Public Education is Under Attack

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Rev. Joanna Fontaine-Crawford
March 24, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Across the United States, people are showing up at school board meetings to protest books and knowledge they deem inappropriate, especially concerning education around diversity. Here in Texas, the governor called the legislature back into session in an attempt to divert public school funding to vouchers for private schools. But there is an underlying battle that has been waged since 1848 when Unitarian Horace Mann said, “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” What is the real outcome we are fighting over?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

WE MEET TOGETHER
Ann Arthur
We meet together to celebate who we are,
to share the insights which give meaning and hope to our lives,
to learn from the wisdom of others
that their truth may contribute to our understanding.
We meet,
We share,
We learn,
We celebrate our coming together.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

CAN YOU SAY HERO?
Tom Junod
Mister Rogers had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are … Ten seconds of silence.”

And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, “I’ll watch the time,” and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked … and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds … and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, “May God be with you” to all his vanquished children.

Sermon

Do you believe in publicly funded education that is common to all? My dad was born in 1929 at the start of the Great Depression, and he grew up in East Texas in a small town called Center (because it was the center of the county, not real poetic, but there you go).

He came from a family that did not have money, but he loved school and he worked hard in school. After High School, he went to Texas A&M, which at that time was a military school and it was known as the school where all the poor kids went. And by kids, I mean white males. Texas A&M would not let in female or black students until the 1960s. So my dad was able to graduate with a degree in petroleum engineering. After that, he paid his debt to Uncle Sam, serving in the Army; this was during the Korean War, and eventually, he was able to provide a middle-class lifestyle for his family in a way that his father had never been able to-and this is what we call social mobility, and it was made possible because of that education system.

Now the system that benefited my father was working the way it was designed to. It was designed for smart, hardworking white boys.

But then in 1954, the Supreme Court had the Brown versus the Board of Education decision, and things changed. Now there was at least the possibility that this public education system that led to social mobility was now accessible to those who were not white and male. And ever since that time, there has been a concerted organized movement to damage that public education system because there are people who do not believe that it should be, in fact, common to all. If you feel like in the last few years that this movement has gone into overdrive, it is not your imagination. It absolutely has. But this is not something new – this has been a long time coming from the people who got our society to this point. They understood (and I will say it was an evil plan) … they understood that it was going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and so they set up different things so that we could be where we are now, which in my mind is a fight for our whole public education system. And for us, as Unitarian Universalists, this is not political. This is hitting at our core religious values, our beliefs about what it means to be a person: inherent worth and dignity, and the idea that every person deserves to be able to try and fulfill their potential. And this also hits at our history.

In 1796, Unitarian Horace Mann was born, and he also grew up in an extremely poor family; his father was a poor farmer, there were many kids, and Horace was never even able to go out and get a complete school year. It was usually only six weeks out of every year that he could go to school, but he made the most of it. He loved to learn; he soaked it all up. They did have in his town a library; he read everything that he could get his hands on. So eventually, he was able to go to Brown University, where he became the valedictorian. After that, he went on to law school, he became a lawyer, and then he became a Massachusetts legislator.

And you know, it’s really interesting, there seemed to be two kinds of people, as the saying goes — those people who had to go through a lot of hardship, had to really struggle to make their way in the world, and some of those people say, “I made it, so can you, you can do it the hard way too.”

And then there are the people like Mann who say, “I don’t want anyone else to ever have to go through what I went through,” and so education to him was one of the big passions of his life. In Massachusetts, while he was a legislator, the governor created a new thing, a state board of education, and he became the Secretary of it, and it was in that role that he was able to take all of these visions he had about creating a system so that everyone could reach their potential, or at least had the opportunity to do so. He created what is called the Common School movement. Now, common doesn’t refer to like commoners, common as in “for everyone.” His vision was that we would have a publicly funded system of education that was common to all. It was a radical idea.

In his vision, all American students would go to these schools, they would sit side by side. He firmly, — he was a Unitarian — he did firmly believe in the equality of all people, and his vision was one where whether you were the child of a wealthy landowner or the child of a family that was in poverty, you would all receive the exact same education. Another thing that Horace Mann really believed in — this was, you know, mid-1800s – he really believed in all of this stuff about the United States of America, and all that it could be, a place where, unlike England, it did not matter, it should not matter the circumstances of your birth. He really believed in it, and he knew that the key to that was education, and he even said,

“Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of people, the balance wheel of the social machinery.”

It is a radical idea now, and it was a radical idea at that time, even many of the people who we look back at the start of this country, people who considered themselves to be the great modern Progressive thinkers. They weren’t there yet. In 1779, Thomas Jefferson also supported the idea of a public education system, but he felt that there should be two tiers to it, one for the laboring class and one for the learned class, he did say that he thought that there should be enough, you know, room in it that it could rake, his exact words, “rake a few geniuses from the rubbish.” Thomas Jefferson, boy, and that’s a sermon for another day.

Do you support publicly funded education that is common to all?

This was and is today a very radical idea, there are many people who do not want it, good publicly funded education common to all leads to social mobility and with that comes a real opportunity for a reallocation of power.

Underneath this idea of public education that is common to all is this idea of social mobility. Do you truly believe in social mobility, the vision of a society where a child is not confined to the circumstances in which they were born? We can look at other countries and we can see where there is no possibility for this kind of social mobility.

My spouse and I sponsored a student from his private school education (just wait just wait for a moment) from about Middle School through college, he was in Nepal. Do we have anyone else here who has sponsored a student from Nepal? Amazing program by the way. Education, even college, over there is more like Community College here and it is private education is way more affordable, I think it was like 5 or $600 a year. The person who runs it, Earle Canfield, is a Unitarian Universalist and he is very clear about the ultimate goal of this program. It is not so much about helping individual students, but rather, the bigger goal – one that is always kept in sight – is to overcome the caste system of Nepal, because this is the only way it can happen. You see, they do have public education, but it is so inferior that if you are in a lower caste, you will never be able to move out of that caste. The only way for you to move into a different caste is through private education.

I believe that this is the real vision for some of the people in our country.

I don’t think we often say things like this when we hear about vouchers and stuff like that. We’ll often talk about how it’s just a way for the wealthy, who are already paying for private education, to have a little more money in their pockets. Then sometimes we’ll go all the way the other way and say, “No, no, the whole goal here is to absolutely kill public education and get rid of it.”

I don’t think so. I think their vision is to have something like Nepal. A public education system that will support the existing caste system in the United States. We all know there is a caste system in the United States, right? To take that existing system and cement it in place.

And this has been a long time coming. You really can’t talk about the war on public education without talking about the Koch brothers. They’ve been part of this for a very, very long time. There was pushback to public education right after Brown versus the Board of Education, and we saw it. There were schools that literally would prefer to close their schools rather than integrate. But ultimately, that was not a long-term solution, and so there were brains that were trying to come up with, “Well, how do we make this happen?”

In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on the libertarian platform, and that platform said, “We advocate the complete separation of education and state. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.” That was 1980.

Charles and David Koch created a political machine that operates on the strategy of astroturfing. Do we have some people here who are familiar with this term, astroturfing? Well, I’m actually going to use the Merriam-Webster definition because it’s really good:

Astroturfing – “organized activity that is intended to create a false impression of a widespread, spontaneously arising grassroots movement in support of or in opposition to something but that is in reality initiated and controlled by a concealed group or organization, such as a corporation.”

There are so many different names, there are so many- it’s just overwhelming how many different little spontaneous grassroots organizations or think tanks are all either started by or funded by the Koch Brothers. This is just a handful: Americans for Prosperity, Koch Institute, Mercatus Center, The Federalist Society, The Institute for Humane Studies, Institute for Justice, FreedomWorks, Freedom Partners, Concerned Women for America, Young Americans for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, and of course, Moms for Liberty.

Here’s the sad thing: astroturfing often works. It worked just this past week, I think it was, in Lake Travis ISD, because of a complaint, banned another book. It’s happening in Houston now. This is where the system has -because, again, there’s not just one way to try and solve this problem of good public education-the state has taken over Houston ISD.

Here in Austin, y’all have also been fighting that. But astroturfing often works. You take anxiety and fear, and you combine it with bigotry, and it especially works in this fight on public education, because evolution has wired our poor little human brains that when we think of our kids, we often go to the amygdala and anxiety rather than the prefrontal cortex and our best thinking.

So when you combine anxiety and fear with bigotry, then that gets everyone stirred up. And then you have people, and this, again, is an organized concerted effort-they provide terms for those who are on the ground, and they tell them to repeatedly use these terms. It’s a way to bring in bigotry without having to admit that you don’t believe in treating everyone equally.

Used to, some of you will remember in the ’70s, it was busing, right? That was the code for, “Oh, I’m not against integration, I just don’t think that children should be bused to somewhere else or neighborhood schools.” Does anyone remember that one? “Oh, we just want our kids to be able to go to their neighborhood school.” It’s the fact that it was in an all-white neighborhood was just incidental.

More recently, in the last few years, it has been CRT (Critical Race Theory), DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and most recently, the one that I have heard the most is safety, especially safety for girls. Not safety from shooters or anything that might actually help-safety for girls is the code word for anti-trans rhetoric.

You get people revved up and give them the talking points. You can go find the talking points. None of this is hidden. You can go right now and Google it — There is a school board guide produced by the Tea Party Patriots, funded by FreedomWorks, which came out of Americans for Prosperity, aka the Koch Brothers’ political advocacy group. Forty-six pages on a how-to guide for activists combating anti-American CRT. Thirty-four pages on combating critical race theory in your community. An A-to- Z guide on “how to stop critical race theory and reclaim your local school board.”

I want to read you one line from that one: “It is important to note that whether CRT is currently in your school system is mostly irrelevant to the purpose of this document.”

Do you support public funding education that is common to all?

Now look, we never came anywhere close to realizing Horace Mann’s vision, especially in terms of a common education. I don’t believe that we ever will. People are always going to want a leg up, l(ike Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin) for their kids.

But the vision is more relevant than ever: public-funded education common to all, that equips children to fulfill their potential, to break the prison of generational poverty. It is not only better for them, it is better for our entire society.

In Nepal, the only way that you are able to break out of your caste is through being picked for a program that sends you to a private school. I believe that for some in the United States, that is the vision: a world with clear and rigid class boundaries that disproportionately correlate with race.

Right now, you know this thing that you’re hearing in the news-the difficulty to find unskilled laborers, right? Of course, they’re not unskilled, but if you call them that, you can pay them less. Do you really think that none of the people with the top economic privilege, those billionaires out in West Texas who have been trying to manipulate things around vouchers and around public education-do you not think that they are wondering about the question of how do you come up with an unlimited source of laborers whom you can underpay and oppress?

And this isn’t just a matter for those who have kids or grandkids in school; it’s for all of us. I ask you to support your school boards, find out what area you are in. If you don’t already know, you can go on the internet and read the agenda for school board meetings. Practically all of them are live streaming. Turn it on, see what is happening. When you start seeing hordes that are showing up there, trying to attack good teachers, attack the school board members, get books banned, show up. You don’t even have to talk; it’s great when you do during those citizen comments. But if you see that there are big crowds pouring into that room, trying to damage our public education, take one seat away from them just by sitting in it. And of course, vote at every school-related election as though it were a presidential election.

Do you support publicly funded education that is common to all? Real nice public education system you got here. It would be a real shame if something were to happen to it.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

– Horace Mann

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