Steven Singer has noticed that the hired hands of the billionaire “reformers” like to play the role of victim.
They are bravely standing up to those teachers’ unions on behalf of “the kids.” All they have on their side are the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons and a long list of other billionaires who want to privatize public schools and get rid of those unions.
Who is Goliath? Who is David?
Who are the real grassroots activists?
Don’t be fooled.
Tom Ultican taught high school math and physics in San Diego after a career in the high-tech industry.
He recently read Katherine Stewart’s outstanding book “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.” He learned about the history of religion and the public schools and how difficult it was to make the public schools secular. Then he realized that his own community had become a target for evangelism.
This post combines his review of Stewart’s book with his observations about what is happening today.
He writes:
“Christian soldiers have been marching off to war and elementary school is the battle ground. Writer Katherine Stewart’s book, The Good News Club, The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children provides the disturbing evidence.
“The Good News Clubs are after school programs, sponsored by evangelical Christians, in elementary schools across America. Stewart begins her narrative by describing how the 2001 arrival of a Good News Club in Seattle’s Loyal Height’s Elementary School splintered the community and created enduring angst.
“Some parents reacted by removing their children from the school. Stewart quotes one dispirited parent as saying:
‘“Before, we were all Loyal Heights parents together,’ sighs Rockne. ‘Now we’re divided into groups and labels: you’re a Christian; you’re the wrong kind of Christian; you’re a Jew; you’re an atheist.’”
“The wrong kind of Christians include all New Age churches, United Methodists, Congregationalists, Catholics and Episcopalians. We Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and Muslims can just forget about it.
“The episode in Seattle conjures images of the nineteenth century religious riots in America.”
He brings the story to the present:
“For the past few decades, I have been seeing more and more athletes at every level pointing skyward when they hit a home-run or score a touchdown. As a kid, I saw BYU players joining in public prayer after games, but now I see public high school kids doing that. From Stewart, I learned that this did not just happen. It is a result of a well-funded campaign led by a group called the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA).
“With funding from people like Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-Fil-A, and non-profits like the Bradley Foundation, FCA has infiltrated sports programs at all levels, marketing their version of “muscular Christianity” to impressionable young men and women. FCA leaders imbed themselves in teams and form sports “huddles.” Thus a peer pressure forms that indicates not precipitating in the prayers and the overt religious gestures means not being a team player. Stewart shared:
“In San Diego, California, a long-serving vice principal who wishes to remain anonymous observes that thirty years ago, prayer played a peripheral role in high school sports. Now, he says, there are FCA huddles at nearly every high school in the region.”
“Conclusion
“Katherine Stewart’s book is written in an enjoyable and fascinating fashion and her personal research is extraordinary. The account of witnessing the infamous Texas school book wars of 2010 or her telling of attending evangelical missionary conferences or her description of the misinformation being disseminated to teenagers in the now federally financed “abstinence-only” sex education programs are illuminating. All Americans concerned about – freedom of religion; Shielding children from unwanted religious indoctrination at school; and protecting public education – should read this book. Reading this book has been an eye-opening experience.
“U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos is a devout member of an evangelical church, Mars Hill Bible Church. It is a widely held view within the evangelical movement that public education is a godless secular movement that provides an opening for Satan. That explains why so many evangelicals home school their children. It seems likely that our education secretary has an evangelically based anti-public education agenda. Arguing the relative merits of school policies misses the point.
“It is more likely that religious ideology is the point.”
Today, I am launching a new format for this blog.
You will not see five or seven posts. Or more.
You will receive only one post today, unless there is breaking news of great importance.
Instead of filling up your computer, I offer you one article that I hope you will read and digest and react to.
I am going to ask you to forward this article to your friends and colleagues, to anyone you know who cares about the future of this country.
Katherine Stewart just published a very important article that appears in The American Prospect called “The Proselytizers and the Privatizers.”
The subtitle is: “How religious sectarian school voucher extremists made useful idiots of the charter movement.”
She is also is the author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.
It is one of the most significant articles I have read in weeks about the current situation in American education.
It documents in detail how we have all been snookered by the religious right, who are now gobbling up taxpayers’ dollars to spread their doctrine.
It begins like this:
At the Heritage Academy, a publicly funded charter school network in Arizona, according to a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, high school students are required to learn that the Anglo-Saxon population of the United States is descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. They are asked to memorize a list of 28 “Principles” of “sound government,” among which are that “to protect man’s rights, God has revealed certain Principles of divine law” (the ninth Principle) and that “the husband and wife each have their specific rights appropriate to their role in life” (the 26th Principle). To complete the course, students are further required to teach these principles to at least five individuals outside of school and family.
Over in Detroit, the Marvin L. Winans Academy of Performing Arts charter school—also taxpayer-funded—is a subsidiary of the Perfecting Church, a religious organization headed by Marvin L. Winans himself. Until recently, the board of WAPA consisted almost entirely of clergy, “prophets,” or prominent members of the Perfecting Church, and it appears that the views of the board are expressed directly in the practices of the school; students are required to recite a “WAPA Creed” that invokes “a super-intelligent God.”
In Texas, Allen Beck, the founder of Advantage Academy, a four-campus charter school funded by taxpayers, has said he established the schools in order to bring “the Bible, prayer, and patriotism back into the public school system, legally.”
And the American Heritage Academy, a two-campus charter school also located in Arizona, describes itself as a “unique educational experience with old-fashioned principles that have worked for hundreds of years.” The school boasts a list of “Principles of Liberty” that include “The role of religion is foundational,” “To protect rights God revealed certain divine laws,” and “Free market and minimal government best support prosperity.”
You might think that these egregious examples of church-school fusion are anomalies in the emerging charter school universe. But they are not. The charter school movement has provided shelter for religious and ideological activists who have specific theological and political goals for public education. Many of them are opposed to the very idea of public schools in the first place.
The Barney Charter Initiative’s former mission statement, which has since been taken down, declared that its goal was to “redeem” American public education and “recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism.” Here, a kindergarten class waits for recess at the Barney-supported Mason Classical Academy in Naples, Florida
To be clear, the charter movement in the United States is large, fragmented, and complex, and includes many individuals and groups that sincerely wish to promote and improve public education. Many charter advocates respect the separation of church and school. But a wing of the charter movement that is ideologically or religiously opposed to “government schools” was present at the charter movement’s creation, and has grown to comprise a sizable segment of the charter universe. With the election of Donald Trump and the appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, it is presently empowered as never before.
In the decades before her appointment, DeVos was one of the primary architects of a First Amendment anomaly—the public funding of religious academies. In the months since she took the helm at the Department of Education, that still seems her first priority. Her meetings with educators have been populated with leaders and teachers from private, religious, and charter schools, as well as homeschooling advocates. Trump’s first budget allots $1.4 billion to bolster the school choice movement—enough funding to enable DeVos to ramp up her campaign for taxpayer-supported sectarian schools.
WHILE CHARTER SCHOOLS are supposed to be nonsectarian, many are run by operators with a distinctly religious or partisan political agenda. In order to understand the impact of this particular segment of the charter movement, one must begin with the history of the pro-voucher movement.
Vouchers first came to prominence as a way to funnel state money to racially segregated religious academies. In the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, white Americans in the South organized massive resistance against federal orders to desegregate schools. While some districts shut down public schools altogether, others promoted “segregation academies” for white students, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes. Today, vouchers remain popular with supporters of religious schools, many of whom see public education as inherently secular and corrupt.
Vouchers are also favored among disciples of the free-market advocate Milton Friedman, who see them as a step on the road to getting government out of the education business altogether. Speaking to an audience at a convention of the American Legislative Exchange Council in 2006, Friedman said, “The ideal would be to have parents control and pay for their school’s education, just as they pay for their food, their clothing, and their housing.” Acknowledging that indigent parents might be unable to afford their children’s education in the same way that they might suffer food or housing insecurity, Friedman added, “Those should be handled as charity problems, not educational problems.”
Up in western Michigan, the combination of religious conservatism and economic libertarianism in the voucher movement found a natural home.
Up in western Michigan, the combination of religious conservatism and economic libertarianism in the voucher movement found a natural home. A century and a half ago, members of the Christian Reformed Church, a strict sect of Dutch Calvinists, settled the area around Holland, Michigan, where the conservative nature of the religion is still felt. Until several years ago, it was forbidden to serve alcohol at restaurants on Sundays. The area has also produced more than its share of ultra-conservative billionaires, among them Richard DeVos Sr., the co-founder of Amway; Jay Van Andel, his business partner; and Edgar Prince, an auto-parts magnate. In 1979, Prince’s daughter Betsy married Richard’s son, Dick Jr., making her Holland’s version of a crown princess.
Since the 1970s, Richard DeVos and his wife and children, including Dick and Betsy, have been major funders of the leading national groups on the religious right. Amway co-founder Van Andel, meanwhile, endowed and served as a trustee of Hillsdale College, which the religious right likes to cast as “the conservative Harvard.” In 1983, Betsy’s father, Edgar Prince, substantially contributed to the creation of the Family Research Council. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation is a key backer to groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal juggernaut of the religious right; and right-wing ministries and policy groups such as Focus on the Family.
The initiatives that Betsy DeVos and her husband have funded are not of the “social gospel” variety. Through their foundation, they donate money to the Foundation for Traditional Values, a nonprofit with a mission “to restore and affirm the Judeo-Christian values upon which America was established.” Shortly after its inception, the FTV distributed a book, America’s Providential History, which asserted, “A civil government built on Biblical principles provides the road on which the wheel of economic progress can turn with great efficiency.” A chapter titled “Principles of Christian Economics” posed the question “Why Are Some Nations in Poverty?” It goes on to explain that “[t]he primary reason that nations are in poverty is lack of spiritual growth. … Today, India has widespread problems, yet these are not due to a lack of food, but are a result of people’s spiritual beliefs. The majority of Indians are Hindus.”
In the mid-1990s, the FTV founded the Student Statesmanship Institute, which describes itself as “Michigan’s premier Biblical Worldview & Leadership Training for High School Students.” Betsy DeVos was listed on the SSI advisory board as recently as 2015, and has been featured as an active SSI program participant nearly as far back as the program had a functional website. SSI functions as a pipeline for Christian teens, many of whom are homeschooled or attend religious schools, seeking to engage in far-right politics. According to the SSI website, SSI “Legislative Experiences” instruct students in topics such as “Laying a Biblical Foundation, Ambassadors for Christ, Christian Citizenship, Worldviews in Action, Science and the Bible, and Debate and Communication.”
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James Muffett, who heads FTV and is also the founder and head of SSI, appears from time to time on the Christian homeschooling circuit, where public schools—or “government schools” as they are frequently called—are routinely maligned. He spoke at one homeschooling convention where attendees were invited to watch the anti–public education film IndoctriNation. The film casts public schools as “a masterful design that sought to replace God’s recipe for training up the next generation with a humanistic, man-centered program that fragmented the family and undermined the influence of the Church and its Great Commission.”
If you want to better understand why the pious elite of Holland, Michigan, think of public education the way they do, a good place to start might be the 2003 report from the Synod, or general assembly, of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. The church warns that “government schools” have “become aggressively and increasingly secular in the last forty years,” and claims they are engaged in “a deliberate program of de-Christianization” that is at odds with Christian morality. “Not only does there exist a climate of hostility toward the Christian faith,” the report continues, “the legitimate and laudable educational goal of multi-culturalism is often used as a cover to introduce pagan and New Age spiritualities such as the deification of mother earth (Gaia) to promote social causes such as environmentalism.” The report goes on to decry efforts, by “powerful lobbying groups” to resist “alternatives to public education such as charter schools and vouchers.”
Phyllis Bush writes a blog about her battle with cancer. So far, she is winning, which is not surprising because Phyllis is a fighter. She also has an irrepressible sense of humor and insists on calling the disease “cancer-schmanzer.” Many years ago, people called it simply “the C word,” fearful of saying the word. Phyllis refuses to be cowed.
This post is not about cancer.
It is about a cause dear to Phyllis’s heart.
Phyllis lives in Indiana. She is a retired teacher. She has seen the Pence-DeVos privatization movement up close. It is divisive, unproductive, anti-democratic.
I hope you will honor her fight by joining her in the battle to save public education.
Jeff Bryant sees the Virginia election, as do I, as an affirmation of a progressive approach to education.
Education is an important issue to parents everywhere and is the biggest item in state budgets. Taxpayers want to know that their money is well spent.
Northam ran against the DeVos privatization policy. But he also ran against Obama’s policies of charter schools and high-stakes Testing.
He points the way to victory for Democrats in other state races.
Support a strong and much improved public school system that seeks to meet the needs of all children.
Mike Klonsky answers the question in this post.
One of the stories reported in the media is that the Erdogan regime in Turkey offered to pay millions of dollars to Mike Flynn if he arranged for the extradition of Erdogan’s adversary Fethullah Gulen. To those of us familiar with the ethically dubious Gulen charter chain, this is bad news. It means we are probably stuck with him forever. He and Trump can duke it out over who gets the most visas for foreign workers: staff at Mar-a-Lago or teachers for Gulen charters.
This is actually a very funny article in The 74, the unofficial voice of the privatization, union-busting movement.
The Republicans in the state legislature want to abolish the State Board of Education (which they don’t control) because of the state’s plummeting test scores.
The legislators do not consider that the state’s total embrace of choice without accountability (the DeVos plan) might be responsible for the state’s decline.
That would require some thought and reflection, which is in short supply in Lansing.
In a move to radically upend Michigan’s governance over schools, Republican lawmakers are seeking to eliminate the elected state board of education. While many believe it’s unlikely the legislation will pass, both its authors and detractors agree that some action is necessary to arrest an alarming decline in local academic performance.
The proposal is spearheaded by state Rep. Tim Kelly, chairman of the House Education Reform Committee and a longtime critic of the state board. He led a similar effort last year in response to its guidance on the needs of transgender students, accusing members of “practicing social engineering with every progressive agenda that comes down the pike.”
That push attracted dozens of cosponsors but ultimately fell short. Abolishing the board would require a constitutional amendment passed by two-thirds of both the state House and Senate, followed by public approval of a ballot measure in the next election. Kelly, recently nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as assistant education secretary under fellow Michigander Betsy DeVos, has assailed the board as a superfluous institution muddling the question of exactly who has jurisdiction over Michigan schools.”
The elimination of districts and the promotion of choice and charters has coincided with a dramatic drop in the state’s performance on the federally-funded National Assessment of Educational Progress.
In 2015, Michigan ranked 41st and 42nd in the country, respectively, for fourth-grade reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — down from 28th and 27th in 2003. It experienced more modest drops in both eighth-grade reading and math as well, fanning worries of a comprehensive downturn in school quality throughout the state.
Michigan is witnessing systemic decline across the K-12 spectrum,” read a 2016 report from The Education Trust-Midwest. “White, black, brown, higher-income, low-income — it doesn’t matter who they are or where they live, Michigan students’ achievement levels in early reading and middle school math are not keeping up with the rest of the U.S., much less our international competitors.”
Some local observers have laid blame for the poor results at the feet of school choice advocates, most notably U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. After the widespread expansion of charter schools and open enrollment across school districts, the quality of Michigan schools is no better than it was two decades ago, and arguably a good deal worse. Analysis from Phil Power’s Center for Michigan has found that close to one-third of Michigan charters occupy the state’s bottom quarter of academic performance. About one-quarter of traditional district schools were grouped in that category.
I wonder what Betsy would say? My guess is that she would respond that Michigan needs vouchers, which voters overwhelmingly rejected in a state referendum in 2000. Betsy and her husband Dick DeVos sponsored the referendum. Then Michigan could have three low-performing sectors, not just two.
Over the past decade, the Democratic party has lost over 1,000 state elections–for governor and legislature. Why? This period of decline coincides with Democrats’ embrace of the Republican philosophy of school choice, closing public schools, bashing teachers, and embracing test-based accountability. If Democrats act like Republicans, why vote for them? If Arne Duncan looks and sounds like Betsy DeVos (with the sole exception of vouchers), why vote Democratic?
Jeff Bryant makes the case here the Democrats are doomed if they can’t support public schools, which are a bedrock democratic institution.
Jeff reviews a “Third Way” document that sounds very much like the Duncan-DeVos agenda for education.
“Here we go again,” was what many left-leaning folks likely felt after seeing a recent announcement about a new effort by wealthy donors to rescue the Democratic Party from its electoral doldrums. Backed by $20 million, the “New Blue” campaign, coming from politically centrist think tank Third Way, promises to lead the party out of the “wilderness” of its minority status to a pathway to “achieving progressive majorities up and down the ballot.”
But Third Way’s offer sounds more like a continuation of the old losing ways. This is especially true on the issue of education where Third Way continues to bang the drum for a failed agenda that voters mostly reject.
The Third Way is Duncan-DeVos all the way:
In its education manifesto “The New Normal in K-12 Education,” Third Way declares that the contentious arguments over important education matters — such as charter schools, standardized testing, and how to recruit and retain teachers – are essentially over and that those who are “fighting in the trenches” just need to get with the program.
The “program,” Third Way advances sounds very much like what’s been in place for the past 15 years, especially during the Obama administration under the leadership of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The title of Third Way’s document is borrowed from Duncan’s own words to describe the need for schools to go along to get along with the “new normal” of Republican fiscal austerity coupled with ever harsher accountability mandates and more competition from charter schools.
Duncan’s calls for higher class sizes and leaner compensation for teachers didn’t sit well with parents then, and Third Way’s support for charter schools, more standardized testing, and cuts for experienced teachers is not popular now.
Support for charter schools has dropped by double digit percentages among Democrats and Republicans, according to a recent poll. Another recent survey found the public is also generally opposed to using voucher money to send students to private schools, an idea pushed by current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that Third Way completely ignores (maybe because it’s too divisive). That survey also found most of voters don’t find test scores to be the best indicators of school quality. Lack of funding continues to be the issue most often cited by voters as the biggest problem schools face. But Third Way says nothing about that either.
Peter Greene says that people are mistaken to think that Betsy DeVos is a dope. She is not. She knows what she wants, and she is single-minded in pursuing her goals.
Just today, Peter posted an analysis of a long article in Politico about DeVos, in which the writer fails to mention her religious zealotry, and in which she blames her handlers for not preparing her for her confirmation hearings. What we learn from the Politico article is that Jeb Bush promoted her for Education Secretary. Bush, as events show, is a choice zealot, who like every kind of school except public schools. Actually, Bush recommended her to his friend Mike Pence, who ran the transgression. Both are anti-public school me. The article is more sympathetic to Betsy than most, and claims that she can’t do much damage and is constantly frustrated by the bureaucracy. We are reminded that this billionaire heiress never before worked in a large organization and is accustomed to unquestioning obedience.
Public opinion seems to have formed two impressions of DeVos: one, she is the most unpopular member of the Trump cabinet (I attribute that to the “billionaire smirk”). The other is that she is a dope.
Peter writes about the second impression:
“From the grizzly bear jokes of her confirmation hearing, to late night television lampoons, to satire from the Onion and Borowitz, DeVos has become an easy mark. Everyone’s in on the joke. Do the budget numbers not add up? It’s that wacky Betsy DeVos having trouble with math.
“I’ve said this before– it’s a huge mistake to think Betsy DeVos is a dope. She is something else ay more dangerous. I’ve been reading her word and a ton of words about her for a year (and you can, too– I’ve included an exhaustive reading list at the end of this piece), and while any game of armchair psycho-analysis has to come with huge caveats (like “I could be completely full of bovine fecal matter”), DeVos seems very much of a type that I’ve known my whole life, and it makes her both familiar and scary.”
He explains why, and he concludes his post with a valuable list of articles about her. She is a dangerous person, not a dope. She uses her wealth to buy politicians. She doesn’t trust democracy. She has the most important education job in government, yet she despises public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 