Destroying Public Education

The aroma has been around but now the quiet part has been said out loud. All the activism around charter schools and CRT is part of an effort to destroy public education.

Hillsdale has inconspicuously been building a network of "classical education" charter schools, which use public tax dollars to teach that the U.S. was founded on "Judeo-Christian" principles and that progressivism is fundamentally anti-American. In January, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced plans to partner with Hillsdale to launch as many as 50 such schools, which public education advocates fear could be a tipping point in the privatization battle.

n this three-part series, Salon looks at Hillsdale's multifaceted and far-reaching role in shaping and disseminating the ideas and strategies that power the right. In our first installment, we met Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, a Winston Churchill scholar who led Trump's short-lived 1776 Commission and has used his connections to right-wing thought leaders like Ginni Thomas and Betsy DeVos to turn his school into a political powerhouse. In the second installment, we explored the curriculum taught at Hillsdale and widely promoted through its national network of charter schools, which is informed by a deeply conservative understanding of American history, an "originalist" reading of the U.S. Constitution and an explicit desire to undo progressive educational reforms of the last 100 years.

The Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA), part of Hillsdale College's Barney Charter School Initiative, opened its doors in August 2020 with a combative flair. The school flew a pro-police "Thin Blue Line" flag and announced its adoption of a sex-ed curriculum "designed to support parent authority and family values," which, an ACLU review has found, includes the suggestion that LGBTQ students may outgrow their orientations or identities, and that women who have abortions are "destroying" themselves. While other school districts around the country stressed over masking or whether to open in person at all, OCCA advertised its complete lack of pandemic restrictions.