The battle for our schools
Far-right ideologues seek to control public education.
Heads up, Capital Region: America's culture wars may be coming to a school board race near you next week.
And while you may be tired of the seemingly incessant divisiveness and conspiratorial blather in our politics today, it's all the more reason you need to show up — at the polls on Tuesday.
The troubling trend in this case is among far-right-wing candidates looking to gain influence over what other people's children are taught and to shape public education to their ideology. But whether it's from the left or the right, extremism should have no place in the running of public schools or the education of children.
School board meetings have over the years been occasional combat zones for localized battles over topics like sex education and having police or armed monitors in schools. But the ideological discord seems to have escalated in recent years.
It wasn't that long ago, for example, that the debate over Common Core — a holistic approach to instruction that some saw as a threat to local control over education, and which conspiracy theorists conjured into something even worse — became the focus of ostensibly nonpartisan school board races as well as state legislative contests. On another front, opponents of masking and social distancing as ways to contain the COVID -19 pandemic zeroed in on what they maintained was the psychological and developmental damage such policies were inflicting on children.
Now, in this year's races, we’ve seen candidates in various school districts decrying the supposed teaching of “critical race theory” — a non-issue that's been fanned by Fox News pundits and Republican politicians into some kind of unpatriotic attack on America. Some assail any instruction or literature that frankly acknowledges that our diverse social tapestry includes people who don't fall into traditional gender identities or sexual preferences – lessons that some conspiracy theorists have twisted into a covert recruitment drive for pedophiles.
And so, scattered through school board races in districts like Bethlehem, Voorheesville, Averill Park, and Shenendehowa are candidates espousing bans on the teaching of racial issues and human sexuality, and on books that touch on such subjects. They run on innocuous-sounding themes like “parent rights” — an Orwellian euphemism for their goal of imposing their ideological views on other parents’ children. Views like not teaching in public schools the realities of slavery and racial discrimination, or tolerance of people these candidates choose not to tolerate.
The danger here is that school board races tend to draw fairly low turnouts, which can allow a small but highly motivated faction of voters to have an outsized influence on the outcome. And if nothing else, those who want to shut down honest instruction of topics on which they prefer to indoctrinate children according to their own biases are highly motivated.
It's crucial, then, that all eligible voters turn out for Tuesday’s school elections. Ignorance, after all, is an indoctrination of its own.