Burning Down The School House

 Ron DeSantis' war on schools is really worth paying attention to. There has been some coverage of how Florida is rejecting math textbooks because of CRT. What's really happening is that they are banning them based on the inclusion of Social Emotional Learning. SEL is a framework that has been around for decades to teach elementary school students to be kind, collaborative and how to work through their frustrations with school and other problems. That's it. In my local batshit insane Facebook group, I've already seen the shift from decrying CRT to attacking SEL, which they call CRT in disguise.

I have no idea why they moved on from CRT, unless it was the constant drumbeat of how CRT wasn't actually being taught in schools, but that seems out of character. When have objective facts made a difference? So there seems to be two reasons why they are attacking SEL.

First is that they generally don't want kids to be kind, empathetic and collaborative, because those are hallmarks of "the Left" in America. If much of left-of-center culture wars can be boiled down to "don't be a complete shit to other people, especially the people who have historically been at the margins, then right-of-center can be boiled down to Adam Serwer's famous phrase "The cruelty is the point." People like DeSantis are playing the long game to create a future generation of selfish assholes who will shit on those who are beneath them in social hierarchies. Since Millennials and Gen Z are moving hard away from that sort of selfishness, Republicans want to create a new cohort of selfish assholes in Gen A.

I dunno. That seems like a very doubtful move for a group that has typically never been focused on anything beyond it's immediate next move.

Second is that Republicans are trying to discredit the very idea of public school education. This has long been an article of faith among both the Christianists and the Extreme Anti-government cohort.

For Christianists, ever since Schempp and Vitale removed religion from public schools we have seen the collapse of morality in America. Kids with their blue hair and gender fluidity are a direct result of not having Jesus forced into them at young ages. Homeschooling produces two things. People who grow up bitter that they were homeschooled and morons like Madison Cawthorn. Delegitimizing the entire public school project is their mission.

For the anti-government set, public schools are a stronghold of the teacher's unions and therefore Democratic voters. Additionally, people tend to like their public schools. It's a tangible example of a governmental service that is free at the point of delivery and which people see real benefits to having. If you can convince people that public schools are full of pedophiles and people teaching little Becky and Chad to hate themselves because they are White, then you can get people to want to privatize the public schools, so they can have more control over who teaches what.

This seems more plausible, as a motivation for attacking teachers and schools. 

So what now?

One problem is the journalist practice of neutrality in place of objectivity. It will be very hard for the press to accurately depict conservative efforts to destroy public schools, because it seems, on the surface, insane. We saw some of this with Louis DeJoy's efforts to destroy the Postal Service. That was active sabotage - not only to screw with the 2020 election but - to destroy the Post Office so that it could be replaced with UPS and FedEx. The press couldn't quite bring themselves to accurately describe what was going on. There is little effort to do the same now with the GOP's war on public education.

Another problem is that it's not enough to decry this within Democratic circles.

Everyone is agreeing that the midterm landscape is bad for Democrats at the moment. In many ways the Senate races in PA, GA, OH, WI, NC, AZ and NV are going to be incredibly important, as Mitch McConnell has already said he basically won't approve ANY of Biden's judicial appointments if he has a majority. Losing the House but preserving the Senate is critical and a lot of these races are going to come down to the suburbs and motivating urban voters. Democratic gains in the Philly, Atlanta, Phoenix suburbs and the Research Triangle are tenuous. Those voters don't like inflation.

But they like their schools. That's why they moved to the suburbs.

Nationalizing DeSantis' war on schools won't be hard. Even if it's not 100% accurate for every race, who cares? If it gets 3 Pinocchios from a fact checker, who cares.  

Glenn Youngkin won for some idiosyncratic reasons, including misleading attacks on CRT. But nationalizing the Far Right's attack on schools should absolutely be a message that should Democrats should start to hammer now. Josh Marshall has noted that we are a storytelling animal. Start telling the stories now.