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.

Keep Calm and Carry On

The phrase and its cognates, ironic and otherwise, embody essentially what thinking parents, educators, and concerned citizens must do now that rightwing conservatives have enlarged their stranglehold on the body politic: Keep calm and carry on. This is not the time to slacken efforts to educate not only students in school but also the general public. Centrists and left-leaning liberals have been failing on both counts, and the failure cannot be laid entirely at the feet of the right. Public education is being co-opted, but those who believe in public education as a cornerstone of American democracy have yet to mount a successful resistance.

Beginning in the 1980s the right has consistently coupled denigration of public education with the promotion of nothing less than an ideology of ignorance. As I have suggested in earlier writing, the denigration had its foundation in falsehood, the vastly flawed and deceptive A Nation At Risk report, which set forth a wholly misleading notion that the public schools were—and are—failing. This label of failure has stuck, largely because of repetition in the face of evidence to the contrary. Lies repeated often enough begin to sound like truth, regardless how preposterous. A great many educators, parents, and members of the public, including elected officials, who ought to know better have been lured into the lie and subsequent actions to "fix" the public schools, all of which have resulted in the current state of chaos.

Maintenance of democracy depends on an educated public, and so it follows that it is necessary in order to move the United States toward its current governance status as a corporate oligarchy that the right, those duped by or in the pay of the oligarchs, must foster an ideology of ignorance. Rejection of science—climate change, evolution—is a manifestation. Mass propaganda, often touted as legitimate news, lifts a page from the playbook of every anti-democratic movement in history. Lie to people using words they want to hear and they will do the oligarchs' bidding, no matter how contrary it may be to their self-interest. 

The goal of the ideology of ignorance ultimately is to destroy public education, to sufficiently undermine the people's faith in the people's schools that they will eagerly embrace a balkanized system that resegregates the schools and ensures that socioeconomic status will continue to be the basic determinant of educational success or failure. Increasing wealth disparity in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is maintained in part by ensuring that schools continue to sort rather than educate, a process that is strengthened by the overuse and misuse of standardized tests. Such testing does not, and never will, improve education. It does, however, strengthen a class system of haves and have nots in which "have not" means "never will have."

What to do? Keep calm and carry on is a start, but it's not enough. Here are a couple of ideas. First, let's stop teaching to the test. It merely creates students who are good at taking tests but haven't really learned anything except to hate school. Everyone is better served by a rich curriculum from which satisfactory test scores are a natural outcome. Teaching a rich curriculum is even more essential in the face of limited resources caused by politicians siphoning off public funds to line the corporate pockets of test purveyors and charter school managers, both of which have demonstrably abused the public trust.

Second, let's work harder to educate our citizenry about the necessity for public education that raises people up rather than keeping them down. Public schools should strive to equalize opportunity, not merely provide a source of cheap labor for the corporate grist mills. The absence of this truly public education effort perpetuates the ideology of ignorance and ensures the dominance of the corporate oligarchy as effectively as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and big-money political campaigns.

It's all well and good to sit back with the view that the oligarchs have sown the seeds of their own destruction, and eventually the downtrodden will rise up, a la the French Revolution, and start whacking off a few of the economic aristocrats' heads. (Ironically, the right has ensured through lax gun laws that the downtrodden will be well armed.) But I for one would rather we prove that education, which we claim can be a powerful force for democracy, actually can be used to that end.

The Tea Party and Civic Education

Make no mistake: The Tea Party is not Republican. It is a separate, anti-democratic, anarchist faction. The characterization is mine, although at least the first part is broadly shared. According to a Pew Research study*, “47% of the public says they think of the Tea Party movement as separate and independent from the Republican Party, while somewhat fewer (38%) say it is a part of the Republican Party, and 14% do not offer an opinion.” Even among the rank and file, “more Republicans view the Tea Party as a separate movement from the GOP (51%) than as part of the Republican Party (32%).”

In terms of civic education, the Tea Party provides examples of how radicalism can derail democracy. Tea Party initiatives deform our otherwise nearly universal understanding of democratic governance for the common good. Some of this faction’s actions undermine the ideal of the common school as an entity, and most Tea Party initiatives contribute to students’ misunderstandings and confusion about how American democracy is supposed to work. But there are some useful lessons to be learned in all of this.

Every political party is composed of an informal coalition of relatively likeminded individuals and groups. However, the coalition of the Tea Party and the Republican Party more closely resembles the type of coalition found in parliamentary democracies. Governing parliamentary coalitions often are composed of parties that, under other circumstances, would not share the same room. If the Republican Party, as some of its members aver, is operating from a “big tent” philosophy, then the Tea Party is setting fire to its corner of the canvas.

As bad examples go, the recent cliffhanger over government funding was a doozy. Tea Party radicals essentially held the Republican Party, the federal government, and, by extension, the American people hostage to the point of forcing a government shutdown in an attempt to defund what amounted to a small portion of the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare). In so doing, Tea Partiers cost U.S. citizens and businesses billions ($24 billion according to Time), rather ironic considering the Tea Party platform is all about decreasing taxes, saving people money, and saving people from “big government.”

The government shutdown, any defensive rhetoric to the contrary, was wholly driven by this radical faction. Consequently, support for the Tea Party has declined. However, because the Republican Party has embraced, at least putatively, its radical rightwing brothers and sisters, the GOP has been tarred with the same brush. This does not bode well for midterm elections, where Republicans are likely to face stiff opposition in all but the most ardently conservative districts.

A couple of civics lessons in this national debacle should not be lost. (It was a debacle, though it could have been a greater one—with even more dire international consequences—had not a last-minute deal been brokered.) First, obstruction is not governance. The exercise of democratic governance requires finding common ground in pursuit of the common good, not clinging obstinately to an ideology with citizens, nation, and world be damned. Second, holding the nation hostage in an attempt to force on everyone the faction’s narrow ideology ultimately is a counterproductive strategy. In our democracy, fortunately, wiser, or at least more moderate, heads eventually prevail; and radicalism harms not only the larger society, and often the people in support of radicalism, but also the radical cause itself.

In Federalist No. 10, James Madison addresses the dangers of factions. Now might be a good time for students both young and old to read or reread this brief.

While conventional wisdom is that the Republican coalition cannot succeed without pandering to the Tea Party faction, it might also be a good time for thinking conservatives to rethink that position. By cutting loose the Tea Party, mainstream Republicanism might be revived by drawing back into their “big tent” those moderates who have defected rather than be held hostage by radicalism. This would not be a bad thing. It might well provide a lesson in how to reposition a party using reason in place of ideology.

* “Tea Party’s Image Turns More Negative,” Pew Research, October 16, 2013.