Arkansas education chief stands out as voice of reason at Moms for Liberty rally

I think most of us can agree the following quote makes sense and might even be considered a progressive position.

“We’re working on reimagining the early learning space so that every parent who wants an opportunity to participate in high-quality child care or pre-kindergarten has the ability to do so. … There’s a direct correlation between kindergarten readiness and third-graders reading at or above grade level.”

The speaker was Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva during a June 30 panel discussion at Moms for Liberty’s Joyful Warriors Summit, a quasi-religious gathering of the right-wing and far out.

In that context, you might wonder why Oliva appeared at the national event in Philadelphia. Oliva’s sole reason for attending was to share the changes Arkansas is making in education through Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sander’s LEARNS Act, according to a state Education Department spokesperson.

Indeed, Oliva’s few remarks hewed closely to discussions of his agency’s policies. He stood out by sounding rational and practical while other state education chiefs peppered their remarks with code words and phrases meant to stir up the Christian nationalists and “parents rights” activists in the audience.

Oliva mostly stayed away from the fear-mongering and religious-war hype used by the others on the stage: South Carolina Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver and Oklahoma Education Superintendent Ryan Walters, both only six months into their elected terms of office, and Oliva’s former boss, Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr. 

Diaz’s boss, of course, is Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Walters, a Harding University graduate and former teacher, pandered at every turn to the Moms for Liberty crowd, telling them they should be proud of the extremist label given them by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“You know who else was called a terrorist group, an extremist group? Those Founding Fathers. That’s who you are today. You are the most patriotic, pro-American group in the country,” Walters said to loud applause and cheers. “This is the most important conference to happen in Philadelphia since 1776.”

Sounding more like a televangelist than the head of a state education system, Walters said  “the forces that you all are fighting, these are folks that want to destroy our society, they want to destroy your family, and they want to destroy America as we know it.”

Weaver, the South Carolina superintendent and graduate of Bob Jones University, piled on: “I truly believe that saving our country starts with saving our schools. There is truly nothing more precious that God has created than the hearts and the minds of our young people. And that is what the radical woke left is after.”

“There are going to be forces arrayed against you,” she intoned biblically. “You know them. They’ve already come after you.” 

Weaver told the crowd that opponents will say “you’re just culture warriors” fighting battles that ended decades ago. “Y’all aren’t culture warriors,” she said. “You’re common sense warriors. You are reality warriors.”

The conversation went on like this for roughly an hour, prompted occasionally by questions from moderator Tiffany Justice, one of the co-founders of Moms For Liberty.

Occasionally, someone would actually talk about what makes for a good education. 

“If you care about justice and equality of opportunity, literacy is the foundation,” Weaver said after Justice asked what the four panelists were doing about kids who can’t read at grade level.

But Weaver couldn’t resist a dig. Using a favorite dog whistle, she claimed schools are “teaching a bunch of woke nonsense” and said education needs to ”get back to the basics.”

Diaz and Walters also called for a return to the basics, but what that means beyond erasing transgender kids and removing books from libraries is hard to say based on their remarks.

Diaz talked about the need to be vigilant against so-called indoctrination slipping into textbooks. To him that apparently means no references to LGBTQ people.

“If you only have half your kids reading at third-grade level, but you’re worried about pronouns, then we’re not serving our kids,” he said.

Everyone on stage referenced the “science of reading” and how important it is to “align” early education with it. They talked as if this was a new thing. Weaver noted that the “whole language” approach to teaching reading was dead. Yes, it’s been dead so long it’s turned to dust.

Walters doubled down anyway: “We’ve gone from not doing a good job of teaching the science of reading, not driving home the basics in math to teaching gender ideology and critical race theory.” 

But the science and data point to other reasons for declines in reading and math proficiency. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted children’s education, and studies point to poverty as a significant factor. 

Nevertheless, the Oklahoma education superintendent wasted no time blaming the usual suspects: teachers unions and the academic elite, including the U.S. Department of Education.. 

“We don’t need the federal Department of Education, folks,” he said to wild cheers. Moms for Liberty advocates for the abolition of the federal agency.

The closest Arkansas’ Oliva got to this kind of attack on the education system was when he said school superintendents in his state are telling him that teacher candidates “coming out of our teacher preparation programs aren’t ready for the classroom on day one. So what is higher education doing for four years to prepare teachers?”

One of his initiatives, he said, is assigning a letter grade to every such program on how they teach their candidates the science of reading. “And some schools are not going to be happy with their letter grade.”

While watching these education leaders trying to outdo one another at dog whistling, I had flashbacks to my early years as a reporter in the 1970s covering John Birch Society speakers or listening to a cop tell me how I’d “end up on the wrong end of a stick” for espousing liberal views. “Woke” is just a new shorthand way of saying “commie” or “pinko” or whatever thing you fear.

Folks, our kids are hurting. Yes, we need to treat the literacy crisis as the emergency it is.

But do we really need a bunch of neo-Birchers attacking hard-working teachers and school boards? Or trying to scrub libraries clean of any ideas they disagree with?

Why aren’t the Moms as concerned about alleviating poverty as targeting books and transgender kids?