Jan Resseger spent her waking years as a warrior for social justice in her church. Now she writes a brilliant and thoughtful blog.
Her recent post made me reflect on the fact that groups like “Moms for Liberty” and “Parents Defending Education” create turmoil and chaos over the issue of the day (masking, vaccines, school closings, trans kids, books about race or gender identity), then use the issues and conflict they created to demand vouchers to send their kids to schools with like-minded parents.
These Astroturf groups are funded handsomely by the Walton Family Foundation, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and other billionaires to act as shock troops for their paymasters.
I cannot even keep track of all the press coverage I have seen in the past couple of weeks about school privatization proposals under discussion in the state legislatures. And in almost all of the articles I read, the move to privatize schools is accompanied by descriptions of culture war fights about book banning, interference with curricular standards, and elimination of programs that encourage “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in public schools and public universities. I have a stack of very recent articles about Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and New Hampshire, and I am sure I have missed others.
What is the cause of today’s attack on public schools and the kind of programming that many of us believe is essential to help our children live well in our diverse society?
In her Washington Post piece about a battle between two parent groups, Concerned Taxpayersand Support Education, in Mentor, Ohio——Hannah Natanson blames COVID for the controversy: COVID Changed Parents’ View of Schools—and Ignited the Education Culture Wars.
And in a powerful report from the Network for Public Education, Merchants of Deception, political scientist Maurice Cunningham identifies the role of Astroturf parents’ groups that present themselves as though they are a spontaneous welling up of parent outrage. Even though financial support for these groups is untraceable dark money, here is how Cunningham tracks evidence that these supposedly local groups are well connected from place to place and supported by powerful, far-right political interests: “First we should watch for groups that have “grown at a pace that only a corporation’s monetary resources could manage.” Then we should identify the group’s allies to “get a better idea of the real powers behind” the organization. Additionally: “We’ll use another tool to draw telling inferences about these fronts: identification of their key vendors, such as law firms, pollsters, and public relations firms, which we’ll see are often instruments of conservative… networks… Another recurring clue… is the ‘creation story.’ A new non-profit group bursts forth with some version of claiming that two or three moms began talking over what they see as problems in schools and resolve to start a nonprofit to take on the teachers’ unions, administration, or school board. By some form of miracle, they almost immediately receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in funding from billionaires. Next, they find themselves gaining favorable coverage on right-wing media—Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox News…. ”
Of course both the disruption COVID thrust upon our communities and the use of parents by far-right groups trying to ban “WOKE” policies represent what many of us have been watching in the past couple of years. But on a deeper level, it is not a coincidence that the outrageous school board disruptions and the attempts by the far right to scrub the textbooks, and the legislatures considering parents’ bill of rights legislation also seem to be happening in places where slate lawmakers are also pushing vouchers, and not merely the old-fashioned tuition vouchers for private schools, but the new Education Savings Account universal programs to provide wider parental “freedom” and lack of oversight of the public dollars being diverted to these plans. These new vouchers are being designed to give parents the ultimate latitude in school choice—homeschooling and micro-schools where parents put their vouchers together to pay for a teacher for several families. Lack of regulation is a key ingredient in most of these plans. In every case the worldview underneath the proposals involves extreme individualism along with marketplace consumerism.
In her new book, The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession, Alexandra Robbins describes parents who view themselves and their children as the customers teachers must please: “At a candidate forum during the COVID pandemic, a Maryland school board member called students the ‘customers in our school system,’ as if teachers existed to satisfy students rather than to educate them… On a broader level, the student-as-customer attitude has contributed to a growing politicized movement pushing for parents to have authority over what is taught in schools.” (pp. 66-67) Believing your child is the client who must be pleased by services rendered is a very different conception of the parent-teacher relationship than believing that the teacher is a professional whose expertise and cooperation you can and should consult for guidance about your child’s education.
Please open the link and read the remainder of this very important post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, thanks so much for sending this around. I was so delighted to open up Benjamin Barber’s book and discover those paragraphs that describe where we are right now!
For over a decade , Bill Gates has been pushing the idea that students are “customers” and that teachers and schools are markets to offer them “educational” goods and services.
And now Gates’ company Microsoft has effective control over the most powerful propaganda tool ever created GPT4.
To say that we are all screwed is an understatement.
During the first phase of the privatization of education was the belief that the private sector can do everything better and more efficiently than the public sector. What ensued was trying to turn education into a commodity. Market based principles applied to education made everything so much worse including hiring the wrong people, endless testing, waste, fraud, firing legitimate teachers and closing public schools. The main goal of privatization has always been to gain access to public funds and transfer it into private pockets. The current interest in vouchers is an extension of this trend. It certainly is not about education as vouchers provide worse education.
Vouchers have always been the goal DeVos, the 1% and right wing extremists. They are a way to scam the working class out of the public schools that protect their children’s rights and send them to valueless schools with zero accountability while teaching them religious dogma and almost anything else the school deems worthy for less cost. Unfortunately, they will unlikely get a valid background in science, history, civics or the exposure to diverse students. Vouchers benefit the wealthy and affluent, and they are a losing proposition for the poor and working class.
Thanks for this excellent article.
Here’s another good article describing vouchers as a “taxpayer swindle.” https://thehill.com/opinion/education/3857925-taxpayer-swindle-more-states-should-not-seek-school-vouchers/
Language police here. I don’t argue with anything and agree with all that Jan writes. My picky, retentive gripe is the use of the word “disruption.” First, definitions. It was not “disruption [that] COVID thrust upon” us. It was an interruption. The disruption was thrust upon us long before Covid, as the time since the publication of The Death and Life…. Second, “disruption” has become an intentional term used by “innovators” to give legitimacy to their intentions and schemes to shift and create new profit sources from existing systems. Many of which run quite well and need maintenance and tinkering, not disruption. My Klemperer-inspired radar goes off when I read these things. The reason I think it is important to recognize because we subconsciously accept terminology that should be benign, but has political and/or power motivations behind them. By continuing to use them casually, we give the misconceptions longevity. Never forget that fascism depends on language and less you notice how it changes, the better for those who would “disrupt and innovate.”
Here’s a corollary to the rant above, just released (note how this is the cult script now):
Forgot to close thought above. For example, Katrina did not destroy the New Orleans public schools, it significantly interrupted the school year. But the disruption, just like the deadly flooding, was man made. The flood was caused by poor planning and incompetence. The disruption was caused by human beings and cynical avarice on a variety of levels.
Resseger’s post is excellent!
Sure wish we got more MSM coverage on the invention of these phony parents’ groups. I remember reading a few yrs ago that a common MO of political operatives was to monitor FB groups that arise around parent agitation against some school’s policy. When they get to a certain size, offer to hook them up with similar-minded groups [build a natl group], & offer funding to organize & act. On comment boards, I’ve noticed JQPublic falls for it, attributing attitudes to “parents” rather than citing the organized groups quoted in the article.
RE: ‘extreme individualism’ & the ‘student-as-customer’ attitude: these fit like a glove onto the creed peddled by wannabe populist autocrats for yrs now: govt is not the people, it’s “the other,” & it’s us against them. “We”’re taking back our country, “we”’re taking back our state etc. From “them”— not just the liberals. The govt. And schools = the govt.
The excerpts from Barber’s “Consumed” nail it.
On the one hand, this is about commercialism. Reframing “liberty” as “freedom of [individual] choice is one of the ways unfettered capitalism corrupts democracy. We can see the corporate hand here, mesmerizing us with the pixie dust of unlimited choice, while the inevitable cycle unfolds behind the curtain: cutthroat competition leads to consolidation and monopoly, thence to diminished choice and higher costs.
On the other, it’s simple libertarian politics, which has moved from fringe to front row of the right wing. The only rule they’ve got is “your rights end where my nose begins.” As Barber astutely notes, “public goods are always something more than an aggregation of private wants.” Since libertarians do not concede the existence of public goods, they don’t acknowledge that unlimited individual choice, when aggregated, raises costs for all—everyone’s rights in everyone else’s noses. They simply counter with: end compulsory ed & child labor laws. [Like the Soup Nazi: “No public goods for YOU!]