Archives for the year of: 2023
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Rather and Kirschner: Our Fragile Freedoms

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
37

Dan Rather and Eliot Kirschner write a blog on current events called “Steady.” We are reminded about how much we miss Dan Rather on the news. In this post, they write about Trump’s latest inductman.

They write:

In an era of unprecedented upheaval, it is difficult to find suitable context and perspective for the latest indictment of Donald Trump.

After all, this isn’t the first indictment he has faced, or even the first in federal court. It isn’t the first time we have had to grapple with his moral failings, the unleashing of political violence, or the degradation of our constitutional order.

Much of what is in the document made public on Tuesday we knew before. We saw it unfold on TV. We read the reporting of its aftermath. We heard the gripping public testimony in front of the bipartisan House Select Committee that investigated the insurrection of January 6.

It wasn’t even that the indictment was a surprise. For a long time, the investigation has been in the public consciousness. After Trump announced that he had been told he was a target, it was mostly a matter of when, not if.

It is important to keep in mind that this latest indictment does not charge Trump with arguably the gravest potential crimes, like insurrection or sedition, even though many who watched in horror the events leading up to and cresting on January 6 think it obvious he is guilty of both.

Randall Eliason, a former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, argued in a New York Times opinion piece titled “What Makes Jack Smith’s New Trump Indictment So Smart” that the special counsel wisely chose to limit the scope of the case (and the number of defendants) to just Trump despite the six other unnamed but easily identifiable co-conspirators. Smith did this, the piece points out, in order to proceed quickly to trial and yield the best chance at conviction. “Although it might have been psychologically gratifying to see Mr. Trump charged with sedition, the name of the legal charge is less important than the facts that will make up the government’s case,” Eliason wrote.

In other words, Smith decided not to try to prove too much; keep the charges few and based on what facts he believes are most likely to convince a jury — and whatever part of the public may be open to persuasion.

Let us stop for a moment to ponder these facts and the narrative they tell. They are chilling, but we must remember the Department of Justice will have to prove them in a court of law. Trump is presumed not guilty until and unless he is proven otherwise. He has every right to mount a vigorous defense. It’s probably best for the country that his lawyers fight hard and smart. The more thoroughly this case is adjudicated, the more its conclusion is likely to be strengthened by the process.

But in reading the indictment, all who love and care for our precious republic and its democratic traditions should feel a deep shudder of fear that we were driven to such a precipice. The writing itself is not fancy — no stacking of dependent clauses or diving into a thesaurus in search of adjectives. Reading the introduction aloud, it almost has the syncopation of a children’s picture book, even if the story it tells is one of horror:

The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020.

The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.

Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.

So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.

These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.

But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.

The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.

He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures.

His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.

Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election result.

What follows that in the indictment is a story we all saw unfold in real time, laid bare in a double-spaced legal document. There is also a lot to read between the lines. Even former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, who enabled many of Trump’s worst instincts and misled the American public about Trump’s fitness for office, told CNN he thinks prosecutors have more evidence than what they have shared thus far. He called the indictment “very spare” and added, “I think there’s a lot more to come and I think they have a lot more evidence as to President Trump’s state of mind.”

Be that as it may, these 45 pages comprise one of the most consequential pieces of writing in American history. It does not have the earth-shattering rhetoric of our Declaration of Independence, the poetry of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” or the urgent morality of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But it is a clear statement at one of the most pivotal intersections in our nation’s narrative; that autocracy and the fomenting of political violence to subvert the peaceful transfer of presidential power is not only anathema to our values — it is illegal.

History is riddled with “what ifs.” We are left to ponder what the worst outcomes might have been if things had turned out differently, from our own revolution, to World War II, to the Cuban Missile Crisis. January 6 should be added to that list.

As bad as it was, it could have been (and came close to being) much worse. And that reality bursts forth from this indictment. According to what is written in the indictment, violence was expected by Trump and his co-conspirators. They understood that their schemes to steal an election would almost certainly plunge the nation into chaos. That was the plan.

In the end, their plot was unsuccessful, but the danger has not receded. Trump is running for president. At this point he is the favorite, by far, to win the Republican nomination. And that means he could win reelection. That result would likely usher in chaos, greater and deeper division than even what we now have. It could very well end the country as we know it.

That may sound to some to be hyperbole, but by any reasonable analysis, that is a lesson to be learned from this indictment. And that is what Jack Smith hopes to prove in federal court. One can make a credible argument that this is one of (if not THE) most consequential criminal cases in American history.

A former and potentially future president is accused of trying to destroy the United States. His own vice president is a key witness. You couldn’t make this up. But this is the reality of what we face. Democracy is always fragile and must be fought for to survive. A free people must constantly be on alert and working to preserve their liberty.

At the birth of our nation, Benjamin Franklin is said to have quipped that the Framers had produced “a republic, if you can keep it.” Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, spoke of how the Civil War was a “test” of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.” We, the people, can take nothing for granted.

This concept of the United States of America, still relatively new in human history, is impossible to maintain without the continual peaceful transfer of power at the top. That is what this new indictment is about.

In his first inaugural address as governor of California in 1967, Ronald Reagan spoke eloquently of this truth:

“We are participating in the orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people. And this is the simple magic of the commonplace routine, which makes it a near miracle to many of the world’s inhabitants. This continuing fact that the people, by democratic process, can delegate power, and yet retain the custody of it. Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”

This is what is at stake for the generations alive today. It is an epic battle that will now take place in federal court as well as at the ballot box.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom

Jeff Bryant: What the New York Times Overlooked in Reporting About N.C. Turncoat Tricia Cotham

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
7

When newly elected Democratic legislator Tricia Cotham flipped parties earlier this year, her switch had a profound effect on North Carolina politics and it was national news. Her change from Democrat to Republican gave the Republican Party a super-majority and enabled them to override the Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s vetoes. It also cleared the way for Republican plans for vouchers and abortion.

The New York Times reported that she was wooed by Republican leaders before the election, meaning she ran as a Democrat knowing that she would switch after the election because of GOP promises to her.

But seasoned journalist Jeff Bryant, who lives in North Carolina, writes that the Times’ reporters missed the real story, which was right in plain sight. Cotham was bought by the charter industry.

Bryant writes:

A July 30, 2023, headline in the New York Times promised to give readers an “inside” story about why North Carolina lawmaker Tricia Cotham changed her political allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in April and handed conservatives a veto-proof majority in the state House. But the ensuing story shed little new light on what motivated her decision to flip and overlooked how her deep dive into the right-wing networks promoting charter schools was likely instrumental in steering her change in political leanings.

For sure, Times journalists Kate Kelly and David Perlmutt are correct in reporting Cotham’s actions as having profound impacts in a purple state, but they erred in adopting an unlikely storyline about who and what lured her to jump.

As I’ve previously reported, Cotham’s own explanation for her party switch strains credibility. And just because Republican officials encouraged her to run in 2022—the Times article’s supposed big reveal—doesn’t mean they, or the Democrats with whom she had purportedly grown disenchanted, were the only, or most important, actors who mattered in her decision.

Yet Kelly and Perlmutt chose to amplify that narrative rather than delve more deeply into Cotham’s legislative record and the business associates she cultivated in the years she was out of office, from 2016 to 2022.

As I reported, Cotham’s split from the Democratic Party first became evident toward the end of her legislative tenure from 2007 to 2016. At the end of that period, Cotham had already decided to leave the North Carolina House to seek office in Congress. But she was soundly drubbed in the Democratic primary contest and returned to Raleigh, perhaps facing joblessness.

It was at that time that Cotham, who had voted strictly the Democratic Party line on legislation related to charter schools, chose to buck her party’s majority to join with just four other Democrats to vote for the creation of the Achievement School District (ASD). The ASD, whose name was eventually changed to Innovative School District (ISD), was created to take charge of low-performing schools and hand them over to charter school management companies.

But Kelly and Perlmutt either didn’t look back that far into Cotham’s legislative record or didn’t believe that vote was important. “In office, Ms. Cotham had criticized charter schools, but now her firm supported private investments in the public school system and charter schools,” was their open-and-shut assessment.

Nor did they bother to note to whom that vote would have mattered the most—Oregon billionaire John Bryan, who not only bankrolled the lobbying effort to enact the ASD/ISD but also founded the Challenge Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for charter schools, operates a firm that builds charter schools, and started a charter school management company called TeamCFA.

Bryan has also been described as “a national figure in libertarian circles when it comes to charter schools” and a donor who “contributes heavily and regularly to conservative causes.”

Cotham’s vote for the ISD preceded a series of career opportunities for her, which the Times article mostly ignored.

The first, beginning in 2017, was a stint at McGuireWoods Consulting, a highly influential lobbying firm whose clients include a long list of organizations closely associated with the charter school industry and right-wing school choice advocacy, including at least one organization funded by the Challenge Foundation. McGuireWoods was also the lobbying firm pushing the bill to create the ISD.

The second in Cotham’s series of business opportunities, which Kelly and Perlmutt did report on, came in 2019 when she was hired to lead Achievement for All Children. Achievement for All Children, the reporters noted, was picked to “turn around” Southside-Ashpole Elementary, a “foundering public school” in the state.

But what Kelly and Perlmutt left out of their reporting was that Achievement for All Children was a charter management company previously led by Tony Helton, who, as I reported, had previously worked for Bryan’s firm TeamCFA. Also, they completely left out the fact that Southside-Ashpole was under the control of the state because it was a school—the only school—incorporated into the ISD.

While Kelly and Perlmutt noted Cotham’s years as a lobbyist included a business relationship with C. Philip Byers, whom the article called “a major donor to state Republicans” and “president of a company that built charter schools,” the reporters didn’t mention that the company he led (Challenge Foundation Properties) was part of Bryan’s Challenge Foundation enterprises.

Cotham’s ties to right-wing individuals and organizations promoting charter schools don’t stop there, as my article reported. But wouldn’t it stand to reason that if Kelly and Perlmutt were to examine all the various possible influencers in Cotham’s decision to switch parties, then focusing on the billionaire in the room would make the most sense?

Further, reporting that Cotham’s switch to the Republican Party was mostly because of her changing relationships with fellow legislators, on both sides of the aisle, as the Times article suggests, trivializes a matter of huge import in a state that figures to be pivotal in the 2024 elections. It also overlooks the growing influence of the big money behind the charter school industry in American politics and its destructive force in the Democratic Party.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Categories Education Reform

Gary Rubinstein: The Disaster Facing Houston Under Mike Miles

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
8

Gary Rubinstein has been a teacher since 1991. Four of those years were spent teaching in Houston. Gary has been watching what’s happening since Mike Miles arrived and was taken aback when Miles imposed sweeping changes on the district without spending time getting to know it. Miles’ “reforms,” Gary predicts, are heading for trouble. Those reforms come out of the “corporate reform” playbook. Maybe Miles took a page or two from the Broad Academy guidelines, applicable in all situations.

Gary writes:

With around 200,000 students, Houston Independent School District (HISD) is the 8th largest school district in the United States. For years there was talk about the state possibly taking over the district and this finally happened on June 1, 2023. The board was fired and replaced by Texas Education Agency (TEA) appointees. Mike Miles, who founded a charter school network called Third Future Schools and was previously the head of Dallas Schools for three years, was hired as the new HISD superintendent. While most people new to a job like this would take some time to get the ‘lay of the land,’ Miles instantly proposed some radical, and in my estimation, terrible, reforms which I will outline in this post.

He identified the three lowest performing high schools in HISD: Wheatley, Kashmere, and North Forest. Those three schools together with the 26 middle and elementary schools that feed into those high schools were to become part of a new ‘New Education System’ known as NES. This NES is the latest ‘turnaround’ district. Over the past 20 years there have been several of these, the most prominent are the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans, set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2003 and the Achievement School District (ASD) in Tennessee, created in 2011 with Race To The Top money. There was also Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority (EAA) in 2011 as well as a few more that have popped up around the country. To my knowledge, there has never been a successful takeover of this sort in the history of this country. The EAA has been shut down, the RSD has been merged back into the New Orleans school system and the ASD has floundered, never having any success at all in improving the test scores of the schools it took over. It is funny/sad to see this hopeful panel discussion by the leaders of these districtsbefore it was known how badly they would fail. (I’ve written a lot about the ASD, but here is something I wrote summarizing the history of these turnaround efforts.)

These turnaround efforts sometimes have school closures or staffs at schools having to reapply for their jobs and often have the schools converted into charters. For the HISD NES model, the schools are not getting taken over by charters but teachers do have to reapply for their jobs. Teachers at these schools will get raises and opportunities for bonuses with test score based merit pay. Other changes that will happen at these 29 schools are a restructuring of the teacher role where the teacher is like a ‘surgeon’ doing the most important part of the job while other tasks like grading, lesson planning, and discipline are done by others. Also, you may have read about elsewhere, libraries at these schools are converted into discipline centers where students are sent to watch a live streamed version of the lesson on a computer screen.

The reason that no turnaround effort like this has ever worked is that it is based on faulty assumptions about what the cause of the low test scores are at those schools so any solution based on those assumptions is doomed to fail. It is like trying to treat a broken leg by giving a patient a complete blood transfusion.

As someone who has been teaching since 1991 – and my first four years were in HISD actually, looking at the list of changes makes me shudder. Anyone who ever taught can see how most of these changes will make the schools worse but I want to summarize some of them here.

All teachers have to reapply for their jobs – When students come back and learn that many of their favorite teachers were not hired back, this can be very traumatic. There is no guarantee that the teachers who replace those who weren’t hired back, even if those teachers have been successful at a different school, will necessarily be a good fit at this school. This uncertain improvement coupled with guaranteed disruption is a pretty big risk. Why not first see how the current staff does with these new supports?

Please open the link to finish this important article.

Gary reviews the other major elements of Miles’s prepackaged plan and explains why they are unlikely to make a difference. They haven’t worked before, why will they work now? As Gary writes, takeovers typically fail because they are based on fake assumptions and prepackaged cures.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Houston, Parents, Teachers and Teaching, Texas

Florida: State Drops Charges Against “New College” Student Who Spit at Chris Rufo

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
30

Governor Ron DeSantis seized control of New College by installing half-a-dozen hard-right trustees and instructing them to turn the small progressive liberal arts college into the Hillsdale of the South. One of his appointees was Chris Rufo, the extremist who invented the furor over critical race theory.

At a recent campus event, a New College student spit on Rufo. He filed charges against her for her “attack” on him.

The State Attorney’s office dropped misdemeanor battery charges against a New College of Florida student who was accused of spitting on Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and one of the school’s trustees.

Libby Harrity, 20, was charged with misdemeanor battery on July 7 in connection with a Gov. Ron DeSantis bill signing at New College on May 15, when Harrity allegedly spat at Rufo. DeSantis’ visit to sign a bill banning state funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at state universities drew vocal protest from students, who have organized against his reshaping of the college since January.

The governor has said he wants to turn New College into a “classical liberal” college akin to the Christian, conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Higher Education

ProPublica: Clarence Thomas’ 38 Luxury Vacations, Undisclosed Until Now

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
12

ProPublica published a new exposé of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ many luxury vacations, yacht trips, and private jet transportation. All provided free to him by very dear friends who happen to be Republican billionaires. How did this man who grew up in poverty in a tiny town in Georgia find so many generous billionaire friends? Why did he fail to disclose their generosity? Were any of them his friends before he joined the Supreme Court?

During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.

Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:

At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.

This accounting of Thomas’ travel, revealed for the first time here from an array of previously unavailable information, is the fullest to date of the generosity that has regularly afforded Thomas a lifestyle far beyond what his income could provide. And it is almost certainly an undercount.

While some of the hospitality, such as stays in personal homes, may not have required disclosure, Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to disclose flights, yacht cruises and expensive sports tickets, according to ethics experts.

Perhaps even more significant, the pattern exposes consistent violations of judicial norms, experts, including seven current and former federal judges appointed by both parties, told ProPublica. “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges’ financial disclosures. “I think it’s unprecedented….”

The total value of the undisclosed trips they’ve given Thomas since 1991, the year he was appointed to the Supreme Court, is difficult to measure. But it’s likely in the millions.

Huizenga sent his personal 737 to pick Thomas up and bring him to South Florida at least twice, according to John Wener, a former flight attendant and chef on board the plane. If he were picked up in D.C., the five-hour round trip would have cost at least $130,000 each time had Thomas chartered the jet himself, according to estimates from jet charter companies. In February 2016, Thomas flew on Crow’s private jet from Washington to New Haven, Connecticut, before heading back on the jet just three hours later. ProPublica previously reported the flight, but newly obtained U.S. Marshals Service records reveal its purpose: Thomas met with several Yale Law School deans for a tour of the room where they planned to display a portrait of the justice. (Crow’s foundation also gave the school $105,000, earmarked for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.)

Don Fox, the former general counsel of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the senior ethics official in the executive branch, said, “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes and live the lifestyle of a billionaire.” Taxpayers, he added, have the right to expect that Supreme Court justices are not living on the dime of others.

Fox, who worked under both Democrat and Republican administrations, said he advised every new political appointee the same thing: Your wealthy friends are the ones you had before you were appointed. “You don’t get to acquire any new ones,” he told them….

To track Thomas’ relationships and travel, ProPublica examined flight data, emails from airport and university officials, security detail records, tax court filings, meeting minutes and a trove of photographs from personal albums, including cards that Thomas’ wife, Ginni, sent to friends. In addition, reporters interviewed more than 100 eyewitnesses and other sources: jet and helicopter pilots, flight attendants, airport workers, yacht crew members, security guards, photographers, waitresses, caterers, chefs, drivers, river rafting guides and C-suite executives.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Ethics

Gary Rubinstein: What Should the Math Curriculum Be? Part 5.

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
10

Gary Rubinstein teaches mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, a highly selective school where admissions are based on one test. He has written a series about what’s wrong with the math curriculum taught today and how to improve it. This is Part 5.

Gary writes:

If you’ve read parts 1 to 4 of this series, you may be confused. I the first part I said that not much of the school math is useful. In the second part I listed a few of those useful topics. In the third part I listed some topics that I don’t consider so useful. If I ended it there, it would seem like the best course of action would be to cut the amount of math we teach by at least half. But in the fourth part I wrote about something that seems to negate the point of the first three posts. I said that some of that ‘useless’ math was just as important as the useful math because it is engaging in the way that art or music can be useless but engaging. So this fourth part could be used to defend the position that no math topics should be put on the chopping block and we should just leave the math curriculum exactly how it is, maybe cutting the topics that are deemed ‘useless’ and not thought provoking but maybe expanding the remaining topics so those can be learned to more depth.

If you’re worried that that’s where I am going with this series, you can relax because in this post I will suggest a radical change to the K-12 math curriculum. But before I can do that, there are three really important questions that have to be answered: 1) What is the current K-12 math curriculum? 2) What is the current K-12 math curriculum trying to achieve? and 3) What is the current K-12 math curriculum actually achieving?

I think I should answer question 3 first. What the current K-12 math curriculum is actually achieving is traumatizing the vast majority of students. We know this because the moment that math becomes optional for the vast majority of students, they never take it again. And they forget most of the math they learned and are left with a vague memory of how much they hated math.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, History

Michael Hiltzik: More About Florida’s Hapless African-American Studies Curriculum

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
5

Michael Hiltzik is the business columnist for The Los Angrles Times, but he has important things to say about Education and the culture wars. In this post, he adds to what we have learned about DeSantis’s efforts to show that slavery was sometimes beneficial to slaves. Some of them—not the ones picking cotton under the blazing sun—learned a trade. Of course, that would not apply to the many slaves who lived and died as slaves. What the Florida excuse-makers don’t get is that we use today’s values to judge slavery, not the values of the slave owners.

Hiltzik writes:

If there’s a bet that you will almost always win, it’s that no matter how crass and dishonest a right-wing claim may seem to be, the reality will be worse.

That’s the case with Florida’s effort to whitewash the truth about slavery via a set of standards for teaching African American history imposed on the state’s public school teachers and students.

The curriculum, you may recall, was condemned for a provision that the curriculum cover “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Dogs and Negroes Not Welcome

— Sign posted until 1959 at the town line of Ocoee, Florida, site of a 1920 racial massacre

Another provision seemed to blame “Africans’ resistance to slavery” for the tightening of slave codes in the South that outlawed teaching slaves to read and write.

A section referring to “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” goes on to list five race riots and massacres from American history, every one of which was started by whites.

More on that in a moment. As the indispensable Charles P. Pierce put it, the Florida standards “look as though they were devised by Strom Thurmond on some very good mushrooms.”

I reported last week on this reprehensible project, which was publicly presented as the product of a work group of the state’s African American History Task Force.

Two members of the task force, William B. Allen and Frances Presley Rice, responded to the scathing reaction to the curriculum from Democrats and Republicans with a defensive statement purportedly on behalf of the entire work group.

“Some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted [sic],” the statement read. “This is factual and well documented.”

As I reported, however, of the 16 individuals Allen and Rice mentioned to support their assertion, nine never were slaves, seven were identified by the wrong trade and 13 or 14 did not learn their skills while enslaved. One, Betty Washington Lewis, whom Allen and Rice identified as a “shoemaker,” was white: She was George Washington’s younger sister and a slave owner.

Now it turns out that Allen and Rice were not speaking for the work group, but for themselves. Thanks to reporting by NBC News, we know that most of the work group’s 13 members opposed the language suggesting that slaves benefited from their enslavement.

NBC quoted several members anonymously as stating that two members pushed the provision — Allen and Rice. Members “questioned ‘how there could be a benefit to slavery,’” one work group member told NBC.

Others said that the work group met intermittently over the internet and did not collaborate with the state’s African American History Task Force, which was created in 1994 to oversee the curriculum for African American studies in Florida’s K-12 schools.

The work group’s standards were approved unanimously on July 19 by the state board of education, every member of which was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running a natural experiment to see whether bigotry and racism can carry someone to the presidency.

We’ve recently learned more about Allen and Rice. Allen, as I reported earlier, is a retired professor of political science at Michigan State University. (The university removed his bio page from its website sometime in the last few days, but here’s an archived version.)

Allen served as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under George H.W. Bush, but angered civil rights activists and members of the commission itself for taking a stand against legal protections for gay people.

At a 1989 conference in Anaheim sponsored by anti-gay Christian fundamentalists, Allen delivered a talk titled, “Blacks? Animals? Homosexuals? What is a Minority?”

Its theme was that treating gays and Black people as distinct minorities would relegate them to animal status. Allen said, “My title is as innocent as a title can be,” a position that prefigured his current defense of the Florida slavery standards as no big deal.

He’s listed as a fellow of the Claremont Institute, which has been funded by a galaxy of right-wing foundations. The institute lists among its senior fellows John Eastman, who is one of the four attorneys identified as “co-conspirators” in the federal indictment of former President Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, handed up Tuesday. Eastman is also the target of a California State Bar proceeding aimed at his disbarment for his alleged role in that effort.

As for Rice, she’s chair of the Sarasota-based National Black Republican Assn., which appears to have shared its business addresswith her home address. She identifies herself as “Dr. Frances Presley Rice,” but she doesn’t appear to have a medical degree or PhD; she does hold a juris doctor degree, but that’s just a law degree and doesn’t customarily bestow the “Dr.” designation on its holders.

Rice has conducted a years-long campaign to associate today’s Democratic Party with the Democrats of the 19th century, a pro-slavery party that shares none of its positions on Blacks or slavery with the Democrats of modern times.

The normalization of Florida’s slavery whitewash has been abetted by a supine press. On July 27, for example, Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR’s Morning Edition, conducted a servile interview in which he sat meekly by as Allen spewed unalloyed hogwash.

When Allen suggested that Black journalist Ida B. Wells had drawn “inspiration” from the slavery experience, Inskeep — had he been even minimally prepared — could have pointed out that the Mississippi-born Wells was 5½ months old when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on Jan. 1, 1863, and 3½ years old when the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.

Nor did Inskeep challenge Allen about the list of 16 supposed slaves that he and Rice issued in defense of their curriculum. The list had been out for a full week before the NPR interview. Inskeep didn’t mention it at all.

When Allen asserted that he was not the author of the curriculum, nor were any other members of the work group, the proper follow-up would have been: “Who wrote it, then?” Inskeep kept mum.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, tried to shoehorn Florida’s whitewashing of slavery into a “both-sides-do-it” framework.

The Post article suggests that the Florida curriculum and President Biden’s July 25 proclamation of a national monument dedicated to Emmett Till, a Black teenager tortured and lynched by a white mob in Mississippi in 1955 for purportedly offending a white woman, are two sides of a “roiling debate” over Black history.

Of course that’s absurd. Most Americans, and most Democrats, don’t see slavery as a topic worthy of reconsideration. That’s all on the Republican side, especially in Florida.

DeSantis and his stooges are pretending that the truth about America’s racist past should be suppressed for fear of making white children feel bad. It’s nothing but a play for the most bigoted members of the GOP base.

That brings us back to Florida’s curriculum. Provisions other than the one about the benefits of slavery aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

Take the part about “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” This standard is illustrated in the text by references to race riots in Atlanta in 1906 and Washington, D.C., in 1919, and massacres in Ocoee, Fla. (1920); Tulsa (1921); and Rosewood, Fla. (1923) — rampages by white mobs lasting a day or more.

In what sense do these point to violence perpetrated by Black people? Pierce conjectures that they “might distressingly be referring to attempts by the victims of those bloody episodes to fight back.”

The Ocoee massacre occurred when the town’s Black residents attempted to vote. When a squadron of Klansmen hunted down a Black leader in his home, his daughter tried to prevent them from taking him by brandishing a rifle, which went off, slightly wounding a white member of the gang.

“A volley of gunfire erupted in both directions,” according to an account on the Florida History blog. In the aftermath, nearly 60 Black residents were dead, their community was razed to the ground, and those who survived were driven from the town, never to return. Until 1959, a sign at the town line read, “Dogs and Negroes Not Welcome.”

Is Ocoee supposed to be an example of “violence perpetrated … by African Americans”? Nothing would speak more eloquently to the true nature of the Florida standards for teaching Black history.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, DeSantis, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Freedom, History, Lies, Racism

California: State Superintendent Tony Thurmond Speaks Up for LGBT Youth and Is Ejected by Chino Valley School Board

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
8

California’s State Superintendent Tony Thurmond went to speak at a meeting of the school board of the Chino Valley Unified School District. He was invited by students there to speak against a policy that the board was about to vote on, one that required teachers to report to parents if a student wanted to be identified by a gender different from the one on his or her birth certificate.

Carl J. Petersen, parent advocate in Los Angeles, describes what happened at the meeting.

He writes:

In a perfect world, all children would have relationships with their parents where they felt safe to discuss any subject without hesitation. Homes would be judgment-free zones where all children, even those questioning their gender identity, would be accepted and loved unconditionally. But in the words of Ice T, It “ain’t like that.”

In reality, there are children whose physical well-being would be put in danger if their parents were to find out that they were members of the LGBTQ+ community. Others might face emotional abuse or estrangement. According to the National Coalition For The Homeless, “LGBTQ+ youth are 120% more likely to experience homelessness than non-LGBTQ youth.”These effects are not limited to parents whose hopeless bigotry is stronger than their love for their children. Some may have unwittingly sent homophobic messaging that they would surely drop if they knew how much they were hurting their child. Others might be struggling to process reality but, given the time, may provide the acceptance that is deserved.

It is families within this last group of parents who will be hurt by policies like the one just passed by the Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD). By requiring parental notification “after a student requests to identify with a gender different than what is on their birth certificate”, politicians are forcibly outing children at a pace that they may not be ready for. They are also eliminating a path to support from outside the family structure, one that is essential when “LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers.”

Students invited Superintendent Thurmond to speak. The board allowed him only one minute, although it is customary to allow more time for elected officials. After one minute, his microphone was cut off.

Petersen wrote, “When he approached the podium again to rebut the Board President’s response to his comments, he was evicted from the room.”

Petersen wrote a letter to Superintendent Thurmond, thanking him for standing up for LGBT students and warning that theofascist extremists, inspired by Ron DeSantis and his crusade against LGBT people, were leading efforts like the one in Chino Valley.

Categories Bigotry, California, Gender

Two Democratic Legislators from Wisconsin Attended ALEC Meeting, Spill the Beans

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
10

Two Democratic legislators from Wisconsin joined the hard-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to keep track of what their opponents were planning. They recently attended the 50th annual ALEC convention in Orlando, Florida.

ALEC has about 2,000 state legislators as members. ALEC writes model legislation on the environment, education, gun rights, and every other topic likely to be considered by state legislatures. The members take the model legislation back to their home state and introduce it after writing in the name of their state. ALEC is against gun control, against public schools, against environmental protections, etc. ALEC is funded by major corporations and acts as a voice for corporations that want no government regulation.

Erik Gunn is the deputy editor of the Wisconsin examiner, which first published this report.

Wisconsin State Reps. Francesca Hong and Kristina Shelton aren’t exactly the typical lawmakers to belong to the American Legislative Exchange Council — ALEC for short.

Hong, of Madison, and Shelton, of Green Bay, are staunch Democrats who have consistently voted against bills advancing the policies of the sort ALEC promotes. While the organization is legally nonpartisan and a tax-exempt nonprofit, it has become widely known as the birthplace of right-wing legislative proposals that find a home mainly with Republican state lawmakers around the country.

Last week, however, the two second-term Assembly members were in Orlando for ALEC’s annual meeting. It was Shelton’s second visit and Hong’s third. When they posted about their participation on social media, some followers wondered what they were doing in a crowd so ideologically at odds with their own political stances.

“I think it’s important to understand the agenda of the opposition,” Hong says. “And our current political reality requires us to know what the motivation is of our colleagues and where they’re getting model legislation from [along with] talking points, candidate training. These are all things that are available at ALEC.”

“It gives us an understanding of what’s to come,” adds Shelton — in the form of future legislation that members of the Republican majority might introduce. “And it helps us prepare as Democrats, organizing our own legislation and messaging. There’s no better way to prepare than to hear it directly from the folks on the other side….”

Hong and Shelton view themselves as carrying on a tradition among progressive Wisconsin lawmakers in joining ALEC, attending its events and going back home to report what they see and hear. Their predecessors are former state Rep. Mark Pocan, now a member of Congress, and former state Rep. Chris Taylor, now an appeals court judge.

Their name tags for the ALEC event simply identify them as Wisconsin state representatives, and Hong and Shelton say they don’t go out of their way to out themselves as Democrats — but they aren’t undercover, either…

As paying ALEC members (dues are $200 a year; conference fees are $750), they can’t be excluded on ideological grounds because of the group’s nonpartisan legal status, says Hong, who adds she has asked ALEC for its guest list “multiple times” but never received it.

Membership includes the opportunity to join two subject-matter task forces. Hong chose energy and environment as well as taxation and federalism. Shelton’s two were health and human development and education and workforce. Those sessions are where the details of proposed model legislation from the organization are outlined. They are also where the role of big business is most evident in helping to shape the organization’s proposals….

On education, Shelton says, the organization has heavily promoted school privatization proposals, including education savings accounts and universal private school vouchers, such as were included in a sweeping education bill in Arkansas, the LEARNS Act, enacted earlier this year.

“They’re no longer interested in sort of nibbling around the edges on school vouchers,” Shelton says. “They’re going all in — removing the income limits, moving to those education savings accounts, wildly expanding public investment for religious schools … [and] dismantling any sort of bureaucratic accountability measures.”

Hong says the education proposals have also been made with reference to the difficulties that employers have had filling job openings.

“The framing of it didn’t come off as full, ‘We’re attacking public schools,’” Hong says. “This is how we’re going to get more workers is to essentially make schooling and education’s sole purpose is to be producing workers.”

On economic and social policy, a persistent talking point was “about making poor people rich, not rich people poor,” she adds, while government assistance is “dragging down the economy” and “morally wrong.”

“They’re really digging into that narrative and saying that growing government to help those people is going to be the end of time,” Hong says.

To be sure, ALEC is just one of many organizations, from the AFL-CIO to the Sierra Club, that pursue policy change, sometimes constructing model legislation for that purpose. The difference, Shelton says, is that the group’s agenda doesn’t appear to her to be about policy so much as about political power.

“I think what’s different here is a sort of militant approach by those on the conservative right to not be as interested in actually solving the problems in the critical issues of working people,” she says, “but rather creating legislation to drive issues that they see as winning at the ballot box.”

Even so, a prevailing theme was diminishing the role of government and freeing corporations and business, the two Wisconsin Democrats say.

Categories ALEC, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, North Carolina, Privatization, Vouchers

Harvard Prof. Laurence Tribe Denounces Use of His Name by Trump Lawyer

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
40

Six unindicted co-conspirators were listed in Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Trump. One of them, according to the media, is Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Cheseboro. In one of his memos to the Trump team, Chesebro cited his former Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. Tribe was outraged, and he wrote this article to show how Cheseboro had distorted his words.

Tribe wrote in Just Security:

Special Counsel Jack Smith has concludedthat he can prove that several private lawyers acted as co-conspirators in former President Donald Trump’s criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election. That conclusion, which is backed up by an enormous body of evidence, has significant implications for American democracy as well as for what it says about members of the legal profession. In the wake of this historic indictment, it is important for those of us with more information to come forward.

I am personally familiar with an aspect of the indictment’s documentary evidence that may shed light on the actions of one of the attorneys – Kenneth Chesebro — who is identified as Co-Conspirator 5 by the special counsel.

In a civil suit, Judge David Carter called the 2020 election interference scheme “a coup in search of a legal theory.” What I have to offer here can shed light on the anatomy of that fraud. It shows how the attorneys concocted arguments that gave the scheme an air of legitimacy but one that could not withstand public scrutiny. I know this well because a key memorandum drafted by Chesebro — which might otherwise appear relatively innocuous even in how it is discussed in the indictment — laid the foundation for the scheme grounded, in part, on misrepresenting my work. I know this especially well because of my prior communications with Chesebro.

I. Background

According to the indictment, the Trump attorneys participated in a “corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified” (para 54). They allegedly helped devise and implement central parts of the conspiracy. Those schemes include an effort to use false slates of electors to obstruct the congressional certification of the election and an effort to get Vice President Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role to interfere with the certification.

The special counsel alleges that Chesebro “assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding” (para 8). It is important to note that the indictment alleges that he and other attorneys’ criminal conduct involved knowingly misrepresenting facts (not just misrepresenting the law). For instance, the indictment states that Rudy Giuliani and Chesebro made factual claims they knew to be false to GOP electors in Pennsylvania to induce those electors to swear to certifications that the two attorneys knew to be fraudulent (paras 61-62).

Please open the link to read the rest of this fascinating article.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Lies, Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »