Archives for category: Extremism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

North Carolina: Why Tricia Cotham Betrayed Voters and Gave GOP a Supermajority

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
22

Last April, newly elected Democrat Tricia Cotham announced that she was switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. This was after she had campaigned as a supporter of abortion rights, an opponent of school vouchers, and a loyal Democrat. Her betrayal of voters in her blue district shook up the state’s politics, because it meant that the hard-right Republicans in the state legislature (the General Assembly) could override the vetoes of Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.

Everyone who saw the damage wrought by Cotham wondered why she did it. She claimed that Democrats didn’t appreciate her enough. That’s a strange reason to flip positions on big issues.

The New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and David Perlmutt found out why she switched: she was wooed by powerful Republicans, encouraged to run, and flipped knowing full well that she lied to her voters.

When Tricia Cotham, a former Democratic lawmaker, was considering another run for the North Carolina House of Representatives, she turned to a powerful party leader for advice. Then, when she jumped into the Democratic primary, she was encouraged by still other formidable allies.

She won the primary in a redrawn district near Charlotte, and then triumphed in the November general election by 18 percentage points, a victory that helped Democrats lock in enough seats to prevent, by a single vote, a Republican supermajority in the state House.

Except what was unusual — and not publicly known at the time — was that the influential people who had privately encouraged Ms. Cotham to run were Republicans, not Democrats. One was Tim Moore, the redoubtable Republican speaker of the state House. Another was John Bell, the Republican majority leader…

Three months after Ms. Cotham took office in January, she delivered a mortal shock to Democrats and to abortion rights supporters: She switched parties, and then cast a decisive vote on May 3 to override a veto by the state’s Democratic governor and enact a 12-week limit on most abortions— North Carolina’s most restrictive abortion policy in 50 years…

More perplexing to many Democrats was why she did it. Ms. Cotham came from a family with strong ties to the Democratic Party, campaigned as a progressive on social issues and had even co-sponsored a bill to codify a version of Roe v. Wade into North Carolina law…

Late in March, just a few days before switching parties, she skipped a pivotal gun-control vote, helping Republicans loosen gun restrictions in the state. After she became a Republican, she sponsored a bill to expand student eligibility for private-school vouchers, voted to ban gender-affirming care for minors and voted to outlaw discussions of race or gender in state job interviews.

“This switch has been absolutely devastating,” said state Representative Pricey Harrison, a Democrat from Greensboro.

Ms. Cotham received a standing ovation at North Carolina’s state Republican convention in June. She was invited to meet privately there with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and former Vice President Mike Pence.

“She’s a rock star among the Republican Party activists and voter base,” said U.S. Representative Dan Bishop, a Republican who said he encouraged Ms. Cotham to join his party and who stood behind her when she announced the decision.

There were clues that should have raised suspicions. In an earlier stint in the legislature, Cotham was loud in demanding greater accountability for charter schools. After she left the legislature, she was a lobbyist for the charter school industry. When she returned this year and flipped parties, she led the Republican demand to transfer control of charters from the State Board of Education to the General Assembly.

The move would, at first, shift independent oversight of charter schools from a board largely appointed by the governor to a board largely appointed by the General Assembly….

Cotham, a former teacher, has been a supporter of school choice. She was the president of a corporation that ran charter schools. Cotham is one of three chairs of the House Education Committee, a role she’s held since the start of the session when she was a Democrat, a rare position for a Democrat in the GOP-controlled chamber.

Real Democrats support public schools, not corporate charter chains or vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Hypocrisy, Lies, North Carolina, Republicans, Scandals, Vouchers

Matt Barnum: Pundits and Politicians Despair about Public Schools, But Parents Are Happy with Them

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
53

“This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters”.

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat summarized recent polls about public schools and noticed a sharp contrast between parents of public school students and non-parents.

Parents who have children in public schools are satisfied with them, based on their experience. But the general public swallows the negative narrative spewed by the mainstream media and rightwing politicians and thus has a sour view of public schools. This gap in perception has persisted for many years but seems to be increasing as Republican politicians like Texas’s Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis amp up their attacks on public schools.

Since it is not newsworthy to report that most parents are satisfied with their children’s public schools, the media loves to publish stories about crises and failure. Eventually, it becomes the conventional wisdom.

We have heard scare stories about the public schools with great intensity since the publication of the ominous “A Nation at Risk” report in 1983. That report, we now know, was purposely distorted to make public schools look bad. The commission that released that hand-wringing report had cooked the books to generate a sense of crisis. And they succeeded. The Reagan administration was alarmed, the nation’s governors were alarmed, the media stoked their fears. And for 40 years, the nation bought the lie.

But one group did not buy the lie: public school parents.

Barnum wrote:

The polling company Gallup has been asking American parents the same question since 1999: Are you satisfied with your oldest child’s education? Every year though January 2020, between two-thirds and 80% said yes.

The pandemic upended many things about American schooling, but not this long-standing trend. In Gallup’s most recent poll, conducted late last year, 80% of parents said they were somewhat or completely satisfied with their child’s school, which in most cases was a public school. This was actually a bit higher than in most years before the pandemic. A string of other polls, conducted throughout the pandemic, have shown similar results.

“Contrary to elite or policy wonk opinion, which often is critical of schools, there have been years and years worth of data saying that families in general like their local public schools,” said Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Categories Education Reform, Extremism, Fake News, Media, Opinion Polling, Parents, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Supporting public schools

Thom Hartmann: Trump’s Big-Lie Ad Threatens Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
23

Journalist Thom Hartmann shows that Trump’s latest ad is an exercise in the Big Lie Technique. It contains vile smears that simple-minded people are likely to believe. It resounds with echoes of fascism.

He writes:

Trump’s people are promoting a new lie-filled fascist advertisement, which even the normally unflappable Frank Luntz called “disturbing.” It follows a fairly ancient pattern of destructive Big Lies that goes back to Renaissance Italy and even the Roman republic and ancient Greece.

German filmmaker Fritz Hippler, one of Goebbels’ most effective propagandists (he produced the infamous movie The Eternal Jew), said that two steps are necessary to promote a Big Lie so the majority of the people in a nation would believe it.

The first is to reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that “even the most feebleminded could understand.” 

The second is to “repeat the oversimplification over and over.” 

If these two steps are followed, Hippler and Goebbels both knew, enough people will come to believe a Big Lie that it can change the politics of a nation.

In Hippler’s day, the best example of his application of the principle was his 1940 movie “Campaign in Poland,” which argued that the Polish people were suffering under tyranny — a tyranny that would someday threaten Germany — and that the German people could either allow this cancer to fester, or preemptively “liberate” Poland.

Hitler took the “strong and decisive” path, the movie suggested, to liberate Poland, even though after the invasion little evidence was found that Poland represented any threat whatsoever to the powerful German Reich. The movie was Hitler’s way of saying that invading Poland was the right thing to do, and that, in retrospect, he would have done it again.

The Big Lie is alive and well today in the United States of America, and what’s most troubling about it is the basic premise that underlies its use. For somebody to undertake a Big Lie, they must first believe Niccolo Machiavelli’s premise (in “The Prince,” 1532) that “the ends justify the means.”

Hitler, after all, claimed to have based everything he did on the virtuous goal of uniting Europe — and then the world — in a thousand-year era of peace, which he claimed was foreshadowed in the Bible. If you believe that a thousand years of peace is such a noble end that any means is justified to reach it, it’s a short leap to eugenics, preemptive wars, torture of dissidents and prisoners, and mass murder.

Believing that the end justifies the means is the ultimate slippery slope. It will kill any noble goal, because even if the goal is achieved, it will have been corrupted along the way by the means used to accomplish it…

In real life, it’s the story of the many tinpot dictators around the world who quote America’s Founders while enforcing a brutal rule, of fossil fuel executives pushing for lax CO2 rules to “help the American economy,” of the legion of lobbyists who work daily to corrupt democracy in the name of GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry (among others).

Here in the US it was used by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to lie us into murderous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when there was little consequence to them personally or the GOP, Republicans decided to continue the Big Lie strategy and are using it to this day.

Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha all warned us about this, as did Tolstoy, Tolkien, Hemingway, and Kafka.

Be it “small sins” like the Green Party and No Labels getting into bed with Republicans to get on state ballots, or “big sins” like rightwing think-tanks working to turn America into a strongman oligarchy with their Project 2025, trying to accomplish a “good” by using the means of an “evil” like a Big Lie inherently corrupts the good.

Now the Trump campaign and its allies are encouraging a new series of Big Lies to assail President Biden and the very idea of democracy itself.

With the smug assurance of damage done to the enemy, Republican governors are rewriting American history (the Big Lie that white children are injured by learning about Black history), criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community (the Big Lie that queer people are “groomers”), and throwing millions of people in Blue cities off the voting rolls (the Big Lie of voter fraud).

They are pushing and celebrating nakedly fascist policies, tropes, and memes.

Most recently, a Trump-aligned group rolled out an ad that strings a whole series of Big Lies together. It says:

If I was the deep state and I wanted to destroy America, I would rig the election with a puppet candidate, one that was so compromised that they would never say a word about it. I would create a false flag that allows for mail-in ballots. I would be in charge of the ballot-counting machines. I would create a false flag to blame all who question the results of the election.

If I was the deep state, I would prosecute anyone that went against me. I would sue and prosecute anyone that spoke up about the fraudulent election. I would use my powers to shut down all your internet businesses and bankrupt you.

If I was the deep state, I would make everyone an example why you should never question a Democrat ever winning an election. I would imprison my foes. I would use my corrupt DAs and blackmail judges to destroy you. I would make sure all crimes I ever committed never happened. I would prosecute my biggest competition. I would make sure they could never run for office ever again.

If I was the deep state, I would convince everyone that Ukraine Nazis were good, and women are men.

If I was the deep state, I would own every politician that mattered.

If I was the deep state, I would push my pedophilia ambitions on you.

If I was the deep state, you’d question your sexual identity, but not the medical establishment.

If I was the deep state, you would fear to ever resist me.

If I was the deep state, you would wish I was really the devil.

If I was the deep state, I would say mission accomplished.

Frank Luntz wrote of it, “This is the most disturbing political ad I’ve seen this year.”

Defenders of the Trump campaign are overrunning social media, defending the lies and threats in this new ad and Trump’s previous, “If you fuck around with us…” statements. They claim that Joe Biden is reviving our economy with “socialism and communism,” and Jack Smith and the DOJ prosecuting Trump and the January 6th traitors is some sort of “deep state tyranny.”

There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between the work the administration is doing to punish seditionists and rebuild our economy from the wreckage of the Trump years and these sorts of naked appeals to fascism.

Truths and issues — however unpleasant — cannot be weighed on the same scale as lies, threats, and character assassination, explicit or implicit.

Lee Atwater, on his deathbed, realized that the “ends justify the means” technique of campaigning he had unleashed on behalf of Reagan and Bush was both immoral and harmful to American democracy.

“In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his [Dukakis’] running mate,’” Atwater said. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not. Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.”

But Atwater’s spiritual and political protégés in the Trump campaign soldier on. He and his GOP allies in Congress are using Big Lies with startling regularity, and old Big Lies are being resurrected almost daily, most on social media, right-wing talk radio, podcasts, and TV.

The most alarming contrast in the coming election of 2024 is between those who will use any means to get and hold power, and those who are unwilling to engage in a Big Lie.

History tells us that, over the short term, the Big Lie usually works. Over the long term, though, the damage it does — both to those who use it, and to the society on which it is inflicted — is often incalculable.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Trump

Trump Claims That He Is Prosecuted to Silence His Base

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
30

I heard it on the radio while driving and couldn’t believe it. Trump claimed that the prosecutors pursuing him for a variety of crimes are actually targeting his supporters. He portrayed himself in near-Biblical terms, as a savior who is being persecuted and crucified on behalf of his devout followers. He said, and I paraphrase, “When they come for me, they are really coming for you.” I couldn’t but think of the phrase “Jesus died for our sins.”

Then I read Philip Bump in The Washington Post, who explained how Trump has made this tack a central part of his campaign. He has done nothing wrong. He wrote a perfect letter. He made a perfect phone call. He is blameless. It is not he but his followers who are targets of wicked prosecutors.

Bump wrote:

Visitors to Donald Trump’s campaign website are immediately implicated in his current legal travails.

“They’re not after me,” text in the primary image on the site reads. “They’re after you … I’m just standing in their way!”

As though attribution were needed, the quote is sourced to Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States.

This idea that Trump faces a legal threat as a proxy for his base of support was offered explicitly during Trump’s speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition over the weekend.

“Every time the radical-left Democrats, Marxist, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of courage,” Trump said. “I’m being indicted for you, and I believe the you is more than 200 million people that love our country.”

That phrasing is dripping with hyperbole. Trump’s federal indictment came at the hands of an experienced federal prosecutor who is in no realistic way a “radical-left Democrat,” much less any of the other (contradictory) categories offered. Trump’s implication that his base of support numbers 200 million is heavily inflated.

Those exaggerations have a purpose. Two-hundred-million Americans are more than three-quarters of the adult population, but they’re also obviously more than half of the country, bolstering Trump’s long-standing claim that he is leading a “silent majority” (despite earning less than a majority of the vote in the 2016 presidential primaries, 2016 election and 2020 election). His framing of his opponents as politically opposed to that base — using vaguely defined pejoratives very familiar to supporters who remember the Cold War — is also familiar in a terrain littered with “Republicans in name only.”

Everyone agrees with him and anyone who doesn’t is a traitor. Simple enough.

I have lived through many Presidential elections but I can’t remember any candidate saying that everyone who votes against him is “radical left Democrats, Marxist, communists, and fascists.”

I recall that John McCain defended Obama when one of his supporters called him a Muslim. McCain did not traffic in the politics of personal destruction.

Trump’s inflammatory language and his disrespect for democratic norms undermines our democracy, just as do his attacks on the Justice Department and the rule of law and on the press. He attacks the integrity of our electoral system, our judicial system, and every part of our government. He is a Samson who would dearly love to tear down the pillars of his society unless he controls it. He inspires violence and relishes his ability to mobilize an armed mob.

If you don’t support him, you are a traitor. You don’t love your country. You are radical left. Or a Marxist or a communist or a fascist.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Florida: New College Paying to Recruit Students After Rightwing Takeover

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
3

If you need any additional evidence of why DeSantis should never be President, read this story by Paul Basken of the Times (London) Higher Education. DeSantis uses his power as Governor to force his beliefs on others. He uses his power to squash dissent. He thinks that anyone who stands in his way should be run over and left as roadkill.

Case in point: his takeover of the state’s university system. It started with New College, the smallest liberal arts college in the state system. He took control of the board and replaced the college president with an unqualified politician. The new board is trying to turn progressive New College into the Hillsdale of the South. They are replacing the college’s nonconformist students with athletes. At DeSantis’ request, the legislature abolished tenure and restricted what professors are allowed to teach about gender and race.

New College was a bastion for free thinkers. It had high academic standards, but was completely “woke,” with regard to race, gender, social justice, and politics. Gay students were welcomed. DeSantis could not let it be.

New College of Florida recruitment
tactics challenged

After losing faculty and students because of partisan DeSantis reforms, campus described as paying recruiters despite federal ban

New College of Florida, the public liberal arts institution undergoing a partisan overhaul by the state’s Republican governor, is reported to have resorted to aggressive and potentially illegal tactics to maintain and build enrolment.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, citing the institution’s own staff and faculty, described New College as lowering its academic criteria foradmission for this coming semester, relying more heavily on athletic recruits, mischaracterising the institution’s resources, offering inducements such as laptops, and paying bonuses to recruitment staff.

A spokesman for New College admitted the institution offered the bonuses to its recruiters, the newspaper said, even though the federal government has long prohibited the practice.
“High achievement deserves a reward, and increased pay will be implemented to recognise the diligent work of the admissions team in assembling this record-breaking class,” the spokesman told
the Herald-Tribune. He and other New College officials did not respond to requests for comment about the report.

New College has recently become the centrepiece of efforts by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a 2024 US presidential candidate, to impose his partisan views across higher education. His agenda has included restricting teaching about the US history of racial division, banning initiatives to improve student diversity, and weakening faculty tenure.

With his heavy focus on overhauling New College, Mr DeSantis chose the smallest institution in the state university system, long known for excellence in the liberal arts that made it one of the nation’s top producers of Fulbright scholars. He accused it of harbouring leftist views, and replaced the majority of its trustees with conservative activists who fired its president and replaced her with a political ally, Richard Corcoran, a former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.

The result has been an exodus of faculty ahead of the coming academic year. New College’s interim provost, Bradley Thiessen, has counted at least 36 departures, or more than a third of the faculty, heading into the autumn semester. Dozens of students also described plans to leave.

Mr DeSantis has mocked the fleeing academics, telling conservative activists that he welcomed the transformation. “If you’re a professor in like, you know, Marxist studies, that’s not a loss for Florida if you’re going on,” the governor told the annual meeting of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council in Orlando. “Trust me, I’m totally good with that,” he said.

Earlier in the month, Mr Corcoran announced that New College would have a record enrolment for this autumn, exceeding 300 first-year students. He attributed the gains to an emphasis on sports, saying that a third of the new students would be athletes. The college’s data also showed that its first-year enrolment of black students would rise 6 percentage points to nearly 10 per cent, and that male enrolment would jump 23 percentage points to nearly 54 per cent.

The Herald-Tribune report, quoting admissions staff speaking anonymously, said the increase was coming at costs that include using photos of a nearby university and presenting them as New College in marketing materials; accepting students with lower standardised test scores; and offering the admissions staff $5,000 (£4,000) bonuses for reaching the 300-student goal.

The US Congress in 1992 forbade colleges paying bonuses or other incentives to anyone based on their success in enrolling students, mainly because of abuses in the for-profit sector. The Department of Education later allowed exceptions for outside companies that provide student recruitment as part of a bigger package of services, although the Biden administration said earlier this year that the use of that exception has grown to the point where
it might need to be reconsidered.


paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Higher Education

Heather Cox Richardson: Good News for Biden, Bad News for Trump

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2023 //
37

Heather Cox Richardson applies her excellent skills as a historian to analyze the news. Open the link to finish reading and to read footnotes.

More good news today for Bidenomics, as the gross domestic product report for the second quarter showed annualized growth of 2.4%, higher than projected, and inflation rose at a slower pace of 2.6%, down from last quarter and well below projections. Economic analyst Steven Rattner noted that as of the second quarter, “the US economy is over 6% larger than it was before COVID (after adjusting for inflation). At this point in the recovery from the Great Recession, 2011, the economy was just 0.7% larger than it had been in 2007.”

Both consumer spending and business investment, which is up 7.7% in real annualized terms, drove this growth. Business spending makes up a much smaller share of gross domestic product, but it drives future jobs and growth, and much of this growth is in manufacturing facilities. In keeping with that trend, the nation’s largest solar panel manufacturer, First Solar, announced today that it will build a fifth factory in the U.S. as alternative energy technology takes off. This commitment brings to more than $2.8 billion the amount First Solar has invested in the U.S. to ramp up production…

While many of us were watching the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., to see if an indictment was forthcoming against former president Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a different set of charges appeared tonight. Special counsel Jack Smith brought additional charges against Trump in connection with his retention of classified documents.

The new indictment alleges that Trump plotted to delete video from security cameras near the storage room where he had stored boxes containing classified documents, and did so after the Department of Justice subpoenaed that footage. That effort to delete the video involved a third co-conspirator, Carlos De Oliveira, who has been added to the case.

De Oliveira is a former valet at the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago property who became property manager there in January 2022. Allegedly, he told another Trump employee that “the boss” wanted the server deleted and that the conversation should stay between the two of them.

In the Washington Post, legal columnist Ruth Marcus wrote, “The alleged conduct—yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms—is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.” If the allegations hold up, “the former president is a common criminal—and an uncommonly stupid one.”

This superseding indictment reiterates the material from the original indictment, and as I reread it, it still blows my mind that Trump allegedly compromised national security documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (surveillance imagery), the National Reconnaissance Office (surveillance and maps), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research (diplomatic intelligence).

It sounds like he was a one-man wrecking ball, aimed at our national security.

The Justice Department has asked again for a protective order to protect the classified information at the heart of this case. In their request, they explained that, among other things, Trump wanted to be able to discuss that classified information with his lawyers outside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, a room protected against electronic surveillance and data leakage.

Former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division Peter Strzok noted that there is “[n]o better demonstration of Trump’s abject lack of understanding of—and disregard for—classified info and national security. He is *asking the Court* to waive the requirements for classified info that EVERY OTHER SINGLE CLEARANCE HOLDER IN THE UNITED STATES must follow.”

The Senate today passed the $886 billion annual defense bill by a strong bipartisan margin of 86 to 11 after refusing to load it up with all the partisan measures Republican extremists added to the House bill. Now negotiators from the House and the Senate will try to hash out a compromise measure, but the bills are so far apart it is not clear they will be able to create a bipartisan compromise. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has passed on a bipartisan basis for more than 60 years.

The extremists in the House Republican conference continue to revolt against House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) deal with the administration to raise the debt ceiling. They insist the future cuts to which McCarthy agreed are not steep enough, and demand more. This has sparked fighting among House Republicans; Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo suggests that McCarthy’s new willingness to consider impeaching President Biden might be an attempt to cut a deal with the extremists.

As the Senate is controlled by Democrats, the fight among the House Republicans threatens a much larger fight between the chambers because Democratic senators will not accept the demands of the extremist Republican representatives.

The House left for its August recess today without passing 11 of the 12 appropriations bills necessary to fund the government after September, setting up the conditions for a government shutdown this fall if they cannot pass the bills and negotiate with the Senate in the short time frame they’ve left. Far-right Republicans don’t much care, apparently. Representative Bob Good (R-VA) told reporters this week, “We should not fear a government shutdown… Most of what we do up here is bad anyway.”

Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA), the second ranking Democrat in the House, disagreed. “The Republican conference is saying they are sending us home for six weeks without funding the government? That we have one bill…out of 12 completed because extremists are holding your conference hostage, and that’s not the full story: the extremists are holding the American people hostage. We will have twelve days…when we return to fund the government, to live up to the job the American people sent us here to do. This is a reckless march to a MAGA shutdown, and for what? In pursuit of a national abortion ban? Is that what we are doing here?

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democrats, Economy, Environment, Extremism, Funding, Republicans, Trump

Florida: DeSantis Doesn’t Want Students to Study Honest History

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2023 //
7

Andrew Spar, president of the NEA in Florida wrote the following opinion article for the Orlando Sentinel.

Florida’s public schools are the places where children of every race, religion and background learn and grow together. No matter what they look like or where they come from, all our children must have the freedom to learn the full and honest history of our nation. They deserve an education that teaches them about the past while helping them understand the present.

Accurate history is powerful knowledge that prepares our youngsters for the world while enabling them to create a better future by avoiding past mistakes.

Unfortunately, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his political appointees have made it clear that they don’t think Florida’s students deserve to learn the full truth of our nation’s history. Instead, DeSantis envisions a history curriculum that downplays the horror of slavery while ignoring pivotal events such as the 1957 resolution adopted by the Florida Legislature that proclaimed the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which justices ruled that racial segregation in public schools is illegal, was “null, void, and of no force or effect.” When our state intentionally forgets historical events such as Florida’s response to Brown, how can we ever reckon with the racial disparities that are still present in public education today?

In another example of the ahistorical nature of the proposed standards, the Society of Friends (Quakers) can be found five times, whereas “racism” is only found once. Are we truly to believe that the legacy of Quakers is deserving of five times the importance of the legacy of racism when it comes to understanding African American experiences?

Yet, that is exactly what DeSantis wants — a history devoid of context, a history that denies students their freedom to learn uncomfortable truths. He is even willing to flout state law in order to keep students from having the freedom to learn. In 2020 amid great fanfare, legislators passed and DeSantis signed into law HB 1213, which among other things required Florida’s African American History Task Force to look for ways to incorporate the Ocoee Election Day Massacre into Florida’s required history instruction.

The task force produced a comprehensive report outlining exactly how to do this. Yet, here we are mere weeks away from the start of the 2023-2024 school year, and the recommendations still have not been implemented. While the proposed standards do (finally) mention Ocoee, where at least 30 African Americans are thought to have been killed, they do not come anywhere close to providing the comprehensive history Florida’s students must learn to understand the connections between the past and the present. It would appear DeSantis is scared that a complete and honest reckoning of our state’s history will force people to draw connections between the voter intimidation of the past and his current attacks on the rights of Black and Brown people to vote.

Rather than showing true leadership by implementing the task force’s recommendations and ensuring Florida’s students learn the whole truth about Florida’s history, DeSantis has engaged in a multi-year campaign to sow division between parents and educators. Screaming about indoctrination and bemoaning everything that he doesn’t like as “woke” might have been a winning strategy for DeSantis electorally, but his ambitions come at a steep price for an entire generation of children whose freedom to learn is under attack.

Fortunately, with each passing day more and more people across Florida, and indeed across the nation, are rejecting DeSantis’ fearmongering and attempts to divide us. Instead, we are uniting across our differences and demanding Florida politicians stop censoring what students learn in our public schools.

Florida may be only a steppingstone for DeSantis, but for millions of educators, parents and students, this is our forever home. We are rooted in our communities and fully invested in a brighter future for our children. We are fighting to ensure a world-class public education that reflects and celebrates student identities, experiences, histories and cultures in order to meet students where they are and prepare them to succeed wherever they may go. We are fighting for students’ freedom to learn.

Andrew Spar is president of the Florida Education Association, representing more than 150,000 education professionals.


© 2023 Orlando Sentinel

Categories Bigotry, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, History, Ignorance, Injustice, Lies

Indiana: Vouchers Expanded to Almost All Students

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2023 //
7

https://www.axios.com/local/indianapolis/2023/07/24/indiana-private-school-vouchers

Categories Bigotry, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Indiana, Religion, Republicans, School Choice, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Two Billionaires Lose Enthusiasm for DeSantis

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2023 //
14

Ron DeSantis thought he could succeed by running to the right of Trump. So far, it’s not working, as most Americans don’t understand his zeal for culture war issues, like fighting gays, banning abortion, and suing Disney.

Two billionaires are reconsidering their support for DeSantis because of his extremism. According to the Orlando Sentinel, billionaires Nelson Peltz and Ken Griffin are not happy about DeSantis’s positions on controversial issues.

Nelson Peltz, a billionaire hedge fund manager from Palm Beach, reportedly is rethinking his support for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bid for the Republican presidential nomination…

“Peltz has taken issue with his stance on abortion,” the Financial Times reported.

The Financial Times said Peltz declined to comment, but quoted a person familiar with his thinking saying: “Nelson Peltz thinks that most of DeSantis’s policies are acceptable, but his position on abortion is way too severe. … That may undermine Peltz’s desire to financially support DeSantis as a candidate.”

Earlier this year, DeSantis supported and signed into law sweeping restrictions banning virtually all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. In 2022, DeSantis signed a law banning almost all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. The 15-week ban is in effect; the six-week is on pause until the state Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the 15-week ban.

Polling shows DeSantis’ position is more restrictive than most Americans support. Gallup reported earlier this month that 69% of Americans said abortion should be legal in the first trimester of pregnancy, which runs through the 12th week and most oppose laws that would ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected around the sixth week of pregnancy.

Peltz isn’t the only billionaire hedge fund manager seen as holding doubts about DeSantis two months after the governor formally announced his candidacy, following more than a year of unofficially campaigning and courting supporters.

The Financial Times said Ken Griffin, the hedge fund manager who moved his firms and himself to Miami last year and had been a public cheerleader and donor to the governor’s reelection campaign, has also cooled.

In April, the New York Times reported that Griffin’s support for DeSantis had become “murkier” than people thought.

The Times, also citing people familiar with Griffin’s thinking, said Griffin was concerned about DeSantis’ statements about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the DeSantis-signed six-week abortion ban.

Citing a person familiar with Griffin’s thinking, the Financial Times reported he “objects to a recent clampdown on teaching about gender and sexuality and DeSantis’s ongoing fight with Disney.”

The story goes on to say that Peltz’s daughter was recently married and told the wedding planners that under no circumstances was DeSantis to be invited, even though hundreds of guests were invited. Methinks that Nelson’s daughter has strong views about abortion and gender that differ from those of Governor DeSantis. Even billionaires must listen to their children.

Categories Billionaires, Cruelty, DeSantis, Elections, Extremism, Florida, Gender

Alan Singer: DeSantis’s Effort to Whitewash Florida’s African American History

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2023 //
8

Florida has a sordid history of racism but Governor DeSantis wants that history to be literally whitewashed so that no white students feels “uncomfortable” learning the truth. DeSantis opposes “woke” history that others call telling the truth.

Alan Singer of Hostra University explains here why it is so hard to sanitize Florida’s history of racism.

He writes:

On Twitter, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis posted that “In Florida, we require the truth about American history to be taught in our classrooms. We will not allow schools to twist history to align with an ideological agenda.”

As part of Florida’s campaign against undefined “wokeness,” the Department of Education banned the teaching of a new African American Studies Advanced Placement course. It rejected the course as lacking “educational value and historical accuracy” and for violating Florida law.

Last week, the Florida State Board of Education unanimously approved new standards for how Black history should be taught in the state. The standards are designed to define “anti-woke” education. In its response, the Florida Education Association (FEA) branded the standards “a disservice to Florida’s students” and “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.” Eleven Florida civil rights and education organizations including the FEA and the NAACP sent a letter to Florida Board of Education that it ignored. The letter charged that “these standards purposely omit or rewrite key historical facts about the Black experience.” Vice-President Kamala Harris called the Florida standards “an attempt to gaslight us.”

Two of the most controversial clarifications in the social studies standards include a statement in the 6-8 grade guidelines that “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” and that instruction in high school on events like the 1920 Ocoee Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre that occurred in Florida should include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” acts of violence by African Americans that did not occur.

The major problems here are that Africans in Africa were agrarian people who had skills that were robbed from them when they were enslaved, and that enslaved Africans were considered property and any benefit from their skills accrued to their supposed owners. The Ocoee riots and murders occurred when African Americans attempted to vote in the Presidential election. In Rosewood, a mob of hundreds of whites murdered Black people they randomly caught and burned the town.

I found other statements and missing statements in the Florida social studies standards equally disturbing. The two places that refer to the Confederate states and the Civil War don’t mention which side Florida was on and which side African Americans fought for. Segregation is mentioned three times and the Klan is mentioned four times, but student do not learn what role they played in Florida.

But for me as a historian and a teacher the most disturbing part of the standards is the way slavery, and the slave trade are explained. It is intended to take responsibility for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery off the European countries that conquered and settled the Americas. “Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian, European and African cultures,” “how trading in slaves developed in African lands (e.g., Benin, Dahomey),” and “how slavery among indigenous peoples of the Americas was utilized prior to and after European colonization.” Students “[e]xamine the condition of slavery as it existed in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe prior to 1619.”

The lesson being taught in the Florida standards is that everybody had slavery and it was the same all over the world. But it wasn’t. Only the European colonies in the Americas and the new countries including the United States had race-based chattel slavery where enslaved people were no longer considered human, and their status was inherited by their children. Even after slavery ended as a result of the Civil War, Florida and the other states in the former Confederacy instituted laws to keep African Americans in virtual bondage and white Southerners enforced those laws through vigilante groups like the Klan.

Florida has many reasons to want to bury its sordid racial history. In the first have of the 19th century white settlers massacred and expelled Florida’s Native Americans.  Between 1870 and 1950, 311 African Americans were lynched in Florida. Three Florida counties, Lafayette, Taylor, and Baker were especially notorious. Florida had some of the strictest Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1881, it banned interracial marriage and in 1885 it mandated racially segregated schools. The interracial marriage ban was added to the Florida State Constitution in 1944. Starting in 1927, it was a criminal offense for a teacher to teach someone of a different race. At least 50 African Americans were murdered in Ocoee, Florida on November 2, 1920, after local Blacks attempted to vote. On January 1, 1923, white rioters stormed through the African American community of Rosewood, Florida, burning the town to the ground, killing six people, and driving the rest of the population into the forest and swamps to escape.  On August 27, 1960, peaceful Black students conducting a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Jacksonville were attacked by a mob of over 200 whites armed with baseball bats and ax handles. No African American student was permitted to earn a bachelor’s degree from the formerly segregated University of Florida until 1965.

Solomon Northup was a free Black man living in New York State who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Northup’s memoir, published after he escaped from slavery, was made into movies in 1984 and 2013. There is a scene in the 1984 PBS version of Solomon Northup’s Odyssey where Master Epps and friends are sitting on the veranda arguing with a Canadian carpenter named Bass about the legitimacy of slavery. Northup is near by trimming hedges and overhears the debate. Bass tells the story of a runaway who was captured and brought to court. The judge is puzzled why the enslaved African attempted to escape when he was fed and not beaten. The African replied “That job’s still there if you want to go ask for it.”

Maybe, with his Presidential campaign flailing, Ron DeSantis should apply for a job like that and get some skills.

Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies
Teaching Learning Technology
284 Hagedorn Hall / 119 Hofstra University / Hempstead, NY 11549
(P) 516-463-5853 (F) 516-463-6196

Blogs, tweets, essays, interviews, and e-blasts present my views and not those of Hofstra University.

“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, DeSantis, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Fraud, History, Injustice, Lies, Racism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »