Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years.
The culture war battles we fight over our public schools are fundamentally disagreements about American values: what does it mean to be an American, and in whose image do we build our public schools?
“When Americans start fighting over their schools, you can be fairly sure of one thing: it probably isn’t really about school.”
— Jennifer Berkshire & Jack Schneider,
The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual
From working as Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration to laying the foundation of the modern conservative education reform movement, Diane Ravitch—a one-time champion of No Child Left Behind—spent most of her life as a Republican with conservative values. The story of her life, as told in her 2025 memoir, is the story of the American Century. As today’s culture war on “wokeness” and “leftist indoctrination” targets diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools, Ravitch’s memoir makes a powerful case study for teaching these core American values.
Born in Houston in 1938, Diane recounts celebrating VJ Day with her family as a young child, surrounded by returning sailors and the pop of firecrackers. She learned to write with a quill pen and attended a segregated high school when the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. The descendant of Polish Jews who came to America in the 1850s, Diane experienced a level of antisemitism and misogyny in her personal and professional life that by today’s standards would be galling (and illegal). She learned as an adult that the entire Jewish community where her grandfather was born was murdered in the Holocaust.
Ravitch’s interest in education didn’t begin until she began attending community meetings as the only white person in the room with parents in Harlem, New York who had felt shut out of the school district’s planning process. As a member of the Silent Generation, she made explicit demands of American wealth and greatness:
“Why shouldn’t all people in our rich society—regardless of their wealth or class or race or personal attributes—have a decent life, meaning health care, decent housing, good schools, food security, and physical safety?…I think these are preconditions for a good society.”
If Diane’s values were informed by a life lived in the greatness of the American Century, what made America great was the steady—and always imperfect—realization of those values in action. The New Deal aligned our immense national resources toward popular economic recovery from the depths of the Great Depression, even as jobs and housing programs discriminated against Black Americans. The GI Bill helped create a thriving post-war middle class by providing housing to millions of veterans and their families and sending millions more to college, even as Black veterans were segregated out of the nation’s suburbs and universities.
As we underwent a decades-long civil rights revolution at home, the postwar world we rebuilt in our image was of an idealized United States that overcame a violent and prejudicial past to renew itself as a more diverse, pluralistic, multicultural, democratic, and egalitarian nation.
E Pluribus Unum. Out of Many, One.
Uneven and flawed as it was, American prosperity did grow in proportion to our inclusivity: by expanding citizenship and voting rights, integrating and publicly supporting schools and universities, asserting our obligations to the elderly and those in poverty, and protecting the rights of marginalized groups. The American Dream became a shorthand for people who came here to start their lives over, even from countries victimized by U.S. foreign policy, knowing their best days were ahead of them. And as Americans watched the Times Square ball drop on the eve of Y2K, they were standing in the most powerful, prosperous, innovative, and culturally dominant nation in the history of the world.
Now, at age 87, Ravitch reflects on how conservative politics abandoned these core values and caused her to leave the Republican Party in the early 2000s, as they became increasingly dominated by self-serving corporations, wealthy donors, and religious interests. “To use current parlance, I went from being a staunch conservative to being ‘woke,’” she writes, adding, “I wear the label with pride. To me, it means that I awakened to the inequity and injustice that deprives millions of people of a good life, the life that everyone wants and deserves.”
In other words, by taking seriously the charge of our founding documents to become “a more perfect union”, taking up “the unfinished work” of the American experiment, and bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice over the course of the 20th century, Diane Ravitch—like America itself—became woke.
Our fights about schools are really battles over American values and what it means to be an American, and the War on Woke has always been a war on American values.
At the start of this midterm election year, Moms For Liberty hosted Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidates in a debate that focused largely on education. Candidates spent their time hammering “leftist indoctrination” in teacher education and classroom teaching, with one complaining about “downright evil” ideology pushed on students in reference to a book about a boy wearing a dress to school. Another called for the installation of the Ten Commandments as a way to put the “concept of God” back in schools. Zach Lahn, founder of the unaccredited private Wonder School and current Republican nominee for governor, offered the closest thing to a positive vision with a partisan twist arguing, “Public school is to promote civic virtue, to understand the principles of faith in our country and our culture.”
The trouble comes in whose answer we enshrine in law, turn into policy, and live in the public sphere through our public education system:
- What kind of nation are we?
- What is the role of public education—that is, the system of tuition-free common schools mandated in our state constitution, accessible to all students, and maintained by taxpayer dollars—in a nation like ours?
- What subjects and practices will inform such a system?
- Whose values will we train in the adults who teach our children?
Today’s Republican Party demands that we forget the hard-fought lessons of history and remove challenging perspectives, making easier for children to believe in nationalist mythology than the imperfect lived reality of people like Diane Ravitch. A closer look at their changing values and legislative agenda tells us exactly what today’s Republican Party means when they appeal to “civic virtue” and “principles of faith in our country and our culture” in education: in the guise of a war on “woke” diversity, equity, and inclusion, Republican policies are at war with the very materials that made America great.
In Iowa, this has manifested as de-facto book bans and banning so-called “specific defined concepts” from public school curriculum. In response to Iowa’s vague and punitive “age appropriate” school materials law in 2023, schools immediately removed more than 3,000 books. The most removed literary classics included Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners written by Nobel Prize laureates: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Brave New World, and Slaughterhouse-Five among them.
These are perspectives that speak honestly about racial, sexual, and gendered abuse and violence, sometimes all at once, and inform a shared past that tolerated and protected it. They’re also some of the most acclaimed and influential works in American and English literature. It’s no accident that most of them are either written by Black authors, by women, or center the experiences of Black people in America.
Iowa Republicans have also banned so-called “specific defined concepts” from mandatory staff or student training. House File 802, in effect since July 2021, makes it a violation to conduct training that the United States and Iowa “are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist,” that anyone “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” or that “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist.” One banned concept forbids including in mandatory training that any student “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.”
Although the law states that it does not “Prohibit the use of curriculum that teaches the topics of sexism, slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination,” and does not “Prohibit discussing specific defined concepts as part of a larger course of academic instruction,” it was widely misunderstood to prohibit classroom teaching about those topics.
The impact of House File 802 has been a documented chilling effect and over-compliance owing to the vagueness of the law as written and interpreted. In one interview-based study, Iowa educators described themselves as surveilled, isolated, and self-censoring. The researchers reported that “the perceived lack of clarity and guidance on this law fueled concerns about their ability to be effective justice-oriented administrators and classroom teachers,” and that teacher candidates are afraid of unintentional violations of the law.
These explicit bans on books and the implicit self-censoring of difficult curriculum leave our kids less prepared for the world outside of school, and outside of Iowa, and create a gap in our children’s public education that is ready to be filled by social media influencers, misinformation, and propaganda.
Public schools are the institution where American values are practiced and lived, not just taught, and where we build shared American identity. All of our fights about books, curriculum, and school choice programs are really arguments over whose answers to these questions we write into law and into the lives of children where the stakes become very real. Through intention or its absence, built by us or built for us, the very real and shared world we inhabit is built bit by bit each day.
The question isn’t whether we teach values in public schools—we always have and we always will. The question is whether we teach the values that actually made this country great: pluralism, inclusion, democratic participation, honest history, and the belief that every child deserves a free and appropriate public education.
“I was a patriot who never questioned my country and its leaders. My complacency was a reflection of my comfort and affluence; radicalism had no appeal to me. If I were to meet that version of myself today, we would have a vigorous argument over everything related to education, race, and politics, although I still abhor violence. Today I want change, demonstrable change that narrows the gap between rich and poor; that provides equal opportunity to all; and that ensures health care and good education as a matter of right, not income. I am still not a radical. I don’t want to overthrow the government. I want it to work on behalf of its ideals to benefit everyone.”
— Diane Ravitch,
An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else