One Plank of the Platform

This is the 3rd in a series of essays that I will be writing about the coming election. One might expect that I would be writing about last night's Presidential debate. One would be wrong. If you saw it, you saw it. If you didn't, you didn't. However you felt is how you felt, and nothing I might say can change that. What I'm going to be doing in this essay is looking at one plank of the GOP platform and that same plank of the Democratic platform. You're receiving this essay in the hope that you will pass it on, particularly if you live in a swing state.

The plank of the platforms I want to examine is the plank that addresses education in the United States.

I voted in my first Presidential election in 1972, and in those days, we had to be 21 to vote. There was a great deal of outrage at this restriction since the military draft still existed then. This meant that young men were old enough to be drafted and sent into battle at 18 years of age, but they had no right to vote for or against the individual who sent them.

With my parents, I watched Presidential nominating conventions from 1960 onward. I remember particularly the violence of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago: Vietnam War protesters demonstrating; Chicago policemen beating them; multiple arrests that would eventually lead to chaotic trials; Hubert Humphrey becoming the nominee amidst the terrible grief caused by the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in April and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in June. It seemed like a time we could not possibly survive, especially in the years that followed when Richard Nixon told America that he had “a secret plan to end the Vietnam War”, when burglars broke into the DNC in an affair that became known as Watergate, when Richard Nixon’s criminal participation in Watergate was revealed, when Richard Nixon resigned and was immediately pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford. It was a heartbreaking time. How, we thought, would we recover? How, we wondered, could things get any worse than this?

Yet here we are.

What made the years between 1968 and 1974—when Nixon resigned—both livable and hopeful was investigative journalism along with a television news media that had “to serve the public interest” in order to be licensed by the FCC. In those years—particularly from June 1972 to August 1974—we were able to read daily and to see before our very eyes what dedicated journalists were digging up about the Committee to Re-Elect the President (or CREEP as it was so appropriately and acronymically called). The corruption ran deep. Individuals went to prison. Law licenses were revoked. Justice was meted out. Nixon was told by GOP Senators that he had lost support in Congress and, if he did not wish to stand trial for impeachment, he had to resign. And so he did.

Now, however, we live in an entirely different time. We are bombarded with information, and we have no trusted news journalists (such as the highly credible Walter Cronkite) to help us sort through the chaff of lies to find at least one wheat grain of truth. We’re able to pick and choose among the various journalistic talking heads to find one who—we think—"tells it like it is.” But we have to take a leap of faith to believe what we are being told because “serving the public interest” by speaking the truth is no longer a requirement for broadcasters. And the only way we can learn and digest what’s going on, being said, being promised, or being claimed is to take the time that none of us have to discover what the future holds with the election of one candidate over the other.

The best way to do this is to look at what each Presidential candidate’s party platform is. It’s usually simple enough to find as the party platform is online and the candidate is intended to give speeches about the proposals made by the party during election season. But there is potential difficulty doing this—at least as far as the GOP—is concerned because of the proposals laid out in their 900 page document called Project 2025.

I believe that seeking the information contained in the GOP document is critical. I would like to consider just one of their proposals in this third letter: their proposal to do away with the Department of Education. I'd also like to consider the opposition party's proposal for the Department of Education.

What I wondered at first was exactly what the Department of Education actually does. In a nutshell, I discovered that it monitors school performance, it promotes evidence-based practices such as testing for skill and knowledge, it provides funds to high-poverty schools, it provides funds for students with disabilities, it enforces civil rights protections in the school system, it distributes financial aid for higher education, it enforces Title IX rules, and it contributes 11% of the cost of K – 12 education.

All of that sounded reasonable to me (although I freely admit I have always despised standardized testing), so I wanted to know what the problem was that the GOP had with the Department of Education that they wished to abolish it. Hence I dug further and discovered that the GOP plan is to cut federal funding for “any school pushing critical race theory”; to end teacher tenure; to adopt merit pay for teachers; to allow universal choice for parents to send their children wherever they wish in order to be educated; to expose “politicized education models”; to overhaul the standards on school discipline; to “restore parental rights in education”; to ensure that “left-wing propaganda” is not taught; to reinstate the 1776 Commission (this last is a panel established by Donald Trump in 2020 to refute teachings on systemic racism, critical race theory, and any deeper examination into how slavery has affected American society); and finally to champion the right to pray and read the Bible in school.

I assume that, since there would be no Department of Education, the GOP’s plan involves removing all its funding, thereby reducing its staff as well as eliminating all monies going to various programs sponsored by the Federal Government. My guess is that a Presidential commission or an individual appointed by the President would then be in charge of policing all the items listed in the preceding paragraph.

I can look at each item and argue that, upon a surface glance, a few of them might fall into the it’s-high-time category. Why do teachers work toward tenure? Why don’t they each have salaries based on merit? Why can’t parents send their children to the school of their choice? Why isn’t there a standardized form of discipline in schools?

To the first two questions, I’ll use myself as an example. I was a high school teacher for more than 13 years. The first year I taught in a private school, a job from which I was fired. I came under scrutiny for two reasons: I did not salute the flag, and I engaged in union activity. Despite receiving rave reviews from my students, I had no recourse but to leave when I was told to do so. At this same school, there was merit pay. The head football coach made the highest base salary. The typing teacher made the least. You were paid based on what the principal decided you were worth.

You can argue that I “knew the rules” when I took the job in the first place, only there were no rules aside from what the principal decided were the rules.

In a different situation, I would not have lost my job. Indeed, as things turned out, the school was ordered by the court to rehire everyone who’d been fired for union activity. Civil rights, apparently, could not be violated by any school, public or private.

Where I stand on the issue of the GOP proposal is this: Instead of eliminating the Department of Education, it could be overhauled in such a way as to allow for universal pre-kindergarten; for expanded career and technical education; for a reduced emphasis on standardized testing; for improvement in teachers’ working conditions (such as supplying them with materials they need, like chalk); for building up social and emotional support systems at schools; for tackling chronic absenteeism; for intensive tutoring; for summer learning; for improved education for English learners; for expanded multi-lingual education; for job training partnerships with in-demand industries; for free trade schools and free community colleges. That is what an overhaul of the Department of Education could do. Indeed, that is what the Democratic platform calls for.

Still, it’s easy to vote based on personalities, isn’t it? It’s tougher to vote based on what the candidate proposes to do if elected. But one thing I’ve noticed about the GOP and the Democrat Party as they exist today is this:

The Republicans seem committed to doing things to people. The Democrats seem committed to doing things for people. It’s my belief that we—as voters—need to consider our choice of candidate carefully and with that in mind.

Elizabeth George
Seattle, Washington
September 11, 2024