Michelle Goldberg has a new fan, Christopher Rufo, “architect of the right-wing crusade against critical race theory.” He wanted to gloat:
“I’ve unlocked a new terrain in the culture war, and demonstrated a successful strategy,” said Rufo, a documentary filmmaker-turned-conservative activist. With that done, he was getting ready for a new phase of his offensive.
“We are right now preparing a strategy of laying siege to the institutions,” he said. In practice, this means promoting the traditional Republican school choice agenda: private school vouchers, charter schools and home-schooling. “The public schools are waging war against American children and American families,” he said. Families, in turn, should have “a fundamental right to exit.”
Hyperbole much?
Public schools have been a culture-war battleground perhaps since the 1950s, Goldberg writes, but Covid shutdowns have reinvigorated conservative opposition and played a role in last week’s gubernatorial election in Virginia:
“The failure of our leadership to prioritize public education in Virginia is what’s created this firestorm,” said Christy Hudson, one of the founders of the Fairfax County Parents Association, which grew out of a pro-reopening group that formed in the summer of 2020. Critical race theory, she said, “has certainly added flames to that fire,” but “this is 19 months in the making.”
“It’s a perilous situation for Democrats, the party of public schools,” Goldberg writes. “If they want to stanch the bleeding, they should treat the rollout of the children’s Covid vaccine as an opportunity to make public schools feel lively and joyful again.” Conservatives are ready to pounce. Conservatives like Rufo.
Rufo readily admits that school closures prepared the ground for the drive against critical race theory. “You have a multiracial group of parents that felt like the public school bureaucracies were putting their children through a policy regime of chaos, with Covid and shutdowns, and then pumping them full of left-wing racialist ideologies,” he said. He’s right about the first part, even if the second is a fantasy.
Now Democrats have a choice. They can repair the public schools, or watch people like Rufo destroy them.
It’s hard to describe just how anti-American this conservative drive is to destroy public schools (or how much it grinds my teeth to nubs). Support for public education was a foundational principle of this country since before ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Prior to government’s ability to tax, disposition of public lands was one means of raising revenue. The Land Ordinance of 1785 provided that in breaking up public land for development, “There shall be reserved the lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools …”
As Stuart Stevens found out the hard way, “Republicans never believed what they were saying” about “belief in a transcendant moral order” or in defending “the unchanging ground of our changing experience,” and such. Much less in America’s historical commitment to public education.
So, once again:
John Adams (a tea party favorite) wrote in 1785, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”
To that purpose, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (passed under the Articles of Confederation prior to ratification of the U.S. Constitution) called for new states formed from what is now the American Midwest to encourage “schools and the means of education,” and the Enabling Act of 1802 signed by President Thomas Jefferson (for admitting the same Ohio that Santorum visited on Saturday) required — as a condition of statehood — the establishment of schools and public roads, funded in part by the sale of public lands. Enabling acts for later states followed the 1802 template, establishing permanent funds for public schools, federal lands for state buildings, state universities and public works projects (canals, irrigation, etc.), and are reflected in state constitutions from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The practice continued up to and including the enabling act for the admission of Hawaii in 1959 as America’s 50th state, for example (emphasis added):
(f) The lands granted to the State of Hawaii by subsection (b) of this section and public lands retained by the United States under subsections (c) and (d) and later conveyed to the State under subsection (e), together with the proceeds from the sale or other disposition of any such lands and the income therefrom, shall be held by said State as a public trust for the support of the public schools and other public educational institutions, for the betterment of the conditions of native Hawaiians, as defined in the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920, as amended, for the development of farm and home ownership on as widespread a basis as possible for the making of public improvements, and for the provision of lands for public use. Such lands, proceeds, and income shall be managed and disposed of for one or more of the foregoing purposes in such manner as the constitution and laws of said State may provide, and their use for any other object shall constitute a breach of trust for which suit may be brought by the United States. The schools and other educational institutions supported, in whole or in part out of such public trust shall forever remain under the exclusive control of said State; and no part of the proceeds or income from the lands granted under this Act shall be used for the support of any sectarian or denominational school, college, or university.
It’s pretty plain that breaching that trust is just what our flag-waving, conservative friends have in mind. As I explained in that Scrutiny Hooligans post (above) in 2012, business interests hope to coopt religious conservatives into putting a middle-man in every middle school for extracting public education tax dollars:
As reported here and here and here, that same hunger for private profit is behind the widespread assault on public education from education industry and “reform” advocates. It is not about innovation, efficiency, smaller government, lower taxes, deficits, choice, or the Constitution. It is about getting investors a piece of the trillion-dollar K-12 public education action, “the Big Enchilada,” as Jonathan Kozol wrote for Harper’s:
It is this prospect – and the even more appealing notion that companies that start by managing these schools might at some future point achieve the right, through changes in state laws, to own the schools as well – that helps explain why EMOs [Education management Organizations] like Edison, which has yet to turn a profit, nonetheless attract vast sums of venture capital. The “big enchilada” represented by the corporate invasion of public schools, even if it takes place only in progressive stages, is sufficiently enticing to investors to keep the money flowing in anticipation of a time when private corporations will not merely nibble at the edges of the public system but will devour it altogether.
That may not serve the public good. It may not create jobs, improve education or improve the lives of students. Or in any way resemble the founders’ vision. But it might net the right people a lot of public money.
And conservatives are fine with helping them, especially if it owns the libs.