SC: Palmetto and The Giant Conspiracy

The Palmetto Promise Institute of South Carolina has just released a report entitled "Education or Indoctrination" a "dossier" of the many, many left-wing enemies of all that is Good and True in South Carolina education--organizations that "target South Carolina teachers, students, and parents." The dossier reveals their "true agenda" in over 60 pages; a good alternate title would have been "Lock Up Your Children! They're Coming To Get You!" SCI describes it as "comprehensive but beautiful," and it really is pretty. And I have read it so that you don't have to. 

Buckle up, boys and girls. We are traveling out beyond the lands where reasonable people understand that there are many legitimate points of view and that the opposition is not necessary evil and/or stupid. These folks are far, far, far right. 

So who are these folks?

The Palmetto Promise Institute was founded (twice) by Jim DeMint, the Tea Party conservative senator who resigned his post to become president of the Heritage Foundation. It is part of the State Policy Network, that network of right-tilted thinky tanks and advocacy groups. Current chair is Phil Hughes, president of Hughes Investments, Inc., a commercial development outfit.

PPI's visiting fellow in education is Jonathan Butcher. Butcher has been around-- he came out of the University of Arkansas's Department of Education Reform (a Jay Greene joint), helped set up education savings accounts in Arizona, and was education director at the Goldwater Institute. These days he's heading up the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. And that's just the highlights; Butcher appears to have never met a public school system he didn't want to dismantle.

That brings us to Ellen Weaver, founding president and CEO of PPI. Weaver graduated from Bob Jones University, then went to work for DeMint, somehow landed on the SC Education Oversight Committee, and then decided to run for State Superintendent of Education. In that race she was backed by Pennstlvania's pro-school-choice gazzillionaire Jeffrey Yass, and managed to beat her primary opponent through good old-fashioned lies, exaggeration, and innuendo about her supposed liberal leanings. Oh--and when it turns out you need a Masters degree to hold that office, Bob Jones University whipped up a custom 6-months masters program and zipped her right through it.

Remember all that, especially the "mischaracterizing your opponent" thing as we look at this dossier--but especially remember that as of January, the woman at the head of the organization that created this thing will be in charge of education in South Carolina. Yikes.

Ready to wade through this thing? Here we go.

Foreword

Butcher wrote the foreword, and it sets a tone. Education is "beset by special interest groups" who want to wrestle "authority--and learning options--away from families." The NEA and AFT push Black Lives Matter Week, which is all about "disrupting" the nuclear family. The National School Boards Association "colluded" with President Joe Biden's administration "to prompt officials to treat parents like domestic terrorists if they speak against leftist ideology," a thing that didn't actually happen, but we are here to raise anger and panic and not understanding.

Butcher wants you to know that the Nation's Report Card shows steep declines in learning, yet while some states have instituted education savings accounts (ESAs), South Carolina has not. Also, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. This is a classic trick--state in loud tones the problem, propose your solution, and never provide evidence that your solution will actually solve the problem. 

Butcher also wants you to be upset that South Carolina has not taken steps to "protect children from racial discrimination caused by educators' application of critical race theory" (I will warn you know that you will lose track of how many things folks are supposed to be scared of that have not actually happened). 

The basic thesis here is a version of what Butcher's old mentor Jay Greene laid out in February-- choicers need to use the culture wars to help push choice policies. 

This report describes how certain interest groups want to limit learning options for students and promote critical race theory’s pernicious ideas.

Introduction

Oran Smith wants you to know that South Carolinians are nice folks, and that's why they've been reluctant to push back and so--

There is no better example of the unlikely coexistence of centrist citizens and radical left ideological efforts than in the area of public education.

That line comes with a footnote, not to a source, but to an explanation that you can tell the unions are really socialists because they use words like "workers." Parents are busy and don't want to be thought of as bigots, and teachers, he explains, are overwhelmed with their duties and don't want to be stigmatized. That's why moderate and conservative teachers "felt pressure to “like” posts of support for the left-of-center Facebook group SC for Ed in 2019, and why a large minority of teachers pay the dues that keep The South Carolina Education Association afloat." 

So, two take-aways here-- the leftists are a minority, and everyone who isn't openly with the right is, either by inclination or intimidation, against them. I half-expect, "When we crush the unions and socialists, we will be greeted as liberators."

To his credit, Smith includes a special-fonted paragraph explaining that they don't think their "policy opponents" are evil. "But, we both respectfully and emphatically disagree with their beliefs about America, about the purpose of education, and their goals for South Carolina children." And the thing is, I believe him. Lots of folks in this biz are not ideologues--just opportunists for hire, there to clear the ground for the corporate interests they represent. Now, if in the process, they have to whip up some ideologues who do think that everyone left of Barry Goldwater is evil and dangerous--well, that's not what they think.

But enough preliminaries. Let the calling out of various conspirators begin--starting with a scary graphic

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See? They're everywhere!

1. American Federation of Teachers

Teachers unions are "the major opponents to meaningful education reform," so we'll start there. 

You know who was awful? John Dewey. He held "a progressive and romantic view of education." He opposed teaching the classics. He didn't like "personal competition." The dossier also says that Dewey "seemed to believe" that a correct view could be arrived at socially, which seems like rather a stretch. Also, Randi Weingarten is a radical, and it's her fault that school buildings stayed closed. And then there's this:

AFT is a traditional labor union, and as a labor union, it favors strikes and walkouts and other measures as leverage for collective bargaining

Nobody "favors" strikes and walkouts. Nobody. "Never mind sitting down to work this out at the bargaining table--I just want to go on strike," said no union member ever. But the dossier wants you to know that if state law permitted it, AFT would have "no qualms" about shutting down schools to demand "better working conditions." The dossier uses scare quotes around "better working conditions," as if that would be a made up excuse for the union to have that qualmless strike that everyone is dying to throw.

2. National Education Association

NEA is also bad, but in addition to strikes, they use the courts, The dossier includes the "most shocking" example, when the NEA in Rhode Island sued Nicole Solas for carpet bombing a school with over 200 FOIA requests, including requests for all of a teacher's emails that include the word "race." Solas became a cause celebre for right wing news outlets.

The dossier authors perused a copy of NEA Today (Jan 2022) and discovered that it identified disruptive parents at school board meetings with extremist right-wing groups, promoted Social and Emotional Learning, identified "voting reform" as Jim Crow 2.0, celebrated the defeat of a charterization plan in North Carolina, and celebrated union engagement and advocacy. 

The authors also rifled through some Representative Assembly resolutions, like schools being fiscally independent, supporting progressive taxation, opposing privatization, opposing immigration enforcement on school grounds, supporting the right of librarians to use their professional judgment, supporting right to strike... the list is, I guess, supposed to be self-evidently crazy radical stuff?

3. South Carolina Education Association

So, just how liberal is The SCEA? A better question is whether The SCEA leadership knows just how liberal and out of touch they are.

The authors apparently got into an SCEA webinar and caught the group saying things like "Christopher Columbus didn't discover America" and "We should be able to teach the 1619 Project" and "We need to organize and advocate for ourselves."

SCEA is also accused of, in its podcasts, "focusing on the fruit of the socialist tree: union-type grievances and demands for more money." Because only socialists want to be paid well? 

A few words about Howard Zinn

We pause now to make some connections. The authors claim that there seems to be a "common liturgy" beneath the surface of the "shockingly consistent" ideology of these groups, including calling capitalism bad and dissing Columbus and saying "the winners write the histories" (which is an odd statement to object to when you're sitting in the state that kicked off the Civil War). 

But these tropes "like so much memorized secular scripture" (there's a lot of language in this report framing leftist stuff as a religion--all the better, I suppose, for contrasting it with good Christian faith) spring from a particular source-- Howard Zinn. This dossier sees a huge smoking gun in the NEA Zinn Project.

Also, capitalism

The "education left" doesn't like the free market, and "anti-capitalism is a core tenet of the new orthodoxy." Then we turn to heroes and villains who run through the whole dossier. Bad guys are Ibram X. Kendi and Zinn; good guys are Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Also, if the unionists don't like capitalism, then the only possible alternative is socialism. And probably authoritarian as well. 

4. SC for Ed

"Clearly to the left of even" the unions, these wacky folks want things like increased salary and improved funding and better working conditions. Their website includes stuff from FairTest, those crazy radicals who call for the end of "misuses and flaws of standardized testing." Also, they have had rallies. And "if social media posts are a barometer (and SC for Ed and its leaders are prolific online), the real fear of SC for Ed appears to be parents encroaching on their turf (advocating for their children and their learning needs)." No word on what would be true if social media posts are not a barometer.

Red State Revolt

SC for Ed was "no doubt" inspired by the 2018 teacher strike in West Virginia, which was another leftist led socialists. "This explains once again the choice of red as the official rally color."

5. Consultants and Foundations

The most dangerous path to radical agendas entering South Carolina’s public schools can be through Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer positions in the district office, or retaining of DEI “consultants.”

For this part they cite Parents Defending Education and their library of Naughty School reports and list of some tales of specific districts and schools that dared to hire consultants and implement DEI or SEL programs. The dossier acknowledges "we need more diversity, inclusion, and equality in South Carolina," but not with "discrimination of another kind" (spoiler alert: there is no other kind of discrimination in their examples). "We hope we are wrong" about these programs, they say, leaving the "but we assume we aren't" part unsaid.

Palmetto State Teachers Association

PSTA is one of those alternative unions for folks who don't want their union to be too uniony. The dossier describes it as "centrist," and they've done good things like being more interested in policy than pay, so they don't get lumped in with the "constellation of the left." However, they have taken to "dogged opposition" to the enactment of any private education choice program, most recently daring to insist that choicey schools take the same state Big Standardized Test as public schools (which the dossier objects to because those schools get to ignore the state curriculum and standards on which the test is based). 

So, the dossier suggests, PSTC used to be a nice bunch of non-lefties, but we've got our eyes on you guys.

6. National School Boards Association

Never to be forgiven for backing masking policies or that time they asked the administration to help defend members from crazy far right attacks at board meetings. 

7. K-12 Associations

There's a bunch of professional associations like the National Science Teaching Association and the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Some are nice, but some insist on advocacy and are "seemingly bruising for a fight." "Seemingly" does a lot of work in that sentence.

8. Higher Education

They cite one incident involving parent protest against one book as proof that higher ed and K-12 organizations operate "hand in hand." Higher ed has been the home of "political correctness: since the 1980s. The dossier doesn't have time to study how higher ed affects the "worldview" of future teachers, but it needs some looking into.

9. Accreditors

Specifically, the groups that provide accreditation for teaching programs. The dossier notes that one of the standards talks about personal biases and increasing the practice of equality, diversity and inclusion, to which they say

Again, diversity, inclusion and equality are important, but by whose definition, Ibram Kendi's or Tim Scott's? We suspect that there is no diversity in the definition of diversity

Diversity is okay, but only the right kind. I'm hearing echoes of every person who ever complained that Civil Rights activists had a point, but they were going about it all wrong and would they please just shut up and wait.

10. Litigators

National litigators that recruit plaintiffs in South Carolina to promote humanism and extreme views of separation of church and state include the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU South Carolina, Americans United [for Separation of Church & State], the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the American Humanist Association.

Is there anybody on any side of any issue who doesn't go out to recruit litigants? I do wish there was further explanation of the difference between "extreme" and "mild" views of the separation between church and state.

11. Standards, Curriculum, and Textbooks

Before Common Core, the dossier argues, nobody outside of the education bubble knew what curriculum standards were.

If the textbooks, curricula, and curriculum standards used in South Carolina are to be rigorous, balanced, and reflective of South Carolina values—it matters a great deal who sits on the State Board.

Wrapping up

The dossier has tried to maintain some even-handed language throughout, but for the big finish, the pristine white gloves come off.

Our tour through the world of “radical” and “disruptive” “social warrior” organizations pressing down hard on South Carolina schools, students, teachers, and parents has had the collateral benefit of revealing the marked difference in worldview from that of the typical South Carolina parent and teacher.

This broad “constellation” of indoctrination organizations has vastly different origins, goals, heroes, and villains from those of advocates of what we believe to be true education.

If you want it all reduced to a chart, they have a crackerjack graphic for you

This is, they assure us, based on primary sources "as well a vast body of proof documents and eyewitness accounts we do not have the space to even footnote here." So totally not a straw man constructed out of their fears and/or desire to agitate feelings against everyone not sharing their view. 

What's a parent (or right-minded teacher) to do?

The dossier concludes with an action list. 

Seek a parental bill of rights, one that "affirmatively protects parental rights." 

Work for "true diversity, equality, and inclusion." That means being color-blind and gender-blind. I suspect they really really didn't think that second one through.

Understand the evils of racism past and present. Tim Scott is quoted, providing yet another version of CRT in which "kids are being taught that the color of their skin defines them." 

Also, learn about NEA and AFT alternatives. Get involved in school and leadership. Parents should talk with their children regularly. Visit our website.

There's an appendix that includes the text from where legislators slipped the standard anti-"CRT" language into the budget. A list of influential national ed groups. And footnotes.

Still here?

That's the whole thing. The language does not froth at the mouth or scream loudly, and there are moments that are perfectly reasonable. And there are dozens and dozens of moments of exaggeration, fabrication and twisting of information--more than I could ever cover in even this long post. But mostly the message is simple--

There's a vast conspiracy of socialist that includes everyone on the left and in the center which is pretty much everyone involved in education. It's a specific and even-tempered version of the old arguments about the education establishment, the keepers of the status quo. They are well-connected. They aren't like the Regular People from Around Here. They want to replace parents with The State, and they have their own (not Christian) religion; that's how Godless socialists roll. 

And as is often the case, there's an assumption here that teaching someone liberal stuff is indoctrination, but teaching them right-leaning stuff is education.

The report's function is not to rant and rave. Reports like this (all the way back to A Nation at Risk) provide ammunition to the ranters and ravers, allowing them to hold up the slickly produced official-looking pages and say, "I'm not just ranting and raving--what I have to say is supported by this sober academic report." 

Did I mention that the woman in charge of the organization that produced this will soon be in charge of education in South Carolina? Going to be a rough couple of years for teachers in Palmetto State.