"We cannot applaud the political ideas these conservative foundations promote, but the successes of these foundations are remarkable, as they continue to frame the policy agenda and pose a challenge to progressives around the nation about how to energize and capitalize public policy addressing social justice concerns."
- NCRP executive director Rick Cohen [89]
The right-wing movement has changed American society in significant ways. It has been successful in turning public opinion and many politicians against spending money on programs that provide essential benefits to those in need, common-sense environmental regulation, and consumer-protection measures, and on the legitimacy of government itself. As a result of the Right's consistent, strategic approach and aggressive use of messaging and communication techniques to dominate the marketplace of ideas, many Americans now believe that government at local, state, and national levels acts against their interests as citizens. Low levels of political participation reflect this alienation - and affect the outcome of elections.
Major print and broadcast media, public opinion polls and the positions taken by politicians of both major parties make it clear that there has been a steady shift toward the school-privatization movement’s and the Right’s attitudes and policies. Very little that reaches the major media today frames issues to the advantage of public schools and teacher organizations.
The right-wing movement, in combination with corporate interests, has been successful not only in opposing teacher unions, but also in getting people into government office that support their ideology. As a result, they have gained control over the legislative and administrative branches of the Federal government. With resulting appointments to the Courts, the Right and the school-privatization movement are poised to achieve their goals.
The Right now controls the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and is engaged in an effort to dominate the Courts with Federalist Society appointees. The political climate has become unfriendly to policies built on the understanding that government can help people and protect them from threats to their well-being. Many of the advances that moderates and progressives have worked hard to achieve over the past century have been abruptly reversed by conservative legislative and judicial decisions.
Passage of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was a major victory for the Right’s privatization efforts. Department of Education descriptions of this legislation even incorporate specific right-wing framing language, referring to variations of the framing phrase “children trapped in failing schools.” From the Department of Education’s official Executive Summary of the No Child Left Behind Act: [90]
“The new law reflects a remarkable consensus - first articulated in the President's No Child Left Behind framework-on how to improve the performance of America's elementary and secondary schools while at the same time ensuring that no child is trapped in a failing school.”
And
“In addition to helping ensure that no child loses the opportunity for a quality education because he or she is trapped in a failing school, the choice and supplemental service requirements provide a substantial incentive for low-performing schools to improve.”
And
”Other changes will support State and local efforts to keep our schools safe and drug-free, while at the same time ensuring that students - particularly those who have been victims of violent crimes on school grounds - are not trapped in persistently dangerous schools.”
NCLB for all practical purposes has created an unfunded mandate with provisions that make it easy for public schools to “fail” and open the door to privatization.
"The president's ultimate goal," said former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), one of the Democrats who now harshly attacks NCLB, "is to make the public schools so awful, and starve them of money, just as he's starving all the other social programs, so that people give up on the public schools." [91]
The Right Sets the Public Agenda
In recent years, the Right and the school privatization movement have enjoyed unprecedented success in influencing both federal and state legislation and policies.
“The result of this comprehensive and yet largely invisible funding strategy is an extraordinary amplification of the far right's views on a range of issues. . . They have . . . been able to keep alive in the public debate a variety of policy ideas long ago discredited or discarded by the mainstream. . . The success of the right-wing efforts are seen at every level of government, as a vast armada of foundation-funded right-wing organizations has both fed and capitalized on the current swing to the right in Congress and in the state legislatures.” [92]
Right-wing ideological premises and arguments dominate the national debate.
In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece [93] describing the American Conservative Union (A.C.U.)’s 40th anniversary party, John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge wrote,
“It would be going a little far to say that the A.C.U. ought to have celebrated under a banner labeled "Mission Accomplished," but it is because of such groups that the right has out-organized, out-fought and out-thought liberal
[. . .] “Fast forward to today. A Republican Party that is more conservative than Mr. Goldwater could have imagined controls the White House, Congress, many governors' mansions and a majority of seats in state legislatures. Back in 1964, John Kenneth Galbraith smugly proclaimed: "These, without doubt, are the years of the liberal. Almost everyone now so describes himself." Today, a Gallup poll tells us, twice as many Americans (41 percent) describe themselves as "conservative" than as "liberal" (19 percent).”
For the last 30 years, voters have rejected vouchers every time they've been proposed. Following is a National Education Association chart tracking voucher initiatives. [94]
| Location | Year | Yes | No |
| Maryland | 1972 | 45% | 55% |
| Michigan | 1978 | 26% | 74% |
| Colorado | 1992 | 33% | 67% |
| California | 1993 | 30% | 70% |
| Washington | 1996 | 36% | 64% |
| Michigan | 2000 | 31% | 69% |
| California | 2000 | 29% | 71% |
“For more and more students, homeroom has become a room at home. Almost 1.1 million students were home-schooled last year, a 29 percent increase since the last government survey in 1999. The growth comes as more parents, frustrated with traditional schools and limits on curriculum, say they would rather handle lessons themselves.
“The estimated figure of students taught at home comes from parent surveys. The results were released Tuesday by the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department.
“Parents offered two main reasons for choosing home schooling: 31 percent cited concerns about the environment of regular schools, such as drugs, lack of safety and negative peer pressure; 30 percent wanted the flexibility to teach religious or moral lessons. Sixteen percent said they were dissatisfied with academic instruction at other schools.”
-- News report, Home schooling is on the rise [95]
Attitude toward Public Education
While polls show that people think their local public schools are quite good, they also think that public schools nationally are just average. This example of people believing information that contradicts their own observation shows the effectiveness of repeated messaging. Particularly, note the differences in the A and B ratings between those rating schools in their own community and those rating schools in the nation as a whole. Also note the higher ratings given by public school parents to schools in their own community.
The following three tables and accompanying wording is taken from Phi Delta Kappan’s “The 36th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools,” September 2004. [96]
The wording and tables are reproduced with permission from the September 2004 issue of the Phi Delta Kappan. Author comments are shown as underlined.
“Tables 1, 2, and 3 report the trend questions used to track the public's assessment of the public schools. Adding this year's 33% of respondents who give the schools a C to the 47% who give the schools an A or a B brings the total to 80%. For public school parents, the percentage who assign the top three grades is 85%.”
How do people rate their own local schools – the ones they know about?
TABLE 1. Students are often given the grades of A, B, C, D, and FAIL to denote the quality of their work. Suppose the public schools themselves, in your community, were graded in the same way. What grade would you give the public schools here -- A, B, C, D, or FAIL?
|
| National Totals | No Children in School | Public School Parents | |||
|
| 2004 % | 2003 % | 2004 % | 2003 % | 2004 % | 2003 % |
| A & B | 47 | 48 | 42 | 45 | 61 | 55 |
| A | 13 | 11 | 11 | 8 | 17 | 17 |
| B | 34 | 37 | 31 | 37 | 44 | 38 |
| C | 33 | 31 | 37 | 30 | 24 | 31 |
| D | 10 | 10 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 10 |
| FAIL | 4 | 5 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 3 |
| Don’t know | 6 | 6 | 9 | 8 | * | 1 |
* Less than one-half of one percent
What about those OTHER schools – the ones that the right-wing is always talking about?
TABLE 2. How about the public schools in the nation as a whole? What grade would you give the public schools nationally -- A, B, C, D, or FAIL?
|
| National Totals | No Children in School | Public School Parents | |||
|
| 2004 % | 2003 % | 2004 % | 2003 % | 2004 % | 2003 % |
| A & B | 26 | 26 | 28 | 26 | 22 | 26 |
| A | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 5 |
| B | 24 | 24 | 26 | 25 | 19 | 21 |
| C | 45 | 52 | 45 | 52 | 44 | 49 |
| D | 13 | 12 | 13 | 11 | 13 | 13 |
| FAIL | 4 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 2 |
| Don’t know | 12 | 7 | 11 | 7 | 15 | 10 |
And what about the school that your oldest child attends?
TABLE 3. Using the A, B, C, D, FAIL scale again, what grade would you give the school your oldest child attends?
|
| Public School Parents | |
|
| 2004 % | 2003 % |
| A & B | 70 | 68 |
| A | 24 | 29 |
| B | 46 | 39 |
| C | 16 | 20 |
| D | 8 | 8 |
| FAIL | 4 | 4 |
| Don’t know | 2 | * |
* Less than one-half of one percent