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SORTA BAK FOR PUBLIC SCHOOL?

see public schools common // libraries

see voucher charter

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RWW

News & Analysis

08/18/2026

by

Peter Montgomery

Dominionist and MAGA activist Jim Garlow devoted his World Prayer Network call Sunday night to an attack on public education. One of the speakers, Liberty University Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances Rev. Glenn Clary, described how Liberty is planning to take advantage of a provision in the Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” designed to funnel tax dollars into Christian schools.

Hostility toward public education is a defining characteristic of the Christian right political movement, which has fought for years to funnel public education funds into religious schools and the conservative-dominated homeschooling movement.

Televangelist Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University, wrote in 1979, “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

Garlow began Sunday’s broadcast by telling his prayer warriors, “We want to help you understand why you've got to help your children, your nephews, your nieces, and your grandkids get out of the public school.” He described public education as “rotten to the core,” and said 75 to 80 percent of students raised in the church lose their faith when they go to college because they had not been “properly grounded.”

Clary, the Liberty vice president and a former chair of the Alaska GOP, described public schools as “anti-God indoctrination centers.” He claimed that public schools are controlled by the National Education Association, an educators’ union that he said he calls the “National Evil Association,” adding, “And so I just think that we need to get the kids out of these public schools.”

An important background to this story is the history of Liberty’s rise to become a billion-dollar behemoth in among conservative Christian colleges. That wasn’t achieved by founder Falwell, but by his now-discredited son Jerry Jr., who saw early on the potential financial windfall of online education, which allowed Liberty to take tuition dollars—much of it funded by taxpayers indirectly through federal student loans—from a huge number of students that didn’t require a lot of physical infrastructure. Liberty devoted millions to high-pressure call centers to recruit tens of thousands of online students.

Liberty University Online Academy, which Clary was promoting on Garlow’s call, is the university’s online K-12 school. Clary says more than 75,000 students have gone through its program. Clary described his current mission as recruiting pastors to turn their church’s used space during the week into classrooms for students taking (and paying for) Liberty’s online classes. It’s a way, he said, for churches to create Christian schools without having to worry about hiring and managing teachers. Students who graduate from the online high school can get 50 percent off their tuition if they become a residential college student at Liberty.

For pastors who might be asking, “How would I pay for this?” Clary suggested that parents and grandparents can contribute. B

The 2025 legislation set up a scheme that allows any taxpayer to get a dollar-for-dollar reduction in taxes for any contribution up to $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) beginning on Jan.1, 2027. The SGO in turn can use those dollars to provide “scholarships” or vouchers to pay for tuition at a private school. There is no cap on the program, which the National Center for Public Education has noted could direct “tens of billions of dollars annually towards private school education.”

Clary was enthusiastic about what this could mean for money flowing into Christian schools like Liberty's online academy:

So if you and your wife did your taxes and you owe $2,000 and you contributed $1,700 to an SGO, scholarship granting organization, you could take that $1,700 off your tax bill and you would pay $300 to the government and you have directed your tax dollars to a Christian school organization in order for a child to have a Christian education.

Clary said that Liberty is going to “stand up” its own SGO. “Liberty is going to have this and make it available to the students that come to Liberty and any of the pastors that stand up affiliate schools,” he said.

It’s worth noting that earlier this year, Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) introduced the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act, legislation that would repeal the SGO tax credit, which is essentially a federal private school voucher program. The bill was co-sponsored by 28 other Democratic senators.

After Clary spoke, Garlow turned to his next guest, Dr. Lisa Dunne, who has a similar contempt for the “anti-Christian” public education system, calling it “anti-faith, anti-family, anti-freedom—a system that hates our God, hates us, and hates our nation.”

We say education is formation and unfortunately, as you heard from Doctor Clary and you heard from Doctor Garlow, we're wasting a lot of time in the in the educational systems today forming children in a non-biblical worldview. I would say we're raising up atheist armies, and I would say that is not an--that's not hyperbolistic, that’s not an exaggeration in any way.

Dunne, who founded a Christian college and network of Christian schools, is pursuing her vision of replacing public education with church-run schools:

We've done the stats in California, and if 75% of our churches in the state of California would open their doors to 250 students, we would shut down the dysfunctional public school system in our state.

Many religious-right activists have adopted part of the worldview taught by Christian Reconstructionists that there is no biblical basis for public education because God assigned that responsibility to the family and church. Dunne made the same claim, citing Kevin Novak, a right-wing attorney who promotes the abolition of the “civil government school system,” which he calls a “tyrannical mechanism that commands our youth to think in anti-Christian terms.” Dunne called Novak a friend and said he is about to start at her Chula Vista Christian University.

And he goes through biblically, he goes through all of the Word and shows that the government, the secular pagan government, has no jurisdiction to educate our children. None. Zero. The mantle of responsibility is on our shoulders as parents. Now we can choose to partner with a trusted agency like our local church, but it is our responsibility. We will stand before the Lord for how we raised or did not raise our children.

While some religious-right activists call for the abandonment of the public school system, others are using political muscle to try to turn public schools into places to proselytize students or use charter school systems to promote taxpayer funded religious indoctrination.

And while anti-public education religious-right voices may have bigger media platforms, it’s also important to recognize that there are many Christian teachers and administrators in public schools, and many pastors and Christian parents who support the mission of public education.

On the Watchlist

Jim Garlow

Jim Garlow is an anti-LGBTQ activist who made a national name for himself by helping to mobilizing churches against marriage equality in California. He has since played a number of roles in the religious-right movement. During the MAGA era he has become an ardent Trump supporter, serving on the faith advisory board for Trump's 2016 campaign. During the turmoil after the 2020 election, Garlow started a series of prayer calls designed to help keep Trump in power. The World Prayer Network calls have continued as venues for religious-right organizing and MAGA propaganda.

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Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon toured two Arkansas schools Tuesday as part of McMahon’s “Returning Education to the States” tour.

They were joined by Arkansas junior U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and state Education Secretary Jacob Oliva on tours of Little Rock’s Don R. Roberts Elementary School and Saline County Career and Technical Campus in Benton.

“I wanted to be in places where I could actually see some of the things that I talked about at work,” McMahon said in Saline County. “Not necessarily everybody has to go to a four-year school. There are places like this that would be sponsored from the tech field, where students can earn dual credits, go right into community college, go right to work in the field. … This is the secret sauce.”

McMahon and Cotton both alluded to the need to rid schools of red tape and bureaucracy. President Donald Trump has said he plans on shuttering the U.S. Department of Education to give states more power over education and wants McMahon to put herself out of her own job — a plan McMahon has supported.

Sanders also touted the expansion of the state’s Educational Freedom Account program to around 50,000 students in Arkansas this year. The program, which is open to all Arkansas students for the first time this fall, provides state funding for allowable education expenses, such as private school tuition.

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While Sanders and McMahon focused on the positive during their two stops, a handful of protestors outside Roberts Elementary held signs criticizing the state’s LEARNS Act and McMahon. The wide-ranging 2023 law made several changes to the state’s K-12 education system, including creating the school voucher program and raising the state’s minimum teacher salary to $50,000

“The parents of [Roberts Elementary] were incredibly upset when the letter was sent home yesterday … that she would be here,” said Courtney Jackson, a mother of two. She said she didn’t want her children to find out she just stood by while public education was under attack.

“The parents of this school do not want her here,” Jackson said.

Alison Metzler, another protesting parent, said she kept her kids home from school Tuesday because she didn’t want them to be used as “political pawns” by Sanders and McMahon.

“Sarah Huckabee and McMahon are actively trying to dismantle public education, and they do not care about public education. This is all for show, and it’s, it’s just disgusting,” Metzler said. “If Sarah Huckabee really stood with public education, her kids would go to public schools. Instead, they go to the private school a mile down the road, and she’s defunding these exact schools.”

Metzler also criticized Sanders and McMahon for visiting the “whitest affluent school in the Little Rock School District, a top school in the state.” She said she loved the school as a parent with a child who attended, but that if Sanders was really committed to public education, she would be visiting struggling schools in other parts of Little Rock.

“[Roberts Elementary] is not a representation of what the whole district is as a whole,” she said.

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.

it’s just disgusting

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rww

03/14/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

The religious-right group Family Research Council promoted an excited letter to supporters Thursday saying that President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education could be a “game-changer” for FRC’s efforts to “bring faith and the Bible back to public schools.”

In her recent book “Money, Lies, and God,” Katherine Stewart wrote about the ways that “privatizers and proselytizers” work together to delegitimize and undermine public education. The right-wing funded Moms for Liberty demonstrates this dual strategy, urging activists to take over public school boards while advocating for “school choice” laws to divert funding away from public schools. FRC President Tony Perkins’ letter showcases such a two-front strategy to push religious indoctrination into public schools and shift more students (and education dollars) into religious schools that are free from public oversight.

Perkins begins by criticizing Supreme Court rulings upholding church-state separation, and moves quickly to Christian nationalists’ favorite target: LGBTQ people: “With God, the Ten Commandments, and biblical truths out of the way, the Left had ample room to push their radical indoctrination plan onto our children.”

Perkins’ letter praises recent actions by state officials to turn public schools into de facto Sunday schools, beginning with a 2024 Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom. “Louisiana’s spark became a flame as other states – including Texas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota – have now taken steps to reintroduce biblical teachings back into their schools,” Perkins writes.

But even that is not enough, Perkins continues, calling on every church to start a Christian school in which the Bible “is more than historical context of our nation's founding or a general ethical context -- it is the complete worldview in which reality and life itself are grounded.”

Perkins’ letter comes in the context of Christian nationalist activists urging state legislators to take advantage of right-wing Supreme Court rulings and go “on offense” to dismantle separation of church and state, particularly where schools are involved.

Oklahoma’s Christian nationalist Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters last year ordered public schools in the state to teach the Bible, which may have been an effort to keep him from being upstaged by Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law, which has been promoted as part of “Project Blitz,” a campaign to promote Christian nationalist legislation at the state level. Walters' plan to buy Trump Bibles for classrooms was put on pause by the state supreme court this week.

Trump chose his billionaire backer Linda McMahon to oversee the dismantling of the Department of Education. McMahon has chaired the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA think tank that promotes right-wing education policies as part of its agenda for “restoring a nation under God.” AFPI promotes so-called “school choice” laws that divert funding from public schools to unaccountable religious schools.

“AFPI has specifically taken credit for lobbying for the expansion of this approach in Arizona—over the objection of voters—where it has become an expensive ‘handout to the wealthy’ that has forced cuts in programs that serve needier families,” Right Wing Watch reported in February. “Pro Publica has reported on the lack of accountability in the program; a failing charter school shut down by regulators simply reopened as a private religious school funded by taxpayers.”

Failing AZ charter school reopens as a private religious school — funded by taxpayers

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Deep-red states meet 'wall of hostility' in forcing Christian nationalism on public schools

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Matt Walsh: “The public school system should be totally abandoned”

07/17/24### Matt Walsh: “The public school system should be totally abandoned”

07/17/24

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Right-wing media figures are systematically attacking a variety of initiatives intended to increase racial equity and inclusion in America’s education system. Since 2021, they have attacked or rebranded certain related concepts in order to vilify them: critical race theory; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and affirmative action.

Schools in Oklahoma and Florida are even starting to partner with right-wing media’s PragerU and “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty, which spread conservative propaganda in public schools. These ongoing strategic assaults from right-wing figures and outlets are poised to make education a culture war issue for the 2024 election.

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For the next time some idiot tries to tell you the GOP is 'The Party of Business'

Nikki Haley is ‘whitewashing’ her record on Putin while hypocritically attacking Democrats: conservative

Thom Hartmann

August 30, 2023

As predictably as the sun rises and sets, every Sunday sees a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows say — without being challenged — words to the effect that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. This weekend, as I recall, it was CNN‘s turn.

All my life, in fact, I’ve been told by the media that the GOP is the “party of business.”

It may have once been true when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution.

Between 1933 and 2020 there were 14 American presidents, 7 Democratic and 7 Republican.

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The economy during this time grew at an average rate of 4.6% under the Democratic presidents, but only an anemic 2.4% under Republican presidents. For example, the economy has grown three times faster under Biden than under Trump.

Ten of the past 11 recessions began under Republican presidents,although lifelong Republican and Trump Fed appointee Jerome Powell seems hell-bent on producing one for Joe Biden, just in time for the 2024 election.

Republican presidents have exploded the national debt, while the only balanced budgets out of the past 60 years have been presented by Democratic presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a $128 billion surplus (after 4 consecutive years of budget surpluses): Bush immediately squandered it with a massive tax cut for billionaires and two criminal wars.

Just last year, President Biden decreased federal spending by $550 billion and reduced the deficit by $1.4 trillion — the largest one-year deficit drop in American history — all while creating five times more jobs in 2 years than the last three Republican presidents combined.

If not for the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for billionaires and the two wars George W. Bush lied us into, our national debt would today be zero instead of over $30 trillion.

The core of American business and thus the livelihood of American communities before Reagan was small- and medium-sized companies.

We enforced anti-trust lawsso aggressively that when Buster Brown and Kinney shoe companies wanted to merge in the 1960s the Supreme Court blocked the merger because the combined company would control about 5 percent of the US shoe market.Nike alone today controls around 20 percent of that market.

Small- and medium-sized companies built America and brought us the American middle class, the first and largest middle class in the world. But in 1983, when Reagan ordered the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing anti-trust laws dating back to the Sherman Act of 1890, giant corporations began a relentless campaign to destroy locally-owned companies.

Strip malls and small-town downtowns that were once mostly home to local retailers are now dominated by giant monopolistic national chains. Big Box stores, spreading across the country unconstrained since Reagan, have been wiping out small towns and rural communities.

One study found, as Reuters reported:

“[T]he closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.”

For most American businesses and the communities they serve, Republican governance has been a disaster since the Reagan 1980s.

In the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower championed building tens of thousands of new public schools all across America, an effort supported by the business community because an educated workforce is a productive workforce.

From the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Americans were proud that we had one of the best-educated workforces in the world, and that itself was a huge boost to business.

In 2010, though, when fossil fuel billionaires bankrolled the Tea Party and were looking for an issue to beat up on Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 elections, they seized on the national standards for education program conceived and legislatively initiated by both Republicans and Democrats called “Common Core.”

Although it had been endorsed by the US Chamber of Commerce and GOP presidential front-runner Jeb Bush (among others) and was in place in 45 states, word went out that it was an effort to “indoctrinate” American students.

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The story ran day after day on Fox “News” and rightwing hate radio. Hysteria followed, and Red state after Red state outlawed these new high standards for high-school graduation. Republican grandstanding for political gain actually dumbed down America.

The 2020 version of this was Critical Race Theory, another equally bogus attack on public education. Between this, “Don’t Say Gay,” and banning thousands of books, the Republican war on public education has blossomed into full flower.

Now, Republican states are trying to shut down their public schools altogether via state-wide voucher programs, replacing Eisenhower’s AAA+ education system with state-funded religious and rightwing for-profit schools that refuse to teach actual science, civics, or American history.

Arizona was the first to go statewide with vouchers, and Republican legislators in Texas, Florida, Kansas, and a dozen other GOP-run states are considering the same.It’s quite simply an all-out effort to destroy public education and subsidize religious schools and private all-white academies for upper-middle-class people who can take advantage of a voucher that only covers part of the cost of tuition.

The only option left for the very poorest people will be the few remaining public schools, essentially turning them into ghettos.

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower ran for re-election in the 1956 election by bragging that he’d expanded Social Security across America, and his 1952 election was mostly powered by his enthusiastic endorsement of unionization.

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At a speech before the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1952, Eisenhower noted that the first national legalization of unions in America was signed by Republican President Calvin Coolidge, the 1926 Railway Labor Act.

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“Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions,” he told the union group now known as the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest. “Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”

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Similarly, in September of 1970 President Richard Nixon hosted labor leaders from across America, praising the movement. As The New York Times noted on September 8, 1970:

“When the ‘great issue’ has been whether to support the President and to meet the nation’s responsibilities ‘for defending and protecting the forces of freedom in the world,’ he said, ‘American labor has never been found wanting. It has always been the first in war and in peace.’”

As a result of combined Democratic and Republican support of unions, by Reagan’s election in 1980 about two-thirds of all American workers had a union job or it’s equivalent,with great pay, benefits, and retirement plans, because a third of workers were union members and that set the pay and benefits floor for the non-union employers to compete for another third of workers.

But, following Nixon putting Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court in 1971, the GOP began to adopt the positions in thePowell Memo, which included gutting labor unions so the morbidly rich could become even richer.

Their rationale was that workers having a say in the workplace had “destabilized” America, a point first made in 1951 by Russell Kirkin his book The Conservative Mind that I detailed two years ago here.

President Reagan, however, declared war on organized labor with his attack on the PATCO union. Ever since, the GOP has been fighting efforts to expand unionization.

Combined with Reagan’s massive tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations, this loss of union representation has led to a$50 trillion transfer of wealthfrom the homes and retirement accounts of working-class people straight into the money bins of the morbidly rich.

Instead of two-thirds of Americans having a middle-class lifestyle like in 1980, today that number is down to around 45 percent of us. As a result, both poverty and homelessness have exploded across the land. And poor and homeless people can’t afford to support a strong economy — and thus American business — the way a prosperous middle class can.

Dwight Eisenhower created the Small Business Administration to “aid, counsel, assist, and protect insofar as is possible the interests of small-business concerns.”

He signed a massive expansion of Social Security to take the pension/retirement onus off small- and medium-sized employers, increased the minimum wage so a prospering working class could purchase the products of American manufacturers, and built low-income housing across the nation to end the homeless “hobo” problem left over from the Republican Great Depression.

Eisenhower created from scratch the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to build a healthy and well-educated workforce, while Richard Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into law to save the lives of American workers being killed by toxic pesticides and other chemicals (the agency’s creation was provoked by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring).

Today’s GOP opposes all of these programs and agencies. They only support the largest American companies and the richest citizens.

When Trump was president, he rolled back regulation of toxic pesticides known to cause brain damage to children, and one of his first official acts in office was to end the prohibition of coal mines dumping their toxic waste and tailings into America’s rivers, polluting downstream water supplies with cancer-causing chemicals.

Arguably, the best policy possible for American businesses of all sizes is the Medicare For All program promoted for decades by progressive Democrats.

Back in 2004, Toyota announced they’d be opening a new factory in North America. Three southern US states offered them billions in tax advantages and free land, with the Republican governor of Alabama openly bragging about how cheaply his citizens would work for the company.

But in the end, in 2005, Toyota announced they’d be building the factory in Ontario, Canada because US healthcare costs are nearly twice those of Canada, which has had a successful Medicare For All system in place for more than a half-century (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich).

Since then, as Republicans (and a few bought-off Democrats) continue to fight any effort to establish a national healthcare or health insurance system, the company has built two more North American factories in Canada.

If it wasn’t for Republican obstruction, they would’ve been built here and the jobs would be here.

The simple reality is that Republicans have no coherent plans for the American economy beyond more tax cuts for their morbidly rich donors and more deregulation of the very largest and most polluting corporations.

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To compensate for this deficiency, they push hate against queer people, public school teachers, women, and dark-skinned immigrants. DeSantis has gone so far as to attack Disney, Florida’s largest employer and source of tax revenues, because they had the temerity to respect their gay, lesbian, and trans employees and customers.

Republicans have banned hundreds of books from public schools and libraries, saturated our towns and cities with weapons of war, banned women’s access to reproductive healthcare, and packed our courts with judges who’d be comfortable with the American Nazi movement, the Federalist Society, and the John Birch Society.

Not only are these policies and positions bad for America, they’re also destructive of most American businesses.

So, the next time some idiot tries to tell you that the GOP is “the party of business,” let them know the real facts.

The only businesses Republicans actually support are gun sellers, megachurches, corrupt defense contractors, and giant monopolies. And none of those are good for average Americans, locally-owned businesses, or the US economy.

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/t**hey-blew-up-my-life**/

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mARTINSVILLE, Ind. — It started April 12, right afterFox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime, one of the most-watched news programs in the country.

A phone call: “You stupid b*tch.”

Then an email: “Everyone you ever encounter … should spit in your face, fling their feces at you (with impeccable aim), punch you, knock you down, kick you, piss on you and hold you there for similar treatment by everyone waiting in line for their turn — you despicable sad excuse for a sub-human being.”

And that was just the first 11 minutes for Jenny Oakley, a mid-level public school administrator in Martinsville, Ind., who found herself depicted in a nationally televised secret camera video and thrust suddenly — and, she said, unfairly and inaccurately — into culture war cruelty.

It would get worse.

During sleepless nights, Oakley’s husband Justin took out his guns for the first time in 10 years. Police began patrols outside the Oakleys’ home after they reported harassment. The couple bought a Doberman named Zeus for added protection. Late on a Saturday night in their quiet neighborhood, a burst of sound — Pow-Pow-Pow — startled them and then a louder Boom.

Having previously enjoyed a quiet life, Jenny Oakley found herself in a debilitating new reality, breaking down when people merely asked how she was doing. She enjoyed reading, but now she couldn’t concentrate. She liked watching videos, but a video got her in this situation. Videos triggered dread.

Oakley describes herself as someone who wants to be liked, someone who has “always cared what people think, to a fault.” She said she avoids controversy and isn’t very political. Justin is the opposite. He works for an Indiana teachers union and ran for state Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2012 before dropping out of the race.

But on social media, strangers took off on Jenny’s character, including one who wrote, “I do not believe in any way that she is a good person.”

An email from the night of the program carried the subject line “God Bless You,” but what it said stung Oakley the most. She could handle the heinous screed of some kook. But this cut deep as an educator and mother of a middle schooler.

“You should never be near any children again, including your own…,” the email said.

That middle schooler helped her mother during the difficult days ahead.

Jenny Oakley and Zeus, her family's Doberman. Doug McSchooler / Raw Story

“I don't think she had ever seen me cry except at funerals,” Oakley said. “And I was walking around here like a zombie, basically. And she made out little Bible verses and stuck them all over the house, you know, trying to hold me up.”

And to what end are the Oakleys suffering through this ordeal?

“I just think it's just part of a bigger attack on public education,” Oakley said. “And, you know, that's the ultimate goal. I wasn't the target necessarily, but I'm definitely the collateral damage.”

Hidden camera, open wounds

In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, Oakley recounted her experience as one of seven public educators from different school districts in Indiana who Accuracy in Media recorded on a hidden camera. Fox News used the video for its April 12 segment on Jesse Watters Primetime.

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Accuracy in Media, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit, and Fox News alleged that the educators were “stealthily” teaching “principles associated with Critical Race Theory,” a highly controversial front in the culture wars that, at its core, alleges systemic racism in America.

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Raw Story last week requested an interview with Accuracy in Media President Adam Guillette. Accuracy in Media responded with an unsigned email requesting Raw Story submit written questions in advance. Raw Story declined to do so, and Accuracy in Media did not respond to subsequent interview requests. Accuracy in Media also did not respond to several emailed questions.

Fox News did not respond to requests for an interview.

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The supposed deception of parents, Accuracy in Media argues, reinforces the need for public tax money to go to charter and private schools.

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“Our goal is school choice where the money follows the child,” Guillette said on Fox News. “That is the only solution.”

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Within the past few months, Accuracy in Media also published hidden-camera video of public educators in Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, and Nebraska. In those states — plus Indiana and several others — such recordings are legal because only one party to a conversation needs to consent.

ALSO READ: A neuroscientist warns: We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history

Educators were accused, as in Indiana, of sneaking CRT concepts into public school curriculum.

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“After this happened, I was like, ‘How in the world did they align what I was talking about to CRT?’” Oakley said. “Because in fact, I couldn't even talk intelligently about CRT at that time.”

Through open records requests to the districts involved, Raw Story obtained Accuracy in Media’s lightly edited video from the Elkhart, Ind., public school district, plus hundreds of pages of emails from all of the districts.

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Oakley said she spoke to Raw Story to explain her side, advocate for the teaching profession and to show the human cost of rabid culture war fighting.

She appears for 24 seconds in the Accuracy in Media video.

“We’ve talked about, to our textbook companies that are coming in to do presentations — and I actually prep them a little because I’m like, “We want this in our curriculum, so if you could just not say specifically this, then it won’t cause a red flag with the community,’” Oakley says. “And I hate that we have to do that. But that way, it’s still there. And the community would support it if just the content was there. They just … it’s the title.”

The Fox News story started with a graphic over Watters’ shoulder showing children’s blocks with the letters CRT.

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“Children are fed CRT propaganda,” it said on the lower-third of the screen.

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Watters started the segment by asserting, “Schools are brainwashing our kids and then lying about it.”

Jenny Oakley is the first educator shown. The Fox News segment cut something Oakley sees as critical from the Accuracy in Media video — the part where she says, “And the community would support it …”

In an interview, Oakley said the red flag she meant was Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), which is sometimes mistakenly conflated with CRT. Teaching SEL is part of Indiana’s state academic standards and is promoted on a flyer from three state agencies.

It equates to skills such as building resiliency, communicating effectively, and goal setting. Indiana schools are required by law to teach SEL concepts, the Plainfield, Ind., school district explained in a Q&A strongly supportive of its administrator who appeared in the Accuracy in Media video.

CRT, however, is another matter. In June, the Metropolitan School District of Martinsville sued Accuracy in Media, saying it defamed the district and presented it in a false light by saying it teaches CRT. In July, the district withdrew its complaint.

The complaint alleged, “MSD of Martinsville believes that AIM has manipulated a surreptitious recording of a School District employee in an effort to falsely claim that the School District is teaching CRT and is lying to School District parents about it."

Superintendent Eric Bowlen declined comment for this story, including why the district dismissed the lawsuit it brought.

Oakley has not seen the unedited version of the video. The school district’s lawsuit said Accuracy in Media initially agreed to provide it and then went silent.

A day after the Fox News segment, a truck with a large screen on the side played the Accuracy in Media video as it rolled around downtown Indianapolis, with the city about to host the National Rifle Association’s annual convention.

It’s unclear who hired the truck, but Accuracy in Media’s tactics were generating attention.

‘Sydney Greenberg’

On a Thursday morning in February, two women who Oakley thought were in their 20s showed up at Martinsville’s administration building unannounced, saying they were looking for a school district for their child in first grade.

Their story, according to an email Oakley wrote later that day to district colleagues: They came from Texas, but Texas was too conservative and they wanted a new community and school. They expressed concern about censored curriculum and book banning.

It was more than two months before the Fox News story.

Oakley wouldn’t normally be the one to talk with school shoppers. That would be her boss, Suzie Lipps, assistant to the superintendent for curriculum, instruction and human resources. But Lipps was working on an issue outside the building, so Oakley, the director of e-learning and literacy, spoke with them. These opportunities are not taken lightly. That’s especially the case with Indiana’s legislature using tax money for a robust voucher program supporting private, usually faith-based, schools.

When Oakley asked the women what part of town they moved to, they named a local church. The conversation lasted five or 10 minutes, Oakley said. She later contacted the principal of the elementary school the child would be attending and suggested inviting the women to a cultural festival at the school that night.

Oakley got a name from one of the women, “Sydney Greenberg,” and a phone number.

Nobody returned the call inviting them to the cultural event. When Raw Story called the number this month, there was a generic message to leave a voicemail.

Martinsville is a conservative town in a red state. It’s not the place one would think of for a couple seeking a community aligned with their progressive politics.

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Nothing came of the women’s visit until an email at 2:39 p.m. on April 12 from Max Kiviat, associate producer for Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime. He addressed it to Lipps and copied Oakley.

“Tonight we will be covering a story about an undercover investigation involving your school district,” the email said. “Video shows administrators admitting that the schools are using misleading language to confuse parents into stealthily teaching students principles associated with Critical Race Theory. We wanted to offer the school district a chance to comment on the story. We are going live at 7:30pm ET.”

The email didn’t say what specifically the district was being asked to comment on. Oakley said during ensuing conversations, she, Lipps and Bowlen all wondered if they were the one being targeted.

A little after 5 p.m., after internal discussions and consulting with lawyers, Lipps emailed back to say the district would wait to see the story. Two minutes later, Kiviat sent a link to the video Accuracy in Media had posted.

In their living room at home, Jenny and Justin Oakley watched the video on a laptop. Then Jenny started to hear from friends that her face was being used on Fox News promotions for that night’s Jesse Watters Primetime show.

The attacks on her would start in a few hours.

Oakley did have supporters in the community. Some came to her defense on social media. She sought therapy.

Before a school board meeting, local pastors led a prayer circle outside the building for people with all points of view on the situation. One of the pastors invoked the Gospel of John: “Love one another. Such as my love has been for you, so must your love be for each other. This is how all will know you for my disciples: your love for one another.”

A pastor led a prayer before a school board meeting at Martinsville High School the week after Fox News aired a story about Accuracy in Media video featuring a local school administrator. He invoked the gospel of John to love one another. Photo: Stacey Miers

About a week later, Justin learned his mother had brain cancer. This added to the pressure on their daughter who couldn’t have both of her parents in a prolonged dark place.

“So I had to snap out of it,” Jenny Oakley said. “I had to snap out of it for her, just being strong in the fact that I did not do anything wrong and that it'll be interpreted how it is no matter what.”

Unedited video

Accuracy in Media reported $908,000 in contributions and grants on its latest federal tax filing.

As a federally recognized nonprofit organization, it did not have to detail the source or sources of its money. Accuracy in Media says its mission is to “monitor the accuracy of news reporting activities by the media” and “promote accuracy, fairness and balance in news reporting.”

Guillette, the group’s president, makes $200,000, according to the document.

As part of a public records request, Raw Story obtained what Accuracy in Media described in an email to the Elkhart, Ind., school district as a lightly edited, 15-minute hidden-camera conversation with Brad Sheppard, assistant superintendent of instruction.

The edits, Guillette wrote, were to protect Accuracy in Media’s tactics during an “ongoing investigation.”

In the video, what sounds like a man and a woman gave Sheppard frequent affirmations of his answers — “right on,” “good,” “I love that.” The couple’s full pretense for showing up wasn’t part of the video, but what they said to Sheppard left little doubt about their supposed political views.

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“In Texas, unfortunately, we banned anything that has to do with the 1619 Project,” the woman says, referring to the controversial New York Times project that put slavery at the center of America’s history.

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“In Texas, they passed one of those stupid laws banning what they call Critical Race Theory,” the man says.

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“We’re really hoping not to get a MAGA version of history, to put it bluntly,” the woman says.

Regarding what’s taught in the classroom, Sheppard emphasized the Indiana state academic standards.

“As long as (teachers) can tie it back to the standards, they’re covered,” he said. “That’s really the bottom line. Are you teaching the academic standards?”

Sheppard was shown in the Fox News video answering what educational material in the district needs to be “relabeled.”

“I think CRT, Social-Emotional Learning are the two biggies,” he says. “We just have to avoid the words. You know? The labels.”

An Accuracy in Media person says, “We can still do the content, just no labels.”

Sheppard says yes, to which the Accuracy in Media person says, “That’s cool.”

Sheppard was placed on paid administrative leave, returned to his same position and retired in June, according to a lawyer for the district.

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Other records obtained by Raw Story show that Sheppard and another administrator in the Fox News story, Laura DelVecchio of the public school district in Plainfield, Ind., received the same email Oakley did suggesting a line of people punch her and urinate on her.

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All of them arrived within 15 minutes after Jesse Watters Primetime ended. Attorney Jon Little, who represents the Oakleys, believes that indicates a connection to an organization with all-purpose, pre-written screeds for perceived political enemies.

Trustees from the Plainfield school district received a long, racist email suggesting, amid the talk of CRT, a “Thank You White People Day.” It said, “White people created the very high standard of living all races in the USA enjoy” and “many immigrants don’t want to assimilate.” It claimed discrimination against “heterosexual White males.”

In the weeks that followed,Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita got involved on social media, encouraging journalists to write about the Accuracy in Media video.

When DelVecchio received an interview request from Indiana Public Media, she echoed what Oakley said, although they have never met or communicated.

“The story really isn’t about me,” DelVecchio wrote, “it is about the fate of public education.”

A life, changed

Jenny Oakley recalled with a touch of disbelief how, years ago, her husband used to rave about being an eighth grade teacher.

“He would come home every day and say, ‘I just can't believe I get paid to do this as a job,’” she said. “He would come home. He was so excited about the impact that he was making on kids and his conversations every day and the light bulbs going on and all those things.”

For many, teaching is a calling. Pay is often low, but the rewards are supposed to be great. That perception seems to be changing. Indiana has a teacher shortage.

Young teachers, Oakley said, “turn on their TV or hop on Facebook, and all they're seeing are attacks on their profession. And it's hard to keep up the intrinsic motivation of teaching when you have so many of these negative external factors.”

Many of the attacks come from advocates for private and charter schools.

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“I don't think that they're going to be happy until public education just completely crumbles,” Oakley said. “And then they're going to see what kind of pillars of the community we really are, and they'll have to build it back up.”

Among the administrators in the Accuracy in Media video, four are in the same job, one retired, and two districts (Monroe County and Fairfield) did not respond to Raw Story’s inquiry.

Oakley has continued to work. But she said she still can’t be certain about her future in the district.

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Oakley still doesn’t know the identity of the women who came to Martinsville. They weren’t asked to sign in. Now the district office uses the same system as its schools, scanning the driver’s license of everyone who comes in.

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“Thankfully, they didn't walk in here with a backpack that they left behind,” Oakley said, “but they blew up my life.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-editor-hannah-grossmans-yearlong-obsession-demonizing-educators-and-chaos

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fox News’ Hannah Grossman has written nearly 100 articles in the last year that target specific teachers, schools, administrators, board members, or other staff, largely regarding the discussion of gender, sexuality, or systemic racism in the classroom. Multiple educators named in her reporting have been doxxed, harassed, fired, hit with lawsuits, or forced to resign.

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Grossman is an associate editor at Fox News who, according to her Fox News webpage, “currently focuses on education” and covers “the U.S. Department of Education, the Pentagon's schools, teachers' unions and K-12 public schools.” She’s previously published articles on a variety of topics, often attacking the Biden administration, mainstream media, and “wokeness,” but shifted to mostly publishing articles about education in May 2022.

In March, The Daily Dot's Claire Goforth reported that after Grossman published five articles attacking one trans teacher in California, both the teacher’s classroom and the school district offices received bomb threats. Media Matters analyzed all of Grossman’s published articles over the last year (from May 1, 2022 through May 1, 2023) and found that Grossman’s attacks on individual teachers and schools go well beyond one California school and one trans teacher.

In fact, Grossman has published 33 articles targeting specific teachers, librarians, or other school staff by name, 52 articles targeting specific schools, districts, administrators, or board members, and 10 articles targeting specific colleges or universities, staff, or professors — accounting for nearly half of all of Grossman’s articles in the last year. Grossman has also published 20 articles targeting federal education officials. Other articles included broader attacks against teachers and teachers unions, public education, state and federal education departments, and education-related organizations. Fox News spread many of these articles across Facebook, where they earned thousands of total interactions.

Grossman’s numerous attacks on teachers are part of Fox News’ growing war on public education — and inclusive education in particular — in which the network has demonized and encouraged violence against educators, LGBTQ people, and those who support or affirm them. Fox hosts have even leveraged their fearmongering to call for the demolition of the public school system.

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Grossman has written 33 articles targeting teachers, librarians, or other school staff by name, several of whom have been doxxed, harassed, threatened, fired, or forced to resign

Over the last year, Grossman wrote 33 articles targeting specific teachers, librarians, or other school staff, largely for discussing gender, sexuality, or systemic racism in the classroom. In fact, 14 of these articles targeted LGBTQ teachers in particular.

Several subjects of Grossman’s attacks have been doxxed, harassed, threatened, fired, or forced to resign:

More than 300 people reportedly attended a school board meeting the month after Grossman published a January 25 article targeting a nonbinary teacher from California, with some attendees calling the teacher “evil” and demanding for them to be fired. Grossman’s article was written in response to a New York Times article about trans students that featured the California teacher, and her piece falsely accused them of boasting about “changing students' genders without parents knowing.”

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In December 2022, Grossman wrote an article attacking two LGBTQ teachers and fearmongering about “social transitioning” — a process that often involves changing one’s pronouns, first name, hairstyle, and/or clothing. The article was the first of at least three that Grossman would write targeting one of the teachers, whom Grossman accused of “hiding students' gender transitions from parents.”

The teacher had reportedly made a TikTok explaining that some students have asked them “not to disclose their [trans] identity” to family or other students, saying, “That’s a promise I always honor.” Grossman attacked the other teacher in multiple articles for using stuffed animals to teach students about gender identity.

Both teachers had reported receiving threats even before Grossman targeted them.

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In September 2022, Grossman wrote an article amplifying Oklahoma Education Secretary Ryan Walters’ calls to revoke a teacher’s license, falsely accusing her of providing students with “access” to “pornographic material.” The teacher told CNN that following the passage of Oklahoma’s HB 1775 she covered the books in her classroom that “could be at issue” with paper as instructed, but labeled them “Books the State Doesn’t Want You to Read,” and placed a QR code linking to the Brooklyn Public Library “Books Unbanned” page on the paper.

The parent of one of her students complained, including on local television, where she said the teacher “should not have access to children now, or in the future. She should be stripped of her certifications. To be perfectly frank with you, she should have criminal charges against her.” The teacher was subsequently placed on leave, and then resigned.

Three days after Grossman's article amplifying calls to revoke this teacher’s license was published, The Daily Beast reported that the teacher had told authorities that since her story went viral, she’d been doxxed and was “worried people may show up to her apartment.” She’d also reported getting messages saying she “should be lynched” or “sterilized” so she can’t “breed.”

Video

CitationFrom an August 26, 2022, KOKH report

Grossman has written 52 articles targeting specific schools, districts, administrators, and board members, and some of the targeted LGBTQ board members have faced death threats and lawsuits

Beyond targeting specific teachers, Grossman has also written 52 articles over the last year targeting specific schools, officials, and school board members. Some have subsequently faced death threats, lawsuits, and calls for their removal. Grossman has written numerous articles highlighting the chaos that has ensued at school board meetings across the country — much of which has been encouraged by Fox News’ dishonest and inflammatory reporting about alleged left-wing indoctrination of children in school.

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She’s also written multiple articles targeting board members, school districts, and their administrators:

Grossman wrote at least 10 articles about specific school board members, 4 of which came in March of this year and targeted an LGBTQ school board member in Arizona.

In February, this Arizona board member suggested the board reconsider extending the district’s longstanding contract with Arizona Christian University, citing concerns about anti-LGBTQ bias, noting that the university’s website claims it seeks to promote “biblically informed values” including “traditional sexual morality and lifelong marriage between one man and one woman.”

On March 3, Grossman wrote her first article targeting the Arizona board member, mocking her for “wearing cat ears during a meeting,” and suggesting that she and the board have a “bias against Christian beliefs.” This board member subsequently received death threats, and dozens of parents reportedly attended the next board meeting, some of whom pushed for her to resign.

Arizona Christian University is now suing the school district and board — which has multiple LGBTQ members — with the help of extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom.

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Grossman has also written 15 articles targeting specific school and district administrators, such as superintendents — seemingly contributing to at least one superintendent facing calls for his removal from state lawmakers.

In March, the Arizona Capitol Times reported that an attempt to remove the superintendent of Scottsdale Unified School District had “spilled over to the Capitol after Fox News reported this year on an interview” he gave “to a progressive Michigan blog in 2019, a year before he was hired in Arizona.”

Grossman had published two articles on the subject targeting the superintendent earlier this year.

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Grossman has also written 20 articles targeting specific school districts and 6 articles targeting specific schools.

Grossman has written 20 articles targeting education officials at the state and federal levels

Over the last year, Grossman wrote 20 articles targeting federal education officials by name, including 15 articles specifically targeting Kelisa Wing, a former diversity, equity, and inclusion chief at the Department of Defense Education Activity. The pieces falsely accused her of anti-white racism and of indoctrinating the children of the nation’s military personnel with Marxism. As Grossman — and right-wing media more broadly — targeted Wing, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) advocated for Wing’s removal.

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Grossman also wrote eight articles that targeted state and local departments of education. For example, she wrote multiple articles targeting New York City’s Department of Education and the Oregon Department of Education, accusing the departments of pushing a “woke agenda” and “transgenderism.” Grossman also wrote five articles attacking the United States DOE, including attacking Education Secretary Miguel Cardona as “equity-obsessed.”

Grossman Embed 7

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sTEVE DOOCY(CO-HOST): Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, a brand new book that hits the shelves today. In it, Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin discuss how American education has been destroyed and what we can do to restore it. Here's an excerpt. "Make no mistake about it the historical singularity that was America's founding was a result of classical Christian education. Full stop. Our founders did not stumble their way to brilliance of 1776. They were forged in the foundry of the education of their time." And Pete and David join us live right now. And they've got the number one book in the world. Who's who?

PETE HEGSETH (AUTHOR, FOX AND FRIENDS WEEKEND CO-HOST): Pete. David.

DOOCY: Thank you very much. David, it's very nice to meet you. We were talking to Pete about this yesterday. This is part of a master plan that a lot of people don't have any idea has been going on for decades.

DAVID GOODWIN (AUTHOR): Right.

DOOCY: Regarding education in the country.

GOODWIN: Yes. Well, you know, that's when I was doing the research, some of the research through the original book, which The New Republic in the early part of the 20th century. I thought I would find a lot about labor unions and a lot about minimum wage, a lot about, you know, the things that we know that the progressives were talking about at the time. But education was in every issue. And I was wondering, why.

DOOCY: Right. And Pete who would –who drew up this master plan?

HEGSETH: Well, there were a lot of – there wasn't one master architect, John Dewey's the father of the progressive educational system.

DOOCY: But they were like-minded.

HEGSETH: Very like-minded. Almost all atheists. Almost all socialists. Eventually, almost all Marxists.And they had a plan to capture the minds of our youngest kids. And we're not talking about the lunacy of higher education. This is K through 12. They knew the affections of young people. Elementary school students would shape the way they view America, their faith, for the rest of their life. And so they set it out on a course. They didn't know exactly where it would lead, Steve. All of these architects of progressives, but they knew where it wouldn't lead: Not toward Biblical wisdom, not toward appreciation for our founding documents.And people say to David I all the time, How do I not know this history?

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: 100-year history. You know why? Because the progressives write the history. They write the textbooks.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: So, David and I had to dig underneath everything that's hidden to find out the real story of how they captured K through 12.

DOOCY: You know, and David, we've known for a long time that America's colleges, for the most part. are way to the left, very progressive. But I don't think a lot of people realized until the last decade or so when they started looking in America'stextbooks,how far to the left aome are trying to drag K through 12.

GOODWIN: Well, they've had the advantage. When you have the college system, you control the instruments of education all the way down to the kindergarten. Right. Because you train the teachers, you train the administrators, you train the curriculum providers. You're the ones doing the accreditation, the college – at the college level. All of that flows right from the, you know, kind of nodes of control that the progressives had.

DOOCY: And, you know Pete, so many parents got a good look at what their kids were doing during COVID-19. Your first chapter is our COVID 1619 moment.

HEGSETH: It's exactly right. You're at home looking at your kid's curriculum through your laptop, and suddenly there's a new founding date on their screen, 1619 or they're talking about gender pronouns for seven or eight-year-olds.[note no eg]  So we start with the problem, and the first step to any recovery is understanding the depth of your problem. And we outline that. But the best part of the book, in our opinion is those five chapters at the end that are about the solution. AndDavid runs the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: Classical Christian Dot Org. There are hundreds of wonderful brick-and-mortar schools across the country that are the exact opposite of what our government schools provide right now. There are online options, there arehomeschoolcurriculum options. The insurgency to take our classroom back has begun, and that's the preferred form of ideological warfare of the weak against the small. You do not have to default to progressive public schools, because otherwise, you're going to war with an educational complex that has 40 hours a week to capture your kid's mind. And that's why we call it a battle. It really is for parents and grandparents.

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WALSH: Biden Says Your 3-Year-Old Should Be In A Government School. Don’t Listen To Him.

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