Empowering Parents to Reform American Education | Tiffany Justice

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty. Tiffany talks about her journey joining her local school board and how the challenges of COVID created an unexpected opportunity—what she calls “COVID lemonade”—for parents to see the indoctrination happening in public schools. They discuss the importance of local and state-level education reform. They also dive into the gender ideology issues that have circumvented parental influence and infiltrated public schools. 

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:00.146)
That'll be funny. Folks, welcome to the Anchor Podcast. Today we have a guest who needs no introduction. Four years ago, none of us had heard of Moms for Liberty. Today, most of us, there are very few who have not heard of Moms for Liberty. We're here today with one of the co-founders, Tiffany Justice. Tiffany, thanks so much for being with us on the Anchor Podcast.

Tiffany Justice (00:00.15)
Okay. Okay.

Tiffany Justice (00:21.4)
Thank you for having me on today. I'm excited to chat with you.

Jeremy Tate (00:24.722)
So I can't wait to hear this story. I mean, this is an organization that has kind of swept the country, empowering parents. You personally have become the voice, I think, for so many mothers and fathers. I'd love for you to kind of just take us back a little bit though, maybe 2005, 2010. Would Tiffany Justice back then be surprised to hear what you're doing in 2024?

Tiffany Justice (00:48.33)
Absolutely. And I would have been surprised to hear that I would run for school board in 2016 because in 2005 I was getting married. My husband and I have been married for 20 years. We have four beautiful children. I got pregnant on my honeymoon. So we were fast at work having babies. yeah, know, politics was something that someone else got involved in, right? I wouldn't have thought that I would run for school board. But then I started putting my kids in public school, Jeremy, and I saw a lot of issues.

Jeremy Tate (01:08.155)
No.

Tiffany Justice (01:16.428)
And that really spurred me to get involved. And we can talk a little bit about some of those issues that I saw. then in 2021, you're right, we started Moms for Liberty with two chapters in Brevard County and Indian River County. And within two weeks, we had a call from a woman, Barbara, on Long Island. I wasn't surprised because my family was originally from New York and the Long Islanders were done with the blue state of COVID. And she asked to open a chapter. And so we very quickly went national and then Moms for Liberty spread like wildfire all over the country.

Jeremy Tate (01:45.892)
I mean, absolutely like wildfire. But let's start at 2016. So you made this decision to run for school board. What were the immediate kind of causes? What were the catalysts for that?

Tiffany Justice (01:57.624)
So my daughter was in a school in my community. It was the only public school on the island. There's a barrier island where I live. And so was the only public school in elementary school there. And she was going to school. I was volunteering in the classrooms. And the hallways were flooding in the school. And I went to the principal. And I said, listen, I have two pairs of shoes for my daughter. But I'm volunteering in this classroom. And there are some kids who don't have two pairs of shoes. And they're coming to school in wet shoes. Why?

aren't you fixing the school? Why is the district not fixing the grading of the land on the school so that these hallways aren't flooding when it rains? You have to remember in Florida, we have a lot of outdoor hallways, right, and outdoor classrooms. Yeah. And so she said, well, the district doesn't really like when you ask too many questions when you're a problem. I've asked before, but they haven't been listening. And you you've known me for a little bit. And so I said, well, I don't care how the district feels about me.

Jeremy Tate (02:35.59)
Yeah, okay.

Tiffany Justice (02:51.254)
And so I'm gonna go ask. And I went and I asked the question as to why the school wasn't being fixed. What I found out was that the school had been pushed off of the capital outlay plan a number of times. The principal really wasn't advocating for the school in the way that she needed to. I found out why that was later because only about 25 % of black students at the school were reading on grade level yet the school was receiving an A every year. And...

So she just didn't want any questions really asked or any attention being paid to the school. It was better to kind of stay under the radar. But when I found all of that out, I advocated for the school to get fixed. I brought together a big group of moms and dads, and we sure did get that school fixed, even though one of the school board members wanted to just shut the school down. That was his idea. He said, we'll just shut it down and move it off the island. And I said, no, public education is important. We need to keep a presence on the island. It's where the largest tax base is.

We need our community to feel connected. And then I worked once I was elected to school board to have that principal replaced.

Jeremy Tate (03:52.658)
Okay, okay. And then what else takeaways from that those were you on for four years on the school board?

Tiffany Justice (03:57.942)
Yep, I was on for four years on the school board and what were the biggest takeaways? The unions have an undue influence in your children's education. Sometimes you'll find things out like lunch is at 930 in the morning. Why? Why are kids eating lunch at 930? it's probably because of the bargaining contract. I saw that the school board members were often beholden to the unions and that was frustrating. A lot of on the school board or so-called Republicans on the school board who weren't very conservative, who weren't protecting liberty and freedom and then COVID happened.

And I saw a lot of cowardice. I saw bureaucrats who were all too ready to make decisions for parents and for children. And I saw school board members who did not hold their authority. And it just was enough, Jeremy. The fact that the government thought that they knew better than us for our children was absolutely ridiculous. And then you saw the federal government, the DOJ, the NSBA requesting the Department of Justice to silence parents at school board meetings.

And it was just shocking to me. And so that's how Moms for Liberty was born as a school board member, knowing that we needed a grassroots army of parents to help us to make sure that our children were being prioritized in public education.

Jeremy Tate (05:00.497)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (05:09.874)
So let's dig into 2020, go back to that time we would all love to forget, kind of early COVID days and at the time was there a conscious awareness that y'all were launching what would become a hard hitting national organization with a tremendous amount of power behind it?

Tiffany Justice (05:28.014)
So March 13th, 2020, schools were closed, pretty much across the country, but that was when in Florida when Governor DeSantis closed schools. And I remember I was standing in the school district office. I was a very involved school board member. went to all of the teacher trainings, all of the leadership trainings. I spent a ton of time in schools going to different meetings with teachers and understanding how they were planning for their classroom. So I was a very involved school board member. And when we shut schools down, it felt like someone punched me in the stomach. was a, it just...

I always think of public education as like a cruise ship. It doesn't start quickly and it doesn't stop quickly. And yet here we were, they were like, we'll just put the kids on Zoom school. I was like, I'm sorry, what? We're gonna do what? And so that was a moment when I just knew it was wrong. It was a horrible decision for children. It wasn't necessary. And I vowed that I was gonna do everything I could to get schools back open. And we did that.

We fought very hard to get schools back open across the state of Florida and I was happy that Governor DeSantis on July 6th came forward and said we're going to have in-person school. Every school district is going to be able to create a plan for reopening. It can be a mix of virtual and in-person, but you must have in-person school. And that was a big, big win. The Florida Education Association sued Governor DeSantis to try to keep schools closed. They won. He appealed. Then he won.

And even in my own district, the teachers union was able to keep schools closed for an additional two weeks. They said for preparations, you the all important distancing and plexiglass and all of that, right? And so, yeah, COVID and the way we treated children was absolutely awful. It really showed me that American, the bureaucrats in America and America in general just wasn't prioritizing children the way that parents knew that they needed to be prioritized.

Jeremy Tate (06:51.686)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (06:58.352)
Mm-hmm.

Tiffany Justice (07:15.478)
And I vowed to do everything I could to make sure that Florida could lead the rest of the country out of COVID by showing that our schools were safe.

Jeremy Tate (07:24.306)
Well, and perhaps, you we can look back now at the four years of distance as almost a blessing in disguise as, you know, parents across the country became aware that it wasn't just the shutdowns. You know, when they had suddenly their classroom in their home and they had a window into what their children were actually hearing and learning, a lot of parents said, what is going on, right? What else happened during COVID in terms of kind of national thinking?

awareness in terms of kind of corruption in mainstream education.

Tiffany Justice (07:55.182)
Well, you saw parents coming forward during COVID and trying to speak out. And you saw the Department of Justice come forward and call parents domestic terrorists, right? The National School Board Association sent a letter to the Department of Justice to Merrick Garland saying that they felt that school boards were being threatened by parents. Parents were rightly upset, right? know, kids were being quarantined left and right, forced masking and healthy quarantines. It was absolutely awful. Even in my own school district, they would go around with a ruler that was six feet long and they would just

point at kids and say, you're quarantined, totally healthy. These kids were hanging out at the beach at each other's houses, not sick at all. And so parents were upset. And that moment of parents being called domestic terrorists, the FBI being sick on American parents, honestly, we had a mom who was contacted by the FBI and asked a number of questions like, do you have any mental health illness?

Do you have any guns in your home? I saw Matt Gates last week after his AG appointment and I told him, said, we've got a lot of work to do, Matt, and just told him about what had happened with the FBI and our moms. And so I just think that what we saw was an effort to silence parents to protect a failing system. Parents, as you said, got to see behind the education curtain. It was a blessing. I talk about COVID. We make COVID lemonade at Moms for Liberty every day.

And parents saw the indoctrination that was happening. They saw the failure that was happening. Oftentimes their children weren't performing at the level where they thought perhaps they were. it just was an opportunity to gather parents together and help them to be effective advocates. Because to be fair, parents were upset. They were coming to the school board meetings and they were yelling sometimes because they were angry. They weren't being listened to.

They were being ignored and we wanted them to know how to build relationships and how to shape policy so that they could have better outcomes for their children.

Jeremy Tate (10:00.498)
Tiffany, almost every article I've looked at, and I think even the betting polls as well. mean, here we are in the middle of November. You're one of three or four or five people that everybody think will become next Secretary of Education. If that's you or someone else, what is your vision for how we enact major reform of American education?

Tiffany Justice (10:27.918)
So President Trump has been very clear that he wants to abolish the Department of Education. He came out with a 10 point plan in 2023. I think one through nine were things that he wanted to see happen, changes that he wanted to see happen. And number 10 was abolishing the Department of Education. So really, to be honest, he's the boss and we're going to have to see what he wants to do. Does he want to work to make some reforms happen or does he want to right off the bat try to abolish the Department of Education?

I think we'll take our cues from him. The one thing that I think is important for everyone to understand is that state level advocacy, local control are the two most important things in education today, right now. That's why Moms for Liberty was created because school board is often ignored. It's a position that often spends the most amount of money in your community, certainly is making very important decisions about the trajectory of your community and the future of the children.

Jeremy Tate (11:03.666)
Hmm.

Tiffany Justice (11:20.974)
in your community, but it doesn't always get paid attention to very often, right? I think Moms for Liberty has made School Board cool again. I hope we have. But it wasn't always a coveted position. It was kind of like, if you want to be a politician, you start off on School Board, not that you're a lawyer, you're a doctor, you're a parent in the community, and you serve on School Board. So we've really tried to get people more involved and get them thinking about getting involved in politics in some way.

But and then state-level advocacy, know, the the Constitution says that education belongs in the state So the Federal Department of Education in and of itself is unconstitutional and we need to make sure that we put the advocacy where it belongs that we put the focus where it belongs and that's at the state level and so moms for Liberty has Legislative committees so we have chapters chapters is set up by County then each County has a legislative liaison that serves on a legislative committee

And that legislative committee puts together a legislative platform and they advocate at the state level on behalf of the chapters. And it's not national driving that, that's local, that's the chapters across a state choosing what and how to prioritize initiatives that will be best for their kids. And so no matter what happens with the Department of Education, local control, state level education reform is where the action needs to happen.

Jeremy Tate (12:41.084)
Hi, Tiffany. I think about FDR's language after the attack on Pearl Harbor and that this sleeping giant was awoken. I feel like that's kind of what happened, that these moms have been there the whole time. They've been passionate about their kids and them receiving the best possible education. And suddenly now they're like super awake and that's taken the form of running for school board and this level of ownership. But at the same time, we're also seeing kind of an exodus from a lot of the public schools, even places like New York City, Los Angeles.

and historic declines in the number of students, many opting for homeschooling, Catholic schools, Christian schools, moms for liberty in terms of questions around school choice, know, Cory D'Angelo's fund students, not systems, or is it kind of big tent, different chapters have kind of different takes on seven to state level?

Tiffany Justice (13:28.974)
That's right.

Tiffany Justice (13:36.204)
Yeah, so moms didn't realize that in the busiest time of their lives, when they were doing incredibly important work, right, having babies, raising their families, oftentimes working as well. I mean, let's be honest, the economy has not been good over the last four years. It's been difficult for parents. have been kind of awakened to the fact that public school may not be a safe place for their kids, but the economy is driving them oftentimes back into the work.

So I'm very hopeful for economic reforms that we see more parents that have freedom to be able to spend money on private school if they choose or to stay home and homeschool But we have moms that are all over the spectrum at Moms for Liberty We have moms who are have kids in public school moms who have kids in private school moms who homeschool to sometimes it's a hybrid

Jeremy Tate (13:59.28)
Mm.

Tiffany Justice (14:18.746)
We have a lot of moms who homeschool that still run chapters of Moms for Liberty and are involved in public school reform because they recognize the fact that while they can educate their children in their homes now, their children will then go out into the world and will need to live and work in a country where hopefully we'll have literate functional people and they can marry people and have a big life, right? And so moms recognize the fact that it's not just about your kids, it's about all of the kids.

Jeremy Tate (14:36.69)
Hmm.

Tiffany Justice (14:45.591)
Oftentimes when you volunteer in a public school classroom as a mom, you're not actually working with your own children. You're working with other people's kids and helping them. So moms have big hearts when it comes to children. And so yeah, you really see moms all over the spectrum as far as how they educate their children.

Jeremy Tate (15:03.056)
The classical education movement, let's talk about that. I think about the handful of folks that I've met from Moms for Liberty, yourself of course, a handful of others, and there seems to be a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. I think in some ways of classical education, not so much about Latin or Greek, but about recovering a traditional education, enough with trying out educational philosophies on kids that are 10 years old. We want the tried and true.

Tiffany Justice (15:29.07)
That's great.

Jeremy Tate (15:32.43)
every parent wants the best for their kids and they're saying that we've abandoned a lot of what was education for centuries and centuries. That's my experience of a general favoritism. the moms that you know, Moms for Liberty, classical education, is it increasingly popular? How do y'all think about that?

Tiffany Justice (15:52.812)
I think it is increasingly popular. think a lot of the moms who are homeschooling have come into contact with classical education and they've been spreading the message to a lot of other moms. Now we see a lot of advocacy happening for classical education in public schools. We actually have a charter school here in my community that's being turned into a classical school. So that should be exciting to see. So I think you're seeing a lot of change happen. Children should want to go to school.

They should enjoy going to school. If you have a kindergartner or a first grader or a second grader and they're not excited to go to school in the morning or they're coming home and they're in a bad mood or they're not happy, something's wrong. School should be fun. Learning should be fun. They should enjoy being around their friends. They should enjoy the good, the beautiful, the true.

Jeremy Tate (16:24.05)
Hmm.

Tiffany Justice (16:37.442)
but kids are being lied to in school. We have critical theory that's been laced through the curriculum across the board in education. Children are being taught to hate each other, to hate our country, to doubt their parents. There's a wedge being driven between the parent and the child in the classroom. And oftentimes to hate themselves. This message of gender ideology that a child might be born in the wrong body.

Jeremy Tate (17:00.242)
Mmm.

Tiffany Justice (17:01.418)
or that parents might be wrong about the sex that they observed in their child at birth and that somehow the school might know better. This is toxic. The demoralization of children with the introduction of such graphic sexual content as the moms have found in many of the books and curriculum in schools is toxic. And it's not good for children. It doesn't bring out the best in them. It doesn't give them hope. The learning and the teaching is not age appropriate. We could talk about that a little bit if you'd like, because I think

Jeremy Tate (17:22.642)
Mm.

Tiffany Justice (17:30.422)
Americans used to know and understand that there was something called age appropriateness with our children, right? We all collectively were okay with movie ratings, for example. No one's really rejected that, but all of a sudden in school, it was like we forgot the fact that maybe you don't talk to a six-year-old the same way you talk to a 12-year-old about different information. So I think moms are looking for positive curriculum. They want their children to love learning, to be inspired by learning.

and to want to go to school or to learn every day.

Jeremy Tate (18:01.466)
I think there's this great irony with the classical education movement and that the hope is that we can drop the term classical at some point, because we're really just talking about getting back to what a great American education always was. I think in terms of the inappropriate, kind of sexually charged teaching that's been happening, this conversation, which you may have seen when Megyn Kelly was on Bill Maher, Bill Maher was the poster child of the far left for my entire formative years.

And they're talking about the number of students that identify something other than their gender assigned at birth. And the number they said was half a million students right now, right? And are doing things that are gonna have permanent lifelong consequences. And it's becoming normalized. A close family member, one of my nieces, she was saying, this was around 2020, that,

at school, that she was a normie because she was just a regular girl who identified as a girl and was attracted to boys. And she felt like she wasn't interesting because she was a normie because of that. mean, this is strange times, right?

Tiffany Justice (19:14.284)
So social contagion. mean, truly Abigail Schreier wrote a book, Irreversible Damage. So let's talk about the irreversible damage first. This isn't like the goth of our generation, right? I don't know how old you are. I'm 45. I'll let my age out. But you know, there were kids who, you know, maybe they got piercings or tattoos or they dyed their hair black or they dressed in all, you know, we had like emo goth, but there was nothing irreversible about that. I mean, maybe the tattoo, right? There are some, I'm sure there are some people who got tattoos when they were

Jeremy Tate (19:25.234)
Hmm.

Tiffany Justice (19:44.171)
in high school that don't love them now. the truth of the matter was that it didn't sterilize you. It didn't create lifelong issues, medical issues. And now we have kids that are being put on puberty blockers as young as eight, nine years old. And it's causing irreversible damage. And parents aren't being told the truth. Sometimes parents are being told that puberty blockers are reversible. And the idea that schools in general, Jeremy, are keeping secrets from parents. That was one of the things that we saw in Florida.

Jeremy Tate (19:46.022)
Yeah

Jeremy Tate (20:11.526)
Yeah.

Tiffany Justice (20:14.306)
When I was on school board, there were some nonprofits that had worked with school districts through the student services department. So it didn't go through the school board. It was all procedure. And they put forms into schools, six pages of forms where they would sit down with a child without the parents and ask, what name would you like to use at school? What name would you like us to use with your parents? What bathroom would you like to use when you go on field trips? Where would you like to sleep overnight with boys or with girls? Unbelievable. In no other instance.

Jeremy Tate (20:38.127)
Unbelievable.

Tiffany Justice (20:42.434)
Does a school keep secrets like that from a parent? The idea that a child's expressing mental distress, and let's make no mistake, there's no such thing as a transgender child. No child is born in the wrong body and there's no right way to be a boy or a girl, right? But the idea that the school is intervening when a child is expressing mental distress and cutting the parent out, the people that love their children more than anyone else, is.

Jeremy Tate (20:53.586)
Mm.

Tiffany Justice (21:09.096)
absolutely nonsense. is criminal. These are government schools. Teachers are government employees. And the government should not be keeping secrets from parents about anything.

Jeremy Tate (21:20.626)
So is the dynamic that it's just like a 10 % kind of fringe, but that everybody has been afraid of that small contingency that you're gonna be called a transphobe? I think there's a lot of normal, kind of moderate middle people who see this as really kind of crazy, but they've been scared to say that out loud. Has that been the case?

Tiffany Justice (21:42.988)
I think that's probably true. I think Moms for Liberty was very brave in engaging on the issue right away. I had some people tell me when I first found out about gender ideology and how widespread it was across America that said, you don't want to engage on this issue. Donors don't like it. They won't want to fund you. And I said, if we're not willing to engage in this issue, then we shouldn't exist as an organization. This was an important issue for us to engage on because it really brought up the issue of parental rights. What does that mean?

Jeremy Tate (21:58.752)
Hmm.

Tiffany Justice (22:10.336)
You have the fundamental right as a parent to direct the upbringing of your child, their education, their medical care, their morality, religion. You don't have the right to abuse your children. You can't just cut off their healthy body parts. If you walked into a doctor's office and you said, I think my son's a pirate, please cut off his leg and put on a peg leg and poke his eye out and let's put an eye patch on, the doctor would say no. And if they did it, they'd lose their medical license. You would probably go to jail as a parent. But here, we're sterilizing kids and we're cutting off healthy body parts.

Jeremy Tate (22:19.962)
Yep. Wow.

Tiffany Justice (22:40.0)
Absolutely not. It's child abuse. It was very clear to us and it was important for us to really draw the boundary to show that yes, parents absolutely have the right to direct the upbringing of your children. They don't have the right to abuse their kids and gender ideology, gender affirming care, so-called gender affirming care is child abuse.

Jeremy Tate (22:58.962)
I think back, I think it was one of JFK sisters who received a lobotomy in the 19, maybe 30s or 40s. And at the time it had become kind of a trendy procedure, teenagers with emotional distress and this kind of thing. Once we get some historical distance from this, are you optimistic that people will kind of see this for, I mean, what breaks my heart Tiffany about this is that,

you're so confused when you're 13 or 12 or 14. And so for an adult to suggest that maybe you're actually a girl or actually a boy, I mean, there's something really, a power dynamic that's just kind of dark.

Tiffany Justice (23:39.894)
And oftentimes there are comorbidities, actually always there's some comorbidity happening either children are on the autism spectrum or they have depression or anxiety. And so there are other issues that are not addressed. And this idea of, might've been born in the wrong body is being given as a cover for everything that might be ailing a child now.

Jeremy, I'm a woman. Going through puberty as a girl is not fun. Your body changes a lot. Everybody sees it and knows it. You know it and it's hard. And so the idea that we've told all these girls that somehow if they're not comfortable going through puberty, getting their period, growing breasts, that somehow there's something wrong with them is absolutely crazy. The other part of it as a woman and a mom, I didn't know I wanted to be a mom when I was 13.

or 14 or 18 for that matter, honestly. If you had told me at 18, you're gonna have four kids. And I don't know how I would have felt about that. I think I would have said, well, I wanna be a mom, but I don't know exactly know how many kids I wanna have or when I wanna have kids, right? And so the idea that children can make these types of life altering decisions is nuts. We all know this. And my 12 year old would eat a pack of Oreos every day if I let him.

But I don't because I'm the mom and sometimes the nicest thing you can say to your child is no.

Jeremy Tate (24:56.914)
Amen, amen, love that. Tiffy, always end the Anchor podcast talking about books. And so I'm wondering if there, for parents thinking about this, thinking about school boards, thinking about some of the ideology that has become so pervasive in a lot of our schools, are there a couple of top reads that you would recommend?

Tiffany Justice (25:13.324)
Yeah, first of all, the first read I'm going to recommend is a new book that Moms for Liberty just came out with called Libby Justice Goes to Williamsburg. You know, for us as parents and as moms, we know that there was a real lack of good quality books that are being written for children. And we wanted to create a character that kids could really get excited about. So this is Libby and her little brother, Link, short for Lincoln, and her mom and dad. And they travel around the United States of America.

Jeremy Tate (25:31.57)
Mm.

Tiffany Justice (25:39.828)
and they visit historical places. So the first place that Libby goes is Williamsburg and she meets up with Gowan Pamphlet and he had started a church there in Williamsburg and he helps Libby to overcome her fear of speaking in person. And that's exciting for us. I really feel like choosing books for your children is such an important part of bonding. And our moms, if you're a member of Moms for Liberty, they share amazing.

Books with each other all the time books that their children are getting excited about You know my kids had a couple favorite books growing up that we like to read together Storytime was always a big part of their lives And so I just say to parents read with your kids all the time read to them when they're babies Read to them and make a tradition of it at night have family dinner and talk about what your kids are learning in school I think that's one of the most important things that you can do as a family

Jeremy Tate (26:29.734)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (26:37.116)
Love that. Tiffany Justice, thank you for the movement that you're leading, your clarity and willingness to say kind of bold things when it hasn't been easy. And clearly God has blessed the work tremendously that you're doing. And keep doing it into the future. Thank you for your encouragement with our work here at CLT and thanks for coming on the podcast.

Tiffany Justice (26:59.353)
Thank you for having me. You guys are doing incredibly important work.