Then there is Tennessee, where odious legislation that would have given public schools the right to turn away undocumented students, or charge them tuition, collapsed this week due to widespread opposition. A broad coalition of groups, sixty five strong, including the Tennessee Chapter of NAACP, Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM) — one of my favorite grassroots organizing groups—and an array of immigrant rights organizations helped bring this thing down.
Local school officials played a key role too. The Hamilton County School Board, representing the largest school system in the home district of Bo Watson, the sponsor of the Senate version of the bill, voted unanimously to condemn the legislation last week, and every one of the district’s 79 school principals came out in opposition.
A look at the battles raging over public education
Public education advocates Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire have a new book called The Education Wars in which they dig deep into the history of the battle over public education – should it even exist? Why do Christians and conservatives seem to be leading the attack on public schools?
The education wars are the conflicts over schools that flare up regularly in this country and that are burning particularly hotly right now. Right now, the conflicts are mainly centered on teaching about race and gender, the place of religion in schools, and the role that schools should play with respect to the larger story of civil rights progress in this country. If you delve beneath the surface of any specific battle that’s raging, you’ll almost always find a larger, unresolved question that we’ve been fighting about since the advent of public schools in this country. For example, a lot of your readers probably think that parents’ rights cause is new, invented by groups like Moms for Liberty. But we’ve had repeated waves of parental rights activism in this country, starting with the effort to ban child labor in the early 20th century. Those original parents’ rights activists opposed a ban on child labor because they saw it as overreach by the federal government, while the conservative industry groups that backed the parents were opposed to public education in principle because they saw inequality as not just natural but desirable. Fast forward to the present and we’re basically having the same argument again. When it comes to questions about education, who gets to call the shots? One of the themes of the book is that today’s education wars make a lot more sense when viewed through an historical lens. You also get to see how previous iterations of the education wars have ended. Hint: This is not the first time we’ve seen broad coalitions form to oppose book banning.
