Know Your Book Banners: Families Engaged for Effective Education

NOTE: The deadline to file to run for a school board seat in the May elections in Texas was last Friday, February 17. I’ll be posting the Book-Loving Texan’s Guide to the May 2023 School Board Election this week (!) and adding races in the weeks to come. Before it comes out, this post is meant to preview a group of book banners you need to know, a sort of supergroup of censorship aficionados who will be very active in the months ahead: Families Engaged for Effective Education.

[P.S.- Just for fun, here’s a playlist to accompany your reading of this piece.]

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I. Crossroads

Moms for Liberty is passé in Texas.

I don’t mean that the book-banning threat in the state is over, or that right-wing groups have stopped trying to take over Texas school boards. I just mean that the specific group Moms for Liberty—which was vibrant and active in the buildup to last year’s May school board decisions—has fallen out of fashion in recent months.

To wit:

The San Antonio chapter of Moms for Liberty is languishing without a leader after its two chapter heads stepped down in late 2022. In the Houston area, the Christian Nationalist group Mama Bears Rising—which I’ve covered extensively—has eclipsed M4L. In the Austin suburbs, the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty remains active, but even it was riven last fall over a conflict in the Round Rock ISD race.

But the biggest shift has been in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The Tarrant County chapter of Moms for Liberty was a major force in the elections last spring, with members either running or donating heavily in races across North Texas. But after the May elections, the Tarrant County M4L Facebook page disappeared; a few months later, its leader Mary Lowe announced that she was splitting from the national Moms for Liberty umbrella and starting a new group, Families Engaged for Effective Education. Since then, Families Engaged has become arguably the most active statewide “parents’ rights,” book-banning group.

II. Strange Brew

Though its Facebook group has fewer members (847) than Mama Bears Rising or even the old Tarrant County Moms for Liberty page, that membership truly draws on many areas of the state, and includes many leaders of more localized groups, from Jessica Brassington and Cassandra Crowe¹ of Mama Bears Rising to Tracy Hanes of Freedom Over Fear, an anti-vax group in Victoria, Texas. It’s a sort of supergroup of book banners, the Cream of the pro-censorship crowd. And members of Families Engaged have filed to run for trustee in a number of Texas school districts, including McKinney ISD, Humble ISD, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, and Carroll ISD.

At first glance, Families Engaged seems like just another of the M4L-style groups that are popping up everywhere, with language about “parental rights” and “protecting our children.” But the big difference, the disagreement that caused Lowe’s rupture with Moms for Liberty, involves “school choice”: the leaders of Families Engaged are vehemently opposed to vouchers, “educational savings accounts,” or any scheme that sends public funds to private schools.

That’s a dramatic shift. As waves of anti-CRT and pro-censorship movements have hit school boards in recent months, many people have (accurately) pointed out that these attacks are useful for those who want to drive down support for public schools and drive up for support for school privatization. On cue, Greg Abbott and other Republican leaders have used uproars about “woke” schools to make the case that now is the time to create a voucher system in the state. So it’s jarring to scroll through Families Engaged Facebook page, where denunciations of educators as “Marxists” and “groomers” sit alongside posts attacking Abbott and Texas Tribune articles explaining how vouchers defund schools.

III. Wheels of Fire

You might think that opposition to vouchers signals moderation, and that therefore the formation of Families Engaged is a welcome development in the education culture wars.

It’s not. The leaders of Families Engaged oppose vouchers for crackpot reasons: they think school choice is part of a global scheme to increase government control over schools, and that if government money is spent on private schools, those schools will be infected with the “woke” indoctrination they say characterizes public schools. “Strings attached” is an oft-repeated phrase among the group.

If Mary Lowe is the chief organizer and public face of Families Engaged, then the virtuosic thought leader of the group—the Eric Clapton to Lowe’s Jack Bruce—is Lynn Strawn Davenport. The two built their group in part by roadtripping around Texas last fall, meeting with leaders of local groups in the Houston area, in the DFW metroplex, and in places like Midland, where school board races haven’t yet drawn much attention.

Davenport ran unsuccessfully for a trustee spot at Dallas College last May². This is what I wrote about her at the time:

Davenport’s social media feeds reflect an obsession not only with “CRT” and “SEL,” but with conspiracies involving transhumanism and “blockchaining” of children–I don’t totally follow her thinking, but it seems to be based on the idea that schools offering mental health service are secretly mining data for the benefit of pharmaceutical companies.

I understand her thinking a bit more now, but I don’t find it any less wrongheaded or conspiracy-minded. It’s essentially an education-centered version of QAnon: global elites, the thinking goes, are using the education system to consolidate power by addicting children to electronics while also stripping authority from the family. This is somehow also accomplished by making kids trans. “What they really want,” explained Davenport in a talk last November, “is coders to build the metaverse of the future, so they want the kids to be completely immersed in technology to build this digital enclosure.”

As with any good conspiracy theory, that “they” in Davenport’s sentence can stretch and contract however she wants it to. At times, the villains in her theory are specific, remote billionaires: Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Mark Zuckerberg. Other times, “they” are all around you: the “woke” librarian, the principal of your daughter’s middle school. “They” generally refers to Democrats, but where Republicans are in power (like in Texas), it can refer to Greg Abbott, or (Republican) Commissioner of Education Mike Morath. And for the commenters on the Families Engaged page, “they” can be communists or capitalists; “they” can be world leaders or protesters in the street. “They” can be the pharmaceutical companies, or the teacher’s unions, or college professors, or parents of trans children. All of them are aligned, and all of them are trying to hide their agenda from you.

And, like any good conspiracy theory, it becomes a catchall for any disagreement with any figure in power.

It’s easy to see how, in such a thought system, even legitimate critiques³ can become wedded to a toxic soup of bigotries and cultural grievances. Christian Nationalism, homophobia and transphobia run rampant on the Families Engaged Facebook page. Two of Davenport’s most prominent disciples are Erin Greene and Tracy Shannon in Humble ISD. Shannon, who blogs under the name “Mad Momma Bear,” is the Texas leader of homophobic group MassResistance, and has challenged more than 30 books in the district. Greene is running for a place on the school board. The two made a video last December in which Shannon complained that the reconsideration committee she served on included “more lesbians than you would find in a representative sample of our community.” Greene nodded along, and later echoed Davenport’s conspiracy thinking: “It’s very well planned. They want the children to depend on the government. That’s what they want. And the transgender thing is just another way of trying to undermine the family and get between the family.”⁴  

IV. Tales of Brave Ulysses

The solution to many of our problems, Davenport and Lowe argue, is classical education.

I covered so-called “trad” right-wing Catholicism for years, so I’ve read quite a bit from proponents of classical education. But Lowe and Davenport use the term differently. I’ve never heard either of them wax poetically the great writings of antiquity; never heard them rave about Greek drama or epic poetry.

Instead, “classical education” seems to mean to them the absence of technology. “Books, paper, pencil and a great teacher” is how Davenport defined it in Highland Park. That’s not at all how someone from, say, the Circe Institute would characterize classical education, which is based on respect for (Western) tradition and an emphasis on a hierarchy of learning.  But the phrase is gaining traction among school board candidates in Texas, who are likely thinking less about Homer and Hesiod than about getting rid of Google Classroom.

Or getting rid of Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe books.

Because that’s where Families Engaged overlaps with the goals of many religious traditionalists in the classical ed movement: by focusing on “Western Tradition,” classical schools have a neat excuse for limiting students’ interactions with literature by writers of color, women and the LGBTQ community. Like the religious traditionalists who have been advocating classical ed for years, members of Families Engaged see contemporary schools as rotten with “wokeness.” Classical education, they think, gives them a way to avoid that.  

IV. Politician

Another Families Engaged school board candidate is Serena Ashcroft in McKinney ISD. Ashcroft, who entered the race with enthusiastic support of Mary Lowe, shows why, despite their opposition to vouchers, Families Engaged can’t be counted as an ally for public schools.

Ashcroft runs a private school in McKinney, MAKE Greatness Academy, which maintains a hybrid homeschool/private school model. Last July, before she announced her run, Ashcroft posted the following on the Families Engaged page:

Sick of it all! I don’t want my tax dollars going into the system in the first place. I don’t want them giving me a tax credit or a voucher. We [need] true tax reform. I will just fund my own education with my own money. I’ll put it where I want. It never goes into the system in the first place. I don’t support porn in schools. I don’t support any anti-american instruction or divisions based on race, sexuality. No gender theories or CRT. Why am I forced to pay into this system that is against my beliefs, anti American and unconstitutional?

While Davenport and Lowe sometimes pay lip service to the value of public schools, posts like this give the game away. Ashcroft isn’t calling for the privatization of public schools; she’s calling for their abolishment.  

NOTE: Thank you for your patience with all of the Cream references. Whenever I think of a supergroup, “Sunshine of your Love” just starts playing in my head.

1. Since I last reported on Mama Bears Rising, its founder Cassandra Crowe—a staffer of state congressman Steve Toth—is no longer listed on its website as a leader of the group, and she is no longer a part of the MBR Facebook page. She is still an active participant on a Facebook page for “The FORCE for CISD,” a district-specific group that previously was named “Mama Bears for CISD.”

2. Davenport also dabbles in election denialism. At a talk in November, she said, “My friend Gene Robinson and I came and spoke about our campaign, of course, you know, we failed in those two races. Although who really knows, because they’re adding voters to the rolls and there’s all kinds of voter fraud, as you all know.”

3. To be clear, there are good reasons to question schools’ reliance on technology, or to ask who has access to student data and to what end they’re using it. Bill Gates is conspiring with Greg Abbott to use The Bluest Eye to turn your child into a digital slave is not one of them.

4. In the same video, Shannon described George Floyd as “the crackhead, meth-addict guy that died of an overdose in police custody.” She also said, regarding challenged books: “The solution, if you ask me, is to fire the librarians that are putting these books in there.” And she and Greene argued that parents who buy books they deem obscene for their children should be prosecuted. “Hopefully we’ll pass laws against that. Actually there are laws against that, so hopefully you can eventually be arrested.”