Archives for category: Extremism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Meet Trump’s Favorite Edupreneur: Erika Donalds

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2023 //
26

If you thought Betsy DeVos was bad, wait ‘til you meet Erika Donalds! She is adored by both Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. She hates public schools and spreads lies about them. Sadly for DeSantis, she has cast her lot with Trump.

Kiera Butler wrote about the rise of Erika Donalds in Mother Jones. She begins:

On a hot afternoon in June, some 700 seated attendees of the annual summit of the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty bowed their heads in prayer. The Moms had waited in a security line that spanned two floors of the Philadelphia Marriott to get here, and even during this somber moment, the giddiness in the ballroom was palpable as they geared up for the highlight of the conference: a speech by former President Donald Trump.

Up at the dais, wearing a shiny green satin T-shirt that stood out against a row of American flags, Moms for Liberty advisory board member and wife of Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) Erika Donalds offered an invocation. “Lord, you have elevated this organization to do your good work in this country,” she said. “We’re grateful that the truth is being exposed, that parents are being able to see what’s really going on in education in our country.”

Presumably, Donalds was referring to the litany of complaints about public schools that had emerged in the conference breakout sessions: how they were corrupting children with lessons about institutional racism, gender diversity, and sex ed. Trump, when he finally took the stage, put a finer point on these forces of corruption, decrying the “radical left, the Marxists and communists” who had supposedly taken over American education. Then, he thanked Donalds by referring to her as “Byron’s wonderful wife.” He went on, “Where is she? I hope she’s here somewhere because she is an incredible person!”DeSantis helped position Donalds as an educational power player in the state. In return, Donalds has had an outsize influence on Florida’s educational policy.

Trump’s hour-and-a-half speech was a meandering affair, but the Moms were rapt: They booed when he accused President Joe Biden of arranging his indictment, and whooped when he complained about “the 87 different genders that the left says are out there.” But possibly the loudest applause of all came when he returned to the topic of education. “By the way I want to move our education system back to the states,” he said. The audience exploded. “You hear that, Erika?”

That Donalds received two separate Trump shout-outs was noteworthy because, well, she’s not all that famous, at least not outside of her home state. A former school board member from Collier County, Florida, she now runs a local network of charter schools—you’re more likely to have heard of her congressman husband, a Black archconservative who has been touted as a potential Trump running mate in 2024. Trump’s praise of Donalds was even more striking given that she was, until recently, a golden child of one of Trump’s Republican opponents. Over the last decade, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis helped position Erika Donalds as an educational power player in the state, elevating her work and appointing her to key committees. In return, Donalds has had an outsize influence on Florida’s educational policy, says Sue Legg, a retired University of Florida professor of education who has followed Florida’s move toward conservatism in education.

But in recent months, as DeSantis’ political fortunes shifted, Donalds appears to have dropped the governor and instead hitched her star to Trump’s wagon. Legg believes it’s possible that Donalds may be on the list of possible Trump picks for the next secretary of education, the role previously filled by charter-school crusader Betsy DeVos. In addition to her school-choice advocacy, DeVos threateneddesegregation efforts, rolled back Obama-era protection for transgender students, and has openly called for the dismantling of the Department of Education. “Betsy DeVos was a disaster,” says Legg. “I think Erika Donalds could be worse.”

A fourth-generation Floridian born in 1980, Donalds grew up middle class in Tampa. Her current passion for education wasn’t on display in her early life; in a 2015 interview with the News-Press, she recalled being a mediocre high school student, buckling down only after she learned she would be thrown off the basketball team if she couldn’t get her grades up. With the help of her churchgoing grandparents, she raised her GPA and narrowly qualified for admission to Florida State University, where she excelled, graduating magna cum laude in 2002 with a degree in accounting. It was at Florida State that she met her husband, Byron, who became a Christian after attending Erika’s evangelical church. The pair got married shortly after graduation and moved to the affluent town of Naples in Southwest Florida’s Collier County. Erika went on to earn a master’s degree in accounting from Florida Atlantic University, then to work her way up in an investment firm, an experience that would later serve her well when she became a charter-school entrepreneur.

In 2013, when the second of Erika and Byron’s three sons was in elementary school, the couple began to question the public school that their children attended. During his speech at this year’s Moms for Liberty summit, Byron Donalds recalled his son struggling with math homework that followed the instructional method endorsed by the federal Common Core education program under Obama, which many conservatives see as an example of federal government overreach. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” said Byron. “He’s sitting at the kitchen table. He’s got tears in his eyes crying. ‘This is how they’re teaching me.’ And I said, ‘Son, I don’t know what they’re teaching you. But I promise you this. In the real world, you get fired over doing math like that.’” The Donaldses promptly pulled their son out of their neighborhood public school and enrolled him in private school.

That experience seems to have made a strong impression on Erika Donalds; she soon began advocating for school choice, an educational policy movement that champions charter schools and private school tuition vouchers as alternatives to public schools. In 2013, she helped found a group called Parents’ Rights of Choice for Kids (Parents ROCK), whose members, foreshadowing the current parents’ rights movement, railed against what they saw as government intrusion into the sacred relationship between parents and children. In a July 2013 Facebook post, the group wrote, “We are fighting so hard for all of these parents, and many more who are still unaware that their parental rights have been snatched away by an overreaching school district, hungry for more money and control.”

There is speculation that Erika Donalds might be Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education. Assuming, that is, that he is not incarcerated.

Categories Censorship, Charter Schools, Common Core, DeSantis, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Florida, Trump

Oklahoma: MAGA State Chief May Take Over Tulsa Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2023 //
4

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, believes that Ryan Walters, the state superintendent, may take control of Tulsa Public Schools, despite the fact that he has no idea how to improve them and that state takeovers have seldom (if ever) improved any schools. It’s ironic that Walters is eager to fire Tulsa superintendent Deborah Gist, since Gist received national plaudits for threatening to seize control of the impoverished Central Falls school district in 2010 when she was state superintendent in Rhode Island.

Thompson writes:

We’ve known that State Superintendent Ryan Walters was rapidly ramping up his attacks on public education, especially the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS), but the intensity of his assaults keeps growing at a frightening rate. Even though I’ve been worrying that Walters would combine the destructive rightwing extremists’ venom with the worst of the discredited neo-liberal corporate privatization reforms, it sounds like on August 24, he may do it in the worse possible way. Rather than remove the TPS’s accreditation and/or its superintendent, Walters may order a rushed takeover of the district patterned after the recent takeover of Houston’s schools.

As Nondoc reported on Tuesday, on Saturday Walters said at a Moms for Liberty event, “Tulsa Public Schools is getting money from the Chinese communist government,” He said, “They funneled it through a nonprofit — I mean, money-laundered it through a nonprofit in Texas.” On Monday, “Walters appeared at the Tulsa County Republican Party headquarters to discuss the district,” saying that it must “Reorient finances to serve students, increase reading proficiency scores to the state average, and lift its schools off of the state F-list.” “Now,” Nondoc reports, “state board members could choose to place TPS on full probation.” Moreover, Walters has “also declined to rule out a non-accreditation vote on TPS, though it is unclear how that action would play out for a district of 33,000 students after the school year has already started.”

Clearly, the removal of Superintendent Deborah Gist is a major priority. Ironically, Walters is challenging the honesty of TPS administrators as his “administration of federal GEER funds is being investigated by FBI agents and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, according to people with direct knowledge of the inquiry.”

Even worse, Walters says he is regularly consulting with the Texas education commissioner, Mike Morath, about “strategies Texas used in its takeover of HISD.” The new Houston superintendent, Mike Miles, has long relied on mass exiting of teachers, and he’s already ordered educators at 28 schools to reapply for their jobs, and ordered the closures of many  “reformed” schools’ libraries. So, it is no surprise that the President of the Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association, Shawna Mott-Wright, says that “the uncertainty over the district’s future already has some teachers stepping away from their jobs.”

In response, TPS board member, Jennettie Marshall, “said during the board’s 90-minute discussion of the district’s accreditation status. ‘We are under attack. If you’re not keeping up with Houston, … if we continue the course we’re on, that’s where we’re headed. That shouldn’t be.’” She warned, “We can’t afford to lose our educators, support groups and people who provide wraparound services. We can’t afford for this district to lose its accreditation.”

To understand why Walters’ new attack could be an existential threat to public education in Tulsa, one should listen to Nancy Bailey’s analysis of such takeovers:

State takeovers aren’t new. Nor are they known for innovation, but for creating school voids, cutting services, and firing key staff, promising to close learning gaps. Takeovers usually only weaken schools, breaking them up and leaving communities with fewer and poorer schools.

Moreover, the Hechinger Report cited a study by Brown University and the University of Virginia which “looked at all 35 state takeovers between 2011 and 2016. ‘On average, we find no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.’” But the Hechinger Report added, “Race, meanwhile, plays a role in the likelihood of a district being taken over.”

The HIDC takeover campaign sped up in 2018 when “four of Houston’s 274 schools, all of them in the city’s economically distressed north and east sides, hadn’t met the standards for four years running.” By the time the takeover was ordered, “all but one of the district’s four failing schools was meeting state standards” but a rule change caused Phillis Wheatley High School to “narrowly” miss the mark. By 2021-22, Phyllis Wheatley had already improved from an F to a high C grade. Persisting in the takeover thus added support to researchers who concluded, “Now red-state governors increasingly use the takeovers to undermine the political power of cities, particularly those governed by Black and Hispanic leaders.”

We must also remember the history of the disastrous reigns of non-educator Mike Miles, a Broad Foundation corporate reform trainee, who Texas commissioner Morath placed in charge of Houston. When Miles was selected, apparently nobody asked about “the 26% drop in high school enrollment during the 6 years he was superintendent over Harrison School District Two in Colorado.” In Dallas, Miles set a target of “at least 75 percent of the schools are ‘partially proficient’ in four areas that focus on classroom instruction.” One of many reasons why that goal was impossible was “the loss of 6000 teachers in just three years.” His dictatorial mindset was illustrated by Miles ordering the removal by the police of a board member visiting a middle school where he had “replaced the principal, two assistant principals and 10 teachers.”

Dallas student outcomes had been increasing before Miles took over but student performance largely stagnated during his administration. As the Dallas Morning News reported, his tenure was marked by “disruptions, scandals, clashes.”

Now, Houston is facing the same situation where “sweeping changes include longer instructional days, lessons scripted by planners, not teachers, and new evaluations for educators that tie pay to academic performance.” The focus will be on math and reading. Cameras will be placed in each classroom to monitor behavior. Not surprisingly, Nancy Bailey notes that as the “HISD is losing qualified teachers, school libraries, and librarians,” it is “advertising for 350 long-term substitutes who don’t require a college degree.” She presciently concludes, “Watch as these kinds of reforms become prevalent in other school districts if they haven’t already.”

I have long had serious problems with Superintendent Gist, but I would have never called her “Woke Barbie” as her opponents have. To me, this is similar to the situation when Democrats joined with former Rep. Liz Cheney in defending our democracy. And, if we unite, the damage that Walters is promising to inflict on the TPS, and the Tulsa metropolitan area as a whole, could undermine his extremist campaigns. On the other hand, if we don’t recognize the extent of the threats of a HISD-style takeover, he might unite the worst of the corporate reform privatizers, with his Moms for Liberty extremism, and impose irreparable damage on the TPS and other school systems.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tulsa

Carol Burris: How Teachers Should Teach PragerU Videos

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2023 //
27

Without any evidence, rightwing talk show host Dennis Prager is convinced that the nation’s public schools are swamped with left wing propaganda. Therefore he feels no compunction about producing rightwing propaganda for the schools and frankly acknowledges that he intends to indoctrinate students with his “PragerU” videos.

Carol Burris, a veteran teacher and principal, gas advice for teachers compelled to use Prager propaganda.

Since the last mid-term election, when young adults came out in high numbers for Democrats, the far-right has stepped up attacks on public schools.  Part of their long-term strategy to stay in power is to mind-snatch young people from public school curricula filled with what they call “dominant left-wing ideology,” hoping to shape the voting habits of the next generation. I never saw any “left-wing indoctrination” in my 30-plus years working in public education, nor do I see it now in my grandchildren’s public schools, but the right wing does, and it wants American parents to believe it is there, too. 

 

The strategy to convince the public that nonexistent problems exist is one part ban, two parts alternatives—ban books and topics and then impose “snoopervision” of curriculum and library books, establish vouchers and classical charter schools, and provide alternative and supplementary materials for those who remain in public schools to shape young minds. 

 

Enter PragerU. PragerU, despite the U, is not a university but rather a website-based nonprofit media company founded by Dennis Prager, a self-important pseudo-intellectual with no advanced university degree or teaching credentials. The website has become famous for its videos “that promote liberty, economic freedom, and Judeo-Christian values.” 

 

Dennis Prager, once a Jimmy Carter Democrat, has now made a career out of sounding the alarm that the barbarians are at the gates. In 1996, he testified at a Congressional hearing against gay marriage. He argues that Judaism rejects homosexuality  and that “the acceptance of homosexuality as the equal of heterosexual marital love signifies the decline of Western civilization.” Like Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson, he excels at making the undereducated to whom Trump professed his love think he is the smartest person in the room. He gives old-fashioned bigotry and right-wing propaganda an intellectual sheen. 

 

PragerU is not new. It has been around for about a decade but has recently been in the news since the Florida Board of Education approved its “mind-changing” five-minute videos called PragerU Kids for classroom use. New Hampshire and Oklahoma, two states with state superintendents who are idealogues, may soon follow Florida’s lead.

 

What should teachers do with PragerU materials, especially if they are told to use them?

 

Put them to good use. Use them to teach students how to debunk propaganda and disinformation campaigns. Researchers at Michigan State University conducted an extensive study on how to battle online campaigns and materials intended to disinform. They found that moderation and even content bans don’t work. What does is teaching how to evaluate information critically, and it works best before opinions harden—hence the importance of teaching such critical thinking K-12.

 

 To teach such skills, I recommend a technique used extensively in the International Baccalaureate curriculum known as OPVL.

·       The O in OPVL stands for origin. Students first determine who published it and when and where it was published. They research what is known about the author that is relevant to the source’s evaluation.

·        P explores purpose. What message is the material trying to convey? Who is the intended audience, and why was that particular delivery format chosen?

·       V stands for value. To determine value, students answer questions such as, “What can we tell about the author’s perspective, and on which side of controversy does the author stand?” “What was occurring when the piece was created, and how accurately does this piece reflect what was happening?” 

·       Finally, L identifies limitations. Students determine methods to verify content and answer questions such as “Is the piece inaccurate in its depiction of a time period? What is excluded? What is purposefully left unaddressed?” 

PragerUKids provides a treasure trove of videos that are perfect for the initial teaching of this technique because the bias is blatant, and the false information is so easy to identify. For example, there is “PragerU’s Leo and Layla’s History Adventures with Frederick Douglass,” which you can watch here. 

 

The video is billed as providing “an honest and accurate look at slavery” and “how to create change.” It begins with wide-eyed Leo and Layla watching news reports of Black Lives Matter protests. Leo tells his sister that his math teacher teaches social justice instead of math. It then morphs into the siblings talking to Frederick Douglass, who both condemns slavery while serving as an apologist for the founding fathers. He tells the kids that the founders did not like slavery but needed to achieve the higher goal of forming a nation. The three then wrap up the discussion with a not-so-veiled condemnation of the protests following George Floyd’s murder.

 

Students as young as middle school could easily recognize that the purpose (P) of the video is not to present an “honest and accurate look at slavery” but rather to condemn protests as a form of initiating social change. The delivery method, a Black historical iconic figure, is deliberately chosen as the messenger—inaccurately depicting Douglass as a victim of slavery who understands the oppressors, portraying them as deliverers of a higher purpose. 

 

Determination of value (V) allows students to explore the BLM protests themselves, what the video excludes (the murder of George Floyd), and what misinformation it presents (protestors “want to abolish the police” and “the U.S. system torn down.”)

 

Further discussion of limitations (L) would note the exclusion of how slavery finally ended (not through gradual change but through civil war); the contradiction between cartoon Douglass’s claim that “our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong,” and the fact that according to Newsweek, two-thirds of the founding fathers kept slaves, and the easily debunked claim that “it was America that began the conversation to end it [slavery]”  (abolishment of slavery: Spain-1811; Britain-1833; Denmark-1846; France-1848; Netherlands 1861; the United States—1863).  Students could then discuss why the video uses the phrase “began the conversation” –also untrue but harder to disprove.

 

The beauty of OPVL, is that the teacher teaches the technique, but the students and the source reveal the content. One thing we know about the current disinformation campaign of the right is that it will only get worse. We can’t ban or stop it, but we can give young people the tools to see through it.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Florida, Propaganda, Teaching

Thom Hartmann: Can Humanity Survive Trump and the GOP?

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2023 //
38

Thom Hartmann is an insightful, incisive journalist and blogger. In this terrifying post, he describes what to expect if the Republican Party wins the presidency.

Please read and react.

Thom Hartmann

So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a GOP president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher…

Hartmann writes:

Every day that goes by, even with yesterday’s newest indictment, looks more and more like Donald Trump will be the GOP’s standard bearer in 2024. After all, his popularity stood at 44 percent when NY DA Alvin Bragg indicted him; it then rose to 49 percent when he was indicted in the documents crime; following his conviction for raping E. Jean Caroll it rose to 54 percent among Republicans.

But even if he’s not the candidate, Republican primary voters will demand a candidate with the same affection for Putin and other dictators; the same disdain for racial, religious, and gender minorities; the same abusive attitude toward women and girls; the same faux embrace of Confederate and hillbilly values and hatred of city-dwellers and college graduates; the same cavalier attitude toward guns and fossil fuels.

There’s also the growing possibility that Trump or another MAGA Republican could win the White House. Yesterday, both the New York Times and CNN reported on polls showing that Trump and Biden are right now at a dead heat.

And even if Trump collapses in the polls as the result of the indictments, which is unlikely (Netanyahu is under indictment for bribery and some pretty terrible stuff and he just got re-elected), there are numerous other Republicans who would love to take his place. 

And no matter who it is, if they are MAGA inclined, Trump has shown them where there are levers of power and corruption that are consequential in ways that they never dreamed of before him.

Joe Biden, at 81, faces multiple possible personal scenarios that could pull him out of the race. No Labels and the Green Party’s candidates (presumably Joe Manchin and Cornell West) could pull enough votes from Biden to hand the election to Trump as Jill Stein did in three swing states in 2016 (she pulled more votes in each of those states than Trump’s margin of victory).

The prosecution of Trump (which almost certainly won’t be resolved before the election — and it’s not even remotely possible that appeals would be resolved by then — because of Garland’s dithering for two years) could backfire politically and make him into a popular martyr even with Republicans who disliked him before.

And don’t discount the impact Putin throwing millions of rubles into social media can have: his previous fleet of trolls overwhelming social media helped get Trump elected in 2016 and drove Brits to make the crazy decision to separate from the European Union.

So, it’s important to examine what a second Trump or 2025 MAGA presidency would look like, what effect it would have on America and the world, and how it will impact average Americans. 

Forewarned, after all, is forearmed, and all these predictions are based on past behavior and public statements:

Women make up 51 percent of the American populace but they won’t be spared by a MAGA presidency.

MAGA voters celebrate Trump’s “proof of manhood” through his multiple sexual assaults, from his alleged rape of 13-year-old Katie Johnson (with Jeffrey Epstein) to the adult E. Jean Carroll and more than 20 others. He publicly bragged that he just “grabs them by the…” whenever he wants, and Republicans — including more than half of all white women voters — ran to the polls to mark his name on their ballots.

The MAGA base supports bans on abortion: the white nationalist part of that base is fervent about having more white babies (and middle class white women are the most likely to get abortions when they’re legal, according to these people).

Catholics and evangelicals even support bans on birth control, an issue that’s already been floated by Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and in several state legislatures. Fully 195 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against protecting birth control from state bans. And all of the Republicans on the Court are conservative Catholics (Gorsuch attends his wife’s church, but was raised Catholic).

Additionally, MAGA Republicans support ending no-fault divorce and limiting alimony, putting women back under husband’s thumbs; lowering the marriage age for girls to as low as 12, as Republicans have already attempted in Idaho, Wyoming, Tennessee, Missouri, and Louisiana; and seizing and monitoring the health and doctor’s records of all childbearing-age women to catch early pregnancies so those women can be detained or surveilled “for their own good” (yes, it’s already happened).

The LGBTQ+ community will come under assault in ways not seen for decades.

Like in Germany in 1933, the trans communitywill be the first to come under assault, a process that’s already begun as Red state after Red state enacts laws banning gender-affirming healthcare. Drag queens are already criminalized in multiple states.

Gays and lesbians won’t be far behind; Republicans are already trying to outlaw gay marriage and adoption. Three-quarters of all House Republicans voted against a Democratic bill protecting gay marriage; all but one Republican on the House Appropriations Committee voted for a Republican bill that would allow states to ban gay and lesbian parents from adopting.

Stochastic terrorism against the LGBTQ+ community will explode, and, in a throwback to the 1980s (when Reagan refused to say the word “AIDS” for 8 long years as tens of thousands, including close friends of mine, died) and before, rural law enforcement will often yawn when queer people are assaulted or even murdered.

Terror against racial and religious minorities will become routine.

The last time Trump was president and sanctioned a “very fine people on both sides” climate of hate and bigotry, incidents of lone-wolf terrorism exploded. Jews executed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue; Blacks gunned down in a supermarket in Buffalo and executed at Mother Emmanuel church in Charleston; Hispanics slaughtered in El Paso. All of the killers cited or wrote what were essentially MAGA or MAGA-aligned propaganda instruments as part of their motivation.

When minority communities rise up in indignation and step out into the streets to demand protection from roving bands of street Nazis, armed vigilantes will threaten and even kill them with impunity. As I noted yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse is now lionized by Republicans and three states have passed into law provisions that hold people who kill protestors with their cars free from prosecution.

American support for democracy around the world will end and Putin will destroy Ukraine.

During his first four years, Trump did everything he could to ridicule and minimize our democratic allies and suck up to strongman dictators around the world.

He tried to blackmail Ukraine’s president and then withheld defensive weapons from that country when Zelenskyy refused to go along.

He told the world that he trusts Putin more than America’s intelligence services. After meeting privately with Putin, he demanded a list of all of America’s spies and their stations around the world; within months, the CIA reported that their assets were being murderedwith an unprecedented speed and efficiency.

He or his son-in-law conveyed top-secret documents to the brutal murderer MBS in Saudi Arabia that enabled him to stage a coup and seize control of that nation, a gift for which the Trump family has already received at least $2.5 billion with more coming every day.

Trump has now said that he will end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours.” His strategy? As Mike Pence (who would know) said, “The only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.”

Putin’s allies, in fact, have told the press that his main strategy for seizing all of Ukraine is to wait for Trump to re-take the White House (and, of course, he’ll do everything he can to make that happen). And just last week, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump came right out and saidthat he’d end all arms support to Ukraine on day one.

Seeing that America will no longer defend democracies, China will take Taiwan and North Korea may well attack South Korea. It could trigger a nuclear World War III, although instead of America being the “bulwark of freedom” as we were in the 1940s, that burden will fall to Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Reagan’s Republican War on Workers will resume and even pick up steam.

The Heritage Foundation already has a 900+ page plan to change the American government, stripping the DOJ, FBI, FCC and the Fed of their independence while ending most union rights and effectively outlawing strikes.

Billionaires will receive more tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare will be fully privatized, and public schools will be replaced with vouchers for private, segregated, religious academies as has already happened under Republican administrations in Arizona and Florida.

The EPA and other regulatory agencies that protect workers, consumers, and the environment will be gutted to the point of impotence in the face of corporate and billionaire assaults.

Efforts to mitigate the climate emergency will be rolled back and fossil fuel extraction and use will explode.

The world just lived through the hottest month in human history; ocean waters off Florida are at the temperature Jacuzzi recommends for their hot tubs; the world’s oceans are dying and winter sea ice isn’t forming in Antarctica.

Right now we humans are adding heat to the atmosphere (because of higher levels of greenhouse gasses) at a rate identical to 345,600 Hiroshima bombs going off in our atmosphere every day: four nuclear bombs per second, every second, minute, and hour of every day.

In response, our planet is screaming at us.

Fossil fuel billionaires and their shills, however, are unconcerned as they continue to fund climate denial nonprofits and Republican politicians who claim it’s all a hoax. They apparently believe their vast wealth will insulate them from the most dire effects.

And they’re probably right: a third of poverty-stricken Bangladesh was underwater this year, as drought, floods, wildfires, heat domes, bomb cyclones, tornadoes, derechos, and typhoons ravaged America with unprecedented ferocity. Increasingly, those without the financial means to withstand weather disasters are killed or wiped out, losing their family homes and often their livelihoods.

Scientists tell us we may have as few as fiveyears, and certainly not more than 20, to end our use of fossil fuels and fully transition to clean renewables. Even within the five-year window it’s technically feasible, but if Trump or another MAGA Republican is elected, civilization-ending weather and the death of much of humanity is virtually assured.

We must wake up America.

So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a MAGA president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Guns, Health, History, Ignorance, Injustice, Insane, Lies, Politics, Privatization, Racism, Vouchers

Hechinger Report: State Takeovers of School Districts Have a Poor Track Record

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2023 //
5

Steven Yoder writes in the Hechinger Report about the state takeover of the Houston Independent School District and the dismal record of state takeovers.

Houstonians see the takeover as the vengeful punishment of a Democratic district by a mean-spirited Republican governor. Takeovers typically don’t improve academic performance. They stifle the democratic voices of Black and brown citizens. Given the research, it’s the silencing of democracy that is the purpose of takeovers.

Yoder writes:

On June 1, the TEA took over Houston’s school district, removing the superintendent and elected board. Critics say it’s an effort by a Republican governor to impose his preferred policies, including more charter schools, on the state’s largest city, whose mayor is a Democrat and whose population is two-thirds Black or Hispanic. In other districts where state-appointed boards have taken over, academic outcomes haven’t improved. Now red-state governors increasingly use the takeovers to undermine the political power of cities, particularly those governed by Black and Hispanic leaders, according to some education experts.

The state took over HISD because one school—Wheatley High School—had been failing for years. But before the takeover, Wheatley improved its test scores, and no school in HISD was failing. But the state took control of the state’s largest district anyway.

At least three studies have found that takeovers don’t increase academic achievement. The latest, a May 2021 working paper by researchers from Brown University and the University of Virginia, looked at all 35 state takeovers between 2011 and 2016. “On average, we find no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits,” the researchers concluded.

Takeovers are premised in part on the idea that improving school board governance improves test scores. But the 2021 paper concluded that may be wrong: “These results do not provide support for the theory that school board governance is the primary cause of low academic performance in struggling school districts,” the researchers wrote.

Why did Governor Abbott and State Commissioner insist on taking control of HISD? Because they could. Because they are vengeful and arrogant. Because they know nothing about research. Because it’s amusing for a hard-right conservative like Abbott to grind down a district that didn’t vote for him. Because Mike Morath was never an educator and knows nothing about how to improve schools.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Houston, Texas

Rather and Kirschner: Our Fragile Freedoms

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
37

Dan Rather and Eliot Kirschner write a blog on current events called “Steady.” We are reminded about how much we miss Dan Rather on the news. In this post, they write about Trump’s latest indictment.

They write:

In an era of unprecedented upheaval, it is difficult to find suitable context and perspective for the latest indictment of Donald Trump.

After all, this isn’t the first indictment he has faced, or even the first in federal court. It isn’t the first time we have had to grapple with his moral failings, the unleashing of political violence, or the degradation of our constitutional order.

Much of what is in the document made public on Tuesday we knew before. We saw it unfold on TV. We read the reporting of its aftermath. We heard the gripping public testimony in front of the bipartisan House Select Committee that investigated the insurrection of January 6.

It wasn’t even that the indictment was a surprise. For a long time, the investigation has been in the public consciousness. After Trump announced that he had been told he was a target, it was mostly a matter of when, not if.

It is important to keep in mind that this latest indictment does not charge Trump with arguably the gravest potential crimes, like insurrection or sedition, even though many who watched in horror the events leading up to and cresting on January 6 think it obvious he is guilty of both.

Randall Eliason, a former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, argued in a New York Times opinion piece titled “What Makes Jack Smith’s New Trump Indictment So Smart” that the special counsel wisely chose to limit the scope of the case (and the number of defendants) to just Trump despite the six other unnamed but easily identifiable co-conspirators. Smith did this, the piece points out, in order to proceed quickly to trial and yield the best chance at conviction. “Although it might have been psychologically gratifying to see Mr. Trump charged with sedition, the name of the legal charge is less important than the facts that will make up the government’s case,” Eliason wrote.

In other words, Smith decided not to try to prove too much; keep the charges few and based on what facts he believes are most likely to convince a jury — and whatever part of the public may be open to persuasion.

Let us stop for a moment to ponder these facts and the narrative they tell. They are chilling, but we must remember the Department of Justice will have to prove them in a court of law. Trump is presumed not guilty until and unless he is proven otherwise. He has every right to mount a vigorous defense. It’s probably best for the country that his lawyers fight hard and smart. The more thoroughly this case is adjudicated, the more its conclusion is likely to be strengthened by the process.

But in reading the indictment, all who love and care for our precious republic and its democratic traditions should feel a deep shudder of fear that we were driven to such a precipice. The writing itself is not fancy — no stacking of dependent clauses or diving into a thesaurus in search of adjectives. Reading the introduction aloud, it almost has the syncopation of a children’s picture book, even if the story it tells is one of horror:

The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020.

The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.

Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.

So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.

These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.

But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.

The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.

He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures.

His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.

Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election result.

What follows that in the indictment is a story we all saw unfold in real time, laid bare in a double-spaced legal document. There is also a lot to read between the lines. Even former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, who enabled many of Trump’s worst instincts and misled the American public about Trump’s fitness for office, told CNN he thinks prosecutors have more evidence than what they have shared thus far. He called the indictment “very spare” and added, “I think there’s a lot more to come and I think they have a lot more evidence as to President Trump’s state of mind.”

Be that as it may, these 45 pages comprise one of the most consequential pieces of writing in American history. It does not have the earth-shattering rhetoric of our Declaration of Independence, the poetry of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” or the urgent morality of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But it is a clear statement at one of the most pivotal intersections in our nation’s narrative; that autocracy and the fomenting of political violence to subvert the peaceful transfer of presidential power is not only anathema to our values — it is illegal.

History is riddled with “what ifs.” We are left to ponder what the worst outcomes might have been if things had turned out differently, from our own revolution, to World War II, to the Cuban Missile Crisis. January 6 should be added to that list.

As bad as it was, it could have been (and came close to being) much worse. And that reality bursts forth from this indictment. According to what is written in the indictment, violence was expected by Trump and his co-conspirators. They understood that their schemes to steal an election would almost certainly plunge the nation into chaos. That was the plan.

In the end, their plot was unsuccessful, but the danger has not receded. Trump is running for president. At this point he is the favorite, by far, to win the Republican nomination. And that means he could win reelection. That result would likely usher in chaos, greater and deeper division than even what we now have. It could very well end the country as we know it.

That may sound to some to be hyperbole, but by any reasonable analysis, that is a lesson to be learned from this indictment. And that is what Jack Smith hopes to prove in federal court. One can make a credible argument that this is one of (if not THE) most consequential criminal cases in American history.

A former and potentially future president is accused of trying to destroy the United States. His own vice president is a key witness. You couldn’t make this up. But this is the reality of what we face. Democracy is always fragile and must be fought for to survive. A free people must constantly be on alert and working to preserve their liberty.

At the birth of our nation, Benjamin Franklin is said to have quipped that the Framers had produced “a republic, if you can keep it.” Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, spoke of how the Civil War was a “test” of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.” We, the people, can take nothing for granted.

This concept of the United States of America, still relatively new in human history, is impossible to maintain without the continual peaceful transfer of power at the top. That is what this new indictment is about.

In his first inaugural address as governor of California in 1967, Ronald Reagan spoke eloquently of this truth:

“We are participating in the orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people. And this is the simple magic of the commonplace routine, which makes it a near miracle to many of the world’s inhabitants. This continuing fact that the people, by democratic process, can delegate power, and yet retain the custody of it. Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”

This is what is at stake for the generations alive today. It is an epic battle that will now take place in federal court as well as at the ballot box.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom

Florida: State Drops Charges Against “New College” Student Who Spit at Chris Rufo

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
30

Governor Ron DeSantis seized control of New College by installing half-a-dozen hard-right trustees and instructing them to turn the small progressive liberal arts college into the Hillsdale of the South. One of his appointees was Chris Rufo, the extremist who invented the furor over critical race theory.

At a recent campus event, a New College student spit on Rufo. He filed charges against her for her “attack” on him.

The State Attorney’s office dropped misdemeanor battery charges against a New College of Florida student who was accused of spitting on Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and one of the school’s trustees.

Libby Harrity, 20, was charged with misdemeanor battery on July 7 in connection with a Gov. Ron DeSantis bill signing at New College on May 15, when Harrity allegedly spat at Rufo. DeSantis’ visit to sign a bill banning state funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at state universities drew vocal protest from students, who have organized against his reshaping of the college since January.

The governor has said he wants to turn New College into a “classical liberal” college akin to the Christian, conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Higher Education

Michael Hiltzik: More About Florida’s Hapless African-American Studies Curriculum

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
5

Michael Hiltzik is the business columnist for The Los Angrles Times, but he has important things to say about Education and the culture wars. In this post, he adds to what we have learned about DeSantis’s efforts to show that slavery was sometimes beneficial to slaves. Some of them—not the ones picking cotton under the blazing sun—learned a trade. Of course, that would not apply to the many slaves who lived and died as slaves. What the Florida excuse-makers don’t get is that we use today’s values to judge slavery, not the values of the slave owners.

Hiltzik writes:

If there’s a bet that you will almost always win, it’s that no matter how crass and dishonest a right-wing claim may seem to be, the reality will be worse.

That’s the case with Florida’s effort to whitewash the truth about slavery via a set of standards for teaching African American history imposed on the state’s public school teachers and students.

The curriculum, you may recall, was condemned for a provision that the curriculum cover “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Dogs and Negroes Not Welcome

— Sign posted until 1959 at the town line of Ocoee, Florida, site of a 1920 racial massacre

Another provision seemed to blame “Africans’ resistance to slavery” for the tightening of slave codes in the South that outlawed teaching slaves to read and write.

A section referring to “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” goes on to list five race riots and massacres from American history, every one of which was started by whites.

More on that in a moment. As the indispensable Charles P. Pierce put it, the Florida standards “look as though they were devised by Strom Thurmond on some very good mushrooms.”

I reported last week on this reprehensible project, which was publicly presented as the product of a work group of the state’s African American History Task Force.

Two members of the task force, William B. Allen and Frances Presley Rice, responded to the scathing reaction to the curriculum from Democrats and Republicans with a defensive statement purportedly on behalf of the entire work group.

“Some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted [sic],” the statement read. “This is factual and well documented.”

As I reported, however, of the 16 individuals Allen and Rice mentioned to support their assertion, nine never were slaves, seven were identified by the wrong trade and 13 or 14 did not learn their skills while enslaved. One, Betty Washington Lewis, whom Allen and Rice identified as a “shoemaker,” was white: She was George Washington’s younger sister and a slave owner.

Now it turns out that Allen and Rice were not speaking for the work group, but for themselves. Thanks to reporting by NBC News, we know that most of the work group’s 13 members opposed the language suggesting that slaves benefited from their enslavement.

NBC quoted several members anonymously as stating that two members pushed the provision — Allen and Rice. Members “questioned ‘how there could be a benefit to slavery,’” one work group member told NBC.

Others said that the work group met intermittently over the internet and did not collaborate with the state’s African American History Task Force, which was created in 1994 to oversee the curriculum for African American studies in Florida’s K-12 schools.

The work group’s standards were approved unanimously on July 19 by the state board of education, every member of which was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running a natural experiment to see whether bigotry and racism can carry someone to the presidency.

We’ve recently learned more about Allen and Rice. Allen, as I reported earlier, is a retired professor of political science at Michigan State University. (The university removed his bio page from its website sometime in the last few days, but here’s an archived version.)

Allen served as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under George H.W. Bush, but angered civil rights activists and members of the commission itself for taking a stand against legal protections for gay people.

At a 1989 conference in Anaheim sponsored by anti-gay Christian fundamentalists, Allen delivered a talk titled, “Blacks? Animals? Homosexuals? What is a Minority?”

Its theme was that treating gays and Black people as distinct minorities would relegate them to animal status. Allen said, “My title is as innocent as a title can be,” a position that prefigured his current defense of the Florida slavery standards as no big deal.

He’s listed as a fellow of the Claremont Institute, which has been funded by a galaxy of right-wing foundations. The institute lists among its senior fellows John Eastman, who is one of the four attorneys identified as “co-conspirators” in the federal indictment of former President Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, handed up Tuesday. Eastman is also the target of a California State Bar proceeding aimed at his disbarment for his alleged role in that effort.

As for Rice, she’s chair of the Sarasota-based National Black Republican Assn., which appears to have shared its business addresswith her home address. She identifies herself as “Dr. Frances Presley Rice,” but she doesn’t appear to have a medical degree or PhD; she does hold a juris doctor degree, but that’s just a law degree and doesn’t customarily bestow the “Dr.” designation on its holders.

Rice has conducted a years-long campaign to associate today’s Democratic Party with the Democrats of the 19th century, a pro-slavery party that shares none of its positions on Blacks or slavery with the Democrats of modern times.

The normalization of Florida’s slavery whitewash has been abetted by a supine press. On July 27, for example, Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR’s Morning Edition, conducted a servile interview in which he sat meekly by as Allen spewed unalloyed hogwash.

When Allen suggested that Black journalist Ida B. Wells had drawn “inspiration” from the slavery experience, Inskeep — had he been even minimally prepared — could have pointed out that the Mississippi-born Wells was 5½ months old when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on Jan. 1, 1863, and 3½ years old when the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.

Nor did Inskeep challenge Allen about the list of 16 supposed slaves that he and Rice issued in defense of their curriculum. The list had been out for a full week before the NPR interview. Inskeep didn’t mention it at all.

When Allen asserted that he was not the author of the curriculum, nor were any other members of the work group, the proper follow-up would have been: “Who wrote it, then?” Inskeep kept mum.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, tried to shoehorn Florida’s whitewashing of slavery into a “both-sides-do-it” framework.

The Post article suggests that the Florida curriculum and President Biden’s July 25 proclamation of a national monument dedicated to Emmett Till, a Black teenager tortured and lynched by a white mob in Mississippi in 1955 for purportedly offending a white woman, are two sides of a “roiling debate” over Black history.

Of course that’s absurd. Most Americans, and most Democrats, don’t see slavery as a topic worthy of reconsideration. That’s all on the Republican side, especially in Florida.

DeSantis and his stooges are pretending that the truth about America’s racist past should be suppressed for fear of making white children feel bad. It’s nothing but a play for the most bigoted members of the GOP base.

That brings us back to Florida’s curriculum. Provisions other than the one about the benefits of slavery aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

Take the part about “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” This standard is illustrated in the text by references to race riots in Atlanta in 1906 and Washington, D.C., in 1919, and massacres in Ocoee, Fla. (1920); Tulsa (1921); and Rosewood, Fla. (1923) — rampages by white mobs lasting a day or more.

In what sense do these point to violence perpetrated by Black people? Pierce conjectures that they “might distressingly be referring to attempts by the victims of those bloody episodes to fight back.”

The Ocoee massacre occurred when the town’s Black residents attempted to vote. When a squadron of Klansmen hunted down a Black leader in his home, his daughter tried to prevent them from taking him by brandishing a rifle, which went off, slightly wounding a white member of the gang.

“A volley of gunfire erupted in both directions,” according to an account on the Florida History blog. In the aftermath, nearly 60 Black residents were dead, their community was razed to the ground, and those who survived were driven from the town, never to return. Until 1959, a sign at the town line read, “Dogs and Negroes Not Welcome.”

Is Ocoee supposed to be an example of “violence perpetrated … by African Americans”? Nothing would speak more eloquently to the true nature of the Florida standards for teaching Black history.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, DeSantis, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Freedom, History, Lies, Racism

Two Democratic Legislators from Wisconsin Attended ALEC Meeting, Spill the Beans

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
10

Two Democratic legislators from Wisconsin joined the hard-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to keep track of what their opponents were planning. They recently attended the 50th annual ALEC convention in Orlando, Florida.

ALEC has about 2,000 state legislators as members. ALEC writes model legislation on the environment, education, gun rights, and every other topic likely to be considered by state legislatures. The members take the model legislation back to their home state and introduce it after writing in the name of their state. ALEC is against gun control, against public schools, against environmental protections, etc. ALEC is funded by major corporations and acts as a voice for corporations that want no government regulation.

Erik Gunn is the deputy editor of the Wisconsin examiner, which first published this report.

Wisconsin State Reps. Francesca Hong and Kristina Shelton aren’t exactly the typical lawmakers to belong to the American Legislative Exchange Council — ALEC for short.

Hong, of Madison, and Shelton, of Green Bay, are staunch Democrats who have consistently voted against bills advancing the policies of the sort ALEC promotes. While the organization is legally nonpartisan and a tax-exempt nonprofit, it has become widely known as the birthplace of right-wing legislative proposals that find a home mainly with Republican state lawmakers around the country.

Last week, however, the two second-term Assembly members were in Orlando for ALEC’s annual meeting. It was Shelton’s second visit and Hong’s third. When they posted about their participation on social media, some followers wondered what they were doing in a crowd so ideologically at odds with their own political stances.

“I think it’s important to understand the agenda of the opposition,” Hong says. “And our current political reality requires us to know what the motivation is of our colleagues and where they’re getting model legislation from [along with] talking points, candidate training. These are all things that are available at ALEC.”

“It gives us an understanding of what’s to come,” adds Shelton — in the form of future legislation that members of the Republican majority might introduce. “And it helps us prepare as Democrats, organizing our own legislation and messaging. There’s no better way to prepare than to hear it directly from the folks on the other side….”

Hong and Shelton view themselves as carrying on a tradition among progressive Wisconsin lawmakers in joining ALEC, attending its events and going back home to report what they see and hear. Their predecessors are former state Rep. Mark Pocan, now a member of Congress, and former state Rep. Chris Taylor, now an appeals court judge.

Their name tags for the ALEC event simply identify them as Wisconsin state representatives, and Hong and Shelton say they don’t go out of their way to out themselves as Democrats — but they aren’t undercover, either…

As paying ALEC members (dues are $200 a year; conference fees are $750), they can’t be excluded on ideological grounds because of the group’s nonpartisan legal status, says Hong, who adds she has asked ALEC for its guest list “multiple times” but never received it.

Membership includes the opportunity to join two subject-matter task forces. Hong chose energy and environment as well as taxation and federalism. Shelton’s two were health and human development and education and workforce. Those sessions are where the details of proposed model legislation from the organization are outlined. They are also where the role of big business is most evident in helping to shape the organization’s proposals….

On education, Shelton says, the organization has heavily promoted school privatization proposals, including education savings accounts and universal private school vouchers, such as were included in a sweeping education bill in Arkansas, the LEARNS Act, enacted earlier this year.

“They’re no longer interested in sort of nibbling around the edges on school vouchers,” Shelton says. “They’re going all in — removing the income limits, moving to those education savings accounts, wildly expanding public investment for religious schools … [and] dismantling any sort of bureaucratic accountability measures.”

Hong says the education proposals have also been made with reference to the difficulties that employers have had filling job openings.

“The framing of it didn’t come off as full, ‘We’re attacking public schools,’” Hong says. “This is how we’re going to get more workers is to essentially make schooling and education’s sole purpose is to be producing workers.”

On economic and social policy, a persistent talking point was “about making poor people rich, not rich people poor,” she adds, while government assistance is “dragging down the economy” and “morally wrong.”

“They’re really digging into that narrative and saying that growing government to help those people is going to be the end of time,” Hong says.

To be sure, ALEC is just one of many organizations, from the AFL-CIO to the Sierra Club, that pursue policy change, sometimes constructing model legislation for that purpose. The difference, Shelton says, is that the group’s agenda doesn’t appear to her to be about policy so much as about political power.

“I think what’s different here is a sort of militant approach by those on the conservative right to not be as interested in actually solving the problems in the critical issues of working people,” she says, “but rather creating legislation to drive issues that they see as winning at the ballot box.”

Even so, a prevailing theme was diminishing the role of government and freeing corporations and business, the two Wisconsin Democrats say.

Categories ALEC, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, North Carolina, Privatization, Vouchers

Darcie Cimarusti: Beware of the So-Called Parental Rights Groups

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2023 //
1

Darcie Cimarusti died a few days ago after a valiant fight against ovarian cancer. She was the communications director for the Network for Public Education and a treasured friend to all who worked with her. Having served many years on her local school board in Highland Park, New Jersey, she was passionately committed to supporting public schools against baseless attacks on the schools and their teachers.

Last December, despite her illness, Darcie wrote an article about hyper partisan groups like Moms for Liberty that were besieging local school boards with baseless complaints and driving wedges among parents.

Her article was printed in newspapers across the nation. This one appeared in the Bedford Gazette. She never stopped speaking up for what she believed in. Hers was the voice of reason, calm, common sense, and responsibility.

She wrote:

I have been a local school board member since my daughters, now 11th-graders, were in second grade. In that time, I have been involved in education policy discussions at the local, state and national levels on issues such as the rights of LGBTQ students, standardized testing and the privatization of public education.

The rise of the so-called “parental rights” movement in public education has been one of the thorniest, most perplexing issues I have encountered.

Parents certainly play a crucial role in the education of their children. Who would dare argue that they don’t? But heavily funded, right-leaning parents groups such as Moms for Liberty have unleashed a juggernaut of opposition to “critical race theory,” LGBTQ rights, social emotional learning, diversity equity and inclusion. So it has become imperative that we have an honest discussion about how much say parents should have in what is (or is not) taught in our public schools.

My district, unlike many, is racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, with 31 languages spoken in the homes of our students. Educating such a diverse student body presents many challenges and requires a nuanced approach to policy and practice to ensure all students have equal opportunities to learn, thrive and grow. While it is easy for school leaders to say they embrace diversity, equity and inclusion, it’s far too challenging to implement policies promoting those principles.

I have spent my time on the school board helping to develop systems that ensure decisions are made collaboratively and with as many voices involved as possible. This means making space not only for administrators, teachers, parents and students but also ensuring that historically marginalized groups are represented.

Decisions that affect students should never be based on the whims of the most privileged or powerful, and not on whose voice is loudest.

But the latter has become the hallmark of parental rights activists. They attend meeting after meeting, berating, shouting down and even making death threats against school board members. During the pandemic, battles over masks erupted at podiums at far too many school board meetings across the country and quickly morphed into demands to ban books, censor curriculum and muzzle “woke” teachers that parents accused of “grooming” their children.

In the 2022 midterm elections, parental rights activists were on the ballot in many states. With the support and endorsement of Moms for Liberty, they ran campaigns to become school board members in districts in red, blue and purple states. Moms for Liberty operates county chapters that aim to serve as watchdogs “over all 13,000 school districts.” Chapters empower parents to “defend their parental rights” and “identify, recruit and train liberty-minded parents to run for school boards.”

The “anti-woke” agenda espoused by Moms for Liberty and endorsed by school board candidates had the greatest successes in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis proudly declared the state was “where woke goes to die.” But in many other parts of the country, parental rights candidates lost their elections, with even conservative political operatives acknowledging that many of their campaigns were “too hyperbolic.”

Chaos has already erupted in several districts where they succeeded and won board majorities, with newly formed, inexperienced boards firing superintendents or forcing them to resign. One board voted to ban the teaching of critical race theory just hours after being sworn in.

After a decade of experience as a school board member, one thing I can say for sure is that the majority of parents, teachers and community members do not respond well to instability and disruption in their local public schools. When school boards run amok and rash decisions make headlines, communities work quickly to restore calm. If parental-rights school boards continue to govern recklessly, they will undoubtedly face a backlash from voters.

Creating and implementing sound school policies and practices that respect and affirm all students requires collaboration. It does not allow for the divisive, polarizing rhetoric and impetuous, rash decision-making that have become the calling cards of the so-called parental rights movement.

+1 

Categories Bigotry, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Gender, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »