As trump seems poised to dismantle and destroy the public education system so many children rely on and the department which grants them loans and grants for college I write this with a heavy heart. My heart is heavy knowing that this will hurt a great many children. It will damage their ability to learn and as we’ve seen from COVID making up lost time and learning isn’t as easy as one might imagine. I worry about this leading to an under-educated and underserved population that can then be exploited by propaganda and indoctrination.
This is all by design. Nothing that is happening here is an accident. These Christian extremists have been planning this hostile takeover of our systems of higher learning and our public schools for some time. All one has to do is look at what DeSantis did in Florida to colleges and universities, high schools and libraries and you can see the parallels in what Trump and Musk are doing now.
Christian fascism and theist thugs have muscled their way into power and are now destroying the very institutions and freedoms we hold dear. They are destroying the chance for children in rural, poor, and underserved communities to get a good education and that will make it harder if not impossible for them to live the American dream. By taking money from public schools and funneling it into their charter schools, which I call cult schools, they will bankrupt our public schools in red states across this nation and with no Department of Education to tell them not to the red states can start forcing the Bible and 10 commandments on students. They can start putting corporal punishment back in the schools and could even turn their curriculum into something that resembles Nazi propaganda. We must not let that happen! We cannot swiftly undo the damage done to young minds eager to learn. We must ensure our children are educated not indoctrinated!
Sara Schwartz wrote a great article entitled “What to Know About a Neo-Nazi Home-School Scandal” and published it to Education Weekly’s website on Feb 3, 2023. In this article she wrote,
“When news reports surfaced of racist and anti-Semitic lessons, posts, and videos from a neo-Nazi home-schooling group in Ohio last week, state and local leaders reacted with swift condemnation.
An official with the Ohio Department of Education told the Washington Post that the agency would investigate the group’s compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements. Interim Superintendent of Public Instruction Stephanie K. Siddens called the lessons “racist, anti-Semitic, and fascist.”
“There is absolutely no place for hate-filled, divisive and hurtful instruction in Ohio’s schools, including our state’s home-schooling community,” she said in a statement.
But despite her strong words there are limits to how much oversight the state actually wields. The story of this group known as the “Dissident Homeschool” on the online platform Telegram, underscores just how many regulatory gray areas surround home schooling.
“Home-schoolers are a broad and diverse group with different motivations and instructional priorities, and this flexibility can benefit them. Some military families choose the option to provide stability for children who have to move to a different base every few years. A growing number of Black parents have chosen to home-school to teach children African American history and culture that is minimized or excluded from public schools.
But it can also provide an open door for extremist ideology and what Longoria-Green calls “white-supremacist-lite” curriculum.”
She then goes on to talk about three things to know about how home schooling operates in the United States and how the incident connects to the issue or public education more broadly.
- Home Schooling is not highly regulated
She notes that states usually set their own guidelines for homeschooling and that only 13 states and D.C. require instructors to have qualifications like a high school diploma according to the Education Commission of the States. Only twenty-three states have attendance requirements. Just two states require parents to undergo background checks before beginning home school.
In recent years there have been reports about child abuse and even deaths at the hands of home school parents and these have rekindled debates over safety regulations. Advocates, such as myself, insist these stronger guardrails are needed to protect the children while home school parents often fight hard against any regulation at all.
Another opponent of such regulation is the Home School Legal Defense Association which is an advocacy group founded in 1983 by Baptist minister Michael Farris. A 2015 ProPublica investigation outlined hw the org has blocked state legislation like bills that would have required parents to let the state know they have chosen to home school their child and for the child to have to take tests to prove they were actually learning efficiently at home.
The HSLDA emerged out of a conservative Christian movement to expand homeschooling in the 80’s and 90’s; partially in response to Supreme Court decisions that fortified the separation of church and state in schools. They have been desperately trying ever since to reverse these decisions and put the Bible and prayer back into schools.
In a statement HSLDA described the “Dissident Homeschool” group as an outlier.
“The repulsive beliefs and actions of one troubled and extreme fringe couple exploiting the home-school freedom should not harm the liberty and parental rights of millions of American families who responsibly home school and who raise their children to be contributing members of society.”
Longoria Green says that while explicit neo-Nazi ideology isn’t the norm, several home-schooling curriculum push Christian nationalist views and ideas (aka propaganda). Her organization advocates for mandatory testing for home-school students. “The assessment should be sufficient so that you can actually tell whether the children are receiving only an alternative version of reality in their home-schooling education,” she said.
2. The home-school movement helped give birth to the parent’s rights rhetoric
“Home-school freedom” has become sticking point for HSLDA advocates and is deeply intertwined with the parents rights movement. The Washington Post and Slate have both traced the connections between conservative Christian home-school parents and the recent political efforts over the last few years to give parents more authority over what books are in classrooms and libraries, and what kids study in school.
Farris, the founder of HSLDA, claims public schools are “indoctrinating students in harmful views of human sexuality and race, injecting ideas from critical race and critical gender theories into classrooms.”
3. The Ohio News Comes At A Complicated Time For Holocaust Education
With everything she wrote in mind we seem to be hurling towards a future where these Dissident Home-School scams can and will occur more frequently if not regularly across the country in red states. With the Department of Education out of the way and Democrats in disarray there’s nobody to stop these neo-Nazis from spreading their propaganda using your tax dollars.
But there is still, yet another reason, very close to my heart personally, why we should all be concerned about the privatization of our public schools and that is that historically these Christians don’t care about disabled kids. They don’t understand them. They often simply refuse to believe in certain disabilities rather than accepting them. They punish kids for behaviors that sometimes are beyond their control. I was one of those children that was punished more harshly than I should have been for behavior that was really just symptoms of undiagnosed and unaddressed childhood PTSD and ADHD. If we allow these Christians to destroy public schools they will because for decades they have refused to give disabled kids the same protections in Christian Schools that they have in Public Schools. So you can best believe when red states are able to dictate education policy they will start rolling back protections for the disabled. This will hurt disabled kids and the impacts will be felt immediately. More on Christians and their treatment of the disabled in another blog.
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