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DeSantis Lashes Out at Black Man Who Accuses Him of Having Blood on His Hands for Stoking Racial Hatred

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2023 //
41

Politicians should choose their words with care. When they whip up animus towards any group, there are mentally ill people who take them seriously and act out violently on their impulses.

That’s what a Black man said to DeSantis. He accused DeSantis of responsibility for the murder of three innocent Black people in a Dollar General store by unleashing a hate campaign against “woke” and against teaching the history of racism. And by making it easier to buy guns.

Gov. Ron DeSantis railed at a Black questioner in Jacksonville on Thursday who suggested his policies bore some blame for the racist shooting there last month that left three Black people dead.
“You have allowed people to hunt people like me,” the man said, leading DeSantis to angrily respond, “I’m not going to let you accuse me of committing criminal activity! I am not going to take that.”

The confrontation happened at the end of an event in which DeSantis and state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo continued their longstanding campaign attacking masks, vaccine boosters and other COVID measures.

The man said the governor his policies have “allowed weapons to be put on the street in the hands of immature, hateful people that have caused the deaths of the people that were murdered.”

“You don’t get to come here and blame me for some madman,” DeSantis said as his supporters cheered. “That is not appropriate, and I’m not going to accept it. That is nonsense.”

DeSantis noted how gunman Ryan Palmeter was temporarily held for a mental health examination in 2017 under the Florida law known as the Baker Act.

“That guy was Baker Acted,” DeSantis told the questioner. “He should have been ruled ineligible [to own firearms], but they didn’t involuntarily commit him.”

DeSantis signed a bill this year allowing people to carry guns without getting a state permit.

The questioner was escorted out of the restaurant where the event was being held….

Behind a lectern sign reading “Mandate Freedom,” DeSantis and Ladapo slammed some of the COVID measures being done in other states in response to rising infections. They also attacked the new round of COVID booster shots expected to be made available soon.

“We will not allow the dystopian visions of paranoid hypochondriacs to control our health policies, let alone our state,” DeSantis said.

Ladapo, who was admonished by U.S. public health agencies earlier this year that his fueling of vaccine hesitancy is harming the public, told residents they should ignore expert guidance on vaccines if “you have an intuition about what the right thing is.”

Watch the number of COVID deaths in Florida. DeSantis and Lapado will both have blood on their hands for urging people not to get vaccinated.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Elections, Florida, Racism

Florida: Judge Throws Out DeSantis’ Gerrymandered Map

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2023 //
44

Florida used to have four Black members of Congress. Ron DeSantis took personal charge of redrawing the state’s districts and changed the lines to make them more Republican, eliminating three Black seats. A judge just tossed DeSantis’s map as unconstitutional. The decision will be appealed.

The Miami Herald reported:

A state judge struck down North Florida’s congressional districts Saturday, rebuffing Gov. Ron DeSantis’ open defiance of anti-gerrymandering protections, finding the governor’s map illegally reduced Black voters’ electoral power.

DeSantis had wagered the state’s Fair Districts Amendment against the U.S. Constitution, arguing mandatory protections for Black voters violated the Equal Protection Clause. Second Judicial Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh flatly rejected that gamble, rendering a decision that could reverberate from the halls of Tallahassee to the streets of Jacksonville, paving the way for a new, Democratic district where Jacksonville’s Black voters have more influence.

Marsh refused to bite on DeSantis’ claim that the state’s Fair Districts Amendment violated the U.S. Constitution, saying DeSantis’ secretary of state and the Legislature didn’t even have standing to make such an argument…

DeSantis conceded that his map did not meet the state’s “non-diminishment” standard, which mandates that new districts must not undermine the voting power of racial minorities. The protection mirrors language in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and the state argued Marsh should strike down that protection as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. At a hearing last month, Marsh questioned why Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody wasn’t defending the state’s Constitution in the case.

He also expressed sharp skepticism that he could make such an expansive ruling. Marsh said that if he ruled for the state, “this court will be the first in the country to say that even the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional.” If the Florida Supreme Court sides with DeSantis, it could have national implications. It means the court, a majority of whom DeSantis appointed, would go further than the U.S. Supreme Court has in advancing a legal argument, pushed by many conservatives, that it’s inherently wrong to take race into account, even if it’s done to preserve the political voice of Black voters.

DeSantis’ veto of the initial map and the GOP-controlled Legislature’s decision to adopt his new one sparked an historic protest in the Florida House where Reps. Angie Nixon (D-Jacksonville) and Travaris McCurdy (D-Orlando) led a sit-in to disrupt the proceedings. After that protest, DeSantis vetoed all of Nixon’s appropriations in the current budget, and legislative leadership put her office in the basement of the Florida Capitol. [Bold added.]

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article278906479.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Elections, Equity

Florida: Vouchers Pay for TVs, Disney Passes, and Water Sports

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2023 //
21

The Orlando Sentinel reported that the $8,000 voucher handed out to every student in a non-public school may be used for non-educational purchases. Florida endorsed universal vouchers so family income doesn’t matter. Rich families get vouchers too just so long as their children do not attend a public school.

As Florida lawmakers expanded eligibility for school vouchers this year, they also gave parents more ways to spend the money.

Theme park passes, 55-inch TVs, and stand-up paddleboards are among the approved items that recipients can buy to use at home. The purchases can be made by parents who home-school their children or send them to private schools, if any voucher money remains after paying tuition and fees.

The items appear in a list of authorized expenses in a 13-page purchasing guide published this summer by Step Up For Students, the scholarship funding organization that manages the bulk of Florida’s vouchers. Many of the items are similar to what was permitted for vouchers to students with disabilities in the past, but now they’re available to anyone who receives an award of about $8,000.

The list quickly raised eyebrows as it circulated.

“If we saw school districts spending money like that, we would be outraged,” said Damaris Allen, executive director of Families for Strong Public Schools, who recently started speaking out publicly on the issue. “We want to be conservative with our tax dollars. We want to be sure it is being used for worthwhile things.”

By comparison, Allen and others noted, teachers who want some of the same items for their classrooms would have to pay out-of-pocket or turn to other fundraising sources such as GoFundMe because schools won’t pay for them…

Supporters of the expansion don’t consider the program as wasting taxpayer money. They see it as allowing families to customize education according to their children’s interests.

“We need to stop thinking like it’s 1960 — that the only answer is four walls with traditional districts leading the charge,” Jeanne Allen, founder of the national Center for Education Reform, said in an email.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: The Lies Embedded in Florida’s Social Studies Curriculum

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2023 //
88

Heather Cox Richardson, a historian, analyzed the controversial Florida social studies curriculum and explains how they attempt to minimize racism and slavery. Their fault lies not in one or two sentences but in their central ideas. The influence of Hillsdale College is blatant in the document’s apologetics. Richardson posted this keen analysis on July 22, but I missed it. I’m pleased to share it now.

She wrote:

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order.

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

—

Notes:

https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20653/urlt/6-4.pdf

Categories Bigotry, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Florida, History, Propaganda, Racism

Fact-Checking DeSantis on Abortion at GOP Debate

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
21

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told a story during the GOP debate about a baby who survived multiple attempts to abort her, presumably to justify his near-total ban on abortions (after six weeks). But the Miami Herald reported the true story, which is very different from DeSantis’ version. The event occurred long before abortion was legal, and the person who tried to abort the baby with a coat hanger was the baby’s father.

The story was reported by Julie K. Brown with the aid of Sarah Blaskey, investigative reporters for the Miami Herald and was based on statements previously recorded by Penny Hopper, contemporaneous newspaper articles, public records and an interview with a family member who asked not to be identified. The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

At Wednesday’s Republican candidates debate, during a discussion of late-term abortion, Gov. Ron DeSantis told a horrific but puzzling story.

“I know a lady in Florida named Penny,” the GOP presidential candidate said. “She survived multiple abortion attempts. She was left discarded in a pan. Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to another hospital.”

Critics of the governor flocked to social media to suggest the “Penny” story was made up or wildly embellished. Supporters countered that liberals were triggered by an ugly truth.

Penny is real and her last name is Hopper. But DeSantis failed to note key details from her remarkable story: The person who tried to end Penny’s life in the womb was not a doctor or even an illegal abortion provider — it was her father. And his effort to abort his daughter with a coat hanger took place almost two decades before the Supreme Court’s seismic Roe v. Wade decision, which established a woman’s right to an abortion…

Miriam “Penny” Hopper’s story begins in 1955, in a hospital in Wauchula, a small farming town in Central Florida. News reports at the time described her as a miracle baby, born weighing 1 pound, 11 ounces. She was so tiny that the nurses initially had to feed her with a dropper.

Her now-deceased father, Charles Wesley Browder Sr., was a U.S. Army sergeant during World War II who served on the front lines in Europe when he was just 20. His family said he was a “scout” who performed advance reconnaissance missions before being wounded, captured and tortured by the Germans. Military records show he was discharged with honors in 1945 and was awarded four Bronze Stars in addition to a Purple Heart, a Good-Conduct Medal and the World War II Victory Medal.

Charles married Glenda Marie Pierce, and they settled in Wauchula, Florida, about 75 miles from Tampa.

In 1953, birth records show, Hopper’s parents had a son, Charles Browder Jr., who was born at Walker Memorial Hospital in nearby Avon Park. At the time of the 1950 census, Glenda worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office, and Charles was a salesman. Hopper’s mother soon became pregnant with her second child, also a boy. In a video posted on YouTube several years ago by a group called “Florida Right to Life,” Hopper said that she learned later that her father had used the coat hanger to abort her mother’s second child. It is one of at least two videos on the Internet relating her story, although the videos differ on some details.

When her mother became pregnant a third time with her, Penny Browder said her father returned to the same method in an attempt to end the pregnancy, later explaining to his daughter that he was earning only $125 a week, which he felt wasn’t enough to support a larger family.

Browder’s mother developed complications during the coat-hanger procedure. The couple rushed to a nearby medical facility in the middle of the night, with her mother very ill and bleeding. In the video interviews, Hopper said her parents were met at the clinic by a doctor in his pajamas. He examined her mother — and concluded that the fetus had no heartbeat. He advised the couple to abort the baby, telling them the child would likely be stillborn.

“If it lives, it will be a burden on you your whole life,” the doctor allegedly said. He used saline and injected her mother with a drug, then left, instructing the nurse to “discard the baby dead or alive,” Hopper said in a video interview, a segment that was to be incorporated into a TV commercial by the anti-abortion group “Faces of Choice.” It can be found on YouTube.

When the baby arrived shortly after 3 a.m., the nurse wrapped her in a towel and placed her in a pan, Penny Hopper said one video. In the other, Hopper said her mother told her the baby was placed in a basket.

The following day, Glenda’s mother and aunt came to check on her at the clinic, where she was recuperating. They found the baby outside on a back porch, unwrapped her, and discovered she was alive, Hopper said.

“My grandmother was so upset she called the local police,” she said.

A news clipping incorporated into a video segment said the baby was transported from the medical facility in Wauchula to what was then Morrell Regional Hospital in Lakeland. The news clipping, which isn’t labeled, seems to partially contradict Hopper’s story, as it states that the doctors at the Wauchula facility “put forth greater efforts to keep the 1 pound, 11 ounce baby alive.” The story said the child was on the “brink of death” when she was transported to Lakeland, with a police escort that crashed on the way to the hospital.

The Tampa Tribune from Nov. 29, 1955, reported on the crash, saying the baby had been born premature that morning. The infant was placed in an incubator, where she remained for four months. Hopper, however, said that while she was in the hospital her father tried to disconnect her from the incubator because he was upset at how much the care was costing. The hospital summoned the police to restrain him, Hopper said in one of the interviews.

“He basically couldn’t stand the thought I was alive,” Hopper said.

In March 1956, she was finally strong enough to go home with her parents…

Anti-abortion groups use Penny Hopper’s story to demonstrate why abortion should be banned.

Pro-abortion groups use it to demonstrate why abortion should be safe and legal. Coat-hanger abortions will resume, and they endanger the life of the mother.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article278586634.html#storylink=cpy

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Categories DeSantis, Elections, Florida, Health, Lies

Michael Hiltzik: The Republican Plan to Dumb Down America’s Youth

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
24

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, finds a pattern in the Republican attacks on the schools and universities. Their hostility to teaching Black history, their encouragement of book banning, their strategic defunding of higher education, their treatment of teaching about race, gender, and climate change as “indoctrination”—together point to a goal: the dumbing down of American young people.

Republicans say they want to get rid of “indoctrination” but they are busily erasing free inquiry and critical thinking. What do they actually want? Indoctrination.

He reminds us of the immortal words of former President Donald J. Trump: “I love the uneducated.” Republicans do not want students to think critically about racism or the past. They do not want them to reflect on anything that makes them “uncomfortable.” They want to shield them from “divisive concerns.” They want them to imbibe a candy-coated version of the past, not wrestle with hard truths.

He writes:

For reasons that may not be too hard to understand, Republicans and conservatives seem to be intent on turning their K-12 schools, colleges and universities into plantations for raising a crop of ignorant and unthinking students.

Donald Trump set forth the principle during his 2016 primary campaign, when he declared, “I love the poorly educated.”

In recent months, the right-wing attack on public education has intensified. The epicenter of the movement is Florida under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, where the faculty and course offerings of one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, New College, have been eviscerated purportedly to wipe out what DeSantis calls “ideological indoctrination.”

The state’s K-12 schools have been authorized to supplement their curricula with animated cartoons developed by the far-right Prager University Foundation that flagrantly distort climate science and America’s racial history, the better to promote fossil fuels, undermine the use of renewable energy and paint a lily-white picture of America’s past.

Then there’s West Virginia, which is proposing to shut down nearly 10% of its academic offerings, including all its foreign language programs. The supposed reason is a huge budget deficit, the harvest of a systematic cutback in state funding.

In Texas, the State Library and Archives Commission is quitting the American Library Assn., after a complaint by a Republican state legislator accusing the association of pushing “socialism and Marxist ideology.”

In Arkansas, state education officials told schools that they may not award credit for the Advanced Placement course in African American history. (Several school districts said they’d offer students the course anyway.) This is the course that Florida forced the College Board to water down earlier this year by alleging, falsely, that it promoted “critical race theory.”

I must interject here that I’m of two minds about this effort. On the one hand, an ignorant young electorate can’t be good for the republic; on the other, filling the workforce with graduates incapable of critical thinking and weighed down by a distorted conception of the real world will reduce competition for my kids and grandkids for jobs that require knowledge and brains.

Let’s examine some of these cases in greater depth.

Prager University, or PragerU, isn’t an accredited institution of higher learning. It’s a dispenser of right-wing charlatanism founded by Dennis Prager, a right-wing radio host. The material approved for use in the schools includes a series of five- to 10-minute animated videos featuring the fictional Leo and Layla, school-age siblings who travel back in time to meet historical figures.

One encounter is with Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist. The goal of the video is to depict “Black lives matter” demonstrations as unrestrained and violent — “Why are they burning a car?” Leo asks while viewing a televised news report. The animated Douglass speaks up for change achieved through “patience and compromise.”

This depiction of Douglass leaves experts in his life and times aghast. Douglass consistently railed against such counsel. Of the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the union but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act — arguably the most detested federal law in American history — he stated that it illustrated how “slavery has shot its leprous distillment through the life blood of the nation.” In 1861, he thundered that “all compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery, is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law.”

Patience? The video depicts Douglass quoting from an 1852 speech to a Rochester anti-slavery society in which he said “great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages.”

But it doesn’t include lines from later in the speech, reproaching his audience for prematurely celebrating the progress of abolition: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … all your religious parade and solemnity, … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Another video in the series parrots the fossil fuel industry’s talking points against wind and solar power: Standing over the corpse of a bird supposedly slain by flying into a wind turbine, the schoolkids’ interlocutor states, “Like many people … you’ve been misled about renewable energy, and their impact on the environment…. Windmills kill so many birds, it’s hard to track how many…. Wind farms and solar farms disrupt huge amounts of natural habitat.”

Acid rain, pollution, global warming — those consequences of fossil fuel energy aren’t mentioned. The video ends with a pitch for nuclear power, never mind the unsolved question of what to do with its radioactive waste products.

PragerU’s sedulous attack on renewables perhaps shouldn’t be much a surprise: Among its big donors is the Wilks family, which derives its fortune from fracking and which approved “future payment” of $6.25 million to PragerU in 2013.

As for New College, its travails under the DeSantis regime have been documented by my colleague Jenny Jarvie, among many others.

In a nutshell, the Sarasota institution possessed a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s outstanding havens for talented, independent-minded students. Then came DeSantis. He summarily replaced its board of trustees with a clutch of right-wing stooges including Christopher Rufo, known for having concocted the panic over critical race theory out of thin air and then marketed it as a useful culture war weapon to unscrupulous conservative politicians, including DeSantis.

Rufo and his fellows fired the university president and installed a sub-replacement-level GOP timeserver, Richard Corcoran, in her place. Faculty and students have fled. Students who stayed behind and were in the process of assembling their course schedules for the coming year are discovering at the last minute that the courses are no longer offered because their teachers have been fired or quit.

Instead of ambitious scholars committed to open inquiry, Corcoran has recruited athletes to fill out the student body, even though the college has no athletic fields for many of them to play on. According to USA Today, New College now has 70 baseball players, nearly twice as many as the University of Florida’s Division I NCAA team.

More to the point, the average SAT and ACT scores and high-school grade point averages have fallen from the pre-Corcoran level, while most of the school’s merit-based scholarships have gone to athletes. New College, in other words, has transitioned from a top liberal arts institution into a school that places muscle-bound underachievers on a pedestal. DeSantis calls this “succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission.”

Finally, West Virginia University. Under its president, Gordon Gee — who previously worked his dubious magic at Brown Universityand Ohio State University, among other places — the school built lavish facilities despite declining enrollments. The construction program at the land grant university contributed to a $45-million deficit for the coming year, with expectations that it would rise to $75 million by 2028.

But the main problem was one shared by many other public universities — the erosion of public funding. As the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy points out, “if West Virginia lawmakers had simply kept higher education funding at the same levels as a decade ago, West Virginia University would have an estimated additional $37.6 million in state funding for [fiscal year] 2024, closing the majority of this year’s budget gap.”

The decision on which programs to shutter at WVU points to a shift in how public university trustees see the purpose of their schools, trying to align them more with economic goals set by local industries rather than the goal of providing a well-rounded education to a state’s students. Trustees in some states, including North Carolina and Texas, have injected themselves into academic decisions traditionally left to administrators, often for partisan political reasons.

When it comes to interference in educational policies by conservatives, such as what’s happened in Florida, Texas and Arkansas, there’s no justification for taking these measures at face value — that is, as efforts to remove “indoctrination” from the schools. The truth is that the right-wing effort serves the purposes of white supremacists and advocates of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — they’re moving to inject indoctrination that conforms more to their own ideologies.

Take the attack on critical race theory, or at least the version retailed by Rufo and his ilk. “The right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle,” the Black scholar Robin D.G. Kelley of UCLA has observed, by caricaturing a four-decade-long scholarly effort to analyze “why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality” into “a racist plot to teach white children to hate themselves, their country, and their ‘race.’”

(The inclusion of Kelley’s work in the AP African American Studies course was cited as a “concern” by Florida officials in their rationale for rejecting the course; Kelley’s work was suppressed by the College Board in its effort to make the course more acceptable to the state Department of Education.)

These attacks are couched in the vocabulary of “parents’ rights” and student freedom, but they don’t serve the students at all, nor do they advance the rights of parents interested in a good, comprehensive education for their children, as opposed to one dictated by the most narrow-minded ideologues in their state.

Where will it end? Florida’s ham-fisted educational policies won’t produce graduates with the intellectual equipment to succeed in legitimate universities, much less in the world at large. The only university many will be qualified to attend will be Prager U, and that won’t be good for anyone.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Higher Education, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Racism, Stupid, Trump

The Leaders of Critical Race Theory Discuss the Attacks on Them and Their Ideas

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2023 //
14

A fascinating discussion was recently published, involving Richard Delgado, Aja Martinez, and Victor Ray, all of whom have written about critical race theory.

Richard Delgado coordinated the conversation.

It begins:

Three authors of books out on Critical Race Theory—Richard Delgado, Aja Martinez, and Victor Ray—discuss the cultural and legal landscape in a post-2020 world. From receiving hate mail, to fielding calls to ban teaching CRT in schools, these authors’ experiences and research offers insight into current debates around teaching race in America.

* 

Lit Hub: You have all recently published books about Critical Race Theory. Right around the time your books came out, white nationalists responded to calls by the previous president and others to destroy the movement. Have you experienced personal backlash from anti-Crit forces on the right?

Richard Delgado: In the early years of the movement, the late eighties and early nineties, I received very little. And that which I did receive was relatively polite and scholarly, as with an article in Stanford Law Review that charged me and other race-crits with undermining rationality and the search for truth and replacing them with stories and personal reflections.

Around the time that the fourth edition of Jean’s and my book went under production, we started receiving a lot of hate mail, most of it from people who had apparently not read the book in any of its editions but knew what they thought about it because Fox News told them so. Some of the hate mail was vicious and personal. One anonymous emailer informed Jean that she was a traitor to the white race for sleeping with me.

Aja Martinez: Similar to Richard, when I was a graduate student starting out with my work as a CRT scholar with a dissertation on CRT’s storytelling methodology, counterstory, the majority of the backlash I received was from liberal academics who said one of two things: 1) “why are you studying race and racism? Obama is President”; or 2) “CRT and counterstory isn’t real/rigorous research.” That’s pretty much the steady resistance and backlash I received for the most of my career.

Everything changed in 2020. My book, Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory was published in May 2020; in September, President Trump issued his “Executive order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” This ban effectively shined a national (and even international—I was asked to speak on this topic with Lithuanian Public Radio!) spotlight on CRT and in many ways placed targets on those of us who are identifiable culprits responsible for supposedly pushing CRT’s “different vision of America.” That vision (also supposedly) teaches Americans to hate America.

Please read this interesting conversation among three scholars who dared to challenge conventional wisdom and found their work at the center of a national maelstrom.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, DeSantis, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Racism

Ron DeSantis, Hypocrite

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
19

On August 20, the New York Times published a story about how Ron DeSantis joined the “ruling class” but now campaigns against it. His story is shot through with hypocrisy. He paints himself as the public school kid from middle-class Dunedin, Florida, surrounded by snobs from private schools who looked down on him. Yet now as governor, he treats public schools and their teachers with contempt and expanded vouchers to pay billions of taxpayer dollars for kids to go to private schools, including high-income families.

Why is he, the public school kid, subsidizing private and religious schools? Why is he so hostile to public schools? He complains that public schools indoctrinate their students yet he’s willing to send kids to religious schools whose purpose is indoctrination. Why does he subsidize the tuition of rich kids who go to private schools? Aren’t those the kind of kids who treated him with condescension?

Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis nestled into his chair onstage in Naples, Fla., to explain to an audience of the would-be conservative elite his journey through the reigning liberal one they hoped to destroy. His host was Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has become an academic hub of the Trump-era right. His subject was Yale University, where Mr. DeSantis was educated and where, as he tells it, he first met the enemy.

The story begins:

“I’m a public school kid,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience, unspooling a story that he has shared in recent years with aides, friendly interviewers, donors, voters and readers of his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free.” “My mom was a nurse, my dad worked for a TV ratings company, installing the metering devices back then. And I show up in jean shorts and a T-shirt.” The outfit “did not go over well with the Andover and Groton kids” — sometimes it is Andover and Groton, sometimes it is Andover and Exeter, sometimes all three — who mocked his lack of polish.

Worse than Yale’s snobbery was its politics: College was “the first time that I saw unadulterated leftism,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition this March. “We’re basically being told the Soviet Union was the victim in the Cold War.” Teachers and students alike “rejected God, and they hated our country,” he assured the audience in Naples. “When I get people that submit résumés,” he said, “quite frankly, if I got one from Yale I would be negatively disposed.”

Then there are the parts of the story he doesn’t tell: How his new baseball teammates at Yale — mostly fellow athletic recruits from the South and West who likewise viewed themselves as Yale outsiders — were among those who teased him about his clothes, and how he would nevertheless adopt their insular culture as his own. How he joined one of Yale’s storied “secret societies,” those breeding grounds of future senators and presidents, but left other members with the impression that he would have preferred to be tapped by a more prestigious one. How he shared with friends his dream of going to Harvard Law School — not law school, Harvard Law School — and successfully applied there, stacking one elite credential neatly onto another, and co-founded a tutoring firm that touted “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.” How his Yale connections helped him out-raise rivals as a first-time candidate for Congress, and how he featured his Ivy credentials — “a political scarlet letter as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” Mr. DeSantis likes to say — on his campaign websites, sometimes down to the precise degree of honors earned. And how that C.V. helped sell him to an Ivy-obsessed President Donald J. Trump, whose 2018 endorsement helped propel Mr. DeSantis to the governor’s office in Florida, where his Yale baseball jersey is displayed prominently on the wall next to his desk…

For Mr. DeSantis and his allies, the culture wars are the central struggle of American public life, and schools are the most important battleground where they will be fought. “Education is our sword,” Mr. DeSantis’s then education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, explained to a Hillsdale audience in 2021. And Mr. DeSantis is the man to wield it — a self-made striver who was “given nothing,” as he told the audience attending his campaign kickoff in Iowa in May. “These elites are not enacting an agenda to represent us. They’re imposing their agenda on us, via the federal government, via corporate America and via our own education system.”

DeSantis has aggressively taken political control of Florida’s schools and universities, passing laws that limit or eliminate what may be taught about gender and race. He has encouraged parent vigilantes to scour classrooms and libraries for books on controversial topics and ban them. His ally, radical conservative Chris Rufo, is quoted in the article:

“The goal of the university is not free inquiry,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and one of the new trustees [of New College], said during a recent appearance in California. Instead, he argued, conservatives need to deploy state power to retake public institutions wherever they can.

“The universities are not overly politicized. The universities are overly ideologized and insufficiently politicized,” Mr. Rufo said. “We should repoliticize the universities and understand that education is at heart a political question.”

At Yale, DeSantis joined Delta Kappa Epsilon (Dekes), which was known for its vicious hazing of pledges. As an upper-class member, DeSantis was known for bullying pledges and forcing them to engage in pranks like dropping their pants and exposing their genitals, while the older members mocked their private parts.

The story says that DeSantis took a course on the Cold War taught by the esteemed scholar John Lewis Gaddis, who was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union. In other words, DeSantis lied about being exposed to pro-Soviet views of the Cold War.

DeSantis portrayed Harvard Law School, where he studied, as a bastion of left wing thought. But the Dean of the law school when DeSantis arrived belonged to the conservative Federalist Society. And he was not the only member of that group on the faculty.

A 2005 survey of The Harvard Law Review, published in the Federalist Society’s flagship publication, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, found that staff members “identifying themselves as left-of-center did not comprise even a majority.”

DeSantis neglects to mention that he was an active member of the Harvard Law School’s Federalist Society. He prefers to play the victim.

When he ran for Congress and then for governor, he tapped his Yale and Harvard networks to raise money.

But then he discovered there was even more political advantage for him if he played the role of the enemy of the ruling class.

How better to attack the ruling class than to destroy the public schools that enabled him to enter Yale? If this makes no sense, neither does DeSantis’ fable about being victimized at Yale and Harvard.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Character, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Hypocrisy, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

Katherine Stewart: The Fascist Intellectuals and Crackpots of the Right

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
34

Katherine Stewart has written several important books about the insidious Right and their radical, racist views. In this article in The New Republic, she looks at an influential reactionary organization, the Claremont Institute, and traces its ideological forebears. From crackpots to intellectual gurus, she traces the Right’s fascination with manliness, racism, anti-Semitism, and its longing for a world led by a new Caesar, a strong man who will protect other men from rapacious women and immigrants.

It’s a long read but worth your time. Stewart looks at the Fascist underbelly of conservatism, and it’s repulsive.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Gender, Trump

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: The War to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2023 //
12

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner wrote in their blog Steady about the importance of saving public education from the forces trying to destroy and privatize it. They remind us and the general public that public schools unite us; privatization is inherently divisive. It is ironic that the red states are implementing voucher plans as the evidence about the failure of vouchers and the null effects of charter schools grows stronger. (The boldfacing of passages in their essay was added by me).

It is back to school. Students of all ages flock to campuses and classrooms. Fleeting memories of summer are quickly replaced by tests and textbooks.


Getting into the swing of a new semester has always included an adjustment period, but this is a particularly difficult time for many of our nation’s students and their parents, guardians, teachers, and others entrusted with the education of young minds.


The pandemic wreaked havoc with the emotional, intellectual, and social development of America’s youth. Dismal test scores provide depressing data of yawning learning deficits. Talk to anyone in or around schools and you hear stories of setbacks and struggle — heaps of qualitative data suggesting a staggering scale of generational loss.
As usual, those who were already the most marginalized have paid the heaviest price. The pandemic exacerbated existing disruptions and placed greater strain on finances and time, particularly in large urban districts and small rural ones tasked with educating children from families struggling economically.


We like to tell ourselves that the United States is a great meritocracy, but wealth and levels of family education continue to play outsized roles in dictating a child’s likelihood of academic success long before she learns her ABCs. The simple truth is that kids come to school from widely different circumstances, and these influence their ability to thrive, independent of whatever innate intelligence or drive they may possess. The pandemic made these differences more acute.


The United States does possess a system (or more accurately, a collection of thousands of systems) that, if nurtured and respected, could foster greater equality of opportunity. And it is exactly the institution that is now struggling the most: public education. America’s public schools were once the envy of the world as engines of opportunity and upward mobility. If the nation had the will, they could return to that status once again.


Our public schools certainly weren’t perfect in the past, especially during legal racial segregation, when the lie of “separate but equal” (separate is never equal) helped enshrine white supremacy. The segregated schools of the Jim Crow Deep South were a shameful injustice and a stain on our national identity. They were inconsistent with our founding documents, which spoke eloquently about equality among people. Of course there was (and remains, to some extent) de facto segregation throughout America based on who lives in what neighborhoods. Well-financed suburban schools were often part of the draw of “white flight” from urban districts.


The very ethos of public education should be one of inclusion for America’s diverse population. It should be a place where children of different backgrounds come together to learn both from teachers and from each other. Our schools should be places that allow students to wrestle with what it means to be part of this great country, including understanding America’s uneven and often bloody road to greater equality.


Sadly, in recent years, we have seen a grave regression from these noble goals. Our schools and school districts have become fiercely contested frontlines in an era of stepped-up culture wars. As reactionary political forces target what we teach our children, it is no accident that truth, empathy, and our democratic values have become casualties.

A chief concern is how and what we teach about our history, particularly the Black experience, and race and ethnicity more generally. We have written here before about the shameful whitewashing of racial violence and injustice, including slavery, by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But this effort is not limited to him or that state. There is a national movement to not tell the full — and unfortunately tragic — reality of race in American history and how it continues to shape the nation.


Another serious concern is the othering of LGBTQ+ students and teachers. After years of progress, we see a wave of intolerance spread across America, including in our schools.


Few institutions in American life are as essential to the continuation of our democracy as the public schools. In a time of ascendent autocracy, attacks on our schools — how they are run, what they teach, what books they have in their libraries — are among the most pernicious, pathetic, and painful assaults on the health of our nation.

Several months back, Texas Monthly ran a striking piece of journalism with the headline, “The Campaign to Sabotage Texas’s Public Schools.” It tells a story that extends beyond the raucous school board meetings and book banning campaigns that have gotten the most attention. There is a movement afoot, and not just in Texas, to destroy public schools more generally, to privatize education through vouchers and other means.


In this context, the various culture fights become battles in a larger war over the very future and viability of public education:

Taken individually, any of these incidents may seem like a grassroots skirmish. But they are, more often than not, part of a well-organized and well-funded campaign executed by out-of-town political operatives and funded by billionaires in Texas and elsewhere. “In various parts of Texas right now, there are meetings taking place in small and large communities led by individuals who are literally providing tutorials—here’s what you say, here’s what you do,” said H. D. Chambers, the recently retired superintendent of Alief ISD, in southwest Harris County. “This divisiveness has been created that is basically telling parents they can’t trust public schools. It’s a systematic erosion of the confidence that people have in their schools.

The ideal of quality, integrated public schools for all children in the United States epitomizes the promise of our country’s founding as a place of equality and opportunity for all. It thus makes sense that would-be autocrats and protectors of privilege would seek to undermine our public schools by whatever means necessary. We must see this as what it is: as much a threat to the nation as was the violent storming of our Capitol.

The future of the United States depends on an educated and empathetic citizenry. It requires us to share a sense of common purpose and recognize our common humanity. It requires an environment that allows every child to thrive and see themselves included in the American story. It requires quality public education. Full stop.

A historic battle to save this institution and the very idea of good public schools has been underway for some time. It is now intensifying. Attention must be paid.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Gender, History, Hypocrisy, Ignorance, Privatization, Providence, Supporting public schools, Vouchers
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