Archives for category: Democracy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Is Trump Our Mussolini?

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2023 //
24

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of History at New York University who specializes in European history, especially Italy, and authoritarianism. On her blog Lucid, she has chronicled Trump’s flirtation with authoritarianism, and she now sees him openly endorsing it.

She writes:

Former President Donald Trump REALLY does not want you to call him a Fascist. Being compared to old-school dictators such as Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini makes him and his handlers crazy: he even sued CNN for defamation over this issue (a Trump-appointed judge dismissed the lawsuit). So why is he using Fascist rhetoric?

If you’ve read the news lately, you’ll know that Trump went to New Hampshire on Veterans Day and delivered a news-making speech that included a “pledge” to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

As I argued in a recent Lucid essay, violence is now Trump’s brand. To that end, he conjures existential threats to the nation from non-White immigrants and an expanding cast of internal enemies, calls the thugs who are in prison for assaulting the Capitol on Jan. 6 “political prisoners,” and praises autocrats such as Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin who depend on propaganda, corruption, and repression to stay in power.

All of this is part of his effort to re-educate Americans to see violence as justified, patriotic, and even morally righteous.

But to get people to lose their aversion to violence, savvy authoritarians also dehumanize their enemies. That’s what Trump is doing. Hitler used this ploy from the very start, calling Jews the “black parasites of the nation” in a 1920 speech. By the time Hitler got into power in 1933 and translated dehumanizing rhetoric into repressive policies, Germans had heard these messages for over a decade.

As a historian of autocracy with a specialization in Italian Fascism, the use of the “vermin” image got my attention. Mussolini used similar language in his 1927 Ascension Day speech which laid out Fascism’s intention to subject leftists and others to “prophylaxis” measures to defend the Italian state and society from their nefarious influences.

By the time Il Duce delivered this landmark address, the dictatorship had been in place for two years, and opposition politicians and the press were in prison or had gone into exile. That did not stop him from talking about killing “rodents who carry infectious diseases from the East: the East that brings us lovely things, such as yellow fever and Bolshevism.”

Mussolini loved to make jokes in his speeches to Parliament, and this one elicited laughter —or so says the official transcript. He is speaking about actual rats but, as the Bolshevism comment makes clear, also about Communists. “We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person,” he concluded chillingly about leftists and other targeted categories of people.

Trump’s recent comment about undocumented immigrants “polluting the blood of our country” is in the same vein, as are the ideas circulating among his 2025 advance team to deport millions of immigrants and “quarantine” others in massive camps.

Typically, Trump and his advisors took exception to being called out for deploying Fascist rhetoric, resorting to threats that simply strengthened the case against them. As the Washington Post reported, Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Cheung had this to say about those (like me) who make such comparisons: “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

Only later did Cheung apparently realize that using Fascist language was unhelpful and claimed that he meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence” —whatever that means.

Some will note that Trump includes Fascists as well as Communists among the “vermin” to be “rooted out” of America. This is classic authoritarian doublespeak. He has to set himself up as the bearer of freedom against all forms of tyranny, even as he signals to left and right-wing autocrats that he will be their staunch ally if he manages to win his “final battle” and return to the White House.

“When two irreducible elements are locked in a struggle, the only solution is force,” Mussolini said on Jan. 3, 1925, as he declared the start of dictatorship in Italy. America may never become a one-party state on the classic Fascist model, but Trump and his GOP enablers carry forth this Fascist mentality. We must take their speech seriously as declarations of intent to wreck American democracy and engage in persecution on a large scale as part of that process.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Fascism, Trump

“In Texas, the Only Good Voucher Bill Is a Dead One”

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2023 //
8

The Houston Chronicle published a stunning editorial denouncing the voucher legislation that Governor Abbott demands. Abbott has called four special sessions of the Legislature, and so far rural Republicans have blocked vouchers. Now the Governor threatens to run a candidate in the primary against every Republican who opposes vouchers. Why the pressure? To satisfy two billionaires.

The editorial board writes:

In March, when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed the state’s new school voucher program into law, she repeated several talking points that advocates use to justify using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private school tuition.

“We’ve seen how the status quo condemns Arkansans to a lifetime of poverty,” said Sanders. “We’re tired of sitting at the bottom of national education rankings.”

Arkansas tried to avoid the pitfalls of some other states’ voucher programs. Participating private schools would have to select a standardized test to use — a small measure of, if not accountability, at least transparency. Likewise, the schools must prove they are accredited or working toward accreditation. And the state set eligibility requirements that should have helped target funds toward the neediest students, including those in foster care, enrolled in failing public schools, experiencing homelessness or living with a disability.

But in the first annual report on the program since its launch, the state found that of the more than 4,700 participants, nearly all were either new students enrolling in kindergarten or existing private school students.

The promise of transforming the lives of poor students trapped in failing public schools hasn’t materialized. Instead, the state has taken on significant new costs to fund both existing public school students and voucher recipients.

SPECIAL SESSION: School vouchers, border bills fall short as Gov. Abbott calls fourth session

From what we can see, Texas lawmakers — whom Gov. Greg Abbott called abruptly back into special session Tuesday for the fourth time this year — have worked to craft school voucher bills that also seek to avoid some of the worst abuses seen in other states. Bills have included some degree of required testing, fraud guardrails, effective enrollment caps and prioritization for lower-income students and those with disabilities. There have also been sweeteners for folks planning to stay in public schools: an increase in the per-student allotment and one-time teacher bonuses, among others. As voucher bills go, the House version proposed last special session was one of the most palatable around.

It still wasn’t good enough for Abbott, who continues to push for a more universal program.

And it isn’t good enough for us, either. Because there is no such thing as a good voucher bill. Not the bill passed by the Senatethat would create $8,000 vouchers nor the one that, for the first time this year, made it through the House committee Friday that would offer students $10,500 annually to attend private schools. Even seemingly benign or narrowly tailored bills have a way of ballooning in cost and generating underwhelming results.

Not only have wide-scale voucher programs largely failed to produce resounding academic improvements for participants, states have consistently seen the programs benefit existing private school students, whose parents most likely could already afford the tuition. They don’t really benefit the struggling public school students often used to sell them.

In Arkansas, restrictions meant to target students with disabilities have been almost meaningless after the state lowered its standards for approval. Investigative reporting there revealed that some of the 44% of students who were granted vouchers based on disabilities had as little as a doctor’s note worth of documentation. Here in Texas, the current House version — an omnnibus school spending bill with education savings accounts wedged inside like a booby trap waiting to spring — makes clear that students who are currently in private schools would still be eligible for the voucher.

TOMLINSON: Texas school vouchers would be financially ruinous, fundamentally unfair or quite likely, both

Then there’s the price tag. The estimated price of the Senate’s voucher program put forward in the previous session was $500 million for the first year.

But buyer beware, that’s just the first year. What voucher advocates want is a foot in the door. And within two or three budget cycles, the number of participants will soar and — more than likely — all those careful (or not so careful) restrictions meant to narrow the program would disappear.

“They’re telling you you’ve got an interest free payment: You can sign up to get vouchers for the next, say, two, three budget cycles. And then the price tag really comes due,” said Josh Cowen, a policy analyst and professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He has been following voucher bills — often nearly identical ones — working their way through state legislatures and sees a cautionary tale in Arkansas.

While some districts may feel the loss of public funding, the real threat, Cowen explains, is that this program will end up helping existing private school families. Meaning the state — and you, dear taxpayer — will be on the hook for two systems.

There are many reasons to oppose vouchers: They don’t guarantee academic improvements; they’ve been shown to increase segregation; they don’t protect the legal rights of students with disabilities in private schools that can discriminate against them; they use public dollars to support private and often religious instruction.

Lawmakers can nip and tuck to address some concerns. But there’s not much they can do to make vouchers less economically disastrous or to slake the thirst of deep-pocketed, pro-voucher advocates pouring in buckets of dollars. Those Wilks and Dunn types aren’t funding this because they want to help low-income students escape failing public schools. They want a universal program that undoes the power of the public school as a secular, accountable, publicly funded institution.

CARTOON EXPLAINER: Austin’s the new Kremlin! A guide to vouchers and puppet masters Wilks and Dunn.

Some want to use carrots to lure lawmakers. Others prefer a stick, threatening to primary out those rural Republicans who have stood up time and again for their communities and against vouchers. There’s a reason this is so hard. It’s clear that, after decades of bipartisan rejection, Texans don’t want this voucher scheme.

So why are we on the verge of passing it, of making the same mistake as Arkansas and other states?

State Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin, said it best amid the marathon testimony that opened the latest special session: “All this for one man and two billionaires.”

Only Abbott, Wilks and Dunn will benefit if bipartisan opposition crumbles. Texas public schoolchildren and taxpayers will lose.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Courage, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Rural Schools, Texas

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

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2023 //
4

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

Strauss writes:

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


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

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


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

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

Here are a few:

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

Moms for Liberty really means Moms for facism and hate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ProPublica: Voters in Midland, Texas, Defy Billionaire, Pass School Bond Issue

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2023 //
3

Last week, ProPublica wrote about billionaire Tim Dunn and his efforts to defeat a $1.4 billion bond issue in Midland, Texas. Dunn ran his campaign through a Dark Money nonprofit that is staffed by his colleagues. Dunn wants a voucher program for the state and opposes new funding for public schools.

Allies of influential Texas billionaire Tim Dunn are pushing ahead in Austin with efforts to create a private-school voucher system that could weaken public schools across the state. Meanwhile, Dunn’s associates in his hometown of Midland are working to defeat a local school bond proposal that his district says it desperately needs.

Dunn, an evangelical Christian, is best known for a mostly successful two-decade effort to push the Texas GOP ever further to the right. His political action committees have spent millions to elect pro-voucher candidates and derail Republicans who oppose them. Defend Texas Liberty, the influential PAC he funds with other West Texas oil barons, has come under fire after The Texas Tribune revealed that the PAC’s president had hosted infamous white supremacist Nick Fuentes for an October meeting and that the organization has connections to other white nationalists.

Less known are Dunn’s efforts to shape politics in his hometown of Midland, which will come to a head next week. On Tuesday, residents in the Midland Independent School District will vote on a $1.4 billion bond, the largest in its history, after rejecting a smaller measure four years ago. A dark-money organization whose leaders have ties to Dunn’s Midland oil and gas company, as well as to a prominent conservative public policy organization where Dunn serves as vice chairman, have become among the loudest voices against the bond.

On Sept. 21, less than two months before the Midland bond election, three Midland residents with deep connections to Dunn and his associated public policy organization registered a “social welfare” nonprofit called Move Midland.

The nonprofit is headed by Rachel Walker, a public affairs manager for Dunn’s oil and gas company, CrownQuest Operating LLC, according to public records. A second member, Ernest Angelo, is a former Midland mayor and board member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that Dunn has helped lead for more than two decades. The third member of the nonprofit’s board is Elizabeth Moore, a former West Texas development officer for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

But then the voters got a chance to be heard. They said NO to Tim Dunn!

Update, Nov. 8, 2023: On Nov. 7, Midland school district voters approved a $1.4 billion bond proposal by a 56% to 44% vote, rejecting arguments against the measure from a nonprofit led by associates of billionaire oilman Tim Dunn.

Categories Billionaires, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Privatization, Texas

Thom Hartmann: Stop the Republican War on Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2023 //
11

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

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

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

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

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

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

The annual PRRI American Values Survey found:

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

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

Nonetheless, they note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As conservative commentator Benjamin Weingarten writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia: Public School Parents Take Back Most School Boards

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2023 //
9

For the past few years, Virginia was a hotbed of dissension over “parental rights.” Governor Youngkin won office by attacking public schools, teachers, trans kids, and libraries. On Tuesday, Virginia’s parents took back most school boards from MAGA extremists.

Pundits cast Virginia’s Tuesday general elections as a referendum on abortion rights. It was more than that. Further down the ballot those votes also sent a strong message to those trying to disrupt public education: listen to parents. Parents who came out to vote in Fairfax, Loudoun and even Spotsylvania, the epicenters of vitriol and fantasy, voted with a resounding “no” to candidates who focused on anti-CRT, book bans and transphobia. Parents overwhelmingly voted for moderate candidates campaigning on safe schools, feeding hungry kids and supporting our teachers.

After almost four years of vile accusations of racism, pedophilia, incompetence and more, voters in Fairfax rejected the lies and returned Rachna Sizemore Heizer, Melanie Meren, Ricardy Anderson and Karl Frish to the School Board, along with a sweep of all pro-public education newcomers. Rachna Sizemore Heizer said “Today, Fairfax County resoundingly rejected the GOP’s divisive politics and relentless attacks on our schools, students and staff, and stood strong in support of public education. It has been a tough four years on the school board, but we’ve stood strong knowing the majority of Fairfax County shared our values of an excellent education in a welcoming and inclusive environment. Now on to work making our great schools even better for every child.”

Spotsylvania County, with one of the most “toxic” school boards in the Commonwealth, flipped from MAGA extremist to centrist, teacher-focused sanity. Carol Medowar, a newcomer to politics, and part of the wave that flipped the Spotsylvania school board, stated “I’m just so happy for the students, families, and educators who really get to breathe a sigh of relief for this race. It’s a huge flip on the Spotsy school board.”

In Loudoun County, the genesis of the politization of public education education, pro-public school supporters held their ground in a clear referendum on Youngkin’s plan to dismantle public schools, drive out teachers and humiliate trans-kids. The acrimony and chaos of the last four years drove every member of the prior school board out of the race. However, the new board, with all new members, will maintain a strong pro-public school majority, despite Youngkin’s concerted, last minute attempt to influence the race. According to Loudoun public school advocate Andrew Pihonek, “a brand new school board will be a breath of fresh air for many in Loudoun.”

Albermarle-Charlottesville followed the same trend as Loudoun, Fairfax and Spotsylvania, rejecting candidates who tried to re-write our history and ban books.

If Glenn Youngkin and his minions truly want to listen to parents, now is their chance. Parents across the Commonwealth, in their first opportunity since his election to send a clear message, have rejected fear-mongering, white-washing, transphobia, sabotage and lack of civility. The question is no longer will we listen to parents, but will he? As Carol Medowar, successful Spotsylvania candidate, pleaded a few weeks ago, “Let’s make school board meetings boring again.”

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, Freedom to Read, History, Parents, Supporting public schools, Virginia

Peter Greene: The Book Banners Will Never Be Satisfied

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2023 //
7

Peter Greene warns that the people who want to ban books will never be satisfied.

He writes:

At the heart of the raging controversy about reading restrictions, there are books about which reasonable adults can disagree, even books that the most ardent free speecher might not want their younger children to read. This is why one tactic of the reading restriction crowd is to shove the most extreme excerpts and pictures in front of audiences. If you aspire to being a reasonable person in these debates, you probably accept the premise that there are some books that do not belong in the middle school library.

But no matter how reasonable you want to be, you have to remember one thing.

The book banners, reading restrictors, censors, ultra-conservative crowd, whatever you want to call them–the people out in front of this drive– are never going to be satisfied.

Greene reviews the list of books that the censors want to purge in Collier County, Florida. It’s an astonishing list, because it contains books that have been taught for decades without incident. One must wonder how many students are actually reading the books that are considered offensive.

So what books did Collier County find as dangerous as guns and drugs? The list is long, but PEN America is sharing it; here are some highlights.

Some of the usuals are here– Steven King, Ellen Hopkins, Toni Morrison. But Ernest Hemmingway? Three are on the list, including The Sun Also Rises which I taught for years and while, yes, sex is obliquely (really obliquely) an idea in the book, digging out sexual content would be a hopeless quest.

Dune Chronicles? Steve Martin’s novel Shopgirl? One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest? 2001: A Space Odyssey– I mean, seriously, Clarke is one of the most asexual authors in all of SF.

Many Waters??!! The Madeline L’Engle second sequel to Wrinkle in Time is, like the rest of the series, soaked hard in religious ideas, but Many Waters has for sexual content some heavy flirting. Flowers for Algernon, also regularly taught and unsexy. The Once and Future King, T. H. Whites four-book Arthurian doorstop that is the basis for both Disney’s Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot and, again, not very sexy.

Man in the Iron Mask, the final of Dumas’s three Three Musketeers novels published in the mid-nineteenth century, when no literary characters ever had sex at all. This is one of several items on the list that lead me to suspect that, in the time honored tradition of non-readers, the compilers of the list skipped the book and watched a movie version instead.

And, believe it or not, both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, the two Ayn Rand cornerstones. Granted, I agree that nobody ever needs to read Atlas Shrugged ever, but if you feel so compelled, go ahead. Both books, other than presenting Rand’s bizarro notions about romance and some very ungraphic depictions of what appears to be angry sex, these are not ban-worthy books. I mean, I deeply dislike them for their blundering prose and teenaged sociopathic egoism promotion, but I wouldn’t ban them.

Do they want students to read anything?

As Greene notes, PEN America made the list of banned books available. It also pointed out that Collier County “responded to growing restrictions from the state by requiring parents to grant permission for their students to access school libraries. District administration also requires parental permission slips to use nicknames for students.”

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Literacy

Pennsylvania: Rightwing School Board Candidates Lose in Critical Districts

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2023 //
10

Moms for Liberty faced big setbacks in school board races in Pennsylvania, reports Peter Greene in Forbes.

He writes:

When he talked to the Moms for Liberty convention back in July, Jordan Adams explained how new conservative board members could use their first 100 days to hit hard, flooding the zone with a kind of shock and awe. The conservatives of Pennridge School District board, Adams’ single client for his fledgling consulting business, may be rethinking his advice this morning as they contemplate their defeat in Tuesday’s elections.

Pennridge is in Bucks County, near Philadelphia, a county that has been ground zero for the Moms for Liberty style installation of far right policies in school boards. Since acquiring a majority, Pennridge has pursued a host of right wing policies. They had trouble telling creationism from science. They banned Banned Books Week. They tried to clamp down on student expression. And they removed DEI policies).

Pennridge’s conservative board also hired Adams, with close ties to conservative Christian Hillsdale College, to scour through their curriculum and remove all things woke. This was a new business model, a proof of concept for retooling a school’s curriculum along more conservative lines. He was, he told the Moms for Liberty crowd, the “fox in the henhouse.”

Now the henhouse is under new management. As of this morning, it appears that all five open seats on the board were won by candidates who ran on opposition to culture wars, secret agreements, poor policies, and the adoption of the curriculum recommended by Adams.

The backlash was also felt in Central Bucks district school board race.

Central Bucks has drawn national attention for implementing a wave of conservative policies. They instituted a book banning policy, aided by the Independence Law Firm, the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute (“Our goal is for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished.”) They banned pride flags. They suspended a teacher who defended LGBTQ students. They implemented a policy that required the school to out LGBTQ students with a “gender identification procedure”. No student name changes allowed without a note from home.

The conservative shift drew enough attention that Penncrest school board on the other side of the statetreated Central Bucks as a model.

The race drew spectacular amounts of money, particularly from Paul Martino, a venture capitalist who had put half a million in 2021 Pennsylvania board races. This year he chipped in $279,000 (out of a total $600,000 for bother sides) in support of his wife’s campaign for a board seat.

The campaign was brutal and, if one followed it on social media, mean. But the Philadelphia Inquirer reported this morning that the Democratic candidates swept the election, including the defeat of Martino’s wife and Dana Hunter, incumbent board president.

Open the link to finish the article.

Categories Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Librarians, Libraries, Literature, Pennsylvania

MSNBC: The Theocrat Who Is Speaker of the House

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2023 //
41

Sarah Posner, a columnist for MSNBC, summarizes what has been learned about the theocratic vision of Mike Johnson, the recently elected Speaker of the House. Johnson was, of course, a prominent and active election denier. In addition, his views are radically fundamentalist. Whenever possible, he cites the Bible—not the Constitution—as the source of his ideology. Those who do not share his religious views may rightly wonder how someone so deeply indoctrinated in his faith can lead without alienating the majority of his fellow citizens. We know already that he is deeply antagonistic to abortion rights and to those who are LGBT+. In time we will learn what other prejudices he holds and how he will deal with them.

Posner wrote:

The sudden elevation of Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La.,to House speaker pushed his record’s vetting to after his election. So it was only once he became second in line to the presidency that most people learned Johnson played a key role in the House’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is virulently anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ Americans, and has promoted teaching the Bible as a history book in public schools.

Now Johnson and his allies are hitting back against his critics. Remarkably, their response to the exposure of Johnson’s turbocharged theo-politics is not to argue that media reports exaggerate or misapprehend his record as a lawyer or legislator, or his intentions as speaker. Instead, Johnson’s closest allies are amplifying his extreme views, and recasting them as mainstream “truths” that are beyond challenge.

This week Johnson gave an interview to the Daily Signal, the news site of the Heritage Foundation, an agenda-setting hub for the right, and particularly the religious right. Johnson was able to “open up,” as the Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan put it, about how his Christian faith “informs his politics.” While he’s hardly been tight-lipped about that topic, this fresh clarification of his central political philosophy makes his rapid, uninterrogated ascension even more worrisome.

“It’s a central premise of the Bible that God invented civil government,” Johnson told Olohan, who added that, “like many Americans of faith, Johnson sees government as a ‘design of God’ and ‘a gift to mankind in a fallen society.’” If those jarring statements do not comport with your own understanding of the Bible, or of the constitutional separation of church and state, you are not alone.

The Washington Stand, the news site of the Family Research Council, whose president Tony Perkins is a longtime friend of the new speaker, similarly assailed Johnson’s critics. In an article entitled “Johnson Critics Mistake Christianity, American Principles for ‘Theocracy,’” the Stand senior writer Joshua Arnold turned to the director of FRC’s own Center for Biblical Worldview, David Closson. (The Center for Biblical Worldview, according to its website, says that “a person exhibits a biblical worldview when their beliefs and actions are aligned with the Bible, acknowledging its truth and applicability to every area of life.”)

Closson defended Johnson’s beliefs as “just basic Christian belief coming right out of the Bible.” That “basic Christian belief,” argued Closson, includes that “God is the one that ordains authority. God is the one that gives delegated authority to human beings to wield it on his behalf.” Closson went on to suggest that Johnson’s critics are biblical illiterates who lack any understanding of Christianity. He described them as “folks who don’t have any reference to what the Bible teaches, trying to scare millions of Americans, when so many of us would just be saying ‘Amen.’”

If anything has come into sharper focus over the past week or so, it’s that Johnson has spent his legal and political career immersed in an insular world where everyone around him believes there are certain “truths,” like regressive gender roles, or creationism, or that separation of church and state is a “myth.” Or, as Johnson stated this week without equivocation, “God invented civil government.”

While these views are commonplace on the Christian right, they are far from commonplace among Christians more broadly. “Most Christians wouldn’t say that this is a ‘central premise’ of the Bible, but Johnson’s focus on authority, as well as the way he distinguishes ‘civil government’ from other forms of government, tracks with the language of Christian reconstructionism,” Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies professor at the University of North Florida and author of “Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction,” told me. As Ingersoll’s work has illuminated, reconstructionism, a movement developed in the 1970s, teaches that God ordained separate “spheres” of governmental authority — the family, the church and “civil government.” In the reconstructionist view, “civil government” should not do anything that interferes with (conservative Christian) families or churches or what they consider to be their inviolable right to impose their religious beliefs in the public square.

There is virtually no one in today’s religious right who would claim the label “Christian reconstructionist,” largely because they do not want to be tied to the positions of its founder R.J. Rushdoony, who cited supposed “biblical law” to support slavery and the death penalty for homosexuality. But the broad contours of Rushdoony’s framework, as Ingersoll has documented, has left an indelible mark on the modern religious right. The insistence that a “biblical worldview” should bear on every government decision shapes right-wing Christians’ positions on a range of issues. Their objections to abortion and marriage equality, for example, is based on their claim that civil government lacks the God-ordained authority to create laws that (they say) conflict with the Bible. They also consider public education to be an improper, unbiblical exercise of government authority. Because of that, they have undermined public schools, created their own Christian schools, and advocated for and shaped the Christian homeschooling movement.

These kinds of crude dismissals of Johnson’s critics serve two purposes: they reassure the GOP base that their “biblical worldview” is the only correct way to view both the Bible and the government, and that any critiques of it evince a lack of “understanding of just basic Christian tenets,” as Closson put it. Second, and more crucially, they aim to bully reporters and political opponents into retreating from examining Johnson’s record and drawing attention to the ways it threatens pluralism, democracy and the rights of others. By repeating the lie that Johnson’s beliefs are “basic” Christianity, and accusing anyone who fails to understand that of ignorance, the Christian right, and the Republican Party it controls, want scrutiny of Johnson to evaporate. We can only hope their efforts will backfire, as millions of Americans wake up to what it really means to have a top government official proudly tout his supposedly “biblical worldview.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Religion, Republicans

Arthur Camins: Choose People Over Their Governments

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2023 //
32

Arthur Camins writes in The Daily Kos about the war in the Middle East:

So many people I speak with are feeling torn and conflicted. They that say they are afraid to criticize either Hamas or Israel for fear of being attacked for taking one side or the other. I say: If you stand for the human rights and dignity of all, the sides to choose between in the latest Middle East conflict are not the Hamas or Israeli governments. Instead, choose their people.

No, the sides to choose between are:

• Accepting the death of innocent civilians as collateral damage as the price of victory of “our side.”

Or

• Finding the path to peace that starts with mutual respect for democracy and human rights for all.

Neither Hamas nor Israel represents that latter choice. Their behavior says the opposite. So, I condemn both without implied approval of either.

If a path to peace, democracy, and human rights for Israelis and Palestinians–and safety for Jews and Palestinians around the world–are the goals, then attempting to determine moral equivalencies between the behavior of Hamas and the Israeli government is a dead-end.

I also see no need for those of us in the United States to promote a one- or two-state solution. That is up to the people of Israel and Palestine, hopefully with a rejection of both Hamas and the Netanyahu governments, rejection of the primacy of any religion over another or none at all.

Anything short of Israeli abandonment of its illegal settlements in the West Bank and assurance of full Palestinian rights is a non-starter.

A lot of digital ink has been spilled over the definitional accuracy of the terms, war crimes and genocide. We can have that debate, but it deflects attention from the necessary condemnations. It abets useless “whataboutism” rather than forging a path forward.

I am not a pacifist, but I explicitly reject two rationalizations for the murder of innocents: Palestinians have a right to resistance by any means necessary, and Israel has a right to defend itself.

I’m not against resistance to oppression, but that does not include murder and hostage-taking of innocent civilians. I am not opposed to defense against attack, but that does not include bombing and depriving innocent civilians of food, fuel, water, and healthcare.

In the current circumstances, both Hamas and Israel claim that the intransigence, crimes, and inhumanity of the other side justifies their actions. They do not.

Condemnation of both Hamas’s and Israel’s actions is the starting point for any moral and political commitments to working across differences to achieve the safety, respect, democracy, and rights that Palestinians and Israelis deserve.

Empathy is a precondition to peace and justice. If we can imagine the pain and grief of Israelis who lost friends, neighbors, and loved ones to the latest Hamas or any terrorist attack, we must also imagine the loss and suffering of Gazans from the Israeli bombing and blockade. We must also imagine being displaced when our land and homes are violently stolen by illegal settlers.

Call your U.S. Senators and House Representatives. Tell them that a ceasefire, a halt to further military aid, and humanitarian aid to Gazans are the necessary first steps.

Arthur taught and led science professional learning and curriculum and assessment development projects for 50 yrs. He writes about education and social justice. He loves spending time with friends and family, hiking, and gardening.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Equity, Evil, Extremism, Failure, International, Justice
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »