A Different Type of Public Schooling

My wife is critical of my vision for a new type of public schooling in this country. She is afraid that like-minded people will congregate together to begin their own version of “schooling,” while accessing public dollars to do it. She pleads with me “Scott, do you want learning pods of Nazis? Because that’s what you are going to get if you let parents start their own schools with other families of a like mind.”

Well, in my defense, those “schooling” operations already exist, and have existed for some time now. Historically, these types of operations have fallen under the category of “home schooling,” and have pretty much flown under the radar over the past 50 years. But now, with the advent of learning pods, microschools, education savings accounts, and other types of government-endorsed voucher programs, there is a real chance schooling operations, including I guess groups of Nazis, could increase dramatically across the country over the next several years.

The Washington Post printed an article last week, not on groups of Nazis starting their own schools, but focused on groups of Christian conservative families coming together to rebel against what they see as a “woke culture” inside our public schools. The Post reports,

“Kali Fontanilla repeated the lesson title to herself one last time – ‘A Com-plete History of Slavery in America’ – sipped her peppermint tea and hit record.”

“’Hello, Exodus students,’ she said, addressing the group of 90 fifth- through 12-graders who would eventually watch the video as part of their lessons from the Exodus Institute, an online Christian K-12 school Kali and her husband founded in 2021 with the motto ‘Exit Public Education.’ The video, which Kali was recording in her guest bedroom turned office, was the latest in a special enrichment program dubbed the Young Patriots Academy, which aims to ‘debunk the ‘woke’ lies taught in most public schools,’ per the Exodus website.”

“Kali, who is half Black and half White, had a particular target that Friday: what she calls the left’s unquestioning advocacy of reparations, the theory that the government should pay restitution to descendants of enslaved Americans.”

“She told her virtual students they were about to learn of the Quakers, and how White members of that religion helped fight slavery. She said that, throughout American history, there were good people and bad people. But focusing only on the bad, like she believes many public school teachers do, would be wrong.”

“’Whenever you learn history,’ she said, ‘it’s important to learn the full context of it.’”

“Kali’s online job marked a sharp departure from the years she and her husband, Joshua Fontanilla, spent teaching middle- and high school English in California’s deep-blue Salinas district. The couple quit their jobs a year after the coronavirus pandemic began, disillusioned by school shutdowns and displeased by some colleagues’ embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement, which both thought was wrongheaded and hateful for what they saw as its anti-police stance.”

“Kali, 41, and Joshua, who is 42 and of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, had also grown convinced their school was teaching harmful ideas about race and history, including what they believe is the false theory America is systemically racist. Across the nation, mostly conservative mothers and fathers were raising similar alarms – anxiety that soon fueled an explosion of legislation restricting how educators can teach about race, sex, and gender.”

“By April 2024, such laws had spread to affect half the nation’s students. The claim that public schools teach left-wing ‘indoctrination, not education’ had become commonplace on the right, repeated by parents, politicians, and pundits.”

“But not, usually, by teachers. And that’s why the Fontanillas felt compelled to act: They came direct from the classroom. They had seen firsthand what was happening. Now, they wanted to expose the propaganda they felt had infiltrated public schools – and offer families an alternative.”

“In 2021, eager to fulfill their mission, the couple moved to Florida to found their own Christian school in a state which, under Governor Ron DeSantis (R), had become a haven for people with views like theirs. In the years since, they have grown their school to nearly 200 students, partly through Kali’s appearances on conservative media like Fox News – but mostly through her social media.”

“Kali’s Instagram videos, filled with right-wing rhetoric and delivered almost daily to her 333,000 followers, proved a powerful recruiting tool. But they also spurred thousands of critical messages from outline observers who contended she was indoctrinating students into a skewed, conservative worldview. “RACIST, ONE SIDED, WHITEWASHED OPINION,’ one wrote on a recent post, just above someone else who declared: ‘No one is impressed by the trash you are trying to sell.’”

…

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that our country is split right down the middle – politically and socially. So it’s not surprising that parents, like Kali and Josh Fontanillas, have chosen to educate children in ways that other Americans would find wrong.

It would be nice if we could return to the time when most of our children attended public schools and, for better or for worse, received an education designed by the likes of Horace Grant and others to make those kids “outstanding American citizens.”

I’m afraid that time might be past us.

Understanding that a new learning system will endorse families of Nazis starting their own school, or families committed to the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi starting theirs, our current public school system is so broken, and the times we live in are so divided, that we need to understand this might be the “new learning system” coming our way.

Several years ago, I had a school board member tell me that parents will enroll their kids in a program or a school those parents feel comfortable with. The school board member went on to say that comfort could take all different forms – race, gender, economics, politics, neighborhoods, community memberships, and the list went on and on.

I thought that school board member was wrong then. Now, I’m not so sure.

Til tomorrow. SVB