Episodes

Florida is the birthplace of Moms for Liberty. It is also the state where the governor has spent millions of dollars to elect extremist members of school boards around the state who have banned books, fired superintendents, and in general wreaked havoc on local school systems. In the face of that, communities around the state have come together to elect pro-public education school board members. In this episode, Karin Chenoweth talks with three who won in 2024. · Stephanie Vanos, who defeated...

In this episode of Democracy and Education, Bobby Omari, who lost his bid for a school board seat in California’s Chino Valley United School District, shares the lessons he learned and the lessons he thinks others can learned from his campaign. Among other things, he thinks he underestimated the political sway a Christian Nationalist mega-church has in local politics, including in “harvesting” thousands of votes of its parishioners—that is, gathering mail-in votes and delivering them to the ele...

When education researcher and parent Jamie Martin first heard NBC’s podcast about the Southlake Families, the group that had taken the majority of the school board in the Carroll School District in Texas proclaiming their allegiance to “parental rights,” she noticed that their web site looked remarkably like that of Francis Howell Families in her Missouri district. It had the same branding and the same language attacking critical race theory, transgender children, and teachers. That started her...

Democracy and Education Episode 9 Rejecting Extremism Alarmed by the allegations made by Libs for TikTok and Moms for Liberty, Courtney Gore ran for school board in her home town of Granbury Texas in 2021. Once on the board, she searched for the evidence of indoctrination and the sexualization of children she had been warned of. When she found none, she went back to her community to tell them the good news. But they didn’t want to hear it and cut ties with her. Now she realizes that she had...

When Sara Bitter ran for school board in a suburban district in Cincinnati, it was after she had already run twice for the state legislature. She knew how to run a contested campaign. But she thought running for the non-partisan school board seat would be different—less contentious, less political. After all, she says, most people just want school board members who will be a good steward of tax dollars and ensure that the children of the community are educated. Then outside money flooded into ...

Steve Grappe says Arkansans are trying to take back political power through “direct democracy.” Grappe, who lives in Rosebud Arkansas on Forevermost Farms, is the former head of the Rural Caucus, former head of the Citizens for Arkansas Public Education and Students (CAPES), and is the new head of Stand Up Arkansas. In a wide-ranging discussion, Grappe describes how he and others throughout the state are working to re-engage Arkansans in civic and political life. Far too many Arkansans, he say...

After dozens of extremists funded and trained by people outside her home state of Minnesota won school board races in 2022, long-time political campaign worker Kyrstin Schuette said, “Someone needs to do something.” She decided that extremists were able to win in part because school board candidates who support public education didn’t have access to the knowledge and expertise that other candidates have. So she started the School Board Integrity Project in order to provide school board candida...

In 2021 Nicole Cole was elected to the Spotsylvania Virginia school board at the same time as two others who, together with existing members of the board, formed a majority that immediately tried to fire the superintendent and ban books. The board president even said he wanted to burn books that were in the school library. The new superintendent they hired banned 37 books, including Toni Morrisson’s The Bluest Eye. Together with a core group of community members, Cole formed a PAC—Support Spots...

In this first episode of 2024, Democracy and Education is revamped to a new, shorter and more frequent interview format featuring Karin Chenoweth talking with school board candidates and people working on school board campaigns. Throughout the year we will talk about what strategies and tactics are successful and which are unsuccessful, as well as the political environment in which those campaigns operate. To kick the year off, Karin checks in with Kris Amundson. Kris is a former school board m...

In the spring of 2023 in Plano Texas a slate of pro-public education, common-sense candidates won their races for school board. This, despite the fact that extremists had supported a competing slate with expert communications and strategy help. In this episode, we hear from Michael Cook, Tarrah Lantz, and Katherine Chan Goodwin, who joined together on a slate formed by a local non-partisan organization, Keep Plano #1. Keep Plano #1 had been formed to support the “best candidate,” not party lab...

In Carmel Clay School District in Indiana, the fairly new superintendent pledged he would do something to address the fact that many students and parents of color had experienced racist incidents or racist assumptions. He hired a diversity, equity, and inclusion coordinator. That prompted a backlash from a group of people, many of whom had no children in the schools and some of whom didn’t even live in the school district. People from neighboring towns flooded school board meetings, yelling and...

How a local community took back its school board from extremists.