‘Tea party-ish’ assault on school officials part of well-funded effort to take over local control of education

A series of alarming spectacles at local school board meetings across the country are being promoted by a loose network of well-connected and deep-pocketed conservative groups.

The culture war battles over mask mandates and anti-racism lessons have erupted in bizarre outbursts and occasional violence at school board meetings in California, Florida, Virginia and elsewhere, and those purportedly grassroots efforts are often tied to groups run by Republican political operatives and conservative lawyers, reported the Associated Press.

"It seems very tea party-ish to me," said conservative lawyer Dan Lennington, who's with the advocacy group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. "These are ingredients for having an impact on future elections."

Lennington's group has offered free legal advice to parent groups looking to remove school boards through recall elections, and the organization is funded by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, whose secretary advised Donald Trump's legal battle against his election loss and has worked to restrict state voting laws.

"Outsiders are tapping into some genuine concerns, but the framing of the issues are largely regularized by national groups," said Columbia University professor Jeffrey Henig, who's written about the nationalization of education.

But conservative parents and their backers insist they're not "astroturf," or fake grassroots campaigns, but are instead driven by real outrage against the supposed liberal influence on education.

"There's a misconception out there that this is part of some national right-wing agenda," said Amber Schroeder, a mother of four who's leading efforts to recall the Mequon-Thiensville, Wisconsin, school board over its hiring of a diversity consultant. "We're the ones pushing back on our own here against an extreme liberal agenda by the teachers union."

The Virginia-based Parents Defending Education was formed in January to fight liberal "indoctrination" in the classroom and set up a national database of "incident reports," and conservative groups such as the Virginia Project and No Left Turn in Education also push back against perceived political bias.

"We created Parents Defending Education because we believe our children deserve to learn how to think at school — not what to think," said the group's president, Nicole Neily.

The nonprofit Parents Defending Education is not required to publicly identify its donors, and Neily wouldn't do so, but she has previously served in senior positions for conservative groups such as the Independent Women's Forum and Cato Institute.

Fishbein has received free legal assistance for parents involved in school board battles from the Liberty Justice Center, Pacific Legal Foundation and other conservative advocacy groups funded by the Bradley Foundation and top GOP donor Dick Uihlein, and her work has been amplified by Fox News.

"A year ago, I had a handful of moms in my suburban Philadelphia living room," Fishbein said. "Three weeks later, I was on Tucker Carlson, and within a week, I had more than a million visitors to my Facebook page."