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Texas: Insurrectionist Likely to Win Seat on State Board of Education

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2022 //
13

The Houston Chronicle reports that a participant in the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol is likely to be elected to the Texas State Board of Education. She has pledged to fight “critical race theory” (i.e. teaching about racism) and to support charter schools.

Underscoring Texas lawmakers’ rightward lurch on education issues in recent years, the candidate likely to replace a moderate Republican on the State Board of Education in a district outside Houston is a right-wing activist who participated in protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

After winning the primary in March, the front-runner in the District 7 race is Julie Pickren, a former trustee for Alvin Independent School District. Pickren was voted off that board last year after her participation in the protest at the U.S. Capitol was revealed — the basis of a campaign against her by the Brazoria County NAACP.

Pickren is a former delegate to the GOP’s national and state conventions, her LinkedIn says, and on Facebook she blamed antifa, rather than Trump supporters, for violence during the Capitol riot, a claim that other Republicans have made without proof. She declined a request for an interview….

Republicans have moved further to the right on education issues in Texas over the past 18 months. Earlier this summer, Gov. Greg Abbott announced his support for private school vouchers and endorsed a “Parental Bill of Rights” to give parents more power over what and how their kids are taught in schools. Last year, the Legislature passed and Abbott signed a slew of conservative bills relating to education, including restrictions on how social studies can be taught and on transgender children playing school sports.

At the local level, school board politics have become increasingly heated, with often angry discussions over diversity and equity policies in the schools. Parent groups have organized PACs in opposition to what they view as progressive activism in education, raising substantial amounts of money to reshape local school boards around the state.

Next year’s State Board of Education is set to be more conservative, with Robinson leaving as well as two other Republicans who lost their March primaries to opponents supported by right-wing PACs. There are currently nine Republicans and six Democrats serving on the board.

The board’s core responsibilities include writing Texas’ public school curriculums, managing the permanent fund that backs debt taken out by schools, and deciding whether to allow new charter schools in the state; Pickren has said she supports adding more of them.

Moderate pushed out

The District 7 seat opened up last year, when the Legislature during redistricting moved incumbent Matt Robinson into a different district so he couldn’t run for re-election. Robinson, a doctor from Friendswood, has said he feels Republican political leaders in the state did this intentionally because they did not believe he was sufficiently supportive of charter schools and other conservative policy goals.

In a rare move in today’s increasingly polarized politics, Robinson is endorsing the Democrat in the race, Galveston ISD teacher Dan Hochman, to be his successor.

Why?

“Because he’s running against Julie Pickren. And she will be bad for public education,” Robinson said.

In lists of the most important issues to her campaign, Pickren has named ridding public schools of critical race theory, an academic theory that critics use as a catchall term to describe diversity and equity initiatives as well as discussion of systemic or historical racism. Pickren is also supportive of “parents rights” initiatives such as those espoused by Abbott.

“She is leading a fight, an assault on public education that’s going on right now. It’s not among all Republicans, but it’s among a good number and she’s kind of leading that fight. And the idea that critical race theory is going on in most schools and most districts, which is entirely false. So her overall approach is, in my view, anti-public education,” Robinson said…

‘ Soul of public education ’

Hochman acknowledged that he’s facing an uphill climb in the race, as the district leans conservative. Pickren’s campaign has spent about $40,000 so far, while Hochman’s has spent about $10,000. Hochman said his campaign bank account currently had less than $100 in it…

“It really, truly is a fight for the soul of public education in the state of Texas, which is failing right now,” Hochman said of the race. Hochman added that he would oppose expansion of charter schools.

“I’m up against a woman who is clearly anti-public education. She’s being funded by the far right, whose agenda has been publicly clear that they want to dismantle public education and replace it with private schools and charter schools so they can push through a far-right Christian agenda in schooling. And that’s not like a conspiracy, that’s been pretty much out in the open.”

edward.mckinley@chron.com

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, For-Profit, Inequity, Privatization, Racism, Texas

Allison Fine: “Nobody’s Free Until Everybody Is Free”

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2022 //
23

Allison Fine wrote a passionate column in defense of reproductive rights in which she quoted the civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer: “Nobody’s Free Until Everybody Is Free.”

No one is free in America today because millions of people have lost the national guarantee of the power to control if and when they have children.

But the barbaric treatment of pregnant people, and the ongoing harassment and death threats against clinicians, isn’t the end of our story, it is the beginning of a new chapter. Our job is to keep getting up, and to keep showing up, just like Fannie Lou.

Fine describes a growing ecosystem that is growing up to provide help to women who seek abortion services, including take health consultations and abortion pills by mail.

She writes that the nation is in a state of “legal chaos” as a result of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe V. Wade, reversing a Court-guaranteed right for the first time in US history.

I am raising this issue to emphasize that we are in a totally chaotic period legally right now. It is actually a really profound moment for our country in terms of national versus states’ rights. Can I mail abortion pills to Mississippi, a banned state, today? No one knows the answer. The State of Mississippi says no, but BioGenPro, one of the two U.S. manufacturers of mifepristone, the abortion medication, with the force of the FDA and national postal service behind it, says yes, and they brought suit against MississippI to force them to allow it. We need to watch how this suit unfolds very closely over the next few months.

Please remember that just because states are passing crazy-ass laws doesn’t mean those laws will stand. They will all be challenged in court.

Sadly, the Supreme Court is sure to overturn any laws that conflict with their Dobbs’ decision.

But think about reality. Can a state actually ban the mailing of abortion pills? Will they open every package delivered to every woman in their state? How can Mississippi or Texas or any other state stop women from receiving the pills?

Categories Citizenship, Courage, Democracy, Elections, Freedom

Yes, Elise Stefanik Is a Shape-Shifter

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2022 //
18

Peter Wehner worked in the George W. Bush administration. He knew Elise Stefanik when she was a moderate. Like others who knew her then, he is confounded by her transformation into a Trump lapdog/bulldog.

The lust for power does strange things to people. Compare Stefanik and Liz Cheney: Stefanik abandoned all principle to curry favor with Trump. Cheney gave up her powerful position and her political future by refusing to tolerate Trump’s assault on the Constitution and Trump’s lies. Cheney was the #3 House Republican before the failed coup; she was ousted by her colleagues and replaced by Stefanik.

Wehner writes:

There was a time in 2016 when Elise Stefanik, now the third-ranking Republican in the House, was so disgusted by Donald Trump, she would barely mention his name. Today he proudly refers to her as “one of my killers.”

She proved that again last month. In an effort to undermine confidence in the select committee investigating the violent assault on the Capitol, Ms. Stefanik said, “This is not a serious investigation. This is a partisan political witch hunt.” The committee, she said, is “illegitimate.” The hearings did not change her mind. In mid-July, before the final session planned for the summer, she referred to the committee as a “sham” and declared that “it is way worse than the impeachment witch hunt parts one and two.”

Maybe Ms. Stefanik was continuing to discredit the House committee because the evidence it has produced from Trump insiders — and the compelling way the evidence has been presented — has inflicted staggering damage on Mr. Trump, even though it might not prevent him from winning the Republican presidential nomination for a third straight time. Ms. Stefanik has failed in her efforts to sabotage the committee, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Ms. Stefanik’s fealty to Mr. Trump is so great that some of his advisers are mentioning her as a potential vice-presidential candidate if he runs in 2024, which he and his advisers are strongly hinting he will do.

The transformation of Ms. Stefanik, who is 38, is among the most dramatic and significant in American politics. Her political conversion is a source of sadness and anger for several people I spoke to who were colleagues of hers — as I was in the White House of George W. Bush although I did not work with her directly — and who were, unlike me, once close to her. To them, Ms. Stefanik’s story is of a person who betrayed her principles and her country in a manic quest for power.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Trump

Arthur Camins: Democrats Should Not Parrot Republicans. It’s a Losing Strategy.

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2022 //
56

Arthur Camins is a lifelong educator and social justice activist. In this post, he explains why Democrats are wrong to pursue Republican voters with Republican themes instead of promoting policies that uplift the common good. Centrism has not helped the Democratic Party.

He writes:

Republicans lead. Democrats follow. And that makes all the difference. Libertarian and wealth-protecting Republican ideologues invest to influence and change most people’s normative ideas and values, whereas Democrats seek to discern and appeal to what voters already think. That has been the case for decades. It has been a triumph for conservatism and the protection of privilege. For Democrats, it remains a losing strategy to win elections, a disaster for a more equitable nation, or any hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

The Republican’s route to power has been to shift public thinking toward several big ideas and implied values: Resources are scarce and therefore competition and inequity are natural and inevitable. Therefore, the pursuit of personal advancement is the only reasonable course of action. In that context, the advance of underrepresented minorities has been understood as coming at the expense of White people. The values message has been, “Look out for yourself because no one else will.” That dystopian message is designed to enable Republicans’ core idea: Financial regulation and taxes on wealth are a counterproductive limitation.

Responding to Republican inroads with white working class and lower-middle class voters in the Nixon and Reagan years, Democratic leadership, led in particular by Bill Clinton, pursued a different approach. They attempted to gain or retain political office by discerning how people already think and crafting appeals and policies to meet them. In pursuit of votes of the elusive undecided voters, Democrats picked up on conservative themes, ceding the war of ideas to Republicans.

For example, upon signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and in an exchange with reporters on August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton said, “The new bill restores America’s basic bargain of providing opportunity and demanding, in return, responsibility.”

Clinton was responding to Ronald Reagan’s characterization of minority welfare recipients as con artists eating steak and driving Cadillacs living off the tax contributions of hardworking, law-abiding white workers.

The theme was still very much in play in 2013 when in an economics speech at Knox College, President Obama declared:

“Here in America, we’ve never guaranteed success — that’s not what we do. More than in some other countries, we expect people to be self-reliant. Nobody is going to do something for you. We’ve tolerated a little more inequality for the sake of a more dynamic, more adaptable economy. That’s all for the good. But that idea has always been combined with a commitment to equality of opportunity to upward mobility — the idea that no matter how poor you started, if you’re willing to work hard and discipline yourself and defer gratification, you can make it, too. That’s the American idea.”

So, we have Democrats at the highest level parroting the conservative shibboleth that poverty is a problem of the failure of personal responsibility and self-discipline rather than racism and inequity built into the structure of our socio-economic system.

Mainstream Democratic response to the push for charter schools is yet another example of their acceptance of deeply conservative language and with it, its underlying ideology. Publicly supported alternatives to democratically governed public education have several roots: getting tax dollars for religiously based schools; support for schools to skirt the Supreme Court rulings against the segregationist separate-but-equal doctrine; acceptance of the idea that government-led bureaucracies cannot be reformed democratically; attempts to squeeze profit from K-12 schools at taxpayers’ expense; and last but not least, undermining the influence of strong public-sector unions. The tagline du-jour for all of this is the right to parental choice, the core of which is the idea that education is a personal consumer good rather than a shared society necessity.

The bipartisan education policy of the last forty years has been a response to insecurity. American schools predictably fail to live up to the absurd disingenuous or naïve promise that education can provide equity in a systemically inequitable society. For Republicans, such insecurity is an opportunity to sew fear and division while promoting their everyone-out-for-yourself dogma. Unfortunately, Democrats rather than challenge that core ideology, have settled for, “You can’t save everyone, so let’s save a few.”

Keep reading.

Categories Charter Schools, Clinton, Courage, Democrats, Elections, Obama, Racism, Republicans, Supporting public schools

William J. Mathis: The Insurrection: Will the Center Hold?

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2022 //
20

William J. Mathis, Ph.D., has served as a school superintendent and vice-president of the Vermont state school board. He also served as Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center and is the president-elect of the Horace Mann League of America.

 

In the beginning, Kansas irregulars attacked Missouri. Missouri replied in kind. It was an unneighborly kind of war. Little mercy was asked and little was given. The Osceola raid, it was said,counted but one survivor. But with the rush of hot-blood, truth is often the victim. The partisans vowed righteous vengeance on each other, heated their rhetoric and twisted their courage for the oncoming civil war. It left 215,000 laying on the ground.

We fumble through our historical rolodex for comprehensible parallels to the insurrection ofJanuary 6; looking for something that explains, something that restores, something that fills the emptiness.

Such conflicts are not innocent unexpected surprises by play-pretend soldiers. Aggressive words lead to aggressive actions. People die.

Then, as now, crises were foreshadowed. Jayhawkers and Harper’s Ferry were not accidents. Our Constitution neglected the humanity of 4 million enslaved African Americans. Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, concluded that Blacks could not be citizens because they were not. Ranked the worst Supreme Court decision in history, this judicial miscarriage was influenced by President Buchanan who, until our times, was widely criticized as the nation’s worst president.Alienating both North and South, he could have prevented the Civil War – but he didn’t.

We have great accomplishments but we also have great fiascos. Benedict Arnold sold out when his ego was not stroked. Vice President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and launched a “filibuster” or invasion of Mexico. Acerbic Andrew Johnson got impeached and U. S. Grant’s administration is known for corruption. But Grant’sreal sin was the wink and nod he gave to the oppression of native Americans. After teaming up with red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy, PresidentRichard Nixon resigned in disgrace.

These shames pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s behavior. What the former president has in common with this rogue’s gallery is a selfish disregard of people and an enormous regard for himself. His minions flatter their Emperor and compliment his new clothes while ignoring his buck nakedness. It took a 26 year-old woman’scourage to say the Emperor was dressed a little light for the weather.

Meanwhile, black-robed justices summoned older spirits, “’tis time! ‘tis time! Double, double toil and trouble.” In one infamous week of opinions they overturned laws on women’s health, religion in the schools, scuttled environmental protections and approved carrying a gun in a society suffering thesickness of repeated mass murders.

Compounding these benighted events, the worst inflation in forty years placed the greatest burdenon people of limited means. The more affluent saw their investment portfolios crash faster than their travel plans. Hit with covid, a cautious population isolated itself while Russia weaponizedoil. The blockade of Ukrainian food threatens the world food supply.

Will the Center hold? – We have survived many crises and in turn, been strengthened by them. But the past is not always the predictor of the future. Rather, the turn of the tale lies in our ability to cohere as a nation and as a society.

We speak of the “United States.” Is it? The East and West coasts are solidly blue while the South and the mid-West are red. The economic and migration patterns increase and sharpen the inflection points. Will we see “Bloody Kansas” again? What is this beast that slaughters people claiming protection of a Constitutional right?

The “greatest generation,” those who came of age in World War II, and gave us the baby boom are coming to the end of their lives. We see the fading of the institutions that for one small flash made the American Dream a reality for some. We promised equality and access to opportunities.Instead, the wealth and educational gaps are increasing while politicians gerrymander voting districts to freeze political power to their advantage. School privatization claims “freedom of choice’ but the least reflection shows the reality is segregation and inequalities. At the same time, the exploding costs of elite higher educationinstitutions, make them inaccessible to children on the wrong side of the wealth gap. People advantaged by this system want to keep it that way.

We have survived the litany of our devils and prospered by the actions of our saints. Yet, the purpose of a democratic society is to build and sustain a fair and just society. It is endangered. We face an election that will likely tell the tale. Our obligation is to select leaders based not on the thin chaff of election season but on the principles and wisdom by which the candidates havegoverned, their commitment to the strengtheningof the commonwealth, and their manifest compassion to embrace all citizens.

Will the center hold?

 

Categories Citizenship, Democracy, Elections

Washington Post: Justice Department Investigating Trump

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2022 //
17

The Washington Post broke the story last night that the Department of Justice is investigating Trump’s role in the failed coup of January 6 and presenting evidence and testimony to a grand jury.

The Justice Department is investigating President Donald Trump’s actions as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury — including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence — have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won, according to two people familiar with the matter. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The prosecutors have asked hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 and January 2021; his pressure campaign on Pence to overturn the election; and what instructions Trump gave his lawyers and advisers about fake electors and sending electors back to the states, the people said. Some of the questions focused directly on the extent of Trump’s involvement in the fake-elector effort led by his outside lawyers, including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, these people said.

In addition, Justice Department investigators in April received phone records of key officials and aides in the Trump administration, including his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to two people familiar with the matter. That effort is another indicator of how expansive the Jan. 6 probe had become, well before the high-profile, televised House hearings in June and July on the subject….

The revelations raise the stakes of an already politically fraught probe involving a former president, still central to his party’s fortunes,who has survived previous investigations and two impeachments. Long before the Jan. 6 investigation, Trump spent years railing against the Justice Department and the FBI; the investigation moving closer to him will probably intensify that antagonism.

Many elements of the sprawling Jan. 6 criminal investigation have remained under wraps. But in recent weeks the public pace of the work has increased, with a fresh round of subpoenas, search warrants and interviews. Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, and lawyer, Greg Jacob, appeared before the grand jury in downtown Washington in recent days, according to the people familiar with the investigation. Both men declined to comment.

The Justice Department efforts are separate from the inquiry underway by the House committee, which has sought to portray Trump as responsible for inciting the Capitol riot and for being derelict in his duty for refusing to stop it. Both Short and Jacob have testified before the committee, telling lawmakers that Pence resisted Trump’s attempts to enlist him in the cause…

No former president has ever been charged with a crime in the country’s history. In cases when investigators found evidence suggesting a president engaged in criminal conduct, as with Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton, investigators and successive administrations concluded it was better to grant immunity or forgo prosecution. One goal was to avoid appearing to use government power to punish political enemies and assure the tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has vowed that the Jan. 6 investigation will follow the facts wherever they lead and said that no one is exempt or above scrutiny, while refusing to divulge information outside of court filings.

Garland told NBC News in a Tuesday interview that the department pursues justice “without fear or favor. We intend to hold everyone, anyone, who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January 6th, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable — that’s what we do. We don’t pay any attention to other issues with respect to that.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Trump

Russia: A Dissident Speaks Out Against the War-and Plans to Vote

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2022 //
35

Vladimir Kara-Murza has been in prison since April because he opposes Putin’s war against Ukraine. He faces a sentence of up to 15 years because he called Putin’s “special military operation” what it is: a war. He is a contributor to the Washington Post.

PRETRIAL DETENTION CENTER 5, Moscow — One morning last week, the prison guard called my name through the cell door: “Be ready in 10 minutes. There’s a commission to see you.”

There are many inspections that pass through this prison, but this one was different. Sitting at the center of a long table and flanked by the prison warden and other uniformed officials was Tatyana Potyaeva, the human rights ombudswoman for the city of Moscow. “Quite a few people have inquired about you,” she said. Looking through her folder, she mentioned Natalia Solzhenitsyna, the widow of Nobel Prize-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as well as Dmitry Muratov, editor of the now-closed Novaya Gazeta newspaper and co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. “So I wanted to see how you were.”

I was fine, I said, as I do to every visiting commission — adding that my only complaint was over being imprisoned for my political views in the first place. My conditions are okay. I know they must certainly be better than what my grandfather experienced when he was arrested on “anti-Soviet” charges in 1937 before being sent to the gulag. He survived that (and went on to serve in World War II, earning some of the highest military decorations). I can certainly survive this.

I did have one request for the ombudswoman, though. On Sept. 11, Moscow will hold municipal elections for some 1,400 district council seats across the city. Until I am convicted, I still enjoy my voting rights. The prison where I am held is only a 40-minute drive from my home and my polling place in downtown Moscow — so I said I wanted to exercise my right to vote. The ombudswoman promised to look into it.

“Voting rights,” of course, is a difficult phrase in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For years, our elections have been deprived of any real meaning. Politicians who posed a genuine challenge to the Kremlin have been murdered, imprisoned or pushed into exile. Some opposition parties have been banned. Independent media outlets have been shut down. And, on top of all that, the authorities have introduced a variety of electoral “reforms” that are clearly designed to allow manipulation of the results.

But even when your vote does not affect the results, it’s still important to express your voice. Years ago, I visited the former Gestapo headquarters in Cologne, Germany, which now houses a museum of national socialism. Among its exhibits is a ballot from one of the many plebiscites held in 1930s Germany to demonstrate universal support for the Führer. Someone had carefully put a cross next to the word “Nein” — “No.” I remember looking at that ballot and thinking that, even though the person who used it might not have changed the course of history, he or she took a step to reject the crimes committed with the complicity of the supportive or silent majority.

Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February, more than 16,380 Russians have been detained at antiwar protests across the country. More than 2,400 have been charged with administrative offenses for speaking out against the war. Dozens, including me, have been arrested under a new Criminal Code clause that penalizes public opposition to the war by up to 15 years’ imprisonment. Earlier this month, a Moscow court sentenced municipal lawmaker Alexei Gorinov to seven years in prison for denouncing the war on Ukraine at his district council meeting. In the same period since the start of the war, some 150,000 people have chosen to simply flee Russia.

But there are many more people in this country who oppose Putin’s war on Ukraine — yet aren’t prepared to risk years in prison by speaking out publicly. (The situation that, I believe, would be true of most societies.) And that is why September’s elections matter. Residents of the capital will have a chance to take a stand on the situation just an hour’s flight away from Moscow, where cities continue to be bombed and people continue to die every day as a result of Putin’s imperial ambitions. Putin’s own United Russia party has placed support for the war — still euphemistically referred to by the state media as a “special military operation” — at the center of its municipal campaign platform. Meanwhile, the so-called official opposition parties, such as the Communists or Just Russia, seem to be competing to show who can be the loudest at expressing support.

The one exception is Yabloko, Russia’s veteran liberal party. It has managed to retain access to the ballot in Moscow, and it opposes Putin’s war on Ukraine. Some of its leading members, including journalist and historian Lev Shlosberg and Moscow municipal lawmaker Andrei Morev, have been fined for making public antiwar statements. In September, Yabloko will be fielding candidates across Moscow, and even though they won’t be able to say much because of the new laws criminalizing antiwar speech, the party’s stance is well known. “Our stand for peace is a matter of principle,” said Maxim Kruglov, a member of the Moscow City Duma and Yabloko’s campaign coordinator. The word “peace” is still legal in Russia, at least for now.

In a few weeks, Muscovites will get a rare chance to say “no” to dictatorship and aggression, as that anonymous German did with their ballot. I may have few rights in a Russian prison, but that is one I am certainly intending to exercise.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Fascism, International, Lies

Berkshire and Schneider: Voters in School Board Elections Reject Slanders Against Their Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2022 //
6

Hello, Democrats! Wake up!

Journalist Jennifer Berkshire and historian Jack Schneider report that voters in school board elections are not falling for rightwing slanders of their public schools and teachers!

Democrats: your best strategy for the fall elections is to campaign aggressively for public schools.

Berkshire and Schneider write that Democrats were panicked by Glenn Youngkin’s election as Governor in Virginia, which they attributed to his attacks on “critical race theory” in the schools and his pandering to far-right fake parents’ groups. Steve Bannon (and Chris Rufo) claimed that the road to a takeover was by seizing control of local school boards and destroying public schools.

Berkshire and Schneider say that their campaign is failing. Even in Trump territory, voters are supporting their public schools and rejecting the crazies.

They write:

As it turns out, GOP candidates running on scorched-earth education platforms have fared quite poorly in school board elections. In places like Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire and New York, voters have rejected culture warriors running for school board, often doing so by wide margins. A recent Ballotpedia review of more than 400 school board contests in Missouri, Oklahoma and Wisconsin found that race, gender and COVID were indeed influential in determining election outcomes, but not in the way one might expect. As they found, candidates who ran in opposition to a “conflict issue” — sexual education curricula, for instance, or a focus on race in the district — were more likely to lose their races.

Cherokee County, Ga., a rural county northwest of Atlanta, offers an instructive example. The county’s schools made national headlines recently after ProPublica reported on a group of white parents protesting the hiring of a Black educator brought on to serve as the first Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer. Yet voters in the county, which Trump won by nearly 70 percent in 2020, overwhelmingly rejected hardline candidates for school board. A self-proclaimed family values slate, backed by the national 1776 Project PAC, and which ran in opposition to critical race theory and school district equity plans, failed to pick up a single seat.

Voters in Coweta County, Ga., sent a similar message to another slate of candidates endorsed by the 1776 Project. All four challengers were bested by board incumbents in the May primary, while a fifth — a controversial incumbent who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection and claimed that students were being indoctrinated with critical race theory through district-provided Chromebooks — was unseated by a landslide in a runoff election in June.

It isn’t that these deep red countries have suddenly begun to turn blue. Instead, the culture war approach is falling short because Americans have direct experiences that contradict what they’re hearing from candidates.

Please open the link and read the good news for yourself.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Community Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Equity, Lies, Parents, Privatization, Racism, Supporting public schools, Teachers

Who Should Make the Choice? A Reason to Join Twitter.

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2022 //
25

Here is the latest ad from Mothers Against Greg Abbott.

It is powerful.

This is a reason to sign up for Twitter.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Texas

Texas: Two Billionaires Want to Destroy Public Education and Replace It With Christian Schools

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2022 //
72

CNN posted an important article about two billionaires in Texas who are spending heavily to push state politics to the extreme right fringes on social issues. Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks despise gays, love guns, and preach a version of Christianity that is suffused with hate, not love or charity or kindness. Above all, they aim to destroy public education, which they see as the root of America’s cultural decline.

If you read one article today, make it this one. It explains the drive for vouchers for religious schools. What Dunn and Wilks want is not “choice,” but indoctrination into their selfish, bumigored world view.

CNN’s investigative team writes:

Gun owners allowed to carry handguns without permits or training. Parents of transgender children facing investigation by state officials. Women forced to drive hours out-of-state to access abortion.

This is Texas now: While the Lone Star State has long been a bastion of Republican politics, new laws and policies have taken Texas further to the right in recent years than it has been in decades.

Elected officials and political observers in the state say a major factor in the transformation can be traced back to West Texas. Two billionaire oil and fracking magnates from the region, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, have quietly bankrolled some of Texas’ most far-right political candidates — helping reshape the state’s Republican Party in their worldview…

Critics, and even some former associates, say that Dunn and Wilks demand loyalty from the candidates they back, punishing even deeply conservative legislators who cross them by bankrolling primary challengers. Kel Seliger, a longtime Republican state senator from Amarillo who has clashed with the billionaires, said their influence has made Austin feel a little like Moscow.

“It is a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” Seliger said. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it…”

Former associates of Dunn and Wilks who spoke to CNN said the billionaires are both especially focused on education issues, and their ultimate goal is to replace public education with private, Christian schooling. Wilks is a pastor at the church his father founded, and Dunn preaches at the church his family attends. In their sermons, they paint a picture of a nation under siege from liberal ideas…

Dunn and Wilks have been less successful in the 2022 primary elections than in past years: Almost all of the GOP legislative incumbents opposed by Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee primarily funded by the duo, won their primaries this spring, and the group spent millions of dollars supporting a far-right opponent to Gov. Greg Abbott who lost by a wide margin.

But experts say the billionaires’ recent struggles are in part a symptom of their past success: Many of the candidates they’re challenging from the right, from Abbott down, have embraced more and more conservative positions, on issues from transgender rights to guns to voting.

“They dragged all the moderate candidates to the hard right in order to keep from losing,” said Bud Kennedy, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper who’s covered 18 sessions of the Texas legislature…

People who’ve worked with Wilks and Dunn say they share an ultimate goal: replacing much of public education in Texas with private Christian schools. Now, educators and students are feeling the impact of that conservative ideology on the state’s school system.

Dorothy Burton, a former GOP activist and religious scholar, joined Farris Wilks on a 2015 Christian speaking tour organized by his brother-in-law and said she spoke at events he attended. She described the fracking magnate as “very quiet” but approachable: “You would look at him and you would never think that he was a billionaire,” she said.

But Burton said that after a year of hearing Wilks’ ideology on the speaking circuit, she became disillusioned by the single-mindedness of his conservatism.

“The goal is to tear up, tear down public education to nothing and rebuild it,” she said of Wilks. “And rebuild it the way God intended education to be.”

In sermons, Dunn and Wilks have advocated for religious influence in schooling. “When the Bible plainly teaches one thing and our culture teaches another, what do our children need to know what to do?” Wilks asks in one sermon from 2013.

Dunn, Wilks and the groups and politicians they both fund have been raising alarms about liberal ideas in the classroom, targeting teachers and school administrators they see as too progressive. The billionaires have especially focused on critical race theory, in what critics see as an attempt to use it as a scapegoat to break voters’ trust in public schooling.

In the summer of 2020, James Whitfield, the first Black principal of the mostly White Colleyville Heritage High School in the Dallas suburbs, penned a heartfelt, early-morning email in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, encouraging his school to “not grow weary in the battle against systemic racism.”

The backlash came months later. Stetson Clark, a former school board candidate whose campaign had been backed by a group that received its largest donations from Dunn and organizations he funded, accused Whitfield during a school board meeting last year of “encouraging all members of our community to become revolutionaries” and “encouraging the destruction and disruption of our district.” The board placed Whitfield on leave, and later voted not to renew his contract. He agreed to resign after coming to a settlement with the district. Clark did not respond to a request for comment.

Whitfield said he saw the rhetoric pushed by Dunn and Wilks as a major cause of his being pushed out.

“They want to disrupt and destroy public schools, because they would much rather have schools that are faith-based,” Whitfield said. “We know what has happened over the course of history in our country, and if we can’t teach that, then what do you want me to do?”

Meanwhile, the legislature has also been taking on the discussion of race in classrooms, passing a bill last year that bans schools from making teachers “discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” The legislation was designed to keep critical race theory out of the classroom, according to Abbott, who signed the bill into law.

Some of the co-authors and sponsors of the bill and previous versions of the legislation received significant funding from Dunn and Wilks.

The billionaires “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” said Deuell, the former senator.

By the power of their money, these two billionaires are reshaping public policy in Texas to make it as narrow-minded and bigoted as they are. Their reactionary vision will indoctrinate students and crush the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn.

If you live in Texas, vote for Beto O’Rourke for Governor, Mike Collier for Lt. Governor, and for legislators who support public schools.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Injustice, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers
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