Fox hosts have started calling for the demolition of the public school system – Media Matters for America

Fox News hosts have begun calling for the wholesale destruction of the K-12 public school system in a drastic escalation of the networks yearslong campaign against teachers.

Laura Ingraham claimed on her Thursday night broadcast that a lot of people are saying it's time to defund government education or at least defund it by giving vouchers to parents, adding, And I think that just has to happen. Greg Gutfeld similarly declared that private school vouchers are needed because public schools are a destructive system, and he described the National Education Associations teachers as the KKK with summers off during a discussion earlier that day on The Five.

Conservatives have long sought to undermine public education, and proposals to eliminate the Department of Education and strip the public treasury bare with private school vouchers are staples of Republican campaigns. But education policy was not a priority for President Donald Trump, and that debate slipped to the background during most of his tenure.

Fox and its allies have waged an opportunistic assault against public schools and teachers in the years since. Their calls to defund government education mark a strident new phase in that effort and if Republican politicians follow their lead, the party will be courting disaster. The public school system serves nearly 50 million children, and polls show parents overwhelmingly approve of the job their childs school is doing.

Foxs new calls to tear down the public school system comes just two years after the network argued that lack of in-person instruction in public schools was a calamity that was hurting viewers children. At the time, many state and local governments had shuttered their public schools, seeking to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Fox responded to those efforts by denouncing teachers and their unions, arguing that public schools provided an essential service for students and their parents that should not be infringed upon, regardless of the cost in COVID-19 cases and deaths. The networks hosts scoffed at the notion of spending more money to try to make classrooms safer from the virus.

Ingraham, for example, said in July 2020 that teachers unions were the culprits behind closed schools, explaining: This is unbelievable. This is like child abuse at some point. From a medical and a common sense standpoint, the decision to put kids back in school should be a slam-dunk yes.

As the pandemic waned, Fox hosts changed their focus from arguing that lack of instruction was hurting students to arguing that their instruction itself posed a threat. Public school teachers, previously scapegoated as villains for purportedly not wanting to teach, became the villains because of what they were purportedly teaching.

In 2021, Fox personalities and their fellow right-wing propagandists began obsessing over discussions of race in public school curricula, which they dishonestly described as critical race theory. The pundits warned that teachers who taught this critical race theory would warp the minds of American children and brainwash your child. Working alongside right-wing think tanks, activist organizations, and politicians, they sought to turn racial anxiety into political energy to win elections for Republican candidates and pass laws changing how race was taught in schools.

The right soon began lumping critical race theory together with public school curricula on LGBTQ identity. By the spring of 2022, the networks personalities had whipped themselves and their viewers into a hateful frenzy targeting LGBTQ teachers and students.

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Fox hosts have started calling for the demolition of the public school system - Media Matters for America