Editor’s Note: Good Faith Media is committed to strengthening faith and democracy, “protecting both and compromising neither.” A strong democracy depends on robust support for public schools. This week, we are highlighting that commitment with a series of articles focusing on the history and current state of the U.S. public school system.

A line buried in President Biden’s March State of the Union address read, “While we’re at it, I want to give public school teachers a raise!” It was a throw-away applause line and designed to get a positive response from Democrats and dare Republicans not to clap.

It had its intended effect.

Democratic lawmakers shot to their feet in loud applause. Sitting behind the President’s left shoulder, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson nodded in mild approval, knowing a smirk or scowl would be a disaster for political optics. But most Republicans in the House chamber sat on their hands, giving a neutral response.

At that moment, the Republicans knew what the Democrats in the room also knew: Biden’s statement was misleading. But because of its implied subject – the children– Republicans couldn’t punish him for his little white fib.

Everyone in the room knew the federal government has extremely limited purview over teacher salaries. That is primarily the responsibility of state and local governments.

What Biden said– that he wanted to give public school teachers a raise– wasn’t technically a lie. He probably does want to. 

Aside from students currently serving time in detention, who doesn’t? But the implication that he could do much about it was misleading.

To be fair, some federal funding goes toward Title I schools, which serve economically disadvantaged students, and portions of that can go toward teacher salaries. But we are talking about tinkering around the edges rather than a large-scale overhaul of salary structures.

Since the native language of the current Republican nominee for president is lies, it can be tempting for political observers to overlook misleading statements from the other side. But to provide good-faith arguments for the most pressing issues of our day, we must be willing to call out bad-faith politics wherever they occur.

Most voters are too busy paying bills, doing laundry and juggling busy schedules to understand all the minutiae surrounding public policy. Politicians count on this, which is why they use misleading rhetorical flourishes like the one Biden did this spring.

It’s why Republicans continue to repeat “School Choice” like a mantra. If they can get voters to believe they are most concerned with parents’ ability to choose the schools their children go to, then maybe they can get voters to ignore their real goal, which is to weaken and eventually, eliminate public schools.

This general lack of public awareness of how things work is also behind partisan sparring over one of the GOP’s favorite punching bags: The U.S. Department of Education (DOE). Aside from providing funding for Title I schools in the form of block grants to states, the main role of the DOE is to provide oversight and set regulations.

Since most of us don’t know the DOE’s function, the Democrats paint efforts to eliminate it, such as proposals in Project 2025, as threats to the existence of public schools. The Republicans seek to educate the public on what the DOE does and then paint its role as “federal meddling in public schools.”

The Department of Education, then, becomes a Rorschach Test. You see what you want to see. Which begs the question, would eliminating the DOE be such a big deal?

If you are a person of faith who believes in the expansive, all-inclusive good news of Jesus, then yes, it would be.

To be sure, there is such a thing as over-regulation. The letter of the law can gum up administrative processes and make operating a school nearly impossible. A good faith approach to public education would acknowledge that.

But one of the cornerstones of public education is, incidentally, one of the cornerstones of the message of Jesus: whoever wants in, gets in.

One of the roles of the federal DOE is to guarantee the rights of all students to receive an education without being discriminated against on any basis, and the responsibility of all schools to provide it. The operative, non-negotiable word in all of this is “all.”

And as evidenced in Oklahoma, Louisiana, my home state of Texas and elsewhere, many believe it is the “state’s right” to discriminate against religious minorities while offering preferential treatment to Christians. Many states want the freedom to target students on the basis of sexual identity and gender expression.

Sadly, schools didn’t integrate on their own. Without legal nudges, they didn’t build wheelchair ramps or provide learning accommodations for all students. And sometimes they fail to tell every child, “You matter and we built this place with you in mind.”

Public education isn’t perfect, but it gives us one of our best shots of creating a world where everyone belongs. For this, it is worth protecting.