CNN's "The Assignment With Audie Cornish": What's Going On With School Boards?

 You have to hand it to Audie Cornish. She leaves NPR after a long and distinguished career there and joins CNN to do, among other duties, host this podcast, and in her first episode she jumps into the deep end of the pool. 

CNN markets her new podcast this way: "Fiery Twitter threads and endless news notifications never capture the full story. Each week on The Assignment, host Audie Cornish pulls listeners out of their digital echo chambers to hear from the people who live the headlines. From the sex work economy to the battle over what’s taught in classrooms, no topic is off the table."

CNN Audio’s The Assignment with Audie Cornish premiered its first episode this week. In her maiden voyage, Cornish delves into the fiery debates and screaming matches at school board meetings. 

In the last two years, these meetings ostensibly about school curriculum have found their humanity dissolved into cage match events. In some cases, parents scream about CRT in their school because a Facebook post told them it was happening, or launch campaigns to ban books in the school library because The Diary Of Anne Frank may upset their little Caitlin or Chase. Other times, parents reaise legitimate concerns when the cameras are off.

Episode 1 Title/Synopsis:  

Meet The Parents Taking Over School Boards

For decades, parents have been passionate about what their children learn in school. In 1970s West Virginia they protested over diverse textbooks, in 2022 it’s the handling of the pandemic and issues of gender and race. In this episode, Audie talks to two parent activists turned elected school board officials about what motivated them to run for office and the changes they hope to make while in power.

Here is a partial transcript:

EP01 - Meet The Parents Taking Over School Boards

 Audie Cornish [00:00:00] Okay. Before we start a little bit of personal history. My mother was an elected school board member and in my small hometown outside of Boston, and this was back in the mid-nineties. That meant she spent long nights at meetings and salary fights with teachers unions or with parents angry over a lot of things. Fast forward to today and I have a kindergartner and I can't get these images out of my head of parents raging at school board members last year.

Audie Cornish [00:00:44] This wave of parent activists were upset about how schools handled the pandemic, handled teaching gender identity, handled issues of race.

 Audie Cornish [00:01:18] But the thing is, it wasn't some pandemic induced moment. It's the latest chapter in a long running movement. And the historians who study this stuff say school battles are really just proxy fights for what it means to be American. So I wanted to know more about these activist parents, what drove them to activism? And now that they have power what do they plan to do with it?

 April Carney [00:01:45] We need more critical thinking, and we need to be teaching our kids to think for themselves and to have their own opinions. And we need to be supportive of that.

 Audie Cornish [00:01:52] Unless a parent thinks it's inappropriate, then they can make a phone call to a tip line. Right, and say, I didn't like the way they went down.

April Carney [00:01:59] And that's a discussion to be had between the school board and the parent. And it's uncomfortable, but we need to be having discussions.

 Audie Cornish [00:02:40] Adam Laats is a historian of education at Binghamton University, and he studies the power struggle over what belongs in the classroom.

 Adam Laats [00:02:47] If we think about public schools as America's dinner table, where everyone comes and has to sit down and has to get along for a certain amount of time. It makes sense that this is where all the underlying tensions, all the long festering angers get expressed from time to time.

 Audie Cornish [00:03:04] And without going too far down the historian rabbit hole. One of the most interesting of those times he told us about wasn't Boston in 1974, but Kanawha County in 1974. That's in West Virginia. And that's where a school board fight about so-called multicultural textbooks spiraled into a boycott.

 Audie Cornish [00:03:39] All right. But let me back up, because like I said, it all started with textbooks, 325 of them.

Audie Cornish [00:03:51] Now, that's from a school board meeting, as on June 27th, 1974, in Kanawha County.

 Audie Cornish [00:04:12] West Virginia. It recently tried to modernize its curriculum. And remember, this was a tumultuous time in the U.S. with civil rights and women's rights and the Vietnam War all in the mix and around the country. There was a progressive push not only to integrate classrooms, but also to integrate reading lists.

 Adam Laats [00:04:32] The word they used at the time a more multicultural set of authors for literature. So, for example, they intentionally included more black authors, but they also included authors that wrote nontraditional poetry. So like E.E. Cummings.

 Audie Cornish [00:04:46] The school board had been prepared to approve these new books suggested by the state, but there was one member who objected and her name was Alice Moore.

Adam Laats [00:05:00] Sweet Alice says she came to be known in the controversy. She was an experienced conservative activist, and she ran for school board because she wanted to make schools more traditional, more conservative, in her words, more American and patriotic.

Audie Cornish [00:05:14] After Alice Moore objected to the new curriculum, rumors spread through the county and there was no Facebook at the time, but there were paper fliers passed around by parent groups, and these fliers claimed the new books promoted reverse racism and criminality. Let's call it Fake News, 1974.

 Adam Laats [00:05:34] So in June, the school board meeting was packed, and it was in a gymnasium and the windows of the gymnasium were packed. People were sticking their heads in to try to hear and see.

Audie Cornish [00:05:45] There were more than a thousand people parents, teachers, pastors, representatives from groups like the West Virginia Civil Liberties Union. And then here comes the part that's going to sound familiar.

Audie Cornish [00:06:28] If you listen close, you can hear the boos on the tape there. The audience cuts in so often that the chairman keeps threatening to clear the room. After 3 hours of back and forth, they decide to buy most of the textbooks. And the vote is 3 to 2. There was no way that fight was going to end just like that, not with the history of this county.

Adam Laats [00:06:52] Has a real strong, powerful tradition of labor activism. So when school politics got heated, the people in Kanawha County, you know, as as labor activists, but also as miners, they had not only traditions of of boycotts and picket lines, but they had also things like dynamite. And they used it.

Audie Cornish [00:07:16] Things more or less moved in that chronological order. You had nearly 10,000 people stay home during the boycotts. Kids, bus drivers. Truckers? Yes. Coal miners. And then someone graffitied Nazi symbols onto school buildings. Then some people took shots at school buses on their way to pick up the students who were still going to school. And then the bombs planted at three elementary schools and dynamite thrown into a school board building.

Audie Cornish [00:08:01] Okay. So we aren't at this point yet, but the argument about parents rights, it's back and the argument about political indoctrination in the classroom is back. And as more progressive ideas about race and gender take hold in the mainstream, some conservatives have felt their grasp on the definition of what it means to be an American slipped. And in the past few years, we've seen an increasing number of parents elected to school boards who want to focus on their right to determine how we should teach our nation's history and how and if schools should talk about race and gender.

Listen to the episode here.