Edumacation

 “The Education Wars – A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual” by JC Berkshire and J Schneider, 2024

Profitable privatization of everything is the ultimate goal of consistent capitalists and this book talks about the battle against it.  Trump’s incompetent Education Department pick, wrestling magnate Linda McMahon, along with Project 2025, plan to diminish or eliminate the department completely.  The Department’s Civil Rights Office will be the first target on her list, with masking next.  This only emphasizes what has been a long-running battle in the U.S.  The capitulation to charter schools by the neo-liberal Democratic Party and the teacher union leaderships enabled this whole plan as its junior partners.  The implementation of a national voucher system, charter schools and ‘school choice’ is the wet dream of Christian nationalists and Libertarian capitalists alike. Look out.

This book puts privatization squarely at the center of the discussion.  Privatization has allowed shabby educational quality, re-segregation, de-unionization, the return of ‘state’ supported religious schooling and vast amounts of corporate welfare for educational incompetents and grifters.  Its real effect will be to increase inequality.  According to the authors it is behind every sex ed. objection, book ban, CRT and DEI complaint, GLBT issue, Marx accusation, mask opposition, anti-woke whine, prayer in school demand and general irritation about ‘failing’ public schools. 

The idea that the schools can solve all social problems is another burden and fantasy put on the public school system and its teachers.  Schools can’t solve poverty, a thing generated by capital, yet are blamed for it. The authors paint a picture of years of complaints against public schools since the ‘common’ school system started in the 1800s – over anti-family attitudes, atheism, communism, integration and now ‘anti-patriotism.’ Essentially modernism is the enemy.  Remember the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee?  This created an avalanche of anti-evolutionist anger from religious Southerners.  None of this is new but the authors maintain that what is happening now is new – a return to a system of separate and unequal education, but now privatized using public monies. 

The authors include facts that counter the image of a failing national school system, first drummed up in the Reagan years.  They cite the actual national rise in test scores, the inclusion of more and more students in democratic and egalitarian school systems, increasing quality and education of teachers, a broader range of subjects taught, an increase in higher level classes and 80% satisfaction with schools by locals. They have no regional statistics to cite, just national averages, so it is unclear what states, locations or regions might lag behind - like the South or the rural U.S. They cite the democratic control of schools by local school boards, unlike charters run by unelected businessmen.  Some states like North Carolina, Arizona, Iowa and Florida have no educational requirements for charter ‘schools’ at all, so they are black boxes of unaccountability.  And then there is the farce of inadequate ‘home-schooling.’  Let’s face it, nearly all parents with their mail-order curriculum are unable to teach children better than the efforts of dozens of trained teachers across a broad array of skills.

The Supporters of Private Education

Rich people have always supported private education because they could afford it and it would give their children a leg-up in the ‘meritocracy.’  Their children were not being taught nonsense and they made sure of that.  However ….

Reactionary religion is at the center of much of the opposition to public schools according to the authors. The plan by Christian nationalists and Catholic right-wingers is to destroy the division between church and state.  Courts now allow public monies to fund religious schools because it would be ‘discriminatory’ not to. Obviously the ambiguous wording of our First Amendment is flawed in the modern context.  30% of present ‘sectarian’ schools and home-schooling programs – maybe 2M kids - use fundamentalist Christian curriculums about dinosaurs and humans; women limited to having babies and heterosexuals the only ones endowed with legal rights.  You can guess the rest.  Yeshiva schools in New York offer little English or math, no science or history but lots of Jewish law, prayer and religion.  You can imagine what Islamic schools are up to.  It’s really a sign of the decay and stupidization of U.S. culture. 

Then there are ‘parental rights.’ And no, it’s not the rights of parents not to spend their tax money on shitty private schools. It’s the right of other parents to block any knowledge or facts about history, geography, culture, critical thinking or science. Not to mention enriching some education capitalist. As the authors note, real parental ‘rights’ should not interfere with the well-being of the child and the interests of society. A functioning bourgeois democracy needs them, as does a workers’ democracy like socialism. The authors claim that parental rights are already protected by U.S. courts. They show case law examples like the Amish being allowed to pull their kids out of school at eighth grade due to their religion.  This seems to open the door to every religion wanting to live in the 1800s.

Children’s rights are not considered, obviously.  Brainwashing the young is needed by the political Right to refresh their voting base, so their access to actual knowledge is secondary to the ‘parental rights’ movement. The authors depict events in which ‘parental rights’ bills were defeated in state legislatures due to them being seen as imposing the views of a strident minority on public education.  Specifically 11 people have filed most of the bills, as it’s been an organized effort by astro-turf reactionaries. 

Vouchers were thought up by libertarian economist Milton Friedman in 1955 and immediately adopted across the whole South as a way to combat desegregation. That is their vile origin story.  Statistics show that voucher and charter schools are worse than public schools and studies and news reports since then confirm that.  “Since 2013 the record is dismal,” according to researcher Josh Cowen.  “Independent studies in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington D.C. have shown impacts on test scores on par with the results following catastrophes…”  Low budget religious schools in strip malls or a church basement are not going to succeed in actually educating children.  “Scale” is key, as it allows wider benefits in an educational system.  The Right’s erroneous slogan, after all, is “Students, not Systems!”  This is the logic of home-schooling or no schooling at all. 

Edumacation at the Mall

The authors note that in many small towns the school is the anchor for the whole community. Some Republicans, such as those in Alaska and Georgia, have resisted ‘defunding’ public schools because in many rural areas that is all there is, but their resistance might be bludgeoned away.   Vouchers ‘bust budgets’ and in states like Arizona, New Hampshire and Wisconsin studies showed they mostly served students that were already in private schools.  The authors’ run-down of cheery successes defeating reactionary efforts in school board elections, legislatures and state propositions all come prior to the November 2024 national election of Trump’s team.  We are now in new terrain.

Oddly they completely ignore the specific issue of charter schools, revealing a Democratic Party reticence to take on the real beast in the room.  Charters are mentioned twice in the book in passing, though they are certainly linked to vouchers. A recent news report in the Minnesota Star-Tribune showed that 100s of charter schools in the state were doing below average, with only 27 above average.  This is what we and our children or grandchildren get for our tax money.  

Solutions?

The authors make a plea to preserve public education unconnected to any other issues. They call the present the last version of this particular culture war and are also clear it is about privatization.  Yet they include no economic details on ‘following the money.’  I.E. who is getting wealthy from vouchers and charter schools, or the many instances of scandals, school closures, graft, theft, bankruptcies and double-dealing. They do not answer the question of what companies, on-line or mail-order firms are getting rich or how much money vouchers and charters take from public education – all the financial math and criminal nitty-gritty.  The book is couched in ‘good democracy’ liberalism, which is essential as far as it goes.  But it does not go far enough. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  ‘charter schools,’ ‘education,’ ‘libertarianism.’   

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / February 15, 2025