A Brief History of the Education Culture Wars: 
On Santorum's Legacy, the GOP and School Reform
Dana Goldstein 
The Nation
March 1, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/blog/166537/brief-history-education-culture-wars-santorums-legacy-gop-and-school-reform

Judging by the applause lines at GOP campaign stops and
debates this winter, a significant segment of the
Republican electorate understands public education not
as a crucial civic institution, nor as a potential path
from poverty to the middle class, nor even as a means of
individual betterment. Instead, this coalition of
religious conservatives and extreme tax-cutters prefers
to vilify public schools-and actually, pretty much any
traditional educational institution, including liberal
arts colleges-as potential corruptors of the nation's
youth; as unwanted interlocutors in that most sacred
relationship: the one between a child and her parent.

It is a curious thing, because with some 90 percent of
American children enrolled in public schools, there must
be significant overlap between the consumers of public
education and the approximately one-third of Americans
who describe themselves as Tea Party-type conservatives.
Never mind: It is clear that in the American political
economy, there is nothing unusual about a voter hating
and resenting a government program even while relying
heavily upon it.

Rick Santorum's presidential bid looks increasingly
quixotic as we head toward Super Tuesday. He clearly
represents only a minority of the Republican base. But
what his surge made clear is that there was appeal in
appointing a sort of national standard-bearer for the
culture war against mainstream education, perhaps
because  anti-government voters could look up to
Santorum, a homeschooling father of seven, as a man who
actually lives their values. Disdain for schools has
been everywhere in Santorum's rhetoric, from his ad
nauseam boasting about his own family's homeschooling;
to his assertion that government-run public schools are
"anachronistic;" to his complaints about comprehensive
sex education; to his counterfactual claim that
President Obama is "a snob" who opposes vocational
training and wants all Americans to be "indoctrinated"
by liberal college professors.

In his now-infamous February 24 anti-college rant,
Santorum likened parents to God, and children to
unformed souls in some idyllic Eden-souls who must be
prevented from biting the apple of wicked, corrupting
knowledge. "I understand why [President Obama] wants you
to go to college," Santorum said. "He wants to remake
you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can
remake their children into their image, not his."

In order for parents to have unfettered access to their
children's minds, government must get out of the way.
During the February 22 GOP debate in Arizona, Santorum
advocated shutting down not only the federal Department
of Education but perhaps state departments of education
too. "I think the state governments should start to get
out of the education business," he said, "and put it
back to the.local [level] and into the community."

At the same debate, Ron Paul declared, "Once the
government takes over the schools, especially at the
federal level, then there's no right position, and you
have to argue which prayer, are you allowed to pray?"
Newt Gingrich has praised President Obama's support for
charter schools, and once toured the country alongside
Mike Bloomberg and Al Sharpton to advocate for national
school reform. But in Arizona he promised to
"dramatically shrink the federal Department of Education
down to doing nothing but research, return all the
power.back to the states."

Mitt Romney alone defended No Child Left Behind, and the
idea of federal school improvement efforts more broadly.

Twelve years ago, George W. Bush and John McCain both
ran for president as aggressive, accountability-driven
school reformers. McCain revised the act in 2008. So it
is worth considering what has changed politically to
leave Romney out in the cold on these issues among the
serious GOP contenders, and pausing to remember just how
reactionary the other candidates' proposals were.

Prior to the civil rights movement, the federal
government indeed did very little to provide oversight
of American schools, just as Santorum et al. propose
today. The ethos of local control dates back to the
colonial era, when schools were run by villages,
churches and ad-hoc neighborhood organizations. The rise
of the Common Schools movement in the 1830s guaranteed
most children an elementary education and led to the
opening of thousands of new schools, but did little to
regulate them.

The problem with localism was that it left millions of
poor, non-white and special-needs children drastically
underserved and undereducated. As late as the mid-1970s,
for example, only one in every five disabled kids was
enrolled in public school. So the federal government
stepped in with new regulations and funding intended to
flow directly from Washington to the neediest children.
There were three policy landmarks: The Supreme Court's
1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which
outlawed de jure school segregation; the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, which provided
hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding for the
education of poor children; and the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1975, which
established a federal funding stream for special
education.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter created the Department
of Education to coordinate Washington's new role. Today
the DOE has an annual budget of some $70 billion, most
of it filtered through ESEA and IDEA.

The idea of dismantling this civil rights apparatus is
not new. After the backlash against school busing,
Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 promising to
shutter the DOE. But he was met in Washington by
bipartisan panic about the Soviets and Japanese out-
educating the United States, especially in math and
science. To satisfy national security hawks, Reagan
appointed a national commission to research American
schools; the result of its work was the "Nation at Risk"
report of 1983, which declared the American education
system failing and inaugurated the standards-and-
accountability school reform movement.

All of this culminated in 2001 with the passage of
George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. Rick Santorum
voted for NCLB. During his 2006 Senate campaign,
Santorum even bragged to a special education advocacy
group that he supported $7 billion in new health and
education funding-exactly the type of federal spending
he opposes today. But none of this made Santorum unusual
in the Bush-era Republican Party. Bush's claim of
"compassionate conservatism" was built in large part on
the argument that school choice and accountability could
be levers for social mobility. Republicans in Congress-
led by John Boehner, then chairman of the House
Committee on Education and the Workforce-lined up behind
Bush, at first reluctantly but then with increasing
fervor. Some became true believers in the idea that
standardized testing mandates could substitute for a
full-bodied anti-poverty agenda, and would make American
workers more competitive in the global marketplace.

All that was before the Great Recession, before budget
shortfalls swept the states, and before the rise of the
Tea Party, with its animus toward almost all government
social programs. Throughout the 1990s, Christian Right
activists like Michele Bachmann had argued that public
schools were dens of iniquity, where kids were
indoctrinated to use condoms, respect religious
diversity and question American moral superiority. In
2010, the Tea Party swept some of these culture warriors
into office, and their electoral success profoundly
influenced the GOP presidential field. The new class of
Republican freshmen pressured their Congressional elders
to reject bipartisan education reform, with its squishy
promise to improve the lot of the poor, and instead use
austerity as an excuse to reverse federal education
mandates, returning power to states and school districts
where local "values" could triumph.

Ideological fervor is often tamed in the byways of the
Capitol. Since closing the DOE and denying the nation's
schools billions of dollars of promised funding would be
politically unpopular and logistically disastrous,
instead House Republicans have advanced a spate of
proposals that would allow local school administrators
to redirect ESEA and IDEA funds away from poor and
disabled children and toward the general student
population. This is a severe attack on the federal
government's already limited ability to enforce fairness
for populations that desperately need supplemental
educational services.

At the state level, a priority of the education culture
warriors is to halt the adoption of the new national
Common Core curriculum standards in math and English;
the South Carolina legislature is considering a bill
that would do so. Another priority is providing
homeschooling parents with tax credits, and lowering the
age of compulsory schooling from 18 to 16-despite
evidence that raising the compulsory schooling age, a
policy President Obama proposed in his State of the
Union address, actually leads to higher lifetime
earnings.

Republican governors like Chris Christie and Mitch
Daniels continue to subscribe to broader, Bush-type
education reforms. Charter schools and private school
vouchers remain popular throughout the party, and if
Romney finally clinches the GOP nomination and faces off
against Obama, perhaps the center will hold in education
policy; the two men have fairly similar approaches to
the issue. But then again, there is pressure from the
left, as well: from parents wary of too much
standardized testing, from teachers' unions weary of
shouldering all the blame when poor children don't
succeed and from pedagogical progressives who want to
empower local educators to create curricula, instead of
relying on state or national standards.

There are few mainstream Democrats standing up for these
ideas, because they do not comport with President
Obama's agenda. Strangely, it is Newt Gingrich who
articulates this critique of federal school reform. "We
bought this notion that you could have Carnegie units
and you could have state standards and you could have a
curriculum. Everybody-every child is unique," he said in
Arizona. "Every teacher is unique. Teaching is a
missionary vocation. When you bureaucratize it, you kill
it. We need a fundamental rethinking from the ground
up."

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