Flooding the School Zone
The notion of “flooding the zone” is much in vogue these days.
In my experience the phrase first arose in football, meaning to exploit zone coverage in the secondary by “flooding” a zone with receivers.
More recently it has been used in media and politics. Steve Bannon infamously (and inelegantly) said,“The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” It is hard to argue. The media is certainly flooded with shit.
Most recently the tactic has been ascribed to Donald Trump, whose torrid stream of executive orders and proclamations surely meets Bannon’s crude definition. The next four years, at least, will bring an unprecedented flood of bad acts to occupy media and public attention.
As with literal or metaphorical floods, true damage is obscured until the muddy waters recede. There is much to anticipate with dread, but I have no greater fear than the insidious shifts in education and the long-term, perhaps irreversible effects those shifts will have.
The conservative campaign against public education has many tentacles, each intertwined with the other.
One intent - and result - is an erosion of public support, political and funding, for public education. As is too often true in recent decades, especially post-Reagan, Republicans have appealed to self-interest over common good. People have been encouraged toward school choice as an inalienable right - especially seductive as it capitalizes on the natural impulse to care for and protect one’s own children.
The foundational idea of public education as a common preparation for citizenship and a de facto expression of equality and equity has been shredded. This erosion has been accelerated by unfair and inaccurate demonization of teachers, who are among the bulwarks against the many social and emotional storms battering our children.
This has allowed for an often profitable proliferation of charter schools which, on balance, do no better than the public schools they replace or abrade, despite glossy promises. The school choice movement has metastasized into the parental control era. Now, not only do you have a right - obligation - to choose a school for your child, you have the right/obligation to determine what they learn; what books they read (or not), what science to learn (as though there are different sciences!), and what version of history to learn, particularly if you are ideologically persuaded to reject or reinterpret the truth.
Another intent, achieved through choice and the malignant resegregation of America’s neighborhoods, has been the wholesale dis-integration of schools, particularly in urban neighborhoods. Nearly all-white and nearly all-minority schools are now the rule, not the exception. The conservative appetite for distancing from “the other” is insatiable. Our schools are now as segregated and unequal as before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Vouchers are the tentacle de jour, spreading through state legislatures like an airborne virus. Few have done as well as my friend and fellow blogger, Jan Resseger, in documenting the voucher flu. I encourage you to subscribe to her blog and read her catalogue of posts if you wish to understand the full threat.
Voucher schemes seduce voters and parents through the mechanisms described above, but are even more dangerous to civil society than merely piercing holes in social cohesion, neighborhoods, and a common civic vocabulary. They are designed to advance de facto Christian nationalism. As the Washington Post reported (before giving up all journalistic integrity), more than 90% of school vouchers are used to attend religious schools, especially, but not all, Catholic schools. The vouchers are useless for poor families to attend secular private schools, as the tuitions are still out of reach, but they are a lovely subsidy for wealthier parents. Many vouchers are used for brain-numbing evangelical schools, where the curriculum is the Bible. Among other unconstitutional offenses, LGTBQ students and teachers are not welcome, despite the indirect public funding. As to religion and vouchers, a recent New Yorker article brilliantly exposes the rancid underbelly of the movement’s origins.
If these matters are litigated, we have a Supreme Court that is essentially a Catholic institution, unlikely to see Christianizing of schools or society as a bad thing.
All of this together may doom our democratic republic. Perpetuation of our complex and elegant system of government is predicated on both knowledge of and commitment to its precepts. One of the stabilizing forces for most of our history, particularly since the progressive bloom in the 1890s and early 20th century, has been nearly universal secular public education. That ship is foundering.
The emerging splintered and inequitable system is ripe for exploitation. As is true in the “shit” flooding the media zone, schools no longer stipulate to the same set of facts or bodies of information. Students are being, and will increasingly be, socialized into whatever world view their low-information parents or manipulative think tanks choose for them.
There is the possibility that Democrats can regain control of one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterms. That may stanch the bleeding. But without a concerted effort by local, state and federal actors, the essential core of the public education system will be hollowed.
If the pipeline of future voters is populated with the products of ideological charter schools, following the playbook of Hillsdale conservatives, or fundamentalist and Catholic schools bathing children in religious doctrine, our secular democratic experiment will end with a whimper.
It is that urgent, but lost in the flood.