The Right’s Long Game to End Public Education
Briefly, this commentary is about creating a better environment for all children in public schools and stymie the political and personal efforts impeding the environment for them coming from privatization interests.
by Jeff Bryant
“Every year, there’s something to stoke division in an attempt to disrupt our public schools and decrease the confidence in our public schools. Four years ago were the masks. [Critical race theory] was a year after that. [Now,] DEI, [and] banning books.”
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona finally said the quiet part out loud.
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On February 13, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, did something Democratic officials seldom do in public: He spoke the truth about what’s behind the relentless attacks on public schools by rightwing advocacy groups and their financial backers.
As HuffPost reported, one of the topics that came up during a meeting between Cardona and Black journalists taking place at the Department of Education, was the recent wave of new laws passed in mostly red states targeting programs in K-12 schools and institutions of higher education addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Advocates for DEI programs say they are needed to ensure positive academic, health, and social outcomes for students who often face discrimination and fewer educational opportunities due to their race, class, religion, gender, or ability level. Opponents say they shame white students and cause “reverse discrimination.”
Cardona called new laws passed by Republican state lawmakers to eliminate DEI programs “a deliberate attack on efforts to try to make sure schools are inclusive, welcoming places for all students—in particular, students from different backgrounds.”
But more than just defending schools for embracing DEI, Cardona went further to call out the intention behind these attacks on the programs, calling them “very deliberate attempts to seek division in our schools so that a private option sounds better [emphasis added] for parents.”
“Every year, there’s something to stoke division in an attempt to disrupt our public schools and decrease the confidence in our public schools. Four years ago were the masks. [Critical race theory] was a year after that. [Now,] DEI, [and] banning books.”
The serial crises that groups like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation string together year after year to inflame the populace with fear and suspicion about public schools have been the subject of extensive reporting.
But when major news outlets report on these outbursts of rightwing rage, the articles tend to focus solely on the legitimacy of specific grievances rather than considering whether the attacks themselves could be a tactic in a much longer game.
According to an analysis by NBC News, there are “at least 165 local and national groups” connected to protests and incidents of threats and violence directed at public schools. Many of these groups have connections to prominent national rightwing advocacy organizations and think tanks, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and FreedomWorks.
In a study of the funding sources for Moms for Liberty, retired University of Massachusetts professor Maurice Cunningham linked the group’s financial records to conservative dark money organizations such as the Council for National Policy (CNP) and the Leadership Institute (LI).
CNP and LI, according to Cunningham, share a common aspiration to “destroy public education and privatize schooling . . . in order to reorient education toward Christian nationalism and transform the culture of the nation.”
Writing for The Nation, education journalist Jennifer Berkshire and education historian Jack Schneider reach a similar conclusion.
Organizations such as Moms for Liberty may say that their goals are to amplify parent grievances and institute more conservative curricula, but the “holy grail” of the organizations that fund these groups is to “privatize education” by expanding school voucher programs and enticing parents to pursue education options other than their local public schools.
To bolster their argument, Berkshire and Schneider point to the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who laid out the strategy for using culture wars to scare parents away from public schools in a speech at Hillsdale College in 2021 when he said, “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
The campaign to convince parents that public schools are “the boogeyman,” to use Cardona’s words, has been hiding in plain sight for years.
As Milwaukee-based education journalist Barbara Miner wrote in The Progressive in 2004,
“Eliminating public education may seem unAmerican. But a growing number of movement conservatives have signed a proclamation from the Alliance for the Separation of School and State that favors ‘ending government involvement in education.’”
Back then, Miner sensed that the Republican agenda was all about politics—and that their goal was, principally, to blunt the political clout of teachers’ unions and to woo more nonwhite families to support Republican politicians who framed school vouchers and other private education options as “the civil rights cause of our time.”
Miner noted that while “[o]ccasionally, Republican strategists let the cat out of the bag and admit that vouchers—which divert public dollars to private schools—are about politics,” the goals of their stealth campaign remain mostly hidden.
But after the election of Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 brought on the rise of the Tea Party movement, the forerunner to today’s MAGA uprising, the right-wing’s calls to get rid of public schools became more out in the open.
As ThinkProgress reported for TruthOut in 2011, leaders in the Tea Party were openly advocating the movement’s “ultimate goal” was to “shut down public schools and have private schools only.”
It didn’t take long for prominent Republican politicians to more openly take up the cause, and in 2012, former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum, during his failed campaign to become the Republican presidential nominee, called for ending public education. “We didn’t have government-run schools for a long time in this country,” he said, according to CBS News. “We had private education.”
While Santorum may have been a dud as a presidential candidate, it wasn’t long before his proposition for ending public education became a signature policy in the presidential administration of Donald Trump under the leadership of his education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
What DeVos’s agenda revealed to the nation was that pushing through new voucher programs in state legislatures can be highly effective at undermining public education.
In the meantime, prominent policy leaders in the Democratic party have been unable or unwilling, until Cardona’s recent remark, to call out this Republican agenda for what it is. It’s uncertain why, but perhaps the reluctance has much to do with the fact that the last Democrat to hold Secretary Cardona’s job for a substantial length of time was Arne Duncan, serving under Obama.
Duncan routinely bashed public schools, ignored educators who disagreed with his policies, and arguably did more than any other secretary of education before him to establish privately run charter schools as legitimate and positive alternatives to public schools.
Given the decades of strategizing and financial investment that rightwing operatives have put into their campaign to end public education, and the reluctance of Democratic leaders to understand and openly oppose that campaign, it’s little wonder that public education now faces its most critical existential crisis in modern times.
The Network for Public Education, in its 2024 report Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools, warns,
“[T]he ‘choice’ movement aims to destroy democratically governed district public schools.”
The report rated each state’s commitment to democratically governed public schools and found that only five states received a grade of A; thirteen were awarded a B; nine a C; seven a D; and seventeen an F. “In short,” the NPE concluded, “the ultimate goal of libertarians and the radical right is the ‘back to the future’ dream of American schooling before Horace Mann,” who is often considered to be the founder of the movement for universal, free, and nonsectarian public schools in the United States.
Indeed, when Santorum declared in 2012 that this nation didn’t have “government schools for a long time,” he was correct. The part he left out was that the mostly private system of bygone years was off limits to almost everyone except able-bodied and wealthy white males.
Fortunately, we finally have someone in charge of education policy in Washington, D.C., who gets that.
A dumb population is a docile population, susceptible to adolescent fairy tales to explain away the dark and the machinations of priests, preachers and pedophiles. Add to the mix Ambien, Prozac, Viagra and crotch-shots on the tube and voila! Kool-Aid
Add to that a charismatic ‘leader’ leading them to suicide. dragging the rest of us with them and … well, things don’t look so good for the rest of us
It has ever been thus, from Romans feeding lions to the christians to the World Wrestling WTFever …
Revisiting this, it has often been my thought this is the root of climate denial. Increased levels of CO2 have been demonstrated to suppress cognitive function. Maybe this is why the elites, the powers that be, (((The Deep State))) aren’t as alarmed by the state of the atmosphere as those of us that are paying attention
@Ten,
Also too:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
~ Upton Sinclair
Ten
don’t count on it. Some of the stupids are highly educated and have top SAT scores.
What makes them stupid is money.
@Ten,
“A dumb population is a docile population . . .”
Not to go all pedantic, but I think the adjective you’re looking for here is “ignorant.” Not all ignorant people are dumb, but one effective way to suppress smart people is to keep ’em ignorant. Another is to make them fight over abortion, LGBTQ rights, teh swarthy people at the border, etc. IOW, keep ’em ignorant about their shared interests.
Yeah but … it doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so nice
George Carlin said it best …
well, i wouldn’t say pedantic, and still try to make the case for a difference between dumb and ignorant. like all words they are used to mean different things and the same things. if by dumb you only mean people with organic brain inadequacy..well, i guess you could say that. and if by ignorant you only mean people who don’t know the things you do…well, then, we are all ignorant.
however, i think i get your point. but if i had only learned the things they taught in school i would have to be both ignorant and dumb. schools (should) give us a framework for learning; the rest is up to us. but there is a stupidity (another word for the same thing) that sets in when people..because of systematic propaganda or simple laziness (having other things to do) embrace a wrong or inadequate idea and make it the centerpiece or touchstone of all their thoughts (none dare call it thinking). this, as you suggest, can happen both to people with organic difficulties or to people otherwise “smart”.
i think it can happen to all of us.
but i did come away from my public school education thinking its purpose was to make most kids think they were too dumb to expect much out of life, and the residual eternal “2% who were causing all the trouble” both alienated and the enemy (mutual as it turned out) of the 98% who did as they were told.
i ran into a video the other night. it seems that my state has started enforcing regulations on very small farmers or gardeners that treat them as if they were mega farmers, and require all the mitigations, that they cannot possibly afford, required, say, of a thousand acre pig farm or an industrial dairy.
IF this is true it could explain why”country people” hate the government, and why the electoral college is necessary…country people have different needs than big city people, that would never get a hearing in one man one vote “democracy.”
of course mega farmers are not “country people,” and it may turn out that in this case the oppressive legislation is brought by the local mega farmers to drive the small farmers out of business so the big farmers can make more money.
i’ll look up the video if anyone wants to look at it.
I have no way to determine if one purpose of California’s Prop 13 back in the 70’s was to decimate public education, but it really does seem to have had that effect. It did not have to be that way, but rather than increase funding and resources for minority (poorer) districts to bring them closer to parity with the average non-minority districts, the choice was made to make all schools operate at the poverty levels of the least. Not explicitly or ever obviously at first, but years of cutbacks and funding shortfalls took a toll. Now the charter schools have a legal way to effectively steal public facilities and profit from them. Without any requirement to actually educate their students to the current level of the public school they pretend to be better than. Of course there are good charters, but too many have been found lacking to say the least. I have seen no proposed changes to the law, in any case.
Parents can see that their children are not learning, and we have had multiple bond issues passed to fund education, but not enough, and with some difficulty. When I was growing up CA had the best or one of the best educational systems in the country. No longer, and I see the decline starting with the anti-tax GOP actions back in the 70’s, when minority students were supposed to be getting an equal education finally.
It takes a special kind of hate to harm your own just to be able to harm others too.
oh don’t cry for them. they send their kids to prep schools.
as for the people who vote for them, they are just thinking about taxes, having been educated in the sit down and shut up days of public education.
i am not sure that money is the problem, except in extreme cases (rotten buildings). Last time I looked my kids were in public school…magnificent buildings, state of the art laboratories, no sign of learning anywhere. when i taught, briefly, in public school, the county was more concerned with “do it our way” that with the kids actually learning anything, and while the seventh grade kids still had some life in them, the twelfth grade kids did not, or they hid it.
i do think i heard somewhere “we don’t want them to get too smart; they start to think they should have a say in things.”
i have no great love for public schools as i remember them [there were great exceptions] but the charter schools are trying very hard to be worse.
Well if vouchers end up reducing the percentage of families who are not aligned well with the public schools’ educational ideas, not sure that’s a bad result for public schools. Which is better: bigger but with more dissatisfaction or smaller but with higher satisfaction? You can argue for either, but getting people to “move on” is often good for those staying, too. Is this a threat or an opportunity?
@Eric,
One problem is that private schools are free to expel students with inconvenient behavioral issues rather than spend the money to manage them. Those students get dumped on public schools, which are obliged to take them. The result is that in a voucher system, public schools have to manage a higher proportion of challenged students using shrinking budgets as the vouchers drain public funds from public schools.
@Eric,
A separate point is that vouchers generally don’t cover the full cost of private schools. The result is that poorer families can’t use them to move their kids to the more affluent schools, while the wealthier families who were going to send their kids to private schools anyway get a subsidy.
Joel
that’s a feature, not a bug.
public schools could be better. but private schools can be worse.
I taught math in a public school once. Did not seem poor. The math teachers were given a special textbook just like the ones given to the kids, but with instructions about “how to teach this,” including how much time to give to it. The kids books were well illustrated, with three different colors of ink, biographies of great mathematicians, latest “new math” presentation…and the kids weren’t learning any math. I said, well hell, I” teach them the way I was taught and see what happens. We had a book with no pictures, no biographies, one color of ink, and old school just the facts math. The kids loved it and began to really learn the math, I was so proud I told the county school-visitor about it. She told me to teach it their way or get out.
By the way, “free to expel” is a symptom of the human “need to punish” a leftover, no doubt, of when it had survival value*. Now it is one of the worst causes of bad education, bad work relations, bad marriages, and crime. Not to mention bad dogs and bad kids. Even B.F, Skinner understood this.
*if nothing else, if you are living in a country that has been conquered you learn to beat your kids to make them polite, because if they sass one of the ruling class they are likely to get killed. It is also a prime feature of Trumpism, passed on from father to son. And likely a factor in the inability of Christians, even the good ones, to get rid of the pagan idea that Christ had to be punished for our sins, God needing to punish someone. Like the future king’s whipping boy. [jesus himself, was not a big fan of punishment.]