Ohio's Got A Plan To Pay Neo-Nazi Homeschoolers $22K A Year

The proposed 'Backpack Bill' would spend over a billion dollars on private school and homeschooled students.

Republicans are on a mission to destroy education in this country.

That sentence feels like hyperbole. In fact, it should be hyperbole — and in an ideal world, it would be. In an ideal world, I would be saying that sentence over a minor disagreement about what sort of math the kids should be learning. But it would be impossible to look at what the Right has been doing, particularly over the last few years, and not come to that conclusion. Especially since they have been so very upfront about it.

Rep. Thomas Massie introduced a bill just last month that would abolish the Department of Education , which many of his colleagues think is a swell idea. Charter school cheerleader Betsy DeVos also agrees that the Department of Education, which she used to run, should be abolished. Sen. Rick Scott proposed a plan last year (and is still pushing it) that would eliminate federal funding for education. Republican state governments have been cracking down on what elementary schools, high schools, and even colleges are allowed to teach, banning books all over the place, and working as hard as they can to make life miserable for LGBTQ students and people in general.

Privatizing public education entirely has long been a goal of conservative organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and conservative Christians have been homeschooling for decades in hopes of being able to indoctrinate their children without the problem of outside influences encouraging them to think for themselves.

And that's not even the half of it.

Ohio Republicans, jumping on the "How can we better murder public education — and thus all education, period — in our state" bandwagon have proposed a new program called the "Backpack Bill" that would take over $1 billion in taxpayer money away from public schools and redistribute it to individual students through "education savings accounts."

While this may sound almost socialist, the purpose of this bill is very specifically to funnel money meant for public schools to private schools and homeschoolers. Awkwardly, this would also include Ohio neo-Nazi couple Katja and Logan Lawrence, who attracted attention earlier this year for running a homeschool network that teaches children to be antisemitic white supremacists.

In the same ideal world where "Republicans are on a mission to destroy education in this country" is hyperbole, Republicans would also be more worried about this than kids finding out that gay people exist and that slavery was bad.

As VICE reports:  

This means that Katja and Logan Lawrence, who ran the neo-Nazi Dissident Homeschool Network channel on Telegram, could soon be taking in thousands in taxpayer money every year to teach their four children that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a “deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro.”

“Beginning in 2025, the bill’s Backpack Scholarship Program qualifies any public, nonpublic, or home-educated student enrolling in grades K-12 or the equivalent to receive a scholarship funded through an education savings account… [these] funds may be used to pay tuition and fees to attend a participating nonpublic school or pay for various other educational goods or services. Under the program, students in grades K-8 receive $5,500 and students in grades 9-12 receive $7,500,” the report states.

Crucially, the new bill would not introduce any new oversights to the homeschooling regulations in the state—which are already so lax that the Department of Education concluded last month that the Lawrences were doing nothing illegal and could continue teaching their children a Nazi-inspired curriculum.

Jonathan Kozol, who has been studying and writing about inequalities in the public education system since the 1960s, predicted this whole neo-Nazi homeschooling situation in a 2009 interview:  

Here’s the thing: When people think of the recipients of vouchers or charters, the general public tends to think of the familiar benign model. They say, “Why should we send our kids to a failing school?” instead of asking “What should we be doing to make sure that we don’t have a separate, unequal system which creates failing schools?” It’s a triumph of the individual self-interest over civic virtue. Americans who are drawn to the voucher idea tend to think, “What’s wrong with a nice Catholic school or a Lutheran or a Montessori school?” There’s nothing wrong inherently with that. But constitutionally, once you let this genie out of the bottle you can’t restrict it to the kind of schools that seem benign.

And that's how you end up with paying neo-Nazis $22,000 a year to teach their kids about what a swell guy Hitler was.

We don't just fund public schools with taxpayer money in order to foster individual achievement, we do it because it's what we need as a society. We do it because we factually need people to become doctors, lawyers, scientists, educators, computer programmers, etc. etc. in order to function. That is why those of us who don't have children also pay taxes that go to schools and education — because we benefit from it as well. We do not benefit, however, from neo-Nazis teaching their children about the glory of the Aryan race. We also do not benefit from fundamentalist Christian children being taught through programs like Bill Gothard's Advanced Training Institute. That does not help us, or anyone (including the children, according to many who have since grown up ). Thus, they should not get public funding. Public funding is for things that benefit us as a society.

One of the primary ways Republicans attack important and necessary publicly funded programs is by individualizing them, by pointing out that the money might go to bad people as well. I don't want to do that here. This program is not just bad because it means some taxpayer money might go to some neo-Nazis. It's bad because taking money meant for public schools hurts us as a society and affects our future ability to take care of our own basic needs. You want to talk about fiscal irresponsibility, that's fiscal irresponsibility.

By taking money away from public schools and funneling them into private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling, we make education worse for those who cannot afford those things, furthering economic inequality. The end result of this is that the only children who get the education they need are the rich and the exceptional. That's not only cruel, it's entirely unsustainable.

Jonathan Kozol also described school vouchers as "the single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life" — and I'm sure that was true in 2009. This "Backpack Bill" is school vouchers on steroids — it's much worse and it's far more dangerous.

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