Moms for Liberty has big plans in North Carolina, its co-founder says | Opinion
Moms for Liberty, the right-wing “parental rights” group, is targeting North Carolina as part of a larger plan to further expand its national presence.
Founded by a group of former Florida school board members in 2021, Moms for Liberty channeled frustration over mask mandates and school closures into a full-blown culture war movement that includes efforts to ban certain books from schools and limit the discussion of gender and sexuality in the classroom. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled it an anti-government extremist group.
Today, Moms for Liberty has more than 300 chapters across 48 states. Twenty of those chapters are in North Carolina, and the group says it plans to double its number of North Carolina chapters in the coming months.
“Education has been replaced by ideological indoctrination in the classrooms, and we’re concerned about parental rights. We’re concerned that the government schools are driving a wedge between parents and their kids, and we will not stand for it,” Tiffany Justice, national co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told me.
Justice claimed that “some of the schools in North Carolina are being used or being considered for what they call ‘newcomer schools’ for illegal immigrants. And we’re not going to let Americans be put on the back burner.”
“Newcomer” schools and programs do exist in North Carolina, but they are not for “illegal immigrants.” Rather, they’re designed to help recent immigrant and refugee children transition into the U.S. school system. Many students attending school in the United States for the first time may encounter hurdles such as limited English proficiency that limit their ability to succeed in traditional public schools, so newcomer programs allow them to spend their first year in an environment specifically tailored for multilingual learners. Studies have shown that such programs improve student outcomes and English proficiency.
It’s curious that Moms for Liberty would object to such a thing, because Justice also told me that poor student outcomes among Black and Hispanic students is one of the group’s top concerns in North Carolina.
“According to North Carolina data, only 34.7% of Black students are reading at grade level, only 37% of Hispanic students, and it’s just atrocious,” Justice said. “We’re very focused on proficiency and making sure that kids are being given the tools that they need in order to uphold their full potential and life.”
Conservatives already have found success shaping public schools in North Carolina in their image. The North Carolina General Assembly has been under Republican control for more than a decade, and a Republican has held the position of superintendent of public instruction since 2017.The state now has a “parental rights” bill that limits instruction of sexuality and gender identity in school curriculum and requires educators to alert parents if their child changes their name or pronoun at school. They’ve successfully challenged school districts to remove certain books from classrooms and school libraries.
Still, Moms for Liberty isn’t satisfied. A key part of the group’s strategy is recruiting and training concerned parents to run for school board themselves, with mixed success. In 2022, slightly more than half of the 500 school board candidates it endorsed across the country won, according to The Associated Press.
Expanding the group’s presence across the state is important, Justice claimed, because “the unions control education in North Carolina.”
The North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) is a frequent target of conservatives, despite statutory limits on its power and influence. Since state law bans collective bargaining by public sector employees, teachers lack negotiating power over their wages and working conditions, so NCAE functions more as an advocacy group than a union.
“No one’s really been focusing on school board elections besides the union. And so we are reclaiming our children’s classrooms. We are reclaiming public education from the grip of the union,” Justice said. “If we do not stop the indoctrination happening in our public school classrooms across the United States of America, we will lose our country.”
This story was originally published March 27, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Moms for Liberty has big plans in North Carolina, its co-founder says | Opinion."
