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The Hartman Report: Please Don’t Lie to Students!

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
14

Greg Palast wrote a guest column for Thom Hartmann about the mendacity of “divisive concepts” laws, which require teachers to lie or suppress the truth, because the truth night make someone uncomfortable. Let’s all be happy by imbibing a steady diet of lies!

Palast writes here:

A Sunday special editorial by my good friend Greg Palast for The Hartmann Report.  Catch Palast this week on Thom.TV

Do you know about Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 13950?  If you don’t, be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Just weeks before he was fired by America’s voters in 2020, President Trump issued this piece of nastiness which was quickly rescinded by just-inaugurated President Biden.

The Executive Order is a “DCL,” what the right-wing brilliantly calls a, “Divisive Concepts Law.”   These DCL’s terrorize teachers with the threat of losing their jobs if they dare teach the truth of America’s racial history:  That white people enslaved Africans, that the Klan enforced racial vote suppression with the hanging rope.  And God forbid, they teach that women were banned from the vote until the 20th Century.  The Executive Order bans teaching  any historical facts if, 

“….any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex….”

As a practical matter, it means teaching the truth of America’s racial stain will get you fired.   In 2021, Tennessee high school teacher Matt Hawn lost his job because a student accused him of teaching—cover your children’s ears—“Critical Race Theory.”  Hawn said he’d never heard of Critical Race Theory when he was canned.

(Critical Race Theory, taught in law schools, says many of America’s laws and their enforcement, contain a racial bias.  Well, D’oh!].

On Thursday, Vice-President Harris told the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston, epicenter of the anti-CRT hysteria,

“While you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history; including book bans! Book bans — in this year 2024!  Just think about it: we want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books.”  

It was a century ago, that Tennessee was the laughingstock of the nation for prosecuting a schoolteacher for telling his class about human evolution, a story recounted in the film, Inherit the Wind.   Now, a hundred years later, Trumpsters are again passing wind over Tennessee.

And he’s baaaaack!  Trump has put his fixation with censoring “divisive concepts” into the GOP platform.  Details are provided in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 master plan for the master race. 

Ill wind out of Georgia

This ill wind originated in Georgia when Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB1084, threatening the jobs of  teachers fot teaching ‘divisive concepts’ that could make a white child feel “discomfort.”

Who would feel “discomfort” about the uncensored history of Georgia? Well, maybe it’s Gov. Kemp himself.  Because it was the Kemp family, then known as the Habershams, that first brought Africans in chains to Georgia.

Maybe Kemp and family should feel a bit of discomfort.  I spoke with Janie Banse, who told me she is she is heartsick that her cousin, Gov. Kemp, won’t admit that their family’s wealth originated in the African slave trade.  Kemp’s ancestors held the largest auction of human beings in American history, still remembered by Black Georgians today as “Weeping Time,” when 436 men, women and their children were separated and sold.

Georgia’s HB 1084, passed in 2022, 

Prohibit[s] the use of curricula that addresses the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination, including topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in racial oppression, segregation, and discrimination in a professionally and academically appropriate manner and without espousing personal political beliefs;

And what if a teacher expresses a personal distaste for slavery?
Since Georgia was among the first to pass a “DCL,” and at least 16 states have followed.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbed his DCL the “Stop WOKE Act.”

He banned the College Board’s AP African American Studies course and supported new Black history standards that include the requirement to teach, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

I can’t make this up.

Since 2021, at least 27 states have imposed or proposed bans or restrictions on teaching topics related to race and gender. Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona and Oklahoma all passed these Divisive Concepts laws.  What do these states have in common?  According to rankings by US News and World Report, they are all in the nation’s bottom third in educational achievement.  Apparently, they won’t teach uncensored history—but then, it’s not clear that they teach much history at all.

Killing Killers

Trump’s DLC brigade is not just putting a blindfold over students regarding slavery and Jim Crow.  Oklahoma’s Divisive Concepts Law has effectively silenced the true story of the state that was once known officially as, “Indian Territory.”

Jim Gray, former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, told me that teachers throughout the state have been yanking copies of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon off their classroom shelves.  Killers, on which the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio movie is based, tells the true story about how, in the 1920s, over 100 Oklahoma Osage were murdered for their oil rights.

The insidious brilliance of the Oklahoma law is that it has a fuzzy general prohibition on “divisive” concepts—with teachers facing loss of their teaching credentials and the entire school district losing funding.  Because teachers have to guess which books or films will get them fired, the result is mass self-censorship, with Killersculled from classrooms across the state.

A RAND corporation study found that a breathtaking two out of three K-12 teachers, “have decided on their own to limit instruction about political and social issues in the classroom.”  Can you blame them?

Any student or parent can put a legal gun to a school principal’s head.  But when the law says, “students,” as a practical matter, they don’t mean young kids on the Reservation.  Every year, on April 22, Oklahoma celebrates “Sooner Rush Day”, the day in 1889, when any white man could simply stand on a plot of land and seize the surrounding 160 acres of what was, by treaty, Indian Territory.  Indigenous kids have to re-enact the theft of their property whether they feel discomfort or not.

I have included this story of the Sooner Rush land grab in my documentary, Long Knife: the Osage Nation, Koch Oil and the new Killers of the Flower Moon.  And for that alone, says Chief Gray, the chance it will screen in an Oklahoma school, even a state university, is zilch.

But some states are not shy about creating Black Lists of books to ban.  Assigning anti-racist classics Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, could kill a teacher’s career.  PEN America counted 3,132 books banned in nine states in the 2022-23 school year.
 

Evicted from the Historical Society

Cui Bono? Who benefits from historical amnesia?  Kemp alone was not the only white boy to make his fortune from a slaver’s whip.  Historic amnesia is a profit center covering many historic misdeeds from Jim Crow to union busting to corporate corruption.

I found this out when I was physically ejected from the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah.  I was having a polite interview with the Society’s in-house historian, Dr. Stan Deaton, who was explaining that the Klan took over control of the South when, in 1876, Republicans lost both the popular vote and the Electoral vote—yet a pact between the Klan-backed Southern Democrats and northern Republicans used a sly maneuver to overturn the vote and install the GOP candidate as President.  It came down to one official, Dr. Deaton noted, then added, “We saw Mike Pence in that situation recently.”

The second the historian uttered the words, “Mike Pence,” the door flew open and the Society’s PR man halted the interview and expelled me from the building, saying, “We have to protect the new corporate donors on our board.”

I was curious.  Who were these “donors” needing protection from history?  I found their gala dinner on YouTube with their tuxedoed corporate money men:  Georgia Pacific (owned by Koch Industries), Home Depot (owned by right-wing union buster Ken Langone), and Southern Company, whom I investigated some years ago for racketeering and the inexplicable death of whistleblowers.  And the Chairman of the Historical Society?  Gov. Brian Kemp.

The Occupation

Just below Savannah, at the Kemp family’s old plantation, I spoke with caretaker and Councilman Griffin Lotson whose own great-grandmother was sold at Weeping Time by Kemp’s progenitors.

Lotson emphasizes the connection between this legally enforced historical amnesia and the fight for voting rights. He says,  “Suppressing history is suppressing the vote.” 

Back in Oklahoma, the current Principal Chief of the Osage, Geoffrey Standing Bear, explained that if Oklahoma were to admit that its “Sooner Rush” was simply theft from the indigenous owners of the land, then it would force open eyes to what he calls, the “military occupation [of Native land] that continues today.”

Napoleon famously said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Trump’s DCL crusade sees history as a set of truths silenced

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Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, History, Lies

John Thompson: Ryan Walters Appoints Extremists to Revise Oklahoma Social Studies Curriculum

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2024 //
5

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, brings us up to date with the latest shenanigans of Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters. Recently, he mandated that the Bible be taught in the state’s classrooms. Now Walters has appointed a list of rightwing luminaries to rewrite the state’s social studies curriculum. Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, Walters proves that it can.

John Thompson writes:

KOSU’s Beth Wallace reports that the Executive Review Committee assembled by Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters features prominent conservatives, including Dennis Prager of PragerU, David Barton of the Christian Nationalist organization, Wallbuilders, and the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts.” She then reminds readers that, “The Heritage Foundation is the think tank behind Project 2025, a movement that proposes to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.”

More information was provided to NBC’s Tyler Kingkade and Marissa Parra during their interview with Walters about his plans for transforming school curriculums. They reported that “Oklahoma educators who refuse to teach students about the Bible could lose their teaching license.” Ryan Walters said that those teachers would “face the same consequences as one who refuses to teach about the Civil War. The punishment could include revocation of their teaching license.” 

Moreover, Walters expressed confidence “that his order will survive legal challenges because of the Justices then-President Donald Trump appointed to the Supreme Court.” And if Trump is elected, “it will help us move the ball forward, even more so than this.”

Until recently, Dennis Prager was the best known rightwinger selected for Walters’ committee. The Hill’s Lexi Lonas explained that Prager’s so-called education group “focused on teaching conservative principles. The conservative platform has been made its way into multiple states, with videos such as ‘Was the Civil War About Slavery?’ and ‘The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party.’”

National Public Radio’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty referred to another committee member, David Barton, in a very different way, as “the most important Evangelist You’ve Never Heard Of.” Hagerty explained that Barton collected 100,000 documents and, “He says they prove that the Founding Fathers were deeply religious men who built America on Christian ideas — something you never learn in school.” Barton argued that the Constitution isn’t a secular document because it “is laced with biblical quotations.” 

However, NPR “looked up every citation Barton said was from the Bible, but not one of them checked out.” The Constitution had “no mention of God or religion except to prohibit a religious test for office.” Then Hagerty quoted, “John Fea, chairman of the history department at evangelical Messiah College,” who said, “Barton is peddling a distorted history that appeals to conservative believers.”

Hagerty also fact-checked Barton’s claim that President Thomas Jefferson “who owned nearly 200 slaves — was a civil rights visionary,” and he had plans that “would’ve ended slavery really early on,” and “they would have gone much more toward civil rights.” Barton said that Virginia law “prohibited Jefferson from freeing his slaves during his lifetime.” When that statement was shown to be false, Barton said that, “Jefferson could not afford to free his slaves.”

So, David Barton and Dennis Prager clearly aren’t qualified to recommend history curriculums, but the most dangerous member of the committee is Kevin Roberts, who is a driving force in the Christian Nationalist Project 2025, which is a detailed game plan for a Trump administration for dismantling the federal government’s administrative institutions. It seems obvious that his goal for the Oklahoma Executive Review Committee is to dismantle public education.

The Washington Post reports that Roberts recently said of Project 2025, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts told the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro that “he views Heritage’s role today as ‘institutionalizing Trumpism.’” Garcia-Navarro said that Project 2025 was:

A transition blueprint that outlines a plan to consolidate power in the executive branch, dismantle federal agencies and recruit and vet government employees to free the next Republican president from a system that Roberts views as stacked against conservative power.

Roberts has praised Hungary’s authoritarian, Christian Nationalist Viktor Orban, adding that “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” He’s also said that he wants to “destroy the administrative state,” and defeat “the secret Communist movement in America.” 

And since he is serving on Walters’ committee for rewriting history, it is noteworthy that Roberts said that Joe McCarthy “largely got things right.”

When asked if he believes that President Biden won the 2020 election, Roberts replied, “No.”

And that brings us to the reason why Rex Huppke writes in the Oklahoman:

Project 2025 is a governing blueprint designed by a collection of former Trump administration officials who seem to have looked at Hitler’s path to power in 1930s Germany and thought, ‘Cool!’

Huppke refers to Project 2025, as “a painstakingly detailed and hellishly authoritarian plan for a second Trump presidency.” He notes that “according to The Heritage Foundation itself,” Trump “embraced nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations.”

I would just add that the leader of Project 2025, and his allies, clearly see Ryan Walters’ Executive Review Committee as one part of their plan.

Categories Accountability, Civics, Curriculum, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, History, Oklahoma, Republicans, Trump

Breaking News! Oklahoma Supreme Court Rejects Religious Charter School!

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2024 //
25

Good news! The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against public funding for a religious charter school. Many were watching closely to see how the court ruled. A decision that went the other way would have rebuffed the tradition of separation of church and state and erased the distinction between charters and vouchers. The fact that Oklahoma’s ultra-conservative Governor Kevin Stitt and its State Commissioner of Education Ryan Walters strongly supported the religious charter school idea makes the decision even more startling.

CNN reports:

An effort to establish the first publicly funded religious charter school in the country has been blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

The court Tuesday ordered the state to rescind its contract with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in a 6-2 decision with one recusal.

“Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school,” wrote Justice James R. Winchester for the court. “As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian. However, St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State.”

A charter contract for St. Isidore was approved by a state board last year.

Charter schools in Oklahoma are privately owned but receive state funding under the same guidelines as government-operated public schools.

The fight over the school exposed a fault line between two of the state’s top Republican politicians. Gov. Kevin Stitt strongly advocated for the school, saying when the contract was approved that it was “a win for religious liberty and education freedom in our state.”

But the school’s charter status was strongly opposed by Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who filed the lawsuit against it and predicted the state could be forced to fund other types of religious education if St. Isidore succeeded.

“The framers of the US Constitution and those who drafted Oklahoma’s Constitution clearly understood how best to protect religious freedom: by preventing the State from sponsoring any religion at all,” Drummond said in a statement Tuesday. “Now Oklahomans can be assured that our tax dollars will not fund the teachings of Sharia Law or even Satanism.”

PLEASE OPEN THE LINK TO FINISH THE STORY.

[Thanks to reader FLERP for alerting us to this story.]

Categories Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Religion, Separation of church and state

Texas: School District Votes to Delete Textbook Chapters on Climate Change, Cultural Diversity, Vaccines

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2024 //
37

The school board of the Cypress-Fairbanks district (Cy-Fair) in Texas voted to delete chapters they didn’t like from textbooks in science. Science teachers in the district were taken aback.

Cy-Fair is located in the Houston suburbs and is one of the largest districts in the state.

Elizabeth Sander of The Houston Chronicle wrote:

The former science coordinator at Cypress-Fairbanks ISD was “appalled” as she watched the conservative stronghold on the school board vote to remove 13 chapters from science, health and education textbooks last month, scrapping in just minutes countless hours of work done by both state and local textbook review committees.

“Chapters are not independent entities. They’re put in an order purposefully, and they build off of prior knowledge, and they reference information in prior areas,” said Debra Hill, who has 40 years of experience in science education. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to take off the chapter on adding and subtracting, and we’ll just skip ahead to multiplication.’”

The material that was deleted will be covered by state tests.

One Cy Falls High School teacher, who served on the review committee for the earth systems course materials, has filed a grievance with the board that will be discussed at Thursday’s board workshop, according to information shared on social media by Trustee Julie Hinaman, the lone opposing vote on removing the chapters. Critics question whether students will get all the information the state intends — and will test for — in a last-minute effort to replace the materials. 

The earth science textbook had three entire chapters removed, titled, “Earth Systems and Cycles,” “Mineral and Energy Resources” and “Climate and Climate Change.”

Other content removed from the textbooks included chapters on cultural diversity, vaccines, COVID-19 and climate change. Courses impacted include education, health science, biology and environmental science.

Cy-Fair ISD’s Chief Academic Officer Linda Macias assured board members when they made the vote in May that it would be possible for their curriculum staff to make these changes, even as the staff has been slashed in budget cuts for the 2024-2025 school year. 

But Hill isn’t so sure it will actually be possible for Cy-Fair teachers to teach the required Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills next year, she said. 

Creating a new curriculum is hard enough, and the district must also provide students with materials that pertain to every single science TEK, she said. Cy-Fair’s curriculum staff and other educators may be responsible for creating their own textbook pages to replace the ones that were deleted, a process that could take countless hours outside of instruction that could drive teachers from the profession altogether, she said.

Plus, Hill hasn’t seen any clarity on who would approve the new instructional materials. The board could theoretically reject new chapters created by the district if it included too much of the type of climate change material that the deleted textbook chapters covered, Hill worried.

“If you want to drive teachers out of education, this is what you should do to them,” she said. “I am just very afraid that students are not going to get access to accurate, TEKS-aligned content.”

Last month, the school board voted to eliminate discussions of vaccines and other topics, while cutting the budget and eliminating 600 positions.

More than a dozen chapters including content on vaccines, cultural diversity, climate change, depopulation and other topics deemed controversial by conservative Cypress-Fairbanks ISD trustees will be removed from textbooks in the state’s third largest school system for the 2024-2025 school year.

Trustees voted 6-1 late Monday to omit the material, after an hourslong discussion about a $138 million budget deficit that is forcing the district to eliminate 600 positions, including 42 curriculum coaches, dozens of librarians and 278 teaching positions.

What were the school board members thinking? Did they think if you don’t teach about climate change, it doesn’t exist?

Who will remove the chapters? Will the publisher? Will teachers cut them out of the textbooks? Will they paste the pages together?

A big thank-you to Trustee Julie Hinaman, who believes in education, not censorship or indoctrination.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Environment, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, History, Ignorance, Stupid, Texas

BREAKING NEWS: Federal Judge in New Hampshire Strikes Down “Divisive Concepts” Law

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2024 //
7

Good news in New Hampshire! Federal Judge Paul Barbadoro threw out the state’s “divisive concepts” law, which banned the teaching of anything that might be “divisive.” The same kind of law has been used in other states to ban the teaching of historical facts and literature about Blacks and gays. The judge declared it was too vague to be Constitutional and created confusion about what was and was not allowed in the classroom. In an ironic twist, the law that censors teaching and curriculum is titled “The Law Against Discrimination.”

Nancy West of InDepthNH.com wrote about the decision, which certainly must have upset State Commissioner Frank Edelblut and Governor Chris Sununu, as well as the state’s busybody Moms for Liberty.

West writes:

CONCORD – A federal judge on Tuesday struck down the state’s controversial ‘divisive concepts’ law, which had its roots in an executive order by former President Trump, that limited how teachers can discuss issues such as race, sexual orientation and gender identity with students.

The law, passed in a budget rider in 2021, created a chilling atmosphere in classrooms around the state with teachers unsure of what they could discuss about those issues without fear of being suspended or even banned from teaching altogether in the state.

The four banned concepts include:  That one’s age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, or color is inherently superior or inferior; that an individual, by virtue of age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; that an individual should be discriminated against  because of his or her age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color; and that people of one age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…cannot and should not attempt to treat others without regard to age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…., according to the judge’s ruling.

In New Hampshire it’s called the Law Against Discrimination and makes it unlawful for a public employer to “teach, advocate, instruct, or train” the banned concepts to “any employee, student, service recipient, contractor, staff member, inmate, or any other individual or group.”

U.S. District Court Judge Paul Barbadoro ruled the law is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment because it is too vague.

In the suit filed against Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and the Department of Education by the National Education Association of New Hampshire and the American Federation of Teachers of New Hampshire, Barbadoro sided with the teachers and granted their motion for summary judgment.

  “The Amendments are viewpoint-based restrictions on speech that do not provide either fair warning to educators of what they prohibit or sufficient standards for law enforcement to prevent arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement. Thus, the Amendments violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Barbadoro wrote…

The controversy escalated after Edelblut posted a page of the Department of Education website to file complaints against teachers for allegedly discriminating and a group called Moms for Liberty offered a $500 reward “for the person that first successfully catches a public school teacher breaking this law.”

Barbadoro wrote: “RSA § 193:40, IV provides that a “[v]iolation of this section by an educator shall be considered a violation of the educator code of conduct that justifies disciplinary sanction by the state board of education.

“An ‘educator’ is defined as ‘a professional employee of any school district whose position requires certification by the state board [of education].’ RSA § 193:40, V. Potential disciplinary sanctions include reprimand, suspension, and revocation of the educator’s certification.

“In other words, an educator who is found to have taught or advocated a banned concept may lose not only his or her job, but also the ability to teach anywhere in the state,” Barbadoro wrote…

Barbadoro was critical of Edelblut’s two op-ed pieces in the New Hampshire Union Leader.

“Despite the fact that the articles offer minimal interpretive guidance, Department of Education officials have referred educators to them as a reference point. For example, after showing two music videos to her class as part of a unit on the Harlem Renaissance, Alison O’Brien, a social studies teacher at Windham High School, was called into a meeting with her principal and informed that she was being investigated by the Department of Education in response to a parent’s complaint.

“Department of Education Investigator Richard Farrell recommended that Windham’s administrators consult Edelblut’s April 2022 opinion article to understand the context of the investigation against O’Brien, without otherwise explaining why O’Brien’s lesson warranted investigation. After witnessing her experience, O’Brien’s colleagues grew anxious about facing similar actions,” Barbadoro wrote.

What did she do wrong? She doesn’t know.

Edelblut, the state’s top education official, homeschooled his children. He was appointed by Governor Sununu. The governor likes to pretend he is a Republican moderate. Don’t be fooled.

Judge Barbadoro was appointed by President George H.W. Bush.

Open the link to finish reading the article.

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Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Lies, Literature, New Hampshire

Texas: Book Banning Gets Nuttier, Along with Efforts to Ban DEI in Higher Education

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2024 //
16

When PEN America released its latest national report on book banning, the state with the worst record was Florida. If you hear any bragging about test scores in Florida, think twice. Educated people typically don’t fear books; uneducated people do.

Chris Tomlinson, columnist for The Houston Chronicle, reports that book banning is getting more absurd in Texas. Why do school board members think they can censor ideas and images that are widely available on the Internet? At the same time, the state has barred public universities from administering programs that promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Tomlinson writes:

The Fort Bend Independent School District superintendent would have to ban department store catalogs and National Geographic magazines if the school board goes through with its latest book ban measure.

My colleague Elizabeth Sander reports that school trustees debated giving the superintendent sole authority over library books and textbooks, mandating that none “stimulate sexual desire” among students. 

Have none of them encountered an adolescent? The only books left would center on mathematics; even then, geometry would be iffy.

Fort Bend ISD is not the only public school system in which activists have seized control. Parents are challenging books at Lake Travis ISD, and a citizen panel will review books at Montgomery County public libraries, not librarians.

Nationwide, PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression, this week reported more than 4,000 instances of book banning during the first half of the current school year, more than in the entire previous 2022-23 school year.

Conservative book banners continue to shock and dismay with their absurdity, anti-intellectualism and renunciation of reality. Before there was online porn and young adult books about LGBTQ love, there was Sears Roebuck selling lingerie and National Geographic photographing semi-nude indigenous women.

Book bans don’t stop at nudity and sexuality; extremists are also targeting ideas they don’t like. For example, teachers may not discuss anything that might make a child uncomfortable lest they face a penalty under state law.

If my fourth grade teacher were subject to the same law, she could have lost her job for telling me enslavers brutalized the African Americans they held in bondage, contradicting my grandfather, who taught me our ancestors were “good slaveholders.”

Lately, it seems any state employee who acknowledges racism in our nation’s history or our present will lose their jobs. The University of Texas is cleaning house, firing dozens of educators dedicated to helping people from disadvantaged communities succeed in higher education.

UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell says the ideological purge is necessary to protect the long-term outlook of the institution. His shameful cowardice in the face of fascist bullies will forever mark him as a collaborator, not a hero.

Free speech and decades of progress toward a more honest assessment of who we are and where we come from are under attack. The wannabe oppressors are organized and winning, and yet, too many of us still don’t take the threat to our liberty seriously.

Categories Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Texas

DeSantis Signs Law to Start Teaching About Communism in Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2024 //
60

In Florida, it is never too soon to learn about the dangers of Communism! Governor DeSantis just signed a bill to teach about Communism in schools from K-12.

Some questions:

1) Will students learn about the dangers of Communism or the dangers of dictatorship?

2)Will students learn only about Communism only in Cuba or will they also learn about it in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and elsewhere?

3) Will they learn about the dangers of fascism and study the Nazis and their ideology?

4) Will students learn about dictatorship, whether Communist or fascist, and the ideology and practices they have in common, e.g. censorship of books and public media, suppression of dissent, jailing of dissidents, subservience of the judicial and legal authorities to the dictator, control of what is taught in schools and universities, persecution of ideological enemies, etc.? Assignment of books such as Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm. Will students be allowed to study examples of censorship and suppression in our society?

Ryan Dailey writes in The Orlando Sentinel:

Flanked by veterans who served in the Bay of Pigs invasion, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday signed a measure that will lead to the history of communism being taught from kindergarten to the 12th grade in public schools.


“We’re going to tell the truth about the evils of communism,” DeSantis said at the bill signing in Hialeah Gardens.


State lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the measure (SB 1264) during the 2024 legislative session that ended last month. Under the bill, lessons on the history of communism will be added to required instruction in public schools starting in the 2026-27 school year.


The lessons would have to be “age appropriate and developmentally appropriate” and incorporate various topics related to communism, its history in the United States, including tactics used by communists.

“Atrocities committed in foreign countries under the guidance of communism,” also would be required as part of the lessons.


“All of this will be spread across the curriculum K through 12,” said Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. The Department of Education will draw up academic standards for the lessons.


DeSantis signed the bill on the 63rd anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and was joined at the bill-signing event by people who fought in the invasion in an attempt to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime…

Florida students are already taught about communism in high-school social studies classes and in a seventh-grade civics and government course. A high-school U.S. government class required for graduation also includes 45 minutes of instruction on “Victims of Communism Day.”

Categories Curriculum, DeSantis, Florida

Peter Greene: How to Ease the Burden of Teachers Who Are Overworked

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2024 //
43

Peter Greene was a classroom teacher for 39 years, and he knows that teachers are overworked. There are not enough hours in the day for them to meet all their obligations. He considers in this post what to do. He certainly does not think that AI or scripted curriculum is the answer.

He writes:

When I was ploughing through the Pew Center survey of teachers, I thought of Robert Pondiscio.

Specifically, it was the part about the work itself. 84% of teachers report that there’s not enough time in the day to get their work done, and among those, 81% said that a major reason was they just have too much work (another 17% said this was a minor reason, meaning that virtually no overstretched teachers thought it wasn’t part of the problem at all). The other reasons, like non-teaching duties, didn’t even come close.

Meanwhile, in another part of the world this weekend, Pondiscio was presenting on something that has been a consistent theme in his work– Teaching is too hard for mere mortals, and we need a system that allows teachers to focus on teaching. 

Pondiscio has long argued that some aspects of teaching need to be taken off teachers’ plates so that they can put more of their energy into actual classroom instruction. I’ve always pushed back, but maybe I need to re-examine the issue a bit. 

Plugging 47 Extension Cords Into One Power Strip

Certainly every teacher learns that there’s never enough. One of my earliest viral hits was this piece about how nobody warns teachers that they will have to compromise and cut corners somewhere. It touched many, many nerves. We all have stories. My first year of teaching I worked from 7 AM to 11 PM pretty much every day. I had a gifted colleague who couldn’t bring herself to compromise on workload, so once every nine weeks grading period, she took a personal day just to sit at home and grade and enter papers. And let’s be honest–being the teacher who walks out the door as the bell rings, and who carries nothing out the door with them–that does not win you the admiration of your colleagues.

Being overworked is part of the gig, and some of us wear our ability to manage that workload as a badge of honor, like folks who are proud of surviving an initiation hazing and insist that the new recruits should suck it up and run the same gauntlet. On reflection, I must admit this may not be entirely healthy, especially considering the number of young teachers who blame themselves because they can’t simply gut their way past having overloaded circuits. 

There’s also resistance because the “let’s give teachers a break” argument is used by 1) vendors with “teacher-assisting” junk to sell and 2) folks who want to deprofessionalize teaching. That second group likes the notion of “teacher-proof” programs, curriculum in a box that can be delivered by any dope (“any dope” constitutes a large and therefor inexpensive labor pool).

We could lighten the teacher load, the argument goes, by reducing their agency and autonomy. Not in those exact words, of course. That would make it obvious why that approach isn’t popular.

Lightening the Load

So what are the ways that the burden of teaching could be reduced to a size suitable for actual mortals. 

Some of the helps are obvious. Reduce the number of non-teaching duties that get laid on teachers. Study halls. Cafeteria duty. Minute-by-minute surveillance and supervision of students. 

Some of the helps are obvious to teachers, yet difficult to implement. Most schools has a variety of policies and procedures surrounding clerical tasks that are set up to make life easier for people in the front office, not teachers in the classroom (e.g. collecting students excuses for absence, managing lunch money, etc). Then there’s the tendency to see new programs adopted at the state or district level with a cavalier, “We’ll just have teachers do that” as if there are infinite minutes in the teacher day and adding one more thing won’t be a big deal. Imagine a world in which preserving teacher time was a major sacred priority. 

Some of the helps would be hard to sell because they would cost real money. Quickest way to reduce teacher workload? Smaller classes. Or more non-teaching hours in the day for teachers to use for prep and paperwork (hard sell because so many boards believe that a teacher is only working when she’s in front of students). These are both tough because they require hiring more staff which 1) costs a bunch of money and 2) requires finding more of the qualified teachers that we already don’t have enough of.

So what are we left with?

Hiring aids to do strictly clerical stuff like scoring objective tests and putting grades into the gradebook. There are also plenty of folks trying to sell the idea of suing AI to grade the non-objective stuff like essays; this is a terrible idea for many reasons. I will admit that I was always resistant to the idea of even letting someone record grades for me, because recording grades was part of how I got a sense of how students were doing. Essentially it was a way to go over every single piece of graded work. But that would be a way to reclaim some time.

But after all that, we’ve come down the biggie, and the thing that Pondiscio has always argued is a huge lift for mere mortals–

Curriculum and instructional planning.

The Main Event

As a classroom teacher, the mere suggestion of being required to use canned curriculum made my hackles climb right up on my high dudgeon pony. For me, designing the lessons was part of any important loop. Teach the material. Take the temperature of the students and measure success. Develop the next lesson based on that feedback. That’s for daily instruction. A larger, longer, slower loop tied into larger scale feedback plus a constant check on what we’d like to include in the program. 

I like to think that I was pretty good at instructional design. But I must also admit that not everyone is, and that teachers who aren’t can create a host of issues. I will also fly my old fart flag to say that the last twenty years have produced way too many neo-teachers who were taught that if you design your instruction about the Big Standardized Test (maybe using select pieces of the state standards as a guide) you’re doing the job. I don’t want to wander down this rabbit, but I disagree, strenuously. 

So is there a place for some sort of high-quality instructional design and curriculum support for mere mortal teachers. Yes. Well, yes, but.

While I think a school should have a consistent culture and set of values, I think a building full of teachers who work in a wide variety of styles and approaches and techniques is by far the best way to go. Students will grow up to encounter a wide variety of styles and approaches in the world; why should they not find that in school (and with that variety, a better chance of finding a teacher with whom they click)?

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

SAVE THE DATE: The Ravitch Lecture at Wellesley Is April 18, This Thursday!

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2024 //
12

All are welcome to a very important lecture at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Admission is free. Join me!

The speaker is a pioneer of critical race theory.

Professor Soo Hong, chair of the Education Department at Wellesley, released the following announcement.

We are thrilled to announce that our 2024 Ravitch Lecture in Education will be presented by Professor Patricia Williams ’72, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University. Professor Williams’s talk is titled, “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History.”

This is a topic that feels relevant now more than ever. 

The lecture will be held on Thursday, April 18, 4:30 PM in Jewett Auditorium. Please share the details of this event widely!

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Description of “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History” 
We live in an oddly contradictory moment: politicians who position themselves as supporters of “absolute” freedom of speech simultaneously enact laws that restrict access to books about race, gender, or critical theory, and seek to constrain conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion. There have always been “culture wars” in America—it is not surprising that conversations about traumatic histories and contested historical perspectives might be fractious. In a civil society, we commit to arguing our way to consensus, however noisily or uncomfortably, and even if it takes generations. But it is the mark of an uncivil—or authoritarian—society when we find ourselves without the right to speak, hear, write, publish, dissent, or share common space even in our disagreement. The First Amendment rightly allows us to curtail speech that poses an “imminent threat of physical harm.” But recent “anti-woke” laws banish from public spaces books and ideas that merely might inspire “shame,” “guilt,” or “discomfort.” This lecture will ponder the conceptual chasm between those two notions of constraint upon speech. What power imbalance, what uses of force are rationalized in erasing whole histories from collective contemplation? What civic dispossession is enacted when certain lives or lived narratives are discounted as intolerable, unknowable–whose mere recounting is silenced as illegal?

Wellesley Logo

Soo Hong

The lecture will be taped and available online at a later time.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Racism

Bob Shepherd: A Review of a Review of “Slaying Goliath”

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2024 //
16

Forgive me for posting two reviews of my last book, which was published on January 20, 2020.

As I explained in the previous post, I did not see either of these reviews until long after they appeared in print. Slaying Goliath appeared just as COVID was beginning to make its mark, only a few weeks before it was recognized as a global pandemic. In writing the book, I wanted to celebrate the individuals and groups that demonstrated bravery in standing up to the powerful, richly endowed forces that were determined to privatize their public schools through charters or vouchers.

America’s public schools had educated generations of young people who created the most powerful, most culturally creative, most dynamic nation on earth. Yet there arose a cabal of billionaires and their functionaries who were determined to destroy public schools and turn them into privately-managed schools and to turn their funding over to private and religious schools.

Having worked for many years inside the conservative movement, I knew what was happening. I saw where the money was coming from, and I knew that politicians had been won over (bought) by campaign contributions.

Publishing a book at the same time as a global pandemic terrifies the world and endangers millions of people is bad timing, for sure.

But the most hurtful blow to me and the book was a mean-spirited review in The New York Times Book Review. The NYTBR is unquestionably the most important review that a book is likely to get. Its readership is huge. A bad review is a death knell. That’s the review I got. The reviewer, not an educator or education journalist, hated the book. Hated it. I found her review hard to read because she seemed to reviewing a different book.

I was completely unaware that Bob Shepherd reviewed the review. I didn’t see it until two or three years after it appeared. He wrote what I felt, but I, as the author, knew that it was very bad form to complain, and I did not.

So I happily post Bob Shepherd’s review of the review here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, DFER, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, History, Hoax, Lies, Network for Public Education, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Race to the Top, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Unions, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers, Walton Foundation
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