Jan Resseger looks at some research about the big players in the culture panic coming after public schools. Reposted with permission.
Today’s post is the second in a two-part reflection on universal vouchers and the meaning of Project 2025, an agenda driven and amplified by today’s culture wars that elevate parents’ personal values over what we have historically understood as the role of public education. Part I of this post was published on Tuesday.
Public schooling developed as an institution unique to the United States, an institution providing free schooling in every city, suburb, town, and rural area. The purpose of public schooling has long been defined as preparing students to participate in our democratic system and at the same time serving the unique educational needs of each particular child and adolescent. Public schools have historically been required by law to protect the rights of all students and to protect religious liberty under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and the provisions of many state constitutions. At times when our society has failed to fulfill these promises, our laws and the system we have collectively established have represented the challenge to which we have been called to respond.
During the past couple of years, however, the explosion of universal vouchers passed by red-state legislatures has been accelerated by myriad political initiatives to elevate the rights of parents to choose schools that will protect parents’ personal values and at the same time undermine equity and inclusion for millions of public school students. Parents’ groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, funded by far-right philanthropies and resourced by far-right thank tanks, have used these attacks to discredit the institution of public schooling itself by disdaining “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” threatening honest teaching about the history about slavery, trying to silence any mention of human sexuality, and banning books on so-called controversial topics. This maelstrom of threats along with the drive for universal private school tuition vouchers has, not coincidentally, been been combined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 education proposal, a scheme to undermine the inclusive institution of public education itself.
Part 1 of this blog post covered last week’s publication by the Brookings Brown Center for Education Policy of a commentary by Tulane University Professor Doug Harris, who explores the ways that universal private school tuition vouchers and Education Savings Account vouchers threaten the core values and traditions that have underpinned public education for generations. Also last week the Brookings Brown Center staff’s Rachel Perera, Jon Valant, and Katherine Meyer published a short brief that identifies the contents of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which threatens the same traditional values of equity and inclusion Harris explores. While on Tuesday we examined Doug Harris concerns about the meaning of the school voucher expansion, today’s post will explore how Project 2025 pulls together and represents the same destructive goals.
In their brief, the Brookings Brown Center’s staff list eight federal education initiatives targeted by Project 2025. Six of eight of these programs would undermine services for poor children or undermine the rights of racial minority or LGBTQ+ students. Eliminating these programs would take us back to the 1950s, before more recent reforms ensured that public schools would come closer to representing the values our society says it prizes. Project 2025 would:
- promote universal school choice (universal private school tuition vouchers);
- eliminate the Head Start program that serves preschoolers in poverty;
- discontinue Title I, that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children;
- rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students;
- undercut the federal capacity to enforce civil rights law; and
- “reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools.”
Five of these Project 2025 proposals threaten hard won political victories for justice accomplished since 1960. All of these protections for vulnerable groups of children are threatened today by political efforts to elevate the rights of particular parents to protect their children from “woke” policies or from peers the parents consider undesirable in public schools. The sixth—universal school privatization—would, of course, also create the opportunity for parents to remove their children, at public expense, to private educational institutions that can insulate those children from experiences and peers that threaten their parents’ values. In his commentary, Harris elaborates on the ways publicly funded school privatization permits schools to discriminate: “While private schools cannot legally discriminate based on race because of the Civil Rights Act, they can discriminate on most other dimensions, including religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, income, and disability status. Moreover, the protections against racial discrimination are stronger in public schools, with additional avenues for recourse available to public school students through the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil rights.”
In their recent brief on education policy, staff at the Brookings Brown Center note that white Christian nationalism seems to be central to Project 2025—to the culture war attacks as well as the biases behind the growth of school privatization. They quote The Flag and the Cross, a book that clearly defines white Christian nationalism as “ethno-nationalism and protecting the freedoms of a very narrowly defined ‘us.’ ”
To better understand what white Christian nationalism is and how this kind of thinking has driven the growth school privatization and shaped the policies in Project 2025, it is well worth looking into The Flag and the Cross, a profound little book by sociologists of religion, Philip Gorsky and Samuel Perry, who, in their definition of white Christian nationalism, identify the kind of thinking that underpins the policies Doug Harris identifies as undermining the important traditions represented by public schools.
Gorsky and Perry define white-Christian-nationalism not as religious thinking, but instead as a myth that seeks to protect the values and rights of a few at the expense of the many in our modern and diverse society: “White Christian nationalism is a ‘deep story’ about America’s past and a vision of its future. It includes cherished assumptions about what America was and is but also what it should be… The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful… Like any story, this one has its heroes: white Conservative Christians, usually native-born men. It also has its villains: racial, religious, and cultural outsiders. The plot revolves around conflicts between the noble and worthy ‘us,’ the rightful heirs of wealth and power, and the undeserving ‘them’ who conspire to take what is ours. But this story is a myth. The religious views of the Founders ranged widely…. The Declaration and the Constitution drew on various influences, including classical liberalism… and civic republicanism. More than a little of the nation’s wealth and prosperity were derived from stolen land and slave labor. These are all well-established facts.”( The Flag and the Cross, pp. 3-5)
Gorsky and Perry conclude: “The first and most fundamental way in which white Christian nationalism threatens American liberal democracy is that it defines ‘the people’ in a way that excludes many Americans. White Christian nationalism is a form of what is often called ‘ethno-nationalism’…. Liberal democracy rests on what is usually called ‘civic nationalism. It defines the nation in terms of values, laws, and institutions. “(The Flag and the Cross, p. 114)
The late political theorist, Benjamin Barber, defines these values, laws and institutions that we risk losing today as the social contract:
“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck. Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)
