Texas woman disavows her distrust of public schools
The subhead perfectly summarizes the ProPublica report from Texas:
Courtney Gore, a Granbury ISD school board member, has disavowed the far-right platform she campaigned on after finding no evidence that students were being indoctrinated by the district’s curriculum. Her defiance has brought her backlash.
The co-host of a local far-right talk show had guzzled gallons of Kool-Aid. She was positive that public schools were cesspools of anti-whatever indoctination that promoted a “twisted worldview.” Then she got herself elected to prove it and to shut it all down.
Weeks after winning a school board seat in her deeply red Texas county, Courtney Gore immersed herself in the district’s curriculum, spending her nights and weekends poring over hundreds of pages of lesson plans that she had fanned out on the coffee table in her living room and even across her bed. She was searching for evidence of the sweeping national movement she had warned on the campaign trail was indoctrinating schoolchildren.
[…]
But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.
The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”
Wow. That seems … horrible.
Gore revealed her apostacy in a series of Facebook posts. Naturally, she was targeted for backlash.
Hard-liners were indifferent and dismissive because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.” Gore told ProPublica they were “interested not in improving public education but rather in sowing distrust.”
“I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy bs,” Gore wrote. “I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer. It’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”
What’s striking about Gore’s Road to Fort Worth experience is the level of burning commitment people in her anti-public-schools movement have to their evidence-free faith. They demand schools remove offending books (they are convinced are there) from school libraries, for example. One activist even sneaked into “a high school library during a charity event and began inspecting books using the light of her cellphone, according to a district report.”
Then a speaker shouting threats about school libraries offering pornography was spotted (allegedly) wearing a handgun at a school board meeting. “We know what you do. We know where you live,” he said.
“That was the moment I saw how crazy it was, how unhinged it had become and how far some people were willing to go to prove their points,” Gore said.
Gore’s survey of her district’s curriculum made her realize she’d been part of a “statewide effort to weaken local support of public schools and lay the groundwork for a voucher system.”
Vouchers are a scheme sold as saving the children (especially those poor, poor ones of color) from “failing” public schools. What they save is rich parents’ budgets by getting taxpayers to sunsidize their kids’ private (often religious) school tuition. State Republicans here prefer to call vouchers “opportunity scholarships.”
Moe Green, Democratic candidate for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, insisted on calling these subsidies for wealthy families “taxpayer-funded private school vouchers” during an Asheville visit Saturday. That’s because opportunity scholarships sound to many people like funding coming from private philanthropy and not from their own pockets.
Again and again, the religious right gets played by people committed to diverting public funds to private, for-profit businesses because not exploiting government spending for private profit is a crime against capitalism.
Gore realized she’d been played. She eventually allied with the very woman her election had ousted from the school board two years earlier, Nancy Alana.
“She let everybody know that she had been misled and that she has seen for herself the good things that are happening in our school district,” Alana said. “That the school board can be trusted. That the administrators can be trusted. And she has spoken out on that. And that has made a big difference. And she is very well thought of in our community because of her willingness to step up and say, ‘I was wrong.’”
There’s no greater sign of weakness (apostacy!) on the far right than admitting you were wrong.
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