For the week of March 13 - 19, 2002

GOP hostility to schools a genetic defect

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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If political lip service could be turned into cash, Idaho’s public schools would be floating on a sea of dollars.

Like Republican-controlled legislatures everywhere, Idaho’s lawmakers are eloquent about improving education and the importance of children and tomorrow’s future generations and all that jingoism.

Even Idaho’s chief executive, Republican Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, has spun political hyperbole into a slogan and a booklet funded by taxpayers — "Generation of the Child."

But talk is cheap and promises are empty.

Cloaking themselves pompously in the tissue-thin excuse of shrinking tax revenues, Idaho’s Republican majority once again is sticking it to public schools, the incubator for future generations that lawmakers like to celebrate and exploit in their political rhetoric.

Balderdash.

If legislators claim they’d be happy to be more generous with schools were it not for the budget crisis, then how come even back in the halcyon days last year of a plump budget surplus — before $100 million of it was frittered away willy-nilly in an orgy of fiscal squandering disguised as a beneficent tax cut — the same lawmakers couldn’t muster the energy to comply with Fourth District Judge Deborah Bail’s order to pony up funds for bringing shabby school plants up to snuff?

(If there’s any criticism of Judge Bail, it’s that she wimped out and didn’t slap a daily fine long ere this on legislators opposing a solution — to be paid out of their own pockets, not the public treasury.)

Face it: as a group, the Republican Party has an inbred, genetic hostility toward public schools. The GOP’s loony far-right wing still suspects public schools are sleeper cells of Marxism.

Most Republicans politicians sooner or later publicly campaign against the National Education Association as an evil empire, and classroom teachers as little more than incompetent union lackeys of the NEA.

The GOP makes no secret of its fetish to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, one of many tactics to cut down public education and in its place erect a system of elitist private institutions fed with tax dollars. But their plan has been foiled.

And Republican far-right apostle Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition has successfully infiltrated anti-public education candidates onto school boards posing as mere concerned parents, but who are in fact dedicated to transforming public schools into theocratic training camps for the Far Right.

Even without obstructionism of Republican legislators, public schools begin their days with handicaps: public schools are subject to political tampering and tinkering by elected officials who want to design curricula; public schools must open their doors to all children, regardless of physical handicaps or IQ shortfall or social status, and they can’t claim bankruptcy and shut their doors as have hundreds of charter schools, the GOP’s prized panaceas to imperfections in public education.

Charter schools not only have the benefit of easy-come government subsidies, but they also screen out what might be euphemistically described as scholastic undesirables and locate their classrooms wherever they choose (usually in "better" neighborhoods), which instantly gives charter schools an illusion of excellence.

However, in Arizona, a Republican hotbed of charter school birthing early on, 41 charter schools closed or gave up before opening since 1995, and others now are on the ropes with heavy debt. California and Texas have put caps on the number of charter schools because of the rash of bankruptcies and other problems. Michigan has launched a study of charters and the quality.

Even though charter schools can rely on state subsidies, they also pass the hat among parents for additional operating funds to forestall bankruptcy.

So, the great educational hope of conservative Republicans — charter schools — are imperfect and fail, too.

Yet, politicians who mindlessly support charter schools out of ideological conviction are reluctant in their support of public schools, which have been the backbone of America’s literacy for two centuries and are imbedded in all state constitutions as a state responsibility.

It’s lose-lose for public schools. The same politicians who grumble that public schools aren’t doing the job in providing America with better-schooled graduates use every trick to cut funding for education.

The dumbing down of America is not just the fault of TV. Republican state legislators are doing their part, too, to stunt young brain power in Idaho and elsewhere.

 

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