Thom Hartmann continues to amaze me, with his steady production of powerful articles. This one is especially important for the readers of this blog, whose primary purpose is to strengthen and protect our public schools.
Thom Hartmann writes:
In 1776, British economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a book that laid out the principles that modern economies have operated under for centuries (with the exception of the Reagan Revolution years of 1981-2021). In addition to arguing for a strong domestic manufacturing base and high taxes on the wealthy, Smith pointed out that one of the things that most directly constitutes the wealth of a nation is its educated workforce and well-informed populace (as a result of that education).
From Thomas Jefferson creating the first tuition-free American college (the University of Virginia), to Horace Mann’s advocacy of public schools in the late 19th century, right up until 1954, this was an uncontroversial position. It’s why every developed country on Earth has a vibrant public school system and — with the exception of the US since Reagan ended free college in California — most developed countries offer free or near-free college to their citizens.
But in 1954, the US Supreme Court upset the education apple cart by declaring in their Brown v Board case that “separate but equal” schools, segregated by race, were anything but “equal.” That decision fueled two movements that live on to this day.
The first was the rightwing anti-communist movement spearheaded by the John Birch Society, which was heavily funded back then by Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch. They put up billboards across the country demanding that Americans rise up and “Impeach Earl Warren,” who was then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for requiring “communist” racial integration of our schools.
The second was the private, all-white “academy” movement that has morphed over the years into charter schools and the “school choice” movement of today. It received a major boost when the white supremacist co-founder of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, published a widely-read and influential article in 1955explicitly calling for what he called “education vouchers” to fund all-white private schools to “solve the national crisis” the Court had created.
In 1958 when the Virginia Supreme Court went along with the US Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision and ordered that state’s schools desegregated, the governor shut downevery public school in the state. Prince Edward County’s schools were still closed in 1964, when they were finally ordered to open by the courts.
Hundreds of “segregation academies” opened across the South; in Mississippi, for example, 41,000 white students left public schools to attend these academies in just the one year of 1969. Parents had to pay the tuition themselves, but they were willing to do so to avoid their children having to interact with Black, Hispanic, or Asian kids.
The turning point for the Republican Party was 1964, when President Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed and signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Shortly thereafter, one Southern Democratic politician after another changed party affiliation to the GOP so they could continue to argue against “forced integration” of public schools.
The Republican war on public schools burst into the open with the Reagan Revolution, when Education Secretary Bill Bennett oversaw a 30 percent cut in federal aid to public schools following Reagan’s promise to abolish the Department altogether. Every Republican running for president since has made a similar promise or claimed the need to end the Education Department.
Bill Bennett wasn’t shy about explaining why it was necessary to gut public schools, after the Supreme Court had ordered they must be racially integrated. Bennett wanted to privatize public education — as did Trump’s former Education Secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos — and is probably most famous for his statement that gives us a clue as to why this idea of ending public education is so persistent in the GOP:
“If you wanted to reduce crime,” Bennett said on the radio, “you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”
Could it be that it’s all about keeping white children away from Bennett’s Black babies? Is simple racism what’s animating the GOP’s antipathy toward public education?
One clue is that the idea of ending public education in America goes back even farther than Bennett or Reagan to a single moment and a single court decision.
When I was born, in 1951, Republicans loved public schools. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower led the charge to build gleaming new public schools all across the United States: I attended one, as did perhaps a majority of my generation.
But then came the Supreme Court, with their Brown v Board decision.
In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools desegregated. The “Little Rock Nine” — nine Black children trying to desegregate Little Rock Central High School — became nationally famous when Governor Orval Faubus prevented them from entering the school that fall, provoking Eisenhower to call up federal troops to escort the children to class.
Faubus called a referendum — an election — and the good citizens of Little Rock voted 19,470 to 7,561 to shut down their entire school system rather than comply with Eisenhower’s order. That, in turn, led back to the Supreme Court, which, in the fall of 1958, ruled unanimously in Cooper v Aaron that the Brown v Board desegregation order was, in fact, now the law of the land for public education.
In response, whites-only private schools and “academies” began springing up across the nation, many run by all-white churches. (Jerry Falwell tried, in 1966, to open an all-white school; in 1980 he became Reagan’s main advisor on merging the white supremacist faction of evangelical Christians — also triggered by Brown v Board — into the GOP.)
Thus, in 1958 the governor of Virginia closed all the public schools in racially mixed Warren County, Norfolk, and Charlottesville; Prince Edward County’s public schools remained closed for a full five years.
While that’s the foundational history of what has become the GOP’s war on public education, for most of the past 40 years Republicans have merely claimed vague libertarian principles when they try to explain what they ironically call “school choice.”
It wasn’t until Donald Trump gave them permission — and showed them how politically potent it could be — to unleash their inner racists that the GOP went public with overt white supremacy as a core value for the party.
While Critical Race Theory (CRT) was a little-known 1993 analysis of structural racism pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell taught only in law school, rightwing influencer Christopher Rufo popularized the term with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox “News” show.
From there, it echoed around the GOP for a few months before catching fire across rightwing hate radio, podcasts, and Fox. Pretty soon white supremacist militia members were showing up at school board meetings threatening members that “we know where you live.”
Republicans anxious to stoke the fears of their white racist base began inveighing against teaching CRT in public schools — even though such a thing had never happened — and passing laws so loosely worded as to bar any meaningful teaching or classroom discussion of America’s racial history.
All-white private schools funded with taxpayer dollars have become the darlings of Republicans. In most cases these schools don’t need to flout the law by declaring their segregated status: Black, Asian, and Hispanic parents most often simply aren’t interested in enrolling their children in schools that proudly proclaim they will not allow a drop of “CRT,” true American history, or real science education in their classrooms.
The issue of privatizing public schools came up in Arizona in 2018 with a statewide ballot initiative that would extend free school vouchers to every student in the state: it was defeated by voters by a 2:1 ratio. Writing for The Arizona Republic, columnist Laurie Roberts was unambiguous in her description of the state’s voters’ horror at the ballot initiative:
“Actually, they didn’t just reject it. They stoned the thing, then they tossed it into the street and ran over it. Then they backed up and ran over it again.”
Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered state, though, didn’t much care about the will of the voters. Appealing exclusively to their white racist “Christian” base, they pushed what was essentially that same proposal through the GOP-controlled state legislature and it was signed into law last year by Republican then-Governor Doug Doocey.
In giving every student in the state the ability to opt out of public education with a taxpayer-funded voucher, Doocey established a new benchmark in the war against racially integrated public schools that was matched this year by Florida, Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah.
Legislation to gut public schools and replace them with vouchers for private schools have failed in six states so far (Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota), but Republicans are not letting go. This year voucher bills were introduced in at least 24 states.
The fact that most of the nation’s public school teachers are union members has given Republicans another good reason, in their minds, to do everything possible to destroy public schools. As Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimedlast year, in the minds of Republicans the American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten is “the most dangerous person in the world.”
Republicans also love the fact that voucher programs mostly subsidize upper-income families, while educationally ghettoizing the children of low-income parents. Vouchers almost never cover all the costs of attending a private school, so they primarily serve as a government handout to the mostly upper-middle-class white families who already wanted to send their kids to today’s version of the segregation academies.
Once the public schools are largely dead, Republicans will begin lobbying to “reduce spending” by cutting the amount allocated for the vouchers, locking the emerging two-tier status of publicly funded education into place.
For the moment, though, private schools are a booming industry as a result of the GOP’s embrace of Friedman’s vouchers. In Florida, for example, they have virtually no rules or standards for the over-one-billion-dollars the state shovels into its private schools: while public schools must disclose their graduation rates, how they spend their money, and let anybody examine their curriculum, private academies have no such rules in many Republican-controlled states, even though they’re receiving public monies.
Many private schools across the country operate with untrained and uncertified “teachers,” have no clear standards for graduation, and refuse to teach “controversial” subjects like evolution, climate science, and the racial history of America.
Which brings us to organized religion, the other recipient of big bucks because of the school voucher movement. Schools affiliated with churches are now raking in billions every month across the US, and Republicans — who continue to push for unconstitutional things like mandatory public school prayer — pander daily to fundamentalists who don’t want their kids exposed to science or history.
Six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized this practice of shoveling taxpayer funds to churches and religious schools in their notorious Carson v Makin decision last year. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent:
[In just five short years this Court has] “shift[ed] from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.” This decison “continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”
Which is exactly what the GOP wants. As SenDem recently wrote for Daily Kos:
“Laura Ingraham claimed that ‘a lot of people are saying it’s time to defund government education or at least defund it by giving vouchers to parents.’ Fox’s Greg Gutfeld similarly declared that private school vouchers are needed because public schools are ‘a destructive system’ and described teachers as ‘KKK with summers off.’
“Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has called public schools ‘a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.’ Donald Trump declared, ‘public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs.’ And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called them taxpayer-funded indoctrination centers that need to end, which is a bit ironic since she is the poster child for the necessity of funding public education.”
Sweden has been flirting with libertarianism for a few decades and was the first developed country to offer American-style school vouchers to all kids so they could attend private, for-profit public schools. Just a month ago, their government proclaimed the experiment a disaster and is trying to figure out how to shut down the private schools and re-establish a public education system.
Public schools were the great social and economic leveler for the last century of American history; Republicans want to end that and instead advantage wealthy children over their lower-income peers, particularly those whose skin is darker than Trump’s spray tan.
Public schools (and free college) made it possible for America to produce an explosion of invention and innovation throughout the mid-20th century; now other countries are surpassing us, as the dumbing-down of our kids has become institutionalized in Red state after Red state.
And public schools gave many students their first experience of interacting with people who look different from them and grew up under different circumstances, awakening many young people to the discrimination and unfairness inherent in how America has historically treated minorities.
All of which explains why Republicans so badly want to put an end to public education in America.
Truly outstanding. Sounds like he’s been reading a lot of Diane Ravitch!!! xoxoxox
How rare it is for a journalist actually to understand all this. Hartman is amazing in that respect. He actually knows what he is writing about.
This is essentially the same conversation I have had for years with libertarians all my life. Their belief is that it is tyranny for someone to require their contribution to the commons. In Nashville presently there is a quiet attempt on the part of the Tennessee Dept of Transportation (TDOT) to create interstate lanes for paying drivers to use to relieve crowding on the existing roadways. This will have little effect, of course, except to reward those who have enough money to be treated in a place of privilege. The common man will continue to see clogged roads on his way to work.
The privatization movement is the same in schools. It costs about 25,000 to send your child to a good private day school, 40,000 boarding. a government subsidy of 5-8000 won’t really help much, but it will buy some votes for the party in power, just like a bottle of whisky really did not help the Jacksonian voters.
Meanwhile, libertarians like Friedman and economist Buchanan (discussed in Democracy in chains, Nancy MacLean) saw free schooling as a bunch of spoiled kids complaining about free speech at Berkeley who needed to be eliminated so the people would go back to work (without considering their lot in life). The Democrats who went along with the idea of public school failure hitched their wagon to this failed vision, and here we are.
Texas has a highway system in Houston where motorists can hop on a paid alternative to the traffic jam on I-10. It creates a confusing maze for those not acquainted with the system and roads. It’s a tiered system of better access for those that have money. The GOP only cares about those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
If you can afford it, you would, send your children to, private schools, because there’s the belief of how, if you pay for it, it’s, better, which may be true, because of the qualifications of the instructors are, stricter, but, not every family can, afford to, send their children into the, way-too-high-in-cost private academies, so, as the children start out, they’re already, on, unequal, basis, and, the gaps will only, widen, as the grade levels get, higher and, higher, which will then, cause the, earning gaps in the, adulthood, years, and, the adults who had a private education all the way up, will, be paid more in their work, which allowed them to send their own next generations to, the private schools, and those who’d, started in the, public education systems, don’t get a higher level of education, because, they don’t have the, resources to give them that, needed, good, start, and, thetly get trapped by the, lower, status, quo. And it’s, a nonstop, vicious cycle…
Trump grew up in privilege with an all private education. In his inaugural address, he said The Continental Army took over the airports; people should inject themselves with bleach to fight Covid, and he couldn’t find Alabama on a map. He’s much worse today. His speeches reveal a violent paranoia. I’ll stick with my public schools where teachers are certified, and facts are facts. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/the-155-craziest-things-trump-said-this-cycle-214420/
Teachers are not required to hold certification in many private schools; if that’s what you mean by qualifications. Students in most states lack oversight of curriculum or protections of their rights in private settings.
As to economics, 90% of Americans have been educated in public schools and we have the world’s largest economy.
Your comma ridden post is merely opinion. Are you a bot?
Hartmann is ‘right on.’
Hartmann is an astute observer of history and politics, and he is an excellent, writer. He understands the importance of defending our fragile democracy, and he can connect the dots. Great post!
Yes, here they are, ignoring the memos:
Doing the same thing, over and over again,
but expecting different results, is insanity.
Different results require a different approach
(strategy).
Looking in the rear view mirror can’t change
the destination.
Speaking in terms of what was, doesn’t
change what is, or reduce SCOTUS power,
stop test giving, or cook rice.
The meaningful change to opine ratio is very low.
The results continue to outpace the strategies.
My sons loved school. Did not miss a day. Then one day they told us, “School is boring. They move so slow.” And, then recess was taken away. When I asked my son’s teacher, “Uh, so when does he get art, music, science, or history?” The teacher said, “When we have time. They really want us to focus on test-taking skills.” So, we pulled both our kids out of public school to try something else because the schools were not doing anything to move them forward in their education. We did homeschooling (actually through our district and the teachers could not keep up with my older son) so we guided him. He was a great learner. Always reading and looking at examples. But, there were far too many programs at the high school when he became a ninth-grade student, so he went there. I actually had to petition to get him into a higher math class because the school said, “All 9th graders take Algebra.” “He took that and passed it why would he repeat it?” What a bunch of hooey to get him into geometry. But, public high school was excellent with band programs and activities. My other son, we tried homeschooling, but he fought with my wife, so we tried private school. It was supposed to be “great” so he rode the bus for an hour to get to the best private school around. Oh, and we paid for it. No one else did. It was our choice. I found he got a sub-par education, the social dynamic of the school was, well, you were part of the “in group” mostly rich kids with BMWs or a kid from the “other side of the tracks.” I watched basketball tryouts and (my son is a great athlete and hustles) where I saw favoritism and knew he was going to get cut. Yep. He was. The teachers did not have credentials and when questioned about “How do I help my student at home?” they gave vague and BS explanations. So, he was pulled and graduated from our local high school. He passed the CAHSEE with a perfect score and was MVP two years in a row for his high school basketball team. And all I know is when I tutored children (for some reason they had brain disorders, processing issues) from private schools, I asked what help they were given and one of my students said, “Focus more.” Mind you, these were my experiences, but having working nearly all my life with special needs kids, ADD/HD, processing issues — that is not the support they needed. I always told the parents, “You might see what your public school has to offer to support your child.”
There are also excellent private schools, but many of the smell of elitism. Some of them are glorified white flight academies with questionable academics like many voucher schools.
If rich people want to help poor minority students go to private schools, they should fund direct scholarships. I wouldn’t even object to them getting a tax deduction for doing it. People with means should have to pay for the choices they make for their children’s education. What is unwarranted is the heinous politicized attacks on public education with the ultimate goal of defunding and dismantling it. Public schools are essential to a democracy.
People with means should not be able to drain the commons for their own personal choices. These folks talk about ‘personal responsibility,’ and they should demonstrate it.
“The John Birch Society, which was heavily funded back then by Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch… put up billboards across the country demanding that Americans rise up and ‘Impeach Earl Warren.'”
Fred Koch went to Germany to dine with Adolf Hitler. Cool!
Also, I’m going to stop calling them Moms for Liberty or their nicknames, Minivan Taliban or Ku Klux Karens, and start calling them more accurately what they are, the KKK.
Every Republican I know is overtly racist as can be.
The
Crackerjack analysis by Hartmann but, he just can’t connect Koch’s Manhattan Institute, Notre Dame Prof. Nicole Stelle Garnet (friend of Amy Comey Barrett) and the Catholic Conferences’ campaign for school choice…. just can’t connect the Koch’s AFP with Catholic Conferences promoting school choice at state capitol rallies…just can’t connect Catholic Republican Gov. Voinovich and school choice legislation in Ohio where the overwhelming amount of voucher money goes to Catholic schools….just can’t connect the founder of the 1776 PAC (Ryan Girdusky) with Pat Buchanan’s description of the political merger of right wing Catholics and evangelicals…just can’t connect a religious sect to the efforts of Koch-funded Paul Weyrich when Weyrich called for creation of a parallel school system and founded ALEC…just can’t connect Leonard Leo, the judge whisperer, with a religious sect.
Journalists don’t just have gloves on, they are soldered on
their hands.
David Blight, historian from Yale, recently called Trump woefully “ignorant” about history, and, in essence a liar.
But Trump IS the current Republican Party, and here’s Blight on that:
“Changing demographics and 15 million new voters drawn into the electorate by Obama in 2008 have scared Republicans—now largely the white people’s party—into fearing for their existence. With voter ID laws, reduced polling places and days, voter roll purges, restrictions on mail-in voting, an evisceration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a constant rant about ‘voter fraud’ without evidence, Republicans have soiled our electoral system with undemocratic skullduggery…The Republican Party has become a new kind of Confederacy.”
“This new Confederacy is regional and rural. It knows what it hates: the two coasts, diverse cities, marriage equality, certain kinds of feminism, political correctness, university ‘elites,’ and ‘liberals’ generally. It is racial and undemocratic. It twists American history to its own ends, substituting ‘patriotism’ for scholarship and science. It has weaponized ‘truth’ and rendered it oddly irrelevant. It has brought us almost to a new 1860, an election in which Americans voted for fundamentally different visions of a proslavery or an antislavery future.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/11/05/republicans-the-new-confederacy/
You can see all of this in Trump’s words and actions, and it’s parroted in turn by his minions, and his supporters, and by his lawyers.
Trump has proved himself to be a serial liar, racist, misogynist, and seditious traitor to the Constitution and the republic. The Republican Party is his enabler.
Tom Hartmann comes down justifiably hard on the GOP for the undermining of public schools — but he overlooks that nearly equal role that Democrats, including Obama, have played in the attacks on and undermining of our public schools:
Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) was founded in 2005 by Wall Street hedge fund managers, including Whitney Tilson, R. Boykin Curry IV, and John Petry. Democrats for Education Reform is a political action committee that uses its immense wealth to lobby for specific policies in public education. In some states, DFER is called Education Reform NOW (the c3 non-profit arm of DFER).
DFER co-founder Whitney Tilson declared that a key DFER goal is “to break the teacher unions’ stranglehold over the Democratic Party.”
DFER wanted to make lots and lots of money and they saw charter schools as a perfect way to funnel public funds away from public schools and into their hedge funds via REITS and other mechanisms.
DFER offered massive campaign funding to Senator Obama, and he took the bait, even delivering the main address to DFER at its founding celebration.
During Obama’s 2008 campaign, he used — and “used” is the operative word — Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond as his spokesperson for his education policy, and It was widely assumed that she would be Obama’s Secretary of Education.
But, after he was elected, Obama unceremoniously dumped her and installed DFER’s darling Arne Duncan, who fulfilled the DFER agenda with his unrelenting proliferation of charter schools, plus the ruinous “Value-Added Method (VAM) for evaluating public school teachers and increased high-stakes standardized testing for students.
Obama’s campaign made promises to the public school teachers who campaigned for him that proved to be false promises. He betrayed public school children and teachers — and Biden went along with it all.
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama pledged to the AFL-CIO that he would push through the Employees’ Free Choice Act (EFCA) that would restore workers’ full rights to organize and would restrain corporations from their flagrant anti-union activities and retaliation against employees who campaign for unionization. Had that been done, much of the odious income inequity we see today would never have happened.
But almost immediately after he was elected, Obama turned his back on the unions, dumped EFCA, and installed Wall Street moguls into his cabinet. And Joe Biden was part of the Obama team that did that.
Behind the feel-good smokescreen of his “Dreamers” program, Obama became Deporter-in-Chief, ripping apart families and shipping people out of America at a rate that Trump envies. And Joe Biden was part of the Obama team that did that.
During his first two years in office when Democrats owned both houses of Congress, Obama could have rammed through a Medicare-for-all health care system— and Nancy Pelosi wanted to do just that, but Obama stopped her. She still despises him for his betrayal. Instead, Obama crafted his “Obamacare” that is a carefully disguised gift to the health insurance industry which allows them to reap huge hidden profits, which is why the health insurance lobby is today urging the Supreme Court to not kill Obamacare. And Biden was part of the Obama team that did that.
People remain starry-eyed over the fact that Obama became America’s first Black President and enthralled by his silver-tongued speeches; but, people need to look at what Obama did instead of assuming what he did matched with what he actually did.
And, of course, Obama adopted a Republican healthcare plan (Romneycare) instead of pushing for Medicare for All. And he conducted foreign policy in the Middle East and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a manner indistinguishable from that of the Bush/Cheney maladministration. And he bailed out the banks and not the homeowners.
HE WAS NOT A PROGRESSIVE.
Obama was a Democratic Party president in name only. And that that would be the case became abundantly clear when he announced his cabinet.
Quickwrit,
I harshly criticized Obama for everything you wrote.
However I don’t blame Biden for what Obama did.
Biden has been a strong supporter of public schools and teachers’ unions and unions in general.
Presidents don’t ask for the endorsement of their vice President when they act.
IMO, five whisperers to the Democratic Party who lack souls- (1) David Axelrod (2) John Podesta (3) Tom Daschle (4) Neera Tanden (5) Gina Raimondo
Linda, a pretty good list. Gina was horrible to teachers in RI (their pensions) and her banker husband and she love charters.
The immediate past Governor of AZ spells his name Ducey. The spelling in this piece is closer to the names of two related folks on Fox who spell their last name Doocy