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Alan Singer: Florida’s Assault on the Right to Teach

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2022 //
19

Our nation is experiencing a resurgence of censorship and gag laws that take us back to the 1950s, to the era of McCarthyism, and even to the 1930s and 1940s, when teachers were suspected of subversive activities if they offended rightwing sensibilities. Alan Singer writes here about the upsurge in restrictions on academic freedom in Florida. Undoubtedly, there are other states where Know-Nothings have taken control but Florida stands out because it’s governor is a leading contender for the Republican nomination for the Presidency in 2024.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to control what children learn, what teachers can speak about in and out of the classroom, and ultimately what people think. Lawyers for the State of Florida argued in a recent court filing that professors at the state’s public colleges and universities have no right to freedom of speech when they teach. Florida is defending the state’s Individual Freedom Act, more commonly known as the “Stop WOKE Act.” The law bars teachers at public institutions from introducing discussion of race, racism, and sex. The big danger is that the rightwing majority on the United States Supreme Court may give him his wish. With DeSantis a leading candidate for the 2024 Republican Party Presidential nomination, this would be another step towards suppressing democracy in the United States.

The out-of-control rightwing majority on the Supreme Court is likely to approve the DeSantis ban on free speech and academic freedom. In 2006, in the case of Garcetti v. Ceballos, a 5-4 rightwing majority of the Supreme Court already ruled that first amendment protection does not apply to employee speech and protect them “from discipline based on speech made pursuant to the employee’s official duties.” At the time the Court did not rule on whether the ban included teachers. But today, an even more rightwing Court majority could rule that teachers, K-12 and college, as government employees in Florida, are subject to discipline including being fired if they exercise speech in their official capacities that violates Florida laws including its notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill and banning any language that might make a student feel uncomfortable such as recognition that Florida was a slave state and attempted to cede from the United States during the Civil War. Since many teacher contracts have a public behavior clause, saying gay or discussing racism outside the classroom but in in public setting could be construed as a violation of professional responsibility and the Florida law.

Florida is not the only state trying to silence teacher and students. According to a June 2021 article in Education Week, in the previous six months bills were introduced in 42 states to restrict teaching about racism and sexism. Anti-CRT laws went into effect in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. The Alabama law forbids teachers from teaching “concepts that impute fault, blame, a tendency to oppress others, or the need to feel guilt or anguish to persons solely because of their race or sex.” A problem that the Alabama and Florida legislators may not have understood is that slavery in the Americas was race-based. Florida’s law adds that teaching that “people are privileged or oppressed due to their race or sex” effectively wipes out any discussion of Jim Crow segregation, limits on the rights of women, and Florida’s long history of voter suppression.

This is not the first time the fundamental rights of teachers have been under attack in the United States because of their beliefs or speech. In the 1930s and 1940s teachers were made to sign loyalty oaths and fired if they held unpopular political beliefs. In the 1940s, New York State prevented the City College of New York from hiring the noted philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell condemning Russell’s views on premarital sex as “immoral and salacious.” In 1941, the New York State Legislature established the Rapp-Coudert Committee to investigate teachers in the state’s educational system. Sixty faculty and staff members at City College were dismissed because they were unwilling to testify before the committee.

In New York City, 1,150 teachers were investigated and 378 teachers were either fired of forced to take early retirement in the 1950s because they were suspected of being current or past members of the Communist Party or had invoked the Fifth Amendment when subpoenaed to testify about their activities. During the Cold War Red Scare teachers were also investigated in other major U.S. cities. At a Congressional sub-committee hearing accusations were made that 1,500 of the country’s one million teachers were “card-carrying Communists.”

In 1954, the school committee in Wayland, Massachusetts removed a second-grade teacher accused of being “[unfit] to teach” because she had been a member of the Communist Party. It accused the teacher of lacking “perception, understanding, and judgment necessary in one who is to be entrusted with the responsibility for teaching the children of the Town.”

The witch-hunts not only impacted the teachers who were fired. Other teachers were frightened into silence and students were denied exposure to ideas that needed to consider, and could potentially reject, about the nature of American society. An earlier version of the Supreme Court recognized this and in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967) and Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, recognized the importance of freedom of speech for teachers. In his majority opinion for the Court in Sweezy, Warren argued, “The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities . . . Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.”

Unfortunately Florida Republicans and current Supreme Court seem committed to overturning these rulings and the right of teachers to teach.

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Extremism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Teachers and Teaching

Oklahoma: Vote for Joy Hofmeister for Governor!

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2022 //
2

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma, urges his fellow Oklahomans to vote for Joy Hofmeister for Governor. I heartily endorse Joy. When I visited Oklahoma a few years ago, I had the chance to speak with her at length. She is intelligent, public-spirited, and devoted to public service. I met her in her role of State Superintebdent of Schools and was deeply impressed by her understanding of the issues and to public schools. I join John in urging you to vote for Joy!

Thompson writes:

The main arguments for electing Oklahoma State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister as governor are grounded in her rescue of public education. Her record proves that Hofmeister is the best possible candidate for uniting the state and pulling ourselves out of the messes that Gov. Kevin Stitt and Trumpists created. And her current campaign, like her approach to reviving public education, illustrates Hofmeister’s ability to bring diverse people together.

In contrast, Stitt supposedly illustrated his commitment to students by rushing down school halls with a semi-automatic rifle.

When Hofmeister switched from being a moderate Republican to a Democrat, a number of young progressives said they supported Joy because she was the candidate who is best able to defeat Stitt. Fearing that young people who just believed that might be less motivated to vote, I’ve been sharing concrete examples of why Hofmeister deserves enthusiastic support; Hofmeister led the rescue of our public schools, and laid the foundation for meaningful and long-lasting school improvements. If voters remember how bleak the future of schools was in 2014, and how she successfully defended them, they will agree that Hofmeister is the proven leader for saving public education and our other public institutions from today’s rightwing assault.

I like to start by asking Gen Z and Millennials about their experiences with schools after the corporate school reformer, Janet Barresi, was elected in 2010. This was the height of the “Teacher Wars,” when schools were to be closed based on an invalid A–F grading system, and educators were to be fired based on an even worse algorithm.As documented byOklahoma City University’s Dr. Jonathan Willner, School grades were supposed to measure student learning, but they had little or nothing to do with teacher quality. They actually reflected:

The number of single-parents in the district; students on free and reduced lunch at the school; school mobility (proportion of new students each year); educational attainment in the district, and the median household income in the district. None of these have anything to do with the actions of teachers and administers. The damage became even worse when almost every teacher and students became subject even more invalid and unreliable high-stakes testing.

This was a time of education funding cuts, nonstop attacks on “Bad Teachers,” who supposedly could have transformed student learning had they wanted to, and increased segregation by economics and school choice. Hofmeister was elected in 2014, when urban schools could have easily crossed the “tipping point” if Oklahoma stuck with the mandate that required students to pass Common Core graduation tests that were written on levels that often were years above their reading levels. A key to Joy’s success was her professional team’s effort to assist in returning more of the authority for developing education policy to local districts.

Hofmeister led the fight to repeal seven inappropriate End of Instruction tests (EOI), to “reduce time testing and allow more time for rich instruction, personalized learning and multiple pathways to college and career readiness.” She also prioritized high-quality pre-K instruction and reading for comprehension by 3rd grade. Joy was successful in bringing back high school students’ access to Career Tech, mentoring, and internships. And she addressed our severe teacher shortage by helping lead the way to significant teacher pay raises, and listening to teachers about policies for making schools better.

I haven’t always agreed with Hofmeister on issues. But after listening to her, and her professional team, neither could I say I was right and she was wrong. Most of the time, a growing body of evidence now argues that her administration was right and I was wrong.

Yes, Kevin Stitt faced strong competition, but he has earned his spot as the worst governor in Oklahoma history. As COVID-19 surged, long before the vaccine was developed, Stittundermined the public health system and disrupted testing programs, as well as ridiculing masks and social distancing while posting family photographs from crowded restaurants. The governor purchased a stockpile of hydroxychloroquine, and later sought to suspend vaccine requirements for the Oklahoma National Guard. During the COVID-19 delta variant surge, Stitt signed a bill attempting to ban public schools’ masking requirements.

Stitt and his appointee, Secretary of Education Ryan Walters, have led the attacks on the so-called teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Walters ramped up attacks on a teacher, Summer Boismier, for posting a QR code to the Brooklyn Library’s banned books lists. He then called on the Oklahoma State Board of Education to revoke Boismier’s certification because, “There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom.”

Stitt’s appointee is being investigated for distributing the federal, COVID-19 relief money for the Bridge the Gap program without following safeguards to prevent fraud or abuse. Stitt defended Walters, saying, “Secretary Walters is doing a great job fighting for parents’ right to be in charge of their child’s education and advocating for funding students.” Moreover, in addition to his state salary, Walters was paid around $120,000 a year by Every Kid Counts Oklahoma.

Stitt politicized the appointment process for the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals and the Supreme Court. He also obtained excessive control over the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, the Oklahoma Department of Transportation, the Oklahoma Office of Juvenile Affairs, and the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services. And his change in the Tourism Department’s governance, apparently led to the Swadley’s Foggy Bottom Kitchen investigation and other conflicts

Stitt opposed Medicaid expansion in Oklahoma, and he has reversed gun safety regulations. And he has continually fought against established state rights of Oklahoma tribes, as well as rights newly established by the U.S. Supreme Court’s McGirt vs. Oklahoma decision.

Stitt also supported, and signed into law, SB 612, which makes performing an abortion a crime punishable by 10 years in prison or a $100,000 fine, with exceptions for medical emergencies but none for rape or incest. Stitt then signed into law a ban on “abortions from the stage of ‘fertilization’ and allowing private citizens to sue abortion providers who ‘knowingly’ perform or induce an abortion ‘on a pregnant woman.'”

Stitt issued an executive order that prohibited transgender individuals from changing the gender on their birth certificates. He said that “people are created by God to be male or female. There is no such thing as nonbinary sex.” Finally, Stitt signed a bill into law requiring public school students “to use locker rooms and bathrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificate.”

So, it is understandable that some would vote for a moderate former-Republican simply because of the havoc created by the current governor and his administration. I am very confident, however, that many, many more Oklahomans now realize that a Gov. Hofmeister will succeed in the two battles that have become even more important, and dangerous, than those she first faced eight years ago. Once again, she is revealing a talent for respectful listening and teamwork. Joy is the leader we need for building a 21st century Oklahoma that represents the best of our state.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Oklahoma

Paul Horton: How Do We Navigate the Culture Wars in the Classroom This Year?

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2022 //
74

Paul Horton is a history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School, one of the very few private schools whose teachers are unionized. This article appeared in History Matters, the journal of the National Council on History Education.

Horton writes:

History teachers are beginning the new school year in a difficult place. Librarians and history teachers are being singled out all over the country as either not “woke” enough or too “woke.”

Constant and often contradictory messages from the left and the right, and self-censorship are on the rise as teachers and librarians either say they are going to quit or they intend to “quiet-quit” to stay off of the radars of “helicopter parents” and scared-to-death administrators.

Like most of my colleagues, I have given some thought this summer about how to navigate the minefield that has become social studies, civics, and history teaching.

I plan to take two steps to support my students’ critical historical thinking. First, to engage my students in talking about current events, I hope to begin each class with five minutes of time for them to read the “Reuters Daily Briefing.” According to “Media Bias/Fact Check,” Reuters is the most objective media source that is mostly free. In addition, the “Daily Brief” is all news and no opinion. This is important because many current events discussions are side-tracked by references to opinion segments that comprise much of the “news” on cable news.

Second, I intend to turn my first major United States History unit into a student evaluation of differing perspectives on American History: controversies surrounding the “1619 Project,” “Critical Race Theory,” and “presentism.”

Rather than ignoring these controversies, my classes will openly discuss and debate the issues surrounding them. My class will use a consensus standard textbook that combines political history and social history and integrates the standard lessons of America’s founding and the writing of the Constitution with what we have learned in the past fifty years about the history of slavery and the histories of peoples and cultures that were marginalized in textbooks until the 1970s.

But my class will also review representative texts that are championed by the left and the right. Student groups will examine the textbook used in the Hillsdale College 1776 History Curriculumcalled, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story by Hillsdale College historian, Wilfred M. McClay. In contrast, the same groups will also review Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s, Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants’: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusionthat represents a virtually opposite perspective to that of the Hillsdale curriculum.

After student groups have studied both texts and noted comparisons and contrasts, they will assume roles in a simulated State Board of Education hearing. Some students will be asked to represent Board members, while other students will represent interested groups and individuals that will offer their professional opinions on the texts. For example, in the simulation a representative from the National Association of Scholars, a conservative history advocacy group, will testify in addition to a representative from the American Historical Association. Parents representing a range of views will also be asked to testify.

At the simulation’s conclusion, the classroom school board will consult and make public a statement that justifies the state’s course of action. Will either book be banned? Will the board allow the teaching of excerpts from both books? Will the state adopt either book for exclusive use in the state’s classrooms?

To finish the unit, our student school board will be charged with the task of writing a letter to the state school board that establishes criteria for History textbook adoptions.

Rather than allowing our history classrooms to be censored, shouldn’t we use free speech to help our students grow beyond the Procrustean Bed of the stilted and shortsighted “culture wars”?

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Democracy, History

Teachers: Would Your District or State Allow You to Teach Ken Burns’ Series on the Holocaust?

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2022 //
25

I recently posted a commentary by John Thompson, a retired teacher in Oklahoma who speculated about whether the state would permit high school teachers to teach Ken Burns’ series on the U.S. and the Holocaust. Oklahoma has a law—HB 1775–which might intimidate teachers.

In response, a teacher in Utah said that he or she felt sure that the Burns’ series would not be allowed because it’s controversial.

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post was taken aback by this intimidation. She asked me to invite teachers to send her an email and comment on whether they felt they would be in jeopardy if they taught the Ken Burns’ series, which acknowledges the unwillingness of the U.S. government to accept European Jews trying to flee from Hitler.

Please write her at Valerie.Strauss@WashPost.com.

She will protect your anonymity.

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Democracy, History, Teaching

Bob Shepherd: Why Extremists Fund Christian Madrassas

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2022 //
77

In response to a post about the generous public funding of yeshivas that fail to teach English, science, mathematics, or history, our resident polymath Bob Shepherd compared these schools to Islamic madrassas.

Well, traditionally, in the Arab world, young men interested in following a religious vocation would go to one of the schools attached to a mosque, a madrassa, to study. These madrassas were Islamic seminaries. During the Russo-Afghan War, powerful, wealthy traditionalists in Saudi Arabia started funding madrassas throughout the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic war to inculcate a new generation of young people, mostly very poor young people, in an extremist version of Sunni Islam that is the de facto official religion in Saudi Arabia, Wahhābīsm. At the time, the U.S. was supporting the Afghan resistance, supplying training and weapons to resistance fighters like the young Osama bin Ladin, who made his name among the resistance fighters when he and others stopped a convoy of Russian tanks with American-supplied Stinger missiles. Well I remember Ronald Reagan speaking of those Afghan “freedom fighters” and saying that they were “Good, God-fearing people, just like us.” Those fighters were the Taliban. Yup. Same Taliban. Now, bin Laden and other young people in that movement were followers of an Egyptian named Sayyed Qutb, who had come to America to study, had been horrified by things like seeing women singing on television, and went back and started writing books about how decadent Western culture was going to inundate and overwhelm Islam and the only way to stop that was to fight back vigorously. To that end, he coopted a word that had referred to spiritual struggle toward enlightenment, jihad. So, the combination of the Saudi-funded fundamentalist madrassas and the work of Qutb helped create a powerful Islamicist movement, with consequences that included the events of 9/11.

Well, flash forward to today. The Extreme Court, formerly the Supreme Court of the United States, has been taken over by a supermajority of religious nutcase Republican appointees, including three appointed by the areligious Donald Trump (his worships only himself and Mammon). That Extreme Court is busily clearing the way for taxpayer funding of religious schools in order to create vehicles for indoctrination of a new generation of kids in fundamentalist, nationalist Christian ideology (see, for example, the Hillsdale 1775 curriculum), just as extremist traditionalists in Saudi Arabia funded the training of extremists in religious schools, madrassas, all over the Middle East and beyond. Why is the Extreme Court doing this? Because educated Republicans can see from polls and from the culture at large that the youth and the cultural avant-garde are against them ON EVERY ISSUE. So, they want to create a mechanism for turning that back, and religious schoolings is such a mechanism. Institutions for indoctrination.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? The Pugs HATE Islamic fundamentalist education, but fundamentalist education is precisely what they want the rest of us, here, to pay for.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Education Industry, Ethics, Religion, Separation of church and state

John Thompson: Will Oklahoma Schools Dare to Show Ken Burns’ Series on the U.S. and the Holocaust?

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2022 //
15

Oklahoma, like many other conservative states, passed a law to restrict teaching about racism and other controversial subjects. John Thompson, a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, thinks that high school students should learn about and debate historical events. He wrote this post for the blog.

After Part I of Ken Burns’ The United States and the Holocaust was shown on PBS, I wrote a review calling for the documentary and its website to be taught in high school. As the three-part series progressed, I became more stunned by the information I had never been taught. Afterwards, conversing with neighbors and strangers, and ten lawyers, the virtually unanimous response I heard was a) The United States and the Holocaust must be taught in every Oklahoma high school, and b) because of HB 1775, educators won’t dare to do so.

I also tried to communicate with ten school systems and education institutions, but received no responses. In fairness, it is unlikely that districts would take a stand before studying the legal and political issues regarding the use of Burns’ work in the classroom.

Of course, I had known that Adolf Hitler patterned his crimes against humanity after America’s eugenics movement. But I hadn’t realized how much Hitler had studied its false claims that people of color were biologically inferior, as well as borrowed lessons from the genocide of Native Americans, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow. Similarly, I had read Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and it seems unlikely that an Oklahoma teacher would be fired for violating HB 1775 by teaching about her the way it has normally been taught. But Burns tells the long story that has not been recognized. Even though the wording of HB 1775 doesn’t seem to ban The United States and the Holocaust from high school classrooms, it is widely assumed that teaching it would be too risky.

Burns tells how the United States State Department repeatedly tightened regulations designed to prevent Jews from escaping to the United States. The Frank family, like hundreds of thousands of Jews, was murdered after years of being excluded from the U.S.

A subsequent review by Diane Ravitch of Part II, explained how a million Jews were murdered by December, 1941 when the U.S. entered the war. She concluded, I believe correctly, that “This series should be shown to high school students in every school in the U.S.” In my first review, I concentrated on why and how Oklahoma educators and supporters of public schools should unite in teaching Burns’ film, and his standards-driven lessons. Part III further convinced me that the stakes are too high to allow Burns’ work to be pushed out of high schools. We must find a way to take a stand. All I know for sure, however, is that it will require careful planning and conversations between teachers and administrators; patrons; and political and community leaders.

We must make it clear that Burns affirms that there is plenty that is great about our democracy, and we must also focus on the heroism of anti-Nazi volunteers and key governmental leaders. He appropriately praises the military and other Americans for winning World War II, and thus putting an end to the Holocaust. Burns explains the logistics and technological limitations that would have made it hard to bomb the railroads to the concentration camps. But he also discusses the extreme anti-Semitism and how, in 1938, 2/3rds of Americans wanted to keep German, Austrian, and “other political refugees” out of the U.S., thus undermining President Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to rescue as many as possible.

This piece will focus on two narratives that Burns uses to illustrate why this complicated history must be taught. And then it summarizes his belief that today it is doubly important that students are taught uncomfortable truths about the genocide of six million Jews.

First, Burns reviews the U.S State Department’s history of racism and its opposition to admitting Jews and Southern European immigrants, as opposed to the Northern Europeans they welcomed. For instance, in1939, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who would later be awarded the Nobel Prize, led the infamous effort to block the St. Louis, a German ocean liner trying to transport 936 Jews seeking asylum to America.

In 1940, Asst. Secretary of State Breckinridge Long “wrote that consular officers should “put every obstacle in the way [to] “postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas.” As it was later learned, Long tried to stop intelligence about mass murder from reaching the United States.

After the U.S. had been at war with Nazis for two years, and a grass roots effort by Americans putting their lives at risk when saving tens of thousands from genocide, the truth was clear. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. finally was able to prove to President Roosevelt that the State Department was lying, and Long had been hiding the facts and the plans for rescuing refugees through southeastern and southwestern Europe.

Long resigned and FDR created the Wartime Refugee Board (WRB). The hero of the rescues that the State Department had undermined, John Pehle, was named the WRB director. The WRB helped to save up to 200,000 Jews, but Pehle said their effort was “little and late.”

The second story was about the initiative General Dwight Eisenhower started in order to inform the world about what happened in the concentration camps. First, he required soldiers and German civilians to walk through the concentration camps and see the piles of bodies. He then asked General George Marshall to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps “so that they could convey the horrible truth about Nazi atrocities to the American public.” Within days, they began to bear witness to Nazi crimes in the camps.”

And that leads to the question that Burns’ website recommends, “Although the images and videos shown in the last clip are very challenging to watch, why do you think U.S. Army leaders said they needed to be shown to people in the United States and across the world?”

In the last five minutes, The United States and the Holocaust returns to the reason why Burns and his team started to make this film in 2015. This was before Charlottesville, the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and at the supermarket in Buffalo, and before the January 6th insurrection. But they saw a similarity to “fragility of civilized behavior” that had existed in Germany. For instance, in the late 1920’s, Berlin was perhaps “the most open and cosmopolitan city in Europe” but only four years later, the Nazis were in charge.

This propelled Burns to reveal the full range of Americans’ actions and inactions. His research showed how quickly societies can spin out of control. Burns concluded that we must learn from the past in order to better deal with today’s “fragility of democratic civilization all over the world, not just here.”

Today, supporters of HB 1775 seem to argue that discussing today’s conflicts in the context of the dark chapters of American history is politicizing classroom instruction. Burns, however, rejects the practice of keeping students in the dark about past and present threats to democracy. Cross-generational conversations about The United States and the Holocaust could be a significant step towards bringing America together.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Injustice, Oklahoma

Idaho: 18-Year-Old Activist Defeats Far-Right Candidate for Boise School Board

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2022 //
27

This is a thrilling story, reported by The Intercept.

THE NATIONWIDE CAMPAIGN to stifle discussions of race and gender in public schools through misinformation and bullying suffered a reversal in Idaho on Monday, when a high school senior vocally opposed to book bans and smears against LGBTQ+ youth took a seat on the Boise school board.

The student, Shiva Rajbhandari, was elected to the position by voters in Idaho’s capital last week, defeating an incumbent board member who had refused to reject an endorsement from a local extremist group that has harassed students and pushed to censor local libraries.

Rajbhandari, who turned 18 days before the election, was already well-known in the school district as a student organizer on climate, environmental, voting rights, and gun control issues. But in the closing days of the campaign, his opponent, Steve Schmidt, wasendorsed by the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs, which in response helped Rajbhandari win the endorsement of Boise’s leading newspaper, the Idaho Statesman.

Rajbhandari, a third-generation Idahoan whose father is from Nepal, was elected to a two-year term with 56 percent of the vote.

In an interview, Rajbhandari told The Intercept that although he had hoped people would vote for him rather than against his opponent — “My campaign was not against Steve Schmidt,” he said — he was nonetheless shocked that Schmidt did not immediately reject the far-right group’s endorsement. “I think that’s what the majority of voters took issue with,” Rajbhandari said.

The Idaho Liberty Dogs, which attacked Rajbhandari on Facebook for being “Pro Masks/Vaccines” and leading protests “which created traffic jams and costed [sic] tax payers money,” spent the summer agitating to have books removed from public libraries in Nampa and Meridian, two cities in the Boise metro area.

But, Rajbhandari said, “that’s the least of what they’ve done. Last year, there was a kid who brought a gun to Boise High, which is my school, and he got suspended and they organized an armed protest outside our school.”

Rajbhandari, who started leading Extinction Rebellion climate protests in Boise when he was 15, is familiar with the group’s tactics. “We used to have climate strikes, like back in ninth grade, and they would come with AR-15s,” he said, bringing rifles to intimidate “a bunch of kids protesting for a livable future.”

So when the Idaho Liberty Dogs called on Boise voters to support Schmidt — and a slate of other candidates for the school board who, ultimately, all lost — Rajbhandari told me he texted his rival to say, “You need to immediately disavow this.”

“This is a hate group,” Rajbhandari says he told Schmidt. “They intimidate teachers, they are a stain on our schools, and their involvement in this election is a stain on your candidacy.” Schmidt, however, refused to clearly reject the group, even after the Idaho Liberty Dogs lashed out at a local rabbi who criticized the endorsement by comparing the rabbi to Hitler and claiming that he harbored “an unrelenting hatred for white Christians.”

While the school board election was a hyperlocal one, Rajbhandari is aware that the forces he is battling operate at the state and national level. “Idaho is at the center of this out-of-state-funded far-right attack to try to undermine schools, with the end goal of actually abolishing public education,” Rajbhandari told me. “There’s a group, they’re called the Idaho Freedom Foundation, and they actually control a lot of the political discourse in our legislature. Their primary goal is to get rid of public education and disburse the money to charter schools or get rid of that funding entirely.”

For his courage and candor, he won the endorsement of The Idaho Statesman.

This is a remarkable young man with a bright future ahead of him. I am happy to add him to the honor roll of this blog.

Read the rest of the story by opening the link. Rajbhandari is a force to be reckoned with. He is a good omen of the bright, dedicated young people who stand up for their teachers and for environmental activism, who fight for gun control and against censorship. Best wishes to him!

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Citizenship, Courage, Education Reform, Environment, Guns, Honor Roll, Idaho, Students, Teachers

Mercedes Schneider: The Value of Reading Banned Books

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2022 //
12

Mercedes Schneider explains the uselessness of banning books. For one thing, young people become curious about the forbidden and may seek it out. For another, banning books banishes critical thinking. Reading only those books that confirm what you already believe limits your intellectual development. Try reading something different. Schneider provides a useful description of done of the most frequently banned books.

Schneider writes:

For those who would ban books, here is something to consider:

Developing critical thinking skills requires that human beings are confronted with the unfamiliar and (perhaps therefore) uncomfortable and that we intellectually wrestle with that which does not fit readily and neatly into our current world schemas. To not allow students to be exposed to a variety of reading materials– and to insist that developing minds be “saved” from what others deem unpleasant– is to stymie the growth of the human mind and, ultimately, maturity of the human will.

Rather than rush to ban, a far better option would be to cultivate cross-generational relationships (e.g., parent/guardian-to-child) in which open, nonjudgmental, respectful communication is the norm and to develop a habit of reading and discussing books together.

If you feel a book that interests your child is age-inappropriate, consider setting a date in the future to read and discuss.

Besides, the surest way to prompt a young people to read a book is to vehemently campaign for a book to be off limits. Social media thrives on such undesired popularity.

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Democracy

Oklahoma: Ousted Teacher Asks: “Which Side Are You On?”

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2022 //
24

Summer Boismier took a stand against censorship of books in her classroom. A teacher in the high school of Norman, she had been ordered to remove from her classroom any books that might violate state law HB 775. That law declares that if any educator makes part of their curriculum teachings that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex” or that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” they could be suspended or have their license removed. She said teachers were instructed to remove such books or cover them with butcher paper. She did cover them up and posted a warning not to read banned books but posted the QR code of the Brooklyn Public Library, where students can gain access to banned books. The state superintendent Ryan Walters moved to suspend her teaching license. He said, “There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom.”

Boissier wrote the following opinion article in The Oklahoman to explain her opposition to censorship and book banning:

May 2, 2004, was a Monday. How do I know, you ask? Well, I was 15 at the time, and like most 15-year-olds, I was at school. I know, shocking! But what you might not know is that a mere 24 hours before, I had lost my father to suicide. I went to school the following day because that is where I wanted to be. That is where, in the worst moments of my life to date, I believed I’d be safe. School — specifically public school — had always been the place where I felt seen and heard and valued for who I was and, most importantly, for who I was becoming as a result. As both an educator and a public school proud Oklahoman, I want something similar for all — and I mean ALL — of my students, including the many amazing learners who often look, think, love, live and/or pray differently than I do. Every single child who walks through the doors of a public school in this state should have the opportunity to feel centered, to feel valued, to feel celebrated, to feel affirmed and sustained for who they are and for the lived experiences and diverse communities they bring to class.

Education is political, and the classroom — by extension — is a political space. Let me say it louder: Education is inherently political, but it is not automatically partisan. That would be, to use the word of the day, indoctrination. Politics encompasses the ideologies supporting a person’s daily choices, or lack thereof. Politics is power — who has it and who wants it. If knowledge is also power, then it would stand to reason that the classroom is indeed political. Who gets to learn what, from whom, and how is steeped in a political reality that Oklahomans would be foolish at best and reprehensible at worst to ignore. Laws such as House Bill 1775 fail to account for the fact that some pre-K-12 students are rarely afforded the luxury of experiencing “discomfort” only at school. When skin color and/or gender presentation is weaponized, discomfort isn’t just a poor word choice in some poorly worded legislation. It is a matter of survival.

Actions can sometimes speak louder than words; however, inaction can often speak just as loudly. Silence can even scream. There is power in what we say, but there is also power in what we don’t. What does it communicate when adults in leadership positions repeatedly and loudly target books by and about the 2SLGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities, among others? Make no mistake, when students — some of whom are also members of these communities — walk into public schools, they’ll get the message loud and clear that the state sees such stories as smut and such lives as less than.

Mother of multicultural children’s literature, Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, argued that stories are mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors. Stories are also telescopes and prisms and ladders. Stories are safety. Stories are possibility. Stories are connection and validation. Stories are power. And stories are political. Empathy is dangerous precisely because it takes a sledgehammer to fear. If we don’t “other” differences and hold them at arm’s length, then those driving division by justifying censorship in our schools lose the power they’ve amassed keeping Oklahomans apart.

This is not a zero-sum game. What a student gains when teachers prioritize inclusive stories in the classroom is not another’s loss. Privilege is not a euphemism for guilt; it is a means to better understand the power a person has and the ways they can use that power to uplift others. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to defend a student’s right to read, to be represented and — by extension — to simply exist. But alas, this world is as far from perfect as I am from retirement. This incessant debate over (insert whatever term best reflects your particular belief system) books is evidence enough of that.

The lives of historically marginalized people should not be up for debate, but as Michael Brown, Ariyanna Mitchell, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, David Kato and George Floyd prove, they frequently are. Their stories cannot and should not be separated from the context of their lived experiences. No story — including the ones we teach and thereby validate in our public schools — exists in a vacuum. In the same way charges of indoctrination are an insult to their critical thinking skills, Oklahoma’s students are certainly capable of speaking for themselves. For instance, one student stated, “Being an openly gay student myself, who is witnessing LGBTQ+ characters for the first time emerging in our own curriculum, gives other LGBTQ+ students and I a more elevated self-worth and pride towards our own respective identities.”

It is time to come together as Oklahomans and side with a politics of critical thinking and compassion. This November you have a choice to make for the future of our state and the state of our public schools: a politics of inclusion or exclusion. So what’s your story? What side are you on?

Categories Academic Freedom, Bias, Censorship, Courage, Democracy, Freedom

John Merrow: Don’t Read Banned Books and Don’t Vote!

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2022 //
10

John Merrow’s title is sarcastic. Of course he wants you to read banned books, and he is deeply concerned about the large number of eligible voters—especially young people—who don’t bother to vote.

When someone on Twitter posted a list of 25 popular books that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had supposedly banned from the state’s public schools, people went crazy. The list included Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.”

Below is a screenshot of the list. How many of these books have you read? Have your children read most of them? What on earth is going on in Florida?

People familiar with DeSantis’s efforts to restrict classroom discussion of controversial topics had no trouble believing that he would try to prevent young people from reading controversial or challenging books. If DeSantis did draw up a list, these books might well be on it.

But the list is a fake, a clever satire.

Many people were fooled, including teacher union President Randi Weingarten and “Star Wars” actor Mark Hamill. Hamill’s screenshot of the list amassed more than 100,000 likes and 24,000 retweets.

(Add my name to the list of those who were taken in.)

Like all good satire, that fake list of banned books is rooted in truth, because book banning is real and growing. Florida school districts have banned around 200 books, according to a report published by PEN America, a nonprofit that tracks book banning in the U.S. Pen America ranks Florida third among US states for banning books, trailing only Texas and Pennsylvania.

We are in the midst of a pandemic of book banning, so it’s hard to imagine any title that would never be banned by some zealous or timid school board or ignorant legislator.

One way to stop this outbreak of censorship is to get active, vote, attend school board meetings, run for school board. Passivity and complaining is a losing strategy.

Time to turn back the rising tide of incipient fascism.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Civics, Democracy, Education Industry, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press
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