reducing the wide-scale push towards the (horrible and broken) charter and private school movement as a purely religious thing really takes away from the fact that it’s about more than just the religion bit
like even from the “control what kids have access to” point of view there’s still more than just religion on the table
it’s kinda an entire worldview thing
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As someone who spent 13 years in the private school system this… really doesn’t seem true?
like for a lot of academics and athletics we had combo of religious and non-religious private schools and the vast majority was religious
and ultimately even at my school, which by all means advertised super hard towards non-catholics with things like better education or college admittance, still the central focus of funding and advertising was always religious
Florida is a closed primary system meaning you can only vote in the primary of a political party that you’re a registered voter for. Where I lived was heavily republican so the democratic primary never mattered, and the republican primary was the de facto election. There was an election for school board superintendent and one of the candidates sucked complete fucking shit and the other one all the teachers supported because they did not suck shit. there was no democratic candidate (because again it’s a waste of time in that area) and therefore no primary which meant that registered democrats could vote in the primary. to stop this, a friend of the superintendent candidate who sucked shit switched parties, and entered the election as a democrat literally to lock teachers out of the de facto election (because the vast, vast majority of them were democrats)
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also this is atleast 95% religious motivated lol. generally every single push against this boils back down to religion lol
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I find it weird that the people who are in charge of things seemingly get there by no merits at all.
Ahhh religion, the joy of kindness, goodness and acceptance.
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maybe its just where people grew up, different places, but at least in the american south the push for private schooling is centered around religion
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I buy that
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I feel like you’re misunderstanding what I was saying. There was a Christian PAC that donated money to candidates who supported polices that, whether intentionally or otherwise, effectively sabotaged the success of the public school system. A public school system that is performing worse drives demand toward private schools which have the perception of providing a better education. Private schools are predominantly Christian. I am not saying that the demand for private schools was only religion at all, but I am saying that there was a push to artificially increase the demand for private schools that are religious.
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I guess to me I’ve always experienced it far less as a push for religious education, and far more as a push against broad education
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with a side of “big government bad, corporations surely better”
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“broad” education in this sense literally means “non-religious education” to the people who are spending the time pushing against it
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teaching about lgbt and sex education etc isnt ‘broad’ its just against these peoples versions of christianity
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I mean fair enough
they should get their christianity checked out tho lol
if we’re talking about the role of religion in pushes for non-district schooling it seems unhelpful to conflate private schools (the majority of which are some form of religious) vs. charter schools (literally every state that allows charter schools currently requires them to be secular (which is not to say that there are never religious influences, but there’s a pretty big gap between ‘Arete’s high school’ and ‘school that teaches you that Catholicism is true’))
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up here it’s usually charter schools in the conversation
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I assume from this convo that further south it’s mostly private schools
I’m pretty sure there’s a good John Oliver video on the topic, but I’m too exhausted to remember anything from it.
Like recently you can look at policies such as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida that are nominally already stupid, dumb, bigoted bullshit, but they also have a side effect of increasing liability of teachers and alienating more and more teachers who are already predominantly left-leaning. Increasing liability is a tactic used to artificially restrict the supply of something that a legislature either can’t or does not want the political backlash of outright banning it. See removing the statute of limitations for medical malpractice suits against doctors who provide gender affirming care. It doesn’t restrict any doctors from providing gender affirming care per se, but it is going to predictably cause an increase in liability insurance for those that do forcing them to either stop providing the care or increasing the cost of such care to offset the increased overhead costs, and in either case has the effect of restricting access to care. If you make it so it fucking sucks so much shit to be a public school teacher that it’s not worth it for even just a not insignificant number of teachers, this has a cascading effect of reducing public school performance thereby increasing justification for expanded “school choice” policies down the line.
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