Where have we seen this before?

Anticritical race theory bills mirror 1967 gutting of UC

Teachers, the Republican governor argued, “have interpreted academic freedom to be their right to teach without political interference,” seeking to advance their “partisan political viewpoints.” Professing shock that “educated young people” were being indoctrinated into “antiAmericanism,” he demanded action.

The year was 1967, and the governor in question was Ronald Reagan. As the New York Times later put it, Reagan’s rhetoric made Richard Nixon look “positively charitable.”

Reagan’s real aim, however, was to slash spending.

As governor of California, he consistently cut public university budget requests by roughly 20% and denied professors the pay raises granted to all other state employees. To do so, he rallied his base to believe that their way of life was under attack. As the Times reported, Reagan’s supporters were “basically decent people” characterized by “a capacity for hate when the neat patterns of their lives are disrupted.”

Reagan’s genius was positioning himself as a champion of the old order in a culture war. As he noted, the people of California had “taxed themselves at a rate higher than any other Americans to build a great university.” They believed in the ideal of public higher education. But Reagan convinced Californians that their colleges and universities had occupied “by a noisy dissident minority.”

Reagan’s austerity budgets left the University of California unable to cover rising instructional and construction costs. In a desperate bid for revenue, officials conceded to Reagan’s demand that they begin charging tuition. Over the ensuing decades, more and more of the cost of public higher education in California was shifted from taxpayers onto individual students. It began to look less like a public system and more like a private one.

This crusade against public higher education eerily presaged today’s school culture wars. Where Reagan made a target of ethnic studies and tried to keep Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party, from teaching philosophy at UCLA, today’s bogeyman is critical race theory or CRT — a legal theory that has become a vague catchall for grievances of the sort that Reagan weaponized so effectively. To date, laws aimed at restricting how public school teachers talk about race and racism have been proposed in 22 states and signed into law in five.

In making the case for laws that are both vague and sweeping, Republicans have resuscitated one of Reagan’s favorite political insults: antiAmerican.

Public schools, GOP leaders have argued, are teaching children to believe that the country is inherently bad. But just as Reagan used his anticampus campaign to undermine support for public higher education, his disciples are motivated by a similar cause. For a Republican party that has grown increasingly hostile to public education, the K12 culture war is also an opportunity to advance the cause of school privatization.

When Sens. Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell recently unveiled a bill to defund the 1619 Project, they echoed language nearly identical to what Reagan deployed six decades ago: “Federal funds should not pay for activists to masquerade as teachers and indoctrinate our youth,” Cotton proclaimed in a news release.

State legislators, meanwhile, have introduced a flurry of bills aimed at cutting funds from schools with curricula that the GOP deems unacceptable. In Michigan, a proposed measure would cut 5% of funding if school districts teach “antiAmerican” ideas about race in America, material from the 1619 Project, or critical race theory. In Tennessee, a new law empowers the state’s education chief to withhold funds from schools found to be teaching components of critical race theory.

That such laws will be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce matters not at all. The real purpose is to alienate aggrieved GOP voters from the one public institution they still hold dear. As a nation, we spend roughly half a trillion public dollars each year to educate America’s young people. And though our schools are far from equal, they are often the cornerstone of communities — urban and rural, rich and poor, Black and white. Whenever school privatization has been put to a referendum, Americans have soundly defeated it because they value the idea of public education — their children’s schools in particular.

The constant drumbeat that public schools are indoctrinating children, however, serves as a powerful nudge to parents to flee them. If their tax dollars are paying for something they’re opposed to, then maybe privatization isn’t such a terrible idea after all. This was Reagan’s move. A half century ago, he used a ginnedup culture war to rally disaffected white, middleclass voters to his cause. And with their support, he began unraveling the public nature of California’s higher education system. Within a generation, the idea of free college was all but a memory. A halfcentury later, it seems like a pipe dream.

Across the country, Republicans are using the Reagan playbook to roll out a manufactured crisis in the schools. As some observers have noted, many of the staunchest opponents of critical race theory can’t point to a single example of its use in the schools — they can’t even define what it is. That’s because they don’t actually care.

What matters, instead, is generating enough ill will to drive forward the only education policy Ronald Reagan ever cared about: privatization.

In the past several months, a dozen states have expanded existing voucher programs or created new ones. In places like New Hampshire and West Virginia, sweeping new plans essentially pay parents to leave the public schools. It is the most successful assault on public education ever waged, and it’s only just beginning.

At a time when the nation is splitting at the seams, a truly public system that serves all — not just openly, but also equally — is an ideal to stand behind. Moreover, our schools may be our last, best hope for bringing young people together, across their differences, and teaching them to live together.

It is not hard to imagine this political moment as an opportunity, rather than a crisis — a chance to doubledown on our investment in public education. Yet that will require us to rise above our differences to see what unites us. It demands something that only a decade ago seemed possible: hope.

Jack Schneider is an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the author of “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School.” Jennifer C. Berkshire is a freelance journalist and host of the education policy podcast Have You Heard.

Associated Press 1967