Public Education - An Endangered Species

Last week Maria Montessori Academy, a public charter school in Ogden, Utah, offered parents a chance to “opt out” of Black History Month activities.  Chastened by a flood of backlash, including unflattering national attention, the Academy reversed course over the weekend.

Despite the reversal, this incident revealed what looms as a great threat to our democratic republic.

Alarmist?   I think not.  While not as acutely troubling as the January 6 insurrection, the threat represented by this small news story is arguably more serious - much more serious.

Roiling beneath the generally good news of the Biden/Harris victory and the slim Democratic majorities in Congress, is a very dangerous backlash in local and state governments.  Wyoming censured the conservative Representative Liz Cheney, R-WY.  The Arizona legislature introduced a bill allowing the majority Republican body to arbitrarily throw out the presidential votes of citizens and award electors to the candidate of their  own choosing.  Other states are introducing voter suppression laws - at least 106 bills in 2021, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

These are just a few symptoms of the dangers of federalism, beginning of course with the curse of the Electoral College, which disfigures the notion of representative democracy every four years.  Consider the absurdity of 60 million citizens in California and New York, who preferred Biden to Trump by vast majorities, watching in fear as results were counted in Nevada - for one example.  Changing the Electoral College’s glaring disenfranchisement of the majority would take a Constitutional Amendment ratified by 3/4 of the states.  55% of state legislatures are in Republican control so “a snowball’s chance in hell” is apt characterization of the odds of that happening.

So what has this to do with Black History in Utah?  Everything.

 Alongside voter suppression bills, voucher proposals are popping up like poisonous mushrooms all over the national landscape.  Many of them, like HB20 in New Hampshire, direct public funds to any school, homeschool or slapdash idea purporting to be “education.”  Excellent blogger Jan Resseger offers a comprehensive summary in her February 8 post.

An acute constitutional concern is the funding of religious schools with public dollars.  The courts thus far are quite tolerant of this seemingly obvious blurring of the “separation clause” and, as more cases wind their way to our very Christian Supreme Court, it seems that public subsidy of Jesus is here to stay.   These schools are also unaccountable and, too often, just all-around horrid.  While it would not be justifiable in any case, these schemes do nothing to improve outcomes - an uncomfortable point for me to make, since “outcomes” are nonsense anyway.  

An equally dire concern is that vouchers and all other iterations of school choice divert resources from already cash-strapped public systems.  Many, I among the many, believe these schemes are part of an oligarch-supported “reform” campaign aimed at the gradual privatization of education.  The evidence for this belief is hiding in plain sight as detailed in this superb Washington Post article.

Progressive educators, particularly as inspired by John Dewey, recognize the singular role education plays in preparation for engaged citizenship.  (My ambivalence about a career in a private school, albeit a very progressive one, is acknowledged, but somewhat beside the point, as most private schools take no public funds and meet high accreditation standards.) 

Engaged citizenship requires a reasonably unified understanding of the world we live in.  I don’t expect a rigid national curriculum.  That has its own dangers, as does the meddling of state and local schools boards who often initiate or fend off assaults on evolution. State and local boards often approve history curricula that whitewash the truth - or make learning Black history an “option” so that young minds might be protected from all that reverse-racist political correctness.

With a nation deeply divided, our historic public education system offers perhaps the only path out.  The possibilities of integration, if we are bold enough to press for them, can ease bigotry through familiarity.  But school choice and vouchers allow citizens to avoid “the other” and stiffen their resistance to diversity and inclusion.  

We will never have powerful democratic insistence on facing climate change if the rising generations have wildly differing understandings of science.

We will never address social injustice with national unity if parents can opt out of all truths they find uncomfortable.

If schools imbue students with very different versions of our past they will have very different visions for our future.

We are much closer to losing our public education system than most folks recognize.  

And once it is lost we will never get it back.