Are attacks on public education part of a larger war against democracy? If so, it’s an assault, often unacknowledged, that goes back for years in the United States.
Darren Marcy’s March 16 Valley News story, “Half the budget, twice as mad,” begins with a March 12 meeting in Croydon, where 20 people at a town meeting — just 3.5% of the town’s 565 registered voters — elected to cut their school budget by 53%. Two days later, as many as 75 people showed up at a meeting of the school board. Many of them were there to object. They were told the new figure is now legally binding. More meetings are to follow, and the matter is still unresolved.
In the New Hampshire Bulletin on March 18, Jacob A. Bennett, who teaches education policy at UNH, reviewed some of the history of the “war on educators” in New Hampshire. On March 23, Ethan DeWitt, New Hampshire Bulletin’s education reporter, noted the recent New Hampshire House Republican defeat of Democrats’ efforts to modify the expensive “education funding program” that allows parents to use state money for private schools or home-based education. Republicans also successfully defended “divisive concepts” and “teacher loyalty” legislation aimed at teachers.
In the March 21 New Yorker, historian Jill Lepore wrote about the longer history of the war against public education in other states. She began with the story of Lela V. Scopes, who was turned down in 1925 for a job teaching mathematics in a Paducah, Tennessee, high school. She had taught in Paducah before, but that summer her younger brother, John T. Scopes, would be tried for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in a Dayton, Tennessee, high school. And Lela Scopes refused to denounce either her brother or Charles Darwin.
Although I took several biology courses as a pre-med student near the end of the 1950s, I thought most objections to the theory of evolution focused on religion — that the belief we evolved from simpler forms of life was thought to undercut the Genesis account of creation. But Lepore suggests many battles over evolution were fought in southern states because if we all evolved from other forms of life, all of us were born equal. Taken seriously, our common origin provides a good argument for supporting a democracy that empowers people of all races and cultures.
Efforts by southern politicians to hold onto segregated schools after the Civil War ran into resistance with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, a ruling that did its legal best to demolish “separate but equal.” This led to “school choice,” a new slogan for those seeking to hold onto segregated schools, claiming parents should be free to choose schools that teach what they think their children should learn alongside students they prefer to be their children’s classmates.
“School choice” has been joined in New Hampshire legislation by the “divisive concepts” slogan. Both are supported by “parents’ rights,” a phrase Jill Lepore considers deceptively benign: “Behind parents’ rights, lies another unbroken strain: some Americans’ fierce resistance to the truth that, just as all human beings share common ancestors biologically, all Americans have common ancestors historically.”
History, in short, has replaced biology as the most dangerous discipline for those who fear genuinely public education. If you learn that slavery had to be accommodated by the writers of our Constitution or that it took 67 years and 200 attempts for Congress to pass the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act on March 7, 2022, you’re not likely to support voting laws designed to keep Black people from voting — laws recently passed by Republicans in several state legislatures.
But residents who come to school board meetings to criticize history that acknowledges our country’s mistreatment of people of color, Indigenous communities and LGBTQ people, don’t see themselves as enemies of democracy. They are staking out positions in the culture wars that have become the closest thing we have to a Republican political platform in our deeply divided country. And some are probably focused on school taxes too.
So, it’s important to admit that the 20 people who recently voted to cut the Croydon school budget in half don’t necessarily oppose democracy. Many residents who fear public education and seek to reduce its funding probably don’t even agree fully with Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, who has devoted much of her life to denigrating and defunding public education. (Her first budget proposal, in 2017, would have added more than $1 billion for school-choice programs and cut $9 billion from federal education funding.)
Most of us have paid little attention to the mutual dependence between a strong democracy and healthy public education. That relationship is surely complex. Good books, as they say, have been written about it. Still, it’s probably fair to say the right to good public education is almost as important to sustaining a strong democracy as the right to vote. We have evidence that good education has the practical benefits of reducing crime, improving public health and increasing civic participation.
Leaders striving to take power away from those who lack wealth and status probably assault public education mainly as a way of concentrating their own power. In this time of an autocratic, brutal war on democracy in Ukraine, it is no comfort at all to say an assault on public education is just an unintentional assault on democracy.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.