Shutterstock, Sheila Fitzgerald
In this critical 2024 election year, MAGA and other fascist forces use public education as a venue for the performative politics of fear, anger, hatred. They claim they are victimized by certain public school programs, which are actually aimed at meeting the educational and emotional needs of all students. Yet Americans everywhere want the government to do far more to support and expand public education, including special support for historically disadvantaged marginalized communities. This is as true in MAGA-controlled states and rural communities as it is in every major urban area.
To influence this election, the fascist Heritage Foundation has published Project 2025, a blueprint for politicians of every party at every level of government. The report calls for the end of public education as we know it by instituting “education freedom” at every level. Project 2025 calls for national and state systems of vouchers, where public funding for schools is diverted into payments to families so they have the “freedom” to go to private schools. This bait-and-switch trick is advertised as helping poor families to get good education. In fact, it is blowing up state budgets by authorizing the private looting of public schools.
ARIZONA DEFICIT
Arizona has the country’s most developed voucher program. Voters were told that the first-year 2022 costs would be $33 million. In fact, it cost $550 million and has been increasing every year. This money is taken from public schools and given to parents, thereby breaking the state’s public education budget. However, 80% of vouchers go to families that have never had children in public schools at all! Parents with children already in private schools have used this money for skiing trips, pianos and lessons for driving luxury cars. Meanwhile, Arizona’s budget deficit for 2024 could run as high as $835 million.
In Iowa, vouchers run $345 million for only 17,000 private school students. This is about $20,300 per student in a state where public school students are budgeted about $7,800 per year!
Project 2025 openly calls for abolishing “the administrative state.” Vouchers are a major means to achieve this aim since they tend to bankrupt school budgets, local, city, county and state budgets.
Most government support for the basic human needs that we all need comes from city budgets. Public schools are a critical part of most local budgets. They are also the broadest form of democratic government that exists in the United States. Destroying public schools goes a long way to destroying government’s responsibility to the public.
As of March 2023, voucher bills have been introduced in at least 24 states. They passed in four states: Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and Florida and have failed in at least six states so far in 2023: Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota – all MAGA-controlled states. In Texas, the governor called four special sessions in 2023 to implement vouchers, only to be rejected each time. Similar rebellions against vouchers are occurring right now in Georgia, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. Once Nebraska passed a voucher law, Support Our Schools Nebraskagathered nearly double the number of required signatures to put its repeal on the ballot this November.
School vouchers are also historically deeply rooted in segregation. This understanding is growing across the country. A 2024 poll of 1800 Georgians shows that people of every political stripe believe the state should provide additional support for K-12 public schools, especially those that serve students from families with low incomes. In Central Bucks School District in Pennsylvania, the community is also rising up against MAGA school board members who are implementing a top-down campaign that is financed by outside money to ban books.
Vouchers attack both urban and rural public schools. Across the country, rural folks well understand that vouchers will destroy rural public schools. These relatively smaller school districts run on a shoestring as it is. The loss of even 10 students to vouchers might mean that they would have to start laying off teachers and staff such that the schools would no longer function. And the MAGA plan to hold back “failing” third-grade students likewise devours scarce resources and is opposed by many rural areas.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
Project 2025 calls for abolishing all government accountability over school funding and wants to legalize states’ rights so that any state can refuse to implement any federal law. In essence, parents are given a voucher and told to fend for themselves in an unregulated market. Privatizing public schools across the board is the goal. To achieve this, fascists rely on divide and conquer.
Public education faces regular and open coordinated attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) as well as book banning, censorship and vouchers. A woman’s right to her body is fundamental in schools, yet it is under attack. Higher education and free speech have been hounded by agitators who deliberately conflate criticism of Israeli genocide with antisemitism. African American History, which is fundamental to our understanding of where we are as a country, is deplored and banned.
The Heritage Foundation report equates the interests of LGBTQ+ people with “pornography.” It would end all rules and regulations that protect trans students, BIPOC students and students with special needs. It proposes that the White Christian Nationalist version of religion be central to all curricula. It rejects the constitutional separation of Church and State and privileges the religious beliefs of one type of Christianity over all other religions and over civil laws. Immigrants are demonized with false claims of inherent criminality. The public simply does not support stripping someone’s rights in the name of “freedom.”
Public education is today a critical arena for the battle for political power. Fascist forces are the gaslighters of an aggressive extractive capitalism that has the agenda of legally establishing the absolute domination of private property over every public interest. By privatizing schools, they are changing government to prioritize corporate interests over the public good. These are far more than simple “culture wars.” The end game is to abolish the public as a legal entity. This is central to establishing a full-blown corporate dictatorship.
The American people recognize these fascist MAGA attacks for what they are. All society is in motion. We have never been here before. We can only secure the power and the interests of the public by abolishing every form of corporate power over our lives.
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References:
https://portside.org/2023-04-26/school-voucher-bills-seek-defund-and-privatize-public-schools/
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/school-vouchers-red-state-budgets/
ITPI — What’s happening in Nebraska?
Published on March 22, 2024
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