Tuesday night’s school board elections in Pennsylvania and Oregon again showed how classrooms continue to be a front in the Republican Party’s broader culture war, a battle it has pursued in states across the country with mixed results.
In an Oregon school district in the predominantly rural Clackamas County, where students have protested a recent onslaught of book bans, several “parental rights” candidates lost their bids for the school board. However, GOP-backed school board candidates in southern Pennsylvania who backed book bans and policies targeting trans students survived primary challenges and will advance to the November elections.
The races are part of Republicans’ national push to politicize once-sleepy school board races, using them as a vehicle to curb discussion of race and gender issues in the classroom and give parents more power over curriculums. Across the country, school board members backed by the GOP have banned seminal works of literature, from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but not without backlash.
Nationally, parents have become increasingly worried about the GOP’s book-banning push and have cooled somewhat on the curriculum concerns that dominate Republicans’ education platform. An April Fox News poll found that 77 percent of parents are extremely or very concerned about local school board book bans, an 11-point increase since May 2022. Though 73 percent of those polled remained anxious about what is taught in public schools, that’s 7 points lower than last year. Other polls conducted in recent months show similar results. Actual election results also cast doubt on Republicans’ school-focused strategy: In Illinois and Wisconsin, a key swing state, school board candidates who ran on culture war issues largely failed in April.
That tracks with Tuesday night’s losses for three parental rights candidates, including two incumbents, in Oregon’s Canby School District….
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