We pause for a commercial announcement. I hope you will consider my book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization. Dark money is huge sums tossed around by America’s billionaires to change education policy to their liking, a liking which includes cutting their own taxes, pursuing profits through a $500 billion industry (Rupert Murdoch’s estimate), crushing unions (the only effective counterweight to corporate power in the U.S.), and dismantling America’s greatest civic treasure, our public schools. Buy it to understand what billionaires and their foundations have been up to and still are up to in Massachusetts. If you’re in California or Michigan you have big privatization ballot initiatives coming up in 2022, read it. And since the lessons apply to other issues where democracy is under attack from oligarchy, it’s useful for anyone who wants to defend democracy.
Another commercial! If your loved ones live in or care about #mapoli you’ll want them to have The Politics of Massachusetts Exceptionalism: Perception Meets Reality (forthcoming in April but you can pre-order) by the MassPoliticsProfs, edited by Professors Erin O’Brien and Jerold Duquette. We do it all—the governorship, legislature, courts, Washington connections, race, gender, the parties, ballot questions, on and on. This volume will change perceptions of what we think we know about Massachusetts politics and be the standard reference of Massachusetts politics for years.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming. If you read Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization you’ll definitely want to read A Wolf at the SchoolHouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire. This is a comprehensive accounting of the many attacks on public schools mounted by the same folks I’ve exposed. But Schneider and Berkshire burrow down into the real treasure of public schooling and what is being lost with the overwhelming attacks on the public good aimed at our education system. It’s a war on public education and if we don’t wake up and fight, we’re going to lose it.
In Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, Bruce Baker argues a fact the privatizers really hate: school spending impacts educational outcome, especially for low income students. (Privatizers will argue choice, liberty, parents’ rights, etc.; what they mean is taxes, taxes, taxes). Moreover Baker argues that public schooling is part of the constitutional fabric of American democracy.
Many of you are familiar with corporate “parent” groups like Massachusetts Parents United or National Parents United; Walton fronts. In 2021 there are new entries like Parents Defending Education and Moms for Liberty. PDE sued Wellesley for taking care of its minority students and was behind the right wing attack on African American principals in Newton. It’s a different chaos model than the older organizations but it isn’t new. It’s been used by Koch and allies against college professors and to undermine university education or years. There is much to learn from Isaac Kamola and Ralph Wilson’s book, Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War.
Yes I retired but darn it, UMB, I didn’t mean from teaching my Lincoln class! So they are letting me back in the building to teach The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln. As a warm up, I’m reading David S. Reynolds’ biography Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times. What new could be written about Lincoln you ask? Reynolds has deep knowledge of America’s cultural strands and how they affected Lincoln’s thinking and conduct. Very valuable and a dream to read.
What else to do in retirement? I’ve been reading lots on the rise of American conservatism post World War II. Read Rick Perlstein’s four part series that takes us from Goldwater through Reagan. This didn’t start with Trump.
Some of this is a bit heavy, though all of it is well written. Your eyes won’t glaze over. Nonetheless, I’ve really needed some laughs these past two years. So I re-read John Kennedy Toole’s gargantuanly funny A Confederacy of Dunces. There is no character in literature like Ignatius J. Reilly. The love letters between Ignatius and that saucy Minkoff minx alone are worth it.
Then there is P.G. Wodehouse, especially the novels and short stories recounting the lives of the dull headed aristocrat Bertram Wooster and his gentleman’s gentleman, the wise Jeeves. From crises including Bertie’s unfortunate attachment to a white dinner jacket through the near betrothal to the soupy Madeline Bassett to The Great Sermon Handicap, Jeeves never fails to rescue Bertie. We should all be so lucky.
Look at the time! I’ve got to run off the Porter Square Bookshop! Happy holidays to everyone!
P. G. Wodehouse is one of the best antidotes to our times!
Happy holidays to you and yours, Mo.