Is the GOP Calling Public Schools “Communist” Just Code for Racism?

Michael Peroutka is the Republican Party’s nominee — elected in the primary this week — for Maryland Attorney General. He wants to close the state’s public schools because, he says, they are “communist.”

Do you believe he’s really afraid that the heir to Fidel Castro’s presidential palace will overthrow America? They don’t even have communists in Russia anymore. The Chinese use the word, but they don’t do it: capitalism is thriving there, even beating us in some ways.

So does he really think public schools are communist? Or is there something else going on here?

For three generations political scientists have tried to figure out exactly why Republicans have been so dead set against public schools.

One theory is that, like Donald Trump famously said, they “love the poorly educated.” Uninformed (or mal-informed: there’s a difference between “poorly educated” and “less educated”) people are easier to manipulate than those who are well-educated.

Another theory is that the billionaires who took over the GOP in the 1980s simply hate the idea of paying taxes to support the education of the kids of people who fail to get rich on their own by “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.”

After all, when David Koch ran for Vice President on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, one of the key planks of his platform was to not only end all public schools but to also end any government…