THE BOSTON GLOBE recently covered a complaint by Defending Education against Smith College’s admission policy on transgender students. Massachusetts policy makers should understand this as a maneuver in the far right’s campaign to undermine freedom of thought and gain control of America’s schools, from kindergarten through higher education. 

The Globe has covered attacks by Parents Defending Education (the parent of Defending Education) on public education in Newton, Milton, Lexington, and elsewhere. Massachusetts was one of the first states to come under attack by Parents Defending Education after its formation in 2021. A search on the group’s website for “Massachusetts” finds 185 entries.  

Parents Defending Education is not about parents, or education. It is an obedient servant of right-wing forces out to dumb down American education from K-12 through graduate school. The right’s lever to achieve its goal is to promote racial division and hatred against LGBTQ+ families.  

For example, in its first year of operation PDE filed a complaint with the US Department of Education and eventually a lawsuit alleging that the Wellesley schools were violating the civil rights of white students by hosting an online “healing space” for students of color after a mass shooting of Asian American women in Atlanta.  

PDE has filed similar lawsuits across the country involving education about America’s history of racial injustice, or the police murder of George Floyd.  

The Smith complaint is an example of how the right has seized on what it calls “transgender ideology.” Far right front groups frequently complain of “indoctrination” that offends “parents’ rights”—meaning, acknowledgement of the humanity of LGBTQ+ people. 

PDE’s attack on LGBTQ+ families is evident in the right’s book ban campaign. According to PEN America, in 2023-2024 there were over 10,000 books banned in America’s public schools. “Books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women. Books about racism, sexuality, gender, history.” PEN America separately reported that PDE had “curated lists of ‘radical’ books that they view as ‘indoctrination,’ and have actively sought to mobilize disaffected parents under the banner of ‘parents’ rights.’” 

The PDE complaint against Smith was signed by Sarah Parshall Perry, “Vice President and Legal Fellow.” Perry previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, for Trump’s first term Department of Education, and for the Family Research Council, which is identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group.  

PDE cheered  the recent Roberts court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which allows conservative religious parents to effectively ban lessons with LGBTQ+ themes or characters from K-12.  As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the “ruling threatens the very essence of public education” by giving religious parents “veto power over curricular choices long left to the democratic process and local administrators.” 

The Wellesley suit was brought by the Republican law firm of Consovoy, McCarthy, whose leading partner, the late William Consovoy, was a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and member of the Federalist Society. The firm has represented Donald Trump.  

In 2021 PDE, supposedly launched just that year by grassroots moms, paid Consovoy McCarthy $800,000.    

PDE’s president, Nicole Neily, told the Columbus Dispatch, “We just all work from home. … We’re all working moms.” That claim is ridiculous. Parents Defending Education had revenues of $5.1 million in 2023. Neily is a highly paid political operative in the Koch network.   

Parents Defending Education’s funders include a long list of right-wing funders and Donors Trust, known as the “dark-money ATM of the right.” Contributors to Donors Trust include Charles Koch, the Bradley Foundation, the DeVos family, and many other right-wing oligarchs.  

Lisa Graves and Alyssa Bowen of True North Research have uncovered PDE’s entanglements with Catholic conservative Leonard Leo, who engineered the appointments of the three Trump justices to the Roberts court. They also detail the connections of PDE to the radical right umbrella group Council for National Policy. Leo has served on the Council’s board of governors.  

The council’s education reform plan, spelled out in a 2017 memorandum to then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and President Trump, is this: abandon public schools and replace them with “free-market private schools, church schools and home schools.”  

The scope of the far right’s project to abolish our freedoms to inquire and learn is breathtaking. Policy makers and real parents must challenge fronts like PDE that seek to turn K-12 through higher education into profit making ventures or Christian academies and impose thought control on higher education. 

Right now, the extremists are winning.  

Maurice Cunningham is a retired professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.