There are legislators in Kansas who share the view that we really shouldn’t even have public schools. You can sometimes catch them referring to them as “government” schools.
The Fox host said, “There really shouldn’t be public schools, should there? I mean we should really go to a system where parents of every stripe have a choice, have a say in the kind of education their kids get because, when we have centralized, bureaucratic education doctrines and dogmas like this, that’s exactly what happens.”
I don’t want to overstate this. I’m only vaguely aware of who Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery is, and it’d be a stretch to characterize her an influential figure in Republican politics.
But she’s not the only one making the anti-public-education argument.
Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a likely Republican presidential candidate, has said many times that he doesn’t believe public schools should exist. Former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) hasn’t gone nearly that far, but he did champion a voucher scheme in his home state – a step towards privatization – and recently condemned public education as “government-run, unionized monopolies.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is also clearly not a fan of public schools, and celebrates “alternatives to conventional public education.”
At the state and local level, this kind of talk is arguably even more common. Last year the vice-chair of the Ohio House Education Committee condemned public schools as “a socialist system.”
And as we talked about the other day, it’s hard to forget the Texas Republican lawmaker who said of public schools several years ago, “Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.”…
But what was once an unheard of idea is slowly becoming a little more common. For education proponents, this isn’t good news.