Education: The Right Wing War on Public Schools.

Public education is a universal part of the American experience. Every one of us interacts with our system of education whether directly or through taxation. Since the nation's founding, a commitment to universal education has been a pillar of our society. More recently, however, public education has come under attack from several places. Some of the criticism is fair. But some of the sharpest attacks have been coordinated by far right extremists determined to break the system and replace it with private enterprises, faith-based curriculums or even...nothing. Together we go through a thorough, albeit incomplete journey on the history of public education and the challenges it faces.

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Part One: Scaffolding.

It’s no secret I’ve been struggling with this topic for quite some time. Now, the reason I’ve been struggling has less to do with the scope of the subject—though that’s certainly part of it—and more to do with the gravity of it. Much like our healthcare series, it’s impossible to tell the entire story. And there are certainly better people to tell it. Teachers, union leaders, administrators, advocates. We are all stakeholders in education. And we’re products of education, or a lack thereof.

There are so many familiar themes that will resonate with Unf*ckers. In some cases, you’ll find the same cast of characters that have maligned progressive initiatives for decades. Some date back much further than that. In fact, to our founding. So, I want to briefly set some expectations and walk you through the approach to these episodes.

Today is the first in a three-part series that explores the history of public education in the United States; promises made, promises kept and concepts that went astray. It’s a story that reflects both the best and worst of our intentions as a nation.

We’re going to start in the present day to frame the inquiry and draw on recent issues that positively and negatively affect the education system. One of the first things to establish is language. To elevate the discussion surrounding education, not in terms of conflicts and divides, but the key elements of the discipline itself. If we’re going to have an honest debate about the future of public education in America, it’s incumbent upon us to educate ourselves on different modalities, the culture of learning, how children learn, and the external influences that impact one’s ability to absorb, retain and benefit from information.

So it will take some time to get to the heart of what plagues the discourse surrounding public education.

First off, it’s toxic. And, like most fundamental aspects of a society and political system, we seem to spend more time arguing about symptoms rather than root causes. Not without reason, mind you. Some of the symptoms are troubling. But the better approach to diagnosing problems is to dig to those roots. Learn the language. The history. And I mean, go all the way back to level-set on why we even have a compulsory education system in this country.

So, before we get into the histrionics and anger-inducing areas of the subject, we’ll build a common foundation of understanding together. Considering this is a series on education, it feels like the logical approach.

We’ll end Part One today with a critical and even-handed look at the opposition to public education in the United States as it is currently conceived. This will undoubtedly be a downer for those in the field of education and for anyone who cares deeply about the subject matter, but it’s vital to meet people where they are in this instance because education is a shared responsibility and universal system.

In the second installment of the series, we’re going to cover three of the four major eras of education in U.S. history: Expansion, Reconstruction and Desegregation. The third installment will bring us into the current era of Privatization, the area in which we will spend the most amount of time.

The issues surrounding privatization are of paramount importance to the discussion, and time is of the essence because, make no mistake, the same forces that have been pushing to tear apart the fabric of our democracy—those proponents of the free market fantasy—have been deliberately targeting public education for the past half century. And their victories are mounting. Their radical ideas are being mainstreamed. And all of it is coming at an incalculable cost to the most important stakeholder of all: Our children.

In terms of sourcing, one of the central resources for this series is a book called Schoolhouse Burning, by Derek W. Black. We have a plethora of sources to pull from, but I’m grateful to have found this one. So I’ll be referencing it a lot.

Oh, and don’t worry. I won’t disappoint the core of us that know who pulled on the very first thread. (#FMF)

Chapter One

Framing the Inquiry

The pandemic exposed so many cracks in our system. The financial system. The supply chain. Hunger. Homelessness. The nature and meaning of work. Our faith in science. We lost trust in our leaders, in one another and, at times, the entire political system. As a nation, we were divided, and so we failed together.

Nowhere was evidence of this fracture more pronounced than in our schools. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics paints a cold picture of what transpired. 2.6 million educators and staff quit K-12 and higher education jobs. 1.3 million were laid off. And “other separations” such as retirement, death and disability accounted for an additional 771,000.

According to wsws.org:

“Data from the first four months of 2022 shows that the exodus from the public education industry is ongoing. In the first four months of this year, 734,000 total separations took place in the industry with the vast majority of those, 64 percent, or 474,000, being resignations.”

It’s been in vogue to talk about the so-called ‘Great Resignation,’ but oftentimes the news focuses on more high profile industries such as tech. And, while a great many people did indeed move around and change their circumstances, locations and careers, perhaps no industry has been more rocked than academia.

Throughout the series, we’ll talk more about this phenomenon. Teaching during the pandemic was more than brutal. It was dangerous. Sometimes deadly. And at all times, thankless. For a minute, it seemed like teachers might enjoy the same love and admiration as healthcare workers, but this enthusiasm dwindled seemingly overnight and teachers found themselves at the center of a vicious storm.

The fact is, teachers have been assailed for many years. These once beloved members of the community have been vilified in school board meetings, face-to-face at parent conferences, in the media, and in research papers from conservative groups that cast blame on the entire profession for having an agenda, being entitled, draining resources and generally failing to deliver on the promise of education. The pandemic ignited rage in the public consciousness like never before and brought these visceral reactions to a boiling point, forcing many dedicated educators to simply throw up their hands. The result should have been obvious to us all.

But this was merely the extension of a trend that began in earnest during the Great Recession.

As Black writes in Schoolhouse Burning:

“Between 2009 and 2012, schools lost 300,000 teaching positions. Nationally, the number of people pursuing education degrees fell by 30 percent… When qualified applicants did not come calling, districts had no choice but to cancel courses, increase class sizes, assign teaching over-loads, and hire substitute teachers to fill full-time positions. States had no choice but to waive certification, overlook college degree requirements, and let college interns teach full-time.”

The first logical question here should be, why? Why did the recession have such a significant and quantifiable impact on the profession? Isn’t the education system designed to be immune from economic activity?

The next logical step in this inquiry is to determine the impact this had on our children. Doesn’t it logically follow that if qualified teachers left the profession and the number of people seeking degrees in education declined so precipitously that it would have a negative impact on the quality of education? Of course. And, right off the bat, you can see how money and funding contributes to the circumstances we find ourselves in. This, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The radical libertarian strain of the nation—now morphing into this bizarre “New Right” movement—certainly weren’t about to squander a crisis when the Great Recession occurred. And for shit sure, they weren’t going to squander an even bigger one that came right on the heels of it. Before the industry had a chance to even recover and plug funding holes to bring the numbers back, along came the pandemic.

There are 50 million children enrolled in K-12 schools in the United States. You remember. You were one of them.

Most kids are enrolled in public schools. According to the National Center for Education Statistics:

“Between fall 2009 and fall 2019, overall public charter school enrollment increased from 1.6 million students to 3.4 million students, and the number of public charter schools increased from approximately 5,000 to 7,500. During this period, the percentage of public school students who attended charter schools increased from 3 to 7 percent.”

About 9% of children, or about 4.5 million, are enrolled in private schools. And In 2020–2021, about 5.4% were homeschooled.

In terms of performance, the numbers vary pretty wildly. Geography plays a big role, but it’s difficult to equate specific outcomes to regions. Having said that, there are periodic performance measurements undertaken in each state that give us an idea of which states thrive and which ones have persistent issues. The most consistent data revolves around 8th grade performance for math, reading, science and writing. One important note here, these are the only disciplines that are tested with comparable data being released in regular intervals. After the 8th grade, data are scarce and even the most recent figures, which only account for reading and math, are at present from 2013. So, when you hear performance measures quoted in the media, we’re typically talking about 8th grade research.

We’ll go deeper into measurements and outcomes, but we should recognize that one of the biggest issues surrounding data collection is the testing itself. This has been a major source of contention, from these periodic surveys to the use of standardized testing in the college application process. This is one of those good debates that we should be having that has otherwise been co-opted by bizarre theories about teaching race, human health, creationism and any other symptom of education that the loudest voices have latched onto.

So, in terms of stakeholders, the children—all 50 million of them—are chief among them. Everything we’ll cover is in service of providing access to quality education from an early age. But others include those who work in the field. In terms of teachers, there were about 3.5 million public school teachers as of 2018, a figure that increased dramatically since an earlier benchmark in 2000, and before the precipitous decline in numbers during the pandemic. These teachers have varying levels of degrees and experience, and more than three-quarters of all public educators are women. 72% of public school teachers are in a union, compared to just 24% of charter school teachers, as of the last available data.

Apart from the day-to-day educators in the classroom, you also have administrators. From school secretaries to superintendents, administrators are there to keep the business of school running and are the ones tasked with many of the pedagogical frameworks that we’ll talk about shortly. These are the people who stand in front of the school boards. Hear the concerns of the faculty and engage with the unions on matters of budget, tenure, discipline, standards and reporting. And the ones who interact with the most vocal and increasingly vituperative stakeholders in a given community: The parents.

Chapter Two

The Structure and Language of Education

Obviously, the country is obsessed with hot topics like Critical Race Theory, gender neutral bathrooms and a bizarre conspiracy that claims schools are placing litter boxes in bathrooms to accommodate children who identify as cats. Despite this tale being debunked almost immediately, this particular conspiracy spread like wildfire and persists to this day, sadly.

We’ve all lost our minds when it comes to what’s being taught in schools, so I thought it would be a really good idea to approach curriculums and standards from, I don’t know, a teacher’s perspective.

Again, this isn’t the fun and salacious stuff that makes for viral videos. And that’s the point. Because we’ve all retreated into our identity corners and suddenly become experts in education, we’ve drowned out some really important concepts and building blocks. So, let’s step back a bit before we detail the grievances of the mob and do a little learning ourselves.

Here is just a partial list of important terms and concepts from the Resilient Educator and other sources to get us good and learned on up on school and shit.

First off, we have Pedagogy. The term refers to the strategy of how educators teach, in practice and theory. This is a wide ranging and all encompassing term that basically just says, “this is how I do the voodoo that I do.” You’ve got traditional methods like lecturing, rote learning and memorization, times tables, old school classroom learning shit. This is usually referred to as behaviorism, where the teacher is the focal point of the classroom.
Then you have concepts like constructivism that believes children learn better in active, rather than passive, learning environments. This is most associated with Montessori or Reggio Emilia style classrooms that use creative, self-guided play time, especially in the early years.
Pedagogy can also extend outside of the classroom in certain ways. For example, the concept of liberationism, popularized in Brazil, incorporated external societal factors into the equation. Most notably, the two biggest barriers to learning are poverty and hunger. So under a liberationist, pedagogical approach, learning environments are ones that incorporate real life cultural experiences and examples to help draw students into a more democratic and pragmatic way of thinking. And that government and society have a role to play in minimizing structural barriers to learning.

So if pedagogy speaks to the general approach and guiding philosophy of a school, then how do teachers and administrators structure classes and curriculum to fit them?

There are different designs depending upon the approach a school takes, and these can obviously change depending upon class size, age, resources, etc. Some schools approach curriculum backwards. Not in a negative way. It’s called Backward Design: where you design a curriculum backward by starting with the outcomes, assessments and goals first.
Then there’s Design Thinking, which comes from Stanford University. Under this approach, students are encouraged to ideate. To solve problems by investigating and inventing their own solutions. You know, so we can create more “geniuses” like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Before we get into some other useful terms, a few more conceptual approaches warrant a brief review. There’s something called an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), which is basically a written plan as to how best educate a student who requires learning accommodations.
Or PBL, which stands for either Pabst Blue Libbon or Project-Based Learning, whichever you prefer, where kids learn through problem solving.

And when we talk about these different ways of teachings, there’s an implication that there is a degree of individualization. A school can have an approach, but things like IEP or PBL, design thinking and backward design are methods within these larger frameworks. And that means teachers have to be equipped to handle some, or all, of these. And to determine which learning path is appropriate for a particular child, there has to be coordination between teachers, administrators and parents.
One of the things that this collaborative team will attempt to determine is how to unlock what Dr. Carol Dweck termed the Growth Mindset. Helping kids move away from a fixed mindset where their internal voice tells them they just can’t do something, to a growth mindset where they believe in their own ability to learn, overcome failure and push through challenges.
One of the ways to help a child break through these mental barriers and begin to believe in their own cognitive abilities is referred to as scaffolding. This is where a teacher will attempt to model certain behaviors and concepts, then step back and support the child as they try to replicate them. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey liken this to teaching a child how to ride a bike.

Here’s how they frame it: “In teaching a child to ride a bike, the training wheels serve as one scaffold. The adult running alongside the bike serves as another. In other words, the adult handles the harder parts temporarily, while allowing the child to try out the easier parts.”
One of the most important modern figures in education who helped open the minds of education professionals to the importance of incorporating different modalities into the classroom is a gentleman named Howard Gardner. Gardner created the theory of Multiple Intelligences, recognizing that we all learn differently. Some of us learn by example. Some by reading. Others by listening. Some require a hands-on approach. So, if we’re going to advance and improve education and continue to evolve as a society, it’s important to see the children, to know them, to learn how they learn and to create environments that foster the growth mindset.

Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

And it doesn’t even touch on specific areas of discipline like math and science, the humanities, physical education and so on. The amount of scholarship on how best to teach what most would consider the fundamentals in school is staggering. The number of opinions from those who’ve never spent a day teaching are exponentially greater.

And it gets even more heated when you get into the higher grades. Like our obsession with STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering and math. Some well intentioned people along the way tried to add an “A” to this for the arts and call it STEAM, but the basic idea is to add more hard math and sciences into secondary schools to theoretically make American kids more competitive in the tech sector.

According to the National Association for Science, Medicine and Engineering:

“Available research does permit several broad conclusions to be made… Among the outcomes reported are increased critical thinking abilities, higher-order thinking and deeper learning, content mastery, problem solving, teamwork and communication skills, improved visuospatial reasoning, and general engagement and enjoyment of learning.”

No matter how much great research there is available about the importance of teaching the arts, music and humanities to support creative mental development that fosters innovation in these same areas, adding more emphasis to science, technology, math and engineering comes at the expense of art, music, theater and literature. There are, after all, only so many hours in a day.

Teachers and administrators have to consider mental health, socioeconomic, language and physical factors as well. Provisions must be made for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students. Now you can holler and bray that everyone in this country should speak English, but where exactly is this supposed to happen if not school?

And what about college preparatory courses and approaches? What’s better? Advanced Placement (AP), or International Baccalaureate (IB) courses? Do you know the difference? I don’t. You know who does? Teachers and administrators.

All of which circles us back to a fundamental question: what are we trying to achieve with compulsory, universal education in this country?

This is where we should investigate some of the opposition to compulsory public education as a concept. As usual, it starts with money, as much of the consternation over public schooling is the use of tax dollars. So let’s talk a little bit about how schools are funded and draw a straight line to some of the troubling performance metrics that critics rightfully point to. That will give us a good jumping off point to dissect the arguments surrounding funding, vouchers, school choice, charter schools and all of the other hot topics we’ll cover in the coming weeks.

Chapter Three

The Opposition

Before we get into specific areas of opposition to compulsory public education in the United States, let’s quickly review the basics of funding.

One point of reference that you’ve certainly heard me make before is to remember that our federal budget for military spending alone is around one trillion dollars when you add it up.

There is no universal formula for funding education, but there are some standard guidelines. Now, the pandemic-era is tricky because the federal government had to step in to shore up so many parts of the economy. So, the best and cleanest data available come from the 2019–2020 school year before the world fell apart.

For that school year, it’s estimated that a total amount of $771 billion was spent on public K-12 education. The funds come from a combination of local, state and federal tax dollars, but the proportion of funding does vary. Most of the onus falls upon state and local governments, and they all have their own formulas for how best to distribute the funds. Some of the poorest districts in the country will receive federal funds as a backstop to provide school essentials and fill in budget gaps.

As one might imagine, one of the most visible signs of funding disparities are in communities of color. The stubborn legacy of Jim Crow and redlining persists to this day, as certain deliberate and other de facto segregation policies artificially divided communities throughout the nation.

For example, a 2019 analysis by EdBuild found that:

“Predominantly nonwhite districts received $23 billion less than predominantly white districts from state and local governments despite serving the same number of students.”

Adding to these historical challenges are more recent funding issues that exposed cracks in the system, beginning with the Great Recession. Go all the way back to our budget episode and you’ll recall that states are required to present balanced budgets. Only the Federal government has the ability to run massive deficits to finance mandatory and discretionary spending. So, during the downturn beginning in 2008, state budgets were slashed, and much of it was taken from education spending, one of the largest ticket items in a state budget.

Moreover, because of the Obama administration’s tepid response, federal funding was used for only a short period of time to shore up budgets before tapering off after the worst of the decline. So, while it had the desired short-term effect, many of the states remained in austerity mode after federal funds ran out. According to Pew Charitable Trusts, by 2019, 17 states spent less than they did in 2008 in inflation-adjusted terms.

In terms of how we rank in the world when it comes to funding, here’s a quick snapshot from the OECD:

“As a percentage of GDP, public and private spending on education in the U.S. is slightly below the OECD average for early childhood education, significantly above average for primary and lower secondary education, and below average for upper secondary education.”

The OECD statistics are interesting. The U.S. still ranks pretty high in terms of tertiary education and international students, but there is no question that our achievement and enrollment levels have been dropping comparatively, and funding for early education is especially low in comparison. The highest enrollment and achievement rates correlate heavily with the level of education among parents in the U.S. Another interesting side note is that our teachers spend a disproportionately high amount of time in the classroom compared to other countries.

But what many in the movement to oppose various aspects of public education in America can certainly point to are the recent achievement gaps due to the pandemic.

Cuts to school budgets continued to mount since the recession, and the pandemic exacerbated the situation dramatically. Our fractured response to COVID had a measurable and negative impact on our kids. Of this, there can be no doubt.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics:

“Average scores for age 9 students in 2022 declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics, compared to 2020. This is the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics.”

Some schools and states did better than others, obviously. But, on balance, we fucked things up pretty badly for our kids. It was a dark time, and there’s no way around it. We simply weren’t prepared. But instead of having rational discussions about finding our way back and trying to fill in gaps for kids in critical learning years, many parents and public education adversaries are using this time to seize on long standing conflicts and pile on the academic community.

The pandemic released a rash of misguided hatred and misinformation, with the public frustrated and looking to demonize and point fingers for the failings of our political system. Everything is now on the table, with parents emboldened to utter callous and outrageous statements at school board meetings across the nation.

Instead of focusing on education, here’s what’s on the minds of Americans these days and grabbing the headlines:

Critical Race Theory

American exceptionalism
Banned books
School prayer
Creationism
Wokeism
Mask mandates
Shutdown
Transgender athletes
Hybrid learning
Gender neutral bathrooms
School choice

COVID school shutdowns and mask mandates were just crowbars to open Pandora’s box. Everything was on the table and mixed into a boiling cauldron of frustration and misinformation.

Over at the DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family—yes this is a real institution—Director Jay Richards recently penned an article for the Heritage Foundation that brings these disparate issues into focus and settles on what the New Right considers the only option. In the article, he criticizes things like critical race theory as “toxic and divisive ideas about race,” or the more shocking and radical “gender ideology… promoting the notion that some kids—perhaps many kids, are born in the wrong body.”

Not to be outdone over at America’s favorite fuck tank, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts declared the recently passed midterms the perfect opportunity to right several of these perceived wrongs, writing:

“States should connect school money to children, rather than to school buildings. Universal school choice for everyone—rich and poor, conservative and liberal—would not just make schools better and more competitive. It would make them less of an arena for the culture war that is otherwise roiling our culture.”

Of course, connecting money to students as though they are customers isn’t a new idea. It’s literally the concept and framework created by none other than uncle stinky fart, Milton Friedman.

This will be the critical piece of Part Three, when we examine the privatization movement of school choice through charter schools and vouchers.

Before we close out this episode, I mentioned earlier that I wanted to objectively listen to the opposition to clear through even the most toxic and troubling rhetoric. So I ordered one of the most popular current books about education called Race to the Bottom, by a Daily Wire reporter named Luke Rosiak.

The book stokes the hysteria surrounding this fractured and confusing time in the world to align the public health instincts to protect children and teachers with a more insidious agenda. The narrative thread of this book, which echoes the right wing talking points, stitches the corrupt unions and evil administrators responses to the pandemic to their woke agenda and ongoing battle to infect the minds of our young.

He calls the National Education Association (NEA) a “hard-core leftist organization.” From here, the blame game ensues and extends to some usual suspects. Woke parents on parent councils and school boards. The New York Times and its dangerous 1619 Project. He takes shots at the NAACP and attempts to debunk Critical Race Theory with anecdotes of achievement gaps and poverty statistics among Asian-Americans. Even Howard Zinn gets dragged through the mud.

Foundations such as Carnegie and Ford also get the business, with Rosiak criticizing their “politically progressive” agenda and saying they have always been “fixated on race.” But the most disgusting claim rests with teachers themselves.

Here’s Rosiak editorializing and generalizing about teachers in America:

“The groupthink mentality of teachers, and their penchant for taking advantage of opportunities to offload the work of creating lesson plans to others, has allowed a handful of activist groups to dominate the lesson plans that teachers draw from, turning even curriculum repositories with no obvious ideological bias into propaganda warehouses.”

Remember that the OECD statistics demonstrate that American teachers spend more time teaching than teachers in every other country. The book is packed with bold lies such as this, and half-truths designed to vilify teachers. But the real fuck you and line of thinking that should send up warning flags and will inform the balance of the series are his closing thoughts in the book:

“After two years of immersion in the issue, I may have been too quick to criticize those whose instinct was just to walk away. I am no longer sure America’s public school system can be saved. It is difficult to reform the schools because policy makers deal with high-level changes, while implementation falls to entrenched insiders who will ignore or subvert them. The rot is too deep.”

There are two slippery slopes here that should be viewed with great concern. First, is the obvious call to simply defund the public education system and privatize it. To treat children as customers. But the second slope is more pitched and dangerous. And that’s the compulsory aspect of it. It’s not too hard to imagine the phrase “school choice” gradually morphing into school is a choice.

You might think this is impossible. The Supreme Court would never allow for such a seminal change in the nation, right? They would never overturn an important precedent like this, would they? Suddenly, it’s harder to ask that question, isn’t it?

Now, let me really fuck with your head. Dig this. We’re going to cover the complete history of legal protection for education in the United States. But know this one fact before we do, then square it with the direction these opposition forces are heading: No Supreme Court in our nation’s history has gone so far as to call education a “fundamental right.” Because the right to education is not in the Constitution.

Do I have your attention now?

Here endeth Part One.

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Part Two: Expansion, Reconstruction & Desegregation.

In Part One, we steeped ourselves in the field of education. Exploring the wondrous world of curriculum, pedagogy and language. Despite our universal interaction with schooling in this country, it’s amazing how little we know about the discipline itself. There’s so much behind teaching that we take for granted.

Building on this knowledge, we zoomed out to examine measurements and outcomes. How we stack up against the rest of the industrialized world, where we have the biggest learning gaps, the budget and staffing challenges stemming from the Great Recession and amplified by COVID, and how public education generally is funded in this country.

We left off at an important place in our story: The opposition to compulsory public education.

It seems like every right worth fighting and dying for over in this country at some point comes up for review and renewal. To the conservative American mind, all progress is bad progress. Voting rights? 200 years to get them. Then they spent the last 50 trying to stuff ‘em back into the box. Roe v. Wade settled law? Hardly. Social Security? Fun while it lasted. Everything is up for debate. Why would education be any different?

At the very end of Part One I spoke their quiet part out loud. The right to education is not in the Constitution. And no Supreme Court has ever called it a “fundamental right.” We’re going to talk more about this today as we move through the history of education. Can’t know where we’re headed unless we understand from whence we came. You see, the “New Right” can’t simply strike down public education as this radical activist court has done with abortion rights, for example. It’s not a yes or no question or black and white belief. The attack on education has, and will, look a lot different.

Chapter Four

Phase One: Expansion. The 16th Lot.

Let’s visit with Derek Black and dig into the heart of his book Schoolhouse Burning. I mentioned it in the first episode as the perfect complement to the research for this series because he addresses the central tension between America’s desire to provide access to education and the legal protections that encompass this right. So, let’s start from the beginning with this awesome nugget:

“Every bound volume of the United States Legal Code begins with a section called Front Matter. The Front Matter includes the nation’s four ‘organic laws’ in chronological order: The Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the U.S. Constitution.”

History buffs probably perked up with the mention of the Northwest Ordinances, but for most people, this is actually a rather startling grouping. The failed Articles of Confederation. Okay. Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Obviously. But the Northwest Ordinances? Chances are you haven’t heard much about them since intro to U.S. history in middle school. Or at all. Let’s spend a minute here.

Independence was won. The founders were in the process of trying to establish a government that would unify the colonies and set some sort of guidelines for how new territories would be established and admitted. We all know the single biggest issue that plagued these discussions, and that was the question of slavery. And this is way before the Missouri Compromise more than 30 years on; expansion was already inevitable and occurring. So we’re in this weird purgatory with a fragile central government, states doing their own thing and settlers moving west and displacing native tribes.

So, the fledgling nation passed what the Oxford Press’ A Concise History of the American Republic called, “the most momentous act in the Confederation’s history.”

[Note: For the sake of accuracy, I should point out that there were two rounds, one in 1785 and the other in 1787, and it’s the latter that we’re going to reference.]

The Ordinance attempted to organize expansion in a manner that kept the territories loyal to the confederation without seeming too much like a royal colonial system. These territories would have fairly liberal organizing principles, but there were a few “musts” that came with territorial claims. Again, A Concise History:

“Six articles of compact guaranteed the customary civil rights and liberties, and declared ‘Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.’”

At this time, governance of the country was faltering somewhat under the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution had yet to be ratified; but time was marching on, and so was westward expansion. So, the Northwest Ordinance was a way to manage expansion while the founders attempted to corral the existing colonies into a federal structure that would bind us together, while allowing a degree of independence for the states.

The one thing, however, that was seen as a given was public education. On this topic, there was unanimity among the framers that if the republic was going to advance on the world stage and stay together, it required an educated citizenry.

The obvious caveat applies here. This was originally conceived as an exclusively white right. That’s not to say there weren’t exceptions, particularly in the northern states. But, on balance, it was too premature to consider the more universal aspects of education. And this would be subordinate to the larger questions of slavery and suffrage. Here’s Black to elucidate the importance of education as the founders contemplated expansion:

“The Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787 placed public education at the literal center of the nation’s plan for geographic expansion and statehood in the territories. The 1785 Ordinance specified how every square inch of the territories would be divided into counties and towns. Every new town had to set aside one-ninth of its land and one-third of its natural resources for the financial support of public education. And every town had to reserve one of its lots for the operation of a public school… What the territories really needed was money. The United States did not have any money, so it gave what it had—land.”

Every town yet to be created in America was to be divided into 36 lots, and the 16th lot was to be set aside for a public school.

Much prior to even the Civil War, the founders imagined a nation that held education at the core of its promise. There was remarkable alignment among the founders to establish a universal standard of education, with Jefferson once again taking charge of the pen to author a bill that went into tremendous detail about funding, teacher compensation, core materials and administrative duties. But the nascent nation wasn’t prepared for the biggest lift of all: new taxes. And so it fell to the states with the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, written by none other than John Adams, leading the way for all other states to eventually follow. At the heart of it was education.

Chapter Five

Phase Two: Reconstruction.

We began the essay with the reminder that education is not a constitutional right and no Supreme Court has codified it a fundamental right. We’re going to parse that a bit more when we examine some crucial decisions, but it’s important to keep this in the front of our minds as we move through our story.

Now, if you’re an originalist or textualist this doesn’t necessarily mean that compulsory education is unconstitutional, or not part of the framer’s intent. Especially since we have Jefferson’s words in a specific, albeit failed, amendment calling for exactly this. The objection to Jefferson’s amendment, by the way, was over money. More precisely, they simply couldn’t agree to levy a tax for education. The fragile republic was broke and thinking more about how it was going to defend itself from foreign interventions.

Having said that, the absence of education in the Constitution doesn’t mean it is unprotected by rule and precedent. And, in fact, it’s one of the few enumerated rights included in every single state constitution. Fast forward four score from the Northwest Ordinance to see how this eventually came to pass. Again, Derek Black:

“All fifty state constitutions include an education clause or other language that requires the state to provide public education. Most of these clauses were first enacted or substantially amended in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War… after the Civil War, no state would ever again enter the Union without an education clause.”

President Lincoln wasted little time trying to bring the nation together at the conclusion of the war. In a letter to General Nathaniel Banks he urged the general to:

“…adopt some practical system by which the two races could gradually lift themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new. Education for young blacks should be included in the plan.”

The presence of troops was essential to the post-war efforts to both heal the nation and compel the southern states to comply with Union demands. But, for as much as Lincoln is associated with this period, it was Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner who emerged as the true hero of the brief era of Reconstruction.

It was Sumner who badgered Lincoln into codifying education into a new constitutional framework for the states modeled on the northern concept of education. Though, it should be said that many of the southern and western states were keen to adopt education formally without any such insistence. But, as always, there were the questions of segregation and funding.

General Banks was tasked with corralling Louisiana after the war, and his first order of business was to enforce the adoption of public education. His second measure is one that even the northern states had yet to figure out, and it was the question of funding. Here’s Banks:

“For the full accomplishment of these purposes and the performance of the duties enjoined upon them, the Board shall have full power and authority to assess and level a school tax upon real and personal property in each and every before-mentioned school district.”

Black details just how fervent the desire for education was among the formerly enslaved class in the South:

“Through the end of 1865, over 90,000 freedmen were attending 740 schools staffed by 1,314 teachers. By 1870, 150,000 students were enrolled under the direction of 3,300 teachers.”

Attendance in some cities even began to surpass the northern districts. Even still, re-admittance to the Union remained an open question.

To maneuver this slow and painful process, Congress facilitated conventions throughout the South to create a consistent framework for admittance. And, to help guide education efforts, it created a federal Department of Education to work with the freedmen to push a national agenda that incorporated formerly enslaved people as well. It’s important to note that, despite the Union’s victory, not everyone suddenly became a federalist. Many in the North and obviously in the South were still wary of too much concentrated federal power.

This would play out in many ways in the years to come, but here Black makes an important point. In contrast to the issues that proved the most bitter for Southern states to swallow, the lack of resistance to the creation of a federal department for education and the universal acceptance of education provisions in state charters and constitutions indicated just how serious the proposition of education was to all involved in healing the union. Even still, the big stuff would have to be hashed out before getting down to brass tacks with education. So, let’s go through the big ticket items as Black lays them out:

“The Reconstruction Act of 1867 spelled out four distinct conditions for readmission. First, the states had to form a constitution of government in conformity with the Constitution of the United States in all respects. Second, the elective franchise shall be enjoyed by all such personas as have the qualification herein stated. Third, states must submit those constitutions to Congress, which will determine whether they are consistent with the U.S. Constitution. Finally, states must adopt the Fourteenth Amendment (which, among other things, prohibited states from denying anyone equal protection under the law or depriving individuals of life, liberty, or property without due process).”

Okay, so this part is a standard piece of important American history. Here’s where Sumner played a crucial role in clarifying the importance and de facto constitutionality of education.

Sumner insisted on including an amendment that required public education and funding. This alone wasn’t an issue. But his amendment included a provision that explicitly called for integration. Sumner was a purist and abolitionist. In his mind, freedmen were just that. Nothing more, nothing less. Entitled to the same rights as everyone else. Obviously, the Southern states didn’t see it that way. So the ensuing debate was not over education as a right. But whether integrated education was a condition of admittance to the union.

The amendment died as a tie vote, and the states quickly busied themselves creating artificial buffers to prevent newly freed black people from accessing education. So egregious were the efforts that it forced Congress to take Sumner’s amendment up once again, this time passing (YAY!) but without the call for integration. (BOO!)

So education would be open and available to all, but the seeds of segregation and funding disparities were planted.

One interesting twist and unintended consequence that would set up a major challenge down the road started in South Carolina.

South Carolina created something that is seen today as a form of voter suppression: The poll tax. Today, we understand this as one of the primary tools of voter suppression that would be unfairly and subjectively wielded to prevent black people from accessing the vote. But, in 1867 when this was established, it was actually a good faith effort to support public education, as it was the primary mechanism utilized to fund the construction and maintenance of schools.

Now, importantly, something else developed in South Carolina; the debate over compulsory education. We take this for granted today, but it strikes at the heart of these essays and what I really want to convey to Unf*ckers about the war on education. Again, Black:

“Some delegates had the right and liberty, they said, to decide for themselves whether their kids should labor or learn. It was not a bad argument. A similar argument made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court half a century later, but the Court validated the decision that South Carolina and several other states had made: It is fully within the state’s power, if not its solemn duty, to see that all kids are educated.”

Hopefully, a picture is emerging surrounding the challenges associated with education and how historically linked it is to democratic principles such as suffrage. It’s fascinating to see how things like poll taxes, created with good intentions, would first be widely adopted and then weaponized. Or how preserving the 16th lot would lay the groundwork for funding disparities stemming from redlining. How the best efforts to include federal constitutional provisions from Jefferson to Sumner were thwarted by racism. And, ultimately, how all of these factors set the stage for a separate and wholly unequal system of education in the United States.

Chapter Six

Phase Three: Desegregation.

Well, I suppose we can’t talk about desegregation without talking about segregation.

With state constitutions guaranteeing access to education and enfranchisement of formerly enslaved people, there was a brief moment in American history when economic and political assimilation seemed attainable.

It didn’t last.

The Johnson administration would prove disastrous, and once the North began to withdraw troops from southern states, a different picture quickly emerged. And the two fundamental and newfound rights of education and suffrage would come under vicious attack, both in the courts and in the streets. Poll taxes turned into literacy tests, with Mississippi leading the way.

Multiple states followed this path by passing literacy and character tests that were subjective, to put it mildly. Mississippi was also the first to pass legislation requiring separate schools for “white and colored races.” It didn’t take long for others to follow suit.

One by one, they fell in line. South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, Oklahoma, Kentucky.

These measures would thankfully fall under scrutiny. But, here’s where Mississippi hatched the most dastardly and enduring scheme of all. Because formulas for funding were still in the early stages, these southern states decided to exploit this by putting more control of the purse strings and spending discretion in the hands of local officials. The possibilities were suddenly endless.

State constitutions might prohibit them from barring education for all, but funding was a different matter entirely. Once again, the other states followed suit and gradually took power away from state bodies and handed it over to local districts. And, you can imagine where the dollars went. Some districts went so far as to simply withhold funding for black schools because they could.

Of course, there were challenges to this. But the Supreme Court doomed generations of such challenges based upon an 1896 case called Plessy v. Ferguson involving a dispute over whether rail cars could be segregated. The court’s logic was that, so long as there were cars that were exclusively for black people, there was no inherent discrimination in having “white only” rail cars. This would be the basis of separate but equal. This would remain the law of the land until three brilliant minds teamed up to begin the slow, steady and painful legal process of tearing it all apart.

It began with a gentleman named Walter White, the head of the NAACP in 1933. White enlisted the support of the organization’s special counsel, Charles Houston. Together they plotted to pull the threads of segregation one at a time until the whole thing came apart. It would be an arduous task. Thankfully, they had another brilliant mind and young talent at their disposal. Thurgood Marshall. Here’s an excerpt from a mini-documentary on Marshall produced by the U.S. Courts:

“In 1934, Marshall graduated magna cum laude from Howard. The following year, he started a private practice and eventually succeeds his mentor, Charles Houston, to become the NAACP’s chief counsel. During this time, Marshall systematically dismantles the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson Ruling that upheld racial segregation under the separate but equal doctrine. He argued 32 civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, winning 29.”

That’s right. Win after win after win, Marshall and company were building a defense that would ultimately paint the Supreme Court into a corner in 1950 when it consolidated four cases—one from each of Kansas, Virginia, Delaware and South Carolina—into what we know as Brown v. Board of Education. The arguments put forward were masterful. I’m not a legal scholar, so I don’t want to do their case a disservice. But, for all the ways they wound up attacking segregation, the court ultimately found its way to one central theme: The role of education in democracy.

Here is perhaps the most famous excerpt from the Supreme Court Opinion on Brown v The Board of Education:

“Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today, it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”

It’s impossible to overstate how important this decision was and how clever the team of Marshall, Houston and White truly was. But, as Black notes, the court stopped short of an important milestone. Something that had eluded leaders in the nation since Jefferson attempted to include education as an ordained liberty in the promise of America, and Sumner first tried to integrate schools. Education, in this decision and in every important decision subsequently, was afforded greater and greater legal protections in all ways but one.

Education has never been absolutely guaranteed as a fundamental right of citizenship.

We know this from specific examples such as Chief Justice Warren’s draft in a related case called Bolling v. Sharpe. Here’s Black:

“Records show that… the initial draft of the Bolling opinion did, in fact, declare education to be a ‘fundamental liberty’ and struck down school segregation as ‘an arbitrary deprivation of that liberty.’ But when he circulated the draft, the two other justices were reluctant to use that language—primarily because the Court’s prior invocation of fundamental rights in the early 1900s had proved to be a grossly misguided attempt to second-guess legislative prerogatives. The Court later overturned those mistakes, but it had left a bad taste in the mouths of some justices for any talk of fundamental rights.”

What I glean from this is that the Court, for all of its foibles and flaw— and we’re certainly bearing witness to them now—does tend to rule on standing, precedent and constitutionality and hesitates to make bold pronouncements that could be viewed as additive to the original intent and language of the Constitution. We explored this briefly when speaking about Roe v. Wade and the difference between enumerated powers and penumbral rights that are implied. The Court typically provides legal reasoning as to why certain powers or rights are or are not explicit or implied.

Anyway, I’m pressing this line of thinking for a reason, so hold that thought.

Let’s stay within the courts for a minute to explain what happened next and how the crusade to unwind all of the protections from the Voting Rights Act, Brown v. Board of Ed, Civil Rights Act, Fair Housing Act and all other progressive priorities would begin with the election of Richard Nixon.

Nixon would appoint four justices in all: Harry Blackmun, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell. You may remember Powell from our episodes talking about the infamous Powell Memo, which many consider the spiritual wake up call for the business community to curb the powers of the federal government. That fucking Lewis Powell. As Black writes:

“Burger and Rehnquist quickly began outlining the limits of school desegregation, limits that capitulated to and threw fuel on the fire of the civil rights backlash.”

The Court essentially established an intent standard. The burden of proof related to segregation now fell on the plaintiff, who had to prove that there was an intent to separate students by race. Housing, redistricting, redlining, inequality. None of these mattered at face value any longer. Somewhere along the line, someone had to explicitly state that children must be separated by race. And the court was just getting warmed up.

The real fuck you came from the pen of Powell, who wrote the majority opinion for a case called San Antonio v. Rodriguez. It doesn’t get as much attention as the other major education reform cases, but it’s crucial. As Black writes:

“The Court in Rodriguez made it clear that the good old days of expanding education rights were behind it.”

Here’s the upshot. The funding mechanics in San Antonio were disparate and highly unequal. The result was obvious and predictable. Black schools were severely underfunded and therefore underperforming and falling apart. But, when faced with the decision as to whether equity and access would prevail over discretion and whim, Powell sided with the state as arbiter of where and how funds are dispensed under the logic that, “The importance of a service performed by the State does not determine whether it must be regarded as fundamental.”

That was it. With the Rodriguez decision, Powell firmly sided with the state’s rights argument and pulled on yet another crucial thread in education equity.

Lewis Powell was never a judge prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court. He’d never even argued a case in front of the Supreme Court. He was a board member of Phillip Morris and represented the Tobacco Institute. And, of course, he authored the infamous Powell Memo as a response to the advocacy of Ralph Nader, which made him a darling of the Heritage Foundation and put him on Richard Nixon’s radar. This fucking prick cast the deciding vote and based his opinion on the fact that education was not explicitly protected in the Constitution. It was not, as he said, fundamental.

Remember when I said “hold that thought?” Well, keep holding it.

Here endeth Part Two.

Image Description: Rendering of a school bus, graduation cap, backpack and miscellaneous school supplies.

Part Three: Criticize, Demonize, then Privatize.

Step 1: Criticize.

The system is broken. Our kids are failing. We’re falling behind other countries.

Step 2: Demonize.

It’s the goddamn unions. And all those woke liberal teachers. We need government out of the classroom.

Step 3: Privatize.

There’s a larger narrative here. One that we should probably tackle soon. We’re officially 50 years into the neoliberal era. 52 years, in fact, since Milton Friedman was elected as the chair of the Mont Pelerin Society. 51 years since Lewis Powell wrote his now infamous memorandum. 50 years since Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, winning every state but Massachusetts. And we’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Heritage Foundation.

As for education, we covered something else that happened in 1973, nearly 50 years ago, and that was the San Antonio v. Rodriguez decision. With Lewis Powell writing the opinion for the majority, the Supreme Court began pulling apart the hard work established by Thurgood Marshall and so many who came before him. It was a pure ‘state’s rights’ decision that paved the way for what we’re calling the fourth era of education.

The era of Privatization.

In the first episode of the series, we talked about K-12 education generally to learn some of the basics of the vocation and language to align us with the field. And Part Two is where we explored the first three eras:

Expansion, where the fledgling nation placed education at the core of our national identity and each new territorial charter under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

Then, Reconstruction, which was sort of the Empire Strikes Back phase of the story when southern states began pushing the boundaries of constitutionality in an attempt to deny equal access to education for formerly enslaved people.

And the third era of Desegregation, or Return of the Jedi, I suppose, where figures such as Marshall, Charles Houston and Walter White successfully argued case after case in front of the Supreme Court to restore balance and equity into the system.

Expansion is best represented by Jefferson and Adams, with Jefferson writing a full constitutional amendment dedicated to education as a right and Adams writing the Massachusetts constitution with education at the heart of it. Jefferson’s bill was only struck down because the new country couldn’t muster the political or financial will to tax the citizenry. But Adam’s constitution is the framework that almost every other state constitution is based on.

Reconstruction, to the extent that anything positive happened, was best represented by Lincoln and Charles Sumner. While the southern states would spend most of the next several decades trying to weasel out of the obligations visited upon them, the fact remains that these covenants existed in the first place due to the efforts of Lincoln and the insistence of Sumner to include education for all as condition for readmission to the union.

The era of Desegregation must be given to Houston and Marshall, who strung together 29 wins in front of the Supreme Court to box the court into a corner when it came time to argue Brown v. The Board of Education. Their combination of patience and brilliance cleared the way for real change in this country in the form of opportunity, equity and access to education.

Of course, our racist and classist roots are always right there, just below the surface. Ready to be exposed and spread their tentacles into our consciousness. These eras, defined by Jefferson and Adams, Lincoln and Sumner, and Houston and Marshall, created a system of education that was once the envy of the world. They battled against our worst instincts to preserve the right for every citizen to access free public education. They didn’t always win, but they ensured that we always moved forward.

As we reflect back on the half century of neoliberal rule, the two people that most represent it are a wolf and wolf in sheep’s clothing. The one in sheep’s clothing is Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who must shoulder the responsibility of bringing to life the wolf’s vision for the future. And the wolf?

You know who.

Chapter Seven

Phase Four. Privatization.

Milton Friedman on school privatization:

“To people of my generation or my parent’s generation who are immigrants into this country or first generation children, we got our values largely at home, at the school and elsewhere. Schools transmit values, but we don’t want a monopoly on the transmission of values. We don’t want any small group of officials to have the power to say what values shall be transmitted, and yet that is what is happening now in a monopoly school system, and particularly as that school system has gotten more and more centralized. It used to be much better when you had local control of schools, because then you can have variety diversity. But as the control of schools has moved from the local district… from the city to the state and from the state to the federal government, increasingly, the values that are being dictated are being determined by an increasingly unrepresentative selection of the population.”

To introduce the concept of privatization and get to the core of what uncle poo-poo-pants is talking about in this segment, let’s return to an earlier series for a moment to bring another dastardly libertarian figure back into the picture. Recall that we covered Nancy McLean’s groundbreaking book Democracy in Chains for our Libertarians Are Exhausting series. McLean detailed the rise of libertarian thinking in the nation and brought good old James M. Buchanan into our consciousness.

Buchanan is a key figure in the neoliberal story, and his origin story itself is directly related to our story today. Buchanan was among many conservatives in the nation who were appalled by the Brown v. Board of Ed decision. So appalled was Buchanan that, when he landed in Virginia in the 1950s and founded the Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy at UVA, he did so with the express purpose of infecting higher education with the free market principles of the Mont Pelerin Society.

He was one of the earliest neoliberals to understand the power and potential of the free market ideology to benefit white upper classes and believed the long path forward was in the halls of higher ed. Here’s McLean:

“James Buchanan, fresh from the recent Switzerland meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, privately called Eisenhower’s ‘dispatching of troops’ to Little Rock a terrible mistake. The whole mess of school segregation versus desegregation, he argued, should have been ‘worked out gradually and in accordance with local sentiment.’ He never acknowledged that this is exactly what the school board of Little Rock and those in three districts in Virginia that wanted to admit some black students to white schools had tried to do, only to be overruled by the power elites of their states.”

We’ll dig in more in the next chapters, but the idea of privatization in education revolves around Friedman’s idea of school choice. Like all things in the neoliberal fantasy world of free market capitalism, every corner of society can be reduced to a series of transactions. Healthcare, incarceration, the military, education, sanitation, energy: All candidates for privatization in the libertarian mind. They truly believe the free market will provide better outcomes for things that involve the public good, so long as friction is eliminated to the greatest extent possible.

And, in their minds, the chief antagonist to the free market is government intervention. Like mystics, they believe there is an otherworldly power that controls human behavior and that, left alone, it will produce a proper and fair outcome. Call it the invisible hand, call it natural order, no matter the euphemism, it all carries the same meaning.

School Choice

In the world of education, Friedman presented his concept through the lens of what he called school choice. If schools operated like businesses in a free market system—which they’re fucking not, nor should they be—then children are customers and schools are businesses that should compete for their attendance. The more competition there is, the greater the effort to produce superior outcomes, thereby making the market the tide that lifts all boats. We’ll disassemble this logic later, but for now understand that my obsession with uncle cheese-nipple is more than just a fancy. The past 50 years have belonged almost entirely to his misguided theories.

Friedman believed that the mechanism to fuel school choice was a voucher system. Instead of tax dollars being extracted by local municipalities and the state to fund districts that provided services for local students, families would be provided with funds to pay for the education of their choice.

Not only did he see this as the foundation for a competitive framework that would enhance education through competition and produce better outcomes for customers, it would put the power in the hands of parents to decide on the type of education their children would receive. It’s a really appealing idea to Americans, because it’s wrapped in patriotic words like freedom and liberty.

Taking his theory a step further, the decision as to what children would be taught would then also be in the hands of the parents who would have greater influence over schools to design curriculum, thereby stripping central governing bodies of this power. In other words, a fucking free-for-all.

And lastly, for good measure, we’ve talked before about how Friedman truly believed that this would advantage children of color in the United States more because their families would have the means to send their children to any school they wanted if they lived in a district with failing schools, as it often the case in predominantly black and brown communities. Again, there’s so much wrong with this thinking it’s hard to know where to begin, but we’ll get there.

In the next chapter, we’ll cover the three main forms of school choice that have been established since Friedman first mainstreamed the concept. Each of the three—vouchers, charter schools and homeschooling—have accelerated in recent years, and the pandemic has only deepened the commitment on the right to go even further. As Derek W. Black writes in Schoolhouse Burning:

“States like Nevada have passed legislation that authorizes the privatization of the entire public education system. Other states, like Florida, Arizona, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan—just a name a few—have not yet gone that far but have been growing their voucher and charter programs at staggering rates while public education funding falls… Other states, like Kansas and North Carolina, have exchanged the financial stability of statewide systems of public schools for tax cuts for high-income earners and corporations… New Orleans, for instance, has already lost all its public schools, operating nothing but charter schools now.”

Chapter Eight

Vouchers are stupid and racist and they don’t work.

Al Franken arguing against the confirmation of Betsy DeVos:

“Mrs. DeVos ran a political action committee called All Children Matter, which spent millions in campaign contributions to promote the use of taxpayer dollars for school vouchers. The argument was that these vouchers would allow low-income students to leave the public school system and attend the private or religious school of their family’s choice. Mrs. DeVos has described this as ‘school choice,’ claiming that it would give parents the chance to choose the best school for their children. But that’s just not how it works.

“In reality, most school vouchers don’t cover the full cost of private school tuition. Nor do they cover additional expenses like transportation, school uniforms, and other supplies. Which means the vouchers don’t create more choices for low-income families. They simply subsidize existing choices for families who could already afford to pay for private school. As it happens, we have a real-life test case we can look at to determine whether Mrs. DeVos’s argument holds water.

“Mrs. DeVos helped develop a voucher program for the state of Indiana. And guess what happened. Today, more than half of the students in the Hoosier State who receive vouchers never actually attended Indiana public schools in the first place. Which means their families were already in a position to pay for private schools—indeed, vouchers are going to families earning as much as $150,000 a year.”

We skipped ahead to a fascinating, if not terrifying, moment in U.S. education history. The appointment of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary under Donald T***p. Some of you may recall the confirmation hearings where DeVos fumbled questions from committee Democrats so badly that it seemed like even the most staunch Republicans would have a hard time confirming her with a straight face. In fact, Murkowski and Collins did indeed defect, which left it to Pence to cast the tie-breaking vote.

To place this in historical context, in our nation’s history, there have only been nine defeated nominations and 18 nominees who withdrew from consideration for various reasons. Even in the most contentious political environments, the Senate typically allows a President to select cabinet members. It has become more fashionable in recent terms to deny appointments, and most certainly to put them through their paces. But few nominees caused as much of a stir as Betsy DeVos.

Once again, the reason for this is because we do have a history of taking education very seriously in this country. But T***p’s cabinet slate was special in that so many of the people he selected had actually dedicated their careers to destroying the very departments they were tapped to serve. Like Ben Carson, who went on to gut Housing and Urban Development. Rick Perry, who literally campaigned on getting rid of the Department of Energy, only to go on and run it.

DeVos never went to public school. Kids didn’t either. Never took out a loan for school. Never taught a class. DeVos was one of the first nominees, other than T***p’s cast of loser appointments, to have literally zero experience in the field she was chosen to lead. In fact, she’s on record calling public education supporters “flat earthers.”

During her nomination, it was revealed that, in total, her family had donated upwards of $200 million dollars to non-profit organizations dedicated to destroying public education and bringing religion into schools. One of the DeVos family’s primary strategies to accomplish this was to increase the use of vouchers to provide for school choice. Of all the dreadful and deceitful ways public schools have been attacked, there’s no bigger Trojan Horse than uncle stinkydoodoo’s concept of vouchers. And no family has worked more diligently, or spent more money, trying to infect the system than the DeVos family.

So, yes. Betsy DeVos was a clown. As clownish as the rest of Donald J. T***p’s cabinet, I suppose. And she did cause real damage during her tenure, but her time was interrupted by a larger and more unfortunate event.

A large scale hoax created in a Chinese lab by Anthony Fauci to sell a vaccine from Bill Gates with a microchip that tracks your every move and thought.

Let’s cap a thought on vouchers before we go back to the Obama Administration. Remember, vouchers are just one avenue of attack on public education. The way it works is that funds that would otherwise be used to support public schools are carved out to be given to families who apply. With these funds, families can then enroll their children in a private or parochial school of their choice. But, as Al Franken so eloquently noted in his remarks, vouchers typically don’t cover the full cost of education, and they don’t cover other important costs like transportation.

Then there’s uncle nipple-tickle’s insistence that vouchers would help create diversity in schools; let’s follow this to the logical conclusion. Private schools usually have attendance caps to keep class sizes small, but it’s not like everyone who applies for a voucher gets one, and even if they do, it’s unlikely that private or religious schools could manage to take in everyone who wanted to apply.

Then there’s travel. With only 30,000 private schools to the nearly 100,000 public schools, it’s likely that a private institution will fall outside of the public busing district. So that means additional transportation costs, or parents that have to drive, which isn’t always an option.

To claim diversity is one of the reasons behind vouchers is a farce. Not to mention, private school acceptance rates hover around 85%, which means not everyone is allowed to attend. Nor are they required to adhere to the same standards for special accommodations as public schools are required to do. So, if your child has learning challenges, perhaps they don’t perform well on standardized tests, don’t present well in an interview or—let’s just call it what it is—if there is bias and racism in the interview process, then they might not make it.

All of that makes sense, considering vouchers were originally conceived as a way to maintain segregation in schools after the passage of Brown v. The Board of Education.

That’s right. Just as Brown v. The Board of Ed was the spark that ignited the libertarian movement beginning with Buchanan, so too did it inspire many southern states to look for ways around integration. But most failed to turn vouchers into law in the first couple of decades. Today, 21 states have a form of school choice systems, mostly in the form of vouchers, some as tax credits, but many states are still fighting the tide.

Fucking Florida. Always, Florida.

One of the earliest states to figure out a way around its own state constitution was Florida, which paved the way for other states to follow, thus normalizing the concept. Here’s Black:

“Florida then began experimenting with ways to get around the problem. It developed an alternative form of vouchers, what it called a ‘scholarship’ program. In most respects, it operated just like a voucher, paying for tuition at private schools. But rather than funding the tuition directly out of the state coffers, Florida gave tax credits to businesses and individuals who donated to a state ‘scholarship’ fund that the state then used to pay private tuition. The real farce, though, was that Florida reimbursed businesses and individuals for the full cost of their ‘donations.’”

The battle over vouchers was on more even ground prior to the Great Recession. States were able to argue credibly that existing programs showed no benefit to students, and in fact many programs demonstrated negative outcomes. As the NEA notes:

“They take scarce funding from public schools—which serve 90 percent of students—and give it to private schools—institutions that are not accountable to taxpayers. This means public school students have less access to music instruments and science equipment, modern technology and textbooks, and after-school programs…Furthermore, vouchers have been shown to not support students with disabilities, they fail to protect the human and civil rights of students, and they exacerbate segregation.”

So why do it? Okay, so religious zealots like DeVos are trying to turn K-12 schools into seminaries. Fine. Fuck you. And there are real problems in underfunded districts throughout the nation that have parents searching for help. Totally reasonable. But, from a public policy perspective, why the war on public education? The evidence is clear that when a district is well-funded and serves a population that has high employment, food security and well compensated teachers, the children perform better. Why would you take money away from a public system and divert it to a fractured private system with no accountability to taxpayers and negligible if not negative outcomes for children?

“The public school system, which isn’t public at all, it’s a government system owned by the teacher’s union.” -Milton Friedman

Oh, that’s right. It’s not about choice. It’s about breaking the unions.

Chapter Nine

Arne Dunks on Public Education.

“Rather than divvying it up and handing it out, we are letting states and school districts compete for it.” -Barack Obama

Like most Obama-era initiatives, school choice seemed like such a good idea to Democrats who vilified George W. Bush for No Child Left Behind—for good reason—and T***p for pushing vouchers under DeVos. Also for good reason. But they weren’t silent under Obama. In fact, they rallied behind him and his nominee Arne Duncan with great enthusiasm. In contrast to the chilly reception Betsy DeVos would receive eight years later, Duncan’s hearing is a complete blowjob.

(I mean, seriously. I’m linking the transcript along with all of his letters of support. I actually read a lot more of it than I had planned because I found it fascinating. I threw up in my mouth a bit at times, because holy shit.)

Charter schools are only mentioned four fucking times in the hearing. Four times. But, once confirmed, this would be where Duncan had the greatest impact.

Like most things that are born within a particular field, charter schools started with the best of intentions. Education became a top priority for the administrations following the Second World War. K-12, higher education, medical degrees. The government viewed education in all forms as an investment into a future that looked especially bright when the United States emerged as the world’s foremost superpower. The specter of the Soviet Union and their advancements in science and technology as the Cold War developed only served to heighten the need to not just compete, but to dominate.

But, as the decades wore on, it became clear that the primary and secondary schools were failing in certain parts of the country, most notably in the cities and rural areas. It was thought that the system had grown too large to innovate and so a new field of education emerged and new schools of thought were being tested, but with marginal success.

Charter Schools

The idea of a charter school started in the 1970s as divisions with the public school system that would be free of state and federal curriculum mandates so new strategies could be tested and then ultimately mainstreamed into the larger systems. But this proved to be a challenge to institutional authority and school norms so advocates pushed for separate facilities to be chartered and built as proving grounds. In theory, if these schools created and implemented successful new teaching modalities, they could use this research to bring these strategies back into the individual districts.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a handful of states passed legislation that allowed for the creation of charter schools to serve this purpose. And there were early signs of success, though not enough to warrant full-scale overhauls.

Clinton Opens the Door

You’ll recall from our Clinton series that the New Democrats under Clinton seized the mantra of charter schools, but with a twist. Instead of serving as a laboratory for innovation that could be brought into public schools, the Clinton administration saw this as an opportunity to promote its privatization agenda. To treat charter schools as separate and apart from the public system. In their estimation, this was a free market solution to the problem of failing schools. Here’s Slick Willy:

“Charter schools are innovative public schools started by educators, parents and communities, open the students of every background or ability. But they’re freer of red tape and top-down management than most of our schools are. And in return for greater flexibility, charter schools must set and meet the highest standards and stay open only as long as they do. Also, charter schools don’t divert taxpayer dollars from our public school system. Instead they use those dollars to promote excellence and competition within the system, and in so doing, they spur all our public schools to improve.”

Actually, Bill. Charter schools, by definition, divert funds from public schools, and they do not promote competition because the nature of competition is that there are winners and losers. Or, in the worst case scenario, funding and attention is spread so thin that everyone loses a little. And that’s exactly what happened. But, like every other free market reform implemented by the Clinton administration, they were less interested in the hard data and lousy outcomes of their programs and more interested in deregulation, privatization and promoting free market solutions. Whether they worked or not.

Bush Doubles Down

When it was W’s turn at the wheel, a new twist occurred. In addition to providing an enormous amount of new funding for the construction and development of charter schools, Bush passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which introduced what education historian Diane Ravitch called a “punitive regime of standardized testing on the schools.” She continues, saying:

“NCLB was passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law in 2002. NCLB law required schools to test every child in grades 3-8 every year; by 2014, said the law, every child must be ‘proficient,’ or schools would face escalating sanctions. The ultimate sanction for failure to raise test scores was firing the staff and closing the school.”

Teachers were on the hot seat and unions appeared powerless in the face of a national wave of support for vouchers, charter schools, teacher metrics and accountability, and teaching to the test instead of the child. No one was looking at the data or drawing the logical conclusion as to what would happen when resources were taken from the public system to build out adjacent systems with less accountability and oversight.

It was a multi-pronged attack that overwhelmed administrators, who now had to fear for their funding and jobs based on standardized tests. Do more with less, or even more gets taken away from you. That was the message from the administration. On this approach, there was, and still is, remarkable alignment between the two major parties in the nation.

Obama Drives it Home

The hope and change that educators were looking for in Obama would soon turn to despair and more of the same under Arne Duncan. Duncan immediately sought to eliminate caps on the number of charter schools and warned states that artificial caps would jeopardize federal funding. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

In the face of a global financial crisis, states were losing tax revenues at alarming rates. As Black notes:

“Desperate for federal funding to ease the pain of plummeting tax revenues, states that had long limited charter schools quickly changed their laws. Duncan’s support helped double the charter school population during his tenure and cement a way of thinking about education that is now proving hard to control or unwind. Duncan also helped fuel a war on public school teachers, requiring states to hire, fire and retain teachers based on their students’ standardized test scores.”

The Big Funding Squeeze

While public schools saw their budgets slashed from declining local tax revenues and state support, charter schools had the opposite experience during the Great Recession. Their budgets went through the roof.

After the recession, only 18 states made an effort to increase funding for public education to former levels. Meanwhile, transportation, wages, benefits all rose, leaving public budgets squeezed. Funding per student during the recession fell 35% in Arizona, more than 20% in Florida and Alabama, 15% in Texas, Oklahoma, Utah and so on down the line. Under the cover of the recession, public officials then took aim at the unions. Again, Black:

“Across the nation, states made major changes to teachers’ collective bargaining agreements, salary structures, overall benefits, and teaching expectations without giving teachers anything in return. One of the first salvos was in Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker made it his mission to break teacher unions… Walker exempted police, firefighters and state troopers from the collective bargaining changes, leaving teachers as the primary group to see its rights change.”

That was the big tell in Wisconsin, especially. Cops and firefighters were untouched. It was the teachers they went after. Easy prey. Fuck ‘em. To pile on even more, Duncan ushered in a wave of reforms designed to chip away at teacher protections, measuring teacher performance to the test scores of the children. Okay, merit based compensation and review. Welcome to the world, right? That’s how a lot of people feel, and I get it.

Here’s the problem. We weren’t testing every subject. So, a social studies teacher would be rated on how well kids performed in math and reading. Moreover, if a teacher had a particularly good crop of students who performed well one year but the next year’s crop shit the bed, the teacher was left hanging. Same teacher. Same curriculum. Different outcome. Again, fuck ‘em.

And that’s the problem with free market ideology. It never considers the externalities that affect real life behavior and events. Just like you can’t account for greed in the financial markets, you can’t account for externalities like food insecurity, bullying, tragedies, impact of social media and the countless influences on our children. Humans aren’t standard.

You Get What You Pay For

Then there’s the cold reality that charter schools, which have now been around in earnest for three decades, don’t outperform public schools. According to the first comprehensive study conducted between the Department of Education and Stanford University:

“Roughly 80 percent perform the same as, or worse, than traditional public schools. The evidence on vouchers is no better. Students tend to fall behind and stay there when they transition from public school to private.”

The budget hawks and free market advocates all focus on the lack of accountability among teachers because of their damn unions. But they’ll completely overlook the utter lack of accountability in the charter system, which is owned by private companies. Here’s Ravitch again to provide a few key examples:

“Businessman Ron Packard, with experience at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, saw a chance to use federal funds to help build the highly profitable K12 Inc. online charter chain (now called Stride), which gets dismal academic results, but paid him $19 million during a four-year period.”
“J.C. Huizenga, the Waste Management heir, used federal CSP dollars to launch his for-profit National Heritage Academies, which helped him amass a real estate empire.”
“Marcus May, now serving time in prison for massive fraud, got substantial funding from the feds for his New Point Education Partner charter schools, some of which he used to buy a yacht and enjoy extravagant vacations.”

How about these gems? 12% of the schools that got federal dollars never opened. And 25% closed within just a few years. And the owners of these schools just kept the money.

The system has been so junked up by bureaucratic nonsense, ironically ushered in by supposed free market idealists, that it’s buried in bullshit. Public schools are losing funding in favor of vouchers that go to middle and upper income families to offset payments to private schools. And losing federal and state funding to charter schools that take kids and teachers away from them. The public school teachers are held to proficiency standards that ignore real life influences and don’t even test half of the subjects that are taught in schools, even though their compensation depends upon it. And, when a charter school fails, private companies pocket the federal funds and just move on.

The cherry on top of the icing of this shit cake is homeschooling, which also flourished during the pandemic. Online companies have popped up all over the country with the promise that they can provide accredited online schooling, and states are lumping these programs in with charters and vouchers as valid forms of education. Spoiler alert: They’re not. Not even close.

A New York Times article titled, “Online schools score better on Wall Street than in classrooms,” offers a glimpse into the world of online schooling that the carnival barker companies that offer programs behind doors number one, two or three. Dig this:

“During a presentation at the Virginia legislature this year, a representative of Connections explained that its services were available at three price points per student:

“Option A: $7,500, a student-teacher ratio of 35–40 to 1, and an average teacher salary of $45,000.

“Option B: $6,500, a student-teacher ratio of 50 to 1, with less experienced teachers paid $40,000.

“Option C: $4,800 and a student-teacher ratio of 60 to 1, as well as a narrower curriculum.”

The article continues with the insults:

“Despite lower operating costs, the online companies collect nearly as much taxpayer money in some states as brick-and-mortar charter schools. In Pennsylvania, about 30,000 students are enrolled in online schools at an average cost of about $10,000 per student. The state auditor general, Jack Wagner, said that is double or more what it costs the companies to educate those children online.”

So, yeah. Arne Duncan oversaw the explosion of charter schools, championed vouchers and refused to support devastated public school districts if they didn’t go along with his free market plan to fundamentally alter the landscape of public education. All while his Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate peppered him with questions about his jump shot and if he ever goes one-on-one with the President. This asshat made Betsy DeVos’s job destroying public schools so fucking easy and set the table for the backlash against teachers during the pandemic.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering where Duncan wound up. He’s currently employed by the University of Chicago.

Chapter Ten

The Propaganda Machine in Full Swing

Ideas and concepts are everywhere. Some take root organically. Some are thrust into public consciousness by happenstance. And some are sold to us. Ideas that are proposed. That circulate. That spark wonder and research. Ideas that are altered by each new input. Like a game of telephone, sometimes these ideas wind up sounding very different by the time they reach the end of the circle. For example, how charter schools started as an idea to form independent divisions within public schools to test new modalities that could be mainstreamed into a curriculum. A bad game of telephone if ever there was one.

Then these ideas are tested. And vetted. And pieces will turn into policy. As they’re adopted, they become normalized. Over time, we can’t remember why or how they started. We simply say, ‘I don’t know. That’s just the way we do it.’

Early on, we talked about the rise of the think tank in America and how ideas from figures like James Buchanan and Milton Friedman made their way into research papers published by these organizations. How they would circulate through the media to be normalized, oftentimes through interviews with the writers of these papers that weren’t subjected to peer review or trials. Their word alone became gospel that was sold on television, radio and eventually podcasts and videos. Political action groups would craft model legislation based on the research, and pollsters would push poll the ideas during elections; ideas that sounded familiar because voters had heard them on television, radio and eventually podcasts and videos.

Privately funded foundations would pump millions of dollars into candidates and elected officials to promote the legislation for these new, groundbreaking ideas while siphoning budget money from the old ideas to ensure their failure stood in stark contrast to the possibility and potential of the new unproven ones.

Foundations like the Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin. Here’s an excerpt from one of their promotional videos explaining their work:

“We further outstanding research, teaching and scholarship, and advance alternatives to K-12 public education monopolies. Bradley promotes the teaching of American Exceptionalism, encourages vocational training and other alternatives to university-based education and supports education for gifted students.”

In an August 2021 New Yorker magazine article, Jane Mayer wrote that the Bradley Foundation “has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right and funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years.”

If Jane Mayer is writing about them, then we should pay attention. The Bradley Foundation moves opinions and puts money in very influential places. And if election fraud conspiracies are any barometer, it appears they’re pretty good at this. But destroying public education is their top priority.

Let’s examine the language from this brief, but telling, excerpt.

They refer to public K-12 schools as “monopolies”. Talk about actually teaching “American Exceptionalism.” Promote “vocational training,” another popular aspect of their ideology that smells of freedom but really stinks of economic suppression by another name. And, of course, providing opportunities for so-called “gifted students.” Fuck the learning impaired, persons with disabilities or the marginalized, food insecure or perhaps homeless children. Let’s somehow identify gifted students by some vague, subjective and unwritten metric and give them the money to succeed in schooling and life.

Here’s what the vaunted Cato Institute thinks about a post-COVID education landscape brimming with opportunities for children:

“Potentially far more valuable than giving districts autonomy is fundamentally changing the education structure by having the money follow children and giving educators autonomy to run schools and teach as they think best. This would create a system that is more flexible and innovative—with smaller schools able to more quickly respond to threats—and empower educators to try new things. That empowerment is key to getting more of the sorts of platforms, such as Google Classroom and Duolingo, that have enabled online education to become increasingly enriching. It is also crucial to enabling parents to find providers that will efficiently furnish education commensurate with families’ tolerance for risk.”

What the actual fuck? Listen to the language here. Empowerment. Innovative. Tolerance for risk. Kids aren’t a venture capital based tech startup. Duolingo? Seriously? We’ve used Duolingo and other apps for fun to brush up on subjects in our house, but if you think a fucking app is going to teach your child a new language, you’re seriously mistaken.

Cato doesn’t end there. Far from it. They also believe that states should “open the doors wide to virtual charter schools.” Hey, the real life charter schools are no better than public schools, so why not make them even less productive by putting them online?

The same asshats who railed against school closures saying kids need to be in class are now advocating for kids to stay home and sign up for option A, B, or C and Duo-fucking-lingo.

Education Savings Accounts

They want to accomplish this, by the way, through Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs; private accounts that are funded by non-profits and the state for parents to use at their discretion. Like how George W. Bush and Paul Ryan wanted to privatize Social Security through private savings accounts that retirees could invest in the stock market. Or how every Republican dickhead today wants to create medical savings accounts to do away with Medicare and Medicaid.

It’s always the same horrible fucking idea designed to take money from government programs and give them to unaccountable private enterprises and Wall Street.

The grandaddy think tank of them all, Heritage Foundation, says “In the modern era, America has never been closer than it is today to realizing Milton Friedman’s vision for universal education choice through education savings accounts.”

They even have an “Education Freedom Report Card” that ranks Florida as the best state in the country for “education freedom,” with Arizona coming in second. Forget that the K-12 standardized test results—for better or worse—rank them 16th and 47th, respectively.

A recent Salon piece dug into the report and offered this take:

“In the Heritage Foundation's inaugural ‘Education Freedom Report Card,’ the think tank is grading according to a different metric entirely: not things like average student funding, teacher salary or classroom size, but how easily state legislatures enable students to leave public schools; how lightly private schools and homeschooling are regulated; how active and welcome conservative parent-advocacy groups are; and how frequently or loudly those groups claim that schools are indoctrinating students.”

Other metrics include things like:

If ESA accounts are readily available.

Whether there are anti-critical race theory laws on the books.
How many groups like the Koch-backed Parents Defending Education groups there are.
Or if discussions of gender and sexuality are prohibited in the classroom.

The Conservative Long Game

It’s helpful to peruse the universe of libertarian think tanks to uncover their long-term plans. Here’s one that calls back to our second episode: Calling compulsory education unconstitutional. Surprise, surprise.

Here’s an excerpt from an unremarkable think tank called the Future of Freedom Foundation, only notable to an extent because its founder Jacob Hornberger ran to be the Libertarian presidential candidate in 2020. Fun fact, he lost to Jo Jorgenson and barely—and I mean barely—mustered enough support to edge out this third candidate in the primary.

None other than 99’s favorite perennial candidate… Vermin Supreme.

That’s right. Vermin Supreme managed to get 206 votes at the convention to Hornberger’s 285 on the promise that every American would get a pony.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from an article on the foundation website titled Compulsory Education - The Bane of Learning and Freedom:

“Compulsory education violates the liberty of all citizens — taxpayers and students alike, not only by forcing parents to subject their children to a state education, but also with the coercive funding (i.e., taxation) used to force children’s attendance.”

Remember. This is where all this shit starts. On the think tank level. They sound a bit wacky at first, but hey, they’re from a think tank, so you never know.

They might start by attacking truancy laws. It’s a fair place to start. That’s the ability to literally lock up parents and send children to juvenile detention for not attending school. They might attack state criteria for homeschooling and what passes for graduation standards. They might attack the legitimacy of district level funding mechanisms. None of these is an original thought.

These are all ideas that exist in the corners of the Libertarian and dark money sphere, and they’re working their way into the mainstream through the language of choice and freedom. Every attack on critical race theory at a school board meeting, every mandate to loosen the cap on the number of charter schools, every mask mandate protest, every attack on collective bargaining, every dollar allocated to private and homeschooling vouchers. Every one of these is subterfuge for the larger dual agenda of the right wing hellscape of think tanks and money. To dumb down the electorate and to stop funding education with tax dollars.

So that’s the one-two punch from the Foundation and the Think Tank. But, as we covered, a successful propaganda campaign means you have to sell it to the public. And right on cue, here’s PragerU to tell us how schools should operate just like a business:

“What if schools had to compete for students in the same way that businesses have to compete for customers? Would schools get better or worse? There’s no need to guess. In almost every state and city where there is competition today, educational outcomes improve—often dramatically. This competition is called school choice, and many states and cities now embrace it. With the old model, under which most American children still live, the government—not the parent—decides which school children will attend. Now, here’s how school choice works: The money follows the student. Every child receives funding that their parents can direct to the school of their choice—public, private, charter or even homeschool.”

Again, I know it’s gauche to quote oneself. But, fuck you, PragerU.

Chapter Eleven

Bring it home, Max.

The choice isn’t whether or not individuals can, and should, choose what type of schooling they want. Children aren’t customers. Education isn’t a marketplace. It’s foundational, and hopefully we’ve demonstrated that it is indeed fundamental. We can quibble over curriculum, standards, teaching to tests, open classrooms, constructivism versus behaviorism, mindfulness, experiential learning and other aspects of education.

The real choice is whether or not we’re going to take our investment into children and education seriously and treat it as a fundamental right.

Will we continue to make the choice to fund our schools and provide for our children? If every district was properly and equally funded, teachers were honored and compensated fairly, and resources were made available for all children and not just ones deemed gifted by some subjective standard, then outcomes would improve for everyone, and not just a precious few who have the ability to navigate a system.

Why not make all schools excellent?

The idea that competition breeds efficiency and improves all stakeholders is folly. Think about this for a second. This is important. Competition breeds winners and losers. That is the nature of competition.

Here’s Derek Black again, from Schoolhouse Burning:

“Rather than fundamentally change our democracy, they try to borrow democratic language and bend it toward their own ends. For instance, they frame charters, vouchers, and school choice issues as educational civil rights. They tap into natural sympathies toward seemingly powerless parents and claim the goal is to allow disadvantaged families to exercise the same choices as wealthy families. They tap into our constitutional commitments to parental autonomy and religious freedom by framing charters and vouchers as issues of personal liberty and religion. They even evoke the nation’s constitutional commitment to a right to education as they blur the lines between private and public education.”

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this series. Nothing I’ve said is intended to imply that we don’t have real world problems within the public school system. The problems that existed and were exacerbated by the pandemic. As a recent New York Times article on pandemic learning loss notes:

“The national test results capture both the initial academic declines and any recovery, and they offer some nuance. While there was a notable correlation between remote learning and declines in fourth-grade math, for example, there was little to no correlation in reading. Why the discrepancy? One explanation is that reading skills tend to be more influenced by parents and what happens at home, whereas math is more directly affected by what is taught in school.

“So remote learning does not explain the whole story. What else does? In a sophisticated analysis of thousands of public school districts in 29 states, researchers at Harvard and Stanford Universities found that poverty played an even bigger role in academic declines during the pandemic.”

Listen. There are bad teachers. In fact, there are many more now as a percentage of the teaching population because we’ve driven so many quality teachers from the profession. There have always been bad teachers. That’s true of any profession, mind you. We can all remember the ones that made us feel bad or stupid. Fuck, I remember a teacher slapping the shit out of a friend of mine while smoking a butt in the teacher’s lounge. (We were in the third grade.) But hopefully, many of us remember the great ones who helped shape and guide us. Like my high school social studies teacher, who ignited my passion for history and debate.

Teaching is part science, part art, and entirely social and human. We cannot expect teachers to endure attacks from parents, school boards, administrators, media pundits and the wealthy libertarian class determined to tear down public education in service of their mission to dumb down the electorate.

But, as the Harvard and Stanford study and myriad others have demonstrated over the years, there is a direct correlation between economic conditions and education outcomes.

It’s hard to learn when you’re hungry.

It’s hard to learn when you are sleep deprived.

It’s hard to learn when you live with the stresses of poverty that manifest in so many ways.

And it’s hard to teach when you don’t have science labs, instruments, gym equipment and textbooks.

When a school’s funding is dependent upon the tax base of its district and the state continues to cut funding; when students show up to class tired, stressed and hungry—maybe even sick; when teachers are attacked by parents who have direct lines of communication to them day and night; when their compensation is tied to artificial test results that are benchmarked against district with far fewer issues; when collective bargaining is gutted, contracts and raises are stalled and professional development is eliminated; the outcomes are inevitable, and so is our response to them.

Throughout the expansion phase, the founders of this nation held close the sanctity of public education. Of course, this only extended to the privileged class of whites. The reconstruction phase sought to right this wrong and bring everyone into the fold, and heroes such as Charles Sumner emerged to remind us of what we fought one another for. Of course, he didn’t get everything he wanted, and while education was universal, it was separate and wholly unequal. Champions such as Houston, White and Marshall fought tirelessly to break down the barriers between us, and succeeded well beyond what half of this country was ready for.

Now, in the era of privatization where Milton Friedman’s idea of vouchers gets even more perverted by libertarian advocates and big money donors in the worst game of telephone, we think private industry is coming to the rescue. For profit institutions with no accountability pocketing federal dollars and closing up shop. You think billionaires have the answers to public education?

Ask Bill Gates how that went.

Vouchers for private and parochial schools are cover for segregationist policies that mask our racist roots.

Remember how the attack started. With James Buchanan’s outrage over Brown v. The Board of Ed. That’s the anger that fuels the movement behind school choice. Arne Duncan, perhaps the most qualified candidate on paper to ever lead the Department of Education, was no better than Betsy DeVos in practice.

And, for that matter, since the Clinton era, Democrats have served as useful idiots to the school choice crowd. Shit, Republicans know the free market doesn’t work to benefit the public and lift people out of poverty. They know competition doesn’t breed success across the board, it creates winners and losers. Only Democrats still seem to believe in the promise of the free market to cure societal ills.

It was Clinton who took the white papers and ran with them, turning them into policy. This opened the door for Bush to double down with standardized testing and punitive measures against teachers, unions and children themselves. But it was Obama who attacked public education from all sides and paved the way for the likes of T***p and DeVos to gut as much faith in educators and the system as possible, particularly when the pandemic hit.

All of the information we need can be found in the think tanks. They’re putting it out there for everyone to see, and even though it has taken decades, they’re winning the battle for hearts and minds. And we’re moving further from what those in the profession—the educators and administrators on the front lines who deal with systemic issues day in and day out—further from what they’re begging us to do. And that’s to protect our children.

So, we know where to look for what’s next. It’s why I spent so much time on constitutionality. As sure as you’re listening to this series is as sure as they’re going to attack the fundamental nature of compulsory education. It’s the last step for them. The absolute way to dismantle the underpinnings of a system the founding fathers themselves wanted for this nation.

For all of their faults, they recognized that the United States of America could only succeed and prove that a democratic system could endure if it had an educated citizenry. They had the answers. What they didn’t have was the money. But we do now. The only problem is, we have all the money we need, but we’re looking to the wrong people for how to spend it.

If we allow ourselves to dream a bit, and think big, we would make a wholesale change to the funding of the education system and strive for a more balanced and equitable equation. That’s how we ensure no child is left behind.

If you were to draw up a plan today, there would be no district level property taxes to fund schools. There would be a universal tax in this country to fund education evenly across the board. Let’s say, for example, we funded every student at the same rate as Massachusetts—the state with the best and most consistent public education outcomes in the nation—and awarded that to districts evenly. That’s one of the highest per student spending, by the way.

The annual budget impact would be about $862 billion dollars, which would include all K-12 and charter school kids. It was always a mistake to fund schools through the local tax base because it baked inequality into the system. It guaranteed disparities in salaries and infrastructure and resources for students.

And, by the way, nothing would prevent states from filling in gaps where they felt it was warranted. States could maintain their own constitutions so long as they’re in alignment with the federal constitution, and also levy taxes to bolster funding. Or add early childhood education, and yes, even innovation centers within districts, as charters were originally conceived.

Local districts would be able to hold fundraisers, solicit donations from organizations and parents to augment programs. Local districts would still retain budget authority over the use of funds for hiring, maintenance and programs. Would this work? Could this work? I don’t know, let’s ask these countries that outrank us (we’re ranked number 16 among OECD countries in performance) and are predominantly, or to a great extent, funded by central authorities:

New Zealand - #4
The United Kingdom - #6
Ireland - #7
Austria - #8
France - #11
The Czech Republic - #15

Also above us are countries that have a mixed formula like Canada, Australia, Belgium and Switzerland. Meaning they use a combination of federal tax and regional dollars, with supplemental funds from local districts. Sort of like the United States, but upside down in terms of the levels of funding.

Then there are the nations that outrank us, but draw funding for education entirely from local sources. Finland. Sweden and Norway. What’s the big difference here? Why are they better at it than us if we have the same funding model?

Because they don’t have such tremendous income inequality; they're starting from a more egalitarian baseline everywhere in the country.

This type of thinking might be too big. When the United States moves in a progressive direction, it’s always incremental. Which is why—once again, I cannot believe I’m saying this—the Biden administration has signaled a shift in mindset that portends good things. Like many other initiatives, it’s not enough. But this administration is moving in a positive direction.

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has been highlighted for his role in pausing and forgiving college debt. We’ve covered this in some detail. But what doesn’t make the headlines is what he’s done at the K-12 level to restore some sanity. Cardona has pushed the administration to allocate billions of dollars to mental health support and students with disabilities.

Moreover, as reported in EdWeek:

“The Biden administration last month announced proposed regulations that would require charter schools seeking federal funding to demonstrate widespread community interest in the program with the help of a survey and data showing over enrollment in local public schools. The proposal would also require private charter providers to partner with at least one local public school district on developing curriculum, professional development opportunities, behavioral interventions, or practices to help struggling students. For-profit operators would be barred from the federal grant program, which totals $440 million in Biden’s proposed education budget.”

The next two years will be a repeat of prior intractable and ugly stalemates in Congress. So we’ll be reliant on the powers vested in the Department of Education to manage policies and funding related to privatization efforts. We can only hope that the department is filled with well-meaning wonks who have studied the data and recognize the dangers lurking around the corner, in every think tank boardroom and in state legislatures that have been historically opposed to federal authority in education.

For now, we can do our part. And that starts with lifting up our educators and listening to the experts. By dialing back the vicious attacks on teachers. Supporting collective bargaining. Sounding the alarm in conversations, and online, when you hear euphemisms like choice, freedom and vouchers. Share positive experiences and interactions with school teachers. Attend local school board meetings and drown out the racists and homophobes.

Education is a fundamental right.

School choice is rooted in racism.

Hug a teacher.

Here endeth the lesson.

Sources & Resources

Resources

World Socialist Web Site: 2.6 million US educators and staff quit public K-12 and higher education jobs during pandemic
National Center for Education Statistics: Public School Enrollment
The Nation’s Report Card: Student Performance Across Subjects
National Center for Education Statistics: Total number of public school teachers and percentage of public school teachers in a union or employees' association, by selected school characteristics: 2015–16
Resilient Educator: Your Guide to Education Lingo
Learning Journals: What Are the Different Pedagogical Approaches to Learning?
Rasmussen University: What Is Reggio Emilia? Your Guide to This Child-Driven Approach
Stanford: An Introduction to Design Thinking
Understood: Understanding IEPs
Resilient Educator: Project Based Learning: A Hands On Approach To Teaching
Bookshop.org: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
National Association for Science, Medicine and Engineering: The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree
Resilient Educator: Why the “A” in STEAM Education is Just As Important As Every Other Letter
U.S. News: IB vs. AP: Discover the Differences
Peter G. Peterson Foundation: How Is K-12 Education Funded?
EdBuild: Nonwhite School Districts Get $23 Billion Less Than White Districts Despite Serving The Same Number Of Students
Pew Charitable Trusts: ‘Lost Decade’ Casts a Post-Recession Shadow on State Finances
OECD: Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators 2012
National Center for Education Statistics: Long-term trends in reading and mathematics achievement
The Heritage Foundation: The Battle Over Parents’ Rights in Education Is Just Getting Started
The Heritage Foundation: America’s School Choice Moment Can’t Be Missed at Midterm Elections
Bookshop: Race to the Bottom
Teaching American History: Letter to Nathaniel Banks
National Archives: Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
National Center For Education Statistics: Results from the NAEP 2022 Mathematics & Reading Assessments at Grades 4 & 8
OECD.org: Rankings
National Foundation for Educational Research: OECD Funding Models
Peter G. Peterson Foundation: How Is K-12 Education Funded?
National Education Association
Resilient Educator: Your Guide to Education Lingo
Pew Research Center: Religion in the Public Schools
Salon: Florida ranked No. 1 for "education freedom" — by right-wing group that wants to privatize it all
Heritage Foundation: Education Freedom Report Card
The New York Times: Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools
NY Daily News: Fix this wasteful federal charter-school fund
The Nation’s Report Card: Student Performance Across Subjects
EdWeek: Education Statistics: Facts About American Schools
EdWeek: Lawmakers, Education Secretary Clash Over Charter School Rules
Teaching Certification: Education Spending by State – How does your state compare?

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