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North Carolina: Why Tricia Cotham Betrayed Voters and Gave GOP a Supermajority

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
22

Last April, newly elected Democrat Tricia Cotham announced that she was switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. This was after she had campaigned as a supporter of abortion rights, an opponent of school vouchers, and a loyal Democrat. Her betrayal of voters in her blue district shook up the state’s politics, because it meant that the hard-right Republicans in the state legislature (the General Assembly) could override the vetoes of Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.

Everyone who saw the damage wrought by Cotham wondered why she did it. She claimed that Democrats didn’t appreciate her enough. That’s a strange reason to flip positions on big issues.

The New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and David Perlmutt found out why she switched: she was wooed by powerful Republicans, encouraged to run, and flipped knowing full well that she lied to her voters.

When Tricia Cotham, a former Democratic lawmaker, was considering another run for the North Carolina House of Representatives, she turned to a powerful party leader for advice. Then, when she jumped into the Democratic primary, she was encouraged by still other formidable allies.

She won the primary in a redrawn district near Charlotte, and then triumphed in the November general election by 18 percentage points, a victory that helped Democrats lock in enough seats to prevent, by a single vote, a Republican supermajority in the state House.

Except what was unusual — and not publicly known at the time — was that the influential people who had privately encouraged Ms. Cotham to run were Republicans, not Democrats. One was Tim Moore, the redoubtable Republican speaker of the state House. Another was John Bell, the Republican majority leader…

Three months after Ms. Cotham took office in January, she delivered a mortal shock to Democrats and to abortion rights supporters: She switched parties, and then cast a decisive vote on May 3 to override a veto by the state’s Democratic governor and enact a 12-week limit on most abortions— North Carolina’s most restrictive abortion policy in 50 years…

More perplexing to many Democrats was why she did it. Ms. Cotham came from a family with strong ties to the Democratic Party, campaigned as a progressive on social issues and had even co-sponsored a bill to codify a version of Roe v. Wade into North Carolina law…

Late in March, just a few days before switching parties, she skipped a pivotal gun-control vote, helping Republicans loosen gun restrictions in the state. After she became a Republican, she sponsored a bill to expand student eligibility for private-school vouchers, voted to ban gender-affirming care for minors and voted to outlaw discussions of race or gender in state job interviews.

“This switch has been absolutely devastating,” said state Representative Pricey Harrison, a Democrat from Greensboro.

Ms. Cotham received a standing ovation at North Carolina’s state Republican convention in June. She was invited to meet privately there with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and former Vice President Mike Pence.

“She’s a rock star among the Republican Party activists and voter base,” said U.S. Representative Dan Bishop, a Republican who said he encouraged Ms. Cotham to join his party and who stood behind her when she announced the decision.

There were clues that should have raised suspicions. In an earlier stint in the legislature, Cotham was loud in demanding greater accountability for charter schools. After she left the legislature, she was a lobbyist for the charter school industry. When she returned this year and flipped parties, she led the Republican demand to transfer control of charters from the State Board of Education to the General Assembly.

The move would, at first, shift independent oversight of charter schools from a board largely appointed by the governor to a board largely appointed by the General Assembly….

Cotham, a former teacher, has been a supporter of school choice. She was the president of a corporation that ran charter schools. Cotham is one of three chairs of the House Education Committee, a role she’s held since the start of the session when she was a Democrat, a rare position for a Democrat in the GOP-controlled chamber.

Real Democrats support public schools, not corporate charter chains or vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Hypocrisy, Lies, North Carolina, Republicans, Scandals, Vouchers

The Big Lie About America’s Public Schools and the Scheme to Privatize Them

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
49

America’s public schools were one of the glories of the nation until recently. Politicians hailed them as a symbol of democracy, a public institution open to all, supported by taxpayers, and controlled by elected local boards.

Local business leaders frequently served on local school boards. Americans broadly understood that the schools prepared the rising generation to be good citizens and to sustain our democracy. Certain principles were taken for granted: public funds were never used to fund religious schools; teachers and principals were career professionals, often the most educated members of their community, and were respected.

This is not to say that everything was rosy. I have written several books about the controversies that rocked the schools, especially over desegregation, which encountered vehement resistance in both the South and the North.

But despite the battles over race, curriculum, and other matters, the public schools garnered high praise from the public and elected officials.

However, this iconic symbol began to take a drubbing in 1983, when the Reagan-era National Commission on Excellence in Education released its harshly negative report called “A Nation at Risk.” The commission claimed that the nation’s schools were mired in a sea of mediocrity, that test scores were on a downward spiral, and that the nation’s public schools were responsible for the loss of major industries to other nations.

The reaction to the report was immediate: states set up task forces and commissions to find solutions to the schools’ crisis. Higher standards for students and teachers, more time in school, tougher curricula, etc.

The one refrain that became the legacy of “A Nation at Risk” was: Our schools are failing.

But we now know that the report was a hoax. James Harvey, who worked on the commission’s staff, explained that the books were cooked to produce a negative result. The data were cherry-picked to paint the schools in the worst possible light. The conclusions were a lie. The report ignored positive findings and chose to ignore the students living in poverty, the students with disabilities, and the other socioeconomic challenges facing the nation’s schools.

So today, relying on the Big Lie of 1983 (“our schools are failing”), ideologues, grifters, tax-cutters, religious interests, and others have joined forces to grab the money now devoted to public schools.

To the original Big Lie have been added new Big Lies to advance the cause of privatization and profits:

Big Lie number one: Test scores are reliable indicators of school and teacher quality. This simple but wrong idea was the basis for No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.

Big Lie number two: Teachers need not be professional to get good results. Inexperienced teachers with high expectations and a few weeks of training will get better results than career professionals. This lie undercut the profession, undermined respect for teachers, and was the founding myth of Teach for America.

Big Lie number three: the private sector will run schools more effectively than local government, therefore we need more charter schools. BUT: The charter sector has spawned scandals, with private entrepreneurs embezzling millions of dollars for themselves. Some charters get high test scores by excluding weak students, some get high scores by attrition of weak students. Many charter schools close every year due to academic or financial problems. On average, charter schools do not get better results than public schools.

Big Lie number four: vouchers will produce higher test scores. BUT: Voucher schools, funded with taxpayer dollars, are usually exempt from state testing and are not accountable as public schools are. Where voucher students do take state tests, they fall farther and farther behind their peers in public schools. Now that it’s well-known that voucher schools are academically behind public schools, their proponents have moved the goalposts to say: Parents should choose, no matter what the studies show about test scores.

The Republican Party, with few exceptions, has swallowed the Big Lies and is intent on giving every student—regardless of income—a voucher to attend a religious school, private school, or home school.

For the first time in two centuries, the very concept of public schools is in jeopardy.

Ninety percent of Americans were educated in public schools. That ninety percent made America a successful nation by most measures. Public schools built bridges among diverse communities.

What will the new paradigm contribute to our nation?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Fake, Fraud, History, Hoax

Thom Hartmann: Trump’s Big-Lie Ad Threatens Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
23

Journalist Thom Hartmann shows that Trump’s latest ad is an exercise in the Big Lie Technique. It contains vile smears that simple-minded people are likely to believe. It resounds with echoes of fascism.

He writes:

Trump’s people are promoting a new lie-filled fascist advertisement, which even the normally unflappable Frank Luntz called “disturbing.” It follows a fairly ancient pattern of destructive Big Lies that goes back to Renaissance Italy and even the Roman republic and ancient Greece.

German filmmaker Fritz Hippler, one of Goebbels’ most effective propagandists (he produced the infamous movie The Eternal Jew), said that two steps are necessary to promote a Big Lie so the majority of the people in a nation would believe it.

The first is to reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that “even the most feebleminded could understand.” 

The second is to “repeat the oversimplification over and over.” 

If these two steps are followed, Hippler and Goebbels both knew, enough people will come to believe a Big Lie that it can change the politics of a nation.

In Hippler’s day, the best example of his application of the principle was his 1940 movie “Campaign in Poland,” which argued that the Polish people were suffering under tyranny — a tyranny that would someday threaten Germany — and that the German people could either allow this cancer to fester, or preemptively “liberate” Poland.

Hitler took the “strong and decisive” path, the movie suggested, to liberate Poland, even though after the invasion little evidence was found that Poland represented any threat whatsoever to the powerful German Reich. The movie was Hitler’s way of saying that invading Poland was the right thing to do, and that, in retrospect, he would have done it again.

The Big Lie is alive and well today in the United States of America, and what’s most troubling about it is the basic premise that underlies its use. For somebody to undertake a Big Lie, they must first believe Niccolo Machiavelli’s premise (in “The Prince,” 1532) that “the ends justify the means.”

Hitler, after all, claimed to have based everything he did on the virtuous goal of uniting Europe — and then the world — in a thousand-year era of peace, which he claimed was foreshadowed in the Bible. If you believe that a thousand years of peace is such a noble end that any means is justified to reach it, it’s a short leap to eugenics, preemptive wars, torture of dissidents and prisoners, and mass murder.

Believing that the end justifies the means is the ultimate slippery slope. It will kill any noble goal, because even if the goal is achieved, it will have been corrupted along the way by the means used to accomplish it…

In real life, it’s the story of the many tinpot dictators around the world who quote America’s Founders while enforcing a brutal rule, of fossil fuel executives pushing for lax CO2 rules to “help the American economy,” of the legion of lobbyists who work daily to corrupt democracy in the name of GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry (among others).

Here in the US it was used by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to lie us into murderous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when there was little consequence to them personally or the GOP, Republicans decided to continue the Big Lie strategy and are using it to this day.

Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha all warned us about this, as did Tolstoy, Tolkien, Hemingway, and Kafka.

Be it “small sins” like the Green Party and No Labels getting into bed with Republicans to get on state ballots, or “big sins” like rightwing think-tanks working to turn America into a strongman oligarchy with their Project 2025, trying to accomplish a “good” by using the means of an “evil” like a Big Lie inherently corrupts the good.

Now the Trump campaign and its allies are encouraging a new series of Big Lies to assail President Biden and the very idea of democracy itself.

With the smug assurance of damage done to the enemy, Republican governors are rewriting American history (the Big Lie that white children are injured by learning about Black history), criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community (the Big Lie that queer people are “groomers”), and throwing millions of people in Blue cities off the voting rolls (the Big Lie of voter fraud).

They are pushing and celebrating nakedly fascist policies, tropes, and memes.

Most recently, a Trump-aligned group rolled out an ad that strings a whole series of Big Lies together. It says:

If I was the deep state and I wanted to destroy America, I would rig the election with a puppet candidate, one that was so compromised that they would never say a word about it. I would create a false flag that allows for mail-in ballots. I would be in charge of the ballot-counting machines. I would create a false flag to blame all who question the results of the election.

If I was the deep state, I would prosecute anyone that went against me. I would sue and prosecute anyone that spoke up about the fraudulent election. I would use my powers to shut down all your internet businesses and bankrupt you.

If I was the deep state, I would make everyone an example why you should never question a Democrat ever winning an election. I would imprison my foes. I would use my corrupt DAs and blackmail judges to destroy you. I would make sure all crimes I ever committed never happened. I would prosecute my biggest competition. I would make sure they could never run for office ever again.

If I was the deep state, I would convince everyone that Ukraine Nazis were good, and women are men.

If I was the deep state, I would own every politician that mattered.

If I was the deep state, I would push my pedophilia ambitions on you.

If I was the deep state, you’d question your sexual identity, but not the medical establishment.

If I was the deep state, you would fear to ever resist me.

If I was the deep state, you would wish I was really the devil.

If I was the deep state, I would say mission accomplished.

Frank Luntz wrote of it, “This is the most disturbing political ad I’ve seen this year.”

Defenders of the Trump campaign are overrunning social media, defending the lies and threats in this new ad and Trump’s previous, “If you fuck around with us…” statements. They claim that Joe Biden is reviving our economy with “socialism and communism,” and Jack Smith and the DOJ prosecuting Trump and the January 6th traitors is some sort of “deep state tyranny.”

There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between the work the administration is doing to punish seditionists and rebuild our economy from the wreckage of the Trump years and these sorts of naked appeals to fascism.

Truths and issues — however unpleasant — cannot be weighed on the same scale as lies, threats, and character assassination, explicit or implicit.

Lee Atwater, on his deathbed, realized that the “ends justify the means” technique of campaigning he had unleashed on behalf of Reagan and Bush was both immoral and harmful to American democracy.

“In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his [Dukakis’] running mate,’” Atwater said. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not. Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.”

But Atwater’s spiritual and political protégés in the Trump campaign soldier on. He and his GOP allies in Congress are using Big Lies with startling regularity, and old Big Lies are being resurrected almost daily, most on social media, right-wing talk radio, podcasts, and TV.

The most alarming contrast in the coming election of 2024 is between those who will use any means to get and hold power, and those who are unwilling to engage in a Big Lie.

History tells us that, over the short term, the Big Lie usually works. Over the long term, though, the damage it does — both to those who use it, and to the society on which it is inflicted — is often incalculable.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Trump

Florida: New College Paying to Recruit Students After Rightwing Takeover

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
3

If you need any additional evidence of why DeSantis should never be President, read this story by Paul Basken of the Times (London) Higher Education. DeSantis uses his power as Governor to force his beliefs on others. He uses his power to squash dissent. He thinks that anyone who stands in his way should be run over and left as roadkill.

Case in point: his takeover of the state’s university system. It started with New College, the smallest liberal arts college in the state system. He took control of the board and replaced the college president with an unqualified politician. The new board is trying to turn progressive New College into the Hillsdale of the South. They are replacing the college’s nonconformist students with athletes. At DeSantis’ request, the legislature abolished tenure and restricted what professors are allowed to teach about gender and race.

New College was a bastion for free thinkers. It had high academic standards, but was completely “woke,” with regard to race, gender, social justice, and politics. Gay students were welcomed. DeSantis could not let it be.

New College of Florida recruitment
tactics challenged

After losing faculty and students because of partisan DeSantis reforms, campus described as paying recruiters despite federal ban

New College of Florida, the public liberal arts institution undergoing a partisan overhaul by the state’s Republican governor, is reported to have resorted to aggressive and potentially illegal tactics to maintain and build enrolment.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, citing the institution’s own staff and faculty, described New College as lowering its academic criteria foradmission for this coming semester, relying more heavily on athletic recruits, mischaracterising the institution’s resources, offering inducements such as laptops, and paying bonuses to recruitment staff.

A spokesman for New College admitted the institution offered the bonuses to its recruiters, the newspaper said, even though the federal government has long prohibited the practice.
“High achievement deserves a reward, and increased pay will be implemented to recognise the diligent work of the admissions team in assembling this record-breaking class,” the spokesman told
the Herald-Tribune. He and other New College officials did not respond to requests for comment about the report.

New College has recently become the centrepiece of efforts by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a 2024 US presidential candidate, to impose his partisan views across higher education. His agenda has included restricting teaching about the US history of racial division, banning initiatives to improve student diversity, and weakening faculty tenure.

With his heavy focus on overhauling New College, Mr DeSantis chose the smallest institution in the state university system, long known for excellence in the liberal arts that made it one of the nation’s top producers of Fulbright scholars. He accused it of harbouring leftist views, and replaced the majority of its trustees with conservative activists who fired its president and replaced her with a political ally, Richard Corcoran, a former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.

The result has been an exodus of faculty ahead of the coming academic year. New College’s interim provost, Bradley Thiessen, has counted at least 36 departures, or more than a third of the faculty, heading into the autumn semester. Dozens of students also described plans to leave.

Mr DeSantis has mocked the fleeing academics, telling conservative activists that he welcomed the transformation. “If you’re a professor in like, you know, Marxist studies, that’s not a loss for Florida if you’re going on,” the governor told the annual meeting of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council in Orlando. “Trust me, I’m totally good with that,” he said.

Earlier in the month, Mr Corcoran announced that New College would have a record enrolment for this autumn, exceeding 300 first-year students. He attributed the gains to an emphasis on sports, saying that a third of the new students would be athletes. The college’s data also showed that its first-year enrolment of black students would rise 6 percentage points to nearly 10 per cent, and that male enrolment would jump 23 percentage points to nearly 54 per cent.

The Herald-Tribune report, quoting admissions staff speaking anonymously, said the increase was coming at costs that include using photos of a nearby university and presenting them as New College in marketing materials; accepting students with lower standardised test scores; and offering the admissions staff $5,000 (£4,000) bonuses for reaching the 300-student goal.

The US Congress in 1992 forbade colleges paying bonuses or other incentives to anyone based on their success in enrolling students, mainly because of abuses in the for-profit sector. The Department of Education later allowed exceptions for outside companies that provide student recruitment as part of a bigger package of services, although the Biden administration said earlier this year that the use of that exception has grown to the point where
it might need to be reconsidered.


paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Higher Education

Heather Cox Richardson: Good News for Biden, Bad News for Trump

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2023 //
37

Heather Cox Richardson applies her excellent skills as a historian to analyze the news. Open the link to finish reading and to read footnotes.

More good news today for Bidenomics, as the gross domestic product report for the second quarter showed annualized growth of 2.4%, higher than projected, and inflation rose at a slower pace of 2.6%, down from last quarter and well below projections. Economic analyst Steven Rattner noted that as of the second quarter, “the US economy is over 6% larger than it was before COVID (after adjusting for inflation). At this point in the recovery from the Great Recession, 2011, the economy was just 0.7% larger than it had been in 2007.”

Both consumer spending and business investment, which is up 7.7% in real annualized terms, drove this growth. Business spending makes up a much smaller share of gross domestic product, but it drives future jobs and growth, and much of this growth is in manufacturing facilities. In keeping with that trend, the nation’s largest solar panel manufacturer, First Solar, announced today that it will build a fifth factory in the U.S. as alternative energy technology takes off. This commitment brings to more than $2.8 billion the amount First Solar has invested in the U.S. to ramp up production…

While many of us were watching the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., to see if an indictment was forthcoming against former president Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a different set of charges appeared tonight. Special counsel Jack Smith brought additional charges against Trump in connection with his retention of classified documents.

The new indictment alleges that Trump plotted to delete video from security cameras near the storage room where he had stored boxes containing classified documents, and did so after the Department of Justice subpoenaed that footage. That effort to delete the video involved a third co-conspirator, Carlos De Oliveira, who has been added to the case.

De Oliveira is a former valet at the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago property who became property manager there in January 2022. Allegedly, he told another Trump employee that “the boss” wanted the server deleted and that the conversation should stay between the two of them.

In the Washington Post, legal columnist Ruth Marcus wrote, “The alleged conduct—yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms—is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.” If the allegations hold up, “the former president is a common criminal—and an uncommonly stupid one.”

This superseding indictment reiterates the material from the original indictment, and as I reread it, it still blows my mind that Trump allegedly compromised national security documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (surveillance imagery), the National Reconnaissance Office (surveillance and maps), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research (diplomatic intelligence).

It sounds like he was a one-man wrecking ball, aimed at our national security.

The Justice Department has asked again for a protective order to protect the classified information at the heart of this case. In their request, they explained that, among other things, Trump wanted to be able to discuss that classified information with his lawyers outside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, a room protected against electronic surveillance and data leakage.

Former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division Peter Strzok noted that there is “[n]o better demonstration of Trump’s abject lack of understanding of—and disregard for—classified info and national security. He is *asking the Court* to waive the requirements for classified info that EVERY OTHER SINGLE CLEARANCE HOLDER IN THE UNITED STATES must follow.”

The Senate today passed the $886 billion annual defense bill by a strong bipartisan margin of 86 to 11 after refusing to load it up with all the partisan measures Republican extremists added to the House bill. Now negotiators from the House and the Senate will try to hash out a compromise measure, but the bills are so far apart it is not clear they will be able to create a bipartisan compromise. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has passed on a bipartisan basis for more than 60 years.

The extremists in the House Republican conference continue to revolt against House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) deal with the administration to raise the debt ceiling. They insist the future cuts to which McCarthy agreed are not steep enough, and demand more. This has sparked fighting among House Republicans; Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo suggests that McCarthy’s new willingness to consider impeaching President Biden might be an attempt to cut a deal with the extremists.

As the Senate is controlled by Democrats, the fight among the House Republicans threatens a much larger fight between the chambers because Democratic senators will not accept the demands of the extremist Republican representatives.

The House left for its August recess today without passing 11 of the 12 appropriations bills necessary to fund the government after September, setting up the conditions for a government shutdown this fall if they cannot pass the bills and negotiate with the Senate in the short time frame they’ve left. Far-right Republicans don’t much care, apparently. Representative Bob Good (R-VA) told reporters this week, “We should not fear a government shutdown… Most of what we do up here is bad anyway.”

Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA), the second ranking Democrat in the House, disagreed. “The Republican conference is saying they are sending us home for six weeks without funding the government? That we have one bill…out of 12 completed because extremists are holding your conference hostage, and that’s not the full story: the extremists are holding the American people hostage. We will have twelve days…when we return to fund the government, to live up to the job the American people sent us here to do. This is a reckless march to a MAGA shutdown, and for what? In pursuit of a national abortion ban? Is that what we are doing here?

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democrats, Economy, Environment, Extremism, Funding, Republicans, Trump

John Thompson: Oklahoma Careens Toward Chaos

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2023 //
18

Historian and retired teacher John Thompson describes the confusion and chaos generated in Oklahoma as MAGA Governor Kevin Stitt and the bumbling State Superintendent Ryan Walters continue on their path of privatization and religiosity.

Thompson writes:

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and his ally, State School Superintendent Ryan Walters, have histories of double-barreled shotgun-style assaults on both public education and other state government agencies. For instance, Stitt previously pushed out “three highly-regarded leaders” of the Corrections, the Health Care Authority, and the Transportation departments. Recently, as Arnold Hamilton of the Oklahoma Observer protests, “Stitt took aim at another experienced state leader, trying to stampede longtime higher education Chancellor Glen Johnson into retirement. And he hasn’t backed off from his other barrel – demeaning rhetoric to advance privatization.

Similarly, Walters has pushed out many of his staff who administer competitive federal grants. The Oklahoman reported that the lead grant writer, Terri Grissom, who had “secured more than $101.5 million in competitive grants over five years,” resigned and “blew the whistle that Walters’ administration had brought the process of competitive grant applications to a halt. These funds supported a variety of initiatives, but many focused on student mental health and behavioral services.”

Grissom said Walters “blocked her from applying to a student wellness grant,” and Matt Langston, his chief policy advisor “forbade her from seeking any programs with elements of diversity and inclusion, LGBTQ initiatives, social-emotional learning or trauma-informed practices.” Moreover, Oklahoma Watch reported, “Langston emailed employees of the agency, threatening any employee ‘found leaking information to the press’ with immediate termination.” Two other managers were fired and filed lawsuits against Walters and Langston.

In May and June, as Walters’ rhetoric and behavior became even more unhinged, I was told that many Republicans decided to not push back against him because his antics drew attention to him, and away from more silent Republicans. But as Grissom, and Auditor and Inspector Cindy Byrd, revealed the losses of tens of millions of federal funds for schools and Covid responses (for which the governor shared responsibility,) and as school system leaders voiced concerns about not receiving timely notification about larger amounts of federal funding, it seemed more likely (or not impossible) that more Republican legislators would listen to their adult Republican colleagues and hold Walters accountable.

For instance, Auditor and Inspector Byrd, a Republican, “released an audit of how the state handled federal pandemic relief money, specifically expenditures made during fiscal year 2021.” The audit found $12.2 million in CARES costs and about $29 million in the state’s spending of federal COVID-19 relief funds were questionable. And Republican Attorney General Gentnor Drummond is investigating Walters and, perhaps, the Stitt administration regarding misspent federal money.

In response, however, Walters has doubled down on both his assaults on public education services and extremist rhetoric. As the Tulsa World reported, “Walters has been critical of federal funding opportunities that come with strings attached and directed the State Department of Education to pass on grant opportunities that don’t align with ‘Oklahoma values.’” Then, speaking to the Moms for Liberty in Philadelphia, Walters proclaimed, “You are the most patriotic, pro-American group in the country right now.”

And chaos has increased. Shouting and physical contact involving Moms for Liberty and other rightwingers have disrupted district school board and State board meetings, resulting in charges being filed.

Walters has continued to weaponize his calls for censoring curriculum and educators. For instance, the Tulsa Public Schools “was penalized for an August 2021 professional development session on implicit bias for teachers — not students — offered through a third-party vendor.” A year later, its “state accreditation was downgraded in July 2022 over an allegation that it violated a state law commonly referred to as House Bill 1775, which limits classroom discussion on race and gender.”

And as the World now reports, Walters’ latest attack on the Tulsa schools for “assaults” on religious liberty, became a shouting match where Walters pledged to further investigate Tulsa’s accreditation.

This controversy started when a board member, E’Lena Ashley, spoke at a high school graduation ceremony, and asked the audience to join her in prayer:

I pray in the name of Jesus Christ that each one of you would walk forward from this moment in the excellence and love of God, that he would guide you, direct you and draw you to your ultimate goal. In the name of Jesus.

The schools’ students and staff “voiced their concerns [about Ashley] during the citizens’ comment portions” at two Tulsa school board meetings. The Tulsa Board and Superintendent Deborah Gist sent an email “saying that the prayer Ashley made is not allowed under the U.S. Constitution and rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Walters replied that the email “fundamentally misunderstands religious liberty and religious freedom and attack a duly elected board member for saying a prayer. … It’s outrageous, and we’re not going to stand for that.” And World reported that he “vowed to make an issue of the matter when the school district’s accreditation is up for renewal next week by the Oklahoma State Board of Education.”

Who knows if these extremists’ rhetoric will lead to greater chaos, vituperation and, perhaps, serious violence? Who knows whether such behavior will undermine Walters politically to the point where enough Republicans take action. It must be remembered, however, that Walters’ and Stitt’s words and actions are parts of a national campaign to undermine our governmental institutions. And, most likely, it will take public servants, legal actions, and the public to defend our democracy.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Censorship, Democracy, Education Industry, Funding, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Republicans

Alan Singer: DeSantis’s Effort to Whitewash Florida’s African American History

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2023 //
8

Florida has a sordid history of racism but Governor DeSantis wants that history to be literally whitewashed so that no white students feels “uncomfortable” learning the truth. DeSantis opposes “woke” history that others call telling the truth.

Alan Singer of Hostra University explains here why it is so hard to sanitize Florida’s history of racism.

He writes:

On Twitter, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis posted that “In Florida, we require the truth about American history to be taught in our classrooms. We will not allow schools to twist history to align with an ideological agenda.”

As part of Florida’s campaign against undefined “wokeness,” the Department of Education banned the teaching of a new African American Studies Advanced Placement course. It rejected the course as lacking “educational value and historical accuracy” and for violating Florida law.

Last week, the Florida State Board of Education unanimously approved new standards for how Black history should be taught in the state. The standards are designed to define “anti-woke” education. In its response, the Florida Education Association (FEA) branded the standards “a disservice to Florida’s students” and “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.” Eleven Florida civil rights and education organizations including the FEA and the NAACP sent a letter to Florida Board of Education that it ignored. The letter charged that “these standards purposely omit or rewrite key historical facts about the Black experience.” Vice-President Kamala Harris called the Florida standards “an attempt to gaslight us.”

Two of the most controversial clarifications in the social studies standards include a statement in the 6-8 grade guidelines that “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” and that instruction in high school on events like the 1920 Ocoee Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre that occurred in Florida should include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” acts of violence by African Americans that did not occur.

The major problems here are that Africans in Africa were agrarian people who had skills that were robbed from them when they were enslaved, and that enslaved Africans were considered property and any benefit from their skills accrued to their supposed owners. The Ocoee riots and murders occurred when African Americans attempted to vote in the Presidential election. In Rosewood, a mob of hundreds of whites murdered Black people they randomly caught and burned the town.

I found other statements and missing statements in the Florida social studies standards equally disturbing. The two places that refer to the Confederate states and the Civil War don’t mention which side Florida was on and which side African Americans fought for. Segregation is mentioned three times and the Klan is mentioned four times, but student do not learn what role they played in Florida.

But for me as a historian and a teacher the most disturbing part of the standards is the way slavery, and the slave trade are explained. It is intended to take responsibility for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery off the European countries that conquered and settled the Americas. “Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian, European and African cultures,” “how trading in slaves developed in African lands (e.g., Benin, Dahomey),” and “how slavery among indigenous peoples of the Americas was utilized prior to and after European colonization.” Students “[e]xamine the condition of slavery as it existed in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe prior to 1619.”

The lesson being taught in the Florida standards is that everybody had slavery and it was the same all over the world. But it wasn’t. Only the European colonies in the Americas and the new countries including the United States had race-based chattel slavery where enslaved people were no longer considered human, and their status was inherited by their children. Even after slavery ended as a result of the Civil War, Florida and the other states in the former Confederacy instituted laws to keep African Americans in virtual bondage and white Southerners enforced those laws through vigilante groups like the Klan.

Florida has many reasons to want to bury its sordid racial history. In the first have of the 19th century white settlers massacred and expelled Florida’s Native Americans.  Between 1870 and 1950, 311 African Americans were lynched in Florida. Three Florida counties, Lafayette, Taylor, and Baker were especially notorious. Florida had some of the strictest Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1881, it banned interracial marriage and in 1885 it mandated racially segregated schools. The interracial marriage ban was added to the Florida State Constitution in 1944. Starting in 1927, it was a criminal offense for a teacher to teach someone of a different race. At least 50 African Americans were murdered in Ocoee, Florida on November 2, 1920, after local Blacks attempted to vote. On January 1, 1923, white rioters stormed through the African American community of Rosewood, Florida, burning the town to the ground, killing six people, and driving the rest of the population into the forest and swamps to escape.  On August 27, 1960, peaceful Black students conducting a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Jacksonville were attacked by a mob of over 200 whites armed with baseball bats and ax handles. No African American student was permitted to earn a bachelor’s degree from the formerly segregated University of Florida until 1965.

Solomon Northup was a free Black man living in New York State who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Northup’s memoir, published after he escaped from slavery, was made into movies in 1984 and 2013. There is a scene in the 1984 PBS version of Solomon Northup’s Odyssey where Master Epps and friends are sitting on the veranda arguing with a Canadian carpenter named Bass about the legitimacy of slavery. Northup is near by trimming hedges and overhears the debate. Bass tells the story of a runaway who was captured and brought to court. The judge is puzzled why the enslaved African attempted to escape when he was fed and not beaten. The African replied “That job’s still there if you want to go ask for it.”

Maybe, with his Presidential campaign flailing, Ron DeSantis should apply for a job like that and get some skills.

Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies
Teaching Learning Technology
284 Hagedorn Hall / 119 Hofstra University / Hempstead, NY 11549
(P) 516-463-5853 (F) 516-463-6196

Blogs, tweets, essays, interviews, and e-blasts present my views and not those of Hofstra University.

“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, DeSantis, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Fraud, History, Injustice, Lies, Racism

DeMatthews and Knight: Texans Don’t Want Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2023 //
3

Texas Governor Greg Abbott wants vouchers. He claims that polls show parents want vouchers. But they don’t, as this article shows. He says he wants “education not indoctrination,” yet advocates public money to fund schools that explicitly indoctrinate students.

He’s annoyed that he has not yet been able to twist enough arms in the Legislature to get them. He even visited private and religious schools to spread the message that parents would get tuition help from the state. But a strong coalition of Democrats and Republicans has returned him down repeatedly.

Two Texas scholars, David DeMatthews and David S. Knight, wrote an opinion piece in The Houston Chronicle explaining that the public wants better-funded public schools, not tuition for kids in private and religious schools.

They wrote:

Governor Abbott will likely call a special session on school vouchers after House Bill 100 failed to pass during the regular legislative session. But we believe a special session should instead be called to improve school safety and teacher retention, not a voucher scheme that runs counter to what Texas families want for their children.

Texas families want safe schools with a stable teacher workforce, especially following the mass shooting in Uvalde and the fact that roughly 50,000 teachers left their positions last year. In a recent statewide poll, 73 percent of Texans identified school safety, teacher pay, curriculum content and public school financing as top priorities.

In the same poll, few Texans viewed vouchers as a priority, although stark differences in opinion emerged between Democrats and Republicans. Only eight percent of Texans prioritized vouchers.

Historically, Americans with children report strong support for public schools when polled. In 2022, 80 percent of parents across the nation were completely or somewhat satisfied with the quality of education their oldest child was receiving, with little change over 20 years.

Unfortunately, some state policymakers continue to push vouchers by attacking public schools. Abbott has overseen the state’s public education system since he took office in 2015, yet only recently has he begun to claim that schools are sites of “indoctrination.”

These attacks likely contribute to Americans’ loss of confidence in public schools. In January 2019, Gallup reported that 50 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of Republicans were satisfied with public schools. By January 2022, Republican support dropped sharply to 30 percent. Democratic support remained stable.

With that background, it’s easy to believe that Texans have grown interested in vouchers. But polls showing that, we believe, are misleading.
For example, a University of Houston poll asked a sample of 1,200 Texans about their support of vouchers. The researchers concluded that 53 percent of respondents supported the policy. Yet a close examination of the data shows that the statistic leaves out approximately 12 percent of respondents — the ones who said that they “don’t know” enough to express an opinion. When the “don’t know” group is added back in, voucher supporters are in the minority.

Polls asking Texans whether they support vouchers are of little value if Texans are unfamiliar with the policy. And to make matters worse, advocacy groups have invested significant resources to mislead the public.

Texans would not support vouchers if they knew the truth. Ask yourself the following questions. What Texan would support vouchers if they knew recent studies found students using vouchers underperformed on standardized tests relative to their public school peers?

What Texan would support vouchers after learning that the cost of Arizona’s voucher program ballooned from $65 million to a projected $900 million in a few years? And that vouchers disproportionately benefited families who were already sending their children to private schools?

State policymakers pushing vouchers are not asking the right questions or presenting adequate evidence. They are being disingenuous.
A special session should focus on school safety and teacher retention, not vouchers. As more families become aware of the harm vouchers cause students, we can’t imagine that most Texans will support them.

David DeMatthews is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas.

David S. Knight is an associate professor of education finance and policy at the University of Washington.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

D.C. Mayor Proclaims “Whistleblower Day” to Honor Those Fired for Telling the Truth

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2023 //
31

Whistleblower Marlon Ray was fired for complaining about lucrative contracts awarded by DC Public Schools to the Relay Graduate School of Education, which is the educational equivalent of a three-dollar bill. Ray was fired along with elementary school principal Dr. Carolyn Jackson-King, who refused to implement Relay’s “no-excuses” model in her school. She said it was racist. They are suing the district.

Yet Marlon Ray, the whistleblower, who is suing the city, somehow persuaded Mayor Muriel Bowser to proclaim July 30 as Whistleblower Appreciation Day, honoring people she fired! Including Marlon Ray.

On July 18, Marlon Ray, a DC Public School (DCPS) whistleblower, secured a Proclamation from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser designating July 30, 2023 as Whistleblower Appreciation Day.

The proclamation celebrates the origins of whistleblower law in the United States, commends whistleblowers who are often penalized for doing the right thing, and encourages D.C. government employees to know their rights to blow the whistle.

Ray’s case is a perfect example of why these efforts are so important. Fired alongside Ray was Carolyn Jackson-King, former principal of Lawrence E. Boone Elementary, who reported and protested the use of a teacher training program that discriminated against Black students. Ray and Principal Jackson-King, known to the community as “Dr. J-K,” had been highly respected administrators at Boone. Both are now suing DCPS for retaliation.

In 2017, DCPS contracted Relay Graduate School of Education to conduct staff training. Contrary to what the name implies, Relay is not in fact a graduate school. As Education historian Diane Ravitch explained, “[Relay] has no scholars, no researchers, no faculty other than charter teachers. It is a trade school for teaching tricks of test-taking and how to control black and brown children and teach them to obey orders without questioning.”

Relay supervised training and evaluation with 20 DCPS schools – mostly from schools in majority Black and low-income Wards 7 and 8. Jackson-King felt that Relay training contributed to the school-to-prison pipeline by militarizing schools and trying to strip educators and students of their agency.

“Kids have to sit a certain way, they have to look a certain way,” Jackson-King told NPR WAMU 88.5. “They cannot be who they are…Those are all the ways they teach you in prison — you have to walk in a straight line, hands behind your back, eyes forward…I just feel they attempted to control Black bodies.”

Another faculty member at Boone commented on the training asking, “Why should the Black and brown children be subjected to move a certain way or respond to certain commands? They’re not dogs. They’re kids.”

Early in the 2019-2020 school year, Jackson-King shared her concerns with Mary Ann Stinson, an instructional superintendent who began overseeing Boone in 2019. At the end of that year, Jackson-King received her lowest evaluation score in 30 years of teaching: a 2.75/4. She tried to appeal the score, but Stinson informed her that the score meant she would not be re-appointed as principal. She was fired.

Marlon Ray, a 20+ year DCPS employee and the former director of strategy and logistics at Boone, was one of the community members involved in protests after Jackson-King’s termination. He had also filed previous whistleblower complaints, including for the overpayment of Relay Training.

Ray was first retaliated against by Jackson-King’s replacement principal, who reprimanded him for participating in the peaceful protests. He became the only school employee required to work five full days a week in person at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak. Ultimately, Ray was let go in 2021 after being told his position was terminated for budgetary reasons. However, DCPS made a job posting to fill the same position just two months later.

In February 2022, Ray and Jackson-King filed suit against DCPS and the District of Columbia, alleging that DCPS violated the Whistleblower Protection Act and the D.C. Human Rights Act. They seek reinstatement of their jobs.

Both Ray and Jackson-King are prime examples of whistleblowers who risked their jobs in order to do their job correctly. These local heroes stood up for students who were subject to unjust and racist education policy, and who may not have had the information or the power to stand up for themselves.

This makes Mayor Bowser’s recognition of Whistleblower Appreciation Day all the more meaningful. Siri Nelson, Executive Director of the National Whistleblower Center (NWC), who received the mayor’s proclamation alongside Mr. Ray said that “local whistleblowers are critical to increasing governmental recognition of Whistleblower Appreciation Day.”

NWC hopes that the day will help government agencies – local and federal – change the culture of whistleblowing. Whistleblowers support government agencies in accomplishing their mission more effectively and holding them accountable to their own policies. It is therefore vital that they are protected and celebrated.

“This proclamation is the second of its kind,” Nelson noted. “Marlon Ray follows Jackie Garrick who received a similar proclamation from Florida’s Escambia County in 2022. NWC advocates for the permanent federal recognition of National Whistleblower Day and these proclamations show that change is within reach. I thank Marlon for taking this incredible action and look forward to celebrating him and Muriel Bowser’s proclamation on July 27th.”

Marlon Ray will speak at NWC’s National Whistleblower Day event on Capitol Hill on July 27, 2023. Those wishing to attend the in-person event can RSVP here: https://www.whistleblowers.org/national-whistleblower-day

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Racism, Resistance

Tom Ultican: CREDO Charter School Claims Demolished

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2023 //
9

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California, wrote a devastating critique of the latest CREDO charter school study, based on the analysis by the Network for Public Education.

He wrote:

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) just released another pro-charter school study, “CREDO also acknowledges the Walton Family Foundation and The City Fund for supporting this research.” It is not a study submitted for peer review and is so opaque that real scholars find the methodology and data sets difficult to understand. Carol Burris and her public school defenders at the Network for Public Education (NPE) have provided an in-depth critical review.

With the new CREDO study, Education Week’s Libby Stanford said that “charters have drastically improved, producing better reading and math scores than traditional public schools.’’ Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal declared charter schools are now “blowing away their traditional school competition.” Burris retorted with “despite the headlines, the only thing ‘blown away’ is the truth.”

Putting a CREDO Thumb on the Scale

CREDO uses massive data sets, unavailable to other researchers, getting minuscule differences which are statistically significant. No one can check their work. They employ a unique and highly discredited statistical approach called “virtual twins” to compare public school with charter school testing outcomes. Instead of reporting the statistical results in standard deviations, CREDO uses their “crazy pants” days of learning scheme.

NPE discovered that the “blowing away” public school results amounted to 0.011 standard deviations in math and 0.028 standard deviations in reading. The minuscule difference is “significant statistically but is meaningless from a practical standpoint” according to CREDO. In a 2009 report showing public schools with a small advantage, CREDO declared, “Differences of the magnitude described here could arise simply from the measurement error in the state achievement tests that make up the growth score, so considerable caution is needed in the use of these results.”To give these almost non-existent differences more relevance, CREDO reports them as “days of learning”instead of standard deviation. “Days of learning” is a method unique to CREDO and generally not accepted by scholars. They claim charter school math students get 6 more “days of learning” and English students, 16 days.

Please open Tom Ultican’s post to see why he considers the CREDO report to be “sloppy science” and “unfounded propaganda.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake News, Hoax, Network for Public Education, Walton Foundation
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