Education

Canaries in the Classroom

Public Education and Authoritarian Politics in West Virginia and Kentucky

collage of protestors holding signs in support of public education in front of a green background

In Kentucky and West Virginia, attacks on public education by the state and federal governments foreshadow the authoritarian future promised by Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation on a national scale.

Article

The Education Wars

Author Q&A with Jennifer C. Berkshire

Woman in blue shirt holding a sign that reads "Teach real history don't ban books"

Jennifer C. Berkshire’s interview with PRA about her and Jack Schneider’s new book, The Education Wars, provides a road map for defending public education.

Q&A

The Next Frontier: Comprehensive Sex Education in the Post-Roe Era

Watch Now: A PRA Roundtable

Open books laid horizontally across a table with a couple laid vertically over.

The webinar asked the question: “What’s next for the anti-abortion movement in this post-Roe moment?” with a focus on the ongoing anti-comprehensive sex ed movement, its overlap with the antiabortion and anti-trans/anti-lgbtq movements, and,…

Webinar

Between a Secular Rock and a Fundamentalist Hard Place

The Aftermath of Scandal at Liberty University

The letters LU in red on a green mountain

I sometimes joke that Liberty University and I grew up together. My childhood home was about a mile from campus. While Liberty was getting on its feet, so was I. I started kindergarten at a Baptist school and stayed through 9^th grade. I…

Article

Exodus or Transformation

Christian Homeschooling and R.J. Rushdoony’s Legacy in the Age of COVID

The word In God We Trust engraved in a stone staircase

On a March 2021 episode of the popular Christian radio show and podcast Stand in the Gap Today, a former Pennsylvania legislator exhorted Christian parents to “leave Egypt behind” and seek out the “Promised Land.”^[1]…

Article

Woman holding sign that reads "I pledge to always teach the truth"

School board meetings across the country have seen an influx of parents and community members over the last few months, many there to fight Critical Race Theory (CRT)—something that the majority of primary and secondary schools don’t teach, and a…

Article

Precarity: The American Way

Watch Now: A PRA Roundtable Discussion

The myth of American Exceptionalism is well-understood to be just that, a myth. But the pandemic-induced national recession has thrown into high relief the true American Exceptionalism: life lived in a constant state of precarity. Precarity…

Webinar

Conservative, Christian, Corporate

COVID-19 Opportunism and Betsy DeVos’s Education Agenda

Since her deeply contested confirmation hearings, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been criticized for incompetence and ignorance regarding the public education system. But this lens obscures the extent to which DeVos’s decisions as secretary…

Article

Homeschooling During COVID-19?

Be Aware of Outreach by Evangelical Homeschooling Organizations

Adult man works on laptop and looks after two children reading nearby in room.

With so many schools closed across the country and so many parents working from home to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus, families are desperate for resources. In response, homeschool organizations like the conservative evangelical-affiliated…

Article

A professor offers a prayer during a rally by the LGBTQ Christian community at Azusa Pacific University to show support after the school reinstated a ban on same-sex relationships, October 1, 2018. Credit: Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.

When Gary Campbell enrolled in Baptist Bible College (now Clarks Summit University) in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, in 2001, he knew he was gay. He was among those students who, in an effort to repress their sexual orientation, choose the…

Article

Dismantling Public Education One Brick at a Time

The Privatization Strategy of Pioneer Institute and Betsy Devos

President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos poses for a photo with students of Saint Andrew Catholic School on March 3, 2017.

On Wednesday, September 12 a federal judge ruled Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s delay of Obama-era regulation of for-profit colleges as “unlawful.” The regulations forgive federal student loans from “misleading, deceitful, and predatory” lending…

Article

War on the Ivory Tower

Alt Right Attacks on University Professors

Thompson Library at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

In an effort to silence academics, right-wing activists, including many from the Alt Right, have doxed, threatened, and smeared professors across the country, without regard for academic hierarchy, type of institution, or discipline. They have…

Article

Charlie Kirk (founder of TPUSA) speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.

Established in 2012, Turning Point USA (TPUSA)’s mission is to “identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.” Claiming to have a presence on over 1,000 college campuses…

Profile on the Right

#First100Days Crash Course: Week 12

Public Education

From “school choice” schemes and the neoliberal privatization movement to the influence of the Christian Right on curriculum and school policy, public education is a key battleground.

Article

The Koch-Like Family You’ve Never Heard Of Influencing State Legislatures

The DeVoses exert influence over state and national policy making.

Article

History Wars Exposed

Right-Wing Influence in APUSH Curriculum Update

On July 30, 2015, the College Board, creators of college-level curricula and testing for high school students, released an update to its Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) course. The revision came after what had already been a two-year battle…

Article

Opening Pandora's Box

The Rise & Fall of the Right's School Voucher Pioneer

A young girl holding a sign that says Celebrate Teachers - Celebrate Choice! National School Choice Week

Polly Williams, the Wisconsin African American lawmaker behind the nation’s first school voucher program, believed vouchers could help students of color in urban Milwaukee. Conservative donors and right-wing think tanks saw her program as opening…

Article

Midterm Elections: School Privatization Continues to Advance DeVos/Heritage Foundation Strategy

Midterm elections present a particularly fruitful opportunity for the school privatization movement to maximize their investment. Since 1974, in mid-term or non-presidential election years, the federal election turnout has failed to reach 40% of…

Article

Neoliberalism, Higher Education, and the Rise of Contingent Faculty Labor

Higher education is under attack by the neoliberal enterprise. While most colleges and universities are still nonprofit institutions, they have been overtaken by the neoliberal agenda.

Article

Neoliberalizing Public Higher Ed

The Threat of Free Market Ideology

The current crisis within higher ed is often discussed primarily in terms of rising tuition and student debt, but the debt crisis is just one particularly ugly manifestation of a larger trend involving increased corporate investment in college…

Article

"Zero Tolerance" for Silenced Histories

Neglecting Civil Rights Education in Schools

Too often, debates over public education sidestep discussions of how schools can teach students not only to master Common Core standards, but also to be active, thoughtful, justice-driven members of society.

Article

Beyond Bullying: Equally Excellent Education for All?

The 2014 Creating Change Conference was held in Houston, Texas on January 29 - February 2 and included several panels led by staff and fellows of Political Research Associates. The following is a summary of my portion of the panel titled “Beyond…

Article

Review - Home is Where the School Is: The Logic of Homeschooling and the Emotional Labor of Mothering

Intensive Mothering

Mothers overwhelmingly bear the burden of the “immense emotional, temporal, and physical workloads required to homeschool,” Lois explains. This, she devotes her ethnography to these mothers, bypassing the more commonly researched homeschooled …

Book Review

Profiles on the Right: Young America's Foundation / Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)

Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) is a conservative youth activism organization that offers college students across the United States a variety of outlets for promoting Right-Wing ideology.

Profile on the Right

Creationists Get Influential Positions in Texas Science Textbook Review

It looks like the Lone Star State’s reputation as a hotbed of anti-science fanaticism is about to be reinforced. At least six creationists/”intelligent design” proponents succeeded in getting invited to review high school biology textbooks that…

Article

Right-Wing Group Places Islamophobic Ad in College Newspapers

Across college campuses last week, students were faced with a full-page ad promoting “Islamic Apartheid Week”. Funded and placed by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, it appeared during the annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” organized by pro-…

Article

The Revisionaries: Documentary Goes Inside Texas Textbook Controversy

From 2009 to 2010, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) set about the once-a-decade task of writing curriculum standards for Texas’ almost five million school children. Claiming that “Academia is skewed too far to the left,” right-wing Board…

Article

VA Bill Allowing Campus Groups to Ban LGBTQ Students Awaits Gov. Signature

The Virginia state legislature passed a bill yesterday that would allow religious and political student groups on college campuses to discriminate and still receive public funding. The bill, which would prevent universities from implementing wide-…

Article

Arizona Proposes Loyalty Oath, Creationism for Students

After the controversy surrounding Arizona’s S.B. 1070 immigration law and recent legislation banning abortion after 20 weeks of gestation, I’ve grown accustomed to controversial legislation from my home state. This month, the Arizona legislature is…

Article

Don't Say Gay in Tennessee Schools

This week, Tennessee State Senator Stacey Campfield (R) re-introduced the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which bans any discussion of homosexuality by elementary and middle school teachers in the state.

Article

A young boy with glasses in a school, looking at a book.

In June 1995, the economist Milton Friedman wrote an article for the Washington Post promoting the use of public education funds for private schools as a way to transfer the nation’s public school systems to the private sector. “Vouchers,” he wrote…

Article

From Schoolhouse to Statehouse

Curriculum from a Christian Nationalist Worldview

On May 21, Texas School Board member Cynthia Dunbar opened the board’s meeting with an invocation: “Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia, or the charter of New England, or the charter of Massachusetts Bay, or the Fundamental Orders of…

Article

A teacher looking at a classroom of students, with one student's hand in the air

Commentary Dover is over, for now. Beginning in 2004, an elected school board attempted to change the Dover, PA, science curriculum so that it cast significant doubt on the evolutionary hypothesis. The board tried to substitute a textbook,…

Article

Conservative Campus Organizing

Growing Pains or Arrested Development?

Two students holding a banner that says "Shut down Coulter. Wed 7 PM Wheeler Hall."

“A few years ago,” the Washington Times reported in a story last year, “Jeff O’Holleran said he began to realize that he was different from the other boys he knew…. Yesterday, he said, it was time to come out of the closet. In the middle…

Article

Progressive and Conservative Campus Activism

Excerpt from Deliberate Differences: Progressive and Conservative Campus Activism in the United States, a Political Research Associates report by Pam Chamberlain (2005). Our findings are summarized as follows: 1. Energetic College Students…

Article

The Pioneer Institute

Privatizing the Common Wealth

Foreword By Patricia JehlenState Representative - Somerville, MA Ideas are powerful. The relentless, well-funded, and well-connected efforts of the Pioneer Institute to “change the direction of the wind” politically in Massachusetts are well…

Report

Canaries in the Classroom

The Education Wars

The Next Frontier: Comprehensive Sex Education in the Post-Roe Era

Between a Secular Rock and a Fundamentalist Hard Place

Exodus or Transformation

Sowing the Seeds of White Supremacy Through Education

Precarity: The American Way

Conservative, Christian, Corporate

Homeschooling During COVID-19?

The Struggle for LGBTQ Inclusion at Christian Colleges and Universities

Dismantling Public Education One Brick at a Time

War on the Ivory Tower

Profile on the Right: Turning Point USA (TPUSA)

#First100Days Crash Course: Week 12

The Koch-Like Family You’ve Never Heard Of Influencing State Legislatures

History Wars Exposed

Opening Pandora's Box

Midterm Elections: School Privatization Continues to Advance DeVos/Heritage Foundation Strategy

Neoliberalism, Higher Education, and the Rise of Contingent Faculty Labor

Neoliberalizing Public Higher Ed

"Zero Tolerance" for Silenced Histories

Beyond Bullying: Equally Excellent Education for All?

Review - Home is Where the School Is: The Logic of Homeschooling and the Emotional Labor of Mothering

Profiles on the Right: Young America's Foundation / Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)

Creationists Get Influential Positions in Texas Science Textbook Review

Right-Wing Group Places Islamophobic Ad in College Newspapers

The Revisionaries: Documentary Goes Inside Texas Textbook Controversy

VA Bill Allowing Campus Groups to Ban LGBTQ Students Awaits Gov. Signature

Arizona Proposes Loyalty Oath, Creationism for Students

Don't Say Gay in Tennessee Schools

The Right's "School Choice" Scheme

From Schoolhouse to Statehouse

Designs on the Culture

Conservative Campus Organizing

Progressive and Conservative Campus Activism

The Pioneer Institute

Research

Search

Education

Research