Home School Nation

August 29, 2023 1:46 PM

How the GOP and Christian millionaires plan to syphon billions of dollars from public schools
Florida is just the start.
posted by Artw (32 comments total)

this is so horrifying.

I'm not done reading yet but where is the mention of Children's Rights?

and this is most telling (and terrifying):

"Membership in the organization — [Ziklag] — is restricted to people with a net worth of at least $25 million"

wow, so the mega-wealthy are just turning the screws to raise a nation of obedience, ignorant cogs, to fight their wars, produce and serve their good. and of course, those with uteruses to churn out as many (white) babies for Jesus, as possible. this is a money-grab dressed up as a culture war. (and a grab to return to the 'good old days' when women and uppity POC knew their places and stayed there.)

/am I ranting?
posted by supermedusa at 2:17 PM on August 29, 2023 [20 favorites]

Keep a close eye on your local school boards - these degenerates are spreading and must be stomped out.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 2:23 PM on August 29, 2023 [30 favorites]

"Keep a close eye on your local school boards - these degenerates are spreading and must be stomped out."
Local school board? We have one as State Education Commissioner here in New Hampshire, Frank Edelblut. He's friendly, smiling, faux centrist Gov. Chris Sununu's sop to the far right wing of the NH-GQP (which has also been infiltrated by Free State Project nutbags).
posted by AJScease at 2:43 PM on August 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

back in the 80s I didn't have the life perspective to see that Steve Jackson's Illuminati was more of a simulation than a game.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:43 PM on August 29, 2023 [16 favorites]

I am really not following the math here: "Ziklag’s education committee estimated in one document, the public education system could lose about $238 billion a year," from vouchers for private and homeschooling. There were something like a million and a half kids being homeschooled pre-pandemic, with a little over four and a half million in private school. (edited to add, what follows assumes that number doubles because yay vouchers) That'd be...what, somewhere under $20k per student, unless I've got a decimal very wrong. We can't manage to provide universal pediatric healthcare, free lunches, or the expanded child tax credit, but they think they government's going to cut you a $20k check to homeschool? Like that wouldn't immediately be seen as a massive entitlement program that had to be cut and cut and cut?

None of this ever makes any sense to me. What's the goal? When you get a secretive group of millionaires together, surely there's a money-making goal, and it can't just be, I dunno, a private-equity version of Abeka to cash in on bible curricula.
posted by mittens at 2:57 PM on August 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

> but they think they government's going to cut you a $20k check to homeschool?

they want to hurt us much more than help themselves
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:59 PM on August 29, 2023 [32 favorites]

I live and work near the Idaho panhandle and I'm watching this happen in real time. I have a coworker who is leaving work early today to go to a recall vote for her local schoolboard that has been usurped by this cult. She is not happy about it because she has deep ties in the district and knows may teachers and admins who have resigned over the hiring of a district superintendent who had no educational background, has been bounced out of and sued by several districts on his way to this district, but who has the backing of these far right evangelical crusaders.
She showed me a screenshot of a flyer that was placed on all of the cars at a local catholic church last sunday and it totally read like a tweet from TFG with a lot of MAGA calls to action, FAKE this and that, and painting the opposing board members, mostly career community members, as LGBTQ+ LEFTISTS who want to HARM your children!
It's pretty scary crazy, but the audience is low information rural farm folk who think this is politics as usual these days and they'll likely either fall in line or pull their kids from the district and "home school".
I hope some sensible people prevail at the vote tonight. Strange times indeed.
posted by OHenryPacey at 2:59 PM on August 29, 2023 [40 favorites]

The United States needs a Solution to the Billionaire Question.
posted by smcdow at 3:02 PM on August 29, 2023 [26 favorites]

France came up with a pretty good one a couple centuries back...
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:14 PM on August 29, 2023 [39 favorites]

France came up with a pretty good one a couple centuries back...

What are you some kind of Anti-Richite

I bet you hate people just for the color of their money
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 3:34 PM on August 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

This fight is over and has been for a while now, the future is the government giving cash to parents to spend at the ideological institution of their choice. It's a dumb idea in the long term, but unless you're the unicorn heterosexual, white, Christian origin nuclear family that votes Democratic but lives in a majority white, high property tax neighborhood, you are down on public schools. Anyone else, from blue haired vegan lesbian mommas to evangelicals who believe dinosaurs are Satan's lie, is at least a doubter and at most a hater.

It's really the one thing that brings Americans together that's not hating the doctor.
posted by kingdead at 4:54 PM on August 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon brings up an important and depressing point: amongst young parents of my acquaintance (mid to late 30s), vanishingly few intend to put their children in public school when the time comes. This is partly out of legitimate terror that they'll be fucking murdered in their fucking classrooms (personally not sure private schools are going to be significantly safer at this point, but I'm obviously not going to bring that up to their faces because, FUCK). But I'll be real, that's not the main reason they're citing when they guiltily bring up the subject hoping I, a fellow bleeding-heart, will somehow absolve them for this (extremely personal and complicated, but decidedly un-lefty) decision.

I get it on a certain level--the world sucks and is terrifying, and they're responding to the moral imperative of protecting their kids in the best way they can come up with. But this also means that the very people we desperately need on school boards, in PTA meetings, raising hell at town halls, etc.--engaged, educated, middle-class (frequently white) parents with the social standing and self-confidence to demand resources and consideration for public schools--are now totally out of the picture in 90% of districts, because the hellscape conjured into existence by the people in TFA has finally driven them out. The latter know this of course, which is why they're finally moving in for the kill.
posted by peakes at 5:47 PM on August 29, 2023 [22 favorites]

This is terrifying to me, actually. Maybe the only thing I'm a zealot about is fully funded, secular, comprehensive public education. It is the glue of society, the most effective means of individual empowerment we have, and the primary mechanism for transmitting our society and culture into the future, so that subsequent generations may benefit from our successes and failures alike; you know: what we've learned. Education is how society pays it all forward, but this mass dumbing down is how we truly forget history, how we collectively unlearn fundamentally important lessons learned only through a lot of suffering, how we lose our wisdom and our sense of ourselves, and it's how a society falls apart.

I don't have much to add to the discussion other than sharing that fear, and noting that these assholes know exactly what they're doing, and it's not providing alternatives to public schools, it's dismantling one of the great achievements of any society, a comprehensive public education system. A thoughtful, educated populace is extremely difficult to control--even to effectively propagandize--but an ignorant one is super easy to manipulate, and that's the end goal here. It's also breaking our sense of ourselves as an 'us' at all.

(The claim that public schools engage in "secular indoctrination" is laughable. The absence of religious indoctrination is not a different kind of indoctrination, it's just the absence of the indoctrination of children. But I guess it's why the term 'atheist' is commonly understood to mean the presence of theistic disbelief rather than simply the absence of any theistic belief. Christians seem to have to imagine non-believers as disbelievers, because they cannot imagine a kind of person who simply has no need for religious belief or disbelief. Thus public, secular education is mapped onto a conceptual framing of indoctrination, which is nonsense because it's not trying to do any version of that.)
posted by LooseFilter at 6:26 PM on August 29, 2023 [60 favorites]

Agree completely LooseFilter.

The absence of [religious] indoctrination of children.

The fact that there are gay people, trans people, and all manner of weirdo non-believers out there, is a fact. Teaching kids that these things exist, and they are going to have to learn about that, seems pretty important.

Fuck these fuckers. Public Education is what makes America great. Not your stupid "religion".
posted by Windopaene at 6:36 PM on August 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

Thank you, LooseFilter. There has been a decades-long, deliberate dismantling of quality public education that is intensifying now. Already, we are witnessing results—far too many people with no critical thinking skills.

And peakes is absolutely correct. In the late 1980s and early 90s, I was among the public school parents in my city who spearheaded a citywide parent organization that successfully advocated for improving services and funding for our schools. Several of our members went on to be elected to serve on the city's board of education. Sadly, that advocacy is not evident today.
posted by Scout405 at 7:22 PM on August 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

Couldn’t finish reading the article, as a victim of fundamentalist Christian homeschooling.

I do think, however, that fundamentalist Christian parents are pretty much fucked on trying to maintain the cult-like isolation previous generations achieved. It’s just not possible with the ubiquity of the internet anymore. We only had a family PC and that was enough for stupid little teenage me to find out my parents were lying to me about pretty much everything.

A public school education would have made it happen faster, probably, but watershed happened before I became an eligible voter so it probably washed out in the end. Not to downplay the horror of what’s happening (esp. the abuse these children will be victim to with no witnesses or advocates), but I truly do not think this is a fight they can hope to win. Unless a full off-gridded zero internet movement takes off, but kind of hard to go viral not being on the internet, now. On the sheltering from any contradictory ideology front I mean; still going to gut public schools, so, fuck.
posted by brook horse at 8:02 PM on August 29, 2023 [12 favorites]

See also Australia.

The well organised long-term assault on the public secular education system, from pre-school to university, is almost complete here. We now have one of the most privatised education systems in the industrial democratic world, and it is getting worse.

One of the last countries you'd think would fall for it, given our alleged egalitarianism and 'fair go' values. But we have, in a big way.

Similar damage is being done to our public health system, and virtually every other public good. All being defunded, defamed, and destroyed, and then handed over to the already rich & powerful by rabid ideologues and opportunistic parasites.
posted by Pouteria at 8:48 PM on August 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

back in the 80s I didn't have the life perspective to see that Steve Jackson's Illuminati was more of a simulation than a game.

Where is SMOF when you need them?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:34 PM on August 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ugh - I'm involved in a recall campaign right now to get some of these folks off of my local school board. They're voting on a parental notification policy next month to out trans students and the social media posts from right wing accounts encouraging "all available forces to amass" at my local board meeting is extremely concerning. I'm hoping we don't end up with a riot Glendale style. We're getting a great reaction from the community when collecting signatures to qualify the recall for the ballot, so there's hope!
posted by Arbac at 9:53 PM on August 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

Meanwhile, getting away with this kind of behavior is the Christofascists' other, equally important goal in driving as many families as possible into for-profit religious institutions [CW for every kind of abuse imaginable]:
"Record $100 Million Settlement Reached in Lawsuits Alleging Torture, Rape, Starvation at Christian School"
posted by peakes at 4:02 AM on August 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Authoritarian parenting is child abuse.

Cf. “Children Are Not Property,” Sarah Jones, New York Magazine, 08 April 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 4:12 AM on August 30, 2023 [14 favorites]

There has been a decades-long, deliberate dismantling of quality public education that is intensifying now.

Very much so. The origins of this in the U.S. go back to the 1970s at least, even further to Brown vs. Board of Education if you really want to dig to the roots. My normal quiet gut reaction when I'm told that someone's children are going to private school is "oh, the parents are racist, then".

In the U.S. South, the pattern was that a slice of wealthy children at the top would go to a "nice" private school, the rest of the white families who couldn't deal with desegregation would go to cheaper christian private schools. The enforcement of desegregation with busing and court orders and busing in the 70s ramped up the trend. That set the foundation for what you see today. The pattern played out in Northern areas, too, with different religious denominations attached, and at lower volumes depending on the city or state you were in, but it was there.

So what's different today? The ideological push is broader: the religion is still there, but the right-wing ideology is more naked now. There's also maybe less of a social stigma for sending your kid to "christian school", there's a return to acceptability to being an ugly person in certain social circles, and behaviors and attitudes that were formerly looked down upon are permissable now (or again). People in that group are literally willing to pay for the privilege. And there are people more than willing to sell it to them.
posted by gimonca at 5:47 AM on August 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

Is there a good book or article that gives a history of this dismantling of the public school system? Like, I take it as a given, but feel naked of citations when stating it in normal conversation.
posted by snwod at 7:34 AM on August 30, 2023

Update from my previous entry: The recall did indeed pass and the two MAGA board members are being booted. There will be another election to fill the spots, and only when the new board is seated can the carpetbagger superintendent be removed. So good news from the Idaho panhandle for now.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:27 AM on August 30, 2023 [36 favorites]

This fight is over and has been for a while now

So why are we having this discussion? Is Metafilter solely composed of these unicorns that support public schools?

I mean, I am the blue-haired transgender lesbian momma, and I am sending my kids to public school. Do I have some concerns about public school? Yes, of course. I worry that they have a built in authoritarian tendency and about the ideological capture of the curriculum, among other things. But does that mean I support replacing them with private and home schools? Absolutely not. I will supplement my kids' education as I am able, but I will also work to improve the schools my kids attend.
posted by eruonna at 11:18 AM on August 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Please don’t listen to people who claim to be left-liberals who tell you that no one sends their kids to public schools or that everyone hates schools. They have a very specific agenda and it’s disheartening how easily well-meaning people are duped by these conservatives in disguise. This IS a very important issue which is why it’s important acknowledge the challenges of public education while also capitalizing on its many strengths.

Most kids attend public school. It’s declining, from around 81% in 2019 to around 77% now. There are still bounce back effects from the pandemic so it’s hard to say where we’ll be in five years, but, the majority of kids, by far, attend public schools.

Public support of public schools isn’t great (around 45% approve) but that number has been consistent for several decades. Additionally, approval of the actual public schools and teachers that families have and interact with is reliably high, around 70%.

The percentage of students who are White or Black is decreasing while the percentage who are Asian or Hispanic is increasing. This is primarily a function of a change in the racial and ethnic make-up of the population as a whole: as the country becomes more diverse, so do the schools.

I’ll stop there but just want to say that anyone who tells you this is already a lost cause either wants to assuage their feelings of guilt about their personal choices or has an agenda to further degrade public education (sometimes both).
posted by scantee at 12:08 PM on August 30, 2023 [17 favorites]

personally not sure private schools are going to be significantly safer at this point

The school shooting that happened quite recently in my city (Nashville) was at Covenant, a private school.
posted by joannemerriam at 2:12 PM on August 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Cf. “Book Bans + Misafropedia 📚 🧑🏾‍🦱 w/ Hari Ziyad”—Victory the Creator, 05 July 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 2:17 PM on August 30, 2023

The article doesn't mention it, but I would not be surprised if Farris and the others mentioned in the article turned out to be Christian Reconstructionists. One of the early figures in that movement was R. J. Rushdoony, who also happens to be a figure in the Christian homeschooling movement. I'm a Christian but that Reconstructionism stuff scares the shit out of me. I like my state and religion separate.
posted by technodelic at 7:34 PM on August 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

I am so fucking horrified and terrified about what's happening in the USA.

Like many Canadians, I'm right near the border, looking at Washington State.

You're scaring the fuck out of me.

FIGHT BACK
posted by Savannah at 12:23 PM on August 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

A public school education would have made it happen faster, probably, but watershed happened before I became an eligible voter so it probably washed out in the end. Not to downplay the horror of what’s happening (esp. the abuse these children will be victim to with no witnesses or advocates), but I truly do not think this is a fight they can hope to win. Unless a full off-gridded zero internet movement takes off, but kind of hard to go viral not being on the internet, now. On the sheltering from any contradictory ideology front I mean; still going to gut public schools, so, fuck.

There was a horror story a few years ago about an isolated, home-schooled girl who fled her Christian family at age 18, only to discover that she couldn't get a job because she also had been home-birthed, and therefore was never given a social security number, and to get one she needed proof that her family was unwilling to give. I forget how it finally worked out. States are starting to pass laws now so that it's not an issue anymore (I forget the details).
posted by Melismata at 12:12 PM on September 1, 2023

Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump's vision - "Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president's return — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024."

With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers...

Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.

> I live and work near the Idaho panhandle and I'm watching this happen in real time.

'Christian patriots' are flocking from blue states to Idaho

The event may be the closest thing yet to Greene’s vision for the GOP, which she has urged to become the “party of Christian nationalism.” The Idaho Panhandle’s especially fervent embrace of the ideology may explain why Greene, who has sold T-shirts reading “Proud Christian Nationalist,” traveled more than 2,300 miles to a county with fewer than 67,000 Republican voters to talk about biblical truth: Amid ongoing national debate over Christian nationalism, North Idaho offers a window at what actually trying to manifest a right-wing vision for a Christian America can look like — and the power it can wield in state politics.

also btw...
The Hostile Takeover of Blue Cities by Red States - "GOP legislatures are increasingly imposing their economic and cultural priorities on left-leaning municipalities like Nashville." (538 earlier)

Highways are the next antiabortion target. One Texas town is resisting. - "A new ordinance, passed in several jurisdictions and under consideration elsewhere, aims to stop people from using local roads to drive someone out of state for an abortion."

-Populists are overwhelming democracies for a reason
-Is the populist right's future ... democratic socialism?

> It's also breaking our sense of ourselves as an 'us' at all.

just reading this excerpt from walter isaacson's musk bio:

...a new ingredient had been added to this cauldron: Musk’s swelling concern with the dangers of what he called the “woke mind virus” that he believed was infecting America. “Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary,” he told me gravely.

Musk’s anti-woke sentiments were partly triggered by the decision of his oldest child, Xavier, then 16, to transition. “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,” she texted the wife of Elon’s brother. “Don’t tell my dad.” When Musk found out, he was generally sanguine, but then Jenna became a fervent Marxist and broke off all relations with him. “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” he says. The rift pained him more than anything in his life since the infant death of his firstborn child Nevada. “I’ve made many overtures,” he says, “but she doesn’t want to spend time with me.”

He blamed it partly on the ideology he felt that Jenna imbibed at Crossroads, the progressive school she attended in Los Angeles. Twitter, he felt, had become infected by a similar mindset that suppressed right-wing and anti-establishment voices...

Musk scheduled a visit to Twitter in San Francisco for Wednesday, Oct. 26, to poke around and prepare for the official closing of the deal, which was scheduled for that Friday. He seemed amazed as he wandered around the headquarters, which was in a 10-story Art Deco former merchandise mart built in 1937. It had been renovated in a tech-hip style with coffee bars, yoga studio, fitness room and game arcades. The cavernous ninth-floor cafe served free meals ranging from artisanal hamburgers to vegan salads. The signs on the restrooms said “Gender diversity is welcome here,” and as Musk poked through cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter-branded merchandise, he found T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Stay woke,” which he waved around as an example of the mindset that he believed had infected the company.

posted by kliuless at 10:50 PM on September 5, 2023