School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education
By Laura Pappano
Beacon Press, 2024
For well over a century, public schools have been nonpartisan gathering places and a vital center of civic life in America. People from different backgrounds have been educated together. Parents have come together to support their child’s local school. But something has changed. Public schools have become the focus of far-right attacks that are not about education. Suddenly, parent involvement is not about baking treats or donating classroom supplies. It is about organizing to protect the very existence of public schools.
Laura Pappano argues that extremist challenges facing public schools are not brand new but have surfaced throughout history, most recently before now in the 1990s, as far-right groups unsuccessfully tried to stop sex education in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Recent efforts to make public schools more responsive and inclusive as demographics have shifted, along with the challenges of pandemic schooling, have given the far right an opening to sway parents frustrated and exhausted by unavoidable educational disruptions.
With help from big donors, political action committees, and conservative networks that are bringing national campaign strategists to local school board races, the far right is executing an agenda to use public schools—that hopeful image of America’s future—as a way to gain political power and install extremist Christian values in our public institutions.
Groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education are attacking revised history curricula they have dubbed as “CRT,” banning books, and making wild claims that schools are “indoctrinating” students with Marxist ideologies. Far-right politicians are passing anti-LGBTQ+ laws and “parental rights” legislation to disrupt the professional selection of classroom materials and make teachers fearful of doing their jobs. On the other side, groups like Red, Wine & Blue—along with fed-up PTO moms—are organizing on Facebook, meeting in coffee shops, and recruiting school board candidates to counter the attacks.
Combining on-the-ground reporting with research and expert interviews, School Moms delves into these battles to reveal what is at stake and why it matters for the future of our public schools.
Commentary + Reviews
“School Moms reveals the real monster under the bed. Through stories of the distracting scuffles in the fight for public schools today, Laura Pappano illuminates who is at war and what is truly at stake in the immediate and dire struggle for the survival of public schools as a bedrock of democratic society. These stories point to the politicization of a public good at the expense of children. It is a rallying call to those of us who care about the well-being of our youngest citizens.”
— Peg Oliveira, PhD, director Gesell Program in Early Childhood, Yale Childhood Study Center
Pappano (Inside School Turnarounds, 2010) makes no bones about her love for her public-school experience. As a child with little home stability, various personalities, subjects, and teaching methods gave her the foundation for her future. An education reporter, she takes a hard look at what political and religious division and misinformation have done to what, according to her, should be the backbone of our society. Much of what she discusses is centered in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. (Ron DeSantis comes off particularly poorly.) For some, it began with protests against mask mandates in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and moved on to condemning critical-race theory and banning controversial subjects in curriculum and libraries, with politicians delineating what can and can’t be taught. This is a serious piece of reporting. It’s not a long book, and 20 of its pages are footnotes that back up Pappano’s observations. For public and academic libraries, this is a capsulized view of a hot topic.
— Denise Hoover, Booklist
“Pappano strips away the mask of right-wing ‘parents’ and ‘moms’ cabals to reveal their political strategy: a fear-driven assault on public schools. But she presents hope too—in teachers, principals, librarians, and, yes, caring moms and parents who fight for their communities”
— Maurice T. Cunningham, author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization
“…a worthwhile read.”
— Thomas Ultican, TULTICAN
“America’s public schools find themselves in the crosshairs of a calculated campaign, driven by dark-money donors and relying on lies to incite fear, anger, cruelty, and intimidation. What do the attackers seek to achieve? To grasp the vast stakes of this siege, read School Moms. And take a stand with our embattled school boards, teachers, and librarians before it is too late.”
— Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
New Book “School Moms” Delves into Battle For Public Schools: Q+A With Laura Pappano
— Wellesley Centers for Women Research + Action Report, Dec. 2023
Interview: Author Laura Pappano On Her New Book ‘School Moms’ And The Fight To Save Public Education From Extremists