Schools awaken sleeping giant as parents fight back against woke education

Parents across the country are fighting back against pervasive leftist ideology in schools — with such frequency that opposition to certain aspects of public education is becoming a national movement.

Dramatic scenes at school board meetings and rowdy neighborhood rallies have become, in the final weeks of the school year before summer break, regular features of a movement that’s been characterized by the intense emotions it inspires on both sides.

Much of the opposition has been focused on critical race theory — a term that has come to encompass a broad range of curriculum changes that teach students to see themselves and others through the lens of race.

But parents and even older students are pushing back against a diverse range of efforts by schools to impose an ideological agenda, from enacting transgender policies to stripping holiday names from the calendar.

Loudoun County, Virginia, has become a microcosm of the fight against left-wing activism in the classroom; a school board meeting on Tuesday night erupted into chaos when parents spoke out aggressively against a new policy that would require teachers to use the preferred pronouns of transgender students, who would be permitted to play on the sports teams of the gender with which they identify.

Parents in the affluent Washington, D.C., suburb organized this year under the banner of a group, Fight for Schools, that mounted fierce opposition to what they said was the adoption of a critical race theory curriculum in the school system, as well as other liberal policies.