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Robert Hubbell: Ignore the Media Doomsday Machine

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2022 //
19

Robert Hubbell is a wonderful, sensible blogger. I enjoy reading his posts. Here is one that ties together our current “gloom and doom” about the politics at home with the defiance and courage of Ukrainians who are standing up to a brutal invasion.

He wrote:

The media doomsday machine is in overdrive.

Readers are again filling my inbox with stories that predict disaster for Democrats in the midterms. All I can say is that we should be thankful that the journalists declaring defeat are not in charge of defending Ukraine. The current narrative is that the only issue that matters to voters is the economy. Of course, except for inflation, the economy is strong—a fact universally ignored by the media. But in the “short-attention-span” media, the criminalization of abortion is a story that has run its course and is baked into the outcome of the midterms. Such a view denigrates the role of voters in the political process and ignores the possibility that the attitudes of voters can change over the course of an election.

So, let’s reset where we are at this moment in time. Most primaries for midterms have not yet occurred, so Democrats don’t know who they will be facing. But we have strong signals that Republican candidates will be more extreme, less qualified, and more vulnerable than the GOP had hoped. The surge of activism that should follow the criminalization of abortion is just getting off the ground. The final opinion was expected in late June; the leak in early May caught many grass-roots groups by surprise. Republicans and the mainstream media want to create a narrative that says, “Nothing to see here, move along. The fight over abortion won’t motivate Democrats or persuadable Independents.”

I believe the above narrative badly mis-reads what is about to happen. We are no longer arguing over abstract legal principles. We are facing a situation in which abortion will be a crime, and teenage girls raped by family members will be ordered by the state to bear children forced on them by violent attackers. The narrative ignores that a strong majority of Americans supported the Roe / Casey paradigm for balancing individual liberty and societal interests. And it ignores the fact abortion is far more common than many believe. Per the NYTimes, “25 percent of women will have an abortion by the end of their childbearing years.” Telling those women, even retroactively, that they are “felons” or “criminals” will surely have some effect on their view of their Republican accusers.

So, what should we do? First, we need an attitude adjustment. If you see a story predicting disaster, you must summon the fighting spirit to say that pundits and “conventional wisdom” do not control your actions or your destiny. The fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people is instructive. The “conventional wisdom” predicted their defeat in two weeks. Our first clue that the Ukrainians would not allow conventional wisdom to determine their destiny was Zelensky’s statement, “I need ammunition, I don’t need a ride.” The second indication came from the defenders of Snake Island who were ordered by a “Russian warship” to “surrender” before being shelled. The reply, “Russian warship, go f**k yourself” will live in legend. [Note: The “warship” in question was later sunk by Ukrainian missiles.]

We all need a bit of the “in-your-face” confidence to tell the doomsayers what they can do with their predictions. In that regard, I recommend the video in a tweet by MeidasTouch, “Hey, Republican Party. Go f—k yourselves.” Fair warning—the video includes about a dozen profanities, which are usually unproductive and distracting. But the sentiment expressed in the video captures the fighting spirit that all Democrats need at this moment. Republicans are busy telling the mainstream media that the 2022 midterms are over and that Democrats should surrender. As the Ukrainian defenders on Snake Island said, “Russian warship, . . . .”

Categories Character, Citizenship, Courage, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Freedom, Grit, Hope

Greg Brozeit: The Danger of the Alito Draft Decision Goes Way Beyond Abortion

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2022 //
72

Greg Brozeit notes here an alarming aspect implicit in the Alito draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade. His comment appeared on the blog. Alito and four other radical conservatives demonstrated that precedent and stare decisis mean nothing to them. Despite their assurances under oath to the Senators who interviewed them, the radical justices intend to overturn a right declared by the Supreme Court 49 years earlier. Never in the history of the Supreme Court has a right granted by the Court been overturned. This radical, reckless decision will set off more demonstrations and protests. Recent polls show that only about 20% of the nation believes that abortion should be banned under all circumstances. The rest believe that it should be safe and legal, with certain conditions, such as rape, incest, the life of the mother. The sweep of this unprecedented revocation will leave many people wondering what other prior decisions will be overturned.

Greg Brozeit writes:

Just as CRT is not about education, the Alito Roe draft is not about abortion. It is much bigger. Some of you come oh so close to crossing the rhetorical goal line. The real question is not if or why, but how this becomes a legal mallet that makes no decision “safe.”

If the wording “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start” remains intact in the final opinion, it basically creates a precedent that precedent no longer exists. It would effectively be the first mortal wound in the legal doctrine of stare decisis as a check on judicial power. Its goal is to make a mockery out of the idea of judicial review as to render it meaningless. It’s “reasoning” could seep into and dominate all law from civil to maritime to military. And it fits perfectly with ALEC’s strategy to marginalize judicial review with packaged, ready-to-go legislation for lazy, partisan, or stupid (or all of the above) statewide elected legislature or governor.

This was not a legal shot over the bow. It was a direct hit on democracy and left no doubt that the only thing this court wants more is a tailor-made case that will give them stronger legal “reasoning” to be even more draconian. That would be the only reason this language might not be in the final decision handed down. It would be a short-lived “victory” that would be a prelude to something even worse for average and poor Americans.

This is the typical drivel the DNC-driven agenda gives us, focusing on individual policies rather than the real existential threat to democracy the Republican Party poses from local government through the office of the presidency. Now as correct as we may be about the fate of women’s rights and as big as that issue is, this is about much, much basic stakes. The radical right and their few partners on the looney left understand this. Hardly anyone else, it seems, does. Or at the very least, they can’t identify the true threat this enemy is posing. If they do not win now or in the next elections, they will continue to poison and cripple the system until they do. That, it seems, is the best we can hope for now. A slow death with faint hope for a miracle recovery rather than an immediate plunge into fascism.

Categories Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Inequity, Injustice, Republicans

Texas: “Cancel Culture” Comes for Beto O’Rourke

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2022 //
38

Republicans like to complain about “cancel culture,” but they are its biggest practitioners. If it were up to them, Democrats would be completely silenced, as would gay students and teachers who want to teach honestly about racism.

Beto O’Rourke is running against Republican Governor Gregg Abbott, and he’s discovering that many venues in red districts won’t allow him to speak because he is a Democrat.

The Texas Monthly describes what happened to Beto in Comal County, a deep red district.

When Democratic candidates for statewide office tour Texas, an atmosphere of doom and despair typically haunts their campaigns, like a pack of wolves shadowing a wounded elk. In 2014, I rode on state senator Leticia Van de Putte’s campaign bus as she embarked on a multiday expedition to South Texas toward the end of her race for lieutenant governor. The bus, which departed from San Antonio, ran for two hours before breaking down around Falfurrias. A few weeks later, she lost by nearly twenty points.

Beto O’Rourke’s first statewide campaign, when he challenged Ted Cruz for a U.S. Senate seat, by contrast, felt enchanted—the political equivalent of a Disney-animated romp with singing woodland creatures. For a year and a half, O’Rourke roamed the state, putting thousands of miles on a truck and a minivan that did not break down, visiting towns other statewide politicians of both parties wouldn’t waste time in. He played with dogs, livestreamed even the smallest events, and had (sometimes awkward) meetings with local elected officials in conservative parts of Texas, trying to find areas of agreement. He spoke often, and in a pretty idealistic manner, about his hope that Democrats he fired up in small red towns would be empowered to create lasting change in their communities.

It felt wrong, somehow. I chatted with O’Rourke about how smoothly things seemed to be going after a picture-perfect event at the hip tent-hotel El Cosmico in 2017, in the decidedly not red town of Marfa, on one of those summer nights in West Texas when the sun sets in a peach-colored sky a little after nine. When I asked him what he would do if protesters—anti-abortion, pro-gun, whatever—started actively disrupting his events, denying him space in the public square and threatening the premise of his campaign, he said he would engage them in dialogue. That struck me as naive, but to my surprise those protests never materialized in the 2018 election. He seemed, in all things, charmed. Of course, he still lost, but by an unexpectedly small margin, all the while boosting down-ballot candidates in suburban districts he helped to flip.

Since then, O’Rourke has had an eventful few years, as has the nation, and his second campaign for statewide office has been more difficult. Gun-rights protesters and open carriers have been showing up at his events since well before he launched his bid for governor, drawn by O’Rourke’s rash proclamation, during his brief 2020 presidential campaign, that he favored confiscation of semiautomatic weapons. And this past weekend, in a small community an hour north of San Antonio, the O’Rourke campaign, hoping to hold a town hall, tried and failed to secure the use of four different event venues and was effectively run out of town.

This debacle took place in Comal County, the southernmost of the two counties in the Interstate 35 corridor between San Antonio and Austin, which ranks as one of the most Republican areas of the state. But there’s still reason for Democrats to think they can do better here. In 2016, Trump won Comal by fifty points; in 2020, he won by a little more than forty. The county’s major population center, New Braunfels, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation.

When O’Rourke’s gubernatorial campaign set out to hold a town hall in Comal County, it aimed not for New Braunfels but for Canyon Lake, population around 30,000. That community, remote and deeply conservative, was the kind O’Rourke had made a special effort to visit in 2018. This time, however, news that O’Rourke would be coming set off agitation in Canyon Lake, especially on social media.

The campaign first announced that O’Rourke would speak at Maven’s Inn & Grill. Some locals threatened to boycott the restaurant if it hosted the event, according to the local news website My Canyon Lake. On Facebook, the restaurant’s patrons made clear their displeasure. “So I heard y’all are hosting Texas’s most famous drunk driver on Saturday,” one wrote, referencing O’Rourke’s 1998 arrest for driving while intoxicated. Maven’s soon canceled the event. Another woman, voicing what clearly was a minority view, objected. “Knuckling under to bullies,” she wrote. “This is how democracy dies and autocrats rise.”

The campaign then announced that it would hold the town hall at Canyon Lake High School. (It’s not uncommon for politicians to rent out school gyms and auditoriums to hold events.) Shortly thereafter, officials with the Comal Independent School District quickly reassured county residents that the event had not been “fully and properly vetted internally,” that the campaign had prematurely announced the town hall, and that the district did not, as a rule, allow rallies to take place on school grounds. Facebook commenters believed they now had Beto on the run. “DON’T BE SURPRISED TJAT BETO WON’T STEAL SOMETHING OUT OF COMAL CTY. OR BIRGLARIZE SOME BUSINESS,” wrote one man, with the tone that’s typical among users of the social network.

The campaign looked for a third venue. It believed it had found one in the Canyon Lake Resource and Recreation Center. But the center, too, backtracked. The head of the nonprofit group that runs it said his team was worried about “safety” at the event and that O’Rourke was polarizing. The campaign then briefly planned to hold an event at the nearby Whitewater Amphitheater, but that offer was rescinded too

Read on to see how closed-minded people did their best to shut down O’Rourke.

Categories Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Freedom of Speech, Republicans, Texas

Berkshire & Schneider: Democrats Need a New Message About Education

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2022 //
44

Journalist Jennifer Berkshire and historian Jack Schneider wrote a warning in the New York Times to the Democratic Party about education. Democrats, they say, used to have a big advantage over Republicans on the education issue, but that advantage has almost disappeared. They say that Democrats have erred in celebrating education as the most important, if not the only, route to economic success. Meanwhile, they ignored trade unions, which dwindled under red state assaults and corporate attacks, and tax policy, which favored the rich.

While I don’t disagree with their analysis, I have a different take on why Democrats lost the education issue. Not only did they ignore growing economic inequality, but Democrats abandoned their historic devotion to public schools (attended by 90% of American students) and adopted the Republicans’ long-standing belief in choice, competition, testing, and accountability.

Thirty years later, it is indisputably clear that those policies do not improve education, do not increase opportunity for those who are at the bottom, and do not reduce economic inequality.

Under Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, the Democratic platform sounded remarkably like the Republican Party on education. Clinton and Gore pledged to create a national system of standards and tests. Their Goals 2000 legislation of 1994 laid the groundwork for George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, which had bipartisan support. The Clinton administration created the federal Charter Schools Program in 1994, which allocated a few million dollars to help start new charters; it has now grown into a charter slush fund of $440 million annually, which is strongly supported by Republicans and for which there is no need, given the many billionaires who subsidize charters.

Race to the Top was the culmination of the Democrats’ complete merger with Republicans on education policy.

The Democrats lost their primacy as the party of public schools because they embraced Republican ideology, and they ignored the causes of economic inequality, which testing, standards, and choice could not fix.

Berkshire and Schneider write:

The warning signs are everywhere. For 30 years, polls showed that Americans trusted Democrats over Republicans to invest in public education and strengthen schools. Within the past year, however, Republicans have closed the gap; a recent poll shows the two parties separated on the issue by less than the margin of error.

Since the Republican Glenn Youngkin scored an upset win in Virginia’s race for governor by making education a central campaign issue, Republicans in state after state have capitalized on anger over mask mandates, parental rights and teaching about race, and their strategy seems to be working. The culture wars now threatening to consume American schools have produced an unlikely coalition — one that includes populists on the right and a growing number of affluent, educated white parents on the left. Both groups are increasingly at odds with the Democratic Party.

For the party leaders tasked with crafting a midterm strategy, this development should set off alarms. Voters who feel looked down on by elites are now finding common cause with those elites, forming an alliance that could not only cost the Democrats the midterm elections but also fundamentally realign American politics.

The Democrats know they have a problem. One recent analysis conducted by the Democratic Governors Association put it bluntly: “We need to retake education as a winning issue.” But reclaiming their trustworthiness on education will require more than just savvier messaging. Democrats are going to need to rethink a core assumption: that education is the key to addressing economic inequality.

The party’s current education problem reflects a misguided policy shift made decades ago. Eager to reclaim the political center, Democratic politicians increasingly framed education, rather than labor unions or a progressive tax code, as the answer to many of our economic problems, embracing what Barack Obama would later call “ladders of opportunity,” such as “good” public schools and college degrees, which would offer a “hand up” rather than a handout. Bill Clinton famously pronounced, “What you earn depends on what you learn.”

But this message has proved to be deeply alienating to the people who once made up the core of the party. As the philosopher Michael Sandel wrote in his recent book “The Tyranny of Merit,” Democrats often seemed to imply that people whose living standards were declining had only themselves to blame. Meanwhile, more affluent voters were congratulated for their smarts and hard work. Tired of being told to pick themselves up and go to college, working people increasingly turned against the Democrats.

Today, as the middle class falls further behind the wealthy, the belief in education as the sole remedy for economic inequality appears more and more misguided. And yet, because Democrats have spent the past 30 years framing schooling as the surest route to the good life, any attempt to make our education system fairer is met with fierce resistance from affluent liberals worried that Democratic reforms might threaten their carefully laid plans to help their children get ahead.

Please read the rest of their article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Republicans

Dahlia Lithwick: The Shameful Failure of Senate Democrats to Stand Up for Judge Jackson

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2022 //
30

Writing in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick calls out Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee (excepting Senator Booker) for failing to support Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as Republicans pummeled her, berated her, distorted her record.

She writes:

I wrote earlier this week about the utter failure on the part of Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to connect this hearing to what is going to be a catastrophic series of progressive losses at the Supreme Court this term, and the almost staggering inability to lay out any kind of theory for progressive jurisprudence, or even a coherent theory for the role of an unelected judiciary in a constitutional democracy. My colleague Mark Joseph Stern wrote today about a broadside attack on the whole idea of unenumerated rights, substantive due process, and the entire line of cases that protect Americans from forced sterilization, indoctrination of their children, and penalties for using birth control, and afford them the right to marry whom they want. More mysterious than this coordinated GOP project to undermine LGBTQ rights, marriage equality, contraception, and abortion—again, none of this is new or shocking—was the almost complete silence from Senate Democrats on these issues of substantive due process, privacy, and bodily autonomy. On the simplest level, the hearing might have been an opportunity to explain why Roe v. Wade is in fact the tip of the constitutional iceberg; that the same doctrinal underpinnings at risk in this term’s looming catastrophe of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization could lead to existential losses of countless other freedoms. But the hearings were framed as if Republicans stand to lose the court and the midterms, while the Democrats behaved as if the future of the courts, the Senate, and democracy itself has no bearing on what happened inside the Senate chamber.

I understand that the decision was taken to just get the nominee confirmed. Take the win. But for those of us watching and waiting to see Democrats support and back the nominee, there was an immense sense of underreaction. Jackson looked alone fending off the QAnon smear brigade for much of these hearings because she was alone, at least until Sen. Cory Booker took it upon himself in his last colloquy to offer up a powerful corrective to the hatred being leveled at her, and to remind us why love can be an equal and opposite reaction to fear.

If we can all agree that the purpose of this charade for Graham is to try to flip Sens. Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski, and that for Sen. Ted Cruz the purpose of this charade is to goose his own Twitter mentions, and that for Sen. Josh Hawley the purpose is to take what was a fringe “endangering our children” smear campaign last week and push it to the GOP mainstream today, it’s manifestly clear who the real pornographers are this week. But if we can all agree what the GOP agenda has been, I remain utterly mystified by the Democrats. They have the votes to confirm. They are about to irrevocably alter the course of American history. So what are they afraid of?

Chairman Dick Durbin’s inability to control some of the most shocking bullying and abuse from Cruz, Graham, Tom Cotton, and Hawley left observers speechless. At some point, you need to just start gaveling. But there was also a pervasive sense of Democratic senators’ almost chilling unwillingness to go to the mat for their nominee, who was being savaged by Cotton, who called her “not credible,” and Graham, who berated her with the claim that he was sparing her from being bullied like Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Take my word for this one thing: If you have been subject to abuse, bullying, and intimidation, what you really don’t need to hear from people in power is that they think you are “brave,” or that you’re modeling perseverance and grace. What you really want is for someone to stand beside you and take a punch—or throw one. Yet beyond a handful of such moments, and notably Booker’s final speech, virtually everything Democrats did felt insufficient to the moment. More than that, it felt inexplicable.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Failure, Injustice, Republicans

California: ALERT! Charter Insiders Infiltrate Democratic Party Platform Committee!

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2022 //
23

Sara Roos, a blogger who writes under the name “Red Queen in LA,” reports on a dangerous development in California. Charter school insiders took charge of writing the California Democratic Party’s education platform and made changes that undercut longstanding Democratic Party opposition to charter schools. Suddenly, charter schools are referred to not as privatization but as “public charter schools,” the preferred language of the charter lobby. The new language dropped the Democratic Party’s insistence that the boards of charter schools must be elected and replaced it with the requirement only that they be authorized by local school boards. A big change, among others that put the Democratic Party platform in the pocket of the charter billionaires.

Roos wrote:

What actually happened with the CA Democratic Party’s (CADEM) platform adopted Sunday (3/6/22) at its convention?

At the eleventh hour, following an eleven-hour meeting finalizing draft proposalsfor updating the 2022 CADEM platform, it came to light that one of its 23 platform “planks”, that of Education, had been tampered with by charter school (CS) industry insiders.

As a consequence, CADEM delegate and California Federation of Teachers legislative advocate, Tristan Brown, urged from the floor that fellow delegates vote “no” on the entirety of the proposed platform changes, since the rules forbade focusing on specifics to excise.

It was argued that the new language altered the hard-won, former mandate that charter school boards must be elected, because democracy demands public, elected accountability. The platform’s new language morphed this fundamental demand, requiring instead that charter schools simply be authorized and monitored by a school board. The language of conditional support was removed altogether.

On the strength of the Union recommendation by the statewide federation of teachers, and the leadership of several key caucus chairs and leaders, the final floor vote passing the platform was far shy of consensus at 57% aye (691 votes), 43% nay (510 votes). [The absolute numbers are extracted from the meeting transcript and are a little different from the poll result percentages shown to delegates via zoom].

From a convention of 3,037 elected delegates + 80 proxies, that translates to passage by just 22% (=691/3117) of total eligible voters at the convention. But the total number of delegates voting for the platform was not presented. If quorum were just reached for the vote with its 1559 members, then a bare minimum of 358, or nearly one-quarter of delegates (23% of the eligible quorum (=358/1559)), abstained from the platform vote altogether. The sum total of those failing to vote for the platform {“nay”+abstain} far outstrips those who did.

As it happens, the reality of the platform language change is far worse than what was hastily presented on the floor. And befitting their shepherding by charter school operators (including the board chair of the charter school lobbying association), these changes do very much advantage charter school operations.

The former language of bullet 23 in the K-12 Education plank conditioned circumstances for the Party’s support of charter schools on five contingencies [emphasis mine]:

  • Support only those charter schools that are managed by public and elected boards, not-for-profit, and transparent in governance; have equitable admissions; adopt fair labor practices and respect labor neutrality; and, supplement rather than supplant public education programs.

The draft language posted in advance of the convention eliminates rules for conditional support altogether. Instead conditions are replaced by definitions. The term “charter school” is redefined through use of the modifying adjective, “public”. A list of characteristics is simply inserted, absent any conditioning on support. And the long-standing federal exhortation acknowledging and specifying the fungibility of money to ‘supplement not supplant’ (ie, do not rob Peter to pay Paul), is lost:

  • Support public charter schools that are governed by not-for-profit, elected, public boards with transparent governance, have equitable admissions, adopt fair labor practices, respect labor neutrality, and supplement public education programs for students in historically low performing subgroups such as low income, English learners, Black, American Indian, and Alaskan Native students, foster children and students with disabilities

The real problem came from a change inserted after the posted draft platform. Support is urged for these entities now defined not by their governance but by the circumstance of their chartering: authorization and monitoring [emphasis mine]:

  • Support public charter schools that are authorized and monitored by public and elected boards, not-for-profit, and transparent in governance; have equitable admissions; adopt fair labor practices and respect labor neutrality; and, supplement public education programs for students in historically low performing subgroups such as low income, English learners, Black or African American, American Indian, and Alaskan Native students, foster children and students with disabilities

The change amounts to saying “I exist therefore I am”. It asserts support of charter schools no matter what, and defines them as “public”, a characteristic denied by the courts. Reversing the stringent conditional acceptance terms delineated formerly, this incarnation accepts charter schools as the choice of the Democratic Party.

Another change instigated by the charter school lobbyist who volunteered their services to the platform committee, softens the field for two competing ballot initiatives to privatize our public schools through the use of vouchers.

Under cover of redundancy, bullet 14 that unequivocally and expressly “opposes voucher systems for schools,” is eliminated. Its declaration is diluted by sending it lower in the long list of bullet points, and combining it with Education Savings Accounts. The real problem comes in conditioning this opposition to their effect. Since charter schools are defined in the platform now as “public”, vouchers would not be found to “take away from public school funding”.

  • Oppose K-12 Education Savings Accounts, school vouchers, or any programs that would take away from public school funding;

This change was not a mere correction of duplication, it substantively prepares the field for a statewide fight about “school choice,” launched and led from the left. The platform now states that because we define charter schools as “public”, vouchers are a system we no longer oppose because they do not take money away from the public-charter entity. Just as this new platform accepts charter schools de facto, we also now fail to oppose voucher systems.

Trickiness gonna be tricky. Voters gotta be vigilant. Special, monied-interests are persistent and focused; the rest of us are harried volunteers.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Privatization

New Hampshire: Pro-Public Education Candidates Sweep School Board Elections!

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2022 //
10

Tuesday’s school board election in New Hampshire was a triumph for parents and citizens who love their public schools!

This must have shocked Republican Governor Chris Sununu, the Republican-controlled legislature, and State Commissioner Frank Edelblut, who home-schooled his own children and is pushing a sweeping voucher plan for the state.

AfterGlenn Youngkin was elected Governor of Virginia by pandering to parents angry about “critical race theory,” mask mandates, and eager to control what children learned and what books they read, the media bombarded us with stories predicting that Republicans would win next November by running against public schools.

New Hampshire families and citizens said on Election Day, “Not so fast! We love our public schools.”

I Love Public Education Sign Visibility

In first town elections since onslaught of attacks on public education and a honest, accurate education, voters send clear message that they support strong public schools and a honest, accurate education

CONCORD, NH – In race after race across New Hampshire on Town Meeting Day, concerned parents and community members in communities large and small successfully organized to elect pro-public education candidates and reject those seeking to dismantle public education and censor history.

“These results should raise serious doubts about any Republican 2022 election strategy that is built around pitting parents against local public schools and educators,” said Zandra Rice Hawkins, Executive Director of Granite State Progress. “In nearly every school board race, Granite State voters chose out-spoken champions for public education and an honest, accurate, inclusive education. This is a big win for public schools and for our future. These leaders are committed to keeping our public schools strong and making sure every student’s history and experience is valued.”

The results from the election are all the more astounding for record-shattering voter turnout, and for the blatant differences between the candidates on everything from public education, COVID public health measures, and attempts to whitewash American history and censor educators. A priority list of school board results can be found here.

Key examples from around the state:

  • Merrimack Valley School District, home to some of the state’s most vocal anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and classroom censorship activists, experienced a 56% increase in voter turnout from 2019, and supported public education candidates while also defeating a classroom censorship/anti-equity warrant resolution.
  • Bedford experienced a 36% increase in voter turnout and elected pro-public education candidate and teacher Andrea Campbell with 2832 votes, compared to 1293 votes for Sean Monroe, a candidate supported by right-wing organization Defend Our Kids, and 856 for incumbent John Schneller; both of whom supported efforts to censor teachers and ban conversations about race and racism in public schools.
  • Londonderry elected pro-public education candidates Amanda Butcher and Kevin Gray, defeating vocal anti-masker Rachel Killian (seen here harassing school board members during a public meeting). Voters also rejected a warrant resolution to make masks completely optional and the sole decision of parents instead of school leaders and public health experts; a significant decision given Gov. Sununu’s recent decision to ban schools from enacting COVID public health measures like masks.
  • Governor Wentworth School District elected Republican State Rep. Brodie Deschaies over far-right activist Jessica Williams, who believes public schools are indoctrinating students and was arrested at a GWSD school board meeting on September 13, 2021.
  • Weare elected pro-public education candidates William “Bill” Politt and Alyssa Small, and passed full-day kindergarten; and Hollis elected pro-public education candidates Carryl Roy, Krista Whalan, and Holly Babcock.
  • Exeter and SAU 16 elected a full slate of pro-public education and honest education candidates, despite a nearly $20,000 effort by the opposition and months of voter mailings from those who oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion justice efforts in the school districts.

“We are in awe of how our communities have come together to protect and support public education,” said Sarah Robinson, Education Justice Campaign Director for Granite State Progress. “Parents, students, educators, and community leaders have been working for months to organize, recruit strong candidates, and support pro-public education campaigns. Watching the results come in and knowing that so many public education champions are going to be serving in these roles gives us all hope. Our schools have been under constant attack from privatization schemes, neo-Nazi’s, and of course Governor Sununu’s statewide ban on a honest education. We all know that serving on a school board right now is challenging, and we thank these leaders for stepping up for our students. We hope the folks at the State House are paying attention, because this showdown will play out again in November unless they stop the attacks on our public schools.”

Categories Democrats, Education Industry, Elections, New Hampshire, Privatization, Republicans, Resistance, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

CBS Poll: Most Americans Oppose Banning Books and Support Teaching About Race

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2022 //
68

Last week, I reported a poll in Educatuon Week, which found that half the public thinks that schools should not teach about racism today. With opinion polls, the results are influenced by many factors, including how the questions are worded. A poll by CBS got very different results.

Greg Sergeant writes in the Washington Post that Democrats should take heart from a CBS News poll: Most Americans oppose book banning. Democrats should stop being defensive.

He writes:

As Democrats debate the GOP’s all-culture-war-all-the-time campaign strategy, here’s a maxim worth remembering: If you’re wasting political bandwidth denying lies about yourselves, you’re losing.

A new CBS News poll offers data that should prod Democrats into rethinking these culture-war battles. It finds that surprisingly large majorities oppose banning books on history or race — and importantly, this is partly because teaching about our racial past makes students more understanding of others’ historical experiences.

The poll finds that 83 percent of Americans say books should never be banned for criticizing U.S. history; 85 percent oppose banning them for airing ideas you disagree with; and 87 percent oppose banning them for discussing race or depicting slavery.

What’s more, 76 percent of Americans say schools should be allowed to teach ideas and historical events that “might make some students uncomfortable.” And 68 percent say such teachings make people more understanding of what others went through, while 58 percent believe racism is still a serious problem today.

Finally, 66 percent say public schools either teach too little about the history of Black Americans (42 percent) or teach the right amount (24 percent). Yet 59 percent say we’ve made “a lot of real progress getting rid of racial discrimination” since the 1960s.

This hints at a way forward for Democrats. Notably, large majorities think both that we’ve made a good deal of racial progress and that we should be forthrightly confronting hard racial truths about our past and present, even if it makes students uncomfortable.

Culture warriors in the Republican Party want to ban all teaching about racism, in the past or present. They pass vague laws that are meant to intimidate teachers.

Their rhetorical game works this way: If you focus too much on the persistence of racial disparities in the present, you’re denying the racial progress that has taken place. You’re telling children that race still matters. You’re not telling a positive or uplifting story about our country. You’re saying America is irredeemable. You’re trying to make children hate our country, each other and themselves.

But this polling suggests many Americans doesn’t necessarily see things this way. Place proper emphasis on the idea that racial progress has been made, and it’s fine to highlight the problems that remain, even if it creates feelings of discomfort. It’s possible to tell a story that is in some ways about progress but also doesn’t whitewash our past.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democrats, Opinion Polling, Racism, Republicans

Jennifer Berkshire: Who Is Driving Teachers Out of Their Profession?

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2022 //
29

Jennifer Berkshire, expert education journalist and co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, writes in The Nation about the forces driving teachers out of the schools.

She interviewed many teachers who explained why they were leaving. Some cited ”the bad teacher” narrative promulgated by Arne Duncan and his insistence that teachers be evaluated, based on their students’ test scores, which is both ineffective and inaccurate. His and Obama’s “Race to the Top” was deeply demoralizing to teachers, and it accomplished nothing positive.

She begins:

Neal Patel survived teaching in the pandemic. It was the culture wars that did him in.

In the fall of 2020, Patel added two flags to the wall of his science classroom in Johnston, Iowa. Now, alongside images of energy waves and the electromagnetic spectrum were the Gay Pride rainbow flag and a proclamation that Black Lives Matter. The flags, says Patel, represented the kind of inclusive space he was committed to creating, sending a signal to all students that even in this conservative suburb of Des Moines, there was a place for them.

School administrators supported him—on one condition. “They’re just there as decoration,” Patel says. “The only time I discuss the flags is when a student asks me about them.”

Patel assumes it was a student who snapped a picture of the display. Somehow it ended up on the Facebook page of a conservative state legislator. Representative Steve Holt, who lives 100 miles from Johnston, pointed to the flags as evidence of creeping left-wing indoctrination in Iowa’s schools and encouraged his constituents to take a stand. Patel says he was shocked by the attention, then upset: “Holt thinks it’s a political issue to try to create an inclusive environment, and he’s using that to try to further divide our community.”Johnston has grown only more divided since Patel became Facebook fodder. At a school board meeting last fall, members debated whether to ban two books on race, including one by the Native American writer Sherman Alexie, after parents complained. The president of the Iowa State Senate, who represents a neighboring county, took the mic during the public comment period, calling for teachers who assigned “obscene” material to be prosecuted. Patel was in the crowd that night, to lend support to minority and LGBTQ students who’d come to speak out against banning the books. And he had an announcement of his own to make: This year would be his last as a teacher in Johnston.

The Obama administration made matters much worse for teachers when it imposed test-based evaluation as the heart of its “reforms.”

The thinking went something like this: Make teacher evaluations tougher, and teaching would get better, which would mean higher student achievement, more students graduating from college, and ultimately a country better able to outsmart China et al. “Tougher” meant holding teachers accountable for how their students fared on standardized tests…

In 2010, Colorado became one of the first states to enact a high-stakes teacher evaluation law; by 2017, nearly every state had one on the books. While the pandemic may have disrupted everything about schooling, policies like Colorado’s Senate Bill 10, with its 18-page evaluation rubric and 345-page user guide aimed at weeding out bad teachers, remain in place.

For Shannon Peterson, an English language acquisition teacher in Aurora, that meant leading her students through a writing exercise last fall as her principal observed. Peterson’s students, many of them immigrants who live in poverty, bore the pandemic heavily, she says: “The kids are stressed, all of their writing is about anxiety, and attendance is way down.”

To her delight, the students responded enthusiastically to the writing prompt she’d come up with: comparing and contrasting the Harlem Renaissance and Black Lives Matter, and how the entertainment industries in their respective eras related to both. In a year of stress and struggle for teachers and students alike, here was something to celebrate. “Excellent writing came out of this,” Peterson says.

Her principal wasn’t convinced. Peterson, he felt, hadn’t done enough actual teaching during the observation. “I just don’t feel comfortable checking off these boxes,” he told her.

The previous year, when the cash-strapped school district had offered teachers buyouts to leave, Peterson turned it down: “I felt an enormous obligation to go back for the kids and my colleagues.” After her evaluation, though, Peterson had reached a breaking point. She quit a week later, walking away from a career that spanned 23 years, 18½ of them in Aurora. “I’m not a box,” Peterson says.

Two weeks after Peterson resigned, a major study came out: The decade-long push to weed out bad teachers had come to naught. The billions of dollars spent, the wars with teachers’ unions, and the collapse in teacher morale had produced “null effects” on student test scores and educational attainment.

Please open the link and read the study. Billions of dollars wasted on ineffective and demoralizing teacher evaluations that produced tons of data but nothing else.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, VAM (value-added modeling)

Paul Waldman: Republicans Are Vilifying America’s Schools. When Will Democrats Fight Back?

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2022 //
138

Paul Waldman is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. In this article, he criticizes Democrats for failing to stand up to Republican slanders and lies about public schools. He raises an important point: Why aren’t Democrats fighting Republican lies about the schools? Why aren’t the billionaires who claim to be liberal speaking out against this vicious campaign to destroy our public schools? One reason for the silence of the Democrats: Arne Duncan derided and insulted public schools and their teachers as often as Republicans.

Waldman wrote recently:

For the last year or so, Republicans have used the “issue” of education as a cudgel against Democrats, whipping up fear and anger to motivate their voters and seize power at all levels of government.

Isn’t it about time Democrats fought back?
Republicans have moved from hyping the boogeyman of critical race theory to taking practical steps to criminalize honest classroom discussions and ban books, turning their manufactured race and sex panic into profound political and educational change. Meanwhile, Democrats have done almost nothing about it, watching it all with a kind of paralyzed confusion.

Look no further than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is pushing legislation with the colorful name of the Stop Woke Act. As the Republican governor told Fox News this weekend, we need to allow people to sue schools over their curriculums, not only because of CRT but also because “there’s a lot of other inappropriate content that can be smuggled in by public schools.”

If you liked the Texas bill that effectively banned abortion in the state, you’re in luck. Republicans apparently want to use a version of that bill’s tactic — putting enforcement in the hands of private vigilantes — to make teachers and school administrators live under the same fear as abortion providers.

It’s happening elsewhere, too. A bill in Indiana allows the same kind of lawsuits. And last week, during a hearing on the bill, a GOP state senator got in trouble for saying that “I believe that we’ve gone too far when we take a position” on things like Nazism, because in the classroom, “we need to be impartial.” The state senator, Scott Baldwin, previously attracted attention when it was revealed that he made a contribution to the far-right Oath Keepers (though he claims he has no real connection to the extremist group).

Everywhere you look, Republicans are trying to outdo one another with state laws forcing teachers to parrot far-right propaganda to students. A Republican bill in Oklahoma would ban teachers from saying that “one race is the unique oppressor” or “victim” when teaching the history of slavery in America; its sponsor says that would bring the appropriate “balance” to the subject.

So ask yourself: What are Democrats telling the public about schools? If you vote for Democrats, what are you supposed to be achieving on this issue? If any voters know, it would be a surprise.
We’re seeing another iteration of a common Republican strategy: Wait for some liberal somewhere to voice an idea that will sound too extreme to many voters if presented without context and in the most inflammatory way possible, inflate that idea way beyond its actual importance, claim it constitutes the entirety of the Democratic agenda and play on people’s fears to gin up a backlash.

That was the model on “defund the police.” Now it’s being used on schools, which Republicans have decided is the issue that can generate sufficient rage to bring victory at the polls.
Devoted as they are to facts and rational argumentation, liberals can’t help themselves from responding to Republican attacks first and foremost with refutation, which allows Republicans to set the terms of debate. So their response to the charge that critical race theory is infecting our schools is something like this: “No, no, that has nothing to do with public education. It’s a scholarly theory taught mostly to graduate students.”

But that doesn’t allow for this response: “Republicans want to subject our kids to fascist indoctrination. Why do they want to teach our kids that slavery wasn’t bad? Why are they trying to ban books? Who’s writing their education policy, David Duke? Don’t let them destroy your schools!”


That, of course, would be an unfair exaggeration of what most Republicans actually want. Is a state senator who worries that public school teachers might be biased against Nazism really representative of the whole Republican Party? Let’s try to be reasonable here.

Or maybe being reasonable isn’t the best place to start when you’re being overrun. Maybe Democrats need to begin not with a response to Republican lies about what happens in the classroom, but an attack on what Republicans are trying to do to American education.

After Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governorship with a campaign largely focused on schools, Republicans everywhere decided that nurturing a CRT-based White backlash is the path to victory. That is their plan, whether Democrats like it or not.

This isn’t just coming from national Republicans. At the state and local level, far-right extremists are taking over education policy, leaving teachers terrified that if they communicate the wrong idea to students — like, apparently, being too critical of Nazis — they might get sued.

The implications of the GOP war on schools and teachers are horrifying, and with some exceptions, Democrats are watching it happen without anything resembling a plan to do anything about it. It might be time for all the party’s clever strategists to give it some thought.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Curriculum, Democrats, Failure, Hoax, Libraries, Lies, Politics, Propaganda, Racism, Republicans
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