Take a moment to look around your neighborhood and beyond. From your observations, have you noticed an increasing number of children away from home during school hours?
If so, you are witnessing warning signs of future social instability. And yes, those warning lights are flashing red. Surprise? Not really. This has been coming for decades.
Recent examples of misdeeds by right-wing legislatures abound. Gerrymandering, voting restrictions, and restrictions on reproductive rights quickly come to mind. But here we have perhaps the most essential offense against democracy: the Republican war on public education.
This war has taken many forms, as in many states public funds are now used to support private charter and residential schools, vouchers for private school tuition, and even subsidies for homeschooling families. Many observers consider the operate of public funds for private purposes to be an unstable mix, a hazardous mix that could prove destabilizing for our society over time.
As a retiree and someone who is out and about, I see these signs in my neighborhood where groups of children play, where others explore Costco and any other place you can imagine that would attract school age children not to school but over time on hands.
Look around. You can hear them before you see them. Over the last decade or so, there has been a edged raise in the number of red states that have enacted education voucher programs, which allow public funds to subsidize private education choices for families. Let us recall that the original purpose of vouchers was to allow families to escape from “failing public schools.”
In Ohio, the so-called GOP-backed “school choice” movement has been running on steroids for the past two decades, with politicians such as Senate President Matt Huffman and state Sen. Andrew Brenner, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, aggressively serving as leading figures anti-public education in the Buckeye State.
However, an analysis of enrollment patterns in private and religious schools in several states indicates that the very justification given for vouchers has now been shown to be false.
The education voucher program, originally planned as a way to provide low-income families with a bailout that would assist them “escape” “failing” schools, instead turned out to be a program in which wealthy families can receive state funds to reduce tuition payments.
The Arkansas Times recently described the situation this way: “Such programs mean that any child already enrolled in a private school can apply for a voucher to pay tuition. This doesn’t sound like a program designed to help low-income families frustrated with public schools; “it sounds like a program designed to shore up the bank accounts of existing private school families, many of whom are wealthy.”
Arkansas subsidizes higher-income families so that their children can receive a private school education. Ohio, despite Huffman and Brenner’s rhetoric, is doing the same, and on a grand scale.
In analyzing the data, WEWS in Cleveland also looked at Ohio’s school voucher program and found the same situation.
It is very clear that regardless of the rhetoric about providing opportunities for disadvantaged families, vouchers in Ohio, Arkansas and other states primarily serve those students who already attend private and religious schools.
Any public program that serves the elite – in this case, students at private and religious schools – is undemocratic and contrary to the public interest, especially when the state budget funds come from the same line earmarked for public schools, as is the case in Ohio. The WEWS report showed this situation in the March investigation:
“The number of students receiving EdChoice Expansion vouchers increased from 23,272 students in the 2022-2023 school year to 82,946 students in the 2023-2024 school year, according to data provided by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.
“Private school enrollment increased by only 3,719 students for the 2023-24 school year, according to ODE.”
These numbers reinforce the fact that the real beneficiaries of vouchers are students already enrolled in private and religious schools in Ohio. William Phillis, longtime leader of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding and a key foe of the state’s school privatization efforts, put it bluntly:
“With the advent of universal vouchers, private school tuition rates tend to increase; therefore, people with lower incomes will not have the financial ability to use vouchers for private schools. The result of this program is that a disproportionate percentage of tax-funded vouchers will go to wealthier people. Therefore, all taxpayers will subsidize a program that only wealthy people will have access to.”
It is now abundantly clear that there is a Republican agenda to encourage the proliferation of private charter schools, to subsidize and ultimately encourage homeschooling, and now to provide massive state resources to supplement the operation of private and religious schools that primarily benefit the wealthy families whose children were already enrolled.
Hello supporters of conspiracy theories. Why did you miss this pattern?
“School choice” is one thing. But using public funds to subsidize and encourage the abolition of public education is a different matter. There are all forces that will lead to the inevitable destruction of public education – the main force that provides community traction and national identity, rather than fragmentation.
Eight years ago, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks worried about excessive individualism and its impact on national cohesion.
“The emphasis on individual choice undermines community cohesion and established social bonds,” he wrote.
“School choice” as a movement is a direct challenge to community cohesion and an attack on public schooling as part of a community’s identity. No word salad can disprove the correctness of this statement. Moreover, community cohesion is related to the idea of democracy in which citizens elect community members to provide management of public schools and the necessary oversight of the public funds that support them.
In an earlier essay on “community cohesion and established social bonds,” I adopted the words of Dr. Kenneth Conklin, a philosopher concerned about cultural fragmentation.
“If the education system is changed, the transmission of culture will be distorted,” Conklin wrote. “The easiest way to disrupt society in the long term without using violence is to establish separate educational systems for the groups to be separated.”
When we look at the damage done to our schools and the public who attend them by Republican zealots like Matt Huffman and Andrew Brenner, we note some additional warnings Conklin gives about social continuity and
schools as factors of community cohesion:
“A society’s culture can survive much longer than the lifespan of any of its members because its educational system transmits the customs and knowledge of one generation to subsequent generations. Culture changes over time, but it has a recognizable continuity of core values and behavioral patterns that distinguish it from other cultures. This continuity is ensured by the education system.”
At this stage of community destruction caused by school privatization fanatics and their operate of public funds to support private and religious schools, it is the responsibility of community members to oppose this attack. A coalition of public school districts has joined a lawsuit to fight the school voucher program. If you are an Ohio resident, check if your school district has filed a lawsuit against the operate of public funds to combat this voucher program and stop the Huffman and Brenner wrecking crew from destroying your community and its schools.
If your local school district is not involved, call the system’s central office and find out why.
Better yet, show up at a school board meeting before the end of this academic year and ask those members why they haven’t joined the Ohio E&A and Vouchers Wholesale Ohio coalition. Your community and democracy itself are at stake. After all, our very culture and the transmission of social values ”…are provided by the education system.”
Note: systemic. Not systems. It’s time to defend democracy. After all, as Jefferson and other founders have told us since our nation gained independence, an informed citizenry is the arsenal of democracy.
Matt Huffman told us what he and his colleagues do.
“We can do whatever we want” he said that in 2023.
Please show up at a future school board meeting and ask what they plan to do about a bully whose goal is to destroy public education and the community it nurtures.
Our democracy is at stake. It’s time to act. Now.
