Judge Samuel Alito went out of his way to say that the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade would not affect other decisions, like contraception and gay marriage. But in the same decision, he asserted that the Constitution contains no “right to privacy,” on which these cases were built.
The Miami Herald interviews Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the gay marriage, who expressed his fear that the Court meant to strike down all rights based on the right to privacy.
In his draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito tries to limit the blast radius of his ruling by writing that abortion is fundamentally different from other privacy matters — like contraception and marriage equality — that have historically challenged the court. “The abortion right,” Alito writes, is “critically different from any other right that this Court has held fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of ‘liberty.’” Overturning one, he says, would not necessarily undermine the others. Jim Obergefell doesn’t believe him.
The plaintiff in the landmark 2015 case before the Supreme Court that established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right now says he is tired, disheartened and terrified of what may come after reading Alito’s sweeping rationale in the draft decision published Monday by Politico. “I’ve been asked if I believe what he says in that decision — that this is specific to a woman’s right to an abortion, and really should not be used on marriage equality,” Obergefell told McClatchy in an interview. “I don’t believe that whatsoever, because so many of the things he says in that decision open the door to using those arguments against marriage equality. And where does it stop?”
“I’m terrified. I really can’t put it any more simply than that. I am terrified,” he continued. “Marriage equality, while we had it for seven years, clearly will not pass his definition of tradition or history.”
Obergefell v. Hodges was a landmark civil rights case that culminated after years of litigation in a 5-4 decision at the high court, requiring all 50 states and U.S. territories to perform and recognize same-sex marriages the same as opposite-sex marriages.
Alito dissented from that decision, and in a speech to the Federalist Society in 2020 criticized it once again. “You can’t say marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” he told the conservative organization. “Until very recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.”
At that time, Alito found himself in the minority. But the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy — who wrote the Obergefell decision and several other key gay rights decisions that preceded it — provided then-President Donald Trump with an opening to nominate a conservative replacement.
Trump chose Brett Kavanaugh, who currently supports the decision to overturn Roe that Obergefell now fears.
“All I have to say is, they said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe v. Wade settled law,” Obergefell said. “Clearly they were misleading the Senate — not being truthful — so regardless of what they said during their confirmation hearings about marriage equality.”
“Losing Justice Kennedy was a loss to the LGBTQ+ community because he was so instrumental in decisions bringing us forward as a nation and toward a more perfect union,” he added. Gay rights organizations told McClatchy they have been preparing for a decision ending Roe v. Wade for months, but were nevertheless stunned by the sheer sweep of Alito’s written opinion.
Top officials and attorneys at the Human Rights Campaign held an emergency huddle on Monday night when the leaked draft published, and both HRC and GLAAD leaders are working to mobilize support for protests around the country with pro-choice groups. “The fact that Alito in this decision takes the track that, if these fundamental rights that we enjoy in our nation are not specifically enumerated in our constitution, then they’re questionable and should only be based on our nation’s history and traditions – to me that is one of the scariest things to hear a Supreme Court justice say,” Obergefell said.
“The history and tradition in North America, in the land now known as the United States of America, was for white people to own black people. There’s a longer tradition there than there is of freedom,” he added. “So it’s just a terrifying thing.”
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/article261132807.html#storylink=cpy
NPR released a new poll showing that, despite the loud mouths attacking public schools, most parents like their public schools and teachers.
They like their schools despite the hundreds of millions, if not billions, invested in promoting school choice, charter schools, vouchers, and privatization.
This poll suggests that Democrats should go after people like Ron DeSantis and other politicians trying to harm a civic institution that most Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, appreciate.
Say this for Jeb Bush: he is not dissuaded by failure. No matter how many studies show the failure of vouchers, he doesn’t care. No matter how many studies show that charter schools do not get better results than public schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how many grifters have drained millions through privatization of schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how little evidence he has for any of his proposals, he still pushes them.
His ideas are old and tired and incoherent. But count on him to package them as fresh and innovative, which they are not.
He is the male counterpart to Betsy DeVos.
He just cares about destroying public schools.
He wrote recently in The Miami Herald:
Last month marked two years since the pandemic swept across the country, causing the largest disruption to our nation’s education system in modern history. But at last, this spring brings an academic revival of sorts. Schools are remaining open, mask mandates are disappearing and plexiglass dividers between students in their classrooms are coming down.
In the rush to return to normal, we owe it to our nation’s children to emerge from this pandemic transformed, not by going backwards, but ready to forge a better future for them with all we’ve learned.
Our starting point is challenging. Prior to the pandemic, America’s public schools were struggling to serve the needs of students, and since the pandemic, a study by McKinsey found students have fallen months behind as a result of school closures and disruptions. There were severe impacts on student mental health, too. Pew Charitable Trusts found students are reporting significantly increased levels of grief, anxiety and depression.
It’s also no surprise that there’s a growing distrust in public education. A survey by Ipsos found trust in teachers declined during the pandemic, and there’s been a subsequent decrease in the number of students enrolling in public school.
Those are serious setbacks, but there are reasons for optimism. The pandemic put a spotlight on a myriad of possibilities for the future of education. Notably, it illustrated a desperate need by families for a broadened ecosystem of options for their children, with funding flexibility to create more equity in choice. And it elevated the power of parents to blaze new educational pathways for their children.
The Associated Press recently reported that homeschooling remains a popular choice for parents, despite schools reopening. And, private schools and public charter schools have witnessed increased enrollment. But choice, in and of itself, isn’t enough. Policymakers must continue to seek new ways to unbundle education systems, transforming old approaches into new and better learning options.
In Indiana, lawmakers, led by House Speaker Todd Huston, took the first step toward creating the nation’s first “parent-teacher compact” law. This innovative policy would allow parents to directly hire teachers. Educators would continue to be paid by the state and receive their health and retirement benefits, but this policy would enable parents and educators to enter into a peer-to-peer relationship to benefit individual students, without the hurdle of a district middleman. This individualized approach to education would give educators more freedom, families more flexibility and individual students the personalized experience they may need.
As we unbundle education, we need to reimagine all aspects of how education is delivered to students. One approach is enacting new part-time enrollment policies. Right now, students are defined by the school in which they’re enrolled.
Lawmakers can improve the education experience by allowing students to have more flexibility, whereby a student can enroll in their local public school and easily access a portion of their education funding to also enroll part-time in a private school, with an online provider, or engage in another learning experience that benefits the child’s education.
Another approach that complements unbundling is rethinking education transportation options. Last year, Gov. Doug Ducey awarded $18 million in grants to modernize Arizona’s K-12 transportation system, including direct-to-family grants to help close transportation gaps. In Oklahoma this year, Gov. Kevin Stitt proposed changing Oklahoma’s school transportation funding formula to expand how public school buses can serve students. And Florida’s Legislature recently passed legislation to create a new $15 million transportation grant program that encourages districts to create innovate approaches to school transportation, including carpooling and ride sharing apps, for both school-of-choice families and traditional school students.
Those are just a few examples, and we must continually look for more ways to unbundle and reimagine education. The pandemic saw an explosion of families, in all communities and from all demographics, embrace micro schools, homeschooling and customized learning pods. Rather than trying to limit these families, we should give them access to direct funds to further personalize and benefit their child’s out-of-school learning experience.
That’s what Gov. Brad Little has championed in Idaho. In response to school closures in 2020, Little used federal emergency COVID relief funds to provide direct grants to families to support students who were no longer learning in school. And this year, Little signed the Empowering Parents Grant Program into law, giving qualifying families up to $3,000 to use for tutoring, educational material, digital devices or internet connectivity….
Transforming our nation’s education system and ensuring students receive the individualized experience to unlock potential and lifelong success require continual forward momentum, especially after two years of disruptions. We have to keep moving, keep reimagining, keep transforming. This commitment to excellence is a point of pride for Florida.
Last year, Florida’s Legislature passed some of the most significant improvements and expansions to the state’s school-choice programs. And this year, lawmakers strengthened the charter school law, expanded the Florida Empowerment scholarship program, created a new financial literacy requirement for high school graduates and ensured parents are better informed of their child’s progress through online diagnostic progress monitoring and end-of-year summative tests.
This Pied Piper plays a tune meant to deceive. Ignore him.
Conservatives used to be known as people resistant to radical change. In decades past, conservatives sought to conserve traditional institutions and make them better. That stance appealed to many Americans who were unsettled by radical ideas, opposed to big-box stores that would wipe out small-town America’s Main Street. Conservatives were also known for opposing government intrusion into personal decisions; what you did in your bedroom was your business, not the state’s. What you and your doctor decided was best for you was your decision, not the state’s.
Chris Rufo is the face of the New Conservatism, who wants to frighten the parents of America into tearing down traditional institutions, especially the public school that they and their family attended.
Rufo became well-known for creating a national panic about “critical race theory,” which he can’t define and doesn’t understand. But he seems to think that schools are controlled by racist pedagogues and sexual perverts. In his facile presentation at Hillsdale College, one of the most conservative institutions of higher education in the nation, he makes clear that America has fallen from its position as a great and holy nation to a slimepit of moral corruption.
He has two great Satans in his story: public schools and the Disney Corporation. The Disney Corporation, in his simple mind, is a haven for perverts and pedophiles, bent on corrupting the youth of the nation.
Rufo asserts, based on no discernible evidence, that the decline and fall of America can be traced to the failed revolution of 1968. The radicals lost, as Nixon was elected that year, but burrowed into the pedagogical and cultural institutions, quietly insinuating their sinister ideas about race and sex into the mainstream, as the nation slept. Rufo’s writings about “critical race theory,” which he claims is embedded in schools, diversity training in corporations, and everywhere else he looked, made him a star on Tucker Carlson’s show, an advisor to the Trump White House, and a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote a profile of Rufo in The New Yorker and identified him as the man who invented the conflict over critical race theory, which before Rufo was a topic for discussion in law schools.
Before Rufo’s demonization of CRT, it was known among legal scholars as a debate about whether racism was fading away or whether it was systemic because it was structured into law and public policy. I had the personal pleasure of discussing these ideas in the mid-1980s with Derrick Bell, who is generally recognized as the founder of CRT. Bell was then at the Harvard Law School, after working as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He reached the conclusion that the Brown Decision of 1954 was inadequate to root out systematic racism.
At the time, I was a centrist in my politics and believed that racism was on its way out. Derrick disagreed. We spoke for hours, he invited me to present a paper at a conference he was organizing, which I did. Contrary to Rufo, I can attest that Derrick Bell was not a Marxist. He was not a radical. He wanted an America where people of different races and backgrounds had decent lives, unmarred by racial barriers. He was thoughtful, gentle, one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. He wanted America to be the land it professed to be. He was a great American.
Was 1968 the turning point, after which the radicals took over our culture and destroyed our founding ideals, as Rufo claims? No, it was not. I was there. He was born in 1984. He’s blowing smoke, making up a fairy-tale that he has spun into a narrative.
In 1968, I turned 30. I had very young children. I was not sympathetic to the hippies or the Weather Underground or the SDS. I hated the Vietnam War, but I was not part of any organized anti-war group. I believed in America and its institutions, and I was firmly opposed to those who wanted to tear them down, as the Left did then and as the Right does now. I worked in the Humphrey campaign in 1968 and organized an event in Manhattan—featuring John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and a long lineup of “liberals for Humphrey”— that was disrupted and ruined by pro-Vietnam Cong activists. That event, on the eve of the 1968 election, convinced me that Nixon would win. (While my event was disrupted, Nixon held a campaign rally a block away, at Madison Square Garden, that was not disrupted.)
1968 was the year that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. It was a horrible, depressing year. America seemed to be falling apart.
Did the Weathermen and other radicals begin a long march through the institutions and eventually capture them? That’s ridiculous. Some became professors, but none became college presidents, to my knowledge. Many were ostracized. Some went to prison for violent crimes. Those who played an active political role in 1968 are in their 80s now, if they are alive.
Rufo’s solution to what he sees as the capture of our institutions by racists and pedophiles is surpringly simple: school choice. He hopes everyone will get public money to send their children to private and religious schools, to charter schools, or to home school them. If only we can destroy public schools, he suggests, we can restore America to the values of 1776.
Good old 1776, when most black people were slaves, women had no rights, and the aristocracy made all the decisions. They even enjoyed conjugal rights to use their young female slaves. Those were the good old days, in the very simple mind of Christopher Rufo.
Turning the clock back almost 250 years! Now that’s a radical idea.
Several years ago, I endowed a lecture series at my alma mater, Wellesley College, focused on education issues. This year’s lecture will be live-streamed on April 12, and the speaker is Helen Ladd, an emeritus professor at Duke University and one of the nation’s leading economists. I hope you will mark the event on your calendar and tune in.
The Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 Lecture
How Charter Schools Disrupt Good Education Policy
Tuesday, April 12, 4 p.m. ET
LIVESTREAMED at www.wellesley.edu/live
Speaker: Helen F. Ladd ’67, Susan B. King Professor Emerita of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University
Ladd will draw on her many years of education research and discuss the four central requirements of good education policy in the U.S., and how charter schools, as currently designed and operated, typically do far more to interfere with, rather than to promote, good education policy in the U.S.
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. In this article, he reveals what we long suspected about for-profit charter schools. They make money by cutting corners.
He writes:
It didn’t take long for Tasha Stiles to realize there was something very wrong with the school where she had just started teaching.
First, there was her rushed orientation to the school, Toledo Preparatory Academy, an early kindergarten through eighth grade charter school in Toledo, Ohio, operated by for-profit charter chain Accel Schools. She told Our Schools that her training during orientation in August 2020 consisted mostly of one workshop on “basics,” which included how to record attendance and enter grades. There was no school handbook or written guidelines about student discipline practices or instructional protocols.
She said that the school had the appearance of a bare-bones operation, with very little decoration on the walls, empty classroom shelves with no books or instructional materials, heavily worn flooring and furniture, a rickety staircase that students and staff had to use daily, and drafty classrooms with insufficient radiator heating, which, on cold days, kept students shivering even in their coats.
Although Stiles had mostly taught social studies in her career, she told Our Schools that at Toledo Prep, she was told to teach math in grades five through eight. To help with lesson planning, she was given binders that contained the Ohio math standards and some student math workbooks, for which there was no teacher’s edition for grade eight.
She was told that students were expected to spend most of their instructional time on their Chromebooks, which the school supplied for in-school use only, and that students needed to be working on i-Ready, a digital software program for reading and mathematics, for at least 30 minutes per class period. The school didn’t seem to have any other curriculum materials available.
Administrative staff made promises of books and supplies that never arrived or, if they came, were never dispersed to classrooms. Stiles eventually resorted to using online learning tools like Khan Academy videos, which were free online, but school administrators disapproved of her using them.
“I had eighth graders who were reading at kindergarten level,” she told Our Schools. She also observed that there were students at Toledo Prep who struggled with English but had no consistent help from specialized support staff. What few support staff there were came from outside agencies that provided services, such as counseling and mental health, mostly online. A lone special education teacher with responsibility for all exceptional students in the building was “stretched very thin,” Stiles said.
The most reliable support staff in the building proved to be the tech support service from a company called Pansophic Learning, which happens to be the parent company of Accel Schools.
There was no school nurse, Stiles recalled, adding that, as COVID-19 raged across Ohio, students generally didn’t wear masks, and the school did no contact tracing when students or staff got sick with the virus. One day, a student came to her with bloodied knuckles, and Stiles went in search of the school’s first-aid kit, which turned out to be empty. The next day, Stiles came to school with Band-Aids that she’d purchased with her own money. Word about this got around, and students would come to her whenever they needed Band-Aids.
The few student clubs and after-school activities the charter school offered were all canceled after a student, following a TikTok trend, damaged a bathroom.
Students were frequently suspended by the school’s administrative staff, often for reasons that weren’t clear to her. “Rules were made up on the fly,” she said. One week she counted and realized that 20 students had been suspended by the school staff.
The school also enforced a rigid student ranking system, placing students in hierarchies based on their academic performance and discipline issues. Students at the top of the hierarchy were called “eagles,” students in the next rank below were labeled “doves,” and students called “larks” included those who were struggling with learning or behavioral issues. Students in the bottom rank, who were currently serving in-school suspensions, were called “turkeys,” until complaints by parents of students prompted the school to change the label to “phoenix.”
What substituted for a rich academic program at the charter school was its near-constant emphasis on test prep. “Everything was focused on testing,” Stiles said. “I had never taught in a school where there was so much emphasis on testing. While I was there, there were three whole days devoted to nothing but mock testing.”
Stiles quit after working only three months at the school, but the experience left her very frustrated and deeply concerned about the students. “I can’t pretend to not see what I saw there,” she said.
What Stiles didn’t know when she took the job at Toledo Prep was that she had stepped into a school that emulates what has become a growing practice in the charter school industry.
As an ongoing investigation by Our Schools has revealed, a substantial sector of charter schools, particularly those operated by for-profit operators like Accel Schools, are at the forefront of a wave of charter operations that follow an investor-driven business model borrowed from retail, health care, and manufacturing sectors.
In the charter school application of this business model, struggling schools are cycled through a series of private entities that, in turn, strip the schools of resources, run them at bare-bones costs, and reap whatever assets that remain before handing the schools off to the next private operator, or shutting them down completely.
In business and investment circles, the model is often defended as “an important economic function” to either “revive” struggling enterprises, or “reallocate” resources that have been invested in failed enterprises to more productive endeavors.
But in the case of Toledo Prep, and other charter schools practicing this business model, although the business consequences might be fine for the charter operators and their investors, the children caught up in this investor-driven enterprise often have their education significantly disrupted, or even permanently impaired, perhaps with lifelong impact.
Portfolios of Failed Charters
Stiles, who earned her master’s degree in education at the University of Kentucky, had been teaching since 1998, mostly at schools outside the United States. When she returned to the United States in 2020, she started looking for work in Ohio.
She was attracted to charter schools because she wanted the challenge of teaching academically challenged students, and Ohio state law generally guides charters to locate in urban or “challenged” districts.
Stiles, who identifies as white, had previously taught mostly in private Islamic schools—she practices the Islamic faith and wears a hijab—where students were often more affluent and better supported than most of their peers. She believed she could have a bigger impact on students who were more disadvantaged.
What Stiles only later came to learn is that Toledo Prep had a previous life, with a different name, a different operator, and a different authorizing agency that held the permit allowing the school to operate—which, in Ohio, is called a sponsor.
According to two leading business registration services, the building at the address now occupied by Toledo Preparatory Academy—824 6th St. in Toledo, Ohio 43605—had previously been occupied by Aurora Academy, a charter school sponsored by, according to state records, the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation (BCHF), an Ohio nonprofit that has long sponsored a number of charter schools in the state.
It’s not clear who operated Aurora Academy before it became Toledo Prep, but according to a 2018 report by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the school was acquired by Accel Schools around the same time Accel was buying up charter schools that had previously been operated by White Hat Management, a for-profit charter management organization (often called a CMO).
White Hat was one of a number of CMOs, according to a 2013 analysis by Policy Matters Ohio (PMO), that had a history of using a loophole in state charter school laws to open new charter schools in the same locations where a previous charter had been closed due to poor academic results. A case study that was part of the analysis by PMO showed that White Hat opened a “new” charter school, Southside Academy in Youngstown, “within days” of a school at the same street address being closed due to poor academic performance.
Both BCHF and White Hat had earned high ratings in the Ohio Department of Education’s 2015 evaluation of charter school sponsors and management firms, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. However, the article also noted that the Cleveland Transformation Alliance, an alliance of local businesses and organizations that advocate for high-quality schools in Cleveland, wasn’t “convinced” with those ratings, finding flaws with BCHF’s “school quality issues” and the “track record” of its associated management companies, which included White Hat.
Whether or not BCHF took this criticism to heart is difficult to assess, but it certainly made a turnabout in its performance evaluation of Aurora Academy.
In its 2016-2017 annual report, the foundation rated Aurora Academy as meeting or exceeding performance levels in all its evaluation categories but one—academic. However, the foundation’s performance report for 2018-2019 lists the school as falling short of the foundation’s acceptable academic and fiscal performance levels, and the report indicated the school was among five of its charter schools that would be closed at the end of the 2018-2019 school year.
As the Akron Beacon Journal reported in 2018, White Hat Management started closing its schools, beginning in 2014, as families of students opted for other schools for their children as a result of “years of low test scores and soaring high school dropout rates.” Charter schools run by White Hat Management, the report further noted, were “among the lowest performers in the state” and “were plagued from the start with allegations of padded enrollment and skirting accountability.”
Although the exact date that Accel bought Aurora Academy is unclear, a state registry of charter schools (which are called “community schools” in Ohio) in 2017 indicates Aurora Academy was being operated by Accel Schools, with BCHF continuing as the school’s sponsor…
Toledo Prep is not the only Accel school that’s been similarly rebranded to cover up its troubled past.
Open the link and learn more about how a for-profit charter operator makes a profit while running a chaotic school.
Representative Gloria Johnson posted a series of tweets describing the hateful legislation that her colleagues in the Tennessee Legislature have passed. Her Twitter handle is @VoteGloriaJ
When I got home this weekend someone asked how things are going in Nashville, I’m not sure they were ready for my answer, but it went kind of like this…
We have a “Don’t Say Gay” bill worse than Florida’s and about 4 more bills to go along with it-all equally filled with hate. GOP and B list celebrities are accusing librarians and teachers of “grooming” kids.
We have a vigilante abortion bill worse than Texas’. A bill that makes your friends and family $10k if they rat you out. Heck, if you decide to abort your rapists baby, his family and friends can sue you for $10k.
Did you ever imagine TN would give more rights to a violent rapist than a victim of a violent rapist. He can choose the mother of his child, but she can’t choose not to have her rapist’s baby. That is pure evil folks. That is today’s GOP, they don’t believe women are equal.
We have a school funding formula that’s not ready for prime time. It takes away local control, doesn’t have details and is more than 50% rule making we won’t see until AFTER the vote. And counties will love the property tax it will inevitably bring in 3-4 years😬. #whenleeisgone
Peter Greene reports here on the battle plans of the radical rightwing “Moms for Liberty,” as revealed by its leader Tiffany Justice on the Steve Bannon show. In short, take over all the school boards, fire everybody, and replace then with conservatives who share the hateful views of Tiffany Justice.
Greene writes, and adds his comments:
BANNON: Are we going to start taking over the school boards?
JUSTICE: Absolutely. We’re going to take over the school boards, but that’s not enough. Once we replace the school boards, what we need to do is we need to have search firms, that are conservative search firms, that help us to find new educational leaders, because parents are going to get in there and they’re going to want to fire everyone. What else needs to happen? We need good school board training. We need lawyers to stand up in their communities and be advocates for parents and be advocates for school board members who are bucking the system. Right now, parents have no recourse within any public education district.
The “no recourse” talking point sits awkwardly next to a description of the recourse (democratic elections) that Justice (who was defeated when she ran for re-election to her own school board seat) plans to take, but sure. Parents will take over school boards, fire everybody, and hire The Right Sort to replace them. And while some training is needed for school board members, the main thing is to run, because
But what my message today is – get out and run for school board. It’s a part-time job. It’s not a full-time job. Anyone can do it. You do not need to have a background in education and we need more people.
Justice was on Bannon’s show War Room: Pandemic, because angling for political victories and advocacy spins is just like what folks are going on in Ukraine these days. She talked about the heroism of Ron DeSantis, and of course parental rights:
Parental rights are rights that every parent has, and the government does not give them to you, and they cannot take them away. Every parent has the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, their medical care. That includes mental health, by the way, their education and their values, education, their morals, their religious and character training. All of these things lie within the responsibility of the parent. We, as parents, are happy to own those responsibilities within our rights.
It underlines the way in which the parental rights movement at its most extreme seems to have nothing at all to do with a children’s rights movement. I’m a parent, and I absolutely get the rights and responsibilities that parents have to protect and guide their children, but there’s a line past which it all starts to become creepy, as if you own this child and will engineer the tiny human to turn out to be exactly what you choose them to be, and much of the parental rights activist rhetoric lives close to that line. “I have total ownership and control of my child” is exactly how you get to the notion of “My child didn’t turn out exactly the way I demanded they turn out, so somebody else must have messed with their head.” Parental rights are a real thing, and parental responsibilities are a very real thing, but children are actual human beings and not lumps of clay to be crafted by other adult humans.
Justice and Bannon are sad that folks are lying about Florida’s bill, which is just a parental rights and anti-grooming bill and not– they interrupt themselves before they can say what it is. But Justice says she doesn’t see the big deal “We said no sexual orientation instruction or gender identity instruction in grades K through three” and many of her fans and Bannon think it should be K through twelve. Yes, why is everyone so upset that supporters of the bill equate teachers, LGBTQ persons, and pedophiles? (Also, implying that Disney only opposes the law because they are interested in sexualizing children.) As with all talk in support of the law, Justice and Bannon skip past the part where any parent can decide for themselves what constitutes “instruction” about sexual orientation or gender identity, so teachers now have to watch out for any lesson that could lead to Pat talking about having two Mommies at home. Though it would be entertaining if the first parent lawsuit under the bill is some parent arguing that boys and girls restrooms are a means of instructing about gender identity. Maybe fans of the law should just wait until we see how the court challenge turns out.
Justice throws around some numbers about public school failure, which serve mostly as a good example of why school board members and other people who want to talk about education policy should know something about it (she cites 29.8% of Kentucky third graders reading on grade level, but she appears to be talking about proficiency, which is above grade level). This, somehow, is related to talking about gender identity and sexual orientation in first grade.
Justice could be on the show because she was in DC to talk to some GOP House members. She can’t imagine why Dems don’t want to talk to her (I’m not sure, but one possible explanation that comes to mind is that she didn’t call their offices to make an appointment). Which brings us back to the point at the top– Moms For Liberty wants to talk about how to take over the states (because states rights are at the heart of all this stuff).
Angie Sullivan teaches in a Title 1 elementary school in Las Vegas, Nevada (Clark County). She frequently sends letters to every legislator in the state about the need to fund schools like hers adequately and the dismal failure of charter schools.
She responded to a post that featured an interview with Jennifer Berkshire, who predicted that some states would phase out public schools in the next few years.
Sullivan responded:
There would have been a time I would have said this will never happen. Public Schools are such an American Insitution. They are protected by laws.
Now I know charter schools are built to go around the laws. Our Nevada Constitution states one district one county. But charters claim they are not a district. And when necessary they are not even a school. The beauty of the EMO/CMO makes them slippery too. They are often a combination for-profit/non-profit. What law can apply to all of the above: a non-profit education.business, managed by a for-profit management corporation which can then also take advantage of all public school resources and tax advantages, while also applying for all the small business grants and money.
Nevada never got the immediate overnight conversion Elaine Wynn and her reformers wanted. That was too quick and shocking. The ASD grabbing 30 schools at a time did not work. [Elaine Wynn is chair of the state Board of Education and wife of a major casino owner.]
So neoliberals have settled for a slow and steady 5 or 6 charters a year. Along with adding to charter chains by grade level every year – 100 students here and 100 students there.
Jana Wilcox-Lavin uses the $22 million in grant money to grease wheels and find favor. Rebecca Feiden is one of the most powerful women in the state. She grants charters; She refuses charters. Rebecca gives some chance after chance after chance to start their charter business. Others, she stops dead in their tracks. They both inherited a dysfunctional and failing charter business. The Charter Authority is still mired in failing charters – failing financially, failing academically, and failing to enroll diversity. Charters in Nevada are obvious segregation and white flight. There is limited appetite to serve poor students.
Mayors in Clark County seem to think running a school is easy. The pandemic allowed them to use education money to offer micro-charters. This seems to have whet some appetites to own a district of their own.
Mayor Goodman of the City of Las Vegas wants a charter. For some unknown reason she paired up with the EMO TNTP (Michelle Rhee’s Group). She signed on the who’s who of education reform. The City of Las Vegas is now in the school business. Interestingly enough Mayor Goodman was successful at running an expensive private school. She does know education. She has zero experience running a school for diverse poor students. She is about to get a wake-up call. Cedric Creer was only voice of reason when this was discussed. He has the failing Agassi, Rainbow, and 100 Academies in his area – he warned the City Council not to go into the school business. Those charters have had few successes and much more failure. Turnover is constant both teachers and students. Mayor Goodman is about to learn that loads of donations and cash from the City of Las Vegas will not be enough if you let Michelle Rhee’s teaching hating group abuse labor. Interestingly enough, Goodman will retire and the City Council will then run this charter school.
Things I did not think were possible.
Are happening.
I thought our straight forward laws would prevent the Mayors from owning a district through their City Councils.. But charters are not in “districts”. Nor are they schools. Nor are they businesses. They become whatever they need to be to skirt the rules the rest of us live by daily. They claim it is “innovation”. Grifters do it everyday. I do not find it new.
I watched Rebecca Feiden define EMO/CMO very differently to the Nevada Legislature the other day – than she has ever defined it is a Charter Authority Meeting. Perhaps she does not even know or want to know. She was certainly snippy like legislators should already know.
I think this year, The Nevada State Public Charter School Authority will become the second largest district (yes, I know they claim they are not one, but they act like one) in Nevada. It is the size of the Reno/Washoe School District almost. And it serves mainly rich white students inside the middle of Clark County. Yes I know it has a hand full of diverse charters – those are not the norm. Yes I know there are charters in other counties. The bulk of the Nevada charters are serving rich white students inside CCSD. Creating a systematic segregation in Clark County. White Flight is obvious.
Charters segregate by religion, race, and money. They are actually tracking special education, language learning, and free and reduce lunch because those categories earn businesses more pupil center funding dollars. This tracking does not help with Mormon charters, all black or all white charters, and charter locations which are obviously limiting access.
Rebecca Feiden is focused on trying to get more free and reduced lunch children into charters. The Charter Authority is sending the charters a letter, inviting them to participate in “Weighted Lotteries” to help correct their diversity issues. All the charters are getting a “Weighted Lottery” and the Charter Authority is claiming this is a tool to diversify. Weighted Lotteries do not help at all. Especially with new charter enrollment which required diversity by law. Weighted Lotteries only go into affect if charters are full. Technically if a charter has even one spot open – the lottery is not triggered.
The irony of all this is not lost on me. CCSD is one of the most diverse districts in the United States. Yet our Nevada Charters which are predominantly EMO’d For-Profit Academica – serve the rich and white. Now Nevada Charters are spending money to attract diversity to their charters – advertising, flyers, walking door-to-door, or so they claim they tried to find a diverse child to enroll. The Tax Payer has to pay these businesses to admit a few IEP, language learners or poor children. For some perspective, my public school is 100% diverse on every and all levels – we do not try at all to add diversity. In fact
Nevada never closes a failing charter. Even charters that cannot fill out the application or meet the requirements just sue until they are finally allowed to do whatever they want. There is not remedy to stop this. $950 million in Nevada Charters and not a single soul can tell you where it is or what it was spent on.
This is why I think Jennifer Berkshire is correct. Eventually, there will be no place called public schools. There will be a selection list and rich people will be able to pay to have a teacher and school. Others will accept cash and their children will not receive anything and that will be fine because it is their “choice”. And most will meet in a charter warehouse somewhere to sit in front of a device with software teaching them. The poor will be used to privatized and receive the lesser quality of the lists.
It will be slow. CCSD has a parasite. At this rate, the Charter Authority will just keep growing and making more messes which use up more education dollars. It takes from some to give to others. And folx are just fine with allowing a corporation take everything from the disadvantaged so their own children can get ahead. The so called “progressives” are leading the charge.
It is wrong and I hope we fight it. I believe in our imperfect public schools. I see nothing the charters offer that is new. I do not see them being a remedy at all. There is some limited liability advantages for businesses – is that good use of tax dollars?
I hope I am wrong.
Logically I am just afraid Jennifer Berkshire is right.
She followed up with another comment:
Sadly CCSD and Nevada “Leadership” are TFA. They are here to stay. Having catapaulted themselves above everyone.
An example is the very powerful Rebecca Feiden who control $950 million in Nevada Education Dollars which go to Nevada Charters.
Another is Jana Wilcox-Lavin in Opportunity 180 which spreads charters and gives “grants” to them.
No one wants to be a teacher – seems there will always be an appetite to make six figures and control everyone and everything for an eduphilantrophist like Elaine Wynn.
Diane Ravitch's blog 