Heather Cox Richardson
speaker
7,479 appearances
87 recordings
10 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 4d ago
Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 86 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 26.
Appearances
But President Andrew Johnson vetoed that bill on the grounds that the federal government had no business messing with education.
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That process, he said, belonged to the states, which for the next century denied black people equal access to schools, excluding them from full participation in American society and condemning them to menial labor.
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Then, in nineteen fifty four, after decades of pressure from black and brown Americans for equal access to public schools, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, unanimously agreed that separate schools were inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional.
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Immediately, white Southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called massive resistance to integration.
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Some Virginia counties closed their public schools.
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Others took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools.
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Within years, these segregation academies would dovetail neatly with the religious schools organized after the nineteen sixty-two Engel v.
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Vitali decision, in which the Supreme Court struck down state mandated prayer in public schools.
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And the nineteen sixty-three Abingdon School District V Shemp decision prohibiting teachers from leading students in prayer and Bible reading.
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The Supreme Court decisions against prayer in schools reinforced the idea that the government opposed family values, and fundamentalists pulled their children out of public schools and created alternative religious schools.
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Fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell began to suggest that public schools should be abolished entirely.
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Both of these developments provided constituents for Ronald Reagan's rise to political power, with a message that public employees had gotten too powerful and that public enterprises should be privatized.
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After Reagan's election, his Secretary of Education commissioned a study of the nation's public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.
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The resulting report, titled A Nation at Risk, announced that the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.
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Although a later study, commissioned in nineteen ninety by the Secretary of Energy, found the data in the original report did not support the report's conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used it to justify school privatization.
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He vowed after the report's release that he would continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education.
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Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.
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The drive to push tax dollars from public schools to private academies through a voucher system remained a top priority for those on the right.
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In his first term, Trump asked Congress to fund school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African American and Latino children.
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These families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious, or home school that is right for them.
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Showing 1881–1900 of 7,479 · page 95 of 374
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