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North Carolina: Vouchers Fund Schools That Discriminate Based on Religion, Disability, LGBT Status

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2023 //
12

Justin Parmenter, a National Board Certified Teacher in North Carolina, is concerned that vouchers in his state will go to private and religious schools that discriminate when they choose their students. Republicans in the Legislature have a super-majority since a teacher elected as a Democrat—Tricia Cotham—betrayed her voters and flipped parties. Republicans ca pass whatever they want without fear of a veto. Would you want your tax money to fund a school that would not accept your own child or one where teachers speak in tongues?

He wrote recently:

As this year’s legislative session hits the homestretch, public education advocates are waiting to see whether proposed changes to North Carolina’s school voucher system become law.

On the House side, brand new Republican Rep. Tricia Cotham sponsored House Bill 823, a bill which would expand funding for vouchers by hundreds of millions of dollars a year until the annual amount going to school vouchers eclipses $500 million in school year 2032-33 and every year thereafter.

In addition to massively increasing funding for vouchers, the proposed legislation eliminates income eligibility requirements so that any student in the state–regardless of financial need–may use public money to attend private schools. That means North Carolina taxpayers will be subsidizing the tuition of wealthy families whose students already attend private schools.

A parallel bill has been filed in the Senate.

Advocates are concerned about the proposed legislation for a variety of reasons. Among them are the continued depletion of resources available to public schools; the relative lack of accountability charter and private schools have, which mean no real way to track return on investment, and; the use of public dollars to support institutions which are legally able to discriminate against children.

Federal civil rights law prohibits discrimination on a variety of grounds for institutions that receive federal funds, among them religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity) and disability.

In most cases, those prohibitions do not extend to religious private schools which take in more than 90% of North Carolina’s voucher students. Many of those schools accept public tax dollars via the Opportunity Scholarship voucher program and deny admissions to LGBTQ students, students whose families practice the “wrong” religion, and students who have special needs such as learning disabilities. And many of the schools come right out and advertise their discriminatory practices in official school documents.

Here are a few examples:

Students with special needs:

Alamance Christian Academy in Graham, NC, assesses students based on their “emotional readiness,” as well as academic and behavioral histories as justification to refuse admission to students with “deficiencies.”

Southeastern Christian Academy in Shallotte, NC says “A student may be ineligible for enrollment based on achievement and/or individual learning styles. Because SCA is a private school, compliance with IEPs [Individualized Education Programs] issued by the public school system is not required.”

North Raleigh Christian Academy also discriminates against children with special needs. The school’s admissions policy states that NCRA only accepts students who score on grade level and will not admit anyone with an IQ of 90 or below. IEPs are not available at NCRA.

LGBTQ students:

Many of North Carolina’s private schools that receive millions in taxpayer funding via vouchers specifically deny admissions to LGBTQ students or vow to expel any student who is discovered to be LGBTQ after enrolling.

For example, Wesleyan Christian Academy does not accept students who are discovered to be “participating in, supporting, or condoning sexual immorality, homosexual orientation, homosexual activity, or bisexual activity; promoting such practices; or being unable to support the moral principles of the school.”

Wesleyan’s promise to exclude those students appears on the same handbook page where the school claims to seek students who are “reflective of the global community in which we live.”

Fayetteville Christian School similarly bars LGBTQ students, labeling them “deviate [sic] and perverted.”

High Point Christian Academy also accepts public funding through Opportunity Scholarship vouchers. This institution makes it clear that attendance is “a privilege and not a right,” and explains that when conduct within a student’s home diverges from “the biblical lifestyle the school teaches,” the school may refuse admission or discontinue enrollment.

Students with religious differences:

More than 90% of the students claiming public voucher dollars attend religious private schools, and the vast majority of those schools are Christian schools. While some are tolerant of religious diversity, many of them will not accept students unless they are Christian.

Freedom Christian Academy in Fayetteville only accepts students “whose home life is led by parents who have a vibrant relationship with Jesus Christ.” The student’s spiritual life must demonstrate “a relationship with Jesus Christ resulting in age-appropriate virtue and high moral character.”

Fayetteville Christian Academy, previously mentioned above for denying admissions to LGBTQ students, specifically states in its admissions requirements that it will “not admit families that belong to or express faith in non-Christian religions such as, but not limited to: Mormons (LDS Church), Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims (Islam), non-Messianic Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.”

Research clearly shows that the most important factor in student learning outcomes is access to excellent teachers. North Carolina requires public school teachers to be licensed in order to demonstrate they have the necessary skills for the job.

Mount Zion Christian Academy in Durham does not require teachers to be licensed, but this voucher-receiving organization is proud of the fact that the school’s entire staff has demonstrated being filled with the Holy Spirit by speaking in tongues.

Public schools are proud to welcome, accept and support our students exactly as they are. It’s disappointing that North Carolina’s state legislature and “school choice” proponents are moving in the opposite direction by exponentially increasing public funding for schools that deny learning opportunities to specific students.

If you object to your public tax dollars funding institutions that discriminate in this way, please contact your state legislator and urge them to oppose expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship voucher program.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, North Carolina, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP Crazies Sabotage the Defense Budget

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2023 //
51

Heather Cox Richardson wrote early today about the GOP’s irresponsible politicization of the defense budget. Typically the defense budget passes with a bipartisan vote. But not this year because the House GOP majority is completely cowed by the hard-right extremists. The Republican crazies inserted all their anti-WOKE priorities into the bill, which will not be passed by the Senate. Marjorie Taylor Greene owns House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Richardson writes:

Traditionally, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which funds the annual budget and appropriations of the Department of Defense, passes Congress on a bipartisan basis. Since 1961 it has been considered must-pass legislation, as it provides the funding for our national security. For all that there is grumbling on both sides over one thing or another in the measure, it is generally kept outside partisanship.

Late last night, House Republicans broke that tradition by loading the bill with a wish list from the far right. Republicans added amendments that eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the Defense Department; end the Defense Department program that reimburses military personnel who must travel for abortion services; bar healthcare for gender transition; prevent the military academies from using affirmative action in admissions (an exception the recent Supreme Court decision allowed); block the Pentagon from putting in place President Biden’s executive orders on climate change; prevent schools associated with the Defense Department from teaching that the United States of America is racist; and block military schools from having “pornographic and radical gender ideology books” in their libraries.

House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tweeted: “We don’t want Disneyland to train our military. House Republicans just passed a bill that ENDS the wokism in the military and gives our troops their biggest pay raise in decades.”

In fact, the events of last night were a victory for right-wing extremists, demonstrating that they hold the upper hand in the House. Representatives Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), both military veterans, expressed shock that so many Republicans voted to strip abortion protections from military personnel. “[T]hey will say, ‘this is a really bad idea,’ ‘this is not where the party should be going,’ ‘this is a mistake,’” Sherill said. “[W]ell then why did everyone but two people in the Republican conference vote for this really bad amendment?”

The bill passed by a vote of 219 to 210, largely along partisan lines. This year’s budget is $886 billion as the U.S. modernizes the military to compete with new threats such as the rise of China, and it provides a 5.2% increase in pay for military personnel.

But Senate Democrats will not vote for it with the new partisan amendments and are working on their own measure. While there will be a conference committee to hammer out the differences between the two versions, McCarthy has offered a position on that committee to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), one of the extremists. This is an unusual offer, as she is not on the House Armed Services Committee.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said: “Extreme MAGA Republicans have hijacked a bipartisan bill that is essential to our national security and taken it over and weaponized it in order to jam their extreme right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”

“We are not going to relent, we are not going to back down, we’re not going to give up on the cause that is righteous,” Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) said.

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) summed up the vote today on Twitter. “The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the bill that funds all of our military operations. It is typically bipartisan and is about as serious as Congress gets. What weapons of war we fund, which allies we share them with, how we recruit. National security is a BFD. We can have our political debates about any number of issues but it is generally understood that when Americans are willing to sacrifice their lives to defend us, it’s time to check the crazies at the door. But today, the crazies won.

“They won first because [McCarthy] put the crazies in positions of power. But second because none of the “moderate” Republicans had the courage to stay the hell out of KrazyTown…. Is every member of the [House Republican Conference] a homophobic, racist, science denying lunatic? No. But the lesson of today is that the ones who aren’t are massive cowards completely unfit for any position of leadership.

“There is space—and demand—for reasonable differences of opinion in our democracy. This isn’t about whether we agree. It’s about whether we can trust that—differences aside—we trust that we’ve got each other’s back if we ever find ourselves in a foxhole together. That’s usually a metaphor, conflating the horrors of war with the much lower-stakes lives that most of us are fortunate enough to lead. But today, the entire [House Republican Conference] told us—both literally and metaphorically—that they don’t give a damn about the rest of the unit.”

Categories Bigotry, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Funding, Stupid

Gene V. Glass: The Sky Truly Is Falling, Somewhere

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2023 //
35

Perhaps you saw the story in the New York Times a few days ago, lamenting that American students were not making up the ground they lost academically during the pandemic. This was presented as a full-blown crisis. The period from March 2020 to the fall of 2022 included many disruptions: family members died or were very sick, teachers and other school staff died or were very sick, many schools closed, many adopted online classes, normal life came to an end for more than two years, affecting family life and mental health.

When I read the panicked discussion in the New York Times, based on a study by NWEA, a major standardized testing company, I reached out to one of the wisest people I know and asked him to discuss the issues. That’s Gene V. Glass, one of the nation’s eminent education researchers. He wrote the following commentary for the blog.

He wrote:

The New York Times is worried — no, it’s panic-stricken.

Jeremiah — the weeping prophet of the Torah — was a veritable Pollyanna compared to today’s policy wonks and political animals when it comes to delivering bad news.

Journalists — like the New York Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh — envision the half-dozen NAEP score point loss from 2019 to 2022 to result in fewer students accepted to college with a resulting lifetime loss of $70,000 income. Does anyone seriously entertain the possibility that colleges will forego the tuition & fees payments of students who scored 5 points lower in the eighth grade on the NAEP test? Nor did anyone weep in 1990 when the scores were 30 points lower and lifetime incomes were doing just fine, thank you?

Three weeks ago, Dana Goldstein reported, again in the New York Times, that on the October 2022 administration of the NAEP test, the 13-year-olds scored an average of 256 in reading – down 4 pints — and 271 in math — down 9 points — from the averages in 2019. What happened between 2019 and 2022? The COVID pandemic, of course.

Conjuring up the causes of NAEP fluctuations has grown into a widespread academic game since the NAEP Governing Board decided to call some scores “Advanced” and other scores “Basic” — euphemisms for “Excellent!” and “My, my; we have a problem here.” When the U.S. History NAEP scores dropped 9 points from 2014 to 2022, no one panicked, or even cared apparently. The Civics NAEP score never wavered more than 1 or 2 points between 1998 and 2022; the average was 150 in 1998 and 150 again in 2022, never rising above 153. Again, a big nothing, though arguably the nation needs better citizens than it needs better calculators.

NAEP scores jump around for all sorts of reasons, mostly a host of very small reasons that are impossible to unravel. Readers can exercise their own analytic muscles puzzling over NAEP scores. Reading scores were already declining from 2017 to 2019 before the pandemic. In 2019, NAEP Mathematics scores increased at grade 4, but decreased at grade 8 compared to 2017. Moreover, the percent of 13-year-olds taking algebra declined from 34 percent in 2012 to 24 percent today. I don’t disapprove of such a decline; I merely advance it as one of a number of reasons why NAEP scores might be wiggling from time to time. And even bigger forces are afoot.

A couple dozen Red states are experiencing a mass migration of middle-class and upper-class white students to private and charter schools, all driven with barely a whimper by crypto-privatization backers. It would be remarkable for NAEP scores to hold steady under these circumstances alone. Arizona’s universal school voucher program is expected to cost the taxpayers $900 million for the 2023-24 year, more than ten times initial estimates. Three-quarters of the initial voucher applicants are students already in charter, private, and parochial schools. The U.S. percentage of white K-12 students in public schools is projected to decline by 20% between 2010 and 2030.

But the occasion of the COVID pandemic has become a good excuse for policy analysts to propose their favorite solution to the crisis, indeed a “manufactured crisis” in the words of my friend and colleague David Berliner who introduced the term in 1995. Experts have offered no fewer than a dozen emergency measures needed for the nation’s recovery. Nine of these follow: 1. Smaller classes; 2. Tutoring; 3. Extending the school year; 4. Adding a fifth year of high school; 5. Focused funding on minority students; 6. Focusing on math, not reading; 7. Full-time summer school; 8. Increased teacher pay; 9. Focusing on students’ mental health. A fifth year of high school?! Seriously? Now I’m in favor of most of these things, except focusing on math. How about Civics?

Some seem to favor no solution at all. A leitmotif of the NYT article is that the federal government’s billions of dollars in pandemic emergency aid to schools were misspent. The trouble is, less will be heard of any of these “solutions” after NAEP scores wiggle up a couple of points in the next testing.

The ravages of the pandemic were caused by a White House of Dunces. Incompetence cost the nation 1.1 million lives, two or three times more than the irreducible number. It will never happen again — at least not with COVID. The stewardship of all children’s education is a responsibility of every citizen, regardless of the next year’s tweak in NAEP scores. Put that on NAEP’s next Civics test.

Gene V Glass

Emeritus Regents’ Professor

Arizona State University

 

The New York Times is worried — no, it’s panic-stricken. https://shorturl.at/mtI15

 

Jeremiah — the weeping prophet of the Torah — was a veritable Pollyanna compared to today’s policy wonks and political animals when it comes to delivering bad news. 

 

Journalists — like the New York Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh — envision the half-dozen NAEP score point loss from 2019 to 2022 to result in fewer students accepted to college with a resulting lifetime loss of $70,000 income. Does anyone seriously entertain the possibility that colleges will forego the tuition & fees payments of students who scored 5 points lower in the eighth grade on the NAEP test? Nor did anyone weep in 1990 when the scores were 30 points lower and lifetime incomes were doing just fine, thank you? 

 

Three weeks ago, Dana Goldstein reported, again in the New York Times, that on the October 2022 administration of the NAEP test,  the 13-year-olds scored an average of 256 in reading – down 4 pints —  and 271 in math — down 9 points — from the averages in 2019. https://shorturl.at/DFHZ5  What happened between 2019 and 2022? The COVID pandemic, of course. 

 

Conjuring up the causes of NAEP fluctuations has grown into a widespread academic game since the NAEP Governing Board decided to call some scores “Advanced” and other scores “Basic”  — euphemisms for “Excellent!” and “My, my; we have a problem here.”  When the U.S. History NAEP scores dropped 9 points from 2014 to 2022, no one panicked, or even cared apparently. And the Civics NAEP score never wavered more than 1 or 2 points between 1998 and 2022; the average was 150 in 1998 and 150 again in 2022, never rising above 153. Again, a big nothing, though arguably the nation needs better citizens than it needs better calculators.  

 

NAEP scores jump around for all sorts of reasons, mostly a host of very small reasons that are impossible to unravel. Readers can exercise their own analytic muscles puzzling over NAEP scores at www.nationsreportcard.gov. Reading scores were already declining from 2017 to 2019 before the pandemic. In 2019, NAEP Mathematics scores increased at grade 4, but decreased at grade 8 compared to 2017. Moreover, the percent of 13-year-olds taking algebra declined from 34 percent in 2012 to 24 percent today. I don’t disapprove of such a decline; I merely advance it as one of a number of reasons why NAEP scores might be wiggling from time to time. And even bigger forces are afoot. 

 

A couple dozen Red states are experiencing a mass migration of middle-class and upper-class white students to private and charter schools, all driven with barely a whimper by crypto-privatization backers. It would be remarkable for NAEP scores to hold steady under these circumstances alone. Arizona’s universal school voucher program is expected to cost the taxpayers $900 million for the 2023-24 year, more than ten times initial estimates. Three-quarters of the initial voucher applicants are students already in charter, private, and parochial schools. The U.S. percentage of white K-12 students in public schools is projected to decline by 20% between 2010 and 2030. 

 

But the occasion of the COVID pandemic has become a good excuse for policy analysts to propose their favorite solution to the crisis, indeed a “manufactured crisis” in the words of my friend and colleague David Berliner who introduced the term in 1995. Experts have offered no fewer than a dozen emergency measures needed for the nation’s recovery. Nine of these follow: 1. Smaller classes; 2. Tutoring; 3. Extending the school year; 4. Adding a fifth year of high school;  5. Focused funding on minority students; 6. Focusing on math, not reading; 7. Full-time summer school;  8. Increased teacher pay; 9. Focusing on students’ mental health. A fifth year of high school?! Seriously? Now I’m in favor of most of these things, except focusing on math. How about Civics? 

 

Some seem to favor no solution at all. A leitmotif of the NYT article is that the federal government’s billions of dollars in pandemic emergency aid to schools were misspent. The trouble is, less will be heard of any of these “solutioins” after NAEP scores wiggle up a couple of points in the next testing. 

   

The ravages of the pandemic were caused by a White House of Dunces. Incompetence cost the nation 1.1 million lives, two or three times more than the irreducible number. It will never happen again — at least not with COVID. The stewardship of all children’s education is a responsibility of every citizen, regardless of the next year’s tweak in NAEP scores. Put that on NAEP’s next Civics test.

 

Gene V Glass

Emeritus Regents’ Professor

Arizona State University

Categories Disruption, Health, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Peter Greene: Oklahoma Superintendent Tries to Define “Woke,” But Can’t

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2023 //
86

Peter Greene discovered that Ryan Walters, the State Superintendent of Education in Oklahoma, attempted to define “Woke” on a far-right website. WOKE is one of those new terms of opprobrium, like “critical race theory,” that Republicans despise but can’t define. Peter eagerly read Walters’ effort to defund Woke, but came away disappointed. It seems that Woke is whatever you don’t like. You may have seen the stories recently about Walters insisting that the Tulsa race massacre of 2021 had nothing to do with skin color, although as the Daily Beast reported, “white mobs killed as many as 300 Black residents and burned some 1,600 homes and businesses in what was known as Black Wall Street.”

Peter Greene writes:

Oklahoma’s head education honcho decided to pop up in The Daily Caller (hyperpartisan and wide variation in reliability on the media bias chart) with his own take on the Big Question–what the heck does “woke” mean? (I’ll link here, because anyone who wants to should be able to check my work, but I don’t recommend clicking through).

Walters tries to lay out the premise and the problem:

Inherent to the nature of having a language is that the words within it have to mean something. If they do not, then they are just noises thrown into a conversation without any hope of leading it anywhere. And when the meaning is fuzzy, it becomes necessary to define the terms of discussion. To wit, the word “woke” has gained a lot of popularity among those of us who want to restore American education back to its foundations and reclaim it from the radical left.

I’m a retired English teacher and I generally avoid being That Guy, particularly since this blog contains roughly sixty gabillion examples of my typo issues, but if your whole premise is that you are all for precise language, maybe skip the “to wit” and remember that “restore back” is more clearly “restore.”

But he’s right. The term “woke” does often seem like mouth noises being thrown into conversations like tiny little bombs meant to scare audiences into running to the right. However, “restore American education back to its foundation” is doing a hell of empty noising as well. Which foundation is that? The foundation of Don’t Teach Black Folks How To Read? The foundation of Nobody Needs To Stay In School Past Eighth Grade? Anyone who wants to talk about a return to some Golden Age of US Education needs to get specific about A) when they think that was and B) what was so golden about it.

But since he doesn’t. Walters is also making mouth noises when he points the finger at “opponents of this movement.” If we don’t know what the movement is, we don’t know exactly what its opposition is, either. Just, you know, those wokes over there. But let’s press on:

Knowing that many such complaints are made in completely bad faith because they do not want us to succeed, it would still be beneficial to provide some clarity as to what it means and — in the process — illustrate both the current pitiful state of American education and what we as parents, educators, and citizens can do about it.

Personally, I find it beneficial to assume that people who disagree with me do so sincerely and in good faith until they convince me otherwise. And I believe that lots of folks out on the christianist nationalist right really do think they’re terribly oppressed and that they are surrounded by evil and/or stupid people Out To Get Them. It’s a stance that justifies a lot of crappy behavior (can probably make you think that it’s okay to commandeer government funds and sneakily redirect them to the Right People).

But I agree that it would be beneficial for someone in the Woke Panic crowd to explain what “woke” actually means. Will Walters be that person? Well….

In recent years, liberal elites from government officials to union bosses to big businesses have worked to co-opt concepts like justice and morality for their own agendas that are contrary to our founding principles and our way of life.

I don’t even know how one co-opts a concept like justice or morality, but maybe if he explains what agenda he’s talking about and how, exactly, they are contrary to founding principles or our way of life, whatever that is.

But he’s not going to do that. He’s going to follow that sentence with another that says the same thing with the same degree of vaguery, then point out that “naturally, this faction of individuals” is after schools to spread their “radical propaganda.” Still no definition of woke in sight. No–wait. This next start looks promising–

Put simply, “woke” education is the forced projection of inaccurately-held, anti-education values onto our students. Further, to go after wokeness in education means that we are going after the forced indoctrination of our students and our school systems as a whole.

Nope. That’s not helping, either. “Projection” is an odd choice–when I project an image onto a screen, the screen doesn’t change. There’s “projection” when I see in someone else what is really going on in me, which might have some application here (“I assume that everyone else also wants to indoctrinate students into one preferred way of seeing the world”) but that’s probably not what he has in mind. I have no idea how one “forces” projection. “Inaccurately-held” is also a puzzler. The values are accurate, but they’re being held the wrong way? What does this construction get us that a simple “inaccurate” would not? And does Walters really believe that schools are rife with people who are “anti-education,” because that makes me imagine teachers simply refusing to teach and giving nap time all day every day, except for pauses to explain to students that learning things is bad. I suspect “education” means something specific to him, and this piece (aimed at a hyperpartisan audience) does seem to assume a lot of “nudge nudge wink wink we real Americans know what this word really means” which would be fine if the whole premise was not that he was going to explain what certain words actually mean.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Gender, History, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Oklahoma, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism

Ohio: Legislature Gives More Money to Students in Private Schools Than Those in Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2023 //
16

Stephen Dyer, former Ohio legislator, closely follows school funding in the state. After studying the latest budget, he realized that the Legislature was sending more money to private school students than to public school students. The Ohio legislature loves charters, Cybercharters, and vouchers. Apparently, the Republicans who dominate the Legislators don’t care about public schools. Nor do they care about accountability.

Dyer begins:

Look, I’m really excited that the Ohio General Assembly followed through on its promise to continue implementing the Fair School Funding Plan — the state’s second attempt at meeting its constitutional mandate to provide a thorough and efficient system of public schools for its 1.7 million students.

I mean, in nearly 2/3 of Ohio school districts, the state is already meeting or exceeding its promised funding amounts from two years ago. And while the lion’s share of the remaining shortage is felt in the state’s most needy districts (something I expressed concern about earlier this year), the fact that the state is actually starting to fulfill promises made to Ohio’s 1.7 million public school students is encouraging. Again, though, only if they finish the job, of course..

But the massive increase to private school tuition subsidies that accompanied the public school increase is a colossal turd in the punchbowl. How colossal?

Try this on for size:

Because the state increased the private school tuition subsidy to $8,407 per high school student, the state will now provide $210 more per student to parents whose kids are already in private schools than they will to public school students in Ohio’s urban core of Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo or Youngstown schools, which educate 173,000 students.

In fact, that $8,407 per pupil amount is greater than the per pupil state aid for nearly 8 in 10 Ohio students. A remarkable 1.13 million Ohio students will get less state aid than the parents of a private school student will receive next year.

Oh, and did I mention that not a penny of these tuition subsidies will be audited by a public entity? So we have no idea if the money is being spent educating kids or buying sweet rides for private school administrators. (Because that’s never happened in this state).

And the disparity is despite Ohio’s historic public school funding increase that occurred in this budget — again, a great accomplishment.

But man. This is crazy….

It would be one thing if vouchers (taxpayer provided private school tuition subsidies) provided better options for students. But study after study has demonstrated pretty clearly that even in urban districts, generally the public schools do better than the private schools — in Ohio, it’s almost in 9 of 10 instances that the public outperforms the private. Never mind that vouchers have also delayed critical investment in the educations of the 1.7 million Ohio public school students or added significantly to racial segregation.

Please open the link to read the rest of this shocking story.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP Attacks the Military and Officers of the Law

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2023 //
39

Heather Cox Richardson describes the bitter factionalism among Republicans. They are going ever more extreme; the Freedom Caucus expelled Marjorie Taylor Greene for not being extreme enough. They spend their time attacking the military, the FBI, and the CIA. In addition to the time they spend attacking the integrity of elections. The Republican Party has become a wrecking ball for democratic institutions.

For the first time since 1859, the Marine Corps does not have a confirmed commandant. For five months, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has held up the confirmation of about 250 Pentagon officers in protest of the Defense Department’s policy of enabling military personnel to travel to obtain abortion care. So when Commandant General David Berger retired today, there was no confirmed commandant to replace him. Assistant Commandant General Eric Smith will serve as the acting commandant until the Senate once again takes up military confirmations.

That a Republican is undermining the military belies the party’s traditional claim to be stronger on military issues than the Democrats. So does the attack of House Republicans on our nation’s key law enforcement entities—the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—after traditionally insisting their party works to defend “law and order.”

David Smith of The Guardian this weekend noted that those attacks are linked to former president Trump’s increasing legal trouble.

MAGA Republicans are seeking to protect Trump by calling for impeaching President Biden, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray (a Trump appointee), and U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, who has prosecuted those who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH), and a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, also chaired by Jordan, have been out in front in the attacks on the DOJ and the FBI. The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has been trying to dig up proof that Biden has “weaponized” the DOJ, the FBI, and the Department of Education against Republicans, especially those supporting former president Trump.

They have not turned up any official whistleblowers—the word “whistleblower” in government context means someone whose allegations have been found to be credible by an inspector general, but House Republicans seem to be using the word in a generic sense of someone with complaints—to support the idea that Biden has weaponized the government.

But Trump did. Last summer the New York Times reported that under Trump, the IRS launched a rare and invasive audit of former FBI director James Comey and Comey’s deputy Andrew McCabe, and Trump talked of using the IRS and the DOJ to harass Hillary Clinton, former CIA director John Brennan, and Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post.

On Thursday, a sworn statement from Trump’s former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly confirmed that Trump asked about using the IRS and other agencies to investigate Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI agents looking into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia.

Another investigation has also backfired on the Trump Republicans. The House Ways and Means Committee has highlighted the testimony of Gary Shapley, a “whistleblower” from the Internal Revenue Service claiming that Attorney General Merrick Garland interfered with the investigation into Hunter Biden. Shapley said that Garland denied a request from U.S. attorney David Weiss, who was in charge of the case, to be appointed special counsel, which would officially have made him independent. On June 22 the committee released a transcript of Shapley’s testimony.

Garland promptly denied the allegation, but on June 28, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to David Weiss, U.S. attorney for Delaware, repeating the allegations. Weiss, a Trump appointee, replied today, saying he never requested special counsel status. Representative Jordan got around this direct contradiction of Shapley’s testimony by lumping Weiss in with those he’s attacking: “Do you trust Biden’s DOJ to tell the truth?” he asked.

And while the radical right has claimed that Biden is on the take for millions of dollars from foreign countries, today the key witness to that allegation was indicted for being a Chinese agent. Also today, LIV Golf, which is funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, announced it is moving its $50 million team championship from Saudi Arabia to Trump National Doral in Miami this October.

In May, LIV Golf allied with the nonprofit PGA Tour to create a new for-profit company in May, but today a prominent member of the PGA board, Randall Stephenson, resigned, saying he and most of the rest of the board were not involved in the deal and that he cannot “in good conscience support” it, “particularly in light of the U.S. intelligence report concerning Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.” (The report concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist Khashoggi.) Stephenson had delayed his resignation at the request of the board’s chair while the PGA Tour commissioner was on medical leave.

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is scheduled to start hearings on that merger tomorrow, but they are having trouble lining up witnesses who were involved in making the deal, which was achieved in secret negotiations and has infuriated many of the PGA Tour players.

The MAGA attacks on the Biden administration are part of a larger story. Trump supporters are consolidating around the former president and so-called Christian democracy. They are enforcing loyalty so tightly that the far-right House Freedom Caucus recently expelled Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) either because she is too close to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) or because she called Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “little bitch” on the floor of Congress, or both. Like the far-right Southern Baptist Convention, which is hemorrhaging members but which nonetheless recently expelled one of its largest churches for permitting a female pastor, the MAGAs are purging their members for purity.

But their posturing worries Republicans from less safe districts who know such extremism is unpopular. Today, 21 members of the far right in the House wrote a letter to McCarthy saying they would oppose any appropriations bills that did not reject the June debt ceiling deal that kept the U.S. from defaulting on its debts, threatening to shut down the government. They also rejected any further support for Ukraine.

Larry Jacobs, who directs the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, told The Guardian’s Smith: “Independent voters, who tend to swing US elections that have become so close, don’t buy into the Trump line. You don’t see support for this unhinged view that the justice department and the FBI are somehow corrupt. There’s not support for that except in the fringe of the Republican party. The question, though, is does the fringe of the Republican party have enough leverage, particularly in the House of Representatives, to force impeachment votes and other measures?”

Alex Isenstadt of Politico wrote today that a new group called Win It Back, tied to the right-wing Club for Growth, which has ties to the Koch network, will run anti-Trump ads starting tomorrow. Americans for Prosperity, linked to billionaire Charles Koch, will also run ads opposing Trump.

Meanwhile, President Biden is on his way to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the 74th North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit. NATO was formed in 1949 to stand against the Soviet Union, and now it stands against an expanding Russia. Today, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg announced that Turkey has dropped its opposition to Sweden’s NATO membership. Hungary, which had also been a holdout, said earlier this month it would back Sweden’s entry as soon as Turkey did.

This means that the key issues before NATO will be Ukraine’s defense, and climate change, a reality that U.S. politicians can no longer ignore (although MAGA Republicans later this month will start hearings to stop corporations from incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals into their future plans). Currently, forty-two million people in the U.S. South are locked in a devastating heat dome, and Vermont and New York are facing catastrophic flash floods.

President Biden told CNN yesterday that he does not support NATO membership for Ukraine while it is at war, noting that since NATO’s security pact means that a war on one automatically includes all, admitting Ukraine would commit U.S. troops to a war with Russia. Instead, NATO members will likely consider continuing significant military support for Ukraine.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Bigotry, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Republicans

Arthur Goldstein: NYC Retirees Are Fighting Their Union and the City to Stay on Medicare

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2023 //
37

New York City’s retired municipal employees are battling the Eric Adams administration and their own unions, who want the retirees to switch from Medicare to a for-profit Medicare advantage program run by Aetna. The city expects to save $600 million a year by switching its employees to Aetna. (Aetna’s CEO is the highest paid person in the health insurance industry at $27.9 million per annum.)

Arthur Goldstein recently retired after a teaching career of nearly forty years, mostly teaching English language learners in high school. He is outraged that the city and his union want to take away the health insurance that he worked for and substitute an inferior Medicare Advantage plan. The city claims that MA is better than Medicare, but where will that $600 million in savings come from? Where will Aetna’s profit come from?

Two sources of savings and profits:

1. Denial of service. If Aetna does not approve a major procedure recommended by your doctor, you won’t get it. You can appeal; maybe your appeal will win. Maybe not. Medicare does not question your doctor’s medical advice.

2. If your doctor is not in network, he or she won’t be paid.

Arthur Goldstein writes:

I need a union to protect me, along with my brothers and sisters, from our adversaries. Our number one adversary is our employer, currently embodied in Mayor Eric Adams. When Mayor Eric Adams says he wants to degrade our health benefits, I’m glad to stand with my union to fight. When Mayor Eric Adams says he wants to give us a compensation increase barely one-third of inflation, I’m ready to descend upon City Hall with all my union brothers and sisters.

Our leadership, though, has asked for neither. Instead of that, they’ve asked me to stand up for a “fair contract.” The contract, though, contained both of the glaring flaws noted above. Leadership wanted me to go to Starbucks and have people there see me work. I don’t set foot in Starbucks unless one of my students gives me a gift card. Starbucks is virulently anti-union, and I have better coffee at home.

I’ve been writing for months about how our leadership has sold out our retirees (and now I am one). I have been quite active opposing private corporate insurance for retirees. I don’t want some clerk at Aetna determining I don’t need care my doctors deem necessary. In service members do not need a plan that’s 10% cheaper than GHI-CBP. How many more doctors need to drop our plan before Mulgrew climbs out of bed with Adams?

Last week, on one of the hottest days of the year, I stood outside with both retirees and active members while the independent Organization of NYC Retirees went to court to stand for us. By the next day, there was a ruling that this downgrade could cause us “irreparable harm.” They embodied not only activism, but successful activism.

Let me ask you this—if our union leadership supports things that cause us irreparable harm, why should we be at their beck and call? Why should we get out there and demand a sub-inflation raise? Why should we demand a contract that does nothing to address the downgrade of our health care?

As I’m asking this, a lot of members have more fundamental issues. A few years back, I was chapter leader of the largest school in Queens (an odd position for someone who opposes activism). I was ready to strike for safety. Members announced, with no shame whatsoever, that they’d be scabs. This tells me they don’t even know what union is.

Whose fault is that? We, as a society, don’t really teach about labor and union. I kind of learned as I went along. There is a great book called Beaten Down, Worked Up by Steven Greenhouse. If you read it, you’ll get a laundry list of things that UFT does NOT do. We could strike, or we could do a whole lot of things short of that. But that’s not how our leadership thinks. I’ll bet you dimes to dollars Michael Mulgrew, except possibly when he read my blog, has never even heard of this book.

That’s why we are asleep. We call Mulgrew and the Unity Caucus “the union,” as though we aren’t even part of it. Whole swaths of us think of Mulgrew as our mommy, and think he should come around and personally help when we are in trouble. Mulgrew’s caucus encourages that false dependency.

In fact, they are the ones who don’t want activism. The very notion of it makes them quake in their boots. If we were truly active, we would not stand for their sellouts. We would not stand for diminished health care. We would not stand for wholly insufficient compensation increases. We would not have 20% participation in union elections. Crucially, we would not have a caucus that doesn’t even know what union is running our union.

I wholly support activism. What I just saw in union leadership was a carefully choreographed rush to a contract. There were few opportunities to examine, discuss or question it. There was a kabuki dance of demonstrations to support whatever leadership wanted, and we were all supposed to believe that these petty actions had something to do with realizing a contract. The fact is the contract was set once DC37 agreed. We had absolutely nothing to say about compensation or health care, our most critical issues.

Leadership thinks we are stupid. Leadership hires people solely for the quality of obsequiousness, and many of these hires may indeed be stupid. But I know a whole lot of smart teachers. They can’t fool all of us. A lot of us who won’t be fooled are, in fact, the most active members they have.

I admire activism. That’s why I contributed to NYC Retirees, who went out and protected us from the machinations of Mulgrew and his fellow union bosses. You should do so as well, and here is how.

Let’s be active. Let’s promote activism. And let’s be done with the delusion activism what current leadership wants from us. We are union, we will stand up, and we will protect ourselves.

And very soon, we will vote those bastards out and take charge.

Open the link to read in full.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Ethics, Health, New York City, Unions

Florida: Vouchers for All, Rich and Poor, Cut Public School Funding

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2023 //
32

Remember back in the day when vouchers were sold as a way to “save poor kids from failing schools”? Those days are over. The new Republican pitch is “universal vouchers,” vouchers for all, regardless of family income, regardless of whether the students ever attended public schools.

Florida is one of several Republican-led states that have passed universal vouchers. With the new money free-for-all, public schools are hiring marketing directors and communications staff to persuade students to enroll in public schools.

Katherine Kokal of the Palm Beach Post describes how public schools in Palm Beach have responded to the introduction of universal vouchers.

For first time, the Palm Beach County School District will actually need to start convincing parents to send their kids to public school.

That’s because Florida’s expanded school voucher program, which went into effect July 1, opens the door for parents of all incomes to use taxpayer money for tuition at private schools. That money is taken away from the student’s public school district at a cost of about $8,000 per student. In March, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that removed the previous income and enrollment limits on the program.

The program has left loads of uncertainty in the school district’s budget, but one thing remains clear to school leaders: Public schools need to better “market” themselves if they’re going to compete.

Superintendent Mike Burke announced an idea in the spring to market public schools to families weighing their options. The district launched a kindergarten registration campaign to get Palm Beach County’s youngest students in public school classrooms. Their thinking was that if students start in public school, they’re more likely to stay.

Among the first orders of business for the district’s new chief communications strategist will be expanding its marketing campaign to try to prove to parents considering vouchers that public schools are their best choice.

“I think we’re going to have to dedicate real resources to this beyond our website,” Burke said. “We’ve been competing with charter schools for 20 years. We’ve never competed with private schools.”

New voucher options arrive on Florida’s education scene at a time when public school districts are fighting pressure from fringe candidates, library book bans and new limitations on what teachers can talk about in the classroom.

Coupled with new obligations to pay millions for private school vouchers, some education experts say Florida is eroding its public education system altogether.

“It’s hard not to look at all of this and grieve,” said Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. “Every school has a pitch. What’s different now, particularly in Florida, you’re going to see schools thinking very carefully about how to market themselves vis-à-vis the culture war stuff.”

Not all private schools in Palm Beach County are religious schools, and they’re also separate from charter schools, which are public schools run by private companies.

Palm Beach County is home to 161 private schools registered with the Florida Department of Education as of July 6. Of those schools, 44% are religiously affiliated.

And most accept vouchers.

While 109 private schools accept Family Empowerment Scholarships right now, Burke anticipates that number growing over the next several months.

“I think we’re going to see proliferation of small, ‘mom-and-pop’ private schools,” he said. “Private schools in a strip mall where people think they can turn a profit.”

Please open the link to finish reading the article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

The Rightwing Scheme to Upend Education—at $125 an Hour

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2023 //
67

Todd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria write here about a school board in Pennsylvania that hired a pricey consultant to improve the district’s curriculum. The consultant had scant experience in his field, but that is no barrier these days to telling teachers what to teach. He did have one important credential: he was a graduate of Hillsdale College, the bastion of Christian conservatism in education. The article appears on the blog Popular Information. Please open the link to read the full post.

They begin:

On June 20, educational consultant Jordan Adams delivered a much-anticipated presentation to the Pennridge School Board, revealing his recommended changes to the Eastern Pennsylvania school district’s social studies curriculum. Adams, the founder of Vermilion Education, appeared via Zoom. The curriculum experts who work for the district recommended that first grade social studies focus on “Rules and Responsibilities,” “Geography,” and “Important People and Places.” Adams instead proposed that 6- and 7-year-olds learn “American History: 1492-1787” and “World History: Ancient Near East.”

In his presentation, first reported by the Bucks County Beacon, Adams did not discuss how teachers could provide instruction on nearly 300 years of American history to students still learning to read and tie their shoes. Nor did Adams explain why his “chronological” approach was superior to the school district’s proposed curriculum. Adams spent less than 90 seconds covering his proposal to completely restructure social studies for Grades 1 through 5, before moving on to his recommendations for older students.

Popular Information asked Adams about his process for curriculum development and how he came to the conclusion that his proposed changes would be beneficial to first graders and other students. Adams responded that he was asked to provide “a high-level overview” and his recommendations “aim to provide students with a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of American and world history and civics, reflective of historical figures, ideas, and events that have had an outsized impact on the world today….”

It was an unusual approach for a consultant the school district is paying thousands of dollars to provide guidance. Notably, Adams, who is 31, does not have any experience developing curricula for public schools. According to Adams, he launched his company, Vermilion Education, in March. (It was formally incorporated in December 2022.) Under questioning from Pennridge School Board member Ronald Wurz, Adams admitted that Pennridge was Vermilion Education’s only public school client. (Asked if he has any other clients, Adams said that he is “not at liberty to share about ongoing or potential work with other clients.”)

In an interview, Wurz told Popular Information that Adams’ presentation was “amateurish,” “horrible,” and reflected “a total lack of preparation.” Wurz was particularly disturbed that Adams has already billed the district $7500 — the cost of 60 hours of work under the contract — to craft his recommendations.

Adams, who appears to have deleted his LinkedIn profile, does not hold any degrees in education. In 2013, Adams received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Hillsdale College, a private Christian institution known for its right-wing ideology. In 2016, Adams received a master’s degree in humanities from the University of Dallas, another private conservative school. Adams later returned to Hillsdale College as an employee, where he promoted a K-12 curriculum developed by the college, known as the 1776 curriculum, that is favored by right-wing activists…

The contract was added to the agenda less than 48 hours before the meeting by board member Jordan Blomgren. It drew immediate objections from Superintendent David Bolton. In an email, Bolton noted that there was no money budgeted for the contract, no one from the school district had reviewed the contract, and no one involved in developing the curriculum for Pennridge schools was consulted. Bolton’s concerns were ignored by a majority of the board, who voted to approve the contract on a 5-4 vote.

Dissident board members fear that Adams has been hired to implant the “Hillsdale curriculum” into their schools, without the involvement of the district’s professional staff.

Categories Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Teaching

Heather Cox Richardson: Moms for Liberty Signals the GOP’s Dumb Extremism

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2023 //
106

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the recent Moms for Liberty convention in Philadelphia, which drew the leading Republican presidential candidates. An unusual feat for an organization founded only two years ago. By contrast, she says, there is a forward movement across the nation, spurred by Biden’s successful economic policies. Will the public fall for fear or vote for progress? To read the footnotes, open the link.

She writes:

For more than a week now, I have intended to write a deep dive into the right-wing Moms for Liberty group that held their “Joyful Warriors National Summit” in Philadelphia last week, only to have one thing or another that seemed more important push it off another day. This morning it hit me that maybe that’s the story: that the reactionary right that has taken so much of our oxygen for the past year is losing ground to the country’s new forward movement.

Today the jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics pushed ahead of them by showing that the U.S. economy added 209,000 jobs in June. The rate of job growth is slowing but still strong, although the economy showed that the Black unemployment rate, which had been at an all-time low, climbed from 4.7% to 6%. Since Black workers historically are the first to lose their jobs, this is likely a signal that the job market is cooling, which should continue to slow inflation.

In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin called out the media outlets so focused on the idea that Biden would mismanage the economy and that recession was imminent that they have ignored “29 consecutive months of job growth, inflation steadily declining, durable goods having been up for three consecutive months, 35,000 new infrastructure projects, an extended period in which real wages exceeded inflation and outsize gains for lower wage-earners.” As reporters focused on the horse-race aspect of politics and how voters “felt” about issues, she noted, “[w]e have seen far too little coverage of the economic transformation in little towns, rural areas and aging metro centers brought about by new investment in plants, infrastructure projects and green energy related to the Chips Act.”

Also of note is that today is Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s first day of talks with top Chinese officials in Beijing, where she will also talk to U.S. business leaders. At stake is the Biden administration’s focus on U.S. national security, which includes both limiting China’s access to U.S. technology that has military applications and bringing supply chains home. China interprets these new limitations as an attempt to hurt its economy. Yellen is in Beijing to emphasize that the U.S. hopes to maintain healthy trade with China but, she told Chinese Premier Li Qiang, “The United States will, in certain circumstances, need to pursue targeted actions to protect its national security.”

Meanwhile, China’s faltering economy has led to new rules that exclude foreign companies, leading U.S. businesses to reconsider investments there. Chinese leaders have tried to reassure foreign business leaders that they are welcome in China, while Yellen told U.S business leaders: “I have made clear that the United States does not seek a wholesale separation of our economies. We seek to diversify, not to decouple. A decoupling of the world’s two largest economies would be destabilizing for the global economy, and it would be virtually impossible to undertake.”

The success of Biden’s policies both at home and abroad has pushed the Republican Party into an existential crisis, and that’s where Moms for Liberty fits in. Since the years of the Reagan administration, the Movement Conservatives who wanted to destroy the New Deal state recognized that they only way they could win voters to slash taxes for the wealthy and cut back popular social problems was by whipping up social issues to convince voters that Black Americans, or people of color, or feminists, wanted a handout from the government, undermining America by ushering in “socialism.” The forty years from 1981 to 2021 moved wealth upward dramatically and hollowed out the middle class, creating a disaffected population ripe for an authoritarian figure who promised to return that population to upward mobility by taking revenge on those they now saw as their enemies.

In the past two years, according to a recent working paper by economists David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew, Biden’s policies have wiped out a quarter of the inequality built in the previous forty. And at the same time that Biden’s resurrection of the liberal consensus of the years from 1933 to 1980 is illustrating that the economic problems in the country were the fault of Republican policies rather than of marginalized people, the extremism of those angry Republican footsoldiers is revealing that they are not the centrist Americans they have claimed to be.

Moms for Liberty, which bills itself as a group protecting children, organized in 2021 to protest mask mandates in schools, then graduated on to crusade against the teaching of “critical race theory.” That, right there, was a giveaway because that panic was created by then-journalist Christopher Rufo, who has emerged as a leader of the U.S. attack on democracy.

Rufo embraces the illiberal democracy, or Christian democracy, of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, saying: “It’s time to clean house in America: remove the attorney general, lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers’ unions, and overturn the school boards.” Radical right activists like Rufo believe they must capture the central institutions of the U.S. and get rid of the tenets of democracy—individual rights, academic freedom, free markets, separation of church and state, equality before the law—in order to save the country.

Because those central democratic values are taught in schools, the far right has focused on attacking schools from kindergartens to universities with the argument that they are places of “liberal indoctrination.” As a Moms for Liberty chapter in Indiana put on its first newspaper: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.” While this quotation is often used by right-wing Christian groups to warn of what they claim liberal groups do, it is attributed to German dictator Adolf Hitler. Using it boomeranged on the Moms for Liberty group not least because it coincided with the popular “Shiny Happy People” documentary about the far-right religious Duggar family that showed the “grooming” and exploitation of children in that brand of evangelicalism.

Moms for Liberty have pushed for banning books that refer to any aspect of modern democracy they find objectionable, focusing primarily on those with LGBTQ+ content or embrace of minority rights. During the first half of the 2022–2023 school year, PEN America, which advocates for literature, found that 874 unique titles had been challenged, up 28% from the previous six months. The bans were mostly in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina. A study by the Washington Post found that two thirds of book challenges came from individuals who filed 10 or more complaints, with the filers often affiliated with Moms for Liberty or similar groups. And in their quest to make education align with their ideology, the Moms for Liberty have joined forces with far-right extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, sovereign citizens groups, and so on, pushing them even further to the right.

Although the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled Moms for Liberty an “extremist group” that spreads “messages of anti-inclusion and hate,” the group appeared to offer to the Republican Party inroads into the all-important “suburban woman” vote, which party leaders interpret as white women (although in fact the 2020 census shows that suburbs are increasingly diverse—in 1990, about 20% of people living in the suburbs were people of color; in 2020 it was 45%).

When Moms for Liberty convened in Philadelphia last week, five candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, including Trump, showed up. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley told them: “When they mentioned that this was a terrorist organization, I said, ‘Well then, count me as a mom for liberty because that’s what I am.”

But here’s the crisis for the Republican Party: Leaders who wanted tax cuts and cuts to social programs relied on courting voters with cultural issues, suggesting that their coalition was protecting the United States from radicalism.

But the Republican embrace of Moms for Liberty illustrates dramatically and to a wide audience how radical the party itself has become, threatening to turn away all but its extremist base. A strong majority of Americans oppose book banning: about two thirds of the general population and even 51% of Republicans oppose it, recognizing that it echoes the rise of authoritarians.

As historian Nicole Hemmer points out today for CNN, Moms for Liberty are indeed a new version of “a broader and longstanding reactionary movement centered on restoring traditional hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality” that in the U.S. included the women of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and segregationists who organized as “Restore Our Alienated Rights” (ROAR) in the 1970s. Hemmer observes: “The book bans, the curricula battles, the efforts to fire teachers and disrupt school board meetings—little here is new.”

In the past, a democratic coalition has come together to reject such extremism. If it does so again, the Republican marriage of elites to street fighters will crumble, leaving room for the country to rebuild the relationship between citizens and the government. When a similar realignment happened in the 1930s under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Republican Party had little choice but to follow.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Fascism, Republicans
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