- There is a war on public
education in the United States. As a teacher turned YouTuber
who makes lots of videos about education related stuff, I'm really interested in the intersection of public education, policy,
and culture war politics. And for several months I have been trying to make a video about the various ways that the very concept of public
education is being eroded. But it feels like every time
I had a handle on things, there would be some new
piece of information or some news story
that came out that added a whole other
angle to this thing, because there is a lot going on. I don't know how much you all
keep up with education news, but it really feels like things
are reaching a fever pitch. Let me just lay out a list of stuff that has been happening just
in the past couple of years. Of course, there's the things that I've already covered on this channel, like how PragerU has been accepted as an educational vendor in several states and is even an alternative pathway to getti
ng actual high school
credit in New Hampshire, as well as the dizzying array of book bans in schools and public
libraries across the country. But there's also Donald
Trump's 1776 Commission, Vivek Ramaswamy's personal crusade to defund the Department of Education, and the campaigns of Ron
DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin who ran on fighting "wokeness" in schools, and to both passed laws against teaching "divisive concepts". There's the US history standards and bathroom bills that became the battlegro
unds for
this war on wokeness, leading to the sometimes
violent school board meetings we've seen on the news, and ending up with groups
like TurningPointUSA and No Left Turn in Education, encouraging students and
parents to report teachers. There's the Oklahoma
Superintendent of Schools, Ryan Walters, who not only
announced the state's partnership with PragerU, but has also publicly called for an end to the separation
of church and state. There is the massive cuts
to humanities programs in colle
ges and universities, which mirrors the cuts to music, art, and special education
programs in K-12 schools, including the case of the Houston Independent School District that was taken over by
state education officials who converted several school libraries into disciplinary spaces. There's also just the endless
rhetoric across social media, accusing teachers of being
predators and groomers, the daily news of policies
limiting the language teachers and students are allowed to use, what topics th
ey're allowed to teach, what books they're allowed
to have in their classes, expanding the number of standardized tests students have to take, and shrinking the resources
available to them. Inflated grades and lower
scores, funding cuts, staff cuts, program cuts, school
choice, school closures, school shootings, crisis,
after crisis, after crisis. So as I was trying to make this video, the problem I kept running into was the volume and rate at
which things were happening. It is genuinely overwhe
lming
to keep tabs on everything, let alone try to read about
it, understand all of it, respond to it and make
a whole video about it, all while new stuff keeps
coming out every single day. I was exhausted, and up
until a few weeks ago, I didn't even have
anything to show for it. But then I read this report. This report by the investigative
watchdog group, Documented, was published on October
17th, 2023, titled, "Inside The Secret Right-Winged Plan "To Take Down the Education
System As We Know I
t." And it solved everything. Well, not everything,
but it provided an answer for why it feels like
education is being attacked from every angle in a nonstop barrage of news, and legislation, and
policies, and court cases, and political platforms, and sound bites. And it's coming from
everywhere all the time, and it just never ends. Because it is, and it is overwhelming
because it's supposed to be. There really is a war on education. It's a war that's being waged
not just by the parent groups wh
o go to school board
meetings to get books removed, or the grassroots organizations
we hear about on the news, or even by the Republican politicians who campaign on school choice and defunding the Department of Education. It's a war being waged by powerful organizations
you've probably never heard of who work outside electoral politics using the vast resources
and political connections at their disposal. So let's explore what is happening to our public school systems. Let's investigate who is wa
ging this war, and more importantly, who is
holding the purse strings. And then let's untangle
the ideological roots of why the war is even
happening in the first place. And finally, let's try to figure out what we can do about it. But before we dive into all that, as someone whose job is being
a person on the internet, I take my privacy pretty seriously. But one of the byproducts of
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for sponsoring today's video. Alright, let's get back to it. (projector whirring) So the War on Education may feel like it's a grassroots movement of parents who just happen to have
a handful of politicians on their side, but in reality, the roots of
this conf
lict are much deeper and much more well connected. It all begins with the
Alliance Defending Freedom, previously known as the
Alliance Defense Fund. The ADF is a right-winged
legal advocacy group who used legal battles to bring conservative
policies to fruition. For instance, they're the ones who represented the baker in the infamous Masterpiece Cakeshop v.
Colorado Civil Rights Commission Supreme Court case. ADF's educational litigation team is funded in part by the
conservative donor group, Zi
klag, which describes itself as a private confidential
invitation-only community of high net worth families. To join Ziklag, you
have to have a net worth of at least $25 million. And using these wealthy donors, they have donated almost
a million dollars to ADF across 2021 and 2022. According to the documented report, Ziklag organizes its work around so-called Seven Mountains Dominionism. The idea that Christians
need to focus their energy on and capture seven
mountains in our culture, religion,
family, education,
media, entertainment, business and government. They are closely aligned with self-described Christian nationalists like Lance Wallnau, who is a leading figure within Ziklag. Now, Ziklag is an offshoot
of United in Purpose, which again, according
to the documented report, was an important player in helping to drive
evangelical support for Trump in 2016 and 2020. While Trump was President,
he appointed Ginni Thomas to a position on the
Library of Congress board. And on multiple
occasions
from 2017 to 2019, she presented awards at UIP events, UIP, the group who not only helped Trump get elected in the first place, but also created Ziklag, the group who funds the ADF legal battles that often make their
way to the Supreme Court, the workplace of Ginni's husband, Justice Clarence Thomas. But it gets worse. Trump also appointed Bill
Barr Attorney General, and in May of 2021, now former Attorney General Bill Barr spoke at a Center for
National Policy event where he was recei
ving an award from ADF. And in his speech, he
described public schools as, "the greatest threat to religious
liberty in America today "that have an increasingly militant "and extreme secular progressive climate." The solution to this issue that he mentioned specifically
was school vouchers, the use of public tax
dollars to pay for tuition at private schools. You know who has fought and
won at least three court cases, defending using vouchers
at religious institutions, with even more cases in the
works? ADF. But it gets worse. That same night after giving his speech, Bill Barr had a conversation with ADF's then President, Michael Ferris, and the chair of the
education mountain of Ziklag, Peter Bohlinger. And the three men brainstormed how they could bring Bill
Barr's vision of education into reality using Ziklag's money to fund ADF's legal battles in courts filled with Trump-appointed judges. I know that this looks like some conspiracy theory (bleeping), but that's because it is
conspir
acy theory (bleeping). There really is a dark money group whose members have secret meetings where they plan how to use their influence to undermine public
education from the top down through the court system. But they're also working
against public education from the bottom up because ADF also recently founded their Promise to America's
Parents Coalition, which is their specially selected
coalition of ally groups, which includes Moms for Liberty,
No Left Turn in Education, and Parents Defending
Education, who all fight for parents'
rights, school choice, and anti-LGBTQ policies, and who have also all been
labeled as extremist groups by the Southern Poverty
Law Center by the way. This is why this war on
education feels so overwhelming and why it's so hard to pin down, because it's coming from everywhere and it's being funded and manifested through these organizations that are working mostly under the radar using millions of dollars from just a handful of
extremely wealthy donors. And t
his isn't some niche thing either. The ADF, which is also labeled a hate group by the SPLC, by the way, has boasted several
high profile politicians as former members, including Supreme Court
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former Vice President Mike Pence, and the recently elected speaker
of the House, Mike Johnson. These are powerful groups
made up of powerful people who are using their power
and vast monetary resources to shape education through
this tangled
web of influence. But why? Like we know that education is one of the of the seven mountains of Seven Mountains Dominionism, but there's not necessarily
anything specific about all of those
policies I listed earlier that feels inherently conservative, right? What is it about school voucher policy, or parents' rights issues, or curriculum transparency
that make ADF and Ziklag wanna spend millions of dollars
in legal battles over them? To put it another way, why is the war on public
education being
waged by right-winged think tanks and donors? (upbeat music) Well, to figure that out, we
need to dig into the ideology, the underlying assumptions,
beliefs, and values underpinning the specific
policies and actions we're seeing. And digging into this
will help us figure out not only why organizations like the ADF are putting millions of
dollars towards these policies, but also why individuals are
fighting for them as well. Because while I think the
whole conspiracy theory thing is a really imp
ortant part of the puzzle, it is just part of the puzzle. I also think that it would be a mistake to chalk it all up to, "well, they're just inherently evil," or "they just hate education," because I don't think that's true. I don't think that anyone wants to purposefully miseducate kids. I want to look at all
of this in good faith and really try to understand where these positions come from. And I want to start with what I think is the easiest policy to
ideology connection to spot. The language
they use to
talk about school choice, and defunding the Department of Education, the language of public schools and the Department of Education, having a monopoly over education. By using this language, it shows
that they believe education either is or ought to be
thought of as a business. Now, I'm not gonna argue
any of this stuff right now. I will do that a little
bit later in the video. I obviously disagree with
a lot of these beliefs, but right now I just
want to understand them, not debunk
them. So let's just put
ourselves into this mindset and assume that schools should
be more like businesses. If schools are businesses,
then we can think of schooling as a product that is consumed
by parents and students. You, the parent, are buying
your child's education with your tax dollars. So in a free market, you should be able to use those tax dollars to buy whatever kind of education you want from amongst a wide variety of schools. If parents only have one
option available to them, publi
c schools, that's a monopoly. So assuming monopolies are
bad, the way to bust them up is by opening the market
and introducing competition. Competition comes in the
form of homeschooling, but also charter schools,
which are basically semi-public schools
that have less oversight than public schools, but which still receive
public funding to operate. And this is also why you
may have seen the phrase, "Fund students, not systems." Basically, it's the argument that if parents don't
wanna send their
kids to public schools, the government should
set aside tax dollars that they would have spent on them as a public school student, and instead give that money to parents in the form of a voucher
to pay for private school, or in the form of an
education savings account to be used for homeschooling expenses. The whole thing is built to create as many options as possible, because in an open free
market, competition is key. And like with businesses, the government shouldn't interfere. Let the market
decide what is best, let the consumers vote with their dollars. With this in mind, it makes a lot of sense why there's so much culture war
stuff going on with schools. Because if schools are businesses, and if public schools are a monopoly, then that means that a lot of consumers are being forced to buy a product that they feel doesn't
align with their values. Their tax dollars are going
towards teaching their kids, things that they have a deep, sometimes religious objection to. It makes sense
that that could lead to pretty strong anger towards
school systems and educators. If this were a different industry, you could just take your money elsewhere, but we can't just not pay taxes, right? So people open up private,
religious, and charter schools that cater to these values or
offer a classical education. And politicians like Ron DeSantis, and groups like the ADF
work from the top down to pass policies that allow parents to use their tax dollars on the schools and products that give
the
m what they want, or even change public schools themselves to be more in line with
these parents' values. But it's not just about values,
it's also about purpose. You buy things for reasons, and for education, those
reasons usually have to do with future employment
or university prospects. This is why we keep seeing
an emphasis on STEM subjects and other hard skills, while also seeing cuts to
the arts and humanities. Because if education is
a product that you buy to help you get a job, then all
of the non-job related
stuff is just unnecessary. Now, I do think that to some extent, this business angle does
unfortunately come down to money. There is a lot of money to be
made in privatized industries, and if we could turn
schools into businesses, it would be a gold mine. Now, I'm not saying that
every right-winged politician who advocates for more charter schools or online learning
products is just doing it because they stand to make money from it. I mean, some of them definitely do, but w
hat I am saying is that
prioritizing economic interests is a part of conservative ideology. Now, I wanna pivot a little bit and take what I've talked about so far and look at it from a different angle. I want to look at schools as businesses through the lens of individualism. Individualism is the
idea that individuals, especially individual choice and individual responsibility should be the focus of society. And this is definitely
evident in all this talk of schools as businesses, right? I mean,
the whole school choice movement is all about individual choice. It's about opening up the
market, introducing competition, and letting people make informed
decisions with their money. People should get to choose to have whatever kind of education they want. All those parents who are angry about history lessons and library books, they're just exercising
their individual choice over what their kids are taught. And the groups who
encourage reporting teachers for being ideological, they're just he
lping to
aggregate information so parents can make informed choices about where to send
their children to school. It all comes back to individuals
and individual choice. But it's important to ask,
who gets to make the choices? Throughout this section, I've described parents as the
consumers, not their children. And this isn't just because parents are the ones paying the taxes, it's because kids aren't the consumers, they're the product, or at
least part of the product. And education isn't some a
bstract thing that stands on its own
out in the universe. Education is embodied. It only exists within a person. And arguably it really only exists through people's actions and interactions. But that's a separate discussion. Students are part of the product
of the school of business because they are the vessels
that receive the education. This is why there's such a priority on test scores and grades, because you need some way to make sure students are actually
getting the education that their pa
rents are paying for. If you buy a product, you expect it to function as advertised. What are final exams if not
quality assurance testing? This is what a lot of people mean when they talk about the
factory model of schooling. It's not that schools are training kids to work in factories, it's
that schools are factories that are producing child computer brains that have the K-12
education widget installed. And if we look at what parents
want out of their schools, that can tell us what kinds of pr
oducts they think are valuable. And like I mentioned
earlier, what parents want is schools that produce students who are ready for the workforce and have the correct set of values, which brings us to one
of the deepest roots of this ideology, the importance of
maintaining the status quo. Now, I'm not gonna get
into the weeds on this because it could be a
whole video on its own, but basically, under this
ideal education system, schools simply train students to become workers who
have the correct
values. And both of those things are based on how our society works right now. There is a current mode of being a worker and a current brand of
values seen as correct, and those are the things being taught. Being ready for the workforce means not just having the
technical skills and knowledge required by jobs, but also knowing how to follow rules, listen to authority figures,
and work under surveillance where their performance
is quantified, measured, and compared to their peers. This is why the
re's so
much focus on STEM skills, financial literacy,
discipline, and test taking, because it's not just about
qualifying students for jobs, it's about preparing them to work in manager-run,
evaluation-filled positions in the professional world. And for most of the parents
that we're discussing, the correct values are things
like patriotism, respect, personal responsibility,
and good character. We need schools to produce
students who are good citizens, and that requires both having knowledge of
the history of their nation, and having reverence for its founders and founding documents. This is why there's such a backlash to things like critical race theory, various history standards,
and any lesson or books that talk about sex and gender. These things are seen as
teaching the wrong history and instilling the wrong values. Schools aren't meant to produce students who will change things. They're meant to produce students who will work within the system and carry on specific values. It's a
bout maintaining the status quo. I do briefly want to discuss
the religious element built into all of this though. As I pointed out earlier, the powerful organizations
leading the charge against public education have
explicitly Christian goals and are associated with
Seven Mountains Dominionism. That whole ideology is based on the belief that God has ordered Christians to literally take over the
nation, and eventually the world, by controlling the seven mountains of family, religion, education,
media, entertainment, business and government. That's Christian nationalism. Now, again, I don't think
that every single person on the right who is fighting for
conservative education policy is a follower of this set of beliefs, but I do think a religious
belief plays a role here. Many Christian fundamentalists fighting for these education policies aren't necessarily doing so because of their ardent
belief in individualism, but because of their deeply held faith. So while I'm not gonna get into
it here, I do think that it's
still worth bringing up because Christian nationalism, this idea that we should have
an explicitly Christian nation with no separation
between church and state has been on the rise in recent years, and it's frankly concerning. But that is outside the
scope of this video. So before we move on, let's recap. So the public education
system is being attacked from all sides, and the institutional
attacks are being spearheaded by a tangled web of ultra wealthy donors, a co
nservative legal powerhouse,
right-winged politicians, and boots on the ground organizations. And to understand why all of these groups are attacking education, we found that a lot of it boils down to seeing schools as businesses that generate educated
students as their products. Most of the attacks on
education come from people who see education as a product that is currently being
monopolized by public schools, but they don't like how public
schools are doing things, either because of a percei
ved
difference in values or because they're not equipping students with profitable enough skills, so they want to take
their business elsewhere. But because education is tied up in taxes, that requires either the
institutional support of tax funded competitors
to public schools, or the institutional reshaping
of public schools themselves. In either case, the solution
hinges on parents' right to individual choice in the
free marketplace of education, and it reaffirms the status quo. So, now that
we have a handle
on what is happening and why, we can start to figure out- (upbeat music) So what can we do about this? Well, the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. So what is really wrong with this ideology that I've been talking
about throughout this video? Why is the war on education a bad thing? Well, to figure that out, we first need to know where it came from. Private schools and homeschooling have been around literally forever. So I think that a better place
to start would be with the first policies that actually focused on taking
power from public schools. And the first concerted
effort against public schools came in the form of vouchers. Just as a refresher, vouchers are where the government takes the tax money
that they would've spent on a public school student, and instead gives that
money directly to parents to use for paying private school tuition or covering homeschooling fees. The history of vouchers
in the United States goes back to the 19
50s, when
the libertarian economist Milton Friedman first argued that they could help
turn the education system into a free market where schools would have
to compete with one another for customers, thus leading
to better schools overall. But the concept didn't really
take off until a decade later for slightly different reasons. "In response to Brown
v. Board of Education, conservative elites in
several Southern states seized on the idea of
private school vouchers as a way of avoiding
court-orde
red desegregation. Given the context, very
few voucher advocates were interested in making the case that market competition
would spur improvement. Instead, they were generally concerned with maintaining taxpayer
support for segregated schooling. Then came Reagan." So we have this idea of turning education into a competition-fueled
free market using vouchers, which then gets co-opted
by Southern politicians who saw it as a loophole to help racist white families
avoid sending their kids to integr
ated schools in the 1960s. But when Ronald Reagan
was elected in the '80s, he brought Friedman's market
language back into fashion and fought to implement
school vouchers more broadly. But the thing is, it didn't really work. The idea gained some headway, but many of the policies attempting to implement voucher programs failed to pass at either
the federal or state levels. So what changed between then and now? Why has this historically
unpopular concept suddenly come back into the
public eye aft
er four decades? COVID may have unleashed the floodgates, but the truth is that
distrust in public schools had been building for a long time. With an increase in testing
starting in the early 2000s, plus ever decreasing scores on those tests in conjunction with
the economic recessions and increases in unemployment that made it feel like school wasn't preparing people for jobs, it was a recipe for school skepticism. And then 2020 happened, and brought with it mask
mandates, critical race theory,
pronouns, book bans, and bathroom bills. Schools had gone woke. The language from people like Ron DeSantis and Glenn
Youngkin about a war on woke, and the insistence that our public schools are hotbeds of this wokeness, combined to give us the
perfect justification for renewing the fight for school choice. We didn't just have the economic
reasoning of the market, which had proved insufficient
at getting the public engaged during the '50s and the '80s. Now, we also had a social reason, one that p
resumably more
people could relate to compared to the more disparate
issues of the Jim Crow South. As Friedman and Reagan had discovered, unless there's demand for
a marketplace of schools, people don't really care. I mean, what's the harm in sticking with what they already have, right? But by instilling this fear
of wokeness in schools, people like Christopher
Rufo, DeSantis, and Youngkin are creating that demand. They're giving parents a reason to want to leave public schools. And vouchers, ch
arter
schools, private schools and home schools are
becoming more and more viable alternatives for
those escaping parents. But if this war on public
schools really rests on this woke stuff, then it's worth questioning how accurate these claims of wokeness even are. Now, there are whole
videos dedicated to this, so I'm not gonna go into
too much detail here. My friend LegalKimchi has a
really great explainer video about critical race theory, and for more information
on the LGBTQ Groomer Panic, I
recommend these videos from Some More News and Jessie Gender. And all of these recommendations, plus all of my sources
are in the description. So instead of going through and debunking every single concern that people have over woke
stuff happening in schools, I want to just briefly discuss an element of this that
I think we often forget. None of this is new. Schools have always been hotbeds of debate around how to teach sex ed, or which books kids should have access to, or what sort of moral tr
aining
schools should provide, if any. We've been debating some
of these things forever. History standards and
textbooks, for instance, have always been targeted for supposed revisionism
whenever changes are made. But the thing is, history
curricula have always been updated to include new information. And by new information, I don't just mean the most
up-to-date current events that happened after the
last edition was published. I mean, new context and new perspectives on
the stuff we are teachin
g. This is a pamphlet from 1935, and it's basically just an early example of a textbook meta-analysis. Basically, this guy wanted to figure out how accurate textbooks
in southern schools were when it came to talking
about black Americans. So he decided to round up a bunch of books from schools in the South,
and read through them. "Seeking to discover
just what they contain, "favorable or otherwise, "what facts of consequence they omit, "and what would be their probable effect "on the student's e
stimate of
Black people in American life, "and upon his attitude toward them." In summary, he found that
things were really bad. "17 of the 20 history
textbooks leave the student "in complete ignorance, "while the other three
give but a faint suggestion "of the facts." I love that, "a faint
suggestion of the facts." It's like the history textbook equivalent of LaCroix. (laughs) I wanted to read some of the quotes that this writer pulled
from the books that he read, but I think that most of them
would go against YouTube's
terms of service. So suffice it to say, the history
textbooks were pretty bad. Like, KKK apologetics kind of bad. And even in the literature textbooks where things were less outright racist, "most of them simply
ignore the whole subject, "leaving the student
entirely without knowledge "of the unique contributions
which Black writers "have made to the literature of America." And this was from the '30s. So yeah, things certainly aren't perfect, but we've always at least
attempted to update our textbooks to be more accurate and include new ways
of looking at our past. And the point of including
these diverse voices and perspectives isn't to
undermine the real stories. History isn't a list of events with an objectively correct
way of looking at it. It's a mosaic that we can construct using a variety of stories from
a variety of points of view. But again, we've been having
these conversations forever. Nothing is happening now
that hasn't happened before. And just
like in the debates
about teaching sex ed in the '80s, and the debates
about including the history of Black Americans in
textbooks in the '30s, all of the debates that we're having today are probably related to larger questions about the purpose of schools and the very nature of moral education. So these debates are just
symptoms, not the cause. But remember, this culture war stuff is only half of the issue. A huge chunk of the war on education comes from the economic angle, the idea that we sho
uld think
of schools as businesses that produce education as their product. So, what's wrong with that? Simply put, schools should
not be run as businesses, and education should not be seen as a product to be consumed. Just consider our current
privatized education options, private schools, charter
schools, school vouchers, and home schools. They all have some flaws. For one thing, they're
all ripe for corruption. So school vouchers are a great
way to use public tax dollars to send your child to
private schools. But many private schools are religious, and most state constitutions
don't allow public money to be spent on religious institutions. But politicians and
school choice advocates still wanted a way to use vouchers at private religious schools, so they found a workaround,
tax-credit scholarships. And these tax-credit scholarships, which were basically just
vouchers under a different name, weren't just a good way to get money to religious institutions. They were also a good way
to
turn a tidy profit. As Jack Schneider and
Jennifer Berkshire explain in their book, "A Wolf
at the Schoolhouse Door", "In the tax credit scholarship program, "instead of the state paying the tab, "individuals would donate
to nonprofit organizations, "which would then provide
private school scholarships "to students. "The individuals making the donations "would then receive a
dollar-for-dollar state tax credit, "effectively reimbursing
them for their gifts. "And in eight states, donors
can take a
state tax credit "and a federal tax deduction, "double-dipping their way to a profit. "Donors in those states are reimbursed "for their contributions with
dollar-for-dollar tax credits, "they are also allowed to deduct "the full amount of those contributions "from their federal taxable income, "reducing what they owe
in end-of-year taxes." In other words, in several states, people can actually use
public funds to make a profit. That's just theft, or it should be, but it gets worse, because even
if we got rid
of tax-credit scholarships, we would still have to
deal with charter schools. And while I don't think charter schools are terrible in theory, I think having schools
that are given more freedom to experiment with different
methods and structures is a good thing. In practice, they are incredibly
susceptible to corruption. This is because while
they are publicly funded, they're operated privately and
don't get the same oversight as strictly public schools. They're instead regulated b
y a charter, basically a contract that
they sign with the state that requires them to
fulfill certain goals. Outside of that charter though, they're mostly unregulated with effectively zero
public accountability, which makes them perfect
breeding grounds for greed. Some charter schools are
explicitly for profit, which feels like it shouldn't be a thing, but even the nonprofit ones can still make outlandish amounts of money
for the people running them, often by contracting work
out to third party
businesses that the people running
the charter schools just also happen to have stake in. For instance, as Schneider
and Berkshire explain, "The Arizona-based
American Leadership Academy "whose 12 charter schools "emphasize patriotism in their curriculum "is a registered nonprofit with the IRS. "But the school's founder, Glenn Way, "has raked in tens of millions
of dollars by developing land "and constructing buildings, "which his schools then purchase. "Once constructed, the schools
pay anothe
r of Way's firms "to manage them. "Such practices are perfectly legal "in Arizona's largely unregulated
charter school sector." In other words, this guy
started up some charter schools which get most of their funding
from state and local taxes, and those schools used their funding to pay his construction company
to build their buildings and to pay his workers to work in them. All of his profits are coming
from public tax dollars being funneled through a school
into his companies legally. And the
se legal loopholes
probably aren't gonna go away anytime soon, because as it turns out, when an industry makes a bunch of money, they can use that money
to lobby politicians. It is no coincidence that Michigan has some of the most lax
school choice legislation when you consider that the
Michigan-based DeVos family, longtime school choice
advocates and multimillionaires are some of the top donors
to Republican lawmakers in the state. But it gets worse, because when schools
don't use federal funds
, they don't have to follow federal rules. And vouchers and tax-credit scholarships don't count as federal funds. To quote Schneider and Berkshire again, "Freedom from red tape
allows private schools "to skirt any number of
laws and regulations, "including those
pertaining to civil rights, "anti-discrimination, "and the rights of children
with special needs. "Even as they accept public funds, "voucher schools enjoy wide latitude "over who they serve and who they don't. "The Sentinel's investigat
ion
found 83 schools "that accept taxpayer-funded scholarships, "but refuse to admit to gay students. "Additional schools
refuse to educate students "with gay parents, "or to hire teachers or
school staff who are gay. "One religious school in Florida "that Betsy DeVos visited
during her school choice tour "stated openly on its website "that students with special
needs need not apply". But it gets worse, because even if your child is
accepted by a voucher school, that doesn't mean that
they're go
ing to get a good education. Most studies have shown that students who transition from a public
school to a voucher school show little improvement, if any. And in fact, many students'
test scores and grades actually decrease while at these schools. Part of this is probably due to the fact that many of these schools are, as the Orlando Sentinel put it, "so weakly regulated that
some schools hire teachers "without college degrees, hold classes in aging strip malls, "and falsify fire safety
and hea
lth records." There is no guarantee of transparency when it comes to the enrollment numbers, graduation rates, test scores, or college acceptance claims of private schools or charter schools. And yet they use these claims
to advertise to parents and to receive more funding from states. That's not to say that
every charter school is lying about its enrollment numbers or how many of its students
are accepted into college just so that when a profit making industry is left unregulated, it becomes ea
sier and easier
to take advantage of consumers. Some argue that while
private and charter schools may not be perfect, the competition they provide will at least force
public schools to improve. But in practice, that just doesn't happen. Studies have found that having to compete
with school choice options doesn't make public schools
better in any demonstrable way. And competition can
actually make them worse because when public schools
lose funding and students to other schools, they close. But t
he worst part of all of this is that the only real reason that public schools are
losing funding and students to privatized schools is because of what those
schools can get away with because they're operated like businesses. Privatized schools are able to acquire huge amounts of public funding because they aren't always truthful about their enrollment
or academic success data, which they are able to be opaque about because they have less
oversight than public schools. Privatized schools are able
to siphon students from public schools because they spend exuberant amounts of money on advertising, which doesn't even have to be accurate because they're less regulated. But for many of the people
supporting this move toward a privatizing education, deregulation is necessary to
allow businesses to succeed. And when schools are businesses, their success is measured in profits rather than what they're
actually supposed to be focusing on, the education. And when education becomes a product, its
industry falls prey
to all of the other issues with all of the other
industries that we see today. There's a focus on churning
out cheap modular products while minimizing costs and
maximizing customer satisfaction. And remember, the
customers are the parents, not the students. The core question isn't just
about costs and benefits, it's about the goal of public education. Consider the question of class size. Smaller classes are hugely expensive. If those smaller classes are used to cultivate mean
ingful relationships between teachers and students, including more personalized feedback and higher levels of interpersonal trust, the benefits might outweigh the costs, but only if those outcomes are valued. If the aim of schooling
is merely acquisition of content, knowledge,
and basic skills, however, spending more on smaller
classes may be a bad investment. In fact, conservatives
have long made the case that class sizes should be larger, even substantially larger. If education is a product, i
ts production costs should be lowered. And a lot of politicians don't even see cost cutting measures as a bad thing. Like Schneider and Berkshire
illustrate in that quote, if the goals of education
are to instill values and train a workforce, and if those goals can be
accomplished through lectures, memorization of facts,
and standardized testing, then of course it makes
sense to raise class sizes. Limiting class size
only becomes a priority when you believe that
the goals of education are someth
ing else. When you see education
as an active process of being challenged and
building relationships and critically engaging with the world, that probably requires smaller classes. But the business of
education, prioritizing, keeping costs low and consumers happy. And through the lens of
customer satisfaction, what counts as a good
education is one that gives you what you want with the
least amount of effort or discomfort on your part. This is why parents' rights
groups are making such waves in
school policy, because it's not about
what would actually be the best education for the students, it's about what the parents want. And what parents want is classes that teach practical
skills, not useless ones. They want history standards that don't require their kids to look critically at the past. They want books that won't make them or their kids uncomfortable. They want grading systems and discipline policies that are simple, unnuanced, and effective. So because the parents are the customer
s, schools both private and public, make claims about career
readiness and patriotism, while politicians push for more technical and college prep classes, turn libraries into discipline centers, and commit to ending the
teaching of divisive concepts regardless of whether such policies are actually good for students. Another example of the danger of prioritizing customer satisfaction can be seen in the textbook industry. Big textbook publishing companies often make different
versions of their tex
tbooks depending on who is buying them. As The New York Times reported, the same history textbook
from the same publisher showed differences depending on if it was
purchased by Texas schools or California schools. Texas's textbooks focused on taxes, were critical of non-white
cultural movements, and prioritized the
perspectives of the majority. Where California's textbooks
prioritized information on racism and inequality, while including more diverse perspectives. And after confronting the publi
shers about these differences, the article's author found
that most of the differences can be attributed to these company's
desire to sell more books by appeasing policymakers. Since the states are so
different politically, it's no surprise that
the finished products contain some big ideological differences. It's not about quality or accuracy, it's about what you can do to sell more stuff to more people. To make matters worse, when something is sold as a commodity, it inevitably leads to
differe
nces in quality. Nicer things are for
people who can pay more, and those who can't afford nice
things just get what's left. For schools, this means
that those with money can get the best education,
and those without money, can't. We already see a version of
this with higher education, where some of the best universities also happen to be the most expensive. And we even see this to some
extent with public schools since they're funded by property taxes, which leads to better funded
schools in weal
thy areas and schools with less
funding in poorer areas. And when there's a direct connection between funding and quality of education, that means that the people who are already disadvantaged are being further disadvantaged by not having access to better schools. But with charter schools and
private schools in the mix, the problem gets even worse. While many people argue that charter schools could
actually help with inequality, in practice, that rarely happens, in part because they
take public
funding away from public schools. And remember, the whole
idea of school choice comes from a history
of racial segregation. As author John Hale put it
when discussing his book on history of School choice, "Race is baked into this
notion of school choice, "so that's where you have to start. "If we don't, we are
missing the entire point." Ultimately though, a lot
of this stuff comes down to the ideological differences
that we discussed earlier. So while I can debate the economic stuff for whatever
number the timestamp says, I don't know that anything
will actually get solved until we deal with the
deeper issues at play, individualism and the status quo. Now, this video is already long enough, so I won't spend too long on this, because honestly, these
deep ideological differences aren't gonna change anytime soon. I believe that individualism
in education is harmful. Setting aside the economic individualism of the school choice movement, our obsession with
attendance and good behavior come
down to personal responsibility rather than seeing the student
as a whole complicated person situated in a complicated world. I also think that it sucks that we see our schools as training grounds, and see education as a
mere means to an end. They're just there to mold kids into whatever shape the current
status quo requires of them. But we should want students
who can change the world, not just work in it. And don't even get me started on the flaws in the grading system. I can point to a lot o
f
problems with our schools that come from the
emphasis on individualism and maintaining the status quo. But at the end of the day, both of these things are so
deeply entrenched in everything that changing schools is just a bandaid on a much larger issue. But that's not to say
that nothing can be done to fix any of the many
things that I have brought up in this video. There is a war on education happening, and if we want to prevent casualties, we are gonna have to get to work. (upbeat music) Lik
e I mentioned earlier, the erosion of our public school system is happening on a level that most of us as
individuals have no effect on. Decisions are being made in courts through legal battles
being waged by legal teams with millions of dollars and dozens of powerful
political figures behind them. What can you even do in
the face of all that? Well, the same thing people do anytime courts make other
unpopular decisions, protest, contact your state
representatives, vote, donate, or volunteer with
civil rights and legal reform organizations. Be loud. And something that's important to remember anytime your goal is be
loud, is you're not alone. You are far from alone. And contrary to what you
may be hearing on the news and from vocal groups
like Moms for Liberty, public education is and
always has been very popular. Turns out people, generally speaking, think public schools are a good thing. Studies have shown that
parents are consistently happy with their kids' schools. Just last year, 80
% of parents
said they were satisfied with their child's education, which is one of the highest
scores in two decades. But when asked about US
K-12 education in general, only 42% of parents are satisfied. And the people most unhappy
with public schools, those without kids. The ones who are the angriest are the ones with the
least amount of information and the least skin in the game. They just happen to be loud. This goes for the book banning stuff too. There has been a wild increase
in the numbe
r of calls for books to be removed from
school and public libraries. But according to a report
looking into the phenomenon, 60% of the requests were
filed by just 11 people. These aren't grassroots organizations of unhappy parents rising
up to protect their kids. It's manufactured dissatisfaction coming from small groups of people who don't even have any
connection to the stuff that they're complaining about. This video is coming out
just a couple of weeks after election day in 2023. And believe
it or not, across the board, candidates backed by Moms for Liberty and other parents' rights
school choice groups lost. Like I mentioned earlier, there have been small groups of people fighting for school
choice for a long time, but they have always lost, because not only is it a bad idea, but it's also just not popular. The reason things feel so different today is because these small
groups are co-opting the language of the culture war. They're taking advantage
of the cultural fears that grew
after COVID to smuggle in their extreme ideologies. They are trying so hard to scare
people, but they're losing. This is also why so many of these policies are being implemented through courts rather than elections, as we're seeing with the ADF. When you're going through the courts, you don't have to worry about pesky things like voters and popularity. It's also why there's such
an emphasis on lobbying. If you have enough money,
you can buy any politician. So it doesn't really matter
who gets el
ected, right? But that's not to say that we should just ignore
grassroots campaigns. Even though two thirds
of their candidates lost, we should still be paying
attention to Moms for Liberty and similar groups like
TurningPointUSA and PragerU, because they're working to
make the lobbying efforts and court cases feel more
palatable to the public. The ADF and others like them know that their positions aren't popular, so they're working with
and providing funding for all of these media organizations
to try to get public
sentiment on their side. It's basically just a
complicated advertising campaign. But no matter how hard they
tried to make New Coke a thing, people didn't want New Coke, so they made noise and New Coke failed. I know that we're near the end of a probably quite long video, but I wanna make sure that
I make something clear. I don't necessarily
think schools are great. My most popular video is
basically a 52-minute manifesto on how schools use systems that exploit and dehumani
ze students and I think that's a bad thing. Schools can do a lot of harm. But that being said, I am pro-education, especially pro-public education. Education is transformative
and liberating, and everyone should have
free unfettered access to it. Education is really the
last universal public good in the United States, and we
are in the brink of losing it. Our public school system isn't perfect. It does a lot of things wrong, but that doesn't mean
we should privatize it or let it become a victim
of individualism or just eliminate it altogether and just make everyone
homeschool from now on. There are many different
ways of doing school. Some of them are bad, as I have explained throughout this video. Some of them are tentatively good. Democratic schools and Sudbury schools that give students more agency and responsibility and freedom offer a humanized version of education. Community schools that act as
a holistic neighborhood hub offer a collaborative
community-based solution. Schools ca
n be better. At the end of the day,
education is simply one way to reinforce the systems we
want to see in the world. So we need to be careful and conscious of what our schools are for, what sorts of invisible
assumptions and beliefs they're based on, and the way that they're
situated in our communities. Change is possible. We are never stuck doing
things a certain way just because we've done them
that way for a long time. We should change schools, but
we need to be careful about it because if t
hat change comes at the cost of our last universal public good, we will never get it back. (calming music) Thank you for making it
to the end of the video. I know that this one took a while, but hopefully it was worth it. And if you did like it, then
be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment, and
all the YouTube things. You know what to do, you've been here. I did work really hard on this one, so consider sharing it with anyone who also seems to be like overwhelmed by all of this educati
on
stuff happening right now. It really does help out. But I want to give a huge thank you to all of my Patrons and members whose names are scrolling here beside me, with an especially huge
thanks to A Tasty Snack, Adam, Hugh'Sophia, Jaded
Flames, Justin Lowery, and Shep Anderson. If you would like to get
your name in the credits alongside these lovely people, and see my videos early and ad-free, or just help me to pay my bills, then you can join my Patreon using the links in the description, or
become a channel member by clicking the little
button below this video. Also, if you're looking
for further resources on education stuff, I have a video about Adjunctification, I talked about that video on
a podcast with Tom Nicholas, And Elliot Sang just came
out with a video on education that I was interviewed for. All great things all
linked in the description, and probably some cards
at the end of the video. Who knows? (laughs) But finally, we have our
Patron Poem of the Video. For Zreyas,
here is "Haiku on Growth" The cicada's husk clings to a rusty screen door I learn to let go The quick-tongued thrasher spreads still wings on sun warmed sand I take time to rest The traveler's star died before the earth was born my work outlives me And until next time, stay safe, stay warm, and I will see y'all again soon, I hope. Bye folks. What if I just sat, what if I just did the
whole video from here? (in a silly voice)
Hello, it is me. I'm Zoebee, and I am very small. I am-
I am just a hea
d. (in a normal voice)
Okay. (laughs) (calming music)
Comments
Use code zoebee at https://incogni.com/zoebee to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan!
Honestly the fact that US schools are funded based on the wealth of the surrounding population is cracy!
“Then came Reagan” Three words send a shiver up my spine and strike fear into my heart
The more you know, the less exploitable you are. That's why they fear well-educated citizens.
the problem with the right wing, is that they can be presented with all of this evidence, and be like "i see no issue with this"
For people who are against government spending, they sure love finding ways to profit from taxpayer dollars.
The three most terrifying words in the English language are "then came Reagan."
"I don't think that anyone wants to purposefully miseducate kids." Boy do I wish I could maintain that kind of naive optimism but I've been around these types behind closed doors. They absolutely DO want to lie to your kids. Not just mislead, outright lie, to serve their political interests. There's no world where the idea that slavery actually had net positive outcomes for many slaves because job skills or whatever dumb thing they've claimed is true but they'll push it anyway. As if being forced under threat of violence and death to learn to do menial labor means you're guaranteed a job after the government reclassifies you as "human." They don't care if your child is completely unprepared for adulthood as long as they say the right words and don't say the wrong words according to these rich people's proclivities.
From my perspective, as a senior programmer and software architect, what I find the most interesting about pushing for STEM and removing humanities is the kind of programmers it produces. Programmers who obviously lack logical thinking skills and the ability to understand fellow humans and are far worse for it. Programmers who'd obviously have benefited from more philosophical and linguistic and social science education.
A few months ago, Reads With Rachel went to a school board meeting to speak out against book banning in her sons’ district and saw firsthand multiple attendees from right-wing groups who not only didn’t have children, but weren’t even from her county!
Too many Americans are proud to be ignorant, "you just gotta do your own research"....*watches Prager U* 🤦
Education is yet another segment of our society that should be a public service and not a for-profit industry. Same can be said of healthcare and incarceration.
I literally don't want to live in a country where "PragerU" is allowed in the classroom... 😮
I think its also important to mention that Private Schools are able to fudge their numbers for academic success purely by the fact they can select their students while a public school cannot. If a private school wants to boost their numbers, they can offer scholarships to students that are already succeeding in a public school while expelling/preventing lower performing students from joining. This practice also ends up taking higher performing students that would boost test scores away from public schools, making them look even worse by comparison despite the fact that the student got to that point in their education from a public school Tldr: Public Schools have to actually teach their students. Private schools instead pick theirs
Parents homeschooled me until freshman year of high school where I went to a private Christian school. Teachers were terribly underpaid and my senior year biology teacher was, I kid you not, 3-4 moms on rotation as “substitutes” after the actual teacher quit a month into the semester. Also having “bible” as a required “elective” class where we just memorized verses and argued over baptist theology. My parents paid soooooo much money for me to get, essentially, a terrible education if not for a couple of wonderful math and English teachers. Literally the only things that saved me when I got to college. None of the educators from my 4 years were there even 2 years later.
Chile did that. Privatized education, lots of charter schools, demand that is financed in stead of supply, standaryzed testing to measure quality, etc. Our education system is market-based. It is also a DISASTER. Friedman policies were impossed in the dictadorship and have been extremely difficult to reverse. If you want an example of why education shouldn't follow market rules, look at what happened in Chile.
Parents also want obedient little robots that reflect well on them and will care for them in old age no matter how much they use their children as punching bags. Let's not forget this.
As a student, I wish the school system would treat me like a person rather than a product. I'm tired of being a part of a machine that doesn't care about anyone's well-being unless they're rich.
The conservative mindset on education sounds very dehumanizing for children.
I wrote a paper on charters in college over 30 years ago. School superintendents told me, "Every time I lose a student to a charter or private school, the funding goes with them." And yet, few people understood why I was so suspicious of charters all this time. And I am so disgusted with our country treating both education and religion as businesses. God, I'm so sick and tired of the exaltation of profit over everything else in the universe!!!