Some of New Jersey’s most powerful political fundraisers and an increasingly organized wave of progressive parents and activists are working to defend the state’s controversial sex education standards, LGBTQ-centric curricula and diversity initiatives they say conservatives have a head start in opposing…
“It’s not surprising that in those places where conservative candidates won running against the state’s health and physical education standards and curriculum issues there is a liberal response,” Marc Pfeiffer, assistant director of the Bloustein Local Government Research Center at Rutgers University, said. “The physics law that says ‘to everything there is an equal and opposite reaction’ applies to school politics as well.”
But Pfeiffer, from the Bloustein center, tracked politicization back to at least 2012, when the state Legislature and then-Gov. Chris Christie gave districts the option to move their elections from April to November, when most other elections take place. Parties started to feel freer to play a role in the formally nonpartisan school elections, he said.