Canaries in the Classroom

Putting public education and democratic decision-making at risk, these efforts are part of broader authoritarian trends. Across the globe, a new coalition of right-wing populists, White evangelicals, Christian nationalists, and oligarchs has been mobilizing anti-gender movements to roll back decades of civil rights and feminist policy gains.^[9] In the U.S., an increase of one-party supermajorities in state legislatures, including West Virginia and Kentucky, is re-establishing White male minority rule against the backdrop of demands for gender, racial, and labor justice.^[10] An acceleration of anti-democratic policymaking has ensued, much of it targeting public schools and their disproportionately feminized and unionized workforces.

A renewed focus on Appalachia allows for a historical perspective on how global and national trends play out in local struggles over state spending and democratic processes. Since its inception in 1973, the Heritage Foundation has been trying to dismantle public education. Where did the organization’s work begin? In West Virginia.^[11] Now Heritage has new tools and allies—anti-gender campaigns, MAGA Republicans, and Christian nationalists—but its underlying goals of upward wealth distribution, privatized public goods, and an end to the separation of church and state remain the same.

Assaults on state public education systems offer early warnings of what the Heritage-led coalition backing the second Trump administration has in store for the whole country. Battles over the future of public education—and democracy—are playing out not only at the ballot box, but in courtrooms, legislative chambers, and school libraries. In West Virginia and Kentucky, parents, teachers, elected officials and wealthy donors are squaring off at the classroom door.

The Family, Gender Ideology, and Public Education in Authoritarian Politics

Several key beliefs about gender and family underpin the authoritarian coalition’s anti-democratic vision. Faith in a family structure operating on a gender-based hierarchy as the appropriate foundation for society is primary. What conservatives call “gender ideology” threatens this family structure, and hence the nation. “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children,” exhorts the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, in the introduction to Project 2025: A Mandate for Leadership, the Right’s policy roadmap for dismantling democratic processes and progressive policies in the U.S.^[12]

Roberts has a very specific type of family in mind: one based on a male-female binary and a husband-wife-children (in that order) hierarchy. Authoritarians see this structure not only as determined by God’s law and biological sex, but also as the ideal political form in miniature. The protective (White) male authority figure has the divine and natural right to make decisions for the family. Patriarchal rule and its centralization of power should naturally extend to, and orient, authorities beyond the family. The church, the military, the Supreme Court, the federal government’s Executive Branch, and even the “free market” should have dominion over a subordinate civil society and public sphere, just as husbands and fathers have dominion over women and children.^[13]       

“Parents’ rights” has become the public rallying cry for such beliefs, a deceptively anodyne slogan uniting conservative religious supporters, militant nationalists, and libertarian free-marketeers. Working in tandem with so-called “anti-gender” activists, parents’ rights movements leverage the popular affective desire to protect children to mobilize voters behind anti-democratic measures and insulate minority rule. Their campaigns typically induce moral panics by conjuring horror-house dangers to children in schools under public authority, then assert parents’ rights as the solution: a natural prerogative and political duty of parents seeking to protect their families. Control over all education in this view should rest with the patriarchal family and its political extensions: the church and the state, as directed by oligarchs, Christian nationalists, and right-wing politicians.^[14]

Such campaigns have sent emotions surging through the digital pathways of online right-wing communities and spilling over into mainstream liberal discourse, reinforcing beliefs that “men and women are natural categories” whose disruption by “gender ideology” is destabilizing society.^[15] They have transformed “gender” into an international bogeyman and shapeshifting phantasm that threatens children, family, nation, and economic prosperity.^[16] Gender has become the symbolic glue binding two groups with opposing approaches to state power: wealthy, profit-minded libertarians who call for limited government with Christian nationalists who demand the injection of their values into the public sphere through government.^[17]

Authoritarians across this ideological spectrum share a conviction that schools should be places for training a pliant citizenry, not for teaching critical thinking.[18] They are sites to be ruled over, not democratically governed, and if the people who work in them fall out of line, they should be punished. “The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country,” Roberts insists in Project 2025. “States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.”^[19]

Weaponizing state power and undermining local authority by deploying anti-gender and parents’ rights campaigns have also become central tactics for authoritarians in mobilizing anti-democracy campaigns abroad. Over the past decade, for example, Viktor Orbán has reshaped Hungary’s education system in service of creating a pro-authoritarian populace, banning gender studies, punishing teachers for demanding better pay, and giving law enforcement control over schools and universities—all under the guise of protecting the nation’s children from “gender ideology.”^[20] Such concepts are not foreign per se. They have traveled in and between countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America via transnational communication networks that receive millions of dollars from wealthy, U.S.-based groups.^[21] One such group, the Heritage Foundation, has played an instrumental role for decades.

Parents’ Rights, Then: The Heritage Foundation in Kanawha County

The Heritage Foundation’s experiment in using parents’ rights to seize control over education from the state—to unmake public schools and, by extension, undermine the growth of multiracial democracy—began in West Virginia in the 1970s. The recently formed foundation learned to interweave libertarian demands for privatization and profit-making with religious and White supremacist calls to prevent children’s exposure to secular, integrated schools.^[22]

West Virginia had established the right to free, publicly funded schools in its founding constitution in 1863. During the Reconstruction period following the Civil War—an unprecedented moment of multiracial democratic politics—former Confederate states under federal mandate approved new constitutions that included public education as a protected right. Despite the damage to this right during Jim Crow, widespread public-school guarantees remain a legacy of the first moment in U.S. history that Black legislators wielded real power in significant numbers.^[23]

In the early-1970s, during another moment of expanded access to the ballot and public education that followed the Voting Rights Act’s passage and the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, West Virginia issued new public-school standards that incorporated a wide spectrum of American experiences and voices. These included a multiethnic language arts curriculum, an achievement of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.^[24]

The standards elicited a backlash. When the Kanawha County school board voted to adopt new textbooks, the only woman board member rejected the curriculum with race-based objections and John Birch Society rhetoric. The dispute attracted a variety of conservative groups and made national headlines. Heritage staff recast the dissent as a mother’s objection to the government’s imposition of “secular humanism” on children.^[25] The Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups leveraged the controversy to spread their own more explicitly racist agendas, and the dispute erupted into violence, with dynamite exploding in one classroom and unknown attackers shooting at school buses.

What appeared to the press as a “hillbilly feud” was an early instance of deep-pocketed conservative groups commingling with racist provocateurs and far-right factions and developing new strategies in the process. Although the K.K.K. occasionally made headlines, more influential neo-Nazis quietly recruited new members in the county, while local businessmen spread the “free market” word as part of the opposition to the textbooks. With the media spotlight on the concerned White mother on the school board, these other elements of the protest coalition—more radical and more mainstream—escaped serious scrutiny.

Witnessing how a mother making public demands could capture political attention, Heritage staffers drew important lessons from the conflict. They learned that explicit anti-communism and racism had become less effective than appeals to protect children from elitist bureaucrats and indoctrinating teachers. A new strategy emerged: playing the mommy card. In Blackboard Tyranny, her 1978 book geared to fomenting a parents’ rights movement nationwide, Heritage campaigner Connie Marshner identified the Kanawha textbook fight as the movement’s “first inkling,” and advised protestors to avoid open talk of race.^[26]

Therefore, in the Post-Jim Crow atmosphere of the 1970s, Heritage found that a populist message about corrupt and meddling government officials could succeed where overt racism and sexism were losing traction. This strategy dovetailed with the conservative movement’s post-Vietnam shift from a blue-blood image (personified by William F. Buckley, Jr.) to a more blue-collar appeal.^[27] Appalachia’s tradition of left-leaning protest featuring militant unionism and legendary labor battles in the coal and chemical industries had long made it hostile territory for blue-blood conservatives.^[28] Yet as federal and state austerity eroded investment in their communities, working people’s ire turned away from the region’s exploitative employers and onto the government.

In the decades since, Heritage’s key role in anti-government populism has fed the dramatic rise of religious affiliated and parent-led schools designed to avoid federal and state authority, desegregation, and mandated rights. Now, alongside parents’ rights advocates like Moms for Liberty and bearing universal voucher programs, Heritage is coming for public school funding and state constitutional protections.^[29]

Parents’ Rights, Now: The Heritage Foundation in 2025

The Heritage Foundation’s parents’ rights strategy may be old, but the coalitions behind it are gathering new strength fueled by vast private resources. Billions of dollars are pouring in from the DeVos family, the Kochs, Jeff Yass, Leonard Leo, and numerous others whose aim is to end state constitutional rights to public education.^[30]

In 2023, the American Legislative Exchange Council, along with coalition partners like the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), launched a state-by-state initiative to introduce copycat legislation for publicly funded school vouchers. They aim to bring vouchers to 25 states by the end of 2025, with the ostensible goal of a Supreme Court decision that would nullify any state constitution’s language preventing public spending on non-public schools.^[31] As ADF’s General Counsel asserted in a June 2021 conference call to Ziklag, a network of millionaire Christian nationalists: “I think that we can establish [vouchers] as a constitutional right.”^[32] Their efforts are aided by growing state political power in one-party supermajority legislatures and evolving gender-focused political vocabularies.

The discursive weapon of “gender ideology” has been especially useful. Anti-gender discourse first emerged in the 1990s, but it received a major boost after 2010, when resentment among religious conservatives over the expansion of civil rights to LGBTQ+ communities dovetailed with populist anger at government mismanagement of the global economic crisis.^[33]

In this context, Heritage’s plan to re-center the authoritarian family structure and its symbolic head (i.e., father, along with the church, nation, and market) has had widespread affective and electoral appeal, resulting in significant legislative action in state houses around the U.S.^[34] Although most media coverage of Heritage’s Project 2025 treated it as a plan for the future, the fights over public education in West Virginia and Kentucky have illustrated its salience in real time, long before the second Trump administration took office.^[35] A tidal wave of Project 2025-style legislation—backed by private funding, parents’ rights discourse, and other anti-gender campaigns—has inundated these states, creating profound changes in public education.

These changes create battle lines at the intersections of gender and race, with White male-dominated supermajorities in the state legislature attacking public education’s feminized workplaces—more than 75 percent of public-school teachers are women—and teachers’ unions, which have among the largest memberships in the U.S. In West Virginia’s 134-seat state legislature, Republicans secured a one-party majority in 2014 and a supermajority in 2020. Over the past decade, as the GOP solidified its political control, the percentage of state legislators who are White men increased from 79 percent to 83 percent, while the percentage of legislators who are women—White or of color—fell to under 12 percent, the lowest percentage since 1980.^[36] In a state where people of color make up 7 percent of the population, only three Black West Virginians—all Democrats—are serving in the 2025 state legislature.

With its growing political power, the state legislature grabbed opportunities to pass unpopular policies that eliminated workers’ rights, undermined public education funding, and criminalized the teaching of materials it deemed dangerous to children: actions straight out of an authoritarian playbook. In 2016, the Republican supermajority overrode the Democratic governor’s veto to pass the so-called “Workplace Freedom Act,” a law that ended the mandate for West Virginian teachers to pay union membership dues. Following this, legislators enacted laws that created the state’s first charter schools, first private school vouchers, and first Education Savings Accounts (ESAs).^[37] In 2021, Republican lawmakers also approved HB 2013, creating one of the nation’s most comprehensive ESA programs, while the governor appointed Adam Kissel, a Koch and Heritage-affiliated official in the first Trump administration’s Department of Education, to the state’s newly formed Professional Charter School Board (PCSB).^[38] Legislators also approved a bill that removed exemptions for school, museum and library employees under existing laws that criminalize the distribution of materials deemed “obscene.” As a result, teachers face up to five years in prison and/or a $25,000 fine for the “crime” of providing sex education instruction in a state with an abortion ban.^[39]

Despite West Virginia voters’ rejection of the legislature’s 2022 ballot measure and its attempt to usurp the Board of Education’s authority, Republicans continue to consolidate their power in the state house. In November 2024, the one-party supermajority expanded to 92 percent —with White men holding at least 89 percent of GOP seats—further solidifying the state’s White male minority rule.^[40] With veto-proof power, the legislature can afford to ignore voters’ democratic will as expressed in ballot measure verdicts. A case in point: During the spring 2024 legislative session, the House of Delegates introduced HB 4313, a “Parents Bill of Rights” that would allow parents to sue schools and local governments for violating their right to ‘school choice.’ The bill passed the House but failed to make it out of committee in the State Senate. It will likely be introduced again in 2025.^[41] Meanwhile, by 2026, the ESA legislation will extend universal access to education accounts for all school-age children in West Virginia, siphoning taxpayer money from public school budgets to fund private and religious schools, including out-of-state online academies.^[42]

In Kentucky, where legislators have been trying to run the same authoritarian and anti-gender parents’ rights playbook, the Right’s push to control education has also accelerated.

By the 2024 election, Republicans in the General Assembly—three-fourths of whom are White men—had secured an 80 percent majority. Under the guise of protecting parents’ rights, the state legislature has passed a slew of laws that foreshadow Heritage’s Project 2025 recommendations, from state oversight of sex education curriculum to policing teachers’ use of students’ pronouns and “harmful to minors” materials.^[43]

Yet, even in a state government where one party holds a supermajority, it took two attempts for Kentucky legislators to pass the Education Opportunity Account Act, the state’s voucher program. Some rural Republican lawmakers first voted against it because the total absence of private schools in their districts made the diversion of funds from public schools harder to justify to their constituents who would be disproportionately harmed by the shift.^[44] The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy’s July 2024 report shows that subsidizing non-public schooling with public funds could cost the state over a billion dollars annually.^[45] Kentucky is not alone: Nationwide, state spending on tax breaks and subsidies for private education expenses has increased by over 400 percent in the last ten years.^[46]

The legislation would also violate the popular will. As the rejection of Amendment 2 proves, Kentucky voters overwhelmingly support maintaining constitutional protections for public education. In contrast, right-wing lawmakers’ anti-democratic policies promise to be a huge gift to for-profit charters, unaccredited non-union private schools, and religious publishers that distribute “independent” Christian nationalist educational materials that valorize authoritarian family structures.^[47] Trampling actual voters’ rights, officials promise to protect symbolic “parents’ rights.”

Beyond Parents’ Rights: Heritage Comes for Public Higher Ed

With the help of its statehouse allies, the Heritage Foundation has deepened its top-down influence on public education in Kentucky while expanding its purview to the state’s colleges and universities. For example, the legislature’s serial budget cuts and reorganizations have reduced funding to Kentucky’s public postsecondary institutions by a third between 2008 and 2019.^[48] In these straitened circumstances, right-wing funders have pounced, pouring fortunes into the University of Kentucky (UK)—with many strings attached that undermine the research university’s public character.

Construction magnate Tom Lewis donated $23 million to establish the Lewis Honors College at UK, his alma mater. A generous contributor to Heritage—including funding Project 2025 co-author Lindsey Burke’s video on education policy—Lewis’s eponymous foundation has also supported UK’s on-campus anti-gender programming by right-wing groups Turning Point, USA, and Young America’s Foundation.^[49] Other major right-wing donors followed Lewis: In 2016, the Charles Koch Foundation supplied a four-million-dollar gift for the newly created John H. Schnatter Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise, named for the billionaire founder of Papa John’s Pizza. This donation came with stipulations granting the foundation the right to revoke its commitment if the university deviated from donor’s intended purposes, which included an academic requirement to “discover and understand aspects of free enterprise that promote the well-being of society” and notification of directorial changes.^[50]As public money dries up, university leaders are tapping private wells, even if the price is academic integrity.^[51]

In 2024, the UK Board of Trustees went further and abolished the University Senate (which had existed since 1917), a decision that eliminated even the veneer of democratic university governance, leaving faculty with a toothless advisory role. The UK University Senate passed a vote of no-confidence in the university’s president but failed to prevent its own demise.^[52] The following year, far-right provocateur and former Heritage Visiting Fellow Christopher Rufo publicly targeted UK, urging the state legislature to “figure out how to abolish DEI” at UK and “tame” the university’s “racialist ideology.”^[53] A few months later, seemingly in anticipation of such anti-DEI legislation, the UK president dismantled the Office for Institutional Diversity.^[54] The closure of the office, which had evolved from the university’s Office of Minority Affairs launched in 1971, ended more than half a century of overt, centralized institutional support specifically for racial minorities and other underrepresented students. Instead, that support work will be decentralized and transferred to different offices, such as the Office of Student Success and the Office for Community Relations.^[55]

These are only first steps toward a new political order based on a vision of the authoritarian family and the dominance of the public sphere. The authoritarian coalition’s plan for education, as spelled out in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, aims to eliminate the separation of church and state in education altogether, allowing taxpayer funds to support church and faith-based nonprofit-run schools with no oversight over spending, curriculum, or admissions. It also recommends cutting federal funding for public and private schools and universities unless they adhere to proposed regulations on curriculum and policy. As outlined, it would eliminate DEI programming, fully privatize student loans and eliminate loan forgiveness programs, abolish tenure and other workplace protections, and adhere to new definitions of sex and race discrimination under Title IX and Title VI, among other proposals.^[56]Project 2025’s plan would also direct the White House to allocate federal funding to “international business programs that teach about free markets and economics” and require “institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests.”^[57]

This is not a vision for education. It is a vision for re-education.

Lessons for Democracy

With its democratic decision-making and egalitarian purpose, U.S. public education represents a major impediment to authoritarian forces. Ideally, this publicly-funded good promises race and gender equity, local governance, and what philosopher Jason Stanley calls “civic compassion” among students sharing public space.^[58] Generations of civil rights activists from Reconstruction to the present have fought to hold it to these ideals amid continuing anti-democratic hostility. Thanks to their efforts, public schools remain, in the words of education advocates Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, “an ongoing experiment in democracy and self-rule.”^[59]

As such, public education offers lessons for resistance to authoritarianism. In recent years, teachers, students, and community activists have mobilized in democratic coalitions to oppose the designs of billionaires, religious fundamentalists, and right-wing ideologues.

In 2018, two years after the West Virginia legislature passed its anti-union “Workplace Freedom Act,” twenty-thousand K–12 teachers, bus drivers and staff—mostly women—walked off their jobs, demanding better pay and investments in public schools. Their strike inspired school workers in Kentucky and other states, launching the #RedForEd movement. As historian Jessica Wilkerson writes, this “face of the new labor movement” was in “a fight for the common good.”^[60] By organizing, they won significant wage increases and were introduced to new political possibilities.^[61]

University and college teachers are also on the front lines of democratic resistance. In 2023, when a new state funding formula undermined faculty decision-making on budget allocation at WVU campuses, threatening jobs and departments, faculty passed a resolution of no-confidence in WVU’s leadership.^[62] They recognized the gravity of the legislature’s power grab. As Wilkerson, a WVU professor, and two of her colleagues said in an Open Letter, “We also write out of concern that what happens at WVU this fall—whether these catastrophic cuts are frozen or forced through—will serve as a canary in the coal mine for the integrity and future of public education throughout the United States.”^[63]

Resistance is emerging in Kentucky, too. When a coalition of students, parents and teachers sued to block the General Assembly’s school voucher legislation, the State Supreme Court upheld their contention that the program violated the state constitution’s language that prevented public dollars from being spent on nonpublic education.^[64] After that, elected officials and their billionaire backers mobilized behind a parents’ rights campaign around Amendment 2—and failed, despite attempting to appeal to moms as modern-day suffragists. As it turns out, playing the mommy card isn’t always a winning hand.

The canary in the classroom serves as a warning and a call to embrace Appalachia’s legacies of resistance to reverse the shift from a left-leaning to a right-leaning protest culture that Heritage steered in the 1970s, and that today’s anti-gender movements aim to complete. Those opposed to democracy and the very notion of a public sector will not stop demonizing and scapegoating people who refuse to conform to the authoritarian vision of the family and its gender norms.

At the same time, from teachers on picket lines demanding state investment in kids’ education to parents challenging attacks on constitutional rights in circuit courts, Mountain and Bluegrass state residents provide a model for action in defending and building on public education’s promise. “There’s a tremendous opportunity,” claims Jennifer Berkshire, “not just to organize people around public schools, but as part of a broader antiauthoritarian project.”^[65]

After all, this battle over education is also a battle for democracy itself.