Regressive Policy, Brutal Honesty

Virulently regressive, rightwing education policy is attempting to turn back the clock, handicapping all of our children, whose lives move forward not backward.

In American society writ large, recent events involving unarmed black citizens confronted, in some cases without cause, by white police officers that have ended in the gun deaths of the black citizens have turned a national spotlight on institutionalized racism. The election of a black president, far from signaling a post-racist era, has revealed deep and pervasive racism at all levels of society. At the very top, it has exposed the naked, deep-seated racism inherent in American conservatism, particularly among its extreme elements. For example, the association between the Ku Klux Klan and Tea Party radicals has become fixed in American culture, and the Republican Party has not distanced itself from its most regressive bedfellows. Indeed, the opposite often has been the case. In true trickle-down fashion, this regressive radicalism is reflected at state and local levels in increasing blatant ways.

Embedded racist, anti-intellectual, anti-democratic policies in schools are leaving the true public out of public education. Textbook dishonesty is approved policy in states such as Texas, where Moses has been morphed into a Founding Father and the Texas Board of Education has tried to pretend slavery never happened. While Texas frequently is the most egregious example of dishonest education, ideologically driven curricula that depart from fact are common is many states in which rightwing conservatives exert power over education policy. Democratic principles, civic education, science, and racial equality are among the radical taboos.

The brutality of the war being waged in American public education must be met with brutal honesty by educators, parents, and thinking citizens if there is to be any hope of reclaiming American democracy. Blatant, brutal racist actions in recent weeks have turned back the clock on race relations to the civil rights era of the 1960s, and people are responding now as they did then by taking to the streets. A similar activism is now needed to preserve public education, and the pro-education activists will need to be prepared to combat a brutal, no-holds-barred regressive response.

Thoreau reminds us: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Nowhere is this more true than in public education, where we all must mount a vigorous campaign to reclaim our schools for the children they serve, rather than the ideologues who would pervert the course of education for their own selfish ends.