School Moms Quotes

“We have counted on communities to be places where everyone could belong and where the public schools were the recipients of mass support, regardless of party or politics. That is no longer true. And we are the worse for it.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“Donning the mantle of motherhood, female activists methodically investigated their community's needs and used their
'maternal' expertise to lobby, create and secure a place for themselves in an emerging state welfare bureaucracy.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“the sturdy power of psychological and emotional engagement to school success, it has become a tool not to replace content such as math, but to make it more likely that students will acquire the math skills being taught. Helping students to feel comfortable, capable, and welcome primes them to learn”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“The answer should not be to ignore race or injustice. But that is what is starting to happen in schools. Rather than grapple with difficult truths, state lawmakers have tied themselves in knots over how to soften the dark chapters of history. Some seek to gloss over racialized horrors and instead focus on the perceived impact of tough truths on students. In some places that has limited what may be taught and what teachers can say aloud.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“But a different atmosphere had swept in. Schools and classrooms were no longer about the relationships teachers built with students. There was less room for the carbonated prodding and ribbing that was a staple of high school learning. Now, people who were not part of a classroom's culture were dropping in and applying judgments.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“Since late 2020, the distorted notion of critical race theory has become a broad and powerful weapon wielded by the far right to halt teaching about or acknowledging the role of race in society.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“The problem, in other words, did not arise with one specific law or regulation, but from an elemental condition and the fact that racial unfairness is embedded in American legal culture and in our institutions.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“It is one of the most true things I have ever heard about how education should work. Learning happens in the context of relationships, which may look like trust in a teacher or in the culture that a teacher builds among students in a class. It is within this shared time and space that understanding evolves. It lets students test ideas-and even change their minds.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“Although the conversation about book banning is often cast as "protect-ing" students from the harms of graphic or detailed information, it reinforces a narrow definition of human experience. It may exclude those seeking to understand themselves, not for a frame they fit, but for what they can bring to the world once they feel included.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“That is a key part of helping kids grow up into successful adults, letting them explore, but letting them know you are here if they need you or if they have a question.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“Because schools are where parents gather and their children's education is a focus of a lot of parental emotion, the far-right has through state leaders and political networks deployed the Republican Party's extreme political vocabulary to manipulate them into mistakenly believing that their children are in danger.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“What does it mean when school board members answer not to neighbors, but to party leaders who direct the language, the policy platforms-and the donations-that shape their agendas?”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“The activism that started with Covid mask mandates, the visuals of angry parents packing school board meetings and holding signs on street corners, revealed something important about power to national politicians.”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

“Emotions were not the only answer to promoting effective learning happened in the context of relationships, that learning was social and developmental”
― Laura Pappano, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education