Of course you realize, this means war.

Election week had some good news for educators, which is bad news for our enemies. The forces that mobilized to frighten parents and turn schools into precisely the type of political indoctrination machines they pretend to oppose lost a few contests, and took a particularly delicious drubbing in Michigan. Ohio did okay but unfortunately Missouri was a mixed bag. North and South Carolina continue to spiral into the sewer, and Florida and Texas are all-around disasters, proving once again that you can indeed fool some of the people all of the time. Additional information including ballot initiatives here.

It wasn't a uniform rejection of the haters, by any means, and they certainly are not going to surrender and quit. But there are indications that the tactics used by these vandals are too boorish even for some folks who otherwise share their views. And there is clear evidence that some candidates all the way up to governor's races found traction in declaring support for what most people understand to be public schools and the people who work there. 

The project to destroy authentic public schooling is sweeping and ferocious. It has a long history going back at least to Brown v Board of Education and the fight over desegregation, back to Milton Friedman's "The Role of Government in Education," and it continues today with vouchers and charter management organizations and resource deprivation, with the testing regime and attacks on schools via CRT, LGBTQ+ intimidation, trans descrimination, and the book banning that follows.

The forces waging war on the institution of public education fight on multiple battlefronts--often simultaneously--utilizing extensive resources and a variety of weapons. Sometimes those weapons look harmless, but they are not. Sometimes those enemies look like allies, but they are not.

Many of these enemies are familiar, like craven politicians and corporate hustlers. However, some of them are exotic and hard to process. The strategies vary in the details but essentially are focused on depriving authentic public schools of the oxygen that keeps them alive: students. 

How? School budgets are sliced up with large portions diverted to consultants and outside programs and "educational materials." Unions are demonized and marginalized resulting in increased administrative control and suppressed employee compensation. Public money is grifted for private schools or private school management companies (charters). 

You starve schools of students, and therefore funding, by degrading existing schools, by diverting and denying schools essential resources, by driving off their workforces. You test incessantly. You mount propaganda campaigns that promote a "failing schools" narrative. You make parents and students and education writers believe that schools are dangerous and hopeless. 

Then you present your preferred alternative as a solution to the problem you created. 

The enemies of public schooling often have specific, sometimes idiosyncratic reasons for their participation in the campaign, but it almost always comes down to money in some form. 

It's helpful to think of the war on public schooling as having one overriding objective: the privatization of public resources. The goal is the transfer of money in our national, state, and local joint bank accounts into their own. 

How do they get away with it?

Let's start with the godfather of the movement: Milton Friedman.

In 1955, Milton Friedman published his famous essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” which was included in revised form in Capitalism and Freedom in 1962. In it, Friedman argued for government to get out of the education business altogether, except for maybe providing subsidies for parents to go out into the free market and find themselves a school. And he wasn't particularly enthusiastic about that. 

This was, not coincidentally, the year after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. Deniers gonna deny, but Friedman's voucher proposal was weaponized by pro-segregation Jim Crow forces to oppose desegregation and promote segregated private school alternatives. It is still being cited today as a rationale for school choice. 

There are a million things wrong with the paper from commodifying learning to commodifying families (at one point described as "responsible 'units'"). Essentially hypothesizing in support of a worldview, to me it reads like an extended justification for what Friedman already believes and wants everyone else to believe is self-evident or inarguable. His pontifical tone takes everything for granted, as if saying it confidently enough can make it true. 

Now, there's a lot of people who swear by this guy, I think mostly because he tells them what they want to hear. And they use his work to justify what they wanted to do anyway. As Friedman sermonizes, he expresses the arrogance of faith as he assigns characteristics to invented terms (words mean what he chooses them to mean), for instance presuming to identify and assess the "social gain" inherent in "neighborhood effects" and making guesses about all of it.

Serving mainly as academic cover for greed merchants as it exalts capitalism as a state of nature, the paper and the guy who wrote it get away with shit I wouldn't take from my ninth graders. If I had to make a case for sustained silent reading or writer's workshop, for my Master's or to my principal, I'd have to show something--some data--some evidence. Friedman gets by with saying it's so.

The paper reads like the bloviating of a drunken sophomore philosophy student telling all his roommates how things are and how they ought to be. It reeks of the neoliberal stench that permeates every facet of our civic life since at least the 70's, the cultish worship of markets and competition that Elise Castillo calls the Neoliberal grammar of schooling. 

Daily Reminder: Competition is good at exactly one thing: sorting winners from losers. 

So how did the Republican army get recruited into this anti-public schooling neoliberal free market battle? It might feel as if it's always been this way, but that's not precisely true. Top marginal income tax rates under Eisenhower were never under 90%. He advocated for and signed the bill that authorized the interstate highway highway system, called by Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks "the greatest public works program in the history of the world." 

Free market faith and fervor marked the emergence of the Reagan Republican and the conviction that the private sector should control and could better perform functions previously understood to be the shared responsibility of all community members (i.e. the government). 

Reagan had a complicated history with organized labor, having served several terms as the president of the Screen Actors Guild while also acting as a secret informer for the FBI, naming names of perceived "communist sympathizers" in the Guild and ultimately testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  

A mouthpiece for General Electric in the fifties, Reagan was influenced by GE's vice president Lemuel Boulware who helped Reagan marry his own existing anti-communism to a growing distrust of labor as he was becoming "the true-believing face of a propaganda campaign for US-led global capitalism." 

As Reagan developed his fantasy of individualism and free markets, he quit GE to become more involved in politics as a registered Republican. He proceeded to campaign against Medicare, saying that "it's a short step to all the rest of socialism" and that, if it became law, we would one day tell our children "what it once was like in America when men were free."

Reagan continued to fortify his conservative credentials by opposing other federal initiatives such as food stamps and a minimum wage increase, and stumping for Barry Goldwater in 1964. As governor of California, Reagan also bolstered his "tough guy" image and authoritarian street cred in clashes with protesters and support for the death penalty. He then used that image to distinguish himself from Jimmy Carter, even wooing Democrats and unionized workers (ironically, and against the counsel of their union leaders).

And then the guy becomes president. 

Call it mass delusion, or a practical joke gone wrong, or just being too tired to pay attention (Iran, Nicaragua, oil oil oil), the conservative Right capitalist marauders finally had their man in Washington, and they made the most of it. As Reagan kept dangling the shiny object of international conflict over there, he achieved the objectives of regulatory demolition and tax vilification under the rubric of "supply-side economics" over here. He also recruited evangelicals (prayer in schools!) and the racists Nixon had cultivated (Neshoba County) creating the modern Republican coalition--and a star was born. 

After having used his history as a union president to dupe the rank and file, Reagan reverted to form, firing the striking air traffic controllers in 1981 and inspiring companies all over the country to aggressively "reshape" their work forces, ultimately cutting the number of significant strikes from an average of 300 per year from 1947 to 1979 to 187 the year Reagan was elected to 40 his last full year in office, 1988.

Through his rejection of organized labor and the positive potential of government, Reagan appropriated the free market fundamentalism of Friedman and built the modern Republican Party on top of it. 

Ronald Reagan was the pathway to power that Friedman and Neoliberals had been waiting for, the mechanism to impact policy and get things done. If his personal journey is one of conversion--from nominal progressive to fanatical reactionary--his story reflects the parallel transformation of the Republican Party.

If you're saying to yourself that Trump appears to break with that traditional Republican prime directive, that's true only in the level of cruelty and disregard for policy. The end result--power in the hands of capital--remains the same. For the entourage of political elites who have supported and enabled and protected Trump, the ends (substituting private enterprise for government agency) justify the means (MAGA violence and treason), or at least make the means palatable to the ruling class.

That's why it often feels like the Republican Party is an avatar for the war on authentic public schooling. We should be cautious, however. Even though the Republican Party is composed of many of our enemies pursuing the objective of turning public money into private and using many of the strategies--both familiar and exotic--I'll be discussing, there are other malign actors who are just as dangerous. And closer to home.