Parents vs. the Regime
Editor's Note
October 4 marks four years since the so-called “Garland Memo,” when the Department of Justice weaponized the Patriot Act to brand parents who spoke out at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.” That moment revealed the true nature of our cold civil war: an entrenched regime willing to use the full power of the state to silence ordinary Americans defending their children.
This dispatch from Jordan Adams documents what followed — the revolt of parents, the collapse of the education machine’s dominance, and the new movement to reclaim America’s schools. It is a story of courage, of citizens dusting off the oldest tools of self-government, and of a battle still underway.
For parents of school-age kids, the pandemic’s disruption to their children’s lives is unforgettable. Continued lockdowns. The BLM cudgel. LGBT duplicity. Rock-bottom performance. Vaccine mandates. And with remote learning, parents had a front-row seat to their children’s schooling and didn’t like what they saw. Their kids struggled while being manipulated and pushed away from their own families by activist educators and district bureaucrats.
Six months into the Biden regime, these parents hit a breaking point. They rose up to protect their children — and to reclaim their schools. The school board, long written off as a powerless “good ole boys” club, suddenly became ground zero for resistance. Parents dusted off the oldest tools of citizenship. They began running for office, packing meetings, demanding accountability.
And just as this revival began, the Biden regime moved to crush it.
In October 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) letter colluded with the Biden Department of Justice on a strategy likening parents attending school board meetings to “terrorists.” Not “engaging in disorderly conduct” or “interrupting a public meeting” (neither of which actually happened), but rather full-blown terrorists — like Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden.
The DOJ memo that followed forced the FBI to slap parents with “threat tags.” With the full force of the federal government and every tool at its disposal, the Biden regime planned to use these tags to go after parents for protecting their children and petitioning their government.
The revelation of this plan — and Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s statement that parents should have little say in what students learn — culminated in a tipping point in the resistance to the most despotic actions of the Biden regime. School boards were ground zero.
Unprecedented Successes
Behind that clash was a bigger story: the collapse of the Democrat school board election machine. For decades, even in conservative strongholds, boards were little more than rubber stamps for unions and administrators. The establishment relied on some familiar tactics.
- “Nonpartisan” races that masked radical ideology.
- Off-cycle, low-turnout elections decided by 5% of voters. (research)
- Union-backed recruitment and ground games. (study)
- Flashy bond proposals sold as “supporting your local schools.”
- Weak or résumé-padding candidates.
- School board associations leaving members pliant.
- Manipulative administrators and emotional appeals to tradition.
By 2021, that machine had grown “flabby,” as a GOP consultant described it once to me. It hadn’t been seriously challenged in years — until parents stormed the field. Republican operatives, late to recognize the power unleashed, eventually poured money in. The result was a school board rout.
The Machine Awakens
By 2023, the wave of conservative school board victories began to ebb. The opposition regrouped, the system fought back, and internal weaknesses surfaced. What looked like a grassroots revolution in 2021 and 2022 now faced headwinds on three fronts.
First, the unions and Democrats woke up and regrouped. They doubled down and turned school board meetings into circuses — not over parental rights or hiding secrets from parents, but over so-called “book bans.” Then they blamed conservative board members for the mayhem they ginned up.
Second, 2023 was an off-cycle year with board elections scheduled at the rock-bottom of turnout — midterms and odd-numbered years — which worked to the Left’s advantage. In that environment, organization was everything. The side with the most discipline and unity could sweep, while conservatives who divided among themselves between Trump and establishment camps, as in Pennsylvania, often lost.
Third, once in office, many conservative board members hit a wall: They didn’t know how to govern. Their campaigns had thrived on opposition — against lockdowns, mandates, and indoctrination — but they lacked a positive vision for what schools should become. That vacuum left them vulnerable.
District administrators, long practiced in the art of self-preservation, stepped in. They specialized in obscuring, delaying, and guilt-tripping while taking the “high road” in public. These polite stonewalling tactics left new board members flustered and ineffective. Without a competing agenda, and without the strategic discipline to rise above the noise and deliver real results, many conservative members were quickly overwhelmed, undermined, and, in time, voted out.
Where Are We Now?
For the first time in memory, Republicans hold an edge over Democrats on education. Polling confirms it — though establishment outfits like Reuters will downplay the issue and mainstream media avoid it on debate stages for fear the GOP would dominate. The real danger now is familiar. Republicans could very well squander their advantage, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory yet again.
It would be sheer folly (one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds in the history of American politics) for Republicans to abandon education and, specifically, school boards. Buying into the leftist narrative that school boards are firmly back in Democrat control and toxic to Republican candidates is a sure way to do just that. Conservatives must not fall for it.
Fortunately, there’s good reason to press forward into the fight for America’s school boards. President Trump’s push to shift authority from Washington back to the states has opened new ground. State legislators, governors, and local boards — long the real power centers in education — now hold the spotlight. With more than 70 percent of districts in solid red territory, the conditions are ripe for local renewal without the constant threat of federal lawsuits or funding cuts.
At the same time, a new generation of school board members is quietly being prepared. That’s where the deeper hope lies. The 2021–22 wave of conservative candidates rode culture-war issues to victory, only to be told by the Left that they had overplayed their hand. In truth, that was nothing more than gaslighting — an old tactic designed to trick Republicans into sabotaging themselves.
In fact, the losses had little to do with the culture-war issues (namely CRT, DEI, sexualized children’s content, and the trans bathroom and sports issues) and more to do with a Democrat union machine dusting itself off and off-cycle elections — coupled with the greenness of new board members. Many focused on little more than the culture-war issues while being largely unprepared for the actual work of governing.
It would be a grave mistake, then, for Republicans to declare that “woke is dead” or that the culture-war issues don’t matter. They do. Leftists will shift, change terms, rebrand, and bide their time. It’s not going away without continued focus, transparency, and thorough implementation by conservatives.
At the same time, it would be a strategic blunder to repeat the mistake of focusing only on culture-war issues. Fortunately, many conservatives have recognized the new opportunity in the school board space and are planning accordingly.
This new generation of conservative school board members adds to parental rights a positive vision for what students should be learning and how best to teach them, with the end goal of raising student outcomes. It’s a return to the Western and Founders’ vision for education: cultivating a citizenry that is wise and virtuous.
That means taking care of the necessary “culture-war” items as a matter of business and common sense (without outrage or getting bogged down) projecting competence, responsiveness to parents, and responsibility for student safety above all else. They rein in divisive concepts, ensure transparency, and enforce responsibility-based classroom management and student discipline. Here, the Trump administration is a great boon to their efforts.
On the positive side, they’re getting back to basics — math, reading, history and civics, literature, and science — in lieu of CRT, DEI, SEL, and revisionist history. They’re seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a hard look at what actually works in education for student achievement. Sure, the DEI push was both a distraction and a cause of record declines, but perhaps the root cause was curriculum and instruction: ineffective, fad-fueled practices and the curricula based on them.
This includes “building thinking classrooms” in math, Common Core, learning styles, whole-word/whole-language literacy, project-based learning, inquiry learning, and an outsized focus on abstract skills, unrealistic levels of differentiation, and too much intervention instruction instead of fixing the initial whole-class teaching.
In place of all this, school boards are leading a rediscovery of culturally rich, knowledge-building curricula; direct, explicit instruction; spacing and review; spiraling; phonics; primary sources; math facts and numeracy; science by observation; great texts; MAHA-friendly physical education; and the like. In short, they’re rejecting the adage that “there are no better and worse ways to teach and to learn,” a learning myth which has made tech companies and education consultants rich on the taxpayer dime.
Instead, they’re looking at what the science of reading and the science of learning say from a cognitive-science perspective. They’re also watching the rapidly growing classical education movement so as to incorporate classical practices or even start classical magnet schools à la STEM or arts magnets. They’re seriously rethinking and corralling the proliferation of screen-based learning in America’s schools after years of expensive experimentation and student declines. They’re looking to real tests that don’t leave teachers mystified over what students will be tested on — and that deliver timely results — such as the Classic Learning Test.
What’s happening here is unprecedented, and was almost entirely nonexistent four years ago.
What’s Making This Possible?
Some enterprising, self-driven school board members have done their own research to figure out how to fix America’s schools. But for most — from candidate recruitment to member training to vetted vendors and research — the Right has built the infrastructure to assemble a new generation of school board members who keep parents in the picture while zeroing in on raising student achievement.
These organizations span most of the country and are mostly state-based and local. They’re forming what is, in effect, an alternative school board association in each state, but one that doesn’t tell their members to delegate all their power to administrators with dismal track records and exorbitant salaries.
Instead of keeping members docile, these organizations train them to govern, communicate with clarity, demand transparency, and pursue real reforms. Groups like the Arizona Coalition of School Board Members, Maine Education Initiative, Colorado Leaders for Academic Success, the Carolinas Academic Leadership Network, the Washington Conservative School Board Caucus, and the Kansas School Board Resource Center are leading the charge — with dozens more rising across the country.
Many of these efforts are supported by a new alternative to the National School Boards Association: School Boards for Academic Excellence, which has helped catalyze their growth and broaden their reach. Alongside it, a host of other supports have emerged to strengthen school board members and candidates — especially those battle-tested in recent years — including the 1776 Project PAC, the Leadership Institute’s Learn Right Initiative, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the Independence Law Center, Chalk Forge, the National School Board Leadership Council, and the Family Policy Alliance.
Meanwhile, researchers and commentators are bypassing teacher colleges and establishment journals. Many of them aren’t conservative either, just simply unwilling to indulge the far Left and genuinely committed to student achievement. It’s why they’re turning to independent outlets like Substack to tell the truth about what works in education and what doesn’t.
That independence matters, because the Left has had a near-monopoly on the field for generations. Going back to John Dewey, the father of progressive education, they’ve had a century-long head start in shaping America’s schools.
The year 2021 to 22 was a watershed moment for Republicans to finally lead on improving America’s schools, and they would be foolish to abandon that mantle now. Fortunately, a major effort is underway to build the infrastructure and talent necessary to meet that mandate, but we need all Republicans singing from the same song sheet — and especially the commitment and support of Republican politicos and state-level officials — to make it the vanguard of an American education renaissance.
We’re finally building a juggernaut to save America’s schools, the futures of millions of American children, and the future of America. A golden age of American education runs through America’s school boards. It’s up to conservatives to lead the charge.