Opinion: LePage’s hateful plot to undermine public schooling in Maine

It’s no secret that Paul LePage is not any fan of public schooling. As governor he referred to as Maine lecturers “a dime a dozen” and advised an viewers of enterprise folks that “if you need a superb schooling, go to non-public colleges. For those who can’t afford it, powerful luck — you may go to the general public faculty.” 

LePage has at all times been upfront about his obsession with privatizing and defunding public colleges. He has referred to as for vouchers that might enable for schooling funding to be diverted to subsidize personal spiritual colleges, dwelling education and for-profit on-line schooling.

As governor, he ignored the 2004 voter-mandated regulation to fund the state’s share of schooling at 55{22377624ce51d186a25e6affb44d268990bf1c3186702884c333505e71f176b1} (Gov. Janet Mills has lastly honored that dedication) and shifted thousands and thousands of {dollars} in prices onto native faculty districts. The previous governor additionally applauded a latest Supreme Courtroom choice to strike down Maine’s regulation banning public funding for spiritual colleges, stating that it was “time to let the parents decide their child’s future, not educational bureaucrats.”

The previous governor’s fondness for personal spiritual colleges is rooted in his personal expertise attending parochial faculty in Lewiston, the place he claims the mix of strict self-discipline and corporal punishment made him a greater particular person.

“We don’t have that in public colleges. So faith-based colleges have a special manner of educating, and it labored for me,” he as soon as mentioned in a radio interview in 2012. 

“It wasn’t the spiritual a part of it that was good; it was the brothers being stern and — take a look at my knuckles — they nonetheless present that they had been hit just a few occasions,” LePage added.

Quite than addressing the important thing components that worsen educational efficiency — like social and financial circumstances, poverty, unequal faculty funding and lack of early childhood schooling — LePage and his fellow faculty privatizers are extra interested by placing all the blame solely on lecturers, faculty boards and directors for low scholar achievement. As an alternative of bettering public colleges, LePage seeks to punish them by diverting public schooling cash to non-public colleges. This additional reduces the quantity of funding obtainable for native public colleges and drawbacks low-income college students and kids with disabilities and better wants. As incapacity advocates level out, personal and non secular colleges can legally reject college students with particular wants and voucher applications don’t cowl bills like transportation and different companies these college students want.

The racist roots of the college alternative motion

Having extra instructional choices feels like a constructive factor, however in actuality research present that this doesn’t enhance scholar achievement general. As an alternative, it additional balkanizes and segregates the scholar physique by permitting extra elite colleges to cherry choose essentially the most privileged and highest reaching college students who’ve extra assets to complement personal faculty educations. That is no accident.

As Duke College historian Nancy MacLean has documented, the “faculty alternative” motion was a direct response to the Supreme Courtroom’s Brown v. Board of Schooling choice that struck down racial segregation in public colleges in 1954. Faculty vouchers had been developed by Southern states to keep away from court-ordered racial integration and permit white mother and father to ship their kids to non-public colleges generally known as “segregation academies” that would discriminate primarily based on the colour of 1’s pores and skin.

Based mostly on intensive archival analysis, MacLean has uncovered how the conservative economist Milton Friedman “taught white supremacists a extra subtle…court-proof approach to protect Jim Crow” by offering a justification grounded within the free market ideology. Friedman argued that breaking the “authorities monopoly” over schooling would promote “competitors.”

The varsity alternative motion was later picked up by well-funded conservative assume tanks and the American Legislative Alternate Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded invoice mill that creates “mannequin laws” for Republican state legislators. LePage, who was deeply concerned with ALEC as governor, described himself as a fan of Friedman and even as soon as declared July 31 to be “Milton Friedman Day” in Maine, citing the economist’s assist for “faculty alternative.”

Inventive Commons through Allison Shelley, The Verbatim Company for EDUimages

However regardless of a decades-long corporate-funded effort to undermine public schooling, polls constantly present People broadly assist it and overwhelmingly reject faculty privatization schemes. That’s why faculty privatizers have been diligently working to erode confidence in public schooling by demonizing lecturers and stoking worry and paranoia concerning the educating of LGBTQ content material and “vital race principle,” or “CRT,” a tutorial idea addressing institutional racism that’s usually not taught in Ok-12 colleges.

This newest manufactured ethical panic will be traced to a right-wing propagandist named Christopher Rufo of the conservative Manhattan Institute, who launched the warfare in opposition to CRT and supposed “grooming” of scholars by sexually predatory public faculty lecturers. Rufo makes use of CRT as a catch-all time period to explain any classes that embrace research of race relations and racial fairness that make white folks uncomfortable. In capitalizing on white racial nervousness in response to the Black Lives Matter motion, Rufo says he purposely makes use of the time period “vital race principle” as a result of it’s the “excellent villain” and comes off as “hostile, educational, divisive, race-obsessed, toxic, elitist [and] anti-American” to common white middle-class People.

LePage and the bigoted anti-CRT mob

In his marketing campaign appearances, LePage has made it clear that he’ll proceed the warfare on public schooling by placing gag guidelines on lecturers and censoring what college students can learn. As he advised an viewers final yr, “I can’t wait to assault the college system, as a result of man, this vital race principle. They’re taking down statues, burning down buildings, killing People.”

Earlier this month LePage echoed calls from the far-right when he mentioned he needed to take away “pornography” from faculty — a label anti-public faculty crusaders have used to explain books that include LGBTQ subject material — and hinted at pushing laws to assist efforts by mother and father to ban books.

“I’ve heard it. I’ve seen one right here in Hampden and one down south in Bonny Eagle, the place folks had been threatened to be arrested, thrown out of conferences. That’s inappropriate,” he advised an viewers at Husson College. “So, the governor’s workplace’s function is to cross laws that permits faculty boards to listen to from the mother and father, and the mother and father and the college board ought to decide what goes into the libraries.”

LePage is outwardly referring to the antics of a far-right agitator named Shawn McBreairty, who has been repeatedly banned from getting into quite a lot of colleges throughout the state after spending the previous two years harassing lecturers and college boards over CRT and books containing LGBTQ subject material. McBreairty first obtained nationwide notoriety after receiving a prison trespass order from SAD 51 colleges — which encompasses colleges in Cumberland and North Yarmouth — for repeatedly violating district guidelines. 

In 2020, McBreairty turned satisfied that the college was calling residents of Cumberland “white supremacists” and educating “vital race principle” after it launched an announcement denouncing white supremacy and committing to racial fairness within the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In violation of faculty guidelines, McBreairty padlocked an indication to a college fence, disrupted quite a few faculty board conferences and distributed flyers denouncing faculty officers to Greely Excessive Faculty college students. At one level he even put a billboard-sized signal of a college board member’s face on his garden that he claimed was surrounded by rat traps.

McBreairty forged himself as a free speech martyr in an look on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Information present, implying, falsely, that he was prohibited from attending his daughter’s commencement for battling with the college for holding what he described as “anti-white coaching.”

After that look, McBreairty rocketed to right-wing stardom and have become a chapter chief of the “No Left Flip Schooling,” one of many largest organizations worry mongering about racial fairness in colleges. The group and its founder have in contrast educators to Pol Pot, Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler and claimed that “black bigotry in direction of whites” is a “very actual drawback.” However McBreairty was an excessive amount of of a free cannon even for that group. No Left Flip later fired him in 2021 after he pled responsible to improperly influencing a Cumberland faculty official by threatening to launch a recording of the deceased father of a college board member in the event that they didn’t resign.

McBreairty on Fox Information | Picture through video

Since then, McBreairty has been working because the particular initiatives director for former state Rep. Larry Lockman’s white supremacist group, generally known as the Maine First Challenge. Lockman has spent the previous 40 years attacking LGBTQ rights and other people of shade. Lockman, who as soon as wrote a homophobic e book titled “The Aids Epidemic: A Residents’ Information To Defending Your Household And Group From The Homosexual Plague,” frequently promotes white supremacist “Nice Substitute” conspiracy theories and accuses pro-immigrant lawmakers of waging a “warfare on whites.” LePage has lengthy supported Lockman and his hateful agenda, having endorsed him for state senate and stood beside him throughout his marketing campaign roll out in 2019.

Most disturbingly, McBreairty and Lockman steadily title particular person lecturers of their defamatory accusations on conservative radio exhibits, podcasts, newsletters and on social media. Considered one of McBreairty’s favourite targets is 2022 “Maine Instructor of the Yr” Kelsey Stoyanova, an eighth grade instructor at Reeds Brook Center Faculty in Hampden. College students have described Stoyanova as passionate about instilling a love of studying and making all college students really feel valued and accepted. 

“In Ms. Stoyanova’s classroom, you’re feeling seen, you’re feeling heard, you’re feeling liked,” former scholar Roz O’Reilly advised the Bangor Every day Information. 

Nevertheless, McBreairty, who doesn’t have any kids in Hampden colleges (or in any Ok-12 colleges), has accused Stoyanova of “hyper-sexualizing” college students and selling CRT as a result of she launched a studying listing for college students that included Black and LGBTQ authors.

Mockingly, McBreairty and Maine First Challenge truly promoted a baby intercourse offender whose  transphobic positions they agreed with. Final spring, Maine First Challenge platformed a self-described “ex-transgender girl” who’s a convicted little one intercourse offender and a life time registrant on the intercourse offender registry.

Combating again in opposition to the anti-teacher witch hunt

Fortuitously, McBreairty and Lockman have been usually unsuccessful in taking up faculty boards, as right-wing cranks who oppose range, fairness and inclusion have fared poorly in Maine. As one latest ballot exhibits, most mother and father like their public colleges and lecturers and assist them by huge margins.

Nevertheless, the fury and fearmongering of a vocal right-wing minority is having a significant affect with conservative voters. One latest ballot discovered that whereas Democratic assist for public colleges has elevated throughout the pandemic, Republican confidence in public colleges has plummeted to an all-time low. Final spring, Maine Republican Occasion conference delegates even handed McBreairty’s “Don’t Say Homosexual” decision to ban CRT and intercourse schooling in colleges and restrict what faculty workers can say about gender and sexuality. 

Free public schooling is one in all our Most worthy establishments and a cornerstone of our democracy. Its mission is to supply each younger particular person within the nation with an equitable, inclusive and high quality schooling that fosters a life-long love of studying and offers college students the data they must be energetic, knowledgeable individuals within the democratic course of. Whereas public schooling could not fully stay as much as its beliefs, we have to proceed working to strengthen and enhance it for future generations of younger learners.

Our educators pursue educating to not get wealthy however as a result of they’ve a ardour to form younger minds. It’s not a straightforward job, although. It entails offering differentiated instruction for numerous learners, limitless paperwork, early mornings and late nights getting ready classes, disciplining college students, coping with bullying and issues at dwelling, and spending cash out of 1’s personal pocket for classroom supplies on account of lack of funding.

The stress of working via the pandemic together with the fixed smears, private assaults and demonization of their career is driving good lecturers out, with greater than a half-million leaving the career for the reason that starting of 2020. Though these far-right activists are small in quantity, they’ve change into very influential in our politics and it’s clear that if LePage is elected governor, he’ll proceed to empower them and legitimize their bigoted grievances. 

For those who worth public schooling, racial justice, LGBTQ rights and the separation of church and state, sitting again and rolling your eyes at these antics is not an choice. We have to arrange and battle again in opposition to this elitist, hateful agenda and ship LePage again to Florida in November.

High photograph: Former Gov. Paul LePage | Beacon