Public Schools And Parents

When the movement for school vouchers first began, proponents insisted that a “free market” in education would improve outcomes–that children no longer confined to those failing “inner city” schools would emerge better-educated. They tended to ignore pesky concerns about transportation, fly-by-night “education entrepreneurs” and the inconvenient fact that public schools serving rural folks who had no private options were losing resources so that urban kids could attend primarily religious schools.

As the years went on, numerous credible research projects showed that the magic of the market had unaccountably failed. Voucher students not only didn’t perform better, they mostly lagged behind their public-school peers.

That was inconvenient, but the intrepid opponents of American public education weren’t about to let a little thing like poor educational outcomes keep them from realizing their goals: destroying teachers’ unions, evading Separation of Church and State, and enriching donors from the for-profit education sector. So proponents pivoted from test scores to the horrors of “woke” instruction: assertions that the public schools were “indoctrinating” children by teaching them accurate history and –horrors!!–letting them read “woke” books.

The battle cry this time was “trusting and empowering parents” whose Christian family values were being undermined. It turns out, however, that a majority of parents are satisfied with their “woke” public schools.

As an article from the American Prospect explains. there was considerable discontent with school closures during the pandemic, and early successes by reactionary parent groups built on that discontent. Then they over-reached.

The new culture war over the future of education is a stalking horse for the same old battle over school choice. The not-too-hidden goal of denigrating public schools is to weaken support for teachers and their unions, and to redirect funds into school vouchers and other programs that pummel public education even further.

Polling conducted by the American Federation of Teachers in mid-December found that the culture-war framing was unpopular. Instead, voters and parents saw strong academic, critical reasoning, and practical life skills as most important, when compared to anti-wokeness. Furthermore, among the sample group, when given the option between improving public education and giving parents more school choices, 80 percent preferred improving public schools. Most revealing was that two-thirds of voters said that culture-war battles distracted public schools from their foremost role: educating students.

The article noted that even some Republican state legislators resist efforts to privatize education.

In Iowa, nine Republicans in the House, and three in the Senate, voted against a bill that would pull $345 million of taxpayer money over a four-year period into family private-school costs. Thanks to the margins in the Iowa legislature, the bill still passed. The state’s education department expects it would include an additional drop of $46 million from public-school funding as a result…

One Iowa Republican who opposed the measure  told the Des Moines Register that he represented a “very Republican, very conservative district” –and that his constituents were opposed to the measure.

The article also referred to the earlier experiment in Kansas under Gov. Sam Brownback that led to a reversal of the cuts and the election of a  Democratic governor now serving her second term.

Diverting resources to voucher and “scholarship” programs has reduced funding for public school teachers, as well as for extracurricular activities, English-as-a-second-language programs, special-education programs, school bus drivers, janitorial services, and coaches. Those cuts most definitely are not in the public interest, nor are they desired by the vast majority of parents.

As NPR has reported:

Math textbooks axed for their treatment of race; a viral Twitter account directing ire at LGBTQ teachers; a state law forbidding classroom discussion of sexual identity in younger grades; a board book for babies targeted as “pornographic.” Lately it seems there’s a new controversy erupting every day over how race, gender or history are tackled in public school classrooms.

But for most parents, these concerns seem to be far from top of mind. That’s according to a new national poll by NPR and Ipsos. By wide margins – and regardless of their political affiliation – parents express satisfaction with their children’s schools and what is being taught in them…

In the poll, 76% of respondents agree that “my child’s school does a good job keeping me informed about the curriculum, including potentially controversial topics.”…

Just 18% of parents say their child’s school taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family’s values; just 19% say the same about race and racism; and just 14% feel that way about U.S. history.

Vouchers don’t improve education, and a small minority of parents is dissatisfied with the curricula in their children’s schools. But in Indiana, evidence is irrelevant. Republican legislators are pushing hard to expand an already-generous voucher program.

They need to explain just who they are representing–and why.

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And Then There’s Indiana’s Housing Crisis…

Our Indiana’s legislative overlords concentration on bullying trans kids and impoverishing public education evidently leaves them little time or interest in solving the state’s real problems, like the lack of affordable housing and/or the plight of low-income renters.

As I’ve indicated before, tenants in Indiana have almost no rights and no recourse against bad actor landlords. Indiana law–or really, the lack thereof– is an open invitation to out-of-state buyers of real property, with the result that Indianapolis is now first in the nation for out-of-state ownership of rental property. (In most cities, around 3% of rental properties are owned by out-of-state investors. In Indianapolis, the percentage is 15% and climbing.)

We have an eviction crisis, made more severe by Indiana’s lack of affordable housing. The Greater Indianapolis Multi-Faith Alliance (GIMA) reports that Indiana has a gap of 135,033 rental units affordable for Hoosiers in the bottom 30% of the income distribution. Indiana has the single highest housing cost burden among all Midwest states for those residents.

As a result,many Hoosiers are spending 50-80% of their incomes on rent. One minor emergency – an issue with a car, an emergency room visit, a layoff– can cause a spiral into evictions.

Indianapolis ranks #2 in the country for evictions. Only New York is higher, and costs are a huge factor; Marion County rents have increased an average of 20% since 2020, while wages have only increased by 4%.

As GIMA has reported,  out-of-state institutional investors are drawn to Indiana for its landlord-friendly laws, a situation that doesn’t just hurt renters, but drives up costs for would-be homebuyers as well.

Some other statistics: Sixty percent of rental property owners in Indiana live in Illinois, California, Georgia, Texas, and Florida. Indiana is on track for more than 30% of all residential property purchases to be by investors.  Indianapolis is #1 among U.S. cities for out-of-state corporate investment in real estate. 

GIMA is trying to get legislators’ attention.

It is supporting HB 1005, Rep. Doug Miller’s bill to establish a residential housing infrastructure assistance program and revolving fund. 

Rep. Miller’s bill will be particularly beneficial in rural Indiana, which highlights that this is not an urban, city-focused issue. It affects all of Indiana. Providing state-supported programs to build more housing is critical to stopping the evictions crisis. We would encourage our legislators to take this first, modest step to show the people of Indiana that they come first, that human dignity is a Hoosier value, and that housing is critical to human well-being.

The organization is also supporting SB114., a bipartisan measure sponsored by  Sen. Eric Koch, Sen. Shelli Yoder and Sen. Stacey Donato. That bill was prompted by an incident that received widespread publicity: in February of last year, Citizens Energy shut off the water supply for 868 tenants of Capital Place and Berkley Commons apartments for 21 hours, because the landlord, JPC Charities, owed $1.3m in missed utility payments.

Citizens Energy Group certainly deserves to be paid for its services, but tenants should be able to apply pressure by paying their rents into escrow accounts until the landlord remedies its misbehavior.

As GIMA’s policy paper put it,

This incident highlights the reality that tenants in Indiana have almost no rights, no power, and no recourse from bad actor landlords. It also highlights the impact that out-of-state investment in rental properties is having in our state… This small step will help send a message that Indiana is no longer ripe for “do-what-you want” property owners.

GIMA’s concerns about Hoosier tenants’ lack of legal recourse is shared by State Senator Fady Qaddoura. Last session, Qaddoura introduced legislation allowing renters to put their rent in escrow if a landlord did not make timely repairs to serious problems. He noted at the time that Indiana is one of just a handful of states without some mechanism allowing tenants to withhold payment of rent until repairs are completed.

Qaddoura has reintroduced that measure, together with some additions that would require out-of-state landlords to contract with real estate property managers inside Indiana.

“The philosophy here is that if you live and operate in Indiana, you’re not going to risk the reputation of your business to engage in deceptive practices on behalf of an out-of-state, negligent, corporate landlord,” he said.

Qaddoura also wants to increase state income tax deductions for tenants – currently set at $3,000. 

You would think these bills would pass easily– they simply reflect a fairer balance between landlords and tenants–but this is Indiana, so of course, you’d be wrong. As a friend who knows her way around the Statehouse tells me, the Indiana Apartment Association has ruled with impunity in the General Assembly for decades, and continues to do so. 

The IAA represents landlords–homegrown or not–and couldn’t care less about tenants. Particularly low-income Hoosiers who struggle to pay those escalating rents.

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Why They’re Leaving The Church

Christianity in America has been losing adherents, and the loss has become too pronounced to ignore. Reaction to that loss has been one of the more obvious motivators of White Christian Nationalists’ prolonged tantrum.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the media was filled with reports that–while “mainstream” Christian churches were losing ground–that loss was offset by the growth of Evangelical “mega churches.” Today, the reports are that those Evangelical churches are also in decline.

The question, of course, is why.

A Guardian  article a while back addressed the phenomenon, and the purported reasons for it

Churches are closing at rapid numbers in the US, researchers say, as congregations dwindle across the country and a younger generation of Americans abandon Christianity altogether – even as faith continues to dominate American politics.

As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year in the country – a figure that experts believe may have accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic.

About 4,500 Protestant churches closed in 2019, the last year data is available, with about 3,000 new churches opening, according to Lifeway Research. It was the first time the number of churches in the US hadn’t grown since the evangelical firm started studying the topic. With the pandemic speeding up a broader trend of Americans turning away from Christianity, researchers say the closures will only have accelerated.

The report noted that a large number of churches are being “repurposed” into cafes, museums and shops, reminding me of my last trip to visit my son in Amsterdam, where  repurposed Churches seemed to be on every corner.

Here in the U.S. the pandemic has come in for a good deal of blame: researchers note that when people break the habit of Sunday church attendance, it requires  some significant effort to get them back.

But a more likely diagnosis is the decreasing religiosity of the American population.

But while Covid-19 may have accelerated the decline, there is a broader, long-running trend of people moving away from religion. In 2017 Lifeway surveyed young adults aged between 18 and 22 who had attended church regularly, for at least a year during high school. The firm found that seven out of 10 had stopped attending church regularly.

As the article noted, some of the reasons were logistical–prompted by people moving away for college or starting jobs which made it difficult to attend church. But–as the research also found–other reasons were more philosophical. When researchers asked why they had broken with their churches, one  of the top answers was that the respondent saw church members as judgmental and hypocritical.

About a quarter of the young adults who dropped out of church said they disagreed with their church’s stance on political and social issues.

A study by Pew Research found that the number of Americans who identified as Christian was 64% in 2020, with 30% of the US population being classed as “religiously unaffiliated”. About 6% of Americans identified with Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

“Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of US adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’,” Pew wrote.

“This accelerating trend is reshaping the US religious landscape.”

In 1972 92% of Americans said they were Christian, Pew reported, but by 2070 that number will drop to below 50% – and the number of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans – or ‘nones’ will probably outnumber those adhering to Christianity.

Scholars of religion quoted in the article noted that the move away from religion occurred much earlier in other countries.

“Canada, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the nones rise much earlier, the wake of the 1960s the baby boom generation, this kind of big, growing separation of kind of traditional Christian moral morality,” Bullivant said.

“What happens in America that I think dampens down the rise of the nones is the cold war. Because in America, unlike in Britain, there’s a very explicit kind of ‘Christian America’ versus godless communism framing, and to be non-religious is to be un-American.

That belief–that one must be religious–or actually, White and  Christian–in order to be a “true” American permeates the current White Christian Nationalist movement. Rage at the decline of that (ahistorical) insistence is fueling what I’ve characterized as a “tantrum,” leading to periodic eruptions of violence like that of the January 6th insurrection, which was striking for its numerous displays of Christian imagery.

A few days ago, a commenter to this blog noted that animals are most vicious when cornered, and that much of the rage we are seeing is triggered by similar perceptions of growing irrelevance. I think it’s a valid analogy.

The question is, how long does it take to tame that rabid animal?

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That “Hot Mess”

Eugene Robinson’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post had a concluding paragraph that really summed up America’s political situation. After explaining that we need at least two political parties, he wrote:

Right now, we have one center-left political party — the Democrats — and one flaming hot mess of ego, resentment and paranoia. It’s going to be a long two years.

The disgraceful antics of the crazies at Biden’s State of the Union address was just one recent illustration of that “flaming mess.” The newly-constituted “oversight” committees were another–evidently, they fell so short of proving misbehavior by the Biden Administration (while unintentionally disclosing Trump’s efforts at Twitter censorship) that Fox News decided against live coverage of committee shenanigans. 

Speaking of shenanigans, the media has been all over wacko George Santos, who appears to live and work in an alternate reality that he managed to peddle  during his Congressional campaign. Santos has been described as an outlier–rejected by “normal” Republicans.

The GOP’s purported outrage hasn’t found expression in Santos’ expulsion from the House, of course, and pathetic Kevin McCarthy (talk about your “hot messes”!) has appointed him to spots on important committees.

Now it turns out that Santos isn’t the only Republican fabulist.

Twelve years before she was elected as the first Mexican American woman to represent Florida in Congress, Anna Paulina Luna was serving at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Mo., where friends said she described herself as alternately Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European. Known then by her given last name of Mayerhofer, Luna sported designer clothing and expressed support for then-President Barack Obama.
 
By the time she ran for Congress as a Republican, she had changed her last name to Luna in what she said was an homage to her mother’s family. A staunch advocate for gun rights, she cited on the campaign trail a harrowing childhood that left her “battle hardened.” She said she and her mother had little extended family as she grew up in “low-income” neighborhoods in Southern California with a father in and out of incarceration. She said she experienced a traumatizing “home invasion” when she was serving in the Air Force in Missouri.

Luna’s sharp turn to the right, her account of an isolated and impoverished childhood, and her embrace of her Hispanic heritage have come as a surprise to some friends and family who knew her before her ascent to the U.S. House this year. A cousin who grew up with Luna said she was regularly included in family gatherings. Her roommate in Missouri had no recollection of the “home invasion” Luna detailed, describing instead a break-in at their shared apartment when they were not home, an incident confirmed by police records. And three years before her first congressional bid as a conservative, Luna registered to vote as a Democrat in Washington state, voting records show.

I wonder how many other GOP Representatives have dramatically re-invented themselves in order to appeal to the GOP’s White Christian Nationalist base.(Calling Elise Stefanik…) 

The New Republic recently published a less snarky and more analytical look at the GOP’s departure from sanity.The article began by quoting from a speech in which former President Kennedy had characterized political clashes as disputes about  

“ways and means of reaching common goals—to research for sophisticated solutions to complex and obstinate issues…. What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy.”

As we’ve all noticed, that civilized era didn’t last long.

Ideological warfare resumed in the United States with the rise of the New Left in the late 1960s and with the rise of the New Right in the early 1980s. Today, those ideological storms have subsided. This time, though, ideology is over not because right and left have reached rough consensus; far from it. The contest is done because the Republican Party walked off the field. We have arrived at the end of GOP ideology….

 The author, Timothy Noah, explained that he wasn’t’t using the term ideology to describe pathologies, or resentments, or ethnic hatreds.

I’m not using it to describe the mob’s surrender to an authoritarian leader. I’m not using it in any of the broadly pejorative senses in which the term is commonly used today.

Rather, I’m using the word “ideology” to describe, in a neutral manner, some set of reasoned and coherent principles and policies, however mistaken, around which a society can be organized.

Instead of ideology (what I would call philosophy) Noah says we have GOP nihilism: “a party’s self-perpetuation for its own sake driven by an opportunistic indifference to fact and reason, expressed through coarse and incendiary rhetoric.”

In other words, a hot mess.

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The Roots Of Our Polarization

There is an analytical rule–really, a problem-solving principle– called Occam’s Razor. It is sometimes called the principle of parsimony, and is basically a reminder that the simplest explanation is usually the best explanation.

A recent poll has confirmed my belief that there is a simple, albeit terrifying, explanation for America’s current deep polarization: White Christian Nationalism.

Although I have long believed that worldview to be the source of a lot of our current unrest, before this particular poll, I really had no clue just how deeply entrenched and widespread that worldview is.

A new survey finds that fewer than a third of Americans, or 29%, qualify as Christian nationalists, and of those, two-thirds define themselves as white evangelicals.

The survey of 6,212 Americans by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution is the largest yet to gauge the size and scope of Christian nationalist beliefs.

The study found–unsurprisingly–that Christian nationalists tend to be older (some two-thirds are over the age of 50). They are also far less educated than other Americans. At most,  20% of Christian nationalism supporters have a four-year college degree, far fewer than the 79% of respondents who were labeled “skeptics” because they rejected the principles of Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism as a worldview is not new but the term is. Indeed, a third of respondents said they had not heard of the term. For that reason, it’s impossible to say whether the ranks of Christian nationalists have grown over time.

In their book “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry found that about 20% of Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalist ideas. The PRRI survey is more in line with a 2021 Pew Research survey that found that 10% of Americans are what Pew identified as hard-core “faith and flag” conservatives.

The survey did confirm that Americans overall reject a Christian nationalist worldview by a ratio of 2 to 1.

In an essay for the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin considered the implications of the survey. As she noted, most of us have only a vague understanding of the term.

When you hear the phrase “Christian nationalists,” you might think of antiabortion conservatives who are upset about the phrase “Happy Holidays” and embrace a vaguely “America First” way of thinking. But according to a Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll released Wednesday, Christian nationalists in fact harbor a set of extreme beliefs at odds with pluralistic democracy. The findings will alarm you.

Rubin enumerated the beliefs held by these adherents:

“The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.”
“U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.”
“If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.”
“Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.”
“God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

PRRI found that 10 percent (“adherents”) of American adults believe in these ideas overwhelmingly or completely; 19 percent agree but not completely (“sympathizers”); 39 percent disagree (“skeptics”) but not completely; and 29 percent disagree completely (“rejecters”).

Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants are Christian Nationalists–either sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%).” More troubling, the poll found that thirty-five percent of all Whites are adherents. 

Those percentages mean that tens of millions of Americans hold these views. And as the poll confirmed, those Americans are overwhelmingly Republican.  Republicans (21%) were found to be about four times as likely as Democrats (5%) or independents (6%) to be Christian nationalists.

Fortunately, the news isn’t all bad.

 There are fewer adherents and sympathizers among younger Americans. “More than seven in ten Americans ages 18-29 (37% skeptics, 42% rejecters) and ages 30-49 (37% skeptics, 35% rejecters) lean toward opposing Christian nationalism.” Support is also inversely related to educational attainment.

You will not be surprised to discover the depths of racism and racial grievance among these adherents. A stunning 83 percent of them think Whites are being discriminated against, and that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.”

More than 70 percent embrace replacement theory, and nearly one-quarter say that Jews hold too many positions of power; 44 percent believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than America. More than 65 percent agree that Muslims from some countries should be banned. Almost 70 percent believe “the husband is the head of the household in ‘a truly Christian family’ and his wife submits to his leadership.”

If you think this sounds like MAGA tripe, you’re right. This is the hardcore MAGA base. More alarming: “Nearly six in ten QAnon believers are also either Christian nationalism sympathizers (29%) or adherents (29%).”

Rubin says that believers in American values have our work cut out for us.

No kidding.

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