It has been nine years since my wife and I had a child in a public school, but I can’t help but feel a little tug on my heartstrings at this time every year.
We live one block from an elementary school, and yesterday morning, I took a minute to watch as a stream of tykes, some of them wearing backpacks not much smaller than they were and accompanied by proud moms and dads, trekked up the sidewalk to the building for the first day of school. This will be their first time in public school for kindergarten kids.
Our neighborhood is diverse. I know from personal experience that the school educates children of all races, creeds, socio-economic backgrounds, national origin, educational ability and so on. Children who may have physical challenges or neurodivergence are embraced. Those with learning disabilities are given the help they need.
Back in 1991, Americans United held a national conference on church-state separation, and one of the speakers was a public school advocate from Oklahoma named Forrest J. “Frosty” Troy. Frosty, who died in 2017, edited the Oklahoma Observer, a scrappy weekly that never hesitated to champion progressive values in a ruby red state.
Many years have passed, but I still remember Frosty’s stirring defense of public education. He was utterly unimpressed by talk about private school vouchers and “school choice.” Private institutions, Frosty noted, had no interest in doing what the public schools do – welcoming and educating all comers.
“There’s no public school, in those 88,000 buildings, with anybody standing out front saying, ‘Keep out, you can’t come in here, you have anti-social tendencies, you’re not prepared for school, you’re [disabled], you’re mentally deficient,’” Frosty told the crowd. “Nobody does that. You know, the most beautiful thing happens in America every autumn when those doors open, and there’s somebody in the front saying, ‘Come on. We don’t care who you are or what side of town you come from. We don’t care who your mommy and daddy are. You do your best, and we’ll do our best.’”
It is a beautiful thing indeed. Yet there are forces among us trying to destroy it, forces that yearn to take a system that serves 90% of America’s children and sacrifice it before the gods of privatization and profit. Among them are Christian Nationalists, who have spent decades demonizing our schools.
The endgame of the Christian Nationalists and the privatizers is to tear down a system that is fundamental to the American experience. They’re not hiding it; in the Project 2025 playbook for dismantling the federal government and upending our democracy, they flat-out call for ending the U.S. Department of Education and diverting students and public dollars to private, mostly religious schools.
Americans United is proud to oppose this scheme; we boldly and happily support the 51 million youngsters across this land who are right now being told by public schools, “Come on in!”
