048 The Erickson Report for February 17 to March 2, Page 4: The Threat to Education

049 The Erickson Report for March 3 to 16, Page 4: The Threat to Education

We conclude with an episode of our recurring feature "The Threat." And this time it is the threat to public education.

We have all heard, I'm sure, of the battles over omigod critical race theory that has lead to screaming threats and even violence directed against school boards and sometimes their individual members. We've seen, too, how that chaotic social panic quickly spread to attacks on school libraries for daring to contain books or teachers teaching concepts that some parent - the singular is deliberate - found objectionable.

We've seen for example, a bill proposed by a Republican state senator in Oklahoma that would empower a single parent to demand books that discuss gender identity removed from public school libraries.

Under the bill, after receiving a written demand to remove a book, a school district would have 30 days to eliminate all copies of the material from circulation. Librarians could be forced to pay said parent $10,000 a day for as long as the book remains available and be fired and barred from working in public schools for up to two years if they don't cooperate.

In November, one member of the the Spotsylvania County [Virginia] School Board ordered school staff to begin removing books that contain "sexually explicit" and added that they should be burned in a public event. He subsequently became chair of that board.

In January, the Florida state Senate's education committee passed a bill banning public schools and private businesses from making people feel "discomfort" when learning about US racial history, with the immediate result that a school district in central Florida canceled a teacher training seminar about the civil rights movement that had been months in the planning.

Also in January, the Indiana House limited what teachers can say regarding race, history, and politics in Indiana classrooms and allows for the state's secretary of education to suspend or revoke the teacher's license of anyone "willfully or wantonly" violating its provisions.

There were a lot more examples, and of course the books most commonly under attack were about gender, being LGBTQ+, and race, with LGBTQ+ and black authors the targets.

But there are two things important to bring up beyond the obvious bigotry involved.

All these bills have something in common: They make it easier - in fact easy - to get things out of the library, out of the classroom, easy to get things out of public education, while providing no way to get things into it. No way to enrich it, expand it, make it deeper or more meaningful or even just more useful. It's all about stripping away from the right to a public education.

In fact, an Alabama bill does away with any pretense. It proposes to just give parents a check for whatever the state would have spend on their children's education and say they can, quoting the bill's sponsor, "use it to pay for educational whatever" they want. The bill, that is, would be the end of public education in Alabama.

But there's another aspect. The big emerging thing is "transparency," is the "right" of parents to have access to all materials used in public schools right down to an individual teacher's lesson plans. Some are even calling for cameras in the classroom to record everything that goes on for future evaluation. It all sounds so wholesome - after all, who could be against transparency?

But that veil of wholesomeness is deliberate. Because what this really is, is another way to provide for an opportunity to complain, to carp, to nitpick, to attack whine bluster and bully. Another avenue for attack.

Have no doubt, this is what it means. This is not some spontaneous burgeoning of parental frustration, this is the result of a deliberate, conscious, coordinated campaign to destroy public education and those parents you see ranting at school boards are classic useful idiots.

Do not doubt it. Christopher Rufo, the Republican boy wonder who guided the whipping up of the anti-CRT hysteria of the past year and basking in the glory of multiple states having passed laws banning the teaching of basically anything that might make white Republicans uncomfortable, has declared “transparency” the word for 2022.

He has openly declared a desire to have at least 10 states pass laws in 2022 requiring public schools to make all teaching materials easily available to parents via the internet, fully aware that the result would be to create impossible demands for public - note, only public, not private - schools to meet, right down to individualized lesson plans for every child as well as opening those teachers and administrators to constant threats of harassment.

That is what all this manufactured hysteria is really about: ending the very concept of a right to a public education. It must not be allowed to succeed.