“Doubts on Romney’s Conservatism Help Santorum in the South,” reads the ABC News headline from March 13. The headline would have you believe that Rick Santorum trounced Mitt Romney in the Alabama and Mississippi GOP primaries. It obscures the fact that Santorum beat Romney by just 44-39 percent in Alabama and 42-39 percent in Mississippi. In other words, nearly half of GOP primary voters in these states voted for Romney.
The headline not only obscures the kinds of political divisions that divide the rural and more liberal urban parts of the South; it also feeds into the idea that Southern conservatives vote primarily on “family values” issues, and takes it on good faith that Romney – who has moved awfully far to the Right during primary season – is somehow the more civilized, sane, humane and/or liberal of the two.
In January, CNN contributor John Avlon wrote about the ugly stereotypes about South Carolina that he saw as that state’s primaries kicked off: “You know, the characterization of South Carolina as a swamp of sleazy politics and brutal attack ads, a Bible belt bastion of rednecks and racism, a state defined by Bob Jones University. Sometimes these stereotypes are floated in political conversations as evidence of how ‘real’ the state is in determining the true feelings of the conservative base.”
These stereotypes are nothing new. In fact, they often date back to the Civil War. They tend to denigrate the Southern poor, under-educated and rural in ways that bear striking resemblance to Republican rhetoric that demonizes the poor in general. But every election season, those of us who have spent most of our lives in the South are reminded of the devastating misconceptions that many other Americans have about us. The Right romanticizes us as the “real America” while the Left treats us a punchline. Polling organizations like Public Policy Polling design studies that target Southern states and reinforce the national sense that we are backward and dim-witted. Here are just a few of the ways in which popular political narratives distort the contemporary realities of Southern life in historical context.
1. We are not predominantly rural.
This one should be a no-brainer. Of course, it is clear to people who live here that our economies no longer operate by way of large-scale plantation systems, if they ever did in the first place. Ferrel Guillory, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor in the school of Journalism and Mass Communication, tells AlterNet, “There is this common wisdom out there that the South remains a rural place dominated by working-class people with no education past high school.”
But the reality is much more complex: “The truth is the South is much more of a metropolitan place. Three out of four Southerners live in metropolitan areas – some combination of cities, suburb and exurb. Throughout the last quarter of the 20th century – up until the recession hit – the South was the fastest growing section in the country. It had outpaced the nation in job and population growth.”
Guillory is the founding director of UNC’s Program on Public Life. He also teaches courses about the political history of the South. He does this, he says, to teach budding journalists how to write about the region in ways that provide appropriate context: “What tends not to be captured is how the South is still the South, but more complex, more diverse. True, you can go into some small towns and find classic Mayberry, and you can go into other small towns and find a lot of poverty. One of the tragic consequences of the recession,” he says, “is poverty in the South, which had been declining. It has gone back up to mid-1990s levels in the past few years.”
But it’s not just news media that perpetuate the rural stereotypes. It also happens in popular culture. Guillory says, “I tell my students that one of my favorite TV shows used to be ‘Designing Women’… What I liked about ‘Designing Women’ was that it was not country music. It was not NASCAR or the ‘Beverly Hillbillies.’ It wasn’t ‘Dukes of Hazzard.’ It was a group of women running a business in Atlanta.” The metropolitan backdrop, which included professional women, he says, provided a refreshing alternative to the usual stereotypical narratives about the South.
And it isn’t just that the South is no longer dependent on plantation economies. The truth is, the region was always more economically diverse than most realize. Jessica Luther, an Austin-based activist and PhD candidate in history at UT-Austin says that states south of the Mason-Dixon Line depended on slave economies at varying levels long before the Civil War began. She notes that, not long after the Revolutionary War, mid-Atlantic States like Virginia and North Carolina had already begun economic transition away from slave-based plantation economics. They had seen the writing on the wall over the slavery issue, particularly when the international slave trade stopped.
And of course North Carolina, which relied on small-scale tobacco production, never had the large plantation-style economy that characterized so much of the South. This is why it was the final state to secede from the Union, and it is part of the reason so many North Carolinians deserted the effort when the Confederacy began experiencing major military setbacks. It may be that these states were able to adapt to modern economies more quickly than others simply because they began the post-plantation transition so much earlier.
2. We are disproportionately poor, but this does not mean we are lazy.
In popular culture, it is easy to dismiss the South as an embarrassing punchline. One of the most common often involves the hilarity of Southern inefficacy and sloth. Television shows like the “Dukes of Hazzard” and “My Name Is Earl” have popularized these misconceptions, making a joke of poor Southerners.
Some of this is probably based on historical observation. As Luther and Guillory both point out, hot Southern climates exhausted farmers and manual laborers in the South. It is a truism that the South became industrialized when air-conditioning became more widely available.
But more important, the tendency to dismiss Southerners as lazy is surely linked to the persistence of inequality and poverty in the region. As Guillory notes, “We have educational gaps that have not been fully closed. We have achievement gaps between young white people and young black people. We have gaps everywhere in the United States, but some of the Southern rates are a little deeper.”
Plus, he notes, we “have some of the highest dropout rates – and so we’re still dealing in many ways with the legacies of our history.” In other words, slavery and then Jim Crow created class distinctions between white and black Southerners that have proven very hard to eradicate. What’s more, the early suppression of the labor movement often meant the disenfranchisement of working-class whites and blacks. Ultimately, the region never fully recovered from its post-Civil War economic collapse.
Southern states usually relied on working-class jobs like textiles, cotton and tobacco. But rising labor costs in the South in the modern era meant that tobacco companies and other sources of employment moved production to other countries for cheaper labor. Guillory says that these new developments have “wiped a lot of that [previous industry] off the face of the state” in North Carolina.
Plus, he points out, older citizens throughout the South have often had trouble adapting to modernization: “They haven’t been trained. They don’t have the education that allows them to adapt… Some [rural towns] haven’t modernized their infrastructure.” So, despite modernization and industrialization, we are still poor states.
Guillory says, “Southerners themselves too often buy into the ‘laziness’ narrative.” But it has very little basis in truth: “Southerners work hard. You know, people worked in fields, in small factories in the heat. Southern states used to attract industry by advertising relatively inexpensive labor but people who would work hard and work independently.”
This linked to a long and troubled history of violent labor suppression in the South that has resulted in some of the worst working conditions in the country – and contributed to the region’s never-ending poverty. Indeed, Southern states often attracted industry based on the fact that they had crushed working-class activism in ways that ultimately produced a pliable – and fearful – labor force. During the 1940s, Jacob Remes, founding member of the Southern Labor Studies Association and assistant professor of public affairs at the State University of New York Empire State College, tells AlterNet, interracial civil rights activism sometimes combined the causes of racial justice and labor rights. But labor organizing was violently put down. People were killed, and both race and Red panic were used as wedges to divide white and black workers. Over time, says Remes, national labor rights activists sometimes gave up on organizing the South, and Southern workers were cowed into poor working conditions and low wages. Just as corporations have moved jobs overseas for cheaper labor, northern industry first came to the South because labor costs had risen in the north, and corporations – like the textile industry that ultimately landed in North Carolina – needed a cheaper labor force.
The entrenchment of Southern poverty may not have happened by design, but capital and history led to the circumstances that made it possible. Though the region was dominated for a time by industrial labor with high wages compared to what had come before, these jobs are no more. This is one reason why so many Southerners have begun flocking to cities, and why metropolitan areas have become, as Guillory points out, the locus of Southern political power.
In contemporary American politics, of course, stereotypes and insults are often leveled at Southerners without regard for historical context. The idea of “Southern white trash” is just one of many problematic tropes that accompany nearly every narrative about poverty in the United States. The Reagan era gave us “welfare queens,” and Southern poverty has given us “poor white trash.” The stereotype, in the latter case, goes something like this: It’s a more aggressive – more denigrating – take on “redneck” culture. “White trash people” – many of them male – are thought to lounge around and, rather than work, collect junk cars for the front yard, drink cheap American beer, knock up 14-year old girls, bet money they don’t have on NASCAR, hate gays and Mexicans, and personally relate to Robert Earl Keen’s comedic country hit, “Merry Christmas from the Family,” which begins, “Mom got drunk and Dad got drunk at our Christmas party.”
We in the South may laugh at these absurd stereotypes, but we know the story of poverty in this region is far more complicated than that. Guillory says the South was slowly climbing out of poverty in the years leading up to the economic crash of 2008, but has since suffered much of that catastrophe’s worst damage. To the rest of the nation, it sometimes seems as if we are – and have always been – “poor white trash.” We are static and unchanging, and people of color rarely figure into these narratives at all. Blaming people for their own poverty is part of the United States mythology of the “American Dream.” It’s not specific to the South, even if the “white trash” trope gives the denigration of poor people a regional flavor.
3. We are not stupid.
The white-trash trope is part and parcel of the idea that we in the South are stupid. Part of this, Guillory notes, is related to the aristocratic education systems that pepper Southern history. He notes that education “wasn’t seen as everybody’s right – it was seen as what rich people do, and what the lucky and the elite do.” Not only this, he says, but “debates over evolution or…liquor or other cultural things” often perpetuated the “sense that Southerners were acting on little or no knowledge of science.”
Even now, evolution remains a hot-button issue that seems to divide North and South. Indeed, evolution remains as controversial today as it was during the Scopes trial in 1920s Tennessee. And though Guillory says that the South has largely converged with the rest of the country when it comes to politics, he explains that it nevertheless “continues to differ with the nation on social issues and cultural attitudes. It’s not that much different, but on a whole series of things having to do with the classic construct of ‘God, guns and gays,’ the South tends to be somewhat more conservative, somewhat more churchgoing, somewhat more accepting of the freedom to own and use firearms and somewhat less accepting of same-sex unions. So, it’s on these cultural issues that there remains some distinctiveness.”
But these beliefs did not develop in a vacuum, and often have more to do with lack of adequate education than innate stupidity. Indeed, as Jane Mayer’s New Yorker exposé on Koch brothers affiliate Art Pope shows, national GOP coffers are pouring into the South to advance causes like school privatization and vouchers under the guise of freedom, equality and “school choice.” Luther says this very same anti-intellectual ideology is also being fueled by right-wing money pouring into Texas.
Often, the moneyed interests that shape Southern conservatism come from other parts of the country – like the Kansas-based Koch brothers – and exploit populations already underserved by their historically underfunded systems of public education. And conservative billionaires bent on privatizing education and dismantling the public system pour lots of money into campaigns meant to reinforce propaganda about untrustworthy “government schools.” These campaigns often result in statewide support for vouchers that further defund the public system. So, when under-educated voters base decisions on issues like “personal morality” rather than perceived economic self-interest, we should probably start talking about the powerful outside interests that are funding this ideology.
But Luther says that dismissals of the South as anti-intellectual – and “stupid” – have dangerous implications for Southern politics in general. She says the stereotype is “not that people don’t know, but that they willfully don’t know. I think that leads to this idea that the South isn’t worth saving. It’s too far gone, it’s not worth it to try and do anything about what people think are serious problems in the South. I think that’s a pretty devastating narrative.” She says that, in her work at RH Reality Check, she regularly encounters snide remarks about the South – “You should just go ahead and secede from the Union” is a common refrain – when she posts information about new restrictions on reproductive rights in the region.
She notes that, whenever people in the South are perceived as doing something stupid, “it gets all this play in the media.” Michelle Cottle has been tracking the disparate coverage of primary season polling at the Daily Beast. She writes, “[N]o one appreciates the absurdity of the South’s retrograde conservatism more than I. For all its many charms, the ‘real America’ that Sarah Palin et al. so mythologize sports its fair share of warts, zits, and infected boils.” Of course it does.
But liberal-leaning media can be particularly unhelpful when it comes to contextualizing lack of education in the South. She points out that Southerners are specifically polled with the kinds of questions – “How do you feel about interracial marriage?” “Do you believe in evolution?” – designed to confirm our collective ignorance. Of the recent polls on Alabama and Mississippi collected by North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling, for example, she says, “when I went back and looked through the rest of PPP’s polls from this year, I couldn’t find any other states that were asked about evolution. Ditto questions about whether Obama is a Muslim. And in only one other state did I see voters being asked about interracial marriage: South Carolina. (Surprise!).” Instead, she points out, other states were asked more predictable campaign year questions: Who do you support? Does a candidate’s electability figure prominently in your vote?
And yet she notes, “On the flip side, missing from this year’s polling were questions about how, say, Arizona or Colorado Republicans feel about Hispanics—immigration, unlike mixed-race couples, actually being a hot political potato. I mean, if we’re going to plumb voters’ innermost prejudices, why not dissect those likely to have real policy implications going forward?”
Luther notes out that statistics like those from PPP fit dominant narratives about the South – people just read the information as “crazy Southerners doing crazy Southern things.” Plus, she notes, Santorum is not really considered a fringe candidate by many Republican primary-voters even if he is dismissed as such in the media.” So, when he establishes Republican support bases in places like Texas, Luther sees it dismissed as common Texas politics. She is keenly aware of the subtext: “Of course that’s what they do in Texas. They elect idiots.”
Not to mention, of course, that Santorum is from Pennsylvania – itself a former slave-owning society and current home base to one large offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. Plus, Santorum has proven popular throughout the Midwest as well as the South. And in any case, it isn’t entirely clear whether Santorum’s success is any more rooted in anti-intellectualism than in the fact that Santorum speaks like a populist. And populism arguably has as much historical currency in working class regions of the country as evangelicalism. Romney, in contrast, makes ridiculous comments about “cheesy grits,” and the nation is surprised that voters see this as pandering and condescension.
The problem, Luther says, is the relative simplicity with which the media often covers issues like the PPP polls from Mississippi and Alabama. That is, the media usually omits context. Luther rarely sees, for example, analyses of corporate influence in Texas politics. For example, in January, Michael Barajas wrote in San Antonio-based independent newsweekly the Current that corporations like Koch Industries, ExxonMobil and Wal-Mart had poured $16.2 million into Texas in just the past 10 years.
Also ignored, Luther says, are the social realities of Texas. She points out that the state “has so many problems with poverty and education” that this “make[s] it so hard for people to know what’s happening politically.” Last year, a CNN Money report noted that poverty had increased in Rick Perry’s Texas so that 18.4 percent of Texan residents now lived below poverty level. This is a problem that is replicated in most every other Southern state, where poverty levels usually exceed the national average of a little over 15 percent.
And of course underfunded education remains a problem in Texas and throughout the South. Just this week, Southern Education Desk explained that Alabama has historically kept education funding low by using race – once again – as a wedge to keep white working-class people from supporting education funding. White working-class farmers had always opposed tax increases in Alabama, but the desegregation of schools left white Alabamans less committed than ever to funding public schools. Unsurprisingly, though, there has always been something in it for the moneyed classes, not the working class – that is, measures to defund education always “played into the hands of large landowners who wanted cheap, non-unified labor, more land, and very low property tax rates, which they have enjoyed ever since the state Constitution centralized power in Montgomery to the state’s planting class. One result of all this is that, across Alabama, there are significant hurdles to raising property taxes to increase local school funding, including mandatory referenda in a very anti-tax state.”
4. We have progressive activists and large liberal contingencies in our states.
The common perception that Southerners are stupid obscures the generations of progressive activists who have fought, sacrificed and sometimes died to make this a more hospitable and inclusive place. But progressive media outlets too often imply that we are an undifferentiated mass of ignorant bigots. In a 2004 Slate article, for example, novelist Jane Smiley wrote that “ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.” Her conclusion? Progressives should just write them all off as potential political allies and marginalize these states as much as possible. But this is extremely ineffective political strategy – and almost certainly would have prevented Obama’s 2008 wins in swing states North Carolina, Florida and Virginia.
Jessica Luther has noticed the deleterious consequences of such dismissive attitudes in Texas progressive politics. Working with RH Reality Check, she watched the “transvaginal ultrasound” media coverage with some skepticism. She notes the vast national coverage of Virginia – a swing state and an urban one – is out of step with the coverage of this issue in throughout the rest of the South. She says the ultrasound law, like the ones passed in North Carolina and Oklahoma – is being held up in the courts. Texas, she points out, is the only state currently enforcing the transvaginal ultrasound law. But where has the national media been on this story?
Luther says at the time of the interview that we are on the 50th day of forced ultrasounds in Texas. And she is angry that there has been so little national coverage that acknowledges it at all. It becomes national news when Virginians protest the law, but the growing weekly protests in Texas – which are drawing hundreds of people – aren’t acknowledged. There is no place, it seems, in the national narrative for progressive Texan activists. Encouragement to “secede from the Union” shows no regard for the history of resistance to regressive legislation and politics in the South. And one need not plumb the entire history of Texas to find them: Molly Ivins found a national audience as a Southern populist feminist icon. Before the election of George W. Bush, feminist Democrat Ann Richards served as governor of the state. Her daughter, Cecile Richards, is the president of Planned Parenthood.
Ultimately for Luther, this is about more than annoying stereotypes; it’s about the fact that no one really notices when marginalized groups in the South are further marginalized by legislation like the ultrasound law. “These people count too,” Luther says, and of course she is right: “It’s something that I just have to keep saying to people. Yes, we live in Texas, but we count too. We are not the ones that are shutting down women’s health programs, and trying to defund Planned Parenthood and forcing women to do ultrasounds. People are angry about that here. There is widespread dissatisfaction with the state government in general.”
Liberal journalists and pundits too often operate as if no one in the South really matters. Luther remembers a 19-minute segment on the “Rachel Maddow Show” devoted entirely to the ultrasound bill in Virginia in which neither Maddow nor other commentators mentioned Texas. Not once. She is glad to see the issue addressed in national media – and on programs like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show.” But she tells me that “everything Stewart says about Virginia also applies to Texas.” And yet few people are telling that story. As Guillory points out, “politically and culturally speaking, the nation has a ways to go in terms of updating its vision of what the South is.”
North Carolina politics are often reduced to the “Jesse Helms legacy.” Helms, of course, was the segregationist and Cold Warrior who served as a North Carolina senator between the early 1970s and into the 21st century. But as Guillory says, this is not the whole story of North Carolina politics. Living in urban North Carolina, one gets the impression that the civil rights movement is far from over – and that current political fights are widely understood in the context of a longstanding commitment to progressive activism in the South.
Certainly, the civil rights movement gets romanticized in dishonest ways. For example, Duke University literary theorist Mark Anthony Neal tells AlterNet that the “civil rights movement was ultimately about [providing] access to a small percentage of blacks, who were outside of institutions etc. The expansion of the black middle-class in the 1970s is the most visible example of that access. In terms of attitudes about race, it means that certain black folk are accepted and the others are still left to the margins.”
This has been true, of course, of most metropolitan civil rights activism throughout the South – and elsewhere – that focuses on civil rights often at the exclusion of economic justice. It is easy to understand why it happens in light of the severe repression against interracial labor movements during the 1940s. It also means that the strongest civil rights advocates in the South are committed to working within the system. Though Remes does not diminish the importance of such advocacy, he does think the Occupy Movement’s decision to operate outside the system is instructive inasmuch as it may open up greater possibilities for transformation.
In any case, Neal says, “however progressive and cosmopolitan the Triangle [comprised of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill] is and how ‘crunchy granola’ Asheville is, there are still pockets throughout the state that reflect Helms’ ideology.” And whatever anyone’s take on the civil rights movement as such, the South remains largely conservative, and is still beset by problems like racial injustice and income inequality. But once again, that isn’t the whole story.
5. We are not a monolith.
For better or worse, Jim Crow is a part of the South’s recent history. Jessica Luther speculates that this may have something to do with the way we experience civil rights as omnipresent in our communities in ways that the North does not. We see the old “whites only” and “colored only” water fountains – signs now removed – in old buildings. We remember that some of our college dorms (including mine at UNC-Chapel Hill 12 years ago) were designed first to segregate the university when blacks began to be admitted. We have vigorous fights about whether or not statues of civil rights heroes should be removed from university grounds.
Much of the country assumes that Southerners are even more inept at discussing race than other Americans. But I think its omnipresence has made it impossible for Southerners not to talk about race. It does not surprise me when my elderly relatives – including those with only a high school education – from the rural South can recognize entrenched racism in their own attitudes and then trace them back to the bigotry they learned growing up. So, we do talk about it, and we talk about it in interracial contexts, and we also talk about it regardless of political affiliation (at least historically).
Jacob Remes points out that Jim Crow was organized in a way that enforced strict segregation, but in some ways depended on day-to-day interactions between blacks and whites in the South. “Colored” water fountains were not always found in separate buildings. Many black working-class people worked for white people on farms or as domestic laborers. So, white supremacy was enforced by way of daily interaction. I sometimes think the fact of “being together” for all these years has enabled us to talk about our history more honestly than we might if segregation had involved the kind of strict urban segregation and non-interaction that is prevalent in the Northeast. That we talk about it just means we’re more socially comfortable with each other. It doesn’t – and didn’t – necessarily disrupt white supremacy.
Talk does not equal progress, and despite advancements in our rhetoric, white supremacist attitudes remain. Ferrel Guillory thinks that, despite all the talk, there is still some denial going on. He notes that it’s difficult to measure the severity of racism in the South, because people have found ways of justifying their own racism without admitting to it. For example, you will rarely hear anyone admit to being a proud bigot, but white people sometimes speak in hushed tones to advise fellow white people not to move to a “dangerous” – that is, usually majority black – neighborhood. Likewise, Guillory says that voters may explain a vote to pollsters by saying, “‘I picked him because he’s more conservative” rather than “because he’s white.” And we sometimes defend ourselves with the claim that we are more integrated than the North (which we are). But hastening to point this out sometimes obscures the changes we still need to make.
Guillory says, “I’m not trying to say that we don’t have real human issues to deal with, and we’ve got a polarized political system much as the rest of the country does. And part of the polarization has been that Southern white people – particularly working-class white people – have gotten increasingly mired – stuck — in their cultural conservatism and the white Southern portion of the Republican party has helped pull the Republican party nationally to the right. So, it’s a complex picture, but it’s important not to say the whole South is ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ or Mayberry.”
He continues, insisting that “those who say…that Democrats ought to write the South off because they can’t make any gains in the South are mistaken. Obama showed that they were mistaken at least in” North Carolina, Virginia and Florida, which voted to elect him by narrow margins. But this wouldn’t have been possible a quarter of a century ago. And it was difficult, growing up in the Jesse Helms era, to believe that anything could ever change. Indeed, “We still matter when it comes to national politics. And we are increasingly diverse” in political opinion.
Guillory thinks the slight political shift – from moderately conservative to moderate – in these newer “swing states” is largely explained by increasing racial and ethnic diversity, as well as urbanization. He says, “The easiest way to say this is [that] people move to jobs, and political power follows the people. So, we in North Carolina and others on the East Coast – we’ve been partly lucky, but partly, we’ve been aggressive” in catching up with the rest of the country. “We’ve built highways. We’ve built good imports. We desegregated the schools… Wake County consolidated the old county and city schools to enforce desegregation. Our cities built good airports. We have good universities nearby. We have the Research Triangle Park.”
But convergence with the nation has happened for better or worse, and the changes are not universally progressive: “We have the banking industry… We have automobile manufacturing…We’ve got the pharmaceutical industry. We’ve got biosciences… We’ve built a modern diversified economy, and that has attracted people from all over.” The legacies of Old South plus all of these new changes have to be included in any characterization of the South. We are not a monolith. There are liberals and conservatives among us.
Simplistic stereotypes about the South do violence to the rather complex histories of struggle, resistance and industrialization in the South, as well as to the diversity of Southern experiences. Progressives and pundits who dismiss the South as a place that is “beyond redemption,” so to speak, miss out on the liberalizing effects of urbanization and increased diversity. They alienate – and ignore – political allies when they do this.
We in the South are not a monolithic population, not by any stretch of the imagination. We disagree among each other on social issues, as well as matters of faith. Our populations are facing some of the most severe reproductive rights restrictions and social services cuts in the nation. If our marginalized groups “count” to progressive Americans outside the region, it shouldn’t be controversial to point out that we could use solidarity, not derision, when we fight regressive Republican legislation. There is a political shift underway in the South. It is incomplete, and it is a moderate shift. But Democrats and liberals do the country a grave disservice by continuing to ignore it.
In recent weeks, home schooling has received nationwide attention because of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s home-schooling family. Though Santorum paints a rosy picture of home schooling in the United States, and calls attention to the “responsibility” all parents have to take their children’s education into their own hands, he fails to acknowledge the very real potential for educational neglect among some home-schooling families – neglect that has been taking place for decades, and continues to this day.
While the practice of home schooling is new to many people, my own interest in it was sparked nearly 20 years ago. I was a socially awkward adolescent with a chaotic family life, and became close to a conservative Christian home-schooling family that seemed perfect in every way. Through my connection to this family, I was introduced to a whole world of conservative Christian home-schoolers, some of whom we would now consider “Quiverfull” families: home-schooling conservatives who eschew any form of family planning and choose instead to “trust God” with matters related to procreation.
Though I fell out of touch with my home-schooled friends as we grew older, a few years ago, I reconnected with a few ex-Quiverfull peers on a new support blog called No Longer Quivering. Poring over their stories, I was shocked to find so many tales of gross educational neglect. I don’t merely mean that they had received what I now view as an overly politicized education with huge gaps, for example, in American history, evolution or sexuality. Rather, what disturbed me were the many stories about home-schoolers who were barely literate when they graduated, or whose math and science education had never extended much past middle school.
Take Vyckie Garrison, an ex-Quiverfull mother of seven who, in 2008, enrolled her six school-age children in public school after 18 years of teaching them at home. Garrison, who started the No Longer Quivering blog, says her near-constant pregnancies – which tended to result either in miscarriages or life-threatening deliveries – took a toll on her body and depleted her energy. She wasn’t able to devote enough time and energy to home schooling to ensure a quality education for each child. And she says the lack of regulation in Nebraska, where the family lived, “allowed us to get away with some really shoddy home schooling for a lot of years.”
“I’ll admit it,” she confesses. “Because I was so overwhelmed with my life… It was a real struggle to do the basics, so it didn’t take long for my kids to fall far behind. One of my daughters could not read at 11 years old.”
At the time, Garrison was taking parenting advice from Quiverfull leaders who deemphasized academic achievement in favor of family values. She remembers one Quiverfull leader saying, “If they can do mathematics perfectly but they have no morals, you have failed them.”
The implication, she says, was that, “if they’re not doing so well academically, well, then they can catch up on that later. It’s not such a big deal. It was a really convenient way of thinking for me because I wasn’t able to keep up anyway.” This kind of rhetoric, Garrison notes, provided a “high-minded justification for educational neglect. I would not have gotten away with that if I’d had to get my kids tested every year.”
Over time, Garrison lost faith in her fundamentalist ideology and became aware that her children’s education was being neglected. Eventually all but one of her six younger children ended up entering and excelling in the public school system.
Why did she stick with home schooling for so long, despite her difficulties? “We were convinced that it would be better for our kids not to have an education than to be educated to become humanists or atheists and to reject God,” Garrison says. “We became so isolated because the Quiverfull lifestyle was so overwhelming we didn’t have time or energy for socialization. So the only people we knew were exactly like us. We were told that the whole point of public school was to dumb down the children and turn them into compliant workers – to brainwash them and indoctrinate them into this godless way of thinking.”
Garrison believes that home schooling has become so popular with fundamentalist Christians because, “there is an atmosphere of real terror among some evangelicals. They are horrified by the fact that Obama is president, and they see the New Atheist movement as a vocal, in-your-face threat. Plus, they are obsessed with the End Times, and believe that the Apocalypse could happen any day now… They see a demon on every corner.
“We home-schooled because we wanted to protect our children from what we viewed as the total secularization of America. We listened to people like Rush Limbaugh, who told us that America was in the clutches of evil liberal feminist atheists.”
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Just how common are stories like Vyckie Garrison’s? Unfortunately, it’s hard to know. The federal government only maintains very broad demographic statistics about home-schoolers in this country; federal data only keeps track of what kinds of people are home schooling and why. You can find plenty of information about home-schoolers according to race, family income or highest education obtained by the parents. But as regards neglect related to home schooling? The government cannot tell you — and there is no systematic state-by-state record of the percentage of truancy convictions (possibly the best measure of educational neglect at present) that involve home-schooling families versus those involving enrolled students and/or their parents.
Capturing that kind of data is essential to understanding the scope of this problem, but getting real numbers will always be complicated by the fact that many home-schooling families choose not to comply with the law by submitting to state home-school regulations, or even report their home-school activity to the state. While it’s possible that some forget, others intentionally fail to report because they fear too much government intervention in their lives. For many conservative Christians, this is a key aspect of their decision not to report.
Given the scarcity of numbers on this issue, the best one can hope for at this point is anecdotal information about the problem. But because home schooling is such a highly politicized issue, it is often difficult to get a clear sense of what is happening from home-schooling parents themselves. And because many parents see themselves as advocates of home schooling, they are not always very eager to discuss potential gaps in home-schooling education.
Luckily, more than a few adult home-school graduates are eager to talk. And as I talk to more and more people who recount first-person stories of home-school-related neglect, it becomes hard to write off what home-school advocates would call “exceptions” simply as fringe outliers.
Erika Diegel Martin’s story is particularly haunting. A home-schooling graduate of the mid-1990s, and an ex-Quiverfull daughter I have known for many years, Diegel Martin was pulled out of public school at 14. Because she was old enough to remember several years of public schooling, she says she never really believed her parents’ dire warnings about it. Her younger brothers were another story. “When the school bus would come by, my youngest brother would go, ‘There goes the prison bus.’ Our parents had them believing that public schools were these horrible places, just dens of iniquity.”
The narrative about public schools, she says, went something like this: “How would you like to get stuck in a building with no light – and secular, godless, atheist teachers for seven hours of the day without even being able to see your parents or go out to play?” As a result, she says, “My brothers were terrified of the public schools.”
Like Garrison, Diegel Martin recounts notable educational gaps in her own family, where there was little academic encouragement. One of her brothers decided to quit school at 16 and faced no parental opposition. The youngest, Diegel Martin says, ceased his formal education at the age of 12, when she left home and was no longer available to teach him herself. And though she was fortunate enough to receive sex education before leaving public school, her siblings were not so lucky. Their parents never taught the three other children about sex, and Diegel Martin remembers giving her 21-year-old sister “the talk” the week before she got married. She also had to intervene to ensure that her younger brothers learned about sex.
As for herself, when she completed her schooling, she says her parents did not allow her to obtain her GED as proof of high school graduation. Their reason? “The girls weren’t allowed to get a GED because we were told we wouldn’t need it. It would open up opportunities that were forbidden to us. We would work in the family business until we got married, and then become homemakers.
“When I talked about wanting to go to college, my parents said, ‘Well, you’re a girl. You don’t go to college.’”
Melinda Palmer, 29, is another home-school graduate who is forthcoming about the problems she encountered as a home-schooled child. She had no experience of public education, and quickly came to fear it. Her father cast the local school as a corrupt example of the dangerous world outside the home. The family’s isolationism created an environment in which everyone was so terrified of the outside they saw no choice but to submit to her father’s abusive rule for many years. She says they had come to believe that the tyranny of their father was preferable to what might await them on the outside.
The oldest of eight children, Palmer grew up in an extremely conservative family that ultimately went entirely off the grid. They lived in a rural country home in Vermont without running water or electricity. Though she says home schooling started out with good enough intentions, it ultimately fell by the wayside, in part because of the sheer amount of work it took to subsist in Vermont without basic amenities while also maintaining the large family’s produce and livestock. It took so much time and energy to complete each day’s chores that they rarely had enough time to study.
Though she says all of the children in her family are literate, she tells me that, in math, she never made it past the start of pre-algebra, and that she has not yet obtained her GED. Since leaving the Quiverfull movement, she has found success as an artisanal cheese-maker, but many opportunities remain unavailable to her because of her upbringing. She speaks hopefully of continuing her schooling at some point, but feels self-conscious about working toward the GED at 29, when some of her younger sisters have already earned theirs. “I study and read things all the time,” she says, “but I haven’t done anything official yet.”
Palmer insists that her family was not alone in home-school neglect. Among the various fundamentalist families that ran in her family’s social circles, she says, “I knew several families whose children were not very literate.” Moreover, she points out, education is “more than just learning math and science and the facts of history – it’s learning how to interact with the kids around you, and figuring out what different kinds of personalities bring to life.
“You can do home schooling right if you’re very careful,” she acknowledges. “Know all the ways it can go wrong and guard against these; have outside interaction; get help with what you need help with and use a decent curriculum.” But most home-schoolers, Palmer points out, “are woefully lacking in every area” of their education.
Palmer sends me a note after we talk that reads, “I know of a family right now in pretty much the exact same situation we were in back then. They reported [their home-schooling status] to the state once, eight years ago, and never after that, to my knowledge. The state never caught on… They are one of the families I know whose children are functionally illiterate. Their 18-year-old daughter can read, but can barely write a paragraph… and the education goes significantly downhill from there. Her youngest brother, almost 11, has barely learned to read.”
I follow up to find out if anyone has reported the family to social services. She says they have been reported, but very little has changed.
*
Still, this is not to say there aren’t many home-schooling parents who are doing an excellent job of ensuring that their children receive a quality education. Most parents realize they are taking on a tremendous amount of responsibility when they commit to home-schooling a child, so I am not surprised to find many – secular and religious – who are doing well by their children.
Maria Hoffman Goeller is one of those. A lifelong family friend, Goeller is a home-school graduate raised in a conservative Christian home, where she never lagged behind in academics. Now she has a son with special needs in the California public school system but educates two other school-age children at home. “Part of the reason we home-school is because I’m choosing what worldview or what subjects I want to introduce my child to,” she says. But she understand the limits of her own skill, which is why she placed her special-needs son in public school. “While I can teach my children reading, writing and arithmetic, I am not trained in special education,” she says. “I want my child to have the best education he can get, which at this time is public school.”
Though she considers herself conservative, Goeller does not demonize public schools as some families do. And contrary to stereotypes about Christian home-schoolers, Goeller is adamant that she will not sacrifice academic rigor, or shield her children from views different from her own. In fact, she says she would welcome more opportunities for them to interact with public school students, for example, in sports and even in certain classes now and then.
Certainly, Goeller is not alone in the care and thoughtfulness she takes with her children’s home-school education. But in light of what Garrison, Diegel Martin and Palmer tell me, it seems irresponsible to assert, as many home-schooling parents do, that home-schooling neglect is just a fringe element in the homschooling world. And getting a straight answer about the scope of the problem from people who champion the cause is difficult at best.
Take Kelly Hogaboom, a secular “unschooling” mother who maintains a popular home-schooling blog called Underbellie, and boasts of having “two terminally truant children.” Hogaboom is an advocate for home schooling and “unschooling,” a type of home schooling that often forgoes curriculum in favor of more child-directed education. She is dismissive of the cases of neglect that I bring up, saying, by way of shutting down my inquiries: “Like yourself, I too had…a deep fear of religious fundamentalism and an erroneous belief state institutions could and should stamp it out.”
Of course, her response misses the mark; the issue of “stamping out” religious expression isn’t the point here. The issue at stake is educational neglect — which is, as the anecdotal evidence shows, an actual problem. My hope is that by looking to home-schooling parents for insights, they will be able to provide an honest assessment of their own successes and failures — in order to paint a more textured picture of the actual potential for neglect.
But in the end, Hogaboom declines to discuss the topic at all, urging me instead to read alternative theories of education she thinks I may have missed. And just in case I don’t understand that she has dismissed the concerns I raise, she concludes our email discussion by saying: “I get a laugh [at] how many grown-ups enjoy talking amongst themselves about what’s best for children” – and following it up with a smiley emoticon.
Though I am frustrated by her failure to engage with me, on some level, I understand her irritation. Home-schooling parents are probably called upon to apologize for neglectful home-schoolers quite a bit. But apologies are not what I’m looking for. I want to know about their experiences – positive and negative — as a way of understanding how to better prevent neglect.
Of course there are parents who are qualified to teach their children at home, and who do an excellent job of it. And there are children who excel in home-schooling environments. These families may well constitute a majority of home-schoolers. But this does not mean that all children do so well, and just as public schools are obligated to educate children who fall behind, so are parents who opt out of the system.
*
Kathryn Joyce, author of “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement,” confirms that there are legitimate reasons for being concerned about a lack of oversight among home-schoolers. She acknowledges the diversity of the home-schooling movement, but notes, for example, that, “among the Quiverfull community, there are families that home-school in such a way that education begins to diverge between boys’ education and girls education around the time they hit puberty.”
Sometimes, Joyce says, girls, “stop receiving the same education as their brothers and are trained instead to fulfill the role that they’re going to have, which is to be a Quiverfull mother and a submissive wife.”
She recalls an anecdote from Quiverfull leader Geoffrey Botkin, who suggested that girls should be taught to use the tools of the laboratory they will inhabit: the kitchen and the nursery. Girls’ education should prioritize “learning how to be mothers, learning in the kitchen, helping their mothers – not merely as chores that are a part of growing up. Rather, the point was that this should be a key part of their education because this was going to be their chief role.” Though Joyce says many home-schoolers go on to do exceptionally well once they go to college, she has also encountered problems with basics like literacy.
Given these sorts of issues, I am unconvinced when Rachel Goldberg, a secular home-schooling mother from Charlotte, North Carolina, echoes what I hear from home-schooling parents of every stripe on the subject of government oversight. “I don’t think there should be any regulation of home schooling,” she says. “I’m not a libertarian or a conspiracy theorist, but I am fiercely protective of my kids and my choices about how to raise them. It’s none of the government’s business how I teach them. Just as I wouldn’t want the state to require me to submit menu plans and quarterly nutritional assessments (even though I believe nutrition is vitally important), I don’t want the state to require curricula plans, portfolios, etc.”
According to Joyce, among extremist Quiverfull families (quite unlike Goldberg’s) there is often “a sense of persecution” when it comes to oversight; many families that refuse to report their activities do so because they fear state intrusion. But their fear may have very little basis in fact. “Often, people have to look outside the United States, to countries like Sweden, where home schooling is much more heavily regulated, to make this argument,” Joyce notes. “There isn’t as much evidence that persecution is happening here, but I think they get a lot of organizing value and activism mobilization out of the argument that they’re persecuted.”
Erika Diegel Martin, whose parents were anti-government extremists, agrees. Her parents did not report their first year of home schooling to the state out of fear, but because she lived in a small New Hampshire town, the neighbors eventually noticed when the children weren’t in school. Finally, a truancy officer showed up to inquire, and as a result, the family reported their home-schooling status. “Look, any other parents [in] a public school would be charged with truancy if their kids didn’t show up at school,” Diegel Martin points out. “Why should it be any different for a home-school family that isn’t reporting their children? It’s our government’s responsibility to make sure that our children are getting a proper education.”
My old friend Maria Hoffman Goeller is a bit more cautious about the need for oversight. With one child in the public school system and two learning at home, Goeller insists that she has not experienced over-regulation in California, one of the more tightly regulated states. But she is always on the alert, she says, for any government mandate that might try to determine “what I can and cannot teach.”
Goeller tells me that her apprehension about over-regulation stems from the arrests of home-schooling parents she knew during childhood, before home schooling was well-understood in the United States. She remembers at least a couple of parents being arrested for truancy, and she remains unconvinced that they deserved this. Some families she knew opted not to report because of these cases. For those children, this meant not answering phones and hiding in the house if a stranger knocked on the front door.
No one I speak to who is home schooling today mentions that this sort of oppressive regulation is a reality for current home-schooling families. Instead, they say that today’s regulation consists mostly of bureaucratic paper-pushing – hardly the kind of home-school persecution some fear. It may be annoying, but so far as I can tell, it’s not trampling on anyone’s rights – though that doesn’t keep home-schoolers from worrying.
*
Ultimately, the women who report neglect in home schooling want their experiences to serve as a warning that either greater restrictions on home schooling are needed, or states need to do a better job of enforcing existing regulations.
For 18 years, Vyckie Garrison says, she continued home schooling even though it became increasingly evident that “we should not have been home schooling. It was a really bad idea for us, but we believed firmly that it was our obligation, that it would be sinful to send our children to public schools, which we called ‘Satan’s indoctrination centers.’” She tells me that yearly testing requirements “would have made a huge difference for our family. It would have either convinced us to quit home schooling, or to do a much better job of meeting those minimum requirements.”
I don’t believe the answer is to end home schooling altogether, and neither do any of the women I talk to, no matter what their experience with home schooling. But neither is it acceptable to allow more home-schooled children to fall through the cracks. And since no one should be deprived of an education, we have a duty to listen to those who were overlooked.
Melinda Palmer has become a vocal critic of home-school neglect since leaving her home about six years ago at the age of 22. She cites “the grace of God” as the reason for her survival, as well as the support of her mother and siblings. She is still a Christian, but says her family believed in a “warped understand of God.” Today, she is no longer a fundamentalist and no longer afraid of living out in the world. She has also gotten involved in advocacy on behalf of better home-schooling regulation.
Of all my sources, Palmer has the most concrete ideas about what needs to change in order to make home schooling safer for all kids. “First,” she says, “we should not reduce the oversight. Second, we need to make sure every child who is not in a public school is either on a private school roster or is on the home-school watch list. I know of many in Vermont right now who are not even registered as home-schoolers, and no one pays attention …When kids are far below grade level, it should raise red flags, and someone should be looking into it.”
Furthermore, as a sister to several children with cognitive disabilities, Palmer highlights the particular attention that home-schooled children with special needs deserve. “If kids have disabilities, the government needs to make sure that the disabilities are being addressed either by the parents or by an intervening agency.…A child with disabilities,” she notes, “has as much right to an appropriate education” as any other child.
Just before we hang up the phone, she makes a final request: “Please spread the word that it is really necessary for the government to make sure children aren’t being robbed of an education… Kids have rights too, and one of them is the right to an education appropriate to their age and ability.”
It’s an important point, and I conclude with it because it is one of the more incisive analyses I’ve heard on this topic yet. There is simply no justification for allowing cases of educational neglect – wherever it exists – to go unchecked. We need not imprison more parents to make sure this happens, but improving state and local oversight of those who opt out would be one step in the right direction. As Garrison, Diegel Martin and Palmer acknowledge, better checks on their own home education would have made a vast difference for them. This is why, they say, they will continue to speak out.
National School Choice Week, a pet project of big corporations and conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers, kicked off Monday with celebratory forums throughout the country. Billing itself as a social justice movement committed to “ensuring effective education options for every child,” “school choice” has actually become a deeply divisive wedge issue for the right. But the folks at School Choice Week would prefer that you didn’t know that.
On their website, you can find photographs and videos of shiny happy children of all races and ethnicities. And you’ll see that Bill Cosby is a major supporter. And since he has a doctorate in education and has acted as a philanthropist on behalf of many African-American schools, many will see his endorsement as an important mark of legitimacy.
But there are a few serious problems with the school choice movement. Though it attracts mainstream conservatives like Cosby, as well as Democrats like President Barack Obama, it is not, at its core, a bipartisan endeavor. Its most important backers are rightwing organizations like the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and other groups supported by billionaire rightwing ideologues like the Koch brothers. They want to dismantle public education altogether and run schools as businesses, judged as “successes” or “failures” based on abstract data taken from high-stakes standardized test scores.
Access to opportunity is replaced with demands for universal “excellence” and “achievement,” in which teachers are punished for student “failure.” This pits parents against teachers, and it ultimately sidelines already marginalized children of immigrant families, poor children and/or children of color.
But you won’t see any of these shortcomings acknowledged in the video below:
To counter some of the misinformation School Choice Week organizers are disseminating to the public, I give you the five biggest lies you’ve heard about school choice:
1. It’s not about racial justice and equal opportunity.
In fact, school choice often makes inequality worse. But because public schools have not solved the achievement gap between white and black children in America, proponents of school choice dishonestly take up the mantle of the Civil Rights Movement.
It isn’t that all aspects of school choice are objectionable to educators. Dennis van Roekel, president of America’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), acknowledges that school choice can benefit underserved populations some of the time. He says magnet schools – that is, schools in poor neighborhoods that provide a range of diverse classes for students not usually offered in public schools – are a good model for school choice. Such schools draw students who are attracted, for example, to advanced arts or sciences programs. The extra funding ensures that magnet schools, located in poor areas, become a district’s best schools. Van Roekel sees this as a worthy innovation that furthers equity, and says the NEA supports it.
His organization also supports teacher-led schools that empower teachers to administer schools and tailor them to the needs of students. He even says that some charter schools – that is, independent public schools designed to fill a specific community’s needs and are less regulated that other public schools – are good ones. He thinks there is room in public education for some charter schools.
But he doesn’t think they’re a viable answer to inequality everywhere. He cites a 2009 Stanford study, which found that only 17 percent of charter schools provided better education than regular public schools. And that, he says, is not acceptable to the NEA because “it ought to be better than that. It needs to be 100 percent.”
He is not as open to school vouchers, which divert public money away from public schools and allot it to parents to assist with private school tuition. Ultimately, Van Roekel says, vouchers disproportionately serve the wealthy. Less funding for public schools is just not good for poor communities, which usually have to rely on the public system.
Karey Hardwood, an ethics professor at NC State University and public school advocate, is also concerned about how school choice affects poor children. She is an activist with Great Schools in Wake, an organization that formed in 2009 to oppose a school choice platform pushed by a newly elected right-wing school board in Wake County, North Carolina. The state chapter of the NAACP has also opposed school choice, arguing that it will lead to the re-segregation of schools in Raleigh, North Carolina and its surrounding suburbs.
Harwood asks: “When they talk about choice, whose choices are they referring to? Are the children of people who are savvy enough to get out of the public schools the only children who are worth educating in our society? What happens to the children who don’t get out? It seems the [people behind School Choice Week] knowingly embrace the idea of creating a second tier of schools for those American citizens who don’t or can’t ‘choose’ – and they are perfectly okay with a divided society of winners and losers.”
Carrie Rogers, a Wake County parent and former teacher who describes herself as a moderate Republican, agrees. She says school choice largely benefits well-educated middle and upper-middle class students. Rogers notes that she devoted 12 hours per week for six months to investigating her children’s options, and says that working class parents who work multiple jobs do not have that kind of free time on their hands. She adds that poor children, who most need access to excellent schools, will end up in the worst schools as a result. Ultimately, she says, “I think ‘school choice movement’ is a misnomer. I view it a movement based on prejudice, xenophobia and racism. The idea sounds good, and we all hate the idea of bussing our children [to outside communities to enforce Wake County’s former economic diversity policy]. But if you don’t want your child bussed, don’t break the entire system. We’ve allowed a very small group of vocal opponents to ruin our schools for everybody.”
Brian Jones is a New York City teacher and activist with the Grassroots Education Movement, an organization that supports progressive school policies. He says, “I think [racial and economic] segregation is the sinister subtext [of school choice]. Very wealthy benefactors are going into Harlem and promoting segregated schools as a solution. But the Civil Rights movement saw racial justice as bound up with economic justice. The school choice movement claims to be about racial justice, but distances itself from questions of economic justice. Under the banner of ‘school excellence,’ school choice advocates would like for us to forget about equity.”
John Wilson, former president of the NEA who now resides in Raleigh, says it is a “travesty that we are allowing our schools to be re-segregated” in the name of social justice. “If you really want to help poor children,” he insists, you have to desegregate your schools.” A native of the South who spends half of his time in North Carolina, Wilson says his background “absolutely informs” his perspective on school choice. When Southern schools were forced to integrate, he remembers, educators ultimately realized that integration was the best way to promote equity.” In other words, it brought home the lesson of Brown v. Board of Education – the groundbreaking 1954 Supreme Court decision mandating school integration on the basis that segregated “separate but equal” schooling always privileged white students and could never be equal in practice.
2. It’s not about making public education stronger
The school choice movement promotes the dismantling of public education at every turn.
Van Roekel says that, for school choice to benefit public education, it must prioritize the needs of students. The problem is that this rarely happens. Instead, school choice is too often a mechanism of privatizing education and defunding public schools. When funds are diverted away from public schools, they are not strengthened, but starved. Teachers end up with so many students per classroom that it is impossible to give every child the attention she needs. Van Roekel says attempts to profit on the back of public education are unacceptable.
Wilson tells AlterNet that he thinks School Choice Week’s primary aim is to promote vouchers at the expense of public education. He says, “Private schools undermine the public school system,” and adds that no evidence suggests they are better than public schools. School Choice Week, he says, is promoting the demise of public education under the guise “excellence.” In the end, he says, they are “doing a disservice to children.”
Judith Armfield, who retired from the Wake County Public School System in 2004 after 31 years in teaching, agrees. She opposes the privatization of education because she thinks diversity is an important aspect of learning. According to Armfield, private schools “encourage withdrawal from reality” such that “students…are not as well-prepared for success in a diverse world. My boys began their school experience in private school in [segregationist George Wallace’s] Alabama, but we realized that they were being sheltered and put them in public school classrooms” where they had access to better school curriculum and learned to coexist with people different from themselves.
Harwood is also concerned about the privatization trend, noting, “One of the most problematic aspects [of it] is the idea of ‘choice’ itself. What the [people behind School Choice Week] seem to be saying…is that, rather than strengthen a weakened public school system because we believe in public schools as the foundation of a democratic society, the solution is to abandon public schools altogether, let them deteriorate, and replace them with alternative private schools and charter schools that can claim they cater to every possible parental preference.”
Harwood has seen this happen firsthand in North Carolina, where wealthy conservatives like Art Pope and the Koch brothers are promoting the privatization of education as a way of shoring up profits for themselves and other large corporations. She says applying this business model to education results in a system that “pits schools against each other in a competitive market…, [and] that’s really not the best way to go about improving school quality. In fact, it’s very counterproductive.” Rogers agrees, saying it creates a system in which “there has to be a school that’s the worst school in the country. We have decided [under the George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act], that, if you’re the worst school in the country, we will shut you down. We’re not looking at whether that school is working” within the confines of limitations like large class size or high homeless rates.
Jones tells AlterNet that the same kinds of corporate interests that promote school choice in North Carolina are at work in New York City. He says, “We have a lot of Wall Street Money involved. We recently learned that Goldman Sachs was backing [one prominent charter school in New York City]. Wall Street bankers and hedge fund executives run that school. They seem to believe that you don’t need to know anything about education in order to run schools.” And this is the sort of hubris, Van Roekel and Wilson say, that is unlikely to benefit students.
3. It’s not about supporting teachers.
School choice often results in a punitive atmosphere for teachers. Why? Well, parents choose schools for their children at least partly on the basis of high-stakes standardized test scores. And the quality of teachers is usually reduced to a zero-sum question about how well a school’s students score on standardized tests. As a result, teachers are blamed when students score poorly on standardized tests, and advocates for school choice use the numbers – and the bogeyman of bad teachers – to advance their cause.
Radical right-wing bigwigs like Rush Limbaugh have also contributed to the demonization of teachers, casting them as “socialists” working to “indoctrinate” students. And though the scapegoating of teachers gets particularly ugly on the far right, anger at teachers is not reduced to the fringe elements of the conservative movement. For example, Jones notes that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says that up to half of the city’s school teachers may be so incompetent they have to be replaced.
But why teachers? Wilson thinks the school choice movement is particularly hostile to teachers because the NEA is a strong opponent of school vouchers. Jones agrees, telling AlterNet he sees the proliferation of non-union charter schools in New York City as a tool to punish public school teachers. Why? Well, precisely because charter schools are usually non-union schools. In New York, he says, non-union charter schools are promoted because they act as “a significant wedge against the teachers’ union.” He says the rise in numbers of non-union teachers leads to the union being pitted against workers who have fewer bargaining rights and worker protections. And it becomes harder for teachers to organize effectively against vouchers.
Rogers agrees that the impetus behind the school choice movement’s call for teacher accountability is to punish teachers, not make them better. She notes, “teacher accountability is [a way of scapegoating teachers in spite of the fact that] problems in education are usually systemic – and not the fault of individual teachers. It hurts morale,” she says, and is counterproductive given that low morale is rarely conducive to outstanding job performance. “When people say teachers are overpaid or should be fired,” she says, “I just don’t believe that… If a school is doing really badly, it’s not because the teachers, administrators and support staff have all gotten together and said, ‘Who cares?’ Educators do try to make it work. We become educators because we are committed to the personal and academic growth of our students.”
Rather than blaming teachers, my sources all suggest that systemic factors like poverty and class size need to be taken into account in assessing school performance. Rogers thinks high teacher-to-student ratio is a major reason why some schools perform poorly, and Jones agrees. He adds, “When you have growing numbers of homeless students, increasing economic inequality and waves of budget cuts year after year,” it is unrealistic to blame failure on the teachers. “It’s nonsensical that they would promote this demand for excellence” even though they have presided over the depletion of public school resources. At the end of the day, teacher accountability is usually bound up with the push for privatization, and it rarely improves teacher performance.
4. It’s not about giving parents what they want.
To the contrary, many of my sources point out, school choice seduces parents by making hollow promises they think will resonate with parents. Jones says many parents are drawn to the idea of school choice – and the accompanying promotion of private education – at first. Plus, the inflammatory rhetoric that school choice advocates use against teachers helps the school choice movement divide and conquer teachers and parents. In other words, it pits parents and teachers against one another, and as a result, the quality of public education suffers.
At first, Jones says, “Historically underserved groups may see it as a solution to inequality. I can understand why some parents buy into it at first. If you feel like your child’s education has been neglected or if you’re a member of a group that has historically been underserved, you feel like finally someone is paying attention. But, in fact, school choice often disempowers parents.” It restricts their level of involvement, for example, in Parent/Teacher Associations. They are afforded less influence over school policy. A bit ironically, then, school “choice” may actually result in less choice for parents.
Jones says, “What we’ve seen over and over again is that many of the parents [who initially pushed for school choice] will switch to our side after they experience it. They realize that school choice does not promote equality or benefit them. Not to mention, what happens when parents have no good choices available?” In any case, he says, “as school choice plays out, parents begin to see that it crushes genuine learning. For example, it reduces literature to a main idea and education to a chore [that is organized around high-stakes standardized multiple choice tests]. The real lesson is that school is not a place where you investigate your own questions, but where you learn to answer someone else’s questions the way they want you to answer them. It makes education a chore rather than a joy.”
Rogers sees may parents becoming disillusioned with school choice in the Raleigh area as well. She says many parents are overwhelmed with complicated school application forms and the imperative to choose the best schools for their children. They must also make ample time to visit schools holding open houses where teachers and administrators and charged with “selling” their schools. Sometimes, she says, the parents who get burnt out are the very same people who welcomed school choice at the beginning. In practice, she says, they find the process taxing and stressful, recognizing that they may be unqualified to determine which school is best for a specific child.
Jones thinks that the alienation of parents and teachers means that school choice advocates are “in danger of creating a very strong alliance of teachers and parents to challenge their agenda.” Jones says one example of this is New York City Public School Parents, an organization through which parents advocate for more parental involvement in schools by way of strengthening public education. Organizations like this facilitate cooperation between parents and teachers, who often begin to side with teachers’ unions opposing vouchers. When that happens, it’s a significant boon to public education.
5. It’s not a bipartisan, secular movement.
School choice is a deeply partisan fight, and one which many – but not all – private church schools have taken up. Don’t get me wrong. This myth, like any successful political narrative, is at least partly true. Moderate conservatives and a range of liberals often lend their support, obscuring the rightwing ideology behind the movement.
So, yes, choice does have a modicum of bipartisan support across party lines. Rogers notes, “I know several parents who are very liberal and
who are pro-school choice… As someone who is kind of hard to pin down politically, I shy away from putting a political label on this, but I know it isn’t only about the Tea Party. There are a lot of very liberal people out there who are in favor of school choice.”
Rogers believes this is due, at least in Wake County, to the pervasiveness of racism across party lines. She stresses that “Republicans are not the only racists. Of course liberals are theoretically less likely to embrace school choice and support public initiatives in education, but then they often get down to it, and go, ‘oh wait, we have to send our kids to schools with the black kids or the poor kids?’” She says she knows many liberals who fail to live up to their high-minded ideals when it comes to school choice.
Though she argues that this is largely motivated by racism, Rogers thinks that some parents – on both the right and left – may not understand that the consequences of school choice – and that includes negative consequences like re-segregation and greater inequality. She says, “Parenthood gives you a very narrow focus… We want to protect our children. If we feel that a school is not doing what it needs to do, we’ll fight to send our children to another one. These parents sometimes don’t realize that what they’re advocating is not fair to everybody.”
Because of this, school choice maintains enough bipartisan support to appeal believably to bipartisanship. Jones points out that President Obama has consistently supported school choice despite a campaign platform that involved overturning No Child Left Behind. In fact, he says, “Obama applauded the mass firing of teachers in a poor school district in Rhode Island that was deemed a failure. And he supports the proliferation of charter schools” that has so negatively affected teachers unions’ in places like New York.
This is because school choice is, at its heart, about the kind of “bootstraps” ideology in which some people win and some lose, as Harwood pointed out. School Choice Week is backed by many private schools associated with the Christian Right, which have an interest in steering children away from public schools that they believe will “indoctrinate” their children with liberal ideology, tolerance for LGBT people, and instruction that recognizes evolution as a viable scientific concept. Because Fox News caters to this audience, coverage of school choice is most prominent there. As a result, religious institutions often favor vouchers as a way of promoting their own political agenda.
Perhaps even more significant are the corporate sponsors of School Choice Week. Morna McDermott of the Baltimore Education Reform Examiner writes that corporate backers, perhaps more than private schools, are interested in the complete dismantling of education. She says “corporate-led [conservative] reformers must have gotten wind that there were billions of dollars to be made by funneling federal dollars through these schools” because they “have since taken the lead to legislate policies to their benefit.” And, she points out, most of the organizations affiliated with School Choice Week “have direct connections with, or strong ties to, a right-wing agenda to privatize many American institutions including education.”
The most powerful, she says, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which brags of helping introduce more than one thousand pieces of school choice-related legislation to legislators every year. She explains, “ALEC describes itself as a ‘unique,’ ‘unparalleled’ and ‘unmatched’ organization,” and adds, “Their largest contributing members include the tobacco industry and big oil.”
But ALEC isn’t the only right-wing supporter of School Choice Week. Conservative organizations like the Goldwater Institute, New Jersey Tea Party Caucus, Heritage Foundation, Alliance for School Choice, Friedman Foundation, Heartland Institute, Reason Institute, and many other right-wing groups are also behind this week’s school choice celebrations. Despite some liberal support, its primary backers are deeply conservative activists whose goal is to dissolve public education in the United States. That’s why school choice bipartisanship is a myth – that is, its advocates use their few liberal supporters to obscure the real political base.
It is crucial to debunk these kinds of myths because, as Harwood says, “School choice is not the panacea that [its supporters are] making it out to be. There is plenty of room for creativity and innovation within public schools. There should be plenty of motivation to strive for excellence. To rely always on this free market ideology as the solution to problems in the public schools [signals] a very limited way of thinking. When students are healthy and well-fed and schools are well-resourced, the results in American schools are excellent. Poverty and extreme social inequality are the real” barriers to adequate education. And as all of my sources confirm, school choice is an unsuitable one-size-fits-all solution that often marginalizes poor children and children of color rather than fixing their schools.
Public education itself is not the lost cause that advocates of School Choice Week would have you believe. The effects of inequality undoubtedly undermine the progress many marginalized students, but this does not require that we do away entirely with public schools. A woman from an Eastern European immigrant family recently told me that, until recently, she thought the United States had largely figured out how to do education well. But causes like school choice now undermine progress our education system has achieved, and that is why its propaganda has to be disputed.
(Credit: Jon Haynes Photography / CC BY 3.0) 
The headline not only obscures the kinds of political divisions that divide the rural and more liberal urban parts of the South; it also feeds into the idea that Southern conservatives vote primarily on “family values” issues, and takes it on good faith that Romney – who has moved awfully far to the Right during primary season – is somehow the more civilized, sane, humane and/or liberal of the two.
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(Credit: Petro Feketa via Shutterstock) 