Tag Archives: public education

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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There’s More….

Yesterday, I shared some of the disturbing proposals of Project 2025, but of course, a document of nearly 1000 pages includes many other terrifying “ideas.”  The New Republic has listed several, gleaned from an advance copy of the book by Kevin Roberts, who captained the Project for the Heritage Foundation.

There’s good reason publication of the book has been delayed until after the election.

Dawn’s Early Light has all the misplaced confidence of a movement that’s mistaken a 6–3 Supreme Court and an easily played New York Times op-ed page for some kind of mandate. The party that has won the popular vote in a presidential election exactly once in the last 35 years is not popular, and people do not want what they’re selling. When your only path to power consists in gerrymandering and shaving tight victories in a few key swing states while the opposition runs up the margins nearly everywhere else, you might try for some soul-searching about why people don’t like you, but Roberts and his Heritage Foundation have instead opted for violent threats, claiming a “second American revolution” is coming that will remain “bloodless” only “if the left allows it to be.”

The book details the Project’s enemies: public schools, China, godlessness, and government regulations are prominent, but the Project proposes widespread destruction of numerous other American institutions.

“Every Ivy League college, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, 80 percent of ‘Catholic’ higher education, BlackRock, the Loudoun County Public School System, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for Democracy.”

What is the plan to enact this bloodletting? While there are sops to Ronald Reagan throughout, Dawn’s Early Light is clear that the era of small government is over; Roberts thinks government should be the change he wants to see in the world. The New Conservative Movement, as he terms it, will use the federal government as a bludgeon against any and all of its cultural and economic foes, while the small-minded small government folk are derided throughout as “wax-museum conservatives.”

Roberts wants government to force American to embrace his vision of “Faith, Family, Community, and Work.” And–not surprisingly–“Faith” means Christianity.

Policies that encourage religious observance, such as Sabbath laws and voucher programs that include religious schools, should be encouraged. American society is rooted in the Christian faith—certainly public institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals under the guise of “religious freedom” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

As I noted yesterday, Roberts reserves special animus for reproductive freedom, especially the birth control pill–which he wants to outlaw.

“The birth control pill,” he tells us, “was the product of a decades-long research agenda paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation and other eugenicist and population control-oriented groups.” These eugenicist-sponsored technologies, Roberts believes, are the true culprits, for they “shift norms, incentives, and choices, often invisibly and involuntarily,” making us think we want something that we in fact don’t.

Even a thing you might think the pro-birth crowd might like, like in vitro fertilization—which produces babies!—is not good in Roberts’s view….

This technological conspiracy, where every modern convenience from the Pill to the Playstation is keeping us from our God-given duty to be fruitful and multiply, must be fought at every level—from government tax policy and regulation (to encourage stay-at-home mothers) to pro-family technologies (like Tinder rival “Keeper,” a dating app whose mission is to “end human loneliness by giving everyone the opportunity to start a happy, healthy family”).

The article has much more of this insane world-view. (I just learned that Heritage wants to end government’s hard-won new ability to negotiate drug prices, something that just saved seniors and government billions!) But you might also be wondering how these lunatics plan to sell their vision to an American public unlikely to favor their version of utopia.

Pro Publica has answered that. It’s reporters uncovered “training videos” produced for Project 2025’s proponents/salespersons.

“Eradicate climate change references”; only talk to conservative media; don’t leave a paper trail for watchdogs to discover. In a series of never-before-published videos, Project 2025 details how a second Trump administration would operate.

The videos have strategies for avoiding Freedom of Information Act disclosures, for ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges,” and for “radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.”

This entire enterprise is delusional. It entirely ignores the existence of a robust contemporary culture that would resist a U-turn to the 1950s (or, really, the 1850’s).

Project 2025 accurately reflects the MAGA worldview. Sane people must defeat it in November.

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The MAGA Vendetta Against Arts And Education

Well, I see where Ron DeSantis has petulantly stripped thirty-two million dollars of art funding from the Florida budget.

Ron DeSantis stripped more than $32m in arts and culture funding from Florida’s state budget over his hatred of a popular fringe festival that he accused of being “a sexual event”, critics of the rightwing governor say.

DeSantis justified his unprecedented, wide-ranging veto of grants to almost 700 groups and organizations by saying it was “inappropriate” for $7,369 of state money to be allocated to Tampa fringe, a 10-day festival that took place earlier this month with a strong message of inclusivity, and its sister event in Orlando.

I talk a lot about culture war on this blog. Usually, that term connotes the growing willingness of MAGA Republicans to publicly indulge their bigotries against Blacks, women, LBGTQ+ citizens and non-fundamentalist Christians, but DeSantis’ recent fit of pique should remind us that the war against anything “woke” extends to important aspects of the actual culture: the arts, certainly, but also public education. (The GOP proclivity for “projection”–accusing others of their own behaviors–is obvious in their hysterical ranting about public education “indoctrination.”)

The most successful effort to replace American public education with religious indoctrination, of course, has come in the guise of “parental choice,” or vouchers, which allow public monies to be siphoned from the public schools and sent  disproportionately to religious schools. I have posted repeatedly about that effort, which has not only failed to improve test scores but has increased civic divisiveness and re-segregated the schools in several places.

I forget who first popularized the phrase “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” but if Trump should win in November, Project 2025 has outlined policies that would dramatically escalate the attack on public education.

Here are some of the elements of what I can only describe as an assault on steroids:

  • Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade.
  • Federal special education funds would flow to school districts as block grants with no strings attached, or even to savings accounts for parents to use on private school or other education expenses.
  • The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.
  • The federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back.

The proposals are contained in a comprehensive policy agenda that’s part of a Heritage Foundation-led initiative called Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, which includes nearly 900 pages of detailed plans for virtually every corner of the federal government and a database of potential staffers for a conservative administration. It will also feature a playbook for the first 180 days of a new term.

Project 2025 was devised by several former Trump administration officials and allies, working with dozens of aligned advocacy organizations (misnamed “think tanks.”) including Moms for Liberty. You will recall that Moms for Liberty is the organization that fought school boards over COVID-19 safety protocols, advocates for censorship of books in school libraries, and endorses far-right school board candidates.

Trump has said that parents should elect school principals. He advocates the abolition of teacher tenure, has promised to cut federal funding to schools pushing “progressive” social ideas, and pledges to establish universal school choice.

Under the Project 2025 agenda, states would be able to opt out of federal education programs, whose “regulatory burden far exceeds the federal government’s less than 10 percent financing share of K–12 education,” the document asserts.

States would also have full authority to decide how to spend Title I funds, which currently go to schools with large populations of low-income students.

Under the Project 2025 plan, those funds would first flow to states as “no-strings-attached” block grants before they’re phased out in a decade. Parents of students attending Title I schools could even have access to the federal funds in “micro-education savings accounts” to pay for private education or supplemental services for their kids. The plan outlines similar ambitions for funds distributed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the nation’s special education law, though it doesn’t propose phasing them out.

The assault on public education has displayed the fundamental disconnect between the civic purposes of education and citizens who see education as just another private, consumer good–skills to be acquired (by those who can afford it) in order to enhance the ability of one’s children to succeed in the marketplace.

Access to the arts and a common base of educational knowledge both facilitate civic conversation and cohesion. Both enlarge our understanding of the world we inhabit–its complexity and, yes, its diversity. The arts and liberal education are the antithesis of rigid ideology and group-think.

I assume that’s why MAGA cannot tolerate either.

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