Education has become a forefront issue among 2024 presidential hopefuls, giving parents newfound power in the primary election. Grassroots organizations like Moms for Liberty (MFL) are actively advocating on behalf of parents across the country to leverage their influence and drive more parental involvement in public education.
Tiffany Justice co-founded MFL with Tina Descovich in January 2021, in response to the concerns they had as school board members and parents witnessing the state of education during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“During COVID, moms and dads all over the country were very concerned about what they were seeing happening in their own communities,” Justice told Fox News Digital. “They saw policies that were really hurting their children… and they had to take a step back and say, ‘How do we have so many bad policies?’ and what they realized was that a lot of the politicians they had elected were responsible for these policies.”
MFL only endorses in school board races to keep the focus on location elections that have typically been dominated by teachers unions, but because the organization has members all over the country it has developed influence among many GOP 2024 presidential hopefuls.
Mom’s for Liberty is actively advocating on behalf of parents across the country to leverage their influence and drive more parental involvement in public education ahead of the 2021 presidential election. (Courtesy of Moms for Liberty)
After establishing the first two chapters, Justice told Fox News Digital that the organization spread like wildfire all over the country to now include 285 chapters in 44 states with over 120,000 members working to unify, educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.
Moms who are part of a MFL chapters across the country meet once a month to discuss the agenda of their school board and review different legislative bills and initiatives that are being presented by elected officials in their state, but they are also paying attention to national politics, Justice explained.
“They are paying attention to this upcoming presidential election, which we know is going to really be the formative and guiding light as we move forward as a country into 2024 and beyond,” she said.
Justice said it has “been awesome to see different people throw their hat in the ring running for president,” who have met with MFL members, but she said the situation hasn’t been the same among Democratic candidates.
“There haven’t been any events to be able to attend from any other candidates besides GOP candidates,” she said. “It seems since Joe Biden, our president, has announced his run for a second term, [but] he has not done any campaigning or speaking to the public about that run.”
She said MFL has invited President Biden to its annual summit in Philadelphia at the end of the month, but they have not received a response from him, leaving her to wonder where Democrats stand on the issue of parental rights, which she doesn’t see as a partisan issue.
Many moms were part of an untapped voter market that didn’t go to the polls pre-pandemic, who now wield voting power in the upcoming presidential primaries.
“We saw that 39% of our moms had never voted in a primary before,” she said. “That’s a game changer. You have a completely new group of people who have not been actively involved in the primary races.”
Moms for Liberty now has 285 chapters in 44 states with over 120,000 members working to unify, educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government. (Courtesy of Moms for Liberty)
Because she and Descovich both served on local school boards, Justice said her experience gave her a peak behind the “education curtain” to really see “how the education system in America is being used to radically transform our country.” She said national education statistics, like the Nation’s Report Card (NAEP), show “rampant educational failure” among students in the U.S.
“The data doesn’t lie,” she said. “We spend $750 billion plus on education. Those outcomes in any other business situation would not be acceptable. If you were the CEO of a company and those were the returns that you were getting, you’d be fired. And yet, in American public education, we continue to allow the people that have been in control of public education to continue to control it, enough.”