I'm a Catholic School Teacher. Chris Rufo Doesn't Speak for Me

Teacher / Poet #50

I’m a Catholic Schoolteacher. Chris Rufo doesn’t speak for me.

We had a discussion in my 12^th grade AP English Literature class a few weeks ago. The subject of our conversation was a recent PBS interview with conservative activist Chris Rufo, President Trump’s extra-administrative consultant on education.

I don’t normally inject politics this directly into the classroom space (though it comes up plenty indirectly in poems, essays, short stories and novels), but we were in that weird space of the year—AP teachers will know what I mean—when we had just finished taking the AP Exam but hadn’t yet started up the final unit that would close out the year. Since I was planning this final unit in collaboration with two other teachers, and the three of us wanted to be starting up at the same time for teaching purposes, I had an extra day or two of class time to play with.

Hence, Chris Rufo’s entrance into the AP English classroom.

I’d checked in earlier that week with the students’ government teacher to see what background they’d had on the Trump administration’s current relationship with colleges and universities. That teacher told me they’d had some background on the administration’s cuts to the Education Department as well as the way those cuts affected FAFSA, but that the students had not discussed the administration’s proposals to cut funding to universities like Columbia and Harvard.

So before showing the 9 minute Rufo interview linked here, I offered some brief context on those two situations. I then asked students to share what they’d noticed in the conversation, what parts of the interview struck them. I deliberately kept the prompt open.

Many students, especially those in the first of the three sections I shared the interview with, were very confused by the back-and-forth between Rufo and PBS News Hour host Amna Nawaz.

Rufo framed the government decision to cut universities’ funding as a response to universities’ “violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964” and “promoting from their central administrations racial discrimination, scapegoating and even segregation.” Students in my classes had not heard of “segregated” graduations. What was that about? I shared with students what I’d found out in my research prior to class, that Rufo was referring to the (optional) affinity graduation celebrations that don’t replace the general campus commencement but offer a way to celebrate the particular culture of different cultural groups at the university. As this CNN piece notes, “Commonly held ceremonies often honor Black, Hispanic, Asian, first-generation and LGBTQ+ students.”

After I was able to give more context on what the affinity graduations were, students in following sections followed the comparison Rufo was making between the fight for civil rights in the 1960s and the Trump’s rescinding of funding for universities. And a number expressed disbelief that Rufo found those two events comparable.

After the last section’s discussion concluded, a student approached me and thanked me for sharing this interview. He’d just made his decision on where he wanted to attend college. He said he’d been paying close attention to the way colleges and universities communicated about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) after Trump’s second term began. He noted that shortly after Trump took office in January, one college he’d been very interested in attending “took down all reference to DEI from their websites” and notably on the programs he’d been interested in. This young man is Black and Muslim. He said he lost all respect for this university and wouldn’t feel good about attending it after their decision to “scrub” their communications to fit with the Trump administration.

Instead, this student chose a Jesuit, Catholic institution that has chosen to embrace its DEI work and communicate that embrace in the language that it shows the public.

I mention the Catholic identity deliberately here, as I have in the title of this essay. Chris Rufo, as many know, is Catholic. In addition, his work to re-shape the educational landscape is not limited to college and universities but very much extends to the K-12 school system, and has ramifications for that Catholic school system, which serves more than a million students.

One good thing I can say about Chris Rufo is that he lays his cards on the table. He tells you what he really thinks. Unfortunately, what he really thinks is that the public school system as it currently exists in the United States should be completely destroyed. In an April, 2022 address, Laying Siege to Our Institutions, at Hillsdale College, Rufo stated, “ To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust.”

Rufo worked hard before this speech, and has worked even harder to since, to sow the seeds of that distrust. And now everyday Americans across the country, in kindergarten through the 22^nd grade, are reaping the bitter fruits of that distrust. School board meetings are sites of acrimonious political dispute. Federal funds to colleges and universities are being withheld unless governmental demands for curriculum are met. College students are being prosecuted (and threatened with deportation) for speaking against a non-government approved opinion about a war. And the list goes on.

Where are Catholic school voices—teachers, administrators, students, parents—in this conversation? Are we going to stand by in silence while a necessary public good is gutted? While our neighbors and their rights are being trampled? Yes, the viability of many of “our” Catholic institutions may benefit from the money the “school choice” movement Rufo advocates for brings us. But how that money is gotten matters.

We Catholics claim to live by the gospel outlined by Jesus. But the wisdom of Jesus’ gospel and the wisdom of the prophets stand squarely in opposition to the interests of empire and empire builders, whether or not these builders espouse “religious” views.

Vice President J.D. Vance, like Rufo, a Catholic, has cited Thomas Aquinas’ formulation of ordo amoris as justification for his administration’s brutal treatment of immigrants. Vance’s reading of Aquinas is that there is a hierarchy in love: we love first those ‘close’ to us, then, if able, we care for the stranger. The new Pope Leo XIV, just before he became Pope Leo XIV, offered this blunt and straightforward correction on X: “JD Vance is wrong. Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

Pope Leo’s correction was, in fact, a direct quote from the title of Kat Armas’ brilliant and incisive National Catholic Reporter commentary on a biblical understanding of love. Armas’ essay, which is full of wisdom, includes these sentences which could be seen as a summation: “The love of Jesus speaks not about calculation or a choice between our families or neighbors. It is not a finite resource to ration out, but a river that flows, wild and without restraint. The empire’s vision of love is built on scarcity, but the kingdom of God is built on abundance.”

It is deeply encouraging to witness, in real time, a prophetic institutional leader offering nourishment and instruction to those they lead. And of course Pope Leo is adopting a stance and role that his predecessor knew well, because Pope Francis was nothing if not prophetic, and in an age desperately in need of a prophetic word.

What this particular prophetic word about love has to do with Chris Rufo, and his stated desire to sow the seeds of “universal public school distrust” should be obvious. But, in order that the message of this essay be crystal clear, I will spell them out. And as I do that, I will spell out also that these words I write are my own, an individual Catholic school teacher. I don’t claim to or care to claim to represent the institution I work at. I’m not that kind of prophetic institutional leader. I’m one teacher at one Catholic school with an opinion that I’m sharing here on Substack.

Now, to some other relevant texts.

On Trump’s “Agenda 47: Ten Principles For Great Schools Leading To Great Jobs” 2024 Campaign page, his team, which I am sure included Rufo, called out two particular networks of schools for praise: the Cornerstone Schools charter school network, and the Cristo Rey Catholic School network. Both of these school systems, through internships with locally-based business and corporations, promote “career-based learning.”

Linked on the Agenda 47 page is an article from Manhattan Institute (an institute where Rufo is a fellow) on the Cristo Rey Network, lauding the Network’s ability to “provide a model for providing low-income students with a helping hand into the middle class.”

Earlier in that heading, #9 of 10 Principles, the platform stated, “President Trump will implement funding preferences for schools that actively work to help students secure internships, part-time work, and summer jobs that will set them on the path to long and fulfilling careers.”

As many readers of this Substack know, I teach at a Cristo Rey school. So my antennae went up when I read that a major presidential candidate (now the president) names the particular model of school where I teach as standing in line for the implementation of “funding preferences.” Especially at a time when “funding preferences” and funds themselves are at stake for so many educational institutions, from the K-12 level to higher education, as I noted at the top of this essay.

A closer reading of the rest of Trump’s Campaign Platform on Education confirms a coherence between his administration’s action and stance toward a higher education and their stance toward K-12 schools here. This same platform page that singles out the Cristo Rey Network for praise also notes that “President Trump will cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children—and he will pursue civil rights investigations into any school that engages in race-based discrimination.”

This language and the strategy it promises is unmistakably Rufo’s. It was Rufo who promised in a March, 2021 Tweet: “We have successfully frozen their brand—'critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

Four years later, the same language and stance from Rufo’s tweet, appears on the President’s education platform page. And the “civil rights investigations” promised in 2024 are now realities for elementary schools, colleges, and universities who dare to name “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” as priorities.

Some of these schools and universities have gone the route of the university that I mentioned earlier (the one that my student withdrew his application from): in their public-facing language they have “scrubbed themselves clean” of the “toxic” stain of “critical race theory.” Or done their best to try to. Young people notice these actions (and middle-aged people like me do too) and judge them as cowardly.

Catholic institutions, including ones like the one I work for, are in a difficult position. I’m not an administrator. I don’t fund raise. I want the lights to stay on and do my work. And I notice that the same awkward conversations around “school choice” and vouchers for charter schools and religious institutions continue today as they have for decades. And federal and state funding helps keep those lights on. Which can make for strange pairings: like a network of schools with predominantly Black and Latino student communities being touted by a president who is working to eliminate “DEI” from education altogether.

My two cents as a Catholic educator who is living through this crisis in real time just like the rest of you is that it actually matters when and how you speak up. And, as the title of this essay suggests, if you notice another person misrepresenting your community publicly, it is worth your time and energy to correct the misrepresentation. Especially when that misrepresentation is being used as a cover to do damage to other people and communities. (Or, to the very communities you are working with.)

I don’t know what, if anything, leaders from the Cristo Rey Network have said about the Trump / Vance public praise of the school system I work at. But as one English teacher in that system, I can say that these words, to me, are hollow praise. And in a moment like the one we’re living in, they’re the wrong words at the wrong time.

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Notes:

I’ve been reading from a number of sources on topics related to this essay. All of these offer a “deeper dive” for those interested in making it. Please don’t hesitate to share your own resources or thoughts in the comments below.

-Vinson Cunningham, a terrific novelist and critic at The New Yorker, asked the question: Do programs that help low-income students of color get into selective private schools obscure the system’s deeper inequalities? in his 2020 essay, “Prep for Prep and the Fault Lines in New York’s Schools”. And his 2020 essay “What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About the Bible” provided essential background for the poem I opened the video of this essay with. If you don’t know Cunningham’s work, I highly recommend it.

-There’s an excellent podcast episode from “fiction/non/fiction” with Megan O’Rourke titled “The End of the University” which goes deeper into Trump and higher education in thoughtful ways.

-Thanks to Pope Leo XIV’s X post, I’ve been digging in to

Kat Armas

‘work. And very delighted and challenged by it! Check out the NCR essay I mentioned here.

-Local connection (and a friend): longtime Carleton professor Deborah Appleman updated her excellent book, Critical Encounters in Secondary English (which I’ve used in the classroom) to include critical race theory as a lens with which to view literature. The opening to the new edition presents what inspired that decision, a conversation with Minneapolis Public School teacher Nafeesah Muhammad, who finds CRT a useful and even essential tool.

-And, for those who think that discussions of race do belong in conversations about the literary “classics,” I highly recommend the work of Ayannya Thompson and Ruben Espinosa, and the work of RaceB4Race. (I’ve used their work in Shakespeare work I do with high school students.) This excellent interview linked on Folger is a good sample of their work’s power.

-Finally, a link to my original reading of the poem “Rufo’s America, Jefferson’s Gospel” on Youtube.