How to stir up parents

There was a news report this morning about the Biden administration's rejecting a FOIA request about last year's weaponizing of the federal criminal justice system against "terrorist" parents.  It prompted me to check in on how the National School Boards Association was doing.  A WaPo article from January gives a sympathetic account of how the misunderstood organization was targeted by conservatives.

The article begins on a promising note:

Now, the association is at risk of total collapse.... Nineteen mostly GOP-led states have withdrawn from the association or promised to when this year’s membership expires, and six members of what was a 19-person board have left. Several states are discussing forming an alternative association for school boards. A new executive director of the [NSBA] is working to save the organization, lobbying individual states to reconsider, but so far he has not persuaded any of them to change their minds.

The disgraced former director explained how he came up with his bright idea to engage the support of federal cops against parents alarmed by racist curricula and COVID mandates:

Slaven said that because this was a sensitive issue, he circulated the letter to the board’s four officers, who all signed off on it. He said he would not normally have done this, but he worried it would be seen as a slap at the Biden administration for not enforcing federal law so wanted them to see it first.

Probably it wouldn't have occurred to him to run the letter by any trusted advisors for fear that it would enrage parents. He just wanted to be sure he wasn't being unfair to President Biden. An NSBA board member reported Slaven's claim at the time that the letter had been solicited by U.S. Education Secretary Michael Cardona. Cardona denies this.  The WaPo article goes on to explain why the letter was in a good cause, because of the need to address all those awful parents, then describes the explosive aftermath, including the usual "drumbeat" from malicious conservatives.

About a month after the letter hit the press, ex-director Slaven was fired. His allies assert he was a scapegoat in a conservative movement to undermine public schools by portraying them as hostile to parents.  Heavens to Betsy, how would parents ever have gathered that impression?  "Many of the [NSBA]’s opponents are also outspoken supporters of school choice programs that direct tax dollars to parochial, private and charter schools." Oh, you'd better believe it. Jim Green, executive director of the Oregon School Boards Association, offered this helpful advice:

“If you’re a person who doesn’t support public schools and want to see public schools go away, what better thing could happen than get rid of an organization like NSBA, one of the leading voices for public education,” he said.

Well, it's a leading voice for something.  Whether ensuring kids an access to education enters into it is less clear.