Governor Bill Lee has made his education views clear: He is a supporter of vouchers and charter schools. His voucher legislation has been held up in the courts on appeal, and voucher opponents are fearful that the highest court will support vouchers, which has become dear to the heart of Republicans everywhere.
In Governor Lee’s budget message, he proclaimed his intention to expand charter schools in the state. He also promised to let parents know which books their children are exposed to, in the classrooms and in school libraries.
The Nashville Tennessean reported that Lee has already planned a partnership with the far-right fundamentalist Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, to open charter schools across the state. Lee originally asked Hillsdale to start 100 charters but apparently the College felt it could handle only 50. Hillsdale is one of the few colleges that has never accepted any form of federal aid, not even scholarships, to protect its independence and religious teachings.
Hillsdale has established 21 charter schools across the nation to spread its ultra-conservative political and religious values and views.
The college was founded by Baptists and has preserved its Christian identity, which it has infused with intellectual, cultural and political conservatism, said Adam Laats, a history professor at Binghamton University and an expert on institutions like Hillsdale.
The college has positioned itself as “a sort of libertarian or ‘fusionist,’ is what the nerds call it, type of conservative alignment,” said Laats, author of “Fundamentalist U: Keeping the American Faith in Higher Education..”
In addition to the charter schools it helps establish, Hillsdale has produced, “The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum,” that includes lesson plans for teachers...
Partnerships between states and colleges and universities for K-12 education initiatives is common, Laats said. But he said there seems to be unique elements with the prospective Tennessee-Hillsdale partnership.
“What strikes me as the unusual takeaway is that the governor is intentionally wheeling the state into this very ideologically loaded and electorally loaded civics education,” Laats said.
The college promotes conservative Christian values and has close ties with former President Donald Trump’s administration. Some Hillsdale alumni served in the Trump administration.
The school is popularly known for rejecting federal government financial aid, meaning it is not subject to some federal regulations that many colleges and universities are.
Hillsdale has a statue of Ronald Reagan on its Michigan campus, and Governor Lee quoted Reagan, talking about teaching the basics and “true” American history.
Ronald Reagan is a graduate of public schools in Illinois.
Perhaps the new Hillsdale charters could be referred to as the MAGA chain.
We know how poorly the all-charter Achievement School District performed in Tennessee. Why would Governor Lee expect different results? The rumor is that he plans to plant the Hillsdale charters in rural communities, which is odd since rural communities typically have one schoolhouse that is a much-loved part of the community.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The Nashville Tennessean reported that Lee has already planned a partnership with the far-right fundamentalist Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, to open charter schools across the state. Lee originally asked Hillsdale to start 100 charters but apparently the College felt it could handle only 50. Hillsdale is one of the few colleges that has never accepted any form of federal aid, not even scholarships, to protect its independence and religious teachings.”
Great! Ed reform echo chamber now backing a chain of ideologically Right wing charter schools to replace public schools.
Remember how they all told us for twenty years they were “nonpartisan” or “bipartisan” and this was not at all about replacing public systems with privatized systems?
Shouldn’t they have to explain how the reality of ed reform veers so dramatically from how they sold it to the country? Or is that yet another area the echo chamber is forbidden to debate or discuss?
Pay attention to these ed reform initiatives and one thing sticks out more than any other- they do NOTHING for public school students. The glaring hole in all ed reform inititives and work is public school students. They offer nothing of value to our students and schools. It’s such an echo chamber none of them even seem to notice that they provide no benefit or added value to any public school anywhere, yet they utterly dominate education policy to the exclusion of any other views.
Our “public education” policy is directed by people who doesn’t actually offer anything to public schools or public school students. Ludicrous and a measure of how insular it is.
There’s not even any “analysis” of these charter/voucher schemes. 100% lockstep cheerleading across the echo chamber for each and every one of them. I guess they’re all super fabulous and perfect.
Did the Governor mention public schools and public school students in his address outside the CRT panic the ed reform “movement” drummed up?
Or were public schools and public school students passed over again in the rush to promote, market and fund private and charter schools?
Let’s list the ed reform “contribution” to public schools over the course of the pandemic:
Anti mask protests, anti vaxx protests and state law gag orders. That’s the sum total of the “work” this lavishly funded “movement” have contributed to public schools. 100% negative. Thousands of full time paid ed reformers in all those think tanks and university departments and lobbying shops and that’s the sum total benefit to public schools- nothing.
Can we possibly think about hiring at a least a few people who actually value public schools and public schools and intend to perform some work on their behalf in “education policy” or is that forbidden by the charter/voucher lobby? Could we at least make a deal with the “movement” that they can continue their work lobbying for charters and vouchers if public schools and public school students can hire their own advocates?
From WKRNdotcom: quote – Teachers aren’t happy with the vague ideas coming from Tennessee’s leaders.
“The idea that just anybody could step in, off the street and do what educators do is quite frankly — it is insulting, it is disrespectful and it’s one reason that we’re seeing educators so demoralized and thinking about leaving the profession,” Brown said (Tennessee Education Association President Beth Brown).
While Tennessee ranks near the bottom in student funding for education, advocates say more money not privatization is needed. [snip]
“How can we make people want to enter this profession and stay in the profession so that we don’t have any sort of shortage issues, but two, how can we support the schools right now with providing the resources they need? Let’s not talk about outsourcing as the solution, let’s get to the heart of the problem and address that,” Brown said. end quote
https://www.wkrn.com/news/tennessee-politics/teachers-respond-to-governor-lees-plan-to-outsource-some-teaching-jobs-in-new-education-funding-plan/
These libertarian/Ayn Rand GOPers have an ideology and a far right dogma which does not include supporting the public schools, quite the opposite. The goal of these GOP ghouls is to demoralize public school teachers, to control them and the school curricula, to demolish the public schools.
The goal is to demonize: five words which cover so much of what has been pushed onto schools in the past two “reforming” decades
Typical ed reform echo chamber opinion piece on public schools:
https://www.educationnext.org/did-public-education-have-it-coming-crisis-students-parents-taxpayers-system/
Public education policy has somehow ended up wholly directed by people who want nothing more than for public schools to abolished.
How is this fair to public school students? They get zero advocates for their schools? We are permitted to have zealous advocates for charter schools and vouchers of all kinds but public school advocates may not exist? Our students get stuck with people who work full time on replacing their schools with privatized systems? How is that working out for them? Does anyone in the echo chamber care or are they still busy “reinventing”?
Go right now and look at any ed reform site funded by the billionaire ed reform funders and look for any positive plan or support for public schools. There is none. You will find a whole set of full time professional public school critics who all promote the exact same charter and voucher schemes.
They gleefully declared months ago that the public had “abandoned” public schools and they haven’t done a lick of work on behalf of our schools since. No one works for public school students. They work for ideological goals of privatized systems. Our students are at best an afterthought and at worst, harmed.
What Finn leaves out in his little diatribe is that the very system we’ve been working under was largely influenced as a result of his precious Fordham Institute.
Hey, Checker. You know why school has inertia?
Because wonderful reformers like you overvalued tests scores and forced the super dry state standards on everyone.
When we left no child behind and raced to the top, we were asked (without our input) to jack up those test scores in order keep our jobs and our schools. For an excellent, he could look at drill-and-kill operations like KIPP and Success Academies.
Oh, no. Wait. Those are good schools in his estimation.
Once I faced increased pressure to get those MWEA scores up to “show growth”, my administrators were always quick to point out and static statistics. In order to achieve that “growth”, I had to remove a lot of creativity and our school had to reduce the number of electives.
The very system Finn laments is the very system he pushed. But it isn’t his fault that we had to resort to rote garbage to maintain our existence. Even though he was one of its primary promulgators.
Thanks for the truth.
Every single day in the ed reform “movement”, 100% negative regarding public schools and public school students and 100% positive cheerleading for charter and private schools and those students:
https://www.the74million.org/
Read any of their work and ask yourself if someone outside this echo chamber would think this was “unbiased”. It’s a laughable claim. Only a member of the echo chamber would consider the echo chamber “unbiased” and since no one outside their group even reviews their work, it’s a perfect closed circle!
Boo hiss for public schools and rah rah for charters and vouchers. Why we need more than one ed reform group is my question- they’re identical. 99% of their employees are redundant. It really shouldn’t take 10,000 full time employees across tens of groups to bash public schools and promote charters andf vouchers. One would do. Call it “charter and voucher lobbying” and call it a day.
“100% negative about public schools” – collected news content posted at Oklahoma Catholic Conference.
I’ve just been reading through the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum. It’s basically a guide to fundamentalist, nationalist indoctrination.
The first thing to notice about this curriculum is that it is very, very short. If your goal is to use history to indoctrinate students in a Christian fundamentalist nationalist mythology, it’s best to keep the discussion at the 50,000-foot level and deal only in abstract jingoism. If you get into the details, you are going to run into all these messy details that don’t support the mythology you are promulgating–the Mystic Massacre; the disenfranchisement in early America of all but propertied white males; the Fort Pillow Massacre; the fact that at slave auctions trade in girls and young women was saved to the end of the day because such human property was particularly prized by good Christian white, male slaveowners; a century of U.S. federal housing policy designed to keep black people from home ownership, the primary means by which people build generational wealth; and so on and on and on and on.
The President of Hillsdale College, Larry Aarn, introduces this curriculum by saying a) that the purpose of education is to produce citizens, from the Latin civitas, or city, b) who can use language to distinguish the good from the bad and c) that in history instruction, the way to do that is to concentrate on the lives of great persons. So, at the outset, everything is cleaved into “the good” on the one hand and “the bad” on the other (in other words, this is going to be a curriculum that deals in absolutes), and an avowed program of hero worship is advanced.
When you get into the heart of this comic book curriculum, you find that what its authors have done is to choose a few “great” men and carefully excerpt from their writings very short selections that support tenets of fundamentalist nationalism (manifest destiny, Christian religious belief, opposition to immigration, opposition to a big, bad federal government, etc.), and these become the subjects of lessons, the takeaways from which are rightwing doctrines/dogmas. So, the history of immigration becomes a few paragraphs from Alexander Hamilton saying that he is against it and that Jefferson has contradicted himself on this issue.
So, this is all about replacing history and civics education with comic book/Cub scout-style mythologized, simplified indoctrination. (The Scouts were created by Robert Baden-Powell for the overtly stated purpose of producing cannon fodder for imperialist wars.) Btw, for most of its history, Rome used the noun urbs to refer to the city and civis to refer to a citizen of an urbs. It was only late in Roman history, when Rome was falling apart, that the word for citizen started being used to refer to a city itself. But if you are a proponent of education as propaganda, then you want to keep things simple: America good. Foreigners bad. Rome good. Barbarians bad.
Greg B has pointed out in comments on this blog that the coming fascist government here will appropriate, a la Orwell, traditional American concepts and iconography, distorted in a fascist funhouse mirror and presented as a new, kinder, gentler fascism. Exactly right.
(Remember George Bush, Jr., aka Shrub, who ran on what he called a “kinder, gentler conservativism” and then gave us 200,000+ Iraqi civilians dead in an illegal war?) In a similar manner, the Nazis appropriated ancient pictographs used by cultures worldwide to represent the sun and lightening made of these abominations, and the pigs in Animal Farm proclaimed that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others [are].”
When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross” goes the phrase often attributed to Sinclair Lewis. Yup. Got that right.
cx: lightning
One of the appeals of fascism to the mob is that everything becomes simple. All complexity is burned away.
This need to keep things simpler than they are is why fascist governments all, pretty soon after taking power, seize absolute control of publishing, the media, and schools and find pretexts for exterminating intellectuals and burning books and artwork.
I say that the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum is “short.” Let me be clear about that. It runs to a couple thousand pages, but bear in mind that this curriculum includes the lesson plans and other teacher materials, worksheets, primary texts for the student–the whole kit and kaboodle. A typical high-school history text runs to about 1,500 pages by itself, and in addition to that, there is an even larger teacher’s edition, as well as accompanying test books, worksheets, primary source materials, online resources, and so on–all told, many, many times as many pages of material as in the Hillsdale stuff. Furthermore, the Hillsdale stuff is a combination history and civics curriculum. In a typical high-school, the Civics program would be a separate student text, teacher’s edition, and set of ancillary materials. High-school history texts already suffer from being fly-bys (two paragraphs on the Vietnam War? Really?). So, the relative shortness and poverty of the Hillsdale materials is telling.
The Hillsdale stuff also “covers” Economics, which again, in a typi4cal high school, would be a separate course with its own texts, teacher’s gui4des, and ancillaries. And ofc what passes for Economics in this curriculum is rah rah Reagan and the Laffer curve, and how about those evil Socialists and their anti-freedom regulations?
cx: that a variant of the word for citizen started being used to refer to a city itself.
Strange that Alexander Hamilton is cited as an opponent of immigration since he was an immigrant, born in Saint Kitt and Nevis. Just as strange as Trump’s hatred of immigrants, since his wife Melania is an immigrant. And her parents are “chain” immigrants.
There you go citing facts again, Diane.
“I love the uneducated.” –Donald Trump
Republicans smell victory. They’ve been trying to privatize all public services–including military ones!–for decades. Too many Dems support similar policies: David Coleman et al; Ed Deformers; Goldman Sachs education “bonds” just to mention three instances of Dems being Republican lite. Even given public education’s obvious faults–and there are many–the institution holds out the promise of equity and quality for all kids. If only we decide to do our duty to the next generation. But vouchers spell segregation. Vouchers spell loss of parent voice, despite current charades to the contrary, because private schools choose their students: parents do not choose whether their kids go to this or that private school. Private schools spell religious indoctrination. Private schools spell fraud. Private schools spell variation in quality according to family income. (This is also a problem in public education, but the scale will be expanded considerably if we privatize.) From the New Deal on–that is for 80 years!–the anti-democratic, racist, xenophobic, anti-union, anti-worker rights, anti-feminist part of our country has fought to contain and destroy the accomplishments of the New Deal (and then Great Society): social security, public education k-16, medicare and medicaid, limits on childhood labor, the length of the working day, workplace protection, civil rights, and public investment in public goods (roads, bridges, buildings, educational programs [higher ed and special ed]). These are the current stakes, and the Right smells final victory. Are they right?
How Republicans plan to rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of democracy:
Like that you included a line I always use. It’s called school choice because the schools will choose their students. Parents will often have to settle for something further down the list.
Private schools will have the benefit of choosing their student bodies. Those rules won’t change.
It’s called school choice because the schools will choose their students.
Beautifully, perfectly said!
The right wants to roll back the clock to before the New Deal. The “ideal” years of the 1920s. Too bad they don’t know any history.
Here they are in 1939:
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/american-nazism-and-madison-square-garden
I guess they’ve never heard of the Preamble, Mann, Dewey, Edelman… and Dr. Ravitch (or Fahrenheit 451)
Must reads for everyone one of these close minded.. … …
On the other hand, this is another example of how we are losing. He thought using this line would bring him political capital, and we know it will certainly bring him campaign cash. Most people in Tennessee either don’t think this is a radical idea or it just doesn’t register as important. The few people who do understand the implications of this are, unfortunately, a small minority and don’t seem to have much of a voice in the state. Multiply the sentences above by 50.
I think we need a simple narrative built around what the nation would look like if they had their way. If you can’t scare the hell out of people then, fuggetaboutit.
“Most people in Tennessee either don’t think this is a radical idea or it just doesn’t register as important.” I can attest to the truth of this statement. Why would this be the case?
The media covered Lee’s speech as though he had said nothing out of the ordinary. I did not even know he had said this since no media covered it. Too busy teaching school.
The problem is that the media are just too liberal….Hahahaha hha you are killing me oh gracious help me my sides are aching
Didn’t mean to pick on Tennessee (this time!), could just as easily have mentioned any state. On this issue, Tennessee is no different than Ohio. Perhaps the Tennessee state legislators envy the Ohio state legislators for their ability to cash in and not only not be held accountable, but promoted!
The irony of Tennessee, perhaps of all this recent movement toward the far right is that it is based on a hatred of government. If yoou ask the average Tennessean how they feel about the government, they will give you a long spiel about its incompetence. So they swallow the hook of smaller government and soon are reeled into the net of those who would replace the government of elected people with a government of insurance companies, industrialists, and real estate men.
Soon they will accept dramatic reduction in their civil liberties. They will never know it.
Yeah. That is a really sad, sick irony.
Fascism + Christian Sharia law. That seems to be where we’re headed.
yup
In response to Steve Cohen’s comment
6-4-2021, Marion Wright Edelman endorsed her son’s Stand for Children at her site, Children’s Defense Fund. (CDF- has a reported $20 mil. in assets, Stand for Children-has a reported $7-$8 mil. in assets.) Marion Wright Edelman is on the Robin Hood Foundation board along with Gates-funded Roland Fryer. Another Wright- Edelman son, Josh, is Gates’ man in the Biden Administration. Peter Edelman is on the CAP Action Fund Board.
Charlie Kirk’s schools- taxpayers forced to pay for his hatred- sometimes, what goes around comes around?
Ravi Gupta (claims “progressivism” at his political site) was interviewed at the 74 about his charter schools (his was the first charter school in Mississippi). He said that Susan Rice (he’s described elsewhere as her former speech writer) told him to make outreach to people in education. Rice’s son is a Trump supporting Republican.