Why billionaires and right-wing extremists want to wreck your kid’s public school

Jeff Yass, the working-class kid whose winning streak started at the late-night poker table in the dorms at SUNY-Binghamton and stretched from jai alai courts and horse tracks until he reached the trading floor that made him the richest man in Pennsylvania, just upped the ante.

Heading down the home stretch of Philadelphia’s make-or-break Democratic mayoral primary, Yass — who lives in Haverford — threw another $350,000 into the pot, raising his total donated to the wonderfully and obscurely named Coalition for Safety and Equitable Growth to $1.1 million. This brand-new political action committee seems to have just one job: running negative TV ads to stop Helen Gym, the candidate endorsed by the Philadelphia teachers’ union, from becoming the city’s 100th mayor.

Yass doesn’t really explain his donations — perhaps because this billionaire makes so many of them — but you don’t need Sherlock Holmes or even Inspector Clouseau to get to the bottom of this political caper. Yass — at least in terms of dollars invested — is Pennsylvania’s biggest advocate for charter schools or tax-funded vouchers to encourage parents to reject traditional public schools. Gym and Philadelphia Federation of Teachers are fierce opponents of that.

But here’s the part that’s not asked often enough: not what, but why?

It’s not that the $1.1 million is a lot of dough — it is for you and me but not so much for Yass. He reportedly has a net worth of $28.5 billion, and is said to have spent at least $18 million on politics ahead of last year’s primary, some on the Pennsylvania governor’s race but a lot on candidates, both Republican and Democrat, who support what he calls “school choice.” (The anti-Gym PAC has other backers including Josh Kopelman, The Inquirer’s board chairman, who gave $50,000.) But why is Yass so committed to his vision of an America where mostly nonunionized charter schools or religious schools thrive while what his crowd insists on calling “government schools” wither?

It matters because Yass and his giant wad of cash are just one major point of attack on what’s becoming an all-out assault on U.S. public schools in the 2020s — one that combines billionaires like Yass and their free-market voodoo economics with the uglier, in-the-trenches culture wars of doctrinaire conservatives convinced that “woke,” pink-haired teachers are indoctrinating kids about race or LGBTQ rights.

On Tuesday in Pennsylvania, voters will be making choices about the future of public schools not just in Philadelphia — where several buildings are closed due to asbestos, amid a broader crisis of disrepair — but in school board elections in smaller communities like Kutztown, torn asunder by campaigns to ban books from Gender Queer to Two Degrees, or Central Bucks, riven by months of conflict over issues such as LGBTQ-friendly books or stickers. It’s part of a national climate in which school board meetings resemble hockey games, while teachers are increasingly demoralized.

“There have been some moments of real anxiety and even some terror,” Brandt Robinson, a veteran history teacher in the suburbs of Tampa, told the Guardian this weekend in a piece describing how many Florida teachers are demoralized to the point of leaving the profession. He and other teachers described a climate of fear caused both by new laws from authoritarian Gov. Ron DeSantis that have removed books from school shelves and chilled classroom education around race or aid to LGBTQ students. “The point,” Robinson said, “is intimidation.”

This war on the egalitarian notion of public education is counterproductive, to say the least. The decades of the mid-20th century were in some ways a golden age both for America’s public schools and, not coincidentally, its then-rising middle class. It’s just one small sample, but I’ve always been amazed how a small gaggle of public high schools in Brooklyn in the 1950s produced Nobel prize winners along with top pols (Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders) and performers (Carole King, Neil Diamond). Yet ironically, others who were educated in public schools and became fabulously wealthy — like the late L.A. billionaire Eli Broad, or Yass — then used their vast fortunes to fund the privatization of American education.

Traditionally, good, taxpayer-supported public schools offered a hand up to striving groups, like the children of European immigrants — but much less so to Black and brown kids, often segregated in crumbling, money-starved classrooms. And it’s definitely not a coincidence that an undercurrent of distrust for public education among the political right metastasized after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that mandated racially integrated schools, or that it’s lasted until this day.

The historian Nancy MacLean, whose book Democracy in Chains traces the rise of modern conservatism through the Nobel Prize-winning Southern economist James McGill Buchanan, said the free-market libertarian economists like Milton Friedman who forged the philosophy of today’s billionaires like Yass found common cause in the 1950s with Southerners urging “massive resistance” to school integration.

» READ MORE: America gave up on truly educating all its kids. Then Jan. 6 happened. Coincidence? | Will Bunch

“[Friedman] and others who were part of this libertarian movement at the time, I was shocked to discover, really rallied in excitement over what was happening in the South,” MacLean said in a 2016 interview. “They were thrilled that southern state governments were talking about privatizing schools.”

This same toxic alliance — billionaires promoting the free-market mumbo-jumbo that keeps their tax rates at historic lows, spending their cash to rile up the working class against left-wing “indoctrination” in their kids’ classroom — is flourishing today. Its modern avatars are the likes of Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who, according to the education historian Jennifer Berkshire, has ”quoted Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement ‘there is no society’ to make her case for a libertarian vision of education that consists of individual students and families [versus] schools and school systems.”

I’m sorry, but there is a society. It’s just that there’s a large faction in this country that doesn’t like the kind of society — more tolerant, capable of critical thinking — that well-supported public education will produce. It’s no coincidence that the immoral panic over antiracism education in K-12 classrooms — labeled ominously and falsely by the right as “critical race theory” — came after millions of young people marched in 2020 for Black Lives Matter.

If I had to guess, I doubt Yass really cares that much about “critical race theory.” And I think he believes in a “society” — just the kind where billionaires like him get to keep most of their wealth. Thus, he would care about keeping the teachers’ union — knowing that strong organized labor is a force for a more equitable society — weak and taxes low. Especially his own. ProPublica reported last year that Yass’ tax strategies that “push legal boundaries” saved him an estimated $1 billion over six years. The money he’s spending to defeat Gym and the PFT is just 0.1% of that, so it’s kind of like a “no-sweat” bet on FanDuel.

These billionaire dollars can support an army of Moms for Liberty-type zealots determined to stop kids from reading books about Ruby Bridges, and thus make common cause. Yass is convinced that teachers are overpaid (even some right-wing pols like Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders don’t think that) and that charter or parochial schools or homeschooling can educate your kids at a fraction of the cost. Instead, a generation of reality has shown the push for charter schools has devastated public schools for the kids left behind — but hasn’t actually improved learning.

The rub is that most people, especially parents, get this. Polls continue to show that most parents are happy with their kids’ teachers and think the big problem with today’s schools isn’t “critical race theory” but a lack of resources. This Tuesday’s election in Pennsylvania is a chance for this silent majority to say “no” to Yass’ money and to the fanaticism of the Moms for Liberty crowd. It’s a day when critical thinking — the kind that most of us want our schools to teach the next generation — will come in quite handy.

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