How Do Republicans Propose to Help Children?

In SC by defunding schools, punishing teachers and blocking medical care

My heart is going out to Florida students and teachers these days, who have to deal with recent laws that make it a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, to provide students with certain books or materials. To protect themselves, teachers are emptying their classrooms of books, lest one of them be on the forbidden list and risk jail time. A Florida dad tweeted about it, in case you want to feel really depressed looking at an empty school library.

South Carolina legislators, eager to join the “anti-CRT” and transphobic bandwagon, have proposed their own bill to restrict inclusive teaching. While it doesn’t make teachers into potential felons, it does punish any schools that are in violation by taking away 5% of their funding. So, if teachers and administrators step out of line, we punish…. the children? Full text of the bill here, and the ACLU of South Carolina’s take here. Remember that despite the labeling of these laws under the guise of “parental rights” these bills are racist, homophobic, and misogynist, because they are trying to prohibit teaching material that is inclusive of students of color, LGBTQ students and girls.

Strand book store display, 2013. Artist Topher MacDonald.

Speaking of making sure kids in our state don’t get what they need, another bill just passed the Senate and is headed to the House that would fund a voucher program to the tune of 90 million dollars. Disguised as an attempt to help children living in poverty attend private (read: religious, unregulated) schools, the bill would transfer a huge amount of state tax money to those schools. In a state that so underfunds its public education system that the feds have to step in, I’m pretty dubious this is going to improve education outcomes, since it hasn’t in all the other places that have tried it, as this education expert explains here.

The SC state legislature seems in lockstep with the rest of the Republican-controlled legislatures around the country, taking up bill templates and pushing them through the legislative process with little to no public debate or consideration. There’s a bunch of new bills to completely ban abortion, despite the SC Supreme Court declaring abortion bans unconstitutional and a violation of women’s privacy rights. There are also a slew of bills to ban gender-affirming care, including banning care for anyone under the age of 26. One of these bills, H. 3730, is called the Millstone Act, in reference to a Bible passage that anyone that harms a child should be killed, which I guess is an implicit threat to doctors and trans advocates that if they fight for or provide gender-affirming care they should be murdered? The co-sponsors of the bill are Representative Thomas Beach representing Anderson and Laurens County’s own Stewart Jones, if you’d like to contact them to register your objections to invoking violence and lazily copying bills from Christian nationalists in Oklahoma.

I know I’m just someone with a doctorate, but all this mess is so exhausting. The manufacturing of fake problems to maintain power instead of actually governing to improve the lives of South Carolinians should really be an outrage to our citizens. My first-year students regularly confess to me that they can count on one hand the number of books they read in high school. A significant portion of my Introduction to Literature course is dedicated to making the case that reading literature is something they’re going to want to do in their lives. One way I try to make this argument is by assigning books that might be relevant to them and their lived realities. My course this semester is on banned books, and we started with the most banned book in America: Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye. And they all read it, and I can tell by thumbing through the stack of essays they just turned in that they were really taken with its messages. The real problem in schools is that students aren’t reading enough. We shouldn’t be emptying the shelves.

We could make some real progress on the actual problems facing our state, if the Republican-led legislature would stop plagiarizing special interest groups’ legislative templates and work together to address our shockingly high rates of maternal mortality, child poverty, lack of parental leave, and teacher shortages. In 2024 we need to run candidates in all of the races, get invested in state and local politics, and demand that our politicians work for us and not far-right think tanks. Speaking of, Nikki Haley is running for president. Sigh. Recommend Paul Bower’s piece on why you shouldn’t be excited.