The People Who Want to Close Down Your Neighborhood School

I guess if literature doesn’t include a stork and a half-pint preacher promising eternal damnation it’s not worth having.

So-called culture wars are raging in school districts large and small from coast-to-coast. 

Legislatures and governors are dictating what schools shouldn’t teach, citing a supposedly serious-as-a-heart-attack crisis in the classroom where students are indoctrinated to hate themselves and not hate LGBTQ people.

Critical Race Theory is presented as a disease infecting every level of education. The “thinking” is that teaching about racism and its role in our society will inevitably lead to some students feeling victimized. Or that name-calling will suddenly be a thing in elementary schools.

Nowhere are they more upset about this than Texas, where the Legislature banned the teaching of CRT, despite not being able to define it. As far as the Austin lawmakers were concerned, any course material capable of encouraging questions about the nation’s past was to be jettisoned.

Governor Greg Abbott was so upset about the possibility of students learning about Texas initially refusing to free the slaves that he  directed a special session of the Legislature to ban it again.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick wants to eliminate tenured positions at institutions of higher learning in Texas based on the premise that this sort of indoctrination must be stamped out.

Not to be outdone, Florida is combing public school textbooks looking for hidden code making young minds susceptible to the dreaded CRT. And in the Sunshine State, they know what they are looking for, namely, another set of deadly initials, SEL.

Books with lessons designed to foment discussions about "social and emotional competence," i.e., helping “children develop emotional literacy when it comes to their feelings and other people’s” are the gateway drug here.

Judd Legum’s Popular Information newsletter obtained some of the 26 math books rejected as unsuitable by Florida and went hunting for offending passages:

• One rejected textbook, Florida Reveal Math Grade 1, includes a series of questions under the heading “Math is… Mindset.” These questions include: “How can you show that you value the ideas of others?” and “What helps you understand your partner’s ideas?”...

• …Florida Reveal Math Grade 5, which was also rejected, uses similar prompts to encourage students to think critically about how they work with others in the classroom setting. “When we do math, we listen to the arguments of others and think about what makes sense and what doesn’t,” the book states in the introduction. …

• …Florida's decision to reject several high school math textbooks is especially puzzling. Popular Information obtained a digital copy of Functions Modeling Change, one of five precalculus books that were rejected by Florida for the inclusion of prohibited topics. 

• Functions Modeling Change contains 10 mentions of "race" but all are related to running and biking. There is no discussion of racism and no math problems that deal with racial issues. There is also no discussion of emotions, teamwork, conflict resolution, or anything else associated with SEL. Instead, it is full of quadratic functions, trigonometry, and parametric equations. Another rejected precalculus book, Precalculus with Limits, has very similar content. So why were these textbooks rejected?

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' Communications Director, Christina Pushaw, was insistent about the rejected math textbooks including CRT.

Holy Cow! Two plus two equals white supremacy? How did they manage to decode that message, clearly planted by Black Lives Matter or Antifa?

Hunter at Daily Kos tells it like it is:

• Communism! It's all communism! The Republican Party has been completely retooled around the idea that nobody should ever "disagree respectfully." If you disagree with someone you should tell them to take off their mask, you should cough in their face, you should make big ol' banners that insinuate swear words to bash the president you disagree with, you should get them fired, you should ban the books they write, and you should declare that everyone except for you is a pedophile!

• Do you think even for a moment Florida Republicans are going to let a first-grade math textbook through that encourages kids to "disagree respectfully" or "value ideas from others" when learning how to work in groups? Truly, communism is afoot in our public schools. This is yet another reason, Republicans will insist, why parents need to be given vouchers so that they can go to private Republican schools where they can learn how to not value ideas from others and not disagree respectfully.

• Oh, and also curiously enough, both of those examples are illustrated with drawings that feature A Black Person. Coincidence? Hard to say, but it became a theme in Popular Information's examples of theoretically objectionable content. Other examples include short profiles of non-white mathematicians; a genetics-themed math problem that notes Black Americans are far more at risk of sickle cell anemia than white Americans; and another brief example from a high school textbook noting that "stereotyping" can lead to faulty "inductive reasoning" versus "deductive reasoning," which may have been objected to either because it uses the word "prejudice" or may have been nixed because of Republican opposition to teaching basic critical thinking skills. It’s hard to say.

One thing you need to remember about all these high and mighty Generals in the Culture Wars is that they are all grifters. The pathways of the mind needed to justify theft aren’t that far from those needed to recite insanely ridiculous political claims.

The Tallahassee Democrat, the daily newspaper of record in Florida’s capitol, did some digging.

• Historically, when Florida school districts reevaluate which math instructional materials they will use, they have had more than one publisher to choose from.

• Now, the only publisher approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education for K-5 mathematics is Accelerate Learning, a company out of Houston, Texas.

• “In the subject area as large as mathematics for grades K through five, it is unusual for there only to be one publisher to choose from," said Billy Epting, assistant superintendent for academic services for Leon County Schools.

To be clear, not all the approved textbooks for Florida’s schools were published by Accelerate Learning. But the ones published by other companies were the exceptions to the rule.

Golly, gee! What’s so great about Accelerate Learning, you might ask?

• The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm, acquired Accelerate Learning on Dec. 20, 2018, according to the firm's website.

• During that time, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin was the co-CEO of the firm. After 25 years with the company, Youngkin resigned in 2020 to run for office in Virginia. 

• The first thing Youngkin did as governor of Virginia was sign an executive order to "end the use of inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory, and restoring excellence in K-12 public education in the commonwealth," a measure that's comparable to DeSantis' "Stop WOKE Act."

Hmmm… Accelerate doesn’t appear to be a publishing house for white supremacists; they’ve got all the usual feel good promises about diversity on their website.

Wait a minute. Didn’t Youngkin run for Governor of Virginia on a platform promising to ban CRT? Why, yes, yes he did.

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Item number two on the Republican moral panic hit list for 2022 is the alleged presence of LGBTQ “pornography” in school libraries, along with just about any book on sexual development. I guess if literature doesn’t include a stork and a half-pint preacher promising eternal damnation it’s not worth having.

Texas, of course, is the trend setter here, with Gov. Abbott ordering the state’s education officials to investigate whether teachers or librarians should be prosecuted for providing smut to kids in the form of books that feature characters who aren’t having straight sex.

PEN America, the non-profit organization working to protect freedom of expression, found that 1,145 books were targeted by rightwing politicians and activists over the past nine months, including the work of the Nobel prize laureate Toni Morrison.

From the Guardian:

• The censorship has frequently been pushed by conservative groups linked to deep-pocketed rightwing donors. Groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have been instrumental in book-banning attempts in the US, often presenting themselves as small, “grassroots” efforts, while in reality they have links to prominent, wealthy Republicans.

• There is, however, some evidence that the efforts to censor literature that focuses on race and LGBTQ issues are having the opposite effect.

• “Banned book clubs”, where children and young adults meet to read and discuss titles that have been censored by school districts, have sprung up across America, while sales of the book Maus, a Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, soared in January after it was banned by a Tennessee school board.

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This is about more than getting selected voters angry enough to vote for Republicans. There is a larger goal in play, namely eroding public trust in one of the key institutions of democracy.

Christopher Hooks gets it right in an essay at Texas Monthly:

• The moral panic is also useful if your goal is to weaken public education in favor of parochial and other private schools. Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, has helped kick-start and nurture the fight over CRT and school “pornography” in the past several years. In early April, he spoke at Hillsdale College, in Michigan, and outlined a teleology of his crusade. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from the position of universal public school distrust,” he said. “In order for people to take significant action, you have to make them feel like they have something at stake.” Offering parents a taxpayer-funded choice among public and private schools has been a hard sell, in Texas and elsewhere. Perhaps calling school librarians pedophiles will do the trick….

• …The problem is not what information kids get. That cat’s out of the bag. It’s how we strengthen kids’ ability to sort through and contextualize the avalanche of information—good, bad, and weird—that they’re getting, not only about sex but about history and politics and culture. Right now, the debate we’re having is whether schools should even be allowed to talk about those topics. 

The school reform era inclusive of the past few decades was, as all these episodes have been, triggered by fears of students (and hence the workforce) falling behind the curve in the race to make the country a leader. 

I personally remember the panic following the Russian launch of the Sputnik satellite. A couple years later we were all subjected to “New Math '' course material, complete with hastily mimeo’d texts and worksheets. The teachers didn’t understand what they were teaching and neither did we. (But I loved that freshly mimeo’d aroma…)

The most recent era of reform is drawing to a close, as the primary “cures” for what ailed education –standardized testing and school choice – hadn’t worked out as expected. (Each had some value, just not in the results.)

The ideological divide over education now breaks down to public schools vs vouchers. Weaken public education and it’s a two-fer for reactionaries; a powerful activist union is broken and the “market” for hustlers selling strip mall classrooms is opened wide(r).

The righties would have people believe that there’s more indoctrination than paste eating going on in primary grades and daily sex orgies sandwiched in between Marxist economic theory at higher levels. And that the only way to a “free” America lies with tamping down public education so that it only serves to keep the underclasses occupied.

Kathryn Joyce, writing at New Republic about the denigration of public education in Florida, quotes education journalist Jennifer Berkshire, co-author of the recent book A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door:

•  “On one hand, they keep imposing new regulations on their public system. But on the other hand, they’re moving more and more kids into a completely unregulated school choice system where there’s no accountability at all.” What it amounts to, she explained, is “a completely hands-off attitude” toward children’s education—parents are considered the regulators of privatized options, and there is a clear goal “to move as many kids out of the public system as possible...”

• … no matter who Republicans nominate in 2024, their campaign will focus heavily on fighting public education. While Florida and Jeb Bush’s coalition may have paved the way for privatization through incremental steps, such as high-stakes testing, those policies have now served their purpose, and Republicans are crafting something new. “In all the elections coming up, whether it’s CRT, school district equity plans, this craziness about ‘Marxist indoctrination,’ or the embrace of this very radical understanding of parents’ rights,” Berkshire argued, “you’re going to have candidates up and down the ballot running against public education as an institution…”

• …The glimmers are already there: in school board meetings around the country that devolve into shouting, threats, and physical fights; in the right-wing think tank “toolkits” training parents to confront local school board members; in the recent suggestion from one Pennsylvania candidate that parents should “forget going into these school boards bringing data.… I’m going in with 20 strong men.”

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For regular updates on the privatization agenda in education, I recommend Thomas Ultican’s writings.

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Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com