Why Have Educational Politics Become So Extreme? (Part I)
"Parental Rights" and the spoils of the culture war
This is Part I of II. (Part II is here.)
Published Friday, June 17, 2022. Updated June 19, 2022 to add a brief discussion of further comments by Ellen Weaver.
Note: Due to length, the following may not be fully readable through email. It looks better on the website (click here).
Representative Adam Morgan visited my AP Research Seminar class on February 24, 2022.
At the time, Morgan, as a member of the SC House Education and Public Works Committee, was in the midst of a series of long public hearings on a five anti- “CRT” school censorship bills that the NAACP Legal Defense Fund aptly called “anti-truth”. (I’m going to use “CRT” throughout this piece because, as experts explained to the commitee, the definition of “Critical Race Theory,” also frequently and incorrectly conflated with “Culturally Relevant Teaching,” was stretched to the breaking point during the hearings.) As I pointed out to Morgan, and to the committee at the time, the bills largely relied on familiar-sounding rhetoric about leaving “partisanship” out of education, which was ironic because most of the language came directly from highly-partisan sources like Heritage Foundation and the Ginni Thomas-affiliated National Association of Scholars, and pushed specifically partisan political ideologies.
In a way, it was brave of Morgan to visit a classroom full of very smart, informed, predominately Black young women even as he was publicly arguing for bills that critics said were intended to make teaching about race, racism, gender, and identity, more difficult. My practice has never been to tell students how to feel about partisan political issues, but my students had mostly arrived, based on their own research and experiences, at a highly skeptical and critical stance on the school censorship bills, which we had read and discussed together prior to Morgan’s visit.
One of my students questioned Morgan on policies that, if passed, would limit the ability of students like her— taking a course designed as a college-level research class— to discuss and learn the required concepts and skills. Shortly after Morgan’s visit the College Board, which awards the AP designation, released a statement conveying similar concerns. The student wondered if it was appropriate to pass sweeping limits on discourse and intellectual freedom that would apply the same limits to a college-level course in high school as to a pre-kindergarten class.
Morgan responded, “Your point about age really is a tough one. Because you’re right, high school students can deal with a lot more complex issues, and can deal with worldviews being challenged and discussing issues. But you’re gonna run the gamut probably with even just your parents, as far as what their opinion on that is: whether or not you’re at an age now where you should be doing that.”
At the time, I probably rolled my eyes at the usual talking point that individual parents or special interest parent groups should wield so much power over curriculum, more than the people explicitly trained to determine the appropriateness of content— teachers, librarians, and content specialists.
But in retrospect, I think Morgan already had a good sense of what a major platform issue “parental rights” in education was becoming for the political right. He seemed to grasp that “parental rights,” as conceived by politicians, seems to rely on the conceit that some parents should decide what students learn, even if those students are attending schools which are publicly-funded and set up for the benefit not only of the students and parents, but of the communities which pay for them and elect their leaders.
I brought this up with Morgan, pointing out the potential conflict between the public education required by the state constitution and “parent demand”.
Morgan responded, “Parents are funding it.”
“I’m funding it, too,” I replied, “And I don’t have kids in school.”
“That is exactly true,” Morgan acknowledged. “All taxpayers are funding it, and so they do have a stake in it. Hence why I’m the one, me and my hundred-and-whatever cohorts representing 40,000 people, are the ones determining this policy and the money.”
I couldn’t help but feel that this concession was much more theoretical than practical, and Morgan’s consistent support of the censorship bills since then (he voted for passage of the final draft) has made it pretty clear that “parental rights” outweigh whatever other considerations he might have had.
All taxpayers fund education; this contradicts the idea, often promoted by “parental rights” advocates, that money “follows the child,” as if schools were funded by use taxes. But specific moneyed interests are funding “parental rights”. As ProPublica reports, “National groups, often through their local chapters, have provided video lessons and toolkits to parents across the country on how to effectively spread their messaging about so-called school indoctrination.” As examples of groups operating in the Georgia area, ProPublica includes the well-funded (and out-of-state) Parents Defending Education, as well as Education Veritas and Protect Student Health Georgia, the later two of which “provide portals for anonymously reporting educators supposedly sympathetic to CRT, DEI and other so-called controversial learning concepts.”
Representative Morgan, and other politicians like him, enjoy a great deal of power, and have pretty clear incentives for promoting a specific version of history and current events. Shortly after visiting my class, Morgan became the head of the new South Carolina House “Freedom Caucus,” telling the Associated Press, “It’s been a crawl toward some kind of conservative Republican future. And it’s time for us to stand up and fundamentally change things”.
For longtime residents of reality, the image of conservative politicians “crawling” towards any goal might seem ridiculously self-effacing in South Carolina, with its Republican-controlled House and Senate, Republican Governor, Republican Attorney General, Republican Supreme Court majority, and Republican Superintendent of Education. Even those who might quibble with the idea that South Carolina Republicans are “conservative,” in whatever sense Morgan is suggesting, might point out that the state’s Republican establishment has already planned to hold a special session to attack abortion rights, passed a $1 billion tax rebate it may not be able to afford, passed a law against transgender athletes (a law supported by even some Democrats, including Representative Russell Ott and recent Superintendent of Education candidate Jerry Govan), and the list goes on. What does the “conservative Republican future” look like, if none of this was “conservative” enough?
My growing feeling is that for Morgan’s brand of “conservative” politician, the goal is not to reach that future but to dangle it like an unattainable carrot in front of the “conservative” voter, to engage in a forever culture war that never has any winners, but does have massive political and financial spoils for its warmongers.
That’s why the goalposts are so continuously on the move they seem to be built on wheels: ending “CRT” becomes stamping out “woke indoctrination” becomes banning “pornography” becomes banning “drag brunches” becomes… whatever manufactured outrage comes next. And all of these phantom issues become excuses to pass vouchers, or defund schools, or push religiously biased and nationalist rhetoric, or further deregulate firearms. It doesn’t matter what the latest outrage is, as long as people are outraged.
And increasingly, many of these bad ideas are coalescing under the “parental rights” banner, even when what politicians are promoting has little to do with parents, and little to do with rights, but much do with promoting a specific right-wing and/ or Christian nationalist vision of government protecting specific parents at the expense of other parents, their children, and sometimes even the children of the parents whose grievances these politicians have stoked and adopted.
At the same time, SC school districts are posting 3,375 open teaching vacancies. The General Assembly, instead of passing teacher raises, raised the minimum starting teacher salary from $36,000 to $40,000. (This has confused many people, including teachers, but to see what a teacher would make under the new budget, add $4,000 to each cell of this salary schedule; if you already make that much or more, you don’t get a raise, unless your district can fund it independently of state funds.) While $4,000 isn’t enough to compete with surrounding states, anyway, in reality the average school district in SC already pays a minimum salary of $39,000. Surrounding states have already raised salaries significantly more to counteract the surge of teachers leaving the profession.
When I asked Representative Philip Lowe, via Facebook, for “any policy suggestions” as to how to address the teacher shortage, his response was
If it almost seems like the General Assembly doesn’t want to solve the problem, maybe that’s because many of our elected officials have little incentive to do so. The politics of outrage are fueled by unsolved problems, and as I’ll discuss below, they are also very well-funded by people and organizations without a stake in the systems that most of rely upon.
Superintendent of Education runoff candidate Ellen Weaver’s go-to suggestion for how to fix schools is to create a private alternative to “South Carolina’s broken education status quo”.
Apparently in response to stiffer competition than expected from Kathy Maness, who won the largest number of votes in the primary for superintendent, this vague platform has taken on a more stridently “parental rights” dimension. Weaver sat down this week for a YouTube conversation with Stephanie Berquist. Berquist has advocated passionately against mask requirements in public schools, often tying that advocacy to the language of what she calls “the parental autonomy movement” (and frequently in ways that pit some groups of parents, such as those with students with severe health problems who have needed others around them to mask, against other parents). In the conversation, Berquist said, “I am against CRT, I am against any diversity, equity, anything like that,” as Weaver nodded along, before asking Weaver to elaborate on her role as an ex officio member of the board for The Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities (a role Weaver includes in a list of her accomplishments on her website, without the ex officio, non-voting status she emphasized in the meeting).
“When I saw the woke things that were happening in this school, I made myself very clear to the chairman of the board that I didn’t agree with it, and that I think we need to take the school in a different direction,” Weaver responded. “And I realized that if this is happening in a school in the heart of Greenville, then this can happen anywhere.” Significantly, she didn’t list or further explain what any of those “woke things” were, perhaps because Weaver, while a veteran of the school privatization campaign, seems new and relatively unschooled in the “parental rights” politics of the moment.
Berquist asked an excellent question near the end of the video: “There are some people who, you know, with your financial backing and whatnot, [ask] ‘How are you in touch with true conservatives?” Weaver received at least $10,000 from Henry McMaster super-donor Dan Adams, who was also on the board of Weaver’s pro-voucher “think tank” Palmetto Promise (and who was appointed by McMaster to the University of South Carolina’s board, where he pushed for the appointment of controversial former president Robert Caslen).
As the Post and Courier reported,
Weaver has a number of out-of-state supporters who contributed to her campaign. These include John Kirtley, a venture capitalist who leads a school voucher program in Florida; Justin Owen, head of the libertarian research organization Beacon Center of Tennessee and another advocate for school vouchers; and Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer from Oklahoma who advised former President Donald Trump in his effort to overturn the 2020 election results.
In general, Weaver saw donations from GOP politicians and school choice advocates, including former U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, Weaver’s longtime boss; Truist bank group president and current gubernatorial appointee on the state Board of Education Mike Brenan; and Meeting Street Schools founder Ben Navarro.
(links mine)
Most of these donors are powerful, well-funded, and pro-voucher. Several are connected with far-right politics (see the links above). Playing to hot-button anti-public school sentiment is very lucrative, both in terms of money and support, because it feeds a narrative that the only solution to “government schools” is private schools which are… uh… also funded by the government. (Proponents don’t seem want the public to think about this last part too hard.)
Weaver, in the video, didn’t really respond to the part of the question about funding. She instead talked about working with the General Assembly, the Governor, and “Senator DeMint in Washington” (emphasis mine). And of course she said “I am running against someone who is very much a member of the education status quo. That is the status quo that has been marginalizing parents for years,” without a trace of irony.
The politics of outrage provide fuel to extremist rhetoric.
According to an Associated Press article about the arrests of members of the extremist Patriot Front, who were planning a riot at an Idaho Pride celebration, “The arrests come amid a surge of charged rhetoric around LGBTQ issues and a wave of state legislation aimed at transgender youth, said John McCrostie, the first openly gay man elected to the Idaho Legislature. In Boise this week, dozens of Pride flags were stolen from city streets.” (In troubling echoes, Horry County rescinded its official support of LGBTQ+ Pride, and a Pride permit was denied in Rock Hill.)
Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric was also in full effect in SC this year. Officials spent months debating school censorship bills that included the same “don’t say gay” language which Florida and other states have successfully passed, as Senator Josh Kimbrell introduced amendments to the state budget banning “pornography” in libraries and cutting off funding to a program providing counseling to transgender and gender nonconforming youth at MUSC, and as other budget amendments and bills have targeted the discussion of gender and race in schools.
These aren’t just words.
Every Republican candidate for the office of superintendent (with the possible exception of Bryan Chapman, who seems to avoid these hot button issues on his campaign website) has waded into these scare tactics around identity politics. I covered some of the “anti-woke” rhetoric of the Republican candidates in my piece last week, and was waiting for clarification from Kathy Maness’ campaign; though they didn’t respond, Maness seems to have doubled down, writing in an op-ed in conservative media outlet FITSNews,
"Teach reading and math not push political agendas and indoctrination. Teach critical thinking not critical race theory. We must prepare students for a job in a 21st Century economy. We need more money in the classroom not the bureaucracy. We need less paperwork and red tape."
Defeated Democratic superintendent candidate Jerry Govan, after being drawn out of his seat and presumably free to follow his bliss, voted this session for one of the more pernicious pieces of legislation introduced in a session full of pernicious legislation, the “Save Women’s Sports Act”. As we head into the general election, both Republican candidates have chosen not to respond substantively to bizarre conspiracy theories and actively harmful misinformation that impacts the health and safety of students.
This goes beyond telling voters what they want to hear. On the contrary, the panic around “CRT” is an issue explicitly created in order to manipulate voters, and the even more troubling offspring of ant-CRT and anti-woke seems to be anti-LGBTQ+, and especially anti-trans, rhetoric.
To take it back to Patriot Front and other extremist groups, there is a point where words aren’t just words, which is a point with which I assume proponents about bills against “indoctrination” would have to agree, if they were being logically consistent.
As I write this, we’ve had three days of hearings from the January 6 Commission, and whatever else may be in dispute, it’s very clear that far right ideology was a major factor in violent and illegal actions. Insurrectionists didn’t simply believe and discuss the idea that Trump had lost the election; they broke into the US Capitol and at least seven people died. They explicitly intended to risk their lives for ideas about how the government should work. Officials and advisors didn’t just wish for Trump to win; they repeatedly and knowingly pushed unconstitutional and dangerous plans to have the Vice President overturn the election.
Recent incidents of mass violence have shown that the ideologies of “anti-CRT” or “anti-wokeness,” however inconsistent or shallow those ideologies may be, have contributed materially to violent actions against real people. According to an NBC News story about the white supremacist who murdered ten people in Buffalo, NY, in an explicitly racially-motivated crime, a document created by the killer “also claims ‘critical race theory,’ a recent right-wing talking point that has come to generally encompass teaching about race in school, is part of a Jewish plot, and a reason to justify mass killings of Jews.”
In Idaho, according to PBS News Hour, “In the same way that it mobilized against Black Lives Matter in the nation’s capital in December, the Patriot Front harnesses what’s in the news cycle — in this case, drag queen story hours, disputes about transgender people in schools, and LGBTQ visibility more broadly.” We saw the highest number of incidents of anti-transgender violence in our nation’s history last year, part of a worsening trend. Similarly, less than a year ago the FBI reported a twenty-one year high for the year 2020 in hate crimes. It seems impossible to believe that increasingly viscous racist, homophobic, and transphobic rhetoric don’t contribute to these incidents.
And we know that the rhetoric, itself, harms people, and it specifically harms kids, even as many of the politicians supplying this rhetoric are the same ones feigning concern about student mental health and safety. According to Kaiser Health News, “In a survey from the Trevor Project conducted last year, 85% of transgender and/or nonbinary youth reported that recent debates about anti-trans bills negatively affected their mental health. In a survey conducted in 2020, the nonprofit that serves LGBTQ youth and focuses on crisis intervention found 42% of LGBTQ youth reported seriously considering suicide in the previous year, including more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth.”
It’s very hard for me to accept the argument that politicians (including Kathy Maness, who in many other ways has been an effective advocate for public schools) should be somehow given a pass for their supposedly hardnosed and practical concessions to extremist and hateful talking points. It’s not okay to claim, without evidence, that teachers are “indoctrinating” students or “grooming” students; that’s going to potentially get people hurt or killed. It’s not okay to imply that “CRT” is a harmful racist ideology which is being systematically taught by “woke” teachers. It’s not okay to conflate “parental rights” with the ability to harass teachers and decide on state curricula— which are issues of public policy— just because they are parents, and at the expense of everyone else’s rights. It’s not okay to assume that “parental rights” automatically come before the rights of children who may be harmed by the decisions of those parents.
The spoils of the culture war, for politicians, are clear: reelection, campaign contributions, and political power.
Mark Burns, an SC candidate for the US House, has called for a reinstatement of the Red Scare committee, HUAC, compared the “indoctrination” taking place in America to that in Nazi Germany, and said, according to Newsweek, that “parents and teachers who communicate with children about LGBTQ issues pose a ‘national security threat’ to the United States and added that those found guilty of ‘treason’ should be executed.” Burns got almost 24% of the vote, nearly forcing his opponent, incumbent William Timmons (who has said in the past that transgender people are mentally ill) into a runoff.
Adam Morgan, notwithstanding his aw-shucks, would-be academic routine in front of my students and during the committee hearings, was given a position of political power in part because he either publicly believed or was willing to act as if he believed, in the ridiculous claim that “indoctrination” is happening in public schools on a systemic level, in a manner serious enough that the House EPW Committee needed to take months to pass a bill in response. Morgan publicly thanked Jim DeMint, Mark Meadows, and Ralph Norman for helping the Freedom Caucus, in his words, “[rocket ship emoji]”.
It should be remembered that these are connected, moneyed interests Morgan is talking about, not just a bunch of good old boys:
Jim DeMint is the main force behind Palmetto Promise Institute, the Ellen-Weaver-fronted pro-voucher group that surely helped Ms. Weaver become the frontrunner, in both contributions and endorsements, for the superintendent race, despite having no experience in public education, and no master’s degree, as required by law to take office.
Mark Meadows is President Trump’s former Chief of Staff. He was held in contempt of Congress by the Jan 6 Committee for refusing to testify, and, in text messages obtained by CNN and other outlets, encouraged the idea that Vice President Mike Pence could reject electoral votes (although it should be said that some testimony from this week suggested that he knew this wasn’t true). Meadows is also a part of DeMint’s powerful political action committee, Conservative Partnership Institute (which received a $1 million donation from President Trump’s PAC less than a month after the formation of the Jan. 6 Commission).
Ralph Norman (the guy who once flashed a loaded firearm at a constituent dinner) is a member of the US House Freedom Caucus.
When Representative Morgan was leaving my school building, he did seem legitimately sympathetic to the plight of teachers— at least, up to a point. He told me he was against proposals to place cameras in classrooms to spy on teachers (something which likely violates federal FERPA law anyway). I told him if the proposed censorship bills passed, I would probably leave the classroom. A version of those bills did pass, and I did leave the classroom. Although the censorship issue was one of many issues that led me to that difficult decision, it was significant.
The larger problem is that politicians like Morgan, Maness, Govan, and many others, are willing to play with fire to win, and that politicians like Weaver (and probably Lowe and Kimbrell, although I don’t know them personally) have embraced that fire. They actively seem to want to to burn down the current system to replace it with a system they (or their backers) prefer, no matter who is caught inside while they’re doing it.
We all need to be doing everything we can to prevent that.
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Further Suggested Reading
Block, Melissa. “Accusations of 'grooming' are the latest political attack — with homophobic origins”. NPR. May 11, 2022.
Boone, Rebecca. “Online right-wing extremists amp up anti-LGBTQ rhetoric during Pride Month” PBS News Hour. June 13, 2022.
Bowers, Paul. “Children of the persecuted majority”. Brutal South. March 10, 2022.
Carr, Nicole. “White Parents Rallied to Chase a Black Educator Out of Town. Then, They Followed Her to the Next One”. ProPublica. June 16, 2022.
Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press. 2017.
Goldberg, David Theo. “The War on Critical Race Theory”. Boston Review. May 7, 2021.