Here Come The Public School Closures: Book Censorship News, June 21, 2024
In one of the first guides to fighting book bans and censorship I wrote back in 2021, I emphasized that book banning was but one arm of a multi-tentacle approach to dismantling public education and public libraries. Book banning is part of the path being paved by groups like Moms For Liberty and No Left Turn in Education, whose missions are to fulfill the goals laid out by right-wing institutions like The Heritage Foundation (the same one as Project 2025*).
Among the goals of groups like The Heritage Foundation are the destruction of the Department of Education. DeVos being named the Secretary of the department during the last administration was a strategic decision that began to destabilize it. Additional goals include the privatization of all public goods—if it can be made profitable, it will be—and, more specifically, a push toward private and homeschool education based on the Advanced Training Institute teachings, accompanied by state level for voucher programs. Those voucher programs help subsidize private and homeschool options by funneling tax money away from public schools and into those alternate education options. The result is that public schools lose more and more money. Their budgets are unpredictable year to year because they cannot rely on a stable pool of tax money. Schools then have access to fewer and fewer resources and students whose parents don’t have the money or time for alternate ideas lose out. Vouchers often do not cover the entire cost of any private school nor any pricey homeschool curriculum—you’d have to be wealthy enough to not need to work full time in order to educate students at home or even in a local homeschool pod. It is primarily those who already have the means of sending their children to private schools who benefit from the vouchers.
A key word here is access. It’s the same idea behind book bans. The few are taking access away from the whole in the name of their own beliefs becoming the only acceptable ones.
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Iowa Starting Line’s reporting on the potential closure of Orient-Macksburg Public Schools is must-read material. The southwestern Iowa school district is small, but predicting enrollment rates has become increasingly difficult for them and other schools in the state because of the governor’s new open enrollment laws, as well as a new statewide voucher program. With open enrollment, which isn’t an uncommon educational option in the US, students can enroll at any public school district in the state where they live. Iowa’s new policies on open enrollment, however, mean that this can happen at any time, as opposed to during a specific period of time. If a student wants to leave their current district and go to another one, they do not need to wait or make a decision at a particular point during the year. The districts where students are leaving pay the new district the per pupil fee.
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Iowa’s statewide voucher program launched in the 2023-2024 school year. It provides families with a per pupil stipend to attend the school of their choice; it’s the same amount of money that a district a student leaves via open enrollment would need to send to their new district of enrollment. But—and this will come as a shock—the vast majority of those who took vouchers in its first year, two out of three, were already enrolled in private schools. Their parents were already wealthy enough to send them to private schools; the vouchers were a scheme that allowed them to avoid paying taxes to the districts where they already lived.
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And yet, one of the most common refrains in book banning rhetoric is the notion of “local control.” Those claiming a lack of parental rights want to be able to be in charge of what materials are available to students on a district-by-district, if not school-by-school, basis. This is a clever way to make discriminatory arguments, as “local control” can be wielded in discussions that uphold white supremacy through language like “traditional values” and/or “traditional education.” But the story of Orient-Macksburg and schools like it is actually one of local-level concern. What happens when the local public school is no longer there? What options do those without the financial means, let alone available time, do when they can no longer walk their children to school? When the best option is a pricey private school in their community that, despite a $7600 voucher, hardly covers half the tuition?
The dissolution of public institutions like schools, like this one in small-town Iowa, is about access.
It’s a chilling realization that Orient-Macksburg is but the first Iowa district to be dissolved under the myriad anti-public good legislation in the state. Students, no matter how small a town they live in, no matter how economically challenged a town they live in, deserve taxpayer-funded public institutions to help educate them. In Iowa, consolidation, as imperfect as it is, is an option and has been used for decades to help small schools stay solvent.
As has been made very clear here, it’s not the poor kids who are benefitting from these new laws. It’s the rich kids and the kids whose parents have no problem affording pricey private institutions or who have the time and means to indoctrinate them with white Christian nationalism educate at home. Parents have always had the right to choose where and how their students are educated. They have not—and should not—have the right to decide how that impacts other students.
Iowa, under the current leader, has failed its future in the name of “parental rights.” It has failed every student who doesn’t fall neatly under the cishet white Christian ideal not only through such fractioning of public education. It’s also done so through bills like Senate Bill 496—the book ban bill currently on hold as it is being heard in the court—as well as changes to labor laws that allow children as young as 16 to operate dangerous machinery and work in demolition jobs (restrictions that exist on the federal level). It’s also allowing children as young as 14 to be permitted to drive to work and school beyond prior distance limits.
Where 16 and 17-year-olds are labeled “children” when it comes to the books that might be sitting on shelves in their school and public libraries, it’s perfectly appropriate for them to be given dangerous, federally outlawed responsibilities at work because they’re believed to be mature enough.
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It won’t be the children of the politicians destroying public school who will be driving an hour to school when they’re 14, nor will it be their children killed while working around heavy machinery. It’s not their kids who have lost their local schools. This is the future they’re not only dreaming of. It’s the one they’re creating in Iowa and in dozens of other states nationwide.
I'd be interested in clenz and fivers' personal experience on what's happening in Iowa.
As an Iowan watching from afar, I'm disappointed in what the state has become and I'm concerned about where it and the nation are going. Iowa used to be a conservative state that valued public education and wasn't afraid to buck national trends. I remember Senator Grassley sparring with President Reagan, now he sucks up to trump.
is not a state dummy
or are they quiet because there's "nothing" wrong and everything is "fine" 
