control of the town’s Republican committee?The electoral worth of the party’s far-right swerve will be tested nationwide in next week’s midterm elections. Here in Greenwich, long a bastion of moderate Republicans like the elder Mr. Bush — a Greenwich Country Day alum — the takeover has people asking: Who are these Greenwich Republicans? And did they lock the town’s traditional Republican leaders in the hold of some yacht in Greenwich Harbor?The answer: They are a small, well-organized group that essentially applied the “precinct strategy” espoused by the former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, which calls for toppling local political establishments to clear the way for like-minded Republican candidates who will one day guide the country’s future.Beth MacGillivray, the chairwoman of the new Republican Town Committee, which stands by its “inclusion” moment, said the previous committee was too moderate and lackadaisical. She promised a “red wave coming in the midterm elections.”But some Greenwich Republicans worry that their party may venture so far right it will fall off the political cliff. For them, former President Donald J. Trump is the unpredictable uncle who could turn the family barbecue into a three-alarm fire. You don’t deny the relationship, but you don’t volunteer it either.This ambivalence was highlighted in 2019 — even before the committee’s rightward lurch — when Republicans became apoplectic over a sudden sprouting of campaign signs linking Mr. Trump with Fred Camillo, their candidate for the mayor-like position of first selectman. “Trump/Camillo,” the signs said. “Make Greenwich Great Again.”The signs turned out to be the satirical handiwork of Mark Kordick, a registered Democrat and Greenwich police captain with 31 years on the force. According to court records, Mr. Camillo texted a supporter: “He better pray I do not win because I would be the police commissioner and he will be gone.”A satirical sign linking a Republican politician, Fred Camillo, to former President Donald J. Trump.Leslie Yager/Greenwich Free PressMr. Camillo did win, and Mr. Kordick was fired. In suing the town and several officials, Mr. Kordick said that the signs were “to remind undecided voters and moderate Republicans unhappy with Trump that Camillo and Trump were members of the same party.”The lawsuit, like the midterm elections, is pending.‘Clowns’ Against ‘Outsiders’Greenwich, with its increasingly diverse population of 63,000, is no longer a Republican stronghold known for fiscal conservatism and social moderation. Just five years ago, the town had considerably more registered Republicans than Democrats; today, Democrats outnumber Republicans, while unaffiliated voters, including more than a few disaffected Republicans, outnumber both.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.A central reason: the divisive Mr. Trump, who was trounced here by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. He was vilified by the town’s progressives and disliked by most moderate Republicans, though he found support among some wealthy and influential residents.It was against this backdrop that the Republican Town Committee chose Dan Quigley, 50, as its new chairman in early 2020. A financial services consultant, stay-at-home father and party moderate, he said he benefited from being a political neophyte: “No baggage. No animosity.”No such luck.Dan Quigley, the former chairman of the Greenwich Republican Town Committee, found himself at loggerheads with outspoken Trump supporters.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesBefore long, Mr. Quigley found himself at odds with Carl Higbie, a local Trump stalwart who, in 2018, had resigned his position with the Trump administration after CNN reported his history of offensive statements, including: “I believe wholeheartedly, wholeheartedly, that the Black race as a whole, not totally, is lazier than the white race, period.”Mr. Higbie, who said these past comments were either “flat-out stupid” or taken out of context, contacted Mr. Quigley about delivering Trump signs to party headquarters for the 2020 campaign, only to have Mr. Quigley explain that he had quietly prohibited Trump material, so as not to hurt the chances of the party’s local candidates. (Mr. Trump would be crushed here by Joseph R. Biden Jr., who would win 62 percent of the vote.)This irked Mr. Higbie, which led to internal bickering, which led to a compromise of sorts. Some Trump signs were delivered to party headquarters, only to be consigned to a corner and covered with a tarp.Mr. Higbie, 39, is now the host of a morning weekend program on the right-wing broadcaster Newsmax. He said recently that he had long been unhappy with the “very establishment Jeb Bush-style Republican Party” in his hometown — “historically squishy,” he said — and he was still annoyed by Mr. Quigley’s suppression of Trump signs.Carl Higbie, a Newsmax host and former member of the Trump administration, clashed with the committee’s leadership.Tyler Sizemore/Hearst Connecticut Media“Look, dude, if you’re not going to support our presidential nominee, the sitting president, we have a problem with that,” Mr. Higbie said. “It turned a lot of people off.”Mr. Quigley called the moment “the first altercation I had with this group.”It was not the last.Months later, some Republicans vehemently opposed one of the Town Committee’s nominees for the Board of Education: Michael-Joseph Mercanti-Anthony, a longtime educator with a doctorate in education leadership whose employment in the New York City school system made him suspect. What’s more, he had donated about $400 to the Biden campaign.“They saw that as unforgivable,” said Mr. Mercanti-Anthony, 47, who described himself as “a conservative who does not believe Trump possesses the competence to be president.”Mr. Higbie used his Newsmax platform to criticize Mr. Quigley and Mr. Mercanti-Anthony as Republicans in name only. He showed their photographs to his national audience, including one of Mr. Mercanti-Anthony with his two young sons — their faces blurred, Mr. Higbie said, “because we’re civil here.”“We can’t let these clowns get away with this anymore,” Mr. Higbie told his viewers.Mr. Mercanti-Anthony won more votes than any other school board candidate in last November’s local elections, part of a Republican sweep that included retaining control of the town’s powerful finance board. An unqualified success for Mr. Quigley, it would seem.Michael-Joseph Mercanti-Anthony was elected to the school board despite his opposition to Mr. Trump and being portrayed as a Republican in name only.Leslie Yager/Greenwich Free PressDays later, in an opinion piece in the local paper, Mr. Quigley urged Republicans to move on from Mr. Trump — an “ego-driven political opportunist,” he wrote — and described the party’s right wing as “angry outsiders” who base their conclusions “on dodgy facts and conspiracy theories.”Most Greenwich Republicans do not share their values, he wrote with confidenceOusting the Old GuardOrganizations like the Greenwich Republican Town Committee may seem more like vanity projects than vehicles of power. But they decide who appears on a party’s endorsed ballot for the school board, the town council, the state legislature — the steppingstones to higher office.Normally, the committee’s underpublicized meetings attract few people. But on two frigid nights in early January, hundreds of registered Republicans showed up for caucuses to elect their committee members for the next two years — after some stealthy coordination by an anti-moderate contingent that included sending out “Dear Neighbor” leaflets vowing to “protect Greenwich from turning into San Francisco.”The insurgent slate overwhelmed the Republican caucuses, winning 41 of the 63 committee seats.“A complete, total blood bath,” acknowledged Mr. Quigley, who commended the winners for being “well organized” but also accused them of a “political coup.”“It made no sense,” he said. “We weren’t Democrats, we weren’t socialists, but people who previously were not engaged in politics believed that narrative.”Five self-described working mothers took over the executive committee, including Mr. Quigley’s successor as chair, Ms. MacGillivray, 60, who was fairly new to politics. She later recalled that when asked in 2020 to help Kimberly Fiorello, a conservative Republican, run for state representative, she initially balked, joking, “It’s golf season, for God’s sake.”Ms. MacGillivray, more seasoned now, wrote in an email that despite the electoral success under Mr. Quigley, people were dissatisfied with his “inactions” and wanted a “more dynamic and responsive” leadership. Others said that dissatisfaction with the “woke” direction of the public schools also played a role.Beth MacGillivray, the committee chairwoman, attended a Greenwich Republican clambake in September with Senator Rick Scott of Florida, right.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesThe new committee cites the familiar guiding principles of limited government, parental rights and individual freedom, as well as “America First,” the catchall trope of Mr. Trump. Still, the abrupt change in tone has been like golf cleats clattering on a country club’s marbled floor.There was the perceived need to champion white inclusion in mostly white Greenwich, for example. And the time Ms. MacGillivray, in opposing transgender athletes in scholastic sports, told the school board that the men on her college ski team were consistently stronger and faster — and “even one of the male ski racers” who was “gay,” she said, “out-skied any girl or woman on the racecourse every time.”There is also the committee’s connection to the Greenwich Patriots, a hard-right group that at times seems like the id to the Town Committee’s ego. The Patriots contend that Covid-19 vaccines are unsafe, rail against “highly sexualized, pornographic and profanity-laced content” in schools, and serve as a conduit for Mr. Trump, promoting his events and sharing his specious claim that the 2020 election was stolen.“In case you are wondering,” the group’s daily newsletter once advised, “election fraud was rampant in the 2020 election in all 50 states, including in Connecticut.”False. More than 1.8 million Connecticut residents voted in the 2020 election, but the state’s Elections Enforcement Commission has received just 31 complaints alleging irregularities. Three resulted in fines, with the rest dismissed, pending or found inconclusive.A Different Kind of PlatformOne way that the Town Committee severed its moderate past was by declining to participate in the candidate debates sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Greenwich. The league’s local chapter was “clearly biased” and dominated by Democrats, Ms. MacGillivray said, with a tendency to take “strident, vocal positions on political issues” like voting rules.The chapter’s president, Sandy Waters, a former Republican member of the Greenwich school board, disputed every point. The nonpartisan organization’s not-for-profit status allows it to support policy issues such as early voting, she said, and the decision by Republicans not to participate hindered the pursuit of an informed electorate.Republican committee members spoke to voters outside Town Hall in August.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesCandidates around the country are increasingly sidestepping events like debates. But some critics said that by doing so, Greenwich Republicans had managed to avoid questions about Covid vaccinations, abortion rights, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, false claims of electoral fraud — and Mr. Trump.Ms. MacGillivray said that the subject of Mr. Trump played no role in the caucuses. She also wondered why, in 2022, the media remained obsessed with the man.Perhaps because Mr. Trump’s ideology and style influence local politics so profoundly that John Breunig, editorial page editor of The Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time, described Greenwich as a three-party town: Democrat, Republican and “Trumplican.”The Greenwich Republican ecosystem is such that James O’Keefe, the founder of the conservative activist group Project Veritas, is practically a local celebrity.In March, Mr. O’Keefe promoted his latest book at a gathering in a Greenwich hotel that was organized with the help of Jackie Homan, the founder of the Greenwich Patriots and an unsuccessful candidate on the caucus slate that ousted the moderate Quigley group.Months later, Project Veritas released hidden-camera video of a Greenwich elementary school vice principal boasting to an unseen woman that he tried to block the hiring of conservatives, Roman Catholics and people over 30. The circumstances behind the heavily edited video are unclear, and the vice principal, since suspended, did not make unilateral hiring decisions.Still, some Greenwich Republicans asserted that the video reflected a larger effort to “indoctrinate students with specific political ideologies.” This would include antiracism training and social emotional learning, which aims to nurture mental well-being, among other goals, but which some on the right believe is intended to make white children feel guilty for being white.Such positions have baffled more moderate Greenwich Republicans like Mike Basham, a former member of the first Bush administration who recently moved to South Carolina after many years as a prominent local leader of the party.“How can people that bright believe some of this stuff?” he asked. “Who indoctrinated them?”An Ex-President’s ShadowMr. Trump’s name doesn’t need to appear on campaign signs for him to have sway in Greenwich.For example, there is Ms. Fiorello, 47, the state representative, who is up for re-election. A participant in the effort to replace Mr. Quigley, she has moderated events with doctors accused of spreading misinformation about Covid, as well as with No Left Turn in Education, a group opposed to what it calls “the radical indoctrination and injection of political agendas” in schools.Kimberly Fiorello, a Republican state representative, helped to push out the local committee leadership.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesAfter the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida — collecting boxes of material, including highly classified documents, that he had failed to return to the government — Ms. Fiorello posted a video expressing concern over the “raid.”“We have to secure this republic,” she said. “Active and engaged citizens is what it takes. Peaceful protest. But citizens, we need to speak out and protect what this country is founded on. There are some things that are happening right now that are simply unacceptable and truly un-American.”There is also Leora Levy, a wealthy Greenwich Republican who, in supporting Jeb Bush for president in 2016, described Mr. Trump as “vulgar” and “ill mannered.” When Mr. Trump won the nomination, she set aside her concerns to become an enthusiastic supporter, and he later nominated her to be ambassador to Chile (the nomination never received Senate approval).When Ms. Levy, 65, decided to challenge the Democratic incumbent, Richard Blumenthal, for the Senate this year, the state Republican committee declined to endorse her. But her local Republican committee did, as did Mr. Trump, during a phone call shared at a crowded party function.Six days later, Ms. Levy won the primary.Leora Levy, a Trump-backed Greenwich Republican, is running to unseat Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesSince then, she has joined her Greenwich compatriots in trying to navigate the tricky Trump terrain.“I was honored to win his endorsement,” Ms. Levy told The CT Mirror, a nonprofit news organization. “He and I agree completely on policy, but I’m Leora Levy … Trump is not on the ballot. Leora Levy is.”Last month the Levy campaign held a fund-raising event at Mar-a-Lago that featured Mr. Trump. For $25,000, you could have your photograph taken with the man who lost Greenwich twice. More

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    How a Christian Cellphone Company Became a Rising Force in Texas Politics

    GRAPEVINE, Texas — Ahead of what would usually be a sleepy spring school board election, a mass of fliers appeared on doorsteps in the Fort Worth suburbs, warning of rampant “wokeness” and “sexually explicit books” in schools, and urging changes in leadership.The fliers were part of a broad effort to shift the ideological direction of school boards in a politically crucial corner of Texas, made possible by a campaign infusion of more than $420,000 from an unlikely source: a local cellphone provider whose mission, it says, is communicating conservative Christian values.All 11 candidates backed by the company, Patriot Mobile, won their races across four school districts, including the one in Grapevine, Texas, a conservative town where the company is based and where highly rated schools are the main draw for families. In August, the board approved new policies limiting support for transgender students, clamping down on books deemed inappropriate and putting in place new rules that made it possible to be elected to the school board even without a majority of votes.The entry of a Texas cellphone company into the national tug of war over schools is part of a far more sweeping battle over the future of Texas being waged in the suburbs north of Dallas and Fort Worth.The company’s efforts have been seen as a model by Republican candidates and conservative activists, who have sought to harness parental anger over public schools as a means of holding onto suburban areas, a fight that could determine the future of the country’s largest red state.“If we lose Tarrant County, we lose Texas,” Jenny Story, Patriot Mobile’s chief operating officer, said. “If we lose Texas, we lose the country.”Glen Whitley, the top executive in Tarrant County, Texas, recognizes the rising political clout of Patriot Mobile in his part of the state. Emil Lippe for The New York TimesGlen Whitley, the top executive in Tarrant County, said the company has become an important player in politics in this part of the state. “They’ve been successful in taking over the school board in Grapevine-Colleyville, in Keller and Southlake,” Mr. Whitley, a Republican, said. He said the company appeared to be setting its sights next on city council races next year.“They’re coming after Fort Worth,” Mr. Whitley said.Patriot Mobile representatives are a frequent presence on the conservative political circuit across the country, taking praise from Steve Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference, buying tables at nonprofit fund-raisers and meeting with candidates from inside and outside of Texas.Modeled after a progressive, California-based cellphone provider founded in the 1980s, the company unabashedly embraces its partisan agenda, donating money to anti-abortion and other conservative causes. Lately, it has begun spending money on behalf of Republican political candidates.Peter Barnes, who helped start Credo Mobile, the California cellphone company that funded progressive causes, said he long expected that other firms would follow a similar path.“The business model is pretty simple and we expected that something similar would emerge on the right,” he said of the plan for channeling profits into politics. “But it didn’t — until now.”In North Texas, Patriot Mobile’s political spending has supported digital advertising, door hangers and campaign mailers as well as get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of its chosen candidates.Patriot Mobile openly embraces its partisan agenda, donating money to anti-abortion and other conservative causes. Emil Lippe for The New York TimesIts political activism has already changed things on the ground in Grapevine, where the nine-year-old company is based. The new policies on books and transgender issues passed 4-to-3, with the two Patriot Mobile-backed candidates making the difference.More on U.S. Schools and EducationDrop-Off Outfits: As children return to the classroom, parents with a passion for style are looking for ways to feel some sense of chic along the way to school.Turning to the Sun: Public schools are increasingly using savings from solar energy to upgrade facilities, help their communities and give teachers raises — often with no cost to taxpayers.High School Football: Supply chain problems have slowed helmet manufacturing, leaving coaches around the country scrambling to find protective gear for their teams.Teacher Shortage: While the pandemic has created an urgent search for teachers in some areas, not every district is suffering from shortages. Here are the factors in play.An array of high school students in this increasingly diverse area responded with a walkout from class, led by transgender and nonbinary students. Parents opposed to the changes have begun meeting to figure out their own response.In Grapevine’s harvest-and-wine-themed downtown, where upscale coffee shops and restaurants can be found near displays of “Ultra MAGA” sweatshirts, Patriot Mobile is headquartered in a cluster of offices unmarked from the outside.The company’s logo adorns a conference room where Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, leads a packed Bible study every Tuesday. Along one cubicle hangs a Texas flag with silhouettes of assault rifles and the words “Come and Take It,” in a nod to a well-known slogan from the Texas revolution.“We just said, ‘Look, we’re going to put God first,’” said Glenn Story, the founder and chief executive, sitting in his office on a recent afternoon, a guitar signed by Donald Trump Jr. hanging on the wall. “Which is why I haven’t erased that from the board,” he said, pointing to a list of core values written on a whiteboard, beginning with “Missionaries vs. Mercenaries.”Under Glenn Story, the chief executive, Patriot Mobile has become a growing influence in communicating conservative Christian values in Texas. Emil Lippe for The New York Times“Our mission is to support our God-given Constitutional rights,” said Ms. Story, the chief operating officer and Mr. Story’s wife.“And to honor God, always,” said Leigh Wambsganss, a vice president at the company who also heads the political action committee, Patriot Mobile Action, founded by the company’s executives.Corporations donate regularly to state and local political campaigns, but a regional company, founded with a partisan mission and willing to spend money in backyard races, is unusual. School boards across the country are increasingly becoming political battlegrounds, attracting larger sums of money and national groups into what had once been largely invisible local contests.Patriot Mobile’s political activities are focused on suburban Tarrant County, north of Fort Worth, in large part because the county has been trending blue, narrowly carried by President Biden in 2020 and by the former Democratic congressman and current candidate for governor, Beto O’Rourke, during his 2018 Senate run.Long a bastion of well-regarded schools, conservative churches and largely well-off, white neighborhoods, the area nurtured strong Tea Party groups during the Obama administration and, more recently, those that supported a Republican primary challenger to the right of Gov. Greg Abbott. It has a reputation, among some in the party, as a hotbed for hard-right politics.Downtown Grapevine, Texas, is where Patriot Mobile has its headquarters. Emil Lippe for The New York TimesThe new policies voted on in the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District have divided parents and raised concern among some teachers, some of whom said they feared becoming targets of the new school board.One of the new board members suggested as much during a Republican forum over the summer, saying the board had a “list” of teachers who she believed were activists promoting progressive ideas about race and equity.“They are just poison and they are taking our schools down,” the board member, Tammy Nakamura, said.Some teachers have begun removing books from their classrooms rather than abide by new rules that require titles to be posted online so that they can be publicly reviewed. The district canceled its annual Scholastic book fair after previous concerns about books that were “mis-merchandised” and were not age-appropriate, a district spokeswoman said.“You now have the school board approving library books, and I feel that is completely micromanaging the administration,” said Jorge Rodríguez, a school board member who voted against the new policies, adding that more than a quarter of the district’s 14,000 students were economically disadvantaged. “We’re here to educate kids and this is not helping.”The top spokesman for the district resigned a few months after being hired, citing the “divisive” atmosphere. The district’s superintendent said recently that he planned to retire at the end of the school year.A neighborhood in Grapevine. New policies in the school district there have divided parents. Emil Lippe for The New York Times“I’ve always been a staunch conservative,” said Christy Horne, a parent whose two children go to elementary school in the district. But the attacks on teachers were too much for her, Ms. Horne said. “It got personal.”But for Mario Cordova, another parent in the district, the new school board leadership has rightly given more control over curriculum and reading material to parents, many of whom were dismayed by what they saw their children learning in remote schooling during the pandemic.“Parents across the district voted for a change on the board last May and are happy to see them follow through,” Mr. Cordova wrote in an email. Opponents of the changes are “crying wolf,” he added. “This crowd has convinced themselves they cannot teach children without incessant conversations about sex and gender.”For many parents and teachers, an early sign that their schools had become a political battleground came last year with complaints over the first Black high school principal at Colleyville Heritage High School.Some parents contended that the principal, Dr. James Whitfield, had been promoting “critical race theory” and were rankled by an email he sent, days after the death of George Floyd, expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters and a desire to create greater equity.“He’s going to start a diversity advisory committee? At our school? He’s going to say that Black Lives Matter?” said Dr. Whitfield, describing the reaction he encountered. The fight made national headlines and the district eventually reached a settlement with Dr. Whitfield that included his departure as principal.The district superintendent has said the decision was not about race.The fight over comments that Dr. James Whitfield made supporting Black Lives Matter protesters when he was principal of Colleyville Heritage High School made national headlines. Emil Lippe for The New York TimesA few months after Dr. Whitfield’s departure, opponents of a diversity plan in neighboring Southlake won control of the local school board, with help from a political action committee, Southlake Families. One of the founders was Ms. Wambsganss, a parent in Southlake schools and a former television news anchor. Another was Tim O’Hare, who is the Republican nominee in November’s election to lead Tarrant County.Parents both in Southlake and in Grapevine-Colleyville have been offended by the sexual content, including explicit descriptions of sexual activity, in some books offered to students, as well as certain discussions of gender and race, said Ms. Wambsganss, now at Patriot Mobile.“Parents do not believe that gender issues should be discussed in K through 12,” she said. “Especially Christian parents do not want multiple genders discussed with their children by someone who is not their parents.”She added: “I always say, it’s not about homosexuality. It’s not about heterosexuality. Stop sexualizing kids in either of those arenas.”The victories by Patriot Mobile-backed candidates surprised some parents who did not agree with the new direction in the district.On a recent morning, a dozen of those parents and community members gathered at the local botanical garden. For many, it was the first time they had met after finding one another through one of the many proliferating Facebook pages dedicated to the school district conflicts.“I ask myself every day, what did I bring my children into,” said Katherine Parks, who moved to the area from France.Marceline, a student at Grapevine High School, helped organize a walkout.Emil Lippe for The New York Times“We were Swift Boated by these people,” said Tom Hart, a Republican former city councilman in Colleyville, referring to the political attacks that helped sink John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004. “We cannot combat $400,000 in funding from the outside.”As parents met to strategize, some students at Grapevine High School, where the Gay-Straight Alliance club was shuttered for lack of a faculty sponsor, have already begun to find ways to protest. A student started a book club for reading banned books. A group of friends organized a walkout.“We can find solidarity, and we can find safety in each other,” said Marceline, who asked that only their first name be used out of concern for possible reprisals. “Because we cannot trust the adults.”About 100 students joined in the walkout. No similar protest has taken place at nearby Colleyville Heritage High School, and for many students, the beginning of the school year has proceeded, more or less, as it always has.In Grapevine, books and the discussion of gender and race continue to be hotly debated topics.Emil Lippe for The New York Times More

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    Most DeSantis-Endorsed Candidates for Florida’s School Board Won

    MIAMI — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was not on the ballot in Tuesday’s primary. Neither was any other big-name Republican. But Republican voters appear to have gone to the polls anyway, in part to weigh in on an unusual new political battleground: school board races.Mr. DeSantis, like other Republicans across the country, has centered his political brand on education issues related to the coronavirus pandemic and to what is taught in schools. Before the primary, he did something that no previous Florida governor had ever done: He took sides in nonpartisan school board races.It worked.Almost all of the candidates Mr. DeSantis endorsed won, unofficial county election results showed. The candidates’ victories are expected to inject conservative priorities into county-level boards that have drawn heightened public scrutiny in recent years, beginning with school closures and mask mandates and extending to how educators handle matters of gender identity and race.“Florida has led with purpose and conviction that our school system is about education, not indoctrination,” Mr. DeSantis posted on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon, along with an image of his slate of 30 “pro-parent” candidates. At least 20 won on Tuesday, and five went to runoffs.Some were incumbents seeking re-election. Others were challenging sitting board members or running for open seats. After Mr. DeSantis became involved in the races, so did the Florida Democratic Party, backing its own slate.Republicans had poured money into school board campaigns, turning previously sleepy contests into pitched races. On Sunday, Mr. DeSantis and several candidates held events together in three counties — the “DeSantis Education Agenda Tour,” they called it.“Florida is the state where woke goes to die!” Mr. DeSantis said at a stop at a firefighters’ union hall in Doral, Fla., west of Miami.At the event, Monica Colucci, a nonpartisan candidate for the Miami-Dade County School Board, denounced “dangerous, radical ideologies that have been creeping into our classrooms.” She vowed, “We take back our school boards!”Ms. Colucci won, ousting a longtime incumbent. More