Let Schools Teach (More) Stupid Stuff (Like Creationism)

I can’t get bent out of
shape over Politico‘s heavy breathing over some tax-funded
vouchers going to religious schools that teach a
Flintstones-cum-Creationist view of evolution.

From my
latest column at Time:

If we’re being honest, private and public schools at all levels
teach all sorts of nonsense with tax dollars (Pell grants and
guaranteed student loans are widely used at religious colleges and
universities after all). Yet the Supreme Court has consistently
ruled that such aid is constitutionally sound as long as
the money goes to individual students and parents.

Whatever else you can say about school vouchers and other forms
of school choice (such as charter schools), they expand
opportunities for parents whose children are otherwise trapped in
schools that rarely perform well. There is much research
documenting that vouchers improve student outcomes and
little that says vouchers diminish student outcomes. Stephanie
Simon, the author of Politico‘s story about
creationism and vouchers, quoted a Brookings scholar in a piece
last year saying, “There’s no evidence that people are being
harmed” via voucher programs. At the very least, it should count
for something that parental rates of satisfaction are higher
at schools of choice (including public charters and magnets)
that at traditional public schools to which students are simply
assigned.

At the very least, the col
almost certainly contains some of the most positive invocations of
Karl Marx since the days of Whittaker Chambers and Dwight
McDonald:

Ideally, none of us would be forced to subsidize lesson plans or
schools with which we disagree — and nobody would be forced to pay
for schools unless their kids were attending or they felt like
making a gift. Certainly it would be better to separate school and
the state, if only because, as Marx might put it, the function
of compulsory education is to reinforce the status quo and maintain
the existing social order rather than to create critical thinkers
who might challenge it.

Read
the whole thing.

Related: “Hey
Politico, Apparently Public Schools Don’t Teach Low-Income
Minority Students Sciene at All!” and “Tax
Dollars Are Used to Teach All Sorts of Stupid Shit, But It’s News
When School Vouchers are Involved.”