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The Mississippi Free Press: A Powerful Voice for News, History and Truth!

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2023 //
3

Donna Ladd, a native Mississippian, founded the Mississippi Free Press three years ago to shine a bright light on the state’s politics, history, and culture. The MFP has grown into a journalistic force. I am excited to join its advisory board, because the force of sunlight can be so powerful. I want to share Donna Ladd’s last newsletter, introducing a new reporter—Torsheta Jackson—and describing some of their exciting plans for the future. This team wants to free Mississippi from the dead hand of the past. Read Donna’s letter and I think you will understand why I am so enthusiastic about the Mississippi Free Press.

Read our latest stories from mfp.ms. And please support our work: mfp.ms/donate. Thank you! Meet Torsheta Jackson!

Donna writes:

One of my favorite reporting trips ever was touring around Noxubee County with then-freelance writer Torsheta Jackson in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because she grew up in the East Mississippi county, over on the Alabama border, Torsheta was the tour guide, driving us around in her big truck I had to lift myself into. First, she pointed out where she grew up in Shuqualak (locally pronounced “Sugar-lock”), the child of educators. Along the way, she pointed out slabs where industry, grocery stores and schools used to stand before her hometown became a shell of its former self over the decades after forced integration in 1970.

We walked around the ruins that now dominate the little downtown and talked about poverty, neglect, white-flight cycles and disinvestment in the county settled by rich white planters—including Mississippi State University founder Stephen D. Lee’s family—and built by enslaved people. The county has always been majority-Black, but usually under white control, from newspapers, to industry, to local education decisions and resources. It was also the site of vicious white terrorism to keep it that way.

Click now to support MFP’s Mapping Mississippi systemic-reporting strategy covering the 82 counties of Mississippi.

In the county seat of Macon, Torsheta showed me the county’s only remaining grocery store—white-owned and too expensive in a region where hunger is far too rampant, she said. She then took me to see the library, which still has its gallows, where they used to hang people in front of crowds on the front lawn, now marketed as a tourist attraction. We looked straight out the front window of the library at the tall Confederate statue standing in front of the courthouse across the street in a town that is 82% Black. The Board of Supervisors voted in July 2020 to remove it; last I checked, it was still there as post-George Floyd anti-racism enthusiasm wanes.

Torsheta showed me the abandoned Central Academy, which the superintendent of the county public schools helped open in the 1960s, supported by state vouchers, becoming the seg academy’s headmaster. She drove me to all the now-boarded-up, or disappeared or repurposed, public schools that used to be in Noxubee (locally pronounced “Nock-shu-bee”) County before most white families fled either to C.A. or to the local Mennonite school, which also opened in 1970.

Torsheta and I spent hours in the “new” Noxubee County public school just north of Macon, talking to the principal and the school psychologist—both women she knew growing up there. We learned about the perpetual state of crisis that faces the district and its one remaining public-school system covering the entire county; district leadership was changing again that day, in fact. And, of course, we learned about the systemic challenges that face Black women and their families, in particular, in Noxubee County, from no broadband, to hunger, to mental health and more. Their honesty with us informed Torsheta’s award-winning installment of our “(In)equity and Resilience: Black Women, Systemic Barriers and COVID-19” cause-solutions journalism project. It is now the prototype of our statewide county-level Mapping Mississippi systemic-reporting strategy that we’re amping up by summer with Torsheta’s help and inspiration.

Not to mention, a new area of research opened up for me when I heard the school psychologist’s story about a mob of local white men killing a Black woman school principal to stop the education and advancement of Black children: white terrorism specifically deployed to keep Black children uneducated and, thus, inequity and white control in place for generations to come. They said what they were doing for white-supremacy perpetuity right in the local newspaper. It wasn’t a secret. They bragged about ugly mob race violence by county leaders.Make a recurring donation now monthly, quarterly or annually to support the systemic journalism of Torsheta Jackson and our other reporters. Become an MFP VIP Club member.

It was an eye-opening and powerful journey for us both. Torsheta would later say on MFP Live that, before that reporting experience, she had not understood fully how intentional barriers and discrimination caused the decline of her home county over the decades. After this journey into the past, she did.

It was also on that tour of Noxubee County that I decided that I wanted Torsheta as a full-time reporter to take her systemic journalism across the state and help me build our Education Equity Solutions Lab. This is a very different kind of education reporting than the partisan griping about schools and funding that we usually see in Mississippi. For me, what I called Project Torsheta started on that trip. With her years of teaching experience (19 as of now), her brilliance, her curiosity, her wit and her stunning work ethic, I knew Torsheta was the kind of reporter Mississippi needs and deserves covering education. She can show us like no one else how education’s use as a political tool hurts families, children and whole communities.

Fast forward a couple of years, and it’s happening. Report for America announced Wednesday that it is supporting Torsheta as our lead education-equity reporter to do this work, paying a chunk of her salary for the next two to three years. After two years of working together to figure out timing and resources, Torsheta and I—and our whole team—are ecstatic that our vision is happening. I cannot wait to develop this work with Torsheta, and it doesn’t hurt that we recently hired fantastic Business Manager Jared Norton to free me up for more journalism. Torsheta and I (and others) will soon be traveling the state together again, doing the systemic journalism we know can help improve this state for all of our people.

I’ll talk more soon about our second new reporter we announced this week. Heather Harrison of Copiah County is the vivacious and dogged outgoing editor of The Reflector at Mississippi State. I knew in our first conversation (and then confirmed in a team solution circle) that she is bringing the energy, passion and curiosity that it takes to succeed and thrive at the Mississippi Free Press. She’ll be our first regional full-time bureau reporter, remaining in Starkville to largely cover that region of the state and help us collaborate with the Starkville Daily News.

Needless to say, you readers are making all of this growth happen. We started with $50,000 and one full-time reporter just three years ago. You have helped create 17 good-paying jobs and pay for myriad freelancers, contractors and interns—most of them brilliant and engaged Mississippi natives staying in their home state to do the work. Our resources are mostly from readers. You get it, and you are intentionally helping us grow our team and our reach to more counties.

Please help keep us growing by giving what you can now at mfp.ms/donate. Remember, your recurring donations are paying for at least one reporter already, so every amount matters.

Donna Ladd, Editor and CEO

Categories Civil Rights, Corruption, Courage, Creativity, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Media, Mississippi

TIME: How Voucher Programs Hurt Students

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2023 //
8

Joshua Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, wrote the following article for TIME magazine:

In recent months, state legislatures across the country have broadened efforts to subsidize private school tuition with taxpayer dollars. New proposals for these programs—collectively called school vouchers—have appeared in more than a dozen states and passed as major priorities for Republican governors like Kim Reynolds in Iowa and Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas. Since 2021, Arizona, Florida, Utah and West Virginia have also created or expanded voucher plans. Meanwhile, a handful states like Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have run voucher programs for years. But do school vouchers actually work? We need to focus on what research shows, and what that means for kids moving forward.

As an analyst who has studied these and other forms of school choice for nearly two decades, I’m in a good position to give an answer. And based on data from existing voucher programs, the answer is almost unambiguously negative.

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such a universal voucher program, following Arizona’s passage in the fall of 2022. In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocatesmarket these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

And what about the students who do leave public schools? Some plans, like the currently proposed bill in Texas, restrict eligibility to students in public school for at least one year. But for the children who do transfer using a voucher, the academic results in the recent scaled-up statewide programs are catastrophic. Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

And these harmful voucher impacts from existing statewide vouchers lasted for years, with little else on balance to show for it.

What explains these extraordinarily large voucher-induced declines? Aren’t private schools supposed to be elite educational opportunities? When it comes to private schools accepting voucher payments, the answer is clearly no. That’s because elite private schools with strong academics and large endowments often decline to participate in voucher plans. Instead the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.

In Wisconsin, 41% of voucher schools have closed since the program’s inception in 1990. And that includes the large number of pop-up schools opening just to cash in on the new voucher pay-out. For those pop-up schools, average survival time is just 4 years before their doors close for good.

Here’s another problem: for most students, using a voucher is a temporary choice to begin with. In states that have reported data on the question–Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin—roughly 20% of students leave voucher programs each year, either because they give up the payment or because schools push them out. In Florida, where vouchers just expanded, that number is even higher: around 30% per year in pre-expansion data.

That kind of turnover is bad for kids, even when they’re leaving under-performing voucher schools. Not least because kids who leave voucher programs tend to be students of color, lower income children, and kids struggling academically in the first place.

And it’s not just the academic results that call into question any rhetoric around opportunities created by vouchers. Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.

Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs. Special education children tend to need more resources than vouchers provide, which can be a problem in public schools too. But public schools are at least obliged under federal law to enroll and assist special needs children—something private schools can and do avoid.

When we look at all the challenges to accessing education with these programs it’s clear that actually winning admission to a particular private school is not about parental school choice. It’s the school’s choice.

That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.

And public support for these programs is tenuous at best, highly dependent on state contexts. Recent media reports indicate that the latest voucher push is at least partly the result of well-funded campaigns led by Betsy DeVos, the conservative billionaire and U.S. Education Secretary under Donald Trump. DeVos has championed vouchers for decades as an alternative to traditional public education in what she, Trump, and other supporters call “government schools.”

But DeVos has acknowledged the poor track record for vouchers—at least when it comes to academic impacts. Asked about the dismal results of the Louisiana voucher plan while she was a public official, DeVos avoided detailed comment, but her answer back then was as good a summary as any that a voucher expert like me could provide. That program, she said, was “not very well-conceived.”

That goes for school voucher plans today, currently spreading across the country.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Hoax, Inequity, Privatization, School Choice, Students, Vouchers

A Conversation about the State Takeover of the Houston Independent School District

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2023 //
7

The Network for Public Education sponsored a conversation among me, Daniel Santos, and Domingo Morel.

Daniel Santos is an 8th grade social studies teacher in the Houston schools and vice-president of the Houston Federation of Teachers.

Domingo Morel is author of Takeover and the nation’s leading expert on the process by which a state abrogates local control of a school district.

I am a graduate of the Houston public schools.

As background, there are two things you should know:

1. Houston is not a “failing” district. It has a B rating.

2. State law in Texas allows the state to take control of a district if only one of its schools has persistently low scores.

Students, parents, teachers, and elected officials have complained about this abrogation of democracy. Governor Abbott and State Commissioner Mike Morath ignore them.

Watch the discussion here.

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Houston, Resistance, Texas

DeSantis and His Morality Police in the Schools

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2023 //
26

The editorial board of the Miami Herald knows exactly what Ron DeFascist is up to: He wants to remove local control of public schools and gather complete power over what is taught in the schools. He wants to crush unions. He wants to censor books in school libraries. He wants to make sure that students use the bathroom assigned to the gender on their birth certificate. He wants to control the pronouns that teachers use in their classroom (check every student’s birth certificate so you don’t break the last two laws). He wants to control the state curriculum and tests to be certain that only patriotic history is taught. It’s not at all clear whether Black history can be taught (even though it is mandated) unless it meets his approval. He wants to control school boards, and he doesn’t hesitate to select and endorse candidates who share his views. He is power-mad. And he thinks his authoritarian behavior is a model for the nation! He must have skipped history at Harvard.

Florida Republicans’ ‘ideology patrol’ is coming to a school near you | Opinion

The Florida Legislature could de-certify many teacher unions in charge of negotiating salaries and working conditions.

Florida Republicans’ ‘ideology patrol’ is coming to a school near you | OpinionBY THE MIAMI HERALD EDITORIAL BOARD

It’s the biggest irony of a state that calls itself “free.”

A basic tenet of America’s political system — one that conservatives, more than liberals, have staunchly defended — is that the government closest to the people is best. But the Florida Legislature, egged on by Gov. DeSantis, is poised to further constrain locally elected school boards from making decisions about books, what teachers can say in the classroom and even school bathroom rules.

If the Republican-led House and Senate get their way, by the time they are done local education will be a mere arm of state leaders who act like the ideological patrol of Florida’s K-12 system. Meanwhile, there’s not enough talk about real issues like post-pandemic learning losses and the shortage of teachers. In fact, lawmakers might make the latter even worse with a union-busting bill that could de-certify many teacher unions in charge of negotiating salaries and working conditions.

So strong is the Legislature’s desire to turn K-12 into a field of culture battles, they are seeking to turn school board races, which are currently nonpartisan, into partisan contests. This would play right into DeSantis’ hands. He’s said that his goal is to elect candidates of his choosing in 2024 local races, including for the Miami-Dade County School Board.

This move would exclude millions of Floridians who aren’t registered with either major party — and who outnumberRepublican voters in Miami-Dade — from voting for their board member in primaries. The saving grace is that this measure would only go into effect if at least 60% of voters in the state approve it as an amendment to the Florida Constitution.

Another bill would relax residency requirements for school board candidates. They would not have to live in the district they want to represent until taking office. This isn’t unheard of in Florida. The same requirement applies to sheriffs and other constitutional officers. But it would allow any outsider with money and backing from, say, a powerful governor to run to represent communities they have no connection to.

To be fair, there are some sound proposals making their way forward at the Capitol. Lawmakers want shorter, eight-year term limits for school board members, down from 12 years. There’s a bill to require instruction on the effects of social media on young people and to ban the use of a school’s internet for social media, unless it’s for education purposes. Senate Bill 52 is ready for a Senate vote and also would ban cellphones in class.

But lawmakers are too busy fighting gender pronouns, sex education and transgender youth.

SB 1674 would make it a second-degree misdemeanor for adults to use a bathroom or “changing facility” that doesn’t align with their sex assigned at birth. The bill also would require districts to come up with “disciplinary procedures” to deal with students who violate the ban, further stigmatizing trans kids who already are often the target of ridicule.

Republican lawmakers want to prohibit teachers and staff from calling students by pronouns that differ from those given to them at birth, even when a parent is OK with it. SB 1320 expands a law that bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity — known by critics as “Don’t say gay” — through the eighth grade.

That same bill would also give outsized power to a single person to, at least temporarily, ban books from schools. Districts would be required to pull books that have been challenged while a complaint is being heard. It allows not just parents, but any county resident, to file an objection, likely resulting in blanket attempts by activists to ban books about LGBTQ issues and race.

SB 1320 also would take away school boards’ power to choose textbooks for sexual and reproductive health classes. Instead, that would be up to the Department of Education, which reports to the governor.

Current law already requires districts to teach that abstinence is the “certain way” to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and about “the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage.” But lawmakers seem to think we still cannot trust the people we elected to run our schools with basic decisions about curriculum.

We’re not fools. This isn’t simply a traditional power grab by Tallahassee. This is an attempt to ensure only certain voices are allowed in public education. Parents and educators who think differently be damned.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Teachers, Unions

Peter Greene: Vouchers Restore Discrimination and Segregation

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2023 //
9

Peter Greene has written several columns about the U.S. Supreme Court’s step-by-step effort to tear down the wall of separation between church and state. With its June 21: 2022, decision called Carson v. Makin, the High Court ordered the state of Maine to pay the tuition for students at two religious schools. Under Maine law, districts that do not have a public high school must pay tuition for high school students to attend a private non-religious school. A majority of the justices ruled that Maine violated the students’ free exercise of religion rights by denying them the same benefits as those who go to private schools at the public’s expense.

The decision was 6-3. The majority were all appointed by Republican presidents (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett). The minority were appointed by Democratic presidents (Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan). All six of the Justices in the majority were born Catholic; Gorsuch graduated from Georgetown Preparatory Academy, a Jesuit school (Brett Kavanaugh was two years behind him.) Gorsuch and his family now attend an Episcopal church. The minority bloc consists of two Jews and a Catholic (Sotomayer).

Before the case was decided, Peter Greene expressed concern that the two religious schools openly discriminated against student, families, and staff by refusing to accept into the school’s community.

He wrote six months before the decision was released:

Bangor Christian Schools require adherence to a code of conduct; trans or gay students will be expelled, even if celibate. Their religious indoctrination is inseparable from their academic instruction. A fifth grade social studies objective is to “recognize God as Creator of the world,” while a ninth grade objective is to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion with the truth of God’s word.” Teachers at BCS must certify that they are born again Christians.

Temple Academy is an extension of the Centerpoint Community Church. TA is unlikely to admit students that do not come from a Christian family; that family must sign a Family Covenant saying they agree with TA’s views on abortion, marriage, and homosexuality. Again, only born again Christians may be hired to teach; teachers also sign an employment agreement acknowledging that the Bible says that God considers “homosexuals and other deviants as perverted.”

The issue, he wrote, was not about freedom of religion or free exercise of religion, but about whether taxpayers should pay for schools that discriminated against defined groups of people.

For several years, fans of school choice have been pushing the argument that a religious school is not free to exercise its religious faith if it does not get to share in taxpayer dollars. The wall between church and state has thus been characterized as discrimination against religion. Turns out you can’t be really free without taxpayer funding.

A few weeks ago, Peter returned to the subject and reviewed some of the Justices’ arguments. Quite simply, he wrote, the Supreme Court was ordering the state of Maine to pay tuition at schools that engage in discrimination.

Justice Breyer asked:

What happens once “may” becomes “must”? Does that transformation mean that a school district that pays for public schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to send their children to religious schools?

Justice Sotomayor said:

In 2017, I feared that the Court was “lead[ing] us . . . to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.” Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.

But the case goes on, because Maine passed a law stating that it would not fund schools that discriminate. The Bangor Christian Academy sued the state and asserted its right to discriminate.

Bangor Christian Schools is now suing the state of Maine, asking first for an injunction against the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA) restriction that bars them from receiving state money as long as they continue to discriminate. Their assertion is that the “poison pill” of human rights law in Maine violates their religious liberty, that they cannot exercise that liberty unless they can both receive state funds and continue to discriminate against students and prospective faculty that don’t meet their religious requirements.

The state of Maine insists that it will not fund schools that discriminate:

Attorney General Aaron Frey said that “all Mainers deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, whether it be in their workplace, their housing, or in their classrooms. The Maine Human Rights Act is in place to protect Mainers from discrimination and the Office of the Attorney General is steadfast in upholding the law. If abiding by this state law is unacceptable to the plaintiffs, they are free to forego taxpayer funding.”

Peter continued his dissection of the decision in a third post, wherein he debated the libertarian Neil McCluskey of the CATO Institute. McCluskey asserts that secular schools are hostile to religion, and the only way to secure true freedom of religion is to fund all choices, all religions.

Peter writes:

First, I don’t accept the premise that “secular” requires hostility to religion. If you play in the percussion section, you aren’t hostile to melody–it’s just not your job to handle it. A secular education system doesn’t try to fulfill any religious functions, for a variety of reasons we’ll get into.

There’s another issue in that first point, which is the newly revived idea among some folks that they cannot fully and freely practice their religion unless they are free to discriminate against people of whom they disapprove, like the Mom who objects to having her child taught empathy because she believes there are some people her child should not feel empathy for. This is a whole other post, but my short answer is this–there is no placating these people as long as circumstances find them in a pluralistic society.

But where I really disagree with McCluskey is in his central notion that by allowing everyone to retreat to their own personal bubbles, we can end all the various battles over culture and religion…

The whole choice thesis is that by not using taxpayer funds to support private religious choice, the government is discriminating against religious folks (with the newest legal test of this theory coming to a courtroom in Maine). Again, this reasoning goes, I am not fully free to exercise my religion if the taxpayers aren’t subsidizing my choice.

I should get to practice in my little bubble, and the taxpayers should help pay for the bubble.

That’s how this vision of choice leads to religious discrimination on an unprecedented scale and takes us all the way back to the question of separate but equal.

Peter demonstrates a variety of scenarios that show how thorny this issue is.

A variety of secular schools realize that if they re-configure themselves as religious schools, the “free exercise” clause is a ticket to the Land of Do As You Please and they can start discriminating against students and faculty in pretty much any way they wish as long as they claim that it’s an essential part of their religion. This will force taxpayers to fund all sorts of things that they (and not just liberal especially) object to, from aryan supremacists to gender theory schools. One worst case scenario will be a government agency given the task of figuring out which religious schools are “real” religious schools and which are just playing games. The other worst case scenario will be states figuring out how to regulate these schools so that they can’t discriminate in ways that would be illegal for anyone else. Or maybe we’ll just have a government office of educational equality that makes sure that every religion gets an equal shake in the school funding/free exercise department. No way that could end badly. None of these “solutions” will be popular.

Now that we’re establishing that I can’t have freedom to exercise my religion without enough of a taxpayer subsidy, who is going to decide how much subsidy is enough?…

I can imagine taxpayers rejecting bond unissued because they don’t to subsidize all those religious schools.

Peter concludes:

I can imagine plenty of awful scenarios. What I can’t imagine is how vouchers + religious schools results in a free and adequate education for every child or greater harmony and cohesions for our pluralistic nation. Yes, yes, I understand we haven’t exactly mastered either of those things currently, but I don’t see how vouchers + religious schools does anything except make matters worse.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Disruption, Education Industry, Maine, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Segregation, Separation of church and state

Fred Klonsky: Tennessee Legislature Revives Memories of the End of Reconstruction and the Birth of Jim Crow

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2023 //
23

Fred Klonsky is a retired teacher who blogs regularly about Chicago, Illinois, the nation, politics, and culture. In this post, he draws an interesting comparison between the recent expulsion of two Black legislators in Tennessee and events concurrent with the end of the Reconstruction era and the reign of Jim Crow. There is this difference: The two ousted members are very likely to be restored to their seats in the legislature by their local elected officials. The Tennessee Three are now national figures revealing the fascist hand in the iron glove of the Republican Party when it has the majority.

Robert Smalls, Congressman during Reconstruction.

The expulsion of Rep. Justin Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson from the Tennessee legislature has a direct historical link to the overthrow of real democracy and Reconstruction following the Civil War.

On May 13, 1862 an enslaved man named Robert Smalls, who labored on a Confederate steamer in South Carolina’s Charleston harbor, set into motion a daring plan.

As his great-great-grandson Michael Boulware Moore explained, “He saw that the Confederate crew had left, and he knew that oftentimes they left for the evening, not to come back until the next day.”

For Smalls and six other enslaved people and their families, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. “They knew that if they got caught, that they would be, not just killed, but probably tortured in a particularly egregious and public manner,” said Moore.

Disguising himself in the straw hat and long overcoat of the ship’s white captain, Smalls piloted the ship past Fort Sumter towards the Union blockade, and freedom.

After serving on a Union Naval vessel during the Civil War, Smalls returned home to Beaufort, S.C., and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives – one of more than a dozen African Americans to serve in Congress during the period known as Reconstruction, when the formerly-rebel states were reabsorbed into the Union, and four million newly-freed African Americans were made citizens.

South Carolina, and throughout the former Confederacy, the era of Reconstruction saw the rise of Black political power and representation in both the U.S. Congress and Southern state legislatures.

During the 1870s, more than a dozen African American men, many of whom had been born into slavery, were elected to the U.S. Congress. 

It was a great democratic movement that ended all too quickly.

Former Southern insurrectionists, aided by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, violently organized an anti-democratic counterrevolution.

Born in South Carolina, Aaron A. Bradley was a shoemaker in Augusta Georgia. Sometime around 1834 he ran away to the North, where he became a lawyer. 

In 1865 he returned to Georgia. He was the most outspoken member of the Black delegation to the constitutional convention. 

In 1868 he was elected state senator from the First District. Bradley rallied plantation workers around Savanah with his insistence that the formerly enslaved people be given land.

But Black political power and Reconstruction was short lived.

One quarter of the Black legislators in Georgia were killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed. In the December 1870 elections the Democrats won an overwhelming victory in overthrowing democracy and Reconstruction.

In 1906 W. H. Rogers from McIntosh County was the last Black legislator to be elected before Black voters were legally disenfranchised in 1908.

The actions by white Republican members of the Tennessee legislature to expel two elected Black members has all the stench of the overthrow of Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, History, Racism, Tennessee

Donna Ladd: The Origins of School Choice in Noxubee County, Mississippi, and the Death of Integration

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2023 //
10

Donna Ladd wrote a compelling story about how white flight in Noxubee County, Mississippi, killed hopes for integration in the 1950s and 1960s. Ladd is the founder and editor of the Mississippi Free Press.

Whites had long controlled the county and its schools. They were determined not to permit any racial integration. Their response to the Brown decision of 1954 was to stall, stall, stall.

When whites realized that the federal courts were determined to integrate the schools, they had two strategies to defy court orders. One was to open “segregation academies,” like today’s charter schools. The other was to create voucher programs so that white children could participate at all-white private academies.

The story is fascinating. It’s not likely to be taught in public schools, because some people might think this honest retelling of what happened might make white students—more likely, their parents—uncomfortable.

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, History, Mississippi, Racism, Segregation

Florida Vouchers: A Multi-Billion-Dollar Hole in the Budget

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2023 //
7

The Florida legislature passed a universal voucher plan, meaning that the state will subsidize the tuition of every student, no matter their family income, Rich or poor. The state will hand out subsidies to rich families whose children go to elite private schools. All money deducted from public schools. Short-sighted and stupid, a giveaway to families who can afford private schools.

Currently, there are more than 400,000 students enrolled in private schools. About 80,000 may already have a voucher. Now, even those attending an exclusive school will be subsidized by the state. Homeschoolers will also be subsidized by the state, at least 20,000 in the fumigation year.

Most of the schools that take vouchers are religious and most are not accredited.

Likely new cost: 320,000 students already enrolled in private schools without a voucher plus 20,000 homeschooled kids x $7,800=$2.65 billion. And that’s without a single student now in public school asking for a voucher. A realistic estimate for the annual cost of Florida’s universal voucher would be at least $3 billion a year.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priotities notes that the Florida voucher funding is designed to reduce the funding of public schools, which currently enroll about 80-85% of the state’s children:

While voucher programs are often funded as line-item appropriations in state budgets or through private donations (which over time reduces the revenues available for education and other state priorities), this Florida voucher is actually designed to take money away from the state K-12 funding formula designated for public school districts.

Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel says that Florida’s universal voucher program is likely to blow a billion-dollar hole in the state budget. As I pointed out above, $1 billion is a low estimate. That hole in the budget will be closer to $3-4 billion, when you include the students whose parents can already afford to pay tuition.

He writes:

Florida lawmakers are about to take the biggest educational gamble in American history — financed with your tax dollars.

They want to offer every child in Florida the chance to use publicly funded vouchers at private schools that have virtually no regulation and offer no guarantee that the students will get educated.

Florida’s existing network of voucher schools is so infamously unchecked that the Orlando Sentinel has found schools employing teachers that don’t have high-school diplomas themselves. Some refuse to serve children with disabilities or gay parents. Others were such financial wrecks that they shut down in the middle of the school year, stranding students.

Flaw #1:

Voucher schools in Florida are unregulated. They can hire teachers who are not certified. They can hire teachers who never finished college. Voucher schools do not take state tests. They need not disclose their graduation rate or their curriculum. They are not overseen by state officials. Some voucher schools ignore safety codes, because they are not required to comply with them. The Orlando Sentinel conducted an investigation called “Schools Without Rules,” demonstrating that voucher schools take tax money without any oversight, transparency or accountability.

Flaw #2:

Voucher schools operate in secrecy. They are not required to report anything to the state.Not test scores, graduation rates, SAT scores, or anything else. Florida is operating on the principle of “Trust But Don’t Verify.” Public schools are held to tight accountability requirements. Voucher schools, none at all. If accountability is good for public schools, why is it unnecessary for voucher schools?

Flaw #3:

Voucher schools can discriminate against any group. Unlike public schools, voucher schools can discriminate on any grounds. They don’t have to accept students with disabilities, gay students, students who don’t speak English, or students from a religion they don’t like.

Flaw #4:

Legislators think that choice is the only accountability needed. If a parent is unhappy, make a different choice. The only choice that parents do not have is to stop paying their tax dollars to fund this sector.

There is another grievous flaw:

The Florida voucher program reduces funding for the schools that the overwhelming majority of students attend. Why does this make sense?

Maxwell says there are good voucher schools, and they should have no objection to accountability, transparency, and oversight. Maxwell recommends the following fixes for the state voucher program.

All voucher-eligible schools should be required to:

  1. Publish graduation rates and nationally accepted test scores.
  2. Hire teachers who are certified or at least have a college degree.
  3. Disclose all the curriculum being taught.
  4. Ban discrimination. (If discrimination is a key tenet of a religious organization’s belief system, they should fund that discrimination with their own money. Any group that receives public dollars should serve all the public.)

Maxwell does not address the two glaring defects of the voucher program:

1. 75-80% of the students who take vouchers already attend private schools. Why is it in the interest of Florida to pay their tuition?

2. About 60% of the students who switch from a public school to a voucher school will drop out within two years. The vast majority of voucher studies conclude that students lose ground academically when they take a voucher. Shouldn’t parents be warned of the risk that they are taking by accepting a voucher?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Deregulation, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Funding, Privatization, Republicans, Special Education, Vouchers

Tennessee: GOP Threatens to Expel 3 Democratic Legislators Who Joined Anti-Gun Protest

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2023 //
17

The statehouse in Nashville, Tennessee, was surrounded by parents and students demonstrating in favor of gun control and against the GOP-controlled legislature’s protection of guns. The protest follows the murder of three children and three staff members at the Coventry School in Nashville.

Three Democratic members of the legislature joined the protest, chanting with the protestors.

The GOP leadership threatened to expel the Democrats. The speaker of the House absurdly claimed that the three Democrats were encouraging an insurrection.

Parents and children held signs and shouted chants during a large protest at the Tennessee capitol last week following a deadly school shooting. And while no one was arrested or injured, Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton is comparing the demonstration to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

During the House Floor session on Thursday — days after the Covenant School shooting — Reps. Gloria Johnson, D-Knox, Justin Pearson, D-Memphis, and Justin Jones, D-Nashville, stood up and chanted with protestors in the gallery.

Pearson and other Democrats attempted to acknowledge the large group of protesters during session, but were told to stick to the subject of the bill by Speaker Cameron.

“We listened to them and helped to elevate the issue that they are demanding justice for,” said Pearson.

House Speaker Cameron Sexton said their actions were more than a breach of decorum, comparing it to the January 6th insurrection in remarks to outlets.

“Two of the members; Representative Jones and Representative Johnson, have been very vocal about Jan. 6 and Washington, D.C., about what that was,” said Sexton. “What they did today was equivalent, at least equivalent, maybe worse depending on how you look at it, to doing an insurrection in the State Capitol.”

Sexton warned that there will likely be consequences for the trio.

“It could be removal of committees; it could be censorship; it could be expulsion from the General Assembly. Anywhere in between,” said Sexton.

Leaders in the Democratic caucus are defending their colleagues. Nashville Democrat John Ray Clemmons says he believes Speaker Sexton is exaggerating.

“You show me the broken windows, you show me anyone who went into the speaker’s office and put their chair up on his desk and trashed his office, you show me where a noose was hanging anywhere on the legislative plaza,” said Clemmons, citing damage committed during the Capitol riot, which resulted in five deaths before and after the event.

The three rebellious Democrats were stripped of their committee assignments. Their member badges were deactivated. Their telephones were disconnected.

In a press conference Monday, Jones says Sexton is more focused on politics than addressing last week’s mass shooting.

“We are members, who are standing in the well, telling our speakers and our colleagues that kids should not be murdered in school,” Jones said, “and rather than address that issue, the speaker has spent more time on Twitter this weekend talking about a fake insurrection than he did about the deaths of six people including 9-year-old children.”

It is not yet clear if the lawmakers will face expulsion. Sexton has not commented on whether they will face further discipline.

A tweet:

Three Tennessee Democrats have been stripped of their committee and subcommittee assignments by the Republican dominated legislature for speaking out against gun violence in the wake of the Nashville shooting that killed three children.

Democracy is dead in Tennessee.

@Sethaweitz

Rep. Gloria Johnson, one of the three Democrats, tweeted:

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Guns, Guns in Schools, Nashville, Parents, Republicans, Resistance, Safety, Tennessee

Professor Amy Wax Makes Racist, Homophobic, Sexist Statements: Should She Be Fired?

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2023 //
88

The New York Times published an article about a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Amy Wax, who has frequently made statements that are racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, the whole range of prejudices, not what you expect of someone who supposedly teaches students that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law.

Amy Wax, a law professor, has said publicly that “on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites,” that the country is “better off with fewer Asians” as long as they tend to vote for Democrats, and that non-Western people feel a “tremendous amount of resentment and shame.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, where she has tenure, she invited a white nationalist to speak to her class. And a Black law student who had attended UPenn and Yale said that the professor told her she “had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” according to the administration.

Professor Wax has denied saying anything belittling or racist to students, and her supporters see her as a truth teller about affirmative action, immigration and race. They agree with her argument that she is the target of censorship and “wokeism” because of her conservative views.

All of which poses a conundrum for the University of Pennsylvania: Should it fire Amy Wax?

The university is now moving closer to answering just that question. After long resisting the call of students, the dean of the law school, Theodore W. Ruger, has taken a rare step: He has filed a complaint and requested a faculty hearing to consider imposing a “major sanction” on the professor…

For years, Mr. Ruger wrote in his 12-page complaint, Professor Wax has shown “callous and flagrant disregard” for students, faculty and staff, subjecting them to “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic actions and statements.”

The complaint said she has violated the university’s nondiscrimination policies and “standards of professional competence.”

The article goes on to cite the many times that Professor Wax has offended women, Blacks, gays, foreign students, or anyone else who does not agree with her idyllic view of the culture of the 1950s. Implicitly she means an era when Blacks were subservient, women were compliant wives, gays were in the closet, and foreigners were tourists.

What should the university do?

…many free speech groups, including the Academic Freedom Alliance, PEN America and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, have criticized the dean and said that Professor Wax should not be fired because of her public statements.

My view: She should not be fired. Perhaps she should be admonished for behavior that is insulting to students, but her academic freedom and tenure protect her job.

Academic freedom protects not just the views that one likes, not just the views of the majority, but the views you hate. I might wish that Professor Wax were open-minded and wish that she had a keener sense of humanity, but I defend her right to be offensive, inconsiderate, and obnoxious. Students are not required to take her courses. Those who take her courses should challenge her views if they disagree.

But academic freedom must prevail.

Voltaire: “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Freedom of Speech, Higher Education, Language, Pennsylvania
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