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Carol Burris: How Teachers Should Teach PragerU Videos

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2023 //
27

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
5

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

Hiltzik writes:

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

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

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

Dogs and Negroes Not Welcome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Florida Appoints Rightwinger to Coordinate with Conservative School Boards

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2023 //
11

The Florida Department of Education has created a new position for an administrator to collaborate with and encourage rightwing school boards. This appointment is intended to cement and expand Governor Ron DeSantis’s control over school boards. DeSantis has endorsed school board candidates to make sure his ideology—and none other—is taught in the public schools.

Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel wrote:

A new office in the Florida Department of Education aims to “facilitate partnerships with district leaders,” but the director’s first months of work show interest in meeting mostly with conservative school board members, records show, including Moms for Liberty members and those endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“We would be happy to meet with the Conservative Coalition of School Board Members as a group to explore ways that our efforts may align,” wrote Terry Stoops, the new director, to a Volusia County School Board member on April 23. “If you hold regular meetings and would like us to participate, please let me know.”

In another email, he shared his views of the previous night’s Orange County School Board meeting with Alicia Farrant, a Moms for Liberty member elected to the board in November.

“I watched some of the very misguided public comment at last night’s school board meeting. I just wanted to pass along a note to thank you for serving on the board and standing up for families,” Stoops wrote her on May 10.

“Thank you so much! I’m proud to represent our community and be a voice for many who feel voiceless,” responded Farrant, who has pushed for the school district to remove library books she finds offensive.

Stoops is the director of the education department’s new Office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts, a job he started in April, according to his LinkedIn page. Stoops spent nearly two decades in North Carolina mostly working for the conservative John Locke Foundation, with a focus on education policy.

The Florida education department’s press office did not respond to emails asking questions about the new office and Stoops’ salary. He is not listed in the state payroll database on the governor’s office website.

In North Carolina, Stoops drafted what would become a framework for a North Carolina “parents’ bill of rights,” legislation that like Florida’s was criticized as anti-LGBTQ, apushed for more school choice options, such as charter schools and school vouchers.

His first months on the job in Florida showed meetings with board members and advocacy groups aligned to DeSantis, according to emails and his calendar obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project and shared with the Orlando Sentinel.

The new office shouldn’t be working only with those with certain political views, said Stephana Ferrell, an Orange County mother and one of the project’s founders.

“This department seems formed for the sole purpose of ensuring the DeSantis agenda is worked into policy,” Ferrell said. “It is using tax payer funds in a very deliberate, political way.”

In Orange, for example, Stoops reached out to Farrant but none of the other seven board members, Ferrell said. The same was true in Volusia, she said, where two conservative members got emails but the other three did not.

DeSantis wants to control what is taught in every school and college class. He is a dangerous man.

Categories Bigotry, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Florida

Another Reason Not to Live in Florida: Toxic Water

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2023 //
37

The Orlando Sentinel published a series of investigative reports about a shocking scandal: for years the ground water in Seminole County was poisoned by toxic chemicals, and the public did not know. The Sentinel published a four-part series, which I highly recommend. It’s a shocking story of political neglect.

Toxic Secret: Our series about 1,4-dioxane in Seminole water

Here is the series:

This is an excerpt from part four.

The Fulmer family dogs died two by two.

Tasha slipped away in 2004 and Rocky passed with cancer three years after. They were Rhodesian ridgebacks. Alan and Patricia Fulmer and their children took in another pair as puppies, Zipporah and Ariel. They would succumb to cancer.

In 2018, the city of Sanford tested their well water and soon came back with results.

“They said don’t drink it, don’t cook with it, don’t brush your teeth with it, don’t bathe in it, don’t touch it,” Patricia Fulmer said, recalling that moment. “It was really scary.”

The Fulmers were blindsided repeatedly.

First, when they learned a chemical called 1,4-dioxane, deemed likely to cause cancer, was in their drinking water coming from their private, household well at a high concentration.

Then they found out officials had known for years that the chemical, linked to hazardous pollution at a former Siemens factory in Lake Mary, was contaminating the underground water supply – the Floridan Aquifer – in all directions around their home just south of Sanford.

The third shock was when Patricia Fulmer was diagnosed with a malignant tumor, adding to the stress of their two daughters coping with chronic illnesses and the passing of a fifth pet, Dunder, a miniature pinscher.

In 2021, they sold their home to a developer and moved away.

The former house of Alan and Patricia Fulmer on a bulldozed lot at the corner of H.E. Thomas Parkway and Cherry Laurel Drive in Sanford, photographed Tuesday, April 11, 2023. The house is located northeast of the former Siemens-Stromberg factory at 400 Rinehart Road in Lake Mary. The Fulmers moved away several years after learning that 1,4-dioxane, a likely carcinogen detected at the former factory site, had contaminated their water well. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel)

The former house of Alan and Patricia Fulmer on a bulldozed lot at the corner of H.E. Thomas Parkway and Cherry Laurel Drive in Sanford, photographed Tuesday, April 11, 2023, days before the home was demolished. The house is located northeast of the former Siemens-Stromberg factory at 400 Rinehart Road in Lake Mary. The Fulmers moved away several years after learning that 1,4-dioxane, a likely carcinogen detected at the former factory site, had contaminated their water well. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel

*****

“It all began making sense,” said Patricia Fulmer, whose family has been firm in requesting a measure of privacy as they confront medical struggles and worries about their exposure to 1,4-dioxane. “It’s just so wrong.”

Her reaction has precedent in Florida. Some of the state’s most harrowing pollution episodes played out in stages: anxiety over exposure followed by distrust of officials for silence about a known threat.

1,4-dioxane was in use across the U.S. by the 1970s. The Siemens factory, making telephone network components, had been cited by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection the time it closed in 2003 for shoddy handling of hazardous chemicals.

There may be no way to learn when and at what strength 1,4-dioxane first invaded drinking water in Seminole County, but its presence was confirmed in the tap water of Sanford and the county’s Northwest Service Area in 2013 and in Lake Mary’s water in 2014.

Factory owners, including Siemens Corp. and General Dynamics, have denied liability for toxic pollution at the Lake Mary manufacturing site, but stated in 2017 that contaminants “may have been the result of historical activities at the Former Facility.”

‘You have the right to know’

The Fulmers were not alone in the dark.

Of the tens of thousands of residents and workers of Lake Mary, Sanford and Seminole County also exposed, it’s difficult to know how many have been made aware of the 1,4-dioxane they were consuming in drinking water.

It’s likely to be a very low percentage, judging from people well positioned to have learned of such a contamination of the Floridan Aquifer.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Environment, Florida

Florida Bans AP Psychology Course Because of Gender Issue

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
39

Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel reports that the Florida Depatment of Education has banned the College Board’s AP Psychology course because it includes the study of gender and sexual identity. In Florida, these topics are not permitted in the state’s schools and colleges. Florida believes that if no one teaches gender or sexual identity, students will agree they don’t exist, and eventually they will disappear.

Postal writes:

Florida will not allow public school students to take Advanced Placement psychology because the course includes lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity, topics forbidden by the state, the College Board said Thursday.

If so, that would mean that a week before school starts in many districts, about 5,000 Central Florida students and about 27,000 statewide may not be able to take a class they signed up to tackle in the 2023-24 school year.

“We are sad to have learned that today the Florida Department of Education has effectively banned AP Psychology in the state by instructing Florida superintendents that teaching foundational content on sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal under state law,” the College Board said in a statement.

The organization runs the 40-course AP program, which aims to offer high school students introductory college courses. Last school year, nearly 27,000 Florida students took AP psychology, which has been offered in the state since 1993.

“This element of the framework is not new: gender and sexual orientation have been part of AP Psychology since the course launched 30 years ago. As we shared in June, we cannot modify AP Psychology in response to regulations that would censor college-level standards for credit, placement, and career readiness.”

In May, Florida asked the College Board to review all its courses to make sure they comply with Florida law, which because of new laws and rules, prohibits teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity as well as certain race-related topics.

According to the College Board, the Florida Department of Education told school superintendents they could offer AP psychology only if lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity were omitted. But the College Board said those are part of the class and, if deleted, the course will not be able to carry the AP designation.

In June, the College Board told the state it would not alter the AP psychology course, which had been taught at 562 Florida high schools.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Florida, Gender

Florida Adopts Curriculum to Indoctrinate Students in Rightwing Views

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2023 //
46

Ana Cenallos of The Orlando Sentinel reports that the state of Florida adopted curriculum materials created by rightwing talk show host Dennis Prager with the explicit purpose of indoctrinating students to accept rightwing views of controversial topics.

Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly says he opposes indoctrination in schools. Yet his administration in early July approved materials from a conservative group that says it’s all about indoctrination and “changing minds.”

The Florida Department of Education determined that educational materials geared toward young children and high school students created by PragerU, a nonprofit co-founded by conservative radio host Dennis Prager, were in alignment with the state’s standards on how to teach civics and government to K-12 students.

The content, some of which is narrated by conservative personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Candance Owens, features cartoons, five-minute video history lessons and story-time shows for young children. It is part of a brand called PragerU Kids. And the lessons share a common message: Being pro-American means aligning oneself to mainstream conservative talking points.

“We are in the mind-changing business and few groups can say that,” Prager says in a promotional video for PragerU. He reiterated this sentiment this summer at a conference for the conservative group Moms for Liberty in Philadelphia, saying it is “fair” to say PragerU indoctrinates children.

“It’s true we bring doctrines to children,” Prager told the group. “But what is the bad about our indoctrination?”

The bottom line message: The US is the best place ever. Its history is unblemished by any troubling episodes. Slavery was practiced in many societies, and white people should be credited with ending it.

PragerU is not an accredited university and it publicly says the group is a “force of good” against the left. It’s a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles that produces videos that touch on a range of themes, including climate policies (specifically how “energy poverty, not climate change” is the real crisis), the flaws of Canada’s government-run healthcare system (and how the American privatized system is better), and broad support for law enforcement (and rejection of Black Lives Matter).

In some cases, the videos tell kids that their teachers are “misinformed” or “lying.”

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civics, Curriculum, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, Florida, History, Lies, Propaganda

Florida: New College Paying to Recruit Students After Rightwing Takeover

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
3

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

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

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

New College of Florida recruitment
tactics challenged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Higher Education

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

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2023 //
7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


© 2023 Orlando Sentinel

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

Two Billionaires Lose Enthusiasm for DeSantis

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2023 //
14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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