The Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July has delivered the party’s vision on its education platform. The section for K-12 education said, “We support options for learning, including home-schooling, career and technical education, private or parochial schools, magnet schools, charter schools, online learning, and early-college high schools.”
The GOP’s education platform supports almost every form of education but public schools; neither does it mention the party’s vision to reform the public school system, if they are dissatisfied with it. Not surprising though, GOP’s educational agenda has long been anti-public school, both in K-12 and higher education. Republicans favor school vouchers that are actually subsidies provided to low-income families so that they can use them to send kids to other non-public schools. This is the Republican’s effort to divert tax money to other school systems and discourage families from sending their kids to public schools.
In higher education, Republicans show no mercy to public colleges and universities. In North Carolina, the GOP-dominated legislature has waged war against its University of North Carolina system, one of the best higher education systems in the nation.
James Hogan, former teacher and now fundraiser at Davidson College, documented in his blog (which was later published in the Washington Post) the NC GOP’s deliberate attempt to weaken the UNC system, including cutting funding, eliminating liberal arts studies and replacing its leadership. Other states dominated by the GOP have similar policies toward public education. In 2015, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, cut millions of dollars from the University of Wisconsin’s budget.
But why is the GOP so hostile to any kind of public education? One of the explanations emerges from their 2016 platform that the party “supports the public display of the Ten Commandments as reflection of our history and our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage and further affirm the rights of religious students to engage in voluntary prayer at public school events and to have equal access to school facilities.”
Many Republican voters are evangelical Christians in the South who particularly fear public schools teaching evolution as a science to students. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Epperson vs. Arkansas (1968) where the court ruled against an Arkansas statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution, Republicans and their supporters see the public school system as a dangerous place to spread non-Christian values.
However, what is written in their education platform is essentially a paradox. Is explicitly supporting Judeo-Christian values in conflict with asserting the freedom of religion, especially when the party becomes the ruling party and exerts its values in public policy?
Education is a process of seeking truth, which means not taking everything, including faith, as absolute truth. Upholding the spirit of the First Amendment in education implies that different views can be fairly addressed and taught to students. Teaching biblical stories and principles as a classic text in public schools does not necessarily violate the principle of separation of church and state. Students should have a right to learn biblical stories just as they have a right to learn about evolutionary theory. Only when forcing students into specific practices of religious rituals, is the principle violated.
The fact that the GOP is tremendously in favor of private over public education is consistent with its view that the market is naturally superior to the public sector. It is true that the market organizes commercial activities more efficiently when it comes to private goods and services. But education is a not a perfect private good, instead, it has mixed characteristics of both private and public goods.
In a competitive market, producers do everything they can to satisfy consumers. But education is not a competitive market. Professors could satisfy students by not encouraging them to work hard and easily giving A’s. In return, students could give professors high approval ratings. In addition, education produces positive externality and the market itself does not fully reflect its value. A highly educated population is certainly beneficial to the labor force and business environment.
No policy is more folly to cherry-picking college majors in order to weaken public education, like what the North Carolina GOP did to the UNC system. As the modern economy gets more specialized, STEM majors flourish, while liberal arts majors like history, English and philosophy are shrinking, according to Steven Pearlstein’s piece in The Washington Post. If these trends happen naturally, those GOP-dominated state governments should encourage studies on liberal arts that contain a great deal of conservative ideas, instead of stifling them. If higher education should be entirely market-oriented, it is a real threat to the GOP because many of today’s private universities are incredibly progressive and rarely accept the GOP’s values.
