Radical Parent Mobs Threaten Public Schooling, the Well-Being of Children and Democracy Itself

Last week this blog explored political theorist Benjamin Barber’s thinking about the danger of conflating the idea of individual liberty with the concept of freedom in a democratic society: “Freedom is not just about standing alone and saying no. As a usable ideal, it turns out to be a public rather than a private notion… Nowadays, the idea that only private persons are free… turns out to be an assault not on tyranny but on democracy. It challenges not the illegitimate power by which tyrants once ruled us but the legitimate power by which we try to rule ourselves in common. Where once this notion of liberty challenged corrupt power, today it undermines legitimate power.” (Consumed, pp. 119-120) Barber reminds us that as citizens of a democracy, we have chosen to accept the social contract: “a covenant in which individuals agree to give up unsecured private liberty in exchange for the blessings of public liberty and common security.” (Consumed, p. 123)

If Barber were alive today, he would worry about what political scientist Maurice Cunningham has profiled as far-right think tanks promoting,  far-right funders paying for,  and politicians like Ron DeSantis exploiting so-called parents’ groups like Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, and No Left Turn in Education.  Barber would have noticed the collaborative, far-right campaign encouraging parents to think they are entitled to public dollars for unregulated private schools and to believe it is their personal right to ban books, shape the school curriculum and individually approve teachers’ lesson plans.

Last Tuesday, the NY Times columnist Jamelle Bouie explored how extreme individualism is playing out in 2023—when parents, operating as advocates to protect their own beliefs and biases, have been awakened by manipulative politicians to band together and declare that they no longer feel bound by the laws and practices created through the democratic process.  Bouie describes the shredding of the social contract: “You may have heard the phrase ‘parents’ rights.’ It sounds unobjectionable—of course parents should have rights—which is probably why it’s become the term of choice for the conservative effort to ban books, censor school curriculums and suppress politically undesirable forms of knowledge… The official name for Florida’s infamous ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, prohibiting ‘classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity,’ is the ‘Parents Rights in Education Act.’ And the state’s ‘Stop WOKE Act’—short for ‘Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees,’ which outlaws any school instruction that classifies individuals as ‘inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,’ was framed, similarly, as a victory for the rights of parents.”

In addition to the Florida laws, Bouie examines Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia campaign for so-called parents’ rights, a proposed Texas ban in Kindergarten through twelfth grade classrooms of any discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, and the Parents’ Bill of Rights legislation passed last week by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Bouie notices that, “‘Parents’ rights,’ like ‘states’ rights,’ is quite particular. It’s not about all parents and all children and all the rights they might have.” “‘Parents’ rights,’ you will have noticed, never seems to involve parents who want schools to be more open and accommodating toward gender nonconforming students. It’s never invoked for parents who want their students to learn more about race, identity, and the darker parts of American history. And we never hear about the rights of parents who want schools to offer a wide library of books and materials to their students.” “The reality of the ‘parents’ rights’ movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent—or any individual, really—can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. ‘Parents’ rights,’ in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.”

As Barber, the political theorist, explains, a society dominated by extreme individualism, “challenges… the legitimate power by which we try to rule ourselves in common.”

Bowie notes that today’s parents’ rights juggernaut is a product of political manipulation by far-right Republicans, not a spontaneous movement as its sponsors intend it to appear. Instead it is a cynical attempt to undermine public education and, at the same time, our democracy: “Ultimately, then, the ‘parents’ rights’ movement is not about parents at all; it’s about whether this country will continue to strive for a more equitable and democratic system of education, or whether we’ll let a reactionary minority drag us as far from that goal as possible, in favor of something even more unequal and hierarchical than what we already have.”

Last Friday, Bouie followed up with a second column listing all the ways the same far-right politicians neglect children’s well-being even as they appeal to parents by pretending to protect children from so-called WOKE books and discussions about sexuality and so-called “critical race theory: “There is a lot… that the Republican Party is prepared to do to protect children from the world at large. But there are limits. There are lines the Republican Party won’t cross. The Republican Party will not, for example, support universal school lunch to protect children from hunger… In the United States Congress, most Republicans will not support a child allowance to keep children and their families out of poverty… And in the wake of yet another school massacre… Republicans refuse to do anything that might reduce the odds of another (school) shooting or make it less likely that a child dies of gun violence.”

Bouie drives home that neither the far-right ideologues nor the “parents’ rights” mobs they have spawned really care about the needs of our nation’s children: “What sounds like due consideration for parents as the most important adults in the lives of most children is in fact a rallying cry for a subset of the most conservative and reactionary parents, who want a state-sanctioned heckler’s veto over the education of all the children in the community. It is a Trojan horse for the slow destruction of public schools.  Something similar is true of the constant calls to ‘protect children.’ The way they talk about them, these ‘children’ are not real, living, vulnerable kids. They are a symbol, and the calls to protect them are an excuse, a pretext for wielding the state against the perceived cultural enemies of the American right. These champions of children aren’t all that interested in young people as citizens with rights and entitlements of their own.”

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The Far Right Has Used Culture War Politics to Open the Gate to a Vast Expansion of School Vouchers

In Merchants of Deception: Parent Props and their Funders, a new report just out from the Network for Public Education, Massachusetts political scientist, Maurice Cunningham explores what appeared a couple of years ago to be the spontaneous emergence of angry parents’ groups protesting teaching about racism, sex and gender.

“In truth,” he begins, “political interests use crises to turn politics and policy their way. This has happened during the COVID pandemic as right-wing ‘parent’ groups came out of nowhere to protest health measures such as masking and vaccine requirements in schools, then moved on to Critical Race Theory, then LGBT issues, book banning, and an endless stream of other ginned up culture war issues.  In truth the Right has been massing its forces for years to undermine public education, but the sudden proliferation of ‘parents’ and ‘moms’ groups has signaled a new and more virulent turn… Conservative groups have exploded since 2021 and include operations like Parents Defending Education (PDE) and Moms for Liberty (M4L). They draw on white backlash politics and resentment.”

Teachers and school librarians are under attack, and local school boards have become sites of screaming and name-calling. In his new report, Cunningham demonstrates that the eruption of far-right trouble making is, in fact, not spontaneous. The new wave of parents’ groups is funded by the same far-right donors who are using the attacks to discredit public schools and public school teachers and promote an explosion of vouchers across state legislatures.

How does Cunningham know that the parents’ groups screaming at local school board members and pressing for laws like Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E.” bill are really fake grassroots—Astroturf—organizations sponsored and funded by the far-right? He explains that the far-right groups supporting the attack on public schooling “rely on a network of dark money donors and their front organizations, and it can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to identify the true sources of funding.” But there are other clues. First we should watch for groups that have “grown at a pace that only a corporation’s monetary resources could manage.” Then we should identify the group’s allies to “get a better idea of the real powers behind” the organization.  Additionally: “We’ll use another tool to draw telling inferences about these fronts: identification of their key vendors, such as law firms, pollsters, and public relations firms, which we’ll see are often instruments of conservative… networks… Another recurring clue… is the ‘creation story.’ A new non-profit group bursts forth with some version of claiming that two or three moms began talking over what they see as problems in schools and resolve to start a nonprofit to take on the teachers’ unions, administration, or school board. By some form of miracle, they almost immediately receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in funding from billionaires. Next, they find themselves gaining favorable coverage on right-wing media—Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox News…. ”

Employing these strategies, Cunningham discovers: “What we see is not just that Parents Defending Education, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn in Education are tied in together, but they are all incorporated into a right-wing network that includes Charles Koch, organizational and individual members of the right-wing Council for National Policy, and other extremist funders, including Julie Fancelli, who helped to underwrite the January 6, 2021, Washington D.C. Stop the Steal rally.”

Cunningham explores three organizations in detail: Parents Defending Education, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn in Education. Here, for example is what he discovered about Parents Defending Education (PDE), which emerged two years ago in Virginia.  Its board members include five members affiliated with the far-right.  Nicole Neily, a board member and the organization’s president, “is an established political operative with Koch-affiliated non-profit interest groups. According to Sourcewatch, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, Neily has previously worked with Koch affiliates, the Franklin News Foundation, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights, and the independent Women’s Forum. She has also served on the boards of Young Voices and Young Voices for Liberty. She is a ‘volunteer instructor’ at the Leadership Institute (which handles trainings and conference activities for Moms for Liberty). Neily has a background in public relations and communications work; many of the supposed grassroots education reform leaders have extensive backgrounds in communications. She was also the initial president of Speech First, a Koch-connected legal interest that files lawsuits against universities’ affirmative action and bias response policies… For PDE major vendors, Neily immediately turned to contractors who had worked for Speech First: the Republican law firm Consovoy McCarthy, paid $950,000 by Free Speech in 2018, and the communications firm Creative Response Concepts, paid $106,000 in 2018. From the start, PDE was promoting itself as a grassroots volunteer organization. Affording such contractors right away belies that. ‘We just all work from home,’ Neily told the Columbus (OH) Dispatch. ‘We’re all working moms.'”

Here is some of what Cunningham calls Parents Defending Education’s creation story: “PDE announced its launch via Twitter on March 30, 2021, and immediately took up Christopher Rufo’s anti-Critial Race Theory campaign. The very next day, its emergence was reported by Fox News. PDE’s announcement quickly reverberated through the right-wing media echo chamber with coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Examiner, and the Federalist. By May 3, the moms working from home were getting coverage in the Washington Post. In June 2021, Neily explained to the conservative Daily Caller how PDE thrusts (usually anonymous) parent complaints into right-wing media: ‘Maybe they don’t know how to get it in the right hands, but we do. We know a lot of reporters, and we’re happy to share those things.'”Cunningham adds: Real grassroots groups often struggle to get space in their community newspapers.” And he adds further: “Neily’s compensation for her ‘work from home’ job was $195,688.”

In the rest of the report, Cunningham dissects the funding and allies and communications firms of Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. The overall story is of Astroturf parents’ organizations playing the race card to frighten legislators about the public schools.

It is an old story.  In Let Them Eat Tweets, a book published in 2020, two other political scientists, Yale’s Jacob Hacker and Berkeley’s Paul Pierson, remind readers that, “Long before the ascent of Donald Trump… a Republican president tried to realign the electorate through appeals to white workers discomfited by racial and cultural change.” (Let Them Eat Tweets, p. 42) This was Nixon’s Southern Strategy, used by subsequent politicians to agitate voters who could be made fearful through racist appeals. When Hacker and Pierson published Let Them Eat Tweets, the Astroturf parents’ groups spreading alarm about so-called “critical race theory” had not yet emerged, but Trump and the far-right had been accelerating the politics of hate because it worked for them.  Hacker and Pierson add: “The false narratives boosted by right-wing media generally have two characteristics: they incite tribalism and they escalate a sense of threat.”  (Let Them Eat Tweets, p. 103

So… what does this have to do with the politics of public schooling in February, 2023? A week ago, this blog traced a history of the plutocratic attempt to privatize education.  Now we are watching as that strategy comes to fruition.  Already at the beginning of their legislative sessions, two states, Iowa and Utah, have fast-tracked huge, Education Savings Account voucher bills through their legislatures. The Astroturf parents’ groups operating—with money from Koch and other far-right funders—have provided a path to an unusually large expansion of vouchers.

Education Week‘s Libby Stanford outlines the politics: “Emboldened by frustrations with pandemic-era policies and battles over what schools are teaching, conservative parents and politicians have accelerated a push for school choice policies that would funnel public funds into private schools. Though school choice has been debated for decades, the movement is in a unique moment as advocates use parent concerns over COVID-era mask requirements, curriculum addressing race, gender, and sexuality, and library book content to bolster their argument that families should have more options outside of traditional public schools. And the school choice proposals states are considering—and in some cases, have already passed—are more sweeping than previous iterations.”

Stanford catches us up on what is happening across the states as legislative sessions get underway: “Already this year, lawmakers in at least 11 states—Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia—have introduced and in some cases (Iowa and Utah), passed school choice bills… (M)any of the bills would establish or expand private school voucher and education savings account programs that give families public funds to pay for tuition at private schools, cover the costs of homeschooling, or pay for other schooling expenses… Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have some sort of policy on the books supporting school choice, including tax credits for parents who switch to different schools, private school scholarship programs, and education savings accounts…. Of those states, eight have education savings accounts in which the state gives eligible families a set amount of public funds to cover school-related costs including private school, online learning, tutoring, community college, and college expenses.  Sixteen states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have voucher programs, which are often branded as scholarships, giving students all or part of their public per-pupil funding to pay for private school….”

Stanford adds: “Until now, school choice programs have mostly been too small to have much of an impact on traditional public schools, but as states pass more sweeping school choice policies, there is a concern that lawmakers are starting down (what Tulane University’s Douglas Harris calls) ‘a slippery slope.'”

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson warn that heated culture war politics turn the political debate away from the merits of specific policies to address serious issues and instead toward a clash of identities—away from “‘this policy versus that policy’ to ‘us versus them.'” (Let Them Eat Tweets, p. 109). Driven by the emotions of the culture war, the political battle about vouchers avoids practical policy concerns: How will public schools survive if states fund vouchers without increasing the taxes that would pay for them? How can our legislators propose to cut taxes and at the same time increase the number of students taking vouchers out of the state public education budget?

The expansion of private school tuition vouchers and Education Savings Accounts is an attack on the funding of public schooling, an attack which will ultimately undermine what is good for us all—a system of democratically governed public schools designed to serve the needs of each particular student and protect by law the rights of all students.

Expansion of School Vouchers Is being Driven by an Ideological Corporate Campaign, Not By Voters

This week in Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds signed an Education Savings Account, universal voucher program into law. And last week in Utah, the same kind of voucher plan took the first step toward adoption when it was passed by Utah’s House of Representatives.

The Des Moines Register reports on Iowa’s new vouchers. The program will “phase in over three years and eventually allow all Iowa families to use up to $7,598 a year in an ‘education savings account’ for private school tuition. If any money is left over after tuition and fees, families could use the funds for specific educational expenses, including textbooks, tutoring, standardized testing fees, online education programs and vocational and life skills training. The $7,598 per private school student is the same amount of funding the state provides to public school students and is expected to rise in future years… The bill allows the Iowa Department of Education to contract with a third party to administer the education savings accounts, but the state has not yet issued a request for proposals from companies seeking to manage the funds.”

It would appear that the Iowa Legislature tried to calm the fears of the public school community by promising that, “Public school districts would also receive an additional $1,205 in funding for students receiving education savings accounts who live within the public school district’s boundaries.”  But despite that promise, a drop in overall public school funding is expected: “By the fourth year, the (Legislative Services) agency estimates public school districts will receive $49.8 million in new per-student funds for private school students within the public district’s boundaries. The agency also expects a net decrease of $46 million in public school funding as a result of more students attending private schools.”

It is hard to keep track of all the states that now have school vouchers or are considering voucher programs and to know which states have the latest flavor of vouchers—Education Savings Accounts (ESAs).  Most ESA programs, unlike Iowa’s, don’t even require that families use the vouchers at private schools.  In most places, ESA’s can be used for educational programs, for educational tools and materials like books and computers, and for homeschooling.  In some states families can use the money for so-called micro-schools in which families come together and hire a teacher to work with children in someone’s home.

Why is there so much so much legislative activity about expanding vouchers?  Several factors are important to consider, and many of them were the subject of economist Gordon Lafer’s analysis in The One-Percent Solution.  Lafer’s book focused on the public policy that flowed from state legislatures after the Tea Party wave election in 2010, but his observations are still on point as we begin 2023. Lafer enumerates all the reasons why far-right ideologues and big corporate moneyed interests seek to undermine and privatize public schools: “At first glance, it may seem odd that corporate lobbies such as the Chamber of Commerce, National Federation for Independent Business, or Americans for Prosperity would care to get involved in an issue as far removed from commercial activity as school reform. In fact, they have each made this a top legislative priority… The campaign to transform public education brings together multiple strands of the agenda… The teachers’ union is the single biggest labor organization in most states—thus for both anti-union ideologues and Republican strategists, undermining teachers’ unions is of central importance. Education is one of the largest components of public budgets, and in many communities the school system is the single largest employer—thus the goals of cutting budgets, enabling new tax cuts for the wealthy, shrinking the government, and lowering wage and benefit standards in the public sector all coalesce around the school system… There are always firms that aim to profit from the privatization of public services, but the sums involved in K-12 education are an order of magnitude larger than any other service, and have generated an intensity of corporate legislative engagement unmatched by any other branch of government. Finally, the notion that one’s kids have a right to a decent education represents the most substantive right to which Americans believe we are entitled, simply by dint of residence… (F)or those interested in lowering citizens’ expectations of what we have a right to demand from government, there is no more central fight than around public education. In all these ways, then, school reform presents something like the perfect crystallization of the corporate legislative agenda.”   (The One-Percent Solution, pp 128-129)

It is hard for public school advocates to mobilize nationally against the expansion of vouchers. Voucher battles are fought state by state because public education and the funding of public education is a state-by-state issue.  Advocates are likely to focus on public education legislation in their own state and not to pay attention to what’s happening elsewhere.  And citizens are not likely to pay much attention to what is happening in the legislature.  Once again, Gordon Lafer identifies the problem: “(M)any of the factors that strengthen corporate political influence are magnified in the states. First, far fewer people pay attention to state government, implying wider latitude for well-funded organized interests… Apart from labor unions and a handful of progressive activists, the corporate agenda… encounters little public resistance at the state level because hardly anyone knows about or understands the issues… So, too, corporate lobbies’ financial advantage is magnified in the states. Citizens United marked a sea change in state as well as federal politics.” (The One Percent Solution, pp. 34-36)

Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy at Indiana University who has studied the impact of school privatization and the politics around privatizing public schools, recently published a reminder that school privatization is driven by the power of the corporate agenda. Expansion of vouchers has never been an expression of voters’ overall preference: “School choice is continuing to expand across the United states…. But these successes often come in spite of overwhelming voter opposition to school choice programs… According to the pro-voucher organization EdChoice.org, the U.S. has over 75 publicly funded private school choice programs, including vouchers, and education savings accounts, as well as another 45 charter school programs. But all of these programs have been implemented by legislators, not the electorate… In fact, voters have been allowed to weigh in on school choice programs only nine times since 2000, and they almost always reject them, often by overwhelming margins. Only twice did school choice programs pass through the ballot box. In 2012, Georgia voters empowered their legislature with the ability to create charter schools. That same year… Washington voters passed a charter school referendum.”

Who are the far-right advocacy groups and think tanks powerfully promoting Education Savings Account vouchers? They include the usual suspects: the American Legislative Exchange Council and a  state- by-state group of think tanks that are ALEC’s partners in the State Policy Network, EdChoice,  the Goldwater Institute,  the Heritage Foundation, and the Institute for Justice, which provides two model laws—“Education Savings Account Act: Publicly Funded,” and “Education Savings Account Act: Tax-Credit Funded“—so that state legislators can merely adapt a canned statute to their own state’s particular needs.  SourceWatch reports corporate funding streams for these and other far-right think tanks that promote vouchers—funding from the Koch Brothers, the Bradley Foundation, and investments from the Donor’s Capital Fund, a powerful investor of corporate dark money since the 2010, U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United.

In the past two years, the campaign to undermine public schooling and promote the expansion of vouchers has developed a new strategy to convince parents that their children in public schools are being brainwashed by critical race theory and surrounded by discussion of gender and sexual orientation. In a new report published by the Network for Public Education this week, political scientist Maurice Cunningham traces the money behind what may appear to be a spontaneous emergence of parents’ groups—Parents Defending Education, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn in Education. Cunningham points to clues that these are not local grassroots groups of parents; their websites, for example, betray a big investment in communications.  And while, for example, the founders of Parents Defending Education (PDE) claim to be a bunch of working moms, Cunningham explains: “PDE took in $3,178,272 in contributions and grants in 2021… Donor’s Trust, a dark money donor associated with the Koch network donated $20,250 to PDE in 2021. The Achelis & Bodman Foundation which funds voucher and charter school programs and targets public education, contributed $25,000. Searle Freedom Trust, another right-wing donor with ties to Donors Trust, contributed $250,000 in 2021.  We don’t know all the names on the checks, but we do know that those checks had to be pretty large, that the attorneys and consultants sit at the hierarchy of right-wing operatives, and that the board members and staffers are connected to the highest levels of conservative donors including the Koch network.”

The same people who are promoting vouchers are working to scare parents with the huge, culture war campaign driven by identifiable funders and a mass of dark money supporting an education marketplace and undermining parents’ confidence in public schools. But as Christopher Lubienski, the scholar who has studied the effect of the privatization of public education reminds us, expanding vouchers has not improved the outcomes for our children: “(R)ecent research is repeatedly showing that… vouchers are not a good investment. Although publicly funded vouchers may be propping up some private schools that might otherwise go out of business, they are not really helping the people they purport to help. In fact… study after study shows that students using vouchers are falling behind where they would have been if they had remained in public schools. Thus, policymakers might think twice about defying voters on initiatives that actually cause harm to children.”

The political theorist Benjamin Barber warned that school choice does not really provide freedom for families: “We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but with respect to relevant outcomes the real power, and hence the real freedom, is in the determination of what is on the menu. The powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers. We select menu items privately, but we can assure meaningful menu choices only through public decision-making.” (Consumed, p. 139)

The Multi-Layered Attack on Public Schooling and Why We are Obligated to Fight Back

The culture war attacks on local public school boards and the school curricula are part of a long campaign paid for by very powerful groups to push for school privatization via universal vouchers.  To understand how this strategy has worked, we can look back at some recent history and some political theory.

In his 2017, book, The One Percent Solution, economist Gordon Lafer describes the attack on public education which was part of the 2010, Tea Party wave across the 50 state governments: “At first glance, it may seem odd that corporate lobbies such as the Chamber of Commerce, National Federation for Independent Business, or Americans for Prosperity would care to get involved in an issue as far removed from commercial activity as school reform. In fact, they have each made this a top legislative priority… The campaign to transform public education brings together multiple strands of the agenda… The teachers’ union is the single biggest labor organization in most states—thus for both anti-union ideologues and Republican strategists, undermining teachers’ unions is of central importance. Education is one of the largest components of public budgets, and in many communities the school system is the single largest employer—thus the goals of cutting budgets, enabling new tax cuts for the wealthy, shrinking the government, and lowering wage and benefit standards in the public sector all coalesce around the school system… There are always firms that aim to profit from the privatization of public services, but the sums involved in K-12 education are an order of magnitude larger than any other service, and have generated an intensity of corporate legislative engagement unmatched by any other branch of government.” (The One Percent Solution, p. 128-129)

In their book about about the era of Donald Trump, Let Them Eat Tweets, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson trace the expansion of far-right plutocrats’ appeal to fear, racism, and xenophobia by stoking the culture wars as a strategy for moving their much broader agenda: “Race was always front and center, but the GOP strategy was adaptable: division on cultural or social issues was the consistent goal; the specific issues and the enemy ‘other’ at the heart of this divide… were designed to be consistent with the party’s plutocratic turn… What Republicans learned as they refined their strategies… is that issues, whether economic or social, are much less powerful than identities, but it is identities—perceptions of shared allegiance and shared threat—that really mobilize… This fateful turn toward tribalism, with its reliance on racial animus and continual ratcheting up of fear, greatly expanded the opportunities to serve the plutocrats.” (Let Them Eat Tweets, pp. 109-117)

This background from experts prepares us to recognize today that Moms for Liberty and similar groups disturbing local school boards with racist and homophobic attacks are part of a conscious strategy of funders like the Heritage Foundation and the Goldwater and Manhattan Institutes to grow school privatization and undermine public support for our society’s largest and most universal civic institution.  In my state, Ohio, House Bill 290, the universal, Education Savings Account school voucher bill, which will be hashed out this month in a lame-duck session of our gerrymandered, supermajority Republican state legislature, is intimately connected with the mass of culture war bills that have been introduced in the same legislature—bills that would ban books and ban any discussion that touches on race, gender, and sexuality. The culture war bills are there to make us define some of our children as “other” or deviant, to generate fear and unease, and to destroy commitment to a public system of education that has been made more inclusive over the decades in accordance with its declared mission of serving each and every child.

Whose responsibility is it to push back against today’s attack on public education?  In his 2021, book, The Privatization of Everything, Donald Cohen assigns the obligation for protecting a democracy to its citizens: “In a democratic society, public goods…. should be defined by the public and its values. Just because some people can be excluded from having a public good does not mean we should allow that to happen. In fact, after we the people define something as a public good, we must use our democratic power to make certain that exclusions do not happen… no winners or losers—when it comes to education (or clean water, or a fair trial, or a vaccine), even if it’s possible to do so. We decide there are things we should do together. We give special treatment to these goods because we realize that they benefit everyone in the course of benefiting each one—and conversely, that excluding some hurts us all. That starts with asserting public control over our fundamental public goods… What’s important is that public goods exist only insofar as we, the voters and the people, create them. That’s how democracy should and often does work. But it really works only if we can hold on to an idea of the common good.  Is it good for individuals and the whole?” (The Privatization of Everything, pp. 6-8)

Today’s attacks on local school districts and their elected school boards undermine confidence in  teachers, in other local school officials, and in the school curricula. The attacks also marginalize some students while affirming others—denying the reality of the children and adolescents from the minority groups whose history is being erased and stigmatizing the children who identify as gay or lesbian, or whose families include two dads or two moms.

In the powerful final essay in the new, Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, Bill Ayers, a retired professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, describes the ideal of public education we citizens are responsible for protecting: “In a free society education must focus on the production—not of things, but—of free people capable of developing minds of their own even as they recognize the importance of learning to live with others. It’s based, then, on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being, constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all.”

Ayers adds that public schools are the product of the society in which they are set: “Schools don’t exist outside of history or culture: they are, rather, at the heart of each. Schools serve societies; societies shape schools. Schools, then, are both mirror and window—they tell us who we are and who we want to become, and they show us what we value and what we ignore, what is precious and what is venal.”  (Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, p. 315)

It is our ongoing challenge as citizens to ensure that our public schools do not merely capitulate to the injustices that are part of our culture. As citizens, we are obligated to push back against today’s attack on public school boards, on teachers, and on public education itself. We must not give up.

An In-Depth Account of the Culture War Attack on Public Schooling

The pundits on television were not talking about public education on Tuesday night, but public school policy loomed large as an election issue nonetheless.

The Wall Street Journal recently previewed the school board election in Frederick County, Maryland: “Three conservative school board candidates have been knocking on doors… in the run-up to the midterms, campaigning with a message that they will curb what they say is the injection of misguided ideas about gender, sexuality and race in classroom instruction…. The group, calling itself Education Not Indoctrination and backed by a political-action committee pumping money into similar efforts around the U.S., will square off in Tuesday’s election against a four-candidate slate supported by teachers unions…. The spirited race in central Maryland mirrors a continuing fight for control of the elected bodies that oversee public schools nationwide… The nonpartisan election site Ballotpedia is tracking about 500 school board races around the U.S. in which candidates have highlighted Covid-19 policies, race in education, or sex and gender issues.”

It may take a while to sort out what happened in all these races on Tuesday, but for an in-depth explanation of what has been happening more broadly in the public school culture war and who’s behind it, please read Paige Williams’ profile of Moms for Liberty in the November 7, 2022 New Yorker magazine.

What is Moms for Liberty? Williams connects all the dots: disruption of school board meetings—policy from the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC—Christopher Rufo—dark money—right wing media—attacks on a well-vetted language arts curriculum—an assault on honest teaching about racism and the Civil War—and attacks on LGBTQ rights.

Williams locates her story in the Williamson County School District in Tennessee—upscale, suburban Nashville.  But Williamson County Schools are a microcosm of a well-funded nationwide phenomenon that merely appears to spring up locally.

In Williamson County, the target is the district’s Wit & Wisdom language arts curriculum—a packaged, widely used reading curriculum, described here by its publisher: “Wit & Wisdom is designed to let students ‘read books they love while building knowledge of important topics’ in literature, science, history and art. By immersing students in ‘content-rich’ topics that spark lively discussion the curriculum prepares them to tackle more complicated texts.”

Although the school district had carefully selected and vetted its curriculum, “seemingly out of nowhere Wit & Wisdom became the target of intense criticism. At first, the campaign in Williamson County was cryptic: stray e-mails, phone calls, public-information requests. Eric Welch, who was first elected to the school board in 2010, told me that the complainers ‘wouldn’t just e-mail us—they would copy the county commission, our state legislative delegation, and state representatives in other counties… It was obviously an attempt to intimidate.”

The school district responded: “(T)he district assembled a reassessment team to review the curriculum and the adoption process. At a public work session in June, 2021, the team announced that, after a preliminary review, it hadn’t found any violations of protocol. Teachers had spent a full workday familiarizing themselves with Wit & Wisdom before implementing it… The review committee ultimately concluded that Wit & Wisdom had been an over-all success… Moms for Liberty members were portraying Wit & Wisdom as ‘critical race theory’ in disguise.”

Williams traces the movement back to its beginning, “when, in early December, 2020, the American Legislative Exchange Council… hosted a Webinar about ‘reclaiming education and the American dream.’ A representative of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, warned that elements of a ‘Black Lives Matter curriculum’ were ‘now in our schools.’… Last November, Glenn Youngkin a candidate for the governorship of Virginia won an upset victory after repeatedly warning that the ‘curriculum has gone haywire’–and promising to sign an executive order banning C.R.T. from schools… Days after the ALEC Webinar on ‘reclaiming education,’ three women in Florida filed incorporation papers for Moms for Liberty, Inc. … A national phalanx of interconnected organizations—including the Manhattan Institute, where (Christopher) Rufo is a fellow, and a group called Moms for America—supported the suite of talking points about C.R.T… Glenn Beck, the right-wing pundit, declared that C.R.T. is a ‘poison,’ urging his audience, ‘Stand up in your community and fire the teachers. Fire them!'”

Williams portrays the chaos, pain and damage wrought by Moms for Liberty in Williamson County, but leaders there warn others that what appears to be local is a much broader phenomenon: “Anne McGraw, the former Williamson County School Board member, told me that the advent of Moms for Liberty ‘shows how hyper-local the national machine is going with their tactics… Moms for Liberty is not in Podunk, America. They’re going into hyper-educated wealthy counties like this, and trying to get those people to doubt the school system that brought us here.'”

What is the ultimate goal? Williams worries: “Progressives and policy experts have long suspected that right-wing attacks on school boards are less about changing curricula than about undermining the entire public school system, in the hope of privatizing education. During the ALEC Webinar about ‘reclaiming education,’ the Heritage Foundation representative declared that ‘school choice’ would become ‘very important in the next couple of years’; controversies about curricula, he said, were ‘opening up an opportunity for policymakers at the state level’ to consider options like charter schools.”

Williams concludes with a warning from Rebecca Jacobsen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University: “Is this a blip and we’ll rebound? Or are we chipping away at our largest public institution and the system that has been at the center of our democracy since the founding of this country?”

How the School Marketplace Wrecks Universal Public Schooling

Universal Education Savings Account vouchers (to pay for private schools or home schooling, or any educational expense) just went into effect in Arizona. A well-funded campaign across the state legislatures for school privatization via this kind of tax-funded universal vouchers threatens to further divert already scarce state tax revenues from the public schools that serve 90 percent of our children.

Peter Greene, a retired Western Pennsylvania high school teacher and writer, describes the meaning of public schooling: “Each community issues a guarantee—a promise that every child will have at least twelve years at this facility to learn as much as they can, to acquire as much familiarity with as many resources and tools as they can. That’s the promise of public education in the United States: that every single child will be given the chance to get as much help, as much training, time, resources, and expert support to figure out how to become more fully themselves, to understand what it means to be fully human in the world.  Have we always fulfilled that promise? Not at all. But the promise has been made, and that means we know what we are supposed to live up to… There is no business in this country that declares, ‘We will make sure that our product or service gets to every single citizen of this country no matter how much time, trouble or money it costs us.’ Only public schools (and the U.S.Postal Service) make any such promise.” (Public Education, Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, “Our Schools and Our Towns Belong to Each Other,” pp. 62-63)

In recent years, however, the defenders of education as a private and individual benefit have been making political strides—pressing politicians to direct state funding away from the public schools to privatized vouchers, charter schools or homeschooling—private services particular parents seek to protect the interests of their children alone. Culture warriors—lavishly funded by school privatizers like the American Federation for Children, the Heritage Foundation, and the Goldwater Institute—have set out to attack the very protections that ensure that public schools protect the rights of all the children who enroll and serve the needs of all kinds of children. Right now, as the voices of Christopher Rufo, and Moms for Liberty blare out of Fox News, it is important to be reminded of the voices we rarely hear these days—those who have defined the values and principles embodied in a system of public schooling and those who have kept that vision alive.

In my state, Ohio, we are in the midst of a full bore attack on public schooling and on the civic and intellectual values our public schools have long been intended to define.  Bills pending in our legislature include House Bill (HB) 290, to add a “backpack” universal Education Savings Account voucher program on top of EdChoice vouchers and several other voucher programs. In a lame duck session right after the November 8 election, our legislature will begin to consider the new vouchers along with all the culture war bills that have been introduced—HB 322, to ban teaching about or discussion of divisive concepts including race and sex; HB 327, to ban teaching and materials about divisive concepts including racism and sexual orientation; HB 454, to ban gender affirming care for minors; HB 616, to ban discussion and materials about racism, sexual orientation, and gender identity; HB 704, to establish gender identity at birth according to DNA; and HB 722, to ban discussion of any ‘sexually explicit’ content and establish a “parents bill of rights.”

In a powerful commentary for the Washington Post earlier this fall, Paul Waldman declared that the culture war maelstrom is a central plank in the far-right platform to discredit public schools and thereby promote school privatization: “The conservative campaign against education is…. many things. As a political matter, it’s about intensifying the culture war so moral panic drives Republican votes. As a policy matter, its long-term goals include dismantling public education.”

Why must we block the Far Right’s drive to add and enlarge all kinds of tax funded, private school tuition vouchers and to expand the number of charter schools? I believe there are two primary reasons we must fight against school choice.

First, public schools are universally available and accessible.

In School’s Choice: How Charter Schools Control Access and Shape Enrollment, the National Education Policy Center’s Kevin Welner and Wagma Mommandi detail the many ways that privately operated charter schools select and choose their students, despite that parents imagine school choice as the path to greater opportunity. Charter schools control and market their specialized curricula to attract particular children. They are free to locate in the specific neighborhoods where they want to attract students, and they may or may not provide federally subsidized free and reduced price lunches. Some charter schools impose conditions on their applications and steer away parents whose children need particular services. Other charter schools charge burdensome fees or require that parents commit to volunteering in the school for large blocks of time. In some cases charter schools neglect to provide special services for disabled students or English language learners. And once students are enrolled, some charter schools  counsel out students whose test scores lag or students who don’t comply with rigid, no-excuses discipline codes. Some charter schools hold students back repeatedly to encourage them to leave. Many charter schools shape their enrollments by failing to replace the students who drop out or are pushed out; enrollment in these schools is higher in the early grades with many fewer students reaching graduation.

While promoters of school vouchers and charter schools claim that publicly funded school choice opens opportunity by freeing parents to look for alternatives, in fact, power and privilege always operate behind the scenes in a system based on individual freedom of choice. In School Choice and the Betrayal of Democracy, Robert Asen explains: “Freedom… elevates individual choice above all while obscuring structured advantages and disadvantages afforded to differently situated people in diverse and unequal societies… (T)his model treats these relationships as free of coercion and the uneven influence of power.” (School Choice and the Betrayal of Democracy, p. 49)

Political theorist, Benjamin Barber, further explores how public schools protect parents’ and students’ rights through the laws and regulations society agrees to impose on behalf of its public responsibility to each of its citizens: “Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Second, the expansion of the privatized education marketplace diverts essential public tax dollars from the public schools, undermining their capacity to serve the masses of our children.

In a 2016 report published by the Economic Policy Institute, school finance expert, Bruce Baker showed how the expansion of charter schools destabilizes the big city school districts where charter schools locate: “(C)harters established within districts operate primarily in competition, not cooperation with their host, to serve a finite set of students and draw from a finite pool of resources. One might characterize this as a parasitic model… one in which the condition of the host is of little concern to any single charter operator. Such a model emerges because under most state charter laws, locally elected officials—boards of education—have limited control over charter school expansion within their boundaries, or over resources that must be dedicated to charter schools.”  Baker continues: “If we consider a specific geographic space, like a major urban center, operating under the reality of finite available resources (local, state, and federal revenues), the goal is to provide the best possible system for all children citywide….  Chartering, school choice, or market competition are not policy objectives in-and-of-themselves. They are merely policy alternatives—courses of policy action—toward achieving these broader goals and must be evaluated in this light. To the extent that charter expansion or any policy alternative increases inequity, introduces inefficiencies and redundancies, compromises financial stability, or introduces other objectionable distortions to the system, those costs must be weighed against expected benefits.”

Last January, over 100 school districts sued the state of Ohio, declaring in their complaint that Ohio’s rapidly expanding EdChoice voucher program is undermining the state’s constitutional responsibility to fund public education: “The EdChoice Scholarship Program poses an existential threat to Ohio’s public school system. Not only does this voucher program unconstitutionally usurp Ohio’s public tax dollars to subsidize private school tuitions, it does so by depleting Ohio’s foundation funding—the pool of money out of which the state funds Ohio’s public schools… The discrepancy in per pupil foundation funding is so great that some districts’ private school pupils receive, as a group, more in funding via EdChoice Vouchers than Ohio allocates in foundation funding for the entire public school districts where those students reside. This voucher program effectively cripples the public school districts’ resources, creates an ‘uncommon’, or private system of schools unconstitutionally funded by taxpayers, siphons hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds into private (and mostly religious) institutions, and discriminates against minority students by increasing segregation in Ohio’s public schools. Because private schools receiving EdChoice funding are not subject to Ohio’s Sunshine Laws or most other regulations applicable to public schools, these private facilities operate with impunity, exempt from public scrutiny despite the public funding that sustains them.”

The damage of expanding the school choice marketplace is particularly threatening in rural states. In Grounded: A Senator’s Lessons on Winning Back Rural America, Montana Senator Jon Tester worries about what the incursion of charter schools would mean for his rural state: “I am going to tell you what happens in a rural state like mine with privatization. My school system in my hometown of Big Sandy has about 175 kids. That is not an exception for Montana; there are a lot of schools that have 175 kids or fewer. By the way, that is not high school; that’s K through twelve. Let’s say that for whatever reason, somebody wants to set up a charter school a few miles down the road and suck a few kids out of Big Sandy, and maybe suck a few kids out of the Fort Benton school system, and a few more out of the Chester system.  Pretty soon, they have their little charter school, and there is less money to teach the kids who are left in those public schools. What do you think is going to happen to those kids who are left there? That is going to take away from our public education system. Ultimately it will cause those schools to close, because the money that funds our education is at a bare minimum right now.” (Grounded: A Senator’s Lessons on Winning Back Rural America, pp. 279-280)

As public schools endure a raging attack from the far right, we need to remember the importance of protecting public education—our nation’s system of publicly funded, universally available, and publicly accountable schools. Public schools are the optimal institution for balancing the needs of each particular student and family with the community’s obligation to create a system that, by law, protects the rights of all students.

Watch Out for Ron DeSantis

The political commentators focus on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis more and more as a potential Republican presidential nominee in 2024—the best alternative, they say, to the other guy.  But never once have I heard the pundits who dominate TV news explore DeSantis’ record on public education.  I guess it will be up to us—parents, teachers, and concerned citizens—to set the record straight.  Here is a summary of the facts we should all have at the ready. (And just to be clear, this post is not an endorsement of Trump as the 2024 Republican candidate.)

Top Education Rating from the Heritage Foundation — Last month, the far-right Heritage Foundation ranked Florida, the state led by Governor Ron DeSantis, as the overall winner on its 2022 Education Freedom Report Card.  If your state gets the top prize in education from the American Legislative Exchange Council or the Heritage Foundation, it does not mean that you have an adequately and equitably funded state system of public schools, a system which requires careful credentialing of teachers.

Here is how the Heritage Foundation describes its 2022 winner: “The Sunshine State embraces education freedom across the board. Florida does exceptionally well in allowing parents to choose among private, charter, and district schools, is home to a strong Education Savings Account (voucher) program…. Among other protections, state lawmakers set a high standard for academic transparency, and reject critical race theory’s pernicious ideas.”  “To assess the regulatory freedom of a given state, we consider barriers to teaching, such as whether a state encourages alternative teacher certification and the number of teachers who have benefited, or whether a state largely requires aspiring teachers to attend university-based colleges of education….”

Writing for Salon, Katheryn Joyce summarizes the policies prioritized by the Heritage Foundation’s report card as “key action items for conservative education reformers, from the promotion of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), as a preferred pathway to universal school vouchers, to alternative teacher credentialing, to the expansion of the Anti-CRT movement which now encompasses anything related to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.'”

Parent Organizing for Ron DeSantis himself along with His Far Right Causes — Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, recently published Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, to follow supposedly untraceable money invested by those who want to undermine public education. Cunningham’s primary focus has been his home state, but last week he tracked the money behind Moms for Liberty, the Florida-spawned group of organized parents known for loudly disrupting local school board meetings: “The group, which claims to be about ‘parent rights,’ has ties to the January 6 insurrection and is expected to provide ‘foot soldiers’ for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Moms for Liberty (M4L) claims the organization was started by moms. But it is hard to believe that three mothers in Florida could start up a grassroots group on January 1, 2021, and then, within a matter of weeks and months, wind up on Rush Limbaugh,Tucker Carlson’s show, Glenn Beck, and Fox News. However, there is a shadowy network of money and influence in right-wing political circles that could arrange that easily. Among M4L’s financial supporters and profile boosters are some of the most influential organizations, media operations, and wealthy donors in the vast theater of the right-wing propaganda machine.”

Cunningham traces funding for Moms for Liberty to the Council for National Policy, which Cunningham describes as “combining vast sums of conservative money, Christian nationalists and their communications networks, and activist groups like the National Rifle Association into a powerful organization.” Moms for Liberty also received a big donation from Betsy DeVos’s mother, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen. Another funder of M4L is the Leadership Institute, which was, “the largest donor for M4L’s 2022 national summit and the sole known $50,000 presenting sponsor.”  “The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America were (also) sponsors of M4L’s national summit.”

For NBC News, Tyler Kingkade describes Moms for Liberty and its July, 2022, first national summit: “The organization’s rapid ascension—its leaders say it has nearly 100,000 members across 195 chapters in 37 states—has been driven by the appeal of its core issues among conservatives, including battling mask mandates in schools, banning library books that address sexuality and gender identity, and curtailing lessons on racial inequity and discrimination….” At its Tampa summit in July, “Attendees… heard speeches from prominent Florida Republicans, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely considered a presidential candidate in waiting, as well as Sen. Rick Scott, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chair, who said Moms for Liberty-backed candidates are going to help the GOP win governor races and control the Senate in the midterm elections…”  Cunningham adds some of the event’s other speakers: Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, and Trump’s former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” and Parents’ Bill of Rights Bill — On July 1, the Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss reported: “Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Law, popularly known by critics as the ‘don’t say gay’ bill, went into effect on Friday, restricting what teachers can say about gender and sexual orientation… The law, signed March 28 by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), is the first of its kind in the country… The law also legally empowers parents to sue school districts as a way to advance their ‘parental rights.’ It is part of a push by DeSantis to restrict what teachers can say—an effort that includes topics in race, racism, and U.S. history.”

The NY Times‘ Dana Goldstein summarizes the bill: “Instruction on gender and sexuality would be constrained in all grades… Schools would be required to notify parents when children receive mental, emotional or physical health services unless educators believe there is a risk of ‘abuse, abandonment, or neglect.’…Parents would have the right to opt their children out of counseling and health services… Parents could sue schools for violating the vaguely written bill, and districts would have to cover the costs… Florida would rewrite school counseling standards.”

Strauss responds to the Florida bill, which has become a model for legislation proposed in other states, by quoting a statement from the White House: “This is not an issue of parents’ rights. This is discrimination, plain and simple. It’s part of a disturbing and dangerous nationwide trend of right-wing politicians cynically targeting LGBTQI+ students, educators, and individuals to score political points. It encourages bullying and threatens students’ mental health, physical safety, and well-being. It censors dedicated teachers and educators who want to do the right thing and support their students.”

A Book Ban — Salon‘s Kathryn Joyce recently exposed another of Governor Ron DeSantis’s public education initiatives: “This March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a policy… that bans schools from using any books that are ‘pornographic’ or age ‘inappropriate,’ and allows parents broad access to review and challenge all books and materials used for instruction or in school libraries… In combination with other recent laws restricting public schools from discussing LGBTQ issues or racism—including Florida’s 2022 ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law… and ‘Stop WOKE Act’… and its 2021 ban on teaching ‘Critical Race Theory’—this has led some school districts to advise teachers to box up their classroom libraries until each book is vetted. Others have instructed teachers to stop buying or accepting donated books for their classrooms until at least January, to give the district time to hire mandatory new staff to serve as ‘media specialists’ who review each title.”

Florida State Public School Funding Dollars Flooding Out of Public Schools into Florida’s Huge and Growing Voucher Programs — In a collaborative report released in September, the national Education Law Center and the Florida Policy Center document that over a billion dollars is currently flowing out of Florida’s public school funding budget into vouchers.  And even more shocking, when students take a voucher the state sucks money right out of the already established school district budget: “School districts have no control over the number of students who apply for vouchers, which makes budgeting difficult. The expansion of voucher eligibility allows higher income families to qualify and removes the requirement for students to have previously attended public schools.”

Here is what has happened since Ron DeSantis was elected Florida’s governor in November of 2018: “Since 2019, the flow of public funds to private education dramatically increased after the State Legislature enacted the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) program. While voucher programs are often funded as line-item appropriations in the state budget or through state tax credits, the FES voucher is funded from the Florida Education Finance Program state allocations that would otherwise be directed to the student’s resident public school district.” “In 2022-23, an estimated $1.3 billion in funding will be redirected from public school districts to private education, representing 10% of the state K-12 education funds allocated through the Florida Education Finance Program, the state’s school funding formula.  This sum is in addition to a potential $1.1 billion taken from general revenue that would otherwise be used to support state services, including education, as a result of tax credits claimed by businesses that donate to voucher programs.”

Consider all these facts when you hear the political commentators describe Ron DeSantis as the best non-Trump.  The conditions of public schools across the fifty states—schools which serve roughly 50 million of our children and adolescents—hardly ever seem to be part of the national political conversation these days.  But far-right advocates and politicians, many of them operating quietly in the statehouses that set public school policy, are working hard to undermine our nation’s largest and one of its most important civic institutions.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a political leader actively working to undermine the institution of public schools and to threaten the work of school teachers. Beware!

Quarrels About Critical Race Theory and the Teaching of “Divisive Topics” Persist and Expand

Pitched battles about so-called “Critical Race Theory” and attempts to ban the teaching of “controversial topics” continue to swell across the states.  What follows is a summary of some of the recent coverage describing where and how this war is being waged.

Diane Ravitch provides a summary: “(T)he nation’s public schools have been the object of savage attacks by politicians and ideologues who claim that the schools are teaching ‘critical race theory’ and indoctrinating (white) children… (L)egislators in red states have passed laws mandating that teachers are not allowed to teach about systemic racism or to teach anything that might make some students (white) feel ‘uncomfortable.’ At least 10 states have passed such laws, including Florida, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho, Tennessee, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and North Dakota. Sometimes such laws are called ‘divisive concepts’ laws, because they forbid the teaching of anything that is ‘divisive.’… Teachers in red states that have passed laws against CRT and divisive concepts are wary about teaching about racism. Is teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, and the persistence of segregation a violation of the law? Should teachers avoid any mention of the Ku Klux Klan or modern-day white supremacists?”

Promoters of the laws being passed say that they want to protect parents’ freedom to determine what their children should be taught at school, but NY Times columnist, Paul Krugman believes that the ideologues behind the controversy are, in fact, threatening freedom: “Americans like to think of their nation as a beacon of freedom… Now, however, freedom is under attack, on more fronts than many people realize. Everyone knows about the Big Lie, this refusal by a large majority of Republicans to accept the legitimacy of a lost election. But there are many other areas in which freedom is not just under assault but in retreat.  Let’s talk, in particular, about the attack on education, especially, but not only, in Florida, which has become one of America’s leading laboratories of democratic erosion… There’s a bill advancing in the Florida Senate declaring that an individual ‘should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.’ That is, the criterion for what can be taught isn’t ‘Is it true?’ ‘Is it supported by the scholarly consensus?’ but rather ‘Does it make certain constituencies uncomfortable?’… And who will enforce the rules? State-sponsored vigilantes! Last month Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, proposed a ‘Stop Woke Act’ that would empower parents to sue school districts they claim teach critical race theory—and collect lawyer fees…. Even the prospect of such lawsuits would have a chilling effect on teaching.”

Krugman describes what’s happening in Florida, but it’s not just in Florida. The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss describes Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s new executive order: “In case you missed it, Virginia’s now governor, Glenn Youngkin, has set up a ‘tip line’ for people to snitch on teachers who supposedly are promoting ‘divisive practices’ and to report on violations of his order against mask mandates. The tip line follows his very first executive order, issued Jan. 22, which forbids the teaching of ‘inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory.'” Strauss adds: “Virginia isn’t original with the teacher tip line idea but is joining a small but growing group of state leaders and legislators who think encouraging citizens to turn on each other is a useful idea in a democracy. For example, in November, the New Hampshire Department of Education set up a website that allows parents to report violations of the state’s 2021 anti-discrimination law, one of a number that use vague language in an attempt to bar teachers from exploring systemic racism with students. Incidentally, it was also in New Hampshire where a chapter of a right-wing group called Moms for Liberty offered a $500 bounty in December that would go to the person who makes the first confirmed report against a teacher.”

In an impassioned editorial, the Columbus Dispatch opposed two laws that have been pending for months in the Ohio Legislature to ban the teaching of divisive concepts: “(These bills) should be rejected outright as toxic to children and truth… (They) are not about protecting children from critical race theory, but they do create a boogeyman people fear.” “It should stir our souls to learn that 17 million people—a number that excludes the millions who died along the way—were trapped in Africa and transported here as part of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, an outrage the United Nations calls ‘the worst violations of human rights in the history of humanity.’ We should feel sorrow that some experts estimate as much of 95% of the native inhabitants of the Americas—as many as 20 million people—were wiped out by smallpox in the years following the arrival of Europeans. Knowing and discussing factual occurrences of the past is not a bad thing even though they may make people feel bad.” “Many good and inspiring things happened in the past, but history—American and world—is full of a lot of brutality. Teachers must be empowered to go beyond the surface to help students find truth… The future of Ohio’s children hangs in the balance. The governor said he wants children to be good citizens who are capable of critical thinking, research, and debate. We should all want those things as well, but sugarcoating history to spare ‘feelings’…. is a betrayal of the past that poisons the future.”

There are reports of widespread book banning. The Guardian‘s Adam Gabbatt reports: “Conservative groups across the U.S., often linked to deep-pocketed rightwing donors, are carrying out a campaign to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities. Literature has already been removed from schools in Texas, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. Librarians and teachers warn the trend is on the increase, as groups backed by wealthy Republican donors use centrally drawn up tactics and messaging to harangue school districts into removing certain texts… Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s office for Intellectual Freedom…. said ALA received 156 book challenges—an attempt to remove or restrict one or more books—in 2020. In the last three months of 2021 alone, the organization saw 330 book challenges.  In most incidents there is a common format. According to conservative groups, one parent of a child at school has spotted an allegedly unsuitable book, and has raised the alarm.  But the movement is far from organic.  The name Moms for Liberty might suggest a homely, kitchen-table effort. In reality, Moms for Liberty is associated with other supposed grassroots groups backed by conservative donors, who appear to be driving the book-banning effort.”

Contrary to the allegations of angry parents mobbing school board meetings, children are not harmed by learning the truth. Chalkbeat just published a moving column by Katherine Sanford, a Northern California social studies teacher whose class raised enough money to take civil rights tour of Alabama and Georgia: “Here in the hills of Northern California, in a community where many deeds still have restrictive covenants on them, it can feel like we are too far removed from certain parts of American history. Several years ago, when it came to my attention that some of my students were casually using the N-word and homophobic language outside of class, my concern only deepened. Black culture was a subject of fascination, but Black people were being denied their humanity. I decided my normal teaching tactics weren’t enough. In 2019, my students and I raised money to fly from California to Georgia and Alabama.”  Sanford’s students definitely felt uncomfortable about what they learned by walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and visiting civil rights museums, but Sanford does not believe their experience of sadness hurt them in any way: “The most powerful learning experiences came at museums that brought history alive. At the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, there are holograms of enslaved people in cages awaiting sale. One was calling repeatedly for her children from whom she had been separated. Several students had to walk back outside to catch their breath, and I could see on my students’ faces that they truly understood what it meant to deny someone’s humanity.”

What appears to be a parent-led attack on so-called “Critical Race Theory” and divisive concepts is, in fact, a well-designed political initiative—led by organizations like Moms for Liberty, FreedomWorks, Parents Defending Education, and No Left Turn in Education—designed by think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute—and paid for by far-right philanthropists. This project has been set up to inflame white parents in segregated suburbs, or, as a new report summarized by the National Education Policy Center shows, in districts currently experiencing racial change, by stoking fear that their privilege and their protective historical myths are threatened. The broader effect of this political initiative is already undermining democracy, threatening teachers, and undermining our children’s grasp of the complexity of our history and our nation’s challenges today.

Glenn Youngkin’s Campaign in Virginia Was about Something Sinister, Not about Public Education

If you listen to the national news on CNN or PBS or the networks, you have been told how shocking it was that public education became a hot issue in the Virginia gubernatorial race.  These newscasters, who rarely cover statewide news and were reporting on the Virginia election as a national bell weather, seemed surprised that public school policy had caught voters’ attention. In fact, public schooling is regularly an issue when candidates run for state legislatures or governor. Usually a third or more of a state’s budget pays for the public schools, and most public education policy is made by state legislators and administered by governors according to the principles defined in the 50 state constitutions.

But what was unusual in Glenn Youngkin’s campaign for governor of Virginia is that it was not really about the state’s public schools, despite that there was some discussion in both his and Terry McAuliffe’s campaigns about the funding of the state’s schools.

As more and more commentators are taking the trouble to explain, Youngkin’s campaign was instead a tissue of dog whistle appeals to racism, the culmination of a months’ long strategy by policy think tanks to redefine an arcane academic term, “Critical Race Theory” for the purpose of provoking fear among white, Republican parents.

The truth is that far-right groups are inflaming parents with an artificially constructed argument that public school teachers and curriculum directors are trying to make white children anxious or guilty or ashamed.  In June, The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler and Josh Dawsey identified Christopher Rufo as a 36-year-old documentary filmmaker and media opportunist from Seattle: “Rufo has played a key role in the national debate, defining diversity trainings and other programs as critical race theory, putting out examples that legislators and others then cite…. He continues to appear regularly on Fox News to discuss the issue and often offers strategic advice over how to win the political fight.”

More recently the National Education Policy Center documented that Rufo is, in fact, a well-paid fellow of the Manhattan Institute: “The work and social media posts of Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo offer a good example of how far Right ideologues push the anti-Critical Race Theory narrative… On Twitter, Rufo states his objective and brags about his success: ‘We have successfully frozen their brand—critical race theory—-into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category… The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire race of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.’”

The National Education Policy Center traces the work aimed at inspiring this year’s controversy about Critical Race Theory to particular think tanks including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Goldwater Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Koch family foundations, and the Manhattan Institute.  Well funded groups working to galvanize parents include Parents Defending Education,  Moms for Liberty,  No Left Turn in Education,  FreedomWorks, and  Parents’ Rights in Education.

In a column in yesterday’s NY Times, political strategists Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson analyze what happened Tuesday in Virginia’s election for governor: “The Virginia election results should shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics. No candidate would think of entering an election without a winning message on the economy or health care. Yet by failing to counter his opponent’s racial dog whistles, Terry McAuliffe did the equivalent, finding himself defenseless against a strategy Republicans have used to win elections for decades. Crucially, the Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, was able to use racially coded attacks to motivate sky-high white turnout… (T)he past half-century of American political history shows that racially coded attacks are how Republicans have been winning elections… from Richard Nixon’s ‘law and order’ campaign to Ronald Reagan’s ‘welfare queens’ and George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad.  Many of these campaigns were masterminded by the strategist Lee Atwater, who in 1981 offered a blunt explanation: Being overtly racist backfires, he noted, ‘so you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.’  C.R.T. (Critical Race Theory) is straight out of the Atwater playbook.”

It is rare for me to agree wholeheartedly with Frederick Hess, a neoliberal corporate school reformer who supported No Child Left Behind’s test-and-punish regime, who bought into Race to the Top, and who supports the expansion of charter schools. But today, Hess’s analysis of Terry McAuliffe’s loss in the Virginia governor’s race is persuasive.  Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson describes Hess’s concerns:

“Frederick Hess, a senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he thinks one of McAuliffe’s fatal blunders was to avoid forthrightly addressing the issue of critical race theory and anti-racism initiatives including teacher-bias trainings. McAuliffe should have told parents that he wants to ensure every kid feels valued and learns the country’s true history,  Hess said — but McAuliffe should have made clear that does not mean letting interest groups or ideologues shape public school curriculums. ‘That would have lanced the boil in a very powerful way, and they could have reset the conversation…. If Democrats start making those decisions and articulating those arguments, I think this could all turn out to be a post-Trump fever and it breaks…. But if Democrats can’t bring themselves to do that… I think this could very well build to a head of steam in 2024.”

This blog has covered the controversy about Critical Race Theory here, here, here, here, here, and here.