TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93TT0418> <title> Nov. 01, 1993: Crusade For The Classroom </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 Nov. 01, 1993 Howard Stern & Rush Limbaugh </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> EDUCATION, Page 34 Crusade For The Classroom </hdr> <body> The resurgent religious right is gaining power on local school boards and stirring angry debate By JILL SMOLOWE--Reported by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington, Michele Donley/Chicago, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Scott Norvell/Atlanta On a Tuesday evening in Greenville, South Carolina, hundreds of parents hurried through dinner and headed for the local school-board meeting. Those who could not find seats flowed into the hallways, where TV monitors captured a heated debate over a proposed program called "Framework for Learning." Supporters argued that this curriculum would strengthen reasoning skills; opponents countered that it was a veiled effort to sabotage home-taught moral and religious values. For many of those in the room and in the hall, the controversy evoked a here-we-go-again feeling that has pervaded every board meeting in town since January, when three Christian conservatives assumed seats on the 12-member body. "There's complete chaos on the board now," says parent Michele Brinn. "Every little thing becomes a huge crisis." The fracas in Greenville is repeating itself across the U.S. Ever since the religious right first began targeting local school-board races in 1990, religious conservatives have monopolized many school agendas with challenges that say more about the parents' political and religious beliefs than their children's education. Should students be molded into "global citizens"? (Unpatriotic!) Should Halloween displays in classrooms feature witches? (Paganism!) Should kids be instructed to take a deep breath before tackling an exam? (New Age religion!) Should classes hold mock elections? (Usurpation of parental authority!) The challengers insist that they are only trying to restore discipline and Christian values to the nation's classrooms. Not so, reply their opponents: the right's aim--here noisily, there stealthily--is to replace public education with home schooling and parochial education. But the guerrilla warfare is actually far more than a battle for children's minds. Some conservatives are using public classrooms as a staging ground from which to advance to the political arena their moral crusade against gay rights, abortion, cultural diversity and any other national inclination that they perceive as a secular evil. Next week, when many school-board seats are again contested around the country, the right will be looking for signs that their grass-roots strategy is having a reverberation nationwide. Even if the echo proves disappointing, the Christian foot soldiers plan to continue exploiting dissatisfaction with the nation's schools in hopes of finding common cause with moderates and conventional conservatives. Looking ahead to more significant electoral battles in 1994, when voters in Idaho, Colorado and Arizona will address education issues at the ballot box, Ralph Reed, executive director of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, vows, "We'll be there with bells on." At the turn of the decade, the religious right's national crusade seemed moribund. A series of spectacular embarrassments (Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker) and costly political setbacks (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, the 1992 G.O.P. Convention) spawned a cocky conventional wisdom that the holy warriors were a burnt-out force. Then from the ashes arose a new strategy of striking at the local level to seize the national agenda from the bottom up rather than the top down. "We do our best to fly under the radar of the media and professions so they don't know what hit them until it's too late," Reed told TIME before last year's elections. "It's easier to be elected to the school board than President of the United States." That boast was prophetic. Last November religious-right candidates triumphed in about 40% of the more than 500 local and state races they contested nationwide. Since then, the conservatives have intensified their focus on school boards. "They provide a local forum at the grass-roots level in every community around which they can build a political network," says Michael Hudson of People for the American Way, an anticensorship watchdog group. "There is always something in the schools that mirrors cultural problems, whether sex education or AIDS or evolution." The strategy of the religious right, he says, is to "find a controversy in the schools that stirs up a lot of energy among local churches, then run candidates using that issue as the flagship controversy." The right's involvement in public education extends well beyond school-board elections. In Virginia the race for lieutenant governor pits incumbent Democrat Donald Beyer Jr. against Michael Farris, a former Washington State director of Falwell's Moral Majority. Earlier this year Farris barnstormed Virginia, waging war against outcomes-based education (OBE), a controversial educational strategy that focuses on mastering skills (negotiation, cooperation) as well as measuring achievement (tests, grades). His efforts forced OBE off the state's school agenda and won Farris the Republican nomination. Now he is running neck and neck with Beyer. Farris vows to "bring my religion into politics." Beyer's forces call Farris "a poster boy for the religious right." Although Farris disavows any ties to the powerful Christian Coalition, founder Pat Robertson recently mailed letters to 12,000 supporters hailing Farris' efforts as "a campaign for the future of the Republican Party." Increasingly, an electoral race isn't even required to win converts and influence agendas. Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum conducts seminars in Georgia to challenge that state's new OBE programs, and not incidentally to publicize the Forum's wider agenda. Opponents of OBE have managed to galvanize concern to the point that parents in suburban Atlanta stick leaflets on car windshields denouncing the "dumbing down" of classes and the substitution of "psychotherapy" for the three Rs. Debi Schwier, an anti-OBE organizer in Gwinnett County, denounces such reforms as "one of the most blatant shifts in the history of the U.S. from what they call the Judeo-Christian ethic to an atheistic, humanistic ethic." She fears that the schools may tamper with her daughter's parent-instilled understanding of God. "Their goal seems to be to reform society," she says, "not just the schools." Teachers hurl that charge right back at their critics. "My worst fear is that the religious right wants to have public schools present a certain way of thinking and living," says Tom Conry, president of the teacher's association in Vista, California. "They are not interested in students learning how to discuss, how to think or how to form their own opinions." Since last November, when Christian conservatives captured a majority of Vista's school-board seats, the board has shifted from opposition to neutrality on Proposition 174, a school-choice initiative that will go before California voters next Tuesday. It is expected to be shot down, but if it passes, parents will be entitled to draw $2,600 in government funds if they place their child in a private or parochial school. John Chase of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union, decries such voucher programs as an attempt by religious conservatives to "pull kids out of public schools and educate them in their own philosophy at taxpayer expense." Teachers in districts where the religious right has gained a strong voice complain that politicking and endless debates over curriculum impede their work. In Xenia, Ohio, two religious conservatives on the five-member school board tie up meetings with arguments against self-esteem programs (Weakens respect for parents!) and sex education (Undermines abstinence!). "The time spent on this is taking away from academics," says board president Wanda Kress. "Teachers are constantly afraid they'll do something offensive." Paralysis also threatens Charleston, South Carolina, where debates over the classroom use of a dragon-shaped hand puppet called Pumsy (Demonic!) and attempts to hire a new school nurse (An overture to abortion!) have smothered all classroom innovation. "There is a real fear among administrators and principals of being harangued for any new ideas, so they just don't do anything," says Robert New, the school-board chairman. "We have board members now saying that if a program is controversial, then maybe we should take it out." Yet Charleston's school board does not include a single Christian conservative. Mere fear of the religious right is enough these days to scare school boards into submission. </body> </article> </text>