White Christian Nationalist Hillsdale College
David Shasha
How this tiny Christian college is driving the right’s nationwide war against public schools
By: Kathryn Joyce
The mood in Costa Mesa on Feb. 2 was more love bomb than fire bomb: yet another school board meeting packed with impassioned parents. But this time they'd come out, on a mild Southern California evening, not to let the board know how angry they were, but how delighted.
The parents who rose to speak at the monthly meeting of the Orange County Board of Education weren't shouting about mask mandates, vaccine requirements, trans kids on sports teams or books about racism. They didn't have to. Instead, mother after mother, with young children in tow or on their hips, came to the podium to say that their kids used to cry before going to school, but now were filled with confidence and wonder; that they had found a transformative community among the school's other moms; that the teachers were giving their children "the best education in the entire country."
One former homeschooler said she'd always sworn to keep her kids out of public school, but the one they attended now had changed all that. One father was moved to talk about sunsets in explaining how the school's mission was uniquely equipped to guide children toward goodness, beauty and truth. From the dais, the board members beamed back at the parents, and when a lone trustee protested that they should address a conflict of interest that appeared to undermine the entire proceedings, the audience burst into laughter and the trustee's colleagues, amid jokes, voted her down.
The school under discussion that night wasn't a regular public school. It was a recently-launched charter called the Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA), which is funded with taxpayer money but follows a private school-like curriculum centered "on the history and cultural achievements of Western civilization" and an ambiguous mission to instill "virtue."
The public face of OCCA is its charismatic co-founder, Dr. Jeff Barke, a Newport Beach "concierge physician" who gained national notoriety as one of the most outspoken skeptics of pandemic public health policies and has voiced vitriolic opposition to today's public schools.
Barke's wife Mari, as it happens, is president of the Orange County Board of Education, which was deciding whether to allow OCCA to expand to new campuses throughout the affluent suburban county of nearly 3.2 million people. (That was the evident conflict of interest that sparked laughter from the crowd.) Although Orange County is more a purple than a deep-red jurisdiction these days, that board is dominated by a conservative majority, swept into power over the last several years thanks to an unprecedented influx of right-wing cash.
But OCCA isn't only a school, or even a network of schools. It's just one facet of a national movement driven by the vision and curriculum of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has quietly become one of the most influential entities in conservative politics.
In an era of book bans, crusades against teaching about racism, and ever-widening proposals to punish teachers and librarians, Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests. The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular. It has featured lectures describing the Jan. 6 insurrection as a hoax and Vladimir Putin as a "hero to populist conservatives around the world."
If you wonder what conservatives hope to install in place of the books they're trying to ban, the answer often lies in Hillsdale's freely-licensed curricula.
If you thought that Donald Trump's 1776 Commission — a jingoistic alternative to the New York Times' "1619 Project" that was roundly panned by historians — died with his presidency, that effort is now being amplified and exported, on a massive scale, around the country. If you wonder what conservatives hope to install in place of the books they're trying to ban, the answer often lies in Hillsdale's freely-licensed curricula.
And as Republicans move into a new phase of their long-game efforts to privatize public education, Hillsdale has become a key resource. Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board members are clamoring to implement Hillsdale's proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the "patriotic education" premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools.
In late January, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, used his State of the State address to tease the most ambitious Hillsdale-inspired plan to date: building as many as 50 new charter schools in partnership with the college; using its 1776 Curriculum to foster what Lee calls "informed patriotism"; and launching a university civics institute to combat "anti-American thought."
As Hillsdale's president likes to say, "Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon."
These linked trends amount to a vision of things to come if Republicans win their current war on public education. And war is how they see it. As one Republican leader promised at Hillsdale last spring, if conservatives can "get education right," they'll "win" the country "back." Or as Hillsdale's president himself likes to say, "Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon."
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In the video that introduced most Americans to Jeff Barke, the doctor stands on the steps of a municipal building in Riverside, California, in May 2020, wearing green scrubs and a white lab coat and claiming to speak for thousands of silenced medical workers who believed the experts were wrong about COVID. In Barke's improbable telling, the video was an accident: He asked his wife to take a picture of him addressing the anti-lockdown rally for their adult children, but she inadvertently hit her phone's "record" button. The resulting footage was too large to email, so they posted it to Facebook instead, and the rest was unintentional history.
The video went viral, and Barke began meeting fellow "freedom fighters" around the country. He helped organize America's Frontline Doctors, the right-wing group that became famous that July when around a dozen of its members stood before the Supreme Court, again in white coats, to call for reopening the country without delay. As later became clear, America's Frontline Doctors was organized in cooperation with the Trump campaign, and Barke's supposedly accidental activism was no more organic.
Barke has been involved for years in right-wing politics in and around Orange County, a realm of beaches and upscale suburban sprawl that has been a centerpiece of American pop culture and is perceived as the birthplace of modern conservatism. Those 948 square miles south and east of Los Angeles are the "Nixonland" that helped create the prosperity gospel and served as the case study for Lisa McGirr's seminal history "Suburban Warriors." It's the place, Ronald Reagan often said, where "good Republicans go to die."
Jeff Barke is a member of Orange County's Republican Central Committee and the conservative donor organization the Lincoln Club. When Mari Barke was a delegate at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Jeff and their son attended as alternates, wearing matching stars-and-stripes suits. For 12 years, Jeff Barke was a member of the Los Alamitos school board, where he led a successful effort to require that a new course on environmental science also include dissenting opinions about climate change.
Barke also became a combative presence on social media, calling for fast-tracking herd immunity through widespread virus infection, and suggesting that masking children is child abuse.
But in 2020, he graduated from local activism to national right-wing stardom as one of the most provocative voices around pandemic policy. He wrote a book, "Covid-19: A Physician's Take on the Exaggerated Fear of Coronavirus," with a foreword by Dennis Prager, co-founder of the right-wing video outlet PragerU. (Its fifth edition was published last month.) Barke also became a combative presence on social media, under the handle @rxforliberty, calling for fast-tracking herd immunity through widespread virus infection, and suggesting that masking children is child abuse.
In one livestream interview, Barke whipped out a Sig Sauer pistol, describing it as his preferred pandemic protection. More recently, he has compared widespread COVID testing to unnecessary breast biopsies for healthy women.
Although the Barkes are Jewish, Jeff undertook a regional mini-tour of megachurches that refused to shut down during the early days of the pandemic, and befriended a number of high-profile evangelical leaders, such as Chino megachurch pastor Jack Hibbs (himself somewhat notorious for blaming the violence of the Capitol insurrection on removing "God from the courts and from the schools"). The headmaster Barke hired to run OCCA is a member of Hibbs' congregation. For her part, Mari Barke is a former Trump 2016 campaign volunteer and an adviser to the Unity Project, a conservative coalition formed in 2021 to oppose vaccine mandates that has since become involved in the U.S. "trucker convoy" protesting pandemic restrictions (although Mari says she has no involvement with that effort).
Along with all this advocacy, Jeff Barke was also working to get his school up and running, and the two campaigns appear strongly connected. Amid his short viral speech in Riverside, he pulled out a pocket version of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, telling the crowd they were written to restrain the government, not the people. The booklet, he later explained, was published by Hillsdale, where his son — after taking a break to work for Trump's Department of Agriculture — is an undergraduate.
In an interview, Jeff Barke told me that attending multiple parents' weekends at Hillsdale had led him to see the school as "a beacon of liberty" that is "fighting to return America back to its founding roots."
Attending multiple parents' weekends at Hillsdale had led Barke to see the school as "a beacon of liberty" that is "fighting to return America back to its founding roots."
In appreciation, the Barkes became members of Hillsdale's top-tier donor "President's Club," and were listed on Hillsdale's website as members of its Parents Association Steering Committee. (In an interview with Salon, Mari Barke said she turned the invitation down, but her election biography includes the committee as one of her volunteer affiliations.) It was also through Hillsdale that Jeff Barke became friends with Tea Party activist Mark Meckler, cofounder of the right-wing group Convention of States, which seeks to hold an Article V convention that could lead to rewriting the U.S. Constitution, and where Jeff holds the puzzling title of "head physician."
In 2018, Jeff Barke lost his seat on the Los Alamitos school board, which his critics say was the result of controversial positions, such as his advocacy of climate-change denialism, although he blames a campaign against him by the local teachers' union. But as he later told Hibbs' church, "God had bigger plans." In that same year, Mari Barke was elected to the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) on a platform of "school choice and parental rights." Her campaign amassed an unheard-of war chest of around $425,000, more than half of that donated by the Charter Public Schools PAC. She also benefited from the support of the California Policy Center (CPC), a state-level affiliate of the State Policy Network, a coalition of more than 150 right-wing groups that promote model conservative legislation. According to a 2018 lawsuit, a CPC offshoot hired Mari Barke — shortly before she announced her OCBE candidacy — to instruct an ESL course for some of its Spanish-speaking pro-charter parent activists, thus enabling her to campaign "as a teacher." Today, she serves as the director of a CPC initiative that provides conservative policy analysis and training to state and local politicians.
Through his wife's campaign, Jeff Barke got to know Mark Bucher, the California Policy Center's co-founder and a fellow member of the Lincoln Club. Bucher had been involved in local education politics for decades, promoting a series of school privatization and charter initiatives and using funds from far-right Christian philanthropist Howard Ahmanson to orchestrate a mid-'90s conservative takeover of the Orange Unified School Board — one of the county's 28 independent school districts, in and around the city of Orange (a different elected body than the OCBE). But by 2019, Barke said, Bucher had developed "a vision about classical education." Barke told him about Hillsdale, and history was made again.
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For decades, 1,500-student Hillsdale College — a liberal arts school in rural southern Michigan, founded by Baptist abolitionists in 1844 — has been known as a "citadel of conservatism." Its campus features prominent statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, its curriculum leans heavily into the Western canon of "Great Books" and it describes itself as "a trustee of modern man's intellectual and spiritual inheritance from the Judeo-Christian faith and Greco-Roman culture."
In the 1980s, the college earned right-wing adulation for refusing to accept any federal funding, including student aid, to maintain its "independence in every regard"; in practice, this means it doesn't have to comply with federal regulations, such as Title IX prohibitions on sex discrimination or the reporting of student racial demographics. (In 2013, Hillsdale president Larry Arnn complained to a Michigan legislative committee about state officials visiting campus to assess whether the student body included enough "dark ones.") Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once summoned up Reagan and American colonist John Winthrop in calling Hillsdale a "shining city on a hill."
Throughout the Trump years, there was a virtual revolving door that shuttled Hillsdale staff and alumni back and forth between the school, the White House and Capitol Hill.
But in recent years, Hillsdale has greatly expanded its influence, becoming one of the most significant actors in U.S. conservative politics — if also one of the least conspicuous. Throughout the Trump years, there was a virtual revolving door that shuttled Hillsdale staff and alumni back and forth between the school, the White House and Capitol Hill. (Vanity Fair described the college as "a feeder school for the Trump administration.") Right-wing politicians and thought leaders vie to give speeches at Hillsdale, which are then disseminated to a claimed audience of 6.2 million through the school's monthly publication, Imprimis.
Arnn, who has led the school for the last 22 years, is a Churchill scholar from Arkansas with a penchant for folksy and antiquated diction. For him, college is "a hoot," freshmen are "little wigglers," his sons (affectionately) are "wastrels," and the emotional namesake patron of Hillsdale's charter school program, conservative philanthropist Stephen Barney, is (also affectionately) "a blubber baby." Arnn came to the college in 2000, in the wake of a shocking scandal that appeared to threaten Hillsdale's future. (The previous president allegedly had an affair with his son's wife, who subsequently killed herself.)
But Arnn's mission went well beyond restoring stability. He was co-founder and later president of the Claremont Institute, an influential right-wing think tank that has spent the last six years trying to ret-con an intellectual platform for Trumpism and is also home to John Eastman, the law professor who tried to convince Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes and overturn Trump's defeat. Given those connections, Arnn seemed destined to deepen the school's ties to the conservative movement. He has succeeded, probably more than he could have expected.
In 2009 Hillsdale hired right-wing activist Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Thomas, to help the college launch a Washington campus on Capitol Hill, across the street from the Heritage Foundation (where Arnn is a board member). From that facility, which inspired a 2018 Politico feature entitled "The College that Wants to Take Over Washington," Hillsdale initially ran a joint fellowship program for senior congressional staff with Heritage and the Federalist Society.
The school's cheerleaders have included many of the biggest names in right-wing media, including the late Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Hugh Hewitt.
Ben Domenech, founder of right-wing publication The Federalist, has used a studio at Hillsdale's Washington campus to record his podcast, and Federalist editor in chief Mollie Hemingway teaches journalism there. Michael Anton, a former Trump White House adviser and author of the notorious essay, "The Flight 93 Election," which made an apocalyptic case for the necessity of electing Trump, has joined Hillsdale's Washington staff to lecture on politics. The school's cheerleaders have included many of the biggest names in right-wing media, including the late Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Hugh Hewitt, who for years has run a weekly interview series with Arnn and other Hillsdale faculty members that now includes hundreds of episodes.
Arnn endorsed Trump in 2016 (along with a number of Hillsdale staff, who dominated a group endorsement titled "Scholars & Writers for America") and was on the short list to serve as Trump's secretary of education. The new president of course picked Betsy DeVos instead, and she too has Hillsdale ties. Her brother Erik Prince, founder of the "military contractor" company previously known as Blackwater USA, is a Hillsdale graduate, and her family's foundations have made extensive donations to Hillsdale over the years. For a small liberal arts school, it has amassed an astonishing endowment of more than $900 million.
DeVos is philosophically aligned with Hillsdale's mission as well. In 2001, she called on conservative Christians to embrace the Republican "school choice" agenda as a more efficient means of advancing "God's Kingdom" than merely funding private Christian schools, since, as she told one group of wealthy believers, "everybody in this room could give every single penny they had, and it wouldn't begin to touch what is currently spent on education every year in this country." Nineteen years later, in a speech at Hillsdale shortly before the 2020 election, DeVos invoked Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper (perhaps questionably) to argue that government should have little role in education and parents should be able to direct taxpayer funds to private schools.
Two months later, Arnn was tapped to lead Trump's 1776 Commission, drafting a blueprint for "patriotic education" as a rebuttal to "The 1619 Project." (The vice president of Hillsdale's Washington operations was also appointed to serve as the commission's executive director.) Although President Biden disbanded the commission the day he took office, Hillsdale released a closely related project last July: the 2,425-page 1776 Curriculum, offered as a free download on the school's website. In his own speech at Hillsdale in September, former secretary of state and potential 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pompeo called for the curriculum to "be taught each place and everywhere."
Hillsdale's alumni are not unanimously happy with the direction Arnn has taken the school. Julie Vassilatos, who attended Hillsdale in the '80s, said that in those heady Reagan days, the school was certainly a world unto itself, "but not like Republican bubbles are now. I don't know if I can get this across — it wasn't insane."
The first signs of a shift were visible, says one Hillsdale alum, when students began trickling in from homeschooling "survivalist" families.
By the time Vassilatos neared graduation, she said, the first signs of a shift were visible, as students began trickling in from homeschooling "survivalist" families. Nevertheless, Arnn's endorsement of Trump left her speechless. "When I was there, it was very ideologically oriented in a Great Books kind of way, towards 'the higher things,' 'the permanent things,' 'the good, the true and the beautiful.' So I have never been more shocked in my life than that they went for Trump, because he's the absolute opposite of everything I thought I was taught in college."
Another alumnus, Tennessee writer and podcaster Sam Torode, who graduated in the late-'90s, likewise saw Arnn's support for Trump — particularly his 2020 re-endorsement, after the first impeachment, the family separation crisis and Charlottesville — as "a betrayal of everything I learned at Hillsdale." When Arnn's 1776 Commission released its report less than two weeks after the Jan. 6 attack, Torode drafted an open letter, signed by a few dozen former students, chastising Arnn for promoting the project in the immediate aftermath of "the greatest threat to the Constitution and America's representative democracy in our lifetimes."
But Hillsdale's actual and planned expansion is much broader than its direct links to political power. In 2020, the college began building a Center for Faith and Freedom in a replica Monticello mansion in Connecticut, donated to the school along with a $25 million endowment by Friendly's restaurant magnate S. Prestley Blake.
In December, Hillsdale launched a new Washington project, the Academy of Science and Freedom, to highlight the arguments of three prominent COVID-19 skeptics, including Dr. Scott Atlas, Trump's former pandemic adviser. In recent months Hillsdale has acquired a sizable tract of land outside Sacramento as part of plans to establish an education center in California. It's adapting its curricula for homeschooling parents and this year will launch a master's program to train teachers to staff its charter schools. Arnn recently said that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem offered to build Hillsdale "an entire campus" in that state.
From Salon, March 15, 2022
Coming to a school near you: Stealth religion and a Trumped-up version of American history
By: Kathryn Joyce
In 2011, Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn began offering slices of his institution's intellectual output to the public with a series of free online courses on subjects like the Constitution, the Bible and, more recently, "American Citizenship and Its Decline."
This open-source continuing ed project, Arnn says, has attracted 3.5 million pupils to date and social media abounds with conservatives energized by what they've learned. Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way, sees the courses as a means of popularizing an extremely conservative "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution, in which "a lot of what the federal government does now, including pretty much anything related to the social safety net, is illegitimate."
Imprimis, Hillsdale's publication, churns out essays adapted from speeches given at school events, including jeremiads on such topics as "gender ideology," "the Great Reset" and "The January 6 Insurrection Hoax" (which includes a defense of an Oath Keeper arrested for the Capitol assault). Recent weeks have seen the recirculation of a 2017 Imprimis article, "How to Think About Vladimir Putin" (by "traditional measures," perhaps "the pre-eminent statesman of our time").
In 2018, as much of the world was horrified by the public unfolding of Donald Trump's kids-in-cages policy, Imprimis offered a provocative defense, arguing that the then-president was taking a "stand on behalf of the nation-state and citizenship against the idea of a homogenous world-state populated by 'universal persons.'" Any honest observer must admit, the essay continued, "that diversity is a solvent that dissolves the unity and cohesiveness of a nation."
"The idea that birthright citizenship is wrong used to be a very fringe position," said Montgomery. "Promoting the idea that ethnic diversity is not a strength but 'a solvent' is pretty toxic stuff to be saying when white nationalism and antisemitism are on the rise." But that's where Hillsdale's strength lies, he added: in providing an intellectual veneer to right-wing ideology. "This is the same stuff you would hear from Dinesh D'Souza or Ann Coulter, but it seems different coming from this classical institution supposedly committed to the search for the truth."
Around the same time Hillsdale began offering online courses, it expanded into primary and secondary education as well. The college already ran a private K-12 academy on its campus. According to an old edition of that school's curriculum, students at the Hillsdale Academy memorized Bible verses and attended both weekly prayer services and daily flag ceremonies as part of the school's "advocacy of ceremony and pageantry in transmitting principles, strengthening traditions and making children feel part of something greater than themselves." They were also instructed to stand up whenever an adult entered a classroom and remain standing until they were acknowledged.
Lists of academy-approved books came with a warning to use only original editions, since later versions might "contain revisionist forewords and introductions" that could sway "impressionable children unequipped to recognize and discount the politicization of literary scholarship." Meanwhile, the academy's history curriculum began with the bedrock premise that "The settling of America and the founding of the United States [are] an expression of Christian Intention." (A spokesperson for Hillsdale said the academy's curriculum has since been replaced.)
In 2010, Hillsdale launched a new program, the Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI), intended to spread that model, adapted to local requirements, nationwide. In the words of the program's head, Hillsdale assistant provost for K-12 education Kathleen O'Toole, BCSI's conception of classical education "is what we used to do in this country back when education was working." Charters launched in partnership with BCSI follow Hillsdale's focus on "the Western tradition," from the Greeks on down, including a heavy emphasis on U.S. founding documents and, somewhat more hazily, an overall "approach to instruction that acknowledges objective standards of correctness, logic, beauty, weightiness, and truth."
That's common language at Hillsdale, where classes and promotional materials promise an education driven by "the good, the beautiful and the true" — rhetoric drawn from Plato and Aristotle, but also ubiquitous in conservative Christian discourse. That ambiguous inspiration is also reflected in BCSI's ostensibly secular approach to teaching "virtue." In place of explicit scripture recitation, BCSI students study the Bible as an example of "Lasting Ideas from Ancient Civilizations." Rather than outright sermons, students are taught, as O'Toole says, "to love the right things" and "spend their lives pursuing the good."
What that means in practice is suggested, at least in part, by BCSI "chief architect" Terrence Moore, who explained in an essay that classical education teaches "students that true freedom and happiness are to be obtained through limited, balanced, federal, and accountable government protecting the rights and liberties of a vibrant, enterprising people" — which is to say, a particularly conservative vision of the proper ordering of society.
There are further hints in the BCSI K-12 program guide, which Hillsdale licenses for free to both charters and other schools it considers compatible. In one teaching guide shared online, BCSI offers extensive classroom resources and text recommendations, heavy on Hillsdale professors' work, laissez-faire economics and the conviction that progressives have betrayed America's founding principles. Among the suggested titles are former Hillsdale history professor Burton Folsom's "New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America," Reagan education secretary William Bennett's "America: The Last Best Hope" (Volumes 1-3), and Hillsdale economist Gary Wolfram's "A Capitalist Manifesto."
"The concern with the Barney initiative is that it's a stealth way of getting public dollars for 'Judeo-Christian' religious ideology" and a deeply conservative vision of America, said Kathleen Oropeza, founder of the progressive grassroots group Fund Education Now. "There seems to be an agenda behind it, which is not the typical equity that public schools strive for in telling the story of history."
Journalist Katherine Stewart, author of "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism," says recent years have seen a growing number of complaints about charter schools incorporating religious instruction in various guises — particularly through the classical school movement's focus on virtue, heritage and founding principles. One former teacher at a Florida BCSI school told Stewart that his charter had a chaplain teach students that "America is a Judeo-Christian nation" founded on "biblical principles." (A spokesperson for Hillsdale responded, "Because BCSI charter schools — by law — are not religiously affiliated, we would remind school leaders that no visitors can advocate or present to the student body the truth of one particular faith.")
In 2018, Arizona's then-superintendent of public instruction was so inspired by the BCSI curriculum that she sought to institute it in place of the state's history and science standards, which she derided as "vague and incomplete at best, indoctrination at worst."
That effort failed, but these days, she might have better luck. Hillsdale's newest K-12 offering, the 1776 Curriculum, has been widely embraced by Republican state and local elected officials. Introduced on Hillsdale's website with the declaration that "America is an exceptionally good country," the curriculum depicts America's founding fathers, even those who owned slaves, as closet abolitionists, while the reformers of the late 19th to early 20th century Progressive era — who sought to address symptoms of Gilded Age inequality such as sweatshops and child labor — were promoters of "group rights" whose activism was fundamentally anti-American. ("Progressivism was a rejection of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as well as the form of the Constitution," the curriculum argues. "Young American citizens must understand why and how the government of the country they now live in was changed from what their country's Founders originally intended.")
The curriculum also suggests that systemic American racism was effectively ended by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and that the ideals of that movement were "almost immediately turned [into] programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders." It argues that most diversity policies amount to a "regime of formal inequality" and asks students to ponder the study question, "How are critical race theory and 'anti-racism' discriminatory?" As a recent analysis from Phil Williams at Tennessee's NewsChannel 5 elaborates, the curriculum further suggests that civil rights sit-ins at Southern lunch counters were an unconstitutional infringement on private property, and falsely implies that Martin Luther King Jr. didn't believe in using "the force of law" to achieve equality, but only an appeal to individual consciences.
A Hillsdale spokesperson said that the thousands of pages released to date "are just the first portions of a greater whole," and that forthcoming units of the curriculum "will provide a fuller treatment" of civil rights figures like King. But in a letter to teachers included with the curriculum, O'Toole emphasizes that educators should proceed from the principle that "the more important thing in American history is that which has endured rather than that which has passed."
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Although it's long gone from Hillsdale's website, BCSI's original mission was described as an effort to "recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism that has corrupted our nation's original faithfulness to the previous 24 centuries of teaching the young the liberal arts in the West."
Exactly how Hillsdale defines this corrupting tide is unclear. Partly they're referring to the sort of student-led, project-based pedagogy pioneered by figures like John Dewey in the early 20th century. Although historians describe progressive education as a shift from rote memorization and authoritarian classrooms to more child-centered teaching, a Hillsdale spokesperson described its legacy as having "reduced education to a vocationally focused, utilitarian enterprise that merely equips students with the skills required for future jobs."
But Hillsdale's opposition to "progressive" education also defines an ambitious effort, as Arnn often describes it, to turn back the clock on "a great engineering project that was born in the Progressive era," in which educators like Dewey began to conceive of universities as a means to guide society's evolution through a new elite of university-trained experts and administrators. In Arnn's words, educators decided, "We could be the ones who would plan the future of society. Now we will rule."
With that appropriation of power, Arnn argues, came a relativistic, progressive reinterpretation of America's founding documents, now wrongly construed to empower an activist government commissioned to solve societal problems and establish a new realm of "positive rights" (like the right to food or housing) instead of just the "negative rights" (freedom from government oppression) outlined in the Constitution. And today, Arnn argues, teachers function as "conveyor belts" to feed that top-down progressive ideology to the nation's young.
In other words, Hillsdale understands the foundational conflicts between conservatives and liberals, at least in part, as fallout from changes in educational philosophy.
But they see the solution there as well. As BCSI's original mission statement proclaimed, "The public school is arguably among the most important battlegrounds in our war to reclaim our country from forces that have drawn so many away from first principles." And in that war, "the charter school vehicle possesses the conceptual elements that permit the launching of a significant campaign of classical school planting to redeem American public education."
Today that campaign is making significant progress, with 53 schools around the country either operating as full BCSI "member schools" or implementing its curriculum. Arnn says the last two years have created surging demand for all of Hillsdale's offerings; that applications to the college — which recruited and fundraised on its lack of COVID-19 restrictions and its anti-"woke" curriculum — are way up; that half a million people registered for Hillsdale's online courses in a recent 12-month stretch; and that there's more public demand for BCSI charter schools than they can possibly fulfill. A December "tele-town hall" for Hillsdale supporters drew an audience of some 13,000 people, along with multiple calls from school board members seeking advice on introducing BCSI charters in their districts.
On the call, O'Toole said they'd been contacted by officials from 15 states asking for advice. Most prominent among these, of course, is Tennessee, where Arnn says Gov. Lee initially asked him last year to launch 100 BCSI charters. Given BCSI's extensive hand-holding in launching each school, including spending weeks training charter staff, Arnn committed to a somewhat more modest plan of 50 schools over six years. (A Hillsdale spokesperson said no specific plans have yet been formalized.)
But while Lee assured skeptical local reporters that the charters will be secular schools serving a general population, Hillsdale and its supporters seem to see a higher purpose.
Last May, Florida education commissioner Richard Corcoran, a close aide to Gov. Ron DeSantis, told a Hillsdale audience, "The war will be won in education. If we can get education right — we can have kids be literate and then understand what it means to be a self-governing citizen in a self-governing country — we'll win it back."
In a September speech in Tennessee (recently removed from the internet), Arnn went a step further. In answer to an attendee concerned — in a month marred by ugly nationwide school board fights — that America might not "make it," Arnn counseled, "Go home and read some Winston Churchill." Arnn also believed that the country was facing "the greatest danger I've ever seen in my life," but said distressed conservatives should embrace the cold comfort of Churchill's wartime motto, imagining the house-to-house fighting that might follow a Nazi invasion of Britain: "You can always take one with you."
"Now that's Sparta talk," Arnn said. As though anticipating Donald Trump's call last weekend for conservatives to "lay down their very lives" to fight critical race theory, Arnn continued, "We don't know what our last reserves are; we may be about to find out. But let's say they're insufficient. It is glorious and honorable to give oneself to a beautiful and losing cause. But it is very wrong to think it's going to lose."
From Salon, March 16, 2022
The far right’s national plan for schools: Plant charters, defund public education
By: Kathryn Joyce
The Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA), part of Hillsdale College's Barney Charter School Initiative, opened its doors in August 2020 with a combative flair. The school flew a pro-police "Thin Blue Line" flag and announced its adoption of a sex-ed curriculum "designed to support parent authority and family values," which, an ACLU review has found, includes the suggestion that LGBTQ students may outgrow their orientations or identities, and that women who have abortions are "destroying" themselves. While other school districts around the country stressed over masking or whether to open in person at all, OCCA advertised its complete lack of pandemic restrictions.
An FAQ on the school's website makes clear that, like Hillsdale itself, it offers a classical education focused primarily "on the history and cultural achievements of Western civilization," which it sees as "the heritage of every scholar at OCCA," no matter where they come from. Students primarily read the works of white men, since "the great leaders, thinkers, scientists, writers, and artists of Western Civilization have mostly been white men." While teachers will discuss historical bigotry or discrimination "when appropriate," they won't judge historical figures by modern standards.
In sum, it's a plan tailor-made to address the conservative complaints of the past two years, which OCCA co-founder Jeff Barke says has now earned the school a 1,000-student waitlist, largely from conservative homeschooling families. But it wasn't an easy road to get there.
Barke and his OCCA partner, Mark Bucher, had to try multiple times before the Orange Unified School Board (a local elected body, not the county-wide board led by Mari Barke) finally approved their petition in December 2019, after a contentious, five-hour meeting that lasted past 1 a.m.
At that meeting and before, critics both among the public and board raised a number of red flags about the OCCA proposal. The school's supporters, noted board members, seemed to have gathered signatures for their petition by canvassing minority neighborhoods and making the unfounded promise that OCCA graduates would receive preferential consideration and scholarships to nearby Chapman University, where one of Mari Barke's colleagues on the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) is a dean and that colleague's husband is president. (Chapman is also where Trump coup planner John Eastman taught until last year.)
Over his years of education advocacy, board member Kathryn Moffat said, Bucher had been involved in a handful of scandals: There was a bus privatization contract that left students stranded on the street, and a school whose charter was revoked after accusations of nepotism, self-dealing and the fraudulent use of more than $25 million in taxpayer funds. The woman OCCA first proposed as its headmaster had caused public outcry the year before over a Facebook post in which she called Colin Kaepernick an "anti-American thug."
Amid the final 2019 hearing, three of the seven Orange United board members opposed the OCCA petition, calling it a "fiscal" and "curricular nightmare" with a transparent religious and cultural bias, and saying that Barke and Bucher weren't professional educators but "ideological and political activists." Even the administrator of an area Christian school wrote in to warn that OCCA's plan amounted to illegal public funding of religious schools.
But the three critics on the board were in the minority, up against four conservatives, two of whom had received nearly their entire campaign budget from a PAC affiliated with the California Charter Schools Association.
"Clearly they needed to recuse themselves," said Lynne Riddle, a retired federal judge who spoke at the meeting to warn about the apparent conflicts of interest. "If you ask anybody, anywhere, which way you might lean if you get almost 100 percent of your money from one donor and the donor is a party to a decision you're going to make, it's not rocket science."
Barke and Bucher also brought more than 100 supporters to pack the meeting, squaring off against a cadre of opponents affiliated with the teachers' union, whom Barke later described, in an interview with the right-wing Epoch Times, as resembling members of "antifa."
In an interview with Salon, Barke chalked the criticism he and Bucher received up to "character assassination" from unions that hate OCCA "because we're competition." He said neither he nor Bucher would ever financially profit from the charter, and that, to the contrary, he'd donated much of his own time and money to the school. He dismissed the suggestion that OCCA was "a religious school in disguise" as "a flat-out lie designed to stir up opposition." That said, he continued, the school is "not afraid to teach kids about the deep religious founding of our country and the beliefs of our founders that were steeped in Judeo-Christian values."
In the summer of 2020, amid Jeff Barke's growing celebrity as an anti-lockdown activist, Mari Barke used her position at the OCBE to issue a set of guidelines calling for in-person schooling without masks, social distancing or reduced class sizes. Those guidelines were ostensibly the result of an expert panel OCBE convened that June, but were actually written by the panel's moderator, Will Swaim, president of the California Policy Center, the right-wing think tank where Mari Barke works. (Swaim later admitted that he'd written most of the document before the panel even met.) When the guidelines drew significant national attention, four of the panelists distanced themselves or asked to have their names removed from the document. Nonetheless, Mari Barke cited it soon thereafter in written testimony for a lawsuit seeking to compel Gov. Gavin Newsom to reopen California schools.
This January, Jeff Barke echoed him, urging the congregation at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills to "Leave the government schools! … And if you're not going to do that, then run for the school board."
Over the summer, Mari Barke suggested that parents looking for in-person education should consider charters, and Jeff Barke promised that OCCA would open that fall "with no restrictions." That July, Swaim said that OCCA would somehow "operate under the aegis" of the California Policy Center, and, like the Barkes, urged parents angry about pandemic restrictions to seek out charters as a rebuke to the regular public school system. "If we can get parents switched into charter schools or private schools," he told the Los Angeles Times, "we're going to make those union schools pay for their failings."
If public schools began mandating vaccines for children, he added, hundreds of thousands of people should descend on Sacramento in protest. "If enough of us stand up, and enough of us say, 'If you do this, my child will no longer be in a government school,'" he told the church, they could win. "Because with your child comes the education dollars, and if your child isn't in school, they won't have the money, the unions won't get funded, and those schools will close down."
Until recent years, the term "government schools" was pejorative rhetoric used almost exclusively by the Christian right, which for decades has called on believers to leave public schools. But through the pandemic, both that language and the sentiment behind it — that a slow war of attrition might cause the public education system to collapse — have gone mainstream.
When I asked Jeff Barke about this, he doubled down, suggesting that the "silver lining of COVID" is a "mass exodus from traditional government schools," and calling for the abolition of the federal Department of Education.
But none of that, he says, is political. "It's not our desire to fight politics in education," Barke told me. "It's our desire to rescue education from politics."
"Orange County is a hotbed of extremism and has been for a while, but it's really exploded over the past couple of years," said Katie Hill, a parent activist in nearby Riverside who has tracked the Barkes' influence on local schools closely. "People in Orange County are pretty tuned into the radicalization of the school boards and their fellow community members. It's just a matter of what you can do to stop it, because there is so much money funding all of this."
During Mari Barke's tenure, the OCBE has emerged as a culture-war force unto itself. The board opens its meetings with a prayer, and when a school board in nearby Chino voted in 2019 to drop its long-standing legal battle to allow prayer and Bible readings during public meetings, the OCBE picked up the case on Chino's behalf. The OCBE has sued Orange County's superintendent twice in the last few years, in addition to its three lawsuits against Gov. Newsom, all on the public dime. The board's primary purpose, Mari Barke says, is to serve as a sort of appellate court for charter schools that have been rejected at the local level, and in such cases, the charters almost always win.
But she dismissed the notion that campaign donations she or her OCBE colleagues have received from pro-charter groups represent a conflict of interest. "I don't do what I do because they support me," she said. "They support me because of my beliefs and because I am pro-school choice."
As even conservative local media have pointed out, OCBE has repeatedly hosted public meetings on topics over which it has no control, largely to serve as a platform for angry right-wing parents, as with a July 2021 forum on "critical race theory," organized in response to new state standards for ethnic studies courses and one such course proposed at a local county high school. (Jeff Barke also wrote a series of letters to the editor during that conflict, suggesting that approving the course would somehow lower property values in the surrounding neighborhood.)
At one point in 2021, Mari Barke also spoke at another Calvary Chapel church, in Silverado, urging congregants to show up at local meetings on school oversight and pandemic restrictions, describing the scene they'd encounter as "kind of like a mini-Trump rally out in our parking lot."
"Every meeting, show up," she continued. "If we all fight, we'll win."
Nine days later, noted Hill, a contingent of Proud Boys and other far-right activists from outside Orange County showed up to protest a Los Alamitos school board meeting, leading police to recommend the board cancel their in-person session.
This January, after Orange County began a post-census redistricting process, and a bill was proposed to move school board elections to align with general elections in November — when the electorate is likely to be much larger and more liberal — the OCBE's conservatives counterattacked, describing the plans as a partisan Democratic effort to "break up our board majority fighting for parental rights." On the night Jeff Barke spoke at Jack Hibbs' church, he said many OCCA parents had gone to a different local meeting instead, to protest "evil forces that are trying to prevent [Mari] and her board from doing what they're doing."
Two weeks later, a related hearing was held at the county's Committee on School District Organization, where one of Mari Barke's conservative OCBE colleagues led supporters in prayer in the parking lot outside. Riddle recalled that meeting as a bizarre experience, with a parade of speakers, many wearing OCCA shirts, testifying against the plan and in favor of the OCBE. "They were led to believe that something untoward was going on in this discussion that put them or others like them in jeopardy," she said. "Some of them were actually weeping — about things that had nothing to do with putting their children at risk, nothing to do with this mapping process."
Eventually the meeting devolved into shouts that the redistricting committee was discriminating against the parents, that they were Communists or Nazis or "white racist bitches." Now the OCBE is suing that committee too.
* * *
The drama around OCCA has been particularly volatile, thanks to both the pandemic politics swirling around Jeff Barke and Mari Barke's seeming conflicts of interest. But similar dramas have played out around the country, if often more quietly, as Hillsdale's charter school initiative has spread.
"This is the sort of campaign that goes under the radar. It takes place school-by-school, district-by-district, and so doesn't get that much national attention," said Jeff Bryant, a journalist with the Independent Media Institute who covered a Hillsdale charter fight in Colorado seven years ago, which sparked heated accusations that the proposed school was seeking to offer religious instruction in disguise. That charter ultimately passed, despite its request for numerous exemptions from state laws related to bullying, student privacy and discrimination, among others.
More recently, a school board director outside Colorado Springs sought to introduce Hillsdale's 1776 Curriculum so students would "know what it means to be an American."
He wasn't the first. In the mid-2010s in Michigan, Tea Party activist Pasquale Battaglia tried to open a BCSI charter, the Livingston Classical Academy, in order to "train up American Citizen Patriots." Local critics highlighted the fact that Battaglia initially proposed the school under the name "Livingston Christian Academy," and for years discussed plans to build a "God and Country" education project to return schooling to the days in which "The first and foremost 'text book' is always the Holy Bible." They also pointed to Battaglia's track record of posting inflammatory material online, including calling climate change a "Prog ploy," sharing a meme comparing Michelle Obama to "The Predator," declaring "The only way to successfully negotiate with Islam is to present them their complete destruction," and quoting Joseph Stalin as perverse inspiration: "Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."
In Florida, the principal of Naples Classical Academy, a BCSI charter, similarly came under scrutiny for his social media history, including posts about Muslim "gang rape marathons," "Muslim indoctrination in US schools," and purported revelations about ties between Common Core curriculum and "Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia." (Asked about these examples, a spokesperson for Hillsdale responded that Hillsdale "does not own, govern, or manage any of its affiliated schools," but that if "uncivil behavior comes to our attention," they flag it for school leaders.)
Sometimes BCSI schools have had to shop around extensively before finding an authority willing to approve their petition. In Michigan, the Livingston Classical Academy eventually opened as a BCSI charter, though not under Battaglia, after a roundabout method of obtaining a "cyber charter" authorization to open what is in practice primarily an in-person school. (In 2021, the school's board announced it would not renew its partnership agreement with BCSI.)
In Indiana, said MaryAnn Ruegger, a board member of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education, Hillsdale has repeatedly sought to make inroads in a state that's already a locus of the "school choice" movement. It has only managed to open one school so far, the Seven Oaks Classical Academy, which was twice denied by Indiana's Charter School Board, on which Ruegger now sits. On its third try, the charter was authorized by Grace College, a small private evangelical school in Winona Lake, a town with deep roots in fundamentalist Christian history and the onetime home of famed evangelist Billy Sunday.
Last year, BCSI turned to a Native American tribal college in Wisconsin to authorize that state's first Hillsdale charter, the Lake Country Classical Academy, after all other potential authorizers rejected their application. Critics noted that the academy didn't serve children of that Native tribe, and that the school's curriculum notably downplays the historical crimes committed against Native Americans.
As Wisconsin Examiner editor-in-chief Ruth Conniff noted in a December investigation, there's a financial incentive for groups that authorize charters, since sponsors receive a percentage of all per-pupil funding contributed by the state. Conniff also reported that Lake Country benefited from friends in high places, with a state conservative Supreme Court justice — himself the co-founder of a private Christian school that bans LGBTQ teachers or students — attending the charter's open house in December.
In many states where Hillsdale has planted a flag, BCSI charters enjoy political connections, but the pattern in Florida is particularly egregious. Former Collier County School Board member Erika Donalds is one example. The wife of Rep. Byron Donalds — who was a speaker at this year's CPAC, where he declared that "the battle for our future" runs through the nation's schools — Erika Donalds helped found an alternative association for conservative Florida school board members and later served on the educational transition team for Gov. Ron DeSantis. When she left the school board after one term in 2018, Donalds founded a consultancy group called the Optima Foundation, specifically to help launch BCSI charters. Her website reports she has worked with four such schools in Florida to date.
Sue Woltanski, author of a public-school advocacy blog and a member of the Monroe County School Board in the Florida Keys, says the political influence runs deep. "If you look at who opened any of the charter schools in Florida," she said, "you're going to find either Erika Donalds and Optima or someone who used to be in the Florida legislature."
Another example is Anne Corcoran, who is married to Florida education commissioner Richard Corcoran, and who served as both a board member and director of BCSI's Tallahassee Classical School until 2019. That was when local newspapers noted a conflict of interest, after Richard Corcoran recruited Hillsdale to help the state draft a new, more "patriotic" civics curriculum.
Richard Corcoran — who has reportedly suggested cutting the public school system by two-thirds and whose brother has worked as a lobbyist for a charter school management company — spoke at Hillsdale the same year, telling the school's attendees to view education as the battlefield where Republicans could win the political war. In that fight, Corcoran said, steady progress toward school privatization was being made.
As Florida Republicans move closer to achieving their stated long-term goal of making 100 percent of the state's students eligible for school vouchers, Corcoran suggested that once the state manages to lure 1.5 million students away from public schools — to get those kids "across that Rubicon," as he put it — the resultant loss of funding and forced consolidation would alter the educational landscape so radically that not even future Democratic governors could change it back. Indeed, they might be getting close already, he said, with almost a third of that number already using vouchers or in charters.
"You can't take those 500,000 kids and bring them back into the public school system. So you have to keep doing what we're doing, as quickly as we're doing it," he said. To illustrate his point, Corcoran turned to the example of Tennessee. "Dr. Arnn was talking about Tennessee asking for 100 Barney initiative charter schools. That's a game-changer. Once you have that, and all of a sudden the governor leaves … and it's a liberal that comes in there, you can't put the animals back in the barn."
What that means, explains Amy Frogge, a former member of the Metropolitan Nashville Board of Education in Tennessee and executive director of the public-school advocacy organization Pastors for Tennessee Children, is that charter expansion on a large scale poses an existential threat to public education. "As charter schools proliferate, they strip public schools of adequate funding," she said, "and in Tennessee, our schools have been inadequately funded for 30 years. At the same time, they 'cream' students from traditional schools."
What happens then, Frogge continued, is something of a death spiral: "Public schools are left serving increasing numbers of high-needs, high-cost students who are being deprived of the resources they need to succeed. Bringing charters and voucher schools into the school system is a recipe for failure for the public school system. Nationally, what we're seeing is a very intentional effort to dismantle public education in this fashion."
Describing the charter campaign in Indiana, Ruegger agreed: "If enough of this pushes through here, whether it's Barney or other charters, my little hometown will lose its public school," since the same small class sizes that charters advertise as a perk are used as justification to shut down and consolidate public schools.
Almost a year after Corcoran's prediction, that promise is on its way to being fulfilled. Along with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee's announced partnership with Hillsdale and an initial funding commitment of $32 million, the state legislature is acting to speed up the charter school application process, allowing petitioners to bypass local school boards and apply directly to a state commission with a history of overruling local opposition. The bill also drastically eases the path for authorized charters to expand through purchasing "underutilized" school buildings for a $1 fee, while requiring the public school district to bear the cost of any major repairs or outstanding debts.
"It's a billionaire's movement, and I believe that all the controversy about critical race theory and those issues are being stirred up in order to drive a 'failing schools' narrative."
"The privatization push is very well-developed by PR firms," said Frogge. "It's a billionaire's movement, and I believe that all the controversy about critical race theory and those issues are being stirred up in order to drive a 'failing schools' narrative."
In many small towns, she continued, where schools are the linchpin of the community, that's a difficult task. "Most communities love their local public schools. They have high school football games, and their friends and family members teach at the schools. The only way the privatization movement can gain ground is to create controversy and distrust of the public school system."
"That's what all of this," Frogge said — meaning the book bans, the CRT panic, the attacks on teachers and school staff — "is about."
* * *
On Feb. 2 at the Orange County Board of Education meeting, Jeff Barke's bid to begin opening new OCCA campuses around the county passed by a 3-1 vote, with Mari Barke abstaining. (Legal questions around the petition could not be addressed by the OCBE's regular general counsel — a guest contributor to the California Policy Center who's helped the board fight the county superintendent — who also had to recuse himself because he also works with OCCA.)
A particularly painful moment arrived when Beckie Gomez, the lone board member outside the OCBE's conservative majority, as well as its sole trustee of color, objected to Mari Barke remaining on the dais during the debate. When Gomez suggested that her presence could still influence the proceedings, from the audience, OCCA parents who had come to support the expansion plan burst out laughing, prompting an exasperated plea from Gomez that everybody try to "be kind." When the board member acting in Mari Barke's stead put the question to a vote — joking that he wasn't married to Barke, and she couldn't influence him — everyone but Gomez voted to allow Mari to remain. Less than an hour later, the board approved OCCA's unconditional expansion and the room broke into cheers.
Watching a livestream of the meeting from home, Briana Walker, a local mother who's been drawn into activism around OCCA, logged off in disgust at the seeming inevitability of the outcome.
"I don't think people realize what this entails," Walker said. Once these kinds of schools are approved, "there's almost no way to get them unapproved. It's never going to happen. They're going to be able to run amok in our county." Just last month, she noted, came news that an OCCA board member will run against Orange County's incumbent superintendent, potentially increasing their influence even more.
Oropeza agreed, warning that "by the time a [BCSI] school is in your community," a lot of groundwork has already been laid to secure its success. She compared the situation to the proliferation of model bills written by corporate interests and then enacted by Republican lawmakers in state legislatures around the country: "You put it together, and it's impossible for people who learn about this plan a year or two later to fight the momentum these people have created for themselves."
The long-term goal of the entire Hillsdale-driven educational universe, as Sue Woltanski of Florida's Monroe County School Board sees it, is no mystery: moving a critical mass of children out of the public schools, as a means of destabilizing and then destroying them.
"I think, like Corcoran said, the battle for America will be won in education," she said. "There are so many wins for conservatives by privatizing education. They get to control the message, decrease taxes and get access to the hearts and minds of all the children in America. They get to kill the teachers' union — that one can't be stressed enough. They basically allow for segregation academies. They're allowed to fund their own Christian views. All of these things are connected."
And it's happening on multiple levels, Oropeza says — federal, state and local. "They're going to keep plugging away because they have the resources, they have the connections and they have the vision. They're playing the long game, and while Hillsdale might not seem important now, with their 53 schools, all they have to do is get a few states to adopt their standards, and the game changes."
That game-changing moment may have arrived last month. But unlike previous BCSI charter efforts, which have largely gone unnoticed outside affected local communities — and, as journalist Jeff Bryant notes, have drawn little protest from Democrats — Gov. Lee's grandiose plans for Tennessee have sparked substantial pushback. State Democratic leaders have criticized the plan as academically unnecessary, an attack on public education and, in the words of Democratic state Sen. Raumesh Akbari, the retailing of a "warped version of history." Local journalists have accused Lee of seeking to create "a network of publicly-funded, private Christian schools" and Hillsdale of a backdoor form of money-laundering. On Feb. 28, the ACLU of Tennessee filed an open records request seeking all records related to Lee's partnership with the college.
To Frogge, this is a heartening wake-up call. "I've been advocating for public education for 10 years, and the last couple of years have been extremely difficult," she said. "It seems sort of hopeless, and like everything is just rolling through the legislature."
This time, things seem different: "Perhaps it's the overreach, but I think it has awakened a lot of people to what the privatization movement is all about, which is not the well-being of students."
From Salon, March 17, 2022