Many 'Parent' Groups Opposing Masks and CRT Are Driven By Dark Money Sources; Book Bans

[appalachiablue]

- Patti Hidalgo Menders, who works for a GOP media consulting firm, speaks during a Loudoun County Public Schools board meeting in Ashburn, Va., Oct. 12, 2021.
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- 'Many “Parent” Groups Opposing Masks and CRT Are Actually Driven by Dark Money,' Truthout, Jan. 29, 2022. - Ed.

Thousands of events take place across the U.S. annually in the last week of January for “School Choice Week,” organized by a self-described “nonpartisan, nonpolitical public awareness effort” group. In truth, National School Choice Week- which has been taking place every year since 2011- has been bankrolled by right-wing special interests, and its local events are mostly organized by schools and organizations that support diverting public education dollars to private alternatives.

Among those most vocal in celebrating this School Choice Week - for which 26,000 events are slated to take place across 45 states - are a new wave of “parent” groups, deployed to make it appear there is wide opposition to public school policies while advancing the agenda of their (largely undisclosed) funders. Staffers from such organizations as “Moms for Liberty,” “Parents Defending Education” and the “Independent Women’s Forum” have been featured in right-wing media as “concerned parents” attacking public schools without disclosing their positions in dark money-funded organizations.

These “parent” groups appear to have joined the decades-long coordinated dark money effort to dismantle public education. Rather than focusing explicitly on promoting privatization, they have attacked public schools - going after masking policies, remote learning & evidence-based curricula they dislike. A Reenergized Effort to Privatize Education in the Wake of the COVID-19 “Shock" - School choice” advocates often claim to promote “freedom” for parents to choose the form of education they see best for their children. But the strategy of “school choice” is to move public funding away from public schools into private hands. Joanne Barkan, who writes about education reform has argued that 4 words sum up education privatizers’ objective: public funding, private management.

This helps explain the recent right-wing reframing of attacks on public schools as “parental rights”: If dark money actors can successfully argue that private citizens should outrank publicly elected officials in school leadership, they will have won private mgmt. over a publicly funded good. “School choice” is rooted in efforts to keep schools racially segregated, & still today these programs in effect maintain segregation by race, class & disability. While disavowing that history, donors- like Charles Koch, Betsy & Dick DeVos & the Waltons (Walmart heirs)- have continued to push school privatization. Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein predicted in March 2020 that Covid presented an ideal opportunity for “disaster capitalism,” a tactic pushed by school privatizers in the wake of the last financial crisis.

She identified the global pandemic as a “shock,” or disruptive event that global elites often use to introduce free-market “solutions” that redistribute wealth upwards...

More, https://truthout.org/articles/many-parent-groups-opposing-masks-and-crt-are-actually-driven-by-dark-money/
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- Also, US conservatives linked to rich donors wage campaign to ban books from schools. 'Moms for Liberty.' Experts say trend is accelerating as groups push for bans of works that often address race, LGBTQ issues and marginalized people,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/24/us-conservatives-campaign-books-ban-schools

[Baitball Blogger]

1. Welp, there are already separate classes for gifted students,

So why not separate schools into two tracks. We'll call the one with limited history lessons, Primary group, and the other one, college bound.