The Right-Wing War on Education

- 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 getting 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 battlegrounds 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 colleges 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 they'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 overwhelming 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 It." 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 who 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 waging 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

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to have a handful of politicians on their side, but in reality, the roots of this conflict 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, Ziklag, 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 receiving 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 conspiracy

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 this 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 important 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, public 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 them 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 what 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 helping 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 abstract 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 parents 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 products 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 there'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 about 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 conservative 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 perceived 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 1950s, 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-ordered 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 integrated 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 after 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 presumably 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, charter 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 training 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 teaching. 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 estimate 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 should 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 by 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 another 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 these 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 investigation 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 going 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 health 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 easier 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 the 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 meaningful 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, its 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 something 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 customers, 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 textbooks 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 publishers 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 differences

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 wealthy 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 of 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) Like 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 number 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 elected, 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 dehumanize 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 can 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 that 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 education 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 head. (in a normal voice) Okay. (laughs) (calming music)