Stephanie Saul is a crack investigative reporter at the New York Times. In this story, she took a close look at Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s request to ultra conservative Hillsdale College to open 50 charter schools in Tennessee.
She begins:
With only 1,500 students on a small-town campus in southern Michigan, Hillsdale College is far from the power corridors of government and top-ranked universities.
But it has outsize influence in the conservative world, with strong ties to the Washington elite. Republican leaders frequently visit, and Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the 2016 commencement address, calling Hillsdale a “shining city on a hill” for its devotion to “liberty as an antecedent of government, not a benefit from government.”
Now the college is making new efforts to reach beyond its campus, this time with an even younger audience. The college is fighting what it calls “progressive” and “leftist academics” by expanding its footprint in the charter school world, pushing the boundaries on the use of taxpayer money for politically tinged education.
Hillsdale has ambitious plans to add to its network of classical public charter schools, which focus on “the centrality of the Western tradition.” And Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee recently invited the college to start 50 schools using public funds, including $32 million set aside for charter facilities. Hillsdale’s network currently includes 24 schools in 13 states.
Mr. Lee, a Republican, sees his new charter school expansion as part of an effort to develop what he called “informed patriotism” in Tennessee students.
“For decades, Hillsdale College has been the standard-bearer in quality curriculum and in the responsibility of preserving American liberty,” Mr. Lee told lawmakers recently. “I believe their efforts are a good fit for Tennessee.”
Charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, have been more commonly promoted as alternatives to low-performing schools in urban centers. In Tennessee, they have been clustered in the state’s four biggest cities, where like other charters, they have been criticized for siphoning money and students out of more traditional public schools.
Mr. Lee’s plan envisions an expansion into suburban and rural areas where, like many Hillsdale charter schools, they would most likely enroll children who are whiter and more affluent than the average charter school pupil.
In that way, the Hillsdale schools could be something of a publicly funded off-ramp for conservative parents who think their local schools misinterpret history and push a socially progressive agenda on issues from race and diversity to sexuality and gender.
The college has also developed the “1776 Curriculum,” which sets out to portray America as “an exceptionally good country.” During a time when education has become inflamed by divisive cultural debates, Hillsdale has been criticized for its glossy spin on American history as well as its ideological tilt on topics like affirmative action. Educators and historians have also raised questions about other instruction at Hillsdale’s charter schools, citing their negative take on the New Deal and the Great Society and cursory presentation of global warming.
In that way, the Hillsdale schools could be something of a publicly funded off-ramp for conservative parents who think their local schools misinterpret history and push a socially progressive agenda on issues from race and diversity to sexuality and gender.
“I’ve been following charter schools over the last 25 years, and I’ve never seen a governor attempting to use charters in such an overtly political way,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “You’ve had governors who’ve encouraged the growth of charters to provide more high-quality options for parents, but it’s highly unusual to see a governor deploy the charter mechanism for admittedly political purposes.”
The article goes on at length to describe the Hillsdale curriculum, which is politically conservative , and the demographics of its charter schools, which are disproportionately white.
She adds:
The students [at Atlanta Classical Academy] are selected through a citywide lottery, but the school’s location in affluent Buckhead may deter some applicants. In a city where 73 percent of public school students are Black and 17 percent white, Atlanta Classical Academy is the mirror image: 17 percent Black and 71 percent white, according to a 2020 state report.
Overall, Hillsdale’s charter school racial demographics are close to that of the Atlanta Classical students. That is a departure from charter schools nationally, which are about 30 percent white.
“They’re catering to white families and affluent families,” said Charisse Gulosino, an associate professor of leadership and policy studies at the University of Memphis, whose research has found that students in suburban charter schools do not outperform their public school counterparts.
Not all of Hillsdale’s charter school collaborations have been successful. Hillsdale recently announced it is ending ties with Tallahassee Classical School in Florida.
The school, approved by the state despite local opposition, set out to serve a diverse student body. But two teachers interviewed by The Times said they suspected that the school was trying to jettison low-performing students, a tactic that charter schools have been accused of as a way to increase test scores.
Try to find the full story. It shows how unregulated charter schools can be turned into white flight academies teaching a Trumpian version of history and science.
Hillsdale Collège would make Stalin, Putin, Hitler, Traitor Trump, and Mao nod their approval at the methods this misleading college takes to program its students to think as far to the right as possible. If the went any further to the right, they’d fall off the flat earth.
I wouldn’t’ be surprised to find Trump hats, armbands, and flags with his name on them in the campus book store along with magazines and books that cater to white supremacists.
I know that anecdotal evidence is poor evidence, but the one graduate of Hillsdale that I know is as hard core Randian libertarian as one can get.
Take very impressionable young folk and indoctrinate them and the results are mindless I,ME,MINE mental midget minions.
The Hillsdale curriculum did its job on him.
Indeed it did! He’s a sharp guy but his I,ME,MINE attitude is sickening.
It always strikes me as curious that “Christian” advocates for the purity of Western Civilization conveniently ignore the fact that Jesus was not European.
Jesus was Jewish and probably brown skinned. He was not European.
Read this from a self-identified “Lefty” on Facebook: “The Left says nothing should be expected of students.” My comment: I’d be interested I seeing your support for this claim. This theme was used to great advantage by Dubya in his “soft bigotry of low expectations” speech, written by prominent White Evangelical Michael Gerson who was recruited for the Bush campaign by Karl Rove. This movement, which continued under Obama, led to the public funding of the segregated, milateristic charter schools (like KIPP*) targeting “inner-city youth” in America.
“these six schools — the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, Amistad Academy in New Haven, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago, KIPP Academy in the Bronx, the SEED school in Washington, D.C., and University Park Campus School in Worcester — are already showing just how different things can be…. The schools are preoccupied with fighting disorder; they fix the proverbial broken windows quickly to deter further unruliness. Students are shown exactly how they are expected to behave — how to sit in a chair without slumping, how to track the teacher with their eyes, how to walk silently down the hall, how to greet visitors with a firm handshake, and how to keep track of daily assignments. Their behavior is closely monitored at all times and the schools mete out real rewards for excellence and real punishments for rule-breaking.“ -from The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an ideologically conservative American nonprofit education policy think tank
They say this tough approach can eliminate the “achievement gap” —without addressing poverty— and without acknowledging that achievement tracks directly with ZIP code.
American Indian Public Charter High in Oakland, was and still is one of the worst examples of how to boost test scores by creaming. Currently, the high school had 40% attrition rates, and virtually no SPED in its school. It’s the same model they’ve had for years, and no one challenges it because…test scores!
I wrote in one of my books a out the American Indian Charter School. The principal wanted to turn it into a high scoring school (s), so he got rid of the American Indians and replaced them with Asian Americans.
I’d wager $$$ that this is the linchpin of Lee’s presidential campaign of the future: making schools centers of worship for Jesus & free market fundamentalism, & vanquishing liberalism (& our previous understanding of democracy for all).
He is not willing to govern—this is the only thing he he cares about.
1. Get elected by riding a tractor & refusing to discuss any platform or substance.
2. Get the vouchers through the leg (by bribery if necessary. )
3. Install fundamentalist religion in public schools.
The rightwinger Christians are gonna worship this guy.
“Travis Pillow
travispillow
·Apr 13
One thing I don’t think enough charter critics appreciate: the more red tape you put around charter schools, the more pressure you create for would-be charter founders or even existing CMOs to opt for permissionless alternatives that bypass public-school gatekeepers entirely.”
This is the old argument of charter promoters- allow unregulated charters to replace public schools or you’ll get private school vouchers.
But is it valid anymore now that the entire ed reform echo chamber all also lobby for vouchers? Do they think people haven’t noticed that they all quietly fell in line behind vouchers and now promote and market them as aggressively as they do charters?
Ed reform is vouchers and charters. Other than ever-changing testing schemes for public school students they do no other work.
And the absolute hypocrisy of anyone in this “movement” objecting to “red tape”
They all just worked to pass a whole host of new state laws governing speech in public schools. They’re more than happy to add ridiculous regulatory burdens to public schools. But hands off their preferred schools! No regulation permitted there!
Public schools are disfavored so must accept all manner of gimmicky and political ed reform regulations, and charter and publicly funded private schools are favored, so are exempted from regulation.
They could not do more to put a giant thumb on the scale towards privatization if they announced they were doing it. “Markets”, my foot. They designed these “markets” and they’re tilting them away from public schools.
key line: disfavored so MUST accept all manner of gimmicky and political ed reforms
Hillsdale and their ilk are a parasite on the body of public schools . They are trying to take the country back 150 years . Amazing that the some of the most bigoted racist conservatives come from what was once known as the Michigan Territory . That is , after they killed or deported all of the Huron Indians . The Hillsdale crew are professional liars at best .
Hillsdale and their ilk are a parasite on the body of public schools . They are trying to take the country back 150 years . Amazing that the some of the most bigoted racist conservatives come from what was once known as the Michigan Territory . That is , after they killed or deported all of the Huron Indians . The Hillsdale crew are professional liars at best .
According to the Nashville Tennessean, Governor Bill Lee, a proponent of charter schools, is planning a partnership with fundamentalist Christian Hillsdale College to open 50 new charter schools in the state. These would use the Hillsdale 1778 Curriculum. Hillsdale bills itself as promoting Classical education.
I’ve just been reading through this stuff from Hillsdale, which is supposed to be a combination American History and Civics curriculum. It’s basically a guide to fundamentalist, nationalist indoctrination.
The first thing to notice about this curriculum, in comparison to existing K-12 American History and Civics programs, is that it is quite short. You can read through it in an afternoon. 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 mostly in abstract jingoism, with a few exempla thrown in. This is the sermon as textbook. If you get too much into the details, you are going to run into all kinds of messy events that don’t exemplify the mythology you are promulgating–the Mystic Massacre; the disenfranchisement at the dawn of the country of all but propertied white males; the Fort Pillow Massacre; slave auctions where trade in girls and young women was saved to the end of the day because such human property was particularly prized (guess why?) by good Christian white, male slaveowners; the Wounded Knee Massacre; a century of lynchings and Jim Crow and voter suppression and white citizens councils and the KKK and U.S. federal housing policy designed to keep black people from home ownership, the primary means by which ordinary people build generational wealth; the Eugenics and Nazi Bund movements in America; Trump furious that he couldn’t order to military to fight BLM protestors and the Border Patrol to shoot innocent asylum seekers; and so on ad nauseam.
One of the reasons why Fascism appeals to semiliterate mobs is that it makes everything simple. All complexity is burned away. And that’s just what the Hillsdale American Exceptionalism Curriculum does. (The successor to the 1930s pro-Nazi German American Bund called itself The America First Party, using the America First phrase that Dog-whistle Donald picked up for repetition at his rallies. Where was Leni Riefenstahl to film these?) This need to keep things simpler than they are is why, soon after seizing power, all Fascist governments establish complete control over publishing, the media, and schools and find pretexts for exterminating intellectuals and burning books and artwork.
The President of Hillsdale College, Larry Aarn, introduces his curriculum by saying that the purpose of education is to produce citizens, from the Latin civitas, or city, who can use language to distinguish the good from the bad, and 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 choose a few “great” men and carefully excerpt from their writings short selections that support tenets of fundamentalist nationalism (manifest destiny, Christian religious belief, opposition to immigration, states’ rights, supply side trickle-down Laissez-faire economics, opposition to a big, bad federal government, etc.), and these become the subjects of lessons, the takeaways from which are rightwing doctrines and dogmas. So, the history of immigration becomes a few paragraphs from Alexander Hamilton saying that he is against it and accusing Jefferson, via quotations from Jefferson’s own writings, of having flip-flopped on the issue. (NB: Right-wingers only hate big government when it’s not their big government; if it’s Trump trying to bar people who practice a particular religion from the U.S., they are fine with that.)
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 young men willing to fight and die in British imperialist wars. It caught on in a big way in the United States.) Btw, for most of its history, Romans 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 a derivative of the word for citizen started being used to refer to a city itself. But if you are a proponent of education as propaganda, like Aarn, then you want to keep things simple: America good. Foreigners bad. Rome good. Barbarians bad. Classics education = learning to emulate being a true citizen of the Empire.
Doubtless, the Fascist government that the Republicans will put in place should they win both houses in the midterms and the presidency in 2024, will appropriate, in the manner presciently described by Orwell, traditional American concepts and iconography, distorted in a funhouse mirror and presented as a New, Stronger, Tougher, Truer American Exceptionalism.
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 his illegal war, perpetrated on a false pretext and in violation of the UN Charter? In a similar manner, the Nazis appropriated ancient pictographs, used by cultures worldwide to represent the sun and lightning, and made of these abominations, and the pigs in Orwell’s 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 observation falsely attributed to Sinclair Lewis but very much in keeping with Lewis’s themes. Yup. Got that right.
A Hillsdale history prof’s book about Andrew Jackson (written at the request of a conservative publisher) provides a view dissimilar to many other historians. The Hillsdale prof covers Jackson’s role in the Trail of Tears very differently.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2022/02/11/you-thought-the-scopes-trial-was-something-well-you-aint-seen-nothin-yet/
Here’s the jingoistic, nationalist Hillsdale College 1776 American History and Civics curriculum:
Click to access The-Hillsdale-1776-Curriculum.pdf
Let me give one example of the general 1776 curriculum approach: The treatment of the disagreement about slavery between Abraham Lincoln and Stephan Douglas is presented as one against absolute moral principles attributed to Lincoln) versus the “moral relativism” attributed to Douglas. This is completely anachronistic. Lincoln, of course, famously disliked slavery but asserted that the important thing was preserving the Union, with or without slavery. Sounds pretty relativistic, doesn’t it? The takeaway from the Hillsdale treatment of this topic is that those who do not support absolute principles (e.g., like those of Christian fundamentalists) are “moral relativists,” bad people who are akin to Stephen Douglas, with his support of slavery. This is using American history classes to teach that there is an absolute moral order in the universe, established by God, that should be enforced by the state. Note that this is in keeping with the earlier teaching, in this curriculum, that the founding principles were about natural law deriving from God. But, of course, the philosophical Deism of many of the founders was a far cry from absolutist Christian fundamentalism and is, in itself, highly debatable.
And again and again, this is how the Hillsdale Curriculum works. It takes events in American history as occasions for advancing right-wing principles–economic libertarianism, nationalism, fundamentalist religious belief, states’ rights, restrictions on immigration, etc.
And all this is wrapped up in a pretty package presented as absolute truth.
cx: as one of absolute moral principles (attributed to Lincoln) versus the “moral relativism” (attributed to Douglas).
From the posted excerpt, at least readers aren’t led to believe Hillsdale is exclusively the domain of evangelical protestants. When I last reviewed the religion of many of those at the top of and in the Hillsdale’s history department, they weren’t protestant. And, Clarence Thomas is not.
I’ve commented before about media writers and the protection that Catholic institutions receive. A recent article at Daily Beast can be used as example. An “ex-prof at North Carolina University” was charged with killing his adopted son. The article quoted him as saying having children was a “scriptural thing”. The article leads with the North Carolina university employment which was a one-term adjunct teaching job. Buried in the middle of the article was his full-time position at Belmont Abbey, where he was an assistant professor. No mention of Belmont’s religious affiliation is made. However, the adoption agency was labeled as “Christian.”
Catholic parochial schools have struggled in recent decades and as conservative Catholics have gained a stronghold in American politics they have embraced an alliance with protestant evangelicals in the push for vouchers as a means to fund their schools. Growing up in the South it often struck me that the dogmatic perspectives of the Southern Baptist Church and the Catholic Church were closely aligned. The Southern Baptist Church grew out of reconstruction and embraced a very authoritarian focus on faith and obedience while rejecting the historical baptist position of congregational independence. Once the Southern Baptists purged their denomination of those who did not follow a specific line of thinking, it opened the door for a partnership with conservative Catholics who have gained significant influence through such organizations as the Federalist Society. Reading excerpts from Bill Barr’s speeches, an ultra-conservative Catholic, it gives me the feeling that I have been teleported back to the Spanish Inquisition. Social justice Catholics have been out flanked.
Thank you for your comment, Paul.
In understanding why liberal Catholics play a part in hiding right wing Catholic politicking, I am limited to speculation. Can you provide insight?
I myself am not Catholic or Baptist. However, I have been watching this conservative transformation in full view, particularly in the South, and the flooding of our Supreme Court with anti-abortion right wing Catholics by the Federalist society serves as exhibit A. Liberal Catholics have lost significant influence in the American church, as has main stream protestantism, even as perhaps the most liberal pope in history, Francis, advocates Christian reconciliation. Conservatives across Christian denominations have simply been more dogged in their determination to shape authoritarian Christian Dogma and have been willing to do whatever it takes to silence opposing voices. The Hillside 1776 project is just one example of such activity. Much of the voucher and charter movement is funded by this effort.
Adding- if the campaign by state Catholic Conferences was limited to
vouchers (excluded the full array of school choice initiatives), I wouldn’t have suspicions about funding sources.
Thanks for the answer. If Georgetown Catholic University allows Ilya Shapiro to return, it will be made evident to all Americans what to fear from Catholic universities. If Amy Coney Barrett renders a verdict to overturn Roe v. Wade, the University of Notre Dame will provide further example.
“. . . said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “You’ve had governors who’ve encouraged the growth of charters to provide more high-quality options for parents. . . ,”
“charters to provide high-quality options” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha “high quality” ha ha ha ha ha ha ha “options” ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Why the hell do so many on “our side” of these debates use the language of the edudeformers? No wonder “our side” loses on so many fronts. QUIT USING THE EDUDEFORMERS’ LANGUAGE!
Wow, seeing this months late…. You all have created mankind’s first perfect echo chamber… Bravo