That is in essence the hardcore agenda behind the seemingly “fair” idea of “teaching the controversy”
It is one of the main components behind the current Republican war on science.
Education “reform” boils down to money and nothing else. Texas and the other states spend more on public education than any other single expenditure. The cost of public education is HUGE. There are lots and lots of dollars involved.
Soooo:
[ol]
[li]Impose expectations that public schools cannot hope to meet.[/li][li]Reduce or restrict the resources needed to meet those expectations.[/li][li]Create privately-funded entities to run schools.[/li][li]Exempt these new entities from the expectations public schools must meet.[/li][li]Show how traditional public schools “fail” and private schools “succeed” (ignoring that they are using different metrics for each).[/li][li]Begin funneling public education money to private coffers.[/li][li]Profit! (And by profit, I mean profit HUGE!)[/li][/ol]
Defunding public schools is one of the conservative goals shared by both economic conservatives, who are opposed to funding anything that serves the common good, and social conservatives, who might very well be for pooling their monies to fund schools, as long as the schools were teaching their own belief system.
Economic conservatives don’t want public schools because they are public. Social conservatives don’t want them because they are secular.
Breaking teachers’ unions, instituting arbitrary mandatory testing systems, and destroying tenure are part of the larger goal of creating a more powerless, insecure, and lower-paid population of workers, which benefits those who employ them.
Different values that happen to overlap, not a monolithic belief system.
The part that consistently amazes is how so many working class and poor people have been suckered into believing that somehow policies which always and everywhere have only benefitted the rich are exactly what they want too. Triumph of marketing I guess.
The REAL Republican agenda is to go back to the sort of government we had in the 1920s and then some
Cut taxes.
Get rid of medicare/medicaid.
Get rid of social security.
Reduce social security and food stamps for all but the most desperate of cases.
Get rid of environmental regulations.
Get rid of the national labor laws.
Cut taxes.
Yes, but you’d really, really love to work me 60 hours at straight time instead of 40hrs straight and 20 hours at time and a half.
The hardcore agenda? Mormon porn.
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Economic conservatives support public choice and oppose federal education funding because the public school system is broken, is captured by the teacher’s unions, and is no longer serving students very well. I would say the reason why Democrats tend to oppose all this is because the Teacher’s Unions are one of the primary donors to Democrat candidates.
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Republicans campaign on small government and govern as big government status-quo types for the same reason that Democrats campaign on grassroots people power, ending corporate power, promoting civil rights and sticking it to the rich - then govern as big government status quo types: The political machine in Washington has been completely captured by special interests. The rich have done better under Obama than they did under Bush, when they should have been clobbered by the recession. Timothy Geithner is the best friend Wall Street ever had. Dodd-Frank is a mess of special favors and carve-outs and exemptions that benefit the big players and tilt the playing field in their direction.
There is a reasonably large percentage of Republicans who are very animated on social issues like abortion and, to a lesser extent, gay marriage. There’s an even bigger percentage of Republicans who don’t care and think that stuff is a distraction from economic issues, and a smaller but not insignificant percentage of libertarian-leaning Republicans who would raise holy hell if the Republican Party ever got to the point where it tried to institute any sort of theocracy or even tried to overturn Roe-v-Wade. That’s why it’ll never happen.
If the Republicans had a majority and started trying to push anti-abortion amendments or really crack down on other social issues, enough of them would cross the aisle to thwart it, and they’d lose their majority in the next election. That stuff today is just fodder for the base to get them revved up. The only candidate who really meant it was Santorum, and most Republicans breathed a sigh of relief when he withdrew from the race.
Where does public education work? Where does solely private education work?
I don’t think there’s really any relationship between fiscal conservatism and opposing impediments to abortion in the Republican party. I’d say Ron Paul is further to the right on both issues than Olympia Snowe for instance.
There is none.
There may have been one at one time, but not now.
The only thing left is an insane howling noise, where plans & ideas once thrived.
It’s Politics 101. Very rarely does any party do something or advocate for something for its straightforward reason. There is almost always more behind it.
Cutting back on education appeases small government fiscal conservatives, and abortion and birth control have to do with the Catholic and Christian vote.
But you have to ask yourself why they want this. It is not a matter of principle, it is a matter of financial opportunity. Republicans want no restraints on any money making endeavor; no environmental regulations, no consumer or worker safety regulations, no minimum wage, no federal income taxes. They believe in the power of the free market so completely, it is an article of faith that any negative consequences will be suppressed by supply and demand, and if they are not, they are by definition, not problems that need addressing.
“Liberty” and “Freedom” are just fig leaves for naked avarice.
*Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. *
- John Maynard Keynes
It is instructive to consider what life was like prior to publicly funded education. The population was split between the children attending parochial schools, children left in abject poverty and/or working in factories (or with parents prior to industrialisation, or left to scamper) and a small minority going to elite secular schools. I have a libertarian friend who complains about the public education system in England. While I agree some of his complaints are well founded, I think the solution in all situations is to try and better emulate the education received by the richest in the country (with the unfortunate stipulations that funding and selection will never reach parity). I will remain eternally suspicious of politicians with degrees from prestigious universities advocating for alternative qualifications.
There are lots of suppositions on this thread. Why don’t we look at the actual Platform of the Texas Republican Party? Actually, these excerptswere compiled by Comedy Central. But there’s a link to The Real Thing…
A few choice snips–snarky comments aside, most of the text was written by actual Republicans:
Read it and weep. Read it and scream. (Oh, they left out the call to return to The Gold Standard!)
- Sam Stone
Ya that’s pretty disturbing stuff, shocking but mostly not that surprising other than them saying these things publicly.