Right-wing “Parents’ Rights” Groups: A Recent History

As the Biden administration elects not to emphatically protect students’ rights to learn the past, read diverse literature, play sports, and feel safe from violence at school, right-wing billionaires… continue to use their purse strings to influence state legislators and, especially, place conservative activists in strategic local school board positions. The Right’s goals today, as they have been for over a century, are to delegitimize public schools, cast doubt on America’s historic and ongoing racism, and deny full civil rights to LGBTQ people. Both the Right’s agenda and the Democratic Party’s failure to protect students out of a perceived duty to show restraint in governing seem to indicate the fate of American institutions in the very near future.

Read the full essay in Idees d’Ameriques.