Oran Smith:
Our guest today is Jonathan Butcher. Jonathan Butcher is the Will Skillman fellow in education in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Goldwater Institute. I started to say of Arizona, but Goldwater is everywhere now. He also allows us to list him as a fellow with Palmetto Promise Institute, and we’ve benefited from his scholarship on numerous occasions. In fact, we have a new piece that we have written together that’s coming out shortly. Jonathan is also a member of the South Carolina Public Charter School District Board of Trustees, where he’s Governor Henry McMaster’s appointee. He is a graduate of Furman University, and of all the places in the world, he got to choose where he wanted to live, and he has chosen my native upstate Greenville in particular. Honored that you chose South Carolina as your home. I know you had probably warm memories already from your Furman days.
Jonathan Butcher:
Well, I was glad to be back in Greenville. It was a nice homecoming when we moved back. My family has really enjoyed it. It has a lot to offer.
Oran Smith:
Yes, it really does. I was trying to place you sort of in an extreme as far as time goes with Furman. My parents both graduated from Furman in 1954. You were there shortly after that, but I’m not sure if you were a student at the time of the great Clint Dempsey, the world soccer phenomena. I’m not sure if he was after you or before you, but somewhere along that.
Jonathan Butcher:
I think he was just after. I had the chance when I was there, there’s a gentleman who was on the football team who was drafted by the 49ers. Well, and another who was drafted by the Steelers. So yeah, we had some great athletes to watch. Furman Athletics has a great reputation.
Oran Smith:
It does. Great history. Well, because you’re one of the foremost experts on education, I only have about 150 questions that I’d like to pose to you. But first of all, I think in the piece that you and I have drafted what we call “Education vs. Indoctrination” — you wrote a marvelous introduction to that piece. I really like the way you tee up an education conversation starting with performance, and I think NAEP scores are kind of where you start. Let’s just sort of get a set. What is the situation right now academically for K-12 public education?
Jonathan Butcher:
Well, for South Carolina parents who are coming out of the pandemic, they should remember reading headlines in either the Greenville News or one of the other major papers in Columbia or Charleston that said that the share of students earning Ds and Fs had increased during the COVID pandemic, which was a clear sign that they were going to be facing some obstacles and really an uphill battle to make up lost ground once the pandemic was officially ruled as over. And it was only just a few weeks ago that the Nation’s report card released test results for fourth and eighth graders in math and reading. This is what happens every other year typically. During COVID, they skipped a year. So we really now have a comparison of this nation’s report card from 2019, right before COVID was set upon us, and now 2021 when we can say, all right, this is how students are doing at this point in time, and the results were not good.
In fact, the results were that students lost perhaps as much as 30 years of achievement gains that had been built up from one student cohort to another. In math in particular, we’re talking about a loss of about eight points. Now, remember, on the nation’s report card, a 10-point movement, either way, represents a school year. So we are saying now that nationwide, on average, we can say that students may have lost an entire year in math.
Oran Smith:
Wow.
Jonathan Butcher:
That is shocking. When you look at urban areas around the country, the numbers are about that size. Chicago, Milwaukee, LA.
Oran Smith:
Yes. As far as South Carolina goes, I have to admit, as we’re waiting for the results to come out, I always hope and pray that we don’t show up as losing further ground to Mississippi. Because it always seems like from the beginning of time, it’s always been, thank goodness for Mississippi because their scores will always be lower. Then I guess it was the last, it was 2019 or maybe in 2017 when we had dipped below Mississippi, and that was quite a hard pill to swallow. Maybe we’ve leveled out compared to Mississippi, but we certainly are not doing very well as the Palmetto state.
Jonathan Butcher:
Well, Mississippi’s made some great gains in reading, especially in recent years, and they’re really a success story, I think that some are pointing to. They’re one of the few, though. I think even as we went into 2019, the scores on the nation’s report card had effectively leveled off or even begun to dip a little bit. So it’s not as though things were just going great and swimmingly up till 2019, and then suddenly COVID hit, and all the scores suddenly went down. Scores had actually been trending downward in general overall. We’re talking about nationwide averages here, but to give us a general sense of the direction in which the entire public school system is moving, things had been trending downward even before 2019. So yeah, that’s why, hopefully, the solutions that we’re going to talk about here for South Carolina and what’s being done in other states are so essential right now.
Oran Smith:
Yes. Well, you would think with the pressure of academic performance and with COVID and learning loss and all of these challenges that our public schools face, you would think that would be a clarion call or a fire bell in the night. I think, as a great American once said, that we really need to focus on academic performance and not become distracted with other things. You have written a book about some of those other things, and that is your 2022 book. I want to talk about your 2019 published book as well if we’ve got time. There’s a 2022 book, which was Splintered, Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth. The point of that book, one of the points is clearly that a lot of our public school leaders have not been focusing like a laser on academics. There have been other things that vary. Wouldn’t you say just straight out of the gate here that these issues, these political points, these politically driven issues have been a distraction for our students and for schools in general?
Jonathan Butcher:
Well, without question. Look, one of the things that drove me to put the book together was that over and over again, we hear from the mainstream media and from so-called elites in higher education and even in government that critical race theory is not taught in schools. Or we’ll hear critical race theory is really just a way to understand race in the United States, and neither of those is true. Critical race theory is most certainly taught in schools, and there are examples in my book where you can, by name, find the words critical race theory in school systems around the US. Then the idea that critical race theory has some sort of redeeming value. There’s this concept of, if we talk about race, we have to concede certain things about people according to their ethnicity or their group identity.
The reality is that critical race theory was developed out of something called critical theory and then critical legal theory with the ultimate aim, and this is the key … the ultimate aim was to drive society leftward. The goal was to rejuvenate Marxism specifically and to move all of the cultural consciousness in the United States in a radical leftward direction. So there’s no compromise here when Ibram X Kendi writes that discrimination is necessary today to make up for past discrimination, and it will be necessary in the future to make up for present discrimination. That’s not a Christmas card.
Oran Smith:
He’s talking about commitment to discrimination.
Jonathan Butcher:
You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. There are other things that I talk about in my book as well, especially around the notion of America’s sense of national identity. But for anyone looking for evidence that they’re not crazy, these ideas really are radical.
Oran Smith:
Right, yeah. That’s one thing on this relatively new podcast that you have joined us on today that we really want to bore down on, and that is, these are issues that are real. This is not hysteria. This is not something that is stirred up for some purpose other than to find out what the truth is. So when Palmetto Promise Institute asked people to send in examples of what they felt were critical race theory teaching in schools, we received a number of responses. Even some of the national organizations that keep track of this on a regular basis have numerous references to South Carolina, where this has happened.
What amazes me, I guess, is if you are an intellectual, one of the things that seems you should be committed to is sort of a liberal sense, maybe in a John Locke sort of liberal sense, let a thousand flowers bloom. Let’s debate issues. Let’s be open let’s have a conversation. That’s sort of what classical liberal democracy is all about. But Jonathan, do you feel like those who disagree with the tenets of critical race theory, do you think that they are telling us that we are bad people and that we are wrong?
Jonathan Butcher:
Well, look, critical race theorists say that they are skeptical of the liberal order. They are skeptical of the rule of law. They’re skeptical of rights and the ideas that came out of the enlightenment that give us really what some of the founding fathers wrote as our sense of freedom and opportunity and representative government. They say that directly. That they are skeptical of these very bedrock ideas on which our government, our culture, and our economy are based. So no, you’re not crazy when you look sideways at someone who says, “Hey, look, equity is more important than equality and diversity. Equity and inclusion is the only way forward.” Because they’ve really redefined those terms. They’re not what they meant during the civil rights movement.
Oran Smith:
That is a great opportunity here for you to help us and our folks understand the difference between the current phrase that I don’t think existed very long ago, equality versus equity. Can you give us a quick comparison of those two terms or at least the way that they’re understood?
Jonathan Butcher:
Well, sure. So equality under the law is the idea that the law treats everyone the same regardless of their ethnicity, the color of their skin, their sex, or their country of origin. Equity means that everyone receives the same amount. The only way for equity to be a part of any culture, or any system, is through coercion. There’s this graphic that was making the rounds on social media during the pandemic in particular, where you have three children of different heights trying to look over the fence at a baseball game, and they’re all standing on boxes. Then it says that is equality because the short child can’t see over the fence. The middle child really has their eyes right at the top of the fence, and it’s only the tall one who can see. Well, then you rearrange the boxes so that they’re all standing on a box that allows them to see over the fence, and they say that’s equity.
Well, what they don’t explain to you is that somebody’s got to be in control of the boxes. What if somebody decides that the short person is going to still stay on the short box regardless of their choices and their behavior? When you apply this to real life, what you’re saying is that no matter how hard you work, no matter how much effort you put into your career or your investment in your family or your investment in your community, you will get the same results as your neighbor regardless.
Oran Smith:
Right.
Jonathan Butcher:
Because we should all only receive the same thing. So you’re coercing. You’re taking things away from someone who earned it, and you’re giving it to someone who did not.
Oran Smith:
Well, this is causing other things to make a lot of sense as well because no conversation about CRT or anti-racism or equity can go very long before we start talking about the evils of capitalism. Which, I have to tell you, surprised me when I started trying to understand some of the underpinnings of this. Then suddenly, I’m watching a presentation, and in the middle of a very interesting conversation that I agreed with none about these issues, suddenly a presenter says, “Well, the problem here and the source and the connection of racism is capitalism, and we should name it. We should name capitalism as the enemy.” Which, makes me scratch my head, particularly when you’ve got Thomas Sol saying that the only way that socialism works is exactly what you just said. There’s got to be forced. You’ve got to force someone to part with something that they have produced and redistribute it like the boxes at the fence. So why does this kind of theory go immediately into this unprovoked attack on capitalism?
Jonathan Butcher:
Well, start with one of the modern-day exposers of critical race theory, Ibram X Kendi, who says that capitalism and racism are conjoined twins. So he says that because in the 1920s, there were a group of German Marxists who were very frustrated that the Marxist efforts and the movement in Germany did not overthrow the ruling class like the Bolshevik did in Russia. So they went back to the drawing board to develop Marxism for what they thought would be the rest of the 20th century. They created what became known as the Frankfurt School, which was a part of the University of Frankfurt. In a strange twist, the Nazis chased these neo-Marxist, or what became known as critical theorists at the Frankfurt School, out of Germany. They landed at Columbia University in 1937, and from there, they began to influence a generation of educators and students, particularly in law schools, but it was also in the feminist movement as well as other parts of society.
Art was also a part of this whole critical theory movement, which was an effort to apply Marxism — the idea that there should be a power struggle or is a power struggle between different economic classes — to culture. They wanted to apply that to culture and say that the only way to explain culture is through a constant power struggle. Well, critical legal theorists in the 1960s, 1970s in particular, coming out of the Civil Rights movement, said that American law has been created by the powerful to keep themselves in power. That was critical legal theory in a nutshell. Well, some critical legal theorists in the 1980s and 1990s said the critical legal theorists had it almost right, but the real issue is racial conflict.
So that is the point at which critical race theory was birthed out of critical legal theory. They said that the Civil Rights movement, that the critical legal theory movement, so those on the right and the left, were not radical enough. They didn’t move left enough. So they, again, base their ideas on Marxism. One of the critical legal theorists, Angela Harris, wrote in 2002 that Marx’s dazzling analysis of capitalism is still riveting to contemporary theorists. So even today, critical race theorists pay tribute to Marx.
Oran Smith:
Riveting. Yes. Well, of course, they don’t seem to stop there because tearing down the system that has built our economy since our founding, and that has created prosperity that’s been found nowhere else in the world, at least in a broad sense, that’s not sufficient, it appears. Because the other path that this seminar I’m describing took was a gratuitous shot at Christopher Columbus and the American Army in World War II, and various other things that I saw could be traced directly to the historian Howard Zen. Everything he had to say was advocacy. He was an advocate historian. So not only did they go after our economic system, they’re trying to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Why are they going after America’s role in World War II? That seems very gratuitous.
Jonathan Butcher:
Well, Howard Zen was also allergic to footnotes, apparently, because he wrote a book called A People’s History of the United States that contained exactly zero, and it was a retelling of American history from the perspective of Native American, and then the perspective of blacks in America, all with the effort to condemn the American experiment, and to say that what we thought we knew about the founding fathers was not true, and that America is just the result of pillage and plunder and destruction. Listen, the fact is that we do need to be realistic about slavery in the United States.
Oran Smith:
Absolutely right.
Jonathan Butcher:
We do need to teach that was an institution that was contrary to our founding ideals. So not only was it wrong to enslave another person, but it ran counter to the very freedoms on which America was based. So we can teach that to our students while at the same time saying we overcame slavery. It took too long. But when you look at world history back over the millennia, slavery has been a part of nearly every major civilization throughout history. That doesn’t make it right. It just makes it exceptional for any civilization to then, by its own choice, do away with it.
Oran Smith:
Yes.
Jonathan Butcher:
Again, it lasted too long. There was too much damage caused by it. However, even despite that, for the United States to emerge from the era of slavery, a failed reconstruction, and then the Jim Crow era and be able to say this no longer has a place in our law, discrimination is no longer a part of what we know is American. That is something that we need to hand to the next generation and say, “This is your inheritance.” This is the legacy that we need you to carry forward. That discrimination has no place in our culture.
Oran Smith:
I might even go a step further to say that it is critical that we understand that the legacy of slavery is still something that we struggle with in our society today, and that should not be glossed over. That’s not critical race theory. That’s just an understanding of what happens when people are brought here in chains, and then they have to have a livelihood after that. So all of this discrimination is something we should talk about, and that’s not talking about critical race theory. That’s just describing American history.
Jonathan Butcher:
Sure, and nor is it condemning the United States to say those things. I think it is just as significant to say that it is remarkable. It is a sign, I think, of the health of the American experiment of how many Americans who are black have been successful. Remember, the population of black Americans is really only 10-12%. They are numerically a small portion of the ethnic diversification in the United States. So the success of those Americans who are black that they have had is something we should celebrate. It’s something that we should elevate so much that they can pass it to the next generation. That’s different than what critical race theory is trying to do.
Oran Smith:
Yes.
Jonathan Butcher:
Which is to say that your skin color is the only thing that matters. And that all we can expect is a constant struggle between identity groups. They’re two very different messages.
Oran Smith:
Identity politics. Well, I really like what Tim Scott had said about this. He said a hundred years ago, kids were taught that the color of their skin was their most important characteristic, and if they looked a certain way, they were inferior. Today, kids, again, are being taught that the color of their skin defines them and that if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor. Tim Scott is always very inspiring, but I thought that that quote really brought it home to exactly what we’re talking about here on that issue.
Well, I’d like to change channels a little bit and talk just briefly here about one of the most unique innovations in American education that has hit since the founding of the country, I think, and it became a trend about 2011. You were present at the creation, Mr. Butcher, in Arizona when all of this happened. I’m going to merge a couple of things here, maybe unfairly, but let me make a shot at it. It’s very important that when government is seeking to encourage innovation and education, that whatever is done be done legally and constitutionally.
So there had been some constitutional issues, particularly at the state level, because of these Blaine amendments that forbade any state funds from going to support private schools. Here in South Carolina, we have had a history of debate over our Blaine amendment. Our amendment was modified in 1972 to forbid any direct — we remove the words “or indirect” — aid may go to private or religious schools. So Arizona, I think I’m fair in saying, had sort of a similar Blaine amendment. So someone, and I think we know who it was, but had the genius to say, “Well, really what we need is an ability for a parent to choose the most specific education to tailor an education for their child, and a person’s wealth should not interfere with their ability to have this opportunity to tailor this education.”
So education savings accounts, which we call here in South Carolina in our proposed legislation, education scholarship accounts, were born in Arizona, and they are sweeping the nation. I guess I would call it ESA 1.0, which was Arizona and Florida and North Carolina and Mississippi. Then, wow, all of a sudden in 2021 ESA 2.0, which has kind of left 1.0 in the dust, particularly in what an ESA is starting to look like in West Virginia and in Arizona. All of those 2021 events, which virtually doubled the number of ESA states, is starting to trickle into South Carolina. As you know, our ESA bill died on about the one-half-foot line. We were trying to punch it in the end zone, and it died right on in the shadows of the goalposts. So we didn’t get it done, but we have hopes of getting it done next year. Tell me why you think the ESA concept is such an innovative concept and why we need them here in South Carolina.
Jonathan Butcher:
Well, we used to talk about school choice in terms of just that, right? Allowing parents to choose a school that meets their child’s needs. It’s still very important. There are still families who have their sights set on a private school or a charter school that they feel would be the best place for their children. With an education savings account, though, the state deposits a portion of a child’s funds from the state funding formula into a private spending account that parents can use to buy education products and services for their children. Instead of just choosing a school, they can choose a personal tutor, an education therapist, a set of textbooks, or part of a curriculum, and pay private school tuition or just decide to educate their child at home. So you’ve suddenly created a way for families to uniquely meet the needs of their children.
Look, anybody who’s a parent knows that every child is different. Even children in the same family have different needs. So with an account, a family can customize the experience that their child is going to go through. So coming out of COVID, we talked about the test score problems. We haven’t even mentioned the statements from the Academy of Pediatrics and various other health organizations that said that we have a mental health crisis right now among students in schools. So with these different differing needs, we need something for parents to be able to say, all right, I need a tutor in math, but I also need my child to talk to a counselor about some of these thoughts of suicide that they’ve expressed to me or that I’ve just seen in my child’s life. This is nothing short of urgent here, right?
We’re talking about a generation of students who may have lost a full year or more of their education and a mental health crisis happening at the same time. So, I think with these accounts, I believe that we are charting a course for the future so that, when the job market begins to change, and students need different skills, parents can adjust their education experience accordingly. Or if they decide they need to save more money for college, in many states, the account laws allow them to do that. You can roll money over from year to year. So this is very exciting. There are 10 states now across the US that offer accounts to some population of students, and Arizona and West Virginia allow it for nearly every child in the state, which I believe, frankly, changes the whole conversation now.
Oran Smith:
That is a game changer.
Jonathan Butcher:
Yeah. It’s not just are you allowing school choice, but are you giving this to every child?
Oran Smith:
Yes. Again, on this podcast, we want to talk about how policy is related to real South Carolinians. I just think that if you have the funds to do it, you can buy a home in the correct neighborhood, and you can exercise school choice even if you’re just choosing your public school by where you purchase your home, or of course, you can pay for private tuition or whatever. So lots of people have choice but those of us who are in many ways the most vulnerable, those are the ones that don’t have choice. Education scholarship accounts represent a way that every person, every individual, real South Carolinians, could benefit from that kind of policy.
It’s part of a healthy landscape. Education Savings Accounts are a great option for some. South Carolina’s charter school sector has become very, very healthy, especially over the past few years, even despite what happened in COVID. I think that’s because there were such strong leaders in the charter school movement to hold things together while the ship was rocking back and forth. So ESAs, charter schools, homeschooling, all of these things can exist at the same time and meet the different needs of students from different backgrounds.
That’s a good kind of diversity. We like that diversity.
Jonathan Butcher:
And inclusive. It’s very inclusive.
Oran Smith:
Inclusive and empowering. Yes.
Jonathan Butcher:
That’s right.
Oran Smith:
Just one last diversion. And that is, we’ve talked mostly about K-12 education. I think you and I may have traded emails at some point last week. There’s an outrage going on in higher education nearly every week. I think I saw come across the wire that in Alabama that the Supreme Court has sided with a group that is fighting the University of Alabama’s policy that they decide where free speech can take place. There are certain free speech zones, and outside of that, you’re not allowed free speech. Then I think there was a Cornell incident. I just don’t understand why colleges can’t embrace the principles of, well, for instance, the University of Chicago statement on free speech that says the university is not going to take a position on issues.
The university is going to do what universities do, and that provides a forum for people to speak their minds to oppose positions that they may find even not just wrong or that they disagree with. They might even find them to be repulsive, but they have every right to contest those principles from each side on a level playing field without the universities involving themselves. I kind of thought that’s what college was all about.
Jonathan Butcher:
Well, so the Calvin Report out of the University of Chicago from the late 1960s, early 1970s, dealt with institutional neutrality. There’s the Chicago statement, which is a little more contemporary or a little more recent than that, that says that a college should not protect a student from ideas with which they disagree. I think we’re getting close to about a hundred schools around the country that have adopted the Chicago statement on free speech. The Calvin Report is part of a concept that schools should be looking to adopt as well. I have a chapter in my book, Splinter, that really talks about the source of all this being critical theory.
Academia has been the Petri dish in which the virus of critical theory has developed over the past century. So when students shout down a professor or an invited speaker using words like decolonization and microaggression and safe space and all that, they are parroting the words from the critical theory lexicon, and they are putting critical theory and critical race theory to work on their campus. It creates division, it creates disruption, and it all goes back to this theory with its truth and roots in Marxism.
Oran Smith:
Yes. Well, and fortunately, we’re starting to even hear some liberal voices, people that would consider themselves left of center, that just don’t like the idea of shutting down discussion and debate. I think of Jonathan McWhorter, who wrote the book Woke Liberalism. He is not a political conservative, but he is just concerned about what it’s doing to us to shut down debate and prevent education from being what it’s really supposed to be.
Jonathan Butcher:
Yeah, that’s right. Bill Maher, the talk show host, he also is appropriately so harsh to the woke crowd, especially when it comes to free speech. There are others, Barry Weiss, who is conservative on some issues and not on others. So I think that for people who have thought deeply about the meaning of classical liberalism, the meaning of freedom, and the meaning and the value of free speech, understand that this isn’t a right, left, conservative-liberal issue. This is an issue of whether or not we as a civilization, as a society, can long survive.
Oran Smith:
Well, Jonathan, it’s always a pleasure. I encourage anyone who is listening to the sound of my voice at this time to pick up any of your books. The most recent ones, I think I see them over your shoulders there. One, the 2019 book The Not So Great Society about the great society and its impact on the expansion of the federal government on education in particular. That’s a must-read. Then the relatively new one, I think it came out in April or so of this year, and that is Splintered, Critical Race Theory, and the Progressive War on Truth.
I’m also glad to say that you can monitor Palmetto Promise Institute for a new booklet, a new dossier that will be published. Jonathan was the author of the introduction to this piece called Education Versus Indoctrination, which I think you’ll find very enlightening as well. So Jonathan, always great to talk to you, and look forward to hearing you again in the chambers of the House and Senate. I hope you’ll agree to come down and testify once again on how ESAs work and how they can be beneficial to South Carolina students. Always enjoy having you testify in the State House, and thank you for your time today.
Jonathan Butcher:
Thank you.
