In May 1963, civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, demanded the integration of public schools. White authorities ordered them pummeled by fire hoses. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that racial segregation in public education violated the U.S. Constitution. One response in the South was to give white parents vouchers to pay to send their children to all-white private schools. (Photo by Frank Rockstroh/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

The Kentucky State AFL-CIO’s opposition to Amendment 2 shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows labor history. Unions have always championed public schools.

The Republican-backed amendment, which will be on the Nov. 5 ballot, would change the state Constitution to permit the General Assembly to pass laws letting tax dollars go to private schools. You can bet if voters approve the measure, come January, the GOP supermajority House and Senate will lose no time approving a voucher program in which parents and guardians can use those public funds to send their children to private schools.

Just as unions have historically supported public schools, “Republicans, and white conservatives, have long been hostile to public schools,” Brynn Tannehill wrote in the New Republic. “School desegregation drove white evangelicals to become the strongest Republican demographic. Ronald Reagan promised to end the Department of Education in 1980. Trump put Betsy DeVos in charge of the Department of Education, precisely because she was a leading proponent (and funder) of defunding public schools, and funneling it to religious schools.”

Simply put, a voucher program will severely weaken public schools by draining away funds desperately needed to keep schools open. Depending on its size and scope, a voucher program in Kentucky would cost between $1.19 billion and $199 million, the equivalent of employing between 9,869 and 1,645 teachers and other staff, according to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

Supporters of Amendment 2 claim vouchers enable parents or guardians to choose where to send their kids to school. While Amendment 2 proponents maintain that vouchers especially benefit poor families, evidence points the other way, starting with the origin of voucher programs.???

“Vouchers were first created after the Supreme Court banned school segregation with its ruling in Brown v Board of Education,” explains the National Education Association. “School districts used vouchers to enable white students to attend private schools, which could (and still can) limit admission based on race. As a result, the schools that served those white students were closed, and schools that served black students remained chronically underfunded.”??

The NEA points out that “unlike public schools, private schools can (and some do) limit their admission based on race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and any other number of factors. Furthermore, vouchers rarely cover the full tuition, so families who were promised a better education are left footing the bill.”??

It’s no coincidence that supporters of vouchers are also anti-labor. “They’re against the teachers’ unions,” said Jeff Wiggins, Kentucky AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer. “They want their own private schools so they won’t have any unions.”?

Added Wiggins, “These conservative private schools have their own agendas. They want to teach students what they want them to learn. They don’t want them to learn about unions and the struggles of working people.”?

Writing in HuffPost, Robert J. Elisberg warned that “the less educated the public is, the more it relies on authority figures, rather than question anything. And the more that education is disdained, the less that inconvenient facts will be believed.”

Public schools didn’t become common in the U.S. until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since colonial days, almost all schools had been private and too expensive for working class Americans.

Hence, “the labor movement was instrumental in establishing free public schools,” American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers said in a speech at the National Education Association’s 1916 national convention. He explained that “wage-earners are more vitally interested in…public schools than any other group of citizens” because “public schools are the only educational institutions available for their children and for them.”?

Amendment 2 reflects old-time Social Darwinism, a pseudoscientific theory popular among the rich in Gompers’ time. A perversion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Social Darwinism was an elitist notion that the rich and their apologists in the press and pulpit often cited to justify the brutal exploitation of workers by millionaire industrialists.

In the main, Social Darwinian theorizing held that “the powerful in society are innately better than the weak and that success is proof of their superiority.” Thus, Social Darwinists argued that public schools, unions, worker and safety and health laws — and anything else that helped “inferior” folk — should be resisted as violations of what they claimed was an immutable law of human nature: the strong survive, and the weak don’t.

The self-styled “Captains of Industry” worshiped at the altar of Social Darwinism and sent their kids to posh private schools while cheerily hiring poor kids — the younger the better — to work in their hellish factories, mines and mills. (Today, some right-wing Republicans are talking up rolling back child labor laws.)

In the heyday of Social Darwinism, industrialists stubbornly, and often violently, resisted unions. Wages for industrial workers were so low, their children as young as 10 had to go to work to help their families make ends meet. Precious few families did, even with mom, dad and the kids all working. Unions saw public education as the surest way out of poverty for the children of workers.

Elisberg said conservatives have always wanted “just private schools and homeschooling” which he said will be “the end of an educated nation. …. But for conservatives, that’s okay. The wealthy and privileged will get their children a great education. And the rest of America? You’re on your own.”

He concluded: “Public education is what helped make America the envy of the world. A nation of well-informed citizens. Leading the way in the space race, technology, finance, and medical advances.

“But conservatives? They want to go back to ‘the old fashioned way.’ Like the Dark Ages. Where kings and the aristocracy ruled. And you peasants, obey thy overlord. Make no mistake, this is nothing new. The attack against education is the drug that conservatives have been pushing through history.”

In Kentucky, that drug is Amendment 2. “Power is their drug,” Wiggins said. “They want to control everything, so they’re coming after public schools. My tax money belongs in public schools, not private schools.”?