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Iowa Dismantles Child Labor Laws, with 14 Other States

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2023 //
13

Iowa recently enacted legislation that rolls back the clock on child labor laws. The Economic Policy Institute reports on the Republican-led effort to put young children to work in hazardous industries, which conflicts with federal law.

What a disgrace these laws are! Are the red states lowering the age of employment because they don’t have enough immigrants to take these jobs? Are they ready to sacrifice the well-being of their children to keep immigrants out? All of the jobs opening for children under 18 appear to be the kind that are usually filled by minimum-wage adult workers.

EPI writes:

Last Friday, this concerted attack on child labor safeguards further expanded. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed an expansive bill enacting numerous changes to the state’s child labor laws, including:

  • allowing employers to hire teens as young as 14 for previously prohibited hazardous jobs in industrial laundries or as young as 15 in light assembly work;
  • allowing state agencies to waive restrictions on hazardous work for 16–17-year-olds in a long list of dangerous occupations, including demolition, roofing, excavation, and power-driven machine operation;
  • extending hours to allow teens as young as 14 to work six-hour nightly shifts during the school year;
  • allowing restaurants to have teens as young as 16 serve alcohol; and
  • limiting state agencies’ ability to impose penalties for future employer violations.

Multiple provisions in the new state law conflict with federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) prohibitions on “oppressive child labor”involving hazardous conditions or excessive hours that interfere with teens’ schooling or health and well-being.

In Arkansas, Governor Sarah Sanders signed a law in March that eliminated youth work permits. Under the law, 14- and 15-year-olds will no longer need an employment certificate from the state Division of Labor verifying proof of their age and parental consent to work.

At a moment when exploitative child labor is on the rise, such changes are dangerous, removing an important paper trail intended to provide “proof that the companies that hire children at least acknowledge—in writing—that they’re following the law.”

In intervening weeks, the U.S. Department of Labor has cited employers for hundreds more serious child labor violations, while additional state legislatures have advanced proposals to weaken child labor standards…

Iowa’s extreme new child labor law violates federal prohibitions on hazardous occupations and excessive work hours

Iowa labor unions and their allies organized significant opposition to weakening the state’s child labor laws, compelling lawmakers to remove some of the original bill’s most egregious proposals—including language allowing teens to work in some areas of meatpacking plants and granting employers blanket immunity from liability for deaths or injuries caused by negligence while employing teens in “work-based learning programs.”

Yet even after several amendments, the final bill(passed with only Republican support) remains one of the most dangerous rollbacks of child labor protections in decades.

Many aspects of the newly enacted Iowa law contradict federal child labor law. In a May 10 letter to Iowa lawmakers, U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda and Wage and Hour Division Principal Deputy Administrator Jessica Looman clarify that “the FLSA establishes federal standards with respect to child labor, and states cannot nullify federal requirements by enacting less protective standards.”

Because most employment situations are covered by the FLSA, employers who follow weaker new state rules in Iowa will be violating federal child labor law. Enforcing federal standards that the state no longer maintains will, however, now be solely up to the federal government.

In their letter, Nanda and Looman report that “the Department currently has over 600 child labor investigations underway nationwide, including in Iowa” and detail the ways in which Iowa’s proposed bill (most of which has now been enacted) contradicts prohibitions on hazardous work or excessive work hours considered “oppressive” forms of child labor under federal law.

Federal law generally prohibits the employment of children in hazardous occupations. The new Iowa law allows several forms of hazardous child labor that are expressly prohibited under DOL regulations on work permitted for 14–15-year-olds or are banned for all youth under 18 under “Hazardous Occupations Orders” (HOs). These are specific types of work the DOL prohibits based on National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health findings that certain jobs have proven particularly dangerous for teens.

The article lists the details of the Iowa law, showing the age at which children as young as 14 are allowed to work in previously forbidden jobs.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Economy, Iowa

Arkansas: Federal Judge Overturns State Law Banning Care for Trans Youth

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2023 //
65

A federal judge in Arkansas tossed out a state law prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The judge ruled that medical decisions should be made not by politicians but by patients, their parents, and their physicians. I don’t know anyone who is transgender, but I’m happy for those who are because personal medical decisions should not be controlled by politicians.

A federal judge in Arkansas on Tuesday struck down the state’s law forbidding medical treatments for children and teenagers seeking gender transitions, blocking what had been the first in a wave of such measures championed by conservative lawmakers across the country.

The case had been closely watched as an important test of whether bans on transition care for minors, which have since been enacted by more than a dozen states, could withstand legal challenges being brought by activists and civil liberties groups.

In his 80-page ruling, Judge James M. Moody Jr. of Federal District Court in Little Rock said the law both discriminated against transgender people and violated constitutional rights for doctors. He also said that the state of Arkansas had failed to substantially prove a number of its claims, including that the care was experimental or carelessly prescribed to teenagers.

“Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing,” Judge Moody wrote.

“Further,” he wrote, “the various claims underlying the state’s arguments that the act protects children and safeguards medical ethics do not explain why only gender-affirming medical care — and all gender-affirming medical care — is singled out for prohibition.”

The challenge to the law, which was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas and named several transgender children and a doctor as plaintiffs, argued that the ban violated transgender people’s constitutional right to equal protection, parents’ rights to make appropriate medical decisions for their children and doctors’ right to refer patients for medical treatments.

Transgender people have been around for many years, as has medical treatment for them. Why now the Republican hysteria about allowing trans people to live as they choose? It’s a diversion from the fact that Republicans have no policies to improve the lives of ordinary people. So, they whip up culture war issues like trans youth, gay marriage, critical race theory, drag queens. Why now indeed.

Categories Arkansas, Bigotry, Cruelty, Freedom, Gender, Health

A Russian Dissident Warns Putin, with a History Lesson

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2023 //
11

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian journalist, author, and dissident who was sentenced to 25 years in jail for speaking out against the war on Ukraine. This article appeared in the Washington Post.

Vladimir Kara-Murza has prepared the following remarks for an upcoming appearance before a Moscow appeals court. In April, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison on treason charges — an accusation based entirely on his public statements about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Throughout this process — first in the Moscow City Court, now here in the Court of Appeal — a very strange feeling has never left me. Judicial procedures, by their nature, must be somehow connected with the law. But everything that has happened to me has nothing to do with the law; if anything, what I have witnessed is precisely the opposite.

“The law — both Russian and international — prohibits the waging of aggressive war. But for more than 15 months, the man who calls himself the president of my country has been waging a brutal, unprovoked, aggressive war against a neighboring country: killing its citizens, bombing its cities, seizing its territories.

“The law — both Russian and international — prohibits attacks on civilians and civilian targets. But during the 15 months of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and wounded, and thousands of hospitals, schools and houses have been destroyed.
The law — both Russian and international — prohibits propaganda for war. But war propaganda is all I hear from morning to night on the television that plays in my prison cell.


“Today in our country, it is not those who are waging this criminal war but those who oppose it who face judgment: Journalists who tell the truth. Artists who put up antiwar stickers. Priests who invoke the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Teachers who call a spade a spade. Parents whose children draw antiwar pictures. Lawmakers who allow themselves to doubt the appropriateness of children’s competitions when children are being killed in a neighboring country.

“Or, as in my case, politicians who openly speak out against this war and against this regime. I received a sentence of 25 years for five public appearances. As the head of my guards in Moscow City Court sarcastically joked: “Impressive work.”

“All this has happened before in our country. In 1968, participants in a demonstration on Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia were sentenced to camps and internal exile, and in 1980, [Andrei] Sakharov was exiled to the closed city of Gorky for speaking out against the war in Afghanistan.

“But it was only a few years later that a Russian president [Boris Yeltsin], on a visit to Prague, condemned that occupation and laid flowers at the memorial to its victims, and the highest legislative body of our country declared that the war in Afghanistan deserved moral and political condemnation. The same will happen with the current war in Ukraine, and it will happen much sooner than it may seem to those who unleashed it. That is because, in addition to legal laws, there are laws of history, and no one has yet been able to cancel them.

“And then the real criminals will be judged — including those whose arrest warrants have already been issued by the International Criminal Court. As you know, war crimes have no statute of limitations. I have some advice for all of those who organized my and other show trials against opponents of the war by trying to present opponents of the authorities as “traitors to the Motherland,” for all of those who are so nostalgic for the Soviet system: Remember how it ended. All systems based on lies and violence end the same way.”

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, International

Nora de La Cour: It’s Long Past Time to End the Tyranny of High-Stakes Testing!

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2023 //
104

Nora de la Cour writes in Jacobin about the damage done to children by our politicians’ obsession with high-stakes standardized testing. They do not test what was taught; they encourage teaching to the tests; the results come back too late to be helpful; they distort teaching and learning.

Nora de la Cour writes:

When I taught at an alternative public school for kids with exceptional social-emotional, behavioral, and learning needs, one of my students — I’ll call him Dante — got As in every class he took. School staff would frequently elevate Dante’s extraordinary focus and commitment as an example for his peers.

In the spring of Dante’s senior year, his counselor informed him he’d earned the status of valedictorian. His beaming smile of pride after hearing the news affirmed everything I love about public education. When his mother found out, she burst into tears of joy.

Then, abruptly, we were informed that there had been a mistake. Because Dante’s exceptional learning needs made it impossible for him to pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) — the standardized tests that Massachusetts requires high school students to pass prior to graduation — he would not receive a diploma. Without a diploma, he couldn’t be valedictorian — even though, according to his grades and the unanimous judgment of his teachers, he clearly deserved the honor. A wave of incredulity rippled through the staff as we tried to resign ourselves to this obviously cruel, unfair reality. For Dante, the news was devastating.

Even before the “giant federal wrecking ball” (to borrow leading education policy analyst Diane Ravitch’s phrasing) known as education reform, evidence from diverse fields had demonstrated a scientific concept known as Campbell’s Law: the more we base social decision-making on a specific quantitative measure, the more likely it is that that measure will become distorted, ultimately corrupting the processes it’s intended to monitor.

Just so, in the two decades since Congress reauthorized the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), researchers have collected a mountain of data showing that in the long run, attaching high-stakes, or punishments, to student standardized test scores does not improve educational outcomes. Instead, it results in a host ofperverse consequences, with poor, minority, and disabled kids like Dante experiencing the greatest harms. This last point makes a lot of sense when you consider that standardized testing was first developed by eugenicists looking to organize people into racist taxonomies based on perceived ability.

But despite these serious problems — and the persistent, bipartisan unpopularity of the high-stakes testing regime inaugurated by NCLB — our current, Obama-era iteration of the ESEA (the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA) still requires states to impose inappropriate test-based accountability on students and school communities.

When we sort children into “proficient” and “failing” categories based on test scores, we’re not solving the opportunity gaps that show up in public education; we’re creating new ones. No one is helped, and many people are hurt, when we give students, teachers, and schools an impossible assignment and then sanction them for failing to complete it. Looking forward to the ESEA’s now overdue reauthorization, it’s high time we built accountability systems that nurture the humanity and potential of all kids — rather than placing artificial roadblocks in their way.

Please open the link and read the article in full. FYI, in addition to referring to NCLB as a “giant wrecking ball,” I have also called it the “Death Star of American education.” If left without modifications, it would have caused the closure of almost every school in the nation. No national legisislature ever passed such a dumb law.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP Wants to Turn Back the Clock to 1931

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2023 //
96

Historian Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly contrasts the views of Republicans and Democrats on the role of government. Republicans want it to be as minimal as possible. Democrats want it to use its powers and resources to improve people’s lives. Understanding this difference helps illuminate why Republicans want to get rid of public schools and why billionaires like Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos support vouchers and libertarianism in a society where everyone is on their own.

Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government.

I’m actually not going to rehash the 122-page plan. Let’s take a look at the larger picture.

This budget dismisses the plans of “President Joe Biden and the left” as a “march toward socialism.” It says that “[t]he left’s calls to increase taxes to close the deficit would be…catastrophic for our nation.” Asserting that “the path to prosperity does not come from the Democrats’ approach of expanding government,” it claims that “[o]ver the past year and a half, the American people have seen that experiment fail firsthand.”

Instead, it says, “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “[i]ndividuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government.” 

It is?

Our history actually tells us how these two contrasting visions of the government play out.

Grover Norquist, one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”

Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross national product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States. 

The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity. 

When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people. 

The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism. 

That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, a high from which it is still coming down), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.

So why is there a growing debt?

Because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations. 

Republicans who backed those tax cuts now insist that the only way to deal with the growing debt is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent. 

“There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his acceptance speech. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”

When the Republican Study Committee calls Biden’s policies—which have led to record employment, a booming economy, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor— “leftist,” they have lost the thread of our history. The system that restored the nation after 1933 and held the nation stable until 1981 is not socialism or radicalism; it is one of the strongest parts of our American tradition.

—

Notes:

Click to access rsc_2023_budget_final_version.pdf

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/11/18/nbsp-government-percent-fm/
https://www.fdrlibrary.org/great-depression-facts
https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/academics/research/faculty-research/new-deal/roosevelt-speeches/fr070232.htm
Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/
https://rollcall.com/2023/06/14/conservatives-budget-plan-renews-battle-over-seniors-benefits/
Categories Biden, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Economy, Education Industry, Elections, For-Profit, Freedom, Guns, History, Hope, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Koch Brothers, Pensions, Propaganda, Racism, Segregation, U.S. education, Unions, Vouchers

Indiana Republicans Say That School Libraries Are “Loaded” with Pornography

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2023 //
73

One of our readers in Indiana noted the paradox that Illinois has banned the banning of books while Indiana Republicans are welcoming any parent or ne’er-do-well to complain about a book and get it removed from school libraries.

Indiana’s Republican-controlled General Assembly decreed this year in House Enrolled Act 1447 that every public school board and charter school governing body must establish a procedure for the parent of any student, or any person residing in the school district, to request the removal of library materials deemed “obscene” or “harmful to minors.”

The procedure may provide for an intermediate response by school personnel to a request to remove a library book, but it must include the school board reviewing, and possibly implementing, each removal request at its next public meeting.

The new law followed claims by Hoosier Republicans that Indiana school libraries are secretly loaded with books containing pornography and other content inappropriate for children.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom to Read, Indiana, Injustice, Lies, Literacy, Literature

Gavin Newsom Slams Greg Abbott for Ignoring Gun Violence

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2023 //
79

California Governor Gavin Newsom has been blasting away at knuckle-headed Republican governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott for their cruel indifference to other people. He’s already suggested he may sue DeSantis for kidnapping, after Florida sent two private planes with Venezuelan immigrants to Sacramento. Now, he’s going after Abbott for his refusal to take action against gun violence.

He wrote:

Texas… where elected officials are relying on Winnie the Pooh to teach their kids about active shooters because they don’t have the courage to keep our kids safe.

Tweet from Gavin Newsom: 'Winnie the Pooh is now teaching Texas kids about active shooters because the elected officials do not have the courage to keep our kids safe and pass common sense gun safety laws.'

Texas… where Greg Abbott signed a law to send DNA kits to parents of school children so their bodies can be identified after a shooting.

Tweet from Gavin Newsom: 'Greg Abbott’s solution to gun violence? Send DNA kits to schools so parents can identify their kids’ bodies AFTER they’ve been shot and killed.'

Guns are the leading cause of death for kids in America. Kids!

We’re not talking about accidents, or cancer or something unpreventable. We know the steps to take to save our kids lives. But leaders like Greg Abbott lack the courage to act.

Until then… It’s Winnie the Pooh for Texas families.

Gavin Newsom

Categories Accountability, California, Character, Courage, Cruelty, DeSantis, Ethics, Guns, Texas

Was This the Greatest Commencement Speech of 2023?

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2023 //
28

J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois, gave a terrific commencement address at Northwestern University, with a fabulous explanation about how to spot an idiot. He says that idiots are not necessarily stupid. They may be your boss. They may even be elected President.

If you want to see the 20+ minute speech, it’s here.

If you want to see the part where Pritzker explains idiots, state at about 7:50 into the speech.

If you are on Twitter, see it here:

Summary:

“Whenever I’m about to do something, I think ‘Would an idiot do that?’ and if they would, I do not do that thing.” – Dwight Schrute

And what is the best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel.

Categories Character, Cruelty, Ethics, Goodness, Lies

Kathryn Joyce: How Sarasota County Became Florida’s Laboratory for Far-Right Extremism

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2023 //
7

If you read one article today, make it this one.

Kathryn Joyce is an outstanding journalist who has written several excellent articles about the far-right conspiracy to destroy public education. In this important article, published by both the Hechinger Report and Vanity Fair, she examines the rightwing takeover of public schools in Sarasota, Florida, by the extremist Moms for Liberty and their hero Governor DeSantis.

Joyce begins:

SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — On a Sunday afternoon in late May 2022, Zander Moricz, then class president of Sarasota County’s Pine View School, spent the moments before his graduation speech sitting outside the auditorium, on the phone with his lawyers. Over the previous month, the question of what he’d say when he stepped to the podium had become national news. That March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, quickly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on all mention of gender identity and sexuality in K–3 classrooms and restriction of those discussions in higher grades as well. Moricz, a student LGBTQ+ activist, had led several protests against the act that spring and joined a high-profile lawsuit against the state. In early May, he charged on Twitter that Pine View’s administration had warned that if he mentioned his activism or the lawsuit at graduation, his microphone would be cut. (In a statement released last year, the school district confirmed that students are told not to express political views in their speeches.)

In the tumultuous weeks leading up to the ceremony, Pine View — Sarasota’s “gifted” magnet institution, consistently ranked one of the top 25 public high schools in the country — was besieged with angry calls and news coverage. Moricz stayed home for three weeks, he said, thanks to the rvolume of death threats he received, and people showed up at his parents’ work. When a rumor started that Pine View’s principal would have to wear a bulletproof vest to graduation, he recalled, “the entire campus lost their minds,” thinking “everyone’s going to die” and warning relatives not to come. His parents worried he’d be killed.

But after all the controversy, graduation day was a success. Moricz, now 19, delivered a pointedly coded speech about the travails of being born with curly hair in Florida’s humid climate: how he worried about the “thousands of curly-haired kids who are going to be forced to speak like this” — like he was, in code — “for their entire lives as students.” Videos of the speech went viral. Donations poured into Moricz’s youth-led nonprofit. That summer, he left to study government at Harvard.

Half-a-year later though, when Moricz came home, Sarasota felt darker.

“I’m wearing this hat for a reason,” he said when we met for coffee in a strip mall near his alma mater in early March. “Two years ago, if I was bullied due to my queerness, the school would have rallied around me and shut it down. If it happened today, I believe everyone would act like it wasn’t happening.”

These days, he said, queer kids sit in the back of class and don’t tell teachers they’re being harassed. A student at Pine View was told, Moricz said, that he couldn’t finish his senior thesis researching other states’ copycat “Don’t Say Gay” laws. (The school did not respond to a request for comment through a district spokesperson.) When Moricz’s nonprofit found a building to house a new youth LGBTQ+ center — since schools were emphatically no longer safe spaces — they budgeted for bulletproof glass.

“The culture of fear that’s being created is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. And much of it was thanks to the Sarasota County School Board.

Over the last two years, education culture wars have become the engine of Republican politics nationwide, with DeSantis’s Florida serving as the vanguard of the movement. But within the state, Sarasota is more central still.

Its school board chair, Bridget Ziegler, cofounded the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty and helped lay the groundwork for “Don’t Say Gay.” After a uniquely ugly school board race last summer, conservatives flipped the board and promptly forced out the district’s popular superintendent. In early January, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to transform Florida’s progressive New College into a “Hillsdale of the South” — emulating the private Christian college in Michigan that has become a trendsetting force on the right — that was in Sarasota too. In February, DeSantis sat alongside Ziegler’s husband and Moms for Liberty’s other cofounders to announce a list of 14 school board members he intends to help oust in 2024—Sarasota’s sole remaining Democrat and LGBTQ+ board member, Tom Edwards, among them. The next month, Ziegler proposed that the board hire a newly created education consultancy group with ties to Hillsdale College for what she later called a “‘WOKE’ Audit.” (Ziegler did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

The dizzying number of attacks has led to staffing and hiring challenges, the cancelation of a class, a budding exodus of liberals from the county, and fears that destroying public education is the ultimate endgame. In January, Ziegler’s husband, Christian — who chairs the Florida Republican Party — tweeted a celebratory declaration: “SARASOTA IS GROUND ZERO FOR CONSERVATIVE EDUCATION.”

It wasn’t hyperbole, said Moricz. “We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.”

For as long as Florida has been grading schools and school districts — a late 1990s innovation that helped spark the “school reform” movement — Sarasota, with its 62 schools and nearly 43,000 students, has enjoyed an “A” rating. Perched on the Gulf Coast just south of Tampa, the county’s mix of powder-soft beaches and high-culture amenities — including an opera house, ballet and museums — have made it a destination for vacationers and retirees. And that influx has made Sarasota one of the richest counties in the state.

Since many of those retirees, dating back to the 1950s, have been white Midwestern transplants, it’s also made Sarasota a Republican stronghold and top fundraising destination for would-be presidential candidates. Both the last and current chairs of the state GOP — first State Senator Joe Gruters and now Christian Ziegler — live in the county. Sarasota arguably launched Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, thanks to Gruters’s early support. These days, though, Sarasota isn’t just conservative, but at the leading edge of Florida’s turn to the hard right.

Partly that’s thanks to the Zieglers, who have become one of Florida’s premier power couples, with close ties to both Trump world and the DeSantis administration and a trio of daughters enrolled in local private schools. As founder of the digital marketing company Microtargeted Media, Christian did hundreds of thousands of dollars of work for pro-Trump PACs in 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. After being elected state GOP chair this February, he announced his goal was “to crush these leftist in-state Democrats” so thoroughly that “no Democrat considers running for office.” Although Bridget stepped down from Moms for Liberty shortly after its founding, she subsequently helped draftFlorida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which helped pave the way for DeSantis’s 2021 ban on mask mandates and ultimately last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. In 2022, the right-wing Leadership Institute hired her as director of school board programs, and built a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Sarasota to serve as a national hub for conservative education activism. This winter, DeSantis also appointed her to a new board designed to punish the Disney Company for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ laws….

Last year, when Ziegler was up for reelection and two other board members were terming out, she ran as a unified slate with former school resource officer Tim Enos and retired district employee Robyn Marinelli. The candidates drew support from both DeSantis’s administration — which unprecedentedly endorseddozens of school board candidates across the state — and local members of the far-right. A PAC partially funded by The Hollow’s owner campaigned for the “ZEM” slate (a shorthand for the candidates’ surnames) by driving a mobile billboard around the county, calling one of their opponents a “LIAR” and “BABY KILLER” because she’d once worked for Planned Parenthood. Proud Boys hoisted ZEM signs on county streets and a mailer was sent out, castigating the liberal candidates as “BLM/PSL [Party of Socialism and Liberation]/ANTIFA RIOTERS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD BABY KILLERS, [who] WANT GROOMING AND PORNOGRAPHY IN OUR SCHOOLS.” (Enos and Marinelli did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

Open the link and read all of the article. It is a devastating article about the takeover of the school board by hateful extremists whose tools are fear and divisiveness.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Gender, Injustice, Lies, Parent Groups, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Safety, Shame, Students

Jeff Bryant: Why Did the Traitor Teacher Switch Parties in North Carolina?

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2023 //
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Jeff Bryant writes often about education. He lives in North Carolina. In this article, he tries to solve the mystery of why Democratic state legislator Tricia Cotham switched sides and joined the Republican Party, giving them a supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly?

Cotham was a Democrat who had campaigned in promises to oppose school vouchers; to defend LGBT rights; and support abortion rights.

Once she gave the Republicans the decisive vote in the lower house, the Republicans had a veto-proof majority and were in a position to override any veto by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.

Cotham, the new Republican, reversed her vote on everything she campaigned for or against. She supported Republicans’ efforts to reduce abortion rights; she endorsed school vouchers; and she sided with Republicans in their attack on trans youth.

In other words, she betrayed the people who voted for her and cast her lot with the hard-right Republicans who have aligned themselves with anti-progressive, anti-liberal, anti-Democrat policies.

Why? She said the Democrats were mean to her. She said they ignored her. She said she didn’t get the committee assignments she wanted. Are these good reasons to join forces with a party that has sought to destroy public education, demoralize teachers, and gerrymander the state to protect its advantages?

None of this made sense. A person doesn’t change their fundamental values because of hurt feelings.

Jeff investigated and determined that her decision was transactional. What did she get in exchange for double-crossing her constituents and her colleagues? Read his article to find out.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Gender, Hypocrisy, Inequity, Lies, North Carolina, Privatization, Republicans, Teachers, Vouchers
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