On February 3, Duke University historian Nancy MacLean and I held a Zoom conversation called “Public Education in Chains,” about the nefarious conspiracy to undermine and privatize our public schools. The discussion was sponsored by Public Funds Public Schools and the Network for Public Education.
Dr. MacLean is the author of many books, including the brilliant Democracy in Chains: The DeepHistory of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.
We discussed the historical origins of the movement, calling out the privatizers as a combination of libertarians, anti-government ideologues, the radical right, segregationists, and rightwing evangelicals, funded by billionaires who hate taxes, public institutions, and unions. Their movement threatens not only public schools but our democracy.
When a bright young man or woman gets an idea to replace experienced educators with inexperienced tyros and is quickly funded by billionaire foundations, you can guess that the ultimate goal is privatization. For one thing, the enterprise rests on a base claim that “our schools are failing,” and that experience is irrelevant and probably harmful.
The idea was so spot-on that the organization attracted millions of dollars from the plutocrats of privatization: Eli Broad, Bill Gates, the Walton Family Foundation, and many more.
Where are the miracle schools led by New Leaders? That’s a hard question to answer.
What Ultican demonstrates is the continuing relevance of New Leaders for New Schools. One of its illustrious graduates was behind the recent decision by the board of the Oakland Unified School District to resume closing schools, despite overwhelming opposition by students, parents, and educators.
Paul Bowers, previously the education journalist for the Charleston, South Carolina, Post & Courier, writes his own blog. In this post, he calls on the state legislators not to pass voucher legislation that would predictably defund the state’s already underfunded public schools. South Carolina has a large budget surplus and one of the lowest tax rates in the nation. Governor Henry McMaster announced that the surplus would be used to lower taxes instead of funding public schools and other public services.
Paul wrote the members of the S.C. Senate Education Committee in opposition toSenate Bill 935, which is an attempt to divert public school funding to private schools.
Senators Massey, Jackson, Hutto, Rice, and Talley:
I write to you as a South Carolinian and parent of 3 public school students asking you to scrap Senate Bill 935, the so-called “Put Parents in Charge Act,” which would redirect public funds to private schools via the creation of Education Savings Accounts.
Every few years, South Carolina teachers and parents have to band together to fight the latest iteration of the school voucher meme, which has spread virally across the states thanks to millions upon millions of dollars of dark-money political contributions, astroturfed special-interest groups, and a network of libertarian billionaires’ pet thinktanks. We fought this idea when New York real estate investor Howard Rich tried to buy a voucher law here in the early 2000s, and we’re fighting it again now that ALEC, Palmetto Promise, and the like are trying to ram the same idea through the Statehouse in Year of Our Lord 2022. There is truly nothing new under the sun.
No money shall be paid from public funds nor shall the credit of the State or any of its political subdivisions be used for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.
Now, I am sure our attorney general would happily defend such an act against the inevitable lawsuits that would follow. I am no legal scholar, but I think it’s reasonable to assume he would employ some of the same arguments used to defend Gov. Henry McMaster when, in the thick of a global pandemic, he tried diverting $32 million worth of federal emergency funding from public schools to private schools. Notably, he lost that fight.
So, I suppose you and your colleagues in the General Assembly could enact this law, and you could win the legal battle that follows. Stranger things have happened. But the question remains whether you should go down this road.
I say no, you should not.
South Carolina’s most reactionary politicians have been clamoring for public divestment from the school system ever since radical Black Republicans created a free public school system for all in the Constitution of 1868. White supremacists clawed back at the notion of public goods with the Jim Crow Constitution of 1895; the Interposition Resolution of 1956; and the cavalcade of privatization laws, segregation academies, and district-level resegregation efforts that have continued without ceasing since Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954.
Data compiled by Steve Nuzum, via S.C. Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office
As a matter of policy, you and your colleagues in the General Assembly have been steadily defunding public education since the start of the Great Recession. You have broken your own promises as outlined in the Education Finance Act and are currently under-funding the Base Student Cost by about a half-billion dollars per year. The results have been disastrous: Our teachers are underpaid and quitting by the thousands, classroom sizes have ballooned, our rural schools are in physical shambles, and a system of separate and unequal education along racial and economic lines has returned with a vengeance.
It is difficult to predict how much money public schools would lose as a result of Education Savings Accounts, which would allow public funds to “follow” individual students to private schools. Our state’s Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office has tried to guess, though. According to a fiscal impact summary published in December, the ESA program could divert as much as $35 million to private schools within the first year it takes effect, depending how many families participate in the program. By 2026, they estimated the program could cost the state as much as $2.9 billion. Compounded by the General Assembly’s ongoing policy of public disinvestment, this could constitute a death blow to public schools.
The bill is built on a few faulty premises, including the underlying assumption that private schools could or would serve South Carolina students better. The authors of the bill also seem to believe that our state’s private schools could handle a sudden influx of new enrollment while accommodating students’ learning, transportation, and health needs. These are dicey propositions at best.
S. 935 is a direct attack on the notion of education as a public good. Its authors would leave us all to fend for ourselves as atomized individuals, cut loose from mutual obligations that once tied us together. For a certain type of doctrinaire conservative, this may sound like a dream scenario. For the rest of us living in the real state of South Carolina, it is a nightmare come true.
A friend of public schools in Missouri sent the following excerpt of a report by the League report by the state League of Women Voters.
EDUCATION Senate Education Committee Votes Out Bills
The committee voted out all bills heard thus far this session on February 10, including:
SB 869 (Koenig) to revise the law specifying payments to charter schools and shift more local school funds to charter schools. The League opposes this, based on our position on charter schools and support for public school funding.
SB 650 (Eigel) to allow charter schools to be sponsored by outside entities (other than the local school board) and operate in many districts around the state. Sen. Eigel also offered a proposed SCS version that would add several other provisions, including moving school board elections to the November election, adding restrictions on approval of debt service levies, preventing schools from requiring face masks, and preventing school districts from requiring students or staff to have COVID vaccinations. The League opposes the bill.
House Elementary & Secondary Education Committee
The committee met on February 8 and heard HB 2428 (Dogan) to impose restrictions on instruction relating to race and history. The bill authorizes lawsuits against school employees for violations of the new requirements in the bill. The League opposes the bill.
Arthur Rock, a California billionaire who has given many millions to Teach for America and charter schools, has given $399,500 to support the recall.
If you set aside the pandemic and the renaming of schools and look at the long term, one of the major issues facing San Francisco Unified School District, and other districts around the country, is the rise of charter schools.
Charter school proponents, led by the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Betsy DeVos, are in essence trying to privatize public education. They want to create a market system where parents get vouchers and can send their kids to private schools or public charters (which typically do not have unionized teachers), starving the public-school system of money.
We all know the outcome: The charters and private schools, which set their own admission policies, will take the students who have the most advantages and need the least help. The public schools will wind up having to educate, with far less money, the most vulnerable populations, who will wind up will lower-quality schools—and economic inequality will get worse, which is fine with the billionaires.
Rock is a big charter-school and voucher proponent.
Again, set aside the pandemic for a moment. The current members of the SF School Board who are facing a recall have been dubious, at best, about charter schools. That may mean a lot more to Rock and his pals that whether Lincoln High School gets a new name.
The Mayor has endorsed the recall. If the recall passes, she gets to choose the new members. If the recall succeeds, the path will open for more charter schools.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, wrote recently about the cultural controversies that are roiling the state of Tennessee. Everyone by now knows about the removal of MAUS from the eighth-grade curriculum in McMinn County. But book-banning and censorship are not limited to Tennessee, or even to the South, nor are they new. What is far more dangerous in Tennessee, she writes, is the “existential threat” to the future of public schools posed by Republican Governor Bill Lee and a like-minded legislature.
She wrote:
NASHVILLE — Tennessee school boards, you may have heard, have been busy lately striking long-beloved, award-winning classic literature from their social studies and language arts curriculums. The Williamson County School Board recently took a hard look at more than 30 texts, restricting the use of seven and striking one altogether: “Walk Two Moons,” a Newbery Medal-winning, middle-grade book by Sharon Creech that follows the story of a 13-year-old girl whose mother is missing. According to the group Moms for Liberty, who lodged the formal “reconsideration request” that caused the school board to take up the issue, “Walk Two Moons” is inappropriate for fourth-grade readers because it features “stick figures hanging, cursing and miscarriage, hysterectomy/stillborn and screaming during labor.”
Well, may God save all American children from the knowledge that women in labor are apt to scream.
The media didn’t pay much attention to Williamson County because the outrage over MAUS made international news. She notes that the American Library Association’s list of books that are challenged includes some that offend parents who are not southerners.
She continues:
Still, it is possible to trust that the parents in McMinn County are acting in what they believe is the best interest of their children, and also to recognize that these parents are being manipulated by toxic and dangerous political forces operating at the state and national levels. Here in Tennessee, book bans are just a small but highly visible part of a much larger effort to privatize public schools and turn them into conservative propaganda centers. This crusade is playing out in ways that transcend local school board decisions, and in fact are designed to wrest control away from them altogether.
I don’t mean simply the law, passed last year, that limits how racism is taught in public schools across the state. I’m talking about an array of bills being debated in the Tennessee General Assembly right now. One would purge books considered “obscene or harmful to minors” from school libraries across the state. Another would ban teaching materials that “promote, normalize, support or address lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) issues or lifestyles.” Yet another would prevent school districts from receiving state funding for undocumented students.
Most of all I’m talking about Gov. Bill Lee’s announcement, in his State of the State address last week, that he has approached Hillsdale College, a Christian institution in Michigan, to open 50 charter schools in Tennessee — Mr. Lee reportedly requested 100— that would follow a curriculum designed to make kids “informed patriots.” Not informed citizens; informed patriots, as conservative Christians define that polarizing term.
“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,” said Adam Laats, the author of “Fundamentalist U: Keepingthe American Faith in Higher Education,” in an interview with The Tennessean.
That’s not surprising at all if you know anything about the Tennessee Republican Party, which is in lock step with right-wing oligarchs funding their campaigns. The fact that so many of these challenged books have been in the literary canon for decades is a dead giveaway that the new bans are a response to contemporary political forces whose true motivation has nothing to do with books. What they really want is to destroy public education. As Christopher Leonard, the author of “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” notes in an interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider for the “Have You Heard” podcast: “The ultimate goal is to dismantle the public education system entirely and replace it with a privately run education system.” (Read a transcript of the full interview here.)
The real tragedy in Tennessee, and across the red states, is this existential threat to public education, which is the very foundation of a functioning democracy. And that’s where our outrage should lie — not at school boards whose decisions are formed by parental concerns that simply differ from our own. [emphasis added]
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.
Charlie Kirk is a pro-Trump activist with a huge following and an organization called “Turning Points USA.” He plans to open a chain of private schools to teach America-First ideology. This is a frightening turn of events. Partisan schools that indoctrinate students.
His plans were temporarily stymied when one of his key contractors backed out after learning that he was the client. But he is forging ahead, with a projection that he will collect $40 million annually in revenue by indoctrinating children into his world view.
Turning Point USA, the youth group led by pro-Trump activist Charlie Kirk, sought to entice investors last year with a new foray in the culture wars: an academy aimed at students failed by schools “poisoning our youth with anti-American ideas.”
A company in the early stages of realizing Kirk’s vision was anticipating millions in revenue from Turning Point Academy — part of an effort to market K-12 curriculum to families seeking an “America-first education.”
A document circulated within StrongMind, an education firm in Arizona where programmers had begun work on the project, noted plans to open the online academy by the fall of 2022 and assessed its “potential to generate over $40MM in gross revenue at full capacity (10K students).”
The firm’s plans disintegrated last week amid a Washington Post investigation and backlash from StrongMind employees concerned about the prospect of Turning Point-directed lesson plans. A key subcontractor tapped to prepare course material also backed out after learning that Kirk’s group was the ultimate client. The 28-year-old activist, who boasts 1.7 million Twitter followers, has championed former president Donald Trump’s baseless claim that widespread fraud cost him reelection and has scorned demands for racial justice that followed the 2020 murder of a Black man at the hands of the Minneapolis police, calling George Floyd a “scumbag.”
Kirk still intends to open the academy, though with other partners, said a spokesman, Andrew Kolvet,who called the agreement with StrongMind “nonbinding and nonexclusive.”
The early blueprint for Turning Point Academy — laid out in detail for the first time in documents and chat logs reviewed by The Post — points to the growing market for education and media serving families disgruntled with public schools, a flash point in many communities and a key issue on the campaign trail. The quest to raise revenue by allowing families to bypass traditional schools and buy curriculum more aligned with their political worldview worried some experts and watchdogs.
“This sounds like a very slippery slope,” said Carole Basile, dean of Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. “It depends on what the curriculum actually looks like, but to move in the direction of letting partisan identity decide what is being taught, that feels new and worrying…
Turning Point USA, founded by Kirk in 2012, rose to prominence by maintaining a “professor watchlist” promising to unmask liberal instructors. The nonprofit prospered under Trump’s presidency, raising more than $80 million from undisclosed donors, according to its four most recent tax filings. It announced its intentions to launch an academy last year, in the midst of an inflamed debate over how much schools should focus on racial inequity.
Tonight, February 3 at 3 p.m. (EST), Public Funds Public Schools and the Network for Public Education are co-sponsoring a Zoom discussion between Nancy MacLean and me about the privatization of public schools.
The Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS) webinar series continues on February 3 with a very special event: “Public Education in Chains: The Road to Privatization of Our Nation’s Schools.” The webinar features Dr. Nancy MacLean, award-winning American historian and author of Democracy in Chains, in conversation with Dr. Diane Ravitch, President of the Network for Public Education.
PFPS webinars explore issues related to private school vouchers and the campaign’s goal of ensuring public funds are used to maintain, support, and strengthen public schools. This webinar is co-sponsored by the Network for Public Education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 