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The Ziegler Sex Scandal: Police Release Rape Affidavit of Accuser

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2023 //
22

The political story of the year in Florida is the accusation by an unnamed woman that she was raped by Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, on October 2. Ziegler famously said that he would not be happy until there were no Democrats elected anywhere in Florida.

The Miami Herald published the search warrant records, which contains salacious details of the imbroglio.

The accuser said that she was expecting Christian’s wife Bridget to have a threesome. When Christian told the accuser that Bridget would not be showing up, she canceled the date with Christian. He came to her apartment anyway, forced his way in, she said, and raped her. She told her sister that she had been raped, then she called the police and reported the rape.

Frankly, it’s worth subscribing to the Miami Herald to read the search warrant.

The woman said she had had a sexual tryst with Christian and Bridget over a year ago. She wanted to do it again, but lost interest when she heard that Bridget would not be there. Bridget is co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a Sarasota school board member, and a DeSantis appointee to the board that controls Disney World.

The police have video footage of Christian arriving at the accuser’s door and leaving.

On 10/24/23, Detective viewed the video surveillance footage from the victim apartment complex. The video captured Christian Ziegler arriving in his gray Ford track bearingFL, 4g SRQGOP on 10/02/23, a 1429 hours. Christian immediately entered the apartment complex, is seen coming off the elevator and driving away in the parking lot at 1507 hours, Christian was wearing dark shorts and a red shirt.

Thirty-eight minutes!

As part of the investigation, Detectives performed a digital extraction on the victim’s cell phone. Detectives located several digital messages from Christian 10 the victim ‘on 10/02/23 starting at 0729 hours. In the messages Christian told the victim to go to Instagram. The victim said Christian liked to Instagram because he conceals the messages using vanish mode. 6. In another message he asked the victim for her address and told her they were driving around referring to him and Bridget. Christian continued sending the victim ‘messages, but she did not respond in a timely manner, When the victim finally responded she asked who was coming. At 1412 Christian said “Prob just me this time ‘now. Was ready at 1:30.” Chistian was referring to Bridget being ready at 1:30. At 1424 hours, the victim responded “Sorry I was mostly in for her” referring to Bridget.

Then the Detective joined the victim in communicating with Christian.

On 10/27/23, Detectives leamed that Christian was tryingto contact the victim by ‘sending her messages via Instagram. Detectives and the victim began communicating with Christian via controlled/recorded messages. The following is a summary of the ‘communication: = Victim: I’m not okay with what happened the other day between us.

«Christian: Oh. That’s not good. You are my friend. Known ya for like twenty ‘years now. Lol. Note: Chistian goes on to talk about how long they have been Friends.

Victim: Yeah I know but that was not cool and you didn’t bring her and then did that to me.

«Christian: She was in. Then coulda’ because no response. She said in next time. But understand. You are my friend. I actually like you as a person, so sorry you got upset, but I can leave you alone if you prefer. Note: Christian then tried to change the conversation to getting his haircut,

It goes on and on, and Christian begins to suspect he is being recorded.

One of the great stories of our time.

Fabiola Santiago of the Miami Herald asked the best question: if Bridget Ziegler is having sex with another woman, why is she so hellbent on persecuting gays?

Another question, from me:

Was DeSantis trying to protect the Zieglers when he pushed his “Don’t Say Gay” law?

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Florida, Scandal

Jeb Bush: Don’t Abandon High-Stakes Testing (Except for Voucher Schools)

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2023 //
8

Jeb Bush, a founding father of the corporate reform movement, was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. He implemented a regime of high-stakes standardized testing, third grade retention, school report cards, and choice. He vigorously championed charter schools and tried to change the state constitution to allow vouchers for religious schools. Now he is concerned that the legislature might undermine high-stakes testing, so he penned this opinion piece for the Orlando Sentinel bragging about the success of his test-and-punish regime.

Yes, Florida’s fourth-grade NAEP scores are high. But he does not acknowledge that the scores are high because Florida “retains” third-graders who don’t pass the reading test. Holding these kids back artificially inflated the fourth-grade scores. By eighth grade, Florida’s scores are at the national average. Nothing to boast about there. The moral of the story: retention raises test scores by removing from the testing pool the kids who were retained (flunked).

The other curious omission in this article is voucher schools. Jeb is a huge fan of vouchers but voucher schools don’t take any state tests. How does he explain this? He doesn’t.

He wrote:

For more than two decades, Florida has remained committed to educational excellence by ensuring that transparency, accountability and opportunity define our K-12 system. We’ve consistently pushed the envelope, transforming Florida into a national leader. This has not happened by accident.

When I took office, nearly half of Florida’s fourth graders had significant reading deficiencies. Similarly, half of Florida’s fourth graders were significantly below grade level in math. Only half of high school students graduated on time.

In partnership with state lawmakers, we championed the A+ Plan in 1999 based on core principles of high expectations, standardized measurement, a clear and achievable system of accountability, rewards and consequences for performance, effective teaching in the classroom and more choices for families to customize an education for each student.

Today, Florida’s fourth graders rank third in the nation for reading achievement and fourth in the nation for math achievement. Our high school graduation rate is approaching 90%.

This is why it’s concerning that some lawmakers now seem eager to throw out or water down key components of the policies that led our students from the back of the pack to top in the nation.

I understand the goal of the Florida Senate’s recently unveiled deregulation package (Senate bills 7000, 7002and 7004). Cutting red tape and removing outdated regulations is a worthwhile effort.

But this cannot come at the cost of our state and students taking a step backward.

Lawmakers have proposed watering down our third grade literacy policy, removing the backstop of retention and paving the way to reinstate social promotion. Requiring that students objectively demonstrate they are reading successfully before being promoted to fourth grade has been a core part of Florida’s comprehensive early literacy policy — one that research has consistently supported.

This is why it’s concerning that some lawmakers now seem eager to throw out or water down key components of the policies that led our students from the back of the pack to top in the nation.

I understand the goal of the Florida Senate’s recently unveiled deregulation package (Senate bills 7000, 7002and 7004). Cutting red tape and removing outdated regulations is a worthwhile effort.

But this cannot come at the cost of our state and students taking a step backward.

Lawmakers have proposed watering down our third grade literacy policy, removing the backstop of retention and paving the way to reinstate social promotion. Requiring that students objectively demonstrate they are reading successfully before being promoted to fourth grade has been a core part of Florida’s comprehensive early literacy policy — one that research has consistently supported.

Most parents believe their children are reading on grade level even when they are not. Florida’s retention policy raises expectations. We know there are grave later-life outcomes for struggling readers. Lowering expectations by watering down the retention requirement will not help students in third grade or beyond.

Moreover, abandoning the requirement that Florida students pass the tenth grade English Language Arts and Algebra I end-of-course assessments further reduces expectations and hampers Florida’s workforce development efforts. Removing this requirement may aid Florida’s graduation rates, but it will reduce the diploma to nothing more than a participation certificate.

If we expect less, we will get less. This cannot be the future we want for Florida.

Finally, part of the package would turn back recent gains for charter schools to be treated equitably alongside their traditional public school peers. The bill’s proposed changes would make it harder for charter schools to access vacant public school buildings and reduce the share of Title I funds made available to students attending charter schools. This is a step backward.

Maintaining Florida’s system of high expectations, clear accountability and robust choice is as important to our future as anything. We’ve spent two decades establishing, maintaining and building upon these ideals.

Now is not the time for lawmakers to get weak-kneed on policies that have played key roles in contributing to two decades of educational progress.

Jeb Bush was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. He is the founder and chair of ExcelinEd, ExcelinEd in Action and the Foundation for Florida’s Future.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Literacy, NAEP, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

Florida: More on Sex Scandal Involving GOP Chair and Mom for Liberty

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2023 //
31

Christian Ziegler is suffering a huge embarrassment. He is chairman of the Florida GOP and his wife Bridget is co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a Sarasota school board member, and one of DeSantis’s appointees to the board controlling Disney World.

The police released the search warrant for Christian’s cellphone and more details emerged that suggest that these paragons of morality engaged in some scandalous personal behavior.

Moms for Liberty has led a moral crusade to remove books about sex and race from classrooms and school libraries.

A search warrant affidavit released Friday sheds more light on the sexual battery accusations Christian Ziegler is facing amid growing bipartisan calls that he should quit his job as Florida’s Republican Party chair.

The allegations are being brought by a woman who says she had a previous consensual sexual encounter that included Ziegler and his wife, Bridget, also a player in Florida politics, according to the affidavit.

The document obtained through a public records request corroborates details from anonymous sources that were first reported Thursday by the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

Ziegler has not been charged with a crime, and his attorney, Derek Byrd, says he will be cleared of wrongdoing.

Sarasota Police outlined the accusations when applying for a search warrant in the 12th Judicial Circuit for Ziegler’s cellphone, Google email and Google Drive.

Ziegler and the woman who he’d known for 20 years agreed to have a sexual encounter including his wife on Oct. 2, but the woman canceled when she learned Bridget was unable to make it, police said in the affidavit.

The woman told detectives she opened her door to walk her dog and Ziegler entered her apartment and sexually assaulted her, the affidavit states.

“The victim advised Christian did not wear a condom, and he stated ‘I’m leaving the same way I came in,’” the affidavit states.

Ziegler was on surveillance footage visiting the apartment, police said in the affidavit.

Ziegler told detectives in an interview with his attorney present he had consensual sex with the woman and took video of it, initially deleting it but then uploading it to his Google Drive since the allegation, according to the affidavit. Police said in the affidavit that they have not located the footage.

Bridget Ziegler told detectives she was involved in a sexual encounter with her husband and the woman once over a year ago, the affidavit states.

What qualifies these people to be lecturing others about sexual propriety?

Should Moms for Liberty be renamed?

Moms Take Liberties?

Moms at Liberty?

Liberty for Moms?

Categories DeSantis, Ethics, Florida, Scandal

Peter Greene: Will Wyoming Pass Vouchers and Throw Rural Schools Under the Bus?

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2023 //
5

Peter Greene has been following the debate over voucher legislation in Wyoming, where they have failed until now. Surely some Republicans must be following what happened to vouchers in Texas, where a significant number of Republicans representing rural districts voted them down to protect their community public schools. They knew their schools needed funding, not competition. What states like Wyoming need is a public referendum on vouchers: let the public decide. Could it be that the politicians know that no state referendum on vouchers has ever passed?

Greene writes:

Attempts have been made to sell a school voucher bill in the Wyoming legislature, like the Wyoming Freedom Scholarship Act (because “scholarship” and “freedom” are more popular terms than “voucher”) earlier this year, but they have all failed. Now a new variation on the theme is aiming at a place on the 2024 schedule.

Oddly enough, the bill comes from Speaker of the House Albert Sommers, a Republican who actually helped block the Freedom Scholarship Act. But he thinks this alternate form will work better. Opponents disagree. Actually, some supporters disagreed, too– State Senator Bo Biteman said this new version was too watered down and was a “crap sandwich,” and so, as we’ll see, GOP reps managed to un-water the bill.

Some key features.

The bill runs on $40 million taken from the general fund. Of that $40 million, $12 million (30%) goes to fund preschool education. Because if there’s one technique that voucher proponents have learned, it’s to team up your unpopular voucher plan with something that people want.

The rest of the funding would go to ESA vouchers.
The bill uses the usual foot-in-the-door feature of an income cap for receiving the vouchers. This bill sets the cap at 250% of federal poverty limit, which adds up to $75,000 for a family of four. Median household income in Wyoming is $68,000. One legislator unsuccessfully tried to boost this up to 350% ($105K). At this point, nobody should be fooled by the “we’re just doing this to rescue the poor kids” line, as we have seen multiple states modify their program with ever-increasing caps or simply getting rid of the cap entirely.

With that expansion of eligibility, we keep seeing voucher program costs explode to budget-busting extremes.

Voucher amount would be up to $5,000. According to the website Private School Review, average private school tuition in Wyoming is $8,719 per year.

In one feature that is not common to voucher laws, the bill proposes that the Department of Education would certify vendors eligible to be paid with the taxpayer-funded vouchers. (That was not part of the Freedom Scholarship Act.) But a legislator successfully added an amendment, typical of current voucher law, that the state can’t interfere with the private school’s curriculum or admission policies, meaning that the school could teach religion, flat earth science, creationism, and racial supremacy if it so desired, as well as discriminating against whatever applicants it so desired.

In practice, what that means is that religious schools can accept vouchers while offering religious indoctrination and religion-based discrimination (e.g. the Illinois voucher school that requires families to be born-again Christians)
And another legislator successfully stripped the portion of the bill that voucher-using students had to take the same state tests as public school students. Rep. Karlee Provenza pretty well captured what all these changes mean.

“When we remove that testing standard, we are moving away from saying is government money being well spent?” Provenza said. “We’re not regulating choice, we’re regulating accountability of our state funds.”

True enough, but current voucher theory says that a voucher bill isn’t non-crappy unless it’s stripped of accountability and oversight. So if Wyoming is going to have school vouchers, they should be as unaccountable and unregulated as possible. Kiss those dollars goodbye, taxpayers, and don’t ask where they went or how effectively they were spent. Freedom!

The bill will still have to clear some hurdles, including a state constitution that prohibits the use of “any portion of any public school fund” for private schools (Article 7, Section 8).

Wyoming voucher advocates have struggled with this, and the argument seems to boil down to:

1) Once we hand the money over to the parents, it is transformed into private money and so there’s no problem!

2) Supreme Court thinks public money should absolutely finance the exercise of religion, so if this makes it all the way to SCOTUS, they will be on our side.

So we’ll see. There are unique features to a voucher initiative in Wyoming. For one, funding vouchers by having “the money follow the child” would never fly, because Wyoming schools have wildly different per pupil costs. In 2019-2020, Laramie #1 spent $14,582 per student, but the very rural Sheridan district (90 students) spent $41,176 per student. That means Wyoming is better inclined to fund vouchers separately from public education. They could, in fact, be the first legislature to be honest and say, “We believe in choice so much that we are going to raise your taxes to fund it.”

For another, there’s that state constitution, exactly the same sort of challenge that sank a voucher proposal in Kentucky.

Other state constitutions, such as Florida and Ohio, ban public funding for religious schools, but that has not been an obstacle to GOP politicians.

Categories Accountability, Equity, Extremism, Funding, Privatization, Rural Schools, School Choice, Vouchers, Wyoming

Florida: Orlando Philharmonic Fined $5,000 for Drag Show

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
12

Governor DeSantis is teaching the nation that “parental rights” are limited. They are respected only when you agree with his ideology. For example, he hates anything related to gay people. He especially hates drag queens. So, parents do not have the right to take their children to a drag queen show, even if the show has zero sexual content. This is peculiar behavior for a short guy who wears white go-go boots to tour hurricane damage.

DeSantis is cracking down on drag queen performances. How dare parents exercise their “parental rights!”

The Orlando Sentinel reported:

The Orlando Philharmonic has settled with state regulators over its “A Drag Queen Christmas” show, agreeing to pay a $5,000 fine and to not allow children into such performances in the future.

The settlement, reached in August but only publicly announced Wednesday, came even though undercover agents reported that they found nothing lewd about the event.

The Plaza Live, owned by the Philharmonic, could have had its alcohol license revoked in the wake of the complaint filed in February by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation over the Dec. 28 show at the theater.

The agency claimed The Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation, which oversees the Plaza Live, had a responsibility under Florida statutes to make sure no minors were in attendance for the show which allegedly featured “simulated sex acts.”

There was a sign at the entrance warning of potentially unsuitable content for those under the age of 18, according to the complaint.

While undercover agents took photos of three minors at the show, all apparently accompanied by adults, an incident report obtained by the Miami Herald stated that nothing indecent had happened on stage.

The Philharmonic admitted no liability by settling the dispute and agreed not to permit minors into such shows. The Philharmonic and state agency also waived all claims against each other.

A spokesperson for the Philharmonic did not respond to requests for comment on the agreement or whether the event would be held this year. No such show was listed on the calendar on the Plaza Live website on Thursday.

In Miami, the city-owned James L. Knight Center agreed to a similar $5,000 fine for a Drag Queen Christmas event the day before the Orlando show. That settlement did not find any violations of administrative or criminal laws, the Herald reported.

The show toured several Florida cities including Orlando, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Clearwater in December 2022. The Orlando show drew in large crowds of supporters who backed parents’ rights to take their children where they wish and to protest the conservative movement’s attacks on the LGBTQ community.

The show also drew protesters who claimed it exposed children to “sexually explicit” content and accused organizers of “grooming,” an allegation often baselessly directed at LGBTQ people to suggest a link between them and child abuse.

A later law criminalizing “knowingly” admitting children to “adult” live performances, signed earlier this year by Gov. Ron DeSantis, was temporarily blocked from taking effect in July by a judge who ruled that it targeted drag show performers’ free speech rights. The ongoing suit was brought by Orlando restaurant Hamburger Mary’s.

Publicity photo for the “Drag Queen Christmas Show” at the Broward Center for Performing Arts

I sent a gift of $50 to the Orlando Philharmonic to thank them for defending freedom of expression. If 99 others do the same, we can make up the ridiculous fine they were forced to pay to pander to DeSantis’s homophobia.

https://orlandophil.org/ways-you-can-give/

Categories Accountability, Censorship, DeSantis, Florida, Gender, Parents

Jan Resseger: The Facts About Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
5

The Network for Public Education reposted this excellent review of a book about vouchers. The review and the book summarize the findings about who benefits from vouchers and how they affect the public schools. The place to begin is with recognition of the handsomely funded propaganda campaign on behalf of vouchers. The promise was equity. The reality was inequity, diverting public funds to subsidize students who never attended public schools. Were vouchers intended as a scam or did they unexpectedly turn into one?

New post on Network for Public Education. Jan Resseger: New Book Contrasts What Voucher Proponents Promise to the Inequitable Results

Jan Resseger writes:

Jan Resseger looks at a new book edited by Kevin Weltner of the National Education Policy Center entitled The School Voucher Illusion. Reposted with permission.

Teachers College Press recently published The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, a dispositive analysis of the failure of publicly funded private school tuition voucher programs.

The book is a collection of essays edited by Kevin Welner, Director of the Education Policy Center and professor at the University of Colorado; Gary Orfield, Director of the Civil Rights Project and professor at UCLA; and Luis Huerta, professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Contributors include the editors as well as Derek Black, author of Schoolhouse Burning and professor at the University of South Carolina; Christopher Lubienski, author of The Public School Advantage and professor at Indiana University; Preston Green, professor at the University of Connecticut; and Suzanne Eckes and Julie Mead, professors at the University of Wisconsin, and many other scholars. The list includes academic experts on constitutional law, civil rights, public policy, and the social foundations of education.

In the final chapter, after 270 pages of data and theoretical exploration, Welner, Orfield, and Huerta contrast what the promoters of school privatization promise to the damage caused by the school voucher programs spreading across the states today: “If the real choice is not access to a superior, idealized school with an excellent faculty, but instead to a segregated religious school that is also struggling with concentrated poverty plus a weak and inexperienced teaching force, then vouchers are offering a fundamentally different experience than what’s been advertised.” (p. 276)

What about the diversion of states’ education budgets to private schools?

“What began in Cleveland and Milwaukee as small-scale pilots targeted to ‘save’ students of color from ‘failing public schools’… quickly transformed into a movement to give all students a taxpayer subsidy to incentivize them to leave their public schools and, then, into subsidies for students who were in private schools anyway—simply a transfer of money, usually to families without the financial exigency.” (p. 278)

Through the research reported by contributors to this book, the editors conclude that measuring the fiscal impact of transferring tax dollars to private schools is complicated due to all the ways: “vouchers interact with public budgets… Any measure of the immediate fiscal and educational efficiency of vouchers must… account for significant cost differentials compared to a comprehensive public school system… and must include measures of quality and the amount of services provided to all students. For example, public schools routinely enroll greater numbers of special education, vocational education, and English language learner students, who require more expensive educational services than those that private schools typically provide.” (p. 284)

There is also the problem of fixed costs that do not change when students leave public schools with a voucher: “A reduction in public school enrollments must also be taken into account due to effects on the economies of scale that support public school infrastructure…. When policies move students out of public school systems, the schools often have fixed costs… that cannot be lowered to match declining per-student aid from state governments, leaving less money for educational operations.” (p. 284)

And what about the vouchers taken up by students already in private schools? “Voucher programs only realize financial savings for state governments when the cost of providing vouchers to families is offset by corresponding reductions for students opting out of the public school system… Advocates who claim voucher and neovoucher programs are a savings to taxpayers use very high switcher rates, which can result in a gross overestimate of public-coffer savings.” (p. 284-285)

What have we lost through the erosion of the Constitutional protection of the separation of church and state?

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Although previous U.S. Supreme Courts used to interpret the separation of government and religion under the Establishment Clause, in three recent Supreme Court precedents, today’s justices have relied on the Free Exercise Clause—opining that if a state provides vouchers to private schools, it may not interfere with the free exercise of religion by denying vouchers to private schools that are run by faith communities, even those private schools that explicitly teach religion as part of the curriculum.

Welner, Orfield and Huerta explain how the Supreme Court’s new definition of church/state separation complicates voucher expansion across the states: “A state-established church is, after all, a formalized entanglement between the two institutions. Connected leadership and decision-making, finances and personnel, beliefs and positions…. Each of these is… a type of entanglement, in the sense that a move taken by one of the two institutions is directly felt by the other… We cannot yet know how far the current Supreme Court will take its elevated Free Exercise concerns about bias against religious institutions—perhaps all religiously motivated discrimination will be given heightened legal protection, or perhaps the Court will treat discriminatory practices as beyond the protection of the Free Exercise Clause, or perhaps racial discrimination will trigger greater scrutiny and protection than discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. It is not difficult to see the slippery slope of unregulated funding combined with extreme protection of religious freedom. While religious beliefs are often caring and comforting, some of these beliefs are hostile to outsiders…. (D)iscrimination against members of the LGBTQ+ community is not unusual in private religious schools.” (pp. 280-283)

Are the most vulnerable children the ones who actually receive the vouchers? And what about protecting children’s civil rights?

“Advocates for expanding vouchers argue that students of color and low income students, particularly those with special needs, are otherwise denied the choices available to middle-class families. Vouchers, they say, will provide a large step toward equity of educational opportunity. Yet as described throughout this book, actual voucher policies tend to reach a different set of students. Choice research across the globe finds that unregulated choice creates stratification and disadvantages the disadvantaged.” (p. 286)

I wish the National Education Policy Center, of which Welner is the director, would publish, as a resource brief, the list of 13 questions (pp. 286-287) which advocates, critics, and regulators should ask when voucher programs are proposed. These questions are designed to expose a voucher program’s violations of standards of equity and opportunity. Here are just three examples: “Under what conditions are voucher-receiving schools allowed to reject applicants and expel students?” “Do the voucher-receiving schools have the staff and training to educate successfully and responsively with a community’s diverse population?” “Does the voucher program increase (or diminish) stratification by race and class? For students with special needs and students whose first language is other than English?” (pp. 286-287)

When students bring vouchers to private schools, there are myriad ways their rights are likely to remain unprotected: “State laws should mandate that, with the receipt of public funds, all participating schools become fully responsible to comply with all civil rights laws. For instance, they must agree to comply with the nondiscrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (or a substantially equivalent state civil rights act), including the antidiscrimination policies protecting students and all job discrimination components of staffing. They must also agree to comply with federal laws on special education rights and prohibitions against sex discrimination. Without such policies (which mirror those in many European countries that have voucher-like funding systems), taxpayer dollars are subsidizing open discrimination against some groups.” (p. 288)

The editors conclude The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity with a warning: “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… If publicly stated social justice goals are to be anything more than empty and misleading rhetoric, lawmakers will need to address the concerns raised by the authors throughout this volume. Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (p. 290)You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/jan-resseger-new-book-contrasts-what-voucher-proponents-promise-to-the-inequitable-results/

Please open the link to read the post in full.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers

Idaho: Red-State Families Fight Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
1

This story appeared in Commonweal, a progressive Catholic magazine of distinction. The author, Luke Mayville, has organized thus-far successful resistance to vouchers.

He writes:

Ever since Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” economic libertarians have dreamed of privatizing America’s system of public schools. In place of a school system that is publicly funded, democratically governed, and accessible to all, policy entrepreneurs have sought to transform American education into a commodity—something to be bought and sold in a free market.

In the push to privatize education, the tip of the spear has always been school vouchers—policies that extract funds from public schools in order to subsidize private-school tuition. Milwaukee established the nation’s first voucher program in 1990. In the following twenty-five years, voucher experiments were rolled out in fits and starts, often meeting with stiff public resistance. Voucher advocates gained significant footholds in Ohio, Washington D.C., Indiana, and elsewhere, but lacked the power to fundamentally transform the nation’s public-school system.

The cause has gained unprecedented momentum during the past five years. In their book A Wolf at the School House Door (2020), Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider sounded the alarm about “an increasingly potent network of conservative state and federal elected officials, advocacy groups, and think tanks…backed by deep-pocketed funders,” all of them committed to dismantling public education as an institution. The new assault on public education intensified in the pandemic era, as voucher advocates seized the opportunity of mass school closures to propose—and in many cases enact—sweeping privatization schemes. In states across the country, the voucher agenda went hand in hand with efforts to sow distrust in public education by claiming, usually without evidence, that schools had become centers for critical race theory, “gender ideology,” and other forms of “social-justice indoctrination.” Meanwhile, voucher proponents were energized by landmark decisions of the United States Supreme Court, most notably Espinoza v. Montana in 2020 and Carson v. Makin in 2022, both of which appeared to remove constitutional obstacles to the use of public dollars for private religious education.

The nationally coordinated push to privatize public education is one of the most corrosive developments in American life. While Catholics and members of other faith communities have rightly cherished private parochial education, they, too, have strong reasons to support America’s public schools even if their own children do not attend them. It is an essential feature of the mission of public education to affirm the dignity of every child and to prepare each child to be a full participant in civic and economic life. As Berkshire and Schneider put it, public education “is our collective effort to realize for all young people their full human potential, regardless of circumstance.”

Fortunately, the coordinated attack on public education has met strong resistance from educators, students, parents, and citizens in several states across the country. During the 2023 legislative session here in Idaho, legislators presented a long series of voucher bills. One proposal sought to enact universal “education savings accounts” (ESAs) that would be available to every Idaho family—including the affluent. Other bills proposed tax-credit schemes or more targeted approaches. Every single proposal failed. Remarkably, Idaho remains voucher-free even as the voucher movement has enacted sweeping legislation in Arizona, Florida, West Virginia, Iowa, Arkansas, and elsewhere.

Grassroots organizing has been indispensable in Idaho’s fight against vouchers. A strong coalition of educators, parents, and advocacy organizations—including Reclaim Idaho, an organization I cofounded—has proved to be an effective counterweight to the voucher movement’s deep-pocketed lobbying efforts.

A recent poll by the Idaho Statesman found that public opinion in Idaho is dead set against vouchers, with 63 percent opposed and just 23 percent in support. The mission of organizers has been to translate widespread public opposition into effective political action. To that end, we’ve organized in communities across this vast state and helped citizens become defenders of public schools and sharp critics of voucher schemes. We’ve helped local advocates understand and articulate the arguments against vouchers that resonate most with the public: that vouchers are fiscally reckless, costing far more than advertised; that voucher programs tend to diminish student achievement and discriminate against students with disabilities; and that voucher programs are especially harmful for rural communities where no private-school options exist.

In local efforts to resist vouchers, grassroots organizing can harness the power of personal stories. The voucher movement has attempted to tell their own personalized story by evoking images of poor, marginalized children who’ve been “trapped” in failing public schools. The promise of “school choice” is to give struggling parents the choice to move their children into private schools that better fit their needs. However, as more states adopt voucher programs, the vast majority of voucher funds are flowing not to students who’ve left public schools but to private-school students who were never in public schools to begin with. A total of 89 percent of voucher funds in New Hampshire, 80 percent in Arizona, and 75 percent in Wisconsin have gone to students already enrolled in private schools, and these students disproportionately belong to affluent families living in suburban and urban areas.

The “school choice” story is mostly a fiction, and grassroots organizing can refocus the conversation on personal stories that paint the full picture. When people get organized on the voucher issue, the question can suddenly shift from “Do families deserve more choice?” to “Why would we pull scarce funds from our public schools—especially in rural areas—in order to subsidize tuition for affluent suburban families?” During testimony before the Idaho Senate Education Committee on a bill to create universal ESAs, a public-school supporter named Sheri Hughes phoned in to testify remotely from Challis—a mountain town of 922 people located 190 miles from the state capital. “I know the power and strength of consolidated public money for education, especially in rural Idaho,” Hughes said. She told the committee that her grandfather had served on the Challis school board and helped build the town’s first high school, that her mother—also a school-board member—helped get the high school rebuilt after the 1983 Challis earthquake. “Based on Arizona’s ESA Voucher experience,” Hughes went on, “the money proposed to be removed off the top of Idaho’s education funding budget would take an estimated 17–20 percent of funding away from Challis schools—in an area with no private alternative choices, and where home-school students still access public-school resources for proctoring, band, sports, special ed, and other extracurricular activities.”

Grassroots organizing can also help advocates expose the creative attempts by voucher proponents to present their policy agenda as something less threatening. With the American public skeptical of school vouchers and school privatization more generally, the privatization movement has aggressively sought to rebrand vouchers by means of convoluted policy schemes. Proponents of ESAs claim that they are not proposing vouchers but merely offering families money that can be used for a wide range of education services—including, but not limited to, private-school tuition. Similarly, proponents of “tax-credit scholarships” claim their proposals are distinct from vouchers because they do not directly spend public dollars on private schools but instead award tax credits to individuals who choose to fund private-school scholarships.

Grassroots organizing can expose these policies for what they are: vouchers by another name. In Idaho, we’ve invested time and energy in community meetings across the state where the goal is to share information with local public-education supporters about the mechanics of ESAs, tax-credit scholarships, and other policy schemes. Such meetings have prepared local citizens to speak out forcefully against thinly veiled attempts to siphon funds out of their public schools. Local advocates have written to their legislators, published op-eds and letters to the editor, spoken with friends and neighbors, and—most importantly—many have shown up to testify before the legislature. With so many grassroots advocates raising their voices and telling the truth about these policies, it’s been very difficult for privatizers to maintain the public narrative that they are promoting something other than a repackaged voucher scheme.

Please open the link and finish reading the rest of this excellent article.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Idaho, Parents, Resistance, Rural Schools, Vouchers

Chris Tomlinson: Texas Oilmen Spreading Hate and Lies

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
5

Chris Tomlinson is an award-winning columnist for the Houston Chronicle. He uses his space to combat bigotry, stupidity, and lies. He is not a “both sides” kind of journalist.

He writes here about the infamous oil billionaires who use their money to spread their religious views, attack public schools, and encourage indoctrination.

He writes:

Texas oilman H.L. Hunt may have been the first to spend millions to promote right-wing media and extremist ideas, but he was far from the last.

Most Texans, let alone Americans, had never heard of Farris and Dan Wilks or Tim Dunn before this year. But journalists have revealed them as key supporters of some of the most controversial figures in Texas politics and bankrollers of political action committees staffed by Christian nationalists and antisemites.

The reclusive billionaires and their allies rarely respond to requests for comment from mainstream media and did not respond to my messages.

Farris Wilks, fracking billionaire and pastor of the Assembly of Yahweh (7th Day) Church, preaches that the Bible is “true and correct in every scientific and historical detail” and that abortion, homosexuality and drunkenness are serious crimes, according to the church’s doctrinal statement, the Reuters news agency reported.

Dan Wilks attends church with his brother, with whom he co-founded Frac Tech, a company they sold for $3.5 billion. They have since become some of the largest donors in Texas GOP politics, giving $15 million in 2016 to a political action committee backing Sen. Ted Cruz.

Like Hunt, who broadcast his extremist commentary on radio stations nationwide, the Wilks brothers have also invested in media, supporting conservative mouthpieces like The Daily Wire and Prager University. Their PAC bought ads disguised as articles in the Metric Media news network, which includes 59 pseudo-local news sites in Texas, the Columbia Journalism Review reported.

The Wilks brothers have enjoyed their greatest success by joining Dunn to move the Republican Party of Texas as far right as possible through Empower Texans, one of the most influential dark-money political action committees.

Empower Texans shuttered in 2020 after spinning off operations into Texans for Fiscal Responsibility and Texas Scorecard, which rank politicians by their adherence to the group’s ideology. Dunn and the Wilks brothers have provided most of the financing and set the agenda for conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan, who has led all three organizations.

In 2016, the groups opposed Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, whom they considered too moderate. They also ran ultra-conservative candidates against Republicans who ranked poorly on their scorecard. When Straus, who is Jewish, invited Dunn for a breakfast meeting, he reportedly said only Christians should have leadership positions, Texas Monthly reported in 2018. This is a sentiment he’d previously expressed in a 2016 Christian radio interview.

Republicans have long struggled with antisemitism. In 2010, State Republican Executive Chairman John Cooke wrote an email proclaiming, “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it,” the Texas Observer reported.

Dunn and the Wilkses also finance special interest PACs. In 2017, Empower Texans supported and advised Texans for Vaccine Choice, an early anti-vaccination movement, former state Rep. Jonathan Stickland told the Washington Post.

Stickland left elected office to start Pale Horse Strategies, a political consulting firm that ran a new Dunn and Wilks PAC, Defend Texas Liberty. The PAC defended Attorney General Ken Paxton against corruption allegations and provided $3 million to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick weeks before he presided over Paxton’s impeachment trial, where he was acquitted.

Fresh from that victory, a Texas Tribune reporter observed Stickland, Republican Party of Texas chair Matt Rinaldi, prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Black Lives Matter shooter Kyle Rittenhouse enter the Pale Horse Strategies office in Fort Worth on Oct. 6.

Fuentes was driven to the meeting by Chris Russo, who used Dunn and Wilks money to found Texans For Strong Borders PAC. Russo has past ties to Fuentes, the Tribune reported.

When current GOP House Speaker Dade Phelan demanded Patrick give away the $3 million donation, Patrick said Dunn had called him to apologize.

Dunn “is certain that Mr. Stickland and all PAC personnel will not have any future contact with Mr. Fuentes,” Patrick explained.

Yet, when the Tribune’s Robert Downen kept digging, he found that Pale Horse’s social media manager, Elle Maulding, had called Fuentes the “greatest civil rights leader in history” and shared photos of them together. Shelby Griesinger, Defend Texas Liberty’s treasurer, has said Jews worship a false god and depicted them as the enemy on social media.

Dunn and the Wilks brothers have spent $100 million on ultra-conservative candidates, political action committees in Texas, and radical nonprofits. They finance a movement staffed by publicly antisemitic foot soldiers.

Conservatives considered H.L. Hunt a crackpot in his day. But this new generation has the GOP falling into a goose step.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ignorance, Lies, Religion, Stupid, Texas

Florida: GOP Leader Under Investigation for Sexual Battery

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2023 //
13

Christian Ziegler is state chairman of the GOP. His wife Bridget Ziegler is founder of Moms for Liberty. They are exceedingly sanctimonious and know what is and is not moral.

For other people.

Sadly, Christian Ziegler is under investigation for sexual battery.

The Sarasota Police Department is investigating an allegation of sexual battery against Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler, according to a report by the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

Citing anonymous sources close to the investigation, the government watchdog group says police seized Ziegler’s cell phone and “investigators continue to conduct a forensic examination of the electronic device.”

Multiple GOP sources with knowledge of the investigation confirmed the sexual battery investigation and said the probe also involves allegations of illegally taping sex acts.

The USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida has requested documents from the Sarasota Police Department but has yet to receive them.

“Records is in the process of redacting the report. It is still an open and active investigation,” said Sarasota Police spokeswoman Cynthia McLaughlin.

Ziegler and his wife, Sarasota County School Board member and Moms for Liberty founder Bridget Ziegler, have emerged as one of the most prominent political couples in the state in recent years.

A former Sarasota County Commissioner, Christian Ziegler took over the Florida GOP in February after years of grassroots GOP activism.

Sources told the Florida Center for Government Accountability that the woman accusing Christian Ziegler of sexual battery “alleged that she and both Zieglers had been involved in a longstanding consensual three-way sexual relationship prior to the incident.”

The allegations are sure to reverberate across Florida’s political landscape, throwing the Florida GOP into turmoil at a time when the party is gearing up for the 2024 election.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Florida GOP.

Categories Accountability, Florida, Hypocrisy

One Brief Shining Moment When Peace in the Middle East Seemed Possible

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2023 //
6

David Kurlander, assistant to Preet Bharara at Cafe Insider, takes us back to the Clinton era, when peace between the Palestinians and Israel seemed to be a real possibility.

Kurlander writes:

The situation in Israel and Gaza is continuing to escalate, spawning overlapping humanitarian crises, regional instability, and fiercely competing narratives of culpability. Amid the carnage, President Biden visited Tel Aviv on Wednesday to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden’s diplomatic move both mirrors and devastatingly diverges from another visit concerning Gaza by an American leader: President Clinton and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat’s optimistic December 1998 meeting in Gaza City. 

In sharp contrast to today, the outward dynamic between Israel, the United States, and Gaza in late 1998 was briefly hopeful. 

I am by no means an expert, and I’m wary – given the extreme sensitivity of this issue right now – of being glib or biased in any way here, but I’m still going to endeavor to give a brief leadup to the visit: Five years earlier, in September 1993, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin had signed the Oslo Accords, a plan to transfer governing control of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority over the following five years. 

In November 1995, an Israeli right-wing extremist hostile to Oslo assassinated Rabin during a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu, skeptical of Oslo’s aims, came into the Prime Ministership and – at least in part spurred by a series of suicide bombings by Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv– stalled the proposed transfer of Gaza and the West Bank and supported the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory. 

Still, at an October 1998 meeting in Maryland brokered by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Arafat and Netanyahu signed the Wye River Memorandum. Most notably, the agreement pushed Netanyahu to resume the transfer of 14.1% of the West Bank to Palestinian control. 

The provisions on the Israeli side also concerned Gaza. They included declarations of support for the opening of an airport in Gaza, and for safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank. 

On the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) side, Arafat agreed to remove several controversial articles from the 1968 Palestinian National Covenant, including those calling for Palestinian “armed struggle” and one calling Zionism “fascist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods.” The PLO also agreed to anti-terrorism enforcement efforts. 

In his remarks at Wye River, Netanyahu underscored the significance of the compromise: “This is an important moment to give a secure and peaceful future for our children and the children of our neighbors, the Palestinians. We have seen this moment.”

Two months later, Clinton traveled to Gaza. When he arrived on December 14th, 1998, he first participated in a ribbon-cutting with Arafat at the brand-new Gaza Airport. Next, he traveled to the main cultural center in Gaza City, where he and Arafat spoke before 1,200 civic leaders, including some 450 members of the Palestine National Council. 

The speeches are available in their entirety on the William J. Clinton President Library’s YouTube channel. 

The words of the two leaders are full of hope, even if they ultimately did not totally reflect the realities on the ground. Arafat both called out the pain that the occupation had caused Palestinians, but also argued, in decidedly poetic terms, that a new future was dawning: 

Mr. President, the beginning of this century marked a major injustice inflicted on our Palestinian people. Today, we see a nearing, shining light. We feel a renewed hope due to your support. We hope that the end of this century will witness the correction of the injustice and the inauguration of a new era: The era of peace and freedom, peace of the brave. Didn’t I tell you that I see that light at the end of the tunnel? 

Arafat predicted that Palestinians would embrace the new aims of Wye River and help to defend the security protocols outlined in the agreement: 

Our people will not go back to the ways before peace. And we will not allow or tolerate any violence or anyone to mess with the security of both sides, both sides, both sides. And we will confront all attempts of violence and jeopardizing security no matter what is the source, no matter where is the source.  

Arafat ended his remarks by broadening out his wishes for peace to the entire region: 

And now, my brothers and sisters — and here I am talking from my heart to your hearts — we are talking for peace for the Palestinian land for the Holy Land, in Israel and in Palestine, and in Golan, and in South Lebanon, and in the Middle East.  

Clinton followed Arafat. He stopped short of calling for a Palestinian state explicitly – something that only former President Carter had done to that point – but he opened his remarks with a vision of Gaza, assisted by the airport, as an independent member of the global economic and political community: 

Hillary and I, along with Chairman and Mrs. Arafat, celebrated a place that will become a magnet for planes from throughout the Middle East and beyond, bringing you a future in which Palestinians can travel directly to the far corners of the world; a future in which it is easier and cheaper to bring materials, technology and expertise in and out of Gaza; a future in which tourists and traders can flock here, to this beautiful place on the Mediterranean; a future, in short, in which the Palestinian people are connected to the world.  

Addressing Israelis, Clinton acknowledged the difficult road to implementing Oslo, and nodded obliquely to Netanyahu’s support for settlements and aversion to the process:

I want the people of Israel to know that for many Palestinians, five years after Oslo, the benefits of this process remain remote; that for too many Palestinians lives are hard, jobs are scarce, prospects are uncertain and personal grief is great.   

I know that tremendous pain remains as a result of losses suffered from violence, the separation of families, the restrictions on the movement of people and goods. I understand your concerns about settlement activity, land confiscation and home demolitions. I understand your concerns, and theirs, about unilateral statements that could prejudge the outcome of final status negotiations. I understand, in short, that there’s still a good deal of misunderstanding five years after the beginning of this remarkable process.

Clinton then focused in on children, detailing parallel interactions from the previous day with Palestinian and Israeli children whose parents were the victims of violence between the two sides: 

I’ve had two profoundly emotional experiences in the last less than 24 hours. I was with Chairman Arafat and four little children came to see me whose fathers are in Israeli prisons. Last night, I met some little children whose fathers had been killed in conflict with Palestinians, at the dinner that Prime Minister Netanyahu had for me. Those children brought tears to my eyes. We have to find a way for both sets of children to get their lives back and to go forward.

I ask you to remember these experiences I had with these two groups of children. If I had met them in reverse order I would not have known which ones were Israeli and which Palestinian. If they had all been lined up in a row and I had seen their tears, I could not tell whose father was dead and whose father was in prison, or what the story of their lives were, making up the grief that they bore. We must acknowledge that neither side has a monopoly on pain or virtue. 

As he wound up his address, Clinton explicitly thanked the Council for ratifying Arafat’s agreement to cut out the most intense Articles of the Covenant, arguing that Israel would respond with generosity and empathy to the change: 

I thank you for your rejection — fully, finally and forever – of the passages in the Palestinian Charter calling for the destruction of Israel. For they were the ideological underpinnings of a struggle renounced at Oslo. By revoking them once and for all, you have sent, I say again, a powerful message not to the government, but to the people of Israel. You will touch people on the street there. You will reach their hearts there. 

And – just as Clinton had highlighted the pain of the Israeli occupation, he also criticized Palestinians who had supported the acts of violence by Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad in the years since Oslo: 

The time has come to sanctify your holy ground with genuine forgiveness and reconciliation. Every influential Palestinian, from teacher to journalist, from politician to community leader, must make this a mission to banish from the minds of children glorifying suicide bombers; to end the practice of speaking peace in one place and preaching hatred in another; to teach school children the value of peace and the waste of war; to break the cycle of violence. Our great American prophet, Martin Luther King, once said, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” 

I believe you have gained more in five years of peace than in 45 years of war. I believe that what we are doing today, working together for security, will lead to further gains and changes in the heart. I believe that our work against terrorism, as you stand strong, will be rewarded – for that must become a fact of the past. It must never be a part of your future.  Let me say this as clearly as I can: no matter how sharp a grievance or how deep a hurt, there is no justification for killing innocents.

Like Arafat, Clinton ended with a sweeping and forward-looking note, listing other diametrically-opposed societies who had found peace over the course of the previous century and arguing that Israel and Palestine were on their way: 

Think of all the conflicts in the 20th century that many people thought were permanent that have been healed or are healing. Two great world wars between the French and the Germans; they’re best friends. The Americans and the Russians, the whole Cold War; now we have a constructive partnership. The Irish Catholics and Protestants; the Chinese and the Japanese; the Black and white South Africans; the Serbs, the Croats and the Muslims in Bosnia – all have turned from conflict to cooperation.

Obviously, Israel and Palestine have not joined the list of reconciled adversaries that Clinton outlined. And despite Arafat and Clinton’s soaring oratory, many on the ground met the meeting with skepticism. 

In the Jabalia refugee camp, 55-year-old Abdul Jalil Freih was pessimistic about the prospects for Palestinian autonomy, telling the Los Angeles Times, “Clinton will not do anything for us. It doesn’t matter to us whether he comes or goes.” 

Sure enough, 1999 and 2000 would be deeply painful. The Netanyahu government would collapse shortly after the Clinton and Arafat addresses, in part due to the Prime Minister’s opposition to Wye River and further implementation of the Accords. The 2000 Camp David Summit between Clinton, Arafat, and Prime Minister Ehud Barak would end without an agreement. And the violent Second Intifada – stoked, arguably, by both a bellicose and violent turn by Arafat and by Israeli politician Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount – broke out soon thereafter. A blame game followed: the Israeli government viewed Arafat as backing the Intifada, while Palestinians highlighted Israeli resistance to the Accords. 

But even if the Clinton and Arafat speeches were ultimately unfulfilled visions of a peaceful future, they can perhaps show that the despair of the current moment has not always been total, and that the prospect for diplomacy and non-violent change can some day be realized in the wrenching conflict.

For more on the current conflict, listen to Preet and Carnegie Endowment for Peace Senior Fellow Aaron David Miller’s conversation last week on Stay Tuned with Preet. And for more on the history of Gaza, read my Time Machine article, “‘History is Unfortunately Repeating Itself’: The Aroyo Murders, Ariel Sharon, and the Pain of 1971 Gaza,” written during the 2021 Israel-Palestine Crisis.

And head to my Twitter account for supplemental archival threads on each Time Machine piece: @DavidKurlander.

Categories Accountability, International
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