Nadra Nittle: Republicans want to kill the Dept. of Ed and privatize education. Billionaires are helping them.
Reporting for The 19th, Nadra Nittle looks at a report on a coordinated attempt to dismantle public education.
In the fall, the Department of Education will mark 45 years since its inception, but that anniversary could be its last if Donald Trump gets his way. The federal agency is one of several he’s vowed to slash if reelected president.
“We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C.,” he said in a campaign video last year. “We’re going to close it up — all those buildings all over the place and people that in many cases hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states.”
State lawmakers have already enacted policies that undermine and underfund public education, their critics say. That’s no coincidence, but part of a scheme to destroy the nation’s public school system, according to a new report — “By the Wealthy, for the Wealthy: The Coordinated Attacks on Public Education in the United States” — released June 25 by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“Over the past decade, there has been a coordinated effort on the part of right-wing billionaires to undermine, dismantle and sabotage our nation’s public schools and to privatize our education system,” Sanders, an independent from Vermont who ran for president as a Democrat, said in a statement. “That is absolutely unacceptable. We can no longer tolerate billionaires and multinational corporations receiving massive tax breaks and subsidies while children in America are forced to go to under-staffed, under-resourced and under-funded public schools.”
State funding on public schools has stagnated over the past decade, rising just 1 percent annually on average, adjusting for inflation, according to the report, written by the majority staff of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), which Sanders chairs. Meanwhile, state spending on tax breaks and subsidies for private schools has spiked by 408 percent.
In Republican-led state legislatures, officials in recent years have intensified efforts to scale up private school voucher programs. Often characterized by their proponents as “school choice” for economically disadvantaged families, vouchers benefit the wealthy most of all, the HELP report found, leaving queer, rural, low-income, disabled and BIPOC youth and families vulnerable to discrimination, since private schools can curate their student populations.
“On this 70th anniversary year of Brown v. Board of Education, let us recommit to creating an education system that works for all of our people, not just the wealthy few,” Sanders said, referencing the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that deemed segregated schools unconstitutional.