About That War On Education…

I know, I know–those of you who follow this blog are tired of my periodic rants about MAGA’s war on public education. But the evidence–which keeps accumulating–is overwhelming.

A state’s economic development is critically dependent on the existence of an educated workforce, and Indiana’s legislature continues to demonstrate that most of its members don’t know what an education is, or how it differs from job training. Worse still, they have consistently attacked the state’s public school system, establishing voucher programs to siphon tax dollars from schools established to serve children from all backgrounds in order fund religious schools serving distinct tribes.

Voucher schools (which, as I always have to emphasize, are different from charter schools) were promoted as a way to allow poor children to escape “failing” public schools. They were sold on the premise that they would improve educational outcomes. Those improvements didn’t come; indeed, research after a number of years shows that public school outcomes are superior. (Private schools catering to the children of wealthy parents do perform well, but most of those schools don’t accept vouchers.)

Given all the evidence that vouchers do not improve educational outcomes, drain our public schools of critically-needed resources, and have an enormous negative budgetary impact in a state where legislators keep telling us we don’t have funds to continue summer food programs for children or medical care for the poor, Hoosiers might wonder why our GOP overlords continue to expand the program.

The Indiana Citizen recently answered that question. The Citizen interviewed Josh Cowen, a researcher who initially had viewed vouchers positively, but who–thanks to his research– has become an outspoken critic of the programs. I have been reading Cowen’s 2024 book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” and I recommend it. It describes how Christian nationalists and wealthy libertarians joined forces to “push vouchers from a fringe idea to the conservative mainstream.”

The report began by acknowledging the research:

Studies of statewide programs in Indiana as well as Louisiana and Ohio, found what Cowen describes as “some of the largest academic declines on record in academic research,” comparable to the impact on learning of Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, which dramatically lowered test scores by disrupting students’ lives and keeping them out of schools for extended periods of time.

For Christian nationalists, Cowen said, vouchers amplify their ability to use K-12 schools to promote a version of Christianity marked by alignment with right-wing politics, a hostility toward reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice initiatives, and, in some cases, a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the biblical creation story.

Private school vouchers are a huge part of the Christian nationalist long-term strategy, the idea that this kind of specific, right-wing interpretation of Christianity should dictate public policy and the law. These folks believe that education, from birth to adulthood, is absolutely key to the idea of, to quote Betsy DeVos, advancing God’s kingdom on earth. She laments that, in her words, public schools have displaced churches as centers of community. She sees vouchers as a cure for that.

Cowen points out that, unlike groups like Catholics that have long prioritized religious education, Christian nationalists have a very specific hostility to public schools.

It really gets back to this idea that public schools reflect this diverse, multicultural, pluralistic society in the United States. To the extent that these people don’t want a diverse, multicultural, pluralistic society, they really don’t want children spending eight hours a day in an environment that educates them to value those things.

Given their inability to claim better educational outcomes, Indiana legislators now argue that parents know best how their children should be educated. But as Cowen notes, if parental choice was really the motive, the state would require private schools to tell parents how they perform– to disclose student test scores and other relevant data. Instead, policymakers “have bent over backward, whether in Indiana or elsewhere, to make sure parents know as little as possible” about voucher school performance. There’s a reason for that.

Over the last decade, as vouchers have gotten bigger in Indiana and elsewhere, when you ask how private schools funded by vouchers are doing compared to public schools, the results are dreadful.

In Indiana, over 90% of voucher students spend our tax dollars at religious schools–and we know very little about what they are teaching. As Cowen says, “If the argument is that parents should have the right to teach their kids creationism, instead of science, I would say, “OK, fine, but not on the taxpayer dime.”

Read the article–or better yet, buy the book.

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Dropping The Pretense

So disappointing! A friend recently sent me a copy of a post that has been making the rounds: it shows the letter that Education Secretary Linda McMahon recently sent to Harvard–a letter filled with vitriol and announcing the cut-off of any further grants to that University–with copious red mark-ups correcting its numerous grammatical and spelling errors. The post suggested that Harvard had returned the letter with those mark-ups to the Education Secretary.

Unfortunately, it turned out not to be true. (Granted, had Harvard done so, it would have been petty and unnecessarily provocative.) As it was, the circulation of the post simply underlined the fact that McMahon–like all of Trump’s appointees–is massively unfit for her role.

One thing the letter did accomplish–probably accidentally–was the abandonment of what has always been a phony motive for Trump’s assaults on higher education: his purported concerns about anti-Semitism on the nation’s campuses.

As an article in the Atlantic recently observed,

What you will not find in the McMahon letter is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. Many students and faculty justifiably feel that these schools failed to take harassment of Jews seriously enough during the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that issue, the administration was cannily appropriating for its own ends one of the progressive left’s highest priorities: protecting a minority from hostile acts.

Now, however, the mask is off. Aside from one oblique reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism (“the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik”), the letter is silent on the subject. The administration is no longer pretending that it is standing up for Jewish students. The project has been revealed for what it is: an effort to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.

As the article noted, McMahon’s letter contained a “disconnected grab bag of grievances.”

The original reason given for the assaults on academia–concern about anti-Semitism–was always laughable, especially given Donald Trump’s own amply documented history of anti-Jewish bias. Wikipedia even has an entry detailing that history. It includes everything from his constant use of anti-Semitic tropes, to his weird accusation that Jews who support Democrats are “disloyal to Israel” and that Jews who are Democrats “hate their religion.” (I assume this accusation follows his acceptance of the old canard that America’s Jews have “dual loyalties”– loyalties that mean we are supposed to favor Israel over other countries, no matter what Israel is doing at any given time and no matter how many of us see its government’s actions as grossly inconsistent with time-honored Jewish values.)

A gratifying number of Jewish organizations have issued denunciations of Trump’s efforts to pretend that his assaults on universities have anything to do with legitimate concern for the Jewish students on those campuses. These “not in our name” statements reject what they’ve accurately labeled as Trump’s effort to use Jews as pawns masking an overtly political agenda.

Trump’s animus toward universities–especially Ivy League universities–is undoubtedly rooted in his festering and well-documented resentment over his failure to be accepted by the graduates of those institutions who dominated elite society in New York, and who dismissed him as the needy and pretentious buffoon he was.

MAGA’s rage at institutions of higher education, however, has more ideological roots, as displayed in a 2021 speech by JD Vance, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” As the article in the Atlantic noted,

Then–Senate candidate J. D. Vance declared that universities, as left-wing gatekeepers of truth and knowledge, “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.” The solution, Vance said, was to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” We’ve been seeing the aggressive part of that formula for two months. With the McMahon letter, the administration has gotten much closer to honesty.

I think Vance has confused “conservative ideas” with reactionary ones. Conservatives typically seek to preserve an existing social and economic order, while reactionaries typically want to return to a perceived golden age, and to reverse the current direction of society. Project 2025 is an excellent example of a reactionary document.

There’s a reason so many actual conservatives are “never-Trumpers.”

Trump himself is neither conservative nor reactionary–he’s the useful fool being used by the reactionary forces behind Project 2025. JD Vance is right about one thing: universities are enemies to ignorance and reaction.

The attack on them has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

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An Excellent Open Plea

My sister was one of those Hoosiers who once held out hope that Indiana’s Senator Todd Young would grow a spine. After all–unlike Senator Jim Banks–he appears to have a working brain and at least a dim understanding of the current constitutional crisis. But after several attempts to communicate with him, she concluded direct messaging was useless–that he is simply more concerned with retaining his seat in the Senate than in fulfilling his constitutional duties or protecting the common good. Frustrated, she has written an “open letter” to him, and sent it to local media outlets.
I don’t know whether those media outlets will print it, but today I am reproducing–and enthusiastically endorsing– it.
______________
Senator Young,
I am one of the many constituents who have written, phoned, and/or visited your office, and given the non-responsive form letters I’ve received in return, I seriously doubt if any of my concerns have been heard, so I am writing this open letter in hopes that someone will share it with you. (I have not made a similar effort to communicate with Senator Banks, who is clearly a lost cause, but due to previous actions and remarks on your part, I had hoped you might be more independent, more open to reason – thus your recent behavior has disappointed me greatly.)
You were a Marine. You are currently a member of Congress. In both of those capacities, you swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. You did not swear allegiance to a person or a party, but to our founding document – to a set of principles. You continue to violate that oath in multiple ways.
In spite of his obvious gross incompetence and lack of qualifications for the job, you voted to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, putting the lives of service members and the national security of our country at risk. You put your loyalty to a cult leader ahead of concern for the health of your constituents by confirming another grossly unqualified candidate – a conspiracy theorist without any scientific background – as head of the HHS. You ignored questions about the dependability of Tulsi Gabbard to guard sensitive information necessary to the safety of our country. These are just three of the many example of times you have shirked your duty.
The United States is in a crisis, one that could be somewhat mitigated if only a few Republicans would put country before party and the good of the people before their own self-interest – if they would remember their oath to uphold the Constitution and take back the power it grants them and which they have so cravenly ceded to a wannabe dictator.
You could help negate Trump’s executive orders, most of which are grossly illegal. You could help counter the horrific consequences of Elon Musk’s attempts to destroy government agencies that provide critical services to your constituents. (And whose actions have, coincidentally, put an end to several of those agencies’ investigations into his very questionable business dealings.) How does cutting off funding for cancer research or Alzheimer’s disease benefit the residents of Indiana? How will gutting Education and the Arts help citizens of this (already under-educated) state? Tell me how your own children will benefit from leaving them an environment with less breathable air, drinkable water, and safe food. How do you think women and other marginalized groups in Indiana feel about being returned to second class citizenship, and how do citizens on the edge of retirement—many of them Hoosiers who have struggled for years to put food on their tables– feel about the GOP’s vicious proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicaid?.
In my almost 78 years (several of which I spent as a member of a Republican Party that no longer exists), I have never seen an administration that is so brazenly corrupt. History will record that every member of Congress who failed to protest this corruption, who cravenly enabled our would-be autocrat, was complicit in that corruption.
It’s probably just as well that former principled Republicans such as William Ruckelshaus, Dick Lugar, and Bill Hudnut are not here to see the debacle you have made of a once Grand Old Party.
_________
Those of you who are so inclined might forward a copy of the letter to Young’s office, with a note suggesting your agreement with its message. Given the sentiments expressed at Young’s “empty chair” Town Hall, it’s clear my sister speaks for a significant number of angry Hoosiers…..
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It Isn’t Left And Right

I’ve become convinced that the contending “analyses” of MAGA/Christian Nationalist extremism and its far-left antagonists really misses the real nature of our current political and social distress. The root of our dysfunctions isn’t really policy differences or political orientations. It’s fundamentalism versus broad-mindedness.

A recent article from The American Prospect about the death of the right-wing crank David Horowitz reminded me of a conclusion I’d reached several years ago, when I became reacquainted with a distant cousin who had moved back to Indianapolis after many years on the West Coast. I hadn’t seen him since college, when I was one of the very few family members who defended his very unpopular left-wing political activism. (Despite being pretty conservative myself at the time,  I was appalled when Bloomington’s then-prosecutor brought charges against my cousin and a few others for their “socialist” activities.) 

Fast forward some thirty-plus years, and–lo and behold–he’d “evolved” into a Right-wing true believer. Just as doctrinaire, but from the opposite political pole.

The article about Horowitz made the point that such changes aren’t uncommon. (Remember the intellectuals who defended their move from Left to Right as a response to being “mugged by reality”?) Horowitz was a communist in early life who transitioned into a rabid Right-winger.

Decades before “woke” became a term of derogation, Horowitz began raging at the academic community: not just the far left, but even social democrats who criticized the far left, like Todd Gitlin, who figured prominently on a Horowitz-devised list of 100 dangerous academics who would be fired if Horowitz ruled the world. Even conservative leaders who declined to drink the Trump Kool-Aid were traitors to the cause: Writing in Breitbart, Horowitz labeled neocon Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew” for the sin of supporting a different presidential candidate in the 2016 Republican primaries. Fellow former lefties who’d repudiated the far left for mainstream conservatism, like the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern, also ran afoul of Horowitz’s diktats for their failure to join the far-right Visigoths taking arms in the culture wars. In 2021, Stern co-authored a New Republic piece with Ron Radosh (both of whom had known Horowitz since his far-left days) in which they documented Horowitz’s career-long commitment to violent extremism. “In that earlier era,” they wrote, “he celebrated the burning of a bank by a student mob. Today he’s an intellectual pyromaniac who honors the MAGA mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6.”

Horowitz’ new certainties influenced some of the worst MAGA ideologues, including the odious Stephen Miller.

The problem with individuals who go from hard-Left to hard-Right–or from hard-Right to hard-Left–really has little to do with the “epiphanies” that trigger their philosophical changes. The real issue is their obvious need for doctrinal certainty in a very complicated and uncertain world. These are people who simply cannot tolerate the ambiguities of modern life–who are desperate for a world rendered in black and white, a world without any shades of gray.

Let’s think about that.

The noted jurist Learned Hand famously said that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” My youngest son has similarly distinguished “good religions”–which help people wrestle with moral dilemmas– from dangerous ones that tell people what they must believe and how they (and others) must act.

Neither of these insights are meant to suggest an apathetic approach to important values. They are, however, recognition of the importance of intellectual humility, what we might think of as a scientific approach to our understanding of the world we inhabit. (One of the reasons some religions reject science is because scientific hypotheses are always open to falsification. Absolute certainty is unavailable.)

Reasonable people can mediate or surmount most differences in policy preferences and political philosophy. (Granted, not all.) Fundamentalism, however, abhors and rejects compromises. It leaves no room for “agreeing to disagree.” The philosophy of “live and let live” that permeates America’s Bill of Rights is anathema to True Believers. 

Unfortunately, rigid adherence to any worldview– scriptural, dogmatic or ideological–inevitably leads to the drawing of distinctions between the ingroup of “righteous” folks and everyone else, and justifies all manner of inhumane behaviors.

I don’t know what psychological issues lead people to these rigid and dogmatic places. But I am convinced that the need for certainty, intolerance of difference, and the rejection of ambiguity and intellectual humility are far more damaging to the American Idea than the particulars of philosophy at either end of the political spectrum.

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A Constitutional Convention?

During the past couple of weeks, the subject of a Constitutional Convention has been raised twice: once during a question-and-answer session following a speech, and once via an email from a good friend. So it would seem reasonable to revisit the subject, and explain why I find that prospect–as proposed currently– horrifying.

Would it be possible to improve upon our centuries-old charter? Sure. We now see flaws that have emerged over the years, (If nothing else, there’s the Electoral College–a system used by no other country, for reasons that have become increasingly apparent…). If the idea of a reasonable review seems innocuous, however, we can be disabused of that conclusion simply by looking at the people pushing for a redo. The most prominent are ALEC (the far-Right American Legislative Exchange Council) and the Heritage Foundation. (Yes, the same Heritage Foundation that produced Project 2025.)

The goals of these and the other ideologues advocating such a convention are entirely inconsistent with the values of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Back in 2017, members of Indiana’s legislature were calling for such a convention, and I explained my opposition. As I wrote then, proponents clamoring for shortcuts to major change—revolution, a new constitution—always assume that the changes that ultimately emerge will reflect their own preferences and worldviews. History suggests that’s a naive assumption.

Indiana’s proponents wanted the state to join the calls for a Constitutional Convention. They claimed that a convention could be limited to budgetary matters–to devising “a framework for reigning in overspending, overtaxing and over-regulating by the federal government and moving toward a less centralized federal government.”

Constitutional scholars disagree with the assertion that such a convention could be limited to specified goals, but even if it could be, the specified matters would open a Pandora’s box. Think about it.

Wall Street bankers could argue that financial laws are “over-regulation.” One definition of “overspending” might be the massive subsidies enjoyed by (very profitable) U.S. oil companies; others might be Medicare or farm subsidies. Many Americans think we spend too much on the military; others target foreign aid. “Less centralization” could justify virtually any limitation of federal government authority, from FDA regulation of food and drug quality to laws against discrimination.

But the risk isn’t simply that a convention could rather easily be hijacked by people who disagree with the conveners about the nature and extent of needed changes. It isn’t even the likely influence of well-heeled special interests. The real danger is in calling together a presumably representative group of Americans and asking them to amend a document that few of them understand.

At the Center for Civic Literacy I founded at IUPUI (now IU Indy), we focused on the causes and consequences of what we’ve come to call America’s civic deficit. The data we accumulated was depressing. The last time I looked at survey results, only 36 percent of Americans could name the three branches of government, and only 21% of high school seniors could list two privileges that United States citizens have that noncitizens don’t. Etc. Even bright graduate students came into my classes with little or no knowledge of American history, episodic or intellectual. Most had never heard of the Enlightenment or John Locke. They certainly hadn’t read Adam Smith. A truly depressing percentage of undergraduates couldn’t explain what a government is, and they had no idea how ours operates. Separation of powers? Checks and balances? The counter-majoritarian purpose of the Bill of Rights? Blank stares.

Given the Trump administration’s current attacks on the Constitution and media attention to those attacks, those percentages have undoubtedly improved, but civic ignorance is still obviously widespread. Do we really want to turn over the task of rewriting our Constitution to people who don’t understand the one we have?

Common Cause has looked at the unanswered questions implicit in these calls for a convention–questions that lay bare the dangers involved: How will delegates be chosen? Will there be any limits placed on the role of well-funded special interests in influencing the selection of delegates? How will votes be allocated amongst delegates? One person one vote? One vote per state? Something else? What kinds of changes would the convention consider? Will the Convention start with the U.S. Constitution or write an entirely new document?

The civically-ignorant and clinically-insane megalomaniac who occupies the Oval Office is currently being restrained only by the existing U.S. Constitution, which he has clearly neither read nor understood. The likely result of a constitutional convention would be to empower him.

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