The Wall Street Journal, owned by billionaire RupertMurdoch (who also owns Fox News), runs a steady diet of anti-public school editorials. Sometimes they bash public schools. Sometimes they praise charter schools and vouchers. Sometimes they do all of this in the same editorial. While an opinion piece that expresses a dissenting opinion occasionally gets published, it’s fair to say that the WSJ does not like public schools. In my last book, Slaying Goliath, I praised retired Austin librarian Sara Stevenson for responding to every WSJ vilification of public schools.
Peter Greene responded to the opinion piece by law professor Philip Hamburger, who claimed that public schools are not “constitutional” because they suppress parents’ freedom of speech, that is, their ability to ensure that their children hear, read, and learn only what their parents want them to learn.
Greene begins:
Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal (Fox News’ upscale sibling) published an op-ed from Philip Hamburger, a Columbia law professor and head of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a Koch-funded pro bono firm that takes cases primarily to defend against the “administrative state.” It’s a hit job on public education with some pretty bold arguments, some of which are pretty insulting. But he sure says a lot of the quiet part out loud, and that makes this worth a look. Let me walk you through this. (Warning–it’s a little rambly, and you can skip to the last section if you want to get the basic layout)
Hamburger signals where he’s headed with the very first paragraph: The public school system weighs on parents. It burdens them not simply with poor teaching and discipline, but with political bias, hostility toward religion, and now even sexual and racial indoctrination. Schools often seek openly to shape the very identity of children. What can parents do about it?
Hamburger offers no particular evidence for any of this catalog of arguable points. Various surveys repeatedly show that the majority of parents approve of their child’s public school. The rest is a litany of conservative complaints with no particular evidence, but Hamburger needs the premise to power the rest of his argument.
So here comes Hamburger’s bold assertion:
Education is mostly speech, and parents have a constitutional right to choose the speech with which their children will be educated. They therefore cannot constitutionally be compelled, or even pressured, to make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination. Conservative talking points about public education routinely assert and assume that public education is a service provided to parents, rather than to the students or society at large. It’s case I’ve never seen them successfully make. At the same time, society’s stake in educated members is clear and the entire rationale behind having non-parent taxpayers help pay the cost of public education. In any other instance where the taxpayers subsidize a private individual’s purchase of goods or service (e.g. food stamps, housing), some conservatives say the social safety net is a Bad Thing, so it’s uncharacteristic for them to champion public education as, basically, a welfare program for parents when they want to dramatically reduce all other such programs to bathtub-drowning size (spoiler alert: they’d like to do that with public education, too).
But Hamburger has taken another step here, arguing that speech to children somehow belongs to their parents. It’s a bold notion–do parents somehow have a First Amendment right to control every sound that enters their children’s ears? Where are the children’s rights in this? Or does Hamburger’s argument (as some angry Twitter respondents claim) reduce children to chattel?
Hamburger follows his assertion with some arguments that don’t help. He argues that public education has always attempted to “homogenize and mold the identity of children,” which is a huge claim and, like much of his argument, assumes that schools somehow have the power to overwrite or erase everything that parents have inculcated at home. But then, for the whole argument currently raging, it’s necessary to paint public schools as huge threat in order to justify taking dramatic major action against them….
But “education is speech” is not the really bold part of his argument. That really bold part is where he goes on to say “therefor, parents should have total control over it.” I have so many questions. Should parents have total control over all speech directed at or in the vicinity of their children, including books, and so would I be violating a parent’s First Amendment rights if I gave their child an book for Christmas? And where are the child’s rights in this? Would this mean that a parent is allowed to lock their child in the basement in order to protect that parent’s First Amendment right to control what the child is exposed to?
Hamburger’s argument has implications that he doesn’t get into in his rush to get to “do away with them and give everyone vouchers.” The biggest perhaps is that he has made an argument that non-parent taxpayers should not have to subsidize an education system. I’m betting he’s not unaware of that.
Please open the link and read the rest of the article.
The complete lack of a defense of PUBLIC EDUCATION from ed reformers is really telling, in my opinion.
How can they be full time, paid public education advocates when they never defend public education?
The only people I ever read defending public education are public school advocates.
Charters are supposedly public. The huge, paid charter lobbying sales force has no interest in defending the whole concept of public education? This too will be solely the job of public schools?
What would it take for ed reformers to defend public education? So far we’ve watched as they sat on their hands while public schools were attacked for masks and vaccine requirements and “critical race theory”. At some point will they muster the courage to say something, or do they plan on standing by as public schools are eradicated?
Are they barred from criticizing fellow ed reformers? They lose the grants if they oppose the Kochs?
I stopped reading the NY Times, WSJ, etc. because of an amazing lack of editorial presence. What editor passed this drivel on as being cogent or even coherent.
Amazing that such drivel gets published in a business-focused newspaper.
It is neither a lack of presence or amazing that they pass this drivel on. Nor is it at all surprising that it should appear in a business focused newspapers.
At least this is on an editorial page. All too often the reporting itself is an editorial . There would be no problem with that if the readers understood it and filtered the information they read or heard. Seldom do they get past the headlines .
Steve,
I AGREE.
A colleague of mine went to an AERA Conference and there was actually a session regarding purchasing FAILED Charter schools, giving the kids drill and skill worksheets, and then selling the Charter schools to other buyers. HOLY COW! My colleague was appalled at AERA for even having this “BAD” session.
And thank you, Peter Greene.
business now being not any sort of logical “economics 101” business but a very tightly focused “make profit at any cost” world of business
I think Greene’s response is very important. Also essential to understand about this attack is that it’s part of a new iteration of the neoliberal project ed activists fought under Obama/Duncan. The new version is being pushed by “Third Way Democrats” and tech moguls with policies and ideas not so different from what Hamburger argues. And sadly yes to a latter comment, the Right and tech billionaires have managed to shift so much of what ed researchers are doing. What a danger to democracy!
Sourcewatch posted info about the New Civil Rights Alliance. The largest donor listed is Charles Koch Foundation ($3,000,000).
The Board of Advisors listed shows about a 5 to 1 ratio of men to women.
Correction- Civil Liberties
Ominously, the disUnited States are fractured now as at no point in our history since shortly before the Civil War. Witnessing what is happening in D.C. right now, one might well ask whether the country has become ungovernable. So, by all means, we should replace public schools with private schools founded on the extremist views of parents of various factions. Instead of sending kids to neighborhood public schools with shared habits of the culture at large, let’s send them to
The Proud Boys School for Incel Male Exceptionalists
The Akashic Academy for Little Cosmic Voyagers
and so on.
That will lead inevitably to the next stage in our evolution as a society into warring factions of crazed extremists.
Correction:
“That will lead inevitably to the next stage in our devolution as a society into warring factions of crazed extremists.”
Thanks to Peter Greene for his point by point rebuttal to Hamburger’s specious arguments. Hamburger’s twisted point of view appeals to the ultra-wealthy readers of the WSJ that seek to abandon the common good.
Conservatives have consistently used the First Amendment to undermine public institutions, something Steven Brill lays out superbly in his book, Tailspin. http://knopfdoubleday.com/2018/04/24/media-center-tailspin-by-steven-brill/
No, not conservatives but regressive reactionaries, which is the vast majority of the political right wing today.
“The Minnesota Catholic Conference, the public policy voice of the Catholic Church in Minnesota” retweeted Hamburger’s WSJ article using as summary, “the public school system weighs on parents by burdening them with…political bias…and sexual and racial indoctrination.”
That’s rich considering that the Catholic Church overtly discriminates against women. That’s rich considering Bishop Hebda prohibited his priests from voting in the 2020 Democratic primary and cited the Minnesota Catholic Conference as the authority for him doing so.
“the public school system weighs on parents by burdening them with…political bias…and sexual and racial indoctrination.”
The oligarchs of the extreme right, as exemplified by Murdoch, have found in this a powerful piece of propaganda–one that, I’m afraid, has legs. It doesn’t matter that it’s entirely false. It was false that the U.S. had “fallen behind” other schools worldwide in education, but that didn’t prevent the argument from being used successfully to remake our schools into test prep institutions. Fortunately, there have been millions of teachers who continued to teach well IN SPITE OF of stupid test-and-punish regime. But after the Espinoza decision, with this Trumpy Supreme Court, public schools are in real danger–danger greater than we have ever seen.
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2021/10/what-wsj-anti-public-ed-op-ed-gets-wrong.html
The radical dystopian core of current Republican/Conservative ideology is that we have no obligation for one another’s well being. As a result, all regulation that interferes with individual pursuit (especially wealth) is anathema. Therefore, restricting discrimination of any type (except against Christians), and buffering inequity is a violation of their version of liberty.
Questions meriting consideration- (1) When the Board of the D.C.- located Catholic University of America got cozy with Charles Koch, did it validate Jefferson’s salient point that in all times and all countries, the priest aligns with the despot? And, does the axis between Koch and the conservative church validate the need for the Blaine Amendments today? (2) When a religious organization gave an award to Leonard Leo (Federalist Society) for the egregious number of conservative jurists appointed during Trump’s tenure, did it validate the need for the Blaine Amendments today?
When professionals saw a need for and created a secular American Medical Association and a secular American Bar Association and then the religious decided to create a Catholic Medical Association and Catholic Bar Association, should a red flag have gone up? Taxpayers have made Catholic organizations the nation’s 3rd largest employer. One out of 6 U.S. hospitals are run by Catholic organizations. The Catholic Medical Association issued a statement calling for policy allowing religious exemptions for Covid vaccines.
Guarantee- the public will only hear and read about the right wing agenda of evangelicals. And, while Pope Francis understands the label Christian nationalists applies to protestants, he knows there’s a right wing threat from the other large religious group in the U.S.
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Pope Francis attempts to tamp down the right wing American Catholic Church. Picture the U.S., politically, if the head of the church hierarchy was in the same camp as the 15 bishops who signed the Manhattan Declaration, same camp as Steve Bannon, as Carl Anderson of the Knights of Columbus, as Scalia, Thomas and Barrett, as Leonard Leo, as Paul Weyrich, as Bishop Hebda, as Trump’s John Eastman, as Robert P. George, as Tim Busch…
Remember the conservative Catholic SCOTUS jurists have already opened the door for forced taxpayer funding for religious schools and they have exempted religious schools from civil rights employment law. Taxpayers have made Catholic organizations the 3rd largest U.S. employer.
U.S. politicians, elected by the conservative religious, delivered on behalf of Koch’s economic predation system. The quid pro quo requires that the U.S. take away women’s rights, distancing the country from all other developed nations.
“the notion that only parents should have a say in education” is a quick route to “only parents should pay for education.”
EXCEPT… NothingBurger makes a big concession from the extreme libertarian position of “no compulsory education; homeschool your kids.” He’s actually saying let society pay for school vouchers. Now when you do that… once again, all society gets a say in what’s taught in school, not just parents.