Republicans have been waging a war on public education for decades, a war based upon retrogressive, hate based, throwback ideologies that seek to demean, denounce, marginalize, dehumanize and ERASE those who they consider as something other.
A war that sprang from opposition to integration, forced busing and the like, and that has now morphed into a cultural war between what they call THEIR "right" and THEIR "choice" - meaning, at the expense of the "rights" and "choices" of those they wish to DEMONIZE.
In order to facilitate this nationalistic throwback, "leave it to beaver" 50's TV vision of America - where blacks, gays, Jews, and other minorities either didn't exist or weren't spoken of (excepting maybe as nannies, butlers and such), the Republican effort has been geared toward the expansion and legitimization of public funds (vouchers and other funding) directed toward private and parochial schools.
Schools in which ideologies as well as curriculum can be molded and modified to reflect right winged, nationalistic, MAGA notions of what constitutes patriotism, a real marriage, a legitimate religion, accepted gender, etc.
Thomas Hartman, in his recent article How to identify fascism and why public schools are on the GOP's hit list (and also published here) covers this quite adequately.
In fact, those objectives had already been CLEARLY spelled out (despite the pretentiously self-aggrandizing wording in which they were framed) in various right wing publications, including the 2016 Republican Party Platform, (pg. 34 "Choice in Education") and the Heritage Foundation's “Blueprint for a New Administration” (pg. 13).
Furthermore, right winged entities and their ideological associates like the Kochs have been hard at work, leveraging their influence upon higher education via funding and grants predicated upon granting THEM the right to not only dictate curriculum, but also the hiring of faculty.
And, lest we forget, when NCLB was inspired by a Reagan era report ("A Nation at Risk") and signed into law by G.W.Bush, it initially received bipartisan support, in spite of its draconian nature and a flawed construct based upon (largely unfounded) assumptions and an instructional model that focused on certain subjects at the expense of others - including enrichment and arts activities that research has found to be a integral component of a well rounded education.
Further, NCLB was later determined to have had little impact on improvement in overall student performance, in spite of the aggressive (and often punitive) nature of the act, the whole of which causes one to wonder (in hindsight) whether failure was the objective in the first place, seeing as how right winged proponents of private school vouchers are so eager to discredit public schools in support of using taxpayer money to fund the former…
...to fund schools that often engage in forms of selective admission and other policies, to the exclusion of poorer, behaviorally challenged, ESL, and special needs students.
... to fund schools often taught by non-certified teachers, wherein incidentally, neither teacher nor student are required to prove academic growth on a yearly basis via federally mandated performance objectives and high stakes end of year testing, like public schools are.
But then, this is how Republicans WANT it, in education and most everything else.. autonomy, lack of oversight, and the ability to do as they PLEASE. And Hartman addresses this as well.
Make no mistake about it, the current ' MAGA "anti-woke" cultural war upon education has at its CORE a retrogressive HATE BASED MENTALITY that includes the demonization, marginalization and exclusion of students (and sometimes even their parents) who don't fit the MAGA THROWBACK model, with regard to race, sexuality, religion, and whatever else THEY deem unacceptable - resulting in the fomenting and promotion of hate, bigotry, violence, and the persecution of even the very young, solely on the basis of who and what they are.
This assault upon diversity, inclusion, literature, and historical FACT (including lessons on colonization, slavery, segregation, the Holocaust, MLK, the Civil Rights Movement, The Trail of Tears, Japanese internment camps, the American Nazi movement, etc.) are all TRUTHS that the current Republican MAGA party wants to erase…
FACTS that THEY don’t want taught, for fear that their progeny just MIGHT make the connection between some of the more loathsome, historical moments of hate, prejudice, and intolerance in America's history
and what the Republican Party STANDS FOR TODAY.
The bottom line being, The MAGA right's "anti-WOKE" MOVEMENT is about supplanting TRUTH with RANK IGNORANCE.
And rank ignorance is EXACTLY what they WANT.