An unorthodox way to lower class sizes

December 28, 2005

Syndicated conservative columnist Cal Thomas may not agree with a federal court ruling that struck down intelligent-design creationism in a Pennsylvania school district’s science classes, but in a principled way, he welcomed the development. As Thomas hopes, the decision should prompt parents to abandon public schools altogether.

[The ruling] should awaken religious conservatives to the futility of trying to make a secular state reflect their beliefs…. Religious parents should exercise the opportunity that has always been theirs. They should remove their children from state schools with their “instruction manuals” for turning them into secular liberals, and place them in private schools — or home school them — where they will be taught the truth, according to their parents’ beliefs. […]

Too many parents who would never send their children to a church on Sunday that taught doctrines they believed to be wrong, have had no problem placing them in state schools five days a week where they are taught conflicting doctrines and ideas.

I disagree with Thomas on practically every political issue I can think of, but he raises a legitimate point. Most public schools will expose students to history that sometimes paints the U.S. in an unflattering light, science that contradicts biblical literalism, and literature that may be at odds with a rigid conservative worldview. Thomas thinks there’s no point in evangelicals working to change this system — and I can think of a lot of school districts that would welcome the end of some of these culture wars.

In fact, Thomas doesn’t mention it, but there’s a significant schism among many social conservatives about just what to do with the public schools. In many far-right political circles, the emphasis is on shaping curricula to match their ideology on issues like abstinence, evolution, school libraries, etc. But it’s worth remembering that a sizable segment of the far-right wants to give up on public schools altogether.

In 2002, Focus on the Family head James Dobson seemed to get the ball rolling when he encouraged California parents to abandon public schools because, as he saw it, “homosexual propaganda” was harming students. Two years later, the Southern Baptist Convention took up a resolution urging all Southern Baptist families to “remove their children from all government schools and see to it they receive a thoroughly Christian education.”

At a minimum, it’s an unorthodox way to lower class sizes.

Isn’t the infliction of fundie moronism on innocent youth some sort of actionable child abuse?

  • Of couse since these social conservatives are paying significant taxes to pay for education, they are going to feel entitled to some of that money back (in the form of school vouchers) since they won’t be making use of the public school system. If they can’t get a voucher program through legislation or through the judicial system, they’ll start voting in favor of reducing taxes by reducing the amount of money the public school system gets. They won’t see the benefit in sending tax money to a school system they don’t make use of. So while class size will get smaller, the amount of money a school system has per student to educate those students will decrease. Sometimes it seems like you just can’t win.

  • Danny has it right. The social conservatives will push more and more for school vouchers. the argument “aside from abortion, liberals are against CHOICE” is one I have heard countless times.

    I’m all for them taking their kids out of the public school system, but not if that also means they remove money from the system.

  • Finally I agree with Cal Thomas. There was an editorial in our local paper calling for the school systems to let the “parents decide” whether the school will teach Intelligent Design. They still don’t get it. Parents CAN decide…they can send your children to a parochial school! The problem is that they want Me to help pay to teach their religion. Of course they want parents to have the say so..Christian parents are in the majority. But, our country is not about might is right..it is about protecting all rights—especially the rights of the minority.

  • Of couse since these social conservatives are paying significant taxes to pay for education, they are going to feel entitled to some of that money back (in the form of school vouchers) since they won’t be making use of the public school system.

    And if they’re not making use of the public police department, they may want a voucher for a private security firm. And if they’re not making use of the public fire department, they may want a voucher for a hose and a dalmation. And if they’re not making use of the public libraries, they want want a gift certificate to Amazon.com.

    It doesn’t mean they’ll get any of these things….

  • Deb, they don’t necessarily want you to help pay to teach their religion, they just don’t want to pay to teach your kids your science. If they could have all their tax money in the form of school vouchers where they could avoid having their tax money pay to teach your science, as many of them as could afford it would arrange to have their kids educated outside the public school system. The problem is that when all the social conservatives in a very social conservative community decide that they aren’t going to have their money paying to teach your science, you end up with a very poor public school system left for those that don’t want to send their kids to be indoctrinated by the private schools.

  • Its just one big can of worms really. Once the evangelicals abandon the public school systems (good riddance, I say), then they will be dissappointed that little Caleb can’t get into public Universities because he doesn’t have the proper Science knowledge. So they will want to make it illegal for the states to support public universities with their tax dollars, or else change the admittance guidelines.
    Sadly, I think it will lead to America’s second Civil War, where this time the South will win and we will have a United Christian States of America…
    Thank God for Religion!
    oh, and a belated Merry Christmas to all Carpetbaggerians.

  • Carpetbagger,

    You and I have had this discussion before, and I never have enough facts, statistics, information, or knowledge to feel like I come out on top of the debate in the end. I still believe that if they can’t have their vouchers, and they can’t have their religion in the public school, they will vote to reduce the amount of money the public schoool system gets. Now in many places there won’t be enough of “them” to keep the needed money from getting to the schools, but there will be school districts that will suffer because of a large concentration of socail conservatives living in the district.

  • This is one area where the evangelicals, business interests, and libertarian branches of guess what party can all agree. Not necessarily in the methods, just the public school system as straw-man.
    Evangelicals hate science, business interests have no real interest in public schools (lots of discussion could go on with this one), and the libertarian rubes hate any type of government actions.
    The Bible says that what you sow is what you will reap. I have come to the point of hating the republicans, and perhaps some of you out there may agree with me. This is their harvest.

  • They won’t see the benefit in sending tax money to a school system they don’t make use of.

    I don’t have children, does that mean I get my taxes that are spent on public schools back? I don’t have a car, does that mean I get the money spent on building and repairing roads back? I don’t use public transportation, do I get that money back too?

    We need to call this line of thinking what it is– bullshit.

    Paying taxes isn’t like paying for a specific service– it is for the good of society that we have public funds for public schools, roads, etc. If you don’t like public schools because they don’t teach your religious views as the only way to think, tough cookies. If you want them to have a religous education send them to parochial school or homeschool them. It’s not for the good of society that government-run schools teach people what religious beliefs they should hold. Sorry, but we do not live in a theocracy. They would be on the other side of this issue if other religions were pressuring schools to teach a different creation myth as science.

    Also, there is such a thing as “opting-out.” Or they could do what other parents do whenever their kids are taught things they personally disagree about– it happens to a lot of parents for a lot of reasons– teach your children something different at home. It is not the end of the world and far too much energy and money is wasted on this issue.

  • Fundies leaving the public school system? Is this a threat or a promise?

    WRT vouchers, if you want your own sectarian education system, you can pay for it out of your own pocket. If you don’t like it, tough.

    Sadly, I think it will lead to America’s second Civil War, where this time the South will win

    Don’t bother with the war, just tell them not to let the door hit ’em on the ass on the way out.

    One real problem with a modern secession is we’d want them to pick up their portion of the national debt (especially seeing as how most of it was built up under red-state backed Presidents), which they’d try to weasel out of. Also I wouldn’t want those idiots to have nuclear capability, and there are lots of nukes based in red states.

  • Regarding Comment #7 from Gridlock, it’s already happening. Some nutbag group is suing the University of California to change its admission standards to accept students who have a less than standard exposure to actual science but who been thoroughly programmed with ‘acceptable Christian teachings’ or something to that effect. Haven’t seen anything on it lately but if I do I’ll keep it handy for reference.

    Times like this I thank God She invented tequila…..just kidding!!!!

    But not too much…….. 😉

  • I still believe that if they can’t have their vouchers, and they can’t have their religion in the public school, they will vote to reduce the amount of money the public schoool system gets.

    Well, if the population is less well educated, then religion has a more fertile breeding ground. This way after a while the whole country will resemble Alabama and Mississippi.

  • As a father, I am ALL for these numbnutz removing their kids from my class.

    They’d raise the IQ of both home schoolers AND the US public education system!

  • While I believe that the Fundies have every right to send their children to the school of their choice to learn whatever ignorance they want to preach, I don’t see much good of this coming for the child. What reputable institution of higher academics would accept kids who don’t believe in science as if it’s a belief system not a collections of theories supported by facts guided by proven strategies for developing the former and discovering the latter? And where are they going to get a job? These poor kids are being kept in an insular world that prevents them with every passing from making it outside their little Christian bubble. It’s abuse, imho.

  • Per J. Bean:
    “Well, if the population is less well educated, then religion has a more fertile breeding ground. This way after a while the whole country will resemble Alabama and Mississippi”.

    And once we’re all like AL and MS, we can have feudalism again. Then, GeorgeW can be a king. Yeah, dismantling public education, supporting antiscientific thinking–it’s all part of the plan.

  • The fundies are trying an end run around the whole meritocracy idea. SF Chronicle had a letter to the editor recently bemoaning the fact that the University of California is discriminating against “some” people on religious grounds.

    UC sets standards for admission by certifying high school text books and some private religious high schools have been wanting to ditch heretical biology etc texts. So… UC says you can’t do that and expect to get into Berkeley even if you are at the top of your class. For some reason parents who paid top dollar for Wingnut Prime High School still want their offspring to have quality liberal education rather than Bob Jones U.

    Now they want affirmative action for “Christians” because they themselves chose to send their kids to a substandard school.

  • Sorry Zoe,

    For some reason this debate always gets me going, and I can’t seem to stop.

    I don’t have children, does that mean I get my taxes that are spent on public schools back?

    Unfortunately, I suspect that a significant number of people without children would be likely to vote with the social conservatives to reduce the budget for the public school system.

    I don’t have a car, does that mean I get the money spent on building and repairing roads back?

    That depends on how you and the majority of residents in your district vote. If there is a large enough concentration of individuals in the voting district who don’t ever intend to make use of the roads, and feel that paying for their maintenance is a waste of money, you could see the funding of road maintenance diminish. Fortunately, the majority of people in pretty much all voting districts want access to navigable roads.

    I don’t use public transportation, do I get that money back too?

    Um, I think most public transportation systems are already underfunded because so few people use them. There are many communities that don’t have any form of public transportation at all, so here you’ve demonstrated my point perfectly. Additionally, where there is public transportation, there is always a fare for use. So, if we use the public transportation model for public education, then we should underfund it, and then charge a fee to those who choose to use it. I think the social conservatives would love that idea.

    it is for the good of society that we have public funds for public schools

    The problem is that ultimately it’s the voters who decide what “for the good of society” means. If the voters don’t want it they won’t vote to fund it, even if outsiders feel it would be best for them to do so.

    I agree that a lot of energy is spent on defending funding of public schools, but that is only because so much energy is spent by social conservatives trying to get their hands on money that they feel they are entitled to for the education of their children.

  • I assume this is of a piece with: the good news about Katrina is that it proves you can’t depend on the government for anything.

    Lenin delighted in the excesses of the police because he felt they would radicalize his constituents.

  • Vouchers and “school choice” will never see wide support amongst conservatives. The fact is that lots of Republicans, expecially those in the suburbs, love their public schools. Schools in Republican-dominated suburbs consistantly perform at the highest levels scholastically. These types of Republicans can’t stand creationist hogwash and could care less if kids are required to pray to Jesus. They don’t want holier-than-thou rubes coming in and messing with what works.

    An exception is that many of these same moderate suburban Republicans detest the performance of poor, innercity schools. Many of them think school choice is a fine idea for those kids. But that would actually mean facing up to poverty in this country, something that neither party has done a decent job of lately.

  • If it’s a question of the pool of public school funding drying up, couldn’t they compensate for the draw down by removing the tax exempt status of churches? That should boost tax revenues.

  • Sparrow,
    I have a hunch that the removal of the profit motive in religion would signal its death. If religion didn’t pay, who would do it?

    Of course, our government would have to see fit to actually tax their corporate benefactors first before they would tax the churches.

  • Sadly, I have to agree with Danny in this debate: the right likes to pick and choose its betes noires (i.e., going after Amtrak every year while ignoring or increasing highway and airline subsidies), and public schools are one of them. The wingers don’t care that there’s a disconnect between refusing to pay taxes for these schools vs. paying for other civic institutions like police and firefighters. These folks are suspicious of public schools, not just because of their “secularized” and “politically correct” teaching, but because of the schools’ “goal” of giving everyone an equal chance — something that is anathema to these top-down types. Get a few more wingers in Congress and the judiciary, and there’s a good chance we’ll see “vouchers” or a “tax revolt” or something like it. And if you think Republicans in the ‘burbs treasure their public schools, then what have they been doing in Cobb County, Georgia?

  • Re: school funding – One source of school funding is school bonds. If a large number of fundamentalists lived in a school district, they could organize and vote down a school bond, but historically, it’s not the fundies but retirees who present the greatest challenge here. Retirees are on a fixed income, they already paid taxes to send their own kids to school, their kids are grown and now they’re not using the schools so why should they have to pay, etc. The answer is to ask them if they’d rather pay for prisons.

    I also think CKT has a good point. I work in school libraries all over my local school district, and I can tell you that parents in more affluent neighborhoods are very invested in their kids’ education. They lobby for advanced classes and programs, volunteer and donate a great deal. They push their kids to build up impressive educational “resumes” so they can get into top colleges. I don’t see them supporting religion in science classes.

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