Education is Power • Kentucky Lantern

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The Kentucky State AFL-CIO’s opposition to Amendment 2 should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of the labor movement. Unions have always championed public schools.

The Republican-backed amendment, which will go on the ballot Nov. 5, would change the state constitution to allow the General Assembly to pass laws directing taxpayer dollars to private schools. You can bet that if voters approve the measure in January, the GOP supermajorities in the House and Senate will waste no time in approving a voucher program that would allow parents and guardians to use those public funds to send their children to private schools.

Just as unions have historically supported public schools, “Republicans and white conservatives have long been hostile to public schools,” said Brynn Tannehill wrote in the New Republic. “The desegregation of schools led white evangelicals to become the strongest Republican demographic. Ronald Reagan promised to end the Department of Education in 1980. Trump put Betsy DeVos in charge of the Department of Education precisely because she was a leading advocate (and funder) of dismantling public schools, and funneling “It is given to religious schools.”

Simply put, a voucher program would severely weaken public schools by siphoning off money that is desperately needed to keep schools open. Depending on the size and scope, a voucher program in Kentucky would cost between $1.19 billion and $199 million, the equivalent of hiring between 9,869 and 1,645 teachers and other staff. according to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

Advocates of Amendment 2 argue that vouchers allow parents or guardians to choose where to send their children to school. While advocates of Amendment 2 maintain that vouchers primarily benefit poor families, proof points the other way, starting with the origins of voucher programs.

“Vouchers were first created after the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in its ruling in Brown v Board of Education,” explains the National Education Association. “School districts used vouchers to enroll white students in private schools, which could (and still can) restrict admissions on the basis of race. As a result, schools serving these white students were closed, and schools serving black students remained chronically underfunded.”

The NEA points out that “unlike public schools, private schools can (and some do) limit their admissions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and a number of other factors. Moreover, vouchers rarely cover full tuition, leaving families promised a better education to foot the bill.”

It’s no coincidence that voucher advocates are also anti-union. “They’re against the teachers unions,” said Jeff Wiggins, secretary-treasurer of the Kentucky AFL-CIO. “They want their own private schools so they don’t have unions.”

Wiggins added: “These conservative private schools have their own agendas. They want to teach students what they want them to learn. They don’t want them to learn about unions and the struggles of working people.”

To write on HuffPost, Robert J. Elisberg warned that “the less educated the public, the more it relies on authority figures, rather than questioning anything. And the more education is despised, the less uncomfortable facts will be believed.”

Public schools did not become common in the United States until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since colonial times, almost all schools had been private and too expensive for the American working class.

Samuel Gompers (National Archives)

That’s why “the labor movement was instrumental in establishing free public schools,” said Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, in a speech at the 1916 National Education Association convention. He explained that “wage earners are more interested in…public schools than any other class of citizens” because “public schools are the only educational institutions available to their children and to them.”

Amendment 2 reflects old-fashioned Social Darwinism, a pseudoscientific theory popular among the wealthy in Gompers’ day. Social Darwinism was a perversion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and an elitist idea that the wealthy and their apologists in the press and the pulpit often invoked to justify the brutal exploitation of workers by millionaire industrialists.

In general, it is social Darwinist theorizing held that “the powerful in society are naturally better than the weak and that success is evidence of their superiority.” Thus, Social Darwinists argued that public schools, unions, labor and safety and health laws — and anything that helped “inferior” people — should be opposed as violations of what they claimed was an immutable law of human nature: the strong survive, and the weak do not.

The self-proclaimed “Captains of Industry” worshipped at the altar of social Darwinism, sending their children to fancy private schools while blithely hiring poor kids—the younger the better—to work in their hellish factories, mines, and mills. (Today, some right-wing Republicans talk up (the rollback of child labor laws.)

In the heyday of Social Darwinism, industrialists stubbornly and often violently resisted unions. Wages for industrial workers were so low that their children aged 10 and older had to work to help support their families. Few families did so, even with mother, father and children all working. Unions saw public education as the surest way out of poverty for the children of workers.

Elisberg said conservatives have always wanted “only private schools and homeschooling,” which he said will be “the end of an educated nation. … But for conservatives, that’s OK. The rich and privileged will give their kids a great education. And the rest of America? You’re on your own.”

He concluded: “Public education is what has made America the envy of the world. A nation of informed citizens. Leading the way in the space race, technology, finance and medical advancement.

“But conservatives? They want to go back to ‘the old way’. Like the dark ages. When kings and aristocracy ruled. And you peasants, obey your overlord. Make no mistake, this is nothing new. The attack on education is the drug that conservatives have been pushing throughout history.”

In Kentucky, that medicine is Amendment 2. “Their medicine is power,” Wiggins said. “They want to control everything, so they’re coming after public schools. My tax dollars belong in public schools, not private schools.”

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