Former President Donald J. Trump is set to speak Friday evening to a gathering of Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group whose priorities mirror much of his own education platform.
Like Mr. Trump, they have called for stricter classroom discipline and vouchers for private school tuition and home-schooling costs. They want to ban certain books and cut funding to schools that embrace progressive ideas on gender and race, while slimming down or even closing the federal Department of Education.
But as his presidential campaign leans heavily on cultural divides over gender, parenting and education, there have been signs of voter weariness, and questions over whether social issues in schools are still energizing voters.
“Is this a wave that’s on the decline?” asked Julie Marsh, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied school board elections. “We’re perhaps seeing signs of parents being turned off by some of this.”
Mr. Trump’s appearance in Washington, D.C., is his second time speaking at the annual convention of Moms for Liberty, which was founded in 2021. He has embraced the group’s rhetoric, telling convention attendees last year that he would “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”
In the past several months, Mr. Trump has floated provocative ideas like allowing parents to elect principals and creating an alternative credentialing body for teachers who embrace “patriotic values.”
But on the local level, conservative activists who focus on similar issues have lost some ground. Last November, candidates who positioned themselves as defenders of “parental rights” lost high-profile school board races in swing states like Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Around that time, Moms for Liberty weathered a scandal over the sexual behavior of one of its founders, Bridget Ziegler, which may have cost it some support. Other leaders of the group have distanced themselves from Ms. Ziegler, who has since left the organization.
Since March, at least six California school board members have been recalled; many were elected as part of a conservative wave in 2022. One voted to ban the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Another called transgender identity “a social contagion.”
In Florida, 47 percent of the school board candidates backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis — the national politician most closely associated with the Moms for Liberty agenda — lost their races last week, and the number could rise as others face runoffs. Two years ago, just 20 percent of his preferred candidates were defeated.
Nikki Fried, the Florida Democratic Party chair, said the outcome was a “revolt” from parents who “want this extreme politics and the policies that come with it gone.”
“People want balance back,” she added.
Governor DeSantis, a Republican, acknowledged last week that several of his preferred candidates “came up short,” but said he remained “optimistic.”
“If you look at where we were four, five years ago versus where we are now, there’s much more interest on these school boards in protecting the rights of parents,” he said at a news conference.
Tiffany Justice, a founder of Moms for Liberty, noted that 60 percent of the Florida primary candidates supported by her organization won their recent races. She argued that the local races represented a significant shift from the prepandemic status quo, in which school board elections were sleepy affairs often dominated by candidates affiliated with teachers’ unions.
“Almost 100 percent of Republicans do not want gender transitions to happen,” Ms. Justice said, “and I think 30 percent of Democrats are with us on this issue, if not more.”
Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, likened Mr. Trump’s attendance at the Moms for Liberty event to Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent speech to an audience of union members at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston.
It made sense, Mr. Hess said, that Mr. Trump would want to speak to “an engaged, Trump-friendly organization of activist parents.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning organization, has declared Moms for Liberty an “extremist group” that spreads “hateful imagery and rhetoric against the L.G.B.T.Q. community.”
Mr. Trump’s affiliation with Moms for Liberty marks just how drastically Republican education politics have shifted during the Trump era.
The Republican Party was once associated with President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, a bipartisan effort to drive test-score gains for low-income children. Now it has embraced a very different agenda.
While leaning into right-wing notions of parental rights, Mr. Trump has been almost totally silent on academic achievement itself — despite continued evidence that the nation’s children, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, have not recovered from the learning loss they incurred during the coronavirus pandemic.
Ms. Harris has not emphasized academics either when speaking about education on the campaign trail. Instead, she has often returned to the themes of student debt relief, opposing book bans and ending gun violence in schools.
The lack of discussion about learning “is very depressing,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute, a center-right think tank, and a former federal education official under Mr. Bush. “There is no talk of achievement gaps, and little talk even of upward mobility or opportunity.”
Joseph Costello, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, pointed toward the Biden-Harris administration’s $100 million investment in education, including pandemic academic recovery, through the American Rescue Plan. The vice president “is fighting for every child to have access to a good school and a shot at the American dream,” he wrote in an email.
In a written statement, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said Mr. Trump’s policies would improve academic excellence “by increasing access to school choice, empowering parents to have a voice in their child’s education and supporting good teachers.”
Mr. Trump has sketched a vision of the federal government as a culture warrior with vast powers to investigate local schools and withhold funding from those that teach about structural racism or recognize transgender identities. Mr. Trump has also promised to push a patriotic, Christian-inflected curriculum into schools.
All of those ideas have played a big role in state-level Republican politics in recent years, and some of Mr. Trump’s supporters argue the issues are still salient for many parents.
“We have to make sure that kids are not being indoctrinated to hate our country,” said the Oklahoma state superintendent Ryan Walters, who is being discussed as a potential education secretary in a second Trump term. “Those are issues that have to be looked at, at the national level.”
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