Conservatives have hated the Department of Education since the second it was created, because they’ve been mad that the federal government made them desegregate schools. But they haven’t had any luck getting rid of it. These days, our geniuses in the state government have decided to look into just turning down federal education funding. Republican Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton gave this wild quote to Vivian Jones at The Tennessean:
“It’s a philosophy thing. Does the federal government provide everything for us? Or was the federal government set up by the states? The federal government was set up by the states,” Sexton said. “We should do everything that we can to be whole and autonomous and independent from the federal government.”
Sexton noted that the U.S. Department of Education did not exist until the 1970s.
“We were doing fine in education until the ’70s,” he said. “It’s not like they increased the attainment level for us.”
This is great! You normally don’t get to see so clearly a person espousing a political philosophy and revealing the shortcomings of that philosophy in one swoop like this. First: The U.S. Department of Education didn’t begin operating until 1980. The law that created it wasn’t signed until the butt end of 1979. Before the 1970s, racists bombed an elementary school (Hattie Cotton in Nashville) and two high schools (Clinton in Clinton and Howard in Chattanooga). This is Sexton’s idea of fine?
Sexton’s parents were both teachers over in Knoxville, a school district that didn't manage to meet court-ordered levels of integration until the 1970s. So maybe Sexton thinks things were fine before integration?
Woo boy. A couple of Black guys in the state legislature hurt Sexton’s feelings, and now he’s openly pining for the days of segregation? Dude is very fragile.
Second: The federal government was set up by the states? Y’all, this is so baffling that, instead of writing this column, I had to stare out the window for 10 minutes trying to rationalize what Sexton could have possibly thought he was saying here. Is Sexton saying that there was some moment after, say, North Carolina declared independence from England but before it became a part of the United States when it was an independent state that it joined together with other independent states to form the United States and hence its government? North Carolina itself doesn’t believe it became a state until 1789 when it ratified the U.S. Constitution.
So North Carolina seems to think the U.S. government made it a state, and not vice versa. Even still, OK, let’s say that what Sexton is saying is that there were 13 entities — and let’s not get into semantics about whether they were states or not at this point — that came together to set up the federal government, and they should remain independent and autonomous in relation to the federal government. What does that have to do with Tennessee? The Tennessee State Museum has a blog entry about how Tennessee became a state.
George Washington put William Blount in charge of the new territory. For the first time there was an official government close to the people it served. With more people moving into the area, they tried to form a state again. This time the federal government had a new Constitution with clear steps on how to become a state. The first step was for a census to be taken. The census showed that they had enough people to form a legislature and write a new state constitution. The state would be called Tennessee. And this time it worked! On June 1, 1796, President George Washington made Tennessee the 16th state to join the United States.
We’d tried to form a state once and could not. The president of the federal government put William Blount in charge of us, and then we took the steps the federal government told us we had to take, and then the federal government made us a state. I read the whole blog post and didn’t see a paragraph about how Tennessee then quickly designed a time machine and went back to 1775 to be one of the founding states of the country. So either that’s because Tennessee didn’t create the federal government, or the federal government is covering up our contribution as a state because it doesn’t want Idaho to find out about our superior time-traveling technology. Why won’t Joe Biden admit Tennessee was a founding colony? I blame critical race theory.
Can you even imagine if our schools had to teach this bullshit? Little Timmy learns that the federal government was created by the states. Little Timmy goes to college and learns that the last state to be admitted to the Union was in 1959. Little Timmy’s midterm contains this question: When was our federal government formed? If the states created the federal government, then it couldn’t have happened until after 1959, right?
Sexton had better make it illegal for kids to go to college, or else Tennessee’s students are going to be pretty damn embarrassed by how much Tennessee’s schools prepared them for encountering actual, difficult concepts like, “When a thing happens after another thing, it did not happen before that other thing.”
Third (and my favorite part of this baloney): Sexton — a Republican — thinks it was better before the 1970s? Before the 1970s, Democrats had been governors of Tennessee going back to the Alfred Taylor years. (Taylor was mostly voted in for having a dog, which, you know, fair.) Democrats had a stranglehold on the state legislature. Sexton wants to go back to when Democrats ran the state? That’s his big idea?
OK. Usually the speaker of the House doesn’t pine for the leadership of his opponents, but how else are we supposed to take this? Because he wants to go back to the Republican national agenda before the 1970s? He wants Nixon? Or maybe he’s dreaming of Ford — the pro-choice internationalist who provided a path to amnesty for draft dodgers? Sure. Bring on more of those Republicans.
All joking aside, Cameron Sexton wasn’t alive before the 1970s. He has no direct experience with those vaunted times when white Southerners didn’t have to go to school with Black Southerners. He doesn’t know if schools were better then. And now he sends his kids to private school way, way outside of the district he represents. What firsthand experience does he have with public schools now? He certainly has no investment in them.
Cameron Sexton has illustrated that he doesn’t have a basic understanding of history. He can’t tell a 7 from an 8. He struggles with concepts like “before” and “after.” And honestly, you don’t have to be a genius to serve in the state legislature. So normally, no harm, no foul. But this is the quality of person we’ve put in charge of deciding whether our schools work how they should?
Then we are also dumb.
