Briefing: Strategic Messaging to Defend Public Education & Defeat Authoritarianism
We’re excited to present our findings from a national study on what messages are most effective in defending public education and defeating authoritarian messages in school board fights. We conducted the study earlier this month in partnership with Change Research. We’ll present our findings on Wednesday, July 26, 2:30pm EST on a webinar co-sponsored by Popular Comms, HEAL Together, American Federation of Teachers (AFT), People’s Action, and Change Research.
Click here for details and to RSVP.
Why we did this study: In recent years, public schools and school board meetings have become a central target for a growing authoritarian movement. Adding to familiar attacks on our public schools, these extremists are fomenting fear and division by contriving new controversies around topics like school curricula (e.g., “Critical Race Theory”) and the rights of transgender students. These attacks have created toxic environments for our school children, endangered vulnerable students, poisoned community meetings, and paralyzed local governance. And they’re the latest tactics in a much longer-term strategy to undermine, weaken, defund, and ultimately destroy public education.
All across the country, concerned students, parents, and community members are standing up and fighting back. Strategic messaging can make a big difference in our organizing efforts to fight back effectively against these attacks. Our new national study tested how different messaging approaches perform against the authoritarian attacks that we are seeing nationwide. We will present our findings and provide practical guidance about how to put these types of messages into practice on the ground.
Registrants for this briefing will be among the first to see the results of our new study. (We presented a “rough cut” presentation of our data at the 22nd Century Conference in early July.) We hope to see you there!
