Wondering What The Hell Is Happening To Education In The American South
Because it's entering the danger zone
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Just How Bad Are Things?
Bad enough that someone granted poetic license could describe Southern education in Orwellian fashion. There’s enough material to turn a creative tale of government strongmen, historical erasure, censorship and ideological warfare. To consider:
A gunslinging state that places one district under a conservator before climbing further up the bureaucratic food chain to swap another city’s conservator with a menacing “board of managers.”
A world where high school football coaches are paid six-figure salaries while districts struggle to attract actual teachers with enticing wages.
Executive orders legally barring indoctrination while in the same sentence limiting what subjects students can learn.
A vacated state Supreme Court ruling that was going to force more equitable, adequate funding for all students in impoverished districts.
Parents moonlighting as education vigilantes, believing certain books will turn children into The Weather Underground but with a Neomarxist, racist spin.
A district administrator banning books that disagree with her worldview, one that believes a divine spirit designed humans to be a certain way, and that way is not anything resembling the LGBTQ community.
Where graduation rates remain near the national average despite math and reading scores lagging behind, ushering in a generation of underprepared, overconfident adults into the real world.
Sadly, there is little spin put on these bullet points of doom. After reading Bellwether’s 2019 report titled Education in the American South: Historical Context, Current State, and Future Possibilities, I truly believe the American South to be in a state of precipitous educational flux.
Across this 15-state region, debilitating teacher shortages are wreaking havoc. Warning signs of a major population boom that could lead to teacher shortages went unheeded and states are just now feeling the repercussions of being home to more than half of the nation’s recent population growth. Marry this fact with the South contributing more to US GDP than any other region and the mismanagement becomes self evident.
With the exception of West Virginia, per-pupil spending remains lower than any other region in the country, pushing districts, especially rural ones, to rely on state and federal funds. All but two Southern states have a percentage of students on free or reduced lunch that is lower than the national average (47 percent.)
Political expectations to keep property taxes low has birthed a paradox: a society that desires better education for their youth but is unwilling or unable to pay for it. In spite of this report’s well-documented figures of inequitable funding for struggling districts, people of color have outperformed the region as a whole in academic growth. That being said, the trajectory for the region in its entirety is cause for serious concern.
Naturally, The News Is Saying Something Entirely Different
The media would have you believe that education in the American South is at a cultural crossroads. They’re correct, but only in part. Depending on which outlets you subscribe to, you’re likely to believe that Southern states are either righteously removing CRT from their public schools or covering up the truth about anti-Black discrimination. Preventing groomerism or limiting LGBTQ rights. Placing patriotism at the front of the classroom or drowning free-thinkers in propaganda.
But this is merely a chapter in what has become a dystopian novel for Southern education. The roots of this story extend deep into a soil that covets cultural consistency. Whether it be through Friday Night glory or the decorative evolution of homecoming mums, public school has been a place to mold progeny into something more comfortable, something more familiar. There is a tight culture in the South and it may be preventing growth for their children (more on this term to come.)
This is a sort of Selfish Education, as compared to New England public schooling which centers on Education To Self. Admittedly, this a bold claim. But I am no provocateur baiting my sub-100 subscribers into clicks. Both anecdotal and hard data reveal what the South prioritizes; an adolescent upbringing which mimics the parents’. A smooth transition for their teenagers which eases them into traditional gender roles. A well-traveled, spottable path that guarantees offspring will play their part in upholding societal pillars of familiarity. You need to squint to see the difference between religion and nostalgia, here.
In spite of this communal conservatism the South, perplexingly, is embracing Big Government in public education. Governor Kay Ivey made Alabama state history by drastically boosting funding for teachers to the tune of $8.3 billion dollars. The budget made teaching a more attractive profession by reducing the full-benefit retirement age by potentially ten years and transforming the payscale to be more competitive. Other examples of improving education through big government include:
An early college credit program in North Carolina
The Drive to 55 Program and Tennessee Promise
A full-funding education bill headed towards a vote in Mississippi
A proposed $50K minimum salary for teachers in Arkansas
These programs or proposals demand a massive injection of public money into education, all with the hopes or hiring or retaining teachers and improving scores across the board; a paradigmatic breakaway from Southern stay-out-of-my-pockets politics.
Perhaps no state better represents this transformation more than Texas. Introduced this March, twin proposals Senate Bill 8 and Senate Bill 9 make for an ideological quagmire. On the one hand it provides parents with more power over their child’s education by pushing the commonplace GOP agenda of mandating that no district would “instruct students on gender identity or sexual orientation.” What’s more, it demands that parents be informed of “any changes to their child’s mental, emotional or physical health.”
Yet embedded in this bill’s sibling are markedly progressive tenets, such as a “free Pre-K for children of classroom teachers, if offered by the district” and a universal pay raise for teachers. Republican state Senator Brandon Creighton - who filed these proposals - has taken upon himself to override the free and fair market, claiming that it is damn well time teachers receive the pay boost they “rightfully deserve.” A conservative official playing Education Czar with public salaries? Someone check Hell’s temperature.
To come in this essay is a series of puzzling questions: How can one approve of million dollar renovations for football stadiums only to simultaneously demand that teachers be paid adequately? What makes it possible to promote free thinking, untainted by a Liberal doctrine, while also censoring what is taught in school? Is school-choice legislation being proposed in earnest or to give conservatives the upper hand in the fight over America’s culture?
In other words, what is confining Southern education to a tortured box of hypocritical conundrums?
Low Hanging Footballs
I mean fruit.
What can 95 large snag for the public schools of Meridian, Mississippi? Maybe two or three badly needed literacy coaches? A tech upgrade for a couple science classrooms? How about one high school football coach who doesn’t have any teaching duties.
Before he was recently fired, John Douglass received nearly $100 grand to bring Meridian High School back to glory. At the time of his hiring, Douglass earned almost three times the amount of a first year teacher with a bachelor’s degree and almost $30,000 more than a PhD teacher who has at least 35 years of experience. The state of Mississippi - who only 170 years ago possessed at least half of the country’s millionaires - isn’t the only place making these financial decisions.
In 2015, AL.com shocked with an article headlined: “Alabama’s high school football coaching salaries soar past $120,000.” Some may claim that these coaches double as teachers or other employees at their institution. But the report detailed how coaches often instruct “a football-specific course like weight training” to meet that requirement.
Moreover, some coaches complain that their rivals are not forced to work for the school at any capacity outside of athletics. But instead of arguing that education should be the district’s first priority, they take umbrage at losing the competitive edge. Consider coach Jack Hankins, who claimed that although he doesn’t “hate those guys because of it” he still insists that “grading tests and setting up labs” while his counterparts prep for football, “kind of stinks.” Wait until Mr. Hankins hears about what Texas has cooked up.
In 2022, the Dallas Independent School District bumped starting pay for coaches up to $95,000. Why? To “retain and attract coaches…within the North Texas competitive market” of course. This comes in the midst of a the Lone Star state’s inability to retain and attract educators, a predicament that resulted in one in five new hires statewide getting the gig without any certification.
Katy ISD of the Greater Houston area admitted to having “150-200 teacher vacancies” across the district. Presumably once promised a tax reduction, district leaders asked voters to approve a Tax Rate Election (TRE) that would keep rates the same. They promised every penny would go to a 4 percent pay raise in an attempt to attract new teachers. Perhaps spending $70 million in 2017 to build a high school football stadium wasn’t the greatest allocation of funds.
Yet it does help us understand what parents and taxpayers prioritize. Whether it be through government funding or generous lump sums from donors, the $70 million raised is a statement, one which divulges to a dollar amount precisely how much people care about high school football. Time, effort and money are finite. Every dollar, every OpEd in support-of, every phone tree fundraiser cold call is energy not spent on improving education.
And Speaking Of Money
Located in Northern Houston, Aldine ISD is the 11th largest district in Texas. For context, they had just over 95,000 State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) tests taken during the 2021-22 school year. Website TXSchools.gov details just how much this district is struggling academically:
89.1 percent of Aldine HS students are economically disadvantaged
Only 10 percent of their students scored in the “Masters” category for STAAR
A Graduation Rate score of 55 out of 100 for Aldine HS students, which measures students who take 4, 5 or even 6 years to graduate
Only 6 percent of MacArthur HS students are “Mastering” all subjects
On a scale to 100, Nimitz HS averaged a 39 for “College, Career, or Military Readiness”
To boot, as of July 2022, Aldine ISD was over ten percent short of fulfilling their teaching staff. The raw number (452) is eye-popping. It even forced their talent acquisition department to be more creative with hirings, bringing foreign educators into the district via visitor visas. Juxtapose this with a decision the Aldine Trustees agreed upon during that same month - to spend $50 million for a new football stadium.
It seems as though the district will invent new ways to beef up a flimsy staff, something residents may applaud them for. Simultaneously, they are also applauding the new stadium. This is likely due to a 2015 referendum allowing a $798 million bond proposal to expand or construct news schools in the district. The State of Texas utilizes a massive bond fund which legally guarantees investors that “the state will pay them back if the school district can’t.”
In a state where everything is bigger, this gigantic example of Leftist ideology is somehow hidden from the national spotlight. Sure, Aldine ISD is located in a liberal voting bloc. Yet Katy ISD is not. And plugging “teacher shortage in _________” followed by “football salary in ___________” or “high school stadium cost in _________” has quickly become my new favorite search engine game. You’ll find that both liberal and conservative communities in the South have embraced big government in high school sports.
The issue of bond funding, on a base level, allows financially struggling districts to offload the cost (re: risk) of borrowing onto others. Who? Those who give money to the state via land purchases or direct tax collection. What a remarkable, undeniable example of socialism in states where millions of voters strongly detest such politics.
So what can we make of such figures and their implications? It is undeniable that Southerners - not just Texans - revel in high school football culture. $50 million isn’t spent without some consent of the governed. Communities and local economies are built around such programs, in spite of any meaningful evidence that they stimulate long term growth.
Intuition tells us to search deeper. Are parents, neighbors, and friends so enthralled with the entertainment value of adolescent sports that they can justify such expenses? I doubt that. Rather, there is meaning in this autumnal tradition. It is an everlasting monument to a way of life. Each Friday in Fall adults can relive the soothing familiarity of their glory days. It must be easy to get caught up in such a sensation.
Gargantuan renovation projects for stadiums aren’t indicative of uncaring parents. Contrarily, they signal exactly how much parents care. The rub is in identifying where their care is directed. Many Southern parents passionately desire for their children to walk the path that they once did, which just so happens to encompass a parochial universe that only orbits between endzones.
For many living outside of the South, using millions for anything but making teacher salaries more attractive would prove unconscionable right now. Fewer teachers directly results in class sizes too large for successful education. But for many Southerners, amplifying this world just makes sense.
For them, education involves more than learning arithmetic and grammar. Public schools are a conduit for tradition. Culture. Life as parents know it. What else could justify silly expenses in districts facing such damaging shortages? High school football isn’t a game as much as it is a totem, and tribute must be paid to guarantee the culture of the past remains the culture of the future. And speaking of culture…
Indoctrinating or Just Introducing
The confusion of Southern education lives on to fight once more in the battle of parental rights. Across the South and rural areas in general, parental involvement in education has surpassed attending PTA meetings and now includes legal challenges to the curriculum.
Educators have long thought increased parental engagement to be a white whale, but they may have regrets about finally spearing it. Instead of connecting with teachers to discuss methods for closing the achievement gap, those taking advantage of this tidal wave of parental rights laws are doing so to remove a particular type of content from the classroom.
Book bans such as the ones documented by nonprofit PEN America seem to be growing exponentially. Their study delineates what content is being banned or challenged. As of April of 2022 they had recorded “1,145 unique book titles” that were coming under scrutiny. Although the common refrain for banning literature is to prevent elementary age students from reading anything inappropriate - a reasonable goal - the numbers reveal a more subjective, more alarming agenda.
According to PEN, 47 percent of the banned books were for young adults, otherwise known as high school age students, whereas a meager 18 percent of bans were placed on picture books. The near majority of parents are targeting students in the 13-17 age range, but what content are they focusing in on? From PEN’s database:
467 contain protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color (41%)
247 directly address issues of race and racism (22%)
379 titles (33%) explicitly address LGBTQ+ themes, or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ+
283 titles contain sexual content of varying kinds (25%), including novels with sexual encounters as well as informational books about puberty, sex, or relationships
There are 184 titles (16%) that are history books or biographies. Another 107 titles have themes related to rights and activism (9%)
Anyway you slice up the data, it becomes evident that parents are uncomfortable with teenagers learning about issues of race, gender and sexuality. But herein lies the question we must ask: If it leads to a shift away from their cultural values, do Southern parents want their children to become free, independent thinkers?
Mandating that publishers submit lessons for review, Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” suggests that many in the South might be scared of confronting some historical truths, especially if they address past discrimination. Although they may have overreacted to the law, publisher Studies Weekly, presumably scared of potential backlash, submitted their lessons about both Rosa Parks and the Civil War.
Their revised literature on Parks reads: ‘She was told to move to a different seat. She did not. She did what she believed was right.” Glaringly absent is the impetus for Parks protest, her being a Black American. Additionally, when referencing the Civil War, terms like “Black People” were changed to “certain groups” in which seems like an attempt to remove race from any discussion of this particular history.
The Florida Department of Education pushed back on this edit, insisting that it is impossible to properly teach about Ms. Parks or the Civil War unless race is mentioned. But this misses the point. The publisher read the cultural tea leaves and preemptively altered their textbook to avoid a parental challenge. They would do well to also edit any passages about The Stonewall Riot, as Duval County made clear that this history might be challenged, too.
Located in Florida’s northeast, Duval County made national headlines for their book removal process. Newspaper Jacksonville Today summed up the spectacle:
“33 titles were sent back to the distributor because, as the district states, it was ‘determined they would not comply with new legislation or were not appropriate for elementary aged children.’ Among those books were numerous books about LGBTQ+ characters, one of which a top district review supervisor (Michelle DiBias) called ‘contrary to the design of humanity’ and ‘morally damning.’ She resigned shortly after those comments were made public.”
Despite of where you land on the issue, it is fair wonder if elementary age children lack the social or intellectual maturity to comprehend transgender issues. Yet this isn’t why DiBias challenged these books. Although lightly coded, her language made clear that she intended to limit any content that could steer children away from her Christian worldview.
This may not be indoctrination, but it is in the same ballpark and many seem to be okay with it. Shoot, many seem to prefer it. Governors across the South have railed against indoctrination; the perceived threat that leftist educators are teaching students to hate themselves for being white. Or perhaps they’re teaching them to change their gender or sexuality. This decree from Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders sums it up:
“EXECUTIVE ORDER TO PROHIBIT INDOCTRINATION AND CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN SCHOOLS”
Specifically, Sanders ordered that “Teachers and school administrators should teach students how to think—not what to think.” I presumed that Arkansas’ parents want their children to become independent thinkers, so when this notion is paired with the pattern of content censorship, a nasty cognitive dissonance seems to be at play.
I may have presumed wrongly. Sanders’ order continued to state that “Government policies must empower parents to make decisions for their children and foster curriculum transparency in classrooms across the state.” Finally, some clarity. Conservative Southerners view public educators not as developers of critical thinking skills, but as embedders of a worldview that finds race and gender history antithetical to an ever-glorious, nostalgic ideal of the America they so cherish.
Is Tight Culture The Culprit?
In both educational proficiency and funding a disparity exists between the South and other regions, especially the Northeast and West Coast. Spending such grotesque amounts of money on amateur sports is glaringly irresponsible for a region desperate for financial resources. Censoring books on race or gender for young adults - students who are statistically graduating with duller intellectual skills than their peers - misses the mark entirely. They’re focusing on a rowdy bonfire kegger instead of the house burning down two streets away.
It is becoming clearer that parents are repurposing public education into a factory of sorts, one which manufactures a new generation but only after they’ve been instilled with the elders’ societal norms and expectations. These include categorizing good with patriotic and bad with un-American, holding outdated views on who can love each other and from what gender, and maintaining a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps folklore that has added a chapter where White folks are the ones being predominantly discriminated against.
Why are these battles being fought with an urgency not seen in their more liberal, more coastal counterparts? There must be some seismic, psychosocial dynamic reassuring parents that education can only be fixed through their precise cultural practices. If it results in such obvious fiscal malfeasance, so be it.
A fantastic read, Michele Gelfand’s 2018 book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers has popularized the phraseology of tight versus loose culture. Tight culture is defined as “many strongly enforced rules and little tolerance for deviance” while looseness includes a greater acceptance. To add depth, tight societies:
“…have more authoritarian governments, more media restrictions, less civil liberties, and greater use of the death penalty; have much more constraint in everyday situations; and have citizens who exhibit greater prevention-focus, cautiousness, impulse control, need for structure, and self-monitoring ability relative to loose societies.”
I had a hunch that this strongly characterizes Southern culture. A 2013-14 study from Gelfand confirmed as much, although I’d reckon that Florida might have an even tighter culture today than shown here.
Their research provides clues as to why much of the South is apprehensive or unwilling to discuss race in the classroom. Tight states disagree with cosmopolitanism - the notion of an “intellectual and aesthetic openness towards divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity.” In sum, tight states also exhibit:
greater conscientiousness
greater cautiousness
lower cultural openness
more charges of employment discrimination
lower political and legal equality
Is it a bridge too far to suggest that embracing CRT - the idea that laws were created to purposefully harm African Americans and subsequently benefit White Americans - is a challenge for those living in a social structure known for intolerance and rigidity?
There is a particularly intriguing trend among Conservative White Americans and what seems to be Southerners and rural Americans in the Rust Belt. In 2022, a University of Maryland poll found that a total of 71 percent of Republicans thought that discrimination against White Americans was on the rise. Only 24 and 20 percent thought the same about African and Latino Americans, respectively.
Those numbers do more than suggest discrimination to be a zero-sum game between non-Whites and Whites. They provide the context for a number of legislative and educational changes, like the one seen in a Florida textbook used by over 45,000 of their public schools. By definition, tight Southern culture fights against the progressive mindset necessary to embrace racial reparations, or even the acknowledgement that anti-Black racism could still exist today. Socially, there is no framework for them to perceive this reality without being outcasted.
But can tight culture account for such irresponsible public spending, especially on high school sports? Actually, this might make perfect sense.
Gelfand describes tight societes as a “cultural adaptation to threat” where “tightness would be associated with increased social organization.” Today’s America places gender, race and sex issues at the forefront of the national discourse, likely leading Southerners to feel as though a cultural tsunami is seconds away from toppling the levies. Why not double down on high school football? Why not sink further into this emblem-turned-touchstone that embodies the love of tradition that tight Southern culture so worships?
Investing millions into stadiums and coaches doesn’t reveal fiscal misguidedness as much as it does the cultural instability Southerners feel. Moreover, it reveals where education stands on their hierarchy of needs. Culture comes first, clearly, even if this means refixing education to be a tool in the fight to control it.
What Does All This Mean?
The movement surrounding Southern public education is now defined by a collective parenting community who perceive schools as a medium for passing down their values. The most consequential outcome of this development is the diluting of conservatism’s small government principle. If anything, GOP state houses are yielding power to their respective governor, who in turn weaponizes legislation to establish a cultural milieu that reflects conservative beliefs.
The Southern battle over culture provides the catalyst for an ideological shift so powerful that it spills into public education. Survey polls show increasing support for homeschooling or reserving public funds for school choice vouchers, both alternative paths for education which eschew the conservative values of strong community and bootstrapism.
A host of other Southern states are legislating educational savings account (ESA) programs. These programs are “essentially taxpayer-supported bank accounts” labeled as “school-choice” options for parents who believe public education isn’t meeting their needs. While many states already have these programs, there is a considerable amount of Southern states who are introducing or expanding them:
Texas - a school-choice priority where money follows “without strings attached.”
South Carolina - an ESA expansion for low-income families, one where the GOP notably voted down an amendment to “require private schools to provide meals and transportation” for accepted students.
Florida - an ESA expansion that would “remove income requirements” and therefore any threshold to accessing it.
North Carolina - a voucher expansion which allows families earning up to “175 percent of the income to qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program” to attend a private school.
Virginia - two ESA bills, one (H.B. 1396) which expands eligibility for families earning up to “1,000 percent of the free lunch standards” and the other ((H.B 1371) that removes the threshold altogether.
Arkansas - a universal school-choice bill clouded in anti-indoctrination rhetoric, so much so that American Federation for Children senior fellow Corey DeAngelis rejoiced that teachers will now lose “control over the minds of other people's children.”
On the surface, Southern states are attempting bold reforms to combat decades of academic underperformance. But both the fine print and sociopolitical conditions in which these bills were authored must be detailed if these bills are to be properly understood.
It could prove foolish to ignore the culture war environment that has risen in tandem with this push for school-choice. If Southern public education has been failing their students for years, then what has sparked such urgency to fixing it? In other words, why now? Is is a mere coincidence that with the exception of Roy Cooper, the governors signing these bills have all approved legislation disavowing Critical Race Theory or other teachings interpreted as divisive to nationalism?
For example, Kentucky passed a statute acknowledging that slavery and post-Civil War laws were antithetical to American ideals, but that instructional materials must not define “racial disparities solely on the legacy of this institution” for it is “destructive to the unification of our nation.” A bill in Tennessee intends to silence the teaching of racism if it makes White Americans feel any “form of psychological stress.” Doing so would “exacerbate and inflame divisions… in ways contrary to the unity of the United States of America.” There is legislation with eerily similar language in Alabama, Georgia and Florida.
It would be just as foolish to ignore the financial barriers discussed in these bills. Prior to this culture war era, school-choice legislation stood on the twin pillars of equal opportunity and parental control for struggling families. Parents deserved the right to look elsewhere if their district - usually underfunded - was failing their child.
Today however, conservatives are abandoning the household income requirement for these programs, opening up ESA access for any parent who desires it, as evident in the legislation offered in North Carolina, Florida, Virginia and elsewhere. The South Carolina GOP took a more heavy-handed approach with their proposal.
By raising the financial threshold to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, they’ve taken the cap off of who can access public funds for private schooling. Refusing to mandate transportation for those utilizing this ESA acts as a socioeconomic gatekeeper. The wealthy (disproportionately white) can use taxpayer funds to ship their kids to private school, while the poor (disproportionately nonwhite) have to find a ride first.
Not all Southern states, or coastal states for that matter, have school-choice programs shrouded in an anti-CRT agenda. Nevertheless, it appears that old ESA and voucher programs are being recycled to achieve any goal but closing the South’s academic proficiency gap. This denotes an overwhelmingly conservative region willing to abandon small government ideology if big government can be used to achieve cultural objectives. If conservatives recapture the White House, expect this movement to encroach upon federal legislation.
What’s more, we can expect more than the opening of new private schools. We can expect more public funding or tax-credits to go towards them. Anti-CRT parents who access these ESAs will not find what they’re looking for in another public school. This could create a new market for what I predict to be labeled America Christian Schools or something along the lines. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is already working on the children’s curriculum.