Again the point of making the laws so vague is to instill fear of violating it as no one really knows how much it covers. That is the point of all these laws from Texas, Florida, and other maga states. It is so that people have to go to the extremes to avoid lawsuits that the laws makes almost impossible for them to win. It is all about returning the US to a time when the LGBTQIA was not seen socially nor in media in any positive way. During that time any media mention of the LGBTQIA had to make them the villain and beware little billy of the homosexual man. Of course, little Billy was in far more danger from the local Priest who was presumed a holy wonderful man because he preached the good religion, Christianity. These people pushing these to remove all mention of LGBTQIA from media, books, libraries, rainbows from schools are driven by fundamentalist religion or a desire to return to a time more comfortable for them. A time that existed only because some people did not have full equality to live openly as who they were in society. They hate that equality, and they love to engage in oppression of others.
Then they use the excuse they are preventing indoctrination. Specifically progressive indoctrination. But when you have to remove dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses, and Genesis book of records, and any positive mention or anything not cis white republican ideology with forced Christianity what is that? Right wing republican indoctrination. It is reeducation camps. It also is about creating a two tier schools system. The public system for poor people that prepares them to be low level workers / laborers, and the privet schools for upper incomes wealthy kids who will be the overseers / managers/ owners of the workers. Hugs. Scottie
The Escambia County School District, located in the Florida panhandle, has removed several dictionaries from its library shelves over concerns that making the dictionaries available to students would violate Florida law. The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary are among more than 2800 books that have been pulled from Escambia County school libraries and placed into storage. The Escambia County School District says these texts may violate HB 1069, a bill signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) in May 2023.
HB 1069 gives residents the right to demand the removal of any library book that “depicts or describes sexual conduct,” as defined under Florida law, whether or not the book is pornographic. Rather than considering complaints, the Escambia County School Board adopted an emergency rule last June that required the district’s librarians to conduct a review of all library books and remove titles that may violate HB 1069.
Each school in Escambia County has thousands of titles. As a result, many school libraries were closed at the beginning of the school year pending the completion of the review.
At the completion of that process, more than 2800 books were removed from libraries. (This includes, in some cases, multiple copies of the same book.) These books are being reviewed again by the school district. But that process is proceeding extremely slowly. According to a list maintained by the Escambia County School District, fewer than 100 texts have gone through the final review process. Many of these books remain unavailable to students absent a parental “opt-in.”
The dictionaries, according to the school district’s data, remain locked away. Their exclusion demonstrates the preposterously broad language of HB 1069. Dictionaries do contain descriptions of “sexual conduct.” Merriam-Webster, for example, defines sex as a “sexual union involving penetration of the vagina by the penis” or “intercourse (such as anal or oral intercourse) that does not involve penetration of the vagina by the penis.” But the idea that we need to exclude dictionaries from schools to protect children defies all logic.
District staff responsible for the review at each school were given a checklist to determine whether a book should be withheld from students. The checklist suggests reviewers consult “Book Looks,” a right-wing websiterelied on by Moms for Liberty and other groups to justify the banning of books from school libraries. It was created by “Moms For Liberty member Emily Maikisch,” according to public records reviewed by Book Riot.
The Florida Freedom to Read Project (FFRP) obtained a copy of the checklist from the school district, which FFRP provided to Popular Information.
Along with dictionaries, thebooks removedfrom Escambia County school libraries as a result of this process includeeight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses, and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records. Biographies of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Nicki Minaj, and Thurgood Marshall are also locked in storage.
Classic texts like Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile are no longer available to Escambia County students. Twenty-three novels by Stephen King have been removed. The dragnet has also swept up books popular with the political right including Atlas Shrugged and two books by conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly.
The reality in Escambia County serves as a rejoinder to DeSantis, who has described concerns about book removals as a “leftist activist hoax” and a “false political narrative.”
At the same event, Florida Department of Education Commissioner Manny Diaz argued “[r]emoving clear instances of pornography and sexually explicit materials, often within arms reach of our youngest kids, is not book banning.” How would Diaz describe removing the dictionary?
DeSantis justified his statements by claiming that no school district in Florida had removed more than 19 books. At the time,148 bookshad been removed in Escambia County as part of the challenge process.Now, in part due to DeSantis signing HB 1069, more than ten times that many books have been taken off the shelves in Escambia County. And Escambia County is not an anomaly. Orange County, Florida, which includes Orlando, hasremoved at least 678 booksfrom library shelves.
Authors and parents fight back
Penguin Random House, five authors, two parents of Escambia County students, and the non-profit group PEN America sued the Escambia County School Board last May, alleging that the board’s actions violate the First Amendment. The lawsuit relates to decisions by the school board, prior to the passage of HB 1069, to permanently ban several books from Escambia schools.
The Escambia County School Board banned most of these books at the request of Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher in the county. Baggett is responsible for hundreds of challenges in Escambia County and neighboring counties. She also appeared at the June 2023 board meeting and spoke in favor of the emergency rule.
Meet the Florida English teacher trying to ban 150 books from school libraries
Baggett has challenged books like And Tango Makes Three, the true story of two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who lived in the Central Park Zoo and raised an adopted chick. Inan interviewwith Popular Information, Baggett said she objected to And Tango MakesThree because it exposes students to “alternate sexual ideologies.” Baggett said she was concerned “a second grader would read this book, and that idea would pop into the second grader’s mind… that these are two people of the same sex that love each other.”
Last year, Popular Information reported that former and current students accused Baggett of being openly homophobic in class. For example, Baggett allegedly told a tenth-grade student that her sister, who had a girlfriend, was “faking being a lesbian for attention” because “nobody’s born that way.”
Florida English teacher pushing book bans is openly racist and homophobic, students allege
More recently, Baggett wasinvolved in a schemethat involved reporting a librarian in a neighboring county to law enforcement for failing to remove a popular young adult novel from the school library.
Although a material review committee in Escambia County voted 5-0 to reject Baggett’s challenge of And Tango Makes Three, the decision was overruled by the school board, which sided with Baggett. “The fascination is still on those two male penguins,” school board member David Williams said. “So I’ll be voting to remove the book from our libraries.”
The lawsuit alleges that the school board banned and restricted books “based on their disagreement with the ideas expressed in those books.” In so doing, the school board has “prescribed an orthodoxy of opinion that violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”
Today, there is an important hearing in the case. A federal judge will consider Escambia County’s motion to dismiss the complaint. In a brief submitted by the State of Florida in support of Escambia, Attorney General Ashley Moody argued that the school board could ban books for any reason because the purpose of public school libraries is to“convey the government’s message,” and that can be accomplished through “the removal of speech that the government disapproves.”This is a novel argument about the purpose of school libraries.
They have to. Words come together to make sentences, and sentences create paragraphs. Then you’ve got people sharing information and getting ideas, and who knows where that could end up? People might start to think.
I knew that I was gay when I was three or four years old. I didn’t know what gay was, and I didn’t know what it meant. I certainly didn’t know about sex. But I knew that I was different from other boys in a way that involved other boys, and I knew that I had better not talk about it whatever it was.
When I was a child, I was a voracious reader. I went through at least two encyclopedia sets. One day, when I was about 10, I was thumbing through the dictionary looking for new words. I found the word “homosexual”, and knew that that word applied to me. It told me that I was not the only one.
And that is what they want to stop. Kids learning anything different other than the religious or right wing party line.
I hope the entry you read back then for homosexual was less judgmental than the one I read as a kid. Mine said being homosexual was about the worst thing in the world, or words to that effect.
I had a similar experience as you. Yet as Johnny says immediately below me, the reading I did secretively in the stacks at our public library did not make me feel confident. In fact, I felt there was something wrong with me. I understood it was who I was, but it was a long time till I could find pride in that.
Businesses and Universities around the country will start rejecting applicants from Florida. Having a diploma that you graduated from the Florida school system will automatically get your resume put into the circular file and it should.
Well they’re also banning science and history books, so why not dictionaries? I’m sure Prager U* can produce some word-books with definitions the fascists will like.
*No idea what the U stands for. Unacceptable? Useless?
History in Alabama is under attack again. A handful of state lawmakers are on a mission to erase it, to cancel those who would mention it and punish those who would protect it. No less than a revered state institution is on the line — the Alabama Department of Archives and History — and the stories it exists to preserve.
It’s LGBTQ history in lawmakers’ crosshairs. Founded in Birmingham in 2015, the Invisible Histories Project collects stories and material regarding LGBTQ history in the South — the things, it seems, many would like to pretend never happened.
In June, the Alabama Department of Archives and History invited one of the Invisible Histories Project founders, Maigen Sullivan, to speak in Montgomery about the group’s work, as part of a lunchtime lecture series. And that’s where all hell broke loose — this time.
Read the full article. As you can see in the June 2023 video below, state Sen. Chris Elliot [photo above] tried to defund the Archives shortly after the one-hour lecture took place. That bill failed. His new bill would fire the entire board.
Cancel culture strikes again.
Alabama Archives hosted a speaker on LGBTQ history. Republican lawmakers are pushing through legislation to fire the board.https://t.co/5stvXMxS0n
And acknowledging the crimes against LGBTQI+ people is some sort of lèse-majesté. Yasss, queen! Inflicting butthurtness upon homophobic hets is such a huge crime, so just don’t even dream of doing it or they’ll plot to toss you in jail… or worse. Really! In fact, they really like that “worse” option — and it ain’t pretty.
The point is erasing the LGBTQIA from public view. Like Russia did. Next is to make being LGBTQIA illegal, again like other countries do. This is not the end of it. It is a deliberate push to wipe out all progress of the past 70 to 80 years on equality and equal rights for those not cis straight white males. It is the first part in a war to return to white Christian cis straight male rule. Hugs. Scottie
A bill before the Legislature this year would replace trustees with political appointments.
Gay Pride Marchers in Birmingham, Alabama The Birmingham News The Birmingham News
History in Alabama is under attack again. A handful of state lawmakers are on a mission to erase it, to cancel those who would mention it and punish those who would protect it.
No less than a revered state institution is on the line — the Alabama Department of Archives and History — and the stories it exists to preserve.
But this time it’s not stories of Reconstruction or civil rights protests at risk of being lost. At least, not yet. Rather, something more recent.
In June, the Alabama Department of Archives and History invited one of the Invisible Histories Project founders, Maigen Sullivan, to speak in Montgomery about the group’s work, as part of a lunchtime lecture series.
And that’s where all hell broke loose — this time.
You see, the other Invisible Histories founder, Joshua Burford, had spoken as part of the same lunchtime lecture series the year before, and no one seemed bothered then.
But political winds changed. The Moms for Liberty types brought back the Inquisition and now a thing that had once escaped notice of all but a handful of history nerds became a moral panic of political importance.
A handful of lawmakers called the Archives and questioned why state money was being spent on such a thing. The Archives director, Steve Murray, explained it wasn’t state money but a grant that funded the lecture series.
Not that the funding mattered. These lawmakers did not want it to happen, period, regardless of who paid for it.
“I wanted to express my concern for this event,” state Sen. Chris Elliot, R-Josephine, wrote Murray in a text message I obtained through a public records request. “Ideally, I’d like to see it canceled.”
Canceled. There’s that word. The next time you hear someone yapping about cancel culture, look back at Elliot’s text message and remember who is trying to cancel who.
Murray declined, the event went forward as planned, and angry lawmakers began to plot retribution.
First Elliott tried to cut $5 million of state funding from the Archives, nearly half its budget. And remember, he already knew tax dollars hadn’t paid for the event.
This was punishment.
Elliott filed his first bill in a special session. Legislative leadership instead kept to the point of the special session to redraw congressional districts. Elliot’s bill died when lawmakers gaveled out and went home.
Now, Elliott has set his sites on those who control the Archives — its board of trustees.
“Ideally, I’d like to see it canceled.”
Alabama State Sen. Chris Elliott to Alabama HIstory and Archives Director Steve Murray regarding an LGBTQ historian invited to speak.
In a bill pre-filed for the 2024 session, Elliott would change the Archives governance from a self-nominating board to one controlled by the governor, lieutenant governor, and the Alabama House and Senate leaders.
All of the 21 current board members would be fired on June 1, 2024. Those board members include folks like Montgomery civil rights attorney Fred Gray, who knows a thing or two about Alabama history (because he made it).
But Elliott’s real target seems to be Murray.
“It really chaps me when we end up in a situation where you have unelected bureaucrats saying, ‘We know better. We’ll do what we want to do regardless of what the people think,’” Elliott said in a recent talk radio interview.
The thing is, I’ve seen Murray speak in at least a dozen public hearings, and I’ve seen him explain things to rooms full of lawmakers that they should have learned in fourth-grade Alabama History. Murray doesn’t fume, yell or condescend. Generally, he’s one of the more patient, soft-spoken people I’ve met in Alabama state government.
And I’ve never heard Murray speak the way Elliott described. Nor did Murray say any such thing in the text messages Elliott exchanged with him before the event.
The Alabama Department of Archives and HIstory was the first of its kind in the country and is home to the Museum of Alabama.Kyle Whitmire, al.com
I called Elliott to ask, who had spoken to him that way?
Turns out, no one. They just didn’t do what Elliott wanted them to do.
When I pushed him on it, Elliott argued that he doesn’t like how Archives and History board members are appointed and he said some things that weren’t exactly accurate.
“They are one of the few, if not only, self-perpetuating boards in the state of Alabama that does not at least answer to elected officials, or by extension to the people of the state of Alabama, and simply reappoints itself over and over and over again,” he said. “And you gotta wonder, is that good governance?”
There are a few problems with what Elliott said.
First, there are other boards that self-nominate to fill vacancies, including the University of Alabama Board of Trustees, and there are others controlled by professional associations, such as the State Board of Medical Examiners and the Alabama State Bar.
Elliott hasn’t filed bills to change how those boards work. I checked.
State Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, wants to fire the Alabama Department of Archives and History Board of Trustees after the department refused to cancel an LGBTQ historian’s speech last year.
Nor is it true the board lacks political oversight or that it is purely self-perpetuating.
The board does nominate its members, but those nominations then go before the Alabama Senate, where Elliott serves, for up or down votes — much like Supreme Court nominees go before the United States Senate.
If Elliott didn’t like any of these prospective board members, he could have voted against them. In fact, he’s had that opportunity 20 times since he became an Alabama state senator in 2018.
Care to guess how many he approved?
In the last four years, Elliott voted to approve all the people he now wants to fire.
Elliott approved three of those nominees this year — just two weeks before he took an interest in the LGBTQ stuff.
Not only did Elliott vote to approve those people for the board, but so did the cosponsors of his bill.
I didn’t get to ask Elliott about this during our phone call.
When I asked him how many Archives and History events he had been to — not counting the open-bar receptions special interest lobbyists host there — the phone call suddenly ended.
“Have a great day!” he said. “Bye!”
And the line went dead.
Text messages between state Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, and Alabama Department of Archives and History Director Steve Murray show Elliott knew the Food for Thought speakers series was not funded with state money. AL.com obtained the texts through a public records request.
Elliott’s record will have to speak for itself.
But what of his question: Is that good governance?
A handful of lawmakers out of 140 demanded an event be canceled because they didn’t care for its subject matter.
The director and the board declined to cancel it.
Because silencing a speaker who has tried to make Alabama history more accurate and more complete would be in direct conflict with Archives and History’s purpose — to document and share true Alabama stories.
They made the archives a place to tell Alabamians’ stories — not just the ones Elliott wanted told.
They did their jobs and now Elliott wants to fire them for it.
This is Don’t-You-Know-Who-I-Am politics.
This isn’t someone concerned with free speech.
This isn’t someone who cares about cancel culture. This is someone angry he doesn’t get to cancel someone else’s culture.
This is someone who wants to bring back the silence — to erase what little has been recovered and mute those who would speak of it.
Unless we say, enough.
Unless we say, this is history that won’t be forgotten.
Unless we say, not again.
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About the Authors
Kyle Whitmire
Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for AL.com, where he writes about political culture in Alabama. Dislikes: corruption, cruelty, incompetence and hypocrisy. Likes: quiet heroes. He is the 2023 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
The way it seems now. The attack on the Harvard President was simply to remove a black woman from her position in a high ranking school. By the same people who give a pass to their dear leader tRump for dining with two well known antisemite Jewish people haters. In the eyes of the racist right, that job belongs to a white Christian cis straight man. Hugs. Scottie
He is trying hard not to say the quiet part out loud. He really just wants a white Christian straight cis male run society. He is struggling with the changes in society that the majority of the people accept and wants to force his minority view on everyone by making it the law. He wants his small minority to rule the majority. He wants to roll back rights and equality. It is flat out bigotry, the same bigotry that led to slavery, Jim Crow laws, anti-miscegenation laws, and laws forcing a religion on other people’s children in hopes it will install in them the same hates against the LGBTQIA that they have. These laws are about stopping children learning tolerance and acceptance of people who are different, of people who are LGBTQIA. It is a way to let bullying go unchallenged and leaving the targeted LGBTQIA with no support or defenders. As it has been mentioned repeatedly, no color flag or book or movie ever turned anyone gay or trans. It is a shame that these people have managed to get into positions of power and think they have the rights to rule others lives, that they have the right to dictate how others must think or live. I wonder if the Christian flag will be one of the exemptions? Hugs. Scottie
Republican State Rep. Gino Bulso (R-Brentwood) has filed a bill to ban all flags in schools that aren’t the official Tennessee or United States flag. Bulso said he drafted the bill after hearing concerns from constituents about pride flags being displayed in schools.
Bulso said the country used to have a “very strong consensus” on what the nation’s values are, and these are the values he believes most parents taught in schools.
“Certainly, you know, 50 years ago we had a consensus on what marriage is; we don’t have that anymore. One-hundred years ago, we had a consensus on sexual morality; I don’t think we have that anymore. So the values that I think most parents want their children exposed to are the ones that were in existence at the time that our country was founded,” he said.
The epitome of homophobia, transphobia is legislators working on tax payer dollars to pass a law to eliminate rainbow flags 🌈 in public schools when it isn’t a problem to begin with!!!! We are citizens too!
What does your argument have to do with flying a rainbow flag??? I know you are all about discrimination…but this is a different era from when you grew up grandpa. You were the bully in school who used to beat up gay students, all the time you were secretly closeted. We know you.
Certainly, you know, 50 years ago we had a consensus on what marriage is; we don’t have that anymore. One-hundred years ago, we had a consensus on sexual morality; I don’t think we have that anymore.
I’m sure he laments that 175 years ago we could keep n*****s as slaves.
“So the values that I think most parents want their children exposed to are the ones that were in existence at the time that our country was founded.” Including slavery, women as their husbands’ property, and Native American genocide.
The values when the country was founded? No divorce for anyone without a great deal of trouble, Black people were slaves but counted as 3/5 of a person, and women couldn’t vote.
But I guess he’s not referring to the value of strict separation of church and state.
Please notice the three factors that drive republicans, racism, money, religion. In that order. Hugs. Scottie
Republicans will then begin lobbying to “reduce spending” by cutting the amount allocated for the vouchers, locking the emerging two-tier status of publicly funded education into place…
In 1776, British economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a book that laid out the principles that modern economies have operated under for centuries (with the exception of the Reagan Revolution years of 1981-2021). In addition to arguing for a strong domestic manufacturing base and high taxes on the wealthy, Smith pointed out that one of the things that most directly constitutes the wealth of a nation is its educated workforce and well-informed populace (as a result of that education).
From Thomas Jefferson creating the first tuition-free American college (the University of Virginia), to Horace Mann’s advocacy of public schools in the late 19th century, right up until 1954, this was an uncontroversial position. It’s why every developed country on Earth has a vibrant public school system and — with the exception of the US since Reagan ended free college in California — most developed countries offer free or near-free college to their citizens.
But in 1954, the US Supreme Court upset the education apple cart by declaring in their Brown v Board case that “separate but equal” schools, segregated by race, were anything but “equal.” That decision fueled two movements that live on to this day.
The first was the rightwing anti-communist movement spearheaded by the John Birch Society, which was heavily funded back then by Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch. They put up billboards across the country demanding that Americans rise up and “Impeach Earl Warren,” who was then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for requiring “communist” racial integration of our schools.
The second was the private, all-white “academy” movement that has morphed over the years into charter schools and the “school choice” movement of today. It received a major boost when the white supremacist co-founder of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, published a widely-read and influential article in 1955 explicitly calling for what he called “education vouchers” to fund all-white private schools to “solve the national crisis” the Court had created.
In 1958 when the Virginia Supreme Court went along with the US Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision and ordered that state’s schools desegregated, the governor shut down every public school in the state. Prince Edward County’s schools were still closed in 1964, when they were finally ordered to open by the courts.
Hundreds of “segregation academies” opened across the South; in Mississippi, for example, 41,000 white students left public schools to attend these academies in just the one year of 1969. Parents had to pay the tuition themselves, but they were willing to do so to avoid their children having to interact with Black, Hispanic, or Asian kids.
The turning point for the Republican Party was 1964, when President Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed and signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Shortly thereafter, one Southern Democratic politician after another changed party affiliation to the GOP so they could continue to argue against “forced integration” of public schools.
The Republican war on public schools burst into the open with the Reagan Revolution, when Education Secretary Bill Bennett oversaw a 30 percent cut in federal aid to public schools following Reagan’s promise to abolish the Department altogether. Every Republican running for president since has made a similar promise or claimed the need to end the Education Department.
Bill Bennett wasn’t shy about explaining why it was necessary to gut public schools, after the Supreme Court had ordered they must be racially integrated. Bennett wanted to privatize public education — as did Trump’s former Education Secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos — and is probably most famous for his statement that gives us a clue as to why this idea of ending public education is so persistent in the GOP:
“If you wanted to reduce crime,” Bennett said on the radio, “you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”
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Could it be that it’s all about keeping white children away from Bennett’s Black babies? Is simple racism what’s animating the GOP’s antipathy toward public education?
One clue is that the idea of ending public education in America goes back even farther than Bennett or Reagan to a single moment and a single court decision.
When I was born, in 1951, Republicans loved public schools. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower led the charge to build gleaming new public schools all across the United States: I attended one, as did perhaps a majority of my generation.
But then came the Supreme Court, with their Brown v Board decision.
In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools desegregated. The “Little Rock Nine” — nine Black children trying to desegregate Little Rock Central High School — became nationally famous when Governor Orval Faubus prevented them from entering the school that fall, provoking Eisenhower to call up federal troops to escort the children to class.
Faubus called a referendum — an election — and the good citizens of Little Rock voted 19,470 to 7,561 to shut down their entire school system rather than comply with Eisenhower’s order. That, in turn, led back to the Supreme Court, which, in the fall of 1958, ruled unanimously in Cooper v Aaronthat the Brown v Board desegregation order was, in fact, now the law of the land for public education.
In response, whites-only private schools and “academies” began springing up across the nation, many run by all-white churches. (Jerry Falwell tried, in 1966, to open an all-white school; in 1980 he became Reagan’s main advisor on merging the white supremacist faction of evangelical Christians — also triggered by Brown v Board — into the GOP.)
Thus, in 1958 the governor of Virginia closed all the public schools in racially mixed Warren County, Norfolk, and Charlottesville; Prince Edward County’s public schools remained closed for a full five years.
While that’s the foundational history of what has become the GOP’s war on public education, for most of the past 40 years Republicans have merely claimed vague libertarian principles when they try to explain what they ironically call “school choice.”
It wasn’t until Donald Trump gave them permission — and showed them how politically potent it could be — to unleash their inner racists that the GOP went public with overt white supremacy as a core value for the party.
While Critical Race Theory (CRT) was a little-known 1993 analysis of structural racism pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell taught only in law school, rightwing influencer Christopher Rufo popularized the term with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox “News” show.
From there, it echoed around the GOP for a few months before catching fire across rightwing hate radio, podcasts, and Fox. Pretty soon white supremacist militia members were showing up at school board meetings threatening members that “we know where you live.”
Republicans anxious to stoke the fears of their white racist base began inveighing against teaching CRT in public schools — even though such a thing had never happened — and passing laws so loosely worded as to bar any meaningful teaching or classroom discussion of America’s racial history.
All-white private schools funded with taxpayer dollars have become the darlings of Republicans. In most cases these schools don’t need to flout the law by declaring their segregated status: Black, Asian, and Hispanic parents most often simply aren’t interested in enrolling their children in schools that proudly proclaim they will not allow a drop of “CRT,” true American history, or real science education in their classrooms.
The issue of privatizing public schools came up in Arizona in 2018 with a statewide ballot initiative that would extend free school vouchers to every student in the state: it was defeated by voters by a 2:1 ratio. Writing for The Arizona Republic, columnist Laurie Roberts was unambiguous in her description of the state’s voters’ horror at the ballot initiative:
“Actually, they didn’t just reject it. They stoned the thing, then they tossed it into the street and ran over it. Then they backed up and ran over it again.”
Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered state, though, didn’t much care about the will of the voters. Appealing exclusively to their white racist “Christian” base, they pushed what was essentially that same proposal through the GOP-controlled state legislature and it was signed into law last year by Republican then-Governor Doug Doocey.
In giving every student in the state the ability to opt out of public education with a taxpayer-funded voucher, Doocey established a new benchmark in the war against racially integrated public schools that was matched this year by Florida, Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah.
Legislation to gut public schools and replace them with vouchers for private schools have failed in six states so far (Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota), but Republicans are not letting go. This year voucher bills were introduced in at least 24 states.
The fact that most of the nation’s public school teachers are union members has given Republicans another good reason, in their minds, to do everything possible to destroy public schools. As Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed last year, in the minds of Republicans the American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten is “the most dangerous person in the world.”
Republicans also love the fact that voucher programs mostly subsidize upper-income families, while educationally ghettoizing the children of low-income parents. Vouchers almost never cover all the costs of attending a private school, so they primarily serve as a government handout to the mostly upper-middle-class white families who already wanted to send their kids to today’s version of the segregation academies.
Once the public schools are largely dead, Republicans will begin lobbying to “reduce spending” by cutting the amount allocated for the vouchers, locking the emerging two-tier status of publicly funded education into place.
For the moment, though, private schools are a booming industry as a result of the GOP’s embrace of Friedman’s vouchers. In Florida, for example, they have virtually no rules or standards for the over-one-billion-dollars the state shovels into its private schools: while public schools must disclose their graduation rates, how they spend their money, and let anybody examine their curriculum, private academies have no such rules in many Republican-controlled states, even though they’re receiving public monies.
Many private schools across the country operate with untrained and uncertified “teachers,” have no clear standards for graduation, and refuse to teach “controversial” subjects like evolution, climate science, and the racial history of America.
Which brings us to organized religion, the other recipient of big bucks because of the school voucher movement. Schools affiliated with churches are now raking in billions every month across the US, and Republicans — who continue to push for unconstitutional things like mandatory public school prayer — pander daily to fundamentalists who don’t want their kids exposed to science or history.
Six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized this practice of shoveling taxpayer funds to churches and religious schools in their notorious Carson v Makin decision last year. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent:
[In just five short years this Court has] “shift[ed] from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.” This decison “continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”
Which is exactly what the GOP wants. As SenDem recently wrote for Daily Kos:
“Laura Ingraham claimed that ‘a lot of people are saying it’s time to defund government education or at least defund it by giving vouchers to parents.’ Fox’s Greg Gutfeld similarly declared that private school vouchers are needed because public schools are ‘a destructive system’ and described teachers as ‘KKK with summers off.’
“Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has called public schools ‘a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.’ Donald Trump declared, ‘public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs.’ And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called them taxpayer-funded indoctrination centers that need to end, which is a bit ironic since she is the poster child for the necessity of funding public education.”
Sweden has been flirting with libertarianism for a few decades and was the first developed country to offer American-style school vouchers to all kids so they could attend private, for-profit public schools. Just a month ago, their government proclaimed the experiment a disaster and is trying to figure out how to shut down the private schools and re-establish a public education system.
Public schools were the great social and economic leveler for the last century of American history; Republicans want to end that and instead advantage wealthy children over their lower-income peers, particularly those whose skin is darker than Trump’s spray tan.
Public schools (and free college) made it possible for America to produce an explosion of invention and innovation throughout the mid-20th century; now other countries are surpassing us, as the dumbing-down of our kids has become institutionalized in Red state after Red state.
And public schools gave many students their first experience of interacting with people who look different from them and grew up under different circumstances, awakening many young people to the discrimination and unfairness inherent in how America has historically treated minorities.
All of which explains why Republicans so badly want to put an end to public education in America.
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