Ending the School Culture Wars

Students and parents remain the best advocates in the fight to defeat extremists and false narratives about America’s public schools

Last summer, I attended a raucous school board meeting in Orange County, Calif., where a conservative school board majority had fired a popular superintendent, started removing books from libraries, banning LGBTQ+ symbols and considering a new parental notification policy that would, in effect, restrict the protected rights of certain students under both state and federal law.

After sitting in a crowded room with adult culture warriors going back and forth for several hours with heated exchanges, I was struck by the bravery of a young transgender high school student who had the courage to go to the podium to address her elected school board with the following request: “I just want to feel safe at school. Please make that happen!”

Fast forward to the March 5 Super Tuesday primary elections here in California, one that was characterized by historically low turnout, which usually gives prominence to the voting habits of older, whiter and more conservative voters.

A new progressive coalition of parents, teachers, organized labor and community members successfully recalled two of the conservative members of the school board majority there and recently appointed progressive replacements for them. The other two members of the previous conservative majority are up for re-election on the November ballot.

A Hopeful Trend

This outcome caught the political pundits and experts by surprise. The 25,000-student Orange Unified School District in Orange, Calif., sits in the heart of historic Ronald Reagan country, which is trending purple rather than solidly red in high-turnout elections. It was not seen as a likely place to launch the progressive pushback against the culture wars that have dominated public school debates at the local level, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.

Evidence of this hopeful new trend is emerging in school district elections around the country, including the critical battleground states that are the key to the upcoming November presidential election outcome.

The emerging evidence from Bucks County and Reading in Pennsylvania, Clarksville in Tennessee, Lexington in Kentucky, Middletown in Ohio, Plattsmouth in Nebraska, suburban New Jersey and other parts of the country suggests that new coalitions of parents and allies are saying emphatically that the interests of all K-12 school children should be the main agenda rather than this recent proxy for the adult culture wars. The latter often creates real-time chaos and disruption in public school districts.

Most of these conservative school board agendas in the past four years generally have flown under the seemingly common-sense banner of something called “parental rights,” which suggests that a majority of parents absolutely know what is best when it comes to policymaking at their local public schools. Who could possibly disagree with such a valid notion?

I would argue that anyone who has studied the legitimate history of the United States would disagree vehemently because the sad truth is that parental rights often have been used in America to take away the rights of certain children under the guise that parents know best under all circumstances. (See related story.)

Did those Louisiana parents know best when they tried to deny an education to six-year-old Ruby Bridges back in 1960? The mob that yelled at that innocent young black girl was arguing absurdly that parents know best under all circumstances.

Or in liberal-learning California and Massachusetts in the late 1970s when school board members declared that parents in Boston and Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley should control who attends the public schools there?

Consider the fact the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Education has logged a record number of complaints this past year, confirming that the rights of vulnerable students are under systematic assault throughout our nation.

Communities Push Back

Writing for The Christian Science Monitor, reporter Courtney Martin describes the rust-belt community of Middletown, Ohio, made famous by Senator J.D. Vance’s 2016 best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, as an emerging success story in fighting back against the school culture wars that dominate so many communities in America.

The school district’s first Black superintendent, Marlon Styles, rather than getting defensive, decided to engage with the parents and community members who criticized his emphasis on culturally responsive approaches to school discipline, reducing inequality and full-on embrace of equity.

Styles sat down with the Middletown Area Ministerial Alliance and began a dialogue, listening and learning tour that was critical to reassuring the respected faith leaders that the school district he headed had not adopted policies inconsistent with the family values they all shared and supported.

Unlike Middletown’s rust-belt status, the Pennridge School District of Bucks County, Pa., is a suburban middle-class community just north of Philadelphia, where a progressive alliance successfully ousted a 5-4 Moms for Liberty school board majority last November 2023 that was determined to adopt a curriculum from conservative Hillsdale College along with banning policies on diversity, equity and inclusion, Pride flags and books with questionable content.

This is yet another example of a community of voters putting the brakes on efforts to adopt extremist policies at the local school board level. As in other communities, these progressive forces do not have the monetary resources that often give a huge advantage to their better-funded conservative opponents.

One of the more interesting progressive groups fighting back against the conservative parental rights groups has emerged in suburban New Jersey. It calls itself SWEEP, or Suburban Women Engaged, Empowered and Pissed. Its members often work with Districts for Democracy, the New Jersey Public Education Coalition and Action Together New Jersey to push back against well-funded conservative alliances.

Book Banning

While open discrimination against LBGTQ+ students through forced outing policies is often the galvanizing force in many of the emerging progressive pushback efforts, book banning is another significant issue drawing the ire of voters in some communities.

The Omaha World-Herald reported on the successful recall earlier this year of a newly elected school board member in the small community of Plattsmouth, Neb., about 20 miles south of Omaha, who argued that about 50 books needed to be immediately removed from school libraries based on her objections to their adult content.

In addition, the board member argued, “People that voted for me should have been very well informed on who I was and what I was going to do.” Her book removal campaign led to a grassroots coalition of parents, students and community members who came together to recall her from the school board after she served on the board for only a single year.

PEN America, a free speech organization, is tracking a record number of book bans in U.S. school districts, encompassing 23 states and more than 4,000 books removed in the first five months of 2024. It’s no surprise Florida leads the nation in book bans with 3,135 removed in 11 school districts during the fall 2023 semester.

On a personal note, I volunteered in the same 1st-grade classroom for 20-plus years at Colin Powell School in the Long Beach Unified School District, which I headed for 10 years as superintendent. In spring 2023, at the start of the baseball season, I read my 1st graders a book that is banned in Duval County, Florida’s fourth largest school system. It’s a delightful children’s book by author Jonah Winter titled Roberto Clemente, Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates. It captures the iconic story of the great Puerto Rican baseball player and humanitarian who died when his plane crashed while transporting relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua on New Year’s Eve in 1972. My 1st graders loved the story of this Caribbean island hero.

Before reading it to my students, I searched for what the objectionable content might be. The only thing I could find was a single sentence that referenced the fact “White sports writers called him lazy when he first came up to the Pirates from the minor leagues.” As most sports fans know, sports writers of all colors are sometimes wrong about future Hall of Famers.

Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, with 19,000 students about 40 miles north of Anchorage, is the center of the most recent book banning controversy to come under federal court scrutiny with a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the Northern Justice Project last fall, according to Alaska Public Media.

The plaintiffs, representing students and parents, are arguing that the school district’s removal of 50-plus books that citizens had complained about is unconstitutional and violates the free speech rights of students. A ruling from a U.S. District Court judge is expected later this year on the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction halting the school district’s removal of the books in question.

A policy under consideration in Wyoming’s largest school district, Laramie County School District 1, would ban any book containing “sexually explicit content” in elementary schools and discourage their use in junior high and high schools, according to news coverage in the Cowboy State Daily.

The battle there is joined by the Cheyenne chapter of Moms for Liberty on one side and the Wyoming Family Alliance for Freedom on the other. Both sides are gearing up for battle as the school board considers final adoption of this strict policy.

Students First

This past spring, I moderated a panel discussion in Sacramento, Calif., on the embattled political landscape of public schools in California. The speakers included the dynamic executive director of our statewide administrators association, a heroic new member of our state legislature and a 17-year-old high school senior who was about to graduate from Chaparral High School in the Temecula Valley Unified School District. The latter is a district whose board, endorsed by an evangelical church, has embraced the notion that the public schools are “the devil’s playground.”

The brilliance of the public school student leader, about to go off to college, stole the show as she confidently articulated what she had learned from outstanding teachers who had exposed her to an honest history of our country and diverse literature that inspires. Proudly sitting in the front row of this large hotel ballroom and cheering her on was her mother, who pointed out that caring and dedicated teachers presenting the truth was what she wanted and demanded from her local public school district. This student and her parent are part of the progressive One Temecula Valley PAC that recently recalled the church-sponsored school board president there.

As we examine the extraordinary stakes in this fall’s election, school leaders would do well to remember that satisfied students and parents are the best allies and advocates that we could possibly have in the fight to defeat extremists and their blatantly false narratives about America’s public schools. 

Carl Cohn, a retired superintendent, is professor emeritus and senior research fellow at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif.