Ohio and Oklahoma: Two States Where Public Education Is Being Undermined by Far-Right Ideologues

Thanks to politicians are poody heads   for the link.  Their link below.  Destroying public education has been a goal of the right for a long time.  They want to make it for profit and use it for public indoctrination in both right wing ideology and in the Christian religion.   The one thing they don’t want to use school for is an educated public.  The well off do not send their kids to public school.  They want the public school to educate workers to follow orders and not to think for themselves.  Hugs.  Scottie 

Posted on July 9, 2024 by janresseger

Ohio Senate President, Matt Huffman has been trying to hide behind the gerrymandered power of the Ohio GOP to avoid being deposed in court about the lobbyists he talked with privately as the Ohio Senate was getting ready to insert an especially lavish, last minute expansion of EdChoice vouchers into the state budget bill in June of 2023.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock explains: “A judge can’t force Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman to answer lawyers’ questions about which private school lobbyists he speaks to outside of legislative chambers, the Republican has argued before the Ohio Supreme Court.” Huffman doesn’t want to comply with a subpoena to testify in the case of the Vouchers Hurt Ohio, brought by 200 school districts to demonstrate that private school tuition vouchers violate the provisions of the Ohio Constitution. Hancock continues, referring to the step Huffman took to discourage school districts from joining the lawsuit: “Huffman’s battle has lasted over a year, and even included a request from Huffman during last year’s state budget season that every school district provide the legislature and Ohio Auditor Keith Faber the amount of money they’re spending on the litigation…. Huffman believes that a portion of the Ohio Constitution that privileges lawmakers’ speech and debate from questioning applies not just to speech and debate on the Senate floor but to all discussion on bills…”

And the gerrymandered legislature’s attempt to wield power isn’t limited to trying to avoid testifying in court about the voucher expansion.  Marilou Johanek just penned another bombshell Ohio Capital Journal column about the debate last week as the legislature finished up work for the summer and autumn:  “Nobody, but showboating extremists in the Ohio legislature, gives a damn about which school bathroom is used by a minuscule number of transgender students… Same goes for the nonsense cooked up in the Ohio Senate to wield an authoritarian hammer over the state’s highly regarded colleges and universities. It’s a kneejerk response to a long-running Fox News narrative about leftist indoctrination ruining higher ed.  The MAGA Republican fever dream to own campus libs by censoring them lives in the Senate bill stalled in the Ohio House that nobody—except gerrymandered ideologues—wants or needs…. It doesn’t improve life for students or faculty and threatens to make it worse with tyrannical rule over great academic institutions.”

The best one can say is both of these bills have been passed by only one chamber and can’t be acted on again until the legislature reconvenes for a lame duck session right after the November election.

But Ohio’s GOP dictatorship pales compared what’s happening this month in Oklahoma—the state where, The Oklahoman‘s Murray Evans reports, “Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters sent a letter to state school districts… ordering them to incorporate the Bible ‘as an instructional support into the curriculum’ for grades 5 through 12, citing its importance as a historical document.  ‘Adherence to this mandate is compulsory,’  Walters’ letter read…. ‘Immediate and strict compliance is expected.’…. Walters announcement came two days after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that a contract between the Statewide Virtual School Charter Board and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have been the nation’s first religious-based charter school, violated both the state and U.S. Constitutions and state law.”

Evans provides evidence that Walter’s new order does not seem to represent the will of the voters. In 2016, they rejected “by more than 200,000 votes,” a state constitutional amendment to remove Section 5, Article 2 of the Oklahoma Constitution, “which states, ‘No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.’”

It is hard to understand why Oklahoma’s state school superintendent is prioritizing mandating the insertion of Bible teaching into the public schools when, as in Ohio, needed school funding and other immediate issues for the state’s public schools are apparent. For years, for example, we have read about teachers leaving Oklahoma for nearby Texas, where teachers’ salaries are higher. In the most recent in a series of reports tracking teachers’ salaries, the Economic Policy Institute showed that in Oklahoma, the disparity between the salaries of teachers and other comparably trained professionals is forth largest in the nation. The only states where teachers’ salaries are more inadequate are Colorado, Arizona, and Virginia.

The President and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rachel Laser released the following statement about Ryan Walter’s act to command Bible teaching in all of Oklahoma’s public schools: “Public schools are not Sunday schools… This is textbook Christian Nationalism. Walters is abusing the power of his public office to impose his religious beliefs on everyone else’s children…  Christian Nationalists and their lawmaker allies want to replace school counselors with religious chaplains, allow teachers and coaches to pray with students, teach Creationism in science classes, and ban books and censor curricula that feature LGBTQ+ people and racial and religious minorities.”

Two sociologists, Philip S. Gorski at Yale University and Samuel L. Perry at the University of Oklahoma, define the mythology of white Christian nationalism in their excellent book, The Flag and the Cross: “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 it should be…  America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were ‘traditional’ Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on ‘Christian principles.’ The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful; and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity. But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from ‘un-American’ influences both inside and outside our borders.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 3-4)

Gorski and Perry conclude: “White Christian nationalism is our term for the ethno-traditionalism among many white Americans that conflates racial, religious, and national identity (the deep story) and pines for cultural and political power that demographic and cultural shifts have increasingly threatened…. (T)he term Christian in white Christian nationalism is often far more akin to a dog whistle that calls out to an aggrieved tribe than a description of the content of one’s faith.” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 44)

In an opinion piece for CNN, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, Amanda Tyler succinctly defines how Christian nationalists like Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, “threaten the careful balance worked out over more than half a century by the courts, presidential administrations from both parties and a diverse set of interest groups about how best to recognize the religious freedom rights of students, teachers and administrators in our pluralistic public schools.  These recent developments are… just the latest examples of a concerted strategy to inject the political ideology of Christian nationalism into public education. Christian nationalism, which merges Christian and American identities, relies on a false narrative of the U.S. as a ‘Christian nation’—a country founded by Christians and for Christians. Such mythology betrays our history and constitutional framework, which created a separation between the institutions of religion and government so that all religions could flourish without the state’s control.”