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- Republican lawmakers will have to decide whether to stand with the president popular among their voters or buck Trump in favor of groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.
On Friday, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon issued the White House’s endorsement of a plan to create Education Savings Accounts pushed by House Speaker Jason White. HB 2 would, among other things, permit money already allocated by the state of Mississippi on a per student basis to follow the child to the school of their choice, including private schools.
READ MORE: Mississippi House Proposes Ambitious Package of School Choice Reforms
In a post to various social media platform, McMahon said she was “thrilled to see Mississippi advancing an ambitious school choice expansion in their 2026 session” and that “[g]iving parents options is essential to improving education outcomes and ensuring every child finds the learning environment that best fits their needs. Well done, Jason White.”
The endorsement of the proposal was not entirely unexpected. President Trump has made dozens of statements in favor of providing school choice to every child in America, identifying it as a priority of the administration, while calling it “the Civil Rights issue of our time.” Trump has said that no child in America should have their future determined by their zip code.
He’s also put his “money where his mouth is,” openly endorsing politicians who voted for similar school choice proposals in states like Texas and celebrating efforts to defeat obstructionist candidates.
Prior to Friday’s endorsement, administration officials had traveled to Mississippi and hosted a delegation of Mississippi legislators in D.C. to show their commitment to the cause. The expectation within the Capitol is that the support coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will grow.
In poll after poll taken over the last decade, support for school choice in the Magnolia State has consistently been at or above 70 percent. Most people understand that every kid is different, with different learning needs.
Consistent with that polling, no legislator in any other state that passed expansive school choice programs has ever lost their seat for the vote.
Conversely, several Republican lawmakers have lost their seats for opposing it. See Texas.
Trump v. Southern Poverty Law Center
So what stands on the other side of Donald Trump that might entice Republican lawmakers to shirk their own Party’s platform? If you said the Southern Poverty Law Center, you’d be right.
The Montgomery, Ala. based organization, with over a half-billion dollar endowment, built a reputation on fighting for civil rights and pushing back against the Ku Klux Klan in the South.
The organization has faced scrutiny in recent years, however, as it expanded its targeted “hate groups” to include many mainstream conservative and Christian organizations.
In 2017, Politico acknowledged the growing criticism that SPLC is “becoming more of a partisan progressive hit operation than a civil rights watchdog.” Shikha Dalmia, President of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, said “the SPLC is not up to the task” of monitoring actual hate groups because “[i]t is too busy enforcing liberal orthodoxy against its intellectual opponents.” The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel called SPLC a “far-left activist group” that “exists to smear conservatives.”
SPLC’s former editor-in-chief of the Intelligence Report, Mark Potok, said, “sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on…. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.”
According to Alliance Defending Freedom, a public interest law firm that SPLC identifies as a “hate group,” other groups and individuals identified by SPLC include Ben Carson, The Federalist Society, Franklin Graham, Focus on the Family, American College of Pediatricians, Catholic Medical Association, Heritage Foundation, and Family Research Council, among others. In Mississippi, the American Family Association and Moms for Liberty have been included.
In 2012, the identification of the Family Research Council led to a gunman attempting to infiltrate their headquarters. In the process, a security guard that subdued the would-be killer, Floyd Corkins, was shot. Corkins later told authorities that he selected the Family Research Council because of its inclusion on SPLC’s list and that he “planned to stride into the building and open fire on the people inside in an effort to kill as many as possible.”
In a report filed this May under “Dismantling White Supremacy,” SPLC shone its ire on Turning Point USA. SPLC argued, “Turning Point USA’s primary strategy is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and civil rights activists.” Turning Point’s founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September.
Trump’s FBI recently ended a relationship with SPLC. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X. “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence. That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership.”
SPLC’s Big Bet in Mississippi
The same SPLC is helping fund the anti-school choice effort in Mississippi. In September of last year, SPLC announced three years of grant support totaling $330,000 to “The Parents Campaign” — the organization at the center of efforts to defeat giving families more education choices.
Orwellian in name, “The Parents Campaign” stands almost exclusively for the interest of education bureaucrats seeking to prevent parents from having a voice in how and where their own children are educated.
Among its other partners, according to the group’s 2022 IRS 990 form, The Parents Campaign counts state affiliates of far left national teachers’ unions like the National Educators Association. Between 2022-2024, the NEA and American Teachers Federation spent over 43 million dollars supporting progressive causes and candidates that have little, if anything, to do with education (think higher taxes, support for illegal immigration, and gun control). Democratic candidates received nearly 100 percent of their combined political contributions.
Other partners listed by The Parents Campaign include Democracy Forward, a group that paints President Trump as an authoritarian who must be stopped and that brags about filing over 100 lawsuits against the Trump administration. The League of Women Voters, an organization that advocates for abortion, is on the list too.
In-state partners listed include the School Board Association, the Association of Administrators, and the Association of Superintendents, along with several progressive think tanks. Glaringly absent from the Parents Campaign’s listed partners is any actual parent group.
Know them by Their Deeds
The Parents Campaign has fought against every major conservative education reform in Mississippi.
The Parents Campaign opposed the Literacy Based Promotion Act (sometimes referred to as third-grade reading gate). That law and a package of other reforms passed in 2013 has been widely credited with sparking “the Mississippi miracle.”
As LBPA neared full implementation in 2015, “Parents’ Campaign” head Nancy Loome told the Clarion Ledger “we are setting these kids up for failure.” Her warning came alongside dire predictions that the LBPA would result in 28 percent of all third-graders being held back.
Loome and other doomsayers were wrong. In the first year of the program, the actual retention rate for third-graders in Mississippi was roughly 8 percent. Instead of seeing marked increases in students held back, Mississippi has achieved historic gains in reading and math that have been nationally celebrated and emulated.
The group and its acolytes were so offended by Republican management of education policy on the backend of the 2013 reforms that they pushed a ballot initiative to amend the Constitution. Initiative 42 was first sold as a way to increase education funding. In reality, the proposal would have taken control of education policy away from Mississippians’ elected representatives and given it to a judge in Hinds County that most Mississippians had no choice in electing. Ultimately, voters rejected the power play.
Then as then-Speaker Philip Gunn tried to push a new funding formula, and again when current Speaker Jason White showed up with the INSPIRE Act, The Parents Campaign lodged opposition. The INSPIRE Act ultimately served as the foundation for a new funding formula that is pumping hundreds of millions more dollars into public schools annually.
Russ Latino
