About That War On Education

Far-right Republicans have been very candid about their war on higher education, as I have previously detailed. The party’s activists have been less open about their continuing effort to destroy American public education, and to re-direct public money to the private, mainly religious schools that teach from a perspective they prefer. (As with so many of the Right’s accusations, projection is obvious; claims that “government schools” are indoctrinating–“grooming”–children reflects their own intent.)

A recent article in the New Republic suggests that the Right is winning its war on public education. The article began with a report on the Congressional testimony of one Lindsey Burke.

Burke, an education policy program director at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, was responding to a question from Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman, after Burke had spoken in favor of “school choice.” Allowing parents to use public education funds to send their children to private schools—including religious schools—was, she argued, merely a way to enable families to “choose learning environments that are safe, and effective, and reflect their values.”

Heritage is one of a number of Rightwing “think tanks” and organizations dedicated to defunding public education–mostly through educational vouchers and similar mechanisms that they claim will “restore parental control” over education. Parental control is increasingly the  “frame that contains both the typical free-market conservative argument against public education and the Christian right argument against exposing children to the immorality of “government schools.”

In 2021, Burke co-wrote a paper with a colleague for the American Enterprise Institute that argued for “allowing families an escape hatch from government schools pushing an agenda that runs counter to their values,” like critical race theory and “transgender ideology.”

This “values-based” coalition Burke said she was introducing in 2022 involved “not just education choice groups,” she explained, “but also groups like Moms for Liberty,” who helped force “parental rights” onto the agenda in school board elections while also aligning with the far right, and “partners” such as Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian nationalist law project focused on anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion cases, which argued both the Dobbs case and a recent fake same-sex wedding website case. These groups, Burke said, “understand that the school choice movement is the solution to current cultural battles.” Conveniently, these groups also instigated these “battles.”

Think about the messaging: calling public schools “government schools.” Talking about “parental choice” and “Christian values.”

It isn’t just coincidence that these “Christian values” warriors focus inordinate attention on trans children (a vanishingly small percentage of the nation’s children, but an unfamiliar population and thus an excellent target for bigots). Rightwing activists are demanding that educators out trans students in the name of “parental rights.”

Nearly 90 bills forcing teachers to monitor students’ gender expression—including dress, pronouns, and names—and report trans and gender-nonconforming students to parents were recently introduced in state legislatures across the country, according to PEN America’s Index of Educational Intimidation Bills. At least five states have adopted these policies into law: North Dakota, Iowa, Alabama, North Carolina, and Indiana. What we are seeing in places like Chino Valley reflects a coordinated national plan to push laws and policies that would penalize educators who don’t go along—inverting their roles as mandatory reporters of harassment, neglect, and abuse at home….

As a tool of gender conformity and as a moral panic about the content of public education, these policies hit a sweet spot for the right—which may explain why more established conservative groups are stepping up to promote and defend them.

The article noted what has become increasingly obvious– the Right’s effort to eradicate public education is “inseparable from their accelerating attacks on LGBTQ rights and racial justice.”

Perhaps there is no better symbol of that intersection than Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who has boasted about writing the playbook: moving from using critical race theory as a rallying cry for white grievance against schools, then similarly promoting accusations that LGBTQ-inclusive schools are “grooming” young people. Rufo revels in “laying siege to the institutions” as strategy, as he said in a 2022 speech at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. “We go in there and we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.”

The linked article explores the effort to “defund” public education in much more depth, and I encourage you to click through and read it in its gloomy entirety.

In Indiana, the effort to help parents escape those nefarious “government schools” is succeeding; a growing number of children are using Hoosier tax dollars to attend  voucher schools–over 90% of which are religious.

Tribalism, anyone?

The next time you hear a self-proclaimed conservative bemoan “identity politics,” you might point out the way vouchers divide Americans.

Comments

One More Time…

Can you stand one more post about the scam that goes by the name of educational vouchers?

This time, I want to begin by suggesting that we may be on the cusp of reversing the effort to destroy public education in the name of parental “choice,” although not before considerably more harm is done.

The Arizona Mirror recently published a report under the headline “Arizona’s universal school vouchers are a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation.”

Here’s the lede:

The nation is watching as the devastating impacts of Arizona’s universal voucher program unfold. The most expansive and least accountable in the country, Arizona’s ESA voucher program is an unmitigated economic disaster with very real human impacts.

Arizona, like Indiana, has a legislature dominated by Republicans, and those legislators sold the concept of universal vouchers by insisting (as they did in Indiana) that it would help low-income students. They also insisted that the additional cost to the state would be negligible.

As the paper reports, just one year into what it calls “this  failed experiment,” it has become apparent that universal ESA vouchers are welfare for the wealthy. They are also on a path that will “devastate the state’s budget and lead to school closures, teacher layoffs, and eventually cuts to services like firefighters, health care, roads and more.”

The newspaper’s analysis was devastating:

  • Vouchers hurt Arizona’s economy: After universal expansion, ESA vouchers are on track to cost Arizona taxpayers over $900 million this school year — nearly 1400% higher than initially projected. The legislature could have used this funding for teacher and staff salary increases, building safety, 21st-century learning, and so much more. Instead, Arizona school districts are already looking at cuts and school
    closures.
  • Welfare for the wealthy: Universal ESA vouchers are primarily claimed by families whose children were already in private school and could already afford this option; now, these vouchers represent an entirely new cost to the state.
  • Arizona’s vouchers have no accountability: Unlike other states, Arizona’s universal vouchers have little to no transparency to taxpayers, zero academic accountability, and zero safety standards. There are no requirements to teach state standards, conduct background checks on teachers or tutors, or ensure site safety — meaning children will inevitably get hurt.
  • Vouchers hurt rural and low-income students: ESA vouchers are primarily claimed by more affluent families in wealthier zip codes and are concentrated in large, suburban areas. This robs funds from low-income and rural communities, leaving them behind.
  • With vouchers, students lose protections: ESA vouchers require parents to sign away federal rights, including protections for special education students, and are leading to many instances of state-funded discrimination against LGBTQ students, English Language Learners, and students with disabilities.

The article noted that other states have begun rethinking their voucher programs. In Texas,  a bipartisan coalition was able to block Gov. Abbott’s repeated attempts to pass ESA vouchers–the Texas legislature rejected voucher schemes five times this year. (One Texas Republican was quoted as saying “I believe in my heart that using taxpayer dollars to fund an entitlement program is not conservative, and it’s bad public policy. Expanding government-defined choice programs for a few without accountability… undermines our constitutional and moral duty to educate the children of Texas.” )

The Illinois legislature eliminated that state’s voucher program, concluding that it had enabled discrimination on the basis of religion, disability status, and LGBTQ+ status. And Georgia and Idaho have refused to institute voucher programs after concluding that the programs are both incredibly costly and lack essential accountability.

An earlier article from Politico confirmed that vouchers simply enrich wealthier Americans. It reported that the new vouchers in many cases lift—or even eliminate—household income caps, thus giving wealthier families state cash to send their kids to private schools–and data shows that many of these students aren’t leaving public schools for private ones.  Instead, most are going to students already enrolled in private schools.

Perhaps the most significant observation in the Arizona newspaper’s report was contained in the last paragraph of the article, which pointed to the underlying purpose of the voucher movement:

Universal ESA vouchers threaten to accomplish in Arizona exactly what they were designed to do: dismantle public education. Arizona would be wise to follow the nation in learning from our mistakes — before it’s too late.

Will Indiana’s legislators learn from Arizona and other states? I’m not holding my breath…but at least other states seem to be catching on.

Comments

Vouchers (Again) And The First Amendment

I was asked to speak to the Shepherd’s Center at North United Methodist Church about  vouchers and Separation of Church and State. Here’s the speech I delivered. Warning:  longer than my usual posts!

______________________

I was asked to talk today about the relationship of the First Amendment’s religious liberty clauses—clauses which, when read together, establish America’s Separation of Church and State—to the nation’s wildly expensive and expanding school voucher programs.

That relationship is key to understanding the overarching threat posed by voucher programs. There are many problems with these programs, and I frequently rant about them on my blog, but the threat to the First Amendment is far and away the most serious.

The exercise of religion requires that each person follow his or her own conscience.  Since opinions and beliefs can be shaped only by individual consideration of evidence that a given individual finds persuasive, no one can really impose opinions on anyone else– government can only force outward obedience to any particular religious tenet. That realization led the nation’s Founders to decree that government should be—to use James Madison’s term– “noncognizant” of its citizens’ religions. Madison believed that government simply had no jurisdiction over religion. He, Jefferson and other Founders believed that a just state is required to be blind to religion–that government should not use religion to classify citizens and should neither privilege nor penalize citizens on the basis of religion.

From the earliest days of the American colonies, separating Church from State was seen as an important protection for both government and religion. Let me just begin this discussion with some history that I hope illuminates that assertion.

Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island, is most often cited for the religious view of the importance of separation; he was the originator, as far as we know, of the phrase “a wall of separation”— a full 150 years before Thomas Jefferson used it. Historians sometimes overlook the importance 18th and 19th century Christians placed on the doctrine of liberty of conscience—what they called “soul freedom.” Such views were most strongly held by Mennonites, Quakers and Baptists, but they were also part of the beliefs of colonial era Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians.

John Leland was a traveling evangelical Baptist with a strong view of the individual’s relationship to God, the inviolability of the individual conscience, and the limited nature of human knowledge. He wrote, “religion is a matter between God and individuals; religious opinions of men not being the objects of civil government, nor in any way under its control.” He also wrote that “the state has no right or leave to concern itself with the beliefs of an individual or that individual’s right to expound those beliefs…The state is to maintain order, not to judge right and wrong.” And here’s my favorite Leland quote: “The very tendency of religious establishments by human law is to make some hypocrites and the rest fools; they are calculated to destroy those very virtues that religion is designed to build up…Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics.”

Did some people living at the same time as Founders like Jefferson and Madison and religious figures like Leland think otherwise? Of course. But it was the position of Madison and Leland that prevailed; it was their view of the proper relationship (which might more accurately be described as the proper lack of a relationship) between church and state that became part of our constitutional structure.

Today, in addition to rampant historical revisionism, there are two common justifications for allowing government to take cognizance of religion—arguments that are mutually exclusive, although often offered by the same people. The instrumental argument holds that public expression of religion changes behavior, and the ceremonial justification says public prayers don’t amount to establishment because they are just meaningless ceremonies meant to add solemnity to occasions.

You are all familiar with the instrumental argument; it is best summarized by a bumper sticker that was popular a few years ago: something along the lines of “When prayer was removed from the classroom, guns and teenage pregnancy came in.”

This naive belief that exposure to a denatured and generic religion in the classroom will make students behave is the same justification given for efforts to post the Ten Commandments—if people see “Thou shalt not kill” on the wall of a public building, well, they won’t kill. (For complex theological reasons I do not understand, this evidently won’t work if the building is privately owned.) Unfortunately, available evidence does not support this belief in the magical powers of religious iconography.

The United States is by far the most religious of all the western industrialized nations—and we are also the most violent. There are few—if any—atheists in our prisons. Folks in the Bible Belt pray more—and kill more. And most school shootings haven’t occurred in hotbeds of secularism like Berkeley or Cambridge or New York City, but in towns where Norman Rockwell and James Dobson would feel right at home.

Historically, a large percentage of America’s persistent arguments over separation of church and state have focused on the nation’s public schools. We’re seeing this mirrored in the current “anti-woke” efforts to ban books in public school libraries; evidently, a significant number of Americans are fixated on shielding children from contact with beliefs of which they do not approve—and that fixation is typically rooted in religion.

The courts consistently ruled against efforts to circumvent the First Amendment by bringing prayer and other religious observances into public school classrooms, so proponents of religious indoctrination found a workaround– and educational vouchers were born. (In all fairness, many early proponents of vouchers were persuaded by arguments that private schools were doing a better job—that children “trapped” in substandard public schools would benefit. Subsequent research has proved those arguments wrong, but I don’t mean to suggest that every voucher proponent wanted public money for religious education. Many did, but others just wanted to destroy the teachers’ unions.)

Predictably, opponents of early voucher programs raised both First Amendment and state constitutional concerns, arguing that the use of public funds to pay tuition at religious schools violated both the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and state-level prohibitions known as “Blaine Amendments.” The Supreme Court considered those First Amendment arguments in 2002, in a case called Zelman v. Simmons-Harris. That case challenged an Ohio voucher program in place in Cleveland. In 1999 and 2000, 82% of the schools participating in the Cleveland program were religiously affiliated, and 96% of the students using the vouchers were enrolled in one of those religious schools. Both the District Court and the Court of Appeals had ruled for the parents who were challenging the program; however, the Supreme Court reversed, accepting the argument that the vouchers weren’t payments to the schools, but to the parents, whose choice of religious schools was made freely and voluntarily, and that as a result, the vouchers could not properly be characterized as tax support for the religious schools. Since the choice of school was made by the parents, and the program’s official goal was secular—it was characterized as a program to allow low-income children to escape a failing school system– the Court held that the voucher program didn’t run afoul of the Establishment Clause.

And we were off to the races.

State courts, including the Indiana Supreme Court, have largely adopted the logic of the Zelman decision, and have allowed voucher programs to operate despite state constitutional provisions forbidding the payment of state tax dollars to religious institutions. The Indiana Constitution has one of these provisions, commonly called “Blaine Amendments.”  They were named for Congressman James Blaine, who sponsored a federal constitutional amendment in 1875 that would have forbidden public funding of religious schools. Blaine’s amendment was seen as an effort to prevent government from supporting Catholic schools—schools that had originally been established in response to Protestant bible-reading in public school classrooms.  Blaine’s effort at a federal amendment failed, but thirty-eight states subsequently added those provisions to their state constitutions. In sixteen states where Blaine Amendments seemed likely to preclude judicial approval of voucher programs, so-called “neo-vouchers” have used tax credits to circumvent the problem; the subsidies have been deemed “tax reductions” rather than direct spending. Arizona is the most prominent state employing this tactic; its Supreme Court upheld the state’s “tax credit scholarships” in 1998. In two states, Massachusetts and Michigan, both vouchers and neo-vouchers have been held to violate those states’ constitutions.

On my bIog, I’ve posted numerous times about multiple ways advocates of privatization and “choice in education” have contributed to the hollowing out of America’s civic structure.  “Choice” sounds great. Providing citizens with a wide freedom of choice–of religion, politics, lifestyle– is quintessentially American. The problems occur when institutionalized choices promote division and undermine civic cohesion.

In far too many communities today, the “educational choice” being offered is the opportunity to shield one’s children from intellectual and cultural diversity. Vouchers provide parents with tax dollars that allow them to insulate their children from one of the very few remaining “street corners” left in contemporary American society. Whatever their original intent, as vouchers work today, they are mechanisms allowing parents to remove their children from public school classrooms and shield them from classmates conveying information incompatible with those parents’ beliefs and prejudices.

In virtually all states with active voucher programs, including Indiana, well over 90% of participating schools are religious, and a disproportionate number of those are fundamentalist Christian schools teaching bogus history and creationism rather than science.

Several academic studies and media outlets have reviewed the textbooks used in those schools. One history textbook exclusively refers to immigrants as “aliens”. Another blames the Black Lives Matter movement for strife between communities and police officers. A third discusses the prevalence of “black supremacist” organizations during the civil rights movement, and calls Malcolm X the most prominent “black supremacist” of the era.

The media continues to report on acrimonious battles in legislatures and boards of education about how issues of race and equity are handled in public school classrooms, but it has largely ignored the education provided by private schools, thousands of which have been excluding diverse voices and teaching biased versions of history for years.

The Guardian is one of the few media outlets that has reviewed the textbooks currently used in thousands of private religious schools. These are schools that receive tens of thousands of dollars in public funding every year. Those textbooks downplay descriptions of slavery and ignore its structural consequences.  The report notes that the books “frame Native Americans as lesser and blame the Black Lives Matter movement for sowing racial discord.”

While we do read about Americans fighting over wildly distorted descriptions of Critical Race Theory and public school “indoctrination,” the Guardian article pointed out that there has been virtually no attention paid to the curricula of private schools accepting vouchers. As the article notes,

“Private schools, unlike public ones, receive little oversight or restrictions when it comes to curriculum. In truth, thousands of private schools are currently teaching history through a racially biased lens.”

The Guardian reviewed dozens of textbooks produced by the Christian textbook publishers Abeka, Bob Jones University Press and Accelerated Christian Education, three of the most popular textbook sources used in private religious schools throughout the US. These textbooks describe slavery as “black immigration”, and say Nelson Mandela helped move South Africa to a system of “radical affirmative action”.

The Abeka website boasts that in 2017, its textbooks reached more than 1 million Christian school students. The Accelerated Christian Education website claims its materials are used in “tens of thousands of schools.” One of its textbooks still refers to the civil war as the “war between the states,” and has a section titled “Black immigration” that characterizes the slave trade as “sometimes unwilling immigration.”

With respect to Reconstruction, the Accelerated Christian Education textbook contained the following paragraph:

“Under radical reconstruction, the south suffered. Great southern leaders and much of the old aristocracy were unable to vote or hold office. The result was that state legislatures were filled with illiterate or incompetent men. Northerners who were eager to make money or gain power during the crisis rushed to the south … For all these reasons, reconstruction led to graft and corruption and reckless spending. In retaliation, many southerners formed secret organizations to protect themselves and their society from anarchy. Among these groups was the Ku Klux Klan, a clandestine group of white men who went forth at night dressed in white sheets and pointed white hoods.”

Huffpost has reported that Christian textbooks used in thousands of schools around the country teach that President Barack Obama helped spur destructive Black Lives Matter protests, that the Democrats’ choice of Hillary Clinton in 2016 reflected the party’s focus on identity politics, and that President Donald Trump was the “fighter” Republicans needed. The Huffpost analysis found that language used in the books “overlaps with the rhetoric of Christian nationalism, often with overtones of nativism, militarism and racism as well.” One scholar was quoted as saying that, as voucher programs have moved more children into these schools, Christian Nationalism has become more mainstream.

Unsurprisingly, since most of these schools refuse to admit gay children or the children of same-sex partners, the books were also biased against homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

I’m clearly not a neutral observer, but I don’t think that science denial, bogus history and homophobia are the best way to prepare students for life in contemporary American society.

Worse, multiple academic studies confirm that these vouchers that have increased religious and racial segregation have done that damage without improving academic performance. Back in 2018, The Wall Street Journal –hardly a leftwing publication–analyzed data on Milwaukee’s program, the nation’s oldest, and found that the city’s 29,000 voucher students, “on average, have performed about the same as their peers in public schools on state exams.” Other studies have found voucher students lagging behind similar students attending public schools.

Meanwhile, in Indiana, which has one of the nation’s largest voucher programs, public schools are struggling to perform without adequate resources, and underpaid teachers are leaving in droves.

The U.S. Constitution gives parents the right to choose a religious education for their children. It does not impose an obligation on taxpayers to fund that choice.

Back in 2005, I wrote an article for an academic journal about the privatization of education, titled Privatizing Education: The Liberal Democratic Idea, Constitutionalism, and the Politics of Vouchers. I’ll conclude this by quoting one of the paragraphs from that early article:

One of the largest and most active blocs working for vouchers are the cultural conservatives of the Christian Right. Groups like the Christian Coalition and Citizens for Excellence in Education (CEE) might at first blush seem very strange bedfellows for libertarians, with whom they share little ideological ground. And it is certainly true that their motives for supporting school choice have little to do with markets and much to do with their views on morality. Many believe, with Robert Simonds of CEE, that “Atheism and many perverted forms of immorality are being forced upon all public-school students, not just Christian students.”

Theodore Lowi has linked the politicization of the Christian Right to the nationalization of the Bill of Rights and especially the application of the First Amendment to the states. Even a cursory reading of their literature will confirm that anger with current Establishment Clause jurisprudence, particularly rulings against officially sanctioned school prayer, is the source of much Christian Right hostility to public schools and support for school choice.

There are many, many other problems with vouchers, but the negative effect on a pluralist democracy is perhaps the most significant–and least recognized.

Thank you.

Comments

Charters Aren’t Vouchers

The media recently reported the results of a recent study of schools in Indiana and other states, and found that children attending public charter schools had better learning outcomes than those in traditional public schools or voucher schools.

When I saw the headlines, I cringed–not because of the study’s findings, which seem credible, but because I’d be willing to bet that nine out of ten people reading those reports don’t understand the difference between charter schools and voucher schools–and it’s a critical difference.

Charter schools are independently run public schools that are granted greater flexibility in their operations than traditional public schools. (Theoretically, at least, that flexibility is in exchange for greater accountability for performance.) In the Indianapolis Public School system, leaders at these schools have independent control of policies and academics while still being part of the public school district. 

Because they are public schools, charters are not allowed to charge tuition. They are not allowed to teach or favor any religion. And importantly, since charter schools are public schools, they are constrained by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, gender, socioeconomic status, previous academic scores, or special education status.

Vouchers–as I have explained repeatedly on this site–are very different. Voucher programs send public money–tax dollars– to private schools to offset the tuition charged by those schools. A vast majority of the private schools that accept vouchers are religious, and a vast majority of students employing those vouchers use them to attend religious schools. Furthermore, virtually all of those voucher schools discriminate on some basis–either limiting enrollment to members of a particular faith, excluding students with special needs, or–in several high-profile situations–excluding gay children, or children with gay parents. 

There are problems with charter schools, particularly with those that have contracted with for-profit entities to manage them, but those problems differ substantially from the issues presented by voucher programs. Vouchers weren’t developed in an effort to improve education; they were meant to be “work-arounds.” The First Amendment, along with many state constitutions, prohibits the use of public funds to support religion or religious institutions. Voucher proponents argued that the millions of tax dollars going into the coffers of religious schools are “really” going to the parents, and that the parents are individual citizens who should be free to spend those dollars to send their children to the school of their choice. (And I have a bridge to sell you…)

Courts bought that argument.

The study found that students who attended charters  in Indianapolis had somewhat stronger educational outcomes than those in either traditional public schools, or in IPS “innovation” schools, which are a different type of charter. (Numerous studies have found that children attending voucher schools do no better–and often do more poorly–than similar children attending traditional public schools.)

Indianapolis students in poverty who attend charter schools showed stronger academic growth in math and similar growth in reading compared to the state average, according to the study. 

CREDO’s own metric for comparison also found that students at Indianapolis charter schools gained more days of learning in math and reading during a typical academic year than similar students at traditional IPS district schools and innovation charter schools within the district. Other comparisons in the study include:

Black and Hispanic students at charter schools had stronger academic growth in math and reading compared to Black and Hispanic peers at district schools. No significant difference in learning gains were found between the same student groups in innovation charter schools compared to district schools.

Students in poverty at charter schools had more learning gains in math and reading compared to their peers at district schools. No significant difference in learning gains were found between the same student group in innovation charter schools compared to district schools.

No matter what type of school English Language Learners in Indianapolis attend from the study, they show similar learning gains in reading and math.

The theory behind charter schools was that their greater flexibility would allow them to experiment with curricula and other aspects of the educational environment, and that successful experimentation could then be “imported” into the traditional public schools. According to the linked article, that is precisely the approach being taken by the IPS Superintendent.

I do welcome the study–and for that matter, all evidence of what works and what doesn’t– but I’d be a lot more enthusiastic if i wasn’t convinced that it will be intentionally mischaracterized to support voucher proponents’ efforts to defame and de-fund our public schools….

Comments

Shades Of Texas

Back before the Internet and e-books, when school textbooks were hard-back volumes printed by educational publishers, Texas had a wildly disproportionate influence on the lessons those books conveyed. Even then, Texas was an anti-intellectual wasteland, but because of its size–and the need to standardize publication of schoolbooks nationally– it had an outsized influence on what went into the nation’s textbooks. (I often think we should give Texas back to Mexico, but they probably wouldn’t take it…)

Today, of course, school districts have access to a wider variety of educational resources, so the minority of Americans who are firmly opposed to giving children an accurate understanding of history or science have pursed a different tactic: educational vouchers. Vouchers–as readers of this blog are aware–allow parents to use tax dollars to send their children to private–almost always religious–schools, a large number of which use textbooks that are even less accurate than those once influenced by Texas.

Time Magazine recently reported on the most widely-used of those “textbooks.”

The report began by noting that the singer-songwriter who wrote the controversial “Try that in a small town” shouldn’t have been so surprised by the outcry the song triggered. After all, he’d attended a religious school that used

textbooks produced by Abeka, a publishing company that has long been part of the effort among conservative institutions to teach an airbrushed version of history—one that presents a narrow vision of a heroic, Christian, capitalist America. For the most part, these books have been limited to private schools and homeschools, though the founders of these networks always hoped to influence public life…

Abeka’s roots go back to the 1925 Scopes Trial, which pitted evolutionary science and expert academic knowledge against local control and religious dogma. After the trial, which produced reams of journalistic mockery of conservative religion, prominent fundamentalists like Bob Jones Sr. decided that America needed a new kind of educational institution, one free from the influence of mainstream academic expertise. He founded Bob Jones College in Florida (now Bob Jones University in South Carolina) to provide white conservative Christians with a “fighting base.”

Eventually, even Bob Jones University was deemed too “progressive” by religious fanatics, and a network of white-dominated private religious schools grew rapidly.

These schools promised to maintain prayer and traditional teaching. Most importantly, they promised a refuge from court-ordered desegregation efforts. These schools needed textbooks that would teach the lessons that parents who opposed such measures wanted their children to learn.

In response, Abeka expanded its publishing efforts. The company eventually published original textbooks in every subject, for every grade. The goal was to provide an alternative kind of curriculum, one that—in the words of one Abeka leader in 1979—would teach students to cherish the Bible, “master the three R’s,” maintain a healthy “respect for authority,” and develop “pride in America.”

As the Time article notes, Abeka textbooks teach a history that is “dramatically distinct from mainstream books.”  They omit the violence that doomed Reconstruction, instead explaining that it failed because many formerly enslaved people were “not prepared for political responsibility.” “The book does briefly note that “some Southern whites used illegal methods” and “terror tactics,” including forming the KKK. Yet, that mention of white terrorism is buried within an overall message of white victimhood.”

In 2019, Abeka’s texts were used by a majority of America’s 1,689,726 homeschooled students plus nearly three-quarters of a million students in conservative Christian private schools. It isn’t just Abeka–Hillsdale College and PragerU, among others, produce wildly slanted versions of America’s history, and have been making inroads in even public schools in Red States.

And it isn’t just history: textbook publishers serving these Christian voucher schools also produce anti-Darwin, anti-evolution. “science” books.

In 2010, NBC reported that Christian-based materials that omit any mention of evolution had come to dominate the home-school education market; that year, that market was more than 1.5 million students. As the article notes, most home-school parents want a “Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation.”

“Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling,” says the introduction to “Biology: Third Edition” from Bob Jones University Press. “This book was not written for them.”

The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its “History of Life” chapter that a “Christian worldview … is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is.”

That is the worldview being supported by Hoosier tax dollars that have been siphoned off and sent to “voucher” schools by Indiana’s legislators.

And we wonder why educated people leave Indiana…

Comments