Christian Nationalism and the School Privatization Agenda
Free-market ideologues capitalize on culture wars to win access to public funds
In their new book The Education Wars, Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider argue that privatizing profiteers are using culture wars as a proxy to win concessions that threaten the existence of public education.
In a recent interview, the pair explains:
Right now, though, the culture war has inflamed the passions of many who would otherwise be perfectly content to send their children to public schools. They aren’t market ideologues who get into bed at night and read Milton Friedman. And most of them aren’t actually culture warriors. Yes, they’re receptive to religiously and culturally conservative ideas about education. But at the end of the day, they want to send their children to taxpayer-supported, open-enrollment, democratically controlled schools. They like public education, or at least thought they did.
Berkshire and Schneider suggest that free-market ideologues are taking advantage of this current battle to push for changes in school funding that would otherwise be unacceptable.
One possible example is the advance of Hillsdale College’s charter schools in Tennessee:
As the post notes, by charterizing Tennessee’s suburban public schools, Hillsdale-affiliated charters stand to gain significant funding - $35 million if all their current school dreams are realized and as much as $350 million if they get ahold of as many as 50 schools, as Gov. Bill Lee suggested in a 2022 speech.
What’s interesting is that local communities aren’t clamoring for charter schools. Instead, these schools (and also school vouchers) are being pushed by Gov. Lee and a cabal of privatizers who seek to dismantle the public education system.
Hillsdale's Goal: The Collapse of Public Schools
Hillsdale College’s Christian Nationalist charter school network gained a foothold in Tennessee recently when the Rutherford County School Board approved an application from Hillsdale-affiliated American Classical Academy to operate a charter school there.
As Berkshire and Schneider note, the rhetoric around “failing schools” doesn’t match reality:
It’s very common to hear that our public schools are failing. And it’s very useful rhetoric if you’re running for office, or if you’re a policy elite intent on convincing people that they need you. But it simply isn’t true. If you look at polls, a majority of Americans do believe that the nation’s schools are mediocre; yet that same percentage of people report that their own children’s schools are doing quite well. So, which one are they likely to be more informed about—the schools down the street, which their children attend, or the 98,000 schools they’ve never set foot in? The simple fact is that for the past four decades, since the Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk” report, we have been telling ourselves a story about failing schools that doesn’t match reality on the ground. And, by the way, if test scores are the currency that you value, scores are up across that period.
Why do free-market types hate on public education?
So what’s not to like? Well, what’s not to like is the fact that this is an incredibly resource-intensive enterprise. If you’re opposed to redistribution, antagonistic toward government, and unconcerned with other people’s children, then this system is colossally wasteful. Sure, there’s some so-called return on investment, in the form of lower incarceration rates, lower utilization of welfare programs, and stronger economic productivity. But much of what we do in public education we do simply because it’s right—because it’s what all young people deserve.
This is reminiscent of how Az voucher money can be spent on discriminatory religious private schools
Great read, as always