In the four years since schools were shuttered in an effort to protect students from the onset of COVID-19, public education has been placed under a microscope and turned into a major political talking point.
Conservatives, led by political figures like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and groups like Moms for Liberty, have embraced a mantle of parental rights and claimed -- in part because of the window that remote schooling opened into the classroom -- that public school instruction has been hijacked by inappropriate curricula on LGBTQ topics, race and discrimination and more.
Opponents like the progressive group Red, Wine and Blue and leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom have pushed back on what they call efforts to de-emphasize focus on minority groups and social issues through controversial changes like Florida teaching middle-schoolers that slaves sometimes learned beneficial skills, as well as bans on books and more.
The classroom culture wars still rage in various states, but educational and parental advocates across the ideological spectrum who spoke with ABC News for this story worry that a pivot is needed away from those battles, some of which these groups first sparked, and back to education.
"Parents want to see our children read. It's not a matter of banning a book if they can't read it," parent Jay Artis-Wright, a critic of what she called Republican-led culture wars and a former leader of Parent Revolution, a nonprofit organization empowering parents based in Los Angeles, told ABC News.
The slogans and school board shouting have exaggerated and overshadowed more pressing issues, according to Artis-Wright and other activists on both sides of the issue.
"Teaching kids to read in school should not be a political issue," said Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, which has become widely recognized and polarizing. "It is not a partisan issue and I actually think it's the greatest national security risk that we have as Americans: a nation of people that are illiterate."
Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021, broadly says its mission is about "educating and empowering parents" and it includes numerous chapters that describe themselves as school board "watchdogs." But the group has also come under fire, with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) saying they spread "hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community," which Moms for Liberty leaders previously maintained to ABC News was "nonsense."
Beyond politics, fears for students' education are well-founded, according to national data and recent expert analysis.
More than a third of the nation's fourth-grade students were below proficient readers in 2022, according to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as the "nation's report card."
NAEP's math, history and civics scores all sunk in 2022, too. Fourth- and eighth-grade students saw their largest declines ever in math and eighth-grade students received the lowest history scores since 1994, when the history assessment was first administered.
In February, Harvard's Center for Education Policy Research Faculty Director Tom Kane issued a stark warning for parents.
Despite Kane's Education Recovery Scorecard outlining one-year gains last school year, the study, based on state-level and NAEP results, found that the average district is still "one more year away from catching up in math" and "two more years from catching up in reading."
"If we allow these achievement losses to become permanent, students will be paying for the pandemic for the rest of their lives, like in the form of lower college-going [and] lower earnings once they get out of college," Kane, who co-authored the scorecard in collaboration with the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, told ABC News.
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