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Arkansas Recruits Students to Enroll in Fundamentalist Christian School

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2023 //
9

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has wasted no time in pushing her evangelical, fundamentalist Christian views and diverting public money to religious schools that teach her views. Sanders, who was Trump’s press secretary, is the daughter of fundamentalist pastor Mike Huckabee, who also was governor of Arkansas.

Sanders pushed through a voucher law, and now the state will pay tuition for students at private and religious schools. As in other states, the overwhelming majority of vouchers were claimed by students already enrolled in nonpublic schools.

The state education department went a step beyond making vouchers available. It’s now using taxpayer money to advertise on behalf of a fundamentalist school that does not admit LGBT students, and is certainly not likely to enroll students who are Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, or modern Protestants.

David Ramsay of the Arkansas Times wrote:

Last week, we noted that the Arkansas Department of Education had released a video promoting Cornerstone Christian Academy, a K-12 private school in the southeast Arkansas town of Tillar.

It’s not unusual for a state agency to promote a new law or policy initiative, which this video does by highlighting the voucher program available under Arkansas LEARNS, the state’s new education overhaul. But what is unusual is for the state’s education department to use public resources to create such an explicit advertisement for a private school. As Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University and a nationally prominent expert on education policy, told us: “[U]sually they pretend it’s about parental choice more broadly. What’s less common — what I’ve yet to see, in fact — is a state agency leaning this heavily into promotion of private education. And Christian education at that.”

The publicly funded promo for a private school is made even more awkward given the religious affiliation: Cornerstone uses a Bob Jones University curriculum known for teaching “young-Earth creationism,” the belief that the planet and universe are only a few thousand years old. It requires students to take a Christian studies class and attend chapel. The application asks parents about church affiliation and about their child’s “personal experience and faith in Jesus Christ.”

The application also asks about whether a student has ever been involved with “sexual immorality” and requires that parents agree to “maintain the basic principles of biblical morality in my home.”

I left a message with the school’s administrator to find out whether its admissions policies explicitly discriminated against LGBT students. I never heard back, but after a little further digging on their website, I found a student handbook that directly states LGBT students are not allowed to attend the school:

The significance the Bible places on the severity of sexual immorality, and our commitment to a “Christ-centered” environment demands certain standards for admittance to CCA. Therefore, students will NOT be permitted to attend CCA who professes any sort of sexually immoral lifestyle or an openly sinful lifestyle including but not limited to: promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, etc.

This sort of policy is not uncommon at some Christian private schools, but it raises some thorny questions about the state’s voucher program. LEARNS vouchers are  funneling somewhere in the neighborhood of $419,000 in public funds to Cornerstone this school year, part of $32.5 million projected to be spent on private school vouchers across the state. It remains unclear whether the Cornerstone promo video was made directly or funded by the education department, which has not responded to questions.

The video sells vouchers as a vehicle of parental choice, but ultimately it’s the schools themselves that decide who can — or cannot — attend. The only obligation these schools face in terms of admission is that they cannot discriminate based on race, color or national origin, which would violate federal law. But unlike traditional public schools, they are under no obligation to take all comers. 

They are free to discriminate against LGBT students. They are free to impose religious requirements. They do not have to admit students who struggle academically or have behavior problems. They do not have to offer necessary services for disabled students. We have no way of knowing how many students might be rejected from applying to a school, or what the reasons were. There is no transparency and there are almost no rules. To receive a publicly funded voucher under Arkansas LEARNS, a student must gain admission to a private school — but the entire admission process is an unregulated Wild West. 

Kicking a student out of a private school likewise leaves wide latitude to the schools. To expel a voucher student, a private school must follow clear, pre-established disciplinary procedures. But so long as they don’t discriminate based on race, color or national origin, schools are free to follow their own policies.

Among the 94 private schools participating in the voucher program, many are Christian. It’s likely that a significant number, like Cornerstone, close their doors to LGBT students. That has been found to be the the case in voucher programs in Wisconsin and Indiana. The vouchers are publicly funded, but not all schools are open to the public: The vaunted principle of school choice is, in fact, the school’schoice, and some families may find themselves shut out.

Categories Arkansas, Bigotry, Curriculum, Education Industry, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Ignorance, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: Democracy Will Not Survive Another Trump Term

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2023 //
12

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner write on their blog Steady about the dangers of another Trump presidency. Trump 2.0, they predict, will mean the end of democracy. They call it “a horrific sequel.” Trump has pledged to turn the Department of Justice into a partisan tool to punish his enemies, both Republicans and Democrats. He will politicize the career civil service and stock it with Trump loyalists. He will use the Insurrection Act to mobilize the military to shut down demonstrations and protests. His plan, Project 2025, lays out a radical plan to redesign the federal role into an instrument of Trump’s vengeance and egotism.

Rather and Kirschner write:

Lately, much of the attention of the Washington establishment, and the media ecosystem that feeds it, has been focused on debating (or diminishing) the electoral prospects of President Biden. There is no shortage of diving boards from which to plunge into the punditry.

One jumping-off point is a series of polls that show Biden in dire straits. These are accompanied by the predictable news reports that quote Democratic “elected officials,” “party leaders,” “campaign strategists,” or even “people close to Biden,” who decline to go on the record when they echo the prevailing wisdom that he is in trouble.

Then there is a rash of third-party candidates threatening to further splinter an already fractured electorate. For example, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s decision not to seek reelection is being framed as both an omen of Biden’s weakness and a threat, because Manchin could represent yet another possible rival for the presidency. Meanwhile, the decisive victories of Democrats across multiple state elections last week have already disappeared in the news cycle’s rearview mirror.

At this point in the campaign season, it is typical for an incumbent president to face this level of scrutiny, second-guessing, and soul searching. Usually, the opposition party is far from deciding on a nominee, and horse race coverage of the current occupant of the Oval Office is catnip for pundits looking for things on which to opine. Furthermore, it is easier to judge an incumbent than a challenger, because we have a lot of data points for how the former would perform in the job of president of the United States — a role without parallel in the world.

But all of these conventions should be thrown out the door for 2024. For starters, while there is a pantomime of a primary campaign going on for the Republican nomination, it has about as much uncertainty as a Harlem Globetrotters game. There is a frontrunner so far ahead that he feels no need to even show up for the debates. And he has paid no price for skipping them. Furthermore, we don’t have to guess what it would be like to have him as president. We’ve already lived through that nightmare once.

But here is where things get even more grim. If Trump were to be reelected, it would be worse, much worse, than the first time. That’s not idle speculation or fantastical conjecture. Trump’s not hiding the truth that he would end American democracy.

We’ve already seen how lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test for Republican elected officials — including the new speaker of the House. And a recent Washington Post report details how Trump and his allies plan to use the Department of Justice to go after his political rivals, in the kind of revenge politics one finds in dictatorships. Then, in an interview with the Spanish language news service Univision, Trump doubled down on weaponizing the DOJ to attack his opponents.

In a Veterans Day rant in New Hampshire, Trump called upon the authoritarian playbook of dehumanizing political opponents. He railed against “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” and added, “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

Of course, Trump has always been a master of projection. His eagerness to weaponize the DOJ stems from his misplaced sense of victimhood — his belief that he has been targeted with his numerous indictments. The legal jeopardy he faces stems from his attempts to tear down American democracy once. In his rage, he promises to escalate. That has been his playbook in business and politics.

Trump is who he is. And that means it is all the more important for the press not to normalize this election. Yes, there will be polls. And yes, there is a horse race. And yes, reporters can and should cover Biden and his policies with objectivity, to the extent humanly possible. But there should be no diminishing what the other candidate intends to do if he regains the White House. There should be no acceptance of the fact that large swaths of one of our two major political parties are denying the results of a free and fair election.

Recently, reporters are becoming bolder in demanding Republicans state that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. That is a positive trend and should be followed up with questions about Trump’s attacks on democracy and the rule of law.

This is not simply an election between a Democrat and a Republican or an incumbent and a challenger. This is not primarily about weighing polls and voter enthusiasm in battleground states. This should not be reduced to comparing advertising dollars or voter registration numbers. This is about a vote that will decide the future of our nation in ways unlike any since the Civil War.

Trump isn’t hiding his intentions. There is no excuse for minimizing the threat he poses. What’s at stake in the upcoming election is the continuity of America’s precarious experiment in democracy.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Trump

Watch This! Gloria Ladson-Billings Speaks at NPE Conference about Attacks on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2023 //
6

If you missed the 10th annual conference of the Network for Public Education, you missed some of the best presentations in our ten years of holding conferences.

You missed the brilliant Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor Emerita and formerly the Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ladson-Billings gave an outstanding speech that brought an enthusiastic audience to its feet. She spoke about controversial topics with wit, charm, wisdom, and insight.

Fortunately, her presentation was videotaped. If you were there, you will enjoy watching it again. If you were not there, you have a treat in store.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Network for Public Education, Parents, Privatization, Racism, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching

Texas Suburb Removes Ban on Gender Roles in Student Production of “Oklahoma”

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2023 //
19

The school board of Sherman, Texas, was faced with a dilemma. The theater department of the high school had planned for months to put on a production of “Oklahoma,” a standby of American musicals. The cast was selected, the students built a set, the play was scheduled. But when the lead left the cast, the director replaced him with Max Hightower, a transgender student. The district superintendent promptly canceled the production; the set was demolished. But then something amazing happened.

The New York Times reported:

A school district in the conservative town of Sherman, Texas, made national headlines last week when it put a stop to a high school production of the musical “Oklahoma!” after a transgender student was cast in a lead role.

The district’s administrators decided, and communicated to parents, that the school would cast only students “born as females in female roles and students born as males in male roles.” Not only did several transgender and nonbinary students lose their parts, but so, too, did cisgender girls cast in male roles. Publicly, the district saidthe problem was the profane and sexual content of the 1943 musical.

At one point, the theater teacher, who objected to the decision, was escorted out of the school by the principal. The set, a sturdy mock-up of a settler’s house that took students two months to build, was demolished.

But then something even more unusual happened in Sherman, a rural college town that has been rapidly drawn into the expanding orbit of Dallas to its south. The school district reversed course. In a late-night vote on Monday, the school board voted unanimously to restore the original casting. The decision rebuked efforts to bring the fight over transgender participation in student activities into the world of theater, which has long provided a haven for gay, lesbian and transgender students, and it reflected just how deeply the controversy had unsettled the town.

The district’s restriction had been exceptional. Fights have erupted over the kinds of plays students can present, but few if any school districts appear to have attempted to restrict gender roles in theater. And while legislatures across the country, including in Texas, have adopted laws restricting transgender students’ participation in sports, no such legislation has been introduced to restrict theater roles, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The board’s vote came after students and outraged parents began organizing. In recent days, the district’s administrators, seeking a compromise, offered to recast the students in a version of the musical meant for middle schoolers or younger that omitted solos and included roles as cattle and birds. Students balked.

After the vote, the school board announced a special meeting for Friday to open an investigation and to consider taking action against the district superintendent, Tyson Bennett, who oversaw the district’s handling of “Oklahoma!,” including “possible administrative leave.”

Suddenly, improbably, the students had won.

“I’m beyond excited and everyone cried tears of joy,” Max Hightower, the transgender senior whose casting in a lead role triggered the ensuing events, said in a text message on Tuesday. He and other theater students were at a costume shop on Tuesday, a class trip that had been meant as a consolation after the disappointment of losing their production. Instead, it turned into a celebration. “I’m getting new Oklahoma costumes!!” he said.

Before the school board vote Monday night, high schoolers and their parents had gathered at the district’s offices along with theater actors and transgender students from nearby Austin College. Local residents came to talk about decades of past productions at Sherman High School of “Oklahoma!,” which tells the story of an Oklahoma Territory farm girl and her courtship by two rival suitors. Many scoffed at the district’s objections to the musical, which school officials complained included “mature adult themes.”

“‘Oklahoma!’ is generally regarded as one of the safest shows you could possibly pick to perform,” said Kirk Everist, a theater professor at Austin College who was among those who came to speak. “It’s almost a stereotype at this point.”

Every seat in the room was filled, almost entirely with supporters of the production. Some lined the walls while others who were turned away waited outside. Of the 65 people who signed up to speak, only a handful voiced support for the district’s restrictions.

The outpouring came as a shock, even to longtime Sherman residents.

“What you’re seeing today is history,” said Valerie Fox, 41, a local L.G.B.T.Q. advocate and the parent of a queer high schooler. Ms. Fox said she was taken aback by the scene of dozens of transgender people and their supporters holding signs and flags outside the district offices. “This is one of the biggest things we’ve seen in Sherman.”

The town, a short drive from Dallas, has been a place where many conservatives have gone to escape the city. Some were supportive of the superintendent’s initial decision to restrict the musical.

“Adult content doesn’t belong in high school; they’re still kids,” Renée Snow, 62, said earlier on Monday as she sat with her friend on a bench outside the county courthouse. “It’s about education. It’s not about lifestyle.”

Her friend, Lyn Williams, 69, agreed. “It doesn’t seem like anyone is willing to stand up for anything anymore,” she said.

At a local shoe store, no one needed to be reminded of the details of the controversy. One shopper, shaking a pair of insoles, said that she believed that God made people either male or female, and that the issue was a simple as that.

Inside the courthouse, Bruce Dawsey, the top executive for Grayson County, described a rural community coming to terms with its evolution into a place where urban development is altering the landscape. Not far away, more than a half-dozen cranes could be seen towering over a new high-tech facility for Texas Instruments. The high school, with more than 2,200 students, opened on a sprawling new campus in 2021, its grass still uniform, its newly planted trees still struggling to provide shade. With all the growth, the school is already too small.

“The majority is Republican, and it’s conservative Republican,” Mr. Dawsey said. “But not so ultraconservative that it’s not welcoming.”

Still, some in and around Sherman have chafed at the changes. When Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic candidate for governor, campaigned through the county last year, he was met with aggressive protesters who confronted him over gun rights, some carrying assault-style rifles. A few wore T-shirts suggesting opposition to liberal urban governance: “Don’t Dallas My Grayson County.”

But the controversy over “Oklahoma!” came as a surprise. The musical had been selected and approved last school year, casting was completed in August and more than 60 students in the cast and crew — as well as dozens of dancers — had been preparing for months. Performances were scheduled for early December.

Max, 17, had been cast in a minor role. But then, in late October, one of the leads was cut from the production, and Max got the part, the biggest he had ever had. He was elated.

Days later, his father, Phillip Hightower, got a call from the high school principal, who told him that Max could not have the part because, under a new policy, no students could play roles that differed from their sex at birth. “He was not rude or disrespectful, but he was very curt and to the point,” Mr. Hightower recalled.

The district later denied having such a policy. But the principal also left messages for other parents whose children were losing their roles, one of which was shared with The New York Times.

“This is Scott Johnston, principal at Sherman High School,” a man’s voice said on the recording. “Moving forward, the Sherman theater department will cast students born as females in female roles and students born as males in male roles.”

The message diverged from the rules for high school theater competitions in Texas, which allow for students to be cast in roles regardless of gender.

The district did not make Mr. Johnston or the superintendent, Mr. Bennett, available for an interview.

In his previous role as an assistant superintendent, Mr. Bennett had objected to the content of a theater production by Sherman High School, according to the former choir director, Anna Clarkson. She recalled Mr. Bennett asking her to change a lesbian character into a straight character in the school’s production of “Legally Blonde” in 2015, and to cut a song entitled “Gay or European?”

At the school board meeting on Monday, theater students from the high school described how things had become worse for gay and transgender students at school since the production was halted. Slurs. Taunts. Arguments in the halls.

“People are following me around calling me girl-boy,” said Max.

Kayla Brooks and her wife, Liz Banks, arrived at the meeting bracing for a tough night. Their daughter Ellis had lost a part playing a male character, and they had been actively working with other parents to oppose the changes.

“We were both nervous, because we live in Sherman,” said Ms. Banks. Then they saw the large, supportive crowd outside. “We began weeping in the car,” Ms. Brooks said.

The school board sat mostly stone-faced as dozens of people testified in support of the theater students, sharing personal histories. A transgender student at Austin College said he had not before come out publicly. Sherman residents lamented the way the school district’s position had made the town look.

“I just want this town to be what it can be and not be a laughingstock for the entire nation,” one woman, Rebecca Gebhard, told the board.

After nearly three hours, the board went behind closed doors. The crowds left. Few expected a significant decision was imminent.

Then, after 10 p.m., the board took their seats again and introduced a motion for a vote: Since there was no official policy on gender for casting, the original version of the musical should be reinstated. All seven board members voted in favor, including one who had, months before, protested against a gay pride event.

“We want to apologize to our students, parents, our community regarding the circumstances that they’ve had to go through,” the board president, Brad Morgan, said afterward.

Sitting in their living room on Tuesday morning, Ms. Banks and Ms. Brooks recalled how their daughter delivered them the news. “She just said, ‘We won,’” Ms. Brooks said. “She was beaming, smiling ear to ear.” The musical would be performed in January.

The couple decided, for the first time, to hang a pride flag in the window of their home. For now, they felt a little more confident in their neighbors than they had a day before.

Categories Arts Education, Bigotry, Censorship, Courage, Creativity, Gender, Parents, Students, Texas

Valerie Strauss: Voters Give “Moms for Liberty” a Well-Deserved Whupping

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2023 //
4

Valerie Strauss reviews the local school board elections in several states, where the self-described “Moms for Liberty” were widely rejected. Despite their misleading name, most voters understood that they have an agenda to ban books, demonize teachers, and harass teachers and administrators with demands for censorship. Voters didn’t want more of the same.

Strauss writes:

In 2021, the right-wing “parents rights” Moms for Liberty claimed victory in 33 school board races in a single county in Pennsylvania — Bucks — saying that it had helped turn 8 of 13 school districts there with a majority of members who support their agenda.


Tuesday’s elections were a different story. In Bucks County, and many other districts across the country, voters rejected a majority of candidates aligned with the group’s agenda in what elections experts said could be a backlash to their priorities.
In Pennsylvania, Iowa, Virginia, Minnesota, New Jersey and other states, voters favored candidates who expressed interest in improving traditional public education systems over those who adopted the agenda of Moms for Liberty, which has been at the forefront of efforts to reject coronavirus pandemic health measures in schools, restrict certain books and curriculum and curb the rights of LGBTQ students, and other like-minded groups.

“‘Parental rights’ is an appealing term, but voters have caught on to the reality that it is fueling book bans, anti-LGBT efforts, pressure on teachers not to discuss race and gender, whitewashing history, and so on,” said political analyst Larry Sabato, a politics professor at the University of Virginia and founder and director of the Center for Politics. “Parents may want more input in the schools, but as a group they certainly aren’t as extreme as many in the Moms for Liberty.”


The school board results were part of a broader wave of support for moderate and liberal candidates in local and state elections who campaigned on support for traditional public education. An election analysis conducted by the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest national teachers’ union, found that in 250 races across the country, candidates in different types of races backed by opponents of traditional public education lost about 80 percent of the time.

I read the many comments that followed Strauss’s article, and to my delight, every comment agreed that Moms for Liberty was phony and its program was to undermine freedom of students to learn and freedom of teachers to teach.

Here are a few:

Moms for Liberty is an antisemitic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, white nationalist, vaccine-ignorant, book-banning, child-endangering hate group. The sooner it lands on the ash heap of Trumpist history, the better.

Moms for Liberty really means Moms for facism and hate.

They overplayed their hand. ‘Tis the demise of so many movements. Plus, oh yeah, they are loud, obnoxious, overbearing, power-hungry, wrong-headed, and anti-American.

Sorry Youngkin..looks like your dragging on public school teachers and setting up Nazi Snitch hotlines to turn them in didn’t turn out to be your key to the WH.

Well, it seems book bans, anti-LGTBQ+ agendas, revisionist history and free speech restrictions on teachers are NOT the wave of the future.

Sod off, Klanned Karenhood. We’ve got your number.

Sounds like voters are catching on to the Minivan Taliban. Not before time.

If you want to raise your own offspring to be ignorant bigots, have at it, ladies. Can’t guarantee they will appreciate you ensuring they will never be able to compete in the real world. Meanwhile, leave the rest of us alone.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Lies, Parents, Propaganda, Teachers

Thom Hartmann: Stop the Republican War on Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2023 //
11

Thom Hartmann is a remarkably well-informed journalist and blogger. In this article, he traces the history of the Republican war on one of our nation’s most important democratic institutions: its public schools.

He writes:

I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled.

That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system:

“With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead, invest it in the right places–and do all this, not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women!”

In less than a year Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured piles of money into our schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids.

I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959: by the time I left elementary school I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I’d had two years of foreign language and two years of experimental music instruction. IQ tests were all the rage: mine was 141 and my best friend, Terry, was 142, something he never let me forget.

Most all of those programs died over the following decades as a result of Reagan’s war on public schools, which began with his bringing private religious school moguls like Jerry Falwell and bigots like Bill Bennett into the White House.

Repudiating Eisenhower’s embrace of public education, Reagan put Bennett in charge of the Department of Education, which Reagan had campaigned on shutting down altogether. Bennett is probably best known for defending his proclamation that:

“If you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Much like Bennett back in the day, the catch phrase among white supremacists and their fellow travelers today is that “Western Civilization” is either under attack or at risk because we teach history, tolerance, and critical thinking skills in our public schools, which are often racially integrated. The answer, Republicans will tell you, is to defund our public schools.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal share of total education spending in America was 12 percent; when he left office in disgrace in 1989 amid “Iran/Contra” rumors he’d cut a deal with the Iranians to keep the American hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, that share had collapsed to a mere 6 percent. (It’s 3 percent today.)

Reagan also wanted to amend the Constitution to allow mandatory school prayer, and unsuccessfully proposed a national tax credit — a sort of tax-system-based national voucher system — that parents could use to send their kids to religious schools like Falwell’s.

Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold:

1. Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America,
2. Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians),
3. Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions,
4. End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and,
5. Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.”

“Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”

There is no more powerful urge humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money. So if you’re a politician looking for an issue to motivate voters, just tell them their children are under attack. It’s cynical, but effective.

In an interview for Semafor, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid it out:

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

Just a few months ago, Donald Trump laid out his plan to deal with the “major problem” America is facing: “[W]e have ‘pink-haired communists teaching our kids.’”

Turning the Constitution upside down and arguing the Founders intended to protect teaching schoolchildren religion, Trump elaborated, arguing that mixing religion, politics, and education was the intention of that document:

“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it’s resembling an established new religion. We can’t let that happen. For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue intentional violations to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”

As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

This isn’t the first time elected officials have used public education as a political weapon. In 1844, 25 people died and over 100 were severely injured in riots in Philadelphia over whether there should be daily Bible readings in that city’s schools. Two churches and several city blocks of homes were burned to the ground.

The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 didn’t provoke riots, but was a major event in the history of public education. Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of the crime of teaching evolution. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in passing laws making such instruction a crime that stood until the 1967 repeal of the Butler Act.

While Republican Glen Youngkin successfully rode a wave of white outrage about Critical Race Theory to the governor’s office in Virginia, polls suggest the issue is really only meaningful to a fragment of the American electorate: a subset of Republican voters. 

The annual PRRI American Values Survey found:

“Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past (92% vs. 5%).

“There are no substantial partisan differences, though Republicans favor excluding aspects of history slightly more (7%) than Democrats and Independents (both 4%). There are few differences across religious traditions or demographics. This consensus holds up across different levels of exposure to critical race theory: 92% of those who have heard a lot about critical race theory, 94% of those who have heard a little, and 93% of those who have heard nothing about it state that we should teach children the good and bad of history.”

Nonetheless, they note:

“[A] majority of Republicans (54%), compared with 27% of independents and only 7% of Democrats, believe that teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children.”

America spent $794.7 billion on primary education last year. For-profit private schools and churches that run schools look at that pile of money and drool. Republicans are committed to delivering as much of it to them as possible, regardless of the damage it does to our nation’s schoolchildren.

Their strategy for privatizing our public schools is pretty straightforward, and echoes the plan of action Republicans are using right now to replace real Medicare with the privatized Medicare Advantage scam.

First, they falsely claim that they’ll deliver a better product at a lower cost. In the education realm, we see this with Florida and several other Red states now offering vouchers that can be used at private or religious schools to every student in the state.

(Nearly 2,300 private schools in Florida accept vouchers, but “69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious, and nearly one-third are for-profit.”)

As more and more students use the vouchers to flee public schools, the public schools sink into deeper and deeper financial troubles. Those cut the quality of teaching and upkeep of the school buildings, causing even more students to use the vouchers.

Because the vouchers never cover the full cost of private school tuition (typically they pay for half to two-thirds), the truly poor can’t use them: the result is the public school system becomes ghettoized, leading to even more flight by middle- and upper-class (white) people.  

Once the public schools are dead and the state has transitioned entirely to private schools, the state will claim budget problems and begin to dial back the amounts available for vouchers. (The same will happen with Medicare Advantage once real Medicare is dead.)

This will widen the relationship between the educational and wealth divides; the racial and class cleavage will become so great that the state will have effectively gone back to a “separate but equal” educational system. Which, of course, is the GOP’s goal.

Republicans are generally convinced that when people have a good, well-rounded education they will vote for Democrats, who explicitly value science and egalitarian social values. Thus, keeping our kids ignorant and destroying one of America’s largest unions, all while helping their education and religion industry friends get rich, is a complete win-win.

As conservative commentator Benjamin Weingarten writes:

“Red states are increasingly engaging in a broad push to purge public institutions of a Wokeness antithetical to the values and principles of their constituents…

“Yet at root, it is the schools — where our children spend much of their waking hours — that have disproportionate influence over American society, seeding every other institution that has succumbed to left-wing ideological capture. …

“It is incumbent on lawmakers and their appointees to use every lever of power they can, within every educational institution under their purview, to combat the divisiveness and forcible conformity engendered by DEI, CRT, and the like and to replace it with a system rooted in the values and principles on which Western civilization is based.”

Much of this battle is playing out in state houses around the country, but there’s a huge and well-funded effort to take control of local school boards as well. David Pepper has a great post in his Pepperspectives Substack newsletter about how to spot the extremists and GOP shills at election time.

Bottom line: the Republican war on public education is real, and if we want to stop it we must get involved. 

Lobby your state legislators and either run for your local school board or support good people who are. 

Our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are literally at stake.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Vouchers

Jeannie Kaplan, a Hero of Public Education in Denver, Has Died

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2023 //
8

Jeanne Kaplan was a tireless champion of public schools in Denver. She was elected to two terms on the Denver school board. She fought for better, more equitable, fully funded schools. She opposed charter schools because they drained funding from public schools. She was a long-time crusader for civil rights, and she appalled by the takeover of the Denver schools by charter interests, who flew a false flag, pretending to care about equity.

Jeannie learned that she had lung cancer last April. Her medical treatment did not slow the disease. She died yesterday. She was 78.

I met Jeannie in Denver in 2010 as I was traveling the country to promote my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. When I met her, we became fast friends. We were on the same page, and she told me about the damage that charter schools were doing to Denver’s public schools. Candidates for the Denver school board were funded by Dark Money, privatizers, and out-of-state billionaires. It was almost impossible for a parent to raise the money to be competitive with the corporate reform candidates.

Jeannie was a warm and caring person who inspired others to get involved, despite the odds crested by Big Money. She started her own blog called “Kaplan for Kids,” and I reposted some of them here.

I think the best way to honor her memory here is to post what seems to be her last commentary, which overflows with wisdom, candor, experience, and common sense. I humbly add her name to the honor roll of the blog.

Jeannie Kaplan wrote:

CHARTERS, CHOICE, and COMPETITION = CLOSURES, CHAOS, and CHURN Principles of Privatization

Posted on November 1, 2022 by Jeannie Kaplan

Reap what you sow and the chickens come home to roost. The elephant in the room.  Aphorisms appropriate to describe what is happening in public education in Denver. 

After 20 years,  more than 5  superintendents, and 11 different school boards, the results of education reform in Denver have become clear, and they aren’t pretty. After opening 72 charters in the last 20 years, 22 of which have closed, the declining enrollments in neighborhood schools have forced the prospect of school closures.  Who knew opening 26 privately run elementary charter schools in competition with district-run schools would ultimately force the district to make some hard financial decisions?  And who knew that ignoring its own 2007 data showing stagnant population growth would lead to less demand for elementary school seats in the 2020s?  Apparently, not those with the power for the last 20 years.  And, as an ironic aside, many of the same people who were the decision-makers in the past and who were unable to make substantive change then, have now decided they will somehow make these previously unattainable changes from their outside “oversight” committee, EDUCATE Denver. In fact one of the co-chairs, Rosemary Rodriguez, was a DPS board member when on March 16, 2017, a Strengthening Neighborhoods Resolution passed, stating:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a citywide committee be formed to review changing demographics and housing patterns in our city and the effect on our schools and to make recommendations on our policies around boundaries, choice, enrollment and academic programs in order to drive greater socio-economic integration in our schools.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that in the face of the sharp decline in the number of school-aged children in gentrifying neighborhoods, the committee is also charged with how to think about school choice and school consolidation to ensure that our schools are able to offer high-quality, sustainable programs for our kids.

These former school board members and former and current civic leaders have formed a “shadow school board” to evaluate and oversee the current superintendent and school board.  Why?  It appears they don’t like what they are seeing being proposed by the current superintendent. What don’t they like?  It appears they have determined the current superintendent is not committed enough to their reform agenda.  You know – the one that has been in place when they were in power, the one that has produced the biggest gaps in the nation, more segregation, and more resource inequity.

As school closures have risen to the fore this week Chalkbeat disclosed these statistics:

“Over the past 20 years, Denver Public Schools has added a lot of schools. It has added students, too — but at a much slower rate.

  • The number of public schools in Denver grew 55% between the 2001-02 and 2021-22 school years, while the number of students grew just 12%.
  • Denver went from having 132 schools serving about 72,000 students in 2001-02 to 204 schools serving nearly 89,000 students in 2021-22.
  • The number of elementary schools in Denver grew 23% over the past 20 years, while the number of students grew just 4%.”

Through expensive marketing and often false narratives, charter schools have had free reign to prey on susceptible families resulting in DPS losing 7400 elementary school students who would have otherwise most likely attended a neighborhood school. Then add in:

  • a state law that prohibits a district from shutting down low enrollment charters, 
  • a district that has ignored demographic information predicting declining enrollment, 
  • a district that employs “attendance zones” and a secretive CHOICE system to often force place students into heavily marketed, often unwanted CHARTER SCHOOLS, and 
  • a competitive financial model called Student Based Budgeting (SBB – money follows the kid) to fund schools, depending on student needs, the goal of which is to close the achievement and resource gaps.  The 2010 Denver Plan/ Strategic Vision and Action Plan describes SBB this way:  
  • Established student-based budget formulas that increase dollars for middle and high school students, special education, English language learners, gifted and talented programs, and students living in poverty. Resource distribution is now more closely aligned with the costs of serving these students. p. 51
  • Refine Student-Based Budgeting formulas to ensure they are best meeting the needs of all of the district’s students. Continue to evaluate and adjust student-based budgeting formulas to 1) meet student needs, 2) make progress on closing the achievement gap, and 3) grow the number of high school graduates and college-ready students. p. 53

No one should be surprised the DPS superintendent is saying schools must be closed (new word is UNIFIED but it still means CLOSURE), given the quagmire he entered.  What would you expect to happen when 72 new charter schools are opened in a landscape of stagnant or declining population growth? Who should be held responsible for the chaos and churn caused by this over-expansion of new charter schools? 

I know, I know. One isn’t supposed to talk about charters any more. But it is the elephant in the room. Education “reformers” want you to believe charters are an irrevocable fact of life in public education, stare decisis if you will. But as we have recently witnessed, that precedent is non-binding. So let’s use it to the advantage of neighborhood school advocates. Let us not assume charters are inevitable, especially given the chaos and poor academic outcomes charters are producing. Denver isn’t the only place experiencing the madness of so many charters. Just this week lifelong educator Arthur Camins wrote:

It is time for Democrats–voters and the politicians who represent them–to abandon charter schools as a strategy for education improvement or to advance equity. Charter schools, whether for- or non-profit, drain funds from public schools that serve all students, increase segregation, and by design only serve the few.

It is worth repeating that in 20 years, DPS has added 72 charter schools, 22 of which have closed.  As students of public education repeatedly attest to, charters have been particularly harmful to neighborhood schools for they gut these schools of resources. Charters have also been disruptive to communities and have contributed to increasing inequity and segregation in our schools. It is not possible to have an honest conversation without addressing that elephant in the room.  Charter schools along with their partners – choice and competition – have had their chance in Denver and their biggest accomplishment has been to pressure neighborhood schools to close.

Let us not overlook the demographic projections DPS has been aware of since the mid 2000’s. 

“It’s really simple, we’ve seen a slow down in births,” said Elizabeth Garner, demographer for the state. “Starting back in 2007, that was our peak birth year, we’ve seen a slowing in births ever since. So with fewer kiddos, that means lower school enrollment.”

Let us not overlook who was supporting and approving this unchecked expansion.  DPS had strong indicators from as early as 2007 onward the population of the city and the number of school-age children was flattening, and yet the district with the strong support of many of the aforementioned  “oversight committee”, EDUCATE Denver, pushed for this proliferation of new charter schools without giving demographics its proper due.

Loss of students = loss of funding (SBB) = loss of programming and supports = closure

Superintendent Alex Marerro has been charged with improving student outcomes and reducing gaps by implementing his strategic plan.  School unifications are one way he has chosen to start this process.  He inherited a district suffering from years of “feel good” oversight from boards and the nonprofit world determined to paint a rosy picture of reform education success, a district more focused on good public relations stories than actual educational outcomes. Now he has to try to provide solutions to problems that have not been dealt with honestly for years. And yes, “unification” has raised as many questions as it has provided answers such as how transportation and language services will be provided and what will be done with these empty buildings. And there is the elephant in the room – again.  Charter schools. Why are they not included in his recommendations? Again, he has no authority to recommend closing them, even though several are also suffering from declining enrollment.  Given this reality, it will be interesting to see how he chooses to address this issue. In the end, how can the board fairly evaluate him according to measures both they and he just agreed on, if it rejects his operational ideas?

As for what neighborhoods these closures would most heavily affect – What would one expect to happen when new charters are opened in neighborhoods heavily populated by families of color and families struggling economically?  Why is there any surprise that most of the schools on the “unification” list affect these neighborhoods?  How could it be otherwise when these are the sites of uncontrolled, privately run options to public schools.  Sadly, it only makes sense that these are the neighborhoods that would suffer the highest impact of school closures.

Few like to close schools.  It is a heart-wrenching, disruptive, negative process. But given the lack of thoughtful planning and oversight for 20 years, what is the better option? Keeping schools open without the financial ability to provide necessary services and supports, or providing unified schools with the money to provide language support,  art, music, nurses, librarians, psychologists, speech therapists?  

Imagine a great school district that had paid attention to population warnings and  hadn’t opened so many charter schools over the last 20 years. Imagine all those charter school children filling those neighborhood schools.

The chickens have come home to roost.

Jeannie and I in Denver, 2013.
Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Denver, Education Reform, Honor Roll

Illinois: Gov. Pritzker’s Scary Trick, No Treat

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2023 //
7

Julie Vassilatos, public school parent, is shocked that Governor J.B. Pritzker has reversed course on his campaign pledge to let the state’s voucher program die. Vouchers are a zombie policy. They were sold over the past 30 years as a surefire way to “save poor kids from failing schools,” but poor kids do worse in voucher schools, and the primary beneficiaries are kids who never attended public schools, families who get a break on their private school tuition. Vouchers have failed. They are nothing more than a trick to fund families whose children attend private and religious schools.

She writes:

Just in time for Halloween, Illinois Gov. Pritzker says he’ll sign whatever “Invest in Kids” legislation crosses his desk. 

Hearing this news gave me a crickly, creepy feeling up the back of my neck. I honestly thought legislators had decided to allow this thing to die its timely death, reach its expected and planned demise. The legislation was originally supposed to sunset in 2023. But it sounds like it’s creeping back from wherever bad policy goes to die. Crawling back from the mostly dead, only to be reanimated, dressed up in a new school uniform, all its awful secrets covered up.

Secrets like: unaccounted-for dollars. Opaque student outcomes. More than $250M in taxes unpaid by the wealthiest Illinoisans. Private schools, with private school rules, getting public money. Discrimination against disabled students, non-religious students, LGBTQ students and families. Expansion of wealth gaps and inequity. Disinvestment of public schools. 

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And worst of all? Tax-credit scholarship programs have demonstrated not just bad, but downright terrifying longterm results. 

Catastrophically bad results. I’m not being hysterical about this, either—these are results drawn from long term research by universities all over the country. Anyone concerned with education outcomes for children—for our most vulnerable children—should care about this data. Because offering children “choice” through vouchers does not help them. It looks like this:

— In Arizona, its recently implemented universal Empowerment Scholarship Accounts divert, on average, $300,000 away from every neighborhood school. The program—granting a $7300 scholarship per child to use for homeschooling or private school—is approaching $1B in cost, funds things like European trips, Disney+, and trampolines,supports “fly-by-night” unaccredited, unlicensed pop-up schools, and may bankrupt the state. Like Illinois’ program, accountability is thin and there is little transparency about the use of tax dollars or the actual results for children. 

— In Milwaukee, one of the longest running voucher programs in the country has failed to yield positive outcomes. “Among black eighth-graders in 13 urban school districts, Milwaukee—where black students make up more than 70 percent of all voucher recipients—ranked last in reading and second-to-last in math.” In 25 years we should be seeing something better than this—especially given the cost of these programs, both in tax dollars and in the financial hit taken by public schools. In 25 years, more importantly, the vulnerable children subjected to these programs should be flourishing, not failing. 

— In Florida, tuition tax credit program students made no gains in reading or math; in Louisiana, a University of Arkansas study found “large negative impacts after 4 years” for participants in the program. 

— Indiana University researchers have found that the larger voucher or tax credit scholarship programs become, the worse the results they generate. Large programs generate negative results that are shockingly bad, equaling or exceeding the impacts of natural disasters and the pandemic. 

Ignoring the damning data, proponents of tax credit scholarships depend on emotional rhetoric to support their cause—who could possibly be against “saving our scholarships”? They also depend on your tax dollars. Up to 5% of donations to the scholarship funds are used for lobbying and marketing purposes. So when you read about busloads and busloads of people wearing matching t-shirts arriving in Springfield, and fancy lobbyists flooding the zone, know that that’s your tax dollars at work. 

Those folks will tell you that “the teacher’s union” is against this good wonderful policy and everyone else supports it. They don’t tell you that 65 organizations are united against this legislation, including Access Living, Illinois PTA, the Network for Public Education, the League of Women Voters, and the American Association of University Women Illinois. 

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People. We have gone over this. This is not confusing, complicated, or even a close call. “Invest in Kids” should be called “Disinvest in Kids,” or, according to the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “Invest in Inequality.” (I strongly encourage you to click that link and read a short, elegant explanation of how this “peculiar tax policy” works and what its impact is.) 

“Invest in Kids” should not, under any circumstances, be extended past its already-extended expiration date of January 2024. But in Eric Zorn’s recent clear, precise column about the drawbacks of “Invest in Kids,” he notes that Gov. Pritzker has “gone squishy” on this issue, which he opposed in 2018. Squishy, maybe. Scary, certainly. That he’ll sign whatever “Invest in Kids” legislation might come crawling back across his desk should frighten us all.

Tell your legislator you want this program to end here.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Ethics, Fake, Funding, Hypocrisy, Illinois, Vouchers

Paul Krugman: There Are No GOP Moderates in the House of Representatives

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2023 //
14

Maybe House Republicans got tired of not finding a new Speaker. Maybe they felt humiliated by their inability to agree on a leader. Every one of them finally agreed to endorse one of the most radical extremists in the House as their party’s leader. You know already that Mike Johnson is hostile to abortion and to gay rights. You know that he was a prominent leader in the effort to overturn Trump’s loss in 2020.

What you probably do not know is that Johnson is an extremist on economic issues as well. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economics columnist for the New York Times, wants you to know that his views on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are also radical.

He writes:

There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Oh, no doubt some members are privately appalled by the views of Mike Johnson, the new speaker. But what they think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters is what they do — and every single one of them went along with the selection of a radical extremist.

In fact, Johnson is more extreme than most people, I think even political reporters, fully realize.

Much of the reporting on Johnson has, understandably, focused on his role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Let me say, by the way, that the widely used term “election denial” is a euphemism that softens and blurs what we’re really talking about. Trying to keep your party in power after it lost a free and fair election, without a shred of evidence of significant fraud, isn’t just denial; it’s a betrayal of democracy.

There has also been considerable coverage of Johnson’s right-wing social views, but I’m not sure how many people grasp the depth of his intolerance. Johnson isn’t just someone who wants to legalize discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and ban gay marriage; he’s on record as defending the criminalization of gay sex.

But Johnson’s extremism, and that of the party that chose him, goes beyond rejecting democracy and trying to turn back the clock on decades of social progress. He has also espoused a startlingly reactionary economic agenda.

Until his sudden elevation to speaker, Johnson was a relatively little-known figure. But he did serve for a time as chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group that devises policy proposals. And now that Johnson has become the face of his party, people really should look at the budget proposal the committee released for 2020 under his chairmanship.

For if you read that proposal carefully, getting past the often mealy-mouthed language, you realize that it calls for the evisceration of the U.S. social safety net — not just programs for the poor, but also policies that form the bedrock of financial stability for the American middle class.

Start with Social Security, where the budget calls for raising the retirement age — already set to rise to 67 — to 69 or 70, with possible further increases as life expectancy rises.

On the surface, this might sound plausible. Until Covid produced a huge drop, average U.S. life expectancy at age 65 was steadily rising over time. But there is a huge and growing gap between the number of years affluent Americans can expect to live and life expectancy for lower-income groups, including not just the poor but also much of the working class. So raising the retirement age would fall hard on less fortunate Americans — precisely the people who depend most on Social Security.

Then there’s Medicare, for which the budget proposes increasing the eligibility age “so it is aligned with the normal retirement age for Social Security and then indexing this age to life expectancy.” Translation: Raise the Medicare age from 65 to 70, then keep raising it.

Wait, there’s more. Most nonelderly Americans receive health insurance through their employers. But this system depends greatly on policies that the study committee proposed eliminating. You see, benefits don’t count as taxable income — but in order to maintain this tax advantage, companies (roughly speaking) must cover all their employees, as opposed to offering benefits only to highly compensated individuals.

The committee budget would eliminate this incentive for broad coverage by limiting the tax deduction for employer benefits and offering the same deduction for insurance purchased by individuals. As a result, some employers would probably just give their top earners cash, which they could use to buy expensive individual plans, while dropping coverage for the rest of their workers.

Oh, and it goes almost without saying that the budget would impose savage cuts — $3 trillion over a decade — on Medicaid, children’s health coverage and subsidies that help lower-income Americans afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

How many Americans would lose health insurance under these proposals? Back in 2017 the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Donald Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare would cause 23 million Americans to lose coverage. The Republican Study Committee’s proposals are far more draconian and far-reaching, so the losses would presumably be much bigger.

So Mike Johnson is on record advocating policies on retirement, health care and other areas I don’t have space to get into, like food stamps, that would basically end American society as we know it. We would become a vastly crueler and less secure nation, with far more sheer misery.

I think it’s safe to say that these proposals would be hugely unpopular — if voters knew about them. But will they?

Actually, I’d like to see some focus groups asking what Americans think of Johnson’s policy positions. Here’s my guess, based on previous experience: Many voters will simply refuse to believe that prominent Republicans, let alone the speaker of the House, are really advocating such terrible things.

But they are and he is. The G.O.P. has gone full-on extremist, on economic as well as social issues. The question now is whether the American public will notice.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Republicans

Thom Hartmann: The Real Mike Johnson Is a Dangerous Rightwing Zealot

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2023 //
21

Thom Hartmann has checked out the record and public statements of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana. He is even more of an extremist than his idol Donald Trump.

Hartmann writes:

The election of Louisiana’s Mike Johnson as House Speaker proves the premise that all the GOP has left are Donald Trump and hate.

As Congressman Jamie Raskin told reporters yesterday:

“Donald Trump has cemented his control over the Republican conference in the House of Representatives. He has a stranglehold on the Republican Party. Even as he faces 91 criminal charges and several of his election lawyers have pleaded guilty now to election-related offenses, one of his enablers on January 6 has just become the speaker of the House Representatives.”

Johnson’s hate of Democrats is so deep that he led a Trump-backed effort in the House to get Republicans to back a lawsuit by 18 Republican state attorneys general to overturn Biden’s election as president.

Their lawsuit had no merit and no facts — everybody, including the Republicans involved, knew that Biden had won fair-and-square — but Republican hate of Democrats is now so deep that the idea of Democrats legitimately governing after winning an election is repugnant to them. No matter how big the Democrats’ victory (7 million votes in this case) may be.

Johnson went public with his support of Trump’s hateful, poisonous Big Lie just a week after the 2020 election, saying:

 “You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that…They know that in Georgia it really was rigged.”

As The Washington Post noted at the time:

“Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, spearheaded the effort to round up support on Capitol Hill. Johnson emailed all House Republicans on Wednesday to solicit signatures for the long-shot Texas case after Trump called. The congressman told his colleagues that the president ‘will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.’”

Johnson got 106 of the 196 Republicans then in the House to sign on to the effort to force four swing states to throw out Democratic votes and declare Trump emperor for life: he was the legal architect of the argument. It doesn’t get more hateful against our republican form of government than that effort to destroy confidence in the vote at the cornerstone of our democracy.

Johnson’s hate of women having agency over their own bodies and lives is so intense that he has repeatedly championed a nationwide ban on abortion. 

His wife Kelly, a “licensed pastoral counselor” with whom he’s in a “covenant marriage,” makes money from Louisiana Right To Life, and before being elected to the House in 2016 he was an attorney for the far-right-billionaire-supported Alliance Defending Freedom that pushed the Dobbs case before the Supreme Court.

While there, he helped sue New York and New Jersey to force them to allow official state license plates that displayed an anti-woman, anti-abortion message; sued New Orleans to try to block benefits for the partners of queer city employees; and promoted a “National Day of Truth” to encourage homophobic students to hate on their LGBTQ+ peers.

Johnson and the GOP explicitly hate queer people and their allies.

“Radical homosexual advocacy groups” are promoting “the culture’s assault on traditional values,” Johnson wrote in an op-ed for a Louisiana newspaper. That “assault,” of course, was gay marriage, something that horrifies Johnson and his wife. 

He wrote:

“Same-sex ‘marriage’ selfishly and deliberately deprives children of either a mother or a father. Children need both. Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone.

“Society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”

Johnson also supports a federal version of DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law that would outlaw any discussion of queer people in any public school classroom in America. In another anti-gay newspaper screed, Johnson wrote:

“Your race, creed and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do. This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices. Where would it end? This is one Pandora’s box we shouldn’t open.”

While Johnson hates queer people, he apparently loves Vladimir Putin, an affection that has earned him the loyalty and help of Donald Trump.

Last month he joined Matt Gaetz and 93 other Republicans in voting to cut off all US military aid to assist Ukraine’s survival in the face of Russia’s ongoing terror campaign.

He’s also a friend to mass shooters and the psychopaths at the NRA. 

Johnson repeatedly voted against gun safety and gun control legislation, and voted against re-authorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

Hating on Medicare and Social Security is another specialty of Johnson and the GOP. As Social Security Works Executive Director Alex Lawson noted yesterday:

“Rep. Mike Johnson has a long history of hostility towards Social Security and Medicare. As Chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019-2021, Johnson released budgets that included $2 trillion in cuts to Medicare and $750 billion in cuts to Social Security, including:
— Raising the retirement age
— Decimating middle class benefits
— Making annual cost-of-living increases smaller
— Moving towards privatization of Social Security and Medicare.”

Johnson also pushed for $3 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), saying slashing the entitlement programs should be Congress’ “top priority.” Johnson is also a huge advocate for a Catfood Commission to figure out ways to slash Social Security benefits to seniors (thus forcing them to eat catfood: the White House refers to it as a “death panel for Social Security”).

Like Red state Republican politicians beholden to the tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries, Johnson also hates marijuana. He’s repeatedly argued and voted against legalization, as well as helping shoot down a bill that would let legal pot dispensaries use banks to conduct their business.  

Hating on science and our children’s future is a feature, not a bug, of Republican politics, and Mike Johnson fits right in. The largest single group of donors to his political career have been the oil and gas industries, and he happily takes their money and spreads their lies. For example, he argued:

“The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”

The League of Conservation Voters gave his environmental record a 0 percent (yes, zero) score for 2022: this guy has burrowed so deeply in Big Oil’s pocket that he’s like a blood-filled tick on a shaggy dog. He’ll never let go.

On voting rights, Johnson hates voters in Blue cities in Red states as much as their own Republican legislatures do. A big fan of voter suppression laws, he argued that making it harder to vote and purging people from voter rolls would help the GOP in the 2022 election:

“They’re making sure that the election results can be counted upon, and that’s a critical thing for us to do.”

That was followed by his voting against the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For The People Act, both of which would have guaranteed Americans’ right to vote regardless of race, religion, or geography. On the other hand, he voted for a Republican bill that would have enshrined GOP voter suppression efforts nationwide. 

Like Rand Paul and Tommy Tuberville, Johnson apparently also hates our men and women serving in the armed forces.

He voted against the Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Actthat President Biden was cheerleading because it would aid service members like Biden’s son Beau who became deathly sick because of exposure to open-air burn pits and other toxins.

He also voted against a year-end package of bills to aid service members, including requiring states to honor the professional licenses of military spouses who find themselves stationed in states other than where they were originally certified. And he joined Tuberville in his opposition to the Pentagon paying to fly raped servicewomen stationed in countries or states where abortion is illegal to places where it is available.

Johnson has supported a few Republican military spending bills, but only, as military.comnoted, when they are “packed with GOP policy riders such as provisions to bar abortion services, transgender health care, and LGBTQ+ Pride flags at the VA.”

Johnson, like most Republicans who hate the idea of Brown people entering our country legally, is also a “border hawk,” having visited our southern border with Donald Trump and introduced two pieces of legislation that would restrict immigration and refugee status. Speaking of his desire to “build a wall” and keep would-be refugees out of the US, he said:

“Now, I have no illusions about this. I’m sure that President Biden will veto anything we send him, but it will send a very strong message. If we can’t override a veto, we’ll be ready to run when the next Republican president is elected two years later.”

Republicans like Johnson love to plaster the word “freedom” all over everything they do. But they’re just fine with a for-profit prison industry lobbying for harsher sentences, and to keeping draconian drug laws in place.

When Republicans say “freedom,” it’s a safe bet they mean they want the freedom to hate on minorities, the freedom of rich people and giant corporations to screw average working people, and the freedom of billionaires to continue paying only around 3 percent of their income in income taxes.

In MAGA Mike Johnson (what Trump calls him), Republicans have found the perfect embodiment of their deplorable basket of hatreds. At this point, the only “loves” they have are rightwing billionaires and the fossil fuel industry. And, of course, Trump’s good buddy and fossil fuel oligarch Vladimir Putin.

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Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Politics, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Trump
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