That the education reform movement would lead states all over the country to consider adopting measures as noxious as Indiana House Bill 1134 was somehow sadly — no, tragically — predictable.

Even inevitable.

HB 1134 is an epic act of foolishness pandering to a constituency that considers ignorance a virtue. The measure’s overarching aim is to limit how much Indiana’s students might learn by preventing schools and teachers from discussing anything that might lead to thought. It seeks to punish even librarians for providing challenging books to curious young readers.

It’s a significant departure from both the origins and arc of the American story. For generation after generation, Americans worked hard to make sure their children and grandchildren had access to more education and knowledge — and thus more opportunity — than they did.

Now, many of them are fighting to make certain that their kids and grandkids learn less, know less and have fewer opportunities.

This outcome has been foreseeable for decades, ever since ambitious politicians realized there was political gold to be mined by attacking public education in general and teachers in particular.

They piggybacked on the work and thought of genuinely idealistic folks who worried that the nation’s schools were doing little to prevent the establishment of a permanent underclass.

They had reason to be concerned. Many, many students from disadvantaged backgrounds were losing ground, year after year, generation after generation. That these gaps in achievement and opportunity often exactly mirrored differences in race and social class created a sense of urgency.

These idealists thought introducing free-market principles would bridge the achievement chasms. Creating competition among schools and educators through the creation of charter schools and school choice programs would unleash innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit in American classrooms.

Test scores and other signs of student accomplishment would rise as a result.

That didn’t happen.

It turned out that persistent problems of race and class in America were just that — persistent — and they did not yield to the dreams and magical thinking of the education reform idealists.

That might have ended the movement, except for a couple of things.

Politicians — particularly conservative politicians — found there were votes to be gained by continuing to blast schools and teachers. And hucksters and other grifters discovered there were massive piles of money to be made by siphoning off streams of the billions upon billions of dollars American taxpayers spend on educating their young.

The education reformers frequently didn’t even realize their movement had been hijacked out from under them.

That’s the way it is.

True believers are the easiest marks for con artists because they so desperately want the con to be true.

After it became clear that the education reform movement’s promised gains in student achievement — particularly improved student achievement among disadvantaged students — never were going to become a reality using the methods the movement promoted, the reformers, their enablers and their leeches were so invested ideologically, politically and, yes, financially, that they couldn’t acknowledge their failure.

So, they switched the standard.

Surveys showed that, even though vouchers and charters didn’t produce better-educated students, these “reforms” had a therapeutic effect. They made parents “feel better” about their children’s education.

So, instead of saying they were helping students learn more, the self-proclaimed reformers said their movement was about “empowering parents.”

The reformers and their fellow travelers had little choice but to go there. They couldn’t argue that their changes meant Hoosier taxpayers were paying for two systems of public education, not one, and not receiving any added tangible value for the increased spending and added layers of often-unaccountable bureaucracy.

But focusing on empowering parents also meant subjecting matters of fact to popular vote and thus political pressure.

That’s why we’re now debating whether Nazism and the Holocaust were bad things and having lawmakers question whether slavery and race had anything to do with the Civil War and this nation’s battles with segregation.

Next, we’ll be taking votes on whether 2+2 equals 4 or if it should be 22 instead.

Or maybe something that isn’t even a number at all.

This is lunacy.

But we didn’t get to this place by accident.

We were led here by some people who don’t care about questions of right and wrong.

And by some who were so desperate to believe that they couldn’t see how badly they had lost their way.