Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years. He is also the co-founder of the Human Restoration Project, an Iowa educational non-profit promoting systems-based thinking and grassroots organizing in education.

In 2022, following a long culture war fight in my own suburban Iowa school district, I resigned from a job I had held for a decade as a high school social studies teacher. When I eventually wrote about these experiences publicly, the feedback I got from students and parents was overwhelmingly positive and supportive, but the most frequent response I got was, “I had no idea all of this was happening.”

Two years ago, we were just beginning to understand what was unfolding in Iowa schools and repeated across the country. It was happening quietly and in isolated pockets, which gave plausible deniability to the idea that this wasn’t an organized, systematic effort to dismantle public education and punish those who refused to go along with it. 

While bigger states like Florida and Texas get more attention-grabbing headlines, in so many ways Iowa has been ground zero for the education wars: from changes to 40-year old collective bargaining laws meant to punish teachers and their unions, to an unpopular school voucher scheme meant to divert public money to private schools, and the culture war panic used to sell it. Iowa’s once-lauded K-College public education system has suffered, and this divisive and destructive agenda harms educators, students, and parents alike.

Fortunately, a new, and appropriately titled book by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider—The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual—maps the front lines and provides the reinforcements to fight back. If division and privatization are the greatest weapons used to dismantle public schools, it will take a unified democratic movement to restore and fortify one of our most important public institutions.

Previously Jennifer and Jack had partnered on A Wolf At The Schoolhouse Door, a thorough look at the organizations and actors driving school privatization in its various forms. The Education Wars situates today’s culture war headlines over book bans and “woke indoctrination” as the current expression of a cyclical back-and-forth over public education’s purpose and role in American life.

The authors remind us that “When Americans start fighting over their schools, you can be fairly sure of one thing: it probably isn’t really about school.” Instead, these fights are proxy battles over ownership of national values and our collective vision of the future. As far back as the Scopes Monkey Trial over the teaching of evolution, through Red Scare accusations of communist indoctrination, vicious fights over school integration, and Reagan-era social conservative backlash against LGBTQ acceptance; for as long as Americans have been debating our values and ideals, we’ve also been fighting over schools.

This context matters for anyone looking out over the cratered landscape of the modern educational battlefield and wondering both, “What the hell is going on?” and “What can I possibly do about it?” To understand that today’s culture war is part of an ongoing conversation over national values, one that each generation has to confront and resolve in its own way, is also to admit we have a lot more power and control over that conversation than we think!

This is where the Citizen’s Guide becomes a Defense Manual. In places like Arizona, New Hampshire, and North Carolina, book bans, budget-exploding voucher programs, and extremist organizations like Moms For Liberty are being defeated, thanks to grassroots organizing around diverse coalitions that emphasize community and shared values. The book quotes a coordinator for Public School Strong, one such grassroots movement, as saying, “When we can come together across lines of difference and say, ‘We want to defend and protect these schools, and we want to make them better for all our families and all our communities,’ we think we can turn the tide.”

Public education advocates at a Des Moines Public Schools board meeting this month

While my students and their parents were shocked in 2022 that the consequences of the culture war had landed so close to home, not a single one of us can say now that we have no idea what has happened to public education in Iowa. We’ve been dealt divisive narratives that pit teachers, kids, and parents against each other, backed by policies that promote private interests, particularly the sectarian religious and out-of-state corporate variety, while disadvantaging our local public schools and the students who need them the most.

Uniting a diverse coalition of Iowans from all backgrounds and interests in solidarity is the first step toward realizing a democratic education through strong public schools. All of this is exactly why I’ve joined Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI) Action Fund’s Public School Strong campaign in Iowa. As Iowa CCI Action puts it, “People power is how we win!”

Iowa CCI Action will be bringing Jennifer Berkshire, co-author of The Education Wars, to Iowa on an organizing tour, with seven stops across four days. 

• October 5 at 6:00 pm in Ankeny
• October 6 at 12:30 pm in Des Moines
• October 6 at 5:00 pm in Tama
• October 7 at 12:30 pm in Iowa City
• October 7 at 6:00 pm in Cedar Rapids
• October 8 at 12:30 pm in Cedar Falls
• October 8 at 6:00 pm in Iowa Falls

You can learn more about Public School Strong and RSVP for any of the tour dates at www.cciaction.org/events. I will be moderating the discussions in Cedar Falls and Iowa Falls on October 8, so I hope to see you there!