Op-Ed: Arisa Shawn

Thank you to Arisa Shawn for providing this analysis.

To prepare for tonight’s school board meeting and try to get a better understanding of what that $400k donation is all about, I watched one of Dr. Dale Broome’s school choice presentations on YouTube. Broome, for anyone like me who had never heard of him until this week for whatever reason, was a member of the local Tea Party Patriots and is a local Redlands radiologist who volunteers to go around talking to people about school choice. At this filmed gathering from February of last year, at a church in the high desert, he gets right to the point. The pandemic school shutdowns gave parents the opportunity to eavesdrop on their child’s school day, and what they found was a whole bunch of “stinking thinking,” as Broome puts it, skipping a beat because he can’t help but show he is a little tickled at his own catchphrase. 

According to Broome what many parents found was an “agenda-driven education,” as he refers to it, being forced on students. The morally offensive subject matter and objectionable material, his words, in the curriculum and/or presented by teachers, includes Anti-Americanism, comprehensive sex education, socialism/communism, critical race theory, atheism, global warming, gender fluidity, globalism, religious pluralism, social justice and secular humanism. That’s like a Tucker Carlson tornado of terror for a conservative. 

He basically threw in every fear-based talking point of the far right, and, then proceeded to give absolutely no proof, examples or anecdotes to back up his assertions. He doesn’t even mention whether he has children in the public or private school systems or where he saw this curriculum. He does, however, throw in something about “private schools opening sooner“ as a little anti-government jab to create some camaraderie with anyone who might roll their eyes when it comes to any mention of the US government. 

I am not sure when the U.S. Government and the public education system went full pinko, but both institutions have apparently sided themselves with the unpatriotic lefties most recently, I guess. It is hard to keep up. Can a government be unpatriotic? Anyways, big daddy government and his little bitch bureaucracy were what kept schools closed, he tells the audience in less colorful language, not a virus that caused a pandemic we can’t get under control because of people who refuse to grasp the concept of doing something for the sake of the better good.

Broome then tells the audience that parents are often not even able to opt out of their “stinking thinking” curriculum-based lessons concerning sex, religion, race and equity being forced upon them. He says kids are being propagandized by the school districts and teachers. Like kids listen to teachers! Man, wouldn’t that be great? 

He then explains why he cares about all of this so much—no mention of kids oddly enough. It’s because he is greatly concerned about the agenda-driven education he apparently knows all about that is being pushed in schools, undermining the “values, faith and traditions“ good Christian parents instill in their children. 

He is so concerned, he put up $400,000 to fund an advocacy group called California School Choice Foundation. The organization introduced the California School Choice inItiative they are trying to get on the ballot for November that Broome volunteers to go around to ladies luncheons and churches to talk about. 

To hear him tell it, he, like the majority of parents—68% according to a questionable poll he cites—are frustrated with the public school system and want to have other options, and he thinks our already collected tax dollars should pay for it, diverting the same money that would otherwise go to school districts. This is where he points out the bonus for the people falling asleep in the back—It can all be done without raising taxes!

If voters were to vote for what would become the Education Freedom Act, all parents and guardians would be allocated $14,000 a year to put towards the education experience they choose for students: a public school, a private school or home school. What he fails to point out is that parents can pretty much already do this when it comes to homeschooling. 

That leaves the real issue—private schools, particularly religious-based private schools. He even paints this opportunity as somehow good news for economically-challenged students because there will be no financially-based decisions.

What Broome doesn’t articulate is that this would be a boon for parents who already have children attending private schools. If there are no new taxes, where is that money coming from? It would be coming from schools and programs that mostly benefit lower-income, often-marginalized, children enrolled at public schools. This proposed legislation amounts to welfare for the wealthy. It is a way to subsidize educations for children who are most often already privileged. 

Are there private schools anymore that only cost $14,000 per year? All the ones that cost more than that would still be out of reach for most families with low-to-middle range incomes. Their kids would be the ones to get the leftovers, the educational scraps that would be pasted together to pass as education, completely underfunded. 

That can’t sustain, which is exactly the point. Weaponizing the pandemic’s masking issue helps galvanize conservatives to go all in on what the real agenda here is on the national level for the GOP: to defund the public school system, effectively blurring the lines of church and state, and wrestling impressionable minds away from educators who teach things like biological and earth sciences, social sciences, history, health, critical thinking and ethics. 

The long game here, and I would guess Broome’s real motivation, is to subsidize the church and its teachings, putting God back in schools—the answer to all problems as the internet’s finest often opine. It’s clearly not about school choice or Broome would spend his energy advocating for disabled children who are at the top of the list of students whose educational needs are more often not met by the public school system. By the way, most private schools, unless solely dedicated to special education, rarely have special education accommodations for mild-to-moderate disabilities, let alone moderate-to-severe, as classified in the educational system. 

It is also obvious this is not solely about perceived educational needs not being met and access to alternatives, or Broome would have backed the other proposed initiative that a different conservative advocacy group was trying to get on the ballot in November, called the Education Savings Account Act. The similarly named initiative was being put forward by a group called Fix California, also funded primarily by a rich person. That act, if it had gone to voters, would have set aside $14,000 per student for alternatives to public education, but it would have prioritized lower income students.

So what is this really all about? It’s about the “path to save the nation,” as simplified by GOP-strategist and human garbage Steve Bannon on his podcast, that is “through the school boards.” This National effort is drawing from the John Birch playbook, adding strategies of disruption, publicity and mobilization Roger Stone-style by energizing conservative voters by any means necessary, whether a lick of it is true or not. It’s about undermining trust in our public institutions, including school districts and boards. 

When I first looked at tonight’s school board meeting agenda, nothing really popped out to me as controversial. But thinking about it again, there is a line item for an expenditure for a presentation for staff, I believe, on equity. Equity is really what this gets to the heart of. Some who have the heftier portion on the ol’ equity scale often only see their own perceived losses when it comes to anyone underprivileged gaining some equal footing. Whether it works like that or not, the idea of equity scares a lot of privileged people and that is the basis of their real fear.