Jennifer C. Berkshire is the author of The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual (with Jack Schneider) and the host of the education policy podcast Have You Heard.
For years, the loudest opposition to school privatization has come from public-school advocates and teachers’ unions, who argue that vouchers steal tax dollars from local public schools. They are now increasingly being joined by critics on the Right.
Donald Trump is pushing an elite-driven school privatization project that is deeply unpopular with his base. It offers a golden political opportunity for Democrats, if only they would seize it.
The Right has deployed attacks on LGBTQ rights, the teaching of black history, and other topics to politicize and undermine public schools. The Left has an opportunity to mobilize a broad coalition to defend public education in response to this assault.
Conservatives today want to root out discussion of racism and other “controversial” topics from schools. Less discussed: the Right is also making advances in its age-old fight to indoctrinate the next generation in rabid free-market ideology.
The bipartisan obsession with schooling as an investment in “human capital” in the US since the 1970s has fostered a highly unequal society. We need wide-ranging redistribution to tackle inequality — and to defend public education against right-wing backlash.
For years, millionaires and religious zealots have teamed up to preach “school choice” in an effort to dismantle public education.