Tag Archives: public education

Civil And Human Rights In Indiana

I recently participated in a Zoom Consortium convened by the Hammond Human Relations Commission. I was a member of a panel that discussed the current state of of civil liberties and human rights in our state.

Panel members were asked to collectively address two questions; a third “ask” was specific to our particular backgrounds.

The first question was “What legislative measures by this administration have caused greatest harm or generated positive outcomes pertaining to civil & human rights.” I responded that, in my opinion, virtually everything done by this administration has been harmful. (I added that the damage couldn’t have been done without the cowardly acquiescence of GOP legislators.) The Trump administration has declared war on civil rights, civil liberties and the Constitution.

The public is just beginning to recognize the multiple harms done by the awful “Big Beautiful Bill,” and Trump’s multiple ridiculous and unconstitutional Executive Orders, but the worst–again, in my humble opinion–has been the unrelenting assaults on “wokeness” and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. That federal assault has emboldened state-level culture warriors like Todd Rokita to pretend that good-faith efforts to level the civic playing field are really “reverse discrimination” against straight White men– a patently false excuse for the state’s vendetta against equal rights for women and minorities.

We were next asked if we had observed biases in the way information is disseminated in Indiana. My answer was really a repetition of observations I’ve shared here many times–about the fragmentation of today’s information environment, in which citizens aren’t all getting the same news or occupying the same realities, an environment which encourages people to choose “news” that confirms their biases—if they bother to consume any news at all.

I was then asked to expand on a paper I’d written about the effects of low civic literacy on democratic accountability, and to suggest solutions. (Ah, if only I had solutions…)

 As I explained, scholars attribute the erosion of American democracy to three interrelated causes: ignorance of politics and governance; the growth of inequality— including civic inequality and informational asymmetries—and a resurgent tribalism (racism and White Nationalism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, the urban/rural divide…). Civic ignorance complicates the interactions between citizens and their government, and it exacerbates inequality. Citizens who understand how the political system works are advantaged in a number of ways over those who don’t, including their ability to recognize when elected officials are violating their oath to uphold the constitution.

Americans’ widespread ignorance of the basics of our Constitution and legal system has greatly facilitated the growth of disinformation and propaganda. It has allowed the current administration to obscure the fact that the majority of Trump’s numerous Executive Orders are at odds with the Constitution.

The most obvious was his attack on birthright citizenship, which is explicitly set out in the 14th Amendment. Eliminating birthright citizenship would require a Constitutional amendment—it cannot be done in a petulant Executive Order.

Citizens who’ve encountered the 14th Amendment would know that.

There are many other examples. If citizens knew that the Constitution vests control of spending in Congress—not the executive branch—they would recognize that Trump’s Orders withholding funding formerly authorized by Congress violates the Constitutional Separation of Powers. They would recognize that his “Muslim ban” was a flagrant violation of the First Amendment’s religion clauses. They would understand that his various efforts to root out Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs not only violate the Free Speech provisions of the First Amendment but are also unconstitutionally vague–and why that vagueness matters.

Long term, the solution is to require a much more robust civic education curriculum in the nation’s schools—a curriculum that doesn’t simply educate students about the Constitution and Bill of Rights but also teaches accurate and inclusive history. (I went all through high school and college and never heard about the Trail of Tears, or the Tulsa massacre, for example.) But efforts to strengthen civics education come up against the far Right’s determination to destroy public education—to use vouchers to send public money to overwhelmingly religious private schools, very few of which offer civics or accurate, in-depth history instruction. Worse, attending such schools operates to reinforce tribal identities rather than inculcating allegiance to an overarching American constitutional philosophy. The effort to replace America’s public schools with religious “academies” was set out in Project 2025—and this administration is clearly following the prescriptions of that document.

Reinvigorating our public schools and requiring appropriate civic education is really the most effective solution to what ails us. If there are other solutions, I haven’t come across them.

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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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They’re Still Coming For The Schools

While co-Presidents Trump and Musk absorb all the oxygen/attention, the Christian Nationalists have continued their long-term focus on the public schools. While Americans who understand the damage of the daily assaults on Separation of Powers and the Rule of Law are distracted, those “Christian soldiers” just keep marching on…

The Guardian recently published a report on that steady march by a product of Evangelical schooling.

The author began by relating his own education in what he termed “a sanctuary of faith, community and ‘true’ education,”  which he reported had left him disillusioned and bullied, and had set him on a “path of crushing financial insecurity that would haunt me for years.”

Twenty-five years later, Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that put him in the White House (twice) are seeking to transform public education into something similar to what I was reared on, where science, history and even economics are taught through an evangelical conservative lens, while prayer and Bible reading are foundations of the curriculum.

As he notes, the efforts to transform education into fundamentalist Christian indoctrination takes two forms: injecting more Christian rhetoric and rituals into public school curriculum and the use of tax dollars to subsidize private religious schools via vouchers. As he also points out, each of these tactics is bolstering the education of America’s most privileged students, while downgrading services for children of low-income families.

Lest readers dismiss his concerns as overstatement, he provides evidence.

In Oklahoma, the state superintendent ordered his public schools to teach from the Christian holy book; he later sought to mandate all schools to air a video in which he prays for Trump. On his desk sat a black mug with the Latin phrase si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

In June, Louisiana passed a law ordering all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. And in Florida, Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, supported a constitutional amendment to allow state funding for religious schools before voters rejected it.

In 2022, a supreme court ruling allowed private religious schools to receive government funding. In response to this, LGBTQ+ advocates helped pass the Maine Human Rights Act in their state, protecting students and faculty from discrimination. Two Christian schools are suing the state for the ability to violate the new law while still receiving government funding. Separately, the supreme court has taken up a case addressing whether to allow taxpayer funds for religious charter schools, potentially leading to the first Christian public school in the US.

A Texas elementary school curriculum infuses Bible stories into language arts programs. And these efforts are not limited to Southern states. Iowa passed legislation granting taxpayer-funded “scholarships” to families who enroll their children in private schools, very much including Christian schools. Meanwhile, the Idaho Family Policy Center (IFPC), a Christian lobbying group, announced it was drafting a bill to would require Bible reading in all Idaho public schools. (The organization has also drafted legislation banning abortions and restricting transgender healthcare.)

These local efforts are currently being supercharged by the Trump/Musk administration. Trump has promised to “bring back prayer to our schools”, shut down the Department of Education and embrace “school choice”–measures that would fulfill a longstanding evangelical wishlist. Christian Nationalists insist that “government schools” brainwash children into “liberal atheists.” 

The Guardian essay recites the history of this effort to make America’s schools “godly” and–not so incidentally–keep them White. (The government’s denial of tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools–not Roe v. Wade– was what galvanized evangelicals and drove them into the GOP.)

Meanwhile, the Christian right doubled down on the creation of its own, independent education system, one that rejected evolution in favor of creationism, made students pledge allegiance to a Christian flag, and preached against environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights and progressive policies.

The essay traced the author’s very painful emergence from the bubble he had inhabited, the fundamentalist education system in which “all knowledge and thought must bend itself to unarguable truth that the Bible is 100% factual in all matters.” As he notes, the “itchy curiosity of philosophy, the relentless questions of the scientific method, the skeptic probing of journalism, have no place in that world.”

That rejection of science, empiricism and inconvenient evidence is the “education” supported by the Trump/Musk Administration–not because either of these megalomaniacs are devout Christian fundamentalists, but because they know they owe their continued support to the fearful, racist, “faux Christian” voters who comprise the majority of the GOP base.

If successful, those Christian Warriors will take us back to the Dark Ages.

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Old Truths

Important notice: Due to the cold, the rally on January 20th has been moved to Broadway United Methodist Church, 609 E 29th St, Indianapolis. Indoors.

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.Several weeks ago, the Indianapolis Capitol Chronicle ran an article in which the author mused about civics instruction. She had come across the 1930 edition of a civics textbook, and noted that its focus on community responsibilities seemed very different from today’s preoccupation with individualism.

The book starts with this preface (and yes, I took photos while at the table): “It is generally agreed today that the main reason for the existence of schools is to help our pupils to become good citizens. Our schools teach the three R’s because everybody needs those tools in order to act intelligently in his relations with his fellow man. It is no less important for the pupil to learn that his life must be lived in close association with his fellow men, and to profit by the experience of human beings in regard to these relations.”

In those few introductory words lies the conundrum that faces all societies: how do we protect the political, religious and philosophical autonomy of the individual while building safe, orderly and supportive communities?

Several years ago, I made a speech in which I considered that question. As I said then, there is an African proverb to the effect that it takes a village to raise a child. Implicit in that saying is the question at the heart of political philosophy: What should that village look like? What is the common good, and what is the nature of social obligation? What sort of social and political arrangements are most likely to promote and enable what Aristotle called “human flourishing”? And perhaps, more importantly, do we live in an era when such questions have largely been abandoned?

That simple introductory paragraph from a long-ago textbook reminds us that our public schools have two vitally important tasks: first, giving children the intellectual tools and skills they will need, not just to negotiate the economic world they will inhabit, but also to lead richer, more fulfilled and considered lives; and second, equipping them for the responsibilities of citizenship.

Over the past few decades, there has been a very unfortunate narrowing of emphasis to just one portion of that first responsibility. Critics of public education have focused almost entirely on the subjects needed to produce a workforce–on giving students the skills they’ll need to compete economically. The sorts of instruction that will help them flourish, that will give them the insights and understandings that will help them create rich and enjoyable lives–music and art and literature–have been relegated to the sidelines or eliminated entirely, dismissed as “frills.”

Worse, the various educational “reforms” that have been pursued have ignored the second important purpose of public education–preparing students for thoughtful and engaged citizenship in a complicated and increasingly diverse society.

Not only have our public schools neglected the proper teaching of American history and government, the vouchers that facilitate evasion of the First Amendment have sent thousands of children to religious schools, most of which ignore civics instruction and deepen tribal commitments rather than helping students understand the complexity–and necessity– of seeking the common good and wrestling with the imperatives of our national motto: e pluribus unum.

Too many of our legislators, here in Indiana and elsewhere, confuse education with job training. They are most definitely not the same thing. We are impoverishing generations of students by depriving them of sustained contact with the liberal arts and with the enduring questions that separate thinking humans from automatons. By neglecting instruction in government and citizenship, we have contributed to the widespread ignorance that continues to elevate so many unfit and unstable individuals to positions of power. It isn’t just Trump–there are plenty of other examples at all levels of government, certainly in Indiana.

Finding the “golden mean” between too much emphasis on individualism and too much emphasis on community and conformity has never been simple. That search for a proper balance between individual rights and the imperatives of the common good is fatally compromised when a significant portion of the population remains uneducated because those responsible for education policy don’t know (or care about) the difference between educating students and training them.

When the body politic lacks a common understanding of their society’s foundational principles, culture warriors and plutocrats are enabled, and tribalism threatens to bring down the entire edifice of legitimate government. That is arguably where we find ourselves right now, and the sustained assault on American education–an assault that has hollowed out the very concept of education– is at the very heart of our impending Trumpian disasters.

We are reaping the whirlwind.

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The Evidence Continues To Mount

Inequality.org recently took an in-depth look at the Right-wing’s increasingly successful effort to destroy public education. In an article titled “Private Fortunes Vs. Public Education,” the article began

The United States essentially invented public education. Back in the 1780s, notes the Center on Education Policy, federal legislation “granted federal lands to new states and set aside a portion of those lands to be used to fund public schools.” By the 18th century’s close, most Americans had embraced the notion of “using public funds to support public schooling for the common good.”

In the mid-20th century, amid growing levels of economic equality, that public financial support for public schools would expand mightily. The results would be impressive. By 1970, graduation rates from American high schools — institutions, notes historian Claudia Goldin, themselves “rooted in egalitarianism” — had quadrupled over 1920 levels.

But that era of growing equality and expanding public education would start fading in the 1970s. Over recent years, a new U.S. Senate report makes clear, that fade has only intensified.

The article went on to report that, during the last decade, funding for the nation’s public schools has “barely increased,” while  “state spending on tax breaks and subsidies for private schools has skyrocketed by 408 percent.”

A report from the Brookings Institution found that universal voucher programs “are unwinding two centuries of tradition in U.S. public education” and that the programs “violate basic traditions of church-state separation, anti-discrimination, and public accountability.” As the researcher concluded, even if the courts -ignoring over fifty years of precedents–rule that these voucher programs are constitutionally permissible, “we should assess them against our principles as a nation.”

Indiana is a prime example. For severa years, the Hoosier state has had the nation’s largest voucher program. It was originally justified as a way to allow poor children to escape “failing public schools,” there were income limits for families taking advantage of the program, and vouchers use was limited to children who had first attended a public school. Those restrictions were steadily eased, and a few days ago, the Indianapolis Star confirmed what I have repeatedly pointed out on this blog: costs have exploded and Indiana’s voucher program has become a subsidy for parochial schools and the well-to-do.

The Star article began with the story of a father who had been paying his daughter’s tuition at a private religious school in Mishawaka, Indiana. The school informed him that Hoosier taxpayers stood ready to assume most of the nearly $10,000 annual cost.

Garcia applied and his daughter joined more than 600 other students ― or about 90% of Marian’s enrollment ― utilizing the state grants to pay for their schooling 2023-24. The tax-funded payments generated $4.3 million for the private school…

A three-month investigation by University of Notre Dame students in the Gallivan Program for Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy found that a majority of the families in the Indiana voucher program today were previously paying for private school on their own, just like Garcia. Yet the state stepped in to offer a financial subsidy to parents who didn’t need it ― a costly decision critics say is hurting public schools, which educate more than 90% of the approximately one million K-12 students in Indiana.

Started in 2011 under former Gov. Mitch Daniels as an avenue to help low-income students escape failing public schools, the voucher program has changed dramatically in the last decade. While it has helped thousands of families choose their preferred school, the cost is projected to grow 263 percent in just five years. This expansion is predicted to force public school districts to either make severe cuts or ask taxpayers for more money through public referendums.

The Indiana legislature has turned the program into “a subsidy for predominantly wealthy, white suburban families”. The Star  found that–far from helping poor minority children– the program’s “average recipient is a white female who has never attended public school, from a family earning more than $99,000 a year.”

That cushy subsidy for the well-to-do has cost Indiana’s public schools an estimated $600 million this year.

In 2011, in order for a family of four to qualify for a voucher, the family could make up to $40,000 a year. Today, the same family can qualify while making $222,000 a year.  A program that initially cost Indiana taxpayers $15.5 million per year cost more than $300 million last year, and is projected to top $600 million this year. 

Meanwhile, a mountain of research confirms that educational outcomes have not improved–and in some places and some subjects, have declined.

Researchers have also identified the “dark money” behind the attack on public education, and Project 2025 acknowledges that the goal is to replace public schools with private and parochial ones.

In Indiana, where gerrymandering has given the GOP carte blanche to do their worst, they’re already working on it.

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