The Radical Republican Attack on the Public Schools

As an educator I have watched, with rising anger, the attacks of the extreme right on the public school system. These attacks are increasingly alarming, inasmuch as fanatics and ideologues of the far right now run the United States. These Republican radicals aren't just for "reforming" the public schools--they're for abolishing them and replacing them with religious schools (of the kind that would be known as madrassas in the Islamic world.) This important article explains the chief attacks the lunatic right is making on the public schools, and makes a point I have made myself many times--the so-called No Child Left Behind act is one of the right's principal methods of attacking the very idea of public schooling. Some key points:

The ongoing assault on America's public schools comes from many quarters including possibly ABC's 20/20 and John Stossel [ story thanks to the ever watchful eye of Media Matters for America Media Matter For America shines a spotlight on a January 13, 2006 "20/20" which seemed to view education through privatization-colored corrective lenses:

"Stossel presented skewed 20/20 segment on "stupid" public schools:

Summary: ABC's John Stossel presented a "special report" on the failure of American public schools that included a series of misleading claims, a lack of balance in reporting and interviews, and video clips apparently created primarily for entertainment to argue for expanding "school choice" initiatives such as vouchers and charter schools."

Meanwhile, writes Talk To Action's Dr. Bruce Prescott, many on the Christian right - including powerful factions in the Southern Baptist Convention - are agitating for the wholesale pullout of children from public schools.

But, the centerpiece of the strategy to destroy America's public schools may in fact be the No Child Left Behind Act.

A recent analysis predicts that 3/4 of Massachusetts schools will fail to meet the provisions of the "No Child Left Behind" act when it goes into full force in 2014 - despite the fact the Mass. schools rank among the highest in the nation.

Further, 1/4 of U.S. schools currently fail to meet the provisions of the No Child Left Behind act.

Despite right wing lies and propaganda, religious private schools actually tend to lag BEHIND public schools in key areas. The true motive of many zealots in pushing for religious schools is plain: to control the thinking of their children and to keep them from being exposed to ideas that compete with or dissent from the parents' religious views. NCLB has been designed to facilitate this process by setting such absurdly high standards that the public schools can simply be declared failures and then destroyed through government-issued vouchers. This must be adamantly opposed.

The public schools are the last institution in America where all elements of the community are brought together to learn and interact with each other. Destroy this institution, and you will simply atomize American society even more and lower the quality of education. Because of conservative Republican political pressure, American students are already dead last among students of the developed world in their understanding of the principles of organic evolution. Pushing all kids into agenda-driven, creationist-influenced religious schools will kill science education, America's scientific preeminence, and America's future. (And think of the perverted "lessons" in history that will be taught as well.)

I do not need to be reminded of the many shortcomings of America's public schools. I have written a book about high school teaching that discusses many of them. But I am for the reform of the school system, not its abolition. The Republican agenda is horrific in many ways: unending war throughout much of the world, the "drowning" of government, the destruction of Church-State separation, the imposition of theocracy on the United States, the destruction of Social Security, and the extreme concentration of political and economic power in their own hands. But we must not overlook the right's war on public education. It is, in many ways, the bedrock of their program. They intend, in the way all authoritarians do, to capture the minds of the children. If they succeed, we need not worry about America surviving to the year 2100.

It won't.