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Houston Chronicle Editorial: Three Theocratic Billionaires Threaten U.S. Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2023 //
2

The Houston Chronicle published a blistering editorial about the power of three billionaires who control Republican politics in Texas and threaten American democracy—not only in Texas. The three are adherents of Christian nationalism and dedicated funders of school vouchers. Their dream is to abolish public schools and enroll every student in a Christian school or home-schooled. They funded State Attorney General KennPaxton’s impeachment defense, and they are now funding Governor Greg Abbott’s campaign for vouchers.

The editorial board wrote:

Since its founding in the early 1880s, the little town of Cisco, 45 miles east of Abilene, has been in the news twice. In 1919, Conrad Hilton paid $40,000 for the Mobley Hotel in downtown Cisco, which eventually gained fame as the first in a worldwide chain of Hilton hotels. Eight years later, two days before Christmas 1927, Santa Claus and three of his helpers robbed the First National Bank of Cisco.

National notoriety will again fall on Cisco if Texas voters — Republican, Democrat and independent — don’t get engaged with their democracy sometime soon. The little town is home to the Wilks brothers, Dan and Farris, oil and fracking billionaires who, by playing Santa Claus to Republican officeholders receptive to far-right extremists, are on a mission to transform Texas into a Christian nationalist state. Their efforts, in conjunction with an even more influential West Texas oil billionaire, Tim Dunn of Midland, was on insidious display during the recent impeachment trial of the most corrupt state attorney general in America.

Ken Paxton skated, not necessarily because he was innocent of the charges that 121 House members, including 60 Republicans, brought against him. He’s back on the job and baying for RINO blood because most Republicans in the Texas Senate are either in thrall to the West Texas triumvirate or they tremble in terror at the prospect of being “primaried” by a Wilks-and-Dunn-anointed challenger. All 19 Republican senators and at least half of the Republican House members have taken money from the West Texas billionaires or their affiliated PACs and organizations.

The biggest recipient by far in this state is none other than Paxton himself. It’s likely that the Wilks and Dunn trio paid for his $4 million impeachment defense, which included the time and effort of very expensive Houston lawyers, Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the judge during the impeachment trial, also is beholden to the West Texans. Their Defend Texas Liberty PAC donated $1 million to the lite guv, while loaning him another $2 million. The PAC largesse came shortly before Patrick began presiding over Paxton’s trial, a trial that ended with a fiery Patrick speech denouncing the impeachment process.

In addition to being fossil-fuel billionaires, both Dunn and Farris Wilks are Christian nationalist evangelists — Dunn as a lay preacher for the Midland Bible Church, Wilks as a preacher for a Cisco congregation founded by his father called the Assembly of Yahweh Seventh Day Church. Dan Wilks and his wife oversee the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, a group funded with a portion of the $3.2 billion the brothers made when they sold the majority stake of their Cisco-based oil field trucking company, Frac Tech Services.

From the pulpit to the campaign pockets of politicians, the West Texans are on what they see as a God-imbued mission to transform Texas and beyond. Over the past 20 years, they’ve contributed nearly $100 million to think tanks, nonprofits, fundraising committees, websites and Texas candidates who support their crusade.

In their preaching and practice, climate change is merely God’s will; homosexuality is an evil on par with incest, bestiality and pedophilia; abortion is murder, unlawful with no exceptions; gun owners enjoy a God-given right to carry their weapons in public without permits or training; only Christians have the God-given right to hold leadership positions in government (which, as Texas Monthly reported, left former House Speaker Joe Strauss, who is Jewish, beyond the pale). Also, oil and gas is a gift from God to be used with gratitude. (They don’t mention God’s gift of sunlight and wind.)

Kel Seliger, a longtime GOP state senator from Amarillo, ran afoul of the triumvirate in recent years. Reasonable, affable and conservative, Seliger is no longer in the Legislature. “It’s a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” he told CNN last year. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it.”

What those “really, really wealthy people” want these days is to destroy Texas public education, a hotbed, as they tell it, of critical race theory and other elements of what one Dunn-and-Wilks-backed group calls “Marxist and sexual indoctrination,” all funded by “far-Left elites for decades.” (That would be the Texas taxpayer.) [Bold-face added by DR, here and below.]

Their strategy, as Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, told Chron.com, is to recruit a generation of Wilks and Dunn-funded mouthpieces in state and local positions to push the narrative that public schools are harmful to students and their parents. Once public education is weakened beyond repair, they offer private religious schools as “a better way.”

With an insidious, well-funded effort, our home-grown theocrats will make sure that Gov. Greg Abbott has all the financial ammunition he needs in the next few weeks for his last-ditch, special-session effort to persuade lawmakers to use taxpayer money in the form of vouchers for private, often Christian-based schooling. Abbott calls it “school choice.” Rural lawmakers, who’ve fought the plan for years, know it’s school suicide.

The West Texans “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” former state Sen. Bob Deuell, a northeast Texas Republican, told CNN. Deuell, a physician, got crossways with the West Texans when he supported a bill that updated the state’s end-of-life procedures. Dan Wilks, falsely claiming that the legislation would “strengthen Texas’s death panels,” backed tea party activist Bob Hall, who defeated Deuell in 2014. Hall was one of Paxton’s most outspoken supporters during the impeachment trial.

Texas is a big state, but the West Texans have Christian nationalist ambitions beyond our borders. They are reliable supporters of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and, of course, former President Donald Trump, who decried Paxton’s “shameful impeachment.” In an expansive, post-impeachment mood these days, Paxton seems to be pondering a larger field of dreams for himself. He told Tucker Carlson last week he may challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. “His time is done,” Paxton told a radio talk-show host.

If Trump wins the presidential election next year, the disgraced Texas AG would be a prime candidate to head the U.S. Justice Department. (His paramour, the woman he brought from San Antonio to Austin, could be installed in a Georgetown townhouse, only a short Uber ride away from Justice.) He (they) would be right at home in a Trumpian Washington, where, as U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney said to The Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

The party’s presidential nominee in 2012 has said he worries about the survival of America’s democratic experiment.

Whether it survives depends in large part on what happens here in Texas, where the national far right comes for funding and ideas. Decades of one-party rule have contributed to voter apathy and made our state a fertile testing ground for extreme policies. It’s telling, for example, that the AG was reelected last year with the support of about 13 percent of the populace (4 million votes out of a population of nearly 30 million). Paxton and other Dunn and Wilks dependents only have to listen to their West Texan Santa Claus trio, not to the people of Texas.

On a Friday morning in Cisco nearly a century ago, a little girl was among the first to notice that the Santa who stepped out of a stolen Buick and into the lobby of the First National Bank was a fake (and a dangerous one, at that). In Texas these days, maybe we’ve grown jaded. Perhaps it will be young voters of all political persuasions who will take the lead in calling out — and rejecting — the dangerous extremists in our midst. Perhaps taking heart from the brave Republicans who dared impeach an errant AG, they’ll elect representatives of the people, not altar boys and girls on call for Christian nationalists.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Dark Money, Democracy, Freedom, Funding, Home Schooling, Religion, Republicans, Texas, Trump

LAUSD Board Will Vote on Co-Location Policy with Charters

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2023 //
32

“Co-location” of charters inserts a charter school into the space of an existing public school, causing the public school to lose space for resource rooms, computer rooms, and other non-classroom uses. California has a law requiring public schools to make room for charters, no matter how crowded one or both schools may be.

Long plagued with bad feeling between public schools and charter schools, the elected board of the Los Angeles Unified School District will vote tomorrow on co-location policy.

MEDIA ADVISORY 

For Immediate Release – September 25, 2023 

 

Media Contact:

Alex McElvain, (630) 881-0545, cp-a.mcelvai­n@lausd.net                

Christine Louise Mills, (213) 503-0883, christine.mills@lausd.net      

                                                 

Los Angeles Unified Board of Education to Vote on Creating a Charter Schools

Co-Location Policy to Mitigate Impacts Caused by Proposition 39  

A long overdue resolution seeks to protect innovative programs and prevent the worst impacts of

co-locations on vulnerable students and schools.

 

What:        The Board of Education will vote on whether to adopt Resolution 026-22/23 “Creating a Charter Schools Co-Location Policy to Mitigate Impacts Caused by Proposition 39”. The resolution authors, Board President Jackie Goldberg and Board Member Dr. Rocío Rivas, along with parents and educators, will be available for media following the event. 

Who:         Resolution co-authors Board President Jackie Goldberg (LAUSD District 5) and Board Member Dr. Rocío Rivas (LAUSD District 2) 

 When:      Tuesday, September 26 

·        1:00 pm           Regular Board Meeting 

·        3:15 pm           Agenda Item will be heard 

·        4:00 pm           Press Availability

Approved in 2000, Proposition 39 imposed mandates on California schools based on its obligations to share space with charter schools. Co-locations—where district-led schools are required to share space with charter operated schools—have raised myriad educational, operational, safety, financial, and legal challenges. Parents, educators, and students have described how co-locations have syphoned away needed resources from neighborhood schools, such as parent centers, computer labs, and even space for electives. Many are concerned that co-locations undermine District-led initiatives to support students and schools, such as Priority Schools, Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP) schools, and Community Schools. This resolution calls for improvements, transparency, and accountability in the charter co-location process. The lack of clear guidance from prior Boards has resulted in co-locations on numerous Priority, BSAP, and Community Schools, and “charter pipelines” that actively encourage students to leave the District for middle and high school charters on their campus. Today’s resolution will not undo any of the District’s current co-locations, but will provide guidance in the future for new co-locations, and those where a charter school moves due to growth or other material revisions.

Where: Los Angeles Unified – Boardroom, 333 S. Beaudry Ave., Los Angeles, 90017; or Live stream in English and Spanish, via lausd.org/BOE Board of Education / Board of Education Homepage (lausd.org)

Categories California, Charter Schools, Competition, Los Angeles

UNESCO Report: The Dangers of Ed-Technology!

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2023 //
33

This is the only post today. Read as much of it as you have time for. The report is a valuable reminder that Ed-tech is oversold and even dangerous. It has its uses, for sure. But it should never replace teachers or parents.

UNESCO released a major blockbuster report warning about the dangers of relying too much on education technology. The author of the report was Mark West. The title of the report is An Ed-Tech Tragedy? Educational Technologies and School Closures in the Time of COVID-19.

An alternate link: https://teachertaskforce.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/2023_UNESCO_An-ed-tech-tragedy_Educational-technologies-and-school-closures-in-the-time-of-COVID19_EN_.pdf

The puzzle at the heart of the document is the clash between learned experience and the imperatives of greed. We learned during the pandemic about the risks of becoming dependent on ed-technology as the main driver of instruction. As we reflect on the period from March 2020 to now, we can discern the damage that occurred to students when their teachers were replaced by virtual instruction: boredom, learning loss, mental health issues, loneliness, lack of socialization with their peers, lack of personal interaction with teachers.

Yet with most people believing that the pandemic (or the worst of it) lies in the past, ed-tech corporations are focused on selling more of what has already failed. Why would we want to expand what has demonstrably proved inadequate and harmful to students?

You probably will take a long while to read the full report, but do read the summary and conclusions to whet your appetite. The overview concludes that the global reliance on ed-tech was necessary in the circumstances, but was a tragedy. Children need human teachers. They need people who look them in the eye and encourage them. Education is not a mechanical process; people are not widgets.

The UNESCO report reviews the global evidence of the harm caused by dependence on ed-tech:

[The report] exposes the ways unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people.

The summary says:

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? documents how widespread school closures and the hard pivot to remote learning with connected technology during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences.

Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning. Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education’s unique standing as a public good and human right. Invasive surveillance endangered the free and open exchange of ideas and undermined trust. Automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences. And technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment.

Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning – in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis – had promised better outcomes. Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unraveled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? recounts this tumultuous period, documenting the actions and decisions taken by governments, schools and technology companies. The publication contrasts the promises of ed-tech with the realities of what ed-tech delivered as a response to school closures that impacted over 1.6 billion learners and stretched intermittently from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. The evidence and analysis highlight trends observed across countries and zoom in on the specificities of local experiences, creating a global mosaic of what students, teachers and families experienced when connected technology was elevated as a singular portal to teaching and learning.

Aimed at general and specialist audiences alike, this publication shows how the abrupt and deep changes brought about by the recourse to remote digital learning during the pandemic continue to ripple through the education sector even as schools have fully reopened. It questions whether more and faster integration of technology is desirable for learners, teachers and schools and if ed-tech is, as it is often billed, a key ingredient of educational resilience.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? posits that new principles are needed to forge more humanistic directions for ed-tech development and use. In-person schooling and teaching should be guaranteed even as technologies improve and connectivity becomes more ubiquitous. Governments need to anchor this guarantee in the legal architecture upholding the right to education, especially for young learners. Moreover, future applications of ed-tech must show greater concern for holistic student well-being. While academic learning is central to education, it is not the only component. Ed-tech needs to support the multiple individual and collective purposes of education, from socio-emotional and personal development, to learning to live together, with the planet, as well as with technology.

In detailing what happened when ed-tech was deployed in response to pandemic school closures, as well as questioning why ed-tech was often elevated as a singular solution, this publication clarifies how the education community can move beyond merely reacting to technological change and instead play a more assertive role steering the digitalization of education towards the more holistic goals of education to shape inclusive, just and sustainable futures.

The future of education needs to be a humanistic one. The lessons extracted from what is premised here as an ed-tech tragedy illuminate the ways technology can better foster education that teaches and revitalizes human values, strengthens human relationships and upholds human rights.…

Ed-tech was supposed to solve a problem but it created other problems.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the many ways that the hurried embrace of technology solutionism steered responses to a global education challenge directly towards ed-tech. Along the way, the logic of technology solutionism changed understandings of educational problems to be solved. The analysis presented here helps reveal, for example, how technological solutions deployed during school closures took a narrow view of education and focused almost exclusively on furthering the academic progress of students in pared-down curricular subjects. This meant that little attention was paid to other education goals, such as fostering curiosity and inquiry and supporting physical health, mental well-being and social and emotional learning. This analysis also shows how ed-tech, originally cast as a solution to maintain learning continuity in the face of widespread disruptions to schooling, has more recently been positioned as a tool to help reverse learning loss. This ‘loss’, however, grew out of the deficiencies of technology-dependent remote learning to preserve the pace of academic learning that would have been typical without school closures stemming from the pandemic. The problem that ed-tech initially set out to solve morphed from assuring the continuity of learning to remedying lost learning. The way the problem was reframed while maintaining connected technology as the centrepiece of the solution is an example of technology solutionism at work.…

Recognizing the chaotic pivot from in-school learning to technology-facilitated distance learning as having a tragic arc provides a forceful rebuttal to a growing consensus that the education sector somehow ‘advanced’, ‘leapfrogged’, ‘catapulted’ or ‘disrupted’ itself to a better future when it deployed technology on a massive scale as an interim measure to confront a crisis. The evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction: education became less accessible, less effective and less engaging when it pivoted away from physical schools and teachers and towards technology exclusively. ‘Tragedy’ in this sense signals regression – a denigration of the status quo,rather than a desired evolution. The narrative that ed-tech should be or must be a central component of ‘building education back better’ warrants new scrutiny after a careful examination of the experiences during the pandemic.

The invocation of tragedy also facilitates awareness that connected technologies, despite their growing reach, power and potential, remain tools in a repertoire of many others to construct stronger, more agile and more flexible education systems that can respond and adapt to disruption. Other tools include strengthened teacher training and support; enhanced school leadership and pedagogical management of schools; curricular renewal; smaller class sizes; and improved physical resources and infrastructure for schools and classrooms. Crises that necessitate the prolonged closure of schools and demand heavy or total reliance on technology have been exceedingly rare historically. Future crises may present entirely different challenges. The trauma of the pandemic has, in many circles, functioned to elevate technology as an almost singular solution to assure educational resilience by providing flexibility in times of disruption. Investments to protect education wrongly shifted away from people and towards machines, digital connections and platforms. This elevation of the technical over the human is contradictory to education’s aim to further human development and cultivate humanistic values. It is human capacity, rather than technological capacity, that is central to ensuring greater resilience of education systems to withstand shocks and manage crises.

Overall, the pandemic is a case study in how technology in its current iterations is not yet a suitable foundation for actualizing the diverse goals that communities assign to education. Expectations that technology may, in time, help further increase the reach, improve the quality and strengthen the agility of education are valid. For now, though, the experiences since early 2020 have shown it to be an alarmingly brittle solution – one incapable of effectively responding to widespread and extended school shutdowns. For far too many students, it was a solution that either never started in earnest or quickly broke down. The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests. Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo. [emphasis added by DR.]

Countries made massive investments to digitalize education through much of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it remains far from clear whether these investments will improve education over the longer term and make it an engine of just, inclusive and sustainable development, especially when compared with conventional school-based and teacher-facilitated education. The digital transformation of education may yet be a force for beneficial change. But the logic of technological solutionism and its associated business models currently steering this transformation, led largely by the commercial technology entities that are remaking so many aspects of society, tend to treat education and knowledge as private commodities and not as global public goods that provide collective as well as individual benefits.

It is hoped that this analysis and its use of tragedy as a metaphor might moderate the discourse and popular view that the pandemic has ‘unshackled’ education systems and ‘launched’ them into desirable futures characterized by greater technology use. Documenting the severity and scope of the many negative consequences of ed-tech responses during the health crisis inverts the triumphalist narratives that accompany many descriptions of technology deployments to address the educational disruption caused by school closures. A critical examination of the assumptions of technology solutionism and a review of the existing evidence provide a corrective and a counterargument to notions that more, deeper and accelerated use of technology is uniformly positive for education…

Throughout the review that follows, considerable evidence illustrates how the rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education in many contexts. While some countries and localities managed a shift to digital learning with limited privatization of the educational experience, a defining characteristic of the technology-centric response to the educational disruptions of the pandemic tended to be the elevation of for-profit, private ed-tech companies. In addition to considering the ways reliance on ed-tech impacted educational inclusion, equity and quality, this publication also explores the complex and often symbiotic links between ed-tech and the privatization of education during the pandemic.The rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education.

Most such reports tend to summarize the status quo. This one challenges it. It’s time to take stock before the Ed-tech industry takes control of our most precious asset: our children.

Categories Childhood, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Hoax, Inequity, International, Online Learning, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Privatization, Propaganda, Technology

Peter Greene on Chris Rufo’s Plans to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2023 //
22

After I first listened to Chris Rufo’s infamous speech at Hillsdale College, something clicked. I saw the plan for the demolition of public education. Rufo spelled it out. He is a proponent of universal school choice, and he says the way to reach that goal is to create universal distrust of public schools. This is why we hear blarney about public school teachers “grooming” their students and indoctrinating them. It’s all part of the plan to create “universal distrust.” It’s a plan to privatize public education by disseminating lies and defaming teachers.

Peter Greene listened to Rufo’s speech and analyzes it closely. Please read to see the master plan, the hoax about “critical race theory,” and the rightwing plot to privatize public funding for education.

And though Peter says he summarized the speech to save you time, I urge you to listen to it. It’s scary.

Categories Education Industry, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers

Frank Bruni: Trump Is Old and Incoherent

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2023 //
188

Frank Bruni, columnist for the New York Times, points out that Trump is almost as old as Biden, yet the media obsesses about Biden’s age and seldom mentions Trump’s.

Worse, Trump is incoherent. The same cannot be said of Biden, who usually speaks in complete sentences and makes sense.

Trump speaks in word salad, following his train of thought.

Bruni wrote:

To our intensifying discussion about whether President Biden has grown mentally fuzzy and too old for a second term, I’d like to add this question: How would we even notice Donald Trump’s lapse into incoherence, when derangement is essentially his brand?

Pretty much any interview he gives is a babble bonanza, and his recent lovefest with Tucker Carlson was no exception. He went on wacky tangents, including one about the wages of building the Panama Canal: “We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito. Malaria. We lost 35,000 people. We lost 35,000 people because of the mosquito. Vicious. They had to build under nets. It was one of the true great wonders of the world.”

“One of the nine wonders,” he added, then corrected himself. “No, no, it was one of the seven.” Seven, nine – he seemed unable to decide, unwilling to commit. “You could make nine wonders,” he ventured. I guess that’s some limit. Once you hit 10, they’re just curiosities. Wonder-ettes.

But was there a bevy of headlines about a brain ravaged by time? Were there notations that Trump, at 77, was already as old as Ronald Reagan at the end of his presidency, and that after another four years in the White House, Trump would be a touch older than Biden at the end of his first term and thus the oldest president ever?

Categories Biden, Trump

Carol Burris: Charter Schools Can No Longer Claim to Be “Public Schools”

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2023 //
4

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote an article in The Progressive about a new law in North Carolina that makes clear that charter schools are NOT public schools.

She writes:

When an Oklahoma state school board approved what would become the nation’s first taxpayer-funded religious charter school, opponents of the proposal called it “deeply un-American” and “a flagrant violation of long-standing constitutional law.” An Oklahoma parents group and a handful of state and national civil organizations filed a pair of lawsuits to block the new school. Creating a taxpayer-funded religious school “turns on its head the concept that charter schools were supposed to be public schools,” American Federation of Teacher president Randi Weingarten argued.

Indeed, they were supposed to be public schools. But anyone who has been watching the devolution of charter schools could see this coming from a mile away.

The magical transformation of what should be a public school to a taxpayer-funded private school is not a trick confined to Oklahoma.

Charter schools, which were originally proposed to be district-run, innovative public schools, have since morphed into national charter school chains, Christian nationalist schools, and facades for for-profit corporations.

From charter schools in churches with websites displaying crosses to “faith-friendly” charters, the charter industry has been flirting with religiosity for years. Under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the federal Charter School Programs were given the green light to award grants to religious organizations that own or operate charter schools.

During the 2021-2022 school year, 20 percent of all charter school students were enrolled in a school run by a for-profit company. This allowed these companies to evade laws and regulations by using a nonprofit school as a facade. And it is but a small hop over a line drawn in the sand to move from the federal government funding a religious organization to run charters, to funding charters that provide religious instruction in classrooms. It only takes a strong breeze, and the sand lines disappear altogether.

The magical transformation of what should be a public school to a taxpayer-funded private school is not a trick confined to Oklahoma, nor does the hocus-pocus turn solely on the question of religion.

Even as quasi-religious and perhaps overtly religious charter schools are on the rise, there is another effort intent on blurring the line between public and private.

A recent bill passed in North Carolina, a state in which a large proportion of charters run by for-profits, dismisses other features that determine whether or not charter schools, in fact, deserve the title “public.”

Charter schools are supposed to be “free and open to all” without discrimination or favor. But HB 219, passed by a Republican supermajority legislature over the veto of Democrat Governor Roy Cooper, allows charter schools to charge tuition and grant enrollment privileges to certain students. With the bill’s passage, North Carolina’s under-enrolled charter schools can now enlist both foreign and out-of-state students on a tuition basis. How will under-enrollment be defined?

Since the bill also allows nearly uncontrolled expansion of existing charter schools, finding space for tuition-paying students will not be difficult. Who will pay the tuition bill—the state, the foreign nation, or the family? North Carolina left that question unaddressed, but the likely outcome will be families, which favors the wealthy.

Not only does North Carolina challenge the definition of a charter school as a free school, but it also flaunts the idea that charters are open to all. The new law erodes equal access to charter schools in the state by giving enrollment privileges to special groups, allowing charter schools to shape their student bodies.

Please open the link and continue reading this important story.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, North Carolina

Free! A Journal About Education and Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2023 //
12

Take advantage of an offer of a free publication about education.

A special issue of Education Policy Analysis Archive (EPAA) just came out, featuring articles by members of the International Academy of Education (IAE). EPAA is a free, on-line journal, published simultaneously in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Access is at https://epaa.asu.edu/index.php/epaa

This special issue was edited by Fernando Reimers of Harvard and features the following articles: Critical thinking and the conditions of democracy by Nicholas C. Burbules; Education and the challenges for democracy by Fernando Reimers; Race, class, and the democratic project in contemporary South African education: Working and reworking the law by Craig Soudien;Speculations on experiences in public education and the health of the nation’s democracy by David C. Berliner; Challenges in fostering democratic participation in Japanese educationby Yuko Nonoyama-Tarumi; Civic education, citizenship, and democracy by Lorin W. Anderson; and Education in a democratic and meritocratic society: Moving beyond thriving to flourishing by Ee-Ling Low.

Categories Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

PEN: Book Bans Rise Sharply, with Florida Banning the Most Books

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2023 //
12

PEN America released a report documenting that book bans had increased sharply over the past year, with the largest number of books banned reported in Florida, followed by Texas.

The freedom to read is under assault in the United States—particularly in public schools—curtailing students’ freedom to explore words, ideas, and books. In the 2022–23 school year, from July 1, 2022, to June 31, 2023, PEN America recorded 3,362 instances of book bans in US public school classrooms and libraries. These bans removed student access to 1,557 unique book titles, the works of over 1,480 authors, illustrators, and translators. Authors whose books are targeted are most frequently female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals. Amid a growing climate of censorship, school book bans continue to spread through coordinated campaigns by a vocal minority of groups and individual actors and, increasingly, as a result of pressure from state legislation.

The Miami Herald reviewed what had happened in Florida.

One example in Florida is the expanded “Parental Rights in Education” law, signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year and dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay” bill as it prohibits discussions of sexuality and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade.

In this year’s session, state lawmakers expanded the restrictions through the eighth grade. The expanded law, which DeSantis signed, also allows a parent or community member to object to instructional material or library books, and requires a school to remove the book or books within five days of a challenge and remain off library shelves until the review is completed.

The process is a “guilty until proven innocent policy” that leads to the removal of more books for more time, said Raegan Miller, director of development at the Florida Freedom to Read Project, a nonprofit that advocates for school libraries being accessible to all students.

Moreover, she said, books are expensive to purchase and public libraries are not accessible to all students — especially young students whose parents are unable to accompany them.

Governor DeSantis insists that there is no book banning:

Desantis, who has championed the bills, has called the “whole book ban thing” a “hoax.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called book banning in Florida a ‘hoax.’

During his May 24 presidential campaign launch on Twitter Spaces, he said, “there’s not been a single book banned in the state of Florida. You can go buy or use whatever book you want.”

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article279568719.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Censorship, Democracy, DeSantis, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom to Read, Libraries, Texas

Gary Shteyngart on Walter Isaacson’s Biography of Elon Musk

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2023 //
22

Gary Shteyngart is a successful novelist and author whose family emigrated from the Soviet Union when he was a child. He reviewed Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk in The Guardian. On the site formerly known as Twitter, he described his piece as “my review of a dull book about a silly but dangerous man.” Please open the link and read the full review.

He began:

Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer. Throughout the tome, Musk’s confidantes, co-workers, ex-wives and girlfriends present a DSM-5’s worth of psychiatric and other theories for the “demon moods” that darken the lives of his subordinates, and increasingly the rest of us, among them bipolar disorder, OCD, and the form of autism formerly known as Asperger’s. But the idea that any of these conditions are what makes Musk an “asshole” (another frequently used descriptor of him in the book), while also making him successful in his many pursuits, is an insult to all those affected by them who manage to change the world without leaving a trail of wounded people, failing social networks and general despair behind them. The answer, then, must lie elsewhere.

There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the “his eyes lit up” school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter. It feels as though, for instance, there are hundreds of pages from start to finish relaying the same scene: Musk trying to reduce the cost of various mundane objects so that he can make more money and fulfil his dream of moving himself (and possibly the lot of us) to Mars, where one or two examples would have been enough. To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best….

Highest on the list of things Musk won’t shut up about is Mars. “We need to get to Mars before I die.” “We got to give this a shot, or we’re stuck on earth forever.” The messianic part of the Muskiverse is his attempt to put 140m miles between himself and his father as he tries to turn humanity into a “multiplanetary civilization” even though we are having a hard enough time making it as a uniplanetary one. But Musk also knows what’s keeping us from reaching the lifeless faraway planet, and he’s not afraid of telling us: “Unless the woke-mind virus … is stopped, civilisation will never become interplanetary.” There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your saviour turns out to be the world’s loudest crank?

Categories Billionaires, Character, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism

DeSantis and His Failed Search for Voter Fraud in Florida

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2023 //
21

One of the most bizarre aspects of the 2020 election-denial drama is the search for voter fraud in states that voted for Trump. Florida is Exhibit Number One, as demonstrated in this excellent article in the New York Times by Alexandra Bersin and Sharon LaFraniere. Trump won Florida handily, yet Governor Ron DeSantis felt he had to mollify Trump’s rabid base by insisting that he would root out election fraud. Did he want to increase Trump’s numbers or what? Maybe Biden really won Florida? It made no sense. Or was DeSantis grandstanding for the nutty rightwing base?

The story begins:

It resembled a political rally more than a news conference. In November 2021, exactly one year after Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida spoke to a raucous crowd in a hotel conference room just a few miles from Mr. Trump’s home base of Mar-a-Lago.

Their suspicions about vast election malfeasance would be heard, Mr. DeSantis promised. He was setting up an election police unit and he invited the crowd to send in tips about illegal “ballot harvesting,” nodding to an unfounded theory about Democrats collecting ballots in bulk.

The crowd whooped and waved furiously. “He gets it!” posted a commenter watching on Rumble.

But in his seven-minute, tough-on-election-crimes sermon, Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, never explicitly endorsed that theory or the many others spread by the defeated president and embraced by much of their party.

In this way, for nearly three years, Mr. DeSantis played both sides of Republicans’ rift over the 2020 election. As his state became a buzzing hub of the election denial movement, he repeatedly took actions that placated those who believed Mr. Trump had won.

Most prominent was the creation of an election crimes unit that surfaced scores of “zany-burger” tips, according to its former leader, disrupted the lives of a few dozen Floridians, and, one year in, has not yet led to any charges of ballot harvesting or uncovered other mass fraud.

Yet Mr. DeSantis kept his own views vague. Only last month — two years, six months and 18 days after Mr. Biden was sworn into office — did Mr. DeSantis, now running for president, acknowledge that Mr. Biden had defeated Mr. Trump.

DeSantis never spoke honestly to the election deniers. Instead he appeased them. His “election crimes unit” managed to find a grand total of 32 ex-felons who voted illegally. They didn’t know they were voting illegally because they received letters from the state urging them to vote and were issued voter registration cards.

Nathan Hart, a 50-year-old ex-felon from near Tampa, is among 32 people who have been arrested or faced warrants under the new initiative. Mr. Hart, who plans to appeal his conviction, said he lost his job as a warehouse worker because he had to show up in court. When he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump he had no idea he was ineligible to vote, he said.

He and others suffered so that the governor “could have a really good photo op and make himself look tough,” he said.

In the 2020 election, 11 million Floridians voted, and Trump won the state by 371,686 votes. Yet the leaders of the election fraud crusade descended on Florida, including Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com. Local activists organized to find evidence of voter fraud. One group even delivered a box of claims to DeSantis’s mother, who sent it on to her son. None of the “evidence” or tips panned out. The search for voter fraud was a wild goose chase.

DeSantis’ much-ballyhooed election crimes unit turned over 1,500 names of potential fraudsters to local officials, which resulted in 32 arrests. A big nothing-burger.

DeSantis boasted about his crackdown on voter fraud, but never admitted that it produced no evidence of voter fraud. The only genuine fraud was the insistence by conspiracy theorists that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud.

And my initial question remains unanswered: what was the point of searching for voter fraud in a state that Trump won handily?

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Elections, Florida, Hoax, Trump
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