House Bill 616 is Cancel Culture on Steroids
Every student in a school district could lose precious state funding because legislators think a teacher may have said "gay" to a kindergartener. Or said that Confederate States of America was racist.
Look, I know it’s an election year. But this bullshit has got to stop.
For many years now, I’ve heard conservatives rail about so-called “cancel culture” or “wokeness”, which means they don’t like being told they can’t use words they’ve always used without consequence anymore.
I remember growing up playing “smear the queer”, for example. My kids don’t even know what that game is. Which is a good thing. It’s progress that we recognize that terminology as hurtful, wrong and really, really offensive.
But conservatives think it’s fine to use that term because it’s what they’ve always used. So when they get called out for it, they get apoplectic. They whine about getting “cancelled”, often on their cable news programs where they make millions of dollars.
Cancelled, indeed.
What people complaining about “Cancel Culture” don’t get is that what they’re complaining about isn’t Cancel Culture.
It’s accountability.
The First Amendment merely says the government can’t make laws abridging free speech. It doesn’t say you have the right to say anything you want without any consequences.
I mean 40 years ago, a bunch of white kids could play “smear the queer” and not worry about LGBTQ+ kids calling them out for it. Today, a bunch of white kids could play “smear the queer” on the playground, but there would be consequences for it.
And there should be.
And there should have been when I played it too.
But 40 years ago, the LGBTQ+ movement was in its nascence. They had little power yet. When the community gained that power over decades with sacrifice, pain and yes, death, their voices grew to be able to also express themselves.
And conservatives hate that.
Now they’re flipping out about Critical Race Theory or diversity, equity and inclusion, or some other bogeyman. And they’re really, really upset that our kids are learning about this. Because it makes kids feel uncomfortable or something.
First of all, our kids are far more comfortable addressing systemic racism than their parents are.
Believe me.
But that’s not the point. What is really upsetting these people is Americans really like their schools. And their teachers. In survey after survey, this overwhelming support of public education and their teachers is annoying to conservatives and their half century effort to privatize education.
And relentlessly deny necessary funding for the 90 percent of kids who are educated in our public system.
So they drive this cultural war bullshit to distract from their absolute desire to destroy the heart of every community — its public schools.
Let’s look at HB 616 — Ohio’s latest iteration of this cynical game. The bill would do the following:
Ban any discussions of racism, sexual orientation or other “divisive topics”, whatever the hell those are.
Punish teachers who mention these things (like in a discussion of the Civil War, for example) by taking away their licenses
Punish every student in a school or district where one teacher brings this up by removing money from the already inadequate state funding the school or district gets
Turn the Department of Education into the Ministry of Truth, forcing them to police educators in Ohio’s 613 school districts to make sure they only say state-approved words and tackle state-approved topics
Meanwhile, these legislators won’t sign on to fully fund Ohio’s new Fair School Funding Plan. But they will sign on to the full-on voucher-ization of Ohio’s public school system.
This is crazy bullshit.
Like I said, it’s Cancel Culture on steroids. They want to cancel educators and the educations of every student in a school or district because they don’t want students to learn that racism caused the Civil War or that their friend Billy’s two Dads are a family too.
But let’s not fall into this trap, shall we?
These people need to be called out for the cynical ploy they’re perpetrating. They want us to fight over words and ignore the outright theft of public education dollars that is occurring every day.
They want you to ignore that Ohio’s charter schools — 5 years removed from the ECOT scandal, which is the biggest taxpayer scandal in the state’s history (Tucker Carlson spoke at the school’s final graduation ceremony, by the way) — receive more than $9,000 per pupil in state funding. That’s more than double what Ohio’s local public schools get from the state.
And they get this largess despite only 1 in 13 charter schools being deemed “high quality” under the most generous standards imaginable while 3 in 5 local public schools buildings are and even more than 1 in 5 major urban school buildings are.
They want you to ignore that 88 percent of the time, students taking public subsidies to attend private schools go to worse performing private options. And those private options have fewer students of color in them because the state’s voucher program drives greater racial segregation. (SEE Lima City Schools racial breakdown below)
They want you to ignore the fact that since 1997 — the year the Ohio Supreme Court first ruled the way we fund schools to be unconstitutional — Ohio lawmakers have sent nearly $20 billion to mostly poor performing, privately run charter schools and generally worse-performing private schools.
They want you to believe the problem with public education is teachers explaining how a student’s two Dads constitute a loving family or how Robert E. Lee was a racist warrior.
Wrong.
The problem with public education is them.
And they really, really, really want you to forget that.