MAGA Restrictions on Education: Coming to a State Near You

​MAGA activists across the country and here in Georgia continue to focus their attention on schools as the site of their culture war efforts, attacking teachers, librarians, books, and classroom content that they feel advances a “woke agenda.” Indeed, a third of all school children in the US now live in a state that has recently passed laws restricting, rather than expanding, what can and should be taught, effectively creating different educational possibilities based on a state government’s political orientation. This, while our children remain in danger from gun violence at school. Click through for a few alarming trends to watch:

Attacks on the teaching of social and emotional development
It should be a simple and non-controversial idea that in order to learn, children need to know how to get along with others and manage their own emotions. The core concepts of building emotional intelligence in children have been around as long as schools have been around. But in recent years, the Right has tried to link social and emotional learning (SEL) to the boogeyman of Critical Race Theory (which is not taught in public schools), and advance the argument that teaching emotional development is a Trojan horse for leftist “indoctrination.” 

Here at home in Forsyth, in the last few years, school counselors at at least one local elementary school were accused by parents of trying to indoctrinate their children by way of a social and emotional learning module. A Forsyth school administrator hired as a DEI trainer and coordinator had her job rescoped and retitled as a “community engagement specialist” despite “social and emotional health” being one of five strategic objectives of the 2025 budget plan. In neighboring Cherokee County, a new administrator hired to focus on diversity and equity in the school system was chased out of town by extremist parents. Bills in at least eight states have sought to limit or ban SEL, despite decades of research showing improved student academic and even health outcomes of SEL. 

Book Banning and Academic Censorship 
Many locals remember that starting in 2022, our Forsyth Board of Education meetings were filled with red-shirted activists clamoring for attention, insisting on reading aloud from library books they felt were “sexually explicit,” eventually filing a lawsuit, and resulting in a finding by the Office of Civil Rights that student rights had been infringed upon by district book removals--removals of books that were largely by or about people in marginalized groups. Even the youngest children’s classrooms were not exempt from reactionary book removals, as last fall, K and 1st grade classrooms had to jettison their new sets of ARC readers because a book like “Who’s in a Family” contained images of children with family structures other an one mom and one dad. In our county, even after the book removal furor of 2022 died down, teachers have continued to censor themselves and feel the chilling effect of the intense anger of right-wing activists. Parents need to proactively let their children’s teachers and principals know that they support book choices that include and represent all students.

Academic Whitewashing 
That same spring of 2022, Brian Kemp chose Forsyth as the setting for his signing into law two reactionary education bills: the so-called Parents’ Bill of Rights; and the “Divisive Concepts” bill, which prevents classroom discussion of nine concepts including any discussion of race or racial history that would “induce psychological distress.” (The fact that this was an election year, and Kemp was being challenged from the right by David Perdue, is a salient fact here.) In a county like Forsyth, with a history of lynching and white terrorism, the restriction of how our racial history can be taught feels, unavoidably, like a turning away from and denial of that history. 

Into the vacuum left by restrictions on teaching real history and social studies, a for-profit company called Prager U is marketing a right-wing K-12 education curriculum that has been approved for use in Florida, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Montana, Louisiana, and Arizona. A privately-funded effort to use disputed videos to teach conservative values in public schools is gaining traction, as Louisiana recently became the sixth state to endorse educational materials produced by Prager U. Prager U is NOT a university and has no academic affiliation, but rather a media company producing short videos that push right-wing talking points and extremely conservative views of history, race, sex and gender, among other topics. For example, their video “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue” dismisses George Floyd’s murder and blames Floyd for resisting arrest, compares the BLM movement to Mexican drug cartels, and calls claims of racial injustice in policing “false.” In “Leo and Layla Meet Booker T. Washington,” the child characters ask Washington if he wishes he’d been born in a country without slavery, and he reassures them that “slavery has been a reality everywhere in the world,” and that “future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.”

More Christianity in Public Schools 
​In a flagrant violation of the separation of Church and State, in July, the Governor of Oklahoma mandated the use of The Bible in all levels of public school curriculum, and then released a set of guidelines for incorporating it into lesson plans in every subject, cautioning, “immediate and strict compliance is expected.” The State School Superintendent, when confronted with the illegality of this, said, “We feel very confident in President Trump's nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court, that, if we can — if we get sued and we get challenged, we will be victorious, because the Supreme Court justices he appointed actually are originalists that look at the Constitution and not what some left-wing professor said about the Constitution.” This force feeding of the Bible to public school students is in service of the Christian Nationalist myth that the United States is inherently and only a Christian country. Oklahoma took this action close on the heels of Louisiana becoming the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, a move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

Dumbing Down in the Name of Culture Wars 
Educational historians claim that this explosion of laws dictating what can and can’t be taught in schools is unprecedented, and that local districts traditionally have had a lot of power to direct their own classroom content. The fact that schools and school curricula have become so politicized should alarm us all. A heightened sense of scrutiny of teachers and classrooms leads to censorship and restricts students' access to diverse perspectives, and restricting a school’s curriculum leads to an inevitable dumbing down of that curriculum. More than a dozen studies over the last forty years show that numerous measures of student performance, from attendance to graduation rates, increase when students see people like themselves in a school’s curriculum. Simply put, representation matters. 

Just this summer, Georgia’s Superintendent of Schools, Richard Wood, canceled the planned rollout of AP African American History courses after a pilot program. It is strange that an educator at the highest level of state government would decide that Georgia’s students need fewer AP course options, not more. Only public outcry and pushback from education advocates, along with the Attorney General’s clarification that college-level courses are specifically exempt from the divisive concepts law, made Wood reverse his decision. Eighteen states have passed “divisive concept” bans.

A Trump Future: Increased Military Access to Schools, Less Safety, More Poverty, More Guns in Schools
Project 2025 recommends “improving military recruiters’ access to secondary schools” by requiring students in public high schools to take a military entrance exam called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). The proposed requirement would extend to schools that “receive federal funding,” the document says. That means the requirement would apply to students attending public schools and any private schools that receive federal funds.

In 2023, the U.S. military services collectively missed their recruiting goals by 41,000 recruits, the Department of Defense said in December, attributing this to a strong economy with more options for young people, and a smaller population of those eligible to serve in the military. 

Also, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not currently conduct enforcement actions on school campuses, as these are considered “sensitive locations,” like churches and hospitals. Project 2025 would rescind that designation, and schools would be subject to ICE raids and a regular ICE presence.
Donald Trump has vowed, “I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, and I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” Like most of Trump’s half-baked assertions, the feasibility of him actually accomplishing this is doubtful, but public health experts fear that even the rhetoric around it could lead to less vaccine participation and an uptick in child deaths from preventable diseases, like measles.

Project 2025 calls for eliminating Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which invests in children from low-income households so they become proficient in reading and math. It would also eliminate Head Start, a federal early education program that serves more than 833,000 children living in poverty, from birth until they turn 5 years old. Head Start has served nearly 40 million kids from low-income families since 1965.

Also concerning is the right’s apparent belief that our schools need more guns, not fewer. Georgia’s own Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones proposed, for the 2024 legislative session, that teachers be offered a $10k stipend to carry guns in classrooms. He made this announcement in Barrow County, the site of last week’s tragic school shooting, no less. The Georgia Association of Educators, plus every public health, pediatric health, and gun safety advocacy group opposes the idea. Earlier this year, Tennessee passed a law allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons in school, without requiring them to inform parents or even their fellow teachers. Teachers, even teachers who have taken a firearms training course, are not law enforcement officers. More guns in schools is the wrong direction for us to be going.  

Vouchers and Inevitable School Defunding 
Meanwhile, the push on the part of dark money special interests for school vouchers finally succeeded in Georgia this year with the passage of SB233, sponsored by Forsyth’s State Senator Greg Dolezal. Far from increasing parental choice and driving better educational outcomes, as its proponents argued, we know that vouchers will divert funds from public schools, exacerbate educational inequalities, and lack true oversight and accountability measures. We know this because we have seen the damage done by vouchers in every state that has implemented them. Arizona’s state budget is nearly bankrupt from the cost of their voucher program; Florida is being forced to close public schools, leaving students and families in the lurch. In Indiana, costs of the voucher program have increased 263% in five years, draining the state school budget by 40%. Nowhere do educational outcomes of tax-funded voucher programs exceed or even meet those attained by public schools, with certified teachers. 

The Republicans’ Project 2025 would dramatically accelerate the funneling of public, taxpayer money into private hands, and also dismantle the Department of Education, along with protections for poor students, students in marginalized groups, and students needing special education. The new overturning of the Chevron deference by the Supreme Court this summer now threatens to further undermine the Department of Education and its ability to advocate for quality education for all students, including here in Forsyth, with their signed agreement with Forsyth Schools, stemming from the 2022 book removal.

Why Does All This Matter?
When teachers and classrooms are restricted, censored, and starved of funding, what is the cost to the future adults we are schooling? “When children are being taught very different stories of what America is, that will lead to adults who have a harder time talking to each other,” said Rachel Rosenberg, a Hartwick College assistant professor of education. With educational professionals confused about what to teach and in fear for their jobs, and students receiving an incomplete or biased education, the politicization of schools risks undermining quality education for all children. This election year in Forsyth, there are three open seats on the Board of Education up for election. The Democrats are running three strong candidates against three MAGA opponents. To halt an extremist takeover of our Forsyth school board, vote blue all the way down the ballot.