WV’s GOP Legislature vs. Public Education: Appalachia’s Oligarchy Revival
Defend public education, defend democracy.
“Population was sparse, roads were bad, schoolhouses did not exist, there was an absolute want of acquaintance with the machinery of public schools, no sufficient supply of competent teachers was to be had, and weighing down all spirit of hopeful progress was the dreary poverty of the taxpayer.”
Those were the words of Dr. J.L.M. Curry to author William H. Skaggs, which Skaggs included in his 1924 book The Southern Oligarchy: An appeal in behalf of the silent masses of our country against the despotic rule of the few.1
Skaggs’ book was published in the middle of the laissez-faire economic glory days of the ‘roaring’ 1920s, but one could easily mistake it as a description of large swaths of West Virginia today. And if West Virginia’s GOP-controlled government gets all of its policies in place, it’s what West Virginia is going to look in the very near future.
Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association, recently described the assault on public education a Charleston Gazette-Mail op-ed.
“Nearly all the education bills, plus plans to eliminate the state income tax, cut public education or demean educators in some way. That means the future of public education is on the line. Some legislators fail to grasp that investing in public education for our children is the only sound, long-term economic strategy. Cutting education now is like eating the seed corn — once it’s gone, you have destroyed your future.”
It is kind of Mr. Lee to give the legislators the benefit of the doubt, but I would argue that destroying futures is exactly their goal.
Not everyone’s future though.
You see, these proposals benefit wealthy West Virginians. The benefits come in the form of tax breaks for the rich along with vouchers & charters that siphon from public budgets. Supporters of these “school choice” programs even acknowledge that the proposed vouchers won’t be enough for some families to be able to “choose” to send their children to charter schools or private schools.
Ryan Quinn at the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported, “in response to concerns about [$4600 per student per year] not being enough to pay the costs of many private schools, Delegate Wayne Clark, R-Jefferson, noted this money could also go to homeschooling and tutoring.”
Delegate Clark seems to miss a few key points: $4600/year (that’s $88/week) is not enough to make homeschooling or hiring a tutor an option for the more than one-out-of-three West Virginian children who lived in single-parent households in 2018. And it doesn’t make homeschooling an option for the 40,000+ households in 2019 where grandparents are responsible for their grandchildren, or for the 34% of children whose parents lack secure employment as of 2019. (All of those figures are from before the pandemic. The situation has not improved.)
And while there may be some overlap in those groups, it’s still at least one-third of all children in West Virginia who probably can’t start being homeschooled just because their guardian receives an extra $88 a week in the form of a $4600 voucher. The only way that would work is if we redefine homeschooling to include “leaving children at home alone while they should be in school”.
Any plan that takes public funds away from public education is a plan to undermine public education. And as William Skaggs understood in 1924 and Alexis de Tocqueville before that: democracy relies on an educated population. Now, just as when Skaggs was writing, opponents of public education are proponents of oligarchy, wittingly or not.
Attacks on public education are nothing new in West Virginia, and these bills are building on a project that began 47 years ago.
During the 1974 “Great Textbook War” conservative Christians led by Alice Moore waged a protest that would put today’s “Cancel Culture” to shame.
According to historian Carol Mason’s book Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy, the core complaints were that a new set of language arts textbooks
“advocated unprincipled relativism, promoted antagonistic behavior, contained obscene material, put down Jesus Christ, and upheld communism.” [Alice] Moore was also concerned that the books would expose white children to black vernacular and teach them “to speak in ghetto dialect.””
The “war” lasted a full year. Schools were closed; people prayed for violence and people got violence; bombs went off; someone was shot.
But a broader movement was also launched. Mason reports:
“Parents continued boycotts amid continuing protests and the arrest of school board members for “contributing to the delinquency of minors.” Rallies and marches opposing the “filthy” and “ungodly” books grew. […] Private Christian schools were set up as alternatives to the public school system in Kanawha County.” [Emphasis Added ]
American RadioWorks sums it up:
“The textbook controversy in West Virginia was a catalyst in the private school movement nationally. Conservative Christians in particular began pulling their children from public schools and placing them in church-run schools, or educating them at home. In Kanawha County, several of the anti-textbook leaders opened schools in their churches and houses. School board member Alice Moore observed that private schools might be the only practical outlet for conservative Christians. "If books like these are going into the schools and we can't keep our children out," Moore said, "we have to do something else."”
The private school & homeschool movement kicked off in 1974, just 50 years after William H. Skaggs highlighted how the dearth of public education helped southern oligarchs foster control over their Jim Crow fiefdoms.
We are now 47 years out from the beginning of that movement, with Republicans looking to leave our public education system further strapped for resources by allowing these private schools to siphon public tax dollars to fund their private operations, without public oversight, without accountability, and without any guarantee of equal opportunity to our children. The only guaranteed “school choice” under these plans seems to be for private schools to choose their students.
These proposals will not help children whose families cannot afford these private schools even with a voucher; they will not help kids who are denied entry to these private schools; and they will not help children whose parents have neither the training, energy, or time to be full-time teachers as well as full-time bread earners and full-time parents.
But these proposals will save the wealthiest families in the state some money, and they will help the most privileged to excel.
In other words, they would worsen West Virginia’s inequality in the present and make it wider every generation in the future.
In that way, destroying public education and using public funds for private education will yield oligarchy almost as a natural law.
On the other hand, widely educated populations are troublesome for oligarchs. Widely educated populations end up having lots of social mobility. Widely educated populations are liberated populations that do not fall for the sleight-of-hand and empty culture-war rhetoric of oligarchs and their crony candidates.
That is why any plan that involves public funds being siphoned off for private education must be rejected.
And if these bills become law, we must be prepared to double down on re-enforcing and investing in our public education system so that our future is more democratic, less unequal, and clearly distinguishable from the oligarchies of our past.
I learned of Skaggs’ work while working with Thom Hartmann on his book, The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class, which includes this quote in full.
This is certainly an eye opener for those who believe that charter schools are the panacea for the future of education.