Historians Gillian Frank and Adam Laats write in Slate about the long history of suppressing textbooks that discuss race and class and investigating or firing teachers who veer away from the standard patriotic view of American history.

They describe the classic story of the textbook series written by progressive educator Harold Rugg of Teachers College, Columbia. Rugg wanted students to learn about the social, economic and political problems of contemporary society in the 1930s. His books were widely adopted but fell victim to a rightwing campaign that labeled them as socialist or Communist, which they were not. The campaign was successful, and the Rugg books were ousted from classrooms across the nation.

The authors tie the current efforts to ban critical race theory (taught in law school) and The 1619 Project from being taught in schools to this long tradition of avoiding controversial subjects.

There is an even longer tradition of banning books that mention topics like race, segregation, religion, or a long list of other “offensive“ issues. Censorship extends to textbooks, tests, and library books. I cover that history in my book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.

Even Shakespeare has been bowdlerized for his bawdy language.

The American Library Association posts a list every year of the books most frequently banned. Many classics are on the list.

Vice News reported that a notorious rightwing, anti-union group was running an astroturf campaign to shame New York City private schools for teaching about diversity and racial bias. The organization was called “Prep School Accountability” and was able to gin up lots of stories, especially in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, about the “indoctrination” of privileged young minds. The man behind the campaign is Rick Berman, who runs ”The Center on Union Facts,” which attacks unions. The story is an impressive example of investigative digging, which exposed a hoax.

Rick Berman, an infamous right-wing lobbyist whose organizations have been accused of several astroturfing campaigns—and who is known as “Dr. Evil”—revealed that his firm is behind an organization that claimed to be a grass-roots movement against New York City’s prep schools focus on “diversity education.”

Last week, the New York Post reported on a “group of parents” that was planning to show billboards showing messages such as “DIVERSITY NOT INDOCTRINATION” and “WOKE SCHOOL? SPEAK OUT.” The Post’s story is centered around and features Prep School Accountability, which describes itself on its official website as “a group of concerned parents.”

“In recent years, a new orthodoxy has emerged at our schools, dividing our communities based on immutable characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. As a result, the core tenets of high-quality education—uniting all children and families through a love and appreciation for learning and community spirit—have gone by the wayside,” the Prep School Accountability website reads…

On Thursday, a researcher who specializes in open source intelligence investigations, published a post detailing evidence that he claimed showed Berman and Company was behind Prep School Accountability.

The researcher, who goes by Z3dster, found a handful of non-public author pages on the Prep School Accountability website, which is built with WordPress. The author pages belonged to:

• Charlyce Bozzello, whom the researcher identified as the Communications Director for the Center for Union Facts, an organization that is also run by Rick Berman. A Twitter account with the same name describes herself as “Just a New Yorker who left NY and can’t remember why.”
• Someone with the last name Petriccione, who appears to be Christy Petriccione, a Communications Associate at Berman and Company, according to a profile found here.

Jeremy Mohler, communications director for In the Public Interest, an organization that fights privatization of public services, reports on the growing adoption of the community schools model, which brings families and communities closer to schools. Frankly, this approach makes a lot more sense than turning public money over to private operators and charter chains, some of which is siphoned away by for-profit managers.

If a full year of school during a pandemic taught us anything, it’s that public schools are pillars of their communities.

Educators and staff have stepped up in ways they never could’ve imagined, from delivering lunches to coordinating vaccines.

What really shone through is that public schools following the community school strategy were some of the most resilient. (Don’t know what a community school is? Here’s an explainer video.)

Here are just a few examples:

• By May of last year, Southside K-8 School in the town of War, West Virginia, had delivered nearly 40,000 books to students sheltering at home.
• By September, Los Angeles’s 93rd Street Steam Academy, located in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, was distributing food to 300 families twice a month.
• Enos Garcia Elementary in Taos, New Mexico, has been providing families with food, clothing, assistance with paying bills, basic computer training, and English as a second language (ESL) classes based on needs assessments school staff conducted when the pandemic began.
• Club Boulevard Elementary in Durham, North Carolina, used an innovative app to communicate with parents as the local school district navigated moving between online and in-person schooling. This streamlined the school’s distribution of computers to students and tech support concerning education technology.
• Arrey Elementary in rural New Mexico has been providing COVID-19 health information and testing services to its surrounding community. In May, it coordinated with the local health department to administer vaccines.

Meanwhile, funding and support for the community school strategy is growing.

President Biden is proposing $443 million for community schools in his education budget, 15 times the current level of federal spending.

California used $45 million in federal COVID-19 relief to start a competitive grant program for expanding community schools. Cincinnati’s school district used the relief to offer students summer learning programs that address learning loss due to the pandemic.

We should use this summer break to reimagine not only what public education looks like but also the role of public schools in their communities.

Community schools are a promising strategy. Especially given the widespread trauma and instability so many have experienced over the past year.

The New York Times reported that the billionaires are investing in the leading candidates, and that their biggest issue is the expansion of charter schools. Although many people have already voted, Tuesday is the official election.

When Andrew Yang led the pack, he received big contributions to his super PAC. When Eric Adams surged ahead of Yang, the big money flowed to him.

With the exception of George Soros, who is backing Maya Wiley, the leading progressive in the race, the billionaires are all connected to charter schools. You might notice that the story doesn’t raise the question of why some of the richest people in the nation are committed to private management of public money.

The NY Times reports:

Together, billionaires have spent more than $16 million this year on super PACs that are primarily focused on the mayoral primary campaign that ends on Tuesday — the first mayoral election in the city’s history to feature such loosely regulated organizations devoted to individual candidates.

Overall, super PAC spending in the mayor’s race has exceeded $24 million, according to the New York City Campaign Finance Board, making up roughly 30 percent of the $79 million spent on the campaign.

The impact has been dramatic: a deluge of campaign mailers and political ads on radio, television and the internet, especially in recent weeks, as the unusually large field of Democratic candidates vied to win over an electorate distracted by the pandemic.

Dedicated super PACs exist for all but one of the eight major Democratic candidates, but half of the billionaires’ spending has benefited just three of the field’s more moderate contenders: Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president who is considered the front-runner; Andrew Yang, the 2020 presidential candidate and a top rival; and Raymond J. McGuire, a former Citigroup executive who trails in the polls.

At least 14 individuals that Forbes magazine has identified as billionaires have donated to mayoral-related super PACs. Several run companies that are headquartered in New York City, while others have interests that would benefit from a good relationship with City Hall, and they are hedging their bets in an apparent effort to improve their chances of backing the winner.

Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who owns the Mets, donated $500,000 to Mr. Yang’s super PAC and $500,000 to Mr. Adams’s in mid-May, when the two candidates were leading the polls. But as Mr. Yang’s support appeared to wane and Mr. Adams’s grew, Mr. Cohen cut off Mr. Yang and donated another $1 million to Mr. Adams.

A similar trajectory characterizes the giving patterns of Daniel S. Loeb, another hedge fund billionaire and an outspoken supporter of charter schools and former chairman of Success Academy Charter Schools. He donated $500,000 to Mr. Adams’s super PAC and $500,000 to Mr. Yang’s super PAC in mid-May. Three weeks later, as Mr. Adams was cementing his front-runner status, Mr. Loeb gave Mr. Adams’s super PAC another $500,000.

Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang have expressed support for charter schools. 

The flood of money — which has also affected other key contests like the Manhattan district attorney’s race — comes as the pandemic has illuminated the stark differences between the city’s have and have-nots even as the mayor’s race has been more focused on gun crime and public safety than on inequality.

The super PACs also threaten to undermine New York City’s campaign finance system, which is designed to combat the power of big money in politics by using city funds to match small donations.

This year, the city rolled out an enhanced version of that system, offering richer rewards for small donations, and has thus far handed out more than $39 million to the mayoral candidates. But it is far from clear that New York City’s campaign finance system — considered a national model — can withstand the big-money onslaught wrought by the Supreme Court’s Citizens Uniteddecision of 2010, which allowed outside groups to spend an unlimited amount of money in elections.

A super PAC played a small role in the last competitive mayoral primary in 2013, when an animal rights group helped fund a super PAC that attacked Christine Quinn, then the City Council speaker who had been a favorite in the race, because of her support for horse-drawn carriages in Central Park.

The following year, the courts struck down a state cap on the size of contributions to super PACs.

“Now in 2021, New York City has a term-limited Democratic incumbent with no heir apparent, which has led to a wide open mayoral race run with campaigns run by consultants with deep experience using candidate super PACs in federal campaigns,” said John Kaehny, the executive director of Reinvent Albany. 

Super PACs are theoretically independent of the political campaigns, and their spending is not supposed to be coordinated with individual candidates. But questions of the funds’ independence emerged in April, when New York City’s Campaign Finance Board withheld the release of public matching funds to the campaign of Shaun Donovan, who served as the Obama administration’s housing secretary and budget director.

The board wanted to delve into the relationship between Mr. Donovan’s campaign and the super PAC supporting him, New Start N.Y.C., which is largely funded by his father. The board eventually released the matching funds.

“Who’s going to be mayor matters to a lot of people with a lot of money,” said Lawrence Norden, the director of the electoral reform program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “You have to ask yourself when people are spending tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a candidate, why are they doing it and what do they hope to get out of it?”

Yes, indeed. Why are the billionaires so eager to expand charter schools (NYC has almost 300 of them, attended by 12% of the city’s students)? Surely they don’t expect to turn the city’s 1.1 million student school system into a large-scale New Orleans. What is their plan? No one asked.

Journalist Rachel M. Cohen broke the news in “The Intercept” that “the school privatization lobby places fake news on local stations.”

She writes:

ON A WEEKLY basis over the last three years, an arm of the national school privatization lobbying group the American Federation for Children has been producing fake news segments and distributing them to local news stations. The stations often air the segments just as they receive them, allowing anchors to recite accompanying scripts word for word. The aired content includes no disclosure that it was produced by the education advocacy group.

The little-known project, known as “Ed Newsfeed,” has “distributed hundreds of stories in dozens of states,” said Walter Blanks Jr., a press secretary for the American Federation for Children, in response to questions from The Intercept. The Ed Newsfeed staff sends out a weekly email to producers nationwide with their new video content, including recommended scripts, available to them free of charge, and where “courtesy is optional.” The news producers can also access a full library of current and previous stories by creating an account on the nondescript site EdNewsfeed.com.

Founded in 1999 as the American Education Reform Council, and long funded by billionaire and top Republican Party donor Betsy DeVos, the since-renamed American Federation for Children pursues policies that redirect public education funding to parents to spend how they see fit. “We believe choice, innovation and entrepreneurism will revolutionize an antiquated K-12 system into a 21st century mode,” states the website for the lobby’s 501(c)(3) partner, the American Federation for Children Growth Fund, which sponsors the videos. DeVos was the group’s chair when she was tapped in 2016 to serve as secretary of education under President Donald Trump.

The news broadcasts are mostly cheerful and positive, focused on students who overcome long odds, transformative educators, and “inspiring schools.” Ed Newsfeed segments have featured organizations, apps, schools, and services that have political and/or financial connections to both the American Federation for Children and the DeVos family. Such relationships are not disclosed in the videos, which are marketed as straight news clips.

Most radio stations don’t have their own education reporter so they are glad to get free content. Some stories are innocuous but most focus on the glories of school choice. Fake news, brought to you by Betsy DeVos.

Christopher Rufo was a successful documentary maker, some of whose shows were broadcast on PBS. He moved to Seattle and his politics moved rightward.

The New Yorker wrote about his rise as a star of conservative politics. An employee of the Seattle city government sent him slides about anti-bias training that started Rufo on a crusade to expose the bias in anti-bias programs.

…in July, 2020, when an employee of the city of Seattle documented an anti-bias training session and sent the evidence to a journalist named Christopher F. Rufo, who read it and recognized a political opportunity.

Rufo, thirty-six, was at once an unconventional and a savvy choice for the leaker to select. Raised by Italian immigrants in Sacramento and educated at Georgetown, Rufo had spent his twenties and early thirties working as a documentary filmmaker, largely overseas, making touristic projects such as “Roughing It: Mongolia,” and “Diamond in the Dunes,” about a joint Uyghur-Han baseball team in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. In 2015, Rufo began work on a film for PBS that traced the experience of poverty in three American cities, and in the course of filming Rufo became convinced that poverty was not something that could be alleviated with a policy lever but was deeply embedded in “social, familial, even psychological” dynamics, and his politics became more explicitly conservative. Returning home to Seattle, where his wife worked for Microsoft, Rufo got a small grant from a regional, conservative think tank to report on homelessness, and then ran an unsuccessful campaign for city council, in 2018. His work so outraged Seattle’s homelessness activists that, during his election campaign, someone plastered his photo and home address on utility poles around his neighborhood. When Rufo received the anti-bias documents from the city of Seattle, he knew how to spot political kindling. These days, “I’m a brawler,” Rufo told me cheerfully.

Rufo has since received many other leaks and has now become the Republicans’ go-to expert on the dangers of anti-bias and anti-racism programs, critical race theory, and The 1619 Project.

The Washington Post wrote this about him:

President Donald Trump was watching Fox News one evening last summer when a young conservative from Seattle appeared with an alarming warning, and a call to action.

Christopher Rufo said critical race theory, a decades-old academic framework that most people had never heard of, had “pervaded every institution in the federal government.”

“Critical race theory,” Rufo said, “has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.”

Critical race theory holds that racism is systemic in the United States, not just a collection of individual prejudices — an idea that feels obvious to some and offensive to others. Rufo alleged that efforts to inject awareness of systemic racism and White privilege, which grew more popular following the murder of George Floyd by police, posed a grave threat to the nation. It amounts, Rufo said, to a “cult indoctrination.”

Spurred by Rufo, this complaint has come to dominate conservative politics. Debates over critical race theory are raging on school boards and in state legislatures. Fox News has increased its coverage and commentary on the issue. And Republicans see the issue as a central element of the case they will make to voters in next year’s midterm elections, when control of Congress will be at stake.

These issues will be central to the GOP campaign in 2022. Republicans have seized on it as the way to win because they are defending whiteness, tradition, and white identity by making debates about race a threatening presence against which children and adults must be protected.

“Critical race theory” has been debated in academic circles for at least three decades. But now politicians are using it as a cultural wedge issue to attack diversity training and to ban anything in the schools that focuses on the untold story of black history. Nearly half the states have banned “critical race theory” (although it is doubtful that any of the legislators have ever read the works of Derrick Bell or Kimberlee Crenshaw. Many are also banning The 1619 Project, which they see as a fundamental part of critical race theory. Above all, they don’t want whites to feel guilty about slavery, Jim Crow, racial violence, or the KKK.

This question of historical guilt is thorny. None of us wants to be held accountable for what we did not do. But certainly we should be aware of the dark chapters in human history and the atrocities committed because of race, religion, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation. Not everyone has suffered equally, to be sure. But the lesson we must learn today is to learn from history about the cruelty of the past and the importance of treating every human being with respect and dignity.

Teachers are rightly confused and concerned about what and whether they may teach black history.

My view: Teach the facts, teach the conflicts, teach about the dangers of bigotry and hatred. Debate, discuss, and review multiple perspectives.

The ultimate goal of education must be to teach fairness, kindness, character, integrity, and empathy. Teach about the outstanding women and men who have stood for justice regardless of social pressures and stigma. In our history and in all human history, there have been leaders whose courage and conduct defied convention.

Let us teach the world as it was and as we want it to be. We must not allow demagogues, hucksters, ignoramuses, bigots, and politicians to censor what we think, what we read, what we teach, what we learn, what we believe.