Maurice Cunningham, author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization,has been tracking parental rights groups for years, and explains some of their true sources and alliances. This piece was originally published at Barn Raiser.
Americans share fundamental values that inform our public education system: dedication to the common good; a learning space where all voices are respected; public resources that help students succeed; neighbors, teachers and administrators working together to create schools that serve their communities.
In recent years, assaults on public schools have sought to undermine those shared values and the institutions that uphold them. We have seen attacks on local school boards and educators from outside groups that profess “parents’ rights” and advocate for “school choice.” They say that our schools are communist, and they organize for book bans that attack our children’s freedom to read and to imagine. These modern-day Puritans decry critical race theory and “gender ideology,” and threaten educators and librarians with criminal prosecution for assigning books they imagine to be “pornographic.” They strangle funding to community schools, using vouchers to divert public money to subsidize religious schools that deny an education to LGBTQ+ identifying students and indoctrinate others.
Despite their brazen objectives, it can be difficult to identify how these supposedly “grassroots” efforts are organized and how they function. The groups have positive-sounding names like Moms for Liberty (M4L) and Parents Defending Education (PDE). Look behind the curtain and you’ll see the investors: billionaires like Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, Jeffrey Yass and Walmart’s Walton family who are out to replace community schools with voucher systems that decimate rural and small town schools, and subsidize private schools for the well-off.
Follow the money
To spot the phonies I adapted a four part-test created by education scholar Daniel Katz:
1. Growth at a pace that only a corporation’s monetary resources could manage
Moms for Liberty claims to have been founded in January 2021 by three Florida women: Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice and Bridget Ziegler, who is married to wired-to-Donald Trump political consultant Christian Ziegler. Within a month of M4L’s launch, Descovich was on The Rush Limbaugh Show to promote the organization, followed by a grand tour of right-wing media, where she appeared on Fox News at least 16 times and Steve Bannon’s War Room at least 14 times. In mid-May, M4L hosted a fundraiser featuring former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly. By October 2021, the Washington Post announced M4L as a powerhouse in Republican politics.
Fast forward to the June 2023 Moms for Liberty annual summit where the featured speaker was presidential candidate Donald Trump. He told those gathered at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia that the time had come to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”
Most recently, on August 30, at this year’s Joyful Warriors Summit in Washington, D.C., Trump sat down for an hour-plus “fireside chat” with Justice, where he claimed falsely that Gov. Tim Walz has made Minnesota a “sanctuary state” where children can go and “have gender surgeries paid for by the government,” and suggested wrongly that schools make decisions about students’ gender transitions.
Parents Defending Education’s founder and president Nicole Neily told an Ohio newspaper, “We just all work from home. We’re all working moms.” In reality, Neily is a veteran political operative within the Koch network. She has ties to the dark money banker Leonard Leo, a right-wing operative who played a key role in packing the U.S. Supreme Court with conservative justices. Neily also helps lead Speech First, a nonprofit with ties to the Koch network that promotes conservative speech on college campuses, with a board of former Bush administration lawyers.
2. Who is funding the group and for how much?
Parents Defending Education’s funders include several foundations with ties to the Koch network including the Donors Trust, which Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) describes as an “identity-laundering group.”
Moms for Liberty is funded by billionaire Publix heiress Julie Fancelli, who donated over $3 million to the January 6 Stop the Steal rally, and billionaire Richard Uihlein, one of the GOP’s top funders.
The Heritage Foundation, which authored the Project 2025 plan for a second Trump administration that would decimate public schools, also funds Moms for Liberty. In July, Mara Richards Bim of Baptist News Global traced the organizations listed on Project 2025’s advisory board and their funding sources. These sources, like the donor-advised entity National Christian Foundation and the Mercer Family Foundation, not only underwrite the organizations responsible for Project 2025 but also subsidize organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups.
3. Who is really running the operation?
Moms for Liberty’s rise traces back to two long established right-wing institutions, the Leadership Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Leadership Institute’s founder Morton Blackwell told M4L’s 2023 national summit that he had been working with M4L since “your early days.” Tiffany Justice of M4L praised Heritage “as amazing partners since we started Moms for Liberty.”
4. Do its supposed grassroots members know what the organization is about?
A better question might be, do the co-founders have a clue what the organization is about? During a CBS 60 Minutes interview, journalist Scott Pelley asked Descovich and Justice what they meant by calling teachers “groomers.” Descovich and Justice were befuddled.
What the billionaires hope their money buys
As Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, wrote in these pages, Project 2025’s plan to slash education funding “would have devastating impacts on small towns and their residents (and) runs counter to the rural notion of helping out our neighbors — regardless of what they look like or who they are.” Moms for Liberty’s Tiffany Justice complained to a Heritage Foundation audience that “community schools equals communism.” In contrast, the Rural Democracy Initiative’s Rural Policy Action Report has endorsed targeted spending to strengthen rural community schools.
Book bans and school board meeting disruptions create chaos in our schools. Chaos is strategic because as right-wing demagogue Christopher Rufo explained, “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust.”
The extremist Council for National Policy explained what “choice” means in a 2017 memo to President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos: decimate public schools in favor of “free-market private schools, church schools and home schools as the normative American practice” (emphasis in original). In Trump’s world those would be your school “choices.”
Rupert Murdoch, who invested in an education technology company, sees U.S. schools as a $500 billion “market” and Descovich calls M4L’s donors “investors.” DeVos wants her education spending to “confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God’s Kingdom.” Peter Bohlinger of the Christian right donor consortium Ziklag told a gathering: “Our goal is to take down the education system as we know it today.”
In 2022, Justice bragged to Steven Bannon: “We’re going to take over the school boards, but that’s not enough. . . . [We will hire] conservative search firms, that help us to find new educational leaders, because parents are going to get in there and they’re going to want to fire everyone.”
Eleven states now have universal school voucher laws, with the harm falling especially hard on rural schools. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have at least one private school choice program. In November 2023, when Politico tweeted out its story, “GOP states are embracing vouchers. Wealthy parents are benefitting.,” Corey DeAngelis, DeVos’s privatization point man, responded, “Fantastic.”
Education professor Josh Cowen shows that most of the money snatched away from public schools has gone to parents who already have their kids in a private school. Financially failing religious schools are using the voucher money as a piggy bank and privatizers are urging churches to start new schools to cash in. Cowen found that “vouchers have some of the worst results in the history of education research.” The voucher program is so out of control in Arizona it has blown a $1.4 billion hole in the state budget. In Ohio it is $966.2 million and counting. This is all by design, to destabilize public schools.
Republican rural legislators who recognize the important roles public schools play in their communities have fought back. In response, DeVos and her wealthy allies bankrolled expensive primary campaigns to unseat them—in Texas, Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Koch’s political organization Americans for Prosperity and DeVos’s American Federation for Children teamed up to attack rural legislators in Tennessee, Ohio and elsewhere. Pennsylvanian Jeffrey Yass, a GOP megadonor, has underwritten campaigns against Republican legislators in Texas. Small town and rural legislators who stand up for their community schools have come under a withering assault from the forces of big money.
The good news is that community members are also fighting back. In 2023, every Moms for Liberty school board candidate in Minnesota, Kansas, North Carolina and Washington state lost and they were badly beaten in Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Just last month candidates supported by M4L and Gov. Ron DeSantis got shellacked in Florida school board races.
And yet the money and influence machine behind these far-right candidates has ensured that even such loses can become a ticket to power.
“The Florida Department of Education is starting to look like a participation trophy case of people DeSantis appoints after his and Moms for Liberty candidates lose their races,” Jennifer Jenkins told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner last week.
In 2020, Jenkins, a mom and educator, ousted the incumbent Descovich from her seat on the Brevard County school board, with Covid-related safety in public schools a central issue. But Jenkins’s victory also came with a cost. As Descovich went on to co-found Moms for Liberty, Jenkins said that she has repeatedly faced harassment, intimidation campaigns, vandalism at her home and stalking while she has served on the school board. This year, Jenkins founded Educated We Stand, an organization and PAC with the goal of “protecting, recruiting and electing” school board members to counter the influence of “far-right extremists” in school board elections across the country. Jenkins’s organization joins a host of others like Red Wine and Blue, Defense of Democracy and Stop Moms for Liberty that are working to protect inclusive public education across the country.
“Republicans like DeSantis and Trump,” Jenkins said, “share a complete disregard for a government that reflects the will of its constituents, and they will do anything to impose their agenda. And that’s what they’re telling us with Project 2025.”
We have a choice between Project 2025 in which hidden billionaires control our schools and rob our freedoms; or we can nurture our community public schools where students can learn freely and we have a say over decisions that impact our families.
This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.