Right wing’s targeting public schools tied to segregation

Bill Knight column for Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, Oct. 16, 17 or 18

Recent attacks on education – from public schools to teachers unions to higher education – can be traced to segregation and a decades-old “free market” theory opposing government whenever possible, according to Nancy MacLean, author of “Democracy in Chains: the Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.”

Today, the attacks range from a troubling compromise in Illinois’ recent school-funding legislation to Trump appointee Betsy DeVos, U.S. Secretary of Education.

The worst part of Illinois’ recently passed Evidence-Based model of funding public education is a voucher-style program that lets wealthy people or corporations get a tax credit for donations to private school scholarship funds. Some educators and lawmakers are concerned the program not only will cost the state $75 million annually over the next five years but take resources and students away from communities’ schools.

It’s nothing new, unfortunately.

The radical Right supports private school vouchers (an obsession of DeVos, a long-time advocate) not because of a commitment to improve education, but because it weakens government, from Washington to local school boards. Long an American ideal, public education started coming under fire after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in “Brown v. Board of Education” ruled that separate schools based on race were unconstitutional since they denied equal access to education. Southern white elites resisted desegregation and used economic arguments to criticize public schools to neutralize integration, MacLean said.

“These ultra free-market/property supremacist ideas got their first test, and it is in the situation of the most conservative whites’ reaction to ‘Brown’,” she said. Economist “Milton Friedman, had written his first manifesto for school vouchers in 1955 as the news was coming out of the South. That was after several years of reports on these arch-segregationists, saying they were going to destroy public education and send kids off to private schools.”

Other conservative economists, such as James McGill Buchanan and Warren Nutter, argued that public schools were a “monopoly,” MacLean found. Ten days after courts prohibited Virginia from shutting down schools in some communities while maintaining them in others, Buchanan and Nutter recommended Virginia privatize all its schools and sell them to private providers that could profit from the once-public resources, the author said. The two went so far as to propose eliminating the requirement that there be public education in the constitution – which the Right’s long crusade called “government schools.” Removing the requirement would enable privatization on a massive scale.

“What they were doing is using this crisis to advance their neo-liberal politics or ultra free-market politics or breaking down the democratic state,” MacLean told Jennifer Berkshire, education editor at AlterNet.

That’s also why the Right is focused on teachers unions.

“It’s not because they are only concerned about the quality of education and think that teachers are blocking that,” MacLean said. “This is a cause that hated public education before there were teachers unions. Today, with so many industrial jobs destroyed or outsourced or automated, our main labor unions are teachers unions, and teachers unions are really important forces for defending liberal policy in general, things like Social Security and Medicare, as well as public education. In targeting teachers’ unions, they’re really trying to take out their most important opponents.

“They hate the idea of collectives (they would call them), whether it’s labor-union, civil-rights [or] women’s groups,” she continued, “and any kind of government provision for people’s needs. In their dream society, every one of us is solely responsible for ourselves and our needs, whether it’s for education or retirement security or health care. We should just do ourselves.”

Likewise in Illinois, the state’s fiscal emergency was exploited by similar powers.

“Governor Rauner capitalized on the crisis he created when he vetoed the original bill and used it as leverage for private school tax credits that benefit the wealthy while working families continue to struggle,” said Illinois Federation of Teachers president Dan Montgomery. “This governor does not prioritize public schools.”