Public Schools Next School Year: A World to Win

Editors Note: With the release of Project 2025 the issues presented in this article of 1 year ago are more relevant than ever.

The old school year ended this spring, centered once again on school shootings. In response to public demands to control assault rifles, many state governments have turned instead to controlling the free speech of teachers, LGBTQ people, African Americans and all marginalized groups.

Rising to oppose this fascism is the power of the youth, who are pushing forward for a different vision of America. It’s a vision that is multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural, multireligious. It’s everything for everybody. This is a battle for democracy and to compel government to meet the interests of people, not corporations.

An unprecedented movement in defense of public schools is rising as a political force, one that is principally led by new generations of young people who are not shy about attacking the status quo. In Chicago, a teacher, Brandon Johnson, was elected mayor on a program of inclusion that openly challenged the supremacy of money over people in elections.

After the Nashville school shooting in late March, 7,000 students walked out of school in the March for Our Lives. One slogan: “You ban books; dead kids can’t read.” Another: “You ban books. You ban drag. Kids are still in body bags.” This protest led to large-scale student rebellions in the South and across the country in open defiance of these bans.

As a new school year begins, public education in the United States is under a massive, coordinated attack from many directions. School issues – from student loans to public safety and more – are becoming central to both the Democratic and Republican parties’ ability to address people whose lives are politically and economically marginalized. These issues will be critical in the 2024 election.

“Death by a thousand cuts” for public schools is well organized, involving:  banning books, censuring teachers, restricting free speech, attacks on LGBTQ+ and gender issues, banning Black History, attacking science, and prohibiting social-emotional learning and culturally responsive teaching. By eliminating the right to share ideas and think critically and by using the politics of fear and anger to demand conformity instead of inquiry, students are rendered less able to participate in struggles over school shootings, abortion and mental health.

These attacks are used as a cover for the real agenda: abolishing the control of the public over every part of the government. Public schools are one of the few branches of government that the people can claim as their own. We claim them because we own them together as the public. Schools are public goods. Public goods are the foundation for democracy. Public schools are an important front in this national campaign to systematically attack and discredit every form of government.

Some of the major organizers of this onslaught are the Bradley Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Koch Foundation. These groups actively work to control public opinion and pass what must be recognized as fascist laws. Through them, capitalism and billionaires try to control politics. Their open goal is to destroy what fascists call “the administrative state.” That means every form of government that spends money on people, rather than exclusively for the benefit of corporations, billionaires and finance.

These are precisely same groups that spend dark money to organize voter suppression, election denial, anti-abortion legislation and attacks on public schools. They demonstrate their true concern for children by loudly supporting the repeal of child labor laws across the country. After all, the United States is the only country that has not signed the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

Vouchers

School vouchers are a major weapon today. So far this year voucher bills have been considered by at least 24 states. Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and Florida passed them. Voucher expansion bills have failed in at least six states: Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota.

The right-wing groups that organize such attacks like to portray themselves as a rising movement, but in reality far more people rose to oppose them.

The public has long been opposed to vouchers, so these laws are re-christened “back-pack funding” and “money that follows the student.” Vouchers give parents a check that they can use to spend on their children’s education in private, religious or public schools. Vouchers divert massive amounts of money from already fragile public schools. Vouchers typically drain money from underfunded rural schools and redistribute it to wealthy counties.

The Cato Institute wrote in 1997, “Vouchers Are the Way to Separate School and State: “Like most other conservatives and libertarians, we see vouchers as a major step toward the complete privatization of schooling. In fact, after careful study, we have come to the conclusion that they are the only way to dismantle the current socialist regime.”

Cato Institute – Policy Analysis – Vouchers and Educational Freedom: A Debate

Vouchers were first used in Virginia to fund private segregated schools after the Supreme Court required school desegregation in the 1950s. Today, most voucher funds go to students who are already in private and religious schools, students who have never been in public schools at all. Vouchers are subsidies to the 1%.

Research shows that students who use vouchers to leave public schools have some of the largest achievement drops ever measured. In Louisiana and Ohio, the achievement loss after they established voucher programs was almost twice the loss these states suffered under the impact of the pandemic.

Forty percent of schools funded by vouchers close their doors within a couple of years. Kids in those schools flee them at about a rate of 20 percent per year. Why? The value of a government voucher for high school in Washington, D.C. in 2016-2017 was $12,679, while tuition at Washington’s elite private schools exceeded $40,000 a year. Vouchers for the poor do not mean a quality education.

The typical school that is funded by vouchers is a pop-up with uncredentialed teachers. It is often located in a mall where a few students are forced to study a canned online curriculum on Chromebook™ devices. These schools often just take the money and run.

Unlike public schools, voucher-funded private schools are allowed to teach a religious curriculum. Likewise, the private schools are allowed to discriminate and ban gay and trans students and teachers–and many of them do. Public funding, private management – that’s American-style privatization whether it is applied to water, prisons or schools.

The battle for democracy

The majority of Americans supports the right to abortion. It opposes banning books that discuss race and critique U.S. history and it opposes vouchers.

The Tennessee student rebellion triggered a series of massive student walkouts and protests, especially in Florida. Its governor forced bills through the Legislature designed to remove a woman’s’ right to bodily autonomy and the right of LGBTQ students – and the general public – to its own history

One week after the Nashville walkout, Florida students walked out of 300 schools in protest. Their walkout2learn.org site includes many links. It states that “This is an education, an activation, and a revolution.”

In teach-ins, students presented 5-to-10 minute “banned history lessons” including that of Marsha P. Johnson, a pioneering Black LGBTQ activist, and that of the Black national anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Protesters pledged online never to vote for people who don’t support student rights.

On May 3, the following week, students and educators across the country participated in the Freedom to Learn National Day of Action. They called for a national resistance:

“Join us for a National Day of Action to defend the truth and to protect the freedom to learn. Now is the time to work to build a broad coalition of people to strengthen our democracy and our values of equity, inclusion, and social justice. Through collective actions across the country, we will resist restrictions on the freedom to learn, fight the right’s anti-woke disinformation campaigns, and demonstrate majoritarian support for equity in our schools, campuses, and workplace.”

Thousands of people from around the world signed the Freedom to Learn Open Letter:

“Punishing literacy, criminalizing “divisive concepts,” and discrediting those who are regarded as dangerous have all been tools of racial domination in the United States and elsewhere.”

“We call for global resistance to all efforts to destroy the vital tools that help us to imagine and create more equitable and inclusive futures for us all.”

History shows that the battle for democracy is essential and central in every revolution. This coming school year that battle will become ever more critical for public education. Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones of Nashville described the larger context:

“We come here to say that the South will rise anew. We represent a new South, a new South that is rising, and that if we can transform the South, we can transform this nation. If we can get commonsense gun laws passed in the South, we can get them passed in this nation. … And so we hope that the national media will lift up what’s happening in the South, because our people are pushing forward a new vision.”