Adam Guillette stands in front of an elementary school in Coppell wearing a gray suit and a wine-red tie. His hand is clenched around a microphone, his hair is slicked back and the tendons of his neck bulge as he approaches the camera and warns of a conspiracy that is bringing racism and antisemitism into the classrooms of North Texas: critical race theory.
As Guillette, followed by a wobbly cameraman, approaches parents arriving at their children’s schools for meet-the-teacher night, he is shooed away by administrators.
“Hey, good afternoon. A Coppell school district administrator was captured on hidden camera bragging about deceiving parents,” Guillette says to a parent outside of Denton Creek Elementary School, who responds that the claim is “awful.”
Guillette is president of the conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media, whose website claims to use “investigative journalism and cultural activism to expose corruption and hold bad public policy actors accountable.” On the media bias tracking website AllSides, Accuracy in Media is identified as being right-leaning, the most conservative ranking on the scale.
A look at Accuracy in Media’s financial benefactors shows the group shares several donors with the right-wing political initiative Project 2025, an effort the American Civil Liberties Union describes as "a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch authored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank that opposes abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity."
Another one of Accuracy in Media’s supporters has contributed $10 million to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s war chest, despite being a resident of Pennsylvania. And each party involved shares a similar desire to implement conservative ideologies into education.
In a video published last week by Accuracy in Media, Guillette claims that critical race theory curriculums are leading to divisiveness, and that the solution is the controversial school choice plan that is applauded by Republicans. A website listed at the end of the video directs viewers to a prewritten email that auto-blasts to elected officials in North Texas. The page also instructs the viewer to send the link “to every parent you know.”
“Public school administrators have been caught on tape bragging about how they indoctrinate children with the principles of Critical Race Theory. These radicals think they're above the law,” the email reads. “The only solution is Arizona-style school choice.”
When the Observer requested an interview with Guillette, a media coordinator said he would reach out to us, but he never did.
Targeting North Texas Educators Who Support Critical Race Theory
Guillette has traversed Coppell ISD with a bus carrying an electronic billboard that shows the faces and names of Dallas-area educators who he believes are not complying with the state’s critical race theory ban.
In 2021, Texas became one of several states to outlaw critical race theory — an academic framework that ties the history of race and racism in the United States to current social and political structures — in K-12 classrooms. Texas’ ban on critical race theory outlaws the teaching of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which examines the roots of slavery in the U.S., and creates guidelines for how teachers can, and can’t, talk about current events and the history of racism in their classrooms.
Debates over critical race theory in Dallas’ suburban school districts is nothing new. In 2021, after the Southlake Carroll school district proposed implementing a 34-page Cultural Competence Action Plan that would require educators and students to undergo diversity training, a well-funded, conservative organization called Southlake Families PAC swung the district’s school board election and killed the proposal. Conservatives have only strengthened their grip on the district since.
Now, Southlake’s neighbor, Coppell, seems to be a target.
Last year, Guillette visited schools across North Texas under the guise of a potential parent looking to enroll his child. Fitted with a hidden camera, he asked school leaders loaded questions about their schools’ standards.
“Whatever stuff [the state Legislature] did might have appeased constituents or whatever, but in practicality it’s not going to mess with education?” He asks a social studies teacher in Richardson ISD, who was not aware she was being filmed.
She hesitates, tilts her head from side to side, then answers, “Right.”
Guillette collected similar videos in Plano ISD, Mesquite ISD, Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD, McKinney ISD, Keller ISD, Saginaw ISD and Coppell ISD. Stitched together, they flash across his bus under the label “The most deceptive educators in Texas.” He seems to believe they are evidence of an inter-district conspiracy to subvert the governor himself.
So far, Coppell ISD is the only district Guillette and his bus have visited, and he is focusing heavily on a video in which Evan Whitfield, Coppell ISD’s director of science, tells Guillette that the district is “doing the right thing” by teaching curriculum that aligns with the national Next Generation Science Standards. Texas is one of only six states whose state curriculum does not align with NGSS.
“If I were to say that Coppell ISD is teaching the NGSS science standards … If I was to publish that on our website, that’s where we would get a call from [the Texas Education Agency],” Whitfield told Guillette. “But are we still teaching NGSS-ish? Absolutely.”
“Whether it's Project 2025 or these more localized efforts with schools, [the right-wing] goals are very similar. They want to tear down institutions that we've relied on for decades." — Will Ragland, Center for American Progress
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Coppell ISD declined the Observer’s request for comment. As an employee of the district, Whitfield also declined to be interviewed, but said the experience of having his face and name posted on a bus that has been driven around campuses in his district has been a “very frustrating situation.”
“It's very intimidating for any teacher to have their face on a billboard with whatever campaign call to action that these people are trying to push,” Will Ragland, vice president of research, outreach and advocacy for the Center of American Progress, told the Observer. “Intimidation is part of the tactics being deployed here, and across Project 2025, to make sure people fall in line.”
Ragland, who worked for the U.S. Department of Education under the Obama administration and has spent the year studying the potential effect that Project 2025 would have on America’s systems, thinks the Coppell billboard is “weak sauce” designed to “get parents riled up.” But the display is also symptomatic of a larger pattern of conservative groups “taking a wrecking ball” to schools, he said.
Accuracy in Media has previously used its billboard method to put pressure on educators. Last fall, Guillette and his bus visited several elite college campuses to call for the resignation of university presidents embroiled in the congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. The group's methods were criticized after the bus began doxxing — releasing the names, images and personal information — of students and faculty involved in organizations that signed a Palestinian solidarity statement.
When it comes to the North Texas campaign, Ragland doesn’t believe Guillette is motivated by legitimate curriculum-related concerns. Instead, he believes Accuracy in Media is using words like “antisemitism” and “racism” as buzzwords to pad their claims.
“Whether it's Project 2025 or these more localized efforts with schools, [the right-wing] goals are very similar. They want to tear down institutions that we've relied on for decades, tear down the trust in schools and the federal government, and rebuild them in a new image with people that are more willing to push forward and implement policies that are in line with the Christian nationalist way of thinking,” Ragland said. “With all of these efforts, they have a lot of similarities, they have a lot of similar fundings, they have a lot of the same tactics and playbooks.”
Who Has it Out For Coppell?
According to a mistakenly filed tax return that lists the financial donations received by Accuracy in Media between May 2022 and April 2023, the nonprofit shares several benefactors with the conservative playbook Project 2025. Accuracy in Media told CNBC that the return was filed incorrectly by the group's accountant — donor names are usually released only to the IRS — but the company did not dispute the accuracy of 25 of the 26 contributions listed.
Shipping supply magnate Richard Uihlein’s family foundation was listed as giving $10,000 to Accuracy in Media, a minor amount compared to the $13 million the group is believed to have contributed to Project 2025 groups. The media company also reported receiving $15,000 from the Adolph Coors Foundation (as in “the Mountains are Blue” Coors.) Adolph’s son, Joseph, is credited as kick-starting the group responsible for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation.
“Joseph Coors, without whom there would be no Heritage Foundation, is dead at the age of 85,” his obituary (which was written by the Foundation’s president) reads.
The Coors Foundation has contributed $2.7 million to Project 2025 groups since 2020.
Fort Worth’s Cullen Davis, who is not associated with Project 2025, as far as we can tell, is also listed as granting Accuracy in Media $10,000. Known as the richest man ever to be tried for murder, Davis helped his brother form the “World's Saddest Republican SuperPAC” back in 2015, and might still be toeing around politics.
Then there is the donor that Accuracy in Media disputes as being inaccurate: Jeff Yass.
Yass, with a net worth of around $45 billion, is known as the richest man in Pennsylvania. He is credited as Accuracy in Media’s largest donor, giving $1 million, but Guillette disputed the accuracy of the donation in an interview with CNBC.
“Jeff Yass is not an AIM donor and never has been. I think our accounting firm made a major, major error,” Guillette said.
Yass has not clarified whether he made the donation, although the address listed on the tax filing gives the address of his trading company. Given Accuracy in Media’s recent push for universal school choice, it wouldn’t be unusual for Yass to sign off on the organization.
In the last year, Yass has contributed $10 million to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is not currently up for reelection. According to Philadelphia Magazine, Yass has also financially supported as many as 15 candidates across the state running for office who were signed off on by Abbott. (At Abbott’s behest, Yass contributed to the campaign of Texas House Speaker hopeful David Covey, who narrowly lost his race and campaigned on, among other priorities, a promise to back legislation that would allow Texans to vote on whether or not they wanted to secede from the U.S.)
So why would a billionaire from Pennsylvania be interested in Texas state elections? Texas is a major battleground in the school choice war, and Yass is a major proponent. Republicans point to the school choice program as a “money follows the child” solution, but opponents say that isn’t necessarily the case.
“They're calling it school choice, but really it's a private school voucher system that makes schooling much more unaffordable for those in the low-income areas and gives a nice check to people that are a little bit more well-off to send [their kids] to private schools,” Ragland said. “It really does little to help kids that come from neighborhoods with low tax revenue or low tax bases, which are the main sources to fund schools.”
The proposal is one of Abbott’s top priorities, and it was a blow when the voucher program got removed from state legislation in 2023. After the most recent Texas House election, Abbott now believes he has the votes to see the program though.
Still, it seems conservative groups won’t take the risk of having school choice thrown out again in the upcoming session. Hence Accuracy in Media’s sights set on the Dallas suburbs. Guillette’s questioning of school officials was about critical race theory, but his call to action is one surrounding school choice.
“Regardless of your ideology, no parent should be forced to send their child to a school district where the administrators are captured lying to them, bragging about deceiving them and potentially breaking the law,” Guillette, neck tendons still bulging, says at the end of his Coppell ISD video. “You can send one message that goes to all of the elected officials in your area letting them know you want universal school choice, where the money follows the child.”
