I fear for public schools as Republican legislatures follow a well-scripted and well-funded campaign to sow mistrust and direct taxpayer funds to private and charter schools, the new Lionheart Classical Academy in Peterborough included.
To stir parents’ fears, a group of right-wing activists plucked Critical Race Theory from law-school curricula and transformed it into a means of indoctrinating K-through-12 students. For Tucker Carlson at Fox News, cameras in classrooms are needed to fight this “civilization-ending poison.” Teacher surveillance came to New Hampshire when the Republican Legislature passed an ill-defined “divisive concepts” law prohibiting public-school teachers from discussing issues like race and gender identity. Anyone can report a teacher on a special web portal. A group called Moms for Liberty offered $500 to the first person to report a teacher.
New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut wrote an op-ed stating concerns about “rogue educators” who impose their values in opposition to parents’ values. Counter to Edelblut and other charter-school advocates, recent Ipsos/NPR polling of public-school parents found strong overall satisfaction, including in how they present “divisive concepts.”
Regarding taxpayer funding, public schools receive per-student state “adequacy grants” of $3,700. The state funds $7,100 to $7,300 per charter-school student. Lionheart also received a federal start-up grant of $1.5 million available to all new charter schools. Last year, Republican legislators created the “Education Freedom Account” program (tuition vouchers for private schools) that averages $4,600 per student, with a cost to the state of about $8 million.
Lionheart is part of a nationwide network of charter schools that use The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum, developed by Hillsdale College in Michigan. Hillsdale College has a politically conservative, Christian pedigree. Its head chaired former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission that issued The 1776 Report that’s central to the curriculum. A Hillsdale vice president said the report promotes “patriotic education that teaches the truth about America.”
Trump’s website describes The 1776 Report as “a dispositive rebuttal of reckless ‘re-education’ attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.” The report identifies enemies that Hillsdale charter schools must combat, including “activist propaganda,” divisive “identity politics” and forces that seek to keep religion “out of the public square.”
Lionheart’s executive director, quoted in this paper, described the school’s “classical education” as emphasizing a “centrality of Western tradition” and “a rich and recurring examination of American traditions.” An April 11 New York Times article on Hillsdale College and its charter schools reported a curriculum search two years ago that found just one mention of climate change. It was termed a “global warming theory.”
New Hampshire’s Republican Legislature recently opened the door for federal funding for up to 27 new charter schools. It’s not known how many will be Hillsdale schools.
All taxpayers deserve a voice in public-school education and funding. Do we support surveillance of trained educators by parents, perhaps primed by Tucker Carlson, or by students perhaps primed by those same parents to distrust their teachers?
After teaching through two pandemic years, the added stress of politically motivated surveillance has driven many public-school teachers from their profession. Undermining public schools, with their real-life diversity of curriculum and community, undermines a democracy’s need for well-informed citizens who can recognize the conspiracy theories on the internet, Critical Race Theory included.
There are many forms of patriotism. Support for public education is one.
Francie Von Mertens, a longtime Peterborough resident, taught sixth grade for a decade and wrote the Backyard Birder column in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript for 25 years.