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Florida: Vouchers Pay for TVs, Disney Passes, and Water Sports

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2023 //
21

The Orlando Sentinel reported that the $8,000 voucher handed out to every student in a non-public school may be used for non-educational purchases. Florida endorsed universal vouchers so family income doesn’t matter. Rich families get vouchers too just so long as their children do not attend a public school.

As Florida lawmakers expanded eligibility for school vouchers this year, they also gave parents more ways to spend the money.

Theme park passes, 55-inch TVs, and stand-up paddleboards are among the approved items that recipients can buy to use at home. The purchases can be made by parents who home-school their children or send them to private schools, if any voucher money remains after paying tuition and fees.

The items appear in a list of authorized expenses in a 13-page purchasing guide published this summer by Step Up For Students, the scholarship funding organization that manages the bulk of Florida’s vouchers. Many of the items are similar to what was permitted for vouchers to students with disabilities in the past, but now they’re available to anyone who receives an award of about $8,000.

The list quickly raised eyebrows as it circulated.

“If we saw school districts spending money like that, we would be outraged,” said Damaris Allen, executive director of Families for Strong Public Schools, who recently started speaking out publicly on the issue. “We want to be conservative with our tax dollars. We want to be sure it is being used for worthwhile things.”

By comparison, Allen and others noted, teachers who want some of the same items for their classrooms would have to pay out-of-pocket or turn to other fundraising sources such as GoFundMe because schools won’t pay for them…

Supporters of the expansion don’t consider the program as wasting taxpayer money. They see it as allowing families to customize education according to their children’s interests.

“We need to stop thinking like it’s 1960 — that the only answer is four walls with traditional districts leading the charge,” Jeanne Allen, founder of the national Center for Education Reform, said in an email.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers

Chris Rufo: A Soldier in the War Against Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2023 //
16

Rob Rogers created an excellent TikTok video that shows where Chris Rufo fits into the war on public schools. Rufo invented the “critical race theory” hysteria out of whole cloth. He’s proud of his malicious role in “laying siege to the institutions.” Of course, Ron DeSantis appointed him to the board of New College as part of a rightwing takeover of that once highly esteemed liberal arts college that welcomed free-thinkers. To people like DeSantis and Rufo, free thinking is anathema.

To get the full Rufo treatment, watch his speech at Hillsdale College from April 2022.

I try to imagine a world in which everyone thought as Rufo wants them to: ban the artists, the creatives, the innovators, the dissenters, the dreamers, the people who think differently. I don’t want to live in that world. It feels like North Korea.

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Creativity, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, For-Profit, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding

Heather Cox Richardson: The Lies Embedded in Florida’s Social Studies Curriculum

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2023 //
88

Heather Cox Richardson, a historian, analyzed the controversial Florida social studies curriculum and explains how they attempt to minimize racism and slavery. Their fault lies not in one or two sentences but in their central ideas. The influence of Hillsdale College is blatant in the document’s apologetics. Richardson posted this keen analysis on July 22, but I missed it. I’m pleased to share it now.

She wrote:

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order.

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

—

Notes:

https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20653/urlt/6-4.pdf

Categories Bigotry, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Florida, History, Propaganda, Racism

Fact-Checking DeSantis on Abortion at GOP Debate

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
21

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told a story during the GOP debate about a baby who survived multiple attempts to abort her, presumably to justify his near-total ban on abortions (after six weeks). But the Miami Herald reported the true story, which is very different from DeSantis’ version. The event occurred long before abortion was legal, and the person who tried to abort the baby with a coat hanger was the baby’s father.

The story was reported by Julie K. Brown with the aid of Sarah Blaskey, investigative reporters for the Miami Herald and was based on statements previously recorded by Penny Hopper, contemporaneous newspaper articles, public records and an interview with a family member who asked not to be identified. The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

At Wednesday’s Republican candidates debate, during a discussion of late-term abortion, Gov. Ron DeSantis told a horrific but puzzling story.

“I know a lady in Florida named Penny,” the GOP presidential candidate said. “She survived multiple abortion attempts. She was left discarded in a pan. Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to another hospital.”

Critics of the governor flocked to social media to suggest the “Penny” story was made up or wildly embellished. Supporters countered that liberals were triggered by an ugly truth.

Penny is real and her last name is Hopper. But DeSantis failed to note key details from her remarkable story: The person who tried to end Penny’s life in the womb was not a doctor or even an illegal abortion provider — it was her father. And his effort to abort his daughter with a coat hanger took place almost two decades before the Supreme Court’s seismic Roe v. Wade decision, which established a woman’s right to an abortion…

Miriam “Penny” Hopper’s story begins in 1955, in a hospital in Wauchula, a small farming town in Central Florida. News reports at the time described her as a miracle baby, born weighing 1 pound, 11 ounces. She was so tiny that the nurses initially had to feed her with a dropper.

Her now-deceased father, Charles Wesley Browder Sr., was a U.S. Army sergeant during World War II who served on the front lines in Europe when he was just 20. His family said he was a “scout” who performed advance reconnaissance missions before being wounded, captured and tortured by the Germans. Military records show he was discharged with honors in 1945 and was awarded four Bronze Stars in addition to a Purple Heart, a Good-Conduct Medal and the World War II Victory Medal.

Charles married Glenda Marie Pierce, and they settled in Wauchula, Florida, about 75 miles from Tampa.

In 1953, birth records show, Hopper’s parents had a son, Charles Browder Jr., who was born at Walker Memorial Hospital in nearby Avon Park. At the time of the 1950 census, Glenda worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office, and Charles was a salesman. Hopper’s mother soon became pregnant with her second child, also a boy. In a video posted on YouTube several years ago by a group called “Florida Right to Life,” Hopper said that she learned later that her father had used the coat hanger to abort her mother’s second child. It is one of at least two videos on the Internet relating her story, although the videos differ on some details.

When her mother became pregnant a third time with her, Penny Browder said her father returned to the same method in an attempt to end the pregnancy, later explaining to his daughter that he was earning only $125 a week, which he felt wasn’t enough to support a larger family.

Browder’s mother developed complications during the coat-hanger procedure. The couple rushed to a nearby medical facility in the middle of the night, with her mother very ill and bleeding. In the video interviews, Hopper said her parents were met at the clinic by a doctor in his pajamas. He examined her mother — and concluded that the fetus had no heartbeat. He advised the couple to abort the baby, telling them the child would likely be stillborn.

“If it lives, it will be a burden on you your whole life,” the doctor allegedly said. He used saline and injected her mother with a drug, then left, instructing the nurse to “discard the baby dead or alive,” Hopper said in a video interview, a segment that was to be incorporated into a TV commercial by the anti-abortion group “Faces of Choice.” It can be found on YouTube.

When the baby arrived shortly after 3 a.m., the nurse wrapped her in a towel and placed her in a pan, Penny Hopper said one video. In the other, Hopper said her mother told her the baby was placed in a basket.

The following day, Glenda’s mother and aunt came to check on her at the clinic, where she was recuperating. They found the baby outside on a back porch, unwrapped her, and discovered she was alive, Hopper said.

“My grandmother was so upset she called the local police,” she said.

A news clipping incorporated into a video segment said the baby was transported from the medical facility in Wauchula to what was then Morrell Regional Hospital in Lakeland. The news clipping, which isn’t labeled, seems to partially contradict Hopper’s story, as it states that the doctors at the Wauchula facility “put forth greater efforts to keep the 1 pound, 11 ounce baby alive.” The story said the child was on the “brink of death” when she was transported to Lakeland, with a police escort that crashed on the way to the hospital.

The Tampa Tribune from Nov. 29, 1955, reported on the crash, saying the baby had been born premature that morning. The infant was placed in an incubator, where she remained for four months. Hopper, however, said that while she was in the hospital her father tried to disconnect her from the incubator because he was upset at how much the care was costing. The hospital summoned the police to restrain him, Hopper said in one of the interviews.

“He basically couldn’t stand the thought I was alive,” Hopper said.

In March 1956, she was finally strong enough to go home with her parents…

Anti-abortion groups use Penny Hopper’s story to demonstrate why abortion should be banned.

Pro-abortion groups use it to demonstrate why abortion should be safe and legal. Coat-hanger abortions will resume, and they endanger the life of the mother.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article278586634.html#storylink=cpy

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Categories DeSantis, Elections, Florida, Health, Lies

Michael Hiltzik: The Republican Plan to Dumb Down America’s Youth

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
24

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, finds a pattern in the Republican attacks on the schools and universities. Their hostility to teaching Black history, their encouragement of book banning, their strategic defunding of higher education, their treatment of teaching about race, gender, and climate change as “indoctrination”—together point to a goal: the dumbing down of American young people.

Republicans say they want to get rid of “indoctrination” but they are busily erasing free inquiry and critical thinking. What do they actually want? Indoctrination.

He reminds us of the immortal words of former President Donald J. Trump: “I love the uneducated.” Republicans do not want students to think critically about racism or the past. They do not want them to reflect on anything that makes them “uncomfortable.” They want to shield them from “divisive concerns.” They want them to imbibe a candy-coated version of the past, not wrestle with hard truths.

He writes:

For reasons that may not be too hard to understand, Republicans and conservatives seem to be intent on turning their K-12 schools, colleges and universities into plantations for raising a crop of ignorant and unthinking students.

Donald Trump set forth the principle during his 2016 primary campaign, when he declared, “I love the poorly educated.”

In recent months, the right-wing attack on public education has intensified. The epicenter of the movement is Florida under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, where the faculty and course offerings of one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, New College, have been eviscerated purportedly to wipe out what DeSantis calls “ideological indoctrination.”

The state’s K-12 schools have been authorized to supplement their curricula with animated cartoons developed by the far-right Prager University Foundation that flagrantly distort climate science and America’s racial history, the better to promote fossil fuels, undermine the use of renewable energy and paint a lily-white picture of America’s past.

Then there’s West Virginia, which is proposing to shut down nearly 10% of its academic offerings, including all its foreign language programs. The supposed reason is a huge budget deficit, the harvest of a systematic cutback in state funding.

In Texas, the State Library and Archives Commission is quitting the American Library Assn., after a complaint by a Republican state legislator accusing the association of pushing “socialism and Marxist ideology.”

In Arkansas, state education officials told schools that they may not award credit for the Advanced Placement course in African American history. (Several school districts said they’d offer students the course anyway.) This is the course that Florida forced the College Board to water down earlier this year by alleging, falsely, that it promoted “critical race theory.”

I must interject here that I’m of two minds about this effort. On the one hand, an ignorant young electorate can’t be good for the republic; on the other, filling the workforce with graduates incapable of critical thinking and weighed down by a distorted conception of the real world will reduce competition for my kids and grandkids for jobs that require knowledge and brains.

Let’s examine some of these cases in greater depth.

Prager University, or PragerU, isn’t an accredited institution of higher learning. It’s a dispenser of right-wing charlatanism founded by Dennis Prager, a right-wing radio host. The material approved for use in the schools includes a series of five- to 10-minute animated videos featuring the fictional Leo and Layla, school-age siblings who travel back in time to meet historical figures.

One encounter is with Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist. The goal of the video is to depict “Black lives matter” demonstrations as unrestrained and violent — “Why are they burning a car?” Leo asks while viewing a televised news report. The animated Douglass speaks up for change achieved through “patience and compromise.”

This depiction of Douglass leaves experts in his life and times aghast. Douglass consistently railed against such counsel. Of the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the union but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act — arguably the most detested federal law in American history — he stated that it illustrated how “slavery has shot its leprous distillment through the life blood of the nation.” In 1861, he thundered that “all compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery, is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law.”

Patience? The video depicts Douglass quoting from an 1852 speech to a Rochester anti-slavery society in which he said “great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages.”

But it doesn’t include lines from later in the speech, reproaching his audience for prematurely celebrating the progress of abolition: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … all your religious parade and solemnity, … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Another video in the series parrots the fossil fuel industry’s talking points against wind and solar power: Standing over the corpse of a bird supposedly slain by flying into a wind turbine, the schoolkids’ interlocutor states, “Like many people … you’ve been misled about renewable energy, and their impact on the environment…. Windmills kill so many birds, it’s hard to track how many…. Wind farms and solar farms disrupt huge amounts of natural habitat.”

Acid rain, pollution, global warming — those consequences of fossil fuel energy aren’t mentioned. The video ends with a pitch for nuclear power, never mind the unsolved question of what to do with its radioactive waste products.

PragerU’s sedulous attack on renewables perhaps shouldn’t be much a surprise: Among its big donors is the Wilks family, which derives its fortune from fracking and which approved “future payment” of $6.25 million to PragerU in 2013.

As for New College, its travails under the DeSantis regime have been documented by my colleague Jenny Jarvie, among many others.

In a nutshell, the Sarasota institution possessed a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s outstanding havens for talented, independent-minded students. Then came DeSantis. He summarily replaced its board of trustees with a clutch of right-wing stooges including Christopher Rufo, known for having concocted the panic over critical race theory out of thin air and then marketed it as a useful culture war weapon to unscrupulous conservative politicians, including DeSantis.

Rufo and his fellows fired the university president and installed a sub-replacement-level GOP timeserver, Richard Corcoran, in her place. Faculty and students have fled. Students who stayed behind and were in the process of assembling their course schedules for the coming year are discovering at the last minute that the courses are no longer offered because their teachers have been fired or quit.

Instead of ambitious scholars committed to open inquiry, Corcoran has recruited athletes to fill out the student body, even though the college has no athletic fields for many of them to play on. According to USA Today, New College now has 70 baseball players, nearly twice as many as the University of Florida’s Division I NCAA team.

More to the point, the average SAT and ACT scores and high-school grade point averages have fallen from the pre-Corcoran level, while most of the school’s merit-based scholarships have gone to athletes. New College, in other words, has transitioned from a top liberal arts institution into a school that places muscle-bound underachievers on a pedestal. DeSantis calls this “succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission.”

Finally, West Virginia University. Under its president, Gordon Gee — who previously worked his dubious magic at Brown Universityand Ohio State University, among other places — the school built lavish facilities despite declining enrollments. The construction program at the land grant university contributed to a $45-million deficit for the coming year, with expectations that it would rise to $75 million by 2028.

But the main problem was one shared by many other public universities — the erosion of public funding. As the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy points out, “if West Virginia lawmakers had simply kept higher education funding at the same levels as a decade ago, West Virginia University would have an estimated additional $37.6 million in state funding for [fiscal year] 2024, closing the majority of this year’s budget gap.”

The decision on which programs to shutter at WVU points to a shift in how public university trustees see the purpose of their schools, trying to align them more with economic goals set by local industries rather than the goal of providing a well-rounded education to a state’s students. Trustees in some states, including North Carolina and Texas, have injected themselves into academic decisions traditionally left to administrators, often for partisan political reasons.

When it comes to interference in educational policies by conservatives, such as what’s happened in Florida, Texas and Arkansas, there’s no justification for taking these measures at face value — that is, as efforts to remove “indoctrination” from the schools. The truth is that the right-wing effort serves the purposes of white supremacists and advocates of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — they’re moving to inject indoctrination that conforms more to their own ideologies.

Take the attack on critical race theory, or at least the version retailed by Rufo and his ilk. “The right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle,” the Black scholar Robin D.G. Kelley of UCLA has observed, by caricaturing a four-decade-long scholarly effort to analyze “why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality” into “a racist plot to teach white children to hate themselves, their country, and their ‘race.’”

(The inclusion of Kelley’s work in the AP African American Studies course was cited as a “concern” by Florida officials in their rationale for rejecting the course; Kelley’s work was suppressed by the College Board in its effort to make the course more acceptable to the state Department of Education.)

These attacks are couched in the vocabulary of “parents’ rights” and student freedom, but they don’t serve the students at all, nor do they advance the rights of parents interested in a good, comprehensive education for their children, as opposed to one dictated by the most narrow-minded ideologues in their state.

Where will it end? Florida’s ham-fisted educational policies won’t produce graduates with the intellectual equipment to succeed in legitimate universities, much less in the world at large. The only university many will be qualified to attend will be Prager U, and that won’t be good for anyone.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Higher Education, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Racism, Stupid, Trump

Ron DeSantis, Hypocrite

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
19

On August 20, the New York Times published a story about how Ron DeSantis joined the “ruling class” but now campaigns against it. His story is shot through with hypocrisy. He paints himself as the public school kid from middle-class Dunedin, Florida, surrounded by snobs from private schools who looked down on him. Yet now as governor, he treats public schools and their teachers with contempt and expanded vouchers to pay billions of taxpayer dollars for kids to go to private schools, including high-income families.

Why is he, the public school kid, subsidizing private and religious schools? Why is he so hostile to public schools? He complains that public schools indoctrinate their students yet he’s willing to send kids to religious schools whose purpose is indoctrination. Why does he subsidize the tuition of rich kids who go to private schools? Aren’t those the kind of kids who treated him with condescension?

Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis nestled into his chair onstage in Naples, Fla., to explain to an audience of the would-be conservative elite his journey through the reigning liberal one they hoped to destroy. His host was Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has become an academic hub of the Trump-era right. His subject was Yale University, where Mr. DeSantis was educated and where, as he tells it, he first met the enemy.

The story begins:

“I’m a public school kid,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience, unspooling a story that he has shared in recent years with aides, friendly interviewers, donors, voters and readers of his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free.” “My mom was a nurse, my dad worked for a TV ratings company, installing the metering devices back then. And I show up in jean shorts and a T-shirt.” The outfit “did not go over well with the Andover and Groton kids” — sometimes it is Andover and Groton, sometimes it is Andover and Exeter, sometimes all three — who mocked his lack of polish.

Worse than Yale’s snobbery was its politics: College was “the first time that I saw unadulterated leftism,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition this March. “We’re basically being told the Soviet Union was the victim in the Cold War.” Teachers and students alike “rejected God, and they hated our country,” he assured the audience in Naples. “When I get people that submit résumés,” he said, “quite frankly, if I got one from Yale I would be negatively disposed.”

Then there are the parts of the story he doesn’t tell: How his new baseball teammates at Yale — mostly fellow athletic recruits from the South and West who likewise viewed themselves as Yale outsiders — were among those who teased him about his clothes, and how he would nevertheless adopt their insular culture as his own. How he joined one of Yale’s storied “secret societies,” those breeding grounds of future senators and presidents, but left other members with the impression that he would have preferred to be tapped by a more prestigious one. How he shared with friends his dream of going to Harvard Law School — not law school, Harvard Law School — and successfully applied there, stacking one elite credential neatly onto another, and co-founded a tutoring firm that touted “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.” How his Yale connections helped him out-raise rivals as a first-time candidate for Congress, and how he featured his Ivy credentials — “a political scarlet letter as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” Mr. DeSantis likes to say — on his campaign websites, sometimes down to the precise degree of honors earned. And how that C.V. helped sell him to an Ivy-obsessed President Donald J. Trump, whose 2018 endorsement helped propel Mr. DeSantis to the governor’s office in Florida, where his Yale baseball jersey is displayed prominently on the wall next to his desk…

For Mr. DeSantis and his allies, the culture wars are the central struggle of American public life, and schools are the most important battleground where they will be fought. “Education is our sword,” Mr. DeSantis’s then education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, explained to a Hillsdale audience in 2021. And Mr. DeSantis is the man to wield it — a self-made striver who was “given nothing,” as he told the audience attending his campaign kickoff in Iowa in May. “These elites are not enacting an agenda to represent us. They’re imposing their agenda on us, via the federal government, via corporate America and via our own education system.”

DeSantis has aggressively taken political control of Florida’s schools and universities, passing laws that limit or eliminate what may be taught about gender and race. He has encouraged parent vigilantes to scour classrooms and libraries for books on controversial topics and ban them. His ally, radical conservative Chris Rufo, is quoted in the article:

“The goal of the university is not free inquiry,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and one of the new trustees [of New College], said during a recent appearance in California. Instead, he argued, conservatives need to deploy state power to retake public institutions wherever they can.

“The universities are not overly politicized. The universities are overly ideologized and insufficiently politicized,” Mr. Rufo said. “We should repoliticize the universities and understand that education is at heart a political question.”

At Yale, DeSantis joined Delta Kappa Epsilon (Dekes), which was known for its vicious hazing of pledges. As an upper-class member, DeSantis was known for bullying pledges and forcing them to engage in pranks like dropping their pants and exposing their genitals, while the older members mocked their private parts.

The story says that DeSantis took a course on the Cold War taught by the esteemed scholar John Lewis Gaddis, who was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union. In other words, DeSantis lied about being exposed to pro-Soviet views of the Cold War.

DeSantis portrayed Harvard Law School, where he studied, as a bastion of left wing thought. But the Dean of the law school when DeSantis arrived belonged to the conservative Federalist Society. And he was not the only member of that group on the faculty.

A 2005 survey of The Harvard Law Review, published in the Federalist Society’s flagship publication, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, found that staff members “identifying themselves as left-of-center did not comprise even a majority.”

DeSantis neglects to mention that he was an active member of the Harvard Law School’s Federalist Society. He prefers to play the victim.

When he ran for Congress and then for governor, he tapped his Yale and Harvard networks to raise money.

But then he discovered there was even more political advantage for him if he played the role of the enemy of the ruling class.

How better to attack the ruling class than to destroy the public schools that enabled him to enter Yale? If this makes no sense, neither does DeSantis’ fable about being victimized at Yale and Harvard.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Character, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Hypocrisy, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

Scott Maxwell: Ethics Are a Bad Joke in DeSantis’ Regime

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2023 //
5

Scott Maxwell, a brilliant opinion writer for the Orlando Sentinel, wrote about the latest scandal in DeSantisland. The man in charge of the state ethics office was recently appointed by DeSantis to be head of DeSantis’ board that controls Disney World in Orlando. It’s illegal for a public employee to serve as ethics commissioner. Immediately after Maxwell’s article appeared, the general counsel for the state ethics commission announced that Glen Gilzean could not hold both jobs and had to choose one. What’s interesting is not just the conflict with the law but Gilzean’s former employment with the Urban League, which advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion, all of which DeSantis opposes.

Be it noted that Gilzean responded to the ruling by the ethics commission’s counsel by attacking the release of the ruling:

Instead of resigning, Glen Gilzean is questioning whether Florida’s ethics commission “weaponized” a memo that concluded he was ineligible to serve as both the state’s ethics chairman and administrator of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ tourism oversight district.

The opinion released on Thursday concluded that Gilzean couldn’t do both jobs because of a state law that bars ethics commissioners from holding public employment.

Scott Maxwell writes:

Perhaps you read Tuesday’s front-page story about how the head of Florida’s ethics commission appears to be in violation of … wait for it … Florida’s ethics laws.

This might be the most Florida story ever. The only thing that could make it more Floridian would be if an alligator or sinkhole were somehow involved.

The news was definitely a head-shaker. But it also underscores the ugly reality of just how lax the state’s ethics enforcement is. Public officials routinely flout rules without paying much of a price.

The problem with that is that Florida statutes say no public employees are allowed to serve as ethics commissioners. That’s for a pretty obvious reason: Because you don’t want the fox guarding the henhouse — a public official in a position to investigate himself.

The rule isn’t complicated either. Chapter 112.321 of the Florida statutes describes the requirements for ethics commissioners. And in the very first section, there is this simple, seven-word sentence: “No member may hold any public employment…”

On April 21, Gilzean’s ethics commission dismissed an ethics complaint against Gov. Ron DeSantis that had been filed by allies of Donald Trump who’d argued that DeSantis was inappropriately using the governor’s office to boost his national political profile.

Then on May 10, the governor’s appointees at the Disney taxing district announced they wanted to give Gilzean the $400,000-a-year job.

So, to recap: The governor’s Disney appointees appointed the governor’s ethics appointee to a high-paying job less than three weeks after that same ethics appointee dismissed a complaint against the man who’d appointed him to that position.

Hillbilly family reunions look less incestuous…

Two weeks ago, Gilzean announced the Disney taxing district was ending all of its “so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives,” calling them “illegal and simply unAmerican.”

Now, if you heard DeSantis say something like that, it wouldn’t be surprising. But it sounded odd coming from a man who spent the last seven-plus years working for the Urban League — a civil rights group that devoutly espouses the value of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) endeavors. The Urban League not only preaches the value of inclusion, the national nonprofit actually offers services to help otherorganizations implement DEI programs “to make your organization a more equitable workplace.”

Tax records filed last year show Gilzean earned $172,272 while working as CEO of the Central Florida Urban League.

Perhaps not surprisingly, after Gilzean trash-talked the very diversity initiatives his previous employer had touted, his former boss responded with force. National Urban League CEO Marc Morial said Gilzean’s about-face was a “betrayal of the values at the very core of our mission,” telling the Tallahassee Democrat that Gilzean’s “crass political expediency is all the more offensive given his previous vantage point to the harm he knows it will cause.”

Gilzean didn’t respond to questions about that issue either.

If you find this unsavory, you can lodge a complaint with…the state ethics commission.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Ethics, Florida

Florida: Huge Increase in Voucher Applications, Available Now to Rich and Poor

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2023 //
5

At the urging of Governor DeSantis, Florida’s legislature rubber stamped his proposal to expand vouchers to all students in the state without income restrictions. As Leslie Postal reported in The Orlando Sentinel, demand for vouchers in the state surged by 44%. Many of the applicants are already enrolled in private and religious schools. In other states where vouchers were made universal, most of the vouchers were claimed by students who never attended public schools. Thus, instead of “saving poor kids from failing public schools,” vouchers have become a subsidy for affluent families.

Postal writes:

The number of Florida students awarded school vouchers jumped by more than 117,500 this year, mostly due to a new state law that made all students eligible for scholarship programs once targeted to low-income children.

By Aug. 11, more than 382,000 students had received vouchers for the 2023-24 school year, giving them access to money for private school tuition, homeschooling services or therapies for children with disabilities, according to Step Up For Students, the private group that administers most of Florida’s scholarship programs.

That represents a 44% increase from a year ago when about 264,400 scholarships were awarded by the same date….

The scholarships are worth an average of about $7,800 a year, though actual amounts vary by student’s grade level and by county. The voucher programs are still required to prioritize giving awards to children whose families earn no more than 185% of the federal poverty limit, or a family of four earning $55,000 a year or less. But everyone, whether middle class or very rich, is now eligible to apply….

The hike in scholarships was expected after Gov. Ron DeSantis in March signed the new law, which he called a “major game changer” that would boost educational options for families. The law was celebrated by GOP leaders, school choice advocates and parents already paying for private school who are now eligible for state assistance.

They argued families who never opted for free public schools still pay school taxes and so it makes sense to provide them school vouchers to help offset private school costs.

This week, the Archdiocese of Miami credited the new law with boosting enrollment at its Catholic schools and creating waitlists at some campuses. “Step Up Blew Up,” it wrote on its website, like many, using Step Up as shorthand for Florida’s school scholarship programs.

The archdiocese noted that at one Catholic school in Coral Gables, with about 900 students, the number of families receiving state scholarships leapt from 160 last year to more than 560 this year.

But the new law also faces fierce critics. They worry its price tag — one estimate says it will cost the state $4 billion in its first years — will devastate public school budgets and dislike that private schools that take vouchers face little regulation from the state.

“The public dollars that they have given to private schools, those are our public school dollars that they are now giving to people to go to a private school,” Castor Dentel said. “Those are public school dollars they are now handling over to unaccountable private schools where you don’t have to have a qualified teacher.”

Private schools that take state vouchers are mostly religious schools, and they make their own decisions as far as teacher qualifications, curriculum and facilities. Some have hired teachers without college degrees and employees with criminal convictions, set up in rundown buildings and offered curriculum outside mainstream academics, the Orlando Sentinel has reported.

Providing scholarships to families whose children already were in private school or were being homeschooled “is absolutely taking away from public school dollars,” said Norin Dollard, a senior policy analyst with the Florida Policy Institute, a progressive think tank that warned back in February that the new law would cost the state billions of dollars.

Dollard said the state earmarked about $3.3 billion for all its scholarship programs this school year and likely will run through that by the end of October, given the number of awards announced so far.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Florida, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers

Meet Trump’s Favorite Edupreneur: Erika Donalds

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2023 //
26

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Florida: Fear in the Classroom, the Republican Goal

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2023 //
38

The Miami Herald published an editorial describing the climate of fear that’s descended on the classrooms of Florida. That’s exactly what Republicans want, says the editorial board. Once people start self-censoring, the battle for censorship is won.

The editorial board wrote:

The fear is the point.

Schools in Florida have been canceling — and then, in some cases, reinstating — Advanced Placement psychology courses for high school students because they’ve been told by the College Board, or simply believe, the classes would violate the state’s ban on lessons involving sexual orientation and gender identity.

The worry is understandable — and a bonus for a state intent on waging culture wars in schools and crushing any dissent. If you can get people to self-censor, you’ve pretty much won the battle.

School districts in Miami-Dade and Broward counties announced Wednesday that they would be among those offering the course, although in Broward it will be require parents to “opt-in.” The districts’ decisions came after Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., who is from Miami and once taught in the public schools here, said the class could be taught.

But the fact that school districts have to publicly announce their intent to teach a class that has been around since 1993 is indicative of the problem. Under Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his lockstep Legislature, fear has seeped into schools. Teachers and school districts are rightfully worried about violating the Parental Rights in Education Act, the “Don’t say gay” law that outlawed sexual orientation and gender identity teachings. The penalties for a violation are potential career-enders, teaching licenses suspended or revoked..

This all happened after the College Board, the New York City-based nonprofit that manages AP courses in the United States, said last week that it wouldn’t recognize Florida’s AP psychology course and — critically — wouldn’t give students college credit for it because the state wanted any mention of sexual orientation and gender identity stripped out. Any course that censors required content cannot be labeled “AP” or “Advanced Placement,” the board said. Students applying for college rely on AP credits as a plus on their applications.

And school is about to start — next week in Miami-Dade and the following week in Broward.

So now the state says it’s OK to teach the course, but the education world is jittery, with good reason. Can the state be trusted?

In Leon County, where Tallahassee is located, Superintendent Rocky Hanna said the district would offer the class, but he is clearly wary. On Twitter, he wrote: “Our teachers have some concerns but we are going to take the commissioner of education’s word when he says that Advanced Placement Psychology may be taught in its entirety,” Hanna said.

He added that he has told the staff to “respect the law and follow the law but not to fear the law.”

This is where we are in Florida: Instead of supporting our public school teachers, we are instilling fear and worry. Instead of celebrating their hard work, we are threatening them with license suspensions if they dare to cross the power of the mighty state.

Teaching has always required courage. In Florida, it now requires a whole new brand of bravery.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Evil, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read
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