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Florida: State Officials Consider “Classical, Christian” Test as Replacement for the SAT

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2023 //
79

Governor DeSantis is unhappy with the College Board Because it had the nerve to disagree with him. He said he might find an alternative for the Board’s products, the SAT and AP courses. The Miami Herald says that the state is in discussions with a new test vendor whose was designed for Christian schools and home schools.

As Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republican leaders explore alternatives to the College Board’s AP classes and tests, top state officials have been meeting with the founder of an education testing company supporters say is focused on the “great classical and Christian tradition.”

The Classic Learning Test, founded in 2015, is used primarily by private schools and home-schooling families and is rooted in the classical education model, which focuses on the “centrality of the Western tradition.”

The founder of the company, Jeremy Tate, said the test is meant to be an alternative to the College Board-administered SAT exam, which he says has become “increasingly ideological” in part because it has “censored the entire Christian-Catholic intellectual tradition” and other “thinkers in the history of Western thought.”

As DeSantis’ feud with the College Board intensified this week, Tate had several meetings in Tallahassee with Ray Rodrigues, the state university system’s chancellor, and legislators to see if the state can more broadly offer the Classic Learning Test to college-bound Florida high school students.

“We’re thrilled they like what we’re doing,” Tate said. “We’re talking to people in the administration, again, really, almost every day right now.”

Will there be another test for students who are not Christian?

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article272526392.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Home Schooling, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Standardized Testing

Jamelle Bouie: The Attacks on Transgender People Are Undemocratic

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2023 //
5

Jamelle Bouie is an opinion writer for the New York Times. He is brilliant. He writes essays about politics, philosophy, and culture. I subscribe to his opinion feed, where he writes about which books he is reading and what he’s cooking. I have never met him but I love him.

He published his thoughts about why transgender people deserve the same rights, respect, and dignity as others.

Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.

In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care.

In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even gone as far as to introduce bans on “drag” performance that are so broad as to threaten the ability of gender-nonconforming people simply to exist in public.

Some of the most powerful Republicans in the country want to go even further. Donald Trump has promised to radically limit transgender rights if he is returned to the White House in 2024. In a video address to supporters, he said he would push Congress to pass a national ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth and restrict Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals and medical professionals providing that care.

He wants to target transgender adults as well. “I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” Trump said. “I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”

There is plenty to say about the reasoning and motivation for this attack — whether it comes from Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas — but the important thing to note, for now, is that it is a direct threat to the lives and livelihoods of transgender people. It’s the same for other L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, who once again find themselves in the cross-hairs of an aggressive movement of social conservatives who have become all the more emboldened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.

This is no accident. The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender.

Politicians and those of us in the media tend to frame these conflicts as part of a “culture war,” which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy.

Democracy, remember, is not just a set of rules and institutions, but a way of life. In the democratic ideal, we meet one another in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges.

I have referred to dignity twice now. That is intentional. Outside of certain select phrases (“the dignity of labor”), we don’t talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many groups for dignity and respect in public life have been a driving force in American history since the beginning. To that point, one of the great theorists of dignity and democracy in the United States was none other than Frederick Douglass, whose experience in bondage gave him a lifelong preoccupation with the ways that dignity is either cultivated or denied.

Douglass observed “that although dignity seems to be woven into human nature, it is also something one possesses to the degree that one is conscious of having it,” the historian Nicholas Knowles Bromell writes in “The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass,” “and one’s own consciousness of having it depends in part on making others conscious of it. Others’ recognition of it then flows back and confirms one’s belief in having it, but conversely their refusal to recognize it has the opposite effect of weakening one’s confidence in one’s own dignity.”

Nicole Walker, a writer and editor, in “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice. It Was My Life.”Read the guest essay.

“It’s important that the government is in sync with the public opinion, but I don’t think they are.”

Dwyarrn, one of the participants in an Opinion focus group with 12 pro-life voters.Read the focus group’s discussion.

“Sometime soon, I am going to meet a patient who has no ability to leave the state, and I am going to have to tell her that her baby has a lethal condition, and she is going to have to carry a pregnancy to term against her will.”

David N. Hackney, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, in “I’m a High-Risk Obstetrician, and I’m Terrified for My Patients.”Read the guest essay.

“There are more of us than there are of them. That’s especially true if American men recognize that their way of life is also under attack. Men also have sex for pleasure. This is not just a women’s issue.”

“My fellow pro-lifers and I will also need to make the case to expectant mothers, and fathers too, that their unborn children are, like the rest of us, dependent and needy persons.”

Erika Bachiochi, a conservative legal scholar, in “What Makes a Fetus a Person?”Read the guest essay.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.”

It is easy to see how this relates to chattel slavery, a totalizing system in which enslaved Black Americans struggled to assert their dignity and self-respect in the face of a political, social and economic order that sought to rob them of both. But Douglass explored this idea in other contexts as well.

Michele Goodwin, a professor of law at the University of California, in “No, Justice Alito, Reproductive Justice Is in the Constitution.”Read the guest essay.

Writing after the Civil War on women’s suffrage, Douglass asked his readers to see the “plain” fact that “women themselves are divested of a large measure of their natural dignity by their exclusion from and participation in Government.” To “deny woman her vote,” Douglass continued, “is to abridge her natural and social power, and to deprive her of a certain measure of respect.” A woman, he concluded, “loses in her own estimation by her enforced exclusion from the elective franchise just as slaves doubted their own fitness for freedom, from the fact of being looked down upon as fit only for slaves.”

Similarly, in her analysis of Douglass’s political thought — published in the volume “African-American Political Thought: A Collected History” — the political theorist Sharon R. Krause shows how Douglass “clearly believed that slavery and prejudice can degrade an individual against his will” and generate, in his words, “poverty, ignorance and degradation.”

Although Douglass never wrote a systematic account of his vision of democracy, Bromell contends that we can extrapolate such an account from the totality of his writing and activism. “A democracy,” Douglass’s work suggests, “is a polity that prizes human dignity,” Bromell writes. “It comes into existence when a group of persons agrees to acknowledge each other’s dignity, both informally, through mutually respectful comportment, and formally, through the establishment of political rights.” All of our freedoms, in Bromell’s account of Douglass, “are meanstoward the end of maintaining a political community in which all persons collaboratively produce their dignity.”

The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time — it inspired his support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act — and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.

Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Extremism, Freedom, Gender, Inequality, Injustice, Racism, Trump

Texas: Unmasking The Campaign to Privatize Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2023 //
8

Mimi Swartz, a writer for the Texas Monthly, explored the background, the funders, and the consequences of the well-coordinated campaign to privatize public schools—by defaming them and discrediting those who run for local school board seats. She focuses on the travails of one dedicated school board member, Joanna Day in Dripping Springs, Texas, who contended with insults and threats in her life.

The following is a small part of a long article, which I encourage you to read in full:

The motivations for these attacks are myriad and sometimes opaque, but many opponents of public education share a common goal: privatizing public schools, in the same way activists have pushed, with varying results, for privatization of public utilities and the prison system. Proponents of school privatization now speak of public schools as “dropout factories” and insist that “school choice” should be available to all. They profess a deep faith in vouchers, which would allow parents to send their children not just to the public schools of their choice but to religious and other private schools, at taxpayers’ expense.

But if privatizing public education is today cloaked in talk of expanded liberty, entrepreneurial competition, and improved schools for those who need them most, its history tells a different story. In 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, a group of segregationist legislators in Texas, with support from retiring governor Allan Shivers, began concocting work-arounds for parents appalled by the prospect of racial integration of public schools. One idea: state-subsidized tuition at private schools. That never came to pass, but it was Texas’s first flirtation with vouchers.

Privatization proponents have since switched up their rhetoric, pitching vouchers as an opportunity for poor urban families to save their children from underperforming neighborhood schools. That hasn’t worked out either. In various experiments across the nation, funding for vouchers hasn’t come close to covering tuition costs at high-quality private schools, and many kids, deprived of the most basic tools, haven’t been able to meet the standards for admission.

School funding in Texas is based largely on attendance—as the saying goes, the money follows the child. Considerable evidence suggests that vouchers would siphon money from underfunded public schools and subsidize well-to-do parents who can already afford private tuition. Critics frequently cite a program in Milwaukee, where four out of ten private schools created for voucher students from 1991 to 2015 failed.

“I don’t think that vouchers serve any useful purpose at all,” said Scott McClelland, a retired president of H-E-B who now chairs Good Reason Houston, an education nonprofit. Ninety-one percent of Texas students attend public schools. “There isn’t enough capacity in the private school network to make a meaningful difference in their ability to serve economically disadvantaged students in any meaningful numbers, and it will divert funding away from public schools.”

In Texas, an unusual alliance of Democratic and rural Republican leaders has for decades held firm against voucher campaigns. The latter, of course, are all too aware that private schools aren’t available for most in their communities and that public schools employ many of their constituents. But the spread of far-right politics and the disruption of public schools during the pandemic created an opening for activists to sow discontent and, worse, chaos. “If they can make the public afraid of their public school, they will be more likely to support privatizing initiatives. Then that puts us back to where we used to be with segregation of public schools,” says former Granbury school board member Chris Tackett, who, with his wife Mendi, has become an outspoken advocate for public education and a relentless investigator of the attempts to undermine it.

They have their work cut out for them. In the past, just a few right-wing legislators pushed for privatization and were routinely ignored. After all, the state constitution spelled out “the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.” But as times have changed, so has the interpretation of that guarantee.

Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s former Education Secretary, set up shop in Dallas with her American Federation for Children to push against “government schools” in favor of “school choice.” Political PACs such as Patriot Mobile Action, an arm of a Christian wireless provider in North Texas, continue pouring millions into school board races and book bans to promote more religious education. Patriot has joined other recently formed PACs with inspirational names such as Defend Texas Liberty and Texans for Excellent Education, all of which supposedly support better public schools but are actually part of the privatization push. But by far the most powerful opponents of public schools in the state are West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and the brothers Farris and Dan Wilks. Their vast political donations have made them the de facto owners of many Republican members of the Texas Legislature through organizations such as the now dissolved Empower Texans and the more recent Defend Texas Liberty, which the trio uses to promote restrictions on reproductive rights, voter access, and same-sex marriage. Almost as influential is the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Dunn is vice board chair.

A November 2021 TPPF fund-raising letter, sent to supporters in advance of the Eighty-eighth Legislature convening, argued that “public education is GROUND ZERO” in the fight for freedom. “The policy team and board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) believe it is now or never,” it read, signaling that the long-standing and robust alliance against vouchers was unusually vulnerable. “The time is ripe to set Texas children free from enforced indoctrination and Big Government cronyism in our public schools.” The letter went on to herald a $1.2 million “Set the Captives Free” campaign to lobby legislators to save Texas schoolchildren from “Marxist and sexual indoctrination” funded by “far-Left elites for decades.”

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, generously backed by Dunn, the Wilks brothers, and their organizations, has long been a proponent of privatizing public education (and of starving it through reductions in property taxes). He has made vouchers a primary legislative goal of the current session. Mayes Middleton, of Wallisville, a Republican state senator and former chair of the TPPF-aligned Texas House Freedom Caucus, filed a bill to create the “Texas Parental Empowerment Program,” proposing education savings accounts that are essentially a form of vouchers. Representative Matt Shaheen, of Plano, who is a member of the Texas Freedom Caucus, has introduced a measure that would guarantee state tax credits for those who donate to school-assistance programs—such as scholarships for kids wishing to go to private schools.

Governor Greg Abbott, knowing all too well the political headwinds that vouchers have faced, has long been wary of publicly supporting them, so he has undermined public schools in other ways. While campaigning early last year, he promised to amend the Texas constitution with a “parental bill of rights,” even though most, if not all, of those rights already existed. By then, “parental rights” had become a dog whistle to animate opponents of public education. (As the Texas Tribune put it: “Gov. Greg Abbott taps into parent anger to fuel reelection campaign.”)

During the recent intensifying crisis on the border, Abbott publicly floated a challenge to the state’s constitutional obligation to give all Texas children, including undocumented ones, a publicly funded education—a step his Republican predecessor, Rick Perry, had denounced years earlier as heartless. Then last spring, Abbott made headlines with his first full-throated public endorsement of a voucher program.

So here we are, with distrust in public schools advancing as fast as the latest COVID-19 variant. The forces behind the spread of this vitriol are no mystery. Those who would destroy public schools have learned to apply three simple stratagems: destabilize, divide, and, if that doesn’t work, open the floodgates of fear

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Hoax, Lies, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Republicans, School Choice, Texas, Vouchers

Carol Burris on Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Horrible Education Plan

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2023 //
26

Carol Burris is the executive director for of the Network for Public Education. in this post, which she wrote exclusively for the blog, she reveals the details of Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ plan to defund and destroy the public schools in her state.

Burris writes:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of Baptist minister and former Governor Mike Huckabee, missed learning the 9th commandment that prohibits telling a lie. As press secretary to Donald Trump, her distortions of the truth resulted in the editor of Forbes warning corporations against hiring Sanders and other Trump “propagandists,” writing, “Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.”

 

Now she is the Governor of Arkansas. On her first day in office and in her response to Biden’s State of the Union, she parroted the old “education is the civil rights issue of our time” line that has been used to justify horrible policies from school closures to charter schools and vouchers. However, the disconnect between what she says and what she does quickly became apparent. On her first day in office, she issued an executive order prohibiting “indoctrination and critical race theory in schools” and another banning the term “Latinx” from being used in state documents. State authorities are investigating AP African American Studies at Little Rock Central High School, where the majority of students are Black.

If we need further proof that this self-proclaimed champion of Civil Rights is more aptly described as a champion of Civil Wrongs, look at her recently leaked ed reform plan.

Here are its features:

 

The Privatization of Public Education:

· Her voucher plan is a universal ESA—the plan now favored by the far-right. These plans have few rules and no family eligibility requirements. They have become Entitlement Spending Accounts–cash going into the pockets of private school families regardless of income. The leaked plan does not say how taxpayers will pay for it. But everyone will be eligible by 2025. It includes Voucher funding for homeschools. The only restrictions will apply to vendors, so those who enroll their children in those recently uncovered Neo-Nazi homeschools can find ways to cash in.

· Increased tax credits for contributions to an existing voucher program.

· Local School Boards can contract with an open-enrollment charter school or private company to run a school campus at risk of state takeover due to low performance—and if they do, they get a financial incentive.

· Establishment of a charter-school construction fund for new charters and expansion.

· Elimination of the cap on charters.

· Charter school applications no longer need to be reviewed and approved by the local school district board of directors.

· All students attending a public school can take courses and earn credit for classes not offered in their school. By the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, students attending a public school that receives a letter grade of “C”, “D”, or “P” from the Arkansas School and District Accountability System may take their required courses (i.e. math, English, etc.) through the course choice program. Bet your bottom dollar that these courses will be online, with vendors like Stride K12 making a fortune.

Censoring and Controlling Curriculum

· K-3 literacy evaluation will be aligned with the “science of reading.”

· Before grade 5, teachers cannot provide classroom instruction on the following topics: sexually explicit materials, sexual reproduction, sexual intercourse, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

· School districts must implement an age-appropriate child sexual prevention program for grades K-12, allowing parents to preview materials and exempt their children from instruction. (I have no idea what a child sexual prevention program even is.)

· The Secretary of Education will review the Department of Education regulations, policies, materials, and communications to ensure they do not indoctrinate students with ideologies that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law.

· No school employee or student must attend training on prohibited indoctrination or Critical Race Theory.

 

Harmful Policies for Students

· 3rd-grade retention based on deficits in reading proficiency.

· An accountability system for pre-school education that includes student data.

· Literacy testing three times a year for all students in K-3.

· Curriculum tracking in Grade 8.

· Community service requirements, which may, for some students, be challenging to meet.

· Mandated cops on campus.

· Career-ready pathways in partnership with local business and industry leaders” translate workforce training programs to track students into low-paying and middle-wage jobs.

Punitive Policies for Teachers

 

· Elimination of due process in dismissals.

· Base salaries will no longer increase by years of experience or for Master’s degrees.

· Bonuses based on VAM.

There are a few likable initiatives in her plan, such as paid maternity leave for teachers, but if she makes districts fund them even as she drains their funding with charter schools and voucher expansion, a good initiative will be one more financial pressure on already underfunded schools.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ education plan is a hodgepodge of all the awful and ineffective ideas proposed since No Child Left Behind. The fingerprints of JEB! and the Walton family are over the leaked legislation.

Despite its hodgepodge nature, one thing is clear—its ultimate intent is to destroy public education in the state by slamming a fist down on students, public schools, and their teachers while propping up a wild and largely unaccountable privatized system.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Florida: The Hostile Takeover of New College by Rightwing Zealots Threatens Academic Freedom Everywhere

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2023 //
11

Ron DeSantis is a dangerous ideologue and a wannabe Mussolini. He speaks of freedom but practices coercion and cancel culture. In Florida, you are free to echo his beliefs but not to disagree. He is a bully.

This frightening story by Kathryn Joyce in Vanity Fair is a MUST-READ. DeSantis engineered the right-wing takeover of New College, a small, progressive college by installing new board members and ousting the President of New College. The extremists are portraying their swift decapitation of a left wing college as a model for other red states. Their plan is to turn New College into its ideological opposite, the “Hillsdale of the South.” Public colleges and universities in other red states should be on high alert. Vanity Fair (to which I subscribe) is usually behind a paywall, but this article is a one-time freebie.

The article begins:

It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of students, faculty, and parents who’d come to defend her record—and the hundreds more outside who weren’t admitted—saying she was sorry to disappoint them, but she couldn’t represent the mandate New College was being given through this “hostile takeover.” And she refused to support the claims of right-wing critics that the school had been indoctrinating its students.

In the audience, supporters hugged one another and students left in tears. The trustees moved on, voting to replace Okker with interim president Richard Corcoran, Florida’s recently departed education commissioner who, in a 2021 speech at Michigan’s right-wing Hillsdale College, came close to calling for the collapse of the public school system through student attrition and said the political war “will be won in education.” The trustees replaced the board chair too, made plans to replace the general counsel, and instructed administrators to start preparing to dismantle the college’s diversity offices. null

It was hard to imagine a starker change in leadership for New College, the small, nontraditional honors college of the Florida public university system, known for its lack of grades, individualized majors, and leftist student body, but which has also been eyed skeptically for years by Florida’s conservative-dominated legislature for its low enrollment and graduation rates. But that was exactly the transformation intended when Governor Ron DeSantis last month appointed six new trustees to the school’s 13-member board, in hopes they would remake New College into a right-leaning “classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south,” as his education commissioner Manny Diaz put it.

After the Republican-controlled Board of Governors appointed a seventh trustee, the new majority represented a team uniquely qualified to carry out DeSantis’s scorched-earth, right-wing education wars. There was Manhattan Institute fellow and anti-critical race theory hype man Christopher Rufo, who has most recently turned his efforts to laying “siege” to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; one of Hillsdale’s graduate school deans, Matthew Spalding, who also helped lead Donald Trump’s short-lived 1776 Commission; Charles Kesler of the right-wing Claremont Institute, which spent the Trump years retconning an intellectual platform for the MAGA movement; a senior editor at a religious right magazine; the Catholic author of a book accused of “fram[ing] LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness”; and a private Christian school cofounder with a penchant for Covid disinformation.

Following his appointment, Rufo immediately began speaking in martial terms: that conservatives were “recapturing higher education,” mounting a “landing team” to survey the school as well as a “hostage rescue operation” to “liberate” it from “cultural hostage takers.” Another new trustee, the private Christian academy cofounder Jason “Eddie” Speir, started a Substack to chronicle the transformation, sparking further panic in late January with a post proposingthe board declare a financial emergency, firing the entire staff and rehiring only those professors aligned with the school’s new business model. (Speir also used his newsletter to propose banning USA Today affiliates from covering campus events over a reader comment suggesting people throw dog poop on the new trustees; to request the entire board be given his essay, “‘Florida, Where Woke Goes to Die’ What Does It Mean?” as “supporting material”; and to ask if any readers had a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order he could borrow.)

Students, faculty, and alumni from New College and far beyond decried the takeover as an attack on academic freedom with national implications. Multiple scholarly organizations, including the American Anthropological Association and the American Historical Association, denounced it as “an orchestrated attack on academic integrity.” The University of Florida graduate assistants’ union tweeted a message of “Solidarity with New College students, faculty, and staff as DeSantis appoints a card-carrying fascist to the presidency.” At a campus rally preceding last Tuesday’s meeting, former Democratic state representative Carlos Guillermo Smith warned, “New College is their first test, their first trial run.” Repeating a Twitter hashtag protesting students had used, Smith added, “your campus is next.”

As though to prove them right, on February 1, Florida Republican state representative Spencer Roach—who cosponsored a recent Florida law mandating ideological surveys of public university campuses to “stem the tide of Marxist indoctrination”—tweeted that Okker’s termination should be replicated “at every university of the state.” In a January essay published in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Rufo touted the opportunities for emulation as well, writing that “If we are successful” in carrying out the mission of “institutional recapture,” what happens at New College “can serve as a model for other states.”

One horrified alum, Cayenne Linke, who attended New College in the 1990s, compared the takeover to a violent assault. “I feel like I’m standing at the precipice of the Fourth Reich, and I’m mostly powerless to fight back,” Linke said. “I weep for our nation if DeSantis wins a presidential bid and inevitably installs Rufo as education secretary.”

Please open the link and read the article in its entirety.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Fraud, Freedom of Speech, Funding, Higher Education, Lies, Religion, Republicans

Florida: Only 11 of the State’s 67 School Districts Offer a “Mandated” Black History Course

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2023 //
38

Ron DeSantis responds to critics of his campaign to stamp out “critical race theory” by saying that Florida mandates a high school course in Black history. What he doesn’t say is that the course is offered in only 11 of the state’s 67 districts.

It isn’t offered because the state has not funded the development of a curriculum and has ignored the “mandate.”

The unenforced mandate was passed in 1994 in an attempt to make amends for the atrocities that occurred in Rosewood, Florida, exactly 100 years ago.

In 1923, 200 white terrorists sacked and burned the all-black town of Rosewood, Florida. The town was burned to the ground, and some who resisted were lynched.

Mary Ellen Klas wrote in The Miami Herald:

The painful details of the unpunished lynchings and vigilante violence went from being family secrets to the foundation for legislation awarding the first reparations paid by a state in the nation’s history to survivors of racial violence. They also became the catalyst for the 1994 law requiring the teaching of Florida’s Black history in K-12 schools. The law requires that courses comprise five components: African beginnings, the passage to America, slavery, the Reconstruction period after the Civil War and the “contributions of African Americans to society.”

DeSantis and his education commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. object to any mention of the state’s violent racist history, and they certainly don’t want people today to know that the state agreed to pay reparations to the few survivors of the Rosewood massacre. That may be why they objected vehemently to any mention of the reparations movement in the AP course. They have a guilty conscience.

As DeSantis defends against charges that he is “erasing the state’s Black history,” he cites the 1994 law as evidence that it is required to be taught, but he is confronted with contradictions:

▪ Budget records show that the implementation of the law that has been on the books for decades has been not only understaffed and barely enforced, but DeSantis and legislative leaders have rejected requests to beef up resources to expand the teaching of Black history in Florida.

▪ The word “reparation,” which is central to the Rosewood saga that spawned the Black history law, is now considered off-limits in Florida classrooms because state officials have determined that discussion of the reparation movement, which involves offering financial restitution to the descendants of enslaved people for the harms of slavery and racial discrimination, is an attempt at “indoctrination.”

“We proudly require the teaching of African American history. We do not accept woke indoctrination masquerading as education,’’ wrote Education Commissioner Manny Diaz on Twitter last month as he defended the Department of Education’s decision to reject the Advanced Placement course in African-American Studies because it “lacked educational value.”

Hypocrites. DeSantis is hoping to become President by appealing to racism and to white grievances and resentment towards Blacks. He has amplified false claims about critical race theory, which involves the study of racism. He wants to make open bigotry respectable by loudly proclaiming that anyone who wants factual history and wants to eliminate racism is “woke.”

Lincoln spoke to “the better angels of our nature.” DeSantis appeals to the worst instincts of our nature.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article271882322.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Curriculum, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Hypocrisy, Lies, Race, Racism

Arizona: A Rightwing Bigot Takes Over as Superintendent of Schools

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2023 //
15

Linda Lyon, former president of the Arizona School Boards Association, writes in her blog “Restore Reason” about the newly elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, who held the same office from 2003 to 2013.

He intends, she says, to stop “critical race theory” and “social-emotional learning.” He seems to think that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are nothing more than left wing propganda. He’s a get-tough guy who will crack down on students and teachers.

She writes:

You’ve heard it said that an old dog can’t learn new tricks. AZ Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne is the living embodiment of this saying. His campaign gave us a preview that he was not going to change his ways. After all, he didn’t tout plans to improve our public schools (he was vying for the position overseeing “public” instruction after all), but rather, posted countless campaign signs shouting, “STOP CRITICAL RACE THEORY”. Never mind that actual CRT, (which rests on the premise that racial bias – intentional or not – is baked into U.S. laws and institutions), is not taught in elementary or secondary schools, but at the university level, most often in law schools. For Republicans, however, the term became synonymous with being “woke” and their focus on “owning the libs” carried Horne back to his old office.

This isn’t a new fight for Horne. After his recent election, MSNBC called him,

a pioneer in the right-wing crusade against school teachings centered on nonwhite people and social inequality.

As evidence, MSNBC cited his fight against “ethnic studies” which led to a ban on such instruction in Arizona schools in 2010. He also banned bilingual education services that same year which the Justice Department found illegal. The ban on ethnic studies held until 2017, when a federal judge overturned it, finding that it had an,

invidious discriminatory racial purpose, and a politically partisan purpose.

At 77, it is no surprise Horne hasn’t changed his spots. After all, it mostly works for him as evidenced by his previous elections to serve as State Superintendent from 2003 to 2011, as well as his election to a term as AZ Attorney General. Now, he’s swept into office on his STOP CRT broom, promising to,

eradicate teaching on diversity and equity and eliminate the use of social emotional learning in Arizona schools.

He’s off to a running start, canceling previously approved diversity presentations at the education conference hosted by his department and wrapping up today. Michaela Rose Classen, an education consultant originally scheduled to speak, expressed worry to the AZ Daily Star about excising social-emotional learning from schools saying,

When students enter the classroom, I think the assumption by some folks is that they just enter ready to learn. But there are different levels of experiences and often trauma that students are bringing into the classroom with them,’ Claussen said. ‘And they’re not quite developed yet emotionally, like we are as adults, to leave it at the door. So we have to really be cautious about how are we paying attention to student needs.

Horne doesn’t believe this type of learning has any place in the classroom. A 2022 Pew Research Poll, however, showed that about two-thirds of parents believe it is important their children’s school teaches social-emotional skills. These skills, in a nutshell, are:

  • Self-Management – managing emotions and behaviors to achieve one’s goals
  • Self-Awareness – recognizing one’s emotions and values as well as one’s strengths and challenges
  • Responsible Decision Making – making ethical, constructive choices about personal and social behavior
  • Relationship Skills – forming positive relationships, working in teams, dealing effectively with conflict
  • Social Awareness – Showing understanding and empathy

As a school board member in my 11th year of service, I can unequivocally say that many of our students need help with social-emotional skills. Should parents and communities teach these skills? YES, ABSOLUTELY!! But, in many cases, this isn’t happening and the global pandemic exacerbated difficulties with students trying to learn and interact with friends remotely. In fact, I’m guessing most would agree that our society in general needs help with these skills more than ever.

Horne, no doubt, thinks our kids just need to “man up” and stick to learning “readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic” with his stated focus on improving academics and increasing test scores. Unfortunately, the narrowing of curriculum and “teaching to the test” are making our students less prepared for the real world. And speaking of that, I noted he allowed presentations on suicide prevention at the education conference. Does he not understand the relationship social-emotional learning has on student mental health relating to not only suicide prevention but also the mass shootings plaguing our schools?

Another of Horne’s first acts was to eliminate the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Department at ADE, stating that in the context of CRT “equity has come to mean equal outcomes by racial groups”. That may be how sees it, but Google’s Dictionary defines equity as “the quality of being fair and impartial”. Doesn’t this mean we recognize not every child is born with the same opportunities to succeed and we should do what we can to make the opportunities available for those who are willing to apply themselves?

There will no doubt be many battles to fight with Horne, (with his “politically partisan purpose”), leading Arizona’s public schools. The inefficiency of jerking our teachers and students around with policy reversals is frustrating. But it is the potential for setting back another generation of our students that really worries me. As the slogan for the United Negro College Fund states, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Arizona, Censorship, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Racism, Republicans

College Board Pushes Back Against Florida Narrative

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2023 //
6

Writing in the Tampa Bay Times, journalist Jeff Solochek reports that the College Board released a letter last night denouncing the Florida State Department of Education. The College Board says it was naive in trusting the latter agency, which wanted to score political points.

Taken aback by Florida’s attacks against its new AP African American studies course, the College Board late Saturday denounced the state Department of Education, saying it used the course to advance a politically motivated agenda.

The organization’s letter, published at 8 p.m. Saturday, came just two days after it released another statement that did not take such a harsh tone as it pushed back against the department’s claims that portions of the course are “historically fictional.”

“There continue to be conversations and misinformation, and we felt the urgency to set the record straight and not wait another day to do so,” a College Board spokesperson said. The College Board publishes AP courses and exams.

In its latest unsigned statement, the College Board said it is proud of its “historic” course, which has been crafted by renowned scholars. It acknowledged it made mistakes during the rollout and accused Florida of exploiting the situation.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has criticized the course and said Florida would not accept it without revisions. DeSantis has been using attacks against the way race is taught in schools, calling it “woke,” in many speeches amid wide speculation that he will use the issue as part of a presidential campaign.

Neither the governor’s office nor the Department of Education could be reached for comments late Saturday on the College Board’s statement.

Related: Florida claims about AP African American studies are false, College Board says

The College Board stated in its latest letter that it regrets not having denounced the Florida Department of Education’s “slander” that the course “lacks educational value.” The failure to speak up “betrayed Black scholars everywhere,” College Board wrote.

It said it also should have made more clear that the course outline did not include all the scholarly articles, lectures and other materials that will be part of the course. That led to the idea that some important thinkers were eliminated, it said — something Florida officials claimed credit for.

“The vitriol aimed at these scholars is repulsive and must stop,” the group wrote.

College Board made other defenses of the materials and the course preparation. Then it turned its sights on Florida’s interaction with the course.

It called the Department of Education’s claims that it had been in frequent dialogue with College Board over the course content “a false and politically motivated charge.”

Florida officials have claimed credit for changes made to the course outline.

“We had no negotiations about the content of this course with Florida or any other state, nor did we receive any requests, suggestions or feedback,” College Board wrote.

It said the organization was “naive” not to publicize Florida’s course rejection when it first came in September. It said the letter misspelled the word “African” and contained no explanation of the rejection.

The article continues with more detail. What it does not explain is why every objection raised by Florida was met by either a deletion of the name or topic, or a shift from “included” to optional.

Did the College Board cave to Florida or reject Florida’s demands? You decide.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bias, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, History, Race, Racism

Florida: Sports Association Cancels Question About Female Athletes’ Menstrual Cycle

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
14

I accidentally posted this in the middle of the night, so am reposting.

In a surprising rebuff to Governor DeSantis, the Florida High School Athletic Association canceled a proposal to require all female athletes to supply information about their menstrual cycle. Presumably, the purpose of the question was to identify transgender athletes. But Florida reacted with outrage to the possibility that the school abd state would demand such personal and intrusive information about their daughters. Republicans like to claim that they want to curb the interference of government in people’s lives. But the GOP seems to have a fixation with controlling the bodies of girls and women. What could be more offensive than the question that was just rejected?

The Florida High School Athletic Association Thursday walked back a controversial proposal to require female high school athletes to disclose information regarding their menstrual history, following scathing criticism from students, parents, physicians, advocacy organizations and some lawmakers.

The FHSAA Board of Directors voted 14-2 during an emergency meeting to instead require students to submit just one page to schools to indicate if they are healthy enough to compete, or only able to participate partially, with their doctor signing off.

Board members Chris Patricca and Charlie Ward cast the two dissenting votes. The menstrual questions will be removed from the form.

The vote came after the board listened to emails from more than 150 people during the public comment period, the overwhelming majority of them deriding the board for its initial proposal.

The majority urged the board to adopt the recommendation to omit questions related to a student’s menstruation. Most speakers said the information should be kept between the parents, student and medical professional — not the schools.

“It is a gross and an extremely sexist invasion of privacy,’’ wrote one Miami-Dade parent of the board’s proposed mandate requiring female high school athletes to report their menstrual history or potentially be banned from playing sports in Florida.

The new one-page physical evaluation form, recommended by the association’s executive director Craig Damon earlier this week, omits any details about a player’s menstrual cycle. The school will still keep the form.

Notably, a question requiring student athletes to report their “sex assigned at birth” appears to have been quietly approved with no mention of the change by board members during the meeting, as first reported by the Palm Beach Post Thursday.

The previous form — which included the optional, though now rejected questions about a student’s menstrual history — asked athletes only to indicate their sex.

The FHSAA governs all high school sports in Florida, both at public and private schools. Its 16-member board is made up of 14 men and 2 women. Florida’s education commissioner, handpicked by Gov. Ron DeSantis, sits on the board and appoints three members.

The other 12 are elected from schools and include school athletic directors.

Member Doug Dodd, who is a father of three daughters, said he had “a real problem” with mandating the menstrual questions, and as a school board member in Citrus County, he said he didn’t believe the information needed to be shared with schools.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article272271043.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Extremism, Freedom, Gender

Miami Herald: Legislature Holds Special Session to Clean Up After DeSantis Blunders

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
7

Time and again, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has exceeded his authority by one-man stunts, created to win national publicity and demonstrate that he’s more fascist than Trump.

Now, his puppet legislature is meeting in special session to clean up the mess DeSantis left behind.

The Miami Herald editorial board excoriates his authoritarian control of weak-kneed legislators.

With Gov. DeSantis’ iron-fisted control of the legislative process in Florida, it’s not elected officials who must conform to the limits of the law; it’s the law that gets modified according to the whims of elected officials.

If you pass a half-baked bill in vengeful haste, someone will clean up your mess. When you get sued for allegedly violating your own migrant-relocation program, no worries, your friends in the Legislature will expand that program and give you ample power — and cash — to make it “right.” When you tout illegal voting arrests of people who the state allowed to vote, and it turns out you might have chosen the wrong prosecutors to bring those charges, you simply change the law.

That’s the story of the special legislative session that began this week in the Florida Capitol. The urgent matter the Republican-controlled Legislature must address is cleaning up the governor’s most controversial policies. Lawmakers couldn’t even wait another month until their regular two-month session that starts in March.

To be fair, there are other valid issues being discussed: providing relief for Hurricane Ian victims and expanding a law that allows college athletes to sign endorsement deals. But this is no ordinary special session. The bulk of it is about giving DeSantis more — and unchecked — power.

Take the law that tried to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District in Central Florida last year. Created in the 1960s, the special taxing district is controlled by Disney and serves as the governing body for the Walt Disney World Resort. Was it time to revisit this unusual arrangement that ceded so much power to a private company (the district can even build its own nuclear power plant)? Maybe, but good governance wasn’t really top of mind. The Legislature, egged on by DeSantis, was retaliating against Disney for opposing the parental-rights law critics nicknamed “Don’t say gay.”

When lawmakers passed a bill to dissolve Reedy Creek last year, they didn’t hash out what to do with Disney’s $1 billion debt that, without the company’s ability to tax itself, would fall on the residents of Orange and Osceola counties.

There’s no mea culpa on the part of Republicans, though they did give themselves until June 1 to make changes to the law. They now want to maintain the district under a different name, take away Disney’s power to control it and give it to our almighty governor, who would nominate the five people who make up the district’s board. We suppose there’s one silver lining: The board would lose the authority to build a nuclear plant.

House Bill 5B and Senate Bill 6B are another gift to the governor from lawmakers. The state is defending a lawsuit filed by a Democratic state senator challenging the taxpayer-funded flights of mostly Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. Those migrants were duped into believing they would find jobs and resources on the island.

The lawsuit centers on a key component of the relocation program lawmakers funded last year at DeSantis’ urging: that it relocate migrants from Florida, not other states.

Republicans want to get rid of that fine print and give DeSantis the unchecked authority to relocate migrants from anywhere in the country as long as they have been released by the federal government pending the resolution of their case. He also would get $10 million and the possibility to access $500 million in emergency funds because he signed an executive order declaring an immigration emergency in January, the Herald reported.

This gives DeSantis the ability to tap into millions of dollars to target any voter-rich Republican primary state in his expected presidential run, courtesy of taxpayers. The premise of the program is that the border crisis presents a threat to Floridians, but whether or not those migrants would ever make it to the Sunshine State is inconsequential at this point.

The other legislative clean-up relates to the state’s new election-crimes office, created by the Legislature after Donald Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election became a major plank in the Republican Party platform. Last year, DeSantis proudly boasted the office had arrested 20 felons who voted illegally.

Those voters told the Herald and other news outlets they were given voter registration cards by their local election offices. DeSantis’ own administration didn’t flag them as ineligible. Some cases were dismissed by judges who found that the statewide prosecutors who filed the charges didn’t have the jurisdiction to do so.

The Legislature’s first order should be to prevent more ineligible voters from slipping through the cracks. Instead, its solution is to make it easier to prosecute them after they have already cast ballots. Legislation would clarify that the Office of Statewide Prosecution can investigate voting-related crimes. The office reports to a Republican, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and is a safer way for DeSantis to score wins than going through Florida’s 20 states attorney, prosecutors who are elected locally.

One-party control of Florida’s government is nothing new. What’s new is that the Legislature has become just another arm of the governor’s office. Its role isn’t to serve as a check on the executive power anymore, but to rubber stamp and inflate the man whose ambition and thirst for the spotlight have turned governing into a power-grabbing spectacle.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Vouchers
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