Alison, Liz, and Rebecca welcome Maya Henson, Senior Research Analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, for a deep dive into the impact of Christian supremacy and anti-student inclusion movements on public education. They discuss the many strategies used by Christian nationalists to influence our public schools—from curriculum control and book bans to release-time religious programs and the weaponization of "parental rights."
Show Notes
Cases
Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Ed. of School Dist. No. 71, Champaign County (1948)
Parents Defending Education v. Wellesley Public Schools (2022)
Maya’s Bio
Maya Henson is a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, where she focuses on the antigovernment movement, which includes the anti-student inclusion movement.
Before joining the SPLC, Maya spent over 10 years in higher education, which along with her academic background provides a unique perspective to monitoring and exposing extremism in public education.
Since joining SPLC, she has provided expert analysis on topics such as the dangers of the newly revived Florida State Guard, the parallels in the current anti-student inclusion movement to anti-integration fights 70 years ago, students mobilizing to fight censorship, and the contradictions and potential threats of curriculum and book bans. In addition to SPLC outlets, Maya’s analysis has been featured in the National Urban League’s State of Black America, as well as in international, national, and local media.
Maya has a B.S. in business administration from Stillman College, an M.A. in psychology, an M.Ed. in higher education administration, and an MLS is Indigenous Peoples law. She also holds an Ed.D. with a concentration in diversity and equity education from the University of Illinois, where her primary research focus was the experiences of minority students in higher education.
Rebecca Markert:
Welcome to We Dissent, the podcast with secular women attorneys discussing religious liberty issues in our federal and state courts and our work to keep religion and government separate. I'm Rebecca Markert with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Liz Cavell: I'm Liz Cavell with the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Alison Gill: And I'm Alison Gill with National Women's Law Center. And in this month's episode, we're discussing efforts by white Christian nationalists and others to incorporate their religious symbols, ideas, curricula, and other materials into public education. And we're really excited to welcome to the show of Maya Henson, who is a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Centers Intelligence Project to speak with us about these issues. Maya's research focuses on the anti-government movement, which includes the anti-student inclusion movement. And before joining SPLC, Maya spent over 10 years in higher education, which along with her academic background provides a unique perspective to monitoring and exposing extremism in public education. Since joining SPLC, Maya has provided expert analysis on topics such as the dangers of the newly revived Florida State Guard, the parallels in the current anti-student inclusion movement to the anti-integration fight 70 years ago, students mobilizing the fight censorship, and the contradictions and potential threats of curriculum and book bans.
So in addition to SPLC outlets, Maya's analysis has been featured in the National Urban League State of Black America, as well as in international, national, and local media. Welcome, Maya.
Maya Henson: Hi, thanks for having me.
Alison Gill: So starting off, can you tell us a little bit about your work and how it intersects with looking at the propagation of white Christian nationalism and other related sort of ideologies in education?
Maya Henson: Absolutely. So before we start, I will say that at SPLC, we use the term Christian supremacy instead of Christian nationalism, and that's for a few different reasons. The groups that we follow really have a vision beyond the nation. Many are globalists. They want the world to be governed along these very strict lines that they deem to be theologically acceptable. Also, Christian nationalism doesn't really get it the way these groups just want a Christian globe. They want the world, like I said, to be viewed with this very narrow set of Christian principles. And those are usually Christian principles that the majority of Christians don't even agree with. Finally, Christian nationalism kind of gets at an important fact that we're seeing right now and present day, and that is the rise of supremacist movements. So think male supremacy, white supremacy, Christian supremacy.
So you asked about my work. So my work really looks at how schools and public schools in particular are living up to their basic democratic promise so that every student can learn, belong, participate without being treated as an outsider, without being excluded based on their religion, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity. So this exclusion can show up in a number of ways in public education that we've been tracking in the past few years. So think all of these attacks on curricula, how especially histories are taught in school, a lot of book restrictions, religious displays, so these current fights to get the Ten Commandments displayed in schools and classrooms, and also the so-called parental rights campaigns. And you can't see me, but I'm putting parental rights in quotes and air quotes.
Alison Gill; Absolutely.
Maya Henson: A lot of the groups that we are seeing that are quote unquote parental rights groups right now aren't true parental rights groups. So I think it's important to kind of highlight the through line through all of this, it's power. These groups and these individuals want to define who gets counted in public education, what counts as knowledge, whose histories are deemed important, what a family looks like, what patriotism looks like and what really belonging in community spaces looks like.
Alison Gill: So trying to shape the future by controlling what people learn really and what narratives are being promoted.
Maya Henson: Absolutely. And also who's deemed acceptable, who's deemed a patriot, who's deemed a community member, what is deemed a family. There's a lot of narratives now on what traditional families look like. So everything is really trying to seize this power to exclude what you don't believe in, what you don't agree with.
Alison Gill:All right. So appreciate you going through some of those intersections. So I also would like to talk a little bit about the history in this area. I mentioned at the top in your bio how you have compared this to the previous anti-student inclusion movements of the anti-integration fight 70 years ago and efforts to build an alternative private, exclusionary, often explicitly religious education system in this country has been a reaction to progressive civil rights advances for decades from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which ended school segregation to the ending of school prayer in cases like Engel v. Vitale and Abington v. Schemp in 1962 to the passage of the civil rights laws like Title VI and Title IX in the 60s and 70s prohibiting discrimination based on race, sex and other bases. So can you talk about some of the parallels that you've seen over time between these previous reactions and what we're seeing today?
Maya Henson: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to start this response off with another distinction. I said that I was putting parental rights groups in air quotes and at SPLC, when we were starting to track these groups a few years ago, it was really important for us not to give them that platform of being parental rights groups because in actuality, they're not working on behalf of all parents or all students. They're really a reactionary minority who are attempting to co-op the term mom and parents in their crusade against diverse students and inclusive curricula. So a lot of the groups now that are considering themselves parental rights groups are really just fighting for a very narrow demographic of parents and students. So usually white, straight, cisgender, Christian parents and students, those are the ones who they are fighting for the rights of. So at SPLC, we consider these groups to be anti-student inclusion groups.
And that is a term that we coined because when we were starting to write about these groups and monitor these groups, we did not want to call them parental rights groups. So to talk about the parallels we're seeing between these anti-student inclusion groups today and groups of decades and decades past, I think one of the recurring patterns is the backlash after expansions of citizenship. So in the 50s when we saw Brown v. Board and the start of desegregation in public education, that's when we saw a lot of these very similar mom groups pop up, also groups like the White Citizens Councils. And now we're seeing very similar groups pop up in terms of gender equality, LGBTQ+ exclusion, also efforts to teach a true honest history of the United States. So also this resistance has always been framed in very neutral sounding terms, things like local control, parents' rights, religious liberty, school choice, protecting children, which are all very legitimate causes, but they can also be deployed to preserve exclusion in public education.
So I think that a really big parallel in these decades long fights is kind of represented as freedom. They're like, "We want the parents to have freedom. We want our parents to have rights." But a lot of these fights are coming at the cost of students who are losing equal access, who are losing safety in schools, and also who are losing representation. So seeing yourself represented in the curriculum and books in the library, things like that.
Rebecca Markert:
And the right to a full education.
Maya Henson: Yes. And along those lines, public schools are preparing these kids to be citizens of our communities, of our nation. So it's important that they know diversity exists. It's important that they know how to communicate and get along with different cultures. It's important that they know how to discern fact from fiction because these are the people that are going to be voting and making decisions. And what we're seeing now are a lot of efforts to kind of tamp down on that very tightly.
Alison Gill: Absolutely. A lot of what we saw in reaction, I think in previous decades was the building of these, what do they call the segregation academies, self-segregation of people in response to growth in civil rights and advances in civil rights. And I think in some ways today we're not only seeing that, but also an increase by some of these folks, including white Christian nationalists and other exclusionary ideologies to impact public education. And I'm sure that existed then, but it's not just self-isolation. It's also our beliefs should dominate public schools. And so I guess I'm curious if that also has historical parallels or is this a newer development? How does that play into the history here?
Maya Henson: So the effort to shape public schools is definitely not new.
Public education has always been a major site of conflict because education reaches nearly every family, every community. And like I said, it helps form civic knowledge. Also, history has shown that the politics of fear works. It's pretty effective. So if you can say these buzzwords and scare people into believing things, then you can get action pretty quickly. I think the education and children are pretty low hanging fruits when it comes to that because it's kind of easy to manipulate people's fears about kids and you can get a lot of attention. So think about after Brown v. Board, a lot of the white citizens councils put out all of this propaganda about what's going to happen when your white daughter is sitting next to these big black men in classrooms. Okay, that's scary when you first hear it. And we're hearing a lot of the groomer rhetoric now.
So what's going to happen when you send your kindergartner to school and their teacher is gay? Oh my God, they're going to come home totally different gender. Okay. I think that what is newer is the scale of what we're seeing, the coordination, the legal strategy. So we're seeing a lot more national advocacy networks, media ecosystems, model legislation and litigation. We're also seeing a larger focus on school board campaigns. I mean, not a lot of people were paying attention to school board campaigns before, but now they've become highly partisan. And we're also seeing a lot of online mobilization that can turn local disputes into national campaigns pretty quickly. So think about when we first saw these school board meetings getting hostile, a lot of it was happening in Florida. I personally don't live in Florida, but I knew of everything that was happening because I was seeing it on my social media feeds.
I was seeing it on national news. So those local disputes became national pretty quickly and then other communities picked those up.
Alison Gill: That makes sense. Well, they made a special effort too to export them. A lot of the original protestors and people speaking before school boards were actually conservative activists in many cases who were pretending to be parents. And it's sort of interesting, it's sort of an Astroturfed campaign initially in many ways. I think that a linkage that sometimes overlooked that sort of links to the idea of self-segregation versus trying to influence public schools is the homeschool movement. There's been a growing homeschool movement in this country and they gained a lot of legal power over time through the efforts of organizations and rules that regulate homeschooling were sort of rolled back in many states. And then these groups provide a great basis for which to mobilize and impact public schools. And so I wonder if that's something you've observed as well. For example, I think for a while, the head of Alliance Defending Freedom was previously the head of a homeschooling organization a while back.
I think he's no longer there, but there's definitely a pipeline. And I remember trying to pass school policies in different states that they would just turn out these networks of, I don't know, 400 homeschoolers and parents to object to bills impacting education, even though none of them attend public schools. And I'm like, there's definitely a turnout network here. It's really kind of fascinating.
Maya Henson: Absolutely. So homeschool has always been a thing, right? It's always been around. What we're seeing now is kind of a greater push to divert public funds to things like charter schools and homeschools, which is a big problem because every time there's an election, you hear when one or two of the candidates talk about our failing public schools, but then people want to divert the little bit of money that public schools get to programs like homeschooling. And also these programs like homeschooling and charter schools that are getting these public funds usually have very little to no standards. So there's very little to no regulation that a public school would have. And also back to what I said before, I mean, these are going to be our citizens. These are going to be the people that are voting for what we get when we're elderly people. And if we are okay with the majority of these kids being taught these very biased, minimalistic, watered down views of history and civics, that's kind of scary.
Alison Gill: Absolutely.
Liz Cavell: Well, Maya, I want to discuss some of the ways that exclusionary movements, white Christian nationalists, Christian supremacy movements are actually influencing our public schools. I think there's a number of different avenues through which adherence of exclusionary ideologies can exert their influence over public schools. How do you categorize these different avenues or think about that?
Maya Henson: So I think there are several strategies and they're very connected. So we talked about this controlling the curriculum, controlling what gets taught in schools. We're seeing a lot more promotion of supplemental materials. So there's this push to restrict what is taught to ban books and to really limit concepts that challenge a very narrow national or religious view. Also claiming public space. So in public schools, we're seeing groups push to have religious displays like the 10 Commandments in classrooms and school sponsored practices like school prayer. And really any symbol that communicates to students that one religion or tradition takes priority or precedence over others. Organizing the pipelines, we talked about school board elections and how they have become very contentious and partisan in the height of parent networks like Moms for Liberty and groups like that and also youth activities. So we see groups like Turning Point USA that are starting to have more and more chapters within schools.
The use of law and policy, so using law and policy to pass mandates and restrictions on DEI, also opt-out rules, and then using litigation to expand what that looks like. And lastly, redirecting public resources. So expanding voucher programs and any other funding mechanisms that divert public funds away from public schools into programs that don't really have non-discrimination policies or strong student protections. So these strategies really reinforce one another. So a curriculum fight can become a school board election issue and then it can become a state law proposal and then it can become a lawsuit. So all of these are kind of interconnected and also very intentional.
Liz Cavell: Maya, can we dig in a little bit for a minute on the curricula and materials piece and what that actually looks like in practice? So we're all familiar with outlets like Prager U and Hillsdale College and these groups that have been creating biased and exclusionary educational, back to the air quotes, materials for years. So can you tell us about some of these, what they look like in practice, some examples and how they're making their way into actual schools?
Maya Henson: First of all, I think it's important to make the distinction that there is a difference between teaching about religion and promoting religion. I mean, religion, different religions, not just Christianity is a part of history. It can be a part of literature, it can be a part of art, but it's important that public education doesn't really make it a devotional thing or show any kind of favoritism. And unfortunately, that's what we're seeing now, this push to kind of make Christianity the only religion. So you asked about PragerU, and PragerU is a company that puts out what they call educational videos. So through their website and through YouTube, they put out educational videos. They also have a subset called PragerU Kids that does a lot of videos in cartoon form and things like that that really cater to children. PragerU's co-founder, Dennis Prager, openly admitted at a Moms for Liberty conference that Prager U materials are intended to indoctrinate, but he said, "What's wrong with our type of indoctrinization?" So they are very cognizant of what they're doing.
So PragerU kids materials have come under fire a lot in the past couple of years because Prager U has started working with state departments of education to get their supplemental materials approved. So in some cases, it's one part of the PragerU kids. So one state has approved just the financial literacy portions, but some states like Florida have approved all Prager U supplemental materials and have given teachers a carte blanche to use them in classrooms however they see fit. So when you're looking at state curricula, there is a standard there. There's a process to get these things approved, to get textbooks approved, to get teaching standards approved, but a lot of these groups like Prager U are getting in by getting their supplemental materials, which don't have this high standard. They can just be approved by the Board of Education of that state. So PragerU kids' materials are very narrow and simple in what they teach.
They're like, "But we teach about slavery and their teaching of slavery is very watered down, very basic. It really minimizes the role that systemic racism plays in American history. It really minimizes how kids will understand how slavery and segregation kind of shaped American society. There's a Columbus video that's been very popular, not for great reasons, where it's a cartoon where Columbus is portraying his treatment of indigenous people in a way that minimizes and justifies the violence and enslavement against them and kind of denies colonialism altogether. Prager U has quite a few videos that kind of deny colonialism was ever a thing. They have videos that present Christianity as an important part of the American identity. They also have several videos about gender, promote traditional views of gender and challenge any kind of contemporary understandings of gender identity. There's another group called Lifewise Academy.
Maya Henson: Yes we Know that. They offer Bible studies during school time. If a parent signs their kid up for this Bible study during school hours, the kid gets on a bus and goes to a different location during this designated time and then they do Bible lessons and then the bus brings them back to school so they can carry on about their day. So LifeWise Academy, this program is privately funded. They take donations to fund the program, but it's happening during public school hours. So that's a couple of examples of alternative and supplemental curricula. Texas also has the Bluebonnet learning that they passed in 2024, I believe. It's a state developed program that individual districts could choose whether or not they wanted to adopt it. And this is another one that goes beyond teaching religion as part of history to teaching religion as Christianity is the end all be all, not as a historical fact, but Christianity is the way of the American life.
And some critics kind of point out that elementary kids could have difficulty distinguishing between this religious claim and historical facts. So if you're talking about lessons that involved Jesus' resurrection and biblical miracles, third grader is not going to be like, "Oh, well, is this a historical factor? They're just teaching me that Jesus was resurrected and these miracles really happened." They found over 4,000 connections that needed to be made in this curriculum, which was like typos and formatting errors and things like that, which is also not a very good look for a state sponsored curriculum.
Alison Gill: It's definitely not. Can we dig in on LifeWise because I just find it so insidious for a bit. It's just the amount of peer pressure that they apply on other students to get them to attend this, it can be really high in some areas. I mean, it's called release time, what they have here to sort of release students. And if all the students except for a couple leave, then what are those students supposed to do? If you look at the Lifewise materials, they specifically brag about reaching and getting unchurched children. That's their explicit goal to sort of use peer pressure and get people to attend who normally wouldn't attend. It's not just unchurched, it has to be their type of church that they're promoting to in many cases. So it's just really fascinating, these sort of insidious manipulative techniques that they're using to reach very young children in some cases.
And also some of these release time laws allow for awarding credit for classes. And I'm not sure if Lifewise does that, but that's also really interesting in some areas that the schools actually give credit for going on the bus and going to receive these classes. It goes back to what you were saying about being confusing to children. I mean, if they're being bused, you're hearing from an adult, it can all blend together and they might not understand that this is not coming from an official source.
Maya Henson: Well, I think that's the intention.
Liz Cavell: Of course.
Maya Henson: Mean, that's the intention. Why else would you put it during the school day? I mean, otherwise these kids could go to Sunday school on Sunday or they could go to something after school. I think it's very intentional that they include it during the school day.
Rebecca Markert: Oh, there have been proponents of this release time education who've said as much as that, we need to get these students to have religion. They're not going to Sunday school, so we need to get them during school hours.
Liz Cavell: Right. It's using the compulsory attendance laws, the machinery of the government that is the public school system as a mission field because that's where students are. And also the added bonus is that you blur the line in the minds of kids between what the authority of your school is telling you, which we know holds so much control and authority over the minds of our kids. The whole point is to blur the line between what the state is telling you and what's private religious education. And so it's so insidious.
Maya Henson: And also very exclusionary. I think that people often don't recognize or realize or care that there are students of multiple religions in a classroom. So like you said, Alison, if all but two students in the class, and we're talking about in a lot of cases, elementary school kids, so they're all in the same class with each other all day. So if all of my peers are going to this program and me and one other kid are sitting here and we're not going to get to go to this program because our parents didn't sign us up because we're of a totally different religion, that is very exclusionary.
Rebecca Markert: Well, that's the story
Rebecca Markert: Or Jim McCollum when this was happening in Illinois back in the 40s or 50s and his parents didn't sign him up to take part in religious education. So the solution for the school was to send him out into the hallway while everybody else got this education. And that's usually what happens when you're punishing a child, not when you're just creating a separate educational space.
Maya Henson: Absolutely.
Rebecca Markert: So white Christian nationalists in adherence of similar exclusionary ideologies are increasingly using legal mandates to force both schools to include their preferred narratives and to exclude more accurate historical materials, things like works by black LGBTQ+ and women authors and other narratives that they object to such as the reality of systemic racism. We talked a little bit about this at the top of the show. Can you tell us a little bit more about these developments, especially talking about some of the state laws against DEI in education, some of the censorship issues that we're seeing, things like that.
Maya Henson: I think two things really come to mind here, and that's laws that enable censorship and the use of legal complaints. And we've seen that happen a lot recently and a lot of legal complaints to target specifically like DEI programs. So we're seeing this shift from individual disputes to kind of structural mandates like you mentioned. So like laws and policies that are regulating what schools can teach, what schools can purchase, so what libraries and textbooks they can purchase and what can be made available to kids. And we saw the start of this during what I refer to as the CRT witch hunt. So
During COVID, right around the time when George Floyd was killed and we had a lot of black people being publicly killed and the rise of the Black Lives Matter move Put this hyper focus on DEI programs and the lack of DEI programs in some instances, and also critical race theory, which in this context was not actually critical race theory. Critical race theory became this catchall term for DEI and really any kind of black history or black books that some people did not agree with, all of a sudden it was CRT. So that kind of led to a lot of these divisive concept laws in states, which are vague and I think intentionally vague because a lot of them are like, "We don't want kids to have anything in the classroom that is a divisive concept. What is a divisive concept?" No one really knows except the person who is deciding what a divisive concept is.
So that's when we saw a lot of curriculum censorship and also library censorship. The American Library Association came out with their 2025 numbers on book challenges, and there were over 4,000 individual titles that were challenged. So not 4,000 books total, 4,000 individual book titles that were challenged in 2025 in public schools and public libraries. And of course, most of those had to do with LGBTQ+ people, people of color, people from historically marginalized communities. So we see these censorship laws and subsequent rating systems really have a chilling effect on what books are banned, what's formally included in classrooms. And we saw also this over compliance. So teachers were kind of afraid of this book really hasn't been banned, but similar books have been banned and I don't want to get in trouble, so let's just not teach that. Or librarians were kind of just removing books from the shelves because in some states there was the threat of personal prosecution.
So if this book has gotten a lot of noise, the librarian might be like, "I'm just going to take this off the shelf so I don't personally get in trouble and I can't be mad at that." Here's an example. In 2021 in Tennessee, right after they had passed their anti – CRT divisive concepts law, there was a local Moms for Liberty chapter that filed a complaint on several books. So one of them was the Ruby Bridges book, the one that she wrote herself about her experience as a child. She wrote it for children. There were two MLK books. One of them was the I Can Read series. So it was written for kids of a certain grade level. I think it was second or third grade. And they said that all of these books were divisive. They were biased. They were un-American. The photographs were disturbing.
So the photographs of white parents yelling at Ruby Bridges as she walked to school, they were disturbing. That is disturbing.
Liz Cavell: They're disturbing.
Maya Henson: Imagine how disturbed she was when it happened to her at six.
Liz Cavell: Seriously.
Maya Henson: Yeah. So luckily that didn't really go anywhere, but we saw teachers getting kind of afraid to teach things in classrooms and be like, "Well, I'm just not going to teach it at all because I might be teaching a divisive concept. I can't really tell." Also, I mentioned legal complaints. So we've seen several of these anti-student inclusion groups only focus on complaints. There's a group in particular called Defending Education. They were formerly Parents Defending Education. They recently changed their name. They target DEI programs, like really target DEI programs, any kind of race conscious equity focused school policy or program. And they file lawsuits and federal complaints. So they file a lot of complaints with the Office of Civil Rights, with the Federal Department of Education and a lot of federal lawsuits. There was a school in Illinois that had an affinity group that was for black, biracial, African American kids.
And they claim that that violated the Equal Protection Clause. So they filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights, the Federal Office of Civil Rights. There was also a lawsuit that they filed against a school district in Massachusetts because they had an affinity group for students of color. There was eventually a settlement where saying that the school had to clarify that the affinity group was open to all students. It wasn't just for students of color. So that was a settlement. But defending education really presents these cases as part of a national effort to challenge race-based affinity groups in other race conscious programs. So they have really kind of catered their wins to their base in this is kind of an example of what we can do and what you should also do.
Alison Gill: They're also trying to sort of brute force their vision of what non-discrimination law means by bringing these complaints. Non-discrimination law is meant to prevent discrimination and they're using it to attack programs that are meant to foster inclusion. So just by weaponizing these investigation processes of the federal government, by bringing out these complaints, it subverts the purpose of the laws and they're trying to impose their own vision of what the law should be.
Maya Henson: Well, absolutely. And there's also been a lot of language in the past few years about discrimination against white people. So there was the Atlanta spa shooting that targeted Asian Americans and there was a school in Georgia who had kind of an impromptu affinity group to kind of support Asian American teachers and students around that whole situation. Defending education did not like that because they were like, "Why are you just catering to Asian American parents and teachers and students?" So there's been so much language around discrimination against white students and that's what they kind of paint these affinity groups as being, as discrimination against white students, which is a whole nother thing.
Alison Gill: Absolutely. And we see that at the federal level now too as well because I mean these people after pushing this for years, they're similar ideologues are in charge of the civil rights organizations. I think it was the Department of Justice's Office of Civil Rights was calling for, are you a white or male and facing discrimination because of that? You should bring complaints. So I mean, this is trying to assert this ideology across many different sectors.
Maya Henson: Absolutely.
Rebecca Markert: Yeah. Well, I want to talk a little bit about some of our recent Supreme Court decisions that came down talking about parental rights in scare quotes. But one notable way in which we are seeing white Christian nationalists, Christian supremacists are exerting this pressure over schools is through the expanded power under the guise of parental rights, particularly after we saw Mahmoud versus Taylor. We did an episode on that case previously, but we'd love to hear how you see that decision and others like it in the lower courts being used to empower this idea of parental rights in ways that are actually exclusionary for students.
Maya Henson: So I think the practical risk is expansion beyond these individual cases. So we've talked about these organized groups like Moms for Liberty, like Alliance Defending Freedom, like Defending Education. So these groups can really use these rulings to demand broader opt-out policies, to demand pre-approval of materials in schools, and just like the removal of inclusive content for everyone. I think that opt-outs can harm students because they can mark LGBTQ+ students and families as inherently objectionable. So schools have to avoid creating this classroom culture where some students are treated as a controversy, as opposed to just a full member of the community. I think that parental rights shouldn't become a mechanism for one set of parents to control what all students are allowed to learn. I'm going to get up on my soapbox right now because this is something that really bothers me.
This is a different kind of opt-out, but most public schools, libraries have opt-out rules. So if you don't want your daughter to be able to check gender queer out of the library, you can sign a form and say, "My daughter cannot check gender queer out of the library." When you look at the public records for a lot of these school districts, they receive hundreds of book challenges, but almost zero opt-out forms. So what you're having is parents who are saying, "Because I don't want my child to read this book. I don't want any child in this whole school district or any child in this whole school to read this book." And that bothers me because maybe you don't want your child to read genderqueer for whatever reason, but why does that mean that my child who may not be queer, but I want them to learn about this community or a child who is LGBTQ+ can't go in the library and see any kind of representation of themselves in there that bothers me
Alison Gill: Like you said at the beginning, it's about control,
Maya Henson: Right?
Alison Gill: About power.
Maya Henson: Yes.
Rebecca Markert: It also just frustrates me because you want to provide materials that children are going to want to read. And if they see something like that on the shelf that represents them, they're more apt to pick it up and do the reading that they're supposed to be doing and learning the way that they're supposed to in public schools.
Maya Henson: I also trust librarians. I mean, think about the fact that school librarians and public librarians, they are trained to be librarians. Some of them even have master's degrees in library sciences. So I am going to trust this librarian who is trained to stock these shelves and pick out these books that are representative of everyone versus this mom over here who just doesn't like transgender people. You want all these books pulled from the library. I trust the librarian over you.
Alison Gill: Yeah. Well, the Trump administration has further enabled this intrusion of white Christian nationalists and similar ideologies into schools by undermining federal education systems in a variety of ways. And one example, and this I've heard mostly about the context of affecting law schools, but definitely affects K-12 and other schools as well. One example is the Department of Education is proposing to exert more power over accrediting entities, which are the organizations that are meant to set quality standards and approve who can teach. And that affects colleges and a variety of different types of schools. And many such entities have rules around preventing discrimination, ensuring inclusion, that sort of thing. And so this would allow educational institutions like colleges greater opportunities to cherry pick what standards and rules they want to follow while allowing the administration to basically pressure accreditors to set different rules and even encourage white Christian nationalists or other exclusionary ideologies.
So I'm wondering if you want to provide any context because there's something happening right now.
Maya Henson: It's definitely something happening right now. And I think that there are a lot of ways that this current administration is enabling these anti-student inclusion groups, are supporting them, are affirming them. And I think that what we're seeing with the Department of Education is very troubling. For several years, a lot of these anti-student inclusion groups have promoted to abolish the Department of Education. During the last presidential campaign, Trump ran on abolishing the Department of Education. When he brought Linda McMahon in, he said, "I am bringing her in to abolish the Department of Education," which I mean legally they can't do, but what they have been doing is laying off the majority of workers and also moving major offices to other federal agencies. So we talked about the Office of Civil Rights and it was announced recently that those responsibilities would be shifting to the Department of Justice.
The Office of Civil Rights under this administration hasn't been doing much anyway. There was an analysis that said that they had dismissed about 90% of the civil rights complaints that had come into their office since the Trump administration started. So that's a pretty big number. And now they're wanting to move things to the Department of Justice. So I mean, I don't think we can be very hopeful that things will get better with that. The Office of Special Education is also supposedly moving under Health and Human Services, so moving under RFK Jr. Great. And a lot of people are concerned that that department is really going to disrupt the continuity of services and the expertise that families really get from the current Office of Special Education. I think that there's also a concern about this broader retreat from federal education oversight. So Trump and Linda McMahon, even this week they had a press conference to talk about moving education back to the states and local communities. But weakening the federal role also weakens the national backstop that students who face discrimination and barriers have. So we talked about those civil rights complaints. Also under Trump, we saw the rollback of Title IX protections. So this administration really restored the 2020 Title IX regulations and they rescinded a lot of those Title IX resolution agreements that the previous presidential administrations put in place. And most of those involved sex discrimination, sexual harassment, particularly expansions to include transgender students. The definition of discrimination has also narrowed a lot. Last month, the Department of Education rescinded this disparate impact regulation, which really generally said that there had to be intentional discrimination for a policy to be considered discriminatory. So it's not enough for a policy to be systemically discriminatory. It had to be very specific instances. So all of that together, especially that last one about rolling back of discrimination, I think it's saying that they can say civil rights protections are still in place. There are still civil rights protections in place, but what they're doing is really watering that down and rolling that back and making the distinction that exclusion doesn't necessarily have to happen through an explicit policy. They are really putting these mechanisms in place for the weakening of these protections while technically still having these policies in place.
Alison Gill: The disparate impact stuff really aggravates me. Disparate impact is, feel free to supplement or correct me, but it's the idea that you can see patterns of discrimination and basically deal with them even though it might not be intentional or you might not be able to determine where the intention is more likely. You see these patterns and you see that students of different backgrounds are not having the same outcomes or not being included in different programs or not being admitted at the same level, those sorts of differences. And that is potentially a clue that there might be discrimination ongoing in the program, whether the design of the program or decisions being made during admittance, those sorts of matters. But they still are considering in some ways disparate impact. They're just using it in a negative way. I've heard about a few examples of the administration looking into the records of universities, for example, that have strong rates of admittance of, for example, black students or Spanish speakers and saying, "Well, we want to look at your records and compare people because we think you might be engaging in discrimination to favor these people." So that is exactly what disparate impact. They're just misused. They're using it opposite to actually harm people that are facing discrimination. So it's not about getting rid of it. It's about applying it in a negative way in some instances. Am I being fair?
Maya Henson: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I think one thing that really comes to my mind in that instance is the disproportionate number of black and brown students when you're talking about school discipline. And of course, that leads to so many other things. It leads to a disproportionate number of black and brown students in special education because you have majority teachers are white and if they're teaching at majority black and brown schools. And then of course they're funneling these kids to special education because they have disciplinary problems or just because they don't communicate as well. And of course, now we're talking about the school to prison pipeline. But according to what the Department of Education is saying now is that these systemic problems just don't exist. You have to show me a concrete example for it to be actual discrimination.
Alison Gill: So we've talked about a lot of efforts by these anti-inclusion movements to really influence schools in all sorts of different ways. Can you talk a little bit about how communities and organizations are opposing these exclusionary efforts? How are they pushing back?
Maya Henson: I think that what we're seeing be most effective are kind of broad based unified movements. So getting students and parents and educators, librarians, faith leaders, civil rights advocates, community members together to kind of fight back against these groups. I think the strongest coalitions we're seeing are cross identity, multiple identities that are coming together to fight back against these groups. Because like I said, these are a very loud, vocal minority. We have all of this research that shows that the majority of educators and parents and community members don't agree with book banning. They don't agree with these restrictive curriculum policies. They don't agree with attacking these DEI, these affinity groups. So when these groups get together that are the actual majority to fight back against this very vocal minority, we're seeing a lot of success. So I think that it's important to say local engagement really matters. It's important to attend school board meetings. It's important to read any proposed policies, submit public comments. It's important to support educators and librarians. It's also very important to vote in school board elections and local elections.
Alison Gill: Absolutely. I feel like sometimes we're talking about really heavy issues and it can be kind of a downer. Can you give us a couple examples if you know of any of the top of your head where there's been success in pushing back against these efforts?
Maya Henson: This is my favorite question that I get from reporters all the time because I love to uplift community groups. I often look at things on a national scale. So I love working with community groups and I love uplifting community groups because those are the people that are on the ground doing the work. A lot of these entire student inclusion groups call themselves grassroots groups and they're not. So these are the true grassroots groups. There is a group in Sarasota, Florida who I've worked with for years called Support Our Schools, and they were kind of first on the scene when Moms for Liberty was getting started. Sarasota was a hotbed. They have been fighting back for years. And just last week in Sarasota, Florida, they managed to flip the school board majority back in their favor, which is amazing. There is a group called Read Freely Alabama that came about in Prattville, Alabama because there was a lot going on with the public libraries there. So they kind of came together to push back against a lot of the banning that was happening at the public library. And they have since done a lot of work throughout the state. Finally, I'll mention a group called Stop Moms for Liberty, which is a national effort that was organized by a former kindergarten teacher in Florida, saw what Moms for Liberty was doing in her area. And she has kind of formed this national movement of chapters in different states and cities and counties to push back against Moms for Liberty in their areas.
Alison Gill: Is Moms for Liberty, is it past its prime or is it continuing to be a big movement? I mean, I just think of the Tea Party. It arose and then died. And that's like we have these waves of these Astroturfed conservative campaigns.
Maya Henson: And it's kind of hard to tell right now because as an anti-government analyst, I can tell you that during Republican presidential administration's anti-government movement activity dies down a little bit because these groups are not really against the government at that time. They're getting a lot of affirmation from the government. They agree with the government a lot. So the national leadership of Moms for Liberty has been very tight with the White House. I mean, they're at the Easter egg hunt and they're doing all of this kind of stuff, but there has been some infighting because the local groups are like, "But we're still down here trying to win school board races. We don't care about you being here at the Easter egg hunt with the president and the first lady." So there is a lot of infighting right now. There have been several chapters that have shut down, publicly kind of distanced themselves from the national leadership.But it's kind of hard to say right now because the national leadership with Moms for Liberty is very ingrained into the Department of Education. They work with Linda McMahon a lot. They endorse a lot of what Linda McMahon says. I will say that they're not winning nearly as many school board races as they once were. Yeah.
Alison Gill: Well, that's good news at least.
Maya Henson: That's very good news. Very good. Actually, at their last convention, they publicly, they kind of said it as, "We know that you've been persecuted for speaking out at school board meetings and running school board races. You've lost friends and family members, but now we're pivoting away from school board elections to legal action," is what they said. But by that time, they were already losing school board elections.
Alison Gill: They're trying to put a cover on it.
Maya Henson: Yeah.
Alison Gill: So what can listeners do to help oppose these white Christian nationalism and other anti-inclusion acts pushing into schools and these efforts? What can we do?
Maya Henson: I think it's important to know what's going on in your district, to know what's being proposed in your district. I think it's easy to rely on viral clips and national talking points, but it's important to know what is being proposed in your individual school district. And I say that to parents and also community members, because there are a lot of people who are active in these movements who don't have kids at school, who are retired teachers, who are just community members that are like, "I don't like what's going on in this school right down the street from me." So it's very important to be keyed into what's happening, and that includes reviewing curriculum and book policies. Many state boards of education have to put this on their website. These are the textbooks we're looking at approving. This is the curricular we're looking at approving. And you can go on and see exactly what they're planning to teach the kids and what currently has been approved. Also, supporting students directly. We've seen a lot of student groups forming to fight back against this and students speaking out at school board meetings, but it's also important to have the backing of their community and the backing of adults and also just joining local groups. We talked about the power of grassroots groups, so just get keyed in with local groups, public education groups, library groups, youth organizations that may need mentorship or support.
Alison Gill: I think that's so important. We're stronger together and we're able to catch more things and work together and advocate. I think it makes such a difference.
Maya Henson: Absolutely.
Rebecca Markert: Great
Liz Cavell: Advice.
Rebecca Markert: Well, thank you so much, Maya, for sharing your expertise with us. This was a wonderful discussion and we're so glad that you were able to join us today.
Maya Henson: Thanks for having me.
Rebecca Markert: So that is it for today's episode. I'm Rebecca Markert.
Alison Gill: I'm Alison Gill.
Liz Cavell: And I'm Liz Cavell. If you haven't already, please follow us on our socials, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, and X. Please also remember to let us know how you're liking the show by leaving us a review. It's the best way to help new listeners find the show. You can also find us at we-dissent.org. Thanks for listening.
Rebecca Markert: We Dissent is a joint production of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the National Women's Law Center, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It is hosted by attorneys Liz Cavell, Alison Gill, and me, Rebecca Markert. Other production support comes from Greta Martens. Audio engineering is provided by Audio for the Arts based in Madison, Wisconsin. Thanks for listening.
