Archives for category: Education Reform

Bob Shepherd is a brilliant polymath who has worked in almost every aspect of education, as editor, author, test development and classroom teacher. I invited him to review recent changes in Florida’s testing program.

He writes:

Among the many claims that Ron DeSantis made when running for Governor of Florida was that he would do away with the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] and their associated high-stakes testing.

Both were, for good reason, in deep disrepute. In fact, the puerile, vague, almost entirely content-free Common Core standards, which Gates and Coleman and Duncan foisted on the United States with no vetting whatsoever, were so hated that at the annual ghouls’ convention of the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, the oh-so-reverend Mike Huckabee told the assembled Repugnicans to go back home and change their name because “Common Core” had become a “tarnished brand.”

Not change the “standards,” mind you, but change their name. In other words, the good Reverend’s magisterial ministerial advice was TO LIE TO or, most charitably, TO CONFUSE people by implying falsely that the standards had been replaced with local ones like, say, the Florida Higher-than-the-Skyway-Bridge-When-We-Wrote-These Standards. And that’s just what most states did. They barely tweaked the godawful Common Core standards, or didn’t change them at all, renamed them, and then announced their “new” standards.

Hey, check out our new and improved Big Butt Burger!

This looks just like your old Ton o’ Tushy Burger.

It is. Same great burger you know and love!

So, what’s so new about it?

The name! It has a new and improved name!

Enter Ron DeSantis, stage right. Shortly after being elected, he promised to “eliminate all vestiges of the Common Core” and “to streamline the testing.” Then, when DeSantis signed an executive order replacing the Common Core State Standards (C.C.S.S.) with the new Florida B.E.S.T. standards and creating new F.A.S.T. tests to replace the Common-Core-based F.C.A.T., his Department of Education (the FDOE) posted this headline:

GOVERNOR DESANTIS ANNOUNCES END OF THE HIGH-STAKES FSA TESTING TO BECOME THE FIRST STATE IN THE NATION TO FULLY TRANSITION TO PROGRESS MONITORING

See Governor DeSantis Announces End of the High Stakes FSA Testing to Become th (fldoe.org)

Under the Governor’s new plan, instead of the Common-Core-based F.C.A.T., given in grades 3-8 and 10 in keeping with federal requirements, Florida would now give not one end-of-year test but THREE TESTS at each grade, in each subject area, Math and English, one at the beginning of the year, one at the middle of the year, and one at the end. And far from being the low-stakes progress monitoring that the FDOE headline and the Governor’s PR campaign suggested, these tests would be high stakes as well. Students would have to pass the ELA test in 2^nd grade to move on to 3^rd grade, and they would have to pass the 10^th-grade ELA test, in addition to other state high-stakes assessments, to graduate from high school.

So, there would be MORE, not fewer, assessments. There would be no end to the attached high stakes. And there would be no end to PRETENDING (see below) that these tests measure proficiency or mastery of the state “standards.” And then, as the cherry on top of this dish of dissembling BS served warm, Florida hired AIR, a maker of Common Core standardized state tests given across the country, to write its new F.A.S.T. tests. Same old vinegar in wine bottles with fancy new labels.

Before I discuss the many problems with the old and new Florida testing regimes, let me just pause to congratulate the state of Florida and the people on its standards team, which, unlike the group that developed Common Core, included a lot of actual teachers and textbook developers. They did a great job with the B.E.S.T. standards. These are a VAST improvement on the idiotic Common Core. They return to grade-appropriate, developmentally appropriate math standards at the early grades. The ELA standards are also much improved. These use broader language generally, thus covering the entire curriculum, as CCSS did not, while allowing for much more flexibility with regard to curricular design than the CCSS did. A curriculum developer could easily create sound, coherent, comprehensive ELA textbook programs based on these new Florida standards as they certainly could not based on the CCSS, which instead led to vast distortions and devolution of U.S. curricula and pedagogy. The Florida B.E.S.T. standards also do not deemphasize literature and narrative writing, as Coleman so ignorantly and so boorishly did in the CCSS.

Now, here is how curriculum development is SUPPOSED to work: A textbook authorship team (or district-or school-based curriculum team) is supposed to sit down and design a coherent, grade-appropriate curriculum with the goal of imparting essential knowledge while at the same time checking the standards from time to time to make sure that those are all being covered. So, the coherence of the curriculum and the knowledge to be imparted are first, and the standards coverage is second—that is, IT COMES ABOUT INCIDENTALLY. STANDARDS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A CURRICULUM MAP. They are a list of desired educational outcomes based on teaching sequenced according to the curriculum map. So, a group might design a unit for eighth graders on The Short Story and plan to cover first its origins in folk tales and traveler’s tales and then, in turn, such short story elements as setting, character, conflict, plot structure, and theme. Throughout, they might illustrate the main ideas with examples of these elements from orature before moving on to literary examples. They might then conclude with lessons on planning and writing a folk tale and then a full-scale short story. And all along, while writing the unit, the group might examine the curriculum map in light of the standards and tweak the plan to ensure alignment.

That’s not what happened with the Common Core. Instead, because of the high stakes attached to the tests that purported to measure proficiency or mastery of the “standards,” people threw the whole notion of coherent curricula out the window. Instruction devolved into RANDOM EXERCISES BASED ON PARTICULAR STANDARDS—exercises based on the formats of questions on the now all-important tests on the standards. In other words, curricula devolved into test prep. I call this the “Monty Python and Now for Something Completely Different” approach to curriculum development. (BTW, a full monty is full-frontal nudity, so a monty python is a _____. Fill in the blank.) In other words, THE STANDARDS BECAME THE CURRICUM MAP. Every educational publisher in the country started hauling off every textbook development program by making a spreadsheet containing the standards list in the left-most column and the places where these were to be “covered” in the other columns. Having random standards rather than a coherently sequenced body of knowledge drive curricula was a disaster for K-12 education in the United States. Many experienced professionals I knew in educational publishing quit in disgust at this development. They refused to be part of the destruction of U.S. pre-college education. An English Department chairperson told me, “I do test prep until the test is given in April. Then I have a month to teach English.” Her administrators encouraged this approach.

The new Florida standards are broad enough and comprehensive enough to allow for coherent curriculum development in line with, aligned to, them. But will that happen? The high stakes still attached to them incentivize the same sort of disaster that happened with Common Core—the continued replacement of coherent curricula with exercises keyed to particular “standards.” Furthermore, because of the “progress monitoring” aspect of the new Florida program, there will be, under it, EVEN MORE INCENTIVE FOR ADMINISTRATORS TO MICROMANAGE what and how teachers teach—to insist that they do test prep every day based on the standards that students in their classes didn’t score well on.

In Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas Moore, the Chancellor of England, knows that he will lose his head if he doesn’t accede to King Henry’s appointing himself head of a new Church of England, but being a person of conscience, Moore can’t bring himself to do this. There’s an affecting scene in which Moore is taking the ferry across the river Thames and this exchange takes place:

MOORE [to boatman]: How’s your wife?

BOATMAN: She’s losing her shape, Sir.

MOORE: Aren’t we all.

That’s what results from high-stakes testing based on state standards lists. Instead of the curriculum teaching concepts from the standards, the curriculum BECOMES teaching the standards. Instead of giving a lesson on reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” teachers are pressured by administrators, whose school ratings and jobs depend on the test outcomes, to teach a lesson on Standard CCSS.ELA.R.666, the text becomes incidental, and the actual purposes of reading are ignored. Any text will do as long as the student is “working on the standard,” and the text is chosen because it exemplifies it (for example, the standard deals with the multiple meanings of words and a random text is chosen because it contains two examples of words used with multiple meanings). In this way, curricular coherence is lost, teaching becomes mere test prep, and without a coherent curriculum, students fail to learn how concepts are connected, to fit them into a coherent whole, even though one of the most fundamental principles of learning is that new learning sticks in learners’ minds if it is connected to a previously existing body of knowledge in those learners’ heads. In summary, putting the cart before the horse, the standard before the content, undermines learning. People like Gates and Coleman don’t understand this. They haven’t a clue how much damage to curricula and pedagogy their standards-and-testing “reform” has done. It’s done a lot. They are like a couple drunks who have plowed their cars through a crowd of pedestrians but are so plastered as to be completely oblivious to the devastation they’ve left behind them.

BTW, when he created the egregious Common Core, Coleman made a list of almost content-free “skills” (the “standards”) and then tacked onto it a call for teachers to have students start reading substantive works of literature and nonfiction, including “foundational documents from American history” and “plays by Shakespeare.” At the time when these standards were introduced, and Coleman doesn’t seem to have known this, almost every school in the United States was using, at each grade level, a hardbound literature anthology made up of stories, poems, essays, dramas, and other “classic” works from the traditional canon—substantive works of literature, including foundational documents of American history and plays by Shakespeare. So, Coleman’s big innovation—wasn’t an innovation at all. It was like calling on Americans to start using cars instead of donkey carts for transportation. Coleman was THAT CLUELESS about what was actually going on in the nation’s classrooms. And far from leading to more teaching of substantive works, the actual standards and testing regime led to incoherent curricula and pedagogy that addressed individual standards using random and often substandard texts and deemphasized the centrality of the works read. And so the processes of reading and teaching, in our schools, lost their shape, became monstrous exercises in dull and seemingly pointless scholasticism. Despite the fact that the new B.E.S.T. standards are broader and more comprehensive and therefore allow for more coherent curricula based on them, the persistence of high stakes in the new Florida standards-and-testing plan will lead to precisely the same sort of curricular incoherence that CCSS did.

That’s a problem, but even worse, if you can imagine that, is and will be the problem of the invalidity of the tests themselves, the old ones and the new ones. The governor and the FDOE promised shorter, low-stakes, progress-monitoring tests. We have already seen that the new tests aren’t low stakes, and we’ve seen that progress monitoring means micromanagement to ensure that teachers are doing test prep. So, what about the length? You guessed it. A typical F.A.S.T. test has 30-40 multiple-choice questions. Same as the F.C.A.T.

Now consider this: There are many standards at each grade level. For example, at Grade 8, there are 24 Grade 8 B.E.S.T. ELA standards. So, each standard is “tested,” supposedly, by one or two questions. But the standards, in the cases of both the Common Core and Florida’s B.E.S.T. are VERY broad, VERY GENERAL. They cover enormous ground. For example, here’s one of the new Florida standards, a variant of which appears at each grade level:

ELA.8.C.3.1: Follow the rules of standard English grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling appropriate to grade level.

Here’s an assignment for you, my reader: Write ONE or TWO short multiple-choice questions that VALIDLY measure whether a student has mastered this standard—that’s right, two short multiple-choice questions to cover the entirety of the 8^th-grade curriculum in grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.

That’s impossible, of course. It’s like trying to come up with one question to judge whether a person has the knowledge of French, of French culture, of diplomacy, and of international law and trade to be a good ambassador to France.

Well, OK. Today I am going to ask you to submit to a brief examination to see if you have the knowledge to serve as our ambassador to France. Are you ready?

Ready.

Have you ever eaten gougères?

Oh, yes. Love them.

What is an au pair?

A young person from a foreign country who helps in a house in return for room and board.

Hey, hey! Great. You passed. Congratulations, Madame Ambassador!

This is a problem with the Common Core tests, and the problem ought to be obvious to anyone. In fact, it’s shocking that given the invalidity of the state tests, which I just demonstrated, that so many people—politicians, federal and state education officials, journalists, administrators, and even some teachers actually take the results from these tests seriously, that they report those results as though they were Moses reading aloud from the tablets he carried down the mountain. “This just in: state ELA scores in sharp decline due to pandemic!” Slight problem. The scores from invalid tests don’t tell you anything. They are useless.

The tests clearly, obviously, do not measure validly what they purport to be measuring. They cannot do so, given how broad the standards are and how few questions are asked about any given standard. That you could validly measure proficiency or mastery of the standards in this way is AN IMPOSSIBILITY on the level of building a perpetual motion machine or drawing a round square. And so the tests and their purveyors and supporters should have been laughed off the national stage years ago. It’s darkly (very darkly) humorous that people who claim to care about “data” are taken in by such utter pseudoscience as this state testing is. That emperor has no clothes. It’s long past time to end the occupation of our schools by high-stakes testing.

But Florida isn’t doing that. The new policy has given us the same kinds of invalid high-stakes tests by one of the standards providers of them, but now students in Florida will take EVEN MORE of those tests, thus making them EVEN MORE invasive and EVEN MORE likely to lead to EVEN MORE onerous and counterproductive micromanagement of teachers. No sane person would want to teach under such conditions of micromanagement.

DeSantis has promised to “Make America Florida.” If I were a religious person, I would say, “God help us.” Instead, I’ll just say, “Uh, no thanks.”

Scorecard

Quality of new standards: A

Quality of new tests: D

Plan for implementation of new standards and testing regime: F

Promises kept: C–

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Reform, Florida, Hoax, Standardized Testing

Jan Resseger: The Culture Wars Are Obscuring What Really Matters

By dianeravitch

January 17, 2024 //

Jan Resseger, dedicated champion of social justice, explains that the culture wars are a ruse that diverts is from far more important issues. Book-banning and attacks on diversity-equity-inclusion are outrageous, but even more so is our indifference to structural issues, such as adequate funding, persistent racial segregation, and the privatization movement.

She writes:

In Schoolhouse Burning, the important recent book about the history of public education since the Civil War and the protection of public schooling by the provisions of the 50 state constitutions, Derek Black declares: “Public education represents a commitment to a nation in which a day laborer’s son can go to college, own a business, maybe even become president. It represents a nation in which every person has a stake in setting the rules by which society will govern itself, where the waitress’s children learn alongside of and break bread with the senator’s and CEO’s children. Public education represents a nation where people from many different countries, religions and ethnic backgrounds come together as one for a common purpose around common values.” (Schoolhouse Burning, p. 250)

Right now, of course, Chris Rufo, the right-wing linguistic reframer and political provocateur, has taken upon himself the mission of undermining the very values Derek Black proclaims. Rufo and his political allies at the national level and across the statehouses are intentionally frightening parents—making them fear children who are different. They have made the topic of the day their hope to eliminate “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” to shut down any curriculum that honors the history and culture of children who are not part of the dominant culture, and to undermine our sense of responsibility for providing equal opportunity. Our statehouses and national politics are being sidetracked by ideologues seeking to silence classroom conversation about how our nation’s past has shaped the present moment and by lavishly funded lobbyists pushing politicians to grant families public tax dollars to pay for their children’s escape from the public schools. We are surrounded by a maelstrom of argument designed to make us forget about our responsibility to the public schools “where people from many different countries, religions, and ethnic backgrounds come together as one for a common purpose around common values.”

Responding to the education culture war provocateurs is essential for those of us who care about public schooling, but it is also a distraction from the difficult essential issues we hardly see in the news anymore. I was jolted by Erica Frankenberg’s concise updatelast week about the persistence of racial segregation in public schools across the states. My surprise wasn’t about the existence of continuing racial segregation and its contribution to inequality; I simply hadn’t noticed any attention to this reality for several months.

Frankenberg, a professor of education and demographics at Penn State University, begins: “Brown vs. Board of Education , the pivotal Supreme Court decision that made school segregation unconstitutional, turns 70 years old on May 17, 2024.” She continues with a concise history of the long resistance to compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision, and updates the situation as we begin 2024:

“Public school students today are the most racially diverse in US. history. At the time of Brown, about 90% of students were white and most other students were Black., Today, according to a 2022 federal report, 46% of public students are white, 28% are Hispanic, 15% are Black, 6% are Asian, 4% multiracial, and 1% are American Indian. Based on my analysis of 2021 federal education data, public schools in 22 states and Washington, D.C., served majorities of students of color. And yet, public schools are deeply segregated. In 2021, approximately 60% of Black and Hispanic public school students attended schools where 75% or more of students were students of color. Black and Hispanic students who attend racially segregated schools also are overwhelmingly enrolled in high-poverty schools.”

What is the financial consequence of racial segregation? Frankenberg explains: “A 2019 report by EdBuild… found that schools in predominantly nonwhite districts received $23 billion less in funding each year than schools in majority white districts. This equates to roughly $2,200 less per student per year.”

Every year the Education Law Center publishes the Making the Gradereport on school funding fairness. The news in the most recent Making the Grade, released in December, compliments Frankenberg’s brief on the impact of racial segregation. Here is the this year’s brief summary of the situation at the end of 2023: “Vast disparities in per-pupil funding levels persist with the highest funded state (New York) spending two and a half times more per pupil than the lowest funded state (Idaho), even after adjusting for regional cost differences. Far too few states progressively distribute funds to high-poverty districts: more than half the states… have either flat or regressive funding distributions that disadvantage high-poverty districts… (T)he worst funded states are often guilty of low effort, indicating a failure to prioritize public education.”

And instead of raising their investment in schools, many states have reduced budgetary allocations for public education: “Nationally PK-12 education saw the smallest annual increase in combined state and local funding since the Great Recession. Fourteen states reduced total state and local revenue for education at exactly the moment when schools needed more resources to deal with the unprecedented challenges of interrupted learning, virtual or hybrid schedules, and health and safety concerns. In Alaska, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming, declining revenues disproportionately affected high-poverty districts and caused these states to become either less progressive or more regressive.”

The Education Law Center concludes the introduction to its comprehensive report with this warning: “A fair, equitable, and adequate (state) school funding formula is the basic building block of a well-resourced and academically successful school system for all students. A strong funding foundation is even more critical for low-income students, students of color, English learners, students with disabilities, and students facing homelessness, trauma, and other challenges. These students, and the schools that serve them, need additional staff programs, and supports to put them on the same footing as their peers.”

Persistent racial and economic segregation in U.S. public schools and inequity and inadequacy of public school finance are merely two of today’s educational challenges, but they among the most serious causes of educational injustice. We can be sure, however, that the culture war missionaries who want to eliminate diversity and inclusion, are not worried about segregation. And as they openly state their opposition to equity, we can assume that public school funding is of little concern. The culture warriors and their political allies have been busy expanding all kinds of private school tuition vouchers and fighting for the right of parents to insulate their children (at public expense) from exposure to the rich diversity that defines our society.

Underneath the noisy distraction of the culture wars, however, serious structural challenges for public schooling require our attention. Only a public committed to public investment in the common good and expanding the opportunity to learn for every child can ensure the future of the public institution that Derek Black describes: “Public education represents a nation where people from many different countries, religions and ethnic backgrounds come together as one for a common purpose around common values.”

Categories Education Reform

The Hoax of Ohio’s So-Called “Community Schools”

By dianeravitch

January 14, 2024 //

Denis Smith worked for the Ohio Department of Education, where he oversaw the burgeoning charter industry. When I was in Ohio a few years back, another former state official told me that charter lobbyists wrote the state’s charter school law. In their effort to make it palatable to give public money to private entities to run schools, the lobbyists decided to call them “community schools.”

As Denis Smith points out in this article, Ohio is the only state that calls charter schools by that name. In fact, “community schools” have their own definition. They are public schools that offer a wide range of social and even medical services. There are federal programs for charter schools and for community schools: they are not the same. Some charter schools in Ohio operate “for profit.” No community school does.

Smith writes:

More than a quarter-century ago, in a move that undermined the status of the state’s public schools, Ohio Republicans approved legislation that authorized the use of public funds to operate schools run by private management companies. These entities that use public funds to establish and maintain a parallel system of education are called charter schools.

Except in one state, where the legal title for these schools may be an issue that is bound to confuse both policy makers and the public over time.

Indeed, in this nation 44 of the states refer by law to these public-private hybrids as charter schools. Sadly, the Ohio Revised Code calls them something else, community schools. That poor choice of language terminology, an awkward construction from the very beginning of Ohio school privatization, may now pose a problem and continuing confusion as the result of legislation in the U.S. Senate that will expand the existing federal community school program.

That’s right, the federal full-service community school program.

On Nov. 29, Ohio U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown introduced the Full-Service Community School Expansion Act of 2023 in the U.S. Senate. The legislation seeks to increase the number of school districts and schools in the federally-funded community school program, which shares the same title with the hybrid schools in Ohio but otherwise has no resemblance.

What policy experts define as a full-service community school was codified in 1991, when Florida legislation defined such an educational program as “the integration of educational, medical, and social and or human services that meets the needs of youth and their families on school grounds or in easily accessible locations.” Indeed, the basic idea of a community school and the terminology for it predated the Ohio legislation that renamed charters as community schools. More on that later.

The initial legislation that established the FSCS program defined the “four pillars of a community school” as having integrated support for students from health and social service agencies, an expanded instructional day for added learning opportunities, community engagement, and collaboration by the school leadership with community service providers.

The federal definition of a community school is instructive, where the school day is extended to enhance learning, and where community organizations provide dental, vision, nutrition, and other key services to help children thrive and be successful in their school experience. If it has been said that it takes a village to raise a child. But it also takes a community to educate a child through public participation in providing the care and support for those who are the future.

This idea of a community school, now defined in federal law, complements the historical image of the little red schoolhouse, which has served as the center of the community since the early days of the republic. In fact, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 required that a portion of the land in new territories be set aside to support the establishment and funding of public schools. It is also fitting to know that Ohio was the first state to be formed from the Northwest Territory in 1803.

With this historical background and the federal legislation that defines a community school, let’s compare the federal concept of a community school with what is called a “community school” in Ohio.

In 1997, the legislature established in the Ohio Revised Code Chapter 3314- Community Schools, a strange entity that is a hybrid of public funds received by private management companies to educate students. But the problem with these “community schools” is that they are neither of the community nor public in their structure.

As an example, the very idea of a national charter school chain operating multiple schools, whose headquarters may be elsewhere, where its board members sit on the governing bodies of several schools and may not be residents of the communities where the schools are located, is antithetical to the concept of a community school.

So we are back to a contradiction in terms that needs to be addressed. Of all the 45 states that have chosen to operate publicly funded but privately operated schools, Ohio has chosen to use the term “community school” in law when these schools are anything but.

And the reason? You shouldn’t be surprised to know that in this state of gerrymandering and supermajorities, it’s all about politics. Here’s why.

About 15 years ago, a former Republican legislator told a colleague who worked with me in the Ohio Department of Education’s Community (Charter) School Office that there was a concern the initial legislation would not have passed in 1997 if the word charter was used. Community was a “word that sells,” it was thought back then. To this day, it appears that Ohio is the only state which uses such unique language to describe these schools, where community replaces the term charter and sponsor replaces another key term, that of authorizer.

In light of the confusion that will only grow as real community schools continue to develop, public schools with extended-learning formats and support programs provided by collaborating community organizations governed by elected and not appointed community members, it’s time for the legislature to do the right thing and amend Chapter 3314 of the Ohio Revised Code. To put it bluntly, and in light of prevailing federal definitions as found in the Full-Service Community School Program, Ohio community schools are not and cannot be identified as community schools.

Conclusion: Ohio politicians, watch your language. Real community schools, particularly the full-service variety and not charters masquerading as such, are the real thing. Thank you, Senator Brown, for your precise use of language in sponsoring this valuable program and advocacy for community schools. After all, it takes a community to govern, oversee, and support a school, a real community school, that belongs to all of us, and not a national chain or profit-centered business enterprise.

Categories Charter Schools, Community Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ohio

Idaho: Governor Proposes to Spend $2 Billion on School Facilities

By dianeravitch

January 14, 2024 //

What a remarkable development! Brad Little, the Governor of Idaho, announced in his State of the State address that he wants to spend $2 billion over the next decade on repairing and replacing crumbling schools. He reached this decision as a result of an investigation by the Idaho Statesman and Pro Publica. This demonstrates the importance of local journalism—thank you, Idaho Statesman—and of the relentless Pro Publica. I am making a donation to Pro Publica right now. If I were in Idaho, I would definitely subscribe to the Statesman! In Idaho, local school bond issues cannot pass unless they win 2/3 of the votes. That’s a high hurdle because most voters don’t have school-age children and don’t want to pay higher taxes. This an unreasonable burden for the schools and guarantees that the horrible conditions documented by the investigation will persist without intervention by the state.

Pro Publica reports:

Idaho Gov. Brad Little on Monday proposed spending $2 billion over 10 years to help school districts repair and replace their aging buildings. This would mark the largest investment in school facilities in state history, he said.

The proposal, announced during the governor’s annual State of the State address, follows an Idaho Statesman and ProPublica investigation, which showed how Idaho’s restrictive school funding policies and the Legislature’s reluctance to make significant investments in school facilities have impacted students and teachers. Hundreds of students, teachers and administrators shared photos, videos and stories with the publications about the conditions they deal with on a daily basis.

“We’ve all seen the pictures and the videos of some Idaho schools that are neglected — crumbling, leaking, falling apart,” Little said, standing before the Legislature in the Idaho Capitol. “In one school I visited, raw sewage is seeping into a space under the cafeteria. Folks, we can do better.”

Showing photos of fallen ceiling tiles, cracked paint and damaged drains published by the Statesman and ProPublica, he added, “Let’s make this priority No. 1.”

Idaho has long ranked last or near last among states in spending per pupil, and it spends the least on school infrastructure per student, according to the most recent state and national reports. Districts across the state struggle to pass bonds — one of the few ways they can get funds to repair and replace their buildings — because Idaho requires two-thirds of voters for a bond to pass. Most states require a simple majority or 60%. Many superintendents told the Statesman and ProPublica that reaching Idaho’s threshold has been nearly impossible in their communities, and some have given up trying altogether.

As a result, students have had to learn in freezing classrooms and overcrowded schools, with leaky ceilings, failing plumbing and discolored drinking water. These conditions have made it difficult to learn, students and educators said, and have, at times, caused districts to temporarily close schools.

“It’s just a continuous struggle,” Jan Bayer, superintendent of the Boundary County School District, told the Statesman and ProPublica. Boundary County, a rural district in North Idaho, has run two bond elections to try to replace one of its elementary schools plagued with disintegrating pipes, cracked walls and a roof that’s reaching the end of its lifespan. But while one bond had 54% of voter support, both elections failed to reach the two-thirds threshold.

“It would be such a relief to be able to go to our local taxpayers and say our state’s going to invest in us too now,” Bayer said. “It would be a pretty joyful and hopeful moment for our teachers and for our community.”

Open the link to read the rest of the story.

Perhaps similar investigations in other states would prod elected officials to act on behalf of the state’s children.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Funding, Idaho

The Teacher Who Inspired Philly’s First Female Mayor

By dianeravitch

January 7, 2024 //

If you are or ever were a teacher, this story will make you happy and proud of your profession. Kristen A. Graham, a veteran education reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, interviewed the teacher who opened up a new world for Cherelle Parker, the new Mayor of Philadelphia.

Graham writes:

When Cherelle Parker stood outside her Mount Airy polling place on Election Day, speaking emotionally about how she rose to the brink of becoming Philadelphia’s 100th mayor, she shouted out the village that got her there: her single, teenage mother, her political godmothers.

And Jeanette Jimenez, her high school English teacher.

“She was the one who told me that my life was a real live textbook case study on how you turn pain into power, and she told me to write about it,” Parker said. That encouragement from her teacher helped Parker — who endured poverty and trauma during her childhood in West Oak Lane — win a citywide oratorical competition and start down a path that would culminate in her being elected the city’s first female mayor.

A reflection in Black literature

Stuffed in a corner of a jam-packed room on the second floor of Jimenez’s Bella Vista home is a time capsule of Parker’s high school years.

Here’s a poem the future mayor handwrote on now-yellowing loose-leaf paper, “I Dream a World.” Here are photographs. There’s the 1990 Parkway yearbook, in which Parker proclaims in the quote next to her photo that she wants “to help Black men and women of the future to unite and remember one nation under the groove.”

She first met Parker in the late 1980s at the Parkway program, an innovative Philadelphia School District high school model with campuses spread around the city.

Jimenez, Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez wrote in 1990, “believes there is a creative way to reach every student, no matter how poor the performance, how bad the attitude, how difficult the home life.” Every young person wants to learn, Jimenez believed, then and now.

At first, Parker — whose mother died when she was 13, whose father was not a presence in her life, who was raised by her grandparents — was skeptical of Jimenez, who had a reputation for giving a lot of homework, and making students read a lot of books. At Parkway, students could choose which classes they took, and Parker shied away from Jimenez.

Parker was “spunky,” a standout in pink jumpsuits and long fingernails, Jimenez remembers. And, eventually, Parker was curious enough about what was happening in Jimenez’s classroom to find out more. Kids in Jimenez’s classes took so many trips to libraries and plays and elsewhere that Jimenez kept a permanent stash of tokens for their ventures.

“We acted out all the plays before we went,” Jimenez remembers. “The kids loved the opera more than the prom.”

It felt as if there were “sunshine coming out” of Jimenez’s room, Parker told the Daily News in 1990, and eventually, she wanted to “walk toward the light.”

Jimenez had a vast classroom library. Parker began to dig in.

“I never said, ‘You can’t do that, you have to read Shakespeare,’” Jimenez said.

Jimenez had Shakespeare available, but she alsohad works by Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison and Sonia Sanchez. Although the district had banned The Color Purple at one point, Jimenez put into kids’ hands books in which they saw themselves.

It was For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, by Ntozake Shange, that sparked a love of literature, of Black authors, Parker told The Inquirer in 1990.

“She saw herself as the protagonist in those books. It’s what made her think she could do this,” said Jimenez, referring to Parker’s rise to power.

She made Connie Clayton cry

Parker had a loving family who did the best they could with limited resources, but her life was complicated, Jimenez said.

“She had a grandfather who was very sick that she took care of,” said Jimenez. “She needed somewhere else to go, physically and emotionally and mentally.”

She found that, partly, in literature and in Jimenez.

“She calls me her white mother,” said Jimenez, who is still vigorous, voraciously intellectual and amusing at 81.

Jeanette Jimenez, a retired teacher who taught at Philadelphia's Parkway Center City High School, among other schools, in her South Philadelphia home. — Jeanette Jimenez, a retired teacher who taught at Philadelphia’s Parkway Center City High School, among other schools, in her South Philadelphia home.Read moreJessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

Parker set her sights on the Philadelphia School District’s Black History Oratorical Contest.

Her first speech was “decent,” Jimenez said, “but it wasn’t good enough for me to put in the contest.”

Parker “was furious. I said no, and she didn’t take the no. She said, ‘I’m getting there,’” Jimenez said.

That “no” made Parker buckle down to write a speech that not only won the 1990 citywide competition, but also made then-Superintendent Constance E. Clayton weep.

Parker called it “Native Daughter,” a play on Richard Wright’s Native Son, and wrote about how Black literature inspired her to rise above her difficult life circumstances.

“I, Cherelle Parker, was a child that most people thought would never succeed,” a teenaged Parker wrote. “You know? They almost had me thinking the same thing.”

She won $1,000 and a trip to Senegal, but she also won something more: the attention of powerful adults, including City Councilmembers Augusta Clark and Marian Tasco, both of whom eventuallynourished her the way Jimenez did.

Parker initially hadn’t given much thought to college, but Jimenez and others encouraged her. Jimenezeven took Parker on a visit to Lincoln University to make sure she gained admission.

“I wasn’t chancing it, with kids, you never know if they are going to follow through,” said Jimenez. “We just sat at Lincoln because I thought they were the ones that would take her fastest.”

Know your audience

Jimenez grew up in South Philadelphia, raised by her Russian immigrant father, a photographer and architect. She graduated from Little Flower High School and Temple University, where fellow student Bill Cosby would practice jokes at Mitten Hall.

She thought she knew some things about teaching when she began working in Philadelphia, at Barratt Junior High in South Philadelphia. She was a white teacher teaching the Edgar Allen Poe poem “Annabel Lee,” describing a beautiful woman to her Black students as blond-haired and blue-eyed.

Her teacher colleague Lenore Johnson enlightened her.

“She said, ‘Have you looked at your audience?’ There was no course that taught you, know your audience,” Jimenez said.

It was a mistake she did not repeat. Throughout her career, at Barratt, and at Parkway, and at Bartram High, Jimenez responded to student interests, teaching about writing and literature and life in ways that kids responded to. Sometimes, that meant using rap to reach students. Sometimes, that meant stopping mid-lesson to ask her students whether they were bored, and course correcting if they were.

Retired from teaching nearly 25 years, Jimenez is still keenly interested in teaching and learning. She’s trying to pick up Russian, and she thinks it’s vital to discuss matters of race and institutional racism, and she worries about how social media is distorting people’s world views. She thinks small class sizes are necessary, and knows that if she were still teaching, she’d be using the recent Barbiemovie as a tool to explore contemporary issues.

Jimenez treasures mementos from Parker’s years as her student, but it’s not just relics of the mayor-elect that she keeps. There are the writings of a student who went on to become a college professor, the young woman Jimenez helped realize her dream of becoming a welder — now she’s a SEPTA supervisor.

“What I’m proud of is those people that I had that became their own true selves,” said Jimenez.

She counts Parker in thatcategory.

“My hope is that Cherelle will run the city as I run my classroom,” said Jimenez.

Jimenez is confident that Parker picked up the most important lessons she instilled in all her students: Everyone can learn. Know your audience. Find ways to inspire them. Value people’s authentic voices. Work hard.

“She has a great soul, a good brain, and the sense to surround herself with good people,” Jimenez said.

Categories Education Reform

Chris Rufo Takes a Victory Lap with Claudine Gay’s Scalp

By dianeravitch

January 5, 2024 //

109

Chris Rufo, far-right provocateur, proclaimed his pride in toppling the President of Harvard. Is he happier with this victory than with his success in turning “critical race theory” into a national scare? Hard to say. This was a big one for Chris, not least because he found a way to incite the liberal media and to walk away with Dr. Gay’s scalp.

He boasted to Politico about his latest triumph.

In recent weeks, Rufo has been at the forefront of a sprawling campaign to force Gay to resign, which began after she delivered controversial testimony before Congress in early December about Harvard’s handling of alleged instances of antisemitism stemming from the war in Gaza. On Dec. 10, Rufo and the conservative journalist Christopher Brunet publicized accusations that Gay — the first Black woman to serve as Harvard’s president and a political scientist held in high regard by her peers — had plagiarized other scholars’ work. Together with pressure from donors about Gay’s response to the war in Gaza, those accusations ultimately led to Gay losing her job this week.

None of that happened by accident. As Rufo acknowledged to me, Gay’s resignation was the result of a coordinated and highly organized conservative campaign. “It shows a successful strategy for the political right,” he told me. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.”

While the extent of Gay’s alleged plagiarism is being disputed in the academic community, Rufo’s campaign worked because instances in which Gay apparently borrowed language from other scholars were frequent and credible enough that the allegations stuck.

For an operative who works mostly behind the scenes of Republican politics, Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired.

As Rufo makes clear, his real target was diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he successfully painted Dr. Gay as the embodiment of DEI, meaning that she was a diversity hire and didn’t deserve her position.

He explained his strategy:

It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard’s history.

Finally, the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign. Once my position — which began on the right — became the dominant position across the center-left, I knew that it was just a matter of time before we were going to be successful.

Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?

It gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.

He makes clear that the issues are not important: what matters is winning and shaming the left.

I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful….

What is your broader objective here, beyond forcing the president of Harvard to resign?

My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.

Peter Greene goes into Rufo’s strategy of announcing his goal, then turning the media coverage into a horse race.

Christopher Rufo is on the dead bird app bragging that he took down the president of Harvard and announcing that he’s going to start “plagiarism hunting,” which sounds so much better than “going after liberal Black academics.”

It is just the most recent demonstration of the Rufo technique, which is to announce the bad faith argument he’s about to launch and how he plans to use it to pwn his chosen liberal target. And then various main stream media and other well-intentioned folks proceed to amplify and engage with that bad faith argument. Even now, social media features a bunch of folks arguing about the plagiarism piece of the Harvard take down (“Well, you know the president of Rufo’s New College won’t get caught plagiarizing because he’s never published anything! Ha! Gotcha!!”) as if the plagiarism is actually the point. And media outlets keep publishing their “Harvard president taken down by plagiarism” takes as if that’s the real story here.

The New Republic took pleasure in revealing that Rufo claimed a master’s degree from Harvard, but he fudged by not admitting that the degree was not from the highly selective Harvard programs but from the Harvard Extension School, which I confess I never heard of.

It’s very hard to gain admission to Harvard College or graduate schools. But Harvard Extension School says this in its website:

Simply Enroll—No Application Required

To get started, simply follow these steps:

Create a MyDCE account.
Review our Enrollment Policies.
Explore our course catalog.
Understand our Enrollment Requirementsand complete those applicable to you and your course of interest.
Complete preregistration in MyDCE.
Register for your course.
Submit your payment by the payment deadline.
Learn and connect!

Readers may recall that I supported Dr. Gay and urged the Harvard Corporation to resist the pressure from Rufo. I did so because I knew that the campaign to force her out was not conducted in good faith. Rufo doesn’t care about anti-Semitism, nor does Elise Stefanik. I don’t recall either of them expressing outrage when anti-Semites chanted “The Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville nor did they speak out when Trump said that there were “good people” on both sides. Neither of them appears to care about anti-Semitism when it’s right in front of them.

As for “truth” and “beauty,” Rufo is blowing smoke. To him, they are just buzzwords. Faculty at the University of Texas called his bluff when he appeared there. Rufo spoke at a center at UT sponsored by Republican donors, and the attendees roasted him.

Ten minutes later, Polly Strong, an anthropology professor and the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Rufo that she believed in intellectual diversity but that a commitment to the concept wasn’t what she heard from him. She said her personal hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom, due process, and neutrality in higher learning and asked if Rufo supported those values.

Rufo thanked Strong for her question but his words came faster and more insistent than before. He derided Dewey, saying it would have been better if he’d never been born, and dismissed his values. “Academic freedom, due process, neutrality – those are means, not ends,” Rufo said. “If you have an erasure of ends, what you get is sheer power politics, you get everything reducible to will and domination, and then you get an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” Rufo concluded by saying that academics who continue to adhere to Dewey’s principles, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”

Strong was completely unawed by the implied threat. “The ‘ends’ of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance is education for a democratic society,” she said simply. “That is the basis of John Dewey’s vision and many, many university professors believe that today.”

The audience was silent after Strong’s remark. It had become clear that Rufo wasn’t dominating his opponents. It got worse for him when Samuel Baker, a UT English professor, came to the mic. Baker reiterated that Rufo’s veneration of beauty and truth was meaningless if he provided no idea of what the concepts mean to him, and he criticized Rufo’s use of violent imagery like “laying siege” and deserving “what’s coming.”

“I just want to be honest with you,” Baker said, “your rhetoric in relation to barbarism and the way you smugly say that the university is not going to like what’s coming – I think that in the context of the world right now, where there is a lot of really tragic violence, that we ought to be careful to remove ourselves from that and from groups with white supremacist associations. I really think you should rethink the glibness.”

Rufo was exposed as a phony and called out for his connections to white supremacists. He beat a hasty retreat.

Freedom of expression and academic freedom are wonderful in action.

If you have never seen Rufo explain “laying siege to the institutions, watch his Hillsdale College speech.

Categories Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Gender, Higher Education, Propaganda, Racism

Thomas Ultican: “A Nation at Risk” Was a Pack of Lies

By dianeravitch

January 3, 2024 //

The document that launched four decades of disastrous education policies was titled “A Nation at Risk.” It was a document produced by a commission appointed by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Terrell Bell.

Reagan wanted to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, which was created in the last year of President Jimmy Carter’s term in office. Secretary Bell wanted to save the Department so he persuaded the President to let him appoint the National Commission on Excellence in Education. This Commission released its report, “A Nation at Risk,” in 1983.

The report was a dire description of the failings of American education. It painted a picture of falling test scores and mediocrity that were causing terrible damage to the national economy.

Thomas Ultican, retired teacher of advanced math and physics in California, noted that the conservative Hoover Institution released a book praising “A Nation at Risk” on its 40th birthday.

Ultican had done his research on the report and concluded that it was a hit job, asham, a pack of lies. He recently heard James Harvey, who served on the staff of the commission that wrote the report; Harvey confirmed that the commission had literally cooked the books. It began its work determined to slime America’s public schools, and it cherry-picked data to make its case.

As he shows in his review of that 1983 bombshell, it was not only filled with statistics sl lies, but it launched forty years of destructive “reforms.”

“A Nation at Risk” was misleading, dishonest, and deeply corrupt in both its intentions and its effects.

Inform yourselves: read this slashing critique of a “landmark” publication that has harmed generations of students and educators.

Categories Education Reform

How Idaho Moms Beat Back the Culture Warriors

By dianeravitch

December 29, 2023 //

One of the biggest obstacles to waking up the public is that most people have no knowledge of the privatization movement. They don’t understand that the attacks on teachers and public schools are part of a long-range plan to destroy public education as a community asset and turn it into an individual consumer choice, like choosing what kind of milk you want when you go grocery shopping (as Florida Governor Jeb Bush memorably said at the 2012 Republican Convention). The culture wars over LGBT issues, trans kids, and critical race theory are part of the same plan to sow distrust of a valued community institution.

This story appeared in Vanity Fair. It was written by Laura Pappano and produced by The Hechinger Report. It brings the controversy to an audience that is not immersed in education politics. Laura Pappano is the author of School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education, to be published by Beacon Press in January 2024. By the way, I just subscribed to a digital edition of Vanity Fair for only $1 a month. There is an educator price of only $8 a year. What a bargain for a publication with excellent content like this story.

Pappano writes:

In Priest River, Idaho, the moms seated at the conference table on Election Day were worried. They had good reason: Their poll watchers at voting sites—grange halls on dirt roads, community centers hardly larger than a bungalow—suggested things were not going their way.

There were no formal exit polls conducted in West Bonner County, where the school district covers 781 square miles over timbered hills and crystalline lakes in the north Idaho panhandle. But Dana Douglas, a fit and forceful blonde sipping on an Americano and a water bottle boosted with electrolytes (she was teaching spin at 6 p.m.) had been poll-watching at Edgemere Grange Hall, and she had her indicator for how voters were casting their ballots: “Anyone who said, ‘Hello, good morning’” was in their camp. “Anyone with a scowl” who would not look her in the eye was in the other.

“It’s going to be a battle,” she said at the table. Sitting beside her, Candy Turner, a retired elementary school teacher who had brought Ziploc bags of pear slices and dried cranberries for the hours ahead, agreed. “I think we are in trouble based on what I saw.”

After Election Day, headlines in key locales all around the country spoke of moms fighting extremists in local school board races and winning. But even as some celebrated “flipping” their school boards back, far-right groups like Moms for Liberty remain. As the organization declared in an email blast in which they claimed winning 50 new school board seats: “WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED!”

Some people overlook school board skirmishes, seeing them as trivial. For Turner, Douglas, and many in the West Bonner County School District, they are anything but. It’s not about Democrats versus Republicans (Turner is a registered Democrat; Douglas is “a proud conservative Republican”). It’s about the viability of public education in their community.

This is not hyperbole. The national infection facing public schooling—the tug-of-war between education professionals and extremist culture warriors—has brought chaos and damage to West Bonner County. After this past school year ended, the superintendent acknowledged that 31% of teachers, counselors, and education leaders left the district, and scores of parents pulled their children, opting for homeschooling, online learning, or enrolling in another district. Buildings are infrequently cleaned; an elementary school principal reported at an October school board meeting that mice were running over children’s feet and hallways smelled of urine.

What has happened in West Bonner County offers a warning to public school supporters elsewhere. Douglas, Turner, and others are fighting to restore normalcy to an institution that should not be up for grabs—but is.

“We’ve been the canary in the coal mine,” Margaret Hall, the current school board chair who faced a far-right challenger, said on the eve of the November election. Hall, a soft-spoken but firm force, has served on the board for eight years, even through chemotherapy treatments for cancer. “What has to happen,” she said, “is people have to wake up and decide, ‘We don’t want someone to come in and tell us what we want. We want to decide ourselves.’”

Idaho is a conservative state and Bonner County is even more so, with registered Republicans outnumbering Democrats by almost seven to one (statewide it’s closer to five to one). Despite the nation’s bitter party politics, residents of this county have traditionally exercised a neighborly pragmatism in which the kids—or, as Douglas prefers, “our babies”—come first.

People filled in the gaps when it came to local needs, from sending groceries home with some children over weekends to teachers helping students brush their teeth or spending extra hours with struggling readers. But that spirit is now being tested by extremists who see a soft target in a stressed school district. Suddenly, the far-right’s anti-public-education catchphrases blared regularly on the national stage have become wedged into the local lexicon.

For example, “transgenderism” (described by one candidate as “boys in girls bathrooms, boys in girls sports, ‘gender-affirming care,’ and related absurdities”) became a top issue in this November’s school board race. One candidate for reelection, Troy Reinbold, a nonchalant figure who has attended meetings in cutoff shorts and exited mid-agenda without explanation, touted his work on “the strongest transgender policy in Idaho schools” and opposition to “social emotional learning,” which he called “a precursor to critical race theory.”

Hall, for her part, abstained in an August vote on a school district policy that would require teachers and staff to “refer to students by their biological sex” and students to use bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding to their genders assigned at birth, along with bar transgender girls from girls’ sports teams. She said it was confusing, poorly written, and not vetted by the board’s legal counsel (instead it was reviewed by the anti-LGBTQ Christian legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom). Hall’s campaign signs were later tagged with rainbow stickers. The policy ended up passing 4-0.

How a place that had long treated differences with a live-and-let-live ethos adopted the intolerant tone of national politics is anyone’s guess. Some blame an influx of newcomers. Bonner County, like the rest of Idaho, is growing, and over the past decade, the tally of registered voters has risen almost 50% to nearly 32,000.

But who they are and why some of them don’t support public education is a more complicated question. It’s possible that Idaho’s lax COVID-19 rules lured extremists, survivalists, and those lacking a communal impulse. There’s also a broader arc at play in a state economy that’s forced people to shift from work in local sawmills to commuter jobs that get them home later and leave them reliant on others to keep civic life running—a common pattern in 21st-century America. But Priest River, where the district is headquartered, is close-knit, populated by descendants of the six Naccarato brothers, who came from Italy to build the Great Northern Railroad in the late 1800s and stayed. That includes many mom organizers like Candy Naccarato Turner.

Priest River police chief Drew McLaindates the start of recent drama to the school board vote to rescind the English Language Arts curriculum from the well-established education publisher McGraw Hill. It had been swiftly and unanimously approved in June 2022 and was delivered to replace the curriculum that was out of print. But far-right activists objected, complaining that it included aspects of social emotional learning. Such instruction—on skills like “self-confidence, problem-solving, and pro-social behavior,” as McGraw Hill described the curriculum on its website—is a bugaboo for conservative ideologues. And on August 24 of last year, with one member missing, the board voted 3-1 to return the texts to the publisher.

The decision got the attention of moms like Douglas, Turner, and others. Whitney Hutchins,a new mother who graduated from West Bonner County schools in 2010 and whose family has operated a resort on Priest Lake for generations, started attending school board meetings. Ditto for Jessica Rogers, a mom of three daughters who had served on the curriculum committee and was upset by the reversal. Others, too, wondered what was happening.

After all, for years the meetings had been quiet affairs at the district’s storefront office on Main Street in a room with aged wood floors, folding chairs and tables, and a capacity of 34. By late 2022, such serenity was a thing of the past. People started lining up three to four hours in advance, which McLain said forced him to close Main Street for safety. Quickly, the gatherings got more and more unruly. First, McLain sent one officer, then several. At times, he called on the sheriff for backup.

Things escalated even further when Jackie Branum, who was hired as superintendent in the summer of 2022, proposed a supplemental levy, which sets a chosen amount as property tax to support local schools’ operating costs, and a four-day school week to address financial issues—then abruptly resigned. The board approved the shorter week, angering many parents. Then it appointed Susie Luckey, a popular elementary school principal, as interim superintendent until June. By May, the board had put a levy before voters that would provide roughly one-third of the district’s budget.

Supplemental levies in Idaho, which ranks 50th nationally in public school funding, had long been used for capital projects and are now essential for operations. But residents suddenly sorted into “for” and “against” factions. Signs sprouted along rural roads; arguments raged on Facebook. The levy failed by 105 votes out of 3,295 cast. Parents expressed concern at a public meeting that the district would cut sports and extracurricular activities; some worried about teacher retention. Not to mention: The district still had no permanent superintendent.

In a swift but puzzling process, the school board eventually announced two finalists for superintendent. One was Luckey. The other was a far-right former elected politician who worked for the Idaho Freedom Foundation by the name of Branden Durst. Durst was an unusual choice given his lack of school experience and the IFF’s hostility to public education. (In 2019, the president of the IFF called public schools “the most virulent form of socialism (and indoctrination thereto) in America today,” adding, “I don’t think government should be in the education business.”)

Then again, it wasn’t Durst’s first go-around: In 2022, the Democrat turned Republican ran for state superintendent of public instruction. He lost the GOP primary but in Bonner County beat his two challengers with 60% of the vote. Among the donors to his campaign were IFF leaders and a local resident who had opposed the McGraw Hill curriculum.

It is unclear how Durst, an abrasive outsider from 420 miles south in Boise, was so quickly ushered into contention. Jim Jones, former Idaho attorney general and a former justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, points to the IFF. He said the organization aims to “discredit and dismantle” public schools throughout the state, “starting with West Bonner County School District.”

Jones also credits the IFF for helping extremists Keith Rutledge and Susan Brown get elected to the West Bonner County School Board in November 2021 in a low-turnout race. It was a pivotal election—but people didn’t realize it then. In hindsight, Douglas said residents “got lazy and complacent and we didn’t get to the polls and put people in the district that valued public education.”

By early 2023, Rutledge and Brown—along with Reinbold, who revealed himself as a fellow extremist—had become a majority voting bloc on the five-person school board. Hall, the school board chair who works on climate change mitigation and who readily references the Idaho education code, and Carlyn Barton, a mother and teacher who describes herself as a “common sense constitutional conservative,” were at odds with the other three.

Durst’s candidacy earlier this year turned up the heat on divisions both on the board and in the community. School board meetings were packed. Militia started showing up. And while the Second Amendment is cherished in Idaho, residents were alarmed to find men donned in khaki with walkie-talkies—and presumably guns—present for conversations on children’s education.

“The militia should not be at school board meetings,” argued McLain, the police chief who claimed that one grandfather “was so pissed at the militia” that he arrived drunk with a rifle. “It’s been frustrating,” he added. “If you told me I had the choice of a school board meeting or a bank robbery, I would be way less stressed going to the bank robbery.”

Following multiple contentious meetings with Hall and Barton, who pressed board members to reconsider Durst’s candidacy, in late June, he was selected by a 3-2 vote. After his hiring was finalized, Barton charged that “the direction of our board has turned into a fascist dictatorship with an agenda which is far from our conservative point of view.”

From the moment he slid into the superintendent’s maroon Naugahyde-upholstered chair in the West Bonner County School District office, Durst seemed to relish his position of power. There was serious work to do—like negotiating a teacher contract—but he appeared far more interested in burnishing his reputation, describing his takeover as “a pilot” that others could learn from.

This was a chance, he told me in multiple interviews, to use the district to test his “ideas that are frankly unorthodox in education,” including some rooted in his Christian values. He wanted intelligent design taught alongside evolution in biology classes. He was working to have a Christian university offer an Old Testament course to high school students at a Baptist church near their school. He hoped the district would adopt curricula developed by the Christian conservative college Hillsdale in Michigan.

Durst also cast himself as a model for how non-educators could take charge of a school district. He boasted that national far-right figures were in touch and encouraged him not to “screw this up.” As he put it, “I broke into the club. I got a superintendency without having to go through the traditional process of doing it.” Indeed, he had not been a school principal, administrator, or classroom teacher.

That lack of process was a major problem for the state Board of Education, which in August gave the district notice it was not in compliance with Idaho law, a determination that jeopardized tax dollars critical for funding the schools. A letter sent to Rutledge, the chair at the time, cited budget irregularities, missed school bus inspections, concerns about discipline rates of special education students, and the failure to file forms to access federal funds. But the main issue, the state’s board said, was the district’s “decision to employ a non-certified individual as superintendent.” Durst had sought emergency certification but was rebuffed by the state.

All of the uncertainty and division grew so dire that teachers found themselves struggling to carry on, leaving many no choice but to give notice. “It breaks my heart that I had to leave,” Steph Eldore, a fixture at Priest Lake Elementary School for 26 years, told me over tears in late August. With her daughter starting high school, Eldore and her husband, Ken, who had been director of facilities and capital improvements for 16 years, quit the district, finding jobs and enrolling their daughter elsewhere.

By the end of summer, 27 teachers had retired or resigned, along with 19 other staff members, including the director of special education, a school principal, and three counselors. Families followed. By fall, school district enrollment was down to 1,005 students, 100 less than projected. Even McLain, the police chief, had rented a place in Sandpoint, about half an hour from Priest River, and enrolled his two high school–aged children there. “We call ourselves the Priest River refugees,” he said. Sergeant Chris Davis, the district’s school resource officer, similarly said his daughter has opted to finish high school online. All in all, the Lake Pend Oreille School District in Sandpoint, whose permanent levy offers steady funding, reported 43 student transfers from West Bonner County School District.

Others, of course, remained. As the school year began, the West Bonner County School District 83 (“Strive for Greatness”) Facebook page was active with notices of cross-country races, soccer games, and picture day. But behind the sheen of normalcy were problems. A shortage of bus drivers led the district to cancel or combine routes. Many students’ commute times doubled, upsetting parents whose young children got home after dark, while other students had no bus transportation at all. There were also issues with school cleanliness. Kylie Hoepfer, a mom of a fourth grader, took on cleaning mouse turds on the bleachers at her daughter’s volleyball game. “I had heard about the mice problem but sweeping it all up was pretty gross,” she recalled.

The biggest hurt for families, however, was the loss of seasoned teachers. The district hired new ones, but a number of them soon quit. Trinity Duquette, a 1997 graduate of the high school, said her 8th-grade daughter “is on her third language arts teacher this year,” each with different styles and expectations. “They have been assigned essays and had a turnover in the midst of the assignment.”

For Paul and Jessica Turco, who built strong bonds with their son’s special education teachers who have since left the district, the loss “was like breaking up a family.” They said it was weeks into the school year before the new teachers read their son’s Individualized Education Program, the written plan outlining his learning needs. “It was like he was starting from the very beginning rather than a stepping stone from where he left off the prior year,” said Jessica. And it’s showing. “We have been dealing with constant outbursts,” she added, and “when he comes home from school, he doesn’t want to talk about his day.”

While watching the disruption, Hutchins, the new mom whose soft features belie a fierce frankness, made a decision: She and her husband were moving to Spokane, Washington. “I’m not going to raise my daughter here,” she said, curling into a leather chair at her family’s resort. Hutchins’s brother is gay. Watching his experience in school had been painful, and the hostility toward LGBTQ+ students seemed to be growing worse. “This is horrible to say,” Hutchins said after Durst’s hiring, “but the right-wing extremists, they are taking over our community.”

She wasn’t the only one thinking that—but not everyone was in a position to leave. Rogers, the mom of three who was on the curriculum committee, and her husband had recently built a home with sweeping views of Chase Lake. There was no moving away. So, she got involved at the school, first as a volunteer, then as a paraprofessional, and, more recently, teaching technology. Initially, she hadn’t wanted to get political, but soon, it no longer felt like a choice.

Back in late 2022, after the school board rescinded the McGraw Hill curriculum and voted for a four-day week, parents like Paul and Jessica Turco reached out to Turner, the retired elementary school teacher, who dialed up Douglas, the Election Day poll-watcher. “I called Dana and said, ‘The kids want some help,’” Turner recalled.

Although Douglas grew up over the state line in Newport, Washington, she married her high school sweetheart from Priest River and now bled Spartan orange. They had built a thriving family business, sent two children through the local schools, and had grandchildren enrolled. She understood that what she saw happening was at odds with what she stood for.

“I am a Republican. I am a Christian conservative,” said Douglas. “But I am 100% pro–public education, and I am pro–every child, and I will do anything for this community to embrace everyone and to love everyone.”

She, Turner, and others, including Hutchins, Rogers, and the Turcos, began meeting. How to take back the district? It started with the school board and, said Douglas, included a notion that should seem obvious: “getting people who value public education” to serve.

By the summer of 2023, they had collected signatures for a recall vote of Rutledge and Brown, the board’s chair and vice chair respectively. The group’s slogan—“Recall, Replace, Rebuild”—blossomed on signs in downtown storefronts, in yards, and banners posted in fields. The group collected endorsements, video testimonials, and built a website. By the time they were days out from the August 29 vote, their numbers had swelled. Over 125 people gathered in the wood-beamed great room at the Priest Lake Event Center for what was part rally, part check-in: Who could pick up “WBCSD Strong” T-shirts? Who would hold signs at key spots ahead of the vote?

Recalls usually fail. But in West Bonner County, the result was resounding. With a 60.9% turnout, Rutledge and Brown were recalled by a wide margin. But then, after the election but before votes were officially certified, Rutledge and Brown posted notice of a board meeting for Friday, September 1, at 5 p.m., just before Labor Day weekend. The top agenda items—“Dissolve Current Board of Trustees” and “Turn Meeting Over to the Superintendent”—raised alarms.

“I read the agenda and I was irate,” said Katie Elsaesser, a mom of two and a lawyer whose office is near the school district office. “I immediately started calling people.” She texted her husband that she would miss their son’s soccer game, then drafted a complaint, finishing at 2 a.m. In the morning, she drove to the district court in Sandpoint. One hour and fifteen minutes before the meeting was to take place, Elsaesser got a ruling to halt it. McLain delivered the news to the crowd in the high school cafeteria. “You would think I scored a touchdown,” he said.

In another strange twist after the recall, the board could not hold several meetings because Reinbold failed to show. Without a quorum, which required three present members, business halted. Finally, after a former school board chair alerted county officials, the sheriff agreed to investigate. Reinbold reappeared, and in mid-October, the board finally filled the vacant seats with two people who supported the recall.

With his options running thin, on September 25, 2023, Durst announced plans for “an amicable and fair exit.” For the fourth time in less than two years—since a longtime superintendent retired in June 2022—the district was again seeking a new leader. Hall reached out to Joseph Kren, a former principal at the high school who had also served as superintendent in a nearby district. Kren was enjoying retirement—he got Hall’s call at 9:30 p.m. before he was to wake at 3:30 a.m. to go elk hunting. He would agree to a 90-day contract (the four-day week means it runs through March).

His appointment was greeted with relief. Kren, a serious-faced former wrestler, is religious but not ideological. On the sixth day of his new job, occupying the same spot Durst had just vacated, Kren showed me the silver-colored crucifix he had hung above his desk. Kren was clear that his faith “has guided [him]” but has “never gotten in the way.”

Growing up with a brother who was deaf, Kren said, has made him attuned to matters of inclusion and accommodation, which he called “a legal and moral responsibility.” His only agenda was to put things right. By Thanksgiving, he told me, the district had corrected state compliance issues, and he was working to add bus drivers. With so many turnovers, he acknowledged “disruptions can and do occur.” But his plan, he said, was steady: to “roll up [his] sleeves and work alongside” staff and to make “firm, consistent, morally sound decisions based in fact and the law.”

The November 2023 election would be pivotal. With the two school board replacements set—picked by the recall supporters who lived in the two school zones that had been represented by Rutledge and Brown—the other three zones’ seats were on the ballot. The pro-recall crowd wanted to boot Reinbold and reelect Hall and Barton. The election, in essence, would decide which side had a majority.

But each had challengers. Hall faced Alan Galloway, a sharp-jawed army veteran and cattle rancher who opposed “transgenderism,” efforts “to impose the outlawed teaching of CRT through SEL or any other ‘trojan horse’ scheme,” and a levy. He circulated a controversial letter with inflammatory claims, including that Hall had “failed our children by delaying action related to bullying, dress codes and Pornography within our schools.”

Barton faced Kathy Nash, who had pushed to rescind the curriculum, was treasurer of the Bonner County Republican Central Committee, and connected to far-right figures at the state level. Two of the far-right candidates shared a campaign treasurer and campaign finance reports show some of the same people donating to the three far-right candidates.

In other words, there were teams. Jim Kelly,Nash’s campaign manager, said Nash would bring scrutiny to school finances—and provide representation to those wounded by the recall. Kelly told me, “The big concern for Kathy, and for a lot of us, is that the school board is going to be 100% lopsided,” if the candidates he backed, whom many would consider far-right, were not elected. “People are objecting that there will not be a conservative voice.”

And yet, Nash’s opponent, Barton, was a conservative Christian. As was Reinbold’s challenger, Elizabeth Glazier, whose website described her as a “Proud Republican & Conservative Christian” who opposed the four-day week and the hiring of Durst. The race was not conservatives against liberals or Republicans against Democrats. It was, as locals told me, a referendum casting those who cared that students had books, buses, and teachers with a decent wage, against those who embraced extremist rhetoric.

At various polling places on Election Day, far-right campaign volunteers were overheard promising that Nash and Reinbold would keep boys out of girls’ bathrooms.

For parents who rely on the public schools, this kind of allegation was maddening. “It’s just paranoid bull honkey,” said Jacob Sateren, a father of eight (six in the schools). We met at a coffee shop across from the junior high on Election Day shortly after he had voted. Sateren, who’d turned a challenging childhood into a successful adulthood building pole barns, laughs when people call him “a woke liberal.” (His Facebook profile features an American flag emblazoned with the Second Amendment, he pointed out.)

He finds charges that schools are “indoctrinating” children absurd. “I haven’t had any of my kids come home and talk about any crazy weird stuff. And even if they did, if you are an involved parent, it doesn’t really matter. If teachers at the school are teaching my kids something I disagree with, it’s my job to be paying enough attention to catch it,” he said. “I don’t know why people get worked up. There is always going to be stuff you disagree with.”

On the day before the vote, under steady rainfall, Hutchins, Rogers, and another volunteer placed signs along Route 57 across from Priest Lake Elementary School, a polling station. Rogers’s youngest daughter skipped while twirling a child-sized umbrella. “A lot of people are very confident of Margy winning—we are not,” said Rogers, referring to Hall by her nickname.

There was good reason for concern. In the end, Hall did best Galloway by a 60-40 margin. But as Douglas and Turner had feared, Nash defeated Barton, and Reinbold won over Glazier. Retaking the district would not be quick or easy. Yet having a majority on the board offered relief. “We can rebuild,” said Douglas.

Hall, however, was concerned about the division that had eroded support for public education in the first place. The question on her mind was how to bring calm. On the eve of the election, she had made a soup with red lentils, ginger, and coconut milk, which she ladled into small ceramic bowls. As she sat at her dining table talking and eating, she rose periodically to let her dog, Cinco, outdoors, accompanying him with a flashlight. Because of a defect at birth, he now has only three legs; there were cougars and a pride of mountain lions in the dark woods.

Between trips, she shared her idea of creating random seating assignments at the round tables in the high school cafeteria where school board meetings were now held, a strategy for encouraging residents on each side to sit together and actually converse. “How tired are people of the fighting and name-calling and bashing?” There was much work to do—a new levy needed, a curriculum people agreed on, teacher contracts, luring families back—but she told me it started with “trying to work as a team, to balance perspectives.”

The day after the election, with the reality of the mixed board clear, Hall offered a sober assessment. “My work,” she said, “is definitely cut out for me.”

This story about West Bonner was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Laura Pappano is the author of School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education, to be published by Beacon Press in January 2024.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Courage, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Idaho, Parents

Commonweal: The Battle Against School Vouchers in Idaho

By dianeravitch

December 23, 2023 //

Commonweal is a liberal Catholic magazine. It publishes thoughtful articles without deference to Church dogma. This article is an excellent example; Luke Mayville of Idaho explains why vouchers are bad for the common good, bad for society. This is a bold stance to take in a Catholic publication. The usual deep-pocketed voucher advocacy groups pumped money into Idaho to promote universal vouchers (vouchers for all without income limits). They were unsurpringly opposed by the Idaho Education Association and the Democratic Party, which saw the danger to public schools. Even State Senate Republicans opposed them because of concerns about cost and accountability.

Luke Mayville explains the secret of Idaho’s success in rejecting vouchers: grassroots organizing.

Mayville writes:

Ever since Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” economic libertarians have dreamed of privatizing America’s system of public schools. In place of a school system that is publicly funded, democratically governed, and accessible to all, policy entrepreneurs have sought to transform American education into a commodity—something to be bought and sold in a free market.

In the push to privatize education, the tip of the spear has always been school vouchers—policies that extract funds from public schools in order to subsidize private-school tuition. Milwaukee established the nation’s first voucher program in 1990. In the following twenty-five years, voucher experiments were rolled out in fits and starts, often meeting with stiff public resistance. Voucher advocates gained significant footholds in Ohio, Washington D.C., Indiana, and elsewhere, but lacked the power to fundamentally transform the nation’s public-school system.

The cause has gained unprecedented momentum during the past five years. In their book A Wolf at the School House Door (2020), Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider sounded the alarm about “an increasingly potent network of conservative state and federal elected officials, advocacy groups, and think tanks…backed by deep-pocketed funders,” all of them committed to dismantling public education as an institution. The new assault on public education intensified in the pandemic era, as voucher advocates seized the opportunity of mass school closures to propose—and in many cases enact—sweeping privatization schemes. In states across the country, the voucher agenda went hand in hand with efforts to sow distrust in public education by claiming, usually without evidence, that schools had become centers for critical race theory, “gender ideology,” and other forms of “social-justice indoctrination.” Meanwhile, voucher proponents were energized by landmark decisions of the United States Supreme Court, most notably Espinoza v. Montana in 2020 and Carson v. Makin in 2022, both of which appeared to remove constitutional obstacles to the use of public dollars for private religious education.

The nationally coordinated push to privatize public education is one of the most corrosive developments in American life. While Catholics and members of other faith communities have rightly cherished private parochial education, they, too, have strong reasons to support America’s public schools even if their own children do not attend them. It is an essential feature of the mission of public education to affirm the dignity of every child and to prepare each child to be a full participant in civic and economic life. As Berkshire and Schneider put it, public education “is our collective effort to realize for all young people their full human potential, regardless of circumstance.”

Fortunately, the coordinated attack on public education has met strong resistance from educators, students, parents, and citizens in several states across the country. During the 2023 legislative session here in Idaho, legislators presented a long series of voucher bills. One proposal sought to enact universal “education savings accounts” (ESAs) that would be available to every Idaho family—including the affluent. Other bills proposed tax-credit schemes or more targeted approaches. Every single proposal failed. Remarkably, Idaho remains voucher-free even as the voucher movement has enacted sweeping legislation in Arizona, Florida, West Virginia, Iowa, Arkansas, and elsewhere.

Grassroots organizing has been indispensable in Idaho’s fight against vouchers. A strong coalition of educators, parents, and advocacy organizations—including Reclaim Idaho, an organization I cofounded—has proved to be an effective counterweight to the voucher movement’s deep-pocketed lobbying efforts.

A recent poll by the Idaho Statesman found that public opinion in Idaho is dead set against vouchers, with 63 percent opposed and just 23 percent in support. The mission of organizers has been to translate widespread public opposition into effective political action. To that end, we’ve organized in communities across this vast state and helped citizens become defenders of public schools and sharp critics of voucher schemes. We’ve helped local advocates understand and articulate the arguments against vouchers that resonate most with the public: that vouchers are fiscally reckless, costing far more than advertised; that voucher programs tend to diminish student achievement and discriminate against students with disabilities; and that voucher programs are especially harmful for rural communities where no private-school options exist.

In local efforts to resist vouchers, grassroots organizing can harness the power of personal stories. The voucher movement has attempted to tell their own personalized story by evoking images of poor, marginalized children who’ve been “trapped” in failing public schools. The promise of “school choice” is to give struggling parents the choice to move their children into private schools that better fit their needs. However, as more states adopt voucher programs, the vast majority of voucher funds are flowing not to students who’ve left public schools but to private-school students who were never in public schools to begin with. A total of 89 percent of voucher funds in New Hampshire, 80 percent in Arizona, and 75 percent in Wisconsin have gone to students already enrolled in private schools, and these students disproportionately belong to affluent families living in suburban and urban areas.

The “school choice” story is mostly a fiction, and grassroots organizing can refocus the conversation on personal stories that paint the full picture. When people get organized on the voucher issue, the question can suddenly shift from “Do families deserve more choice?” to “Why would we pull scarce funds from our public schools—especially in rural areas—in order to subsidize tuition for affluent suburban families?” During testimony before the Idaho Senate Education Committee on a bill to create universal ESAs, a public-school supporter named Sheri Hughes phoned in to testify remotely from Challis—a mountain town of 922 people located 190 miles from the state capital. “I know the power and strength of consolidated public money for education, especially in rural Idaho,” Hughes said. She told the committee that her grandfather had served on the Challis school board and helped build the town’s first high school, that her mother—also a school-board member—helped get the high school rebuilt after the 1983 Challis earthquake. “Based on Arizona’s ESA Voucher experience,” Hughes went on, “the money proposed to be removed off the top of Idaho’s education funding budget would take an estimated 17–20 percent of funding away from Challis schools—in an area with no private alternative choices, and where home-school students still access public-school resources for proctoring, band, sports, special ed, and other extracurricular activities.”

Please open the link and learn how Idaho parents and teachers and citizens organized to beat back the out-of-state money behind vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Idaho, Vouchers

An Israeli Professor at Yale Denounces Efforts to Squelch Palestinian Protests and Harass University Leaders

By dianeravitch

December 19, 2023 //

Naftali Kaminski is a professor of medicine at Yale University and an Israeli. He speaks out here in the Israeli publication Haaretz against efforts to shut down Palestinian protests, as well as the vilification of university presidents who insist on free speech.

Dr. Kaminski writes:

In the flurry of denouncements, op-eds, and social media posts that followed the testimony in Congress by three elite university presidents’, the subsequent resignation of Elizabeth MaGill president of the University of Pennsylvania, and the unprecedented congressional resolution calling on Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth to also resign, a picture began to emerge, one that eerily reminded me of a poem we read when I was a boy in Israel.

The poem, written in 1943 by Nathan Alterman, one of Israel’s most beloved poets, uses the Greek philosopher Archimedes’ statement about the law of the lever “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth” as a metaphor for the role of antisemitism in politics. He suggests demagogues and tyrants use antisemitism as the ultimate “Archimedean Point”, a leverage point allowing them to achieve their most outrageous goals.

This, I think, is what we are experiencing, but now the Archimedean Point is the claim that university presidents are “not doing enough about antisemitism”. It is used with the immediate aim of suppressing pro-Palestinian voices as well as the strategic and, as now is being more explicitly stated, long- term ominous aim of reversing progress towards diversity, equity and inclusion at American universities.

I am aware this is a far-reaching statement. As an Israeli, a son to Holocaust survivors, my family history is one of oppression, discrimination, and genocide. Before joining Yale, my family lived in Pittsburgh and were members of the Tree of Life congregation in Pittsburgh, site of the deadliest attack ever on Jews on American soil.

The Hamas atrocities of October 7 triggered fears and thoughts I never thought I had. I find displays of support or efforts to minimize them despicable. I fear the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and believe it should be fought. I also feel that the current rage against university presidents of elite institutions is not indeed targeting antisemitism. And this feeling is colored by my own experiences in the last few months.

Waking up on that cursed morning in October and hearing about the Hamas attacks, I was immediately caught up in a flood of communication as I frantically sought to confirm that friends and family in Israel were safe, offer help, sympathy, horror and support.

But then I received a different kind of message myself. It was from an American Jewish faculty member at Yale. There was no expression of concern or empathy, no check-in about my well-being or the safety of my friends and family. Instead, it spoke about “Yale antisemites” and requested we “act preemptively” to “alert” Yale leaders. The message suggested a campaign of letter writing. It was obvious to me its intention to help foster an atmosphere that would label any pro-Palestinian expressions as antisemitic.

That message and those that followed were deeply distressing to me. They sounded as if they assumed that the president of Yale, himself Jewish with strong ties to Israel, would not do anything unless cajoled and pressed. There was never an expression of concern about me, or other Israelis on campus, except in one context – fighting the perceived threat of antisemitism by using the horrors to score ideological points.

In the following days, as the unfathomable extent of Hamas atrocities was coming to light, my attention was all on the suffering and killing in the region. I helped the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office at Yale School of Medicine organize a solidarity event in which Israeli members of the Yale community who had family or friends who were victims of October 7 attack spoke, and shared their experiences. The event was well publicized and attended and supported by leadership.

On subsequent days, I was on a previously scheduled lecture tour — five talks in ten days at different institutions and venues. I felt I could not simply speak about science and medicine, and decided to start each talk by introducing myself as a Jewish Israeli, and saying “I am shocked and infuriated by the atrocities launched last week in southern Israel, I am also deeply concerned and horrified by the ongoing violence and exponentially escalating threat to civilians in the region. I hope and pray that violence ends, those abducted are released and threats to civilians are stopped and that all people in the region, regardless of ethnic or religious identity, will finally be allowed to live in peace, freedom, and dignity.” The statement was accepted nearly universally with applause.

In the meantime, at Yale, there were pro-Palestinian demonstrations, pro-Israeli vigils, as well as educational events; I did not attend most, and if I did, I might have probably not agreed with everything said, but I doubt I would feel unsafe. Indeed, despite the attempts by some provocateurs, the events were decidedly non-violent. On one Friday, at the Beinecke Plaza at Yale, there were three contrasting events, including an Israeli Palestinian Humanity vigil, attended by Israelis and Palestinians on campus, but there were no conflicts or arguments. There were no calls for genocide or threats of violence.

At the Yale-Harvard football game, I was walking to my seat, when a pro-Palestinian protest erupted; the students waved flags, chanted their slogans, but there was no sense of threat. There was definitely no call for genocide for Jews. Some in the crowd cursed the protesters and one even spit at them, but they did not respond, and the protest ended with the opposing students staging a walk out.

On that day I also saw the infamous doxing van, showing photos of young students, naming them as Harvard or Yale’s top antisemites. I felt it was a blatant and despicable “attempt to intimidate and harass” students as Yale’s president said.

At a panel discussion on the Public Health Implications of the Israeli-Gaza war, at Yale’s School of Public Health, discussions were concrete, professional and somber. One heckler was quickly silenced, and the rest of the event was very civil. This past Saturday, a pro-Palestinian protester hung briefly a Palestinian flag on a public Hanukkah Menorah in New Haven. The protester quickly removed it at the urging of other participants in the protest. This event met with wide condemnation by the organizers of the protest, Yale president and local officials, and local vigils were held in response

On social media, I have received multiple solidarity notices from colleagues and friends, Jewish and Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian. I have gotten some antisemitic responses, but mostly from bots. Notably, most of the personal attacks I experienced were from self-proclaimed friends of Israel, even colleagues of mine, especially when I expressed support for the first ceasefire and hostages release, when I expressed concerns about the toll on Gazan civilians from Israel’s response or when I mentioned that Palestinians in the West Bank were targets of an unprecedented wave of violent attacks by Jewish settlers.

When one such acquaintance attacked me, I did not hold back, and reminded them that unlike them, I had served in the Israel Defense Forces, and had saved Israeli lives as a physician. The argument ended there, but I couldn’t help but reflect, if this was how I was treated as an Israeli, a tenured professor, how are Palestinians being treated? Are they silenced by the fear of being tagged as antisemitic, for expressing their anguish?

I am not making this digression to dismiss or minimize the rise of antisemitism or threat and isolation of Jewish faculty, staff and students feel, but to highlight how my own experience allowed me to realize that the anguish experienced by Jewish students and communities has been weaponized to suppress and delegitimize pro-Palestinian voices.

Moreover, and worse, for some groups this looked like the perfect opportunity to reverse the progress American Academia has made towards more diversity, inclusion and equity. And now this coalition of populists, rich donors, politicians known to be enemies of science and democracy and other bigots, is feverishly hoping that their Archimedean point will bring them a first achievement: the reversal of one of most impressive achievements for equity for women in recent American academic life – by forcing the presidents of Penn, Harvard and MIT to resign.

Watching that congressional hearing felt like revisiting the public hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy Years. The presidents made powerful statements, expressed shock at Hamas atrocities, denounced antisemitism and described actions they took on campus. But what followed was a highly orchestrated circus, with targeted questions, aimed to trap them into indefensible answers. In the public eye, the five-hour hearing, crystalized into 30-second viral clips, based on misrepresentations and lack of nuance made the university presidents look indecisive and equivocal, while their previous statements and actions were not.

And when I watched the public shaming of these amazingly accomplished women, one voice kept ringing in my head, that of Counsel Joseph Welch words to Joseph McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency?”.

I hope the decision by Harvard to retain President Claudine Gay, despite the powerful campaign and false allegations against her, will once be remembered the same way Joseph Welch’s statement is now remembered, a turning point. A moment in which voices of reason, rejected the use of the justified fear of antisemitism as an Archimedean Point, and allowed all of us to focus on continuing making our universities and colleges more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and safe for all.

Naftali Kaminski MD is an Israeli Physician-Scientist and Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine. On Twitter/X @KaminskiMed

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Reform, Higher Education, International

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