Join the conversation

In a recent Slate article, Dana Goldstein argues that “Michele Bachmann's growing popularity among the Republican base signals . . . a sea change in the party's education agenda.” I would add the same goes for Rick Perry’s popularity, and for the general abundance of Tea Party affiliated candidates among GOP nomination hopefuls.

Goldstein contrasts the common Republican positions of a decade ago—an era defined largely by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind—as often bipartisan, and emphasizing standards-and-accountability in order to make America more competitive in the global marketplace. Now, however, Goldstein notes that the GOP has shifted to cater to “the anti-government, Christian-right view of education epitomized by Bachmann, in which public schools are regarded not as engines for economic growth or academic achievement, but as potential moral corrupters of the nation's youth.”

She argues that Tea Party rhetoric calling for actions like abolishing the Department of Education and severely cutting the federal government role in schools has influenced the normally moderate Republican chairman of the House education and workforce committee, Rep. John Kline, to refuse to engage productively with Arne Duncan and the Obama administration on reauthorizing a better NCLB (thus Duncan’s sidestepping of congress to offer conditional NCLB waivers to states). This seems to reflect the general tenor in the party: while NCLB (obviously not a good bill, but a bipartisan one that affirmed a federal role in education) was initially supported by the vast majority of Republicans in the house, many Republicans are decrying virtually any federal role in education these days.

To provide background for this shift, Goldstein explains that Tea Party views on education derive largely from the national “parental rights” movement of the 1990s (a specific ideology, in contrast to generally affirming the rights of parents as meaningful agents in education), which was organized by Christian organizations like Focus on the Family and Liberty University, as well as other conservative groups promoting home schooling, and pro-life agendas (as well as the requisite founding fathers-and-constitution-mythology-promoting-chest-thumpers).

Those involved in the movement lobbied against state and federal regulation of home schooling and against curriculum standards, and they recruited thousands of Christian right school board candidates in order to wield their influence over schools. The movement focused on how public schools taught and dealt with social issues such as homosexuality, single parenthood, and contraception and abortion; it also promoted the ultra-nationalistic take on American history that would eventually take the form of the Tea Party revisions we all know and love. Goldstein notes that in this version, “the evils of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans were downplayed or sometimes totally whitewashed.”

Now those early parental rights agenda points have found a happy place among many Tea Party congressional freshmen like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. Of course Sarah Palin is also a devotee, and Rick Perry has provided obligatory hat-tipping to Tea Party education issues as well (promoting creationism and intelligent design, and condemning role of federal government in education, and leading opposition to Texas adoption of the common core curriculum standards—since apparently anything involving multiple states, even when it’s state led, smells too much like federalism to Perry).

But Bachmann takes the cake.

Some relevant points about Bachmann’s background regarding education (based on Ryan Lizza’s recent New Yorker profile):

• Her initial foray into politics came through her disapproval of local public schools (while the family’s twenty-plus foster children attended public schools, rest assured that her biological children were homeschooled). According to Lizza, her foster children’s homework “had more to do with indoctrinating kids than educating kids. And the indoctrination had to do with anti-parent themes, anti-Biblical themes, anti-education themes, anti-academic themes.”

• Among her efforts at rectifying the situation, she co-founded a charter school for at-risk youth that heavily pushed evangelical themes (Bachmann and her co-founder resigned six months after founding the school when the school district warned they were consistently violating the charter agreement—and state law—to be non-sectarian), and ran (unsuccessfully) for her local school board as part of a Christian right block that campaigned on social issues—such as abstinence-only sex education—as well as structural issues—opposition to state education standards and to federal vocational education programs aimed at poor kids. In fact, among her quotable claims, Bachmann wrote that federal education law “embraces a socialist, globalist worldview; loyalty to all government and not America.” As a state senator, she continued with this mentality on education. 

• To summarize her trajectory, Goldstein writes that “[a]s her political career advanced, the overarching theme of Bachmann's education activism was that government attempts to improve schools threatened the prerogatives of the Christian family and represented a dangerous move toward a socialized, planned economy.”

Goldstein notes that it will be interesting to see how the more moderate candidates—Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman—discuss education issues in their campaigns given the Tea Party stances. Both have pretty centrist education records, but neither has emphasized this topic in their campaigns thus far. This largely reflects the general trend within the GOP currently: all play up issues that cater to the extreme right, and try to avoid discussing stances that do not. I wonder what this will ultimately mean for who gets the Republican nomination, and then who gets elected to the presidency. I shudder to think what President Bachmann would do in the education sphere.