The Right has deployed attacks on LGBTQ rights, the teaching of black history, and other topics to politicize and undermine public schools. The Left has an opportunity to mobilize a broad coalition to defend public education in response to this assault.
Students line up to enter their respective classrooms during a kindergarten orientation at Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy in Alexandria, Virginia on August 19, 2022. (Craig Hudson for the Washington Post via Getty Images)
In the past month, both Louisiana and Oklahoma have passed laws mandating that all state-funded schools display the Ten Commandments — an explicit rejection of the idea of secular public education. In 2023, the state of Florida pressured the College Board to remove references to “critical race theory” from AP African American History curricula, a year after enacting “Don’t Say Gay” policies that aimed to stop teachers from discussing LGBTQ subjects in their classrooms. Meanwhile, half of all US states have put “school choice” policies in place that, instead of funding public education, provide parents with vouchers to educate their students at home or in private schools.
In The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual, journalist Jennifer C. Berkshire and historian Jack Schneider trace the connections between these seemingly disparate battles, revealing how and why the Right has launched this political onslaught on US public schools. From attacks on the rights of transgender teens to the backlash against critical race theory, these culture wars are part of a conservative strategy to privatize US education by eroding public schools’ broad base of popular support. In response, Berkshire and Schneider offer strategies for championing a historically fundamental mission of public education in the United States — to provide equal opportunities to all children.
Cal Turner and Sara Van Horn spoke to Berkshire for Jacobin about the biggest threats to public education, the problem with “funding students, not systems,” and what, exactly, the culture wars are distracting us from.
Sara Van Horn
What are the biggest threats to public education in the United States today?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
If we went into the street right now and asked people, “What is the purpose of public schools?” you’d be amazed that people do not agree on the most basic definition of why we have schools. That’s a huge part of why we’re fighting so intensely about them.
Because people disagree so profoundly on the point of public education, we’ve recently seen some policy proposals that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. Take, for example, the governor of Louisiana announcing that public schools are going to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom, or Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Commissioner of Education, announcing that every public school will be required to not only post the Ten Commandments, but also teach the Bible.
They share a particular vision of what public schools are for: to produce Christians. What about all the other kids? They don’t have an answer for that.
Some people feel very strongly that school is where kids should learn to become patriots. Look at what’s happening in Florida: Governor Ron DeSantis is mandating that kids learn how great capitalism is — because if we don’t instill that early, they’ll grow up to become socialists. If you look at some of the specific changes that have been made to social-studies curricula in states like Texas and Florida, one of the things they’re eliminating is the opportunity for kids to work together in groups to solve a problem, because they’re worried that kids will grow up thinking that collective action is the answer.
Much of this is driven by a concern that kids today are so much further to the left than the generations that preceded them. On issue after issue, they want to see a stronger government role in providing things like housing and education and government intervention to deal with climate change. If you’re a red-state legislator, policymaker, or governor, you look at those polls and say, “We need to fix this, and we’re going to do it through the schools.”
Cal Turner
What impacts have these culture wars had on schools? What is the relationship between the culture wars and the push to privatize education?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
People might assume that the goal of a group like Moms for Liberty is to take over and implement its particular curricular vision. When groups like that end up losing elections two-thirds or three-quarters of the time, the assumption, then, is that they have lost.
But the arguments they stir up are actually the point. They create the sense that we’re so hopelessly divided that we can’t agree on the most basic things, so why bother even trying? These groups also make the case that, like all of our public institutions, public schools are now hopelessly poisoned by partisan rhetoric.
The point is to drive a wedge between people who use these institutions.
At a certain point, people who live in communities with endless battles around schools start to tune out. They don’t want to hear yet another school board argument. Suddenly, joining with a few of their neighbors with whom they agree and starting a microschool doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Think about progressive parents who live in states that are suddenly mandating religious education in a very aggressive way: they’re going to think, “The public schools aren’t for me anymore.”
The point is to drive a wedge between people who use these institutions. In a rural community, a public school is a central hub. It’s the largest employer; it’s where you go to vote; it’s where you go to see an art show and the football game. These constant arguments convince people: “We tried living in community together, but it didn’t work. Let’s just all go our own ways.”
Sara Van Horn
In addition to driving a wedge between people, you write that culture wars act as distractions. What are they distracting us from?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
The single largest thing that they’re meant to distract from is that we need public schools more than ever right now, and we need schools that are fully funded. Kids came out of the pandemic needing more support, but many states are actively divesting from their public schools or encouraging people to flee them.
There are very few people out there saying, “Defund my public school!” That’s a very unpopular position. But when Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, warns people about a rising tide of transgenderism threatening to swamp the Texas public schools, that rhetoric aims to distract folks in Texas from the real, material things that their schools and their kids need and aren’t getting.
Cal Turner
Could you lay out how race and gender have become central to the culture wars in schools?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
In the era of Brown v. Board of Education, policymakers and families in Southern states basically said, “If there’s going to be a constitutional imperative that our schools have to be integrated and my kids have to go to school with those kids, I am going to move my kids out from under the reach of the Constitution.” That is what we’re seeing play out again and again, first with race and now with gender identity.
We can criticize the Biden administration for a lot, but they have taken an aggressive stance on the need to expand our vision of civil rights to include kids who identify as transgender. You hear policymakers in red states saying that if there’s going to be a constitutional imperative to recognize that these kids and their families have rights, then they are going to move their kids away from the reach of the Constitution, or they’re going to figure out how to use the public schools to narrow those civil rights.
Something particular to this country is that our public schools are the place where we expand and defend kids’ civil rights. If you look back on the history of US public education, we’ve made two major decisions about who our schools have to serve. First, in the wake of Brown v. Board, it was kids of color. And then, in the 1970s, it was kids with disabilities.
The United States is unique in its commitment to educating all kinds of kids. That’s part of why we’re so consistently disappointed with our schools now: we expect them to deliver on a vision of equality.
But what if you start with the vision that kids are not equal? If you believe that some children are simply meant to work in factories and mines, for example, the bold vision of civil rights and public education as a place where we expand on that vision makes no sense. Policymakers like Betsy DeVos and Jeff Yass want to roll back the civil rights agenda of the last sixty years and replace it with a marketplace where all there is is a customer service relationship, and there’s no possibility of collective action to demand that your rights be recognized.
Sara Van Horn
Could you talk about the backlash to teaching critical race theory and black history in schools?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
There is a sizable group of people in the United States who believe that our efforts to make the country a more equal place have gone too far, and we need to start rolling them back. The reason this is so dangerous for public education is that furthering equality is the system’s defining purpose. We put an unbelievable amount of faith in the idea that schools can overcome the staggering levels of inequality in this country. (Have you ever heard that quote about education being the “great equalizer”?)
So what happens when we no longer agree that equality should be the end goal? You see this playing out at the school-district level as efforts to level the playing field among kids are now triggering a backlash among affluent white parents. They’re laser-focused on making sure that their kids get into an elite college, and they see policy changes — like opening access to advanced classes or detracking — as jeopardizing their kids’ chances.
Cal Turner
Parental rights are often cited in debates about public schools. Could you explain what they are and what they mean politically?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
The first time we ever heard about parents’ rights in this country was in the 1920s, during the intense battle over child labor. There was an effort to amend the US Constitution to ban child labor, and opponents of that amendment couched their opposition in the language of parents’ rights.
These were the first astroturf campaigns in US history. Industry funded grassroots groups with names like “Farmers and Parents Standing Together Against Federal Overreach.” That wasn’t an actual group, by the way, but you get the point!
The United States is unique in its commitment to educating all kinds of kids. That’s part of why we’re so disappointed with our schools now: we expect them to deliver on a vision of equality.
That argument is now being made again. Almost all the same states that have been enacting huge school-voucher programs are also rolling back their child labor protections. You hear folks using the argument that we shouldn’t force kids to go to school, that it should be up to the parents, and they may feel like their kids are ready to work.
We also see parents’ rights flare up whenever there is anxiety that the tide of social progress is moving too fast. In the 1990s, for example, some parents didn’t want their children learning about multiculturalism or gay and lesbian rights — they wanted to be able to limit what their children learned.
That’s where you see students’ rights come to the fore. When people talk about parents’ rights, they want to impose limits on the rights of their own kids, what they can learn and what their futures will look like.
Sara Van Horn
What are students’ rights?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
For all the talk about parents’ rights, we’re really not hearing anything about the rights of students, and that’s significant. Students have very clear rights related to speech and discrimination that have been upheld by the courts again and again.
But here’s the key thing: the efforts to strengthen parents’ rights and to privatize public education are also about weakening the rights of students. The constitutional protections that say, for example, that a public school can’t discriminate against LGBTQ students no longer apply when the school is private. Same with speech rights and the rights of students with disabilities.
So if your goal is to “disrupt” the ability of students to come together and make demands, then you’re going to be doing everything possible to move them into private schools where they have fewer rights, or homeschool, where all of the power is in the hands of their parents. I think it’s important to understand that a lot of what we’re seeing play out right now, especially in red states, is real fear of young people and their demands for a fairer, more just world.
Cal Turner
What is wrong with the idea of “funding students, not systems”?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
The reality is that there are very few people in this country who can afford what it actually costs to educate a kid. If you look at the states that are enacting voucher programs, it turns out — surprise, surprise — that the parents who are taking advantage of these programs are parents whose kids already attend private, usually religious schools, because the state is handing them a coupon to pay for part of the tuition. Schools are then responding by raising tuition.
But for the families who we’ve been hearing so much about, the ones who are “trapped in failing schools,” there’s never enough money in the voucher to pay for what an education actually costs. The schools that end up opening to serve the demand for private schools that can be paid for with the vouchers are really substandard: they are the religious school in the strip mall, or the microschool that doesn’t have a certified teacher — just a guide who passes a background check — where the kids are learning online.
That’s why these voucher programs have such terrible outcomes. “Fund students, not systems” is a catchy bumper-sticker slogan that disguises this unfathomable inequality that we are walking right into.
Cal Turner
What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about public education in the United States today?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
Since the 1980s, the only thing we ever hear about public schools is that they’re failures, so it’s difficult for us to talk about them in any other terms. Think about the way that politicians talk about schools: they use a very narrow metric of school success, usually hinging on test scores. We don’t pay attention to the larger historical story, which is that the US has an incredibly inspiring vision of using our schools to make this country more equal.
But of course, schools can’t make the country more equal on their own. The deep faith we have that without a broader social safety net, schools can be the thing that lifts kids out of poverty is also a grave misconception. Very briefly during the pandemic, we had an expansive child tax credit, and we got to see for ourselves what a dramatic difference it made on the child poverty level. Instead of the government continuing to give families money, which would have freed up our schools to realize a broader vision of what’s possible, there wasn’t the political buy-in to keep that program going.
Now, we’re back to the misguided notion that schools can do it alone, which they can’t. That feeds our perpetual disappointment in our schools.
Sara Van Horn
You write that The Education Wars is a guide to understanding the attacks on public schools, but also a manual for surviving them. What are the principal strategies that you are seeing on the ground?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
The fact that the campaigns to privatize schools, to use tax dollars to fund religious education, to discriminate against whole categories of kids, and to defund public education are so unpopular gives us an incredible opportunity to organize. The first real parent organizing against mask mandates and COVID mitigation was able to attract a fairly broad coalition, but over time, they moved into supporting extreme policies like book bans for which there is much less support.
The deep faith we have that without a broader social safety net, schools can be the thing that lifts kids out of poverty is a grave misconception.
What we’re seeing now is expansive coalitions forming against right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty. This is very exciting, because it means you have groups that traditionally haven’t had anything to do with public education — citizens’ groups, gay and lesbian rights groups, and others — making the case for public schools accessible to the general public in a way that campaigns by teachers and school advocates haven’t always been.
Cal Turner
What steps do you think would help public education regain ground as a real force for social equality?
Jennifer C. Berkshire
We have to figure out how to assemble a broad coalition that includes both people who have access to great schools and people whose schools have historically not delivered. We need to get those people talking and envisioning what a future would look like where all kids are getting what they need.
I find this organizing really exciting, because there’s a tremendous opportunity not just to organize people around public schools, but as part of a broader antiauthoritarian project. It’s an opportunity to reach out to communities with a real populist agenda — and it requires us to remember how to talk about our broader principles and the public good.