The analysis of last week’s colossal political upheaval continues. One explanation: education was a major driver of the public’s discontent with Republicans.
Voters were upset about a number of issues, including a voucher program, signed into law by Greg Abbott, the governor, that sent $1bn of public money to private schools. They were concerned about new social studies standards that critics say promote Islamophobia and minimize the impact of slavery. They had seen students detained by immigration authorities, and Abbott threaten to strip district funding if students protested against ICE. And they were angry about a curriculum incorporating Bible verses that felt “forced down the throats” of schools, Palmer said.
Well, yes. I, and just about everyone on the left, has been howling about those kinds of issues for decades. It’s nice to see it’s finally sinking into voters’ minds that the conservatives have been dismantling public education, and that that is a bad thing.
Maybe soon they will recognize that there are certain organizations, often religious, that are loci of spreading corruption, and will work to cut them out.
Yeah, unfortunately no one has done a real solid public campaign, that everyone can see, not just the people that already know its happening, on the “basement” style indoctrination camps they run, and get to call “private schools”, despite being exempt from pretty much all of the rules about education, and content, that public schools need to follow, and almost entirely fail at due to… ding, ding, ding – money being either denied them, due to refusal to fund schooling in this country, or it being stolen, to funnel into voucher systems, which get used to indoctrinate kids in basements into Evangelical/Christian Nationalist bullshit. They found an end run around desegregation – just destroy the system that isn’t allowed to do it, and “allow” parents to funnel their kids into places that the new laws can’t stop them from segregating.
“If there is a god, he wouldn’t want to be shoved down people’s throats.”
Strangely enough, it was public education that originally Made America Great.
We were and still are, the leading nation in the world in science, and the largest economy, etc.. We played a major role in defeating the Nazis and imperial Japanese during World War II, defeated the commies in the Cold War, landed on the moon, have robots scattered through the solar system, and so on.
That we are now on a sharp downhill slide is mostly due to GOP mismanagement and their intentional destruction of our society.
The reason the GOP is targeting public education is real simple. It works. They think that uneducated people are easier to oppress and take advantage of.
These same people trying to keep your children uneducated and dumb by defunding public schools are making sure their children have expensive and good private educations. Because they know the value of a good education.
It’s the same with the colleges and universities. The GOP politicians attacking the universities almost all have elite Ivy league college degrees. A lot of them also have advanced degrees as well, often law or MBA degrees.
In our world, magic doesn’t actually work.
The closest thing to magic that does work is, education.
I was born and raised in a dead end nowheresville in the 1950s.
We kids didn’t have much of a future to look forward to.
A good high school and a university education changed everything.
I’m going to point out one huge flaw with the private schools.
Some of the private schools are just fake scams, but some are good, elite private educations.
I just checked the tuition per year for the local private xian school.
This school does give the kids a good education, but it is no better than the local high schools, which in this area are well funded. Their facilities aren’t as good. They don’t have a pool and just recently got a real library.
The tuition this year is $11,000 for high school. It is almost as much as one year of college.
With two kids in school, you are almost looking at a new car every year.
In this era of rising prices for everything, a huge number of families simply can’t afford this.
The local high schools are just as good and they are…free.
A few of the xian private schools around here have closed in the last decade.
People couldn’t afford them and they lost student numbers until they had to shut down.
Furthermore, the Abbott-appointed state Comptroller has refused to release the amount of voucher money received by each institution citing “privacy concerns.”
Total BS. Clearly, “Christian” schools are receiving the lion’s share of the loot. That was the idea all along. The champion of vouchers, Lt. Gov. Patrick (racist, bigot and white Christian nationalist) proclaimed the program was designed to help families “escape the indoctrination of public schools.”
Patrick was voted out. Abbott was voted out. Comptroller Huffines (who incidentally owns the Epstein porno ranch in New Mexico, I kid you not, can’t make this up) was voted out. AG Paxton lost his bid for the Senate. And, the new Gov, Hinojosa, stated that she will fire the Texas State Education administrator, Morath, on her first day in office.
That alone makes me glad I voted for her.