Is It ‘Extremist’ to Care About Your Kid’s Education? Some on the Left Seem to Think So

While the media world fixates on the 37-count indictment of Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents scandal, other issues — such as those on the education front — continue to go largely ignored. 

Take the decision by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to label Moms for Liberty, a national organization started by two Florida mothers in 2021, as an "extremist group" in its “The Year in Hate and Extremism” annual report. Moms for Liberty has more than 115,000 members in 280 chapters nationwide. 

The SPLC has regularly thrown the "extremist" label on conservative organizations with which it disagrees — sometimes to its own detriment. In 2018, for example, the center paid a $3.375 million settlement and issued a video apology to Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation after falsely labeling him as an "anti-Muslim extremist." The settlement was made to avoid a defamation lawsuit.

According to the SPLC report, the Moms group can be "spotted at school board meetings across the country wearing shirts and carrying signs that declare, ‘We do NOT CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT.’” Per SPLC’s view, it is an “antigovernment” group. Moms for Liberty and other parental-rights groups or chapters have been added to SPLC’s "hate map."

SPLC’s report also cites what it describes as the group’s “attack on the LGBTQ community and their rights [that] has been particularly focused on gender identity and the use of pronouns in schools, the transgender community and gender affirming care,” along with what it alleges as “ties with groups that SPLC has designated as hate or extremist.”

Could there possibly be a political angle here? Well, Susan Corke, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, visited the White House this past week to meet with National Security Council counterterrorism director John Picarelli.

Moms for Liberty’s co-founder, Tiffany Justice, laid out the organization’s mission in a statement to Fox News and in an interview. As a parent of two kids in elementary school, I didn’t see anything remotely extreme or unreasonable in what she said. In fact, many parents, regardless of political leanings, might agree with her basic perspective, even if they disagree with some of the specific issues the group takes on. 

"We are a group of moms and dads and grandparents and aunts and uncles, community members, that are very concerned about the direction of the country," Justice explained. 

According to the Moms for Liberty website, its core mission is to "unify, educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government." This includes its battles against mask mandates, the teaching of Critical Race Theory, gender identification, and sexual orientation in grades as low as kindergarten. 

In that, the group is basically no different in its focus than the educational platforms championed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who was reelected in a landslide in 2022, or Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who was elected in 2021 in a state that President Biden won by double digits the previous year. 

DeSantis went on in 2022 to sign a bill that mirrors the Moms for Liberty mission. Said bill was officially called the Parental Rights in Education law, but progressive groups and many Democrats quickly dubbed it the "Don't Say Gay bill,” in an effort to make the governor and parents' rights groups appear to be homophobic and transphobic. Many major media outlets followed suit. 

In a signal that logic and truth may not yet be dead and may still be valued, many Floridians and much of the American public appear to have rejected that characterization, with one poll showing more than 60 percent of voters supporting the law. 

Some in the media took their cues from the SPLC about the Moms group anyway. On MSNBC, Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI assistant director of counterintelligence-turned-cable news analyst, hailed the SPLC report and recalled the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan, which the SPLC quite properly and successfully targeted when it was founded in 1971. 

Figliuzzi said that after the FBI focused on the KKK decades ago, “they took off their hoods and their sheets and they put on suits and ties, and they went local, and they ran for office. So, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this going-local mainstreaming of hatred. We’ve seen it before, and we see it now with people who truly are driven by hate and deception, running for school board and elective office.”

A statement from the New Hampshire Moms for Liberty chapter refuted the SPLC’s branding: ”Labels only have the power you give them. We are not now, nor will we ever be, a ‘hate group’ no matter what the SPLC says. If you understand, defending parental rights and fighting to improve education is not hateful, but instead, is our duty.”

Education and parents’ rights could be a deciding issue in the 2024 presidential election, in which the difference in key battleground states could come down to suburban women and independent voters. 

Disturbing numbers tell the story about the current state of U.S. academia: 

- ACT test scores are at a 30-year low, according to tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the Nation's Report Card;

- One-third of fourth and eighth graders can't read at even a basic achievement level;

- Just 22% of Chicago public school children read at a basic achievement level;

- Just 26% of 8th-grade students overall are proficient in math, while 31 percent are proficient in reading.

So what are the consequences of all of this? According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, "two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of the fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare." 

The American educational system is obviously in serious trouble. The U.S. ranks near the bottom in math, for example, badly trailing the likes of Japan, South Korea, Estonia and even countries like Poland and Slovenia. 

Many parental groups and individual parents are concerned about their child's education, and such fears led to Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia. But some on the left seem horrified, not so much by the state of America’s educational system, but by the pushback from parents on the right and in the middle who are demanding a return to basics in education — and so, those parents are labeled as extremists.

That might not work so well politically in 2024.

Parents have every right to insist that their children receive the best education, not the politically correct one. They have every right to know what their kids are being taught, and then to decide if they think it’s the right curriculum for their kids. Because when it comes to the basics of reading, math and writing, our students clearly are failing at a patently alarming level.

Joe Concha is a media critic, politics and sports commentator, and a contributor on Fox News.