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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

Heather Cox Richardson: Florida’s Distorted Standards for African American Studies

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2023 //
78

The people in Florida who wrote the standards for African American studies had a challenge: how to write them to satisfy Governor DeSantis’ hatred for anything that speaks about racism and injustice. Admitting that whites who enslaved Blacks were racist might make whites today feel “uncomfortable” and would be “woke.” So how is it possible to paper over the brutality and inhumanity of slavery?

Heather Cox Richardson explains how they did it.

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order.

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

One senses the hand of advisors from Hillsdale College in this prettified version of U.S. history.

To read the standards, open the link and see the footnote.

Categories Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Florida, History

Frank Breslin: How to Combat Cancel Culture at Universities

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2023 //
65

We are familiar with stories of controversial speakers who were shouted down on campuses. Not long ago, students at Stanford Law School disrupted the appearance of Kyle Duncan, a federal appeals court judge appointed by Trump who was invited to address the conservative Federalist Society. The university apologized to Judge Duncan.

Retired teacher Frank Breslin offered some valuable advice about how students should act when a controversial speaker comes to campus.

Critically Responding to Guest Speakers

If these student protestors are convinced that they’re right and can make their case, why don’t they do so and teach these speakers why they are wrong? Why protest when they could simply let these speakers have their say, then refute them publicly?

Then during the Q & A period have these students come to the microphone to ask their questions and have those speakers respond? Wouldn’t this be better than protesting and giving their college a black eye in the media?

Unfortunately, however, they fail to do this, but pressure their colleges and universities to disinvite these speakers, or protest against them if they do come, and demand that even their own professors whose courses challenge their beliefs be fired because this is the only way they can cope with ideas that frighten them.

College & the World Not One’s Personal Nanny

Somehow these 18- to 21-year-olds have never learned that their college is not their Personal Nanny, who should dry their tears when something upsets them. What they need is a crash course in Real Life 101 that would teach them to accept the world as it is while at the same time trying to change it by learning to deal with ideas critically in a calm and dispassionate manner rather than running away to hide in “safe places.”

Raising Objections

They must learn to raise objections that challenge these speakers by questioning their assumptions, exposing fallacies if present, and determining whether their claims are certain, probable, or only possible. Many claims may sound impressive, but cannot be proven, and the ability to point this out publicly will weaken a speaker’s case.

Many explanations may not be true, but only arguable, and if a claim is based upon arguable assumptions or debatable value judgments, that claim can also be weakened. Or a claim that is offered as a fact may not be a fact at all, but only a hope, a fear, a wish, or bigotry.

How many arguments have you heard in your lifetime that were nothing more than appeals to the man, fear, authority, or antiquity?

The ability to stand back from a line of argumentation and see at once whether any of two dozen different kinds of fallacies are present, or whether the various statements that make up that argument are not facts, but arguable value judgments, explanatory or metaphysical theories would also weaken a case.

It goes without saying that the self-confidence that comes with this ability to refute an argument can be a life-altering experience for students and the mark of trained young scholars well-read in the humanities and afraid of nothing but running away. Tragically, however, the ability to do this in these colleges rarely occurs.

Instead, the spirit of dogmatism has these students tight in its grip, There is no compromise, no attentive listening to what a speaker is saying, no opening oneself to another’s truth. There is only digging in and defending one’s turf as each surveys the other from within one’s own fortress mentality.

What an anti-climax to spending years in educating themselves! Instead of becoming more aware, open-minded, and tolerant, these young protestors make a virtue of closed-minded belligerence.

There may be other protestors motivated by a love of political theater, headlines, and the local celebrity these protests confer, while for others it may be the need for a permanent grievance to give their lives meaning or themselves an identity, both of which they may see as more urgent than resolving their grievance.

These reasons are especially likely if those leading these protests are zealots with private agendas, whereas some of their followers may simply be bored, in need of excitement, or victims of Groupthink.

Danger of Groupthink

If you’re one of those few high-school graduates trained in critical thinking, you should be able to cope with this anti-intellectualism — up to a point. I say this because there is one conditioning factor you yourself may have to overcome upon entering college or becoming a member of any group or organization later in life.

I am referring, of course, to the power of Groupthink that may pressure you into becoming part of this irrationalism should you find yourself on one of these campuses.

As usually happens in “closed universes” like prisons, hospitals, monasteries, or the military, for instance, a form of Groupthink inevitably occurs. In colleges and universities, it will be only a segment of the school population that over-identifies with the particular viewpoint of this group.

As a new freshman on campus, one will naturally want to be welcomed and accepted by those in this new social environment where one will be spending the next four years of one’s life.

Once on campus, however, one may not want to protest but feel that one must or lose acceptance by failing to do so, and so will “go along to get along.” Some of this may explain the more reluctant protestors who don’t want to disappoint or alienate the “pack” or its leader….

Being Taught “the Right Answers” is Indoctrination

Strive for the kind of knowledge that will make you aware of all the competing answers to the questions you study, for all of them contain some measure of truth, and some of them may even be misrepresented by the accepted theories. Beware of the delusion that you’re being taught “the right answers,” but if you’re told that you are, give yourself a quiet chuckle.

If you leave a course with more questions than when you entered because the answers you received didn’t satisfy you, consider yourself lucky because you’ve gotten your money’s worth just by realizing this. A good course will teach you how to look at things differently and to judge them within a broader context that will enhance the quality of your critical judgment.

People often don’t need more arguments, but more air to breathe, a longer view and broader perspective by stepping back to see the bigger picture. They need to discover that what they once thought was important is really not that important at all in the overall scheme of things.

Wherever you go, college or university, with or without protests, what you’ve learned about critical thinking in high school and college will become supremely yours as you struggle against human inertia.

Learning the theory of critical thinking isn’t enough, even overlearning it will never suffice. You have to embody the theory but, most of all, have the courage to use it.

Please open the link and read the section I omitted for reasons of space.

Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Freedom of Speech, Higher Education

Steve Nelson: These Are REAL Parental Rights—and Children’s Rights Too!

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2023 //
17

Steve Nelson is a retired educator. In this post, he contrasts the demands of the fake “parental rights” folk with a genuine agenda for the rights of parents and children:

As is true in many aspects of current American politics, the right wing conservatives dominate the discourse on education. As is also true in other aspects of current American politics, it seems not to matter that they are wrong – terribly wrong – and are gradually unraveling the critically important institution of public education.

The assault is on two broad fronts:

*The persistent efforts to privatize education through charter and voucher schemes, accompanied by defunding traditional public schools and diverting support to all manner of incompetent opportunists.

*An overlapping campaign to bring more Christianity into publicly-funded education and remove any and all references to race, gender, sexuality and normal functions of the human body.

In service of these goals they have successfully captured the PR realm, with groups like the attractively named Moms for Liberty. Who wouldn’t love moms or liberty?

The most damage is being done with legislation at the local and state level. Right-wingers have taken control of school boards and many gerrymandered state legislatures. Once again, these zealots have seized the PR reins by using the inarguably appealing mantra of “parental rights.” What parents want their rights taken away? So, the significant body of laws and policies that already protect the rights of parents is being absurdly enhanced with laws and policies that give parents the “right” to dictate what books children can read, what bathrooms children can use, and what public health measures can be exercised. They also claim the right to micromanage curricula, thereby ensuring that a white, Eurocentric, Christian, heteronormative experience is enjoyed by all. Ozzie and Harriet are applauding from the grave.

We liberals and progressives have done a piss poor job of responding in kind. Lots of folks (like me!) opine passionately to minuscule effect, given that our readers are in the hundreds or, rarely, thousands. There are politicians and pundits who argue against the nefarious work of this loud, conservative minority, but we are seldom, if ever, on the offensive.

We too need slogans and initiatives with catchy names that capture the imagination.

Perhaps:

*Moms for Keeping Crazy Moms Out of Our Schools and Libraries.

*Parents for the Rights of Teachers to Teach Without Nut-bag Interference

*Citizens for Keeping God Safe in Our Churches and Out of Our Politics

*Parents of Black and LGBTQ Students Who Won’t Take This Shit Anymore

Nelson then lists an educational bill of rights that the overwhelming majority of parents and teachers would likely endorse:

Then, if and when we can get the crazies under control, the parents in the majority can address the actual needs of children. What might happen if a grassroots effort gathered momentum and demanded that schools and school systems adopt this Bill of Rights?

Bill of Educational Rights

The undersigned insist that our school(s) and all teachers:

Open the link to read Steve Nelson’s Bill of Educational Rights.

Would you endorse these principles?

Categories Censorship, Childhood, Creativity, Education Industry, Education Reform, Joy, Parent Groups, Parents, Play, Privatization, Real Education, Students

Idaho: How to Destroy Public Schools and Grab the Money: Connect the Dots

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2023 //
16

Steve Berch is a member of the Idaho House of Representatives, one of only 11 Democrats in a body with 70 members. He is serving his third term. His analysis of the attack on public education in Idaho and other states is brilliantly cogent. He understands that privatization is all about the money. This article appeared in the nonprofit IdahoEdNews.org.

Berch describes the playbook of the privatization movement.

Berch writes:

Idaho will spend $2.3 billion on K-12 public education in 2024. There are powerful out-of-state forces who want to get their hands on that money. Some are driven by profit, others by political ideology, religious beliefs, or a combination of interests. They all share one common goal: shift your public schools dollars to the private sector. Here are some of the dots to connect in the “privatizing public education” playbook:

  1. Make public schools look worse than other school choices. The legislature does this by continually underfunding public education. Schools can’t meet parental expectations, accommodate growth, or hire/retain experienced teachers when salaries are not competitive and buildings are falling apart. Idaho has a backlog of over $1 billion in K-12 school building maintenance and we’re still at or near the bottom in per-student investment, even after having a $2.1 billion surplus and a recent budget increase. This makes other school choices look more attractive by comparison.
  2. Undermine confidence in public schools. Propaganda campaigns incite fear and anger against local schools. Parents are bombarded with false claims about porn in libraries, groomers in classrooms, and student indoctrination. Non-stop postings on social media perpetuate these inflammatory accusations. Self-proclaimed “think tanks” funded by third-parties produce official looking reports that create a false perception of legitimacy to these manufactured fears.
  1. Hide the facts. Legislative leaders tried to kill the Office of Performance Evaluations (OPE) – which provides factual, in-depth, unbiased research and analysis to the legislature. The public wouldn’t know about the billion dollar backlog in school building maintenance if OPE didn’t exist. The OPE report that revealed this new information angered political leaders trying to tell a different story. Without facts, false narratives go unchallenged.
  2. Legislative intimidation. New laws are making classrooms a hostile workplace. This includes bills that threaten to sue educators, imprison librarians, fine school districts, muzzle teachers, and empower the Attorney General to aggressively prosecute the targets of these punitive laws. No wonder teachers are leaving Idaho.
  1. Promote “school choice” and “education freedom.” This is clever rhetoric, but it is meaningless since Idahoans already have a myriad of education choices – none of which are going away. It’s not about having choice, but rather having you pay for someone else’s choice. A recent in-depth investigationrevealed a vast network of powerful forces funneling money into Idaho to promote and sell their alternative education choices to the public.
  2. Kill public education with vouchers (deceptively called Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs). An attempt was made earlier this year to convert most of the $2.3 billion public education budget into checks sent to parents to spend however they want – without accountability. This would starve Idaho public schools into oblivion.

The 2023 bill tried to hit a home run and failed. However, the lobbyists behind privatizing public education will be back, fronted by their legislative allies. Expect to see legislation next year that allows public tax dollars to pay for private and religious school tuition in limited amounts and isolated situations.

This is fool’s gold – there is no room for compromise. If the legislature allows just a small amount of public tax dollars to be spent on tuition for any private school, your tax dollars must be made available to all types of private schools and religious schools. Once one bill passes, the flood gates open up to flow your public education dollars to the bottom line profits of private sector businesses.

Your public education tax dollars belong in your public schools, not in their pockets.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Education Industry, Funding, Idaho, Lies, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Oklahoma Superintendent Tries to Define “Woke,” But Can’t

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2023 //
86

Peter Greene discovered that Ryan Walters, the State Superintendent of Education in Oklahoma, attempted to define “Woke” on a far-right website. WOKE is one of those new terms of opprobrium, like “critical race theory,” that Republicans despise but can’t define. Peter eagerly read Walters’ effort to defund Woke, but came away disappointed. It seems that Woke is whatever you don’t like. You may have seen the stories recently about Walters insisting that the Tulsa race massacre of 2021 had nothing to do with skin color, although as the Daily Beast reported, “white mobs killed as many as 300 Black residents and burned some 1,600 homes and businesses in what was known as Black Wall Street.”

Peter Greene writes:

Oklahoma’s head education honcho decided to pop up in The Daily Caller (hyperpartisan and wide variation in reliability on the media bias chart) with his own take on the Big Question–what the heck does “woke” mean? (I’ll link here, because anyone who wants to should be able to check my work, but I don’t recommend clicking through).

Walters tries to lay out the premise and the problem:

Inherent to the nature of having a language is that the words within it have to mean something. If they do not, then they are just noises thrown into a conversation without any hope of leading it anywhere. And when the meaning is fuzzy, it becomes necessary to define the terms of discussion. To wit, the word “woke” has gained a lot of popularity among those of us who want to restore American education back to its foundations and reclaim it from the radical left.

I’m a retired English teacher and I generally avoid being That Guy, particularly since this blog contains roughly sixty gabillion examples of my typo issues, but if your whole premise is that you are all for precise language, maybe skip the “to wit” and remember that “restore back” is more clearly “restore.”

But he’s right. The term “woke” does often seem like mouth noises being thrown into conversations like tiny little bombs meant to scare audiences into running to the right. However, “restore American education back to its foundation” is doing a hell of empty noising as well. Which foundation is that? The foundation of Don’t Teach Black Folks How To Read? The foundation of Nobody Needs To Stay In School Past Eighth Grade? Anyone who wants to talk about a return to some Golden Age of US Education needs to get specific about A) when they think that was and B) what was so golden about it.

But since he doesn’t. Walters is also making mouth noises when he points the finger at “opponents of this movement.” If we don’t know what the movement is, we don’t know exactly what its opposition is, either. Just, you know, those wokes over there. But let’s press on:

Knowing that many such complaints are made in completely bad faith because they do not want us to succeed, it would still be beneficial to provide some clarity as to what it means and — in the process — illustrate both the current pitiful state of American education and what we as parents, educators, and citizens can do about it.

Personally, I find it beneficial to assume that people who disagree with me do so sincerely and in good faith until they convince me otherwise. And I believe that lots of folks out on the christianist nationalist right really do think they’re terribly oppressed and that they are surrounded by evil and/or stupid people Out To Get Them. It’s a stance that justifies a lot of crappy behavior (can probably make you think that it’s okay to commandeer government funds and sneakily redirect them to the Right People).

But I agree that it would be beneficial for someone in the Woke Panic crowd to explain what “woke” actually means. Will Walters be that person? Well….

In recent years, liberal elites from government officials to union bosses to big businesses have worked to co-opt concepts like justice and morality for their own agendas that are contrary to our founding principles and our way of life.

I don’t even know how one co-opts a concept like justice or morality, but maybe if he explains what agenda he’s talking about and how, exactly, they are contrary to founding principles or our way of life, whatever that is.

But he’s not going to do that. He’s going to follow that sentence with another that says the same thing with the same degree of vaguery, then point out that “naturally, this faction of individuals” is after schools to spread their “radical propaganda.” Still no definition of woke in sight. No–wait. This next start looks promising–

Put simply, “woke” education is the forced projection of inaccurately-held, anti-education values onto our students. Further, to go after wokeness in education means that we are going after the forced indoctrination of our students and our school systems as a whole.

Nope. That’s not helping, either. “Projection” is an odd choice–when I project an image onto a screen, the screen doesn’t change. There’s “projection” when I see in someone else what is really going on in me, which might have some application here (“I assume that everyone else also wants to indoctrinate students into one preferred way of seeing the world”) but that’s probably not what he has in mind. I have no idea how one “forces” projection. “Inaccurately-held” is also a puzzler. The values are accurate, but they’re being held the wrong way? What does this construction get us that a simple “inaccurate” would not? And does Walters really believe that schools are rife with people who are “anti-education,” because that makes me imagine teachers simply refusing to teach and giving nap time all day every day, except for pauses to explain to students that learning things is bad. I suspect “education” means something specific to him, and this piece (aimed at a hyperpartisan audience) does seem to assume a lot of “nudge nudge wink wink we real Americans know what this word really means” which would be fine if the whole premise was not that he was going to explain what certain words actually mean.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Gender, History, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Oklahoma, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism

Reid Friedson: DeSantis Is a Homegrown Fascist

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2023 //
14

The Republican primary is shaping up as a carnival of horrible. Coasting in the lead is former President Donald Trump, whose ignorance, lying, and braggadocio are well-documented and on display whenever he speaks. His indictments tend to increase his poll numbers, and apparently are no bar to bring re-elected.

In the second spot, far ahead of the rest of the pack is Ron DeSantis, who wants to be known as the meanest one in the race. He will boast about how he crushed academic freedom, how he outlawed drag queens and demonized gays, how he made honest teaching of history illegal, how he encouraged book banning.

In this article, Reid Friedson contends that DeSantis’s full-blown fascism should disqualify him from office. But if the public wants fascism, there he stands, ready to suppress and criminalize dissent, debate, anyone who offends him.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, DeSantis, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read

Heather Cox Richardson: Moms for Liberty Signals the GOP’s Dumb Extremism

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2023 //
106

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the recent Moms for Liberty convention in Philadelphia, which drew the leading Republican presidential candidates. An unusual feat for an organization founded only two years ago. By contrast, she says, there is a forward movement across the nation, spurred by Biden’s successful economic policies. Will the public fall for fear or vote for progress? To read the footnotes, open the link.

She writes:

For more than a week now, I have intended to write a deep dive into the right-wing Moms for Liberty group that held their “Joyful Warriors National Summit” in Philadelphia last week, only to have one thing or another that seemed more important push it off another day. This morning it hit me that maybe that’s the story: that the reactionary right that has taken so much of our oxygen for the past year is losing ground to the country’s new forward movement.

Today the jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics pushed ahead of them by showing that the U.S. economy added 209,000 jobs in June. The rate of job growth is slowing but still strong, although the economy showed that the Black unemployment rate, which had been at an all-time low, climbed from 4.7% to 6%. Since Black workers historically are the first to lose their jobs, this is likely a signal that the job market is cooling, which should continue to slow inflation.

In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin called out the media outlets so focused on the idea that Biden would mismanage the economy and that recession was imminent that they have ignored “29 consecutive months of job growth, inflation steadily declining, durable goods having been up for three consecutive months, 35,000 new infrastructure projects, an extended period in which real wages exceeded inflation and outsize gains for lower wage-earners.” As reporters focused on the horse-race aspect of politics and how voters “felt” about issues, she noted, “[w]e have seen far too little coverage of the economic transformation in little towns, rural areas and aging metro centers brought about by new investment in plants, infrastructure projects and green energy related to the Chips Act.”

Also of note is that today is Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s first day of talks with top Chinese officials in Beijing, where she will also talk to U.S. business leaders. At stake is the Biden administration’s focus on U.S. national security, which includes both limiting China’s access to U.S. technology that has military applications and bringing supply chains home. China interprets these new limitations as an attempt to hurt its economy. Yellen is in Beijing to emphasize that the U.S. hopes to maintain healthy trade with China but, she told Chinese Premier Li Qiang, “The United States will, in certain circumstances, need to pursue targeted actions to protect its national security.”

Meanwhile, China’s faltering economy has led to new rules that exclude foreign companies, leading U.S. businesses to reconsider investments there. Chinese leaders have tried to reassure foreign business leaders that they are welcome in China, while Yellen told U.S business leaders: “I have made clear that the United States does not seek a wholesale separation of our economies. We seek to diversify, not to decouple. A decoupling of the world’s two largest economies would be destabilizing for the global economy, and it would be virtually impossible to undertake.”

The success of Biden’s policies both at home and abroad has pushed the Republican Party into an existential crisis, and that’s where Moms for Liberty fits in. Since the years of the Reagan administration, the Movement Conservatives who wanted to destroy the New Deal state recognized that they only way they could win voters to slash taxes for the wealthy and cut back popular social problems was by whipping up social issues to convince voters that Black Americans, or people of color, or feminists, wanted a handout from the government, undermining America by ushering in “socialism.” The forty years from 1981 to 2021 moved wealth upward dramatically and hollowed out the middle class, creating a disaffected population ripe for an authoritarian figure who promised to return that population to upward mobility by taking revenge on those they now saw as their enemies.

In the past two years, according to a recent working paper by economists David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew, Biden’s policies have wiped out a quarter of the inequality built in the previous forty. And at the same time that Biden’s resurrection of the liberal consensus of the years from 1933 to 1980 is illustrating that the economic problems in the country were the fault of Republican policies rather than of marginalized people, the extremism of those angry Republican footsoldiers is revealing that they are not the centrist Americans they have claimed to be.

Moms for Liberty, which bills itself as a group protecting children, organized in 2021 to protest mask mandates in schools, then graduated on to crusade against the teaching of “critical race theory.” That, right there, was a giveaway because that panic was created by then-journalist Christopher Rufo, who has emerged as a leader of the U.S. attack on democracy.

Rufo embraces the illiberal democracy, or Christian democracy, of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, saying: “It’s time to clean house in America: remove the attorney general, lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers’ unions, and overturn the school boards.” Radical right activists like Rufo believe they must capture the central institutions of the U.S. and get rid of the tenets of democracy—individual rights, academic freedom, free markets, separation of church and state, equality before the law—in order to save the country.

Because those central democratic values are taught in schools, the far right has focused on attacking schools from kindergartens to universities with the argument that they are places of “liberal indoctrination.” As a Moms for Liberty chapter in Indiana put on its first newspaper: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.” While this quotation is often used by right-wing Christian groups to warn of what they claim liberal groups do, it is attributed to German dictator Adolf Hitler. Using it boomeranged on the Moms for Liberty group not least because it coincided with the popular “Shiny Happy People” documentary about the far-right religious Duggar family that showed the “grooming” and exploitation of children in that brand of evangelicalism.

Moms for Liberty have pushed for banning books that refer to any aspect of modern democracy they find objectionable, focusing primarily on those with LGBTQ+ content or embrace of minority rights. During the first half of the 2022–2023 school year, PEN America, which advocates for literature, found that 874 unique titles had been challenged, up 28% from the previous six months. The bans were mostly in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina. A study by the Washington Post found that two thirds of book challenges came from individuals who filed 10 or more complaints, with the filers often affiliated with Moms for Liberty or similar groups. And in their quest to make education align with their ideology, the Moms for Liberty have joined forces with far-right extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, sovereign citizens groups, and so on, pushing them even further to the right.

Although the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled Moms for Liberty an “extremist group” that spreads “messages of anti-inclusion and hate,” the group appeared to offer to the Republican Party inroads into the all-important “suburban woman” vote, which party leaders interpret as white women (although in fact the 2020 census shows that suburbs are increasingly diverse—in 1990, about 20% of people living in the suburbs were people of color; in 2020 it was 45%).

When Moms for Liberty convened in Philadelphia last week, five candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, including Trump, showed up. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley told them: “When they mentioned that this was a terrorist organization, I said, ‘Well then, count me as a mom for liberty because that’s what I am.”

But here’s the crisis for the Republican Party: Leaders who wanted tax cuts and cuts to social programs relied on courting voters with cultural issues, suggesting that their coalition was protecting the United States from radicalism.

But the Republican embrace of Moms for Liberty illustrates dramatically and to a wide audience how radical the party itself has become, threatening to turn away all but its extremist base. A strong majority of Americans oppose book banning: about two thirds of the general population and even 51% of Republicans oppose it, recognizing that it echoes the rise of authoritarians.

As historian Nicole Hemmer points out today for CNN, Moms for Liberty are indeed a new version of “a broader and longstanding reactionary movement centered on restoring traditional hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality” that in the U.S. included the women of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and segregationists who organized as “Restore Our Alienated Rights” (ROAR) in the 1970s. Hemmer observes: “The book bans, the curricula battles, the efforts to fire teachers and disrupt school board meetings—little here is new.”

In the past, a democratic coalition has come together to reject such extremism. If it does so again, the Republican marriage of elites to street fighters will crumble, leaving room for the country to rebuild the relationship between citizens and the government. When a similar realignment happened in the 1930s under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Republican Party had little choice but to follow.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Fascism, Republicans

Virginia: State Democratic Party Denounces Attacks on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2023 //
54

The Virginia Democratic Party took a strong and well-informed stand in opposition to attacks on public schools.

It issued the following statement:

The Democratic Party of Virginia

Condemns the Right-Wing, Dark Money-Funded, Republican Agenda to Dismantle Public Education, Divert Public Education Funding to Private Education Management, and

Eliminate Critical Thinking and Evidence-based Curricula from America’s Public Schools

Whereas, 

GOP leaders have for decades sought to dismantle public education by reducing public support to facilitate moving  public funds from public to for-profit schools. 

Rather than focusing explicitly on promoting privatization, the coordinated, right-wing, special-interest-bankrolled,  decades-long effort has established such schemes as the annual “National School Choice Week” event and deployed  “parent” groups such as “Moms for Liberty,” “Parents Defending Education” and the “Independent Women’s Forum”  to make it appear that there is wide opposition to public school policies. Their current tactics are to attack public  schools by opposing masking policies, remote learning, and evidence-based curricula; harassing school board  members, administrators, and staff; and threatening to burn books. “School choice” is rooted in efforts to keep  schools segregated by race, class, and disability. 

Truthout wrote, “’Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein predicted in March 2020 that COVID-19 presented an ideal  opportunity for ‘disaster capitalism,’ a tactic pushed by school privatizers in the wake of the last financial crisis. She  identified the global pandemic as a ‘shock,’ or disruptive event that global elites often use to introduce free-market  ‘solutions’ that redistribute wealth upwards.” Vindicating Klein’s prediction, since the pandemic, a Koch-funded  group produced an “Opportunity on Crisis” report listing numerous school privatization schemes. 

Education is a multibillion-dollar market, and the private sector is eager to get its hands on those dollars. Shrinking  public education also furthers the overarching Republican Party goal of drastically reducing the public sector overall.  Privatization also significantly undermines teacher unions, thereby reducing the voice and power of teachers to  affect the terms and conditions of their workplace. Unions are also a strong and active part of the Democratic base  and hobbling them hobbles their capacity to support Democrats. 

Corporate-focused extreme-right Republican leaders want to censor, control, and narrow the exposure of most  students to the broad knowledge base that would enable them to analyze, understand and accurately evaluate, and  manage the forces that affect their lives. They want to consign the masses of America’s children to for-profit,  unregulated, unaccredited, tax-funded “schools,” with large classes of inexperienced staff or digital platforms with  no teachers at all, designed to supply a less-educated, malleable citizenry and subservient labor pool. Meanwhile,  the children of the financial and corporate elite are to be taught a broad, rich curriculum in small classes led by  experienced teachers in exclusive private schools. 

Preparing people for democratic citizenship was a major reason for the creation of public schools. The Founding  Fathers maintained that the success of American democracy would depend on the competency of its citizens and  that preserving democracy would require an educated population that could understand political and social issues,  participate wisely in civic life, and resist tyrants. Early leaders proposed the creation of a more formal and unified  system of publicly funded schools. 

Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced  that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.” Jefferson  further explained: “The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country,  for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our  population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries.” 

In the 1830s, Massachusetts legislator Horace Mann advocated for the creation of public schools that would be  universally available to all children, free of charge, and funded by the state. He emphasized that a public investment  in education would benefit the whole nation by preparing students to obtain jobs that will strengthen the nation’s  economic position and promote cohesion across social classes. Proponents later reasoned that public schools would  not serve as a unifying force if private schools drew off substantial numbers of students, resources, and parental  support from the most advantaged groups. To succeed, a system of common schooling would require children from  all social classes, and educating children from different religious, and European ethnic backgrounds in the same 

schools would also help them learn to get along. Despite its founding ideals, throughout the historical development  of early public education, there was discrimination against access for girls, children of color, new immigrants, minority religious groups, children with disabilities and others. However, the founding rationale has guided the  evolution of the public-school mission to promoting equity of access to all in the mid-20th century, addressing social  needs after WW II and ensuring that all students receive a high-quality education in the 21st century. 

The original reasons for public schools — preparing people for jobs and citizenship, unifying a diverse population,  and promoting equity–remain relevant and urgent today. The Republican agenda to dismantle public education will  reverse all of these. 

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin is facilitating this ongoing right-wing scheme of school privatization and blocking  of evidenced-based curricula with his executive orders allowing parents to opt out of mask mandates in Virginia  schools, and ending “the use of divisive concepts, including critical race theory, in public education.” Meanwhile,  Virginia’s Democratic legislators are introducing and protecting legislation that supports and promotes public  schools with enriched and broad curricula to prepare students for citizenship and work in the 21st century. 

Most American parents, students, and teachers do not agree with this privatization and curricula-limiting scheme,  and many are standing up for schools that protect kids’ health, teach the truth, and promote equality for all. Our  democracy 

requires informed citizens. Public education enables its citizens to develop their full potential, which enables our  democracy to flourish. It enables individuals to learn and grow and creates a successful and prosperous society. 

Therefore, be it resolved that the Democratic Party of Virginia: 

1. Calls on local, state, and federal officials, within the purview of their offices and roles, to: 

a. Investigate, expose, and prosecute all individuals and groups who deploy intimidation tactics, threats of  violence and violence against school board members, administrators, teachers, and others; 

b. Initiate a public campaign, including forums, social and other media, etc., to highlight the historical  compact establishing universal primary and secondary public education as a necessity to prepare an  informed citizenry for their role in a democracy; illuminate the accomplishments of many decades of public  education and the benefit to our country’s democracy; and provide a platform for people, including doctors,  scientists, business leaders, and religious leaders, to relate their stories of the public school teachers who  were instrumental in their success; 

c. Increase funding and support for public schools and educator, administrator, and staff compensation;  and 

d. Introduce legislation and support an enriched, broad, public-school curricula for all students in liberal  arts, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and career and technical education. 

2. Commends Officials at all levels, including democratically elected school boards, who implement and parents  who support an enriched, broad, public-school curricula for all students in liberal arts, science, technology,  engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and career and technical education. 

3. Calls on grassroots activists and organizations to launch a campaign to expose the right-wing, special-interest funded, Republican agenda to dismantle public education, divert public education tax dollars to private management  of public schools, and to eliminate critical thinking and evidence-based curricula from America’s public schools. 

4. Calls on grassroots activists, organizations, community and faith groups, parents, and the public to support increased funding for public schools and educator, administrator, and staff compensation, and to support an enriched, broad, public-school curricula for all students in liberal arts, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and career and technical education.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Virginia, Vouchers

Florida: Orange County Removes Classics from Schools

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2023 //
116

Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel reports that the Orange County school district has removed classic literature in its efforts to comply with state laws.

She writes:

The classic novels “A Room With a View” and “Madame Bovary” and the epic poem “Paradise Lost” — published in England more than 350 years ago — have been at least temporarily rejected by Orange County Public Schools for sexual content that educators fear runs afoul of a new Florida law.

Novels that in past years were frequently taught in OCPS high school classes, such as “The Color Purple,” “Catch-22,” “Brave New World,” and “The Kite Runner” have been put on the rejected lists, too, as have novels by Toni Morrison and Ayn Rand and popular, turned-into-movies books like “Into the Wild,” and “The Fault in Our Stars.”

The lists of books rejected and approved for OCPS classrooms are not finalized yet as district media specialists continue their summer work of reviewing all books in classroom libraries, said several people familiar with the process.

Some books rejected earlier this summer, among them “The Scarlet Letter” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” have since been approved, according to the lists shared with the Orlando Sentinel by a district teacher and by an advocacy group that obtained a rejection list through a public records request. Other books have been approved but only for certain grades.

Four plays by William Shakespeare, including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” are currently listed as approved for grades 10 through 12 only, as is Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the lists show.

For many of the books, the reason for at least a temporary rejection is sex. “Depicts or describes sexual conduct (not allowed per HB 1069-2023,” reads the explanation, referencing a new state law passed by the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The new law makes book challenges easier and, if the concern is sexual content, requires the books to be removed from the shelves within five days and remain inaccessible to students while being reviewed. Republican lawmakers said they passed it to make sure pornography and books that depict sexual activity are kept from children.

But critics say the effort has wrongly labeled many books pornographic, when state law says, in part, that books with sexual content or nudity are considered pornography only if they are “without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

This could be a clever plot to entice teens to read forbidden books. (“Come over to my house, I have ‘Paradise Lost!’”) But Florida’s legislators and state education officials are not clever. They are narrow minded bigots.

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom to Read, Gender, Libraries, Literature
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