Category Archives: Education / Youth

This Is How You Keep ‘Em Down On The Farm…

Republicans in Indiana are currently struggling to find enough votes to engage in a mid-cycle gerrymander that they believe would send one or two more Republicans to Congress.

If enough members of Indiana’s GOP legislative supermajority cave to Trump and pass his desired gerrymander –and if that legislation survives a legal challenge (not a given, since it would run afoul of the state constitution)–and if the sheer effrontery of the act doesn’t drive turnout that reduces, rather than adds Republican seats–Indiana will presumably send to Congress the same sort of Republicans who keep trying to turn Indiana into Mississippi.

I have posted several times about the sheer knuckle-headedness of Indiana’s legislature, especially (but certainly not exclusively) when it comes to education policy. Not only have religious fundamentalists and Christian nationalists managed to squander huge amounts of our tax dollars on vouchers–starving public education while sending those dollars to private, overwhelmingly religious schools– virtually all of their interventions in education reflect their utter lack of understanding of what education is–they apparently confuse it with job training.

Not surprisingly, Indiana’s Department of Education reflects that legislative blind spot.

Michael Hicks–a Ball State University economist–recently published an essay criticizing a dangerously misguided policy change from DOE.

In crafting Indiana’s new high school diploma requirements, the state Department of Education identified only one of the two deep challenges to education in Indiana.

The new diploma might, and I stress might, help the smaller of the two problems. At the same time, it risks making the larger problem worse.

Indiana’s largest, and growing, problem is that we send too few young Hoosiers to college. The decade-long decline has been so bad, and so sustained, that we are now graduating and keeping young people beneath the replacement rate of our already dismal educational attainment.

This ensures we will slide toward the bottom of the nation in our share of college graduates by mid-century. That matters for our economy because over the past half-century more than 100% of economic growth accrued to places in the top half of educational attainment. So, if you wish to grow the place where you live — whether it’s a county, city or state — it needs to have better than average educational attainment.

The second problem Hicks identifies is a lack of entry-level job skills among the “excess supply of young Hoosiers” who don’t go to college. The state’s large employers complain about that lack, but as Hicks notes, employers who need college graduates or employees with advanced degrees don’t complain to the legislature–they simply recruit elsewhere.

DOE’s new policy charges schools with finding additional internships for more “hands-on” learning. Sounds good–but as Hicks quite correctly points out, the changes come at a steep cost. That’s because, in order to accommodate work outside the classroom, academic requirements have been reduced across the board.

Under the new rules, it is now possible to get a high school diploma with mathematics courses that are mostly taught in middle school and have been since the 1920s. Math, science, literacy, history and writing requirements have all been reduced. These are the lowest diploma standards in modern state history.

Once again, Indiana is ignoring the needs of poor and rural children. As Hicks says, affluent, college educated parents will ignore the minimum standards. Children from those families may even be better off, because “smart kids in rural and poor school corporations will be funneled into less exacting academic programs” weakening competition for college slots.

The new diploma offers some nice soundbites, but it’s an engine of unequal opportunity and a near guarantee that we’ll send fewer kids to college, and that we’ll send them there less prepared. That will be a panacea for businesses looking to hire folks for $15 an hour jobs, but will do nothing to promote prosperity in Indiana.

Of course, none of these concerns appeared in the briefing slides or implementation guidance of the new diploma. State officials simply didn’t do their homework, which is a damning observation for folks involved in education.

Hicks also notes the lack of homework evident in what the new policy calls the “military option.”

Students can obtain a “military diploma” in one of three ways–appointment to a service academy (which would require far more academic preparation than the new standards call for), enrollment in a college ROTC program (which requires that the student be in college–again, requiring more academic preparation than the standards contemplate), or enlistment in the armed forces before high school graduation.

Can we spell embarrassing?

Just what Congress needs–more GOP representatives from Indiana’s version of Mississippi…

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Our Diverse History

There’s a reason the Trump administration and its White Christian nationalist base are so intent upon replacing education–especially classes in history–with a wildly inaccurate, “White-washed” version. The substitution of their fanciful and phony nostalgia for the inconvenient facts of America’s history supports their fond belief that only White Christians are real Americans.

Today’s historical revisionists like to insist that those who can trace their ancestry to the people they want to believe settled the country and/or who fought in the Revolutionary War are the “real” Americans. Since the country’s actual history is rather different from that version, they are working to subvert accurate historical instruction.

A recent guest essay in the New York Times focused on the history of this country’s diversity–a diversity that has existed from the nation’s beginnings. Titled “The Right Wing Myth of American Heritage,” the essay began by recounting a fight–in 1764 Pennsylvania–between Irish settlers and English Quakers. When Benjamin Franklin’s diplomacy averted an all-out conflict, the battle devolved to a “war” of pamphlets giving voice to what the author called “the toxic stew of grievances held by the wide mix of ethnic and religious groups in the middle colonies.”

There were pamphlets that accused the Quakers of taking secret satisfaction in the slaughter of Irish and German settler families at the hands of the Indians, and that called for Quakerism to be “extirpated from the face of the whole earth.” In the reverse direction, Irish Ulster Presbyterians were described as “Ulceration” “Piss-brute-tarians.” Franklin himself referred to the Irish settlers as “Christian white savages” and Germans as “Palatine boors” who refused to assimilate or learn English.

This was the state of relations among European settlers on the brink of the American Revolution. It’s a history that is inconvenient to the latest ideological project of the nativist right.

Those nativists insist that to be a “true American,” one must be descended from a group of founders who–they imagine– were united by a shared system of values and folkways, founders who (in their fevered imaginations) were all English-speaking Protestants from Northwest Europe. Those with bloodlines going back to those settlers–considered by nativists to be America’s “founding ethnicity”– are more American than those who lack such bloodlines, and they argue that immigration has “diluted” that “pure” American stock.

The MAGA bigots who embrace this ahistorical story are thrilled by Trump’s efforts to favor White asylum seekers over non-white ones, and his proposal to counteract growing diversity in America, which the Trump administration regards as a destabilizing cultural force. “The documents submitted in connection with the proposals assert that increasing diversity, “has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity.”

The Times essay quoted Vice-President J.D. Vance’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, in which Vance disavowed the belief that the United States is a country built on a creed, and insisted that “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history.” As the author notes, that mythology is historically delusional.

Americans have never been “a group of people with a shared history.” The founders were an assortment of people from different histories and backgrounds who coexisted — often just barely — because they didn’t have any other choice but to do so. This was true even within the British majority; Puritans and Quakers alike were banished from Anglican Virginia, Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts, and English colonists in New England and the Tidewater region sided with and in some cases fought for opposing sides of the English Civil War. America was a nation that emerged in spite of itself…

Mr. Vance, like other nativists, refuses to acknowledge that cultural diversity, with all of its prejudices and conflicts, is in fact the through line of American history. The United States isn’t exceptional because of our common cultural heritage; we’re exceptional because we’ve been able to cohere despite faiths, traditions and languages that set us apart, and sometimes against one another. The drafters of the Constitution tried to create that cohesion by building a government that could transcend our divisions.

As the essayist concludes, the achievement of the founders would have been far less remarkable had the colonists been a monoculture. It is the very rejection of the pretense that any one group deserves some kind of privileged status that has made us  American.

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What We Stand To Lose

A while back, the Indianapolis Capital Chronicle published an article reminding readers of the importance of the nation’s public schools. The article began with an acknowledgement of the war being waged on those public schools by the Trump Administration and the Christian Nationalists responsible for Project 2025, and it followed that acknowledgement by underscoring what the nation stands to lose if that war succeeds. The authors reminded readers that the nation’s public schools have been responsible for creating an educated workforce–and far more importantly, for inculcating generations of students with the United States’ fundamental values of liberty, equality, fairness and concern for the common good.

As the great political scientist Benjamin Barber wrote, the public schools have been constitutive of a public–they have forged a community of Americans from the diverse families who sent their children into those public school classrooms.

Education is a public good;  it doesn’t simply benefit individual students, it benefits the country. The authors quote Horace Mann–often dubbed the father of our public school system–for the assertion that universal, publicly funded, nonsectarian public schools would help sustain American political institutions, expand the economy and fend off social disorder. Mann’s words really resonate right now, as the years of persistent war on public schools and the diversion of tax dollars to primarily religious schools has contributed greatly to the current polarization and tribalization of the American public, and contributed to our growing social disorder.

The authors of the article noted that they’d written a book titled “How Government Built America,” and they shared two lessons they took from their research for that book.

One is that the U.S. investment in public education over the past 150 years has created a well-educated workforce that has fueled innovation and unparalleled prosperity.

As our book documents, for example, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the states expanded public education to include high school to meet the increasing demand for a more educated citizenry as a result of the Industrial Revolution. And the GI Bill made it possible for returning veterans to earn college degrees or train for vocations, support young families and buy homes, farms or businesses, and it encouraged them to become more engaged citizens, making “U.S. democracy more vibrant in the middle of the twentieth century.”

The other, equally significant lesson is that the democratic and republican principles that propelled Mann’s vision of the common school have colored many Americans’ assumptions about public schooling ever since. Mann’s goal was a “virtuous republican citizenry” – that is, a citizenry educated in “good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well-being.”

Mann believed there was nothing more important than “the proper training of the rising generation,” calling it the country’s “highest earthly duty.”

The people currently in positions of authority have made it abundantly clear that they have no interest whatsoever in that “rising generation,” neither its training nor its very survival. From the replacement of medical science with quackery likely to cost children’s lives to denial of the climate change that threatens the livability of the planet, the grifters and con men currently in power are interested only in what they can extract during their time in office. They are perfectly happy to advance Christian Nationalists goals, including the destruction of “government” schools and their replacement with “godly academies” that deepen America’s social divisions.

Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education has been accompanied by pious statements about returning control to the states, but in direct contradiction to that rhetoric, the administration has also been busy mandating what can and cannot be taught in public schools. It continues to threaten funding for school districts that fail to penalize transgender children or that teach about slavery and contemporary forms of discrimination. The White House is demanding a curriculum highlighting “patriotic” education–a curriculum that ignores the less admirable parts of our history and instead depicts the founding of the U.S. as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling.”

A shining City on a hill…

Trump and MAGA fear true education. Instead, they want to indoctrinate–and the material they want to impart is (to put in mildly) inconsistent with reality.

The weakening and eventual destruction of America’s public schools is an essential part of the Christian Nationalist/MAGA/Project 2025 plan to privilege (certain) White Christians and turn others into second-class citizens.

The assault on our universities has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, and the assaults on our public schools have nothing to do with the quality of education.

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The Long Game

Historians and scholars have pointed out that the current, previously unthinkable assault on America’s Constitution–especially on Separation of Church and State–and the accompanying war on science and education aren’t sudden eruptions. Recent documentaries like “Bad Faith” have focused on those I think of as the “anti-Founders,” the men who began their theocratic and plutocratic efforts more than fifty years ago, willing to play the long game.

A game that is now bearing (rotten) fruit.

I was intrigued to come across a description of one strand of that long game, written in 2023 for Inside Higher Educatiion by Linda Stamato. Linda is an unusually perceptive scholar with whom I’ve become a sometime-email-correspondent, and her analysis focused on a much-discussed memorandum written by former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell–a memorandum “credited” with triggering the long corporate war against the nation’s universities and public education.

There is significant recognition of the way Powell’s memo jump-started the war on public education via the so-called “privatization” of the nation’s public schools through the vouchers that send our tax dollars to private, overwhelmingly religious, schools. In this essay, Stamato focuses on the less widely recognized influence of that memo on the current, ferocious assault on higher education. 

As she wrote,

The “war” on higher education in the U.S.—and the status it once held as a public good—has been going on for decades. This war no doubt has many points of origin. One can be found in a once-obscure, intended-to-be-confidential document, written for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971 by Lewis F. Powell Jr., shortly before he ascended to the nation’s highest court.

Decidedly conservative, and dead set against the academy, the Powell memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” placed higher education in its crosshairs.

Powell’s manifesto—the focus of this essay—laid the groundwork for much of what we now see in the efforts to undermine tenure, to prohibit faculty from appearing as expert witnesses to share their professional knowledge in legal proceedings and to undermine the autonomy of institutional governing boards, not to mention the explosion of bills and laws emanating from state legislatures that would dictate what is to be taught in college and university classrooms.

Powell’s memo began with the thesis that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” and he outlined what Stamato described as “a comprehensive, coordinated counteroffensive on the part of the American business community in response.” That response singled out “the Campus” as a source of those attacks.

Powell saw “bright young men,” from campuses across the country,” who were seeking “opportunities to change a system which they have been taught to distrust … if not, indeed, despise.” They sought these opportunities to challenge free market ideology through employment in “the centers of the real power and influence in our country”—namely the news media; in government, as staff and consultants; in elective politics; as lecturers and writers; and on the faculties of educational institutions.

Stamato describes Powell’s prescriptions for battling what we might now call a “woke” ideology–measures that we can now see in a variety Red state efforts to “balance” faculty ideologies and monitor what can be taught in America’s academic institutions. 

As Stamato reports, Powell’s memo prompted corporate interests to take up the challenge, and college campuses have been targets ever since. 

Richard Vedder, writing in Forbes, lays out the conservative campus movement—and it is that—as taking “at least four forms: entire schools where conservative or traditional values dominate campus life, national organizations promoting conservative ideas, foundations which support conservative or libertarian enclaves on campus, and non-university think tanks and research centers which provide conservative analysis of the world outside the traditional Ivory Tower.”

The article describes the ways in which the rise of conservative think tanks have influenced not just educational institutions, but the courts–and their success in creating language that obscures their ideological intent. Terms such as “intellectual freedom” and “viewpoint diversity” are used to justify restricting intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity. (One thinks of Humpty Dumpty from Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word, it means what I say it means…”)

The article is well worth your time to click through and read in its entirety.

The Powell memo, along with racism and fundamentalist hysteria over the growing secularization of society, spawned the current resistance to “elitism”–i.e., knowledge and expertise.  America’s current dysfunctions and the elevation of dangerous and embarrassing ignoramuses to positions of authority are rooted in efforts that began a long time ago. 

You really need to read the whole essay.

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Told You So…Repeatedly

WFYI recently reported on a new business alliance focused on improving civic education. It’s a welcome development.

The Indiana Business Alliance for Civics will provide resources and work with businesses to encourage employees to register and vote, and will provide education about civics. It will also connect businesses with schools, to encourage civics education. The alliance is led by Business For America, a national nonprofit. 

As long-time readers of this blog know, civics education has been a primary focus for me for a long time. During my tenure at IUPUI (now IU-Indy), I founded the Center for Civic Literacy, which explored ways to reverse Americans’ really shocking lack of knowledge about the most basic elements of their Constitutional, political and legal systems. 

A recent Substack attributed the lack of emphasis on civics–and really, all of the humanities–to the growing emphasis on STEM, which the authors traced back to the shock of Sputnik. As they wrote,

it’s not enough for students only to study math, technology, and the sciences. It’s not enough for our country to have the top earners, or the top innovators of weapons and warfare. We all need to be educated citizens, knowledgeable about history and civics as well as science and technology.

If you think the over-emphasis on STEM and the neglect of civics is overstated, you need only follow the money.

At the start of the Biden administration, the federal government was spending more than $50 per student on STEM education, versus only $0.50 per student per year on civic education (and even that represents a tenfold increase from a few years earlier). You get what you pay for: on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) civics assessment, American students have been scoring pretty dismally for decades now. And as of August 2025, the Trump administration has cut $12 billion for K-12 education (including some STEM programs) and merged funds for civic education with other areas, so that some states may not spend any money on civic education at all.

One paragraph really says it all–it explains how our woeful lack of civic knowledge has contributed to the success of the MAGA/Trump assault on America’s democratic institutions.

Democracy is reliant on a culture of civic participation. Governing ourselves takes work and commitment. So if we’re going to renovate our constitutional democracy and institutions in the United States to work better for everyone, we also need to do some serious work on our culture of citizenship, to make sure that we are ready to play our part well. Civic education is how we restore and grow that culture.

When you don’t know how the system is supposed to work, you are a prime target for disinformation.

I attribute the over-emphasis on STEM and the corresponding lack of concern for civic literacy to what is a hot-button issue for me: the widely-accepted belief that education is basically a consumer good–that it is indistinguishable from job training. Ratings of colleges focus on the earnings of graduates, not the depth of knowledge communicated in classrooms–a fatal misunderstanding of the educational mission. Not only is genuine education a far broader benefit to the individual, it is a public good that builds the capacity of the nation to govern itself.

As Robert Reich wrote in a 2022 essay,

Such an education must encourage civic virtue. It should explain and illustrate the profound differences between doing whatever it takes to win, and acting for the common good; between getting as much as one can get for oneself, and giving back to society; between seeking personal celebrity, wealth, or power, and helping build a better society for all. And why the latter choices are morally necessary.

Finally, civic virtue must be practiced. Two years of required public service would give young people an opportunity to learn civic responsibility by serving the common good directly. It should be a duty of citizenship.

A concerted emphasis on civic virtue might even begin to change the nature of America’s social incentives, which now are disproportionately weighted toward rewarding greed and celebrity. And–again, as regular readers know–I have long been an advocate for a year or two of mandatory public service.

It’s a positive sign when business leaders recognize the dangers of our civic deficit and take action to combat it. If and when we defeat MAGA’s assault on the principles that made America America, strengthening civics instruction should be a very high priority.

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